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|
Libertarians: The Enemy Within
Send Lawyers,
Guns & Money
31 March 1999
Libertarians: The Enemy
Within
by C.J. Carnacchio
 When
Napoleon was asked upon whom he would most like to wage war, the
vertically-challenged dictator replied, “My allies.”
With this in mind I would like to turn my intellectual guns on
the libertarians — the so-called “allies” of
conservatives.While superficially conservatives and libertarians
have a political alliance based on a mutual support of the free
market and opposition to the omnipotent State, philosophically we
are mortal enemies.
The philosophical war between conservatives and
libertarians began two hundred years ago when the first
aristocratic French head was placed on a pike as declaration of
war to prescriptive society. Libertarians are the disciples of
the Enlightenment and staunch supporters of the French
Revolution. They are the bastard children of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and Thomas Paine.
Conservatives, on the other hand, are the
disciples of the eighteenth-century British statesman Edmund
Burke. It was his fiery diatribe against the French Revolution,
Reflections on the Revolution in France , that gave conservatives
their philosophical substance for the next two centuries. Burke
railed against the atrocities of the Jacobin revolutionaries as
well as Enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau, whom he viewed
as responsible for the revolution.
Unfortunately, most modern-day conservatives and
libertarians are ignorant about this 200 year old quarrel. Most
believe the alliance based on superficial common interests is
sound political practice. But the conservatives’ pact with
the libertarians has been most harmful to the cause of true
conservatism as expounded by Burke. More often than not you hear
so-called conservatives constantly singing the praises of the
free market and stressing individualism rather than speaking
about tradition and the spirit of community. The libertarians
have so polluted the intellectual waters of true conservatism
with their ideological filth that many conservatives now have
trouble distinguishing between the two. In light of this, I would
like take this opportunity to remind my fellow conservatives of
the extreme philosophical chasms which have always separated
conservative man from libertarian beast.
The most fundamental difference between
conservatism and libertarianism is one of ideology.
Libertarianism is an ideology based upon abstract ideas and
doctrines such as the free market, absolute liberty, and radical
individualism. The libertarian foolishly believes that if his
abstract ingredients are properly mixed within the social
cauldron, an earthly utopia will bubble forth.
Conservatism, as H. Stuart Hughes declared, is
the negation of ideology. Ideology is founded upon abstract ideas
which possess no relation to reality, whereas conservatism is
founded upon history, tradition, custom, convention, and
prescription. As Russell Kirk put it, “[C]onservatism...is a
state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at civil
social order. The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a
body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological
dogmata.” The conservative puts his faith in the wisdom of
his ancestors and the virtue of experience, rather than the
abstract jargon of “sophisters, calculators, and
economists.” He knows that there are no simple political
formulas to solve all the world’s troubles.
Next, conservatives and libertarians disagree
over what binds civil society. Libertarians view civil society as
something artificial — a dissoluble agreement made to
furnish individual self-interest. In their repugnant view,
society is a “partnership in things subservient only to the
gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable
nature.” Society is merely a machine with interchangeable
and separable parts, says the libertarian.
In contrast, the conservative declares that
society is not a paltry economic agreement or a mechanical
device, it is a spiritual and organic entity. The conservative,
imbued with the spirit of Burke, sees society as a partnership
between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born – a
community of souls. Each social contract in each particular state
“is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal
society, linking the lower and higher natures...”
It is not true that the legitimacy of the state
is dependent solely upon tacit consent, as the libertarians would
have us believe. The social contract’s legitimacy is the
work of history and traditions which go far beyond any single
generation. The present is not free, as political rationalists
tell us, to redesign society according to abstract doctrines or
theoretical dogma. As Russell Kirk put it, “Society is
immeasurably more than a political device ... If society is
treated as a simple contraption to be managed on mathematical
lines, then man will be degraded into something much less than a
partner in the immortal contract that unites the dead, the
living, and those yet to be born, the bond between God and
man.”
The next philosophical issue at which
conservatives and libertarians cross swords is the concept of
liberty. Libertarians believe that liberty is the first priority
of any society. But the liberty they value so highly is solitary,
unconnected, individual, selfish liberty. Theirs is an abstract
liberty divorced from order and virtue. The libertarian views
liberty as a good thing in and of itself and constantly strives
to maximize it, no matter the cost.
The conservative believes that order is the first
priority of society, for it is only within the framework of an
enduring social order that a true and lasting liberty may be
attained. To the conservative, the only liberty is “a
liberty connected with order: that not only exists along with
order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without
them.” When considering the effects of liberty, the
conservative hears Burke’s words ringing in his ears:
“The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do
what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do,
before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into
complaints.”
Individualism is the next battlefield on which
conservatives and libertarians slip the dogs of war. Libertarians
possess an ideology of individualism which denies that life has
any meaning other than the gratification of the ego. They
envision a utopia of individualism where man exists for his own
sake and human beings are reduced to social atoms. Selfishness is
a virtue, says the libertarian.
Conservatives recognize that that basic social
unit is not the individual but the group – autonomous groups
such as family, church, local community, neighborhood, college,
the trade union or guild, etc. These groups intermediate between
the individual and State and help preserve social order. As
Robert Nisbet pointed out, “Release man from the context of
community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable
aloneness and subjection to demoniac fears and passions.”
The conservative values the spirit of community and agrees with
Marcus Aurelius that, “We are made for cooperation, like the
hands, like the feet.”
Both conservatives and libertarians support the
free market economy, but they differ in the degree of their
devotion. Many libertarians worship the free market as if it were
a religion — indeed many have no trouble replacing the cross
with a dollar sign. But libertarians do not confine their zeal
for the market to the economic arena. They believe the market is
an abstract doctrine to be applied to all facets of life and
social problems. The libertarians are really just inverted
Marxists, who substitute the free market for socialism as not
only the dominant economic system but also the overriding social
and political influence. Indeed, they are guilty of the same
dialectical materialism as Marx.
Conservatives know that society is too complex to
be reconstructed according to abstract economic doctrines. They
think too highly of man and society to distill everything in
existence down to the production and consumption of material
goods — the nexus of the cash payment is indeed a weak
social link. The laws of commerce are no substitute for the laws
of convention and the Divine.
In conclusion, libertarianism is as much an
anathema to true Burkean conservatism as Marxism and it should be
fought against equally as hard. As Russel Kirk once said,
“Adversity sometimes makes strange bedfellows, but the
present successes of conservatives disincline them to lie down,
lamblike, with the libertarian lions.” MR
This article was published in the 31 March 1999 edition of The Michigan Review
(Volume 17, Number 9).
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