Anthony Gregory on Why the Left Hates Us

Libertarians, who have never won a presidential election or come remotely close to winning a majority of seats in either house of the federal government (or in either house of ANY state government) are more of a threat to liberals than conservatives, who have done all of these things regularly?

This isn’t good writing, David. It’s crap. It’s ridiculous on the face of it. Sure conservatives and liberals are more like each other than are libertarians. That’s because they both want to be as close to the median voter as possible. From where most libertarians are today, they can’t even see the median voter.

To paraphrase Al Franken, I see two possible routes for libertarians to come to power. In the first one, every mainstream voter in the country gets on the same airplane, and it crashes. The second route is similar to the first, except in this case, they all get on the same bus.

Daniel

I found myself skimming through this article. It’s effect is to preach to the choir and nobody else, at all.

My disappointment with libertarianism started with Bryan leading us through Rothbard. Libertarians are deeply interested in wild theoretical inanity such as should courts be privatized. People’s eyes just glaze over. There are no votes here.

Libertarians want to explain how great (and strange) it will be when we get to Libertyville, when the consuming question is, which way should we move?

That’s an excellent point. Libertarians do seemingly enjoy intellectualizing government when the general populace and our two major parties tend to prefer sticking to quick emotional satisfaction and lighter-than-air thought processes.

But can you really blame libertarians for simply not playing along? And besides, if you believe libertarians can only diagnose the disease without prescribing a cure you’ve not been spending enough time reading. Libertarians generally aren’t the type to be shouty on TV. That’s why Ron Paul, Judge Napolitano, and want-to-be-so-badly-libertarians like Glen Beck get so much attention. There like the 1950’s housewife sitcom character who breaks social norms and speaks her mind. People get a look of shock on their faces and then quickly dismiss them anyway.

Can you name one prominent liberal blogger or commentator who hates libertarians more than conservatives? I can’t.

One thing you learn is when anyone has to say why they are hated, it is because they have no argument to make or case to state. You are sounding more like Glenn Beck every day.

“As the chief political architects of the 20th century in the West, they have no one to blame but themselves, and so they target us – the true liberals, the ones who never let go of authentic liberal idealism, love of the individual dignity and rights of every man, woman and child, regardless of nationality or class, and hatred of state violence and coercive authoritarianism in all its forms”.–Really?

“Can you name one prominent liberal blogger or commentator who hates libertarians more than conservatives? I can’t.”

Who cares? That was never the point, most prominent “liberal” bloggers love to play the partisan political game. Now, a better question posed to a “liberal”(or “conservative”) would be to ask them what defines their political philosophy and how it differentiates itself from the philosophy held by their counterparts.

I have to say, I think Anthony Gregory is way off the mark unless my reading of the left half of the blogosphere is way off the mark. I suspect that he *wished* it was hated by the left in the ways he enumerated.

However, Libertarians are subject to a fair amount of vitriol from the left, and I’ll hazard two main reasons:

The belief that Libertarians value freedom over correcting injustice (defining injustice as reducing total harm). Since our morality is built around justice, this makes Libertarians immoral.

The idea that you *cannot* have a power vacuum is intrinsically obvious to every thinking human being, Libertarians who want to strip the state of its power *must* understand that if the people’s representative (the state) doesn’t have power, then something else will – the corporations. Thus the *only* explanation for wanting to strip the state of power is they want the corporations to rule. This makes Libertarians evil.

Obviously this is a vast simplification of the left’s animus (where it exists), but it does seem a theme when we’re talking actually hatred of Libertarianism as opposed to simply severe disagreement.

When Gregory frames his piece as an exhaustive defense of all liberal criticism of libertarianism, or says things like:

Leftist criticisms of libertarianism have surged lately, a phenomenon warranting explanation.

or:

Yet nearly every week our beloved philosophy of non-aggression is subject to some progressive’s relatively widely read hatchet job.

it seems really unsubstantiated, since he only links to one critical piece. Is Gregory responding to Metcalf, or to The Left? If the latter, who on the The Left is Gregory responding to?

It’s too easy to dismiss your opponents’ arguments by choosing weak ones, not linking to them, paraphrasing them, and declaring that they are the entirety of the opposing view. It’s a method or arguing that leads believers to applaud and critical thinkers to question/ignore.

Vague collective statements about “them” and “us” are a sign of lazy thinking, not good writing.

While I agree with the person who said it was a bit of preaching to the choir, I loved it precisely because it expressed much of the incredulity and frustration libertarians have felt over the decades since the progressive realignment of the parties that pushed us onto the streets.

@Daniel : I wonder why environmentalists, or socialists, or other philosophies with “pure” forms don’t get comments like these. Like the others, we are willing to accept our marginal victories (elimination of the draft, deregulation of airlines) while continuing to work towards maximizing liberty. Maybe we attract that sort of comment because libertarians, unlike the others, have a cogent enough notion of “libertopia” that we actually bother to allude to it from time to time.

Not usually if I don’t have to. They aren’t up to the quality of the rest of Econlog.

Yeah I don’t think the left – as I know it, really hates libertarians. I think this is a caricature of the left. Also I don’t think libertarians have any long-term viability, maybe on SOME issues (probably ones in which “the left” would agree with the libertarian side). Part of the problem is for all their obtuse pontificating it’s really hard to see how much of what they advocate actually benefits anyone – it seems as if they’re mostly after ideological purity and consistency rather then advocating policies that actually make the world a better place. Why would the mainstream voter want to support something just because it’s ideologically consistent?

The other thing is I think there ends up being a confusion between “the left” and “Democrats”. I don’t consider them to be the same but many people mistakenly do.

I don’t know that liberals feel “threatened” by libertarians. A lot of us would prefer that the Republicans would go the way of the Whigs and that the Libertarian Party, or something like it, would emerge as a major political party in the United States.

Conservatives criticize libertarians for their stand on drug legalization, immigration, and social issues like abortion and gay rights. Liberals disagree with libertarians primarily because of their stand on economic issues.

I don’t know that it’s correct to say that liberals “hate” libertarians, but we do resent libertarians because, if libertarians were really neutral, they would align themselves with the Democrats and liberals about as often as they align themselves with Republicans and conservatives. That’s rarely the way things work out in practice.

A distinction was drawn in another recent article on this blog between libertarianism in the world of ideas and libertarianism in the world of practical politics.

To the extent the liberals feel threatened by libertarianism at all, I would submit that they feel threatened about it in the world of ideas. In the realm of practical politics, libertarianism is not very threatening at all, even in the long run.

“Karl Hess was right: “Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.””

How about those voters buying into big government in relatively peaceful countries like Sweden? I don’t see anything inevitable about social democracies going to war.

The left just sees little real difference between such phenomena as the Tea Party, Ron Paul, “libertarians,” anti-government attitudes and all the right-wingey stuff. To the degree that anti-state attitudes coincide with being anti-police state and anti-war, well it’s just an interesting yet happenstance occasion that still can’t compensate for the decimation of the domestic welfare and regulatory state the left has fought long and hard for.

The Left is attacking libertarianism because it believes it’s part and parcel of the Tea Party movement, a vicious development as far as they’re concerned, but one which must be accorded grudging respect because it possess a “coherent” philosophy:

http://redemmas.org/books/131/

There’s little indication that the Left would “see the light” if it were to realize that Republicans and Tea Partiers are hypocrites (and thus don’t really believe in limited government), because by most accounts a principled, anti-government philosophy in action is what they believe they are witnessing now in the form of the Tea Party.

Maybe leftists, or at least the loudest among them, fear that libertarianism’s hostility to the warmongers could divide leftists. After all, leftwing prejudice is that capitalism and imperialism are brothers in arms.

So what happens when a leftist encounters a libertarian demanding an end to the subsidization of some capitalists, i.e. the weaponsmakers and traders? What’s that, you say, libertarian? Slash the military budget…to zero?!

What happens when the libertarian reminds the leftists at a party one evening of the perennial tendency of leftist regimes to be not only despotic but militaristic? The antimilitaristic rhetoric of leftists looses credibility; it’s shown to be just posturing and hot air.

The leftist loses yet more credibility when it’s noted that leftists’ tend to support military veterans’ benefits. Libertarians, on the other hand, are more likely to demand that veterans’ benefits be terminated. Veterans were once the willing tools of gangsters; surely they don’t deserve to be rewarded for their free choice to aid and to abet organized criminals.

I think we can push a little farther these themes, not only the leftists’ fear of division and abandonment but also fear of exposure of leftist hypocrisy.

Consider ACC. From where did it come? Some of it came from the tailpipes of gasguzzlers driven on subsidized highways, no? So the libertarian at a party one evening says to the goo-goos and other leftists there, “let’s kill the subsidies. This strikes at the root, not merely a branch, of what you regard as a problem, namely, CO2 emissions.” How can the leftwing environmentalist answer that without sounding foolish? Of course, leftists in America are well known for supporting organized labor, and organized labor for decades has been a workforce for the construction of subsidized highways, not to mention for vehicles. It’s also no secret that leftists do not call for an end to subsidies for highways. But why not? Don’t they want to stop ACC? This issue has enourmous potential for friction between the leftwing environmentalist and the bleeding hearted leftist who wants make-work schemes, e.g. roadbuilding.

Also undermined here is the leftwing caricature according to which libertarians are fascists who support rigged commerce, subsidies for big business, etc. The facts, however, suggest that leftists, not liberals, are guilty of fascism, which is nanny statist, militaristic, and involves a close partnership of government and business.

It’s by the way that abolishing subsidies for highways undermines the business models of two politically influential industries. Isn’t this what leftists are supposed to want?

Another example: Atheism is widespread among libertarians. This makes some libertarians enemies of the flagwaving Christian fundie. But isn’t it leftism that’s supposed be the tolerant home for atheists? If a youngster with weak faith or no faith recognizes that atheism can have libertarianism as a dancing partner, he or she might be tempted to explore other ideas held and espoused by libertarians.

The thoughtful leftist agitator may be benighted about economics, morality, ontology, etc., but she can recognize a mortal danger to leftist unity when she sees it. So fearful of division is she that to spit venom at the big, bad libertarian is quite nearly a reflex.

Oh, and any liberal who’s ever interacted with the poor and needy is familiar with the contempt that the poor and needy often have for arrogant, bleeding hearted do-gooders, who are usually white, wealthy, and from the suburbs. That contempt, if developed with a rational critique of leftwing support for big business and militarism, could give the leftist agitator a nightmare of a PR problem at election time. After all, how did the do-gooder from the nice neighborhood become so wealthy? And if leftists really care about the poorest, most innocent people, then why do they invest so much energy in demanding that someone else bear the burdens of their alleged caring? The leftist retort here is that caring is what community is all about; to this the liberal, the libertarian, need merely observe that community, to a leftist, is red in tooth and claw. Community for a libertarian, however, is not red in tooth and claw but voluntary.

I could go on here, but I think I’ve made my point sufficiently. The leftist desperately needs to bury liberalism, i.e. libertarianism, for it’s a caustic acid for leftwing unity. It just so happens, also, that bloodthirsty people regularly despise those who are not so. Thus do we find leftists spiting and mocking liberals.