During
college, a friend admitted he was confounded by my politics. He didn’t
know how to reconcile my libertarianism with my other commitments. We
were Buddhists and vegetarians, and I knew exactly what he meant. The
tension centered around compassion. He wanted to know how someone
concerned with the world’s suffering wouldn’t adopt a more compassionate
political perspective.
It was a reasonable question,
one that I asked myself regularly. My stock answer was that while I
supported compassion in the form of assistance to those in need, I
opposed the clumsy government mechanisms we relied on for it, not to
mention the veiled coercion behind them — where did anyone get the right
to enforce their values at the barrel of a gun (meaning taxes), no
matter how noble those values might be?
Pretty
by-the-books stuff. Libertarianism represented to me a matrix of freedom
that could be collapsed onto any particular set of individual values.
It was a simple formula to live by: If enough people value X, those
people will pay for X, whether or not X = someone else’s interest.
Government intervention was at best superfluous to this outcome and at
worst distorting of the collective will (measured as the aggregate
economy).
When my friend offered the natural response,
What if people fail to provide enough for those in need?, I resorted to
the tried-and-true strategy of telling him the problem wasn’t a problem.
The real problem was taxation or regulation or minimum wage or a failed
incentive structure. If people were in need it was because government
was preventing the market from providing for them.
What’s interesting to me now is not why this kind of thinking is wrong but why it was once so attractive to me.
I
found my way to libertarianism in my teen years when I began reading
some of its introductory texts and was attracted to the internal
consistency of its policies. If you accepted that the individual was
sacrosanct and the government’s only role was to protect the individual,
everything else pretty much followed. Unlike mainstream liberalism and
conservatism, which were constantly engaged in negotiations between
social and economic freedoms, libertarianism was systematically clean
and neat. So much so that I quickly stopped concerning myself with how
ideas played out in the world. The ideas themselves were enough.
As
a kid, you learn to refute anyone’s “theory” by snidely mocking — “In
theory, communism works.” When I was in college, I knew that communism
did not work, even in theory, and I was happy to tell you why. Only
libertarianism worked in theory.
That
in switching the terms of the joke I made myself its butt was,
regrettably, lost on me. When the lens of ideology grows so thick it’s
all a person sees, a sense of humor is often the first thing to be
occluded.
So what accounts for my transition from
orthodox libertarianism to an unremarkable liberalism? At the risk of
putting the cart before the political horse, I’m not an isolated
reasoning subject and individual actor but a complex and conflicted
human in various social and environmental contexts, and the reasons I
abandoned libertarianism are personal and psychological as well as
intellectual.
It felt good to be libertarian. I could
win political debates (to my satisfaction) by applying the internally
consistent reasoning I so admired to any issue. My reluctance to
compromise was a virtue that straightened my posture. I took my rigidity
as a sign not of narrow-mindedness but of integrity, the consequence of
careful advancement from first principles. This particular kind of
coherency put me self-satisfactorily and peacefully to sleep on many
nights.
But it also sometimes felt bad to be a
libertarian. I didn’t like that people I cared about regularly thought I
was a smug asshole. I didn’t like that so often in debates I sounded to
myself like a smug asshole. Not my intentions — say what you will about
the positions, I always held them sincerely — but the words themselves.
They didn’t sound compassionate, as it got harder and harder to remind
myself they really were supposed to be.
The ideological
purity at the heart of libertarianism was so true that I was certain
only good effects could follow from it. The plainness of this was
apparent enough that I was actually perplexed when others didn’t see it
on face value. Whenever an interlocutor pointed to a real-world
counterexample I was ready with a distinction between the applied and
the perfect libertarian policy.
But the truth an
ideologue is at pains to accept is that no life can live up to ideology.
We are a messy species living messy lives. And we are lucky for this.
The intellectual libertarian wants the world to be the kind of ideal
world it never can be. He (and it’s often he) is unable to live with
ambiguity and compromise. The beautiful (it is a kind of beauty) logical
edifice of libertarianism is built on the faulty premise that this is
the kind of world that is built on logical edifices.
The
discomfort I felt with libertarianism was the discomfort of my ideas
not aligning with my experiences. My thoughts and feelings were at odds.
The feeling nagging me was that I couldn’t reconcile my humanity with
my ideology any more than my friend could for me. Over time, that
feeling became a reason in its own right.
I saw, as many
libertarians see, a world tangential to this world we live in, which is
the world I always felt like I belonged to.
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