Libertarians vs democracy, again

I find it’s almost twelve years since, in the early days of this blog, I wrote a post on Rand Paul, the quasi-libertarian Republican senator from Kentucky, and his odd scepticism about democracy. I generalised from this into a theory about the supposed incompatibility between limited government and democracy, which I dismissed as a fiction that had been promoted for different reasons by both left and right:

There’s a conflict between human rights and unlimited govern­ment, for sure: if a government has to respect people’s rights, then that’s a limitation on its powers.

But within the limits set by constitutions, courts and the rest, such a government can still be demo­cratic. Indeed it’s very desirable that it should be, not just because democracy is good in itself (although I think it is) but because democratic governments have a much better record than authori­tarian ones in respecting their constitutional limits.

Since then, the schism has deepened between actual libertarians, who believe in freedom for everyone, and the ersatz sort, whose solicitude is reserved mostly for a favored group (usually rich white men) and whose politics veers towards Trumpism. Unfortunately the latter have dominated most of the discourse, and may well have tarnished the brand beyond repair.

But some of the former group are not giving in. Philosopher Matt Zwolinski, or the Bleeding Heart Libertarian as his substack is known (he formerly ran a blog of the same name), takes up the topic this week in a very fine essay that tries to both understand the libertarian hostility to democracy and explain why it’s so wrong-headed. For varying reasons, he says, libertarians

are all too ready to hand over the keys to a “liberal dictator” who promises to make government smaller and more rational. Especially if that dictator can portray himself as a Randian superman – the smartest guy in the room who is not afraid to speak truth to power and who will not sacrifice his individuality under pressure from the woke mob.

But if you give unchecked power to anyone, they’re going to use it for their purposes, which probably won’t agree with yours. And that’s when you discover that those checks and balances were there for a reason. If you assume the autocrat will always be on the side of truth and justice, autocracy isn’t a problem – but that’s because you’ve assumed away everything that makes politics hard.

Zwolinski puts it like this:

The problem with all of these anti-democratic arguments is not that they are wrong, exactly. The criticisms of democracy are valid. It really is unjust and inefficient, at least a lot of the time. The problem, of course, is that all the other systems are worse. It’s easy enough to imagine a system that might perform better. But constitutional democracy has a pretty impressive track record of actually delivering the goods when it comes to securing the blessings of peace, prosperity, and liberty. Democratic constraints undoubtedly limit the ability of well-intentioned, smart people to make sweeping reforms that make all our lives better. But they also limit the ability of those same well-intentioned, smart people (not to mention their less benign or intelligent fellows) to make all our lives remarkably worse.

Zwolinski thinks that the state will always be necessary to protect against concentrations of private power. I disagree: I think free individuals would do a better job, because the state is always going to be prone to being subverted to serve the ends of oligarchy. But for now, that dispute is academic. The Trumpist “libertarians” are not anarchists, except somewhere in the weird recesses of their own minds; they have no intention of dismantling the web of legal privileges on which the oligarchs’ power and wealth depend.

In the world as we find it, the choice is between democracy and dystopia. Libertarians, more than anyone, should realise the importance of that choice and, for all democracy’s faults, should stand firm against those who wish to destroy it.