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 |  Subject: Are we in a libertarian moment?  Sat Feb 12, 2022 2:00 am | |
| A libertarian moment?
Are the libertarians winning? Some seem to think so. In fact, a slew of recent op-eds have contemplated whether the backlash to government overreach during the pandemic means we are living in a new “libertarian moment.”
“A funny thing happened on our way to democratic socialism: America pushed back,” writes Scott Lincicome for the Dispatch. “Across the country, in all sorts of ways, Americans reacted to the state’s activism, overreach, incoherence, and incompetence and…kinda, sorta, embraced libertarianism.” He cites columns by Gerard Baker and Samuel Goldman making similar arguments.
There’s plenty of evidence to back up the theory: from the failure of Build Back Better to the many mistakes of top-down policymaking throughout the pandemic. When it comes to education, a school-choice revolution really seems to be underway. School closures, an essentialist approach to the way race and history are handled in the classroom and a retreat from the traditional commitment to merit have radicalized parents against teachers’ unions and public school bureaucrats. What could be more libertarian than that?
Throw the Canadian truckers into the mix too, to many a heroic example of working-class direct action done in the name of scrapping a government regulation.
And why not add to that list the burgeoning private-sector space race between tech billionaires, something straight out of a fictional libertarian utopia or dystopia (depending on your tastes)? Then there’s crypto-currency and the weird world of web3: anarchic in both spirit and substance.
For the uninitiated, “the libertarian moment” is a call back to claims in the late 2000s and 2010s that, whether it was drug legalization or the gig economy, America was entering a new phase of blossoming individual freedom. That all came crashing down with Trump’s rise, his 2016 campaign being a repudiation of much of the cheery libertarian optimism that had come just a few years earlier.
The libertarian movement may have been in self-imposed exile ever since. But the new right vanguard who saw Trump’s ascent as an opportunity to definitively repudiate libertarian ideas have been sorely let down by the voters. The Trump administration did not turn decisively against the market. Protectionist on trade and restrictionist on immigration, it also cut taxes and deregulated. The former president ended up leading a merry band of what Matthew Walther has invaluably identified as “Barstool conservatives”: libertarian and permissive in impulse even if they couldn’t care less about the harm principle or Ludwig Von Mises.
But talk of a libertarian moment feels, at best, premature. In many important debates, the libertarians are losing. Take big tech, where the prevailing mood on both sides of the aisle is hostile to the behemoths of the internet age and eager to use the tools of the state to counteract what they see to be an inappropriate amount of political and/or economic power. Or consider policing and crime: the progressive libertarianism of defund the police is political kryptonite in a country facing a violent crime wave.
Moreover, how much of a win for libertarianism is it that the Democrats were only a few senators away from passing an unprecedentedly massive spending package? Republicans may have been reassuringly hostile to the idea, but the prospect of a serious attempt to reassess the role and scope of the state in the US economy feels remote.
Meanwhile, traditional libertarian principles are deployed very selectively by the right today. Take vaccine mandates: by-the-book libertarians argue that business owners should be free to set whatever terms of employment they like, including insisting on vaccination. But such an approach is dismissed as stuffy and naive by those who want to fight fire with fire and ban vaccine mandates, public or private, altogether. A similar debate exists around critical race theory in the classroom: ban a noxious idea or allow students to debate its merits?
But the real reason I think talk of a libertarian moment misses the point is that libertarianism seems, at best, peripheral to many of the anxieties and problems that America faces. At home, the pandemic has frayed America’s social fabric. The crisis in the country’s institutions continues, with cynicism (much of it justified) and showmanship beating out constructive, careful stewardship everywhere from Congress to the local school board. Whatever one wants to do about Big Tech, it’s clear that the internet age has not worked out the way techno-optimist libertarians predicted. It has too often delivered insecurity and isolation, not liberation and empowerment. Overseas, America faces fearsome threats and the difficult realities of life in a multipolar world.
The pandemic may have infused US politics with a surprising (and healthy) amount of anti-state skepticism, but as Covid fades and the conversation moves on, I suspect that the outlines of a libertarian moment on the horizon will, once again, prove to be a mirage.
.https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/are-we-in-a-libertarian-moment/ |
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