“I think the two of them were having a bit of good time having a debate like you had at 2 a.m. in the morning when you’re going to college, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with anything.” Jon Kyl on Rand Paul's appearance on the Maddow show.
Kyl seems to support the definition of Libertarianism I posted the other day. I don't deny that Libertarians are often very intelligent, but I also think that they are adolescent in their thinking and stunted in their sense of what it means to live in "society".That's not just a snark. I mean it quite literally. They are like bright high-school debaters who take a simple premise, and with relentless consistency develop an abstract one-dimensional system of thought they promote as "principled". And because they are often "bright", they find ingenious ways to explain everything through the lens of their unbalanced thinking. But in the end it's sophomoric nonsense embraced only by those who remain intellectually and socially stunted.
Libertarian one dimensionality is rooted in its assumption that Liberty is the only value that matters for Americans; it forgets that Equality is part of the picture, too. Libertarians make sense when they affirm things about Liberty we all agree are essential for the good health of American society. They stop makings sense, though, to the degree that they embrace Liberty as an absolute that diminishes the importance of Equality. It's not either Liberty or Equality. Both keep one another in a kind of tension and balance. When Liberty dominates, Equality suffers; when Equality dominates, Liberty suffers. A healthy democracy finds ways through use of its tools in the political sphere to keep the two in a rough balance.
In a healthy society, amity, or a peaceful balance, between freedom and equality has implications for activity in the economic sphere. The free exchange of goods and services is an essential element in the healthy functioning of activity in the economic sphere, but, once again, Liberty is not an absolute, and it must be checked when severe inequalities in wealth (and the power that comes with it) emerge. Neither is some rigid idea about Equality an absolute, and so, of course, any healthy society would reject a program to implement a top-down redistributionism in which some ideal of complete Equality was the goal. The challenge is not to celebrate equality as preferable--or liberty--but to find a balance point that defines social health, and the health of activity in both the political sphere and the cultural sphere depend on this balance being struck in the economic sphere.
My longstanding argument on this blog has been that the genius of the American experiment has been its struggle in fits and starts to find this balance, and that while its failures have been egregious, what makes this country interesting is its ability to correct course. The social and economic imbalances that dominated American society in the immediate post-Civil War period were corrected by the efforts of Progressives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which culminated in the mixed economy compromise we call the New Deal consensus, which created the conditions for the tremendous widespread prosperity through the middle decades of the twentieth century.
This consensus was accepted by Democrats and Republicans alike, and provided the framework for civil discourse and honest disagreements about how best to manage issues that came up within the political sphere. Right-wing extremists had no credibility and were relegated to the fringe or were roundly defeated as Goldwater was in '64. During this time the third-world cultural and economic backwater which comprised the former Confederacy was slowly integrated into the mainstream both economically and in terms of insuring the civil rights of its African-American citizens. Nothing is perfect, normal corruption and dirty dealing were always there, but things were generally on track. Sure, there was some Liberal over-reaching, but still enough common sense and pragmatism within the consensus to make adjustments when needed.
All this changed with the ascendancy of movement conservatism during the Reagan presidency fueled by the backlash to the social and economic anxiety that characterized the seventies. (See my post "How Liberalism Got Its Bad Name" for my somewhat contrarian defense of this era as Liberalism's finest moment.) The movement conservative agenda was to destroy the New Deal framework and the amity between equality and Liberty that it had established. And we are harvesting the bitter fruits now. Those bitter fruits are egregious economic inequalities, the mainstreaming of insane, extremist right wing ideology, and the destruction of any civil framework for solving real problems that Americans need to deal with.
The American Civil War was the American archetype for this conflict, which was a clash of cultures in the economic and political spheres. Southern elites saw the preservation and flourishing of their culture as dependent economically on slaveholding. It was impossible for them to separate out the political, economic, and cultural. They were all enmeshed, and even many of those southerners who saw slavery as an evil could not see a way out. At best they tried to ensure that slaves were well treated, along the lines of an ASPCA for humans.
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I've often presented myself as sympathetic to a Burkean Whiggishness that isn't against progress, but against socially engineered progress. And I understand and respect the arguments of principled conservatives like Deneen and Larison who understand the destructive effects of modern Liberal thinking and the policies that follow from it on living traditional values and institutions. I, too, prefer organic growth to engineered growth, but not all natural growths are benign. Sometimes the kind of growth we're dealing with is cancerous and it needs aggressive intervention, and the cure is often painful and the recovery prolonged. The Civil War comes to mind.
We saw that kind of cancerous growth in the late 18th and early 19th century as the slave economy of the south metastasized. Such a "natural" growth needed intervention if the nation founded on principles of equality and freedom was to flourish. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and then Dred Scott in the 1850s, it became clear that this cancerous growth within the body politic could not be contained.
This is a clear instance in which the liberty rights of white Southerners and equality rights of African Americans were out of balance, and aggressive outside intervention was required to redress the balance. I do not believe that this problem would have just worked itself out over time, and the Feds were justified to intervene to redress the balance. The idea that slavery would have just died out is ridiculous. After Dred Scott, there was no preventing slavery from infecting the North. If anything the Social Darwinist logic of the late 19th Century would have justified the expansion of slavery into factories, mines, and anywhere cheap labor would enhance profitability. Why deal with unions if you can just hire slaves?
Are conservatives justified in their concern about imbalances in the other direction, when society becomes imbalanced toward an equality and the leveling conformism that abusively infringes on the liberty rights of individuals? Of course, but for the most part this is an abstract straw-man argument in the contemporary U.S. because there are minor nuisances, and they are played out more in the cultural sphere than in the political sphere. And there are simply no egregious imbalances that come even close to the inequality imbalance suffered by Blacks in the south before the Civil War and during Jim Crow.
For extreme Libertarians, any constraint on individual liberty, even constraints that I would describe as attempts to find a balance between liberty and equality, are considered tyrannical. So when a Libertarian says, "I do not see how libertarians and liberals can work together so long as liberals seek to continually increase the state's power to plan society and control the market," he's criticizing a theoretical straw man, because there are very few Democrats or Liberals that fit the description of seeking to "plan society and control the market." There's no grand plan, that's a figment of the Libertarian imagination. Liberalism in practice has been for the most part an ad hoc process to use the government as a tool to fix problems that don't fix themselves. Name a prominent politician who advocates total government control of society and markets? Not even Bernie Sanders would advocate for that.
The New Deal was not a socialist plot, but an attempt to find a balance between free markets and a government role to mitigate the harmful effects of free markets on the lives of ordinary Americans. The New Deal introduced to the U.S. a mixed economy, not a socialist economy, and it works, despite Republican attempts to dismantle it since Reagan. It can be called socialist only by those who care not a whit about finding the balance between liberty and equality. Again, it's not either/or; it's about finding a balance. Reaganism and doctrinaire Libertarianism represent a movement in the direction of Liberty that causes severe imbalances when it comes to equality.
And if such Libertarians were able to think objectively, they'd see, for instance, that a single-payer system, if it's set up correctly, actually increases the liberty of doctors and patients to make decisions, that it would deliver providers from the tyranny of onerous paper work and interfering insurance bureaucrats who veto physicians' decisions, and deliver patients from the tyranny of insurance companies that deny needed coverage on the flimsiest of pretexts because their goal is to minimize payments to increase shareholder returns. Single payer is an example of where a government role would increase liberty and equality significantly, especially when compared to the current arrangements.
This is another example of where the freedom of insurance companies comes into conflict with both the freedom of consumers and their right to be treated fairly. If insurance companies can't rectify their abusive m.o. on their own, and why should they if no one forces them to, then somebody has to force them, and the only entity with power to do that is the government.
[Ed. note: the second half of this post is excerpted from a longer post entitled "Conservatives/Libertarians/Liberals".]