Libertarianism for all

Back to blogging this week, and time for a quick look at the libertarians – not the fake sort, who marry the rhetoric of freedom with a Trumpian politics,* but the genuine believers in individual rights and a society with maximum liberty for all. Back in March I expressed the fear that the former group “may well have tarnished the brand beyond repair,” but suggested that at a time when freedom and democracy were under concerted attack, real libertarians needed to make common cause with their defenders.

Now someone from a different intellectual tradition has arrived at the same point. Cass Sunstein, legal scholar and a giant of American left-liberalism, wrote a couple of weeks ago that he was wrong to have dismissed the importance of libertarianism. He now realises, he says that people like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises “were apostles of freedom.” The return of something like traditional fascism has opened his eyes:

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I did not see that clearly enough, because they seemed to me to be writing against a background that was sharp and visible to them, but that seemed murky and not so relevant to me — the background set by the 1930s and 1940s, for which Hitler and Stalin were defining.

… Hayek and the Mont Pelerins (…) seemed to be fighting old battles, and in important ways to be wrong. With respect to authoritarianism and tyranny, and the power of the state, of course they were right; but still, those battles seemed old.

But those battles never were old.

As he says, echoing a point I’ve made here many times, “Liberalism is a big tent.” In dangerous times, we need as broad an alliance as possible to defend civilisation; we can argue about the fine detail of economic policy some other time.

Sunstein’s words found an echo from the other side. At the libertarian Institute for Justice, Anthony Sanders welcomed his call and acknowledged that his own side has had similar blind spots in the past:

But 2025 isn’t 1991. And although we haven’t changed our principles in those 34 years we realize that highlighting liberalism, the rule of law, and the justice that is part of our namesake is something that makes more sense and is, frankly, more important today.

There’s a philosophical moral here, in the shape of a realisation that classical (or European) liberalism and welfarist (or American) liberalism were never as different as many people made out. But there’s also a political moral about the urgent need for former rivals to work together. Neither author mentions Donald Trump by name, but there’s no doubt about what has made it so vital to, in Sanders’s words, “make common cause for fights that are brewing.”

Which makes the project of those who want to reconcile Trumpism and libertarianism all the more fantastic. So, for example, Scott Hargreaves, director of the Institute for Public Affairs, reposts and praises Sunstein’s piece, apparently oblivious to the contradiction between concern at “watching the world turn to sh*t again” and the shameless promotion of Trump in which the IPA has engaged.

Freedom is a package deal. You can pick and choose different items from the menu, as the varieties of liberalism have done, but the ones that you reject will come back and bite you in the end.

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* For an example of the fake sort you need go no further than Australia’s “Libertarian Party”, whose New South Wales leader, John Ruddick, happily participated in the Nazi-led anti-immigration rally a week ago.