War of Words:
Communicating the ideas of liberty while avoiding partisanship in politics.
I have had both the fortune and misfortune of finding Libertarianism and Austrian Economics at a critical time. The ideas of Mises, Rothbard and so many more contemporary thinkers are experiencing a boom, Ron Paul has received a national audience and is winning straw-polls all over the country, and the Internet Communities of Mises.org and LewRockwell.com have seen massive increases in traffic. Mainstream media has been forced to include our viewpoints in discussions ranging from foreign intervention to social programs at home. Again, I see this as both fortune and misfortune and I worry it could spell the end of Libertarianism.
What do I mean by this? After all, as the saying goes, “All publicity is good publicity.” Shouldn’t the expansion of Libertarian ideals be a wonderful thing that we should encourage? Well of course we should be spreading Austro-Libertarian ideals, in fact I contend that very policy is the most important method of creating liberty in our society. In all reality, I believe education is the only way to create an atmosphere of liberty since it is the only method available to us; due to both governmental restrictions and our own principles, namely the non-aggression axiom.
Education, however, is subjective. As Mises says in Human Action “Those writers who consider historical events as an arsenal of weapons for the conduct of their party feuds are not historians but propagandists and apologists.” He continues “They are not eager to acquire knowledge but to justify the programs of their parties.”[1] Every educator represents themselves as a historian, their teachings however, are necessarily biased. The student, whether in a classroom, reading a forum, or watching a mainstream media channel is inherently malleable, they want to absorb new ideas but this exposes them to said bias. Therefore we must occupy the role, not of educator, but of historian. The Libertarian must expose the lies of the ‘propagandists’ and expose the truth of history to the student. However we must expose all lies equally or else we risk the fatality of partisanship. To that end though, we have a decisive advantage.
To paraphrase a number of Austro-Libertarian scholars; Libertarianism is the only philosophy that does not advocate slavery to some degree. Whether it be through taxes, conscription, welfare, or corporatism all other philosophies place the individual as a slave to society. Libertarians stand alone in the pursuit of freedom. We need to use this moral high-ground to our advantage. We cannot fall prey to the petty divisions that have infiltrated American society, Red vs. Blue, Left vs. Right, none of that matters to the Libertarian. We are not fighting for a party, we are fighting for liberty, and what greater cause is there?
The solution to avoiding partisanship is multifaceted, yet deceptively simple. We refocus our knowledge to exposing the faults, not of politicians, but of politics. We do not attack politicians for the beliefs they hold, we attack the positions that let them pursue those agendas. It is of the utmost importance we do not allow the revitalized push towards a free society and a free market be overwhelmed by the ideologues that inhabit the political mess that we call the United States Government. To go into a bit greater detail about how the Libertarian philosophy has wavered let me use two of the most prominently discussed topics of the last few years: The War on Terror and the Health Care Reform bill.
The Iraq war and the overarching War on Terror served as a great boon to the political left, and a
major defeat for the Neo-conservative movement. It also, arguably, was a major factor in the revitalization of the conservative movement away from the ‘Rovian’ nightmare of the Bush administration. None of that should concern the Libertarian, who is against all wars of aggression. The politics of the matter do not concern us, by definition the Libertarian is a non-aggressor and any argument to the contrary is distorting the facts.
Yet this has not always been the case, the Libertarian philosophy is widely being co-opted by the emerging ‘new wave’ of conservatism that hijacked the ‘Tea Party’ movement, which we all know was founded by Ron Paul and Campaign for Liberty long before the recent Neo-Conservative backlash.
Yet we are against this(and any) war regardless of which party is waging it, and that is the crux of my argument. The libertarian needs to extend this logic to every aspect of their persuasions. We cannot allow the foundations of liberty to be corrupted by the same system we are fighting against. In our search for exposure we cannot sacrifice our values even if we are faced with the largest expansion of government power since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The Health Care Reform bill is a bit more volatile, in my opinion, due to the majority of Libertarians originating on the ‘conservative’ side of the false left/right paradigm. The vitriol of the last year has disturbed me to some degree, not because of the anger over this wild expansion of government power, but who it was directed at. Obamacare, Socialist-Nazi’s, Death Panels, the ‘Joker’ image of Obama, and countless others. These ‘buzzwords’ serve no purpose for the Libertarian other than to marginalize our message. This marginalization is self-inflicted, we lump ourselves together with Republican politicians and Conservative pundits and we forget that it is not the politicians that enact these policies, but the government that allows them to do so that we must fight to restrain.
The specific policy is irrelevant, whether it is an expansion of healthcare, the unlawful war in Iraq, or the restriction of Civil Liberties at home, the cause of these gross violations are not the politicians who occupy these positions of power, but the positions of power themselves. Thomas Jefferson once said that “[W]here you of a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control…”[2] We fix this not but removing the men, who will soon be replaced by like-minded individuals, but by removing the concentration of power.
We are at a crossroads in history, we have the chance to change the world for the better. Yet we could lose all that if we succumb to the trivial manipulations of those who seek to preserve the status quo. I cannot state it enough, do not direct your arguments against Barack Obama he is just a man, direct your arguments against the Presidency. The members of Congress are inconsequential, it is the Congress that is the problem. It does not matter who is nominated to the Supreme Court when the Supreme Court as an entity exists today only to expand the power of the federal government over the States. We must stand united in liberty against the transgressions of a corrupt government which would continue to function without pause if every member was replaced today. Only by removing the power of these offices will they cease attracting the worst of individuals, that must be our goal.
Note: Any references to ‘We’ or ‘Us’ is solely representative of those who agree with this authors beliefs and not any insinuation to the beliefs of any other individual including those referenced in this article.
[1]Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A treatise on Economics The Scholar’s Edition (Auburn, AL The Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2008) p. 48.
[2]Thomas DiLorenzo, Hamilton’s Curse ( New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008) p. 21.