Libertarians in America

Brink Lindsey wrote an interesting column called “The Libertarian Center.” I suggest you all read it. Excerpt:

There is no organized libertarian movement of any significance in American politics. To be sure, libertarian academics and intellectuals occupy some prominent positions and exert real influence on the public debate. But they do not speak on behalf of any politically mobilized mass constituency. Only about 2 percent of Americans describe themselves as libertarian, according to a 2000 Rasmussen poll. And the Libertarian Party is a fringe operation that, at best, occasionally plays the spoiler.

Nevertheless, the fact is that American society today is considerably more libertarian than it was a generation or two ago. Compare conditions now to how they were at the outset of the 1960s. Official governmental discrimination against blacks no longer exists. Censorship has beaten a wholesale retreat. The rights of the accused enjoy much better protection. Abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, and gay sex are legal. Divorce laws have been liberalized and rape laws strengthened. Pervasive price and entry controls in the transportation, energy, communications, and financial sectors are gone. Top income tax rates have been slashed. The pretensions of macroeconomic fine-tuning have been abandoned. Barriers to international trade are much lower. Unionization of the private sector work force has collapsed. Of course there are obvious counterexamples, but on the whole it seems clear that cultural expression, personal lifestyle choices, entrepreneurship, and the play of market forces all now enjoy much wider freedom of maneuver.

The many and complex reasons for this trend can be boiled down to one sweeping generalization: in an age of mass affluence, economic development and individualism go together. For a detailed historical argument in support of this thesis, I refer you to my new book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture…

In the new, more individualistic culture, traditional attitudes about race relations, sex, the role of women in society, the role of religion in public life, the permissible limits of artistic expression, and the nature of American cultural identity have taken a beating. The country is now much more tolerant and pluralistic than before. And people are much less willing to subjugate their personal interests to standards set by families, employers, churches, and governments.

In the economic realm, it was once thought that the progress of industrialization would lead ineluctably to an extreme centralization of economic decision-making. I discuss the rise and fall of that wrongheaded idea in my previous book, Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism. It turns out, of course, that the glittering collectivist future never arrived. While the scale of economic production and that of government planning and control increased in tandem for a while, further progress beyond a relatively simple mass-production economy has required increasing reliance on entrepreneurship by outsiders and vigorous market competition that allows good new ideas to get a tryout…

American society has become more libertarian because, more than any other country on the planet, it has successfully adapted to the novel conditions of economic abundance. And because of the way this adaptation took place, a broadly defined libertarianism now occupies the center of the American political spectrum.

Ron Coleman does not exactly agree with Brink Lindsay… to put it mildy:

The argument is fine as far as it goes, though it goes and goes — whenever someone links to Brink, he proves himself scan-proof as ever. But Brink takes it beyond where it ought to go, which is bedtime stories; for besides writing very long essays, libertarians have no future in this or any other country as a political force except along the margin. Sorry, Ron Paul. (Did I say Ron Paul?!) Part of it is their reveling in social non-traditionalism. I wonder (and now I am only thinking aloud) whether notwithstanding the fact that Americans act like godless Europeans when it comes to issues such as contraception and premarital cohabitation, they still don’t want to admit to themselves that — like “conservative” Sean Hannity savaging the Catholic Church when it doesn’t go his way — their use for traditional mores is a sort of spiritual balm they’re not ready to abandon. Or, perhaps, we still want to be a little more good, and to recognize there is such a thing as good in society other than non-interference with other people, then the libertarians would like to believe?

We can, and probably should, talk about these questions all day. But no matter how badly GWB wounds conservatives, they are not going away, and certainly not in order to make way for the libertarians as anything but a principled and needed voice in the mix. I’m pretty darned libertarianish on economic policy issues, after all. But I believe an official policy of amorality is not what civilization is about.

Your thoughts?