View source for The Political "Me" Movement: A Piefight In D-Minor

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[[Category:Brian Flemming]]
[[Category:Unclassified Criticisms]]
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{{DES | des = "... if a libertarian sees a starving child, they want to build a privacy fence so they don't have to look at that shit anymore.  It seems on its face amoral, misanthropic, and cynical. It is an abdication of the commons entirely, and of the very premise of the common good or unalienable rights or any of those other phrases that get tossed around by idealistic founders of any other movement or nation." | show=}}
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In which I insult libertarians and libertarianism for no good reason...

I know many among us -- among Democrats, that is -- are attempting to woo small-L libertarians into our big tent, primarily because they are so disaffected with the Republican party that they are finally willing to contemplate living with such horrors as modest environmental protections, a drive for energy efficiency, and seat belts. But let me come clean on something from a personal standpoint, and if it results in a one-thread piefight then it can be on my conscience and mine alone. Consider this my public confessional.


There are many political -isms that I am distinctly not a fan of, and I am wary of all of them; in general, any word that ends in -ism tends to have a long and boisterous tail -- the kind of tail that, on the rear end of a dog, scatters papers and knocks over lamps, and on the rear end of a government, sometimes scatters rights and knocks over nations. I have chosen to adopt two socially moderate -isms as my own, progressivism and liberalism, and rejected outright most others on both sides of the right-left divide. I believe Marxism, for example, to have been based on almost comically poor reading of actual human nature -- Marx rivals Freud for brilliant, insightful, and truly ingenious misdiagnoses of the collective psyche -- and I consider conservatism to be a thin veneer of morality overlaid on top of a deep-seated and primal bigotry against the onknown other. Conservativism as a unified movement can only exist in the presence of a perceived and very human enemy, in the form of some ethic group, or religious premise, or "threatening" social tribe.

But libertarianism I will freely admit I do not understand -- at least, not in any way that libertarians might like -- and I confess I find it hard to credit what I can decipher only as glorified, self-centered apathy as an -ism at all. From my own experiences and conversations, it has always seemed that modern libertarianism is the political philosophy you tie yourself to if you are too lazy and politically uninterested to come up with any concrete justifications for anything better. It wears well on cynics, especially young cynics that are bitter enough to become conservatives but not willing to thereby subject themselves to a lifetime of being isolated and un-hip, and on old, isolated-by-decades-of-choice cynics that don't give a crap anymore. But I am always a bit surprised when I meet a middle aged or older self-described libertarian who is politically aware and keeps up with current events. Well-informed and libertarian, in all the rooms and hallways I have found myself in, seldom seem to cross paths, except in the context of other words like "pox" and "both houses".

I have heard libertarians rail against food safety standards: if people are poisoned and die, the reasoning goes, the free market will have retribution against the people or companies responsible, and it will work itself out in the end. I have heard libertarians rail against building and fire codes: if people are killed by shoddy building construction, the companies involved will (eventually) stop being hired. Ditto for employee safety, environmental protections, etc. All of these arguments seem shakily founded on a fundamental misunderstanding (or self-enforced ignorance) of what the free market can and cannot do: buildings last long enough that the original builders may be long since dead when a fatal event is finally triggered, and our food supply chain has a long enough tail that, without regulation, tainted food could often not even be associated with an individual supplier. Workplace accidents were indeed always commonplace and frequently horrific, before safety standards, because the actual free market price for a low-income human life has always hovered between cheap and nothing.

As a separate entity and movement, there are open range libertarians of the west, the libertarians in cowboy hats for whom political libertarianism revolves entirely around the premise that they should be allowed to utilize the public lands for any number of industries, and for a pittance, and to any effect whatsoever on their neighbors and communities, but that anyone else who might expect equal rights to the same public land is nothing but a common thief. This is not libertarianism so much as it is simple greed, or the American west version of belt-and-boots nobility: titled lords of barbed wire fiefdoms that the rest of us are expected to pay for, and then lose. It joins with common libertarianism in that both consider the rights of a property owner to trump those of the community and the health and well-being of all others, but open range libertarians then take the next step and simply annex, in their minds, "public" lands as among those that they themselves -- and not any other member of the public -- rightfully own and should gain profit from.


Conservatism I can begrudgingly comprehend in premise, though not in action. Liberalism and conservatism are two sides of an ongoing conversation about the ethic of the commons: both are interested in the betterment of the community, but we disagree profoundly about what "bettering" the community actually means. Conservatives (and I am intentionally conflating social conservatism with fiscal conservatism here, because they themselves have demonstrated fiscal conservatism to have been a hollow joke all along, while social conservatives are not only ascendent in the movement, but dominate all aspects of it and conversations within it) are generally concerned with enforcing standards of morality within the community, specifically their standards of morality, with the notion that private personal behavior is the dominant moral issue of our time. Liberals are generally concerned with human rights, and we define human rights as a basic equality among all to have food, and shelter, and opportunity, and life.

Liberalism and conservatism are thus two very different sides of the same coin: both at least have an interest in the social fabric outside their own fencelines, an interest which has generally been equated with having empathy, or morality, or a "social conscience", or at least enough basic common sense to recognize that the plague next door, if ignored, would soon become a plague on your own doorstep. Libertarianism seems the opposite of all of that.


If a liberal sees a starving child, they want to give them some food. If a conservative sees a starving child, they want to give them a Bible. And if a libertarian sees a starving child, they want to build a privacy fence so they don't have to look at that shit anymore.

It seems on its face amoral, misanthropic, and cynical. It is an abdication of the commons entirely, and of the very premise of the common good or unalienable rights or any of those other phrases that get tossed around by idealistic founders of any other movement or nation. It is social rebellion against collective responsibility or even empathy itself. It is anarchism, but with crappier music.
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