A week ago, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy piece titled Has the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived? Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an op-ed Libertarian, Liberal Lawmakers Share Concerns About Police Tactics in Ferguson. Drudge has added “libertarian” to his headline lexicon. Politicians like Rand Paul and Justin Amash are described as “libertarian-leaning.” Celebrities such as Clint Eastwood, Vince Vaughn, Kurt Russell, Kelly Clarkson and Drew Carey, Angelina Jolie and Tom Selleck are self-professed libertarians. The list of libertarian musicians and comics is long.
The evidence is strong, the word is out. I mean that fairly literally. The word “libertarian” has become commonplace and well-known. Libertarians can self-identify nowadays without explanation or definition. This wasn’t remotely true just a couple decades ago, when calling yourself a libertarian often required added description and commentary. This brings great joy to the hearts of many long-suffering libertarians. No longer do we have to detail our positions and beliefs to those with whom we talk politics. We can self-identify and move along, confident that most people have at least some familiarity with the term.
Even more heartening is the growing embrace of liberty in our society. Not only do more and more people have some sense of what a libertarian believes, more and more people are saying “yeah, I like it, it describes much of what I believe as well.” This observation is further validated by the increasingly angry tones that non-libertarians (of both major parties) are taking with regard to the movement and its current standard-bearers. While we might expect the Angry Left with its embrace of big nanny government to dislike anyone who objects to their statist ways, we also see a lot of shrill derision from those on the Right who see nothing wrong with big government as long as they’re in charge.
I’ve been on the receiving end of more than a few denigrations, insults and attacks, from the Left, from the Right, from the Middle (whatever that means) and even from libertarian purists over the years. It’s an inevitable part of putting forth opinions and engaging in arguments with strangers. They don’t bother me. In fact, they usually bring a smile to my face. A quote from Margaret Thatcher says it all:
I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.
I won’t even concede, however, that attacks are “wounding.” For them to be so, that would mean I’ve granted sufficient power to the attacker to wound me. To be wounded, I’d have to care sufficiently about the attacker and his opinion to give it credence and empower it.
In fact, the more raging, bilious and hyperbolic the attacks, the happier I become. They reflect real fear of the liberty movement, which is offering a “third way” to many who are fed up with the Left’s unceasing worship of big government and unhappy with the social-conservative and militarist elements of the Right. They also reflect a recognition that the liberty movement is infiltrating the major parties, instead of simply hanging out in an easily-ignored third party.
Sadly, not all libertarians are happy about the main-streaming of libertarianism. They rage against politicians like Senator Rand Paul, who is quite libertarian but not sufficiently “pure” for their tastes. They relish in denouncing anyone who doesn’t conform perfectly to their particular flavor of the philosophy, and would rather denounce someone who’s 2/3 of what they’d like and live under someone who’s 3% of what they like than accept an incremental change in the right direction. This echoes a phenomenon I’ve often witnessed in pop culture. People who discover a band early in its career, while it’s still small and struggling and playing bars and small clubs, sometimes get angry when that band hits it big, when it starts playing arenas and getting commercial airplay and building a bigger fan base and actually making some money. The sense of superiority, of “we’re the cool kids, the ones with taste, better than the ignorant masses,” takes a hit when everyone else starts liking something you found first. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially if all the songs you love are the songs that are suddenly popular, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Libertarianism certainly has a lot of this going on. Many long-timers, used to playing in the sandbox unmolested by anyone other than their purist peers, show signs of disappointment in the mainstreaming of the movement. Disagreement and compromise used to be only with others within the movement, and so were often over minutiae and obscure philosophical differences. With mainstreaming, however, comes the real questions regarding the journey from the state of things today towards a more libertarian society. Those questions involve compromise and incremental change, not “air-drop the ideal philosophy on the nation,” and armchair theorists are having their quiet little corners rattled by the encroaching hordes.
The purist crowd, ironically, threatens the very movement it embraces and advocates. Purists make great bogeymen for the opposition, enabling outlandish predictions and fear-mongering. An anti-libertarian can claim that libertarians would privatize law enforcement, eliminate all redistribution programs, eliminate Social Security, decimate the military, kill off all public works projects, eliminate NASA and the CDC, legalize all drugs, eliminate the FDA, eliminate public education etc etc. While all these fall well within the philosophy’s precepts, they’re all straw men. Yes, it would be good if there were changes made, but none of these seismic events are actually going to happen, certainly not in any of our lifetimes. Political change doesn’t work that way, and even if major Social Security reform happens, the program WILL continue to exist.
While the threat from purists is real, it is also manageable if the straw man attacks are recognized and countered as such. It can also energize people to think practically about libertarianism, and to challenge the purists to actually become engaged in real politics and help things. There’s a bandwagon, and people are hopping on board. As the numbers grow, as more and more people learn the word and realize that it describes them, the chances for real change grow.
With all that’s being done to us by government, it may not be the greatest time in the nation’s history to be an American. But, it is a good time to be a libertarian.
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