Though a libertarian would disagree with a leftist on most topics, he has to acknowledge that the leftist manages to convince plenty people of his position while the libertarian struggles with the same task. So what is the main advantage a leftist ideology has over a libertarian one besides broad public support? What makes libertarianism so unappealing when compared to other ideologies?
I see two reasons.
The Leftist says: vote for me, and I will feed you (by taking from others), the Libertarian says: be like me, and we will feed ourselves. Apparently, most people prefer to vote to obtain goods, not to work to obtain goods.
Another reason is that leftists promote themselves as caring, selfless people, while libertarians are usually seen as greedy selfish bastards. Nevermind that the leftists provide care by robbing.
It’s not so much that the left managed to convince people, but that it is what people believe initially. I don’t think it’s a wild claim to say that all of you were on the left when you were 10. What we call the political left is simply the beliefs and intuitions we all start out with as children. All you really have to do to be on the left as an adult is to not change your mind.
Libertarians are the best environmentalists out there, I think. I wish we’d leverage that more.
Speak for yourself. I believed in freedom when I was 10. 
Yeah ok, there probably are exceptions. But didn’t you believe that the government should give everyone a free lunch and that environmental regulation is a good thing at 10?
Nope, not really.
AJ,
In “Stuff we can do” you already wrote ideas I had, namely that libertarians should associate with people from other ideologies with similar or identical ideas. Do you know of any efforts besides the mentioned book against war that work under this premise?
To leftists, being controlled is a way of feeling in control.
To libertarians, being free is a way of feeling in control.
It’s kind like how babies prefer to be wrapped up in blankets in order to feel protected, but, when they get older, they prefer not to have someone cluching them 24/7.
It isn’t. Everyone that you talk to has already been anti-libertarianized in school. It’s the default position. I know without any doubt that I would never have picked up communist ideas had I never been in a school classroom. It came entirely from that experience even without explicit political classes.
Someone that is only interested in taking advantage of benefits will admit as much in private. Those that don’t are mobilized by ideology.
Leftists have emotional statist rhetoric on their side, a powerful form of (fallacious) argument if you have a poorly-educated voting public.
Libertarians have decent rhetoric but people have been drugged up with statism so that freedom gets drowned out by the idea of an apotheotic (i.e., god-like) state.
I’ll give the Frank Chodorov answer. People either believe in leaving other people alone or they believe in the need to engineer society to their liking. For the most part, this is innate in a person’s character. The problem for libertarians is that the conservatives have hijacked what ought to be our positioning. The one silver lining here is that some people are repulsed by the actual actions of conservatives and identify with the left even though they are actually not leftists at heart. During the Bush years, I was repulsed by conservatism because of Bush’s violations of the Bill of Rights and because of his war of aggression. I was also economically ignorant and had learned the “government school history textbook” version of economics. I once believed that the minimum wage should be raised to a very high level (that is, I believed the pro minimum wage arguments and carried them to their logical conclusion). I was always capable of disagreeing with the textbooks. For example, I remember reading a story in government school about somebody during the Vietnam War who was trying to decide whether to flee to Canada or go off to war. The story was trying to argue that the “mature” choice was to go off to the war instead of being drafted. I knew then that I was on the side of the draft dodgers. Another example would be the Martha Stewart trial, where I actually came up with libertarian arguments against insider trading laws on my own. I even remember that I disagreed with the history textbook’s glorification of the “Progressives” and that I especially disliked Wilson and the “farmers” who allegedly gave us the income tax!
These were my views during the time when I identified with the left. I actually thought that I was a Lockean and that I believed in the ideas of the Founders and identified those ideas with left-liberalism (even though I believed the Democrats were “centrists” rather than authentic leftists). At that time, I was unwilling to think too deeply about these issues because I was worried about going too far out of the mainstream (Ron Paul running for President set me on the right ideological course).
Was I ever really a leftist? I thought I was, but I don’t believe that I have ever been a genuine leftist. I did support Bush in 2000 (I was very young then, as I wasn’t eligible to vote in a presidential election before 2008) and I actually broke with Bush only after the Iraq War began (I didn’t know anything about the Patriot Act or No Child Left Behind at that point in time). Actually, I am more “socially liberal” today than I was when I identified with the left.
Another contributing factor is that the left controls virtually all of the professions that Hayek labeled “second-hand dealers in ideas.” I don’t remember the full list at this moment, but if we are going to spread libertarianism to the public, we need to take over those professions. In general, 40% of the voter identifies themselves as “conservative” and 20% identify as “liberal.” The other 40% largely are influenced by the media to vote for one party or the other (around 3 quarters of them vote for Democrats because the media, with the sole exception of Fox, is biased toward left-liberalism). One of the things libertarians often talk about is the question of the gender disparity in the movement. There are 2 main reasons for this disparity and they are both rooted in the biological differences between men and women. Women tend to be more apathetic about politics and they also tend to have a socialistic mentality (women are natural collectivists while men are natural individualists). This is extremely controversial in libertarian circles, but it is true (women are also inherently attracted to Keynesian rather than Austrian, as they tend to be more likely to spend money and to run up debt than men). To greatly reduce this particular disparity, we can either change the culture by taking over the professions that are “second-handers in ideas” or individual libertarians can take the initiative for themselves (as Walter Block once recommended).
Of course, part of the left’s appeal is that they just buy the support with government handouts. I believe this explains the reasons why minority groups disproportionately are left-liberals (although there are very few minorities outside the center-left, except for the obvious exceptions). In the case of African-Americans, the left-liberals often seem to have a particuarly intense hatred for black Republicans (Clarence Thomas seems to be hated much more by the left than the other conservatives on the Supreme Court for example). Marco Rubio, the “Latino” Republican Senator, is actually a Cuban-American to use just one example. Other minorities vote for the left due to conformity (Asian-Americans, most of whom live in highly Democratic areas). Still others vote for the left because of bigotry from the Republican Party (Arab-Americans, who used to lean Republican until the Republicans went Islamophobic).
To summarize, I think the lack of appeal of libertarianism is largely a result of conservatism having taken our positioning. There are more people who are innately libertarian than people that are innately leftist. The problem is that most of them think they are conservative. Our 2 goals for the movement need to be 1) taking over the professions that are “second-hand dealers in ideas” and 2) taking over the Republican Party. With the coming fiscal collapse likely to bring down the Welfare-Warfare state, our task is much more attainable today than it would have been in the past. Although libertarians have a tendency to pretend that we are “neither left nor right,” in reality libertarianism is an ideology of the right and is acknowledged as such by almost everybody (with the exception of libertarians that deny this in a ridiculous attempt to pander to the left).
The issue is very simple: free meals. Libertarians and classic liberals don’t provide them and are determined at curbing or eliminating the ones currently provided. Leftists (whatever they call themselves these days including so called Republicans and Conservatives) not only promise to keep the current free meal programs in place, but also to add punch and pie to it. There are also other factors at work.
Take environmentalism: it’s all about forcing somebody else to be greener. Loggers in the Amazonian Forest, Indian car manufacturers, Chinese steel mills… As Statism remarked this has already been highlighted by Chodorov: use the State as a vehicle to force others into behaving as you see fit. The present Global Warming movement is a perfect case: people advocating it always maintain others should make sacrifices to save the Earth while they have lifestyles all of us can only dream about. They aren’t ready to give up their huge cars, their private jets, their vacation houses. Even at lower levels you won’t see Gorettes making sacrifices for the Earth: they won’t ride on a bus or turn off the heater, but are well ready to force an Indian peasant to give up his moped or a Filipino fisherman to trade in his outboard engine for oars. That’s why “developing” countries were so p***ed off at Copenhagen.
And it’s the same thing with Welfare State. The “rich” should shoulder their fair burden. Problem is how the “rich” are defined. If I think “rich” I think about Warren Buffett, Bill Gates or the Quandt family. An advocate of the Welfare State seems to think “rich” is a good 30-40% of the population: in short every shopowner and kulak (sounds familiar?). And he doesn’t seem to care the true “rich” can lobby for favorable legislation or, failing that, simply take their wealth abroad in a completely lawful manner. They can afford to hire the best lawyers and pay any fee without blinking, something most of us can only dream about.
Fear…
…of death.
…of abandonment.
…of uncertainty.
Infuse the above fears into any human and he/she immediately submits to whatever hierarchy/structure/system promises to alleviate them.
Z.
Its the "can"ology argument.
That syndicalist factories CAN benefit their workers, CAN consider environmental and social effects above profits, CAN be kind to kittens and birds.
Its convincing because its intellectual masturbation. Not because its true. After all, people don’t bear the costs of their bad political opinions so why try and get it right?
I blame hormones.
It’s easier to flirt with women if you focus on pretending to be compassionate (in a way that doesn’t involve explaining an economic framework).
Intentions are romantic, only econ geeks care about the economic impact.
It’s true that our progressive rivals benefit greatly from underlying currents favoring their position as a consequence of government involvement in education, and thus raising of children, to say nothing of countless other influences. Even conservatives have more inherent traction in society than us liberals (in the original sense) and libertarians, again because of this same massive socio-poltical system combining government, society, culture, media and other such facets into a set of largely unquestioned norms, if not always the same norms for everybody. I think more critical to their success however, especially on the lower level, is that compared to more practiced libertarians these groups of politicals can be more savvy on average in making the emotional rather than the logical argument.
Obviously good vibrations don’t change the state of the world in and of themselves, but man is not a solely logical machine. Much like fulfilling other desires, we hold onto our beliefs and opinions because we perceive a benefit to our condition in doing so. Whether we’re objectively right or wrong is of little consequence beyond that as long as we can continue to feel good for believing what we do. Furthermore, it’s not simply enough to attack this emotional “argument” directly, since oftentimes this is tantamount hurting someone’s feelings, and no one is in much of a position to agree with you if you deliberately hurt their feelings. However right or wrong a person may be, cold logic alone does not usually trump warmer, softer feelings, and so pathos has been the favored tool of the politican regardless of affiliation to accomplish their ends.
The solution I find then, is to make the case for freedom in both the logical and emotional fashions together, using one to further the other as you carefully assess and probe the emotional argument of the opponent alongside their logical argument. In this the true strength of the freedom message shines through, as to make a consistent case for liberty is perhaps even more emotionally uplifting than it is logically revealing. I’ve combined this two-pronged emotional-logical approach with other strategies and have found drastically improved success in converting my opponents over with it. It’s definitely worth considering as an addition to your reprotoire.
From which of his books is this? If I want to find it, where does he write it?
The majority of people are inherent leftists because they are not near the top of the social status pyramid; thus they blame other people for their failings. Usually, as people get closer to high-status they become more right-leaning; even as they still use leftist ideology to gain status their practical behavior becomes more conservative and authoritarian (Chomsky, Obama, etc.) whereas the ‘real’ leftists are mainly confined to good-for-nothing young pups trying to make the climb themselves.
I really don’t think people are going to be convinced; they don’t hear anything they don’t want to. I think almost every libertarian/individualist is born that way, and they are always vastly outnumbered. Educational resources should be directed at this remnant, not some mass of people whose political views are basically religious in nature and primarily motivated by the desire to appeal to other herdish people.
A lot of it has to do with their ability to stir people’s passions. I write about it here.
“[M]uch of the process by which the doctrine of freedom is to be accepted by the populace has little to do with rationality per se, and more to do with providing conducive conditions for such an acceptance. I have mentioned the use of art, but there are surely other ways by which ‘the word’ can be spread. Humor, for instance.”
I also mention how most people are accustomed to using wrong parts of their brain when contemplating social issues. They are often vulnerable to the fear-mongering of politicians. The ‘fearing’ compartment in the brain is different from that used for reasoning.
Hayek also points out how much of socialism is the application of the ‘tribal’ system in place of the impersonal system of capitalism by which strangers from different countries can benefit one another.