Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

The Higgsian moment

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Donald Boudreaux agrees with me that this is the right time to dust off Crisis and Leviathan.

Typically, the quantum of additional powers granted to – or seized by – government during each crisis shrinks somewhat when the crisis passes. Normal times, after all, aren’t crisis times. But never do such additions to state power fully disappear. Government’s exercise of these powers is perceived as having been key to escaping the crisis – so such powers become more widely regarded as being beneficial. Fear of such powers is lessened.

The fact that this happy perception of the consequences of such powers is, at least to some degree, always an illusion conjured by the propaganda that government officials inevitably deploy to justify their exercise of their new powers is irrelevant. If people believe that this new grant of power and that new expansion of authority as used by government officials were both effective and necessary to the nation’s escape from Armageddon, people naturally lose some of the skepticism they had, pre-crisis, about such power and authority.

A sad possibility is that the process consists of government becoming stronger, people becoming more sheep-like, government becoming stronger, etc.

Yuval Levin and TLP watch

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Yuval Levin writes,

The left wants to be sure we do not take injustices in our society for granted—that we see the ways in which the strong oppress the weak, that we take them seriously, that we never walk by them and pretend they don’t exist. . .

The right, on the other hand, wants to be sure we do not take social order for granted—that we see the ways in which our civilization protects us, enriches us, and elevates us, that we never imagine that this is all easy or natural, and never forget that, if we fail to sustain this achievement, we will all suffer for it.

He does explicitly cite The Three Languages of Politics.

The topic of the essay is education policy, and I recommend the entire essay–it is probably the best essay I have read this year. I could have selected many passages to quote.

My inadequate attempt at a summary:

1. For the past 30 years, conservatives have focused on ways to strenthen incentives for K-12 schools to improve test scores.

2. Meanwhile, the left has taken over the culture of education. Conservatives need to fight to reverse this trend.

I think that these are valid points. But the song that runs through my head comes from Carole King. “It’s too late baby, now it’s too late.”

The left takes the social justice mission of education as given. The cultural values that Levin views as important are treated as relics of a racist patriarchy that must be purged from schools.

I would say that conservatives face an uphill battle, with an emphasis on the word battle. Even the ordinarily mild-mannered and moderate Levin concludes,

this adds up to a controversial understanding of the purpose of primary and secondary education, and one that will tend to fan the flames of our culture wars. Whether we like it or not, the next phase of conservative education-policy thinking will need to be willing to do that

On Garett Jones’ latest book

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I review 10 % Less Democracy.

At a time of populist ascendance, his theme is bracingly countercultural.

I suggested that the editors that we might want to allude to the Bernie Sanders phenomenon as making the book particularly timely, but they demurred.

In the end, I find providing checks on the voters to be the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Once you get lots of Fear Of Others’ Liberty, the FOOLs are all rooting for the exercise of government authority. I doesn’t matter whether you label it “the will of the people,” “technocratic independence,” or “state capacity,” the bottle is still filled with poison.

The analogy with religion

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Molly Bridgid McGrath writes,

Sacrificial Politics is a system of roles bestowed upon people by those around them, and these roles carry rights, prerogatives, obligations, expectations, and social statuses. For example, with diversity talk we do not just recognize that some people are “different” in the desired way; we do not just include them; and we don’t treat everyone in the room equally. We confer a status on select people as “diverse” and as having the power to bestow “diversity” on the groups they join. Other people get the status of not “diverse.”

You might think of this system of social constructions as a game with four positions and rules for what each position is supposed to do. (i) The Sacred, who are members of an oppressed category, are supposed to represent their category by believing and advocating certain things. (ii) The Pious are the members of the privileged category (e.g., white, male, straight, or cis) who recognize, honor, protect, and avenge the Sacred. (iii) The Profane are the members of the privileged category who are not pious (“profane” just means “outside the temple”). (iv) The Blasphemers commit acts of desecration against the Sacred (sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose) and are marked henceforth as perpetrators of injustice.

It is a long essay on the theme of the religious character of the oppressor-oppressed axis.

Amy Wax follows up with another long essay on how this religion may undermine our legal tradition.

The cult of progressivism dictates that these groups, and any individuals within them, are always victimized by evil attitudes and actions — discrimination, bigotry, racism, sexism — on the part of members of favored groups (mainly white males), or to unfair and unjust societal structures. Regardless of facts, logic, or evidence, any disadvantage or detriments they suffer must be attributed to these causes. To the extent these conditions are legally actionable — and the job of progressivism is to ensure that they are — they must be rectified. Those are the central tenets of the legal department of the cult, which must be indulged without exception. Any aspect or result in the law that is inconsistent with these tenets is designated and banished as evil.

Understanding the dire effects of this brand of progressive wokeness rests on recognizing that the proper operation of our legal system depends on objective, impartial, and intelligible limits on the reach of our laws and the instruments of legal redress, and on respecting longstanding discursive, analytical, and adversarial methods for determining those limits.

To me, these read like very unflattering portrayals of the social justice movement. It is hard to believe that they would pass an ideological Turing test. Yet they strike me as valid.

Andrew Sullivan on Klein and Caldwell

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Sullivan writes,

Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.

He is referring to Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement. He compares and contrasts it with Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. Although both books might seem to be in my wheelhouse, I am not planning to read either one. Instead, I am inclined to rely on what others say about them.

Sullivan’s peroration:

I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.

Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?

What strikes me is that for all of the talk about how race affects less-educated white voters, actual race relations seem most tense on college campuses. That is where change appears to require a miracle.

But suppose that black college students were to join the backlash against the social justice movement. Imagine a number of them saying, “We don’t need this patronizing condescension. It isn’t helping. We’re strong enough to do without it. From now on, treat us as individuals.”

I’m not predicting that black students will do that, nor am I saying that they should. But if black students were to join the backlash, that would strike a severe blow to the social justice movement.

Why liberty requires state capacity

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Nick Gillespie writes,

Again and again—and in countries all over the world—declines in trust of government correlate strongly with calls for more government regulation in more parts of our lives. “Individuals in low-trust countries want more government intervention even though they know the government is corrupt,” explain the authors of a 2010 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper. That’s certainly the case in the United States, where the size, scope, and spending of government has vastly increased over exactly the same period in which trust and confidence in the government has cratered. In 2018, I talked with one of the paper’s authors, Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist who grew up in the Soviet Union before coming to America. Why do citizens ask a government they don’t believe in to bring order? “They want regulation,” he said. “They want a dictator who will bring back order.” [links omitted]

It seems as though “liberty with ineffectual government” is not an equilibrium.

A trend I have been noticing among libertarian organizations is that they are starting to express worries about populism, polarization, and the sorry state of political discourse.

Yuval Levin watch

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1. My review of A Time to Build.

Levin sees today’s elites as unwilling to abide by institutional constraints. Some abuse their power within an institution. Levin terms this “insiderism”. Others only use institutional prestige to enhance their personal ambitions but eschew any obligations to bolster the institutions that support them or to conform to institutional norms. Levin calls this “outsiderism” or “platforming,” meaning using the institution as a platform from which to expand one’s personal recognition.

2. A very comprehensive interview of Yuval Levin by Richard Reinsch . Hard to excerpt, but here is a slice:

meritocracy contributes to that problem because it leaves our elites now thinking that their positions are earned, that their authority is legitimate by default because they’ve been selected into elite institutions of higher education in particular. . . an elite that doesn’t think it needs to be constrained is a very bad fit for a democratic society.

It invites the kind of resistance, frustration, and ultimately populism that we’ve seen, and I think it deserves that response. Our elites in fact don’t think enough about how to constrain themselves in ways that could make it clear to the larger society that they’re playing a legitimate and valuable role. And I think institutions have an enormous role to play in that because our elite institutions can constrain our elites in ways that put them to use for the larger society. That’s what the professions do. That’s what political and cultural institutions do when they’re functioning well.

But if we understand our institutions as performative, as just platforms for people to stand and shine on, then they don’t really function to constrain our elites. They just display our elites and increase the frustration of the larger society with them. I think part of the solution to this part of the problem our country confronts is an idea of institutionalism that requires much more constraint and formation, that requires people to understand themselves as needing to prove that they operate by some standard of integrity and public service and that would require a real cultural change in a lot of our elite institutions.

Large countries and bad government

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F.H. Buckley writes,

We’re overly big, one of the biggest countries in the world. Smaller countries are happier and less corrupt. They’re less inclined to throw their weight around militarily, and they’re freer. If there are advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is badness.

It sounds like I should read his new book, American Secession.

I originally wrote this post before his article appeared. I started with a list of the countries with at least 100 million in population.

1 China 1,384,689,024
2 India 1,296,834,048
3 United States 329,256,480
4 Indonesia 262,787,408
5 Brazil 208,846,896
6 Pakistan 207,862,512
7 Nigeria 203,452,512
8 Bangladesh 159,453,008
9 Russia 142,122,784
10 Japan 126,168,160
11 Mexico 125,959,208
12 Ethiopia 108,386,392
13 Philippines 105,893,384

Note that the governments of all of them, with the exception of the U.S. and Japan, are either very authoritarian, incompetent, or both.

I’ve made this point before in different ways. But the U.S. is not comparable to Denmark or Singapore. The peer group for the U.S. is the countries on the list above. And from that perspective, we should really be grateful for what we have.

Scale is seriously under-rated as a challenge in human society.

Classical liberalism vs. libertarianism

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John O. McGinnis writes,

Tocqueville recognized that civic mediating institutions and the habits they inculcated were essential to a free society. Victorian liberals supported aid to the poor but, as the late great historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has described, sharply distinguished between the deserving and the not-so-deserving poor. That distinction not only has good incentives for the poor but helps express the larger social values of honesty, thrift, and self-control needed for a liberal society.

Thus, classical liberalism offers a relevant critique of the modern libertarian movement, its wilder and younger brother. Libertarianism need not be so indifferent to the habits and morals of citizens, even as it ought to be less grudging in taking care of those who cannot care for themselves. Libertarianism cannot succeed as a governing philosophy if it is only a creed of low taxes and personal freedoms, important as these are to good society. It must, for instance, protect the associational rights that help sustain traditional virtues.

Prestige hierarchy and dominance hierarchy

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Humans have two types of hierarchies–prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. I admit that there are some cases where a hierarchy is not clearly one or the other, but bear with me.

A prestige hierarchy is positive sum. Those at the bottom of, say, the chef hierarchy or the guitarist hierarchy, can learn from those higher up. We get better at doing things by copying what prestigious people do. When we need help, it is useful to have an idea who the real experts are.

A dominance hierarchy is negative sum. The more resources I obtain at gunpoint, the less for you. And the fight to get to the top wastes resources.

The business world has elements of both. Your boss may have prestige but also has the ability to threaten you.

Marxists see capitalism as a dominance hierarchy. Non-Marxists see capitalism differently. A mesh of prestige hierarchies? Or a competition that is not interpretable in terms of hierarchy?

In our Martin Gurri world, some important prestige hierarchies are under stress. Elites don’t enjoy the prestige they once had.

Elites who lose prestige tend to resort to dominance. China in Hong Kong. Journalists who want Internet censorship. But making dominance moves is no way to recover prestige. It does the opposite.

Cancel culture uses dominance moves. From a prestige perspective, it is a poor tactic. As Peggy Noonan wrote,

The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture and journalism. In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them. They are the most hated people in America

Assuming that our erstwhile elites are not going to recover their prestige, where are we headed? Will a new stable prestige hierarchy emerge? Or will we have to settle for either chaos or a dominance hierarchy?