In a recent Bleeding Heart Libertarian post, philosopher Matt Zwolinski tells us he can no longer “describe the core commitments of American libertarianism” as he could have just ten years ago. The reason, he says, is that the apparent consensus about libertarianism that emerged in the 1970s and started unraveling by the 1990s was just a temporary condition—an anomaly; libertarianism has otherwise been a shifting, evolving movement suffering “recurring bouts of fragmentation and re-fragmentation.”
Libertarianism has no “fixed philosophical essence,” Zwolinski says, or you wouldn’t have seen the drastic swings in how the term was applied between Déjacque’s anarcho-communism of the 1850s and Leonard Read’s free markets and limited government of the 1950s, let alone the present-day. There simply has never been a permanent, stable paradigm of liberty.
Yes, an apparent consensus was arrived at in the 1970s in the “rights-based free-market” views of Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard—which Zwolinski also tellingly labels as rationalist and absolutist. (Code-word alert: he means unempirical and dogmatic, which are bad things, unlike the empirical and flexible approach he favors.) But this was more of a historical accident, or perhaps a breathing spell, before society in general and libertarian theory in particular began a steady unraveling and loss of cohesion.
And now we have a half dozen or so factions all claiming a spot under the “big tent” of libertarianism: bleeding-heart libertarians with their interest in social justice and the possibility of wealth redistribution and racial reparations, left-libertarians and their critique of “actually-existing capitalism” (not just the mixed economy of government favors and regulations, but also “boss”-run businesses), paleolibertarians getting cozy with right-wingers, tech-right, neo-reactionaries aligned with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk—and, of course, the aging remnant of the Nozick-Rand-Rothbard axis that wonders why the others don’t see true nature of liberty the way they do.
As Zwolinski explains, the reason why the rationalistic, absolutist champions of rights and free markets just don’t get it is that they fail to realize that libertarianism isn’t a cohesive system of ideas but instead is a sociological phenomenon, explained by what he refers to as “tribalism.” He applies to libertarianism the framework described by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis in their book The Myth of Left and Right, in which they claim that “left” and “right” are tribes, “not coherent ideologies,” and that they “don’t hang together because of any underlying philosophical essence,” but “because they happen to be the positions currently held by the left-wing and right-wing tribes.”
A number of things must be said about this “tribal,” sociological analysis of political shifting and about Zwolinski’s prescriptions of how to make peace with it. First of all, there’s the idea already noted that libertarianism should be a “big tent” under which all the various “tribes” of claimants to the title can live and work together. Multiple tribes—under one tent? Whoever heard of such a thing! Perhaps neighboring villages, but one big tent?
Zwolinski’s appeal to the notion of “tribes” is a poor fit for what he himself says about libertarians. He thinks of “tribes” as groups of people that are united but can change views so long as they retain their ground for unity—like Trump supporters who shift their opinions according to what Trump now favors, but not their loyalty. But Zwolinski’s examples of libertarians are people who keep splitting, not tribes that remain together!
Secondly, the idea that a political philosophy is an ephemeral set of beliefs and policies with no fixed nature is simply ahistorical. Communism, for instance, has been around for over 2,000 years, and no communism worthy of the name would fail to demand that people turn over their property and their children to the state. You don’t have to be rationalistic and absolutist to acknowledge this.
Further, if you want to borrow the mantle of communism and claim that your brand of communism doesn’t require state ownership of property and people, that doesn’t make you a communist! Or, in contemporary terms, identifying as a communist does not change the essential nature of what communism is, nor the essential nature of your view which you claim to be communism. Trans-communism is not a “thing,” nor is trans-libertarianism.
Zwolinski also says that the basic principles of libertarianism are “too open-ended” to settle some political issues, that they “underdetermine the conclusion” people are looking for. This is the borderline-case issue of epistemology transferred to political philosophy. As Zwolinski would agree—since he affirms that libertarian principles “rule out, for example, the more extreme forms of state socialism or totalitarianism”—there really are bright lines in nature and in society, just as we have no trouble distinguishing red from yellow, or even orange from either red or yellow.
The problem comes, as it always does, in tackling borderline cases. How did we distinguish between orange-red and red-orange, both of which used to be in a child’s Crayola box? Which was closer to orange, and which was closer to red? Unless you had a color perception challenge, it was a simple matter of holding them up together and comparing them against the paradigm cases of red and orange, and the answer came easily enough.
The same is true for solutions to problems such as income inequality and poverty that can result from being treated unjustly in social and economic dealings or by being the victim of discriminatory or oppressive laws. We just have to put on our big boy (and big girl) pants and do the work of applying our principles—and to acknowledge that if they are, in principle, incompatible, then there really is a more serious problem than income inequality or past racial discrimination.
For example, for poverty and income inequality, the laissez-faire principle in general requires getting the government’s hands off the economy (in both its regulatory and its privileging modes) and instead to restrict government to enforcing laws against force and fraud and contract violation. By contrast, the bleeding heart alternative is to suggest that redistribution of wealth via some sort of guaranteed annual income—and/or via some sort of reparations for past centuries of slavery—will help to mitigate poverty and suffering and to right injustices of the past.
It doesn’t take a Rothbard or a Rand to point out that two very different principles are at work here, and that the respective groups or “tribes” favoring them have very different essences defined by advocacy of and adherence to those respective principles. Briefly: laissez-faire is the principle that you own your justly-earned property and your body and your labor, and no one else may rightfully deprive you of it. The non-aggression principle reigns supreme and without exception. Yes, it is absolutist, because it is an axiom of libertarian politics.
Bleeding-heart, by contrast, is the principle that rights may be well and good, but that a starving man is not free, and that some amount of aggression may need to be accepted in order to right the injustice caused by the evil deeds of other individuals or of government. But, of course, none dare call it aggression. Instead, the bleeding-heart perspective would assure us that redistribution-for-justice is the price we pay for a free society. But where would the line be drawn? What should be the limit on forced redistribution-for-justice? As with the question of how much is a just tax, a true libertarian would say: zero.
This points to another problem. Zwolinski argues that rights are just one of several principles that must be balanced and applied flexibly against one another. Well, in one’s own private life, one is free to balance physical health, entertainment, nutrition, intellectual study, creative pursuits, personal relationships, etc. against each other, and to shift one’s focus or amount of time and effort spent from one to another.
Indeed, Zwolinski speaks approvingly of “Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism,…the long tradition that insists there are many goods, that they don’t reduce to one another, and that practical wisdom about particular cases can’t be replaced by the application of a master principle.” And he adds, “all of that sits much more comfortably with me than the monism of an Ayn Rand or a Murray Rothbard, for whom political philosophy is the deductive application of a single axiom to every case that comes along.”
How can one disagree about value-pluralism and many goods and practical wisdom? These are part of the ethical wisdom handed down from Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. Wise and prudent persons weigh and balance their values among each other and make such shifts on their own, perhaps with suggestions and advice from others, but freely, as autonomous human beings. We can hold the master principle that survival and flourishing as a rational being is the ultimate good, while also holding that, in practice, we must balance the various constituent goods that contribute to our survival and flourishing. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.
But when someone else directs how you make such shifts, would we say that you are free and autonomous? No, we would call this a paternalistic state. And what about when someone dictates to you whether and how much of your time, energy, and resources you give to others? When someone else forces you to do the walking and gum-chewing in the manner they prefer? That’s certainly not libertarianism—any more than a so-called communism allows you and your children to enjoy family life and ownership of property is actually communism, just because those promoting it want to use the label. Wishing, or asserting, doesn’t make it so!
Ultimately, Zwolinski appears to be a pragmatist, who asks that principles be set aside in order to come up with practical solutions to problems, to do what works for understanding the world and figuring out how to live and how to live together. For over half a century, we have heard left-leaning politicians demand that we leave our principles at the door and instead roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of problem-solving. But they thinly disguise, if at all, the fact that they have every intention of pressing for their actual principles. Overt pragmatism, but covert agendas—stealth principles. The hidden gun or knife, when the others have left their weapons at the door.
Before about 30 years ago, libertarians would never have dreamed of suggesting that a free society could be achieved by committing aggression against some people in order to transfer wealth to others in the name of “social justice.” It is a measure of how deeply corrupted our culture’s ethical base has become that now, fully one-third of the younger generation have a favorable opinion of socialism.
It would be good if young folks didn’t have to find out the hard way just how inhumane and unjust a principle and system socialism is. Perhaps they wouldn’t have to, if Zwolinski and his compatriots would make their bleeding-heart proposals just a bit more explicit with a bit more of a hard edge.
As for us, we absolutely and rationally prefer “the monism of an Ayn Rand or a Murray Rothbard.” Tempered with the practical wisdom of an Aristotle, of course.
