Has libertarianism poisoned ideas on the left?

[Cutlass]

Except calling Trump a liar and a racist is a straightforward matter of just looking at the things he says and believes. When we look at the things libertarians say and believe, it doesn't seem we arrive at any clear conclusion that they are fascists.


Yet my descriptions of libertarianism in this thread and your descriptions of fascism here show striking differences.

- Strong in-group affinity: libertarians have a strong affinity for libertarians, that's true enough. But for, say, Americans or white people? Clearly a more complicated picture, as evidenced by the fact that many libertarians are strong supporters of immigration and strong believers that immigrants make everyone better off. I already gave an example of the CATO institute supporting this view. Of course there are racist libertarians, but in-group affinity and racism don't seem to be particularly salient descriptions of libertarians or libertarianism.

- Political authoritarianism: in terms of direct action by the state, this is a very poor descriptor of libertarians. I continue to maintain that an important historical context of libertarianism is in fact backlash to authoritarian regimes in the 20th century, including of course the fascist ones. Again, in recent decades a major hobby horse of libertarians has been staunch opposition to the expansion of police powers and expansion of state powers in the name of counter terrorism. I dunno about you, but fascist is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Edward Snowden.

- and distaste for parliamentary or other forms of democracy: There is a little bit going on here in terms of libertarian opposition to electorally popular welfare programs and apathy about corporate governance. But they maintain this is about maximizing utility for society and that many popular or well-intentioned policies are socially suboptimal. A related issue is their concern for bloated state programs. E.g., CA's stupid and expensive HSR plan. They are occasionally correct on these fronts. An issue is their naive belief in the powers of civil society and markets to fix things, but this is not tantamount to fascism by any stretch of the imagination. Also, look to how loads of libertarians support UBI as an alternative to the web of welfare policies we currently have. As it turns out, most of them don't actually want people to starve

- scapegoating of racial, ethnic or religious minorities: I have never seen libertarians do this. They are much more likely to see the state as a vehicle for enforcing the prejudices of an ethnic majority and oppose state power on those grounds. For example, they regularly point to the Holocaust as an example and say it wouldn't have happened in a libertarian world. I'm sure you have some nice theory about how capital caused the Holocaust, but don't convince me, convince the libertarians who just want to point out a weaker state apparatus with way better respect for individual rights would not have regulated Jewish life, confiscated Jewish property, or murdered millions of Jews. Another example: in the US context, many libertarians are of the view that the state has been extremely oppressive towards African Americans and this continues via mass incarceration and the drug war. I'll concede the picture libertarians paint is complicated by some degree of Social Darwinism underlying their ideology. But it seems their views lend themselves more to Social Darwinism within the white population, than between whites and people of color. Once again, I have a lot of criticisms of libertarians with respect to issues of racism and justice, but scapegoating minorities is not a prominent feature of libertarian ideology or rhetoric.

You say fascism is not a one size fits all model. Reading your denunciations, it seems like it almost is. Until I read your own description of fascism and then I'm not so sure.


This is basically what I'm getting at. Here we have a fraught claim to knowledge about what is natural or organic. As I'm sure you know, these types of claims are inspired by Newtonianism and Darwinism. Yet they only have a scientific veneer. Leftists of the early 20th century, convinced of the certainty of their doctrines, used the state as a vehicle to accelerate the natural and inevitable trends of history. So two things are going on. One is a lack of epistemic modesty regarding social models and beliefs about how virtually everything works. The other is the bureaucratic ontology that gives people a point of view where they can simplify the subtle dynamics of economic networks, institutions, information processing and flow, social relations, justice, human psychology, even genetics. It's important to see that 19th and early 20th century intellectuals were not safely cordoned off from ballooning statist ontology. Rather, they were enamored with it. Their policies were made realizable by the idea that if the state could, say, mobilize the population to win World War I, the state could mobilize the population to bring about known, inevitable, and morally righteous transformations.

Market-oriented thinking and bureaucratic thinking may go hand in hand, but knowledgeable liberals seem to be much more cognizant of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. They openly acknowledge that things are complicated, hard to model, and monkeying around is fraught with challenges and unintended consequences. Libertarians are more utopian, but they still emphasize complexity and subtle efficiencies in ways that, say, socialists rarely, if ever, do. In fact, their epistemic modesty is a key element of their philosophy: they always point out that there's only so much the state can know and do and therefore it is often best to let the more spontaneous organization and information processing of markets just do their thing. Capital is an important part of all that, so let's definitely be careful there. Liberals, more generally, will maintain that we can't know exactly what's best or what will happen in the future, so we'll take a hands off approach, providing interventions, investments, and legal tools when we can identify them as necessary.

There's a problem here. You are describing a theoretical part of the libertarian spectrum. Now this part of the spectrum does in fact exist. But what you are missing is that it is only a part of the spectrum. And, in terms of American politics, it is a vanishingly rare to the point of politically irrelevant part of the spectrum. In short, this is not how people who self-describe as libertarian vote! Because if it was, not a one of them would vote for or with Republicans, who are opposed to all of those things. Yet you don't see any libertarians allying with Democrats, who are not libertarian, but are closer to the libertarian ideals that you describe.

 

[cardgame]

Consequences matter, dammit, and libertarians are universally against such things as the civil rights act. If their policies have a direct lead from cause to effect, it can be safely said that they are in favor of said effect, in this case racism, or as lexicus argues, fascism.

Can children consent to child pornography? The government stepped in because they cant. Marriage between minors as defined by age of consent laws is still allowed in some (all?) states with the permission of the parent(s) and maybe a judge/administrator's approval. People can debate what the age of consent should be, but working adults can consent. Debate the issue, not 'analogies' you think are interchangeable. If Payday is mistreating people, others will see an opportunity to undercut them and the neighborhood will get more sources of loans.

Not sure why I'm bothering since you've already been told, but you cannot compete with predatory businesses without being a predatory business yourself. They have an inherent advantage, which is why they're predatory; it's not just random that they are choosing to be evil, they are incentivized to be evil.

 

[Traitorfish]

You say fascism is not a one size fits all model. Reading your denunciations, it seems like it almost is. Until I read your own description of fascism and then I'm not so sure.

It's true that somebody who subscribes to the raft of positions you outline would make a poor fascist. But it is not self-evident that everyone who describes themselves as a "libertarian" subscribes to all of these positions, or that they do so in a sincere, substantive or enduring way. Lexicus' claim is not that the positions you outline are fascistic, or even compatible with fascism, but that the positions which most self-defined libertarians actually hold in practice are.

I don't think I quite agree with that, I think that American libertarianism has too much of a weird, frontier town, "get off my property" vibe to be fully consistent with fascism, but consider that the closest thing which American libertarianism have to a central text hasn't turned out to be something like Henry David Thoreau's Walden, a meditation on the values of moral and economic self-reliance, but rather Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, an unambiguous celebration of authoritarian leadership. It's hard to believe this is simply because libertarians all coincidentally have awful taste in prose fiction.

 

[Estebonrober]

It's true that somebody who subscribes to the raft of positions you outline would make a poor fascist. But it is not self-evident that everyone who describes themselves as a "libertarian" subscribes to all of these positions, or that they do so in a sincere, substantive or enduring way. Lexicus' claim is not that the positions you outline are fascistic, or even compatible with fascism, but that the positions which most self-defined libertarians actually hold in practice are.

I don't think I quite agree with that, I think that American libertarianism has too much of a weird, frontier town, "get off my property" vibe to be fully consistent with fascism, but consider that the closest thing which American libertarianism have to a central text hasn't turned out to be something like Henry David Thoreau's Walden, a meditation on the values of moral and economic self-reliance, but rather Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, an unambiguous celebration of authoritarian leadership. It's hard to believe this is simply because libertarians all coincidentally have awful taste in prose fiction.

This pretty much nails the way I see libertarians in the US. Nice post!

 

[Truthy]

It's true that somebody who subscribes to the raft of positions you outline would make a poor fascist. But it is not self-evident that everyone who describes themselves as a "libertarian" subscribes to all of these positions, or that they do so in a sincere, substantive or enduring way. Lexicus' claim is not that the positions you outline are fascistic, or even compatible with fascism, but that the positions which most self-defined libertarians actually hold in practice are.

I don't think I quite agree with that, I think that American libertarianism has too much of a weird, frontier town, "get off my property" vibe to be fully consistent with fascism, but consider that the closest thing which American libertarianism have to a central text hasn't turned out to be something like Henry David Thoreau's Walden, a meditation on the values of moral and economic self-reliance, but rather Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, an unambiguous celebration of authoritarian leadership. It's hard to believe this is simply because libertarians all coincidentally have awful taste in prose fiction.

So, first thing is that it turns out this isn't actually what Lex said. His posts have made no mention of what most libertarians believe in practice, but what Lex suspected were the goals of particular famous libertarians like Milton Friedman. Therefore, the focus was on the policies and ontologies of libertarians, which are most identifiable if you look at popular libertarians, libertarian think tanks, and libertarian outlets. Second, yeah, I have no way of telling you what they truly believe sincerely, just what they say they believe, what policies they appear to support, and what thinkers/think tanks/websites they like. When we look at those things, there's scarcely a resemblance to fascism.

I guess you're trying to accuse libertarians of pulling a motte and bailey: they hide in the motte saying "we just want to maximize liberty for all and free markets would work swimmingly if you guys would just give them a chance." And the bailey, where they actually spend their time, is something closer to fascism. But I don't think this is what's going on.

We all agree Trump is fascy, no? Yet the Libertarian Party's share of the vote was historically high in 2016 when they could have voted for Trump.

Fascists wouldn't vote for a black Democrat, right? Well, libertarians favored Obama in 2008.

The American Libertarian Party platform is distinctly not fascist. Note carefully this page celebrating immigrants as "very peaceful and highly productive." Do we assume there is at best a weak connection between a party's platform and its bailey? Probably not, as platforms actually matter. Also, a fun exercise might be to compare this with the Nazi party platform. Some striking resemblances there.

A Pew survey finds their beliefs are pretty similar to what I've been describing. Government regulation does more harm than good, Americans shouldn't give up privacy, gays should be accepted, marijuana should be legal. About half said US involvement in the world makes problems worse and were less likely than the general population to think problems in the world would be worse without the US. As you predict, there are some deviations from the "raft of positions." The respondents have basically the same attitudes as the general public on whether the police should be able to search people "who look like crime suspects." Before you gallop to the conclusion that this is a racist dog whistle, note that this is a pretty ambiguous question. My initial interpretation was that the police had, say, a photo of a particular person and were stopping people who looked like them. Plus, take a look at some of the other deviations: 40+% said government regulation of business was necessary and corporations make too much profit.

My own experience with libertarians online and IRL: far from fascism, for whatever that's worth.

Finally, I'm going to point you back to all the other stuff I've said in this thread. If a popular libertarian book suffices as evidence of what libertarians really believe, then so should popular libertarian websites, think tanks, and talking points. After all, aren't these the people coming up with fascist policies hidden under the guise of libertarianism? Yet, Cato are very much not fascist.

Also, take a moment to observe that motte and bailey allegations are the essence of loads of political arguments. I can do the same thing with socialism. The motte is achieving a bunch of stuff that's really good for workers and almost everyone else. Sounds good, doesn't work cause the bailey is intellectual elitism, banning free speech, gulags, poorly thought out land reform, and so on. You can be like "nuh uh, but look at all our intellectuals who say that's not what it's all about." And then I can be like "well, have you thoroughly checked what the vast majority of socialists, whatever that even means, have believed in a sincere, enduring, and substantive way at various points in time? You gotta do that too!" Figuring out exactly what the bailey is for any movement is tricky and harder than just pointing fingers at political enemies based on what you think the bailey is. In your case, you're content to say you know the bailey resembles fascism because libertarians like a book by a Jewish woman about an industrialist. I don't think that's good enough.

 

[Berzerker]

Not sure why I'm bothering since you've already been told, but you cannot compete with predatory businesses without being a predatory business yourself. They have an inherent advantage, which is why they're predatory; it's not just random that they are choosing to be evil, they are incentivized to be evil.

I thought they're called predatory because they prey on others. Unless there are laws or regulations restricting new entries into the short term lending market someone - like banks - will jump in to take their customers. Are they all predatory? At what point does profit go from profit to predatory?

 

[Estebonrober]

I thought they're called predatory because they prey on others. Unless there are laws or regulations restricting new entries into the short term lending market someone - like banks - will jump in to take their customers. Are they all predatory? At what point does profit go from profit to predatory?

Roughly anything over 20% apr (usary laws are still in place in a lot of states, they have less of this predatory lending, but the payday industry has gone from state to state buying legislatures to open those states up), that said some people won;t ever qualify for credit that way, that said, it is probably a good thing considering that anything higher than that rate your income isn't stable or high enough to justify taking on debt realistically.

http://www.everyvoicecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Indebted-Final.pdf

This is where regulation comes into play. The banks won't get in the game they see it as too risky, but allowing predatory lenders only does a massive disservice to the community and the individuals involved.

 

[Lexicus]

So, first thing is that it turns out this isn't actually what Lex said. His posts have made no mention of what most libertarians believe in practice, but what Lex suspected were the goals of particular famous libertarians like Milton Friedman.

No, Traitorfish's post is a decent summary of what I've been arguing. American Libertarians certainly claim to be for "limited government" and I don't doubt many of them sincerely believe that's what they want, but my point is that when a political threat to the capitalist order emerges the jackboots always come out. That is what comes of preferring private property to democracy. The more extreme forms of libertarianism go so far as to draw up authoritarian constitutions that replace one person, one vote with a sort of CEO of America, elected by a vote of the nation's "shareholders" (property owners). This is one of the proposed political outcomes of the "constitutional economics" of Buchanan or the "ordoliberalism" derived from Hayek and von Mises. In either case the idea is to make private property immune from democratic challenge. Whether we call this situation "fascism" or not over time its methods of rule will inevitably come to resemble those of fascism.

My own experience with libertarians online and IRL: far from fascism, for whatever that's worth.

You, and the pollsters, just don't know the right questions to ask the libertarians.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Consequences matter, dammit, and libertarians are universally against such things as the civil rights act. If their policies have a direct lead from cause to effect, it can be safely said that they are in favor of said effect, in this case racism, or as lexicus argues, fascism.

Fascism was much more socialist than anything resembling free market. The government control over the relevant companies made it function similarly enough to USSR communism in practice. They largely attempted to distinguish themselves from that for obvious political reasons, but the wholesale slaughter tipped their hand.

To date, socialism has consistently performed worse than libertarian policies in outcome measures, though even the US has been far from consistently libertarian. You do need some means to break monopolies, as well as to block lobbying. The US has been pretty bad at both in recent years, and AFAIK was never effective in blocking lobbying.

 

[stinkubus]

Why would we want to block lobbying? The people's right to petition their government is a bedrock constitutional principle.

 

[Naskra]

Atlas Shrugged, an unambiguous celebration of authoritarian leadershi

"Unambiguous" is correct; those other words make it look like a lucky guess.

 

[Truthy]

American Libertarians certainly claim to be for "limited government"

Unlike fascists, who claim to be for, well, fascism. Walks like a non-fascist, swims like a non-fascist, quacks like a non-fascist. Must be a fascist because my analytical toolkit of choice tells me so.

and I don't doubt many of them sincerely believe that's what they want,

I'm getting the feeling no matter what I say, you're going to disagree because deep down inside just know they're fascists. What I said about epistemic modesty was lost on you.

but my point is that when a political threat to the capitalist order emerges the jackboots always come out. That is what comes of preferring private property to democracy.

Was the great recession a threat to the capitalist order? Why did libertarians vote Obama? We're in the middle of a political threat to capitalism right now, no? Why aren't libertarians flocking to Trump? Why are libertarians and their think tanks and websites still espousing the same classic libertarian stuff, whether capitalism is in danger or not? Where are the jackboots? Has it occurred to you some people are just rigid in their principles, think the US government is inefficient and corrupt, and don't like high taxes? Plus, they actually have a track record of being right sometimes, as I've pointed out several times in this thread. Could it be that they're motivated by the belief that their policies work?

The more extreme forms of libertarianism go so far as to draw up authoritarian constitutions that replace one person, one vote with a sort of CEO of America, elected by a vote of the nation's "shareholders" (property owners). This is one of the proposed political outcomes of the "constitutional economics" of Buchanan or the "ordoliberalism" derived from Hayek and von Mises.

For one, this is borderline tautological. The extreme forms of any movement support extreme things. That's why they're extreme. I can use the same argument to say socialists are fascists. After all, loads of socialist extremists have supported authoritarian governments, suppressed rights, and opposed democracy. Two, American libertarians overwhelmingly love the US constitution as it is. I get the feeling you're going to say that too is tantamount to fascism.

ordoliberalism

Ordoliberalism is absolutely not fascist. At this point, you might as well just say liberalism is fascism.

In either case the idea is to make private property immune from democratic challenge. Whether we call this situation "fascism" or not over time its methods of rule will inevitably come to resemble those of fascism.

You're pretty much just saying strong support for private property is tantamount to fascism. Yet this is not your definition of fascism and it is hardly what anyone else in the world would call fascism. The reality is that libertarians are far more motivated by opposition to high taxes and firmly believe much of what the US government does is a waste of time and money. That's the kernel of their ideology and it's not fascism. What you've outlined is not evidence, it's a just-so story, a narrative that feels coherent and compelling to you, but actually has limited explanatory power and poorly fits the evidence.

You, and the pollsters, just don't know the right questions to ask the libertarians.

Like what? Are you a fascist? Do you hate immigrants? Are you a white supremacist? Should we expand the police state and mass incarceration? Should the US invade more countries? Do you oppose freedom of speech? Should poor people starve? Do you oppose democracy and consent of the governed?

We all know what the answers to these questions would be. Look, I've shown that the core platform of the libertarian party, libertarian think tanks, and popular libertarian websites scarcely resemble fascism. I've given you decent evidence that the beliefs of most libertarians in practice don't resemble fascism. At some point, you should be ready to admit calling them fascism is hyperbole at best.

 

[Lexicus]

Unlike fascists, who claim to be for, well, fascism. Walks like a non-fascist, swims like a non-fascist, quacks like a non-fascist. Must be a fascist because my analytical toolkit of choice tells me so.

Actually, part of my point is that hardly any fascists today will admit they are fascists. Just as we have racism without racists, sexism without sexists, we have fascism without fascists.

Was the great recession a threat to the capitalist order?

Toward the beginning it looked as though it might be, but it has turned out not to be. If anything capitalism has only been strengthened in its aftermath. Additionally the recession did not see the emergence of a serious political movement challenging the basis of private property. Of course, a useful exercise for you might be asking any libertarians you know what they think of Occupy Wall Street.

The extreme forms of any movement support extreme things.

What you fail to realize is that American libertarianism itself is simply an extreme form of the modern conservative movement.

Ordoliberalism is absolutely not fascist. At this point, you might as well just say liberalism is fascism.

To say that liberalism is fascism would be a bridge too far. But if liberalism is not allied with a firm support for democratic political institutions it can and frequently does morph into fascism. Ordoliberalism is one manifestation of this. It is all about creating institutions that safeguard private property from democratic politics. As I've noted before on this forum the early liberals ran an ideological gamut from the more humanist and 'progressive' types like Adam Smith to far less enlightened and benign dudes like Bentham (the guy who came up with the totally-not-fascist concept of the panopticon) or Malthus (whose work provided the intellectual framework for scientific racism).

Mussolini for a more modern example governed initially largely according to the liberal playbook: deregulation, privatization, balanced budgets. And as we have seen contermporary liberals praised him to the skies. It is no coincidence that the states most admired by the original ordoliberals were generally fascist states.

You're pretty much just saying strong support for private property is tantamount to fascism.

That is correct, yes. In much the same sense as Hayek claimed that any interference with the free market will lead inexorably to totalitarianism, I am claiming that institutional defenses of private property against democracy will inevitably lead to fascism. The background to this is that political theorists have understood for literally millennia that private property and majority-rule are in basic tension. For example, Adam Smith:

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

James Madison:
"In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."

Like what?

"In a political situation where a majority votes to steal private property from the rich, would you support state action to protect private property even if this means suppressing civil and political rights?"

 

[inthesomeday]

Fascism was much more socialist than anything resembling free market. The government control over the relevant companies made it function similarly enough to USSR communism in practice. They largely attempted to distinguish themselves from that for obvious political reasons, but the wholesale slaughter tipped their hand.

How in the world can people possibly still believe this?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

How in the world can people possibly still believe this?

That fascism was more command economy than free market, or that they committed wholesale slaughter that took communism a while to surpass?

 

[stinkubus]

How in the world can people possibly still believe this?

Propaganda to this effect is older than any one still left alive on Earth. It's a world-view which is more or less actively taught in K-12 and post-secondary institutions, nationwide, to this day.

I always thought that 1984 was one of Orwell's worst, and it turned out to be his most prescient.

 

[Naskra]

Hayek claimed that any interference with the free market will lead inexorably to totalitarianism

You will not find this anywhere in Hayek's writings. Don't feel bad; there's no way you could have known this.

 

[stinkubus]

That fascism was more command economy than free market, or that they committed wholesale slaughter that took communism a while to surpass?

I'm going to blow your mind: all forms of privately held business are also command economies. "Command Economy" is a redundancy because "Economy" sort of implies that resources are ultimately directed by someone or something, whether it be private ownership or the polity.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm going to blow your mind: all forms of privately held business are also command economies. "Command Economy" is a redundancy because "Economy" sort of implies that resources are ultimately directed by someone or something, whether it be private ownership or the polity.

In context I meant centralized government command...IE Germany wasn't really "private" in functionality.

 

[inthesomeday]

That fascism was more command economy than free market, or that they committed wholesale slaughter that took communism a while to surpass?

I guess if your economic analysis is as blunt and reductive as “is it a command or free market economy?” then you’ll come up with lots of quite foolish conclusions but to still maintain the assertion that even an absolute command economy has anything to do with “being on the left” you have sorely misjudged what one of those things means.

Anyway the Nazi economy featured so much market capitalism that economic historians literally invented the word “privatization” to describe what occurred there. I might well argue that during WWII the German government had the LEAST control over its economy among all of the great powers, possibly save Britain.