Michael Lind, Wishful Thinker
Michael Lind of the New America Foundation claims in the Financial Times that he has witnessed
the utter and final defeat of the movement that has shaped the politics of the US and other western democracies for several decades: the libertarian counter-revolution.
Let’s set aside the errors and the misunderstandings of classical liberal ideas in his essay and focus on his remarkable claim. How could a reasonable person evaluate it? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that if any failure, setback, or disappointment is evidence of “the utter and final defeat” of a movement, then every movement has been utterly and finally defeated. With that standard in mind, a critic of Lind, many of whose ideas have not been implemented, would conclude that Lind’s ideas have been utterly and finally defeated. That seems as unlikely to me as his bizarre and overly excited claim about libertarianism. Of course, it’s much easier to dismiss ideas contrary to one’s own than to try to understand them (too much trouble) and rebut them.
I haven’t read the article, but if Lind was referring to the Bush administration’s brutal disregard for the libertarian principles in the Bill of Rights and rest of of the Constitution, his bizarre contention wouldn’t seem quite so goofy.
I vaguely remember reading Lind’s book, “The Next American Nation”, in a freshman political science class. I thought it was pointless, dull, and almost totally incoherent. That’s the last of his thinking I can remember noticing. What a trite article, though.
Now that I have read the article, “bizarre” and “goofy” seem right on target. Contrast libertarianism with socialism.
Marxism and similar socialist schemes aren’t quite dead, despite extremely damning refutations from economic and political theory, and socialism’s complete failure everywhere it was tried. Supporters became embarassed to be associated with it (advocates such as Heilbroner, Leontieff, and others publicly confessed it had failed).
Absolutely nothing like this has happened with respect to libertarianism. The most that has happened is that a president has failed to implement some “free-market” reforms that some people thought he would. Big deal. No ideas were refuted, no policies failed to work, and no libertarians or free marketers have any reason to think libertarianism is dead.
If anything, given the current not-so-good state affairs under non-libertarian policies, libertarianism looks like it should be the wave of the future.
Libertarianism is not dead, but it’s down for the count, and not for the reasons that Lind has laid out. Libertarians made an unholy alliance with conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s.
As a consequence many libertarians, some organizations like Cato excepted, were insufficiently wary of Republican warmaking from 1990 onward. Now we’re mired in a catastrophic war in the Middle East, and the neocons are clammering for war against Iran.
Libertarians were insufficiently able to make the case that interventions – as in the domestic sphere – beget additional interventions as the first intervention either begins to fail or inspires blowback.
In addition, many libertarians were too slow to seek out alliances with potential friends on the left, in part because the official libertarian movement is too bound up financially and professionally with the right.
I agree with Lind that there are no small government solutions. We need a balance between free markets and state invervention. A mixed economy gave our country the greatest period of prosperity. Libertarianism is dead and John Maynard Keynes lives !
The essential flaw in the article is that his standard for his success of libertarian politics is democratic when the essential claims of libertarianism rest on economic evidence.
So people vote against their liberty, so what? That does not mean that libertarian economic policy would not improve their lives in measurable ways.