Samizdata

Beauty of Grey criticizes a couple of our recent offerings:

This sort of shrill extremism is a big reason why most people view libertarians as a third party wacko fringe group, just on this side of the Larouchies on the respectability scale. The sneering condescension Perry displays probably won’t help their poll numbers any, either.

Firstly it was Brian Micklethwait, not me, who wrote the first piece ‘Beauty of Grey’ mentions. Also the fact is that the majority of libertarians in the USA who deign to vote actually vote Republican, not Libertarian. Ever heard of Ron Paul? That should be obvious and as a ‘small l’ libertarian that is of no concern to me.

I would have thought the jocular tone would have made it apparent that Brian was not seriously supporting the idea of people being mugged. He is just saying that if people advocate and legitimise political actions that result in a more violent society, he is not going to be too concerned if they reap the harvest they have sown and I certainly agree. That ‘Beauty of Grey’ should decry our lack of moral relativism and therefore our sentiment that people are responsible for the consequences of their actions in the ballot booth, is certainly rather revealing. But that is not the same as Brian actually advocating mugging. Victim disarmament supporters “deserve” being mugged because they are responsible for people being helpless when confronted by an emboldened mugger, not because Brian is going to organize bands of libertarian muggers to roam the streets looking for ‘liberals’. To read his remarks any other way strikes me as bizarre.

Secondly, ‘Beauty of Grey’ clearly has no idea what modern self-described socialist parties who are in power in various western European countries actually advocate and do. He can delude himself that the pervasive incrementalist approach to regulating economic activity that pretty much defines the Democratic Party (and elements of the Republican Party) in the USA is materially different to that of the French or British or German or Swedish government’s ‘democratic socialist’ model but it is not. The only difference is that there is more effective political opposition to it in the USA.

Modern ‘democratic socialism’ is a strange hybrid between paleo-socialist aims of outright national ownership of the means of production and the national socialist approach of allowing nominal ownership of the means of production but regulating the ways in which they can be used to require the support of National Objectives: control by overt ownership vs. control by regulation… but the end result is still control by the state, it is only how you get there that varies. How does this differ from the ‘liberalism’ of the Gore/Kennedy/Schumer way? These are people who constantly advocate ‘National’ solutions driven by regulations rather than free markets. The only difference is the language they use to describe what they want.

That Gore’s plank does not explicitly lay out the pervasive role of the state, and that ‘Beauty of Grey’ therefore thinks that there is a huge difference between the ‘liberal’ and the modern democratic socialist, says more about ‘Beauty of Grey’s’ credulity than the political process he describes. Vast areas of economic (and private) life are subject to regulation and thus the owners of the means of production find their control ever more circumscribed by the state as it tells you who you may or may not trade with, who you may hire or fire, how you educate and interact with your children, how (and if) you protect yourself from harm, the manner in which you may marry, how you must clear the snow from property you do not even own in front of your house, how you install plumbing and electrical wiring in your own home etc. etc. Yet we are to believe that the sanctity of private property is alive and well and living in ‘liberal’ constituencies in the USA.

Or maybe I just missed the plank in Gore’s platform that called for a state seizure of the means of production and an abolition of private property? They do try to sneak things by you in the fine print, those scoundrels.

I could not have put it better myself. Beauty of Grey’s remarks demonstrate exactly how effective the incrementalist approach is. Al Gore wants exactly what Gerhard Schroder, Tony Blair and Lional Jospin want. And what do Gerhard Schroder, Tony Blair and Lional Jospin all call themselves? Socialists.

If Beauty of Grey is going to talk about ‘the fine print’ it would behoove him to read it first. Perhaps he should start by getting the author right on things he criticizes.

Several readers have written in on the subject of the term ‘liberal’ and the following e-mails from Evan McElravy and Joe Clibbens also make good points

Evan McElravy writes:

It’s worth noting that the positive connotations of our ideology are so overwhelming that not only have the left stolen “liberal” from us, they are now working on “libertarian” too. Noam Chomsky, notoriously, refers to himself as a “libertarian socialist” and I was just the other day reading an article claiming much the same ground for Rosa Luxembourg, on the basis that she opposed Bolshevik centralism. The independent bookstore Book People in Austin, TX, where I just returned from, has their political books organized roughly by orientation. In the conservative shelf is Pat Buchanan along with David Boaz’s The Libertarian Reader, and a few other books of theirs and ours muddled together, while the “Liberal/Libertarian” shelf is home to Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Ralph Nader, as well as those more mainstream liberal writers you’d expect. On the other hand, the magazine section had more copies of Reason than anywhere I’d ever been, prominently displayed, and outnumbering widely The Nation and the National Review. So I’ll give them some credit, even if their history section was decidedly pedestrian.

Joe Clibbens writes:

I could not agree with you more in this campaign, and I myself have for years used the ‘liberal’ label, albeit with the necessary addition of ‘classical’ in certain company, whenever possible and never use it to refer to social democrats, but I am writing to suggest you expand it to other hijacked terminology.

The term progressive has its roots firmly in liberalism, while socialism has always been reactionary and luddite. Every time I hear a socialist referred to as ‘progressive’ I go all bug-eyed, they are in fact the very antithesis of its true meaning.

Of course ‘leftist’, traditionally speaking, would also denote minimal government, and the socialist bludgeoning of the left-right paradigm is the very reason it no longer makes any sense.

Still, all’s fair in love and propaganda, but it’s time we started fighting back.

Up the Revolution!

[Ed: I have always preferred ‘Up the Evolution!’ myself, for rational libertarians are nothing if not radical evolutionaries]

We received an e-mail from Kevin Connors on the issue of the term ‘liberal’

I believe David’s piece on the label “liberal” is quite ill-advised. I have a hard enough time trying to explain libertarianism to people and differentiate it from conservatism without swimming against the tide on an issue of semantics.

However I must disagree with Kevin. I think this is a useful point to raise for several reasons.

It is useful to put the evolution of the term into historical perspective, as Tom Burroughes has done, in order to understand the evolutionary process by which a term can come to mean the opposite of its original meaning, at least in the USA and to an extent the UK.

It is also useful to note that in the process of defining a word, it forces people to contrast it against opposing concepts and thus discover synonyms and antonyms. It is very helpful indeed to be able to point out that liberal is just a synonym for socialist and that it is mostly because ‘socialist’ has such negative connotations in the USA that members of the Democratic party use the term liberal. Thus a little discursive musing on the term ‘liberal’ makes that point rather hard to avoid. There is little daylight between modern ‘democratic socialists’ in Europe, Liberal Democrats in the UK and Democrats in the USA: they are just the modern faces of socialism.

Pointing this out is far from ill-advised. Many in the UK who vote for the ‘Liberal Democrats’ do so because of quaint ideas that they are the ‘middle way’, whereas the truth is that they are further to the socialist left than the Labour Party. In the USA many who would sooner use the star-spangled banner as a doormat than vote ‘Socialist’ nevertheless vote ‘Democrat’.

All we are doing is trying to introduce a little coherence into the political taxonomy!

Something has been bothering me for a while now and I regret to have to say that the source of my concern emanates from across the pond. Wonder what it is? Well, it’s the use of the word ‘Liberal’ when referring to someone of the leftist persuasion which is nothing less than a complete inversion of the term.

It gives me pleasure, therefore, to link to a campaign being undertaken by Bureaucrash, a group of seriously well dug-in and commited US student capitalist activists (and it feels so good to be able to type those words in earnest).

“Here in the birthplace of modern freedom, liberalism has come to identify a view that favors the use of force — force exercised by the bureaucratic state — to achieve supposedly noble ideals.”

I could not have put it better. Just what happened to the word? From 18th Century up until around the 1960’s ‘Libertarianism’ in this country was called ‘Liberalism’. It denoted support for free trade, limited government, low taxes and property rights. But these trends being what they are, Britain has been influenced by the US terminology and now the word denotes, regulation, nanny state, high taxes and hate speech laws. The latter is not ‘liberalism’ it is ‘socialism’. The very word ‘Libertarian’ was conceived as a means of distinguishing us from them.

You can test this theory if you ever go to Continental Europe where the term ‘Liberal’ has retained its original meaning. Just go up to any European socialist and tell him/her that you are a ‘liberal’. Note how their faces swifty transform from the customary rictus of hate to a rictus of seething hate shot through with horror.

I don’t know if was an underhand tactic by the left, a cruel happenstance of fate or mere sloppiness that allowed our political foes in the Anglosphere to grab our cloak and wrap it around their own bodies but it is way past time that we grabbed it back.

So I support the Bureaucrash campaign and, whilst I know it will stick in many a craw, I invoke all my fellow Capitalists, Libertarians and, yes, even you Conservatives to join in and declare; “Say it once, say it loud, I’m a Liberal and I’m proud!!”