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Riposte Marxism of the Right? by John
Coleman Libertarianism is not the "Marxism of the
Right," as a critic has recently charged. In fact, it's not an ideology of any
sort. Libertarians want people to run their own lives and society to run itself.
By so limiting its scope, it makes itself compatible with many religions and
philosophies.
Many on the Web have begun to refer to the string of
Lebanese beauties gracing the covers of magazines and newspapers across the
United States as "protest babes." With a mix of determination, drop-dead good
looks, hope, and excitement, these women (and their slightly less photogenic male
counterparts) have come to represent what many are calling "the Arab Spring."
| | John
Coleman is an analyst and writer living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
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They are blossoms in the desert of a despotic region. They are the forerunners
of an Arab renaissance that will finally, hopefully, bring liberation to the
peoples of our oldest civilizations. They are flowers of hope — fragile,
rich, colorful, beautiful, diverse — asserting themselves amongst the weeds
of fascism and coerced privilege. They provide irrefutable proof, as so many did
at Tiananmen Square and in the events that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall,
that if there is one thing more powerful than a wall or a tank or a tyrant it is
the sheer force of human liberty, creativity, passion, and love — the same
force that, seeping through the cracks of the Gulag walls, once led Alexander
Solzhenitsyn to proclaim boldly: One word of truth shall outweigh the
whole world. The Iron Curtain subsequently collapsed under such a heavy
truth — one, in fact, that had been captured two centuries earlier in a
simple, universal, and revolutionary phrase: "All men are created equal and
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. . . ." Robert
Locke recently argued in "The American Conservative" that libertarianism is the
Marxism of the Right. He is wrong. Libertarianism, broadly defined, is nothing
like Marxism. It is an intellectual and political movement, an anti-ideology
that, having vanquished the two greatest ideological threats of the last century,
is poised to affect political and philosophic movements across the spectrum of
belief for centuries to come. And if the Arab spring is any indication, it is the
intellectual and practical force that may finally drive democracy into the hearts
of some of the most undemocratic nations on earth. Locke's fundamental
flaw in attacking what he defined as libertarianism lay in his understanding of
both Marxism and libertarianism. One is an ideology, the other an anti-ideology.
The distinction can be seen in analyzing the definition of ideology laid out in
Peter Lawler's more thoughtful criticism of libertarianism and materialism,
"Communism Today": "The name rightly given to specifically modern lies is
ideologies. An ideology is a form of popular science, and so not a form of real
science. It is a comprehensive and easy to understand account of all that exists.
Ideologies are dogmas that fill the vacuum created by the discrediting of
religious dogma . . . [They] are never personal; we aren't controlled by persons
but forces — such as history or material forces or the economy or
technology. . . [They] make us all seem more soulless and less truly free than we
really are."
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| Marxism is an ideology.
Libertarianism is an anti-ideology. |
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By Lawler's account, Marxism is a pure ideology. Libertarianism is not. In
"History of Political Philosophy," Joseph Cropsey notes that "Marxism presents
itself as a comprehensive account of human life, and not only of human life but
of nature as well." And it is this distinction that first separates the two.
Marxism sought to combine the political, the natural, the human, the
cultural, and the economic in one unified theory, and claimed that utopian
governance and the conquest of nature (the end of history) were both
possibilities once a fundamental understanding of this unified theory guided
political action. But in elevating the abstraction of an impossibly fluid
rationalistic philosophy over the reality of individual human life, he laid the
foundation for the 20th century's greatest monstrosity: the communism of Stalin
and Mao. Contradictions to the theory were not seen as disproof of Marx's
formulation, they were seen as outliers to be slaughtered, obscured, and
cleansed. Placing value only in the material progress of "mankind" and in the
final liberation of human beings from the natural constraints of choice, Marxism
became a real-world creed — a frightening manifestation of the republic of
Plato — that was primarily dangerous because it transcended the abstract to
become reality. Governments acted on these theories. People internalized them.
And the world was transformed. But Locke would have us believe that
libertarianism is cut from the same cloth: "Free spirits, the ambitious,
the ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive
political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should
be the sole role of ethics and government (emphasis mine). Libertarianism
offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains,
like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent
formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in
American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole or
society. . . "This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the
Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely
on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion
that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism." To be fair
to Mr. Locke, his analysis continues for several pages, but it is here, in his
initial formulation of both Marxism and libertarianism, that it runs wildly
astray. First, I find it hard to believe that anyone who has read Marx
would actually define Marxism as "the delusion that one can run society purely on
altruism and collectivism"; but granting his case, I know of no one that would
define libertarianism as the "delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness
and individualism." At the very heart of libertarian belief is the idea that no
one should run society, but that societies work best when communities, families,
businesses, and individuals are free to run themselves within the confines of
civility, and without the threat of violence for purely intellectual differences.
Ideologues run societies; libertarians, as Hayek would admonish, demote these
ideologues, relying on the passions and dreams of individuals rather than on the
intellectual permutations and perversities of a distinguished few. And it is
revealing that Locke cannot remove himself from a construct in which intellectual
movements must be pure, and must force their beliefs on others. This is certainly
the definition of ideology, but it is the primary point at which libertarianism
separates from ideology.
| Libertarianism recognizes
that real differences in morality do exist, and that they are vitally important.
It emphasizes a system that respects these differences in the hope that conflicts
may be resolved nonviolently. |
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Marxists need a top-down implementation of Marxism, in the form of communism,
because the entire system relies upon impersonal forces trumping individual
preferences. Just like fascism, it demands rigorous adherence to rules for the
execution of its societal plan. Libertarianism and classical liberalism,
on the other hand, demand nothing of the sort, and this is primarily because the
foundation of libertarianism is not a holistic philosophy of mankind. Hearkening
back to Lawler's guidelines, it is not an "impersonal" system, but a hodgepodge,
a political framework designed to safeguard the personal from the coercion of the
few. Far from making each person feel "more soulless and less truly free than we
really are," its essential dogmas — dignity, political autonomy, mutual
respect — place liberty and humanity at the forefront of all human behavior,
emphasizing the very basic fact that politics is not everything, and that a safe
and civil society is merely a vehicle for deeper human development. And
while Locke would have us believe that libertarianism proposes a comprehensive
program for government and ethics, nothing could be farther from the
truth. It is proper to note that libertarianism demands some level of
political obeisance to individual preference; but it never proposes the kind of
moral nihilism that Locke claims as its primary motive. Again, if
ideologies are holistic conceptions of humanity and nature, then libertarianism
is the opposite. Recognizing the contradictions and individualistic longings
within people, it attempts to create a political system in which one moral
framework may win over another through persuasion rather than force. It
recognizes that real differences in morality do exist, and that they are vitally
important, to the point that they sometimes lead to violence and coercion; and it
emphasizes a system that respects these differences in the hope that conflicts
may be resolved nonviolently. It is a political philosophy designed to
protect personal philosophies. If you want further proof of its decentralized and
wholly unideological formulation, try to find two people who define their
libertarianism in the same way. They don't exist, which is why Locke was forced
to establish a perverse straw man as his libertarianism instead of the diverse
mosaic of beliefs and actions that has for centuries comprised the philosophies
of free markets and small government. Libertarianism is not an ideology
because libertarians are content to make government smaller piece by piece. Those
who love liberty do not have to agree on every issue of government or morality.
They do not need armies or prison camps to win the war of ideas — they just
need a few courageous men and women to step to the forefront when real ideologies
and ideologues threaten to undermine human dignity. Despite their personal
beliefs and political preferences, they refuse the government the right to
degrade their souls and their rights in order to shape culture, government, or
society to their liking.
| Locke must resort to
fear-mongering — invoking "Free spirits, the ambitious, the ex-socialists,
drug users, and sexual eccentrics" — because in the absence of such straw
men his readers might see the real faces of libertarianism.
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Locke must resort to fear-mongering — invoking "Free spirits, the
ambitious, the ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics" — because
in the absence of such straw men his readers might see the real faces of
libertarianism. Not stereotypes, but people. They might see Martin
Luther King Jr. standing defiantly on the top step of the Lincoln Memorial and
denying an ideology of racial hatred the right to crush his dream. They might see
Patrick Henry, who coined the phrase "Give me liberty, or give me death!" planted
in front of the House of Burgesses, shouting to his oppressors, "If this be
treason . . . make the most of it!" They might see Gandhi passively enduring his
own degradation or Christ professing, "Render unto Caesar what it Caesar's, and
unto God what is God's" — because in a world destined to fall short of
Utopia, He knew, as Solzhenitsyn did, that "one word of Truth might outweigh the
whole world." And they might see the same ageless struggle in the flawless
visage of a Lebanese "protest babe." Because great ideas are not confined to
so-called "great men," nor are they the product of universities or of political
caucuses. They are the natural outgrowth of billions of human souls, young and
old, thirsting for a birthright of freedom that has languished for centuries
under those "who know better," longing for that moment when real human potential
can be realized and unleashed. In his essay, "Liberalism in the New
Millennium," Mario Vargas Llosa wrote: "For liberals, the war for the progress of
liberty in history is, above all else, an intellectual battle, a struggle of
ideas. The Allies won the war against the Axis, but that military victory did
little more than confirm the superiority of a vision of man and society that is
broad, horizontal, pluralist, tolerant, and democratic over a vision that was
narrow-minded, truncated, racist, discriminatory, and vertical. The
disintegration of the Soviet empire before the democratic West validated the
arguments of Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin
concerning the open society and the free economy, and invalidated the fatal
arrogance of ideologues like Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and Mao Zedong, who were
convinced that they had unraveled the inflexible laws of history and interpreted
them correctly with their proletarian dictatorships and economic centralism."
Libertarianism, at base, is not an ideology. It is the enemy of ideology,
but like Marxism it has the power to change the world on the basis of a few basic
ideas, and if small battles against the drug war and sodomy laws accompany the
larger war on autocracy and state oppression, let that be the case. The price of
liberty, after all, is vigilance — even in the smallest and most
controversial of things. Locke makes a number of good points about the
dangers of materialism and moral relativism, but he would do well to address
these issues separately and realize the more diverse nature of "libertarianism"
— not a school of thought or political party, but a broad-based and hopeful
core of ideas. Perhaps then, in his concern for what he terms "the Marxism of the
Right," he would look around to see that the anti-ideology he describes was a
social force of power, beauty, and strength long before Marx published his
manifesto. It battled and outlasted his movement, and now, with its emphasis on
the importance of human liberty regardless of race, culture, or creed, it is
washing over yet another region in this — the slow awakening of a global
spring.
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