It occurs to me that there are probably many people out there who don’t really understand all the libertarian goings on about Ron Paul—they might have heard about the racist trash in his newsletters, but they may not know all the other baggage that underlies what’s going on here. This post is an introduction to the controversy.
As with any ideological group or political party, there’s more than one kind of libertarian. (All of the following will be “roughly speaking” since precision on these matters is never very easy. Just as there are Rockefeller Republicans and Goldwater Republicans and people who fall somewhere in between or off to one side or the other.)
But there are basically three kinds of libertarians. I enjoy coming up with derisive names for the group of which I’m critical, and the group of which Paul is a member—I call them Doughface Libertarians, for instance, after an early nineteenth century expression. (Northern Democrats who supported southern slaveowners were called “Doughfaces,” and said to be “northern men with southern principles.”) I think an accurate term for them is paleo-conservatives. But we might call them Rothbardians after the economist Murray Rothbard who can figure, more or less, as the spiritual head of this group. The group of which I am a member is largely—though certainly not entirely—grouped around the philosopher Ayn Rand. Rand never called herself a libertarian, and to this day a large portion of Rand’s followers refuse to call themselves that, because of the Rothbardian element within the libertarian community. The third group tends to focus around, let us say, Milton Friedman. VodkaPundit, some years ago, called them “sensible shoes libertarians.”
The Rothbardians are largely grouped around the Mises Institute and the blog Lew Rockwell.com.* One of their most distinctive features is their belief in secession and their (quite frequent) argument that the south was in the right in the Civil War. Members of this group have published books arguing that Abraham Lincoln was the cause of the nation’s collapse into welfare state-ism, and that secession is an essential right. (For an explanation of why they are wrong on these issues, see here, here, and here, among other things.)
Their belief in “states’ rights” was reflected on Ron Paul’s argument that Texas was in the right in the Lawrence v. Texas case—that is, that state governments have the right to police the private sexual conduct of consenting adults. In a similar vein, they tend to be extremely non-interventionist in foreign policy. They are so extreme on this matter sometimes that they say truly outlandish things, such as the recent post taking at face value Iran’s “explanation” of its recent confrontation with U.S. Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf.
Not long before he died, Murray Rothbard called for an alliance with paleo-conservatives—what the Rothbardians call “the Old Right,” meaning the elements that in the 1930s and 40s opposed the rise of the New Deal. Naturally, there were many elements in this coalition who are quite unsavory: racists, theocrats, and so forth. What unites these guys is their often highly emotionalistic hostility to government. Rothbard, for example, infamously cheered the victory of communism in Vietnam because, he said, it was pleasant to watch “the death of a state” (i.e., non-communist Vietnam).
In my article, “How Libertarians Ought to Think About The U.S. Civil War,” I argue that the Vietnam experience was essential to the Rothbardian element of the libertarian community. They learned two lessons from that experience: that war is never, ever worth it no matter what, and/or that societies have a right to choose their forms of government without interference by others. Thus “if the Vietnamese want to be communists, it’s none of our business,” and “we shouldn’t force democracy on people.” This is why they think the south was right in the Civil War: slavery may have been an awful thing, but it was none of the north’s business to do anything about it. Obviously, the same goes for the Iraq War, or just about any other American intervention overseas.
As I’ve argued before, the core of the Rothbardian viewpoint is moral and cultural relativism, that is to say, subjectivism. Morality is whatever a society says it is, and therefore we have no right to go outside of our society and “enforce” our views (such as freedom) on others.
The Objectivists—those who draw their understanding from the works of Ayn Rand—believe on the contrary in a universal human nature, natural moral laws, and therefore, in a universal right and wrong. That doesn’t mean that we favor military adventurism necessarily, but it does mean that no foreign dictator, and no southern state, has a right to oppress people, and if we choose to stop them we have that right in the same way that we have the right to shoot a rapist we see raping a woman in a back alley. We argue that freedom cannot be “forced” on people: it is oppression that is “forced” on people. Since no state can claim a right to enslave people, the south cannot have been engaged in a legitimate act of revolution during the Civil War, and the mullahs do not have a right to force women to wear the veil, and so forth. (Again, this does not mean we have a duty to come to the aid of the oppressed; just the right to do so.) Likewise, contra Ron Paul, we believe that no state ever has the right to use force on people who are engaged in private, adult, consensual sexual activity—or the right to censor me, or to take away a woman’s right to an abortion (again contra Paul). We believe judicial independence is essential to ensuring that a free society remains free, rather than a collection of bullies who enforce their will on us through majority vote.
The “sensible shoes” libertarians tend to focus mostly on policy arguments. Many in this group overlap with the Objectivists, or hold views entirely consistent with ours. Virginia Postrel, for example. Many hold conventional popular moral views and have not delved much into the more abstract controversies on this head. Many others are purely consequentialists—that is, they believe that morality simply cannot be the subject of disciplined inquiry, and that all that a libertarian can talk about is practical reasoning. In other words, they can’t argue that liberty is morally right; they can only argue about how as a practical matter free social and economic networks are organized. I have argued that if consistently followed, this practice will lead them to default on the responsibility of moral judgment, and ultimately they fall into the cultural relativism of the Rothbardians.
I have argued in many posts that libertarianism properly understood must be based on an objective, universal morality. (Naturally I think that, being an Objectivist.) And I have argued that the Rothbardians are better classified as paleo-conservatives, like Russell Kirk, Robert Weaver, or Robert Nisbet, (or today’s Robert Bork) who argue that morality is a social phenomenon only.
The reason the Ron Paul situation is important is because it exposes these dividing lines in the libertarian community. Paul was put forward as a libertarian, and for a while some comfortable shoes libertarians were drawn in his direction. (As were, I think, not a few Objectivists.) What they’ve discovered is not only Paul’s troubling views on race, but also his paleo-conservative views on politics—which Skip Oliva some time ago very effectively summarized:
• Ron Paul believes women’s bodies are the property of the state.
• Ron Paul will use federal power to prevent families that don’t match the structure of his own from living in freedom.
• Ron Paul would rather orphan children than allow them to have two loving parents.
• He may not talk about it openly, but Ron Paul is carrying out the agenda of fundamentalist Christians.
• Ron Paul opposes individual rights for anyone who has a different cultural background than his own.
• Ron Paul opposes the protection of individual rights through the courts.
• Ron Paul will allow state and local governments to violate any individual rights in the name of protecting “federalism” and the sacrosanct Constitution.
What’s going on now is that both the Objectivists and the sensible shoes libertarians are talking about the need to clarify these points and (if I could work my will) to read the Rothbardians out of the movement entirely.
For more explanation of why libertarianism is a basically liberal philosophy incompatible with the views of the Rothbardians, I recommend this post, and this series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) contrasting libertarianism with conservatism ( and briefer recap here).
* Update: David Friedman has objected to my use of Rothbard's name here on the grounds that Rothbard himself was not a moral relativist. I think that some things Rothbard said sound relativistic, but I'm willing to concede that issue. The point I was trying to make was the prevalence of moral relativism in some circles of the libertarian community, and particularly in the camp that in my experience groups itself around Rothbard.
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