Libertarian conservatism, also referred to as conservative libertarianism and, more rarely, conservatarianism, is a political and social philosophy that combines conservatism and libertarianism, representing the libertarian wing of conservatism and vice versa.
Libertarian conservatism advocates the greatest possible economic liberty and the least possible government regulation of social life (described as "small government"), mirroring laissez-faire classical liberalism, but harnesses this to a belief in a more socially conservative philosophy emphasizing authority, morality, and duty. Primarily an American ideology, libertarian conservatism prioritizes liberty, promoting free expression, freedom of choice and free-market capitalism to achieve conservative ends while rejecting liberal social engineering.
Although having similarities to liberal conservatism and therefore mainstream American conservatism with both being influenced by classical liberal thought; libertarian conservatives are far more anti-statist and are much more hostile to government intervention in both social and economic matters.
Philosophy
In political science, libertarian conservatism is an ideology that combines the advocacy of economic and legal principles such as fiscal discipline, respect for contracts, defense of private property and free markets, fewer laws banning minor crimes, and the traditional conservative stress on self-help and freedom of choice under a laissez-faire and economically liberal capitalist society with social tenets such as the importance of religion and the value of religious morality through a framework of limited, constitutional, representative government. For Margaret Randall, libertarian conservatism began as an expression of liberal individualism and the demand for personal freedom.
In 2004, Thomas DiLorenzo wrote that libertarian conservative constitutionalists believe that the way to limit government is to enforce the United States Constitution. However, DiLorenzo criticized them by writing that "he fatal flaw in the thinking of the libertarian/conservative constitutionalists stems from their unawareness or willful ignorance of how the founders themselves believed the Constitution could be enforced: by the citizens of the free, independent, and sovereign states, not the federal judiciary". DiLorenzo further wrote that the powers accrued to the federal government during the American Civil War overthrew the Constitution of 1787.
Unity or conflict
In 2006, Nelson Hultberg wrote that there is "philosophical common ground" between libertarians and conservatives. According to Hultberg, "he true conservative movement was, from the start, a blend of political libertarianism, cultural conservatism, and non-interventionism abroad bequeathed to us via the Founding Fathers". He said that such libertarian conservatism was "hijacked" by neoconservatism, "by the very enemies it was formed to fight—Fabians, New Dealers, welfarists, progressives, globalists, interventionists, militarists, nation builders, and all the rest of the collectivist ilk that was assiduously working to destroy the Founders' Republic of States".
Other scholars, such as conservative philosopher Russell Kirk, have highlighted the contrasts between conservatives and libertarians, stating that "to talk of forming a league or coalition between these two is like advocating a union of ice and fire". Libertarian activist Jerome Tuccille wrote: "Libertarianism is basically Aristotelian (reason, objectivity, individual self-sufficiency) while conservatism is just fundamentally Platonic (privileged elitism, mysticism, collective order)."
According to Andrew Gilbert, conservative parties such as the British Conservative Party and the American Republican Party hold a significant libertarian conservative wing, although Gilbert argues that "it is questionable to what extent conservatism and libertarianism are compatible". According to Mark A. Graber, libertarian conservatives are "philosophically consistent liberal legal individualists".
In 1998, George Wescott Carey edited Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate, a book which contains essays that Carey describes as representing "the tension between liberty and morality" and "the main fault line dividing the two philosophies". For Brian Farmer, "Libertarianism is a form of Conservatism often considered separate from the more mainstream conservative ideologies, partially because it is a bit more extreme, and partially because Libertarians often separate themselves from other forms of more mainstream Conservatism".
Economics
Libertarian conservatism subscribes to the libertarian idea of free-market capitalism, advocating minimal to no government interference in the market. A number of libertarian conservatives favor Austrian School economics and are critical of fiat money. Libertarian conservatives also support wherever possible privatizing services traditionally run or provided by the government, from airports and air traffic control systems to toll roads and toll booths. Libertarian conservatism advocates economic freedom in the product and capital markets and consumption whilst excluding collective action, collective bargaining and labor organization in general.
History
In the 1950s, Frank Meyer, a prominent contributor to the National Review, called his own combination of libertarianism and conservatism fusionism. The agorist philosopher Samuel Edward Konkin III coined the term right-libertarianism in order to describe this mixed ideology.
In a 1975 interview with Reason, California Governor Ronald Reagan appealed to libertarians when he stated to "believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism". Ron Paul was one of the first elected officials in the nation to support Reagan's presidential campaign and actively campaigned for Reagan in 1976 and 1980. However, Ron Paul quickly became disillusioned with the Reagan administration's policies after Reagan's election in 1980 and later recalled being the only Republican to vote against Reagan budget proposals in 1981, aghast that "in 1977, Jimmy Carter proposed a budget with a $38 billion deficit, and every Republican in the House voted against it. In 1981, Reagan proposed a budget with a $45 billion deficit—which turned out to be $113 billion—and Republicans were cheering his great victory. They were living in a storybook land". Ron Paul expressed his disgust with the political culture of both major parties in a speech delivered in 1984 upon resigning from the House of Representatives to prepare for a failed run for the Senate and eventually apologized to his libertarian friends for having supported Reagan. By 1987, Ron Paul was ready to sever all ties to the Republican Party as explained in a blistering resignation letter. While affiliated with both Libertarian and Republican parties at different times, Ron Paul stated to have always been a libertarian at heart.
In the 1980s, libertarians such as Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard criticized President Reagan, Reaganomics and policies of the Reagan administration for, among other reasons, having turned the United States' big trade deficit into debt and the United States became a debtor nation for the first time since World War I under the Reagan administration. Rothbard argued that the presidency of Reagan has been "a disaster for libertarianism in the United States" and Ron Paul described Reagan himself as "a dramatic failure".
Already a radical classical liberal and anti-interventionist strongly influenced by the Old Right, especially its opposition to the managerial state whilst being more unequivocally anti-war and anti-imperialist, Rothbard had become the doyen of libertarianism in the United States. After his departure from the New Left, with which he helped build for a few years a relationship with other libertarians, Rothbard had involved the segment of the libertarian movement loyal to him in an alliance with the growing paleoconservative movement, seen by many observers, libertarian and otherwise, as flirting with racism and social reaction. Suggesting that libertarians needed a new cultural profile that would make them more acceptable to socially and culturally conservative people, Rothbard criticized the tendency of proponents of libertarianism to appeal to "'free spirits,' to people who don't want to push other people around, and who don't want to be pushed around themselves" in contrast to "the bulk of Americans", who "might well be tight-assed conformists, who want to stamp out drugs in their vicinity, kick out people with strange dress habits, etc." whilst emphasizing that this was relevant as a matter of strategy. Rothbard argued that the failure to pitch the libertarian message to Middle America might result in the loss of "the tight-assed majority".
In the 1990s, Rothbard, Lew Rockwell and others described their libertarian conservative views as paleolibertarianism. In an early statement of this position, Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker argued for a specifically Christian libertarianism. Later, Rockwell would no longer consider himself a "paleolibertarian" and was "happy with the term libertarian". Those libertarians continued their opposition to "all forms of government intervention—economic, cultural, social, international" whilst upholding cultural conservatism in social thought and behavior. Paleolibertarians opposed a licentious libertarianism which advocated "freedom from bourgeois morality, and social authority". Rockwell later stated to have dropped that self-description because people confused it with paleoconservatism which libertarians such as Rockwell rejected. While distancing himself from the paleolibertarian alliance strategy, Rockwell affirmed paleoconservatives for their "work on the immigration issue", maintaining that "porous borders in Texas and California" could be seen as "reducing liberty, not increasing it, through a form of publicly subsidized right to trespass".
In 2001, Edward Feser emphasized that libertarianism does not require individuals to reject traditional conservative values. Libertarianism supports the ideas of liberty, privacy and ending the war on marijuana at the legal level without changing personal values. Defending the fusion of traditionalist conservatism with libertarianism and rejecting the view that libertarianism necessarily requires support for a liberal culture, Feser implied that a central issue for those who share his viewpoint is "the preservation of traditional morality—particularly traditional sexual morality, with its idealization of marriage and its insistence that sexual activity be confined within the bounds of that institution, but also a general emphasis on dignity and temperance over self-indulgence and dissolute living".
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a libertarian conservative, whose belief in rights of property owners to establish private covenant communities, from which homosexuals and political dissidents may be "physically removed", has been strongly criticised. Hoppe also garnered controversy due to his support for restrictive limits on immigration which critics argue is at odds with libertarianism. In Democracy: The God That Failed, first published in 2001, Hoppe argued that "libertarians must be conservatives". Hoppe acknowledged "the importance, under clearly stated circumstances, of discriminating against communists, democrats, and habitual advocates of alternative, non-family centered lifestyles, including homosexuals". In contrast to Walter Block, Hoppe argued that libertarianism need not be seen as requiring open borders and attributed "open border enthusiasm" to "egalitarianism". While defending "market anarchy" in preference to both, Hoppe has argued for the superiority of monarchy to democracy, maintaining that monarchs are likely to be better stewards of the territory they claim to own than democratic politicians, whose time horizons may be shorter.
Notable people
Richard Epstein, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock, Richard Posner, Peter Schiff, Thomas Sowell, David Stockman, Dennis Miller, Peter Thiel, and Walter E. Williams have been described as libertarian conservatives. Former Congressman Ron Paul and his son Senator Rand Paul have been described as combining conservative and libertarian small government ideas and showing how the Constitution of the United States defends the individual and most libertarian views. Barry Goldwater who furthered conservatism in America was a libertarian conservative. Javier Milei, the current President of Argentina, has also been referred to as a libertarian conservative.
Filmmaker and producer Ivan Reitman, described his political views as "conservative-slash-libertarian".
See also
- Anti-Federalism
- Chicago school of economics
- Democracy promotion
- Empire of Liberty
- Fiscal conservatism
- Freedom Caucus
- Jeffersonian democracy
- Libertarianism and Objectivism
- Libertarian perspectives on foreign intervention
- Libertarian Republican
- Liberty Caucus
- Neo-libertarianism
- Paleolibertarianism
- Republican Liberty Caucus
- Starve the beast
- Supply-side economics
- Tea Party movement
- Western conservatism
References
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- Gilbert, Andrew (2018). British Conservatism and the Legal Regulation of Intimate Relationships. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 40. ISBN 9781509915897. "Political parties which are usually considered to be conservative parties (such as the US Republican Party or the British Conservative Party) are also known for having a significant libertarian grouping within their ranks (especially in America), yet it is questionable to what extent conservatism and libertarianism are compatible."
- Passavent, Paul (2003). No Escape: Freedom of Speech and the Paradox of Rights. New York: New York University Press. pp. 48–49. ISBN 9780814766965.
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- ^ Feser, Edward (December 22, 2001). "What Libertarianism Isn't" Archived 2018-09-22 at the Wayback Machine. Lew Rockwell.com. Retrieved December 22, 2001.
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- See Raimondo, Enemy; Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs 2007).
- Raimondo, Enemy 372–383.
- Doherty 565–569.
- Murray N. Rothbard, "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1.1 (Spring 1965): 4–22.
- Roderick T. Long, "Rothbard's 'Left and Right': Forty Years Later" (Rothbard Memorial Lecture, Austrian Scholars Conference 2006).
- Raimondo, Enemy 266–295.
- Doherty 561–565.
- ^ Sheffield, Matthew (2 September 2016). "Where did Donald Trump get his racialized rhetoric? From libertarians". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 12 October 2016. Retrieved 27 February 2020.
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- Murray Rothbard, letter to David Bergland, June 5, 1986, qtd. Raimondo 263–264.
- ^ Rockwell, Lew. "The Case for Paleo-libertarianism" (PDF). Liberty (January 1990): 34–38. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 7, 2018. Retrieved November 20, 2018..
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- Guenzl, Simon (June 23, 2016). "Public Property and the Libertarian Immigration Debate Archived 2020-10-02 at the Wayback Machine". Libertarian Papers. 8 (1): 153–177. "I conclude that supporting a legitimate role for the state as an immigration gatekeeper is inconsistent with Rothbardian and Hoppean libertarian anarchism, as well as with the associated strategy of advocating always and in every instance reductions in the state's role in society."
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 2001) 189.
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "My Battle With The Thought Police Archived 2014-10-28 at the Wayback Machine," Mises Daily (Mises Institute, April 12, 2005). The quoted material in the text is intended as an elaboration of an earlier discussion in Democracy; Hoppe notes that "a few sentences" of Democracy: The God that Failed address this point and writes: "In its proper context these statements are hardly more offensive than saying that the Catholic Church should excommunicate those violating its fundamental precepts or that a nudist colony should expel those insisting on wearing bathing suits." In Democracy, he suggests that, in a stateless society, it would make sense for people forming communities "for the purpose of protecting family and kin" to eschew "tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal." He says that "the advocates of alternative, non-family-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism—will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order." Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 2001) 218.
- Stephan Kinsella, "Hoppe on Covenant Communities and Advocates of Alternative Lifestyles Archived 2020-10-01 at the Wayback Machine," LewRockwell.com (n.p, May 26, 2010).
- Walter Block, "A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration," Journal of Libertarian Studies 13.2 (Sum. 1998): 167–186.
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem," Journal of Libertarian Studies 16.1 (Winter 2002): 75–97.
- Hoppe, "Immigration" 93n23. Proponents of open borders, he maintains, "were initially drawn to libertarianism as juveniles because of its "antiauthoritarianism" (trust no authority) and seeming "tolerance," in particular toward 'alternative'—nonbourgeois—lifestyles. As adults, they have been arrested in this phase of mental development They express special 'sensitivity' in every manner of discrimination and are not inhibited in using the power of the central state to impose non-discrimination or 'civil rights' statutes on society. Consequently, by prohibiting other property owners from discrimination as they see fit, they are allowed to live at others' expense. They can indulge in their 'alternative' lifestyle without having to pay the 'normal' price for such conduct, i.e., discrimination and exclusion. To legitimize this course of action, they insist that one lifestyle is as good and acceptable as another. This leads first to multiculturalism, then to cultural relativism, and finally to 'open borders.'"
- Hoppe, Democracy.
- Rockwell, Lew; Tucker, Jeffrey (1991). "Cultural Thought of Ludwig von Mises" Archived 2020-08-03 at the Wayback Machine. Journal of Libertarian Studies. Mises Institute. 10' (1): 23–52.
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- "Who is Javier Milei, Argentina's new hard-right president?". Yahoo News. 2023-11-20. Retrieved 2024-07-27.
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Bibliography
- Heywood, Andrew (2015). Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations: Palgrave Key Concepts. London: Macmillan International Higher Education. ISBN 9781137494771.
- Heywood, Andrew (2004). Political Theory, Third Edition: An Introduction. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0333961803.
- Johnston, Larry (2007). Politics: An Introduction to the Modern Democratic State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9781442600409.
- Van de Haar, Edwin (2015). Degrees of Freedom: Liberal Political Philosophy and Ideology. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1412855754.
Further reading
- Ashford, Nigel; Davies, Stephen (2012). A Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought (Routledge Revivals). London: Routledge. ISBN 9781136708336.
- Blanchette, Jude (October 27, 2004). "What Libertarians and Conservatives Say About Each Other: An Annotated Bibliography". LewRockwell.com. Retrieved September 23, 2020.
- Hoppe, Hans-Hermann (2014). "A Realistic Libertarianism is Right (Conservative) Libertarianism". Mises Institute. Retrieved September 23, 2020.
- Rothbard, Murray (1981). "Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian Manqué". Modern Age. Retrieved September 23, 2020 – via LewRockwell.com.
External links
- Republican Liberty Caucus. A group of libertarian conservatives.
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