Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Revisiting the Hidden Tribes poll

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Several commenters did not like the poll, and a reader suggested that I try the Hidden Tribes quiz. Ugh! What a terrible survey instrument.

I would like to believe that there is a large portion of the population that is tired of hyper-partisanship. But if there is such a majority out there, this poll is not a credible way to find it.

I would trust a survey based on my three-axes model more than I would trust the Hidden Tribes report. If the general public is more centrist or nuanced, that would show up as a lot of people not consisting aligning with any one axis.

The non-polarized segment of America

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It’s large, according to a study by Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon, helpfully summarized by Yascha Mounk, who writes,

According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”

If Lilliana Mason and Ezra Klein are correct in forecasting a future alignment between a Social Justice party and those who are opposed, the Social Justice party has little chance. Which means they are not correct.

The paper offers this ideological picture:

– Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.
– Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious.
– Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.
– Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic,
conspiratorial.
– Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.
– Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.
– Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising,
patriotic.

I am skeptical of this breakdown. Where do African-Americans or Hispanics fit? Libertarians and others who with some beliefs that align left and other beliefs that align right?

Still, this report is catnip for me, with all sorts of interesting nuggets. Another excerpt:

The old left/right spectrum, based on the role of government and markets, is being supplanted by a new polarization between ‘open’ cosmopolitan values and ‘closed’ nationalist values. Insurgent populists, usually advancing a strident ‘closed’ agenda, are disrupting many political establishments. Yet we also find in each country that somewhere between 40-60 percent of people do not identify unambiguously with either the open or closed ends of the spectrum, and many are disturbed by the increasing sense of division in their country.

An Estonian comments

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Speaks thus:

I am Estonian and what Diamandis writes is not reality, but marketing talk.

In fact, Estonian e-residency is dead. Killed by ALM and KYC rules. Estonian banks are closing accounts of existing e-residents and not opening new ones. Government still tries to promote it a bit, but enthusiasm is dying.

Attitudes and regulations about cross-border finance have changed in recent years and killed e -residency.

If the challenge with implementing your idea is that the incumbents don’t like it and try to regulate it out of existence, then it’s probably a good idea.

Exit and governance

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Scott Alexander writes,

I think a libertarian treatment . . . would argue that towns have the most right to pass restrictive laws when things like exit rights are most salient, and less right when they aren’t.

Peter Diamandis writes,

States and their governments have forever been tied to physical territories, and public services are often delivered through brick-and-mortar institutions.

Yet public sector infrastructure and services will soon be hosted on servers, detached from land and physical form.

1. The relationship between governance and the right of exit has long been of interest to economists. The Tiebout hypothesis is that when residents can exit freely, they will sort themselves into towns where the services, taxes, and regulations suit their preferences.

2. I don’t think that we get much Tiebout sorting in practice. Most jurisdictions are bundles of private and public amenities. You can’t exit from the amenities you don’t like without also losing the amenities that you do like.

3. Scott’s post suggests that a way to improve things would be to allow more start-up cities. In my most widely unread book, Unchecked and Unbalanced, I suggested instead making exit more powerful by enabling unbundling. Make it easy for me to choose an alternative trash-collection service, and alternative school for my children, etc.

4. Read the Diamandis post. In theory, Estonia could franchise its government model to other jurisdictions. In my book, I suggest something approximately like that. See also Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. But if governments will not let you unbundle, choice will be thwarted.

Yoram Hazony from a three-axes perspective

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How would one evaluate a government, and what does this imply about nationalism vs. trans-nationalism?

For a conservative, the question is how well the government preserves the civilization of the people within its jurisdiction. According to Hazony, this is most likely to occur within a nation-state, that is a state that consists of people with a shared culture. Trans-nationalism threatens to imperil national civilizations.

A progressive might ask whether a government sides with the oppressor or the oppressed. A government must have enough power to overcome oppressors. This might require trans-nationalism, in order to overcome oppressors in particular nations. But nationalism may suffice.

A libertarian might ask whether a government limits its use of coercion. Trans-nationalism sounds like coercion carried to a higher degree. Even nationalism may be too coercive. It should be easy for people to exercise exit. In the United States, federalism was supposed to ensure relatively easy exit, but that is no longer the case.

Thanks to Yuval Levin for suggesting applying the three-axes model to the issues raised by Hazony.

Handle on the right wing

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He comments,

A reactionary then is in favor of radical change to reestablish and restore the status quo ante. Instead of just being yesterday’s conservatism, reactionaries seek to ideologically justify and explain the practical basis for the wisdom undergirding the prior regime. And what naturally accompanies that project is the attempt to explain the root causes of what went wrong with the new system and why it resulted in such atrocious excesses and led to political and economic catastrophes.

He has more to say, and he includes a link to his very long essay on Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. In that essay, he writes,

it seems clear that a Benedict Option community should be one in which life in centered around frequent study, learning, and teaching. Like, say, a small ‘campus’ of connected, committed households in close proximity.

Alberto Mingardi on Hazony

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Mingardi offers more criticism of The Virtue of Nationalism.

I find Hazony’s view of European history troublesome. For one thing, saying that Hitler wasn’t a “nationalist” is, to use a euphemism, a far more controversial claim than he acknowledges. Let’s put it in this way: can you picture national socialism raising to power without Herder, Fitche, and all the other prophets of nationalism? I doubt it.

Indeed, one reading of Hitler’s vision is that he wanted to see Germany and Great Britain as cooperative hegemonic powers in a nationalist world order. It was Churchill who was the imperialist, in two senses of the term. First, he wanted to preserve the British empire. Second, Hazony uses the term imperialist to describe any philosophy that is based on a universalist ideology. For Churchill, that ideology was individual freedom and the values of Western Civilization.

What World War II does illustrate is that transnational institutions are not a solution to the problem of war. The League of Nations was helpless in the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, all of which took place in the run-up to the larger conflagration.

Since 1945, there have been numerous wars, in spite of (and in a few cases sanctioned by) the United Nations. Perhaps there are those who are willing to defend the UN by saying that things would have been worse without it. I do not claim the expertise to adjudicate that one.

Suppose we were to describe nationalism in terms of “negative liberty” or “the non-aggression principle” for national governments. Do whatever you want internally, as long as you don’t infringe on people outside your borders. This might be more reliably libertarian than a project of world government, even though it would leave some people imprisoned by their regimes.

Russ Roberts and Yoram Hazony

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I found this one of the most interesting econtalk podcasts. Let me pick one nit. Trying to argue that nationalism is not inherently war-generating, Hazony says,

universal wars are devoted to some kind of an ideology of world domination. I the case of the 30-Years’ War, it was the theory of the universal Catholic order. In the case of the Nepolonic Wars, the theory of the new universal French liberalism. And, in the two World Wars, an attempt by two German emperors in effect to try to, uh, make Germany Lord of the Earth.

My nit is with taking the view that World War I was an attempt to create a world order. Let’s even stipulate that Germany was the most war-seeking nation in 1914. My reading of the history is that Germany did not have a goal of world domination. I buy the argument that Germany started the first World War out of fear that if it did not fight then, it would at some point have to fight on more adverse terms. It saw Russia getting stronger every decade. Its ally, Austria-Hungary, had obvious weaknesses.

After World War I, many people saw the war as a case of nationalism run amok. I still think that is an appropriate way to look at it.

Now that The Virtue of Nationalism is available, I expect I will be giving it more attention going forward.

Claire Lehmann and Tyler Cowen

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Interesting conversation, I could have picked many items to excerpt. She says,

If you look at the personality data on libertarians, they tend towards being more systematizing in their cognitive profile. Women, on average, tend to be more empathizing and agreeable, and so arguments around political issues that are based on quantitative reasoning and facts and logic without an emotional layer to it are going to be less appealing to women.

I’ve said to libertarian friends that if you want to be more appealing, get your message across in a more appealing way, you need to wrap up the ideas into a story that has an emotional component.

Yoram Hazony watch

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An op-ed by Hazony.

Consider the Western tradition of limited government, individual liberty and open elections. Historically, free institutions appeared and persisted in national states such as England, the Netherlands and Scotland—countries built upon a dominant national language and religion, as well as a history of setting aside internal differences to fight common enemies. In “Considerations on Representative Government” (1861), John Stuart Mill argued that it is no accident that free institutions exist in such countries. As he wrote, “It is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.”

Peter Berkowitz offers a critique.

Hazony asserts that independent national states have an interest in promoting an international order of independent national states. Such an order, he insists, “offers the greatest possibility for the collective self-determination” and “establishes a life of productive competition among nations, each striving to attain the maximal development of its abilities and those of its individual members.” But Hazony has little to say about the alignments, legal arrangements, and political institutions that would undergird it. And he declines to examine the circumstances under which national competition turns counterproductive, vicious, and indeed a threat to life on the planet.

I believe that on Monday Russ Roberts’ podcast will be with Hazony. All this relates to his about-to-be-released book.