Reading Marxism of the Right, in the March 14, 2005 issue of The American Conservative, by Robert Locke [respek to my bud Tony Diehl], I could not get much past the first paragraph without feeling the impulse to annotate.
Opens Locke, “Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs.”
Wow. In the first two sentences, he equates “the ambitious” with hippies. Wow. Yeah, I always lump together those who “want to make more money” with those who want to “have more sex, or take more drugs.” (What hetero male does not “want to have more sex,” by the way? Are “conservatives” eunuchs?) What could inspire Locke to mix the hippies and the yuppies is a mystery. If conservatives were neither hip nor successful, I could understand this mistaken equation… but I didn’t think they were such professional failures and losers.And, he makes the the mistake of conflating rights with right. As libertarians tire of pointing out, to say you have a right to do something (like drugs, hedonistic sex, … or make money) does not mean it is morally right to do so. One has a right to insult one’s mother, but in most cases it is immoral.
And the first sentence of the second paragraph: “There are many varieties of libertarianism, from natural-law libertarianism (the least crazy) to anarcho-capitalism (the most)….” Here he acts as if these categories are mutually exclusive. But a goodly (to use a word sure to please paleocons) number of anarchists are anarchists because they adhere to a strict version of natural rights. Is Locke confused, or would plowing ahead through the rest of the paragraphs clear it up for me? I guess I will never know.
Coda:
Dan McCarthy apparently has a rejoinder to Locke (though not mentioning him by name), In Defense of Freedom. And I had a few more thoughts on Locke’s article (I couldn’t help skimming a bit more of it). Jonah Goldberg made some similar fallacious comments about libertarianism; I took him to the woodshed in On Jonah Goldberg’s Youthful Phase. Locke does have some good insights, but they apply mostly, to the extent they are correct, to left-libertarians and/or to the way we express ourselves. When we talk about laws, we are saying we oppose a given law because it violates rights. We might think the behavior prohbitied is immoral but we don’t bother to mention it because … the immorality of the behavior wrongly prohibited is simply not relevant to the view that the (possibly immoral) behavior should not be criminalized. So outsiders, who are used to equating the illegal with the immoral, think we are all libertines. Especially for paleo-type libertarians, this is certainly not true.
11:39 pm on March 7, 2005
