Liberty with Virtue or Vice

Rachel Lu has a thought-provoking article on the much blogged-about “libertarian moment.” She examines the differences between the “libertine libertarian” perspective (a 'vice' focused liberty leading to James Poulos’s pink police state) and “conventional libertarian” perspective (a 'virtue' focused liberty leading to smaller government undergirded by stronger family, community, and economic systems), and what’s at stake for Millennials going forward.

In If Millennials Want Liberty, They Need Virtue, Too, the author concludes:

“I do not believe this grim dystopia is inevitable. Human cultures are remarkably dynamic, and ours has ‘good bones’; we still have a chance to show young Americans that there are better alternatives than the tired non-solutions of the progressive Left. But we have to understand that the culture wars and the size-of-government wars are connected on a deep level. If we can’t persuade the young to embrace some version of conventional morals, promises of prosperity and greater autonomy will not save our Republic. …

“The good news is that Millennials, although largely dismissive of conventional morality, have only the vaguest notion of what they are rejecting. A relatively superficial makeover may be enough to make old ideas seem exciting and new. But the project is most likely to succeed if we can seize the libertarian moment by re-committing ourselves to the fusionist compromise. Libertarians and social conservatives do need each other, and not only for the purposes of building a winning coalition. We need each other in order to present a complete and satisfying conservative vision.”

Goldberg: Freedom - The Unfolding Revolution

Jonah Goldberg addresses the question, why there are no libertarian countries today?, raised by Michael Lind in Salon.com.

Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.

Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don’t harm anyone. The job of the state is limited to fighting crime, providing for the common defense, and protecting the rights and contracts of citizens. The individual is sovereign; he is the captain of himself.

It’s true, no ideal libertarian state has ever existed outside a table for one. And no such state will ever exist. But here’s an important caveat: No ideal state of any other kind will be created either.

America’s great, but it ain’t perfect. Sweden’s social democracy is all right, but if it were perfect, I suspect fewer cars would be on fire over there.

Ideals are called ideals for a reason: They’re ideals. They’re goals, aspirations, abstract straight rules we use as measuring sticks against the crooked timber of humanity.

In a fitting tribute to Independence Day, Goldberg quickly weaves through the various experiments of governments and their failures (and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 1940 that statist governments were the "wave of the future") to conclude:

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it’s still unfolding.

Indeed, what’s remarkable about all of the states Lind identifies as proof that libertarianism doesn’t work is that they are in fact proof that it does. What made the American experiment new were its libertarian innovations, broadly speaking. Moreover, those innovations made us prosper. Even Sweden — the liberal Best in Show — owes its successes to its libertarian concessions.

I’m actually not a full-blown libertarian myself, but it’s an ideal I’d like America to move closer to, not further away from as we’ve been doing of late — bizarrely in the name of “progress,” of all things.