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Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Liberals, libertarians and conservatives
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, there's a lot on the libertarian-conservative split and whether there's a liberal-libertarian alliance in the works. I don't see it. Liberals and libertarians share a lot of positions, of course, but their approaches to the world do not begin to harmonize.
Libertarians see the world as it is - or they so believe. Liberals see the world as it could be - it's imperfect but perfectible. For libertarians, man is good enough and should be left to run free as long as he harms not others. For liberals, man could be even better through social engineering. Liberals may agree with libertarians about some places where the government should stay out of things, then, but they don't agree with the basic idea of government staying out of things in general.
Conservatives see man's nature as unchanging and, frankly, less than desirable. As such, there are places where they might like to bring man into line, and use government to do it. But seeing man fallen and living in a fallen world, they entertain two core suspicions of government that liberals don't: First, government is an institution run by fallen men, thus untrustworthy. And second, man and the world are fundamentally messed up, so it's best to be restrained in your enthusiasm for projects to fix what cannot be fixed. The result is that while conservatives and libertarians disagree about the rights of or nature of man, they share a predisposition against the government getting involved.
In the end, then, in a world dominated by liberals and conservatives, the libertarian's choice is between liberals who agree here and there about individual freedoms but are philosophically disposed to remaking the world through government or conservatives who can be unreasonably restrictive about certain behaviors but who doubt in the basic premise that government is the answer to our problems. In such a climate, the libertarian's best bet, in my view (as a conservative libertarian) is to ride it out with the conservatives. With their conviction that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, they will in time throw in the towel on gay marriage, etc, as lost causes, but the liberals will never give up trying to save the world.
posted by gbarto at 12:00 PM
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