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Grant Me Freedom and Small Government — But Not Yet
da mihi castitatem et continentam, sed noli modo — St Augustine
Ricochet contributor Rachel Lu wrote an article in the FEDERALIST yesterday, taking the left-anarchist wing of the libertarian movement to task for wanting to dissolve the bonds of family and community. At least I think that is who she is attacking — it is never quite clear who actually holds the views she disagrees with (although she almost implies it is Ben Domenech). Nevertheless, the core of her argument is that, yes, freedom is great and all, and small government is a fine idea in theory, but until a strong conventional morality is re-established in society they are just too dangerous.
Small government will not succeed unless people have a strong ability to govern their own affairs. That requires a culture that provides people with clear norms and expectations, and replaces the hard and impersonal boundaries of law with the softer forces of social approval and sanction. What we need, in short, are traditional morals.
I don’t think Lu ever explicitly says that the state — and, by the logic of her argument, it must be the not-small state — should be the vehicle for fixing the culture, but it is implied by everything she says.
[N]eutrality [ed. which I take to mean ‘state neutrality’] [in the culture war] won’t work either, at least if we’re thinking about the broader conservative outlook. All conservatives agree that government should be smaller than it is. But the culture also needs to recover its moral bearings if freedom is to have a chance.
This view seems rooted in a conception of big government as a mechanism detached from the culture war, so that all it takes is the right set of policies to animate the vast bureaucratic apparatus and the decline of civil society will be reversed. Thus Lu takes the small-government reasoning (which she rejects) to be:
The main reason culture wars have reached such a fever pitch is because the state is too big. If we can limit the size of the state, then people can simply live as they like without settling hotly contested moral questions.
But there are those who would argue quite differently. The reason we have a society of atomized individuals is precisely because big government inevitably accrues power at the expense of family and community. Big government is a player in the culture wars, has its own side, and — by its own ineluctable logic — dissolves the conventional morality Lu would like to see restored.
In short, small government is not a way of surrendering in, or stepping away from, the culture wars, but the indispensible first step in winning them.
Add into the balance the undeniable fact that, in the big government we already, the apparatchiki are all on the other side. One can but conclude that this attempt to smuggle big government ‘conservatism’ back on to the agenda under the ‘libertarian moment’ flag will do much for the government part of the equation, and, like all the attempts before it, nothing for conservatism.
Image Credit: Flickr user penguincakes.
Published in General
But the culture thinks that it does require it, and therefore keeps voting for it. They certainly want it like a junkie wants his drugs. How then to deal with it?
Business claims it wants smaller government, but pushes for regulations (with all their attendant regulations) to strangle competition.
Farmers claim they want smaller government but demand subsidies and price supports.
Parents claim they want smaller government but keep demanding tuition assistance for colleges.
Seniors claim they want smaller government but demand transfer payment incomes.
On aggregate then, the culture still demands larger government… for everyone else.
Sorry, Genefrei. You’re right, that’s not what I wanted to say. It won’t help if libertarians join in the efforts *to destroy cultural connections and traditional mores*. My kids interrupted me and I didn’t finish the sentence the way I meant to.
While all of that is true, my point is I live in a micro-cultural far superior to the one that forces me to live under a disruptive state. I don’t need it, want it, and it’s not morally required for me to help others see the light. I want to help others, but that’s beside the point. They are the ones infringing on me; it’s not my responsibility to fix my oppressors, though it seems to be a(n impossible) requirement.
I run a business and am forced to confront the larger culture daily in regulations, employee attitudes, taxes, corruption, etc. I cannot isolate myself or my business without closing it down. I have a vested interest in seeing it fixed, just as I did in my Homeowners’ Association.
That’s a good point. I just reject the premise that I practically don’t deserve freedom from government unless I do something to change the culture.
I’m finding it difficult to jump into this conversation as neither side is wrong depending on how their views are explicitly stated, and what qualifiers they add to their various arguments.
Uh huh. Spineless as usual, Frank.
RINO SQUISH!
Interesting that your examples are about big business and/or the middle class. While these folks will lobby and/or bribe their congresscritters, they are unlikely to take to the streets to pillage and burn.
I prescribe cold turkey.
You guys could help by saying something without thinking it through first. Dawkins gave me 1450 words yesterday because of his verbal diarrhea.
Well, I cited what is usually considered our “base”. If we cannot get our own side to vote for us we’re in trouble. We need to actually win, and to win… well, can we actually win on a “cold turkey” campaign?
We’re on a strict regimen of rhetorical Imodium. Try Huffpo or the comments section on Youtube.
I don’t consider myself socially conservative, but I do think that the preservation of small government requires a morality consistent with it. My concern is not that people will suffer because they are unprepared for the responsibility that goes with a free society.
Think for a moment of the Egyptian election. After complaining about the repression under Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptians go and elect the Muslim Brotherhood in large numbers, which proceeds to make them less free.
It’s a bit of an extreme example, but it illustrates a worst case scenario version of the problem. You can make people free, but they have to choose to want to remain free. My fear is that without the proper moral foundation, even if we could restore small government, people will eventually go back to looting the treasury and regulating as much of civil life as possible.
With respect to the libertinism problem, I think the solution is prioritizing how we shrink government. For example, I am reluctant to de-regulate drugs when I still have to pay the cost for the medical treatment of junkies.
We can fight over the exact order, but there is probably some order or plan where people who wish to be libertines do so with the knowledge that the government won’t be there to protect them from their mistakes.
Otherwise, we are likely to be only libertarian enough to let people do what they want, but not libertarian enough to let people feel the consequences of their mistakes.
Yet “A vs not-A” is the only meaningful distinction that can be drawn. If words have definitions, then a thing is either meant by that word or it isn’t. A thing is either a member of a set or it isn’t.
This is where I’m going with my crusade “against” libertarians. Libertarians can be divided into conservative or not conservative, and I say that (so far) the discriminant is support for a morally normative society, not just acceptance of what apparently cannot be changed (sigh), but support. I’m not against most libertarians; quite the contrary. Instead I claim most of them, on the grounds that they are actually conservatives driven off the reservation by a hideously mis-managed party.
So often in these comments, I come across the word “morality,” and I know that what is meant is sexual abstinence. In my mind, there are about a thousand qualities that go into morality, starting with honesty, loyalty, responsibility, charity, empathy, and a sense of duty. Not one of these qualities – not one – requires sexual abstinence. Nor does a single one of these qualities require big, intrusive, coercive government. Not one.
You worry about children without two parents? Fine, so do I. Pass out lots and lots of birth control. Problem solved, to the extent it can be.
You want a society where everyone practices chastity except in marriage? Well, there are a lot of Islamic states that would be glad to oblige you. But not me. Not here. Keep your burkas, your scarlet letters, and your “morality” state.
It’s a lot cheaper than incarceration.
For what it’s worth, I note that the picture I had chosen to accompany the post, before deciding that any picture was superfluous, was the below:
As for the tags (does anyone use tags? can they be used?), I chose ‘No Tag,’ because I don’t really get tags, and ‘Oi Oi Oi’ because of this:
We already do pass out lots and lots of birth control. Unwed pregnancies are now epidemic. When birth control was not available, illegitimacy was not nearly the problem it is now.
And what caused this destruction? Did people all over America just wake up one day and say, “I think I don’t want to be moral anymore.”?
No offense, but if you’re a guy (and I think you are), of course sexual self-control doesn’t loom as large in your moral life as it does for the other half of the population. Why would you worry about the cost of sexual adventures as much as a woman would, when your biology doesn’t impose as heavy a cost on them as women’s biology does? Not that anyone is to blame for this difference in cost between the sexes, unless you feel like blaming nature herself – and where’s the point in that?
Neither does believing that sexual self-control is a virtue. People can believe in sexual virtues without wanting to get the government involved.
Yes, I’m a guy. Which means that I have much less control over whether I sire a child than the other half of the population. And since I would never, ever, ever abandon a child, it did indeed weigh on me when I was single.
If someone (male or female) wants to believe it is a virtue to remain celibate before marriage, power to them. But I don’t have to share that belief, and I don’t. I have many regrets in my life, but the sexual relationships I had before I met my wife (and the 5 years my wife and I spent living together before marriage) don’t even come close to being among them. And I don’t much appreciate being told how immoral I am because of that.
Without commenting on the morality of sex without marriage, I think all people engaging in immoral behavior don’t much appreciate being told how immoral it is. Not a terribly interesting fact.
Yeah, well, I understand that. Just because I think a belief is good enough to advocate for doesn’t mean I expect every other basically good person to share it.
You would have to do a lot worse than that in order for me to consider you a basically immoral person. Most of us have ideals about what is good, and most of us fail to wholly live up to them. An ideal about sex isn’t any different. Why should I look down on you, when I know my own moral failings? If you want me to think of you as a bad person, you’ll have to try harder.
If I don’t live up to my own moral standards, that is a failing. If I don’t live up to someone else’s moral standards, that is irrelevant. Of course, if I don’t have moral standards, that is sociopathy. Anyway, yours is an odd argument for a radical libertarian to make.
The thing about Utopians, whether they be Marxists or SoCons, is that they do expect every other basically good person to share their beliefs. That, and only that, is my objection in this thread.
It all starts when someone thinks the have the one and only Truth, whether they call it “natural law” or “categorical imperative” or “scientific dialectical materialism.”