The Alleged Libertarian Center

Hot new debate on the Cato Unbound site:

In this month’s lead essay Cato vice president for research Brink Lindsey elaborates his argument in The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture that the culture wars are over and a vaguely libertarian consensus is the result. While recognizing that principled libertarianism doesn’t have a significant constituency, Lindsey argues that the soft libertarian synthesis constrains the Democrats and Republicans as they seek to cobble together working political majorities.

Responses will be forthcoming from Jonah Goldberg, Matt Yglesias, and Julian Sanchez.

Comments

So, a libertarian declares (partial) victory for libertarianism. Lessee now, when Gingrich was in charge of Congress, there was a permanent Republican majority, conservative (sic) ideals had swept the nation, and the evils of liberalism (sick) had been revealed. So naturally, when the next guy comes along and declares that his views are not dominant, we believe him completely.

What we have, as far as I can tell, is a distaste for the two parties that have jiggered the system so that nobody else has a chance. Dislike for Republicans and Democrats, given how they have behaved toward their constituents, is no surprise, but it is not the same thing as affection for libertarianism.

One common behavior among elected officials of the two major parties is inattention to (fostering of) the spread of corporate power. Since liberarians have no taste for intervention in the economy, they are similarly unlikely to do anything to rein in corporate power. Why would we like them better than Democrats or Republicans?

Posted by kharris | July 9, 2007 10:47 AM

I'm not sure what country he thinks has a libertarian center.

In this country, if you want to win the center ground, you go for Medicare Prescription Drug Benefits, not Social Security privatization.

Posted by Chris | July 9, 2007 10:59 AM

I don't think "soft libertarianism" is a very useful description of the phenomenon. Calling the broad national consensus in favor of social security, medicare, etc., any form of libertarianism empties the term of all meaning. What Lindsey is referring to is basically neo-liberalism. In the economic sphere the shift isn't ideological, it's pragmatic.

Posted by Led | July 9, 2007 11:01 AM

I think the summary version if fairly plausible. There is FAR more tolerance in this county for gays and lesbians, women who don't put their husbands and kids ahead of themselves, unconventional religious practices and crossing of racial boundaries (in that order) than a few decades ago. There's a real danger that progressives get too focused on current problems and forget how much we've achieved over the past couple generations in terms of tolerance and social equality.

On the flip side, it's also true that a vast number of Americans imagine they will someday be individually wealthy, and respond to economic policy in terms of its effect on that fantasy life (or, OK, aspiration) than its effect on their current circumstances.

These constraints aren't of equal weight -- criminalization of homosexuality, let alone to Jim Crow, are gone for good, while Social Security, the minimum wage, etc. are alive and well. But still, there's something to it.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | July 9, 2007 11:23 AM

A libertarian way of thinking about social order (that curtailment of some sphere of liberty is justified only or mostly to prevent harm) surely is part of the center in America. But disagreements about what's inside the sphere and what constitutes "harm" are sufficiently robust that this meta-consensus is just taken for granted most of the time.

Posted by henry evans | July 9, 2007 11:30 AM

Lindsey is surely right about the socially liberal part of the socially liberal/economically conservative consensus. A lot of people can still get riled up about teh gay, and more still haven't reconciled themselves to full equality for gay people. But despite the vociferous anti-choice minority, there is no political basis whatsoever for rolling back the sexual revolution.

By contrast, Americans are perfectly happy with government at its present size. They aren't economically conservative at all, but are merely susceptible to the promise of free lunches in the form of tax cuts and deficit spending.

Posted by kth | July 9, 2007 11:40 AM

If by hot and new you mean the same lukewarm Cato wank about how really we are all libertarians, sure.

Posted by Rob | July 9, 2007 11:58 AM

Americans are perfectly happy with government at its present size. They aren't economically conservative at all, but are merely susceptible to the promise of free lunches in the form of tax cuts and deficit spending.

This is basically true, but I tend to agree with Ruy Teixeira that many (most?) working-class Americans imagine they'll be much richer in the future, and in particular that they'll be independent through owning their own business or simply wealthy enough not to work. This doesn't mean people are hostile to big government per se -- public opinion is way to the left of both parties on things like universal healthcare -- but it does limit appeals to workers as workers, and make them more susceptible than they "ought" to be to appeals based on the interests of small property owners. It's not the decisive factor in American politics, and certainly not a big new development in the way that sexual (and to a lesser extent racial and religious) tolerance is. But it's still real, and interesting.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | July 9, 2007 12:25 PM

Exactly...the true victories libertarians seek are on the economic front, seeing as who they prefer to caucus with almost invariably. In that sense, their ideology isn't exactly waxing. I've yet to meet a fierce libertarian stance on any social issue, compared to their rabid hatred of economic populism.

Posted by EpicureanQuaker | July 9, 2007 12:28 PM

Are you trying to become known as "the liberal Jonah Goldberg"?

Posted by theCoach | July 9, 2007 12:53 PM

It's broadly true that there's a certain amount of "big government" that Americans won't tolerate. They wouldn't tolerate the nationalization of industry, say, a requirement that women must (or mustn't) wear headscarves, or appointing John Yoo chief justice of the Supreme Court. It's also true that there's a certain amount of small government that Americans won't tolerate, such as trying to privatize social security. The current "center" vis-à-vis government size, and what's acceptable within the mainstream left and mainstream right, isn't the worst case scenario for libertarians, just as it isn't the worst case sceenario for liberals, conservatives, or anyone else. However, in that case, the existence of any consensus at all other than radical authoritarianism becomes a small victory for libertarianism.

Libertarians, in short, have jumped over a bar that is a little bit above the level of the floor, but not much above the floor.

We may live in a time when the treatment of the detainees of Gitmo are a source of widespread disgust among ordinary Americans, but we also are just coming out of a time when such policies were popular and widely supported. This is hardly a demonstration of even a "soft" libertarian synthesis. I mean, how "soft" does libertarianism have to become before it is compatible with the High Yooism we were seeing in the early 2000s?

Posted by Julian Elson | July 10, 2007 2:12 AM

Note: I have no justification for making sweeping claims about The Age of Abundance without having read it, and for all I know Lindsey has a brilliant, subtle argument here. I'm just responding to the quoted text of Lindsey's thesis, which is, of course, unsupported (since supporting it does, after all, require a book).

Posted by Julian Elson | July 10, 2007 2:14 AM