Can Progressives and Libertarians Find Common Ground?

So, there is a Socialist Caucus within the Libertarian Party, which is trying to bring libertarians and progressives together around their shared interests (legalize pot, abolish prisons, end war, etc.). Here are my thoughts on the subject.

You’re going to have a hard time getting progressives and libertarians on the same page. There are deep irreconcilable differences in their underlying assumptions/presuppositions. There are superficial similarities, by which I mean very real similarity on certain policy proposals but similarities coming from radically different angles that will ultimately end up putting the two factions at odds with one another. Yes, progressives and libertarians can collaborate on anti-war stuff and anti-corporate welfare stuff, but they will ultimately end up working against each other because their underlying principles are fundamentally at odds with one another.

Oh, hell…the old presuppositionalist in me is coming out. I'm no longer a Christian. I am certain that God in the theistic sense is non-existent, by which I mean that the only sort of "God" that could possibly exist is the sort that has absolutely no implications for human ethics or epistemology. I am no longer a Christian, but damn! I'm still a presuppositionalist. When discussing important issues with people that disagree with you, you can't just take a case-by-case evidentialist approach. You have to get at their underlying presuppositions. If our basic assumptions or presuppositions (our first principles) are at odds, then we cannot possibly see eye-to-eye. We have no anknüpfungspunkt or point of contact. And, more often than not, you'll find that most people are all over the place because they don't have any foundation or worldview to ground them. Most people are really just standing in mid-air swinging a bat around. They are like a blind cat in a dark room on a moonless night looking for a black spot that isn't there. Until you get at first principles, there's no use in talking.

When two people have fundamentally different principles or presuppositions, they may say the same thing but actually mean very different things. The old Christian presuppositionalists, like Cornelius van Til, liked to point out the irreconcilable differences between Christians and atheists. When a Christian says that such-and-such is “the right thing to do,” they mean it is absolutely the right thing to do, because they define right and wrong in concrete terms based upon the will of the Absolute Person, the Concrete Universal God of Christian theism. The atheist believes no such thing, so while he may say “such-and-such is the right thing to do,” what he means is something fundamentally different. He may merely mean “such-and-such is desirable to me” or “such-and-such is preferred by our society” or any number of things really, but what he does not mean is that such-and-such is right by definition as determined by some Absolute Standard apart from the material world in which we live.

Now, I say all of this for a reason, because I do think that the divide between libertarians and progressives is of a similar nature to that described above. Abraham Lincoln once made the observation about “liberty” that “in using the same word, [different people] do not mean the same thing.” Recently, most of my research and writing has been on the topic of differing conceptions of liberty. So, I’d like to delve into the differences on the concept of liberty.

When I think of progressives, I usually think of social democrats or democratic socialists, which I see as the modern representatives of the civic republican or classical republican tradition. Now, the classical republicans defined liberty as the absence of domination, liberty in contrast to slavery. A man is free to the extent that no one else is in a position to arbitrarily interfere in his choices. I won’t go into too much detail, but this framework of assumptions leads to a number of ideals: that liberty requires the abolition of wage-slavery, that liberty requires universal free healthcare, that liberty requires economic equality, etc. Well, then came Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham, with a re-defining of liberty, and a whole classical liberal tradition that centered around a new conception of freedom. The liberal tradition defined liberty as the absence of interference or coercion. A man is free if no one actively interferes in his choices or actively forces him to do anything. These conceptions are fundamentally at odds. The republican sees the boss-employee relationship as an infringement upon liberty because the boss has a dominating role over the employee, but the liberal sees that same relationship as compatible with liberty because it is voluntary rather than coercive.

Flash forward to F.A. Hayek. Hayek defined liberty as the absence of arbitrary interference in the free exercise of ones will. This is about halfway between the republican and liberal conceptions. The republican says the wage-laborer is unfree because his employer has the capacity to arbitrary interfere in his choices (e.g. the employer could threaten to fire him in order to manipulate him into doing what he wants). To the liberal, it is not the capacity that makes him unfree and it does not matter if the interference is arbitrary or non-arbitrary. To Hayek, in contrast to both the republican and the liberal, the wage-laborer is only unfree if the boss/employer does arbitrarily interfere in his choices (e.g. if the employer does threaten to fire him in order to manipulate him into doing what he wants). To Hayek, it doesn’t matter if the employer COULD use his position to manipulate you; it only matters if he DOES use his position to manipulate you.

Then, we get to Rothbard, who has a very different conception of liberty. Rothbard defines liberty as the lack of arbitrary interference in the actions of others when they are acting upon their own persons and property. Thus, the boss-employee relationship is perfectly compatible with liberty because the employer has every right to do what he wants with his own property (e.g. the employer has the right to use his property as leverage to manipulate his employees into doing what he wants).

I think a major problem with many libertarians is that they have propertarian conceptions of liberty, i.e. they kind of agree with Rothbard’s definition of liberty. Right-wing libertarians tend to have a distorted Lockean conception of liberty (Locke minus the proviso). The problem is that propertarian conceptions of liberty tend to logically justify fascism.

The libertarian tradition, historically speaking, was quite broad. By libertarian, I mostly mean anarchist and anarchist-leaning. But, the libertarian/anarchist tradition was split between two factions from the offset. On the one hand, there were republican libertarians (like Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin), who defined liberty as non-domination and, therefore, saw self-government through participatory democracy as a prerequisite for liberty. On the other hand, there were liberal libertarians (like Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, Herbert Spencer), who defined liberty as non-interference and therefore opposed all forms of democracy because, as far as they were concerned, even direct democracy is a form of interference. This divide between classical republican anarchists and classical liberal anarchists is why European anarchists tended to be anti-statist democratic socialists whereas American libertarians tended to be closer to anarcho-capitalists. I think the whole “anarchism without adjectives” movement ultimately failed because it played down the fundamental differences between the two factions within anarchism. I think this push for a progressive-libertarian alliance could end up running into the same problems as the “anarchism without adjectives” movement did. For one thing, anarchists that would have been more republican ended up borrowing destructive and anti-democratic ideas from liberal anarchists (e.g. Johann Most, basically a terrorist, was accepted by Emma Goldman, and Voltairine de Cleyre began to sympathize with “capitalistic anarchism”). In reality, the two factions differed greatly. The republican anarchists wanted democracy to replace the State, whereas the liberal anarchists wanted the market to replace the State (or, sometimes they just wanted to destroy existing institutions without replacing them [as with Johann Most, John Zerzan, Hakim Bey]). When put into practice, republican anarchism gives us Rojava, whereas liberal anarchism gives us South Africa (I mean specifically the South African private police model of governance) or Somalia (I mean, collapse of institutions and relative chaos).

Now, I would say there is a lot of room for collaboration between progressives and libertarians. As a progressive, I fancy myself a left-libertarian. However, I think that the collaboration that takes place must be focused on specific goals. Both right-libertarians and progressives, for instance, could attend anti-war protests and push their representatives to be vocal in opposition to war. Nevertheless, the Libertarian Party is a political party. This, of course, means that they will be supporting politicians that are in line with a wide range of right-libertarian, classical liberal or propertarian, ideas. Progressives and libertarians aren’t going to be able to get behind the same candidates because they have fundamentally different presuppositions or first principles. As a progressive, I see tax cuts for the wealthy as being fundamentally anti-liberty insofar as it allows for more accumulation of capital at the top, allowing the wealthy to have more of a capacity to use their wealth to manipulate other people into doing what they want. The right-libertarian, on the other hand, sees taxation as fundamentally anti-liberty because all taxation represents interference and violation of property rights. Yes, I can agree with a Ron Paul or a Justin Amash when it comes to foreign policy, because I oppose aggressive war and military interventionism. However, when it comes to taxes, welfare, healthcare, regulating banks, nationalization, and a host of other issues, all progressives will find themselves fundamentally at odds with any libertarian candidate. Likewise, libertarians may be able to agree with someone like Bernie Sanders when it comes to his foreign policy, but they will have to disagree with his stance on taxes, welfare, healthcare, etc. In fact, I doubt that the commonalities are sufficient to induce anyone from either side to vote for any candidate from the other. As far as libertarians are concerned, Sanders would be a terrible choice in spite of his few redeeming qualities. From a progressive standpoint, Ron Paul would be a terrible choice in spite of his few redeeming qualities.

What is needed is something more non-party/non-candidate oriented, some sort of libertarian-progressive alliance that does not focus on electoral politics. Maybe we could get the two groups to set aside their differences in order to attend rallies, protests, or occupations with goals or messages that both sides can embrace. There is some room for intersectionality. Furthermore, I think there needs to be a focus on dialogue between progressives and libertarians; not an alliance where they agree to disagree, but a discussion in which they both agree to be open to the possibility of being wrong. Most fundamentally, libertarians and progressives should be getting together to organize panels of speakers and debates that focus on the question “What is liberty?”.