President Bush is pretty much universally abhorred by libertarians, and his popularity among the general public has fallen greatly. This is as it should be. With all the focus on Bush, though, I think the more important lesson he teaches is being neglected.
Libertarians are quite rightly hostile to the idea that massive state power is fine as long as it’s in the “right” hands. The widespread acceptance of that idea by the general public serves to make statism largely invulnerable to attack; all of the state’s numerous evils can be blamed on specific malign individuals, without ever considering the possibility that state power itself is the root of the problem.
For this reason, I think that the widespread focus on George Bush is counterproductive. It’s not that he doesn’t deserve the anger directed his way; he certainly does, but Bush and his warmonger buddies are only branches of the tree, not the trunk or roots. My concern is that focusing on Bush will lead people into the assumption that he is somehow uniquely wicked, thus making it easier for them to go on comfortably believing that massive government power in general is not objectionable.
This, I think, makes it easier to understand why Bush drives so many people on the statist left, especially pundits and commentators, into a frothing rage: Bush-hatred is “safe,” in that it allows one to rail against those in authority without ever questioning the general statist consensus. It’s a comfortable way to feel and seem like a rebellious "truth to power" sort of person without challenging the real pillars of control and oppression – a handy thing if, like so many liberals, you aspire to someday do the controlling and oppressing yourself. As long as Bush is there to be held up as Evil Incarnate, liberals don’t have to consider the possibility that Bush is the result of past expansions of state power, expansions people on the left have often themselves supported in the past and will themselves exploit in the future.
Something similar happened under the Clinton administration. The election of 1994 was the first one I took an interest in, and I can still remember my excitement when the Republicans swept into Congress – now, I thought, the growth of the state will be reversed! It didn’t happen, of course. There were several reasons for that, but part of the problem was that conservatives became so focused on Clinton personally that the statism that made Clinton’s evils possible was ignored. Clinton’s major offenses as a political actor – his police state crimes, his abuse of executive orders, his use of military force abroad without declarations of war – were often disregarded by conservatives in order to focus on the personal offenses of Clinton the man. Even when Clinton’s political misdeeds were attacked, the criticisms only scratched the surface. Consider the Waco massacre: Clinton was rightly condemned for that outrage, but the militarization of law enforcement that made it possible was commented on much less, especially on the "respectable" right.
The result of that focus on Clinton was that most conservatives learned nothing about statism from the Clinton era. Once Bush came along, far too many quickly fell into line in support of Bush’s expansions of state power, however outrageous they may be. As a conservative in the 1990’s, my attention was drawn to the way statism made Clinton’s evils possible, and so I became a libertarian. Others focused on a personality, and so were happy to trade one oppressor for another. Now liberals are at the same crossroads, and seem likely to make the same mistake.
When using the negative example of Bush to argue for libertarianism, our primary method of argument should not be, “Bush did this, which is bad because…,” but rather “Our existing system of government made it possible for Bush to do this, which is bad because….” This is already being done to some extent, of course, but I think it needs to be hammered on more than it is. Otherwise, people who recognize that what Bush has been doing is wrong will respond by simply favoring some slightly different flavor of statist, while doing nothing to address the underlying problem. There is an opportunity here to create and inspire new libertarians, especially among young left-leaning people where anti-Bush sentiment runs high, if we can seize it.
The evils of statism are being dramatically illustrated thanks to Bush, but if Bush and company are focused on as the fount of all evil, people aren’t going to learn the right lesson from the past few years. This is, of course, precisely the result that statists of both left and right would prefer.
April 21, 2007
