Editor's Note: Jonah will be back to filing your favorite "news"letter next week. In the meantime, we editorial lackeys thought we'd share his terrific piece from NR's 60th anniversary issue, "Fusionism, 60 Years Later." An excerpt is below: 'Who lost the libertarians?" It's a question you hear a lot from conservatives of late. The reason should be obvious to anyone who has followed the conservative movement's internecine intellectual frictions over the last decade -- or decades. Self-described libertarians are a minority, even among the ranks of people one could properly describe as libertarian. On many, or even most, contentious public-policy issues -- economics, gun rights, health care, free speech, regulation, constitutional interpretation -- most support for the libertarian position actually comes from people who describe themselves as conservatives. In other words, conservatives tend to be libertarian, but libertarians tend not to be conservative. And self-described libertarians are very keen on emphasizing that distinction. They justifiably point to the areas, many of them quite significant, where the bulk of libertarians depart from the conservative consensus: foreign policy, drugs, gay rights, etc. Of course, the demarcations between these different camps are not hard and clearly defined. Many conservatives now -- and even more in the past -- hold the same convictions as libertarians on foreign policy and drugs and, to a lesser extent, on issues such as gay rights. But as a generalization, libertarians want to have their own identity, separate and distinct from that of conservatism. They're a bit like the Canadians you meet abroad who go to almost obsessive lengths to show everyone that they aren't American. Some conservatives feel the same way about libertarianism, but few are passionate about it. Conservative figures from William F. Buckley Jr. (who described himself in the subtitle of one of his last books as a "libertarian journalist") and Frank Meyer to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, straight down to our own Charles C. W. Cooke, author of the recent Conservatarian Manifesto, have worked assiduously to find common ground and common purpose with our libertarian comrades. Most famously, Meyer created an entire philosophical project called "fusionism" to explain why conservatism and libertarianism should remain joined at the hip. In brief, he said that a virtuous society must be a free society, because acts not freely chosen are not virtuous. National Review remains an essentially fusionist enterprise. But while it's easy to find conservatives who want to keep this marriage going, it's much harder to find prominent libertarians who do. As a matter of cultural identity, the libertarian outlook on conservatism is "We're just not that into you." In the last decade, Brink Lindsey, a scholar at the Cato Institute, tried to defenestrate conservative–libertarian fusionism in favor of what a headline writer at The New Republic dubbed "liberaltarianism." Save at the margins, the uneuphonious effort failed, largely because the animosity that some libertarians hold for conservatism pales in comparison with the outright revulsion that progressives hold for any libertarianism distinguishable from libertinism. A house of anti-statists and statists is obviously one divided against itself, and cannot stand. But the friction between libertarians and conservatives is nothing new. There has never been a time when libertarians (or "individualists," as they used to be called) did not struggle against what they perceived to be unjust shackles. The history of National Review is in significant part a story of William F. Buckley Jr.'s trying to herd a bunch of cats . . . *** Read the full piece here. |
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