For several months now, I've been waiting for the debate now swirling around what's being called "libertarian populism." It's been a long time in the making. And now that it's here, I welcome it. But in one important way, it's the kind of conversation that's not going to give its participants access to what's really at stake in the push to reform conservatism and libertarianism.
I know it can be scary to tell policy wonks that they should consider changing their everyday view of our human anthropology, but that's what I'm going to do -- because libertarian populism won't be a huge help to Republicans in winning elections -- or to Americans in recovering together a knowably extraordinary political, economic, and cultural existence -- unless the conversation goes way deeper than policy proposals, right down to what characterizes the experience of being human.
Not coincidentally, it's on that level that Republicans are really in trouble. The most direct and influential critics of Republican policy, like Paul Krugman, are bitterly clear on this point: Republicans are the anti-human party, the party of jerks, the party of those who remain stubbornly out of integrity as regards their relationship to their fellow man. All the think tank panels and policy papers in the world will not rebut this idea, and it is this idea -- for reasons we'll get into below -- that will kill off Republicans, and their beloved country, if it is not rebutted.
That's why, as I came, over Christmas, to feel out the shape and size of the challenge, I chose to devote this blog in 2013 largely to exploring one big idea. In short: Libertarianism can be an exceptional force for creating powerful new possibilities in American political life -- but only if its main insights and promises are shown to chime with a fresh account of being human that captures the imagination of more than a fraction of people on the political right.
Fortunately, this is relatively easy to do -- once we let go of the notion that politics should lead culture, and policy should lead politics, by the nose. In an effort to do just that, I've put a name to the one big idea -- "radicaltarianism" -- and to the sort of people -- "free radicals" -- who I think are apt to be moved and inspired by it. Rather than drafting a radicaltarian policy agenda, I've launched a Free Radicals subscription newsletter. (Subscribe here!) And rather than reasoned critiques of pieces of legislation, in the works are a Free Radicals podcast and, currently being pitched, #FreeRadicalsTheBook.
Let's, then, consider the debate over libertarian populism from the standpoint that underneath all the policy argumentation lies a more important set of distinctions -- more important because they're more basic distinctions that give us stronger access to the things that occur to the political right, and to Americans in general, as serious stumbling blocks.
Ben Domenech and Tim Carney touched things off by putting forward varieties of a self-styled "libertarian populist" agenda, focused around the classic (small-r) republican insight that the prime directive of politics in a free society is punishing the corrupt, not rewarding the virtuous. In this case, that means shifting Republican energy toward things like destroying crony capitalism, and away from things like tweaking the tax code to favor privileged struggling groups ("middle class families").
From corners of the political blogosphere as far apart as mainstream conservative Ramesh Ponnuru and ex-libertarian liberal Will Wilkinson, the response was the same: not enough Americans care about beating back corruption if there's no immediate, direct improvement in their own material affairs. Nor, both Ponnuru and Wilkinson implied, should they. Carney responded like this: "Everyone sees the GOP as the party of the rich. This hurts the GOP among people are who aren’t rich. It also probably turns off some rich people (recall, Obama won the rich vote in 2008). Libertarian populism could be understood as an effort to make the GOP no longer the party of the rich, in both reality and perception."
Domenech, meanwhile, focused on a different line of critique -- that the political right is too fractious for libertarian populism to cohere and prevail. For Domenech, despite some very real tensions, "[w]here once the thread of American populism was about the redistribution of other people’s money, now it is about ending the government’s unfair redistribution of opportunity. This is a task which should unite the city mice and country mice, and with the right leadership, it will."
As it happens, the challenges Carney and Domenech face are closely interrelated. Ross Douthat intuited this when he cautiously endorsed the libertarian populist push, warning that it will "cut against the party’s historical identity" as -- per Carney -- the party of the rich. But this is an oversimplification. I've suggested that the historical identity of the GOP is not rooted in mere wealth, but, in substantial part, in business wealth, money accumulated through productive commercialism. Only very recently has the GOP been caricatured as "the party of Wall Street" -- in the face of obvious apolitical "bipartisanship" on the part of America's megabankers, who throw heaps of money at both parties and extra heaps at whomever they think is actually likely to win. The Republican party is -- in substantial part -- the party of the Chamber of Commerce.
But, as I've suggested, it's also the party, in good measure, of the puritans. What's key is that, historically, what held the puritans and plutocrats together within a single political party -- since the Civil War itself -- was militant nationalism. As I wrote toward the end of last year:
Politically speaking, the disunited hodgepodge of interests and identity groups that had sprung up in the North’s greater yankeedom could only unite around some awesomely superlative theme — precisely what the Civil War supplied, once it solidified into a joint holy war/military-industrial nation-building project.
Usually, people who speak of the Civil War in terms like these are neo-Confederates of some kind. But some mainstream conservatives and liberals are actually quite happy to treat the Civil War as a flatly noble enforcement of America’s promise of undeterred progress toward the free and equal life ordained as our anthropological destiny in the Declaration of Independence. What’s important here is the structural conditions that gave rise to the Republican party, and gave it an organizing principle powerful and broad enough to continue to win elections. What the Civil War reveals is that the alliance between the Whig branch of the GOP and the Free Soil branch could only form under the banner of militant nationalism, a pattern repeated endlessly throughout Republican and American history.
Daniel McCarthy's recent reflections on these matters help us understand how the fallout from Rand Paul's former professional relationship with Jack Hunter lays bare the anthropological roots of the debate on the political right over the future of its relationship to America. For many decades, foundational theorists on the right have contended sharply over a dangerous question: does justice require, and the Constitution permit, a missionary and constabulary approach by the federal government toward the spread and enforcement of equality? Will Wilkinson believes that an honest reckoning with the damage inequality does to liberty will cause someone on the right to abandon that political ground. But Harry Jaffa and other tremendously influential people on the political right have put the sacred federal pursuit of equality at the very heart of Republicanism, where Lincoln installed it so long ago.
Obviously, many Republicans today disagree with Jaffa and his allies (who included neoconservatives!). But that's the point: the political right is disunited because it is disunited on what obligations are created for American government on account of what defines our experience of being human. Domenech homes in on the issue when he discusses the "culture clash" problem facing libertarian populism: the relationship between some otherwise closely-aligned libertarians and Christians is antagonistic to say the least, because they feel themselves differ so profoundly on anthropological matters. For Jaffa, America's official interpretation of that experience is codified in the Declaration of Independence. That may be so. But today, Americans speak in a language different enough from Thomas Jefferson's that we might consider talking about our anthropology in a different way.
In fact, the urgency of an anthropological conversation is underscored by the fact that what's a stumbling block on the right is a stumbling block for America more broadly. Not even Republicans can agree on what experiences define our human being -- much less all of us together! Republicans are attacked as the party of mean people, and Republicans are divided politically, and America is divided politically, because Republicans and Americans lack a shared anthropology. Libertarian populism might make good policy and good political sense, but critics like Ponnuru are right to warn that this is not much to cheer about if it doesn't move and inspire a very large portion of Americans.
Alas, Ponnuru doesn't seem to recognize the anthropological character of the challenge he, too, faces. "The defect of libertarian populism," he writes, "is that it would do more to put Republicans on record against the collusion of big government and big business than in favor of policies that would help most people. And while both of these things are politically important, the latter is more so." Unfortunately, Republicans cannot win a contest with Democrats on this ground -- not exactly because Democrats do help people or want to help people more than Republicans, but because, as we have known since Tocqueville, the kind of anthropology that rules in a democratic age if left unchecked always leads people to seek salvation from government more and more utterly. Fortunately, Nick Gillespie has recaptured the kernel of this insight, observing that distrust in government actually breeds greater demand for more government. We see this in Detroit, where the failure of all kinds of governance has thrown the people ever more abjectly at the feet of government.
For Tocqueville, people like us -- living in an era when it has become obvious that the definitive thing about us is how similar we all are to each other as humans -- two competing anthropologies rise to the fore. According to the first, being human is defined by being in servitude to a heavenly master. According to the second, being human is defined by being in servitude to an earthy master. For people like us, today, that seems to tee up the same old culture clash. But Tocqueville himself made some little-noticed and very pregnant remarks in Democracy in America about just what kind of anthropology would suffice to steer us, in the fragility of our freedom, away from servility before the state and its human masters. He speculated that belief in an immortal soul, or even reincarnation, might be enough.
I offer a rather different answer to the same question. I think it's an answer that can work not just for Republicans who want to take a shared stand together for the betterment of humankind, but for any particular American who feels that way too. You may be on the edge of your seat about what this anthropology might be. You might be slumped pretty far back in your seat with skepticism and cynicism. Either way, the first hurdle for us to clear is a shared recognition that we should choose not to limit ourselves to a policy conversation -- and that without a deeper conversation about what anthropological vision can capture all our imaginations, all the wonkery in the world is largely a waste of some very precious time.
