libertarian strategy, in two senses

Tony Woodlief quotes Murray Rothbard:

“Most classical liberal or laissez-faire activists have adopted, perhaps without much thoughtful consideration, a simple strategy that we may call ‘educationism.’ Roughly: We have arrived at the truth, but most people are still deluded believers in error; therefore, we must educate these people – via lectures, discussions, books, pamphlets, newspapers, or whatever – until they become converted to the correct point of view.”

They both apparently think this is pointless, and what libertarians ought to be doing is whatever it takes to get elected. But Woodlief, seemingly unaware of the irony, goes on to show why the ‘educationist’ approach is vital:

. . . imagine that libertarians have nominated a slate of charismatic, well-funded, highly networked candidates (indulge me – it’s a Friday) who have won the Presidency and a solid majority of Congress. These revolutionaries proceed to create the libertarian wet dream . . . .

Except, people get older. Memory fades. The Left remains committed to brainwashing children and co-opting public and private organizations. A child overdoses on heroin. Drugs are slowly re-criminalized. Some idiot old babyboomers (sorry for the triple redundancy) starve to death because they could never be bothered to save for old age. Others lose their savings when they invest them all in Bill Clinton Enterprises. Hello Social Security and financial regulation. . . .

So, in a generation or less, the revolution is slowly dismantled, and libertarians are blamed for the ills of society. . . .

Unless (at the very least) a large minority of opinion-makers are persuaded of the libertarian message and understand it fairly deeply, the electoral miracle will have temporary results at best. The first Libertarian Congress will last exactly one term unless the people are prepared for the inevitable dislocations, and the Party won’t achieve that by insisting that every candidate join Toastmasters and get a proper haircut.

Meanwhile, Woodlief somehow commuddles this issue with foreign policy.

Libertarians like to pretend, for example, that the U.S. could have avoided World War II without consequence for liberty. At best they argue from historical accident rather than principal [principle?] – the claim that Hitler would have lost by virtue of his failure in Russia, for example, or that Britain could have survived without the American Lend-Lease program.

Roosevelt wanted to get into the war to save Britain; does anybody remember why Britain and France went to war in the first place? To save western Poland from an invader. Why, if they hadn’t done so, and if Roosevelt hadn’t made a deal with Stalin over the liberties of Central Europeans, Poland might have suffered under a foreign thumb for . . shall we say fifty years?

Likewise comes the libertarian claim that American adventures in the Cold War were misguided. In this they display an ugly penchant for concerning themselves with the liberties of white Americans, which explains the view of many that the U.S. Civil War represents the earliest great infringement on liberty (as if the liberty of slaves doesn’t count in the balance).

It certainly didn’t count in the first year and a half of the war, and after that it was a tool of the war. Hypocrisy aside, do the rights of slaves count infinitely against those of soldiers conscripted, voters denied free choice, publishers suppressed, non-slaveholding families whose property was burned to the ground? (It’s true that the rhetoric of secession was mainly about slavery, but the secession put slavery in more danger, not less; this Usenet post by Shack Toms summarizes the matter well. The new outgoing Union Congress offered an Amendment to prohibit Federal interference with slavery, but that was not enough to stop the secessions. The South’s real grievance was taxes (and the loss of its former majority in the House); I suppose that was too grubby for the gentry to say in public, so instead they huffed and puffed about the sanctity of their peculiar institution.)

John Quincy Adams – no wild-eyed libertarian – famously said, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” That neutrality, until it was abandoned, made America a safe haven for the downtrodden: no small thing.

These arguments against foreign intervention derive from the libertarian principle that coercion is wrong, which is really no fixed principle at all, because nearly all libertarians admit that a military financed through taxation is a necessity for the protection of liberty. Somewhere in their calculus, however, they conclude that this coercion shouldn’t extend to financing the liberation of non-Americans. Perhaps this is principled, but it is certainly not the only viable alternative for a true lover of liberty. To tell people languishing in states like China and the former Soviet bloc that our commitment to liberty prevents us from opposing their masters is the height of churlishness and foolishness.

This illustrates the great statist fallacy of equating the government with the people. The paradox goes away with a more accurate rephrasing: “Our commitment to liberty prevents us from compelling our neighbors to take part in opposing your tyrants.” (By the way, what’s stopping you now?) The majority, after all, may be misguided (as Lincoln’s, Wilson’s and Roosevelt’s apologists must agree). On the other hand, my administration would not prevent Americans from volunteering their own lives and fortunes to fight tyranny abroad, and would probably give them rhetorical support.

Your government was, it claims, created to defend your liberties. It was not created to do every good thing that might be done, to embrace every temptation of hubris. Its Constitution – the document that gives it conditional permission to exist – does not merely forbid it to do wicked things.

Woodlief closes with:

If libertarians were serious about taking and maintaining power — truly serious — then they would drop the caterwauling over drug criminalization and focus every drop of energy on building schools. The latter is hard work, however, and forces consideration of messy things like moral instruction, and self-discipline, and what makes for good parenting. . . .

Perhaps he’s unaware of the role of libertarians in the home-schooling movement and the Alliance for the Separation of School and State founded by libertarian Marshall Fritz.