Roderick has posted a reply to my post on Libertarians and the Left (scroll down to “The Ties That Bind” to read Roderick’s response, the post “Alienation, Assignation, and Inflation” also deals with this issue). Roderick’s response focuses on my comments regrading how many libertarians reject leftist talk of patriarchy because of the use of opposition to patriarchy to advance a statist agenda:
“Or does Norm mean that concerns about patriarchy, white supremacy, etc. – unlike antiwar concerns – are intrinsically tied to an anti-market agenda? If so, I deny it; on the contrary, these concerns were originally libertarian concerns, and libertarians’ alienation from such concerns, and from their “left-wing” heritage generally, throughout much of the 20th century is a historical anomaly (resulting, I believe, from the understandable, though to my mind disastrous, libertarian alliance with conservatives against the genuine menace of state socialism).
As Charles Johnson points out in his comments at the Molinari Symposium last month, there may be certain values that, while not “strictly entailed by the non-aggression principle,” are nevertheless “a causal precondition for implementing the non-aggression principle in the real world” because a libertarian society might be unlikely “to emerge, or survive over the long term, or flourish, without the right bundle of commitments.” Moreover, rejection of such values, while not logically inconsistent with libertarianism, might “undermine or contradict the deeper reasons that justify libertarian principles in the first place.” Charles and I have argued previously that opposition to patriarchy is indeed one such value (and it’s not hard to see how our arguments there could be extended to concerns about racism, etc.). The fact that many of those who currently espouse such concerns have an anti-market agenda (or more precisely, an animus against something called “capitalism,” in which genuine free markets and state-sponsored corporate mercantilism are murkily conflated) is no proof that these concerns are inherently un-libertarian, any more than the fact that (switching from left to right) most supporters of tax cuts these days are also supporters of drug prohibition and the like proves that tax cuts are a bad thing”
Of course, tax cuts are not a bad thing just because they are advocated by drug warriors, any more than opposition to war is a bad thing just because communists organize anti-war rallies. The question of opposition to patriarchy is a little different since, in the modern political context, leftist talk of opposing patriarchy it is not a case of a statist advocating a libertarian position but a statist using what may have once been libertarian concerns to expand state power. This is not to suggest that there cannot be a libertarian version of opposition to patriarchy, although I don’t see patriarchy as one of the leading threats to our freedom today. Of course, I welcome further comment on this issue from Roderick and other interested parties
