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 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Up From Libertarianism?  Tue Oct 22, 2019 1:48 am | |
| Conservatives are grappling anew with how to balance liberty and virtue.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A libertarian and a conservative go to dinner. America’s numerous problems and challenges are on the menu. The conservative laments the woeful state of our culture, family dissolution and low birth rates, the intersection of identity politics and uninterrupted mass immigration, the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party. “Libertarianism has failed,” the conservative concludes. “What are you talking about?” the libertarian asks incredulously. “It has never been tried!” To which the conservative replies, “Sure. Just like the Marxists say about communism!”
It’s a frustrating time to be a libertarian. The federal government is growing. The annual budget deficit is once again approaching $1 trillion, this time without an economic contraction, adding to a $22 trillion national debt that itself seems insignificant compared to Washington’s total unfunded liabilities. The forever wars still aren’t winding down, as even modest redeployments continue to raise bipartisan hackles. They are now joined by tariff-laden trade wars. To add insult to injury, libertarians see themselves getting the blame.
“The Obama-libertarian foreign policy does not make America safe,” warned Senator Lindsey Graham, who is second only to former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley as the neoconservatives’ favorite South Carolina Republican, when President Donald Trump planned to move U.S. troops away from the border between Syria and Turkey. “If ignoring radical Islam made America safe, there would NOT have been a 9/11.” Libertarians found themselves asking, “What Obama-libertarian foreign policy?”
“I never would have guessed libertarians dictated U.S. foreign affairs not only from 2008 to 2016 but also in the run-up to 9/11,” replied my friend Bonnie Kristian, a sometime TAC contributor, in The Week. “I thought we were very angry about American foreign policy in those years, always complaining about the blowback, the drone strikes, the unconstitutional executive war-making, the attacks on innocent civilians, the costly and incompetent nation-building efforts, and so on.”
This disconnect drives much of the discourse on the Right. Populists, traditionalists, and nationalists look at what ails this country and feel constrained by possible solutions that are limited to deregulation, tax cuts, or seemingly politically implausible budget reductions. They ask a question supply-siders and deficit hawks alike find impolitic: what, if anything, will these ostensibly conservative policies actually conserve? Indeed, what have they conserved?
Libertarians by contrast keep hearing how they control the Republican agenda, yet libertarianism is a political philosophy that seeks minimal government. Whatever can be said about the government we have, minimal is not the most apt adjective. In fact, they see a government attempting to do many things while doing few of them well, a foreign policy that remains stubbornly interventionist even under a Republican president who campaigned otherwise, and politicians promising to expand federal entitlement programs even though over the long term we have no clear plans for paying for the commitments we have already made. The baby boomers are exiting the workforce and retiring, the bombers are still flying, the bureaucrats are getting paid.
More: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/up-from-libertarianism/ |
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