The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Brigenbach.
It may seem odd to speak of any problem in the libertarian movement as perennial.
Has the movement existed long enough to be plagued by perennial problems? I think so.
The libertarian movement we know today dates back to the early 1940s.
It is just short of 70 years old.
And I'd say 70 years is plenty long enough for problems not only to develop, but also
to become perennial.
David Bowes of the Cato Institute commented incisively on one such perennial libertarian
movement problem in a piece that ran recently on both the Reason and Cato websites.
For many libertarians, Bose wrote, the road to serfdom is not just the title of a great book, but also the window through which they see the world.
We're losing our freedom, year after year, they think.
They quote Thomas Jefferson, the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
And Jefferson was, of course, right.
There is a sense in which all of American history is the story of how the conservative
reaction to the American Revolution beginning in the 1780s gradually undermined and even
reversed the Revolution's principles and goals.
For a detailed version of this story, see The Decline of American Liberalism by Arthur
E. Kirch, now in a handsome new edition from the Independent Institute and available for
for Sale on this website, www.meses.org.
The short version of the story may be had by reading chapter five of my own much less
ambitious book, Why American History is Not What They Say, An Introduction to Revisionism,
and that's also available on this website, either as a paperback book for sale or as
a free download.
The problem is that when we take this long view, examining individual liberty in the
United States over the past 250 years or so, from the 18th century, shortly after the revolution
was won, to the 21st century, in the era of President Barack Hussein Obama, we see that
the undermining and reversing of the original goals of the revolution is not the full story.
For we see that, overall, Americans are more free, not less free, than Americans were in
the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
In the 18th century, as Bose points out, one American in five was a slave.
In the 19th century, as late as the 1860s, one American in seven was a slave.
Also, in both the 18th and 19th centuries, at least half of all Americans were women,
just as they are today.
And in the words of the libertarian feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor, like the slaves, American
married women in 1848 could not own property, could not sign contracts, could not vote,
could not control their own earnings, could be physically beaten, and could be returned
to their homes by force if they ran away.
More than a hundred years later, as late as the 1960s, the descendants of those 18th and
19th century slaves could be arrested and jailed for sitting in the wrong seat on a
public bus, or for using the wrong restroom or water fountain at a facility they were
required to pay taxes to support.
As late as the 1970s, American women, married or not, could be arrested and jailed for choosing
to End Their Own Pregnancies, or for daring to choose how many hours they wanted to work
in a day or in a week, or for daring to make their own decisions about what kind of work
they wanted to do.
They were subject to special laws limiting the hours they could work and the kinds of
jobs they could accept, laws that applied only to women, not to men.
David Bowes quoted an apposite passage from the 2007 book, The Age of Abundance, written
by his fellow Catoite Brink Lindsey.
The fact is, Lindsey wrote, that American society today is considerably more libertarian
than it was a generation or two ago.
Compare conditions now to how they were at the outset of the 1960s.
Official government discrimination against blacks no longer exists.
Entrepreneurship has beaten the wholesale retreat. The rights of the accused enjoy much better protection.
Abortion, birth control, interracial marriage and gay sex are legal.
Divorce laws have been liberalized and rape laws strengthened.
Pervasive price and entry controls in the transportation, energy, communications and financial sectors are gone.
Income tax rates have been slashed, the pretensions of macroeconomic fine-tuning have been abandoned,
barriers to international trade are much lower, unionization of the private sector workforce
has collapsed.
Of course there are obvious counter-examples, but on the whole it seems clear that cultural
expression, personal lifestyle choices, entrepreneurship and the play of market forces all now enjoy
and a much wider freedom of maneuver.
About a year and a half ago, shortly after the 2008 presidential election,
two editors of Reason Magazine, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch,
looked back at the course of American history since 1971 and came to very similar conclusions.
The contraceptive pill, which gave women unprecedented control over their sexual and reproductive lives,
made legal for married women in 1965, Gillespie and Welch wrote, and in 1971 was on the verge
of being legalized for unmarried women too. And, by the end of the 1970s, the Civil Aeronautics
Board was in the dustbin of history, sharing much deserved space with price controls, the
reserve clause and back-alley abortions. What started out as a decade marred by pointless
in a nutshell, if you take the long view, you have to conclude that where individual
liberty is concerned, things are not getting steadily worse, they're getting steadily better.
And make no mistake, we need to take the long view on questions like this.
For as Ayn Rand used to say, it is earlier than you think.
Though the overall trend is definitely in the right direction, the conservative reactionaries
have won many, many small battles, and have re-established many of the kinds of regulations
and controls the revolution was designed to end.
They have also succeeded in establishing and maintaining for decades many government initiatives
for which no real precedent existed back in the 18th century.
The American people have long been of two minds when it comes to government.
Broadly speaking, they are individualists.
They distrust government and want to diminish its role in their lives.
They certainly don't believe in slavery or in having different rights for men and women.
But when they focus more narrowly on particular government programs, they can see little reason
to oppose very many of them.
They especially like entitlement programs that seem to benefit mostly the middle class.
Social Security and other aid to seniors, federal aid to students, federal aid to small
business.
They paid in all these years, didn't they?
Doesn't the American middle class pay the lion's share of the cost of the U.S. government?
The American people also tend to like government agencies like the CIA and the FBI and government
programs of the kind that are offered as solutions to systemic economic problems, recessions,
unemployment, business and bank failures and so forth.
The people tend to be far too quick to believe that these agencies and programs are working
in this country in our time. The educational job we have ahead of us is too huge. In the
face of an inimical public school system, we have to teach people to understand the
nature of the state and to grasp the lessons of its malignant history. Until they comprehend
the situation, they cannot be expected to adopt a libertarian stance toward it. It is
earlier than you think.
It is far too early, for example, for libertarians to expect to advance their agenda by electing
candidates to public office.
Those few they do manage to elect will be isolated and ineffective in office, surrounded
by unsympathetic and uncooperative statists, unable to accomplish anything.
Until a larger fraction of the American public understands the libertarian idea well enough
The Chief Usefulness to the Movement of Libertarian Political Campaigns will be educational.
This will be true whether the campaigns in question are those of the Libertarian Party
or those conducted entirely outside the LP, like the recent presidential campaign of Republican
Congressman Ron Paul.
Such campaigns should not be undertaken with the goal of electing the candidate.
The candidate, after all, will almost always prove utterly unelectable if he or she rejects
ideological compromise and adopts hardcore, plumb-lined libertarian stances on the issues
addressed in the campaign.
The campaign, therefore, should be undertaken with the goal of educating the public, calling
Paying their attention to the libertarian idea and the libertarian movement.
There is no political shortcut to a free society.
Our primary job is education, not politics, and our victory, when it comes, will come
not in the next election, but in the long run.
Now if our primary job is education, then our primary job is communicating with people,
Prospective recruits, new recruits, and fellow libertarians who still have important things
to learn.
There has been a bit of discussion online recently about exactly how we should talk
to people about libertarianism, especially about how we should talk about it to people
we hope to convert.
It has been suggested, for example, that we avoid the term capitalism, especially when
When we're talking to potential converts whose current orientation politically is left-wing,
I say let a thousand flowers bloom.
If you're eager to spread the word, address people as you think best.
Don't worry about what other libertarians think of what you're doing.
If the tack you decide to take doesn't persuade your chosen audience, maybe the tack some
other libertarian takes will do the trick.
And who knows?
It may be that the tack you take will persuade somebody, possibly even somebody outside the
audience you thought you were speaking to.
Above all, get your ideas out there.
You never know what effect they might have.
All you do know is that if you remain silent, worrying about whether your word choice is
perfect, your ideas will have no effect at all on anyone.
You also know that, in the words of the immortal Kevin Costner film, if you build it, they
will come.
If you get your ideas out there, they will be seen.
They will have impact.
Albert J. Nock, one of the founding fathers of the libertarian movement we know today,
wrote in the Atlantic Monthly nearly 75 years ago about the distinction between the masses
and the remnant.
He wrote that, The mass man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend
the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character
to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct.
And because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they
are called collectively the masses.
The remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and
by force of character are able at least measurably to cleave to them.
The masses are those who are unable to do either.
It is the remnant in Knox's sense that will always be the most fruitful audience for any
libertarian to address, for libertarianism is one of those principles issuing in what
and the Human Life.
It may be the most fundamental and important of all of them.
If you're a libertarian, you definitely want to address the remnant, because they are the
people who, by force of intellect, are able to apprehend these principles, and, by force
of character, are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them.
One of the difficulties in trying to address the remnant, however, is that, in Knox's words,
In any given society the remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity.
You do not know and will never know more than two things about them.
You can be sure of those, dead sure as our phrase is, but you will never be able to make
even a respectable guess at anything else.
You do not know and will never know who the remnant are, nor what they are doing or will
do.
The man who seeks to address the remnant, Nock wrote, may feel confident that the remnant
will find him.
He may rely on that with absolute assurance.
They will find him without his doing anything about it.
He does not need to advertise for them, nor resort to any schemes of publicity to get
If he is a preacher or a public speaker, for example, he may be quite indifferent to going on show at receptions, getting his picture printed in the newspapers, or furnishing autobiographical material for publication on the side of human interest.
If a writer, he need not make a point of attending any pink teas, autographing books at wholesale, nor entering into any specious Freemasonry with reviewers.
He may be quite sure that the remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids.
But only, I would add, if the man or woman who seeks to address the remnant gets his or her ideas
out there, where the remnant can find them. It might also help if those of us who seek to
address the remnant try to avoid teaching false history to our audience, like the idea that
Every day, in every way, things are getting worse and worse and worse with respect to individual liberty.
So let us educate, shall we? Let a thousand flowers bloom.
This is Jeff Riggenbach.
www.fieggen.org