I’ve
seen a lot of talk in the last week about the differences between libertarians
and conservatives–what’s a ‘real’ libertarian or what’s a ‘real’ conservative?
Who is a libertarian and who is a conservative? Is Dr. Paul a conservative or a
libertarian? Is Sen. Paul really a libertarian or really a conservative?
Ron
Paul is a heavily-libertarian leaning conservative. So is Rand Paul. Both are
constitutionalists, hence the appropriate term “constitutional conservative.”
It
is entirely possible to be a libertarian but not be conservative. I know many
people who fit this description. But it is impossible to be a conservative
without also being a libertarian to some degree. When Republicans like Rick
Santorum and Mike Huckabee denounce libertarianism, it is no coincidence that
they also had ridiculously big government records. Republicans who don’t care a
whit about limiting government, don’t.
I
addressed this issue after CPAC 2010. In their glaring historical ignorance,
Republicans like Santorum who complain about libertarians not being ‘real’
conservatives simply don’t know what in the hell they’re talking about.
From
2010, via The Charleston City Paper:
During a question-and-answer session at
the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., one man
opined, “One thing I’ve learned here at CPAC is that the ‘C’ actually doesn’t
stand for ‘libertarianism.’ It’s not ‘L’PAC.” When Congressman Ron Paul won the
annual straw poll at CPAC, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh made a point to tell
his listeners that CPAC wasn’t conservative this year because a libertarian had
won.
Both men are worse than just wrong.
They’re out of their minds.
Arguably the most popular history of
American conservatism, George H. Nash’s book The Conservative Intellectual
Movement in America begins with libertarianism. In the first chapter titled
“The Revolt of the Libertarians,” Nash states: “For those who believed in the
creed of old-fashioned, classical, 19th-century liberal individualism, 1945 was
especially lonely, unpromising, and bleak. Free markets, private property,
limited government, self reliance, laissez-faire — it had been a long time
since principles like these guided government and persuaded peoples.”
Chronicling the intellectuals who tried
to rectify this bleakness, Nash begins his history with two men: economists
F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Then he explains how these libertarian heroes
kick-started the American conservative movement. Few actually used the word “conservatism”
in 1945, a term that began to gain popularity when Russell Kirk’s book The
Conservative Mind was published in 1953 and with the founding of William F.
Buckley’s National Reviewin 1955. Nash notes that even Kirk was inspired by
both Hayek and Mises, writing to a friend that these men represented a “great
school of economists of a much sounder and different mind.”
After Hayek and Mises, Nash then cites
Albert Jay Nock, publisher of the unabashedly libertarian magazine The Freeman
in the 1920s. Writes Nash: “Nock came to exert a significant amount of
influence on the postwar Right,” yet was so libertarian that “Nock verged on
anarchism in his denunciations of the inherently aggrandizing State.” Noting
the impression Nock made on a young Buckley, Nash explained that “it was
Nockian libertarianism, in fact, which exercised the first conservative
influence on the future editor of National Review.”
Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., president of the
conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, says, “Nash’s work is one of
the very few books that must be read for a full understanding of the
conservative movement in America.” However, Feulner’s Heritage Foundation
advertises on Limbaugh’s show, where the host is seemingly oblivious to the
fact that the American conservative movement could not have existed without
libertarianism. Furthermore, pundits like Rush often claim to be “Reagan
conservatives.” However, they seem to forget that in 1976 said Reagan, “I
believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” As you can
see, advocating for “limited government” without employing some degree of
libertarianism would be logistically impossible.
Which is exactly why so many of today’s
so-called conservatives are so quick to dismiss it. If there is an interloping
ideology on the Right today, it is not libertarianism but neoconservatism, an
ideology born not of limited government philosophy but of ex-socialists who
migrated Right in reaction to the counterculture of the 1960s. Today, neoncons
are devoted to promoting the maintenance and expansion of America’s global
empire.
Whereas traditional conservatives
considered war — and the massive bureaucracy necessary to wage it — an
occasional, necessary evil, neoconservatives consider perpetual war a good
precisely because they believe it is America’s mission to export democracy to
the rest of the world.
Questioning the cost or wisdom of waging
perpetual war is considered unconscionable or even “unpatriotic” to
neoconservatives, which is why they are so dismissive of libertarians and
others who question foreign policy. Most neoconservatives instinctively realize
that their ideology is incompatible with the libertarian’s pesky obsession with
limited government, giving neocons reason to marginalize, or expel, any libertarian
influence that threatens to expose the statist nature of today’s mainstream
conservative movement.
Considering their new, radical
definition, it’s easy to see why Rush and other mainstream conservatives don’t
consider libertarians part of their movement —because they’re not. And while it
remains to be seen how the irreconcilable differences will play out between
limited government libertarians (whose numbers are growing) and big government
neoconservatives (whose ideology still dominates), let there be no more
ignorance about which philosophy is truly more alien to the historical American
conservative movement.
And let there be no further delusions
about which philosophy was most responsible for creating it.
Source: Paulitical Ticker with Jack Hunter
