THE CHIMERAS OF "LIBERTARIANISM": WHAT'S BEHIND THIS POLITICAL MOVEMENT?
Newman, Stephen L.
The liberal tradition has always been ambivalent toward government. On the one hand, liberal theorists have usually deemed some form of civil government necessary to the security of life and...
...For their purposes Maddox and Lilie devised four ideological categories— libertarian, liberal, conservative, and populist—and assigned respondents according 311 to their attitudes toward government intervention in the economy and the expansion of personal freedoms...
...Religion, especially as employed by the politicized preachers of the New Right, is a powerful symbol of institutionalized morality and can be an effective instrument for policing communal norms...
...In the 1970s the LP and the movement benefited greatly from the support of millionaire industrialist Charles Koch...
...A recent study of ideology in the electorate published by the libertarian Cato Institute allows us at least a partial test of this hypothesis.' William Maddox and Stuart Lilie employed national opinion data from the Center for Political Studies of the University of Michigan and the National Opinion Research Center to search for libertarian sympathies in the general population...
...The conservative bias inherent in libertarianism is perhaps most clearly revealed in its reduction of civil rights to property rights...
...What distinguishes the Libertarian party is its consistent antistatism...
...Liberals" expressed support for both positions, "conservatives" were against both, and "populists" answered in the reverse of libertarians...
...No doubt Reagan cut heavily into the libertarian vote...
...Their major journal was The Freeman, edited by John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt, a successor of sorts to Albert Jay Nock's Freeman of three decades earlier...
...5 Conservatives claimed only 15 percent of the highest income bracket, populists a mere 11 percent...
...They portray the state as a proud and grossly swollen leviathan wreaking havoc in the economy and arbitrarily invading the rights of its citizens...
...Libertarians take their principles from the likes of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Albert Jay Nock, leading critics of socialism abroad and the New Deal at home in the 1930s...
...It is small wonder that classical liberalism preaches separation of church and state and insists on adherence to the impersonal rule of law...
...The geography of the libertarian vote shows that the party is strongest in the West, especially in California...
...Koch, whose father had been a member of the John Birch Society, embraced libertarianism after reading Mises's dense tome, Human Action...
...Electoral support for the LP, though large by third-party standards, is still too slight to register in the national voting studies...
...While libertarians oppose state-sponsored discrimination, they have nothing to say about discrimination in the marketplace...
...Ultimately libertarianism neither transcends nor resolves the dilemmas that plague contemporary American politics...
...The Cato Institute, founded in 1976 as a libertarian alternative to the liberal Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, continues to churn out a steady stream of position papers...
...The new state of nature suggested by libertarian schemes for less or no government (amounting in effect to the privatization of the public realm) is a highly romanticized version of the Lockean original...
...Yet, however absurd or anachronistic it may seem, libertarianism is no refugee from the lunatic fringe of academic discourse...
...Generally speaking, libertarians divide into two camps...
...Today in California, private courts, operating under a long-neglected nineteenth-century statute, dispense civil justice for a fee to litigants desiring greater privacy or speed than can be had in the public court system...
...It can hardly be mere coincidence that libertarianism emerged politically in the Me Decade...
...They reject the authority of tradition in social practice just as they rebel against the tradition of authority in politics...
...Though acutely sensitive to the use and abuse of power by the state, libertarians are oblivious to the exercise of economic power by giant national and multinational corporations...
...Nor does their study contain evidence of electoral realignment even among those said to be ideologically attuned to libertarianism...
...In the real world, ironically, libertarianism lends support to a Reaganite politics that is repressive in spirit and often statist in practice...
...Radically individualistic, unabashedly hedonistic, libertarians epitomize the cosmopolitan spirit of modern society...
...Hence the party's opposition to military adventures and its support of abortion rights and gay rights...
...Ideologically, libertarianism and the New Right supply a chorus of voices singing the praises of free-market capitalism...
...No defense of personal freedom that protects pornography, homosexuality, and abortion is likely to overcome the New Right's fears for the survival of the patriarchal family or allay its concern over the decline of Christian values in public life...
...Finally, in opposition to New Right moralism, libertarians call for the repeal of all laws touching on private morality...
...Rather, it seems in keeping with the trend observed by Christopher Lasch, who believes that contemporary American culture has carried the logic of individualism "to the extreme of a war of all against all...
...Visited with libertarian grace, saints and sinners can sit down together with mutual forbearance of one 314 another's life styles...
...The stark inequality that defines the relationship between the employee and the corporate employer or the consumer and the corporate provider creates a dependency far more insidious and more widely spread throughout society than any plan for government patronage yet imagined...
...The would-be speaker unable to afford a hall or unable to find a willing landlord is simply out of luck...
...In contrast, the percentages for each class were roughly equal among both liberals and conservatives, while populists tilted toward the working class...
...Its preoccupation with the bogeys of secular humanism and evolution is symptomatic of deep-seated cultural anxieties and the resentment felt by local communities toward distant, imperious bureaucrats and their "alien" values...
...THE SEEMINGLY INESCAPABLE tendency toward pork-barrel politics that entraps the modern state and ultimately works to undermine its legitimacy is in the end a reflection of America's liberal political culture, which has always understood the general welfare in terms of the satisfaction of private interests...
...Though essentially a nineteenth-century vision, it remains in force today, limiting the more 315 powerful twentieth-century state to the role of a political broker...
...As historian George Nash recounts, the antistatism of the Old Right was partially eclipsed after the Second World War by the emergence of a new generation of conservatives obsessed with fighting communism...
...The end result, however, may well turn out to be a political formula calculated to alienate conservatives and liberals alike...
...Libertarians casually assume that the profit motive will dispel prejudice in time...
...Today's self-styled "libertarians" draw upon this traditional liberal ambivalence toward government to deliver a harsh critique of the modern state...
...Anecdotal information, though grossly unreliable, suggests a constituency composed primarily of young professionals...
...The still more recent New Right of Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan has added a strong dose of religious moralism to conservative ideology...
...Libertarians hope that their unorthodox 309 mix of economic and cultural laissez-faire will attract a diverse constituency from across the political spectrum united in its desire to be left alone by the state...
...Lockean nature is in many ways analogous to the free market projected by libertarian theorists...
...316...
...and in a more hysterical tone, Daniel C. Maguire, The New Subversives: Anti-Americanism of the Religious Right (New York: Continuum, 1982...
...The other, calling itself "anarcho-capitalist," considers even the minimal state too much to bear and instead proposes a variety of anarchism in which private police forces and private courts compete for clients in a free market...
...Salem, Arkansas, where volunteer firefighters watched as a house burned to the ground because its owner had not paid his $20 annual fee, provides an 308 ominous foretaste of what we might expect...
...It is even possible to find small experiments of a more radical nature...
...4 William S. Maddox and Stuart A. Lilie, Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1984...
...He won a mere 5,000 popular votes...
...As a consequence, the libertarian universe is peopled by exceedingly cool enthusiasts whose passion for liberty stops short of any emotion that would dissolve the boundary of rights protecting each from the others...
...It would be a mistake, however, to overestimate libertarian influence on the Reagan White House or to confuse what has been called the Reagan Revolution with the libertarian agenda...
...Intellectually, these spokesmen for the Old Right represent a bygone era in American politics when conservatism was defined by adherence to the principles of classical Old-World liberalism...
...Its economic planks are decidedly conservative, calling for an end to the welfare state and full deregulation of the economy...
...Nozick's book, famous as a reply to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, should also be read as a minarchist refutation of the anarchocapitalist position...
...competition among selfish interests is believed to be self-regulating in such a way as to maximize everyone's well-being...
...Neo-isolationists, the libertarians also demand that the United States withdraw from the United Nations...
...Falwell discovers capitalism to be expressly sanctioned by the Bible...
...Historically speaking, their stern rejection of paternalistic statism in the Western democracies was provoked at least in part by the example of totalitarianism recently arrived in Europe...
...IF THIS READING of the movement's appeal is correct, the typical libertarian voter might turn out to be a yuppie not so much frightened by the specter of totalitarianism as resentful of the high taxes, redistributive programs, and paternalistic measures that threaten his/her style of life...
...The economic moralism of the New Right reflects once again its concern with individual character and the moral tone of public life...
...Libertarianism, by contrast, is a thoroughly secular doctrine...
...Doug Bandow, former editor of Inquiry, served as special assistant to the president for policy development between 1981 and 1982...
...His opening to the left fell flat, but a similar antiwar appeal helped foment a split in the conservative Young Americans for Freedom and converted former Goldwater aide Karl Hess to libertarianism...
...The party was the creation of a small group of renegade Young Republicans who left the GOP over Nixon's imposition of wage and price controls...
...Notes 1 George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976...
...Such confidence in the ultimate triumph of economic rationality suggests an astonishing degree of naivete...
...In 1978 the libertarian gubernatorial candidate in California received nearly 400,000 votes, the best showing for any third-party candidate there in almost three decades...
...42-44...
...The Maddox-Lilie study further suggests that the libertarian constituency is almost entirely white (96 percent in the 1980 sample...
...They seek to control the state in order to use its 313 powers to reverse the damage that has been done and to preserve tradition in the face of modernity...
...Liberals, who drew support evenly from all income levels, received roughly one-quarter of the top bracket...
...In the libertarian view of things, values are just another commodity and the market has room for all...
...In 1976, only 4 percent of these failed to vote for either Ford or Carter, and in 1980 Independent John Anderson and all other minor party candidates (including the Libertarian party's Ed Clark) shared 17 percent of the sample's libertarian respondents...
...Rothbard, a professional economist trained by Mises and for a time a member of Rand's inner circle, was a veteran libertarian activist...
...Libertarian Ideology AT FIRST GLANCE the Libertarian platform reveals a seeming ideological eclecticism...
...This is what sociologists call "status politics," less a conflict of economic or political interests than a competition over values at the core of public life 6 New right politics and libertarianism reveal their differences even where they appear to have most in common, in the area of economic policy...
...Unlike government, which ultimately relies on coercion, the market operates on the principle of voluntarism—at least in a purely formal sense...
...Thanks largely to Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974, libertarian concerns occupy a prominent place in the world of contemporary political philosophy...
...It is puzzling that libertarians who can imagine a market catering to every conceivable taste and life style cannot envision a market for prejudice as well...
...In a world marked by inequality and intolerance—that is, in the world we know—persons without property would effectively be without rights under a libertarian regime...
...Ending with Locke LIBERTARIANS DIFFER with these critics less in their analysis than in their conclusions...
...An unlikely amount of ink has been spilled in argument over the likelihood of war among competing private police forces and in disputing the feasibility of a privately owned nuclear deterrent...
...In their view its guiding spirit belongs not to Locke but to de Maistre or Stalin...
...It might be more accurate to say that they have pitted the Old Right against the New Right...
...Pointing at Washington, they charge that the Lockean guarantor of life and property has grown into the biggest thief of all...
...The contemporary legitimation crisis in America, therefore, is in large measure a product of the country's Lockean past...
...Obsessed with the coercive state, libertarians are oblivious to the effects of inequality in the market that can translate so-called "negative liberty" into the virtual negation of liberty for the economically disadvantaged...
...It is a fundamental assumption of libertarian politics that warring values will not produce actual warfare if the would-be combatants can no longer hope to enlist the state on their side...
...5 Ibid., p. 85...
...His economic policies and antistatist rhetoric play to the same constituency...
...Others, including the Libertarian Review, a magazine for the movement, and Inquiry, a slick semimonthly intended for a general audience, are still in business...
...New Right champions of the market like George Gilder and Jerry Falwell, on the other hand, invest capitalism with a specific moral content that reflects the teachings of fundamentalist Christianity...
...Indeed, there is little if anything in their data on which to build hopes for a mass movement...
...His hopes for the RLA were dashed at the group's very first convention when the meeting broke up amid sectarian disputes...
...Although they, too, profess to abhor Big Government and especially government intervention in the marketplace, they have no qualms about recommending state action to protect endangered "family values...
...In the 1960s her Objectivist movement, a vehicle for the quasi-libertarian philosophy propounded in her novels, spread across college campuses and would serve as a bridge to libertarianism for many of her disciples...
...The debate between the camps may seem fanciful to an observer, but the participants are in deadly earnest...
...but this is a fanciful cure for an imaginary disease...
...While almost half of the libertarians in the sample claimed no party affiliation in 1980, 38 percent identified themselves as Republicans and 43 percent described themselves as ideological conservatives...
...In that period libertarian representation almost doubled, rising from 9.4 percent of the sample population to 17.7 percent...
...While they agree on the superiority of capitalism as an economic system, they have strikingly different attitudes regarding its virtue...
...8 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. xv...
...So-called "excessive" individualism leading to the decline of family, church, and community is taken as a sign of the new social order born of respect for each person's individuality...
...Their emphasis on communal solidarity addresses the void in American political life encouraged by liberal atomism...
...also, the essay by John H. Simpson, "Moral Issues and Status Politics," in the same volume...
...In less than a decade the LP had established itself as the third-largest political party in the United States...
...Libertarians prefer their government bound and the marketplace unfettered...
...Although a minor political movement, it is no cultural anomaly...
...Economist William Niskanen sat on the Council of Economic Advisers before leaving the administration to assume command of the Cato Institute...
...Libertarianism is not unfairly characterized as an expression of American individualism run amok...
...In the symbolic war between traditional faith and contemporary relativism, libertarian ideology represents everything the New Right holds in contempt...
...Persons categorized as libertarians expressed support for the expansion of freedoms but were opposed to government manipulation of the economy...
...This is enough to satisfy the libertarian notion of freedom...
...Libertarian schemes, then, are not necessarily absurd, though they are certainly of dubious practicality...
...Reaganism is better understood as a New Right cocktail, an apparently intoxicating blend of laissez-faire, anticommunism, and traditionalism that has made drunkards of the electorate...
...Looking forward to a libertarian realignment in American politics, Maddox and Lilie optimistically point to the steady increase of libertarian respondents in their sample between 1972 and 1980...
...Libertarian themes sound the complaints of a wealthy, well-educated middle-class constituency unhappy over the cost and paternalistic inclination of the modern state...
...The data for education show libertarianism to be most popular among the most highly educated respondents...
...to libertarian theorists it appears to be a model of the world after politics, a vision of the self-regulating society that awaits the abolition of the state...
...The success of the New Right testifies that the popular revolt against the modern state is not born of a simple passion for the free market or a desire to be left alone to do one's own thing...
...When Reagan affirms the biblical foundation of all political wisdom, endorses "creation science," or refers to abortion as the "murder" of the unborn, he sides with these estranged middle Americans against the cosmopolitan elite that has long controlled the nation's power structure...
...Libertarianism, self-declared heir to the legacy of classical liberalism, takes these and other hard-won political victories for granted...
...Like the novels of Ayn Rand, this is simply escapist fantasy dressed up as political theory...
...Libertarian Demographics IT CLEARLY EMERGES from the Maddox-Lilie study that libertarianism, as they define it, is an upper-middle class phenomenon...
...Reaganism and the New Right amount less to a rejection of statism per se than to a repudiation of the symbolic content of modern American government...
...That people in the real world do fight over religious differences and other "irrational" objects, even where the state is neutral, seems mysterious to libertarian thinkers, a symptom perhaps of the false consciousness that will pass away with the state...
...This, as several students of contemporary government have observed, is a sure recipe for failure and explains the incoherence of public policy...
...3 Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, The Libertarian Manifesto, revised edition (New York: Collier Books, 1978), pp...
...Revolutionary pamphleteer Tom Paine captured the essence of the liberal dilemma when he wrote in Common Sense that "society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil...
...There is more to be gleaned from this point than further evidence of factional disputes on the right...
...The resulting cacophony signals not just their political differences, but suggests that each side intends its song for a different audience...
...Essays by Hayek, Mises, and other 310 veteran anti-New Dealers were the staple fare...
...6 See Jerome L. Himmelstein, "The New Right," in Robert C. Liebman and Robert Wuthnow, eds., The New Christian Right (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1983...
...In 1984 the LP presidential ticket appeared on the ballot in just thirty-nine states and the party's popular vote total dropped to 228,000, a poorer 312 showing than in 1976...
...Ultimately, the integrity of the entire liberal edifice depends upon the psychic insulation protecting the bourgeois personality from the political effects of such dangerous emotions...
...Optimistic leaders predicted major party status before the year 2000...
...Almost nonexistent in the lower levels, libertarianism claims the support of significant minorities [8 to 14 percent] in the middle-income brackets (defined as the range between $10,000 to $19,999 per year), about 20 percent of those with upper-middle incomes ($20,000 to $34,999), and the lion's share (36 percent) of those with incomes over $35,000 per year...
...The percentage of respondents identifying themselves as middle class among the libertarians outnumbered working-class self-identifiers two to one throughout the period surveyed...
...It will come as no surprise that true-believing ideologues abound in the libertarian movement...
...In 1972 three-quarters of those identified as libertarians by Maddox and Lilie voted for Richard Nixon...
...Taking a longerterm, structural perspective, it can be said that the modern American state invites disaffection through its brokerage relationship to the plethora of special interests...
...Libertarian analysts, however, mistake the liberal character of modern government...
...The authors use three measures of class: respondents' self-identification, income, and education...
...It is precisely this tolerance of a wide variety of moral preferences and their associated life styles that makes the libertarian defense of the market so attractive...
...On the concept of status politics, see Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1963), especially ch...
...The polemical novels of Ayn Rand provided yet another source of inspiration...
...They attack the modern state for what they suppose to be its role in the dissolution of customary social norms...
...In the tradition of French sociologist Emile Durkheim, they perceive anomie as the psychological consequence of social atomism...
...As Theodore Lowi points out in The End of Liberalism, American liberalism entails a conception of politics modeled on the invisible hand of the marketplace...
...Rather, it proposes a self-centered flight from political choice to a utopian, self-regulating market society...
...Lacking any set of criteria by which to define the public interest, government struggles to meet virtually every demand placed upon its limited resources with sufficient political intensity...
...Yet the promise of freedom that libertarianism holds out to nonconformists and moral dissidents will not bear close scrutiny...
...A year earlier Rothbard had published an appeal to the New Left in the pages of Ramparts calling for a left-right coalition against the war in Vietnam...
...In the 1950s libertarians were scarcely organized and the "movement" consisted of scattered circles of right-wing individualists who went to school on Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and other anticollectivist tracts...
...Perhaps the best measure of libertarian strength is the electoral record of the Libertarian party (LP...
...As a remedy for the nation's ills, libertarians strenuously urge a return to liberal first principles...
...In fact, libertarian proposals to turn over at least nonessential government services to the private sector have met with approval in many quarters...
...For Locke nature represented a prepolitical world, an anarchical condition made intolerable by the prospect of social chaos...
...Ironically, the waning of the LP coincides with Ronald Reagan's conservative crusade against Big Government...
...Its denizens enjoy perfect liberty, interacting voluntarily for the satisfaction of their various wants and needs...
...After all, power wielded in behalf of the governed might as easily be used to oppress them...
...Some of these, like the Students for a Libertarian Society and the Council for a Competitive Economy, were extremely short-lived...
...The paradox of the New Right is that it relies on a sophisticated electronic ministry and draws support from a constituency at home with space-age technology even as it rebels against "nihilistic" modernism...
...A similar naivete is to be observed in their failure to come to grips with the role of the modern corporation...
...Libertarianism, on the other hand, carries American liberalism to its logical extreme, transforming neglect of community into a conscious assault on the affective ties that hold society together...
...They would legalize the "victimless crimes" of prostitution, gambling, and the sale and use of narcotics, activities which might be described in Nozick's phrase as capitalist acts among consenting adults...
...James Davison Hunter, American Evangelism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983...
...Largely thanks to Koch's generosity, a host of new libertarian organizations and publications made their appearance...
...Private "police" like the Pinkerton are well known and have existed alongside their public counterparts for many years...
...SOME OF THE STRONGEST ATTACKS on libertarian politics have come from the right...
...State-mandated affirmative action is, of course, condemned as an unwarranted invasion of individual rights...
...Their decisions are given force by the state...
...Moreover, his own ideological affinity for libertarianism is reflected in the appointment of libertarian activists to important White House posts...
...On the contrary, they maintain that employers, for example, are well within their rights to refuse someone a job on account of that person's race, religion, gender, or sexual preference...
...In fact these seeming aberrations are better understood as the obverse of America's Lockean consensus...
...History of the Party THE FIRST ATTEMPT to create a national libertarian movement was sponsored by Murray Rothbard through his proposed Radical Libertarian Alliance (RLA...
...I The New Right of the 1950s retained the economic libertarianism of its predecessor, but welcomed the enhancement of the state's military and police powers to combat enemies foreign and domestic...
...What were originally advanced as hypothetical constructs and contested concepts come to be viewed in the American mainstream as the natural order of things...
...PERHAPS THE CLEAREST INDICATION of the cultural divide that separates libertarianism from the New Right is to be found in the significance each gives to religion...
...Libertarians and liberals were also found to be younger than conservatives and populists...
...By joining economic libertarianism with civil libertarianism and antimilitarism, libertarians claim to have moved politics beyond the conventional dialogue between left and right...
...On defense, however, it parts company with the conservatives by proposing to reduce the military establishment to a minimal defensive force and insisting on termination of all foreign commitments...
...Libertarianism presents the triumph of naked selfinterest as a milestone on the road to human freedom...
...This causes all nonLockean politics, whether the nostalgia for feudalism evinced by George Fitzhugh in the nineteenth century, or the godly politics of seventeenth-century Puritan divines, or for that matter the status politics of twentieth-century fundamentalists, to appear marginal when viewed from the center...
...It is Hartz's thesis that in America Lockean claims regarding human nature, natural rights, and the ends of politics take on the quality of "givenness...
...Overconfidence of liberalism SUCH NAIVETE is symptomatic in a much broader sense of the overconfidence of the liberal tradition in America...
...As Maddox and Lilie note for the 1980 data, the proportion of libertarian supporters increased dramatically along with annual income...
...Libertarian theorists like Nozick and Hayek deny the free market any special moral content...
...One camp, composed of "minarchists," favors a constitutionally limited minimal government akin to the night-watchman state of the last century...
...Nonetheless, Rothbard tells us emphatically, the disappointed speaker's right of free speech has not been violated...
...Here we encounter emotions— akin to madness in Hobbes's view— that have the power to overturn rights, property, and even to sweep away individual identity as the zealot becomes one with the mob...
...In 1972, the year of its founding, the LP was able to place its presidential candidate, philosopher John Hospers, on the ballot in only two states...
...Rather, the market is said to accommodate all moralities equally well, so long as they observe the procedural constraints governing market transactions...
...The decline of religious authority under the pressures of modernization gave rise to the Christian fundamentalism that currently feeds New Right politics...
...Ernest van den Haag, in an especially vituperative article, describes the libertarian critique of state power as naive and accuses libertarians of being soft on communism...
...In Locke's view, only the promulgation and enforcement of law by a universally recognized authority can guarantee the peace...
...In their view, once government strays from the tasks of protecting life and property, it inevitably becomes a threat to both...
...Personal freedom is their highest political value, realized through the absence of formal constraints on individual behavior...
...Demographic studies simply do not exist...
...Eight years later LP candidate Ed Clark was listed on the ballot in all fifty states and polled just over a million votes nationwide...
...Seemingly enchanted by the market model of human psychology, libertarians routinely overestimate the role of instrumental rationality in human conduct...
...It remains to be asked what would become of the poor once essential public services are privatized...
...Less scholastic than Hayek and the others, Rand's heroic portrayal of capitalism was especially popular with high school and college students...
...As a political movement libertarianism owes its life to middle-class discomfort over the swelling of government in the 1960s and a series of unhappy events (the agony of Vietnam, the scandal of Watergate) that damaged the credibility of the state and caused it to suffer a loss of public esteem...
...The distribution of ideologies across income levels offers an even more striking contrast...
...At the same time, liberals have tended to regard the state with suspicion...
...The blatant selfishness of libertarian politics may well be its strongest selling point...
...7. 7 See James L. Guth, "The New Christian Right," in Liebman and Wuthnow, The New Christian Right...
...THE NONECONOMIC BEHAVIORS that SO puzzle libertarian theorists, behaviors associated with religious fanaticism and rabid nationalism that will not meet the economist's test of rationality, have always disturbed and often frightened liberal thinkers...
...If the Libertarian party's actual share of the electorate is taken as a measure of political influence, libertarianism is in decline...
...And still libertarians insist that the absence of physical coercion in the workplace and in the market leaves the wage-dependent worker perfectly free and grants the passive consumer a kind of sovereignty over production...
...The United States, as Louis Hartz contends, is surely the Lockean polity par excellence...
...For 1980, 34 percent of those claiming an advanced degree and 32 percent with a college degree were classified as libertarians...
...The profile of libertarian sympathizers that emerges from their study, however, suggests an elite constituency of limited size...
...8 What disturbs these analysts is the possibility that social bonds may have decayed beyond the point of providing the individual with any sense of membership in a corporate body...
...On the one hand, liberal theorists have usually deemed some form of civil government necessary to the security of life and property...
...In its view the marketplace is a major theater for civic education and cannot be regarded as ethically neutral...
...Their data base does not identify self-declared libertarians, and so cannot be used to characterize the movement's actual constituency...
...In the United States, which lacks the discipline of a traditional class structure, religion has always served this regulatory social function...
...The end of libertarian politics resembles nothing so much as Locke's hypothetical starting point, the state of nature, where autonomous men and women invent and initiate the social compact...
...In the Maddox-Lilie study, libertarians showed a higher percentage of respondents with no religious preference than any other group except liberals...
...Moreover, libertarian rhetoric has re-emerged in American electoral politics, most notably through Ronald Reagan, and it appears to possess considerable appeal...
...Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. viii...
...Libertarianism, which fails as a mass political movement because at bottom it does not understand the cultural sources of so much popular opposition to Big Government, fails also in its critique of the modern state because it cannot distinguish the social welfare policies of a liberal democracy from the totalitarian road to serfdom...
...In contrast, the New Right articulates the anger and frustration of a less well educated, lower-middle class constituency that has risen in defense of its traditional world view...
...The conservative tilt to libertarianism betrays its origins as a political movement...
...Heeding the prophecy of Ayn Rand, libertarians appear confident that the future belongs to the rational egoist—economic man unbound...
...Only liberals displayed a similar pattern, while conservatives received under one-fifth of the college-educated respondents and populists less than one-tenth...
...The right of free speech, for example, according to libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard, is nothing more than the individual's right to own or rent a hall in which to give a speech...
...The libertarian movement finally became viable with the founding of the Libertarian party in 1972...
...2 Ernest van den Haag, "Libertarians and Conservatives," National Review, June 8, 1979...
...Libertarians shun domestic moralism and cold-war militarism for the same reasons they condemn the welfare state...
...More than half of those classified as libertarians in 1980 and over two-thirds of those designated liberals were under 41 years of age...
...And, in the tradition of Karl Marx, they attribute the dissolution of established social conventions and the atomization of society to the influence of liberal capitalism...
...It is difficult to say much about the rank and file of the libertarian movement...
...Denied the assistance of government (which alone has the power to create economic privilege), the corporation, they assert, would no more be able to defy market forces or dictate to the rest of society than could the baker, butcher, and brewer in Adam Smith's celebrated illustration of the invisible hand...
...3 (Rothbard gives no sign of recognizing the irony of his account...
...These data would appear to lend credence to the notion advanced earlier that the libertarian constituency is primarily composed of young professionals...
...The National Review routinely meets libertarian proposals with derision...
...Though unsubstantiated by hard data, this assessment seems entirely plausible given the libertarian equation of personal freedom with the individual's right to any life style he or she can afford...
...New Right spokesmen have no sympathy for the social anarchy at the heart of the libertarian vision...
...yet, though the lyrics are quite often shared, they follow inharmonious scores...
...2 It is not difficult to imagine an equally stinging rebuke from the Moral Majority...
...Libertarians routinely portray the modern corporation as simply a larger version of the small shopkeeper familiar to classical economic theory...
...Religion is the cement that binds the New Right constituency and the vital force that animates its members...
...In a similar vein, the authors of Habits of the Heart, a recent study of individualism and commitment in American life, worry that American individualism "may have grown cancerous...
...That largely accounts for their virulent antistatism and also explains why they so highly prize free-market capitalism...
...In 1976 and again in 1980, despite the presence of an LP candidate in the race, twothirds of the designated "libertarians" in the sample cast their ballots for the Republican candidate...
Vol. 34 • July 1987 • No. 3
