Over the past few months, as a result of Occupy, my lack of awareness of leftist thinkers, and my exposure to Corey Robin’s fantastic The Reactionary Mind, I’ve become decidedly less enamored with that veritable hobby horse of mine, left-libertarian coalition building. So think of this as a partial mea culpa, a qualified repudiation of my earlier expositions.
To understand my attraction to libertarianism—and it was an attraction, even if I was just pushing for a short-term alliance—you first have to understand my relationship with the Left. While I fancied myself a genuine man of the left, happy to attract the scorn of conservative interlocutors, I was essentially just a Bernie Sanders-style liberal Democrat. More importantly, my actual acquaintance with leftists thinkers was, to put it charitably, minimal. This probably had something to do with the left’s emaciation and general invisibility.
A compounding cause was being ensconced in the world of mainstream political journalism. I was the politics reporter for my college newspaper for several semesters and covered the Iowa Caucus, the Iowa Legislature, and the 2008 presidential election, among other things. I had absorbed the circumscribed version of political discourse most mainstream journalists advance (and, disgustingly, congratulated myself for being “in the know”—i.e., parroting conventional wisdom). Accordingly, even as a political junkie with liberal persuasions, I rarely read anything to the left of The Nation; these publications and thinkers had negligible political purchase, so I all but disregarded them.
As a result, my initial foray into libertarian works surprised me. I was surprised to find cogent critiques of liberal governance; I was especially drawn to disquisitions on the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracy and the twin scourges of concentrated power and corporatism. Furthermore, I appreciated libertarians’ unwavering commitment to civil liberties and anti-militarism, especially in light of widespread liberal Democratic apologism for Obama’s capitulations. In short, I had become sympathetic to (without fully embracing, mind you) a strain on the American right, ignorant that the left had superior critiques of liberal foibles—without the corresponding contempt for democracy.
Then Occupy came onto the scene. It was my first experience of an enlivened, confident left. This beautiful upsurge radicalized me and opened my eyes to alternatives: both of ways to order society and to think about the problems of liberalism—this time from a leftist, anti-capitalist perspective. It also prompted me to take the long view of the struggle for freedom, equality, and self-determination. I became convinced that expending too much energy on short-term, trans-ideological coalitions can militate against the longer term, Gramsican goal of uprooting the prevailing neoliberal capitalist ideology. Myopic pragmatism can undermine the long-term project of the egalitarian left.
Which brings me to Robin’s work. Robin’s principal assertion is that the right is animated by an opposition to the extension and deepening of democracy. Proponents of this protean ideology—traditionally, conservatives—adopt transitory political stances, but their abiding interest is in defending privilege, elite rule, and hierarchy, of quelling calls from below for the “lower orders” to govern their own affairs. The “lower orders” are mutable and historically contingent; the reactionary’s opposition to the assertion of their agency is static.
Robin’s claim has been met with cries of calumny, but his thesis shouldn’t be controversial: Correctly perceiving its embedded egalitarianism, the right is hostile to democracy. The left would be wise to sharpen its underlying division with the right, elevating democracy and self-governance to its rightful place in the leftist constellation of principles. (The left and center-left have a history of subordinating democracy to ostensibly more important objectives and principles. Dispensing with democracy is rarely prudent or normatively desirable.) With democracy as a reference point, a new dividing line, libertarians could no longer “transcend the left-right spectrum”; they would be ineluctably arrayed against the long-term project of democratizing undemocratic spheres and subverting domination and hierarchy.
I won’t retract all I’ve written on left-libertarian coalitions. The drug war needs to meet its demise, civil liberties need to be restored, and the imperialist march needs to be halted. Aligning on these ends could quicken their realization. But time and energy is finite.
And as for a more ambitious, multi-issue coalition, my own experience calls its plausibility into question: A resurgent left, in part, prompted me to rethink my once-strident support for left-libertarian coalitions. At the end of the day, maybe that’s the folly of cross-spectrum alliance building: Once one camp senses its electoral or political power growing, it quickly reneges on its end of the deal, (understandably) opting for purity over pragmatism.
A resurgent left, in part, prompted me to rethink my once-strident support for left-libertarian coalitions. At the end of the day, maybe that’s the folly of cross-spectrum alliance building: Once one camp senses its electoral or political power was growing, it quickly reneges on its end of the deal, (understandably) opting for purity over pragmatism.
Ain’t that always the way?
Anyway, we look forward to seeing you again once the Right resurges.
Last November a post I put up about Occupy got into a brief thing in comments about democracy & its meaning. Or “meanings”, rather. Basically, my worry is about scale and ease of exit, preference for each respectively being small&direct and very easy, as representation strikes me as a myth.
Since you mention democracy as being a sticking point with regard to alliances with libertarians, I wonder what you’d say to that view.
Can you elaborate on that, b-psycho? I guess I think representative democracy is preferable in some contexts and more direct forms of democracy is preferable in others.
Among other criticisms of it, direct democracy is said to not scale well compared to the representative form. Considering the clear difficulty of preventing self-serving, abuse of power & outright lying to the voting public in “representative” government, to that critique I’m inclined to say “that’s the point”. Entrusting our interests to a 3rd party made up of people with ever decreasing attachment to us (if, indeed, they ever had one) while they block attempts to keep track of what they’re actually doing and attaching our names to serves them, not us.
At the same time, I’m no majority absolutist. There have been all too many times throughout history where there being more of one group than another has been taken as excuse for injustice. Sometimes a majority can simply be wrong. Yet, writing an explicit internal check on this just leads to an elite bossing around everyone else.
There’s a theme in my understanding, not just of the political system, but the economic powers that feed off and reinforce it, and that theme is this: it’s all too damn big. We need to bring it all down to eye level somehow. Thus my preference for “democracy” would be a form so decentralized and direct that it defines consensus without rule.
I’m curious*, Shawn, why you hold on to the terms “left” and “right” in this understanding, when it seems very obvious to me, and I know you’re well aware, that large portions of those who identify as Leftists are just as frightened of the agency of the majority as many of those on the Right are (though on the Left it is generally dressed up as, and often genuinely believed to be by its members, as patronage, the “these people can’t take care of themselves so we have to take care of them” school that has justified “enlightened” despots and colonialism for centuries, almost exclusively under a banner of liberalism, egalitarianism, and globalism/multiculturalism that was vehemently opposed by reactionaries/conservatives). To me, to say the Left consists only of those who genuinely believe in true democracy/egalitarianism, or that the Left consists of that despite its self-identifying members not holding those values, seems like no-true-Scotsman-ing that robs “left” and “right” of any meaning beyond tribal totems for bludgeoning intellectual opponents.
*As in genuinely curious, not as a pretense for intellectual one-upsmanship.
As I acknowledged in the piece, I think many on the left have jettisoned democracy in the pursuit of their desired ends. That’s a mistake—I view a commitment to democracy as a vital component of egalitarianism, an end in itself. Historically, however, the left has certainly been more egalitarian than the right—and more supportive of efforts to expand and deepen democracy—so I still view it as a useful way to think about the left-right spectrum.
Thanks for the article. I think you have some more reading to do, including the fact that right now Libertarians are the main champion of democracy worldwide. You need to get Libertarians are a movement of the center and are about process and rights/voluntary options, not issues in themselves; and historically are the source of the progressive, left and Green movements.
IMHO you need to stop confusing Libertarians with any issue, even though the LIO for example encourages some things but always as voluntary options e.g. reducing pollution to pre-industrial levels and socialist-based communities. If you don’t get that e.g. Milton Friedman was an advocate of voluntary or more-voluntary socialism, you will be walllowing in ‘hip’ misunderstanding for a very long time. Libertarians are about process, so they transcend any specific solution; their opposite as you seem to sense are the extremes who sell out the process for their pet projects.
I could say more but for info on people using voluntary Libertarian tools on similar and other issues, please see the non-partisan Libertarian International Organization @ http://www.Libertarian-International.org ….
Well, it’s I guess it’s a good thing then that the anti-capitalist left has such a solid long term history of freedom, equality, and self-determination.