"...Throw me in that briar patch, I’m guilty. I love liberty... I’ve been accused of being a libertarian, and I... wear it as a badge of honor. Because I do love, believe in, and want to support liberty."
That would all be puppies and kittens if it made any sense, but since libertarianism is wholly inconsistent with conservatism, it doesn't: Any form of radicalism is inconsistant with conservatism.
Low-Hanging Fruit
The reference, I assume, relates to the allegiances within the Republican Party tent. In that sense, including libertarians isn't a bad thing, anymore than including conservative Democrats is inconsistent with furthering our shared goals. If, however, we're defining conservatism, libertarian has no place in the definition.
Suggesting that libertarians are the only ones who get to claim a love of liberty is a bit specious (as well as arrogant). It would be as if someone suggested that only those in the Republican Party love our republic, or only those in the Democratic Party support a democratic outcome of elections. Simply because you share a word origin with a lofty concept, it doesn't mean you have exclusive rights and claim to to the root word.
It's the Type, Stupid
Within the social universe there are many types and categories of liberty, but I'll not focus on those here. What we're discussing is the socio-political aspect of liberty.
- Emotionally Glorified, Unfettered Liberty: Libertarianism focuses on Utopian or unfettered liberty, where a society has no moral claim or right to restrict the actions of another person, except by the artificial and ideologically-invented construct of causing physical harm. Libertarianism uses the infamous cliche, "your right to swing your arm stops at my nose," to define the outward limit of the restraint of liberty. Libertarianism is an ideological theory of how liberty should be applied universally, with an idealized version of liberty, having no bearing on reality or praticality, and no downside. It's a nice pipe dream, but it doesn't help us very much other than to make us feel proud of ourselves, or morally superior to the ideology of others. Feelings have no place in establishing or evaluating the effects of public policy.
- Pragmatic Liberty: Conservatism can be as emotionally-charged with marketing memes as the next political theory, but that generally focuses on conservatism in the abstract, not as it was defined by the men who first championed the idea: as an approach to how government should align itself with the people of a given society and culture. Ordered liberty (an oxymoron in the philosophy of libertarianism) is the goal of conservatism, i.e., the outcome of public policy should be good for most, without unnecessarily restraining the few, while recognizing and trying to find a balance of the practicality of imposing a change on a society that does not have the social history or mores to handle it.
Cause and Effect
If a blind man is put in a room he has never been in before without his cane, it would be reasonable to posit that he would bang his shins. Depending on the capriciousness of man, he could go so far as to fall and break his leg, or split his head open from a fall, and die. We could go so far as to suggest that it might not be the best way to introduce the man to his new surroundings. It would be theoretically pure, from the perspective of recognizing his liberty, to allow him to do it. Ideological purity belongs in church pews and children's fairy tales, not in the analysis of public policy.
Conservatives then, are not interested in recognizing the man's liberty alone. They balance his liberty with his ability. Conservatives would ask that the blind man's introduction to the room be with his cane, or with a trusted friend or family member to acclimate him to his surroundings, before he is left alone to explore it further. It isn't necessary to go so far as to coddle him, but it is necessary to recognize his blindness as a factor in our approach.
There are degrees of blindness, just as there are degrees of sightedness. A one-size-fits-all policy for the above doesn't work, either for the blind or the sighted: A policy that assumes that all are blind would unnecessarily restrain the sighted. Conversely, one that assumes that all men are sighted would unnecessarily allow harm to come to the blind. Theoretically then, it requires nuance to find a balance of liberty for each person, based on his abilities.
So, too, with cultures and societies. All societies and cultures are not the same, nor do they share the same experiences to allow them to handle the world in the same way. It is, therefore, just as cruel and wrongheaded to impose too much liberty on a society as it is to impose too much rigidity and structure. Societies and cultures evolve, so it is necessary for a government to evolve with it, but nothing should be imposed (too quickly, carelessly or too soon). If there is a change of law or policy, the person who hears about it should be surprised that it wasn't always that way, as the person's beliefs, opinions and experience should have evolved to the point of acceptance, without conflict or apprehension. If the response is one of shock or alarm, then the society/individual has not evolved to it. It may be ready in a year, a decade, or never, depending on the severity of the change suggested, and the evolution of the society/culture in their historical and social path.
The French Revolution Debates
During the French Revolution, a great debate occurred among the Founding Fathers (specifically Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Paine, and Hamilton), and also foreign intellectual theorists and statesmen, including Alexander de Toqueville, the Marquis de Lafayette ("General Lafayette") and the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke. The debate was not without controversy, nor were all the men involved restrained in their actions to destroy the character of those on the opposite side of the issue. In other words, it got ugly and nasty, but with oh, such much more panache and flare than our petty and vulgar disagreements today.
What all the men agreed on was the idea/ideal of a liberated France. In that sense, they were more in agreement on the big issue than Americans are today on the idea/ideal of a free society. In contrast, however, America, England ("Britain" in the larger sense), and France were at different stages of their evolution:
- America had fought, won, and was in the process of keeping its liberated society, after a previous 200 year history of self-government and self-reliance, fostered by the distance of the mother country, and accidental brilliance on the part of the early Puritan settlers to form social compacts, rather than tyrannical structures of order.
- England had limited the powers and authority of its monarch, establishing an elected parliament, while still maintaining the monarchy as a figurehead for social consistency. It had decades of experience in developing statesmen and had a populace who had grown accustomed to restraining itself.
- France, on the other hand, had no such history. It was about as pure as a monarchy as a society can get. While there were up and comers, men who had supported and assisted America during its revolution, and certainly no shortage of passionate intellectuals and theorists, it had no statesmen ready to assume authority with the experience necessary to show restraint, nor any mechanism by which to accelerate the machinations necessary to create them. France had no history of a constitution, a bill of rights, nor a social compact.
France, unlike America or Britain, was just not ready for liberation, and the fact that they quickly dissolved into a murderous mob and assumed authoritarian-rule as quick as a blink, demonstrated the wisdom of those who thought, at the time, that they just weren't ready for it.
The debates at the time included accusations that the men who were unwilling to support France were hypocrites or authoritarians (impugning their character), but that was simply not the case. There were also arguments (mostly from Jefferson) that suggested that Americans owed a debt to France, because of their assistance in our Revolution, but that argument was one of emotion, not pragmatics. Jefferson, after seeing how quickly the guillotine replaced the gavel and round table, wavered in his support of the French, but his idealism for the spread of liberty was consistent throughout his life. It is clear from his writing at different times of his life, however, that he'd have wished the outcome could have been otherwise:
"It is difficult to conceive how so good a people, with so good a King [as Louis XVI of France], so well-disposed rulers in general, so genial a climate, so fertile a soil, should be rendered so ineffectual for producing human happiness by one single curse--that of a bad form of government. But it is a fact; in spite of the mildness of their governors, the people are ground to powder by the vices of the form of government. Of twenty millions of people supposed to be in France, I am of opinion there are nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence than the most conspicuously wretched individual of the whole United States."- Thomas Jefferson, 1785
"In the struggle which was necessary [in France], many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as anybody, and shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle."- Thomas Jefferson, 1793
There was a desire to spread the cause of freedom. That passion is understandable, but it is also wrong-headed, without the social and political fabric in place to support it. The other side of the debate felt that Europe dissolving into repeated and unsuccessful revolutions would be destabilizing, for the nations involved, as well as our own interests abroad.
It was Jefferson who championed the idea of Manifest Destiny, and it is the destiny of the world. Destiny, like liberty itself, cannot be imposed, but it can be fostered and nurtured. It must reveal itself as a seedling, with good soil and loving care, breaks through the soil to breathe free.
From these debates we can learn two things (as well as many others, but irrelevant to this topic):
- The Founding Fathers were not against "foreign entanglements" in the abstract. They were against intrusion into the petty disagreements between monarchs. Just as France was unwilling to assist the Americans in revolution, until there was a reasonable prospect of success, the Founding Fathers were unwilling to engage in fueds between warlords, but they were perfectly willing to support liberation, if it had a chance of success and brought long term stability.
- Freedom is earned.
Learning to Walk
When we teach a child to walk we remain close by during their initial steps. In the strictest sense, we are coddling the child, but our motivation and intentions are not to coddle, but to protect and encourage the goal of walking. That protection prevents the child from hurting themselves so they are not discouraged from walking. If we protect too much then the child doesn't learn the outcome of a misstep or the dangers of walking too much, too soon. The goal, of course, is that the child will eventually walk on his own, without harnesses, crash helmets, or bumper guards. When we stand clear, and how soon we give the child greater latitude, depends not on an artificial construct of development charts and median outcomes, but on the specific child who is learning to walk. So, too, with liberty: You have to earn it, not by an artificial construct of how much is the ideologically pure amount, but how much a person can handle without the extremes coddling or recklessness.
The ultimate goal of conservatism is liberty, but it is practically limited to what an individual and society can handle at a given time in their development/evolution. In other words, conservatives are patient in their pursuit, like the tortoise against the contrast of the libertarian-hare. The goal of libertarianism is liberty, too, but it wants to drop it on society as the blindman is thrown into a new room. It is unnecessarily harsh and reckless, and its outcome will not be liberty. It will be chaos and then tyranny... just like post-revolutionary France.
Customized Approach and Intellectual Laziness
It is not uncommon for libertarians to assume the moral high ground. After all, they're the ones who champion liberty... to the exclusion of all others, they assume. The arrogance in Gov. Sanford's statement is just the type of presumption of superiority that typifies the claim to moral higher ground to which I refer.
When one confronts the libertarian-indoctrined, it is not unusual to find them spewing forth with platitudes about the purity of the theory, believing it to be a blueprint for how we should all behave, lest we be lumped in with other less-than-intellectual dunderheads: If we understood it, then we would, of course, be libertarians ourselves. Since we conservatives do not share their faith in unfettered liberty, we are, by default, simplistic, socialist and/or fascist desiring overloads, incapable of intellectual thought or reason. Conservatives do not disagree with the goal, only the way the goal is achieved.
It is libertarianism that is intellectually lazy, as it provides a one-size-fits-all, faith-based rule to determine whether an action is good or bad. Faith is the bastion of belief, without the requirement of analysis, evaluation or proof. The evaluation of issues by libertarians is done in a vacuum, without the messy details of reality or recent- or long term- history. It can ignore sociology, psychology, and physics as well. Libertarianism has it all sewed up in a nice neat box: if it is liberty, then it is good. If it is not liberty, then it is bad. There are no shades of gray or nuance, and no practical analysis of the cause and effect, nor any recognition that there are unintended consequences. In fact, it is most often in the libertarian campsites where the concept of unintended consequences is pushed in the logical fallacy closet, rather than the cause and effect light of day.
There is no one-size-fits-all analysis and contemplation for every issue, problem, or challenge that faces an individual or a society. Each one has to be evaluated on its own, with a careful, honest, and unemotionally-charged analysis of its pros and cons, its strengths and weaknesses, and its reasonableness as it applies to the given society or culture it would be placed on. In other words, analysis isn't trumped by ideologically purity, nor a slogan. It isn't easy to do that work every time, which is why the hard work is least favored over the mantras and memes of faith-based ideologies such as libertarianism. Just as Democrats like to refer to conservatives as "the party of NO" libertarians share the belief that saying "no" to unfettered liberty is a distraction rather than a requirement of the thoughtful, reasonable, and intelligent.
It is possible for libertarians and conservatives to share a political tent, and work together to fend off the tide of fascism and progressivism, but it is ridiculous to propose that two ideological opposite approaches to the making of public policy are consistent, or that one is a subset/subordinate of the other.
Radicalism, either to impose liberty or tyranny, has no place in the definition of conservatism.
Why and how to achieve it, not what you believe in or support is what matters in the definitions.
"You hope, Sir, that I think the French deserving of liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think that all men who desire it deserve it. It is not the reward of merit, or the acquisition of our industry. It is our inheritance. It is the birthright of our species. We cannot forfeit our right to it but by what forfeits our title to the privileges of our kind. I mean abuse, or oblivion, of our rational faculties, and a ferocious indocility which makes us prompt to wrong and violence, destroys our social nature, and transforms us into something little better than the description of wild beasts. To men so degraded, a state of strong constraint is a sort of necessary substitute for freedom; since, bad as it is, it may deliver them in some measure from the worst of all slavery--that is, the despotism of their own blind and brutal passions.
You have kindly said that you began to love freedom from your intercourse with me. Permit me then to continue our conversation, and to tell You what the freedom is that I love and that to which I think all men intitled. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish Liberty. As if every Man was to regulate the whole of his Conduct by his own will. The Liberty I mean is a social freedom. It is in that state of things in which Liberty is secured by the equality of Restraint; A Constitution of things in which the liberty of no one Man, and no body of Men and no Number of men can find Means to trespass on the liberty of any Person or any description of Persons in the Society. This kind of liberty is indeed but another name for Justice, ascertained by wise Laws, and secured by well constructed institutions. I am sure, that Liberty, so incorporated, and in a manner, identified, with justice, must be infinitely dear to every one, who is capable of conceiving what it is. But whenever a separation is made between Liberty and Justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe. I do not believe that men ever did submit, certain I am sure they never ought to have submitted, to the arbitrary pleasure of one man; but, under circumstances in which the arbitrary pleasure of many persons in the community pressed with an intolerable hardship upon the just and equal rights of their fellows, such a choice might be made, as among evils. The moment will is set above reason and justice, in any community, a great question may arise in sober minds in what part or portion of the community that dangerous dominion of will may be the least mischievously placed.
If I think all men who cultivate justice entitled to liberty, and, when joined in states, entitled to a constitution framed to perpetuate and secure it, you may be assured, sir, that I think your countrymen eminently worthy of a blessing which is peculiarly adapted to noble, generous, and humane natures. Such I found the French when, more than fifteen years ago, I had the happiness, though but for too short a time, of visiting your country; and I trust their character is not altered since that period.
I have nothing to check my wishes towards the establishment of solid and rational scheme of liberty in France. On the subject of the relative power of nations I may have my prejudices; but I envy internal freedom, security, and good order to none. When, therefore, I shall hear that, in France, the citizen, by whatever description he is qualified, is in the perfect state of legal security with regard to his life, to his property, to the uncontrolled disposal of his person, to the free use of his industry and his faculties: when I hear that he is protected in the beneficial employment of estates to which, by the course of settled law, he was born, or is provided with a fair compensation for them, that he is maintained in the full fruition of the advantages belonging to the state and condition of life in which he had lawfully engaged himself, or is supplied with a substantial, equitable, equivalent: when I am assured that a simple citizen may express his sentiments upon public affairs without hazard to his life or safety, even though against a predominant and fashionable opinion: when I know all this of France, I shall be well pleased as everyone must be who has not forgot the general compense, fear, and humiliation, they shall not be put to judge on the lives, liberties, properties, or estimate of their fellow-citizens; when they are not called upon to put any man to his trial upon undefined crimes of state, not ascertained by any previous rule, statute, or course of precedent; when victims shall not be snatched from the fury of the people to be brought before a tribunal, itself subject to the effects of the same fury, and where the acquittal of parties accused might only place the judge in the situation of the criminal; when I see tribunals placed in this state of independence of everything but law, and with clear law for their direction, as a true lover of equal justice (under the shadow of which alone true liberty can live) I shall rejoice in seeing such a happy order established in France, as much as I do in my consciousness than an order of the same kind, or one not very remote from it, has been long settled, and I hope on a firm foundation, in England. I am not so narrow-minded as to be unable to conceive that the same object may be attained in many ways, and perhaps in ways very different from those which we have followed in this country. If this real practical liberty, with a government powerful to protect, impotent to evade it, be established, or is in a fair train of being established in the democracy, or rather collection of democracies, which seems to be chosen for the future frame of society in France, it is not my having long enjoyed a sober share of freedom, under a qualified monarchy, that shall render me incapable of admiring and praising your system of republics. I should rejoice, even though England should hereafter be reckoned only as one among the happy nations, and should no longer retain her proud distinction, her monopoly of fame for a practical constitution in which the grand secret had been found of reconciling a government of real energy for all foreign and domestic purpose with the most perfect security to the liberty and safety of individuals. That government, whatever its name or form may be, that shall be found substantially and practically to unite these advantages will most merit the applause of all discerning men."
Edmund Burke, (Letter to Charles Jean-Francois Depont on the French Revolution), 1789
H/t Instapundit.
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