United Liberty

Last night I attended a debate held at the American Enterprise Institute between Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online (and the Institute itself), author of Liberal Fascism and other notable works, and Matt Welch, of reason fame and the author of The Declaration of Independents. The question posed by the debate has been argued over ever since Franklin Delano Roosevelt began the New Deal, and conservatives and libertarians—then known as “classical liberals”—allied in order to present a unified front to keeping the massive new nanny state at bay. It was reinforced in the fifties when William Buckley formed National Review, and presented his argument for a “fusionist” political movement. It’s been going on for a long time, and it will continue to go on long into the future. Despite the jokes about it, the debate did not solve the question for most people. I, however, left convinced more than ever that libertarianism and conservatism do not mix.

Welch’s argument was that libertarianism and conservatism were two different political ideologies and not mutually compatible; Goldberg argued that libertarianism and conservatism were one and the same. In fact, he said that if one “pulled the pillars of libertarianism” out of conservatism, “conservatism could not stand.” I find this to be at once somewhat reassuring and yet utterly bizarre. On the one hand, it reassures me because it alerts conservatives that yes, they need us—badly. They could not stand without libertarians, and should accomodate us to some degree. Yet it also baffles me because, quite frankly, they have done very little other than sidelining us since the Reagan era, giving shift to Santorum of all people ahead of Ron Paul, and blatantly espousing policies that are simply unlibertarian. Perhaps if you pulled libertarianism out of conservatism, the latter would fall, but I think it would actually stumble and stay somewhat tall. Anti-same-sex marriage, protectionism, aggressive foreign policy, crony capitalism and “pro-business” support in the form of bailouts—none of these are libertarian positions, and they very nearly form an entire political philosophy.

And then again, you don’t really need an entire political philosophy to run for office. Look at Newt Gingrich. He’s got parts of about 256 different philosophies, but they’re not all together. Not in any assembled, holistic sense. More like a junk pile together sense.

Another point Goldberg hit upon was grassroots, local communities, that things would all be better off if we focused on decentralizing political power to local communities and focusing more on voluntary institutions. As he put it, it was that people had the right to live conservatively, and that’s something I totally agree with. He also said that the one lone guy who wanted to “let his freak flag fly” shouldn’t use the state to bully the community into accepting him. Again, agreed. The problem was when he then basically stated that the conservative community had the power to use the state to bully the one “freak flagger” into submission. (For example: blue laws.) “If you have a problem,” Jonah argued, “then MOVE.”

On the one hand, I am not entirely against this. It is not that difficult to move from one locality to another, certainly much more easy than moving from one state to another or one country to another. But at the same time, no one should be forced to. Should Goldberg’s conservatively living citizens be forced to leave their homes and move to a new city because their lifestyle choices are different from others? I cannot believe he would agree to that. It’s another place where libertarianism and conservatism simply disagree totally and do not align whatsoever.

Finally, the last point I completely disagree on was put forward by both Welch and Goldberg. Welch basically said that he wanted conservatives, even if they didn’t necessarily adopt libertarianism wholesale, to actually focus on the massive debt problem we have, and actually put forward a credible plan towards fixing it. What Welch is getting at is that conservatives have, for over the past decade, used a great deal of limited government, budget slashing rhetoric, but have done the exact opposite in practice. (As Goldberg said, Dubya “spent money like a pimp with a week to live.”) The problem was that both then basically said that we can’t really focus on other things right now and need to focus on the debt crisis first, that cultural issues will be a sideshow.

I truly beg to differ. Ending the drug war will save billions of dollars per year in failed enforcement policies, while taxing marijuana would generate billions of dollars in revenue—not something libertarians want to hear, but it would help fix the problem. Legalizing same-sex marriage would allow gays and lesbians to develop long-term economic stability and progress, which would in turn help generate additional economic growth, which, as Daniel J. Mitchell points out in his Golden Rule, is what we really need to be focusing on if we want to get the debt crisis out of the way. What about the hundreds of billions we’re spending on national security programs that violate civil liberties and go to finance wars that kill thousands of people in other countries? You cannot truly separate economic issues from the civil liberties.

Ultimately, I walked away feeling entertained—you don’t go to a Welch v. Goldberg debate and not be entertained—but relatively unchanged. From what I heard, conservatism and libertarianism just aren’t the same thing, with very different ideas on the role of the state and the position of the individual. No jokes will bridge that divide in the end.