Libertarians and those on the left today enjoy a happy camaraderie. We find ourselves in coalition in a long twilight struggle against right wing authoritarianism. We are usually in agreement on most of the big issues from torture, to hefty farm subsidies to big business, to useless pork, to obvious corruption, to a startlingly hawkish foreign policy, and, most importantly, to government sponsored intolerance. This makes it very tempting for leftists (note: I don't use the term “liberal” because it is a term that, depending on the context, can include both left wing politics and libertarianism) to acquiesce with libertarians, to simply nod and smile when they talk dreamily of an America with greater freedom, and to imagine that their concept of freedom is much the same as yours. After all, attacking libertarians in our troubled time feels a bit like Legolas criticizing Gondor for its lack of respect for nature just as Sauron is poised to crush Middle-Earth.
Then again, this attitude has made libertarianism one of the least attacked ideologies currently around in American politics. Leftists have the aforementioned attitude and also find it harder to attack than conservatism with all its bizarre excesses; meanwhile, conservatives usually decline to attack libertarians specifically, since they have a soft spot for their tax policies. In addition, Libertarians have not been in power for at least a hundred years (depending on your interpretation, maybe not since Thomas Jefferson...maybe never) so they've never have power worth attacking, and have never recently had to defend their ideas converted to actual policy, which is where most ideologies fail. Libertarians always have the luxury of accusing those in power of not being libertarian enough, and of corrupting their good ideas with shoddy execution.
Obviously I recognize that libertarianism is a respectable ideology in which an intelligent person could honestly believe, and I do know some passionate libertarians. However, I feel that a lot of young college students and recent college graduates are libertarians because of the things expressed in the preceding paragraph. That is, they can always be on offense and rarely have the bright light of criticism focused on them. They are socially liberal enough to not get their liberal activist friends furious at them, while also having economic views conservative enough to not get chortles from economics professors, lawyers, and the businessmen that interview them for jobs. When you're a libertarian you can be sophisticated, popular, give endless shit, and take absolutely none. It's a pretty tantalizing political viewpoint.
To me, this means that leftists need to focus their energy more on refuting libertarianism and less on making snide jokes about the Bush administration. True, our biggest quarrel is still with conservatives, but I think our future quarrel will be with libertarians. The future of the right isn't in the Southern-fried conservatism of George Bush, but with the selfish yet tolerant ideology of libertarianism. If the fad goes unchecked, it could well be more than a fad; it could become the accepted conventional wisdom of our generation
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