Libertarians in theory: “Government should be afraid of its people and any regime that uses coercion or limits its citizens cannot be legitimate. In this 50,000 word essay, I will explain why the delicate balance between personal freedom and public service…”
Libertarianism is practice: “Look, I really need us to revisit this whole age of consent thing…”
Thank you for this honest reflection. We need more of this in our polity.
I've long been torn by libertarianism. I think of myself as a not-so-woke progressive, so I agree with libertarianism on the matter of personal liberties. But I've always been critical of it for the way in which it seems to disregard civic responsibility and social health. What differentiates people like me from the typical libertarian is how collectivist I am in my thinking.
We live in a world that is immeasurably more interconnected and advanced than the one in which this country was founded. Today, individual actors and parties exercising what might have once been fairly considered to be their own personal liberties have a potential to affect the rest of the world in ways that our founders couldn't have possibly anticipated.
Yet libertarians seem to want an 18th century government in a 21st century world, one in which politicians in Congress can be trusted to micromanage the jobs of qualified experts and professionals in government agencies. And so we get the obsession with the "administrative state". But in a world incomparably more complex than in the 1790s, even the "eminent men of letters" then intended to populate our legislative bodies would be ill-equipped for such a task, much less the Lauren Boebert's and Tomny Tuberville's of the world.
The perils of government being "too big" seem obvious right now, but I worry we will take the wrong lessons from this. The people being targeted by this purge are not the tyrants that libertarians rage against, but dedicated public servants who do their jobs apolitically and take pride in getting it right—in particular the agencies that compile information to inform the public. Despite the negative connotations of "sprawling" institutions, it is the distributed and bureacratic nature of our government which protects it from being easily commandeered by malicious actors like Trump and his mottled coterie of celebrity incompetents, vindictive malcontents, Christian fascists, and Yarvinite neo-tyrants.
And it's the latter group which are particularly concerning, because many of these are precisely the kind of people you described in your rival group—Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Marc Andreesen, David Sacks, and now Elon Musk, et al. Cosplaying as libertarians, yet flush with cash and influence and seeking a new world order that undermines and/or circumvents the institutions of democracy, these people are dangerous and are starting to get along a bit too well with the other MAGA factions.
I'm all good with the abundance liberals or "supply side progressives"; it probably best describes where I am. I once bought into the agenda of tariffs and protectionism before wising up. I now support free trade and a generous welfare state, along with a what I'd call a *wide* government, one which concerns itself with all of the things regarding which society may need to act in concert, but where power is distributed and duly delegated to the private sector where best, with a lot of checks and balances and independent moving parts.
Regardless of where you and I may or may not disagree, I'm glad to see that you've pulled away from the corrupting influence of the false libertarians, the enablers of moneyed, right-wing authoritarianism whose defense of personal liberties was born of a sense of privileged impunity and indignant superiority, who only opposed government when it was inconvenient to their personal designs, and who had no qualms about throwing in with those who opposed it because they believed it to be irredeemably secular and liberal.
I hope we can effectively band together to build a new and better America from the rubble of this current debacle.
I think you are spot on with this point: "Yet libertarians seem to want an 18th century government in a 21st century world, one in which politicians in Congress can be trusted to micromanage the jobs of qualified experts and professionals in government agencies."
I would go further to argue that many actually want an 18th century world and believe that somehow they will get it. The lure of libertarianism also seems to be the premise that we will go back to opening up land, covered wagons etc. It is a vague promise of return no different than Trump's MAGA and that is why it has captured so many.
I think this a really interesting aspect of human psychology. We think of conservatives as the ones who pine for an over-idealized past, but they aren't the only ones.
In fact, conservatives tend to look to the *recent* past since, being still within our cultural memory, its positive aspects are more tangible. Liberals and libertarians, on the other hand, being more acutely aware of its negative aspects, need to go back much further in time in order to forget the obvious downsides of a former era.
So this is why some environmentally conscious liberals like myself make the mistake of romanticizing pre-industrial society, and the more extreme anti-capitalists claim to want to return to the barter system, or in some cases even our pre-Neolithic hunter/gatherer era.
I think this is how some of us resolve the apparent contradictions between our ideals and our lives, by placing our ideals in such obvious fantasy territory that of course we have no choice but to live the modern lives we were given, complaining through our smartphones and indulging in our modern forms of entertainment, etc., while dreaming of a glorious return (one day!) to a better time.
Abundance liberals, on the other hand, realize the folly in trying to roll back the present and seek to get the most out of our unquestionably better modern lives while doing our best to mitigate the downsides for future generations.
And so yeah, I think libertarians sometimes spend so much time reading the Federalist Papers and the wrtings of Madison, Jefferson, and Paine—good things per se—that they, perhaps unwittingly, settle into a comfortable ignorance of all of the things people of that era didn't need to worry about, if only because they didn't know any better.
They fail to realize how truly small our small government was back then, and begin to see themselves almost as brave crusaders bent on restoring a time when it was remotely plausible to have a government so small it could run itself off import tarriffs and consumption taxes.
That era is gone, and never coming back, and we should all be thankful for it.
I think you have a point although I am not sure what to make of "Abundance Liberals". So far as I can tell the concept is new and not well developed. I think the notion that we should aim for abundance sounds good but in the abstract it also reads like another form of longtermism which isn't really a meaningful ethos to me and certainly a useless guide.
I know a lot of people talk about it without really defining it, but Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson actually have gone into a decent amount of detail.
As I understand, the biggest difference with typical progressives is that they're ardently pro-free-trade and pro-growth, as opposed to many progressives who actually want tarriffs and austerity (like the zero-growth crowd). Like regular progressives, they support a generous welfare state domestically.
They sometimes call themselves "supply side progressives". The idea is that to help the poor and working class, instead of pursuing inflationary solutions like handing out lots of money, provide goods and services to the needy, and pursue a high-output economy to keep prices low.
Yeah but sooner or later you have to make tradeoffs. The "high growth" approach sounds fine in the abstract but when you are greenlighting nuclear energy without waste storage or natural gas for AI datacenters you are also creating issues. My problem with Klein is that he essentially ignores all that in favor of a more strawman "we love growth, you don't" kind of approach.
I compare this to longtermism because both seem to have a central notion but which fails to clarify things when you actually have to make the hard choices. I also don't think that characterizing progressives as being pro tarriffs and austerity makes sense. Nor do I see handouts as necessarily inflationary.
As I see it you need pragmatism but Klein at least hasn't convinced me he has a plan so much as a rebrand. In general I think we should build things too and I don't think all growth is bad. But like saying we should focus on the long-term supporting those things in the abstract does not tell us which growth is good because not all of it is.
Spot on. I had a very similar evolution to yours (and experiences with SFL and YAL). Wrote a bit about that here. The Mises Caucus takeover was the last nail in the coffin to me. But hopefully, it's just a temporary death. https://exasperatedalien.substack.com/p/liberals-are-not-responsible-for
I used to feel I had a lot in common with Libertarians, but I felt COVID restrictions attracted a whole new element into the Libertarian Party, people who believed that public health authorities were corrupt liars, people who believed and spread disinformation, and as you noted about that other group — people who were just pissed off at government. And now they feel Trump is their retribution, now that he’s in charge of the government it can do no wrong.
It’s more about emotion than logic. Too many people pissed off about too many things. Personally I think it’s overpopulation and overconsumption of resources finally leading to a zero sum world instead of one in which most people can share in an ever growing feast. So you pick a side and plunder while your side is in charge.
I agree with a lot of this, only thing I might differ on is that the zero sum world you speak of mostly exists in their collective imagination. Strangely, paradoxically, it seems to me that we live in an age of greater abundance that would actually reduce the need for zero sum thinking, but because of mass media, zero sum thinking can now be imposed on gullible, resentful people more easily.
I argue the YAL group are a type of libertarians: Paleolibertarians. This comes from Murray Rothbard who said this was a combination of libertarianism and right-wing populism. He wrote this in his manifesto.
Congress is broken and we know where the power went…
“The saddest twist of fate is that back then, if there was one thing most of the YAL and SFL people seemed to agree on, it was that too much power had been concentrated in the executive branch for far too long.”
Thank you for this piece. It brought back a number of memories for me as well. Your YAL group reminds me of some libertarians I knew as well but I would characterize them as a third group, angry traditionalists. They were conservative Catholics who also absorbed conspiracy theories about overbearing government but their expectation was not that fighting the state would bring weed but that "the market" would naturally choose a society of traditional values and free enterprise (in the 18th century mold). They were, to put it bluntly, anti-woke before woke was a thing. While I'm not in contact with them I have little doubt they have followed your YAL friends into MAGA land.
But, while I like your piece I would argue it is too optimistic. It is not fair to simply call the MAGA-verse anti-liberal. They are too far gone for that. They have really gone around the horseshoe to becoming open Maoists who are so disappointed that they will wage a cultural revolution. At that point I don't think it is enough to assume people will wake up.
Libertarians in theory: “Government should be afraid of its people and any regime that uses coercion or limits its citizens cannot be legitimate. In this 50,000 word essay, I will explain why the delicate balance between personal freedom and public service…”
Libertarianism is practice: “Look, I really need us to revisit this whole age of consent thing…”
Sad but true
Thank you for this honest reflection. We need more of this in our polity.
I've long been torn by libertarianism. I think of myself as a not-so-woke progressive, so I agree with libertarianism on the matter of personal liberties. But I've always been critical of it for the way in which it seems to disregard civic responsibility and social health. What differentiates people like me from the typical libertarian is how collectivist I am in my thinking.
We live in a world that is immeasurably more interconnected and advanced than the one in which this country was founded. Today, individual actors and parties exercising what might have once been fairly considered to be their own personal liberties have a potential to affect the rest of the world in ways that our founders couldn't have possibly anticipated.
Yet libertarians seem to want an 18th century government in a 21st century world, one in which politicians in Congress can be trusted to micromanage the jobs of qualified experts and professionals in government agencies. And so we get the obsession with the "administrative state". But in a world incomparably more complex than in the 1790s, even the "eminent men of letters" then intended to populate our legislative bodies would be ill-equipped for such a task, much less the Lauren Boebert's and Tomny Tuberville's of the world.
The perils of government being "too big" seem obvious right now, but I worry we will take the wrong lessons from this. The people being targeted by this purge are not the tyrants that libertarians rage against, but dedicated public servants who do their jobs apolitically and take pride in getting it right—in particular the agencies that compile information to inform the public. Despite the negative connotations of "sprawling" institutions, it is the distributed and bureacratic nature of our government which protects it from being easily commandeered by malicious actors like Trump and his mottled coterie of celebrity incompetents, vindictive malcontents, Christian fascists, and Yarvinite neo-tyrants.
And it's the latter group which are particularly concerning, because many of these are precisely the kind of people you described in your rival group—Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Marc Andreesen, David Sacks, and now Elon Musk, et al. Cosplaying as libertarians, yet flush with cash and influence and seeking a new world order that undermines and/or circumvents the institutions of democracy, these people are dangerous and are starting to get along a bit too well with the other MAGA factions.
I'm all good with the abundance liberals or "supply side progressives"; it probably best describes where I am. I once bought into the agenda of tariffs and protectionism before wising up. I now support free trade and a generous welfare state, along with a what I'd call a *wide* government, one which concerns itself with all of the things regarding which society may need to act in concert, but where power is distributed and duly delegated to the private sector where best, with a lot of checks and balances and independent moving parts.
Regardless of where you and I may or may not disagree, I'm glad to see that you've pulled away from the corrupting influence of the false libertarians, the enablers of moneyed, right-wing authoritarianism whose defense of personal liberties was born of a sense of privileged impunity and indignant superiority, who only opposed government when it was inconvenient to their personal designs, and who had no qualms about throwing in with those who opposed it because they believed it to be irredeemably secular and liberal.
I hope we can effectively band together to build a new and better America from the rubble of this current debacle.
I think you are spot on with this point: "Yet libertarians seem to want an 18th century government in a 21st century world, one in which politicians in Congress can be trusted to micromanage the jobs of qualified experts and professionals in government agencies."
I would go further to argue that many actually want an 18th century world and believe that somehow they will get it. The lure of libertarianism also seems to be the premise that we will go back to opening up land, covered wagons etc. It is a vague promise of return no different than Trump's MAGA and that is why it has captured so many.
I think this a really interesting aspect of human psychology. We think of conservatives as the ones who pine for an over-idealized past, but they aren't the only ones.
In fact, conservatives tend to look to the *recent* past since, being still within our cultural memory, its positive aspects are more tangible. Liberals and libertarians, on the other hand, being more acutely aware of its negative aspects, need to go back much further in time in order to forget the obvious downsides of a former era.
So this is why some environmentally conscious liberals like myself make the mistake of romanticizing pre-industrial society, and the more extreme anti-capitalists claim to want to return to the barter system, or in some cases even our pre-Neolithic hunter/gatherer era.
I think this is how some of us resolve the apparent contradictions between our ideals and our lives, by placing our ideals in such obvious fantasy territory that of course we have no choice but to live the modern lives we were given, complaining through our smartphones and indulging in our modern forms of entertainment, etc., while dreaming of a glorious return (one day!) to a better time.
Abundance liberals, on the other hand, realize the folly in trying to roll back the present and seek to get the most out of our unquestionably better modern lives while doing our best to mitigate the downsides for future generations.
And so yeah, I think libertarians sometimes spend so much time reading the Federalist Papers and the wrtings of Madison, Jefferson, and Paine—good things per se—that they, perhaps unwittingly, settle into a comfortable ignorance of all of the things people of that era didn't need to worry about, if only because they didn't know any better.
They fail to realize how truly small our small government was back then, and begin to see themselves almost as brave crusaders bent on restoring a time when it was remotely plausible to have a government so small it could run itself off import tarriffs and consumption taxes.
That era is gone, and never coming back, and we should all be thankful for it.
I think you have a point although I am not sure what to make of "Abundance Liberals". So far as I can tell the concept is new and not well developed. I think the notion that we should aim for abundance sounds good but in the abstract it also reads like another form of longtermism which isn't really a meaningful ethos to me and certainly a useless guide.
I know a lot of people talk about it without really defining it, but Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson actually have gone into a decent amount of detail.
As I understand, the biggest difference with typical progressives is that they're ardently pro-free-trade and pro-growth, as opposed to many progressives who actually want tarriffs and austerity (like the zero-growth crowd). Like regular progressives, they support a generous welfare state domestically.
They sometimes call themselves "supply side progressives". The idea is that to help the poor and working class, instead of pursuing inflationary solutions like handing out lots of money, provide goods and services to the needy, and pursue a high-output economy to keep prices low.
Yeah but sooner or later you have to make tradeoffs. The "high growth" approach sounds fine in the abstract but when you are greenlighting nuclear energy without waste storage or natural gas for AI datacenters you are also creating issues. My problem with Klein is that he essentially ignores all that in favor of a more strawman "we love growth, you don't" kind of approach.
I compare this to longtermism because both seem to have a central notion but which fails to clarify things when you actually have to make the hard choices. I also don't think that characterizing progressives as being pro tarriffs and austerity makes sense. Nor do I see handouts as necessarily inflationary.
As I see it you need pragmatism but Klein at least hasn't convinced me he has a plan so much as a rebrand. In general I think we should build things too and I don't think all growth is bad. But like saying we should focus on the long-term supporting those things in the abstract does not tell us which growth is good because not all of it is.
These are good observations. Like most libertarians, I am saddened by the turn my former party has taken. I made some adjacent points about it here that might interest you: https://substack.com/@peterceverett/note/p-155934447?r=12miu2&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Spot on. I had a very similar evolution to yours (and experiences with SFL and YAL). Wrote a bit about that here. The Mises Caucus takeover was the last nail in the coffin to me. But hopefully, it's just a temporary death. https://exasperatedalien.substack.com/p/liberals-are-not-responsible-for
I used to feel I had a lot in common with Libertarians, but I felt COVID restrictions attracted a whole new element into the Libertarian Party, people who believed that public health authorities were corrupt liars, people who believed and spread disinformation, and as you noted about that other group — people who were just pissed off at government. And now they feel Trump is their retribution, now that he’s in charge of the government it can do no wrong.
It’s more about emotion than logic. Too many people pissed off about too many things. Personally I think it’s overpopulation and overconsumption of resources finally leading to a zero sum world instead of one in which most people can share in an ever growing feast. So you pick a side and plunder while your side is in charge.
I agree with a lot of this, only thing I might differ on is that the zero sum world you speak of mostly exists in their collective imagination. Strangely, paradoxically, it seems to me that we live in an age of greater abundance that would actually reduce the need for zero sum thinking, but because of mass media, zero sum thinking can now be imposed on gullible, resentful people more easily.
I argue the YAL group are a type of libertarians: Paleolibertarians. This comes from Murray Rothbard who said this was a combination of libertarianism and right-wing populism. He wrote this in his manifesto.
It looks like libertarians have been very useful to reactionary elements.
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/from-madisons-vision-to-musks-dystopia
Congress is broken and we know where the power went…
“The saddest twist of fate is that back then, if there was one thing most of the YAL and SFL people seemed to agree on, it was that too much power had been concentrated in the executive branch for far too long.”
I really enjoyed your piece. Keep writing!
Thank you for this piece. It brought back a number of memories for me as well. Your YAL group reminds me of some libertarians I knew as well but I would characterize them as a third group, angry traditionalists. They were conservative Catholics who also absorbed conspiracy theories about overbearing government but their expectation was not that fighting the state would bring weed but that "the market" would naturally choose a society of traditional values and free enterprise (in the 18th century mold). They were, to put it bluntly, anti-woke before woke was a thing. While I'm not in contact with them I have little doubt they have followed your YAL friends into MAGA land.
But, while I like your piece I would argue it is too optimistic. It is not fair to simply call the MAGA-verse anti-liberal. They are too far gone for that. They have really gone around the horseshoe to becoming open Maoists who are so disappointed that they will wage a cultural revolution. At that point I don't think it is enough to assume people will wake up.
https://open.substack.com/pub/publis324843/p/another-cultural-revolution?r=7av8t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true