Contradiction as Innovative Political Strategy

[Updates below.]

It was my fealty to the notion of personal liberty that made me a Republican when I came of age in the 1980s. It is my continued fealty to personal liberty that makes me a Democrat today.

-Markos Moulitsas, leading off a Cato Unbound discussion

This ought to be enough evidence that Kos doesn't know a damn thing about the subject of personal liberty. However, should you desire more...

That blog post on libertarian Democrats, imperfect as it was, struck a chord. But it wasn't written in a vacuum. It stemmed not from theory or philosophy (I'm neither a theorist, political scientist, nor a philosopher), but from personal experience and from my excitement at the growing ranks of Western Democrats who aren't just transforming the politics of the Mountain states, but will hopefully lead to the reformation of the Democratic Party and a new embrace of the politics of personal liberty.

The "libertarian democrat" rhetoric must be seen for what it is: an incoherent attempt to gather votes for Democrats so they will win control of a system that not only has never been seriously libertarian, but will also barely budge the truly frightening statist inertia it has gathered over the last hundred years. There is no reflection on the core principles of nonaggression, private property, and freedom of contract. He repeats, without any new ideas, the Established Necessities that clearly require a state for civilization to function®: roads, education, research grants, the Internet, business accountability, safety rules, advertising regulations (this, just after talking about flag burning amendments as threats to free speech!).

He thinks individual freedom without the opportunity to exercise it is pointless, completely ignoring the concerted challenges to his unstated premise: individuals cannot be trusted to create their own opportunities for themselves and therefore we must have a state to herd us along. No note of the decades of scholarly effort that, at the very least, cast doubt on this most sacred of political assumptions. He assumes you and I and everyone else simply would not be able to intelligently make our own decisions without the state compelling companies to disclose information on their products.

He wraps it all up thusly:

So a "free" market needs rules ("regulation") in order to function. And such rules should be welcome so long as they are designed to enhance and protect our personal liberties.

A law that in practice forcibly removes a concrete representation of our personal liberty and in theory sets the stage for an infinite number of other such invasions is...designed to enhance and protect our personal liberty.

Everything I said in The Myth of the Libertarian Democrat applies as it did back in June. Kos may be espousing a position marginally nicer to some existing and future victims of state aggression, but I'm getting real sick of him selling him and his compatriots as friends of individual freedom. They are not and I could spend all day highlighting examples to disprove his claim and demonstrate the opposite.

The only grains of truth in his essay are those condemning Republicans as hypocrites and shills for corporate welfare. He closes with this:

For too long, Republicans promised smaller government and less intrusion in people’s lives. Yet with a government dominated top to bottom by Republicans, we've seen the exact opposite. No one will ever mistake a Democrat of just about any stripe for a doctrinaire libertarian. But we’ve seen that one party is now committed to subverting individual freedoms, while the other is growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility and - most important of all - individual freedoms are paramount.

His emphasis. Here's my question to people who value their freedom:

What do you think about a political party that is more "comfortable" than it was in the past with letting people run their affairs as they see fit, a comfort based not on any unyielding principle but on political expediency?

UPDATED 10/6/2006 1:15pm
Kyle Bennett sent in the following comment:

Kos and his ilk have a very different notion of "personal liberties" than libertarians do. It's not just a political difference about what constitutes a personal freedom, but a fundamentally different epistemological and metaphysical view of what freedom is. They look at freedom as something like Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms". Things like freedom from want, freedom from fear, etc. The root of it is that they see *any* obstacle as an impingement on their freedom, where libertarians see coercion as the only obstacle that qualifies. Poverty, tragedy, discomfort, lack of opportunity, and even the need to pursue your own happiness, etc., to them, these are all examples of freedom being limited . Their "state of nature", against which the legitimacy of government is measured, is not the libertarian one in which everyone gets a spot on the starting line, but one in which everyone has a comfortable spot on the finish line, complete with a bed of laurels, and so never has to actually run the race. It's the *universe* that is his nemesis, not (some) other men - except for those other men who take the universe's side against his, i.e., those who hold reality and reason as primary.

And where libertarians see the only obligation of society as that of not *causing* the limited class of obstacles (coercion) that limit their freedom, from their view of nature flows the Kos Kind's vision of society as having a positive obligation to remove or prevent the things they see as limiting freedom.

In that sense, he's not engaging in any contradiction, (at least not until you delve deeper into the derivation of his notion of "personal liberties" - there's contradictions a plenty to be found there). It may not even be a cynical and insincere attempt at some kind of rapproachment, he probably actually believes it.

--Kyle Bennett
www.humanadvancement.net/blog

Mr. Bennett is referring to the two conceptions of positive and negative liberty.

If Kos is sincere about seeking a sensible partnership, this again highlights how little he studies the fundamental issues. Libertarians generally adhere to a "negative liberty" mental framework while the more statist political ideologies advocate a "positive liberty" mindset. There are exceptions to this. For example, I remember (but can't find at the moment) Kos making some negative-liberty-style arguments against the drug war, government banning gay marriage, and government spying. Of course, the smart money is on him ultimately favoring "positive liberty" arguments leading to government intervention in any given situation.

I shudder to think about the intellectual acrobatics it would take to reconcile two 1,000-word Kos-authored essays elucidating his position on random personal liberty issue (such as bike helmet laws or consensual sex) and random broad economic issue (such as minimum wage laws or tariffs). The irony being that at their core, every issue becomes a concretely, painfully personal issue at some point. Libertarians generally understand this because, in yet another significant departure from Democrats, they see and analyze the individual as the fundamental unit of society. Not the class, race, sex, orientation, religious belief, and so on.

It is good to see Democrats opposing various Republican Party schemes and elevating their civil liberties rhetoric. However, I am absolutely convinced that much of this is the result of their dislike of Bush, today's GOP, and everything done that can be linked to them. I'm not at all surprised to see Nancy Pelosi put forward a muddled government-expanding mix of solutions as a hint at what she'd do to redirect the House of Representatives' agenda.

Posted by Drizzten at October 02, 2006 02:19 PM