At my first real journalism job, I started off covering personal
finance. Not having the first clue about financial topics going in,
I ended up asking patient sources a lot of questions like, “So tell
me who should consider an REIT—and also what are they?” In
my naivety this seemed very crazy to me, that people would let you
write professionally about a topic with no prior knowledge of it.
Yet journalists cover complex things they don’t know about all the
time, and this is usually okay because they research and talk to
people who do know about it.
Unless, of course, they’re writing about libertarians.
Not only do you not have to know the first thing about
libertarianism to cover it for major news outlets, it is perfectly
fine to a) decline to ask anybody who does know, b) make up your
own version of what it is, and then c) lament the terribleness of
this terrible philosophy or people you have just created. Cases in
point: approximately every 10th article published by
Salon,
this piece by Damon Linker at The Week.
Linker’s recent piece is titled, “How liberalism became an
intolerant dogma,” which made my ears perk up because, duh. This is
a topic near and dear to me, many libertarians, and
many liberals right now. The indolent hubris so
many on the left express toward social progress and the corrosive
Twitter-mob effect on the leftist discourse is roundly upsetting.
As Linker puts it, “liberals have begun to grow increasingly
religious about their own liberalism, which they are treating as a
comprehensive view of reality and the human good.”
Linker laments “liberalism’s decline from a political philosophy
of pluralism into a rigidly intolerant dogma,” which he
feels like has been especially evident in the wake of the Supreme
Court’s
recent Hobby Lobby ruling. But then—after decrying
this type of liberalism as one that “that threatens to poison
American civic life for the foreseeable future”—Linker suddenly
brings libertarianism into things. Apparently it’s us
pesky libertarians that have had this contaminating influence
on the left:
The rise of dogmatic liberalism is the American left-wing
expression of the broader trend that Mark Lilla identified in a
recent blockbuster essay for The
New Republic. The reigning dogma of our time, according to
Lilla, is libertarianism — by which he means far more than the
anti-tax, anti-regulation ideology that Americans identify with the
post-Reagan Republican Party, and that the rest of the world calls
“neoliberalism.”
So… libertarians (who are really just post-Reagan
Republicans), with our emphasis on personal liberty and freedom,
are somehow to blame for liberals who want to limit liberty and
freedom? How does this work? Linker follows by noting that
libertarianism “fuels the American right’s anti-government furies,
but it also animates the left’s push for same-sex marriage.”
Huh. That makes us sound more like good guys than folks driving
the slow liberal poisoning of American culture. But what “makes
libertarianism a dogma,” writes Linker, “is the inability or
unwillingness of those who espouse it to accept that some people
might choose, for morally legitimate reasons, to dissent from
it.”
On a range of issues, liberals seem not only increasingly
incapable of comprehending how or why someone would affirm a more
traditional vision of the human good, but inclined to relegate
dissenters to the category of moral monsters who deserve to be
excommunicated from civilized life—and sometimes coerced into
compliance by the government.
As you can see, at this point Linker begins conflating
libertarians and liberals entirely, and not just in a
using-liberal-to-also-mean-classical-liberal
(i.e. libertarian) way. Rather, he is looking to the opinions and
actions of modern, mainstream American liberals and then labeling
those he finds wanting as libertarian. Observe:
The latter tendency shows how, paradoxically, the rise
of libertarian dogma can have the practical effect of
increasing government power and expanding its scope. This happens
when individuals look to the government to facilitate their own
liberation from constraints imposed by private groups,
organizations, and institutions within civil society. In such
cases, the government seeks to bring those groups, organizations,
and institutions into conformity with uniform standards that ensure
the unobstructed personal liberation of all—even if doing so
requires that these private entities are forced to violate their
distinctive visions of the good.
The main problem with this paragraph is that, while describing
an observable phenomenon in political thought or behavior, it has
nothing whatsofuckingever to do with libertarians.
We are the people arguing against the government
imposing any particular version of morality—be it based in religion
or progressivism or anything else—on private groups, individuals,
and institutions. We are the ones arguing against forcing
photographers and bakers to take part in same-sex marriage
ceremonies and against the Health and Human Services
Department
mandating what kinds of insurance plans companies must offer.
We certainly aren’t advocating (as Linker suggests in another
example) “that academic freedom shouldn’t apply to …
conservatives” on college campuses.
Libertarians are the ones who tend to both support same-sex
marriage and people’s right not to be compelled to work in service
of one; to want to get both our bosses and the government out of
birth control decisions; and to take free speech, freedom of
conscience, freedom of association, and personal autonomy very
seriously. For the benefit of future folks covering libertarians,
here is a quick list of links (all from the past few months) to us
expressing the exact opposite views Linker attributes to
libertarians:
Free Birth Control and Unfree Photographers
Nobody, Gay or Straight, Has the Right to a Wedding Cake
Brendan Eich and Bipartisan Hypocrisy on Free Speech
Organic Grocery Store in Portland Gets the Brendan Eich
Treatment
Hobby Lobby Could Be a Slippery Slope in the Right
Direction
Universities Void Freedom of Religious Association in the Name of
Tolerance
Should Libertarians Support Religious Exceptions to Generally
Applicable Laws?
Campus Trigger Warnings Threaten Speech and Treat Students Like
Children
Linking Without Consent: the New Imagined Tragedy of the Twitter
Commons
Big Government and the Campus Rape Crisis
When the Left Turned Against Free Speech
I hope I have helped clear up this misunderstanding. Linker also
asks “where have been all the outraged liberals taking a stand
against these and many other examples of dogmatism—and
doing so in the name of liberalism?” Just a few, off
the top of my head: “Sooner
of later they’re going to come for people you do
like“;
“We’ve
Gone Too Far With Trigger Warnings“; “Feminism’s
Toxic Twitter Wars“.
There’s actually a rather lovely alliance between liberals,
libertarians, and conservatives whom I think of as the
anti-hysterics—people who would rather see intellectual
honesty, good-faith arguing, and a plurality of ideas than watch
(social) media become a wasteland of orthodox, hyper-partisan
attack dogs. I think we all do admirably at putting aside
ideological differences to agree on the fact that the center cannot
hold, so to speak (“the best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity”).
Whether it’s dishonesty or just dimwittedness, Linker and other
conjurers of straw libertarians are part of the problem; it does no
one any good to go around fighting enemies that don’t exist. By
definition, those who believe people with dissenting opinions need
to be “sometimes coerced into compliance by the govenrment” are not
libertarians.
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