TGIF: Who Rules? That Is Not the Question

Today's two major contenders for political power seem to be elitists and populists. Funnily enough, both types are present in each of the big tribes known as progressive/liberal and conservatism, left and right, or Democratic and Republican. (Here's the lowdown on paleoconservative elitists.)

However, the elitist/populist framework should leave everyone dissatisfied. It omits too many details. Namely, it presents a contest apparently over who should rule: an anointed elite or "the people," which is not always well-defined. I put the term in quotes because the whole people cannot possibly rule.

The common framework ignores the far more fundamental question: which rules? In other words, what are the rulers, whoever they are, proposing to do? Exactly which orders are to be enacted as legislation and imposed by force? Are there to be limits on this rule? By what means? What happens if the limits are breached, as they have been constantly over the years?

That's what libertarians care about first: the rules. Who rules comes second. But everyone should care about this. Under certain rules, it wouldn't matter who was "in charge." Imagine a rule against anyone -- even "rulers" --  initiating force in any way against anyone else.

The problem is that the rules typically administered by the state, including representative democracies, shouldn't exist. We shouldn't want anyone enforcing those rules because they are bad rules. They may constitute legislation, but, as F. A. Hayek and others have taught, they are not (natural) law.

We cannot assume that populist, or unfiltered democratic, rule would be preferable in all circumstances to elitist rule. I think of the self-styled "extreme libertarian" H. L. Mencken's famous observation, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Take the Federal Reserve System -- please! If a gun were held on me, I'd choose the current system over a Fed run by Congress or by plebiscite. I'm not sure that's a tough call, but I'm marking on a steep curve. (Ron Paul wanted to end the Fed, not hand it over to "the people.") 

In The Myth of the Rational Voter, libertarian economist Bryan Caplan reports that surveys consistently indicate that better-educated individuals tend to give more sensible answers on economic-policy questions than the general, less-educated population do and thus are less, say, anti-trade and anti-foreign.  What might that mean for trade, immigration, and even monetary policies? Of course there shouldn't be trade, immigration, and monetary policies. They override individual freedom, cooperation, and spontaneous order.

Look across the Atlantic and consider Brexit. With good reason, a majority of Britons didn't like policies being made by distant and largely unaccountable politicians and bureaucrats. Most voters chose to exit, that is, they opted for decentralization. At the same time they favored nationalism and national sovereignty, that is, immigration control and protectionism.

Notice what wasn't on the ballot: individual sovereignty -- not just for Britons but for everyone. In the Brexit case, decentralization coincided with more national government power over the freedom to trade and to deal with would-be migrants. That's hardly a win if the standard is individual liberty. (Decentralization has a potential advantage: it lowers the cost of voting with one's feet.)

It's not that "the people" are stupid -- far from it. While most of us are reasonably competent in normal life, in the political realm we face special incentives and disincentives that make us act stupid. When one vote is impotent, why would most individuals spend scarce time and money studying complicated subjects to investigate whether to vote for Smith or Jones? They might as well vote their feelings and biases. Besides, most individual voters will bear a only microscopic fraction of the total expense that the winning candidate will help to impose. Bad incentives all around.

Admittedly, democracy as a way to pick officeholders is certainly preferable to violence in the streets, but that is faint praise. We can do better.

But we don't want an elite to rule either. Elitism's track record here and elsewhere is nothing to brag about. It includes war, depression, and other lamentable political maladies. Of course, the rejection of elitism doesn't mean the wholesale rejection of expertise, as some people seem to think. That would be irrational. Who doesn't consult a doctor when ill? No, what must be avoided is endowing select experts with access to political power. The damage can be seen in the recent pandemic.

The alternative to elitism isn't more democracy, which would trade one form of authoritarianism for another. The alternative is individual liberty in markets and civil society, and that calls for the strictest limitation on -- as we work for the elimination of -- all coercive political power. The objective is to free all peaceful relations from government. Instead of elitism and populism, let's have individual liberty and cooperation.

TGIF: Tribalism and the Dark Art of the Package Deal

Tribalism not only lives; it rules -- even more than I thought! I've been reading Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis's book The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America. It's certainly clarified my thinking.

The Lewis brothers are a historian and a political scientist. What they show is something that I and many others have only partly understood. But for me, that's changing now. (Here's an interview with them.)

Their thesis is that the terms left, right, liberal, progressive, conservative, Republican, and Democrat do not indicate opposing sides of a single basic ideological principle that would make their respective policy programs coherent. Instead, those labels identify two social/cultural tribes that are based on something other than ideology. The disparate components of their respective policy package deals change, depending on contingent events, but the tribes endure with few defections. Compare "right-wing" Republican leaders Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. You can do the same with the "left."

What do those labels really mean? You can't say, for example, that the left is for big government and the right is for small government: too many shifts and inconsistencies have occurred. Think of their changing attitudes toward free speech, foreign intervention, surveillance and the intel apparatus, free trade, the rule of law, and even tax cuts.  Republicans have joined Democrats in opposing even future cuts to doomed Social Security and Medicare. Why don't the media report that the Republicans have moved to the left on entitlements? Anything they do is called a move to the right; anything the Democrats do is a move to the left. How can that be?

Have you heard the cliche "This isn't your father's Republican [or Democratic] Party?" Tribal change is not new. (That was lifted from an Oldsmobile advertising slogan.)

When you come right down to it, members of Team Red hate members of Team Blue because they wear the wrong color jersey and vice versa.

The Lewises' "social theory" explains the scene better than the prevailing "essentialist theory." If the two tribes had ideologically driven platforms, each side's members could coherently (but not necessarily correctly) say, "My team's positions are all good because of our underlying vision, and the opposing team's positions are therefore all bad. But if their lists of positions are grab bags determined by something other than a worldview, then the members can't reasonably say that.

The authors ask us to imagine that supermarkets offered just two pre-loaded shopping carts to choose from. You'd pick the one that had more things you liked than disliked. But you wouldn't say that every item in your basket manifests a consistent worldview and so is better than every item in the other one. But that's how most people think of their political tribes.

Libertarians have more or less known this since the modern movement arose after World War II. As young libertarians, my friends and I wondered how so-called conservatives and so-called liberals could be pro-freedom in some ways and anti-freedom in others. Why weren't they consistent?

We wondered how a political spectrum could make sense when it had totalitarian Josef Stalin at one extreme and totalitarian Adolf Hitler at the other. The authors ask a similar question: what use is a spectrum that puts Milton Friedman, a staunch advocate of individual liberty, the free market, and limited government, on the same side as Hitler, a staunch advocate of national socialism and the total state? Is a center-right person moderately pro-free market or moderately pro-Nazi? Is a center-left person moderately pro-welfare state or moderately pro-Bolshevik?

If the Lewises are correct, we should be wary about common phrases like moving further to the left/right or becoming more progressive/conservative. The reason is that there is no single-issue spectrum with fixed points to move along. The tribes define, not reflect, what it means to be rightwing, leftwing, conservative, and liberal/progressive.

If you have doubts about this, try stating the principles that unify the conservative and progressive programs or the party platforms. You can't do it. If you ask a conservative or progressive what principle unifies his program, his answer, write the Lewises, will be a post-hoc rationalization. The tribes could exchange positions (and have) and still rationalize their new programs in terms of their previous answers.

This phenomenon need not apply to every group. Libertarians are united on a central principle -- individual liberty -- and their policy positions show it. (They sometimes argue about how to derive or apply the principle, but that's a different matter.) Their policy preferences are predictable when we know that principle. Tribal policies are predictable because we know the color of the jerseys. What does support for abortion rights have to do with high taxes on the wealthy? What does opposition to abortion rights have to do with support for tariffs on Chinese goods?

How do people choose a tribe if not by principle? Lewis and Lewis say that a person's choice can have a variety of sources: parents, friends, a single heartfelt issue (abortion, say), or a charismatic leader. But once he's joined, his incentive is to embrace the whole package deal. Exceptions exist, but they are exceptions.

So enough with left and right, conservative and progressive (or liberal). Those labels obscure thought and fuel tribal antagonism. They are also harmful to libertarians who would benefit from public clarity. The only phrase I dislike more than conservatives and libertarians is libertarians and conservatives.

TGIF: Don't Blame Wokeism on the Unfinished Liberal Revolution

The National Conservatives are not only wrong about genuine liberalism -- that is, libertarianism -- they also apparently haven't bothered to read up on what they think they're attacking. Take Yoram Hazony, author of Conservatism: A Rediscovery, who recently appeared on the YouTube show Triggernometry. As Hazony makes clear, for him it's straw men all the way down.

Throughout the interview he uses the word liberalism for the philosophy he blames for saddling the West with wokeism. That's unfortunate because people use that term in many ways. What definition does he have in mind? I think we can infer that he means something like libertarianism (and not, say, Nancy Pelosi's "liberalism") since he faults the philosophy for its powerful commitment to free markets. Although he's not thoroughly opposed to free enterprise, he favors a government strong enough to step in when the "national interest" (ascertained by whom?) requires it. National conservatism without a commitment to government power to override the free market would be like a square circle.

Like other right-wing critics of libertarianism, Hazony believes that Western societies are in the woke soup because Enlightenment liberalism is intrinsically prostrate before its leftist adversaries. Why would that be? In his eyes, it's because liberalism's only message is this: do your own thing. He told Frances Foster and Konstantin Kisin:

If you [liberals, presumably] raise children and you tell them, "Look, do whatever you want. Do whatever feels good. Use your own reason, exercise your own thinking, and come to your own conclusions, and you don't give them anything else, a great many people, maybe the majority, end up stuck and unable to make the decisions among, you know, what exactly is it I'm supposed to do and what is it I'm supposed to believe.

I have no idea why Hazony thinks that liberalism teaches people to do whatever feels good, or that, as he says elsewhere, that freedom is "all they need." One of the first things liberal parents would teach their children is to respect other people's rights: specifically, don't hit other kids and don't take their stuff without asking.

By the way, "do whatever feels good" is hardly the same as "use your own reason, exercise your own thinking, and come to your own conclusions." How does Hazony not see that?

Further, using your own reason does not mean: don't read history, don't learn from others' experiences, don't absorb the moral and political lessons of those who came before. Liberalism is not about the individual's starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel. Rather, it means that you shouldn't blindly accept what others tell you. Use your head. We have much to learn from other people and other ages. So what's Hazony's real beef with liberalism?

As this makes clear, he clearly doesn't know what liberalism is, but he's certain he knows what it has wrought:

Liberalism is what brought woke neo-Marxism. Every single institution that the woke neo-Marxists are running now was a liberal institution 15 years ago. So if liberalism had the antibodies, if it was enough to say let's just be free, if that was strong enough to be able to defeat woke neo-Marxism we wouldn't be where we are today....

Liberalism brought Marxism.

Have you noticed how everything the woke left favors these days -- to be sure, genuinely abhorrent stuff -- is reflexively condemned by the right as "neo-Marxist" -- even when the idea in question has nothing to do with the material forces of history and economic classes? You'd think Marxism was the only evil in the world. Actually, It's not.

Sometimes, when Hazony thinks he's scored points on liberalism, he sounds a bit like a liberal, such as when he reminds us that each individual is born into a culture, which ought not to be automatically rejected. The reason he doesn't realize that liberals can agree with this is that he thinks -- wrongly -- that liberals are Jacobins, who aspire to wipe the social slate clean and start over. Some liberals have occasionally sounded like they're saying something like that, but to suggest that Jacobinism or utopianism is intrinsic to liberalism is to do a disservice to an honorable and valuable -- yes -- heritage.

While Hazony concedes that it might be okay to reject some inherited traditions, he seems uncomfortable with that prospect. As he puts it, your forebears "hand[ed] down things [and] you have a responsibility to fight for those things." Why? Because they were handed down?

I prefer Thomas Sowell's take: another culture may well have features that are better than one's own -- superior at dealing with an aspect of life.

The entire history of the human race, the rise of man from the caves, has been marked by transfers of cultural advances from one group to another and from one civilization to another....

Cultures exist to serve the vital practical requirements of human life -- to structure a society so as to perpetuate the species, to pass on the hard-earned knowledge and experience of generations past and centuries past to the young and inexperienced, in order to spare the next generation the costly and dangerous process of learning everything all over again from scratch through trial and error -- including fatal errors.

Cultures exist so that people can know how to get food and put a roof over their head, how to cure the sick, how to cope with the death of loved ones, and how to get along with the living. Cultures are not bumper stickers. They are living, changing ways of doing all the things that have to be done in life. [Emphasis added.]

Every culture discards over time the things which no longer do the job or which don’t do the job as well as things borrowed from other cultures. Each individual does this, consciously or not, on a day-to-day basis. [Watch the video; read the text.]

Problems with change occur not when people are free to adopt "the stranger's ways" (the supposedly scary phrase is from Fiddler on the Roof); they occur when those who favor change have access to state power -- especially when government controls or strongly influences education, the media, and other commanding heights. Then some people, however well-meaning, can potentially impose their preferences on the rest.

Without access to power, people are free to adopt changes for themselves and try to persuade others, but then they would have to wait to see if the new ways catch on. Change, under those circumstances, tends to happen at the margin, although exceptions can't be ruled out. (Social contagion is possible.) But even then, free people would have peaceful consensual ways to protect themselves and their children from unwanted change. This is where freedom of association kicks in.

In general it seems reasonable for individuals to provisionally defer to tried-and-true ways because they have apparently passed the cultural natural selection test. Yet one also ought to remain open to demonstrations of better alternatives. Liberalism delivers the best of both: stability without stagnation and dynamism without chaos. But individual rights must be respected.

As a national conservative, Hazony of course favors nationalism. If all he means is that a world of many nation-states is preferable to a global empire, then libertarians stand with him. If we can't get rid of power, at least let's disperse it among small competitive jurisdictions. But he means much more than that since he and his fellow National Conservatives favor trade restrictions and other forms of welfare-state industrial policy. And I presume he would oppose secession, at least from nation-states he approves of. (He is an Israeli.)

Hazony commits a major blunder when he says that liberalism is inherently imperialist and that nationalism is inherently anti-imperialist. How does he figure that? Since liberals believe they have identified universal principles, he says, it is committed to imposing those principles on everyone. If you fail to see his logic, I imagine you're not alone.

Contrary to Hazony, liberalism doesn't says it has the one true way for everyone to live. Rather, it says all people ought to be free to decide how to live. Liberalism, which seeks to limit state power, doesn't entail imperialism because that would expand state aggression both domestically and abroad. Thus "liberal imperialism" is a contradiction in terms. Nationalist imperialism, however, is not.

While I wouldn't expect Hazony to be persuaded by what I'm about to say, I will point out that the alarming and long-standing decline of liberalism can be plausibly explained by its initial incompleteness politically, economically, legally, and even morally. Twentieth-century liberal writers, scholarly and popular, pointed this out repeatedly and tried to do something about it. That's why they wrote so much. These included Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Leonard Read, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, and most fundamentally, Ayn Rand, who argued persuasively (to me at least) that as long as a secular or religious ethics of self-sacrifice predominated in a culture, the political-economic-legal system rooted in individualism and private property would never be whole-heartedly embraced because it would be tainted by the alleged sin of "selfishness."

Even the doctrine of limited government kept liberalism from fully blossoming because, as we've learned so often the hard way, limited governments don't stay limited. (See my article "Anthony de Jasay on Limiting Power.")

Thus liberalism didn't yield because it was inherently weak. It yielded because it was fatally compromised from the start. That's my answer to Hazony's question of why wokeism has succeeded. We don't need illiberal national conservatism to win back our freedom.

TGIF: Why Freedom Is the Goal

In online interviews and conversations I'm hearing intellectuals in the national conservative movement say that the liberal Enlightenment "project" has mostly failed because people need more in their lives than freedom. I've also heard this from a few people who have lately become disillusioned with leftism but yet are uneasy about libertarianism.

My first response is to wonder whom these critics of classical liberalism, or libertarianism, its modern-day form, have in mind. Which important and widely influential liberal political, economic, or, social thinker even implied that freedom is the only thing worth valuing? Let's name names, please. I can't think of one, but perhaps I'm overlooking someone.

Those conservatives will also insist that freedom without virtue is not just worthless but a clear and present danger. But again, which past and present of genuine liberal stalwarts would disagree? I've always understood liberalism to be distinct from libertinism. I see no grounds for confusing the two.

Classical liberalism, in its consequentialist, deontological, and eudaemonist forms, has been concerned with what makes for a proper society by some articulated standard or other, starting with the most fundamental unit of analysis, the individual. The literature is saturated with positive observations about society, the division of labor, association, and rich communities -- in a word, cooperation.

One way or another, all of that is related to values in addition to freedom; it all is related to virtue. Far from embodying an atomistic, licentious, to-hell-with-everyone-else (pseudo)individualism, libertarianism extols what I call Adamistic (Smith, that is) individualism, in which human beings "selfishly" flourish through mutually rewarding relationships of all kinds. I've also dubbed this "molecular individualism. Of course, some people will engage in vice and aggression (those aren't the same things), but as long as the state is unavailable for social engineering, free individuals using private property in association with others can peacefully protect themselves and their children from what they find abhorrent. Live and let live is the rule.

For liberals, freedom was never just an end in itself. Freedom means freedom from aggression, whatever the source, but at least implicit in the liberal vision -- and indispensable to truly understanding it -- is the freedom to produce material and nonmaterial values in a social context. We want freedom so we may live fully as human beings and enjoy fruitful lives among other people. Successful long-term participation in the market and society more widely encourages honesty, justice, and conscientiousness -- virtues by any reckoning. To understand the value of society is to understand the need for -- yes -- order, but it is specifically the bottom-up, emergent, spontaneous order that F. A. Hayek and other liberals have emphasized. (You find this in Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and countless others.)

The critics of liberalism are right of course when they say that freedom is not enough to properly address the social problems we observe today. But again, which libertarian ever said it was? The libertarian point is that freedom is the condition in which people have the best chance of dealing with problems. Liberalism doesn't promise a rose garden; it's not utopian. In fact, freedom is not the answer to any problem. Rather, it -- along with the resulting decentralization and competition -- is essential to the discovery process that enables people to deal with problems as best they can. Since no one is omniscient, that discovery process is indispensable both for the good life and the good society.

Freedom is not some magic ingredient that when sprinkled on a problem miraculously produces a solution. It's the political, legal, and social environment in which people can act to make their lives better. In the process of virtuously pursuing their rational self-interest, they make others better off too. No central coercive authority, conservative or progressive, can hope to deliver the equivalent, no matter what theory of virtue it seeks to impose. For one thing, they could never know enough.

Thus those who reject libertarianism as unequal to modern challenges show themselves to be boxing with a strawman. But worse, they deceptively pose as the guardians of virtue when they are not.

When conservatives say politics is downstream from culture, they mean that for freedom to be a good thing, people must first be virtuous. But that suggests the conservative program is to change things around and put culture downstream from politics. It's a justification for limits on freedom of speech, religion, commerce, association, etc., until the state's subjects have been prepared to live freely. But who is qualified to tutor the people or to say when the people are ready for freedom? How are their overlords to be chosen?

Liberals have long asked those questions, but not because they thought virtue is unimportant. It is because they knew how important virtue is. They also asked how people can be virtuous without being free to make choices.

Albert Jay Nock, the quirky libertarian writer of the 20th century, wrote about this in his 1924 essay "On Doing the Right Thing," Nock wanted to see human beings free precisely so that they "may become as good and decent, as elevated and noble, as they might be and really wish to be.” (See my essay "Nock Revisited.") He elaborated:

The point is that any enlargement [of state authority], good or bad, reduces the scope of individual responsibility, and thus retards and cripples the education which can be a product of nothing but the free exercise of moral judgment.... The profound instinct against being "done for our own good" ... is wholly sound. Men are aware of the need of this moral experience as a condition of growth, and they are aware, too, that anything tending to ease it off from them, even for their own good, is to be profoundly distrusted. The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed. [Emphasis added.]

That's the answer to the paternalists of all parties.

In contrast, conservatism wants the government to control the culture in the name of building virtuous people. How can they overlook the perils of this program? Once political officials assert control over culture, where does it stop? And how can they be sure that the people whose values they despise won't eventually grab hold of the muscular state they've fortified?

TGIF: True Liberals Are Not Conservatives

The relevance of F. A. Hayek's essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative," the postscript to his important 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, is demonstrated at once by the opening quote from Lord Acton:

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition. [Emphasis added.]

Who among true liberal advocates of individual liberty and free social evolution -- aka libertarians -- would deny the truth of that observation?

Hayek had European conservatism in mind when he wrote his essay, and for years, American conservatives, who still had affection for true liberalism, hastened to point this out. As Hayek wrote:

Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.

Later in his essay, he elaborated that "in the United States it is still possible to defend individual liberty by defending long-established institutions. To the liberal they are valuable not mainly because they are long established or because they are American but because they correspond to the ideals which he cherishes."

But he noted that "This already existing confusion [over labels] was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character." The confusion was compounded, Hayek wrote, when socialists began to call themselves liberals.

Many still suffer from this confusion today. But change has been afoot because the illiberals of the left and right increasingly want no part of true liberalism or the label -- and in a way, that's good. Those on the left who call themselves progressives or socialists don't like the label liberal (or neo-liberal) because they associate it with the current permanent bipartisan prowar regime beholden to special corporate interests (so we liberals still have work to do), and virtually all conservatives eschew the label because they don't want to be mistaken for libertarians. That's also good.

So Hayek's essay has new relevance for America. Would Hayek have been surprised? He would have distinguished national conservatism from neoconservatism because of the latter's cosmopolitanism. But how could he embrace as bonafide allies people who view imperialist war as a way to create "national greatness" and social solidarity, as the neocons do? Hayek would have agreed with Abraham Bishop who said in 1800 that "a nation which makes greatness its polestar can never be free; beneath national greatness sink individual greatness, honor, wealth and freedom."

So let's look at Hayek's problem with conservatism. For him, the "decisive objection" is that "by its nature," conservatism can do no more than slow down the change that progressives have initiated. That's not good enough: "What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move." He acknowledged that although the liberal's differences with the "collectivist radical" are greater than his differences with the conservative, the latter "generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time." Thus "the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists."

Explicitly illiberal American conservatives would take issue with Hayek here, but I think Hayek was right. To the extent that conservatives want to use the state to impose their values -- through censorship, immigration and trade restrictions, vice prohibitions, antitrust law, cultural protectionism, and the like -- they indeed share conceptions with their enemies on the left. The ends may differ, but the means bear an uneasy resemblance. (The late Leonard Liggio used to say that the original socialism arose as a middle way that promised to use conservative means, that is, the state, to achieve liberal ends, that is, industrial progress and widespread wealth. Later a "new left" turned against industrial progress and disparaged the goal of material abundance for all.)

"The main point about liberalism," Hayek wrote, "is that it wants to go elsewhere, not to stand still." My sense is that in the last few years, elements of the right have come to appreciate Hayek's point. They became fed up with mere holding actions and have resolved to push a "positive" program. Unfortunately, it's a state-saturated program that ought to make genuine liberals sick.

The exception appears to be foreign policy. Right-wing nonintervention seems to have two justifications: first, that the U.S. government is wrong to think it can design the cultures of other nation-states, and second, that the trillions of dollars the government spends on the military and foreign populations could be better used for domestic matters, including "border security." So even in foreign policy the liberal and conservative bedfellows ought to be uncomfortable.

The liberal's wish not to stand still is the crux of the matter.

There has never been a time when liberal ideals were fully realized and when liberalism did not look forward to further improvement of institutions. Liberalism is not averse to evolution and change; and where spontaneous change has been smothered by government control, it wants a great deal of change of policy. So far as much of current governmental action is concerned, there is in the present world very little reason for the liberal to wish to preserve things as they are. It would seem to the liberal, indeed, that what is most urgently needed in most parts of the world is a thorough sweeping away of the obstacles to free growth. [Emphasis added.]

Hayek's embrace of a social order that guarantees change may seem to conflict with other things Hayek wrote that seem more conservative. But I think that may be mistaken. I take him to say that although the new is not necessarily the good, people must be free to try new ways to flourish. It is one thing to personally default to tried and true until something new proves itself worthy (because a tradition's value may not be immediately apparent), but quite another to empower the state to impede innovation and entrepreneurship, which is disruptive insofar as it is constructive. (Hence I would change Schumpeter's creative destruction to creative disruption.)

Hayek proceeded to enumerate several differences between liberal and conservative attitudes. The first, as already suggested, is that "one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such, while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead." This for Hayek explained the liberal enthusiasm for the free market's generation of spontaneous if unpredictable order, and the conservative lack of enthusiasm for such.

Relatedly, unlike liberalism, conservatism displays "its fondness for authority and its lack of understanding of economic forces. Since it distrusts both abstract theories and general principles, it neither understands those spontaneous forces on which a policy of freedom relies nor possesses a basis for formulating principles of policy." For Hayek, the conservative's "complacency ... toward ... established authority ... is difficult to reconcile with the preservation of liberty."

Hayek could have been describing Sen. Josh Hawley and the thinkers behind national conservatism when he wrote: "In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not to be too much restricted by rigid rules."

Hayek faulted the conservative for lacking -- indeed, for disparaging -- abstract political principles, which are the key to peaceful coexistence among people within a society who have different moral visions:

What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force.

And this point of Hayek's is especially pertinent:

Connected with the conservative distrust of the new and the strange is its hostility to internationalism and its proneness to a strident nationalism. Here is another source of its weakness in the struggle of ideas. It cannot alter the fact that the ideas which are changing our civilization respect no boundaries.... It is no real argument to say that an idea is un-American, or un-German, nor is a mistaken or vicious ideal better for having been conceived by one of our compatriots.

Hayek continued that "it is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism: to think in terms of 'our' industry or resource is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest...."

As he closed his essay Hayek confessed that since the word liberal had been corrupted, thanks to the French Revolution and other forces, by "overrationalis[m], nationalis[m]" and socialis[m]," it had ceased to a good label for his political outlook, which he shared with Tocqueville and Acton: "What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself." (He found libertarian "singularly unattractive" and "manufactured.")

I could go on quoting Hayek's essay -- which is not to say I agree with all of it -- but I fear that would unduly impose on the reader. So I recommend that the entire essay by the self-described "unrepentant Old Whig" be devoured forthwith.

TGIF: Liberty, Democracy, and the Right

I am mystified by the claim that the long-standing libertarian critique of democracy furnishes aid and comfort to conservatives who display a taste for populist authoritarianism. Let me say at the outset that the libertarian critique has nothing to offer those who would impose legal or social disabilities on racial, ethnic, religious, and other minorities. If white supremacists see something helpful here, they are mere opportunists who would find something helpful to their cause in anything they looked at.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!