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May 3, 2002
Today's
Wall Street Journal [May 2] proclaims, with a flourish of editorial
trumpets, "The Fall
of the Libertarians." The cause of the movement's alleged demise?
9/11. Oh yes, "everything's changed"
since that awful day, including the possibility of getting Big Government
off our backs:
"The great free-market revolution that began with the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at the close of the 1970s has finally reached its Thermidor, or point of reversal."
THE END OF
'THE END OF HISTORY'
The great
irony of this exceedingly odd little screed is that it was written by someone
whose philosophy most definitely bit the dust on 9/11: Francis Fukuyama's "the end of history" thesis
was blown to smithereens along with the World Trade Center and lost amid the
smoking rubble on that fateful day. In essence,
the central argument of his famous article, published in the summer of 1989,
is summarized in a single sentence:
"What
we may be witnessing in not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of
a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that
is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization
of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
While he was
careful to note that "the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily
in the realm of
WARMED-OVER
HEGELIANISM
Set down
as the Soviet empire was tottering into oblivion, Fukuyama's warmed-over
Hegelianism soon became the favorite intellectual clichι of Marxists-turned-neocons
from Commentary to National Review. Fukuyama's giddy triumphalism
provided a fitting backdrop for the unabashedly neo-imperialist flights
of fancy indulged in by the post-cold war, post-9/11 neoconservative right.
Bill Kristol's clarion call for "benevolent global hegemony"
and National Review's crazed campaign demanding that George W. Bush
invade and occupy
the Saudi oil fields come immediately to mind. As neocon columnist Charles
Krauthammer proclaimed in the pages of The National Interest [Winter
1989-90]:
"The
goal is the world as described by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama's provocation
was to assume that the end [of history] what he calls the common marketization
of the world is either here or inevitably dawning; it is neither. The West
has to make it happen. It has to wish and work for a super-sovereign West
economically, culturally, and politically hegemonic in the world."
The triumph
of the liberal values supposedly represented by the US government is inevitable,
according to Fukuyama, but, just in case it isn't, Krauthammer and his fellow
neocons want to use the American military to "make it happen." Like
Marx, who also posited the inevitable victory of his adherents, Fukyama is
more than willing to go along with this. Fukuyama recently signed on along with
a passel of neocon intellectuals to a call issued by the Project
for a New American Century calling for the outright invasion and military
occupation of large swatches of the Middle East.
FUKUYAMA
VERSUS THE LIBERTARIANS
Libertarianism
is an obstacle to Empire, and, as such, must be removed: conservatism, says
Fukuyama in the War
Street Journal, has "matured," and it's time to cast away
the youthful chrysalis of libertarianism:
"Like
the French Revolution, it derived its energy from a simple idea of liberty,
to wit, that the modern welfare state had grown too large, and that individuals
were excessively regulated."
To begin with,
it is absurd to identify the free-market "revolution" that supposedly
triumphed in the 1980s with the electoral victories of either Thatcher or
Reagan, since neither reduced the size, scope, or arrogant presumptiveness
of government power, but only at best momentarily slowed the rate of increase.
And I would argue that Reagan, in pursuing a military build-up unprecedented
in our history, did more to increase the power of the public sector than any
other President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But then this
confusion on Fukuyama's part is unremarkable in someone who sees libertarianism
embodied in the complaint that "the modern welfare state had grown too
large." Libertarians abhor the day the welfare state was spawned, and
have called for its complete abolition ever since. As for Americans being
"excessively regulated," it is not the degree but the presumption
that regulation is required that libertarians have always contested.
RED RHETORIC
"Yet
the revolution entered a Jacobin phase with the election of Newt Gingrich's
Congress in 1994," Fukuyama continues hey, wait a minute! This
guy is supposed to be a (neo)conservative, I know, but how come he writes
as if he were Leon Trotsky? His prose is chockfull of references right out
of some Trotskyist tract: "Thermidor" (Trotsky's
term for what called the "degeneration" of the Soviet "workers
state"), "Jacobins," and comparing the conservative-libertarian
ascendancy to the French Revolution. What is this the Wall Street
Journal or the Socialist Worker? With Fukuyama and his neocon fan
club, it's often hard to tell.
LIBERTARIAN
'JACOBINS'?
Okay,
so this "Jacobin" phase of the alleged free-market revolution, according
to Fukuyama, went too far, allowing the Clintonites to seize the vital center.
"For many on the right," he avers,
"Mr.
Reagan's classical liberalism began to evolve into libertarianism, an ideological
hostility to the state in all its manifestations. While the dividing line
between the two is not always straightforward, libertarianism is a far more
radical dogma whose limitations are becoming increasingly clear. The libertarian
wing of the revolution overreached itself, and is now fighting rearguard actions
on two fronts: foreign policy and biotechnology."
Well, he's right
about one thing: libertarianism, while most emphatically not a "dogma,"
is indeed radical, in that its critique of the status quo strikes at the very
root of the evil that besets us, which is the State. If Reaganism represents
"classical liberalism," in any sense, then perhaps Fukuyama means
classical liberalism at the end of its tether, after a long decline into utilitarianism
and gradualism. In any case, Fukuyama's conflation of Reaganism and libertarianism
is interesting only because it prefaces the real point of his piece:
"The
hostility of libertarians to big government extended to U.S. involvement in
the world. The Cato Institute propounded isolationism in the '90s, on the
ground that global leadership was too expensive. At the time of the Gulf War,
Cato produced an analysis that argued it would be cheaper to let Saddam keep
Kuwait than to pay for a military intervention to expel him--a fine cost-benefit
analysis, if you only abstracted from the problem of weapons of mass destruction
in the hands of a megalomaniac."
Of course, the
reality is that Saddam
and Kuwait have kissed and made up, forming a common front, along with
the Saudis, against the US. So it turns out that it would indeed have
been cheaper in terms of lives, both American and Iraqi, as well as dollars
to let Saddam keep Kuwait after all. As for weapons of mass destruction
being in the hands of a Middle Eastern megalomaniac, I, too, am disturbed
that Ariel Sharon has his finger on the nuclear trigger, but are we going
to blame the Iraqis for that, too?
So there was
the "isolationist" (i.e. pro-peace) Cato Institute, daring to question
Washington's pro-war consensus. Ah, but then along came 9/11, when "everything
changed" and the rug was ostensibly pulled out from under the libertarians:
"Contrary
to Mr. Reagan's vision of the U.S. as a 'shining city on a hill,' libertarians
saw no larger meaning in America's global role, no reason to promote democracy
and freedom abroad. Sept. 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder
to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and
spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and
not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into
buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports."
Oh, thank God
for the US government! They did a great job of screening, now didn't
they? Why, if not for them, the 9/11 hijackers would've wriggled through our
security nets and managed to smuggle weapons aboard four aircraft, hijack
the planes, and ram them into the hey, uh, hold on there, correct me if
I'm wrong, but didn't something terrible happen that day in spite of
all the warnings, all the precautions, all the "anti-terrorist"
task forces and government studies, all the billions poured into "security"?
It's pathetic, really, that the neocons are now imitating the Daschle Democrats
in proclaiming that big government, post-9/11, is back
in style. Good lord, we may not have reached the end of history, but surely
we have reached the end of our patience with Fukuyama's sloppy polemic. What
makes it interesting to begin with, however, is that this attack on the Cato
Institute is completely gratuitous.
True, the Cato
folks were once committed to the cause of noninterventionism, because they,
like all authentic libertarians, know that war is the health of the state,
as
Randolph Bourne famously put it. The centralizing effect of military priorities
in wartime, the comprehensiveness of state controls for the duration of the
conflict, necessarily shrinks the sphere of liberty and increases the role
and reach of government. Even more importantly, just as libertarians oppose
the consolidation and expansion of the public sector at home, so they must
logically oppose its geographical extension abroad. This view was held by
Murray N. Rothbard, the real intellectual
founder of the Cato Institute, and advocated in one form or another by Cato
(in spite of their break with Rothbard in the early 1980s) up until 9/11.
CATO SELLS
OUT
In the
post-9/11 atmosphere, however, this principled opposition to warmongering
dubbed "isolationism" by Fukuyama is understood to be "anti-Americanism"
of the worst sort, and has been explicitly disavowed by Cato. As I pointed out in a previous
column, their representatives now have set themselves in the vanguard
of the War Party, with Cato foreign policy honcho Ted Galen Carpenter calling
for the invasion of Pakistan (!) and Cato coming out in favor of Bush's
endless "war on terrorism." Carpenter has even gone so far as to
jump on the "Let Sharon be
Sharon" bandwagon, urging "nonintervention" by opposing
US pressure on Israel to stop slaughtering the Palestinians. But intervention
in the form of US tax dollars filling Israeli coffers as Israeli tanks roll
over the Palestinians for some reason this form of intervention goes
unmentioned by Cato's chief foreign policy "expert." But all that
backtracking and neocon ass-kissing, in the end, didn't get them anything
but an attack in the Wall Street Journal and a particularly galling
one, at least from the pro-war "libertarian" perspective.
LIBERTARIAN
CLONES FOR WAR
For the
one big crusade of the Virginia Postrel-Glenn
Reynolds-Warblogger axis of cyber-evil
has been the legalization of cloning; on their endless little "blogs,"
calls to nuke Mecca and replace the House of Saud with the International House
of Pancakes are interspersed between earnest little petitions for the legalization
of cloning, which will supposedly usher in a golden age. To Fukuyama and his
fellow neocons, this is monstrous, and must be stopped, while the pro-war
libertarians are ready to make the first scientist
prosecuted for illegal cloning their very own Mumia Abu Jamal.
Without taking
a position on cloning one way or the other, it is interesting to note that
the neocons wouldn't cut their "libertarian" satellites any slack,
not even on this somewhat abstruse issue. It didn't matter that Postrel and
her little blogger kids kowtowed on the all-important foreign policy question.
Not even running interference for Sharon's blitzkrieg was enough to earn them
sufficient brownie points for any kind of exemption. Any deviation
from the neocon line is the occasion for a denunciation, a reminder of who
is on what end of the leash.
The pro-war
libertarians thought that, if only they allowed themselves to be properly
domesticated, if only they bought into the globalist foreign policy agenda
of the neocons, and stuck to economics and exotica like cloning and drug legalization,
they would be left alone in peace. Let this be a lesson to them not that
they can afford to learn it, as this point. I am reminded of what Murray N.
Rothbard said of the Catoites back in the 1980s, when they were trying to
pass off libertarianism as "low-tax liberalism": "They have
sold out for a mess of pottage," he wrote, "without even getting
the pottage in return."
DEVELOPING
A TASTE FOR THE LASH
Fukuyama
is right to herald the fall of the pro-war libertarians: they have corralled
themselves into a tiny and rather unrewarding ideological niche, where individualism
is conflated with a narcissism so overweening that the Postrelian embrace
of cloning issue seems almost too parodic to be true. Relegated to the fringe,
the "libertarian" branch of the War Party will be allowed to feed
off crumbs from the neocons' ample table only as long as they keep quiet about
their more unconventional ideas. Okay, drug legalization, well, maybe that's
okay, since even Bill Buckley agrees with them: but cloning? No way. It was
time for them to feel the editorial lash, time to let them know who's the
dominant force in this coalition: but they shouldn't despair. The lash may
sting the first couple of times, but they'll get used to it after a while
and may even come to like it.
Indeed, such
masochistic tendencies are obvious in Cato "scholar" Brink
Lindsay's craven reply to Fukuyama. As the number one critic of those
libertarians who have retained their opposition to empire-building interventionism,
Lindsay loudly protests his loyalty to the War Party and even distances himself
from his employer:
"Yes,
it's true that some libertarians, including folks at the Cato Institute, opposed
the Gulf War. But I'm a libertarian, I support cloning, and my only complaint
with the Gulf War is that we didn't take Baghdad. Virginia Postrel, far and
away the most prominent libertarian on the cloning issue, supported the Gulf
War
. Many prominent libertarians have been front and center in urging vigorous
and aggressive military action"
Yes, Brink,
why don't you crawl on your belly all the way over to Bill Kristol's doorstep?
Maybe that will do some good. Or maybe you can make your argument for cloning
in terms of the US acquiring an invaluable military asset. Imagine cloned
American soldiers, genetically-designed warriors ready to fight practically
from birth: why, we could win the war on terrorism, and even conquer the whole
world, given such bioengineered Myrmidons!
Surely such a prospect could go a long way toward helping us achieve Bill
Kristol's dream of "benevolent world hegemony."
CLONING AND
THE PROMISED LAND
Another
way to appeal to a neocon audience is to show how cloning will benefit Israel.
And of course the benefits to the Israelis are glaringly obvious. Instead
of trying to convince the Diaspora to move to one of the most dangerous places
on earth, a socialist Sparta where
the government takes more than half your income, the Israelis could solve
their demographic problem
by simply cloning new citizens more than enough to populate the Greater
Israel of Sharon's dreams.
It's sickening,
really, to contemplate the self-abasement of these social-climbing careerists,
whose degenerate "libertarianism" is but a distorted shadow, a caricature
of the real thing: and they aren't worth contemplating, really, except as
a lesson and a warning to the young. This is what you turn into when
you sell out: as Rothbard put it, "and they didn't even get the pottage!"
The fall of the pro-war libertarians, and their absorption into the neoconservative
grand consensus, is an event worth noting only as an object lesson in what
it means to fail.
LIBERTARIANISM
ALIVE AND WELL
The real libertarianism, however, is alive and very well, thank you, flourishing as a result of the great work being done by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, as well as Antiwar.com's sponsoring organization, the Center for Libertarian Studies. We are reaching, every day, tens of thousands of people from practically every country on earth. From the Midwest to the Middle East, from Northern Europe to South and Central America, the libertarian message on the vital issue of war and peace as well as free trade and economic and personal liberty is being broadcast globally to a large and steadily increasing audience. Let the "warbloggers" and pro-war "libertarians" congratulate each other on their career-advancing war fervor, and imagine they are defining the terms of the debate. We are defining the future of libertarianism that is, if it is to have one.
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