Libertarianism ("do nothing") is always weaker than authoritarianism ("do something"). Where Libertarians need to step up is in making the argument against the case of "doing something". But, as we saw during Covid, many Libertarians don't actually agree on "doing nothing" or in fighting against the "do something" agenda.
In other words, there are far fewer Libertarians in practice than there are in theory - everyone is a Libertarian about what they want, few are Libertarians in defending others to do as they please.
I appreciate the true Libertarian believers - such as Don Boudreaux. For even if I don't accept all his positions, I know he is defending my liberty and I am grateful for that. Milquetoast Libertarians are a nuisance. They promote liberty for all their favorite causes - Ukraine, gays, big business, etc, but will never lift a finger to defend the liberty of the people and groups they don't like.
Being personally familiar with each of Fischer's "factions" I find each simultaneously admirable and insufferable. Ultimately I align myself politically with the "Quakers" but my empathy is for the "borderers" - the "Scottish-Irish" who just want to be left alone.
"freedom without restraints of law or custom" sounds like "defund the police" and "what do you mean I can't groom your kids?" - very Trumpy
the problem is that you can't really expect the american coastal elites to know the difference between one tribe of americans and another
everyone who is not them is a redneck
Trumps' base is the petit bourgeoisie and the working class (they do ordered and reciprocal liberties) but Gov/media/academia types can't tell the difference between a plumber and an appalachian moonshiner
Quite good sets of freedom that are similar but different. But it's not the type of freedom that's so different as much as the abstract/ in-practice split.
"These two factions have really parted ways on issues of trade, immigration, entitlements, and foreign intervention."
It's intellectual "freedom in theory" folk splitting against practical, local "freedom in practice" folk; college educated, indoctrinated, intellectuals. The college vs non-college split today dominates the other prior type of freedom differences, but multiple axes remain hard to graph or think or talk about.
Since Vietnam, but even more relevantly since Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya - those favoring fighting in foreign wars have created what looks like lousy results.*
Trump seems more right than the conservative interventionists - but in 4 years in power, he avoided "running away" in Afghanistan and losing to the Taliban, despite being against that nation-building military exercise. [Paul Ryan intellectuals were OK with endless war - and few kids of intellectuals dying.]
Trade and being trade dependent on hostile-to-freedom Communist China is a lousy idea, today. There was an argument that supporting Chinese trade & WTO would help move China to more freedom, and it certainly helped create a HUGE Chinese "middle class", including those who put life-savings into a now-failing Chinese bank that won't give the money.
Trump was correct. [not Paul Ryan]
Similarly, Europe being dependent on not-really democrat Russia for oil and especially gas is clearly a bad idea - and was a bad idea even before Trump publicly told EU intellectuals that truth, but was laughed at then. [by Germans, tho also Paul Ryan types]
Illegal immigration is lousy for "rule of law", and it's clear that such immigrants are hired to do work in America at lower wages than the company would have to pay to citizens. Legal immigrants are much better but also do push down local programmer wages in Silicon Valley as higher paid semi-indentured servants of Big tech, tho it hugely helps the individual immigrants and, over time, America. Not only Republicans, but even most Democrats pay lip-service to being against illegal aliens, tho often supporting Open Borders in practice. Rep registered but Libber supporting Milton Friedman often noted that he can't support Open Borders, nor are they practical, until gov't welfare entitlements are repealed. [Paul Ryan lip-service only against illegals?]
Entitlements repealed? Ain't gonna happen. Free money from the gov't to pay for the mistakes and bad luck, and yearly aging, of the carless, irresponsible, and elderly folk - keeping grandparents out of poverty is a hugely desired social good. Until Libertarians (or others) provide a practical way to migrate away from Social Security, few benefits will be cut.
Trump was politically correct, in terms of getting votes not merely PC/woke, to keep them or expand them. He failed to reduce them, wrongly but to popular acclaim AND in a failure less than Hillary would have done, or Biden is now doing.
On entitlement reform, Trump was the lesser failure. Paul Ryan would have been far, far better -- but that's primarily why he was so horribly, totally unpopular with voters.
Arnold and most intellectuals, both Paul Ryan supporters and NeverTrump Republicans, continue to have some TDS ticks and aren't quite honest about Trump results vs Democrat results. Instead, they compare real Trump against some unreal ideal alternative even further away from today's Democrats. (Not so different from Marxists' reasonable criticisms of capitalism becoming terrible in supporting unreal alternatives.)
A huge little discussed issue is the reality that low IQ folk, stupid folk, more often make stupid decisions. That cause problems which "somebody" has to pay for. Often such stupid folk don't have the money to pay for their own mistakes - so how much freedom should they have to make such mistakes which then must be paid for by other folk?
Even tho there are more stupid white folk than black folk (less than 85? 80? 76? IQ), the reality of lower black averages means even talking about group IQs can be called racist. And no amount nor type of education makes stupid folk good intellectuals, nor smarter. One key educational reform I'd like is an emphasis on avoiding making life choices with high probabilities of being a mistake, having a bad outcome. "Less freedom for dumb folk" is less likely to be politically possible than entitlement repeal.
Personal note:
I'm in Slovakia because of my meeting in London with the Libertarian Alliance, and joining Tim Evans in going to Slovakia, where Sean Gabb also advised the Slovak gov't for a year. Nice quick history of LA (not SK) by Sean. http://libertarian.co.uk Other LA folk continue with Samizdata.net, like this:
*I'd prefer Iraq split into Shia Arab, Sunni Arab, and Kurd - but that's not quite in the cards. I'm glad South Sudan split from their Northern Muslim "masters". I used to be a mild neo-Con, but now support trade sanctions far far more than military force.
Substack says that my response - at ... let's see here, yikes ... 2,000 words (sorry!) - is too long for a single comment. Please allow me to reply to it to serialize, thanks.
------
I think Saint-Andre and Postrel are missing another key development and source of tension in the overall libertarian scene that happened mostly post-WWII and cannot fairly be traced back to Albion's Seed-era roots. It led in part to the evolution of "Orange Line Libertarianism" (a big tent term for what is in reality a small number of people), and their gradual ideological separation from the rest of the scene.
I'm not talking about the more recent trend of splinter so-called """libertarian""" groups simply selling out (literally, and cheaply, it seems) to the progressives in an incoherent and unprincipled fasion (not that they don't spill a lot of ink trying to convince themselves and other dupes otherwise). That is its own problem - and one to which Orange Liners were particularly susceptible - but one can dismiss the nonsensical shenanigans of the fake libertarians as not having any relevance to the analysis of intellectual and ideological splits among actual libertarians.
And while there is a strong correlation with the split I'll describe, I am also not talking about the genuine and intellectually serious - and more right-vs-left pattern-matching - split between the "libertarianism in one country" types flavored with nationalist realism (a kind of chauvinism) and the "libertarianism without borders" types flavored with universalist humanism (a kind of utopianism).
What I am talking about what one could call a split between the Monocentrists or Polycentrists as regards to the exclusivity of the top-level sovereign entity's roles in the legitimate use of coercion and as guarantor of personal liberties against limitation by other lower-level entities. This is more than just a matter of federalism or subsidiarity.
The libertarian polycentrists once used the terms "14th Amendment Libertarians" as an epithet to describe the monocentrists, and that is a good descriptive terminology in the American context, where federal courts can use the 14th Amendment to greatly restrict the sovereignty of the states in the name of 'liberty'. People who are familiar with how this worked out in practice will understand the scare quotes. The moncentric perspective when implemented in practice also has a way of displacing, crowding out, and hollowing out the salience of everything between the individual and the central state, which is fine and dandy from the perspective of the central state, but which tends to contribute to the general trend of alienation and atomization for those individuals.
But the larger disagreement is more general than the particular context of American Constitutional law, and the American federal government is really just a "Leviathan of Convenience" to them for the sake of this discussion, which would just as easily be the EU, any other country, or a one-world-government.
The question boils down to whether the central state should tolerate an arrangement whereby an individual can agree to pre-commit his future self to being bound to restrictions on liberties considered fundamental by the central state, and *subject to the potentially violent coercion* of some entity to which he grants the right to enforce the provisions, and in a way such that the central state recognizes and respects that the individual has relinquished his rights to the central state's monopolization of coercive violence and guarantee of those liberties.
That's a confusing mouthful, sorry, but it's what one gets by trying to be as general and precise as possible about the issue. It's related to the question of whether one can sell oneself into servitude, and before one gives a knee-jerk answer, it's worth reflecting on Nozick's "The Tale of the Slave" and perhaps rephrasing the question into one of whether someone already in servitude should be allowed to switch masters.
It just means whether the big government will allow there to be other, little governments, which would be able to do different things in non-trivial ways (unlike today), including some things the big government really doesn't like. Without rights to coercion, especially to punish premature breach, there can be no such thing. Monocentric libertarians are cool with all this for *private organizations and especially corporations*, obviously except for the hard coercion and "precommitments enforceable with tools beyond mere money damages" parts, but those are the critical parts if one wants the ability to live in a viable community operating under really different laws.
Really it is a "freedom trade", which is something most monocentric libertarians grasp effortlessly in the economic context but seem to have a tough time accepting or wrapping their heads around in other contexts. Sometimes you have to give up some freedoms in order to open up the possibility of other freedoms.
To illustrate, consider the whole "pre-commitment" part of the puzzle. One thing the progressives used to get right (while still under a shred of social pressure to want to at least look like they were trying to make sense) was that the dynamics of a marriage, for example, are to an important degree determined by the particular balance of power in terms of which moves the party could makes under the rules of the game.
"Love Is War", and just like the balance of power and the customs of international law determine in the deepest manner the way states act and regard each other, it's the same way for the behaviors and feelings of a relationship in a marriage, though of course the hard calculus is performed at a degree of separation from the self-deluded conscious awareness experiencing the emotions.
The relationship between neighboring countries, for example, is totally different in scenarios of equal power and when one has overwhelmingly greater strength than the other. Ukraine may want to have the type of relationship with Russia it would have with an equal, but that's not in the cards. It may not want its bad neighbor, but territories don't move so it's stuck with one. Likewise, much as we might like to imagine otherwise out of naive sentimentalism, the quality and character of a relationship between spouses depends to a very large extent on whether both parties really are stuck with each other, or whether one or both spouses carries the missile-command football with them at all times and can thus at any moment decide at reasonably acceptable cost to nuke the marriage. Which is, in fact, the state of modern secular marriage with no-fault divorce and the mess of contemporary family law.
Along another axis, the Quaker/Libertarian view may be in tension with all 3 other views. Both the red and blue tribe seem to have adopted the more collectivist aspects of the Puritan and hegemonic approaches, where freedom relates to collective autonomy/control for one's tribe.
Libertarianism looks weak now because after Trump and Putin people see the need for a strong authoritarian figure at the head of our nation. Libertarianism can have leaders of charisma, but not of power and force, or the balance becomes skewed.
Libertarianism may pass the test of the intellectual, but fails the test of human nature. Mankind is hierarchical in every facet.
Libertarianism ("do nothing") is always weaker than authoritarianism ("do something"). Where Libertarians need to step up is in making the argument against the case of "doing something". But, as we saw during Covid, many Libertarians don't actually agree on "doing nothing" or in fighting against the "do something" agenda.
In other words, there are far fewer Libertarians in practice than there are in theory - everyone is a Libertarian about what they want, few are Libertarians in defending others to do as they please.
I appreciate the true Libertarian believers - such as Don Boudreaux. For even if I don't accept all his positions, I know he is defending my liberty and I am grateful for that. Milquetoast Libertarians are a nuisance. They promote liberty for all their favorite causes - Ukraine, gays, big business, etc, but will never lift a finger to defend the liberty of the people and groups they don't like.
Being personally familiar with each of Fischer's "factions" I find each simultaneously admirable and insufferable. Ultimately I align myself politically with the "Quakers" but my empathy is for the "borderers" - the "Scottish-Irish" who just want to be left alone.
"freedom without restraints of law or custom" sounds like "defund the police" and "what do you mean I can't groom your kids?" - very Trumpy
the problem is that you can't really expect the american coastal elites to know the difference between one tribe of americans and another
everyone who is not them is a redneck
Trumps' base is the petit bourgeoisie and the working class (they do ordered and reciprocal liberties) but Gov/media/academia types can't tell the difference between a plumber and an appalachian moonshiner
Quite good sets of freedom that are similar but different. But it's not the type of freedom that's so different as much as the abstract/ in-practice split.
"These two factions have really parted ways on issues of trade, immigration, entitlements, and foreign intervention."
It's intellectual "freedom in theory" folk splitting against practical, local "freedom in practice" folk; college educated, indoctrinated, intellectuals. The college vs non-college split today dominates the other prior type of freedom differences, but multiple axes remain hard to graph or think or talk about.
Since Vietnam, but even more relevantly since Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya - those favoring fighting in foreign wars have created what looks like lousy results.*
Trump seems more right than the conservative interventionists - but in 4 years in power, he avoided "running away" in Afghanistan and losing to the Taliban, despite being against that nation-building military exercise. [Paul Ryan intellectuals were OK with endless war - and few kids of intellectuals dying.]
Trade and being trade dependent on hostile-to-freedom Communist China is a lousy idea, today. There was an argument that supporting Chinese trade & WTO would help move China to more freedom, and it certainly helped create a HUGE Chinese "middle class", including those who put life-savings into a now-failing Chinese bank that won't give the money.
Trump was correct. [not Paul Ryan]
Similarly, Europe being dependent on not-really democrat Russia for oil and especially gas is clearly a bad idea - and was a bad idea even before Trump publicly told EU intellectuals that truth, but was laughed at then. [by Germans, tho also Paul Ryan types]
Illegal immigration is lousy for "rule of law", and it's clear that such immigrants are hired to do work in America at lower wages than the company would have to pay to citizens. Legal immigrants are much better but also do push down local programmer wages in Silicon Valley as higher paid semi-indentured servants of Big tech, tho it hugely helps the individual immigrants and, over time, America. Not only Republicans, but even most Democrats pay lip-service to being against illegal aliens, tho often supporting Open Borders in practice. Rep registered but Libber supporting Milton Friedman often noted that he can't support Open Borders, nor are they practical, until gov't welfare entitlements are repealed. [Paul Ryan lip-service only against illegals?]
Entitlements repealed? Ain't gonna happen. Free money from the gov't to pay for the mistakes and bad luck, and yearly aging, of the carless, irresponsible, and elderly folk - keeping grandparents out of poverty is a hugely desired social good. Until Libertarians (or others) provide a practical way to migrate away from Social Security, few benefits will be cut.
Trump was politically correct, in terms of getting votes not merely PC/woke, to keep them or expand them. He failed to reduce them, wrongly but to popular acclaim AND in a failure less than Hillary would have done, or Biden is now doing.
On entitlement reform, Trump was the lesser failure. Paul Ryan would have been far, far better -- but that's primarily why he was so horribly, totally unpopular with voters.
Arnold and most intellectuals, both Paul Ryan supporters and NeverTrump Republicans, continue to have some TDS ticks and aren't quite honest about Trump results vs Democrat results. Instead, they compare real Trump against some unreal ideal alternative even further away from today's Democrats. (Not so different from Marxists' reasonable criticisms of capitalism becoming terrible in supporting unreal alternatives.)
A huge little discussed issue is the reality that low IQ folk, stupid folk, more often make stupid decisions. That cause problems which "somebody" has to pay for. Often such stupid folk don't have the money to pay for their own mistakes - so how much freedom should they have to make such mistakes which then must be paid for by other folk?
Even tho there are more stupid white folk than black folk (less than 85? 80? 76? IQ), the reality of lower black averages means even talking about group IQs can be called racist. And no amount nor type of education makes stupid folk good intellectuals, nor smarter. One key educational reform I'd like is an emphasis on avoiding making life choices with high probabilities of being a mistake, having a bad outcome. "Less freedom for dumb folk" is less likely to be politically possible than entitlement repeal.
Personal note:
I'm in Slovakia because of my meeting in London with the Libertarian Alliance, and joining Tim Evans in going to Slovakia, where Sean Gabb also advised the Slovak gov't for a year. Nice quick history of LA (not SK) by Sean. http://libertarian.co.uk Other LA folk continue with Samizdata.net, like this:
https://www.samizdata.net/2022/07/thoughts-on-spheres-of-influence/
with specific disagreement of some with Sean.
*I'd prefer Iraq split into Shia Arab, Sunni Arab, and Kurd - but that's not quite in the cards. I'm glad South Sudan split from their Northern Muslim "masters". I used to be a mild neo-Con, but now support trade sanctions far far more than military force.
Substack says that my response - at ... let's see here, yikes ... 2,000 words (sorry!) - is too long for a single comment. Please allow me to reply to it to serialize, thanks.
------
I think Saint-Andre and Postrel are missing another key development and source of tension in the overall libertarian scene that happened mostly post-WWII and cannot fairly be traced back to Albion's Seed-era roots. It led in part to the evolution of "Orange Line Libertarianism" (a big tent term for what is in reality a small number of people), and their gradual ideological separation from the rest of the scene.
I'm not talking about the more recent trend of splinter so-called """libertarian""" groups simply selling out (literally, and cheaply, it seems) to the progressives in an incoherent and unprincipled fasion (not that they don't spill a lot of ink trying to convince themselves and other dupes otherwise). That is its own problem - and one to which Orange Liners were particularly susceptible - but one can dismiss the nonsensical shenanigans of the fake libertarians as not having any relevance to the analysis of intellectual and ideological splits among actual libertarians.
And while there is a strong correlation with the split I'll describe, I am also not talking about the genuine and intellectually serious - and more right-vs-left pattern-matching - split between the "libertarianism in one country" types flavored with nationalist realism (a kind of chauvinism) and the "libertarianism without borders" types flavored with universalist humanism (a kind of utopianism).
What I am talking about what one could call a split between the Monocentrists or Polycentrists as regards to the exclusivity of the top-level sovereign entity's roles in the legitimate use of coercion and as guarantor of personal liberties against limitation by other lower-level entities. This is more than just a matter of federalism or subsidiarity.
The libertarian polycentrists once used the terms "14th Amendment Libertarians" as an epithet to describe the monocentrists, and that is a good descriptive terminology in the American context, where federal courts can use the 14th Amendment to greatly restrict the sovereignty of the states in the name of 'liberty'. People who are familiar with how this worked out in practice will understand the scare quotes. The moncentric perspective when implemented in practice also has a way of displacing, crowding out, and hollowing out the salience of everything between the individual and the central state, which is fine and dandy from the perspective of the central state, but which tends to contribute to the general trend of alienation and atomization for those individuals.
But the larger disagreement is more general than the particular context of American Constitutional law, and the American federal government is really just a "Leviathan of Convenience" to them for the sake of this discussion, which would just as easily be the EU, any other country, or a one-world-government.
The question boils down to whether the central state should tolerate an arrangement whereby an individual can agree to pre-commit his future self to being bound to restrictions on liberties considered fundamental by the central state, and *subject to the potentially violent coercion* of some entity to which he grants the right to enforce the provisions, and in a way such that the central state recognizes and respects that the individual has relinquished his rights to the central state's monopolization of coercive violence and guarantee of those liberties.
That's a confusing mouthful, sorry, but it's what one gets by trying to be as general and precise as possible about the issue. It's related to the question of whether one can sell oneself into servitude, and before one gives a knee-jerk answer, it's worth reflecting on Nozick's "The Tale of the Slave" and perhaps rephrasing the question into one of whether someone already in servitude should be allowed to switch masters.
It just means whether the big government will allow there to be other, little governments, which would be able to do different things in non-trivial ways (unlike today), including some things the big government really doesn't like. Without rights to coercion, especially to punish premature breach, there can be no such thing. Monocentric libertarians are cool with all this for *private organizations and especially corporations*, obviously except for the hard coercion and "precommitments enforceable with tools beyond mere money damages" parts, but those are the critical parts if one wants the ability to live in a viable community operating under really different laws.
Really it is a "freedom trade", which is something most monocentric libertarians grasp effortlessly in the economic context but seem to have a tough time accepting or wrapping their heads around in other contexts. Sometimes you have to give up some freedoms in order to open up the possibility of other freedoms.
To illustrate, consider the whole "pre-commitment" part of the puzzle. One thing the progressives used to get right (while still under a shred of social pressure to want to at least look like they were trying to make sense) was that the dynamics of a marriage, for example, are to an important degree determined by the particular balance of power in terms of which moves the party could makes under the rules of the game.
"Love Is War", and just like the balance of power and the customs of international law determine in the deepest manner the way states act and regard each other, it's the same way for the behaviors and feelings of a relationship in a marriage, though of course the hard calculus is performed at a degree of separation from the self-deluded conscious awareness experiencing the emotions.
The relationship between neighboring countries, for example, is totally different in scenarios of equal power and when one has overwhelmingly greater strength than the other. Ukraine may want to have the type of relationship with Russia it would have with an equal, but that's not in the cards. It may not want its bad neighbor, but territories don't move so it's stuck with one. Likewise, much as we might like to imagine otherwise out of naive sentimentalism, the quality and character of a relationship between spouses depends to a very large extent on whether both parties really are stuck with each other, or whether one or both spouses carries the missile-command football with them at all times and can thus at any moment decide at reasonably acceptable cost to nuke the marriage. Which is, in fact, the state of modern secular marriage with no-fault divorce and the mess of contemporary family law.
"Thou" and "thee" are parallel to "I" and "me". So "for me and for thou" is wrong, Arnold should add a [sic] there.
Paul -- anything to reduce tax collections from high income people -- Ryan is a libertarian ideal?
Along another axis, the Quaker/Libertarian view may be in tension with all 3 other views. Both the red and blue tribe seem to have adopted the more collectivist aspects of the Puritan and hegemonic approaches, where freedom relates to collective autonomy/control for one's tribe.
Libertarianism looks weak now because after Trump and Putin people see the need for a strong authoritarian figure at the head of our nation. Libertarianism can have leaders of charisma, but not of power and force, or the balance becomes skewed.
Libertarianism may pass the test of the intellectual, but fails the test of human nature. Mankind is hierarchical in every facet.