The Only Winning Move

There’s an interesting bit of speculation on Division of Labour as to whether libertarians will really be able to either sit this one out (perhaps by voting for Bob Barr) or even vote for Obama.

In spirit, it’s highly similar to a recent post of mine, and even complains about some of the same studiously noncommittal comments from Reason contributors that seem to indicate that a lot of them are casting about for excuses for vote for Obama. But it seizes on a different aspect of the issue - namely the merits of the theory that libertarians should vote strategically against the Republicans in order to cost them the election and force them back into our free-market, small-government camp (i.e. illustrate to them that they need our votes to win, and that those votes aren’t theirs for free).

Brad Smith (the author of the bit) considers this strategy folly because it never yields the desired results. By way of evidence, he cites two elections in which one of the two parties ran an extremist, lost, and was forced to shift back to the center for the next election. This would, of course, be Goldwater v. Johnson 1964 and Nixon v. McGovern 1972 - where Goldwater was a small-government extremist who lost in a landslide, and McGovern a big-government extremist who lost in an equally-humiliating landslide. The Republicans put up Nixon next time, and the Democrats went with Carter - both considered moderates.

I think this misses the point, though. While it’s true enough that the public rejected Goldwater and McGovern pretty handily, I wonder whether Goldwater is an appropriate analogy for Bush? It would seem to be just the opposite: Bush is more like Nixon - a centrist who runs an imperial presidency that loses no love on free-market reforms and shows no desire to shrink the size and scope of government. That is, the whole complaint about President Bush is that he is INsufficiently conservative. The same libertarians who want to punish the Republicans now wanted to punish them in 1972 - which is indeed why the Libertarian Party was founded: as an objection to the Nixon Administration. The whole point was to make Nixon fight on two fronts - against not only his ultra-leftist opponent, but also to fight to retain the small-government base that so strongly objected to his Vietnam and price control policies. It didn’t work, of course. Nixon positively thumped McGovern, and the Libertarian Party polled next to nothing. But hey, it was a first-year freshman effort.

A more appropriate analogy would be Bush I losing in 1992. Here was a moderate Republican to whose policies a lot of small-government-minded voters objected. Many decamped first to Pat Buchanan, then to Ross Perot, costing the Republicans the presidency. When the Republicans reemerged in the 1994 midterms, they seemed to have learned their lessons, and the so-called Republican Revolution of that year rallied around a document that promised small-government reforms. So I think Smith has it exactly wrong. When you consider applying this strategy against a moderate incumbent in order to make the party more extreme - which is the whole idea, after all - I think it DOES work.

Of course, on the larger point of whether we can afford this strategy this year, I think I agree with Smith: we can’t. Obama is pretty far left, and although he definitely seems tempermentally better-suited to the presidency than McCain in my book, his policy proposals are not the sorts of things that Libertarians can afford themselves the luxury of allowing to pass. The Democrats are going to get a majority in Congress - possibly even a fillibuster-proof one. With the kind of economic policies that Obama is proposing, there are very real implications not only for our pocket books, but for the future of economic self-determination in this country. Voting to keep Obama out of the White House is the only thing for lovers of liberty to do. All I’m saying is that this need not be seen as a repudiation of the general strategy, which - conra Smith - does seem to work when applied in the right environment. This IS that environment - the question is really one of whether we can afford the price. We cannot.

Via Distributed Republic (which got it from here), a much-needed Taxonomy of Libertarians:

1. Randians/Objectivists/Egoists - Meet John or Jane Galt. While most card-carrying Objectivists assert that they are not libertarian in name, the movement started by Ayn Rand (author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) was and is an important influence on the thought of modern American Libertarianism (Cathy Young says that “Libertarianism, the movement most closely connected to Rand’s ideas, is less an offspring than a rebel stepchild.”). They imagine an individualist/collectivist and egoist/altruist dichotomy and put it at the heart of their entire worldview as the supreme good vs. evil (along with some peculiar axioms like “A is A” and “existence exists”). According to those influenced by Randian Egoism, greed is a virtue, while compassion is a deadly sin. The word capitalism can stimulate a spontaneous orgasm. They are prone to histrionics and delusions of grandeur.

2. Dominionists - Business giants and empire-builders, moguls, magnates and tycoons who don’t want antitrust laws, industry watchdogs, trade unions or environmental, worker, or consumer regulation to get in the way of their ambitions. They often fund libertarian and right-wing think tanks and organizations. Silicon Valley had many Dominionist younglings in the 90’s until most of them perished tragically in the bursting of the dotcom bubble.

3. Market Fundamentalists - Focused on libertarian theories of economics/political economy, Market Fundamentalists believe the capitalist free market is best for the common good, and any interference with said market is contrary to the common good. They frequently use concepts like “the wisdom of the market” and “the invisible hand,” etc. Austrian and Chicago schools, neoclassical economics, neoliberalism, etc.

4. Naïve Libertarians - This was a hard to name category (I also considered “propagandist libertarians”). Naïve Libertarians are like Market Fundamentalists, except they usually parrot Market Fundamentalist arguments and harp on “how liberals are weakening America” instead of coming up with arguments and ideas of their own. They believe hardship doesn’t befall people who do what they should do, the environment isn’t in any real trouble and environmental/pollution problems are negligible, and big corporations are really responsible and good on their own (”Greenhouse gas emissions? Those are just ‘unrequested carbon surpluses’”). They are likely to listen to/host right-wing talk radio or do/follow right-wing journalism, and usually amount to little more than apologists for the Right.

5. “Liberty” Libertarians - Their libertarianism arises primarily from their ideas on the metaphysics of personal liberty, around concepts like “non-aggression” and “self-ownership.” Libertarian philosophers are usually in this category, some of whom were founders of the modern American libertarian movement.

6. Libertarian Republicans - More traditional conservatives; Republicans who are against neoconservative big government and/or the religious right; conservative critics of the Bush administration. They consider themselves the true conservatives, and usually base their libertarian ideas on their perspective on the U.S. Constitution. “Goldwater conservatives;” Republican Liberty Caucus.

7. Crazy Libertarians - Primarily concerned about gun rights and privacy. Many survivalists, conspiracy theorists, tin-foil-hatters, etc. tend to fall into this group. They are likely to live in a rural area, with an impressive arsenal and weeks worth of food stocked up to secure against a New World Order threat.

8. Lifestyle Libertarians - Like the Crazy Libertarians about guns, but also for drugs, sex, alcohol, uncensored material, not having to recycle, driving without a seatbelt, driving without a seatbelt at 100mph, driving without a seatbelt at 100mph while receiving oral sex, etc. They are basically people who want to do whatever they want. If conservatives want government to be your daddy, and liberals want government to be your mommy, Lifestyle Libertarians want to get rid of daddy and mommy and stay up all night eating ice cream and watching after-dark cable.

9. Localist Libertarians - Anti-Federalists, they would rather have autonomy distributed to the community level, like town halls, local school boards and churches, than a strong federal government or any centralized power. More Main Street than Wall Street, they are communitarians and traditionalists, largely Catholic, often Scouting enthusiasts, people with Norman Rockwell paintings throughout their homes, etc. More compassionate and worker-oriented than other libertarians, and more likely to be concerned with local environmental problems.

10. Left-Libertarians - A special category. Left Libertarians believe big, powerful government is as oppressive and bad as big, powerful corporations. They are anti-war (including the War on Drugs), pro-choice, and against government favors for corporations (or against large corporations altogether). They usually favor participatory action and mutual aid over government for social justice and environmental causes, as well as smaller, more local businesses and community-centered marketplaces. They may caucus with right-libertarians (”vulgar libertarians” is a commonly used phrase) for strategic purposes, which is the primary reason they are on the list at all. They are also likely to work with Green parties. Often Georgist on physical property and against extensive and restrictive intellectual property (and a major front behind Open Source), they are related to others of the broad libertarian left–agorists, mutualists, libertarian socialists, cyberpunks and anarchists; also “Buddhist Economics.”

I’ve been waiting for one of these for a long time - precisely because it’s equal parts difficult and essential to sum up the finer shades of the Libertarian caucus to outsiders. It would be nice to have an index card that you could simply hand the curious, and this is as good a proposal as I’ve seen.

I have my nits to pick, of course. Let’s start with “those who are on the list but shouldn’t be.” There are two: (2)Dominionists and (4)Naive Libertarians. I object to (4)Dominionists being on the list on the grounds that they’re not really Libertarians but rather infiltrators. Libertarianism is not a cause for them so much as a convenience. It’s sort of like how Bill Clinton getting himself on film praying in church every week is less than convincing to certain members of the religious right. He needs their votes; he doesn’t represent their cause. As for (4)Naive Libertarians - they are definitely an identifiable category and definitely associated with “Libertarianism,” but more as hangers-on than contributors. As the description makes clear, they don’t really have any ideas of their own - mostly they’re just anti-leftists. This kind of faction exists in any party, really, and I don’t think it’s correct to confound the philosophy of the movement with their reasons for joining. It’s exactly the same trick that gets played by pointing to Ann Coulter as the prototypical conservative and failing to mention the George Wills and Bill Buckleys of the movement. Bill Buckley is a Consevative thinker; Ann Coulter is merely an anti-Democrat. She may vote Republican, but you wouldn’t attend one of her talks to find out what Republicanism is all about.

Next, let’s talk about the last two categories. I think these could safely be collapsed into one without misleading anyone about essentials. The differences between these groups are really of temperment. Left-libertarians are direct descendants of the 60s street preachers, and localist libertarians of commune hippies. They both got lumped into the “New Left” category in the 60s, and I see no reason to separate them out now. Localist libertarians are, like their commune hippie forebearers, in complete sympathy with the politics of left-libertarians, they simply disapprove of (or are anyway not interested in getting involved in) potentially violent street protests and political maneuvering to accomplish their goals, preferring to drop out and go somewhere else. I think if I were to hand out this list, I might draw a line above (9) and put a caption that says “left wing starts here,” and then color the background red.

Finally, there are some unnecessary weasel words that might should be removed. For example - the “peculiar” in front of “axioms” in the description of (1)Randians/Objectivists/Egoists. I happen to agree that the brilliance of Ayn Rand’s “Epistemology” is … how to put this? … somewhat overstated by her followers. But I don’t see any need to editorialize about that in presenting the facets of the Libertarian caucus to an outsider. Similarly, to the extent that one keeps (4)Naive Libertarians on the roster, a better name should really be found for them. As stated, I’m for leaving them off altogether, but if we’re going to include them as a contributing member of the caucus it’s best to present rather than judge. The same goes for (7)Crazy Libertarians. They could have been called “Survivalist Libertarians” or “Outback Libertarians” with no loss of descriptive precision.

As for which category I fall under… Like with most members of a coalitionist party, there are several categories here that could suitably fit me, I suppose - but to pick just one I’ll go with (3)Market Fundamentalists. When it all comes down to it, I’m a worshipper of the free market (a former paramour called it my “version of a religion”), and my primary political concern is seeing that it be allowed to function. This stems from a deep skepticism that any individual or group of individuals has enough knowledge to successfully regulate something so complex as human affairs. If evil has a name it is Social Engineering. To comandeer an oft-cited quotation for use as a slogan, I believe in “human action, not human design.” It also has its roots in the same source of my love for science fiction, I think. I love technology and progress. I find little in the world more objectionable than the luddite types who want to go live in the woods and smoke mushrooms with the deer. I like a good nature hike as much as the next guy, but that is only one avenue of personal enrichment. ALL the others depend on my ability to exchange goods, services, and ideas with fellow sentient beings, and that requires a functioning civilization. Wealth, comfort, science, progress, achievement - these are such stuff as dreams are made of. And when you come right down to it, I guess I am a consequentialist free marketer as much as I am a moral one. Perhaps that will form the subject of another post, but for an overview you could do worse than this essay. In particular, I relate to Friedrich Hayek, whom the essays describes as “constantly struggling between his Scottish heritage in the form of a Humean love of the empirical and his Germanic debts to Kant.” As a researcher, a human, a philsopher, I feel the same way. I am very much in awe of Kant’s work, and it is a foundational influence, but at the end of the day I suppose I am simply less impressed with the moral than the practical. British and not German, as it were. So of all the picks here, I suppose (3)Market Fundamentalists is the one that best applies to me.

I consider this some small reason to be hopeful that the libertarian message is getting out. The following graphic is a network analysis of book purchases on Amazon done by Valdis Krebs, whose blog is the newest addition to my daily reading roll.

Basically, it works like this. Krebs takes the “people who bought this book also bought” data from Amazon and clusters the political bestsellers. His clustering methodology isn’t entirely clear. The network patterns you see are generated automatically by software. I’m assuming that’s also more or less true for his cluster identifications. The point I’m not too clear on is how the purple nodes get there. Krebs claims in one part to have colored the nodes himself based on subjective impressions of the content of the books. Fair enough. In another part, however, he speaks as though he’s “surprised” that Ron Paul and George Will’s books end up in the purple zone. This suggests that at least some of the coloring was done on the basis of cluster proximity. It might have been better to use two different visualization approaches here. That is, precolor all the books based on compiler’s impression of whether they’re left or right and then use an additional mechanism to show membership in software-discovered clusters. As it stands, Krebs seems to be confounding a natural expectation of how the book should cluster with how it does cluster, which isn’t as informative as it might be.

Of course, as I say, it’s sort of difficult to me to discern the exact methodology from the post, so there’s the real possibility that I’m being unfair to Krebs by mischaracterizing what he’s actually done.

In any case, the clusters he arrives at jive pretty well with what we might expect the political landscape to look like. One of Krebs’ readers notes that the clusters are really support for and opposition to the Iraq War. Seen in that light, the facts about the purple “buffer zone” make sense. First - the conservatives who find themselves in the “buffer zone” are mostly people like Ron Paul, George Will and Pat Buchanan who, if they have anything in common at all, share a strong stated opposition to neo-cons. Indeed, the relative proximity of the three books to the “red” cluster backs this up. George Will (”One Man’s America”) is closest - which fits, since while he certainly pulls no punches criticizing the Bush Administration, he usually makes it clear that the Republicans are still preferable to the Democrats in the big picture. Pat Buchanan (”Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War”) is a bit more convincing as an anti-neocon (and certainly harsher in his criticism of Bush), but unlike Will he’s also a member of the Religious Right. His positioning shows alienation from the red group, but no real compensatory membership in the blue group. (Indeed, his book is arguably the most isolated on the display.) And then there’s Ron Paul, who from where I sit looks like a blue group member on straight clustering alone, actually. His book was bought almost exclusively by people who also bought other “blue” books, save that a lot of people who bought Buchanan seem to have done so at the same time they did Paul. Indeed, the only other link from Paul goes to Lew Rockwell’s book, which is about what we’d expect. The only reason Lew Rockwell is selling this book in the numbers he is is because Ron Paul’s high profile is acting as his ad agent (anyone who knew who Lew Rockwell was before the campaign probably doesn’t feel the need to buy his latest book - we know the script).

So yeah, I find it wholly convincing that the divide is really along pro- and anti-Iraq War lines. I would just add that I think support for and opposition to this particular war is a proxy for party identification (so we come full circle). I’ve admitted before on this blog that my own support for the war took a long time to drop off precisely because it was more a reaction to the anti-war crowd (which I see as largely self-defeating, irrational anti-patriots) than a firm belief in the policy. And for their part, it’s pretty clear to me that the most vocal anti-war protesters are pretty selective in which wars they oppose. There was no problem with Clinton going into Somalia or Bosnia, for example. The people who buy the blue books are against war as a tool for advancing national interest; the people who buy the red books are against foreign spending for anything other than national interest - and, I suspect, what defines the purple group is an actual principled opposition to war. That is, most of them seem to be people who agree with the red group’s requirement that foreign spending - if it be done at all - only ever be done in direct national interest, but with the additional proviso that war should be avoided. Not “at all costs,” mind you, but that it should be avoided.

Under those terms, I’m proudly purple.

The interesting point is that the war issue seems to be doing a good job selling libertarian books to “blue” readers. Which is a Good Thing in one way. Anti-Capitalism is so entrenched on the left that they’re unlikely to come to free market arguments by any other method. It’s a Bad Thing in another way, though, and that’s in the sense that for strategic reasons I think it’s probably more important that we reach red readers ahead of this election. That is, if we’re serious about getting libertarian policies passed in the next couple of decades, then reminding Republicans that a large part of their natural voting base is less interested in God and displays of patriotism than it is in just getting the government off our backs so we can go about living our own lives in our own ways. (And what better way to do this than giving them a shock by splitting McCain’s vote?) Any way you slice it, that message is antithetical to Democrats, so short-term inroads with that voting block are unlikely. They’re a tougher nut to crack, and honestly I think “cracking” the Democrats means more winning over their supporters to our side than it does merely winning their sympathies on policies. So I can see long-term positives in getting blue readers to read libertarian books. It won’t have an effect overnight, but exposure to free market thinking is desperately needed “over there.” What I’m not seeing are short-term positives in terms of waking the red readers up to free market thinking. They seem to be drifting further and further right, to a national security patriot state that we obviously can’t support.

What it’s looking like, really, is the early 70s all over again, when libertarians were mostly about being against Nixon and the Vietnam War and tended to identify (irrationally, if you ask me) more with the counterculture of the left than with the free market and civil liberties principles that make me a libertarian. We can see more or less eye-to-eye with the Democrats on things like gay marriage and marijuana legalization, but these are superficial issues. Rights and liberties begin with private property, and I think we’ll only ever have so much in common with a party like the Democrats that has only conditional support for property rights.  (We’ll have more long-term luck convincing the Republicans that marijuana legalization is consistent with their belief in property rights than we will getting it passed with the help of the Democrats at the cost of more welfare programs, higher taxes, etc.) So there’s a real sense in which Krebs’ plot shows that we’re reaching the wrong crowd.

Check it out. Here’s Michael Goldfarb - otherwise known as the McCain Campaign’s Deputy Communications Director - on how much he doesn’t want the Ron Paul vote:

Allah beat me to the punch on this, but let me just say to Ron Paul supporters everywhere, and on behalf of the New Right (by which I assume Paul means the Jew Right), get lost.

There should be plenty of room for the Paulnuts in Obama’s big tent. If Rev. Wright isn’t exactly a 9/11 Truther, at least he’s breathed new life into the Pearl Harbor Truther movement. Imagine a newsletter coauthored by the Reverend and Lew Rockwell–now that’s racial harmony.

Yeah, this guy’s gonna be just splendid with the masses. Maybe he’ll manage to insult the entire Republican base piecemeal before November and we Ron Paul supporters won’t even have to split his vote for him.

Actually, though, I think the real point of this is the elephant in the living room that wasn’t mentioned: Bob Barr. Ron Paul supporters are more likely to vote Libertarian than to run to a big-state Socialist like Obama, and Goldfarb knows it. This is yet another way of not mentioning what the Republicans don’t want to face. They have a serious problem in November in the form of a huge likelihood that the LP is going to matter this time in the way Ross Perot did in 1992 - by which I mean it just may cost McCain the White House. I think it is no coincidence that everyone from Mike Huckabee to Michael Gerson has been trashing libertarians recently. The line is that we’re supposed to be the ones to blame for the Republican Party’s recent failures. Quite transparently, it’s just the other way around. Bush is being punished by the electorate because he abandoned small-government principles, not because he is insufficiently statist. The evangelicals and the neocons see the writing on the wall, and this is them grasping at straws.

Via Econopundit, this interesting graph showing the nations plotted by the percentage of the population that believes luck is the main determinant of their outcome vs. the percentage of its GDP that country devotes to social spending. Maybe it’s not a stunning revelation, but there is a correlation:

Econopundit’s analysis:

So what do we learn from this? Although many other factors are involved (meaning the observations don’t all exactly line up in a straight line) there’s a reasonably good positive correlation between, on the one hand, belief that luck (rather than hard work) determines income, and, on the other, the percentage of GDP a nation decides to devote to social spending.

I think the correlation is a bit clearer than Antler gives it credit for being. Notice that all the nations well below the line (i.e. not Chile, Australia or Iceland) are developing countries. They’re up-and-comings, maybe, but definitely “not there yet.” If you were to plot this group separately, you would have a regression line with almost exactly the same slope, just lower down on the plot. Ditto that cluster at the top. If you were to plot Austria, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium on a plot by itself, you would get a regression line that was maybe slightly steeper, but not by much. In other words - if you eyeball this graph, there are three pretty obvious clusters of nations - call them “social spending tracks” - and each of those three clusters shows the same pattern between belief in luck as main determinant of success among a nation’s population strongly positively correlated with how much emphasis that nation places on social welfare spending. I consider the pattern robust, and the more interesting question becomes one of what accounts for the three “tracks” of nations we see?

The sticking point, obviously, is Germany. We would get a pretty clear pattern if I could be allowed to include it in the top group, rather than the middle group it seems to cluster with. If Germany could be in the top group, it would be pretty clearly the group that Rumsfeld called “Old Europe,” i.e. the EU establishment. (Yes, Sweden’s not in the currency reform, but it’s culturally exactly what Rumsfeld was complaining about.) The middle cluster would be the “standard” first world. And the lower cluster the group of nations that seem poised to leave the third world (some - Turkey and Brazil - having already achieved this now properly belong to what we might call the “second world”).

In any case, this graph lends credence to something that I’ve believed on annecdotal evidence from my own life for a long time: that support for Socialism is motivated in large part by insecurity. I’ve noticed an unmistakable patterns among my own friends and acquaintances that’s just like the one on the graph: the more socialist a particular friend/acquaintance is, the more likely he is to carp about how “it’s all luck” or “it’s all who you know” or any of that. People who believe that effort is rewarded more often than not tend to be more capitalist. Not that annecdotal evidence from my life is conclusive exactly, but it makes inuitive sense that it should be this way, and this graph goes some way to confirming it.

Of course, there are obvious omissions from the graph. Why these nations and not others? Where, in particular, are Mexico, China and Japan?  More interesting would be to have included the Eastern Bloc as well.  These nations are culturally more likely to believe that luck and connections determine individual success than average, I would imagine, and yet they are often in the news these days for relatively free-market approaches to taxation (Romania and Estonia in particular).  Their inclusion might seriously skew the trend.  The paper this came from is here, but I won’t have time to read it. Maybe they explain their choices better there.

In any case, if this is to be believed the lesson for libertarians is this. If we want to shrink the size of government and return economic decision-making to individuals, we need to play up stories about self-made men in popular culture - because apaprently the more people think their effort will be rewarded, the more libertarian they become. Alternately, I suppose, the lesson could be that corruption is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you turn your nation into a welfare state, then conenctions do matter, because the government runs everything, and so the beast feeds on itself.