While most Vanderbilt students were spending their last weekend of spring break hanging out on the beach or building habitats for the homeless in rural Appalachia, this dorky political columnist found himself in Richmond, Virginia for a discussion on political theory with other policy nerds. This is not because I don’t know how to have a good time or am averse to helping the poor, but because the trip was free and the hotel was swank.
Fortunately, the topic was interesting, too. Of our small colloquium group, about half of us were self-described libertarians and half were self-described conservatives. The question at issue: are we still friends?
Our first discussion session was friendly enough, but a funny thing happened as that formal grouping came to an end and the informal dinner gathering began. Somewhere between the conference room and the dining room this group of fifteen strangers had somehow segregated ourselves and by the time we chose our tables all the libertarians were sitting in one place.
This was not an intentional grouping, or even a conscious one. We were not even aware of it until well into the meal. Yet this was just one sign of a divide that would become clearer as the weekend went on. Despite our long history, the libertarians and conservatives were realizing more and more how different we are.
This might seem strange to the general public, who tends to think of libertarians, when it thinks of them at all, as standing at the far right of the political spectrum. Libertarians have had a long-standing alliance with conservatives and are staunchly free market, but the relationship is more complex than that. There is a tension due to the fact that libertarians are also very socially liberal, preferring to keep the government out of morality and personal affairs.
For this reason, in recent years libertarians have emphasized that the traditional left-right political axis leaves no place for their philosophy. As an alternative, many promote a two-dimensional political map: economic issues on one axis, social issues on the other. Today’s right would be skewed toward economic freedoms; the left would be skewed toward social freedoms. Libertarians would support both, placing them not left, not right, but “above.”
For most of the previous century, it made sense for libertarians to ally themselves with the right despite their differences. Central economic planning was en vogue throughout the world and in the U. S. the New Deal and the Great Society were increasing the role of the state to an unprecedented degree. Against these tides, friends of free markets and individual rights needed to stick together to beat back the growing leviathan. Today, as evidenced by our group in Richmond, that alliance is tenuous.
The falling of the walls in 1989 put liberal democracy, market economics, and globalization on an ascendant track, revealing central planning as grossly failed experiment. Eventually even Democrat president Bill Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over.” Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite true.
In the mean time, elected conservatives have turned away from conserving our heritage of limited government to playing the political game of dispersing political benefits. Compassionate conservatives re-label the welfare state Christian, and it becomes just fine with them. Today’s Republicans seem no less willing than Democrats to toss out new public programs.
Of course, no one has done more to alienate libertarians from the political right than George W. Bush. The war in Iraq, campaign finance reform, protectionist tariffs, the prescription drug benefit, enormous federal spending, the Patriot Act, support for a Constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage… the list of sins goes on. In fairness, these issues anger many conservatives as well. Yet the fact remains that there is a growing cultural divide between the two camps.
A telling sign of this divide can be seen in the list of 35 Heroes of Freedom published recently by Reason magazine, whose libertarian credo is “Free Minds, Free Markets.” The list included people you would expect, such as Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Barry Goldwater. It also included some you might not, like Madonna, Dennis Rodman, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. For these new libertarians, changing the cultural milieu is as much a part of their philosophy as fighting the feds. It’s not about the Good or the virtuous, but about the cool (or even, as Reason says, the “groovy”).
Does this mean that today’s libertarians will shift to the left, reuniting the classical liberals with the modern liberals? Perhaps on a few issues, but the left is still too fond of expanding the government to make this a viable pairing. For the time being they are becoming alienated from the right and opposed from the left, invigorated as a movement but as politically homeless as ever.
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