Category Archives: Libertarianism

HotAir.comThe "Google Memo" (read it here) raises at least two big questions from a specifically libertarian perspective: When does an employer have a right to fire an employee and how do social pressures work to shut down speech that makes powerful people uncomfortable?

The answer to the first question is pretty clear-cut, at least when talking about an at-will employee: Google (and other employers) should and do have extremely broad rights to fire any worker at any time. Exceptions rightly exist (and depending on the state one lives in, there may be fewer or more legal exceptions recognized by the courts) but they are narrow. Critics fear that at-will employment will result in chronic job instability, but no firm thrives over time by firing its workers on a regular basis and without good reasons (at-will employment also gives workers the not-insignificant ability to leave a situation without having to explain themselves or negotiate out of contractual obligations). The vast majority of Americans have never signed an employment contract (in nearly three decades of adult work, I know I never have) and are not the worse off for it.

Shortly before the memo's author was fired, Google's vice president of diversity, integrity, and governance wrote

Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture we continue to cultivate. We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company, and we'll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul. As Ari Balogh said in his internal G+ post, "Building an open, inclusive environment is core to who we are, and the right thing to do. 'Nuff said."

You might think that such values would have meant that James Damore, who penned the memo, might have been lauded for raising the issues he did, if not necessarily the way he did. Just earlier this year, at a shareholder meeting of Google's parent corporation Alphabet, chairman Eric Schmidt told an audience, "The company was founded under the principles of freedom of expression, diversity, inclusiveness and science-based thinking."

But whether you agree with Google's specific decision in this case, there should be no question that it has the right to fire people. If a company does that consistently for arbitrary and unconvincing reasons (ranging from enforcing ideological consistency in non-ideological organizations to erratic management to whatever), it will have huge trouble attracting and keeping talent. But in a free society, every company should have the right to put itself out fo business through bad management practices.

James Damore says that his most-recent performance review at Google rated him as "superb, which is the top few percentile" at the company. Supporters of the firing say that nobody at the company would want to work with a person who publicly questioned the announced demographic diversity goals at Google, a fact belied by reports that "over half" of Google employees don't think he should have been let go. If his firing causes more morale problems than it solves, that's Google's problem and it shouldn't erode confidence in the system of at-will employment.

The second question raised by the Google Memodubbed "an anti-diversity screed" by Gizmodo, the site that posted it in its entirety apparently without reading itis a more-complicated and interesting topic from a libertarian point of view.

Damore titled his memo "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," and management's quick response to it underscores his titular implication, which is that political correctness has in many ways stymied any sort of good-faith conversation about issues touching on race, class, gender, and other highly charged topics. If libertarians instinctively only think about state power as worthy of critique, such a myopic perspective misses all the ways in which power asserts itself in society. As linguist Steven Pinker tweeted in response to Damore's firing, Google's hair-trigger response actually gives the supporters of President Donald Trump a juicy talking point in their war against the tyrannical ideological orthodoxy that Trump specifically said he was running against. From Pinker:

The situation is compounded by the fact that Damore's text is not in any sense the screed or rant that detractors call it. In fact, it starts with the statement, "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don't endorse using stereotypes" and continues

People generally have good intentions, but we all have biases which are invisible to us. Thankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document.

The result is a discussion of possible causes, including genetic and cultural influences, for why Google's attempt to hire more women and minorities is going so badly despite massive and ongoing efforts to change that. I suspect that the real problem with the essay's logic (as opposed to, say, Damore's personality and reputation within Google, of which I know nothing) is calling attention to the costs and effectiveness of diversity programs along with their benefits, which are simply taken for granted. Additionally, he makes a plea for ideological diversity, which never turns out well in most places that say they value "diversity":

I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don't fit a certain ideology. I'm also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I'm advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

At Quillette, a website whose editor says suffered a denial-of-service attack after publishing stories critical of Google's actions, Rutgers psychologist Lee Jussim writes:

The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right. Its main points are that: 1. Neither the left nor the right gets diversity completely right; 2. The social science evidence on implicit and explicit bias has been wildly oversold and is far weaker than most people seem to realize; 3. Google has, perhaps unintentionally, created an authoritarian atmosphere that has stifled discussion of these issues by stigmatizing anyone who disagrees as a bigot and instituted authoritarian policies of reverse discrimination; 4. The policies and atmosphere systematically ignore biological, cognitive, educational, and social science research on the nature and sources of individual and group differences....

This essay may not get everything 100% right, but it is certainly not a rant. And it stands in sharp contrast to most of the comments, which are little more than snarky modern slurs.

That last point is indisputable, as the more charitable negative assessments of Damore include only calling him a "shitball" and the like. And of course, the near-immediate firing of Damore, thus at least superficially proving his large point that Google's commitment to "freedom of expression, diversity, inclusiveness and science-based thinking" is a joke.

Even self-described Marxists such as Princeton philosopher Peter Singer have criticized Google for its actions:

On an issue that matters, Damore put forward a view that has reasonable scientific support, and on which it is important to know what the facts are. Why then was he fired?

Again, from a libertarian point of view, one traditional response to Singer's question would be: Who cares, it's none of our business what a private entity does because libertarianism is ultimately about relations between individuals and the state, not individuals and voluntary associations they make, including employment.

The Google Memo controversy reveals the limitations of such narrow or "thin" libertarianism. Political correctnesswhich is both the enforcement of an orthodox set of beliefs and the legitimization of any criticism of those beliefsis an attitude that is hardly limited only to state capitols, state agencies, and state universities. It exists everywhere in our lives and should be battled wherever we encounter it since it undermines free-thinking and free expression, the very hallmarks of a libertarian society. We have not just a right to criticize the actions of private actors but arguably a responsibility to do so, even if there is no public policy change being called for (Google should be allowed to fire whomever it wants, though its grounds for doing so are fair game for public discussion). Libertarianism is ultimately grounded not in anything like knowable, objective, scientific truths, but in epistemological humility built on (per Hayek and other unacknowledged postmodernists) a recognition of the limits of human understanding and that centralization of power leads to bad results. That is, because we don't know objective truths, we need to have an open exchange of ideas and innovation that allows us to gain more knowledge and understanding even if we never quite get to truth with a capital T. At the same time, we need to allow as many "experiments in living" (to use John Stuart Mill's phrase) as possible both out of respect for others' right to choose the life they want and to gain more knowledge of what works and what doesn't. Political correctness is not simply an attack a given set of current beliefs, it is an attack on the process by which we become smarter and more humane. That's exactly why it's so pernicious and destructive.

With that in mind, here's Penn Jillette in 2011 talking about why he's a libertarian. It's a provocative and persuasive argument, I think:

See more here:
The Google Memo Exposes a Libertarian Blindspot When It Comes To Power - Reason (blog)

If you thought Cliff Hyra was the only libertarian running for governor of Virginia this year, think again. There might be a second: Democratic Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam.

Up to now Northam has stuck about as close to the middle of the road as you can get without turning into a double stripe of yellow paint. Nominally a Democrat, he voted for George W. Bush twiceand at one point there was some talk that he might join the GOP (Northam says such rumors were false). Still, he holds the party line on issues such as Medicaid expansion, gun control, and abortionareas where he and his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, differ.

Gillespie has said he would like to see abortion banned in most cases, and recently admitted he would sign legislation defunding Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood promptly endorsed Northam, and its political action committee plans to spend $3 million supporting his campaign.

Northam has been milking the endorsement. "As I always say," he insisted on Friday, "there is no room for a bunch of legislators, most of whom are men, to tell women what they should and shouldn't do with their own bodies." He repeated the point in a tweet: "There's no excuse for legislators to tell women what they can do with their bodies."

A commendably bold and unequivocal position. The question is: Does Northam actually mean it? Because it leads to all sorts of conclusions that qualify as provocative, if not radical.

If there is no excuse for legislators to tell women what they can do with their bodies, then Virginia should pass right-to-try legislation that lets terminally ill patients experiment with new and untested treatments. The U.S. Senate approved such a measure the very day Planned Parenthood endorsed Northam.

Laws like that apply to both men and women, but it's safe to assume that Northam thinks men and women have equal rightsand therefore that lawmakers have no excuse to tell men what they can do with their bodies, either.

If there is no excuse to tell people what they can do with their bodies, then there also is no excuse to require that motorcycle riders wear helmets, if they would prefer not to. And no excuse to make drivers wear seat belts.

Similarly, there is no excuse to prevent a woman from using drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Or to stop her from selling her organs.

There is no excuse for outlawing prostitution. There is no excuse for prohibiting someone from working for less than an arbitrarily determined minimum wage.

And so on.

This is libertarianism in its purest crystalline form: Every person owns his or her self, and has the absolute right to control his or her own body and what is done with it. You might think society has very good reasons for making people wear seat belts and outlawing heroin and so on. But as good as those reasons might be, libertarians argue, they do not trump the individual's right to bodily self-determination.

Moreover, it is a deontological argument, not a consequentialist one. In other words, the point is not simply that, on balance, things generally go better when the government lets people decide for themselvesbut it may decide for them when the scales tip the other way. The point is that the government has no moral authority to order people around, period.

Candidates don't win general elections arguing for pure crystalline libertarianism like that, though. So when asked about some of the implications of his stance, a spokesman for Northam wisely dodged the question: "Theoretical discussions about political philosophy are stimulating, but the reality of governing is more complicated. Dr. Northam believes reproductive freedom leads to economic freedom. If the legislature were to limit it, they are controlling what women can and cannot do in the workforce."

A smart answer, but not a helpful one. Because either the government can tell a woman what to do with her body, or it can't.

For instance: If the government has the authority to force a woman to wear a helmet when riding a motorcyclebecause, say, her physical safety has implications for aggregate social spending on medical care, on workplace productivity, on her family's well-being, and so onthen it also has the authority to make her childbearing decisions for her. Because (some would argue) her pregnancy has implications for aggregate spending on public education, consumer demand, the solvency of old-age pension programs in future years, and so forth. Just look at China, with its one-child policy, or the alarm over falling birthrates in Europe.

In the end, the government might decide such impositions are unjustified on a cost/benefit basis, and forbear from telling a woman what to do. But such a decision would be contingent on how the scales tip. No bright-line principle would prevent it from making such impositions in the future, if circumstances change. Enshrining such a principle is the only guarantee that it won'tbut a bright-line principle opens Pandora's Box.

Northam's team is right: Questions about political philosophy are stimulating. Bet his answers would be even more so.

Link:
Is There a Second Libertarian Running for Governor of Virginia? - Reason (blog)

August 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Friedman Print

So now we finally know. Libertarians arent the ditzy bumblers exemplified by 2016 presidential candidate Gary (What is a leppo?) Johnson. Nor are they ideological extremists, like the proprietor of the Ayn Rand School for Tots. In reality, the libertarian movement is a cabal of racist plutocrats engaged in a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance at the behest of their billionaire paymasters, the Koch brothers.

Or so Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, tells us in her widely discussed book,Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America. As a long-time critic of both libertarianism and the branch of economics, public-choice theory,[1] on which MacLean focuses most of her attention, I was open to being persuaded by her dark musings. Yet, as a small army of aggrieved libertarian bloggers has pointed out, MacLean presents no evidence for her sensationalistic accusations. Instead what she presents are quotations taken out of context or so mangled by ellipses that they suggest the opposite of the quoted libertarians intentions (some examples can be found here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here). As a work of history, this book is a fiasco.

Nevertheless, it is worth reading. Libertarians can benefit from it if they put aside the authors conspiracy theorizing and think about how their movement is perceived by those outside it. Non-libertarians can take the occasion to wonder if MacLeans Manichean view of politics is not uncomfortably similar to their own. Theorists of democracy can think about how close public-choice theory is to one of the most common forms of political criticism in mass democracies: the very form of criticism MacLean directs at libertarians. In short, everyone can profit from the chance to reflect on why MacLean, who in previous work showed herself to be a fine historian, was able to call forth no interpretive charity in attempting to understand libertarians in general and, in particular, her bte noir, James Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel laureate in economics and founder of the public-choice school.

Libertarianism as a Conspiracy of Evil

Consider MacLeans most explosive claim: that public-choice theory was motivated by Buchanans desire to preserve the way of life of white Southerners who in the 1950s, early in his career, were being threatened by desegregation (p. xiv). MacLean doesnt provide a shred of evidence to back up this claim. Seeking to channel Buchanan, who was born in Tennessee but was teaching in Virginia when Brown v. Board of Education was issued, MacLean writes: Northern liberals were now going to tell his people how to run their society. And to add insult to injury, he and people like him with property were no doubt going to be taxed more to pay for all the improvements that were now deemed necessary and proper for the state to make. What about his rights? . . . . I can fight this, he concluded. I want to fight this. (p. xiv, italics in original.) One of MacLeans libertarian critics makes much of the fact that the words she italicizes are not actually quotations from Buchanan: unwary readers might assume otherwise. But MacLean doesnt even provide evidence that Buchanan held the un-italicized thoughtsshe puts into his head. She allows back-handedly that Buchanan was not a member of the Virginia elite. Nor is there any explicit evidence to suggest that for a white southerner of his day, he was uniquely racist or insensitive to the concept of equal treatment. Yet she doesnt provide any indirect evidence that he was at all racist or insensitive to the concept of equal treatment.

The source of MacLeansanti-empirical historiography can be found in the next sentence: And yet, somehow, all he saw in the Brown decision was coercion (emphasis added). The somehow implies that Buchanan did not really believe what he said he believed (despite the absence of evidence for this). But MacLean fails to recognize that libertarians are positively obsessed by coercion, blinding them to just about everything else. It is wrong to accuse them of anything more than the narrowness that marks the thinking of any ideologue.

Breaking: Ideologues Can Be Obtuse

Yet, to be charitable to MacLean, she clearly finds it incredible that libertarianism could make sense to any intelligent person. Therefore, she has little choice but to think that libertarianism must be a mask for something deeper and darker. The tacit premise of the book is that nobody can honestly believe that the opposite of coercion, freedom, overrides claims of need and welfare. But having been a libertarian myself, I can testify that thats exactly what libertarians honestly believe. Orto be charitable to themwhat they honestly think they believe.

Libertarians take the sanctity of liberty (or freedom) for granted. And they fail to question the legitimacy of private property ownership, so they include property rights among our sacrosanct freedoms. Thus, government incursions on property rights are as impermissible as coercion by private actorsalso known, they are eager to point out, as criminals. To libertarians, then, taxation is theft. Conscription is slavery. And government, whose every action is backed by men with guns (the police), is inherently suspect. All of these beliefs are, to libertarians, simply logical consequences of their commonsensical commitment to liberty.[2]

Political theorists argue that libertarians use of terms such as coercion, liberty, and freedom is moralized. In other words, libertarians definitions of these terms beg the question against those who think that, for example, private property diminishes the freedom of the poor or of workers.[3] In response, libertarians will ferociously argue about the correct definition of these terms.[4] Such arguments serve to emphasize how far removed libertarians are from the concerns that have persuaded so many peoplethe vast, vast majority, across the entire planetto embrace government intervention, even if it violates freedom. These concerns revolve around the concrete social and economic problems suffered by people in modern societies. MacLean makes it abundantly clear that she, too, is absorbed by these concerns. So (apparently) she refuses to accept that libertarians obtuse preoccupation with liberty, correctly defined, explains their (apparently) cold indifference to the victims of social and economic problems. Thus, she searches for racist, plutocratic explanations of their indifference.

The Epic Libertarian Fail

Yet while it would have been more charitable, and more accurate, for MacLean to interpret libertarians as obtuse, it would not have been entirely fair. On the other side of the equation is the singular entanglement of libertarianism with economicsparticularly Austrian and Chicago-school economics.

No other political movement has as one of its bibles a tract entitled Economics in One Lesson.[5] No other movements first institution of any significance was called the Foundation for Economic Education. Yet if libertarians really believed, deep down, what they tell themselves they believe about the sanctity of liberty-cum-private property, the teachings of economics would be irrelevant to them: the freedom of property owners would be inviolate regardless of its economic effects. Yet libertarians are even more obsessed with these effects than they are with the linguistics of liberty. While they do honestly believe that government is inherently suspect because it is inherently coercive, they also honestly believe that government action to solve social and economic problems is inherently counterproductive. At the heart of libertarianism is not a deliberate, sinister defense of privilege, but a confused acceptance of two potentially contradictory ideas: a philosophical critique government as inherently coercive and an economic critique of government as inherently counterproductive.

In my experience, libertarians tend to be drawn into their worldview by the economic critique of government, adding the philosophical critique only when they plunge in and read the works of the key libertarian ideologists, Ayn Rand and the lesser known but equally influential Murray N. Rothbard (or the works of their many epigones). Rand and Rothbard were themselves deeply influenced by Austrian economics, and MacLean acknowledges that Buchanan was converted to libertarianism in 1946, while he was a student of Frank Knight in the graduate program in economics at the University of Chicago. (However, she maintains, again on the basis of no evidence, that it is unclear whether his conversionwas the result of the cogency of Knights teaching or the upheaval on Chicagos South Side as steel and meatpacking workers downed tools in the most massive strike wave in Americas labor history [p. 36]. Here she footnotes three different pages of Buchanans autobiography, where he repeatedly proclaims Knights influence on him butsays nothing at all about the strike.)

MacLeans lack of charity proves especially unfortunate in this connection, for libertarians economic preoccupations lead directly to the need, in their ideological system, for public-choice theory. The key doctrine conveyed by free-market economics, in both its Austrian and Chicago variants, is that unintended consequences may frustrate attempts to solve social and economic problemsand that these attempts frequently cause more harm than good. That is, the governments problem-solving attempts backfire so badly that they hurt the very people they attempt to help. Classic examples are the housing shortages that economists often attribute to rent control, and the unemployment they often attribute to minimum-wage laws.

However, while libertarians have been profoundly affected by the Austrian and Chicago idea that unintended consequences are ubiquitous, neither Austrian nor Chicago economists ever proposed a theory to explain why this should be the case; or why unintended consequences, when they do occur, are more likely to be harmful than beneficial. Such a theory would be about politics as much as economics: it would explain why political decision makers are likelier to do harm than good. Instead of such a theory, libertarians adopted a different theory of politics: Buchanans theory of public choice.

Public Choice: Uncharitability as a Political Theory

I well remember the buzz in elite libertarian circles when, in 1983, public choice began to be discovered by them. (MacLean does not recognize that public choice was a relatively late addition to the libertarian creed.) Public choice, libertarians exclaimed at the time, was the theory of politics that libertarianism had always lacked. But instead of explaining why the unintended consequences of public policies are (supposedly) rife, and (supposedly) negative, public-choice theory goes in the opposite direction. Buchanan asserted that people are just as self-interested in politics as in other areas of life.[6] So we should expect self-dealing from political actors, not benevolence. If they are in it for themselves, then it is logical to expect them to do more harm than goodnot unintentionally, but deliberately. Public choice took a very old and often-legitimate worrythe worry about corruptionand turned it into a universal law.[7]

MacLean is rightly outraged at this. Buchanan and his followers, as she puts it, projected unseemly motives onto strangers about whom they knew nothing (p. 98). In particular, she is offended that public choice deglorif[ies] the social movements that have transformed America since the nineteenth century, and recast[s] the motivations of the government officials who rewrote the laws (p. 76). Buchanans reductionist analysis turned young Americans with a passion to live up to their nations stated ideals into menaces who misrepresented their purposes for personal gain (p. 107). This reductionism, however, brings Buchanan much closer to MacLean than she recognizes. Public-choice theory rules out interpretive charity in advance. All that is left is the imputation of bad motives to ones political opponents. Public choice is MacLeans own method, systematized.

By the same token, however, it is rich to read public-choice libertarians begging MacLean for interpretive charity. Their entire careers have been dedicated to denying interpretive charity to the political actors with whom they disagree. Indeed, one defender of public choiceconfessing that he has not read MacLeans booknotes that MacLean benefited from public funding in writing it. Gotcha, Professor MacLean!

MacLean and public-choice theorists, of course, are not unique in ascribing the worst to their political opponents. Everybody does it. This is an immense problem in modern politics, one we see playing out right now. If ones political opponents are not just mistaken but evil, one may well feel that anything is justified in combating them. MacLeans practice, and Buchanans theory, can lead to a war of all against all.

The Politics of Good and Evil, and an Alternative

Manicheaism is not only politically dangerous but a barrier to sound scholarship. Evil is an accusation, not an explanation. Actions may be objectively evil, but subjectively, everyone is doing what they think is somehow justified. Attributions of (subjectively) evil motives end the process of scholarship before it can begin. In studying politics, we want to know (among other things) why evil results may flow even from good motivesas an unintended consequence.

The Niskanen Centers Institute for the Study of Politics will ask that question insistently. (Watch this space on Wednesday mornings.) Even in considering the objective evils of our time, such as rampant nationalism, we shall try to understand their proponents as they understand themselves. This means starting with their own explanations of their actions and questioning their motives only if this is warranted by charitably interpreted evidence.

Interpretive charity is not merely good ethics, or a salve for raw political divisions. It is essential to the scholarly task: the task of understanding each othera task to which all of us, not just academics but political actors, must attend.

[1] E.g., Jeffrey Friedman, Whats Wrong with Libertarianism, Critical Review 11(3): 407-67 (on public choice, see p. 442).

[2] E.g., David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (1997), pp. 87, 110, 149, 171, 225, 276, 300.

[3] E.g., G. A. Cohen, Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat; Justin Weinberg, Freedom, Self-Ownership, and Libertarian Philosophical Diaspora, Critical Review 11(3) (1997): 323-44.

[4] E.g., Tom G. Palmer, G. A. Cohen on Self-Ownership, Property, and Equality, Critical Review 12(3) (1998); and Whats Not Wrong with Libertarianism: Reply to Friedman, ibid.

[5] Hazlitts Economics in One Lesson is not merely a primer for libertarians who want to brush up on economics for purposes of policy debate. It has been the embarkation point for many a journey into libertarian ideology.

[6] James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, pp. 19-20.

[7] It turns out that it is not even a good generalization. For a summary of empirical evidence against it, see Leif Lewin, Self-Interest and Public Interest in Western Democracies (1991). In a twentieth-anniversary symposium on this book, two of the leading proponents of public-choice theory, Dennis Mueller and Michael Munger, essentially conceded that they were unaware of this evidence and had no answer to it. See Dennis C. Mueller, The Importance of Self-Interest and Public Interest in Politics, Critical Review 23(3) (2011); and Michael C. Munger, Self-Interest and Public Interest: The Motivations of Political Actors, ibid. This is not to say, however, that laws are everywhere and always designed to serve the public interest. See, e.g., Terry Moes Vested Interests and Political Institutions; or The Captured Economy, by the Niskanen Centers Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles. On the tendency of public-choice theory to be removed from reality, consider the words of the Niskanen Centers namesake: Much of the [public choice] literature is a collection of intellectual games. Our specialty has developed clear models of first and second derivatives but cannot answer such simple questions as Why do people vote? (William A. Niskanen, The Reflections of a Grump, p. 151).

Jeffrey Friedman, the Director of the Niskanen Centers Institute for the Study of Politics, is a Visiting Scholar in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley.

Read this article:
Public Choice Theory and the Politics of Good and Evil - Niskanen Center (press release) (blog)

VCU poll results

The predictable headline of the new Virginia Commonwealth University poll is that Democrat Ralph Northam has a five-point edge, with a five-point margin of error, among likely voters over Republican Ed Gillespie in the gubernatorial race. You can read all about it in the Washington Post article filed this morning.

The more interesting story is how well the Libertarian Party candidate, Cliff Hyra, is faring. Among registered voters, he scored 8%. Among likely voters, he snagged 6%.

Thats in the same ballpark as the 6.5% vote that Robert Sarvis won in the McAuliffe-Cuccinelli match-up four years ago. The difference is that Sarvis was thought to have benefited from a large none of the above sentiment among voters who found Terry McAuliffes wheeler-dealer persona and Ken Cuccinellis strong cultural conservatism to be off-putting. By contrast, the Northam-Gillespie match-up is a battle of the bland. Both candidates are cautious and inoffensive. No one has to hold their nose to vote for them.

If thats the case, how does one explain the strong showing of Hyra, a political novice who is campaigning part-time on a shoe-string budget? Maybe, just maybe, his libertarian principles are resonating with voters. Could Virginia become a three-party state? Its not impossible.

Follow this link:
Libertarian Hyra Cracks 8% in VCU Poll - Bacon's Rebellion

Libertarian party founderDavid Nolan.

(CourtesyFran Holt of DuPage Libertarians)

In 1977, the condensed version of the party's platform was described in this fashion by Nolan:

1. We favor the abolition of damn near everything.

2. We call for drastic reductions in everything else.

3. And we refuse to pay for what's left!

The Libertarian party has grown to have somewhere around half a million registered voters nationwide. There's a new project to document its history, led by Caryn Ann Harlos, Libertarian Party of Colorado communications director and Region 1 representative on the Libertarian National Committee. Harlos has been cataloging and digitizing party documents, photos and artifacts at LPedia.org.

Here's a look at some of the things Harlos has unearthed:

A poster for the party's first presidential ticket with John Hospers as president and Theodora "Tonie" Nathan as vice president. Nathan the first woman in U.S. history to get an electoral vote in the electoral college.

(Courtesy Libertarian Party of Colorado)

Harlos found issues of the Libertarian Party News, or the LP News, and early newsletters that she says "give a snapshot of what was going on at the time."

(Courtesy Libertarian Party of Colorado)

There's also this abridged history of the party.

(Courtesy Libertarian Party of Colorado)

Related:

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Link:
Libertarianism Was Born In Westminster And Other Historical Party Facts - Colorado Public Radio

Certain quarters of the libertarian universe are in an absolute tizzy because Mises Institute President Jeff Deist invoked blood and soil in a recent speech. In the minds of some PC brain-addled libertarians, this is clearly an indication that the speaker was dog whistling to Nazis. This is both profoundly clueless and shameless PC grandstanding.

Proof that blood and soil can only be some sort of cryptic reference to Nazism is supposedly supplied by a Google search of the term which brings back a lot of links to wrongthink websites. I respect many libertarians. I have many libertarian friends, both real and virtual, but too many modern libertarians inhabit a world that exists only in their heads, and they can be grossly unfamiliar with the intellectual (and real) world outside the echo chamber that is their segment of libertarianism.

Blood and soil is, in fact, a rather mundane formulation that is used to express an undeniable aspect of reality. To deny that attachment to blood and soil is a fundamental aspect of the human condition identifies someone as intellectually unserious, but that is what ideology can do to people. It makes otherwise smart people stupid as they try to force reality to conform to their tidy theories, rather than letting reality inform their theories.

Man has been attached to blood and soil, hearth and home, kith and kin, for the entirety of human history. In fact, much of human history is a tale of blood and soil. Such is certainly hardwired into our DNA, which makes perfect Darwinian sense. Attachment to blood and soil is very logical from a survival standpoint.

For making a statement similar to this during a Facebook debate, I was accused of peddling baseless pseudoscience. Huh? Because other primates do not demonstrate attachment to kin and territory? Because no other mammal does? You cannot penetrate this sort of ideological blindness.

Far from being some exclusively Nazi code, blood and soil have long been invoked within American conservative circles, for example, as part of the long-running debate between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives over the nature of America. Paleocons assert that these United States are a continuation of old Europe in the New World, not some radical new departure or experiment. Neocons on the other hand assert that the U.S. is instead an idea or proposition nation unlike the blood and soil nations of Europe. I certainly side with the paleocons in this debate because an idea nation is an ideological conceit that is inherently leftist. It is also important to note that other countries that claimed to be idea nations were the old Soviet Union and post-Revolution France. Not exactly stellar company.

But even if you concede that the U.S. is an idea nation, the claim is that it is uniquely so. Therefore, by implication, other nations are not and follow the model. Arguably, every nation on earth is a nation founded on blood and soil to a greater or lesser degree, and the degree to which it is lesser is largely dependent on how many differing blood and soil groups it is attempting to make coexist under one national roof. The only nations that are arguably not based on blood and soil are the modern nation states that were artificially cobbled together by others, such as Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, and we saw how well those little experiments worked out. They were led by strongmen and held together by force, but when that fell apart, they naturally separated into their blood and soil constituencies with much messiness. So Iraq is not a natural blood and soil nation, but Kurdistan within Iraq is. So, according to the PC libertarian thought police, is Kurdistan inherently a Nazish country? Are all Kurds therefore Nazis?

I asked one of the Rightthink Enforcement Brigade in my aforementioned debate if he considered a Cherokee Indian Reservation to be a manifestation of blood and soil Nazism? Are the Cherokees who live there therefore Nazis? Needless to say, I didnt get a straight answer. Off course, Nazi-esque Indian Reservations would be a bit of a difficult thing to pull off since the Reservations predate Nazism, but history has never been the righthinkers strong point seeing as how they are peddling a laughingly novel intellectual formulation.

Aside from all of this ridiculous hoopla, I highly recommend that you read the Deist speech. Far from a dog-whistling screed as the PC libertarians have characterize it, it is actually eminently reasonable and a much needed counterbalance to the detached-from-reality brand of libertarianism being peddled by the hypersensitive PC-obsessed new breed.

The speech is very well done, and comes at a very important time as many libertarians are going astray. The Anarchist Notebook calls it probably the most important libertarian speech made in the last decade. What Deist is essentially doing in his speech is defending a concept that, while some will object to the term, used to be called paleolibertarianism. I do not intend to diminish Deists speech in anyway, but what he articulates is not new or groundbreaking. He makes some observations that are really truismsthat people value family, faith, culture, place, and so forthand then makes some arguments that men and women of good will could have an honest debate about, such as the relative role of universalism vs. self-determination.

Early on in his speech, Deist describes and defends orthodox Rothbardian libertarianism. What he defends in theory is a stateless form of libertarianism. It isnt even minarchism that he is defending. He goes on to defend the paleolibertarian belief that the institutions and sentiments that undergird civil society such as family, faith, culture, tradition, attachment to place, etc. are essential components that will hold society together in the theoretical absence of the state, rather than impediments to liberty as many of the new breed libertarians see them. He defends decentralization, secession, and self-determination as political ends that libertarians should strive for rather than the imposition of a universal moral ethic.

Deist concluded his speech with a call to action. In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance, he said. This statement is true on its face. These things do manifestly matter to people and libertarians certainly ignore them at the risk of their own irrelevance, but it is apparently this line more than any other that has the PC libertarian thought police so hysterical.

There is something not normal about a person who can read a defense of the stateless society and decentralization, secession, and self-determination as means of achieving it and immediately think Nazi because of a reference to the obvious reality of blood and soil. This is a sorry attempt by competing power centers in the libertarian orbit to marginalize a mindset that they disagree with at the expense of the greater movement as a whole. Perhaps some of the not-too-bright spear carriers arguing over this really are ideologically brain addled, but I simply cannot believe that people like Steve Horwitz, one of the main ringleaders of the PC jihad, are really that stupid. Theyre not. They are arguing in bad faith by exploiting the reigning PC zeitgeist rather than have an honest debate. Shame on them.

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Defending Jeff Deist From The Politically Correct Libertarians - The Liberty Conservative

LINCOLN, NEBRASKAThe shebeen has relocated for a few days to keep an eye on the hearings being conducted by this state's Public Service Commission into our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel and conservative fetish object. At its roots, the fight over the pipeline is a fight over the limits of corporate deregulation as it affects ordinary citizens, and over the obligation of elected officials to enforce those limits. (The PSC here is an elected body.)

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In that spirit, we should look at this sadly hilarious story from another state. The Texas Observer brings us the tale of a small place called Von Ormy, where the citizens voted themselves into a state of libertarian paralysis.

For the last few years, Von Ormy has been in near-constant turmoil over basic issues of governance: what form of municipal government to adopt, whether to tax its residents, and how to pay for services such as sewer, police, firefighters and animal control. Along the way, three City Council members were arrested for allegedly violating the Open Meetings Act, and the volunteer fire department collapsed for lack of funds. Nearly everyone in town has an opinion on who's to blame. But it's probably safe to say that the vision of the city's founder, a libertarian lawyer whose family traces its roots in Von Ormy back six generations, has curdled into something that is part comedy, part tragedy.

In 2006, fearing annexation by rapidly encroaching San Antonio, some in Von Ormy proposed incorporating as a town. But in government-averse rural Texas, incorporation can be a hard sell. Unincorporated areas are governed mainly by counties, which have few rules about what you can do on private property and tend to only lightly tax. There's no going back from what municipal government brings: taxes, ordinances, elections and tedious city council meetings. Still, the fear of being absorbed by San Antonio with its big-city taxes and regulations was too much for most Von Ormians.

Look out, Mother. It's government! Head for the root cellar!

Initially, the city would impose property and sales taxes, but the property tax would ratchet down to zero over time. The business-friendly environment would draw new economic activity to Von Ormy, and eventually the town would cruise along on sales taxes alone. There would be no charge for building permits, which Martinez de Vara said would be hand-delivered by city staff. The nanny state would be kept at bay, too. Want to shoot off fireworks? Blast away. Want to smoke in a bar? Light up. Teens wandering around at night? No curfew, no problem.

Good morning, suckers.

Today, there is no city animal control program and stray dogs roam the streets. The Bexar County Sheriff's Office patrols the town instead of city police, and City Hall resides in a mobile home with one full-time staffer though that's a step up from the dive bar where City Council met until the owner bounced them out. If you go to the city's website, you'll be informed that it's still under construction. If Von Ormy is a libertarian experiment with democracy, it's one that hasn't turned out as expected.

I would argue that, except perhaps for the dive bar part, the experiment has turned out exactly as expected, at least as expected by anyone not raised in a baby farm at the Cato Institute.

What ensued was a confusing series of boycotted meetings, obscure loopholes and eventually a possibly illegal hearing that landed the three women briefly in jail. In September 2014, Martinez de Vara had formally proposed zeroing out the property tax, but Goede, Hernandez and Aguilar voted it down 3-2 and, at least for five days, kept the property tax in place. However, to formally ratify the rate, per state law, at least four council members needed to hold another meeting to vote, but Sally Martinez and Debra Ivy refused to show up to any hearing with ratification on the agenda. The result: Martinez de Vara got his way and the property tax rate was eliminated.

The idea that you can run a self-governing republic with minimal government is one of the more pernicious (and persistent) lies of American history. (Ask Jefferson Davis how his experiment in that hypothesis turned out.) They're going to be playing out that same old drama here in Lincoln this week. I'm not sure, but I don't think we all want to live in a Von Ormy of the mind.

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This Texas Town Went Full Libertarian and Hilarity Ensued - Esquire.com

Getting into writing can be quite daunting for people, but it is easier than ever before to be a writer. The internet has placed virtually all the information of consequence known to anyone at our fingertips. So it is vitally important for all those libertarian writers who feel so inclined, to be active.

With this article I hope to get some hesitant aspiring libertarian writers, or writers who have already started but are still unsure about some things, to put pen to paper.

This is simply a collection of those things which have helped me throughout my writing career and which I have told people when they asked me for advice. I am not a journalist or a literary scholar, so everything you will read here comes from my personal experience in writing. I have also had the privilege of being the editor in chief of two publications: The Rational Standard, South Africas only libertarian publication, and, of course, Being Libertarian. But dont see these tips as the only set of valid tips, as many different things work for many different people.

This list is also not comprehensive. These tips are merely some of my thoughts, and if pressed, I might be able to share many others.

This is the most important tip I hope aspiring libertarian writers take to heart.

While research and fact-checking are by default important for any type of writer, overthinking your endeavor can at best lead to significant delay, and at worst to abandonment. If you are unable to verify something dont worry, writing op-eds is not academic writing. Tell your readers that you were unable to verify it, but explain why you believe it to be true regardless. Make an argument; dont get hung up on the numbers, especially if you are writing from the perspective of Austrian economics. Dont, however, be dishonest or try to hide the fact that you couldnt find empirical evidence from your readers.

Also try to set limits on the scope of your article. I will address brevity below, but here it is important that you not consider your article to be the final word on a given topic. You do not need to explain everything you say at length. Assume your readers have a hunger to do some reading on the topic elsewhere!

The most important thing you should do, however, is to just start writing. Put your ideas on paper, and see what happens.

Remember, you are not writing an academic paper where you are investigating something. You already have a message you want to get across.

Start your article by writing down your core thought usually your conclusion and build it around that. For example, if you think minimum wage laws would hurt unskilled workers, start your article by writing exactly that. Your lead-up and introduction will come later, but you need to ensure the core message you want to convey appears in the text of the article in a similar way it came to your mind; usually brief and in understandable language.

We are ordinarily taught that conclusions need to be at the end of the text, but when writing articles, its important to get your message across in the very first paragraph, to ensure even those people who dont read the entire text have at least seen the most important information. This is known as the lede or lead of the article, and is essentially like a preface in a book.

The next paragraph, whether it has a heading or not, will usually be your introduction.

Many other editors will disagree with me on this point, but I must re-emphasise, again, that you are not writing an academic paper which requires extensive justification for your assertions. In ordinary articles, this is not necessary, depending on your audience. If you are writing to a libertarian audience, you usually do not need to explain at length why the State is a violent institution, for example.

The best length of an article has been said to be 500 to 800 words. Any longer than this might cause ordinary readers to bookmark your article to read later something which doesnt always happen. Longer articles, however, certainly have their place, and this will usually depend on what you intend your article to be a summary, a comprehensive analysis, a manifesto and whether or not you are commenting on something timely or timeless.

Many writers are very concerned about the responses they get to their articles. This is good, as this is how a market ordinarily functions. However, just like a company should be free to determine for itself how to do things, should a writer not submit himself entirely to the whims of his readers.

Be conscious of what your readers think about your work, but dont let that get in the way of continuing to do what youre doing. After all, you have an idea youre trying to sell, and just because others are not willing to buy it doesnt mean you have to stop. Otherwise, libertarians would be in big trouble!

Dont be afraid of preaching your message to the converted.

Libertarians often need to have our core principles put to us in different ways, or simply reminded of our core principles in the first place, which sometimes get lost in the academization of libertarianism. By reading others interpretations or conveyances of our principles, we can also learn how to more effective market our ideas.

Another common concern libertarian writers often have is that they have already written an article on a given topic, or that one of their colleagues wrote one, and thus they feel they shouldnt do so again or as well.

Repackage your previous article. Write it in a different way. Look at the topic from another angle. Or dont; write it from the same angle, but in response to a different event. But never think that it is not necessary to write something just because it has already been written about, by you or someone else. Libertarian ideas are not winning or widely known, so it is fair to say that most people probably have not read about that topic you think has been exhausted.

I left this one for last, as it tends to upset quite a number of new and even experienced writers.

It takes years for columnists to get paid a significant amount or any amount of money for writing. You should not set out to write because you want to get paid there is an oversupply of people who want to give their opinions for money. As an up and coming libertarian writer, you should always humble yourself, as you are part of an era where sharing your ideas with virtually everyone else in the world is easier than it has ever been. Imagine: Your ideas can reach further than the dictates of kings and dictators just a few hundred years ago.

We are all capitalists, and that means we believe that one shouldnt expect time and effort from someone else with some kind of reciprocity. However, being capitalists, we also accept the principle of value subjectivity and reject the labor theory of value. This means, principally, that other people must value being able to see your opinion more than they value the amount the paywall charges. But it also means that you have to value your time and effort more than you value writing for the libertarian cause and spreading our ideas. And this, for an up and coming writer, is not recommended. You should want to write because you have something meaningful to say and you want to share it with others.

Too many writers have argued that non-monetary payment does not qualify as payment. To up and coming libertarian writers, the payment offered by a platform is often the platform itself, with a potentially massive audience just waiting to be exposed to your brand and ideas. It is, unfortunately, quite one-dimensional to perceive payment in currency as the only valid type of payment. If your problem is putting food on the table, writing opinion articles might not be the best way to ensure that happens.

Keep at it consistently and develop yourself, and the money will come eventually.

* Disclosure: At the time of writing I was ill with a cold and sinusitis. Please excuse me if some of my writing here seems more abrupt than usual.

This post was written by Martin van Staden.

The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.

Martin van Staden is the Editor in Chief of Being Libertarian, the Legal Researcher at the Free Market Foundation, a co-founder of the RationalStandard.com, and the Southern African Academic Programs Director at Students For Liberty. The views expressed in his articles are his own and do not represent any of the aforementioned organizations.

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8 Tips for New and Aspiring Libertarian Writers The Chief's Thoughts - Being Libertarian

Viking, AmazonNo recent book has caused a bigger splash in libertarian circles than Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains. The Duke historian avers that Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, who helped created what's known as public choice economics, had racist, segregationist intentions in his life's work of analyzing what he called "politics without romance"; that the Koch brothersCharles and Davidare not-so-secretly controlling politics in the U.S. and are devoted to disenfranchising Americans, especially racial and ethnic minorities; and that libertarians are deeply indebted to the pro-slavery philosophy of John C. Calhoun and that we wish "back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation."

None of this is true, but that doesn't mean MacLean should go unchallengedor that libertarians don't need to explain themselves better if we want to gain more influence in contemporary debates over politics, culture, and ideas.

In the latest Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Michael Munger of Duke's political science department, who has written a caustic, fair, and even generous review of MacLean's book for the Independent Institute. Even as he categorizes Democracy in Chains as a "work of speculative historical fiction" that was "in many cases illuminating," he concludes that her book is wrong in almost every meaningful way, from gauging Buchanan's influence on libertarianism to her inconsistent views toward majoritarian rule as an absolute good to her attempts to smear Buchanan as a backward-looking racial conservative.

Munger, who ran for governor of North Carolina as a Libertarian in 2008 and maintains a vital Twitter account at @mungowitz, also discusses how that experience changed his understanding of politics, why he's a "directionalist" advocating incremental policy changes rather a "destinationist" insisting on immediate implementation of utopian programs, and how the movement's heavy emphasis on economics has retarded libertarianism's wider appeal.

"Many libertarians celebrate something like the perfection of the market," he says. "And so we end up playing defense. When someone says, 'Look at these problems with the market,' we say, 'No, no. Actually, the problem is state intervention, the problem is regulation. If we get rid of those things, then perfection will be restored.' The argument that I see for libertarianism is not the perfection of markets, it's the imperfections of the state, the institutions of the state."

It's a wide-ranging conversation that touches on growing up in a working-class, segregated milieu and possible futures for the libertarian movement.

Munger's home page is here.

Read Reason's coverage of Democracy in Chains here.

Audio post production by Ian Keyser.

Subscribe, rate, and review the Reason Podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

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This is a rush transcriptcheck all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Hi, I'm Nick Gillespie. This is the Reason Podcast. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you're there. Today I'm talking with Mike Munger, a political scientist at Duke, about the new book Democracy in Chains by a Duke historian, Nancy MacLean.

In her controversial work, MacLean argues, among other things, that Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan, who helped create what is known as public choice economics, had racist segregationist intentions in his life's work of analyzing what he called "politics without romance", that the Koch brothers, Charles and David, are not so secretly controlling politics in the US and are devoted to disenfranchising Americans, especially racial and ethnic minorities, and that libertarians, as a group, are deeply indebted to the pro-slavery philosophy of John C. Calhoun, and that we wish "to go back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of mid-century Virginia, minus the segregation".

We're going to talk about all that and more, including Mike Munger's journey from economist to political scientist then his past history of selling drugs. Michael Munger, thanks for joining us.

Michael Munger: It's a pleasure to be on the podcast.

Gillespie: You wrote a comprehensive and archly critical review of MacLean for the Oakland-based Independent Institute, it's up on the Independent Institute's website, in which you characterized Democracy in Chains as "a work of speculative fiction". Elaborate on that for a bit. What is speculative about it or what is speculative fiction about her account of James Buchanan?

Munger: Well, there's a history of history being speculative interpolation of here's what might have happened given the few points we're able to observe. It's as if a strobe light at irregular intervals illuminates something, and all you get is a snapshot. It's hard to say what people were thinking, what they were saying, but given these intermittent snapshots, you then interpolate a story. Sometimes those stories are pretty interesting, particularly if we don't know much about what otherwise was going on.

The difficulty that Professor MacLean has, I think ... And I think she's surprised. Frankly, I think she is surprised that so many people knew so much about James Buchanan and about public choice, more on that in a minute. What she did was admirable. She went to the very disorganized, at the time, archives at the Buchanan House at George Mason University, and she spent a long time going through these documents and got these snapshots.

To her credit, she did go to the archives. To her discredit, she was pretty selective about the snapshots that were revealed that she decided to use to interpolate between. There's plenty of exculpatory evidence that she ignored, put aside, misquoted, but she came up with a really interesting story. I found myself, when I'm reading the book, Democracy in Chains, thinking, "If this were true, it'd be really interesting." I can see why many people who don't know the history of Jim Buchanan in public choice and libertarianism, on reading it, would say, "That's a terrific story," because it is a terrific story, it's just not true.

Gillespie: I mean the large story that she is seeking to tell is that James Buchanan and other libertarian leaning oftentimes, pro-free ... I mean, I guess, always pro-free market, classical liberal ideologues, or scholars and ideologues and what not, want to put limits on what majorities can do to people, and they often talk about that pretty openly. She reads that as a conspiracy of disenfranchisement.

Munger: Right, because she doesn't know anyone who believes that. The fact that that's actually just standard in not just public choice, but political science since Aristotle, she finds that astonishing. It's something that...

Gillespie: Well, is she being honest there? Because I mean you've mentioned Aristotle, well, I'll mention Magna Carta, where even the King of England, at a certain point in time, had to admit that his powers were limited and that Englishmen had rights that could not be abrogated by even a king much less any kind of majority. I mean is she just being willfully opaque or thick there, or does she, in these moments ... And I guess I'm asking you to speculate on her motives, but does she really believe that?

Munger: Well, in my review, I invoke what I call the principle of charity, and that is that until you really have good evidence to the contrary, you should accept at face value the arguments that people make. She seems to say that we should respect the will of majorities, full stop. I'm willing to accept that as what she believes.

I had an interesting interview with a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Education, who said, "Can you explain what's wrong with this book?" I sent him four pages with examples handwritten so that he could see. He said, "No, that's too complicated. I don't understand that," so I simplified it. He said, "No, it's too complicated. I don't understand that." Then, finally, I said what I just said, "She appears to believe there should be no limits on majorities," and he said, "Oh, no. That's too simple. Nobody could believe that."

Gillespie: Well, I mean the opening of the book, in many ways, the taking off point is the Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954, which itself was an act by the Supreme Court invalidating a majority position that local school districts could segregate students based on race, not based on majority rules. It seems very confusing from the beginning.

Munger: Yeah, not just the Supreme Court, but federal troops sent in directly and explicitly to thwart the will of majorities.

Gillespie: Yeah, but she, at the same time, is saying that any limits on the majority's ability to do as it wants with 50% minus one vote of the population is somehow cataclysmic and calls to mind ...

Munger: Well, but to your question, no, I don't think she actually believes that. She's a political progressive. When you dig down, when you drill down on the progressive position, they're not that sure that actual majorities know what they want, and so they need the assistance of experts and technocrats. On some things, that probably is a sensible position, that we could debate whether the Food and Drug Administration, in all of its particulars, is useful, but you've got to at least understand a reasonable person could believe that there are some things that we can't really leave up to the particulars of voting, rather it's what the people would want if they were well-informed. That's what progressives think they're trying to implement.

Gillespie: I mean what is the goal of progressivism in this? Is it on a certain argument it's to say that there's no limit on the government's ability to tax people or regulate people or redistribute wealth and resources? Because obviously she doesn't believe if a majority ... I mean she's not a true procedural due process person, where as long as a majority, a simple majority, votes on something, that's the law.

Munger: Well, what she is worried about is any limitation on the ability of the state to act on the rightly understood will of the people. Anything that the First Amendment or ... It's fairly common among progressives to say anyone who defends freedom of speech is racist, anyone who defends freedom of property is a plutocrat who is defending ... That's a caricature of their position, but what they're saying is any limit on what the government can do when it's trying to do the right thing, we don't want that. They believe they know. They actually believe that they know the right thing.

I have to admit that I have enjoyed going around to my colleagues who, throughout the Obama administration, were pretty happy with what I saw were excessive uses of executive invocation of power. They would say, "As long as my guy's in charge, I don't really mind," but their guy's not in charge anymore. They'll admit, "I just never expected Trump to be in charge."

Gillespie: Right. Well, if we take for granted that progressives tend to be majoritarians, in fact, when their people are not in power, I should point out, they're less likely to be interested in a simple majoritarianism, right?

Munger: Yeah, yeah. Well, but that's why they have to come up with stories for why there's some conspiracy, there's someone who's suppressing the vote, there's someone who's spending money behind the scenes because if actually left up to the people, as Hillary Clinton said, she'd be ahead by 50%.

Gillespie: Right. One of the charges that MacLean makes in the book is that ... And she goes back and forth between implying that libertarians are somewhat racist by design, other times it's by default, or that they're not sufficiently interested in the outcomes of particular policies such as school choice, essentially both in a form that was practiced in mid-century Virginia, in the 1950s, as a result of federal orders to integrate their schools. Virginia and a couple of other states talked about vouchers.

That's actually where Milton Friedman got the idea for school vouchers. He talks about it openly in the 1955 essay where he first talked about school vouchers. That libertarians are insufficiently concerned about certain policies' effects on racial and ethnic minorities. Do you think there's truth to that charge?

Munger: There is some truth to it in the sense that libertarians tend to take property rights as given and to the extent that the distribution of power and wealth reflects past injustice. In the case of the south where I grew up, it's not debatable. The distribution of power and wealth does, in fact, reflect past injustice, and saying we're going to start from where we are. It's one of the things Jim Buchanan often said; as a political matter, we're going to start from where we are. The reason is that to do anything else endows not the state, but politicians with so much power that we expect it to be misused.

That's the public choice part of this is that many progressives imagine a thing called the state that's well-informed and benevolent, naturally has the objectives that they attribute to it, but if instead you think politicians are likely to use that power for their own purposes, and it's actually unlikely that we'll achieve the outcomes even that progressives think that we'll get. You might concede, suppose that that were actually achievable, we could at least debate whether it would be a good thing. That's not how the state is going to use the power that the libertarian of public choice person would say. As a result, we have to start from where we are. It's not perfect, but we have to start from where we are.

Gillespie: Let's talk about Buchanan and the response to Brown versus Board of Education by people like Milton Friedman James Buchanan, who, despite having various connections, are very distinct thinkers. On a certain level, they advocated for school choice in the 1950s. School choice in that iteration would have allowed essentially a voucher program, let's say, where a local government, a state government, a federal government gives parents of students a certain amount of money to spend however they wish on education. That would have allowed conceivably for parents to choose segregated schools for their children while also allowing a lot of poor parents as well as racial and ethnic minorities freedom to leave racially-segregated schools.

How should libertarians talk about that? I mean nowadays school choice is primarily driven by explicit concern for and results that are good for poor students in general and ethnic and racial minorities. I guess I'm groping here for the question of should libertarians replace such a prioritization of property rights or of autonomy, individual autonomy, with questions about racial and ethnic disparities? I mean is that something that should come from a libertarian perspective?

Munger: Well, the reason that this is a hard question to ask is that it's a difficult issue for libertarians to take on in the first place. I found this when I was running for governor in 2008. My platform when I was running for governor for education was means-tested vouchers because wealthy people often have some kinds of choices. Now what we should worry about is making sure that those.

Gillespie: Just to point out, you ran for governor of North Carolina as a libertarian.

Munger: As a libertarian.

Gillespie: What percentage of the vote did you end up polling?

Munger: I got 2.8%, 125,000 votes, but I found that libertarians themselves were the hardest ones to convince about a voucher program because they just thought the state shouldn't be involved in education at all, but it already is involved in education; the question is how can we improve it?

I think one of the arguments for vouchers is that if you look at parents, the parents who ... And you already said this, but I want to emphasize it. The people who really favor voucher programs tend to be those who otherwise see themselves as having few choices they're happy with. A lot of them are poor African American inner city parents who really care about their children, but have no means of sending them to a better school.

To be fair, there's a famous letter from Milton Friedman to Warren Nutter in the mid-'50s. Warren Nutter was one Buchanan's partners at University of Virginia. In it, Friedman points out that vouchers may be a way around the problem of segregated schools. The reason is that, yes, schools are going to be segregated, there's not really a way around that, but this means that African American parents will have more resources to send their children to better schools. If they're still segregated, at least they're better schools. It's a way of giving more resources to parents.

Gillespie: Do you think somebody like Milton Friedman ... He's an interesting case because he stressed, for instance, about the war on drugs, that it had a disproportionate effect on racial minorities, and he did that with other programs as well. Was he hopelessly or willfully naive about the meanness of American society, I think, where he would ... And a lot of libertarians say this, and there's some truth to it, but there's also some accommodationist thinking going on, where as long as your dollars are green, racial attitudes will ... And you empower people with more money, say, in an education market that people will integrate or get along more easily. Is that just ridiculously idealistic?

Munger: Well, for Friedman, in particular, he himself had been subject to discrimination, very explicit, open discrimination. I think for Friedman, in particular, he was quite aware of the problem and was concerned in a way that many people are not. Libertarians generally often just say, "What we need is a race-blind society." Since it's unlikely that we have that, having institutions that otherwise seem fair may not be a very good solution, but Friedman himself advocated for policies that he thought would at least make discrimination more expensive or would allow people to work around discrimination.

The answer to your question is complicated. I do think that libertarians have, at a minimum, a public relations problem because of the tin ear that we have in talking about this, but I also think that there's a substantive problem in the way that you say that it might be that having some sort of ... Well, what I favor, and this is something that Jim Buchanan favored, is to avoid the waste that's involved in denying something like equality of opportunity to almost everyone.

Buchanan was very concerned about unearned privilege. He actually favored a confiscatory estate tax, inheritance tax because he thought that was honoring the privilege, making sure that people, regardless of where they start out, are able to achieve is not just in their interest, but in all of our interests. They're more productive, the society produces more, people are better consumers and better citizens. Equality of opportunity is something we should advocate for more explicitly.

Gillespie: Part of that is that libertarians often try to pass as anarchists, it seems to me. They simultaneously will say, "Well, I'm a libertarian," which is one thing, and it's easily defined or quickly to defined as somebody who believes in a strictly limited government. Almost always from any given starting point, libertarians are going to argue to reduce the size, scope, and spending of government, but a lot of us play-act as anarchists, saying there should be no state, so that the answer to everything, if it's gay marriage, it's like, "Well," or marriage equality, it's the state shouldn't be involved in marriage at all. If it's about public school or about school policy, the state shouldn't be involved in schooling at all and education.

Was Buchanan and Friedman ... Or most of the libertarian, major libertarian figures of academics, certainly an economist like Friedrich Hayek, like Friedman, like Ludwig von Mises, like Buchanan, they are not anarchists at all. They take the state as a given, and then it's a question of do you move it in a more libertarian direction or a less libertarian direction. Is that accurate?

Munger: I think it varies a bit. Mises is a hero to anarchists. I think it's complicated, but Murray Rothbard took Mises and, I think, in some ways, overinterpreted, but the Mises-Rothbard approach is much closer to being anarchist. Their claim is that anything that the state does, it will either do wrong or it's just inherently evil; whereas equality of opportunity is a more complicated question.

One problem with equality of opportunity is that it's much easier to take opportunities away from the wealthy than it is to give them to the poor. It's just a knee-jerk argument against redistribution is that all we're going to do is cut the top off the distribution. The problem is not inequality, the problem is poverty.

But a lot libertarians, I think, would not even admit that poverty is a problem on which the government should ask should act. What should happen instead is all we need to do is get rid of taxes and regulations and the market will respond by creating equality of opportunity. There is a point to that in the sense that the best welfare program is a good job.

Gillespie: Right. Well, to cut to the chase, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and there were multiple Civil Rights Act in the years, decade leading up to 1964, but that's a flash point because it's often seen as a ... Barry Goldwater who later in his life espoused a lot of libertarian-sounding platitudes and ideas and policies. In 1964, when he was running against Lyndon Johnson, was definitely ... I mean he was the favored candidate of National Review conservatives and of libertarians. If you talk to older libertarians, a lot of them talk about being actualized into politics through the Goldwater campaign in '64. He also courted segregationists; although he had a long history of actually integrating things like a family department store in Phoenix as well as the Arizona National Guard and the schools in the Phoenix area and what not.

But the civil rights acts in the mid-'60s are often castigated by libertarians for redefining places like hotels, theaters, businesses that were open to the general public as public accommodations, meaning that the state, local, and federal law could force business owners to integrate or to serve all customers regardless of race, color, creed, gender. Do you think the stock orthodox libertarian reading that that went too far? That's actually what Goldwater said when he had voted for everything before that, voted against it. Are libertarians wrong to interpret the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or rather the creation of public accommodations? Are they wrong to say that that is taking government action too far to remedy racism or prejudice?

Munger: That's an interesting question because what Goldwater would have said, and I think many people would rightly defend him for having said, is that the merits don't matter, this is a states rights question. The state needs to be able to govern itself in terms of the way that it decides on voting rights, and individuals need to be able to govern themselves in terms of the uses of their own property. Do you persist in that view when it turns out that the states are systematically misusing that ability to create an apartheid society?

I grew up under Jim Crow laws. I grew up in the '50s and '60s in rural Central Florida, and school busing was taking the black kids who live near my nice white kids school and taking them 15 miles away to a rat-infested, horrible place because that was the black kids school. The beginning of forced busing ended busing. It meant that the black kids could now walk to the nice white kids school.

The state systematically misused this. If individuals systematically misuse their property, at what point does the state say, "All right. That's not really your property. We're going to intervene." I think those are really different questions, but they get conflicted severely by the state.

Gillespie: Right. Also, if I can add, I mean that's one of the things that's interesting is that federal law's often seen as just coming out of nothing as opposed to addressing local and state laws or customs that have the force of law, so that ... Simply to focus on federal action misses the point that there's other levels of government doing things that are directly opposite of what the feds were talking about.

Munger: Yes, you cannot defend the right for states to do what they want when what they want is just manifestly evil and which violates the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. There were clear violations of the US constitution that the federal law was finally trying to change. Both the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965 addressed really legitimate problems that the states were misusing the power that they had been given. Now you can lament that the federal government took that power back. It's in violation of the Tenth Amendment.

Okay, the states deserved it because there's no such thing as states, what there is is politicians. Politicians cannot really be trusted. Saying that these are states rights, what it meant was that majorities, and we're back to MacLean now, majorities in these states got to act on evil racist impulses, and those majorities had to be controlled by the federal government. I don't think any other outcome was possible. Certainly no other outcome would have been better than the actual military intervention, which is what we saw: the 101st Airborne with tanks occupying some southern cities and enforcing what should have been the Civil War end of slavery amendments from the 1870s.

Gillespie: Well, you mentioned, bringing it back to MacLean, you also brought the conversation back to Buchanan and his idea of politics without romance by saying there aren't states, there's politicians who use power in ways that are specific and more individual. Just as I think libertarians oftentimes invoke the market as if it's some kind of Leviathan made up of all the different decisions, but it's a walking, strutting humanoid figure, we do that with the state, too.

If you could discuss a bit about Buchanan's characterization of public choice economics. Is that part of what gets under MacLean and other progressive skin? Because he actually is saying that we're not talking about a value free or a progressive values state, what we're talking about are individuals who amass power and then use it.

In a crude way, what public choice economics is about is looking at people in the public sector, elected officials, non-government organizations, in ways that they're similar to actors in the private sector. They want to increase their market share, they want to increase their revenue, but instead of profits, they get more tax dollars or more attention and more resources. That is very punishing to progressives or people who believe in good government. Is that part of what you think is irking her and other people who react negatively to libertarians?

Munger: Sure. It's exactly what is irking them. I think the odd thing is Professor MacLean's indictment of Buchanan as being the embodiment of this, because for him ... And I tried to talk about this in my review. It's a little complicated so let me just hit the high spots. The three things that public choice tries to do is methodological individualism. You have to start with individuals partly for reasons of autonomy, but also that's the reason people get to vote.

The second thing is what they call behavioral symmetry, but it's what you said, that politicians after all are not so different from the rest of us. Maybe they're public-spirited, but they also have their own objectives. We can't assume that they're either all-knowing or benevolent, which is often an assumption we make about the state.

The third thing, though, that Buchanan talks about, and this is different from a lot of public choice theory, is that we should think of politics as exchange, that is political institutions are a means of getting groups of people to cooperate in settings where markets might not work. We need some sort of way of choosing as groups. Here, Buchanan really was worried about the problem with political authority. The problem with political authority in philosophy is when can I be coerced? When can the state use this power, which is the definition of what the state is, which is violence, when can the state use violence against me?

The answer that Buchanan wanted was consent, when I have actually consented; not tacit consent, not something that we've made up, not hocus-pocus, actual consent. That's a hard problem, but he did believe that there was such a thing as political authority, but it took something like consensus. We're not all going to agree, but we all have to consent to be coerced. If we are, then we can do it. Under what circumstances can the 101st Airborne be brought into an otherwise sovereign state and force those citizens to do something that they don't want? It's a real problem because they did not consent to be coerced that way.

If you think that the constitution, with the Tenth Amendment reserved certain rights to the states, now maybe they're being misused, but there's a contract called the constitution that says this is what we can do. What we need to do perhaps is change the contract. He was probably too worried about constitutions, but you need to understand that Buchanan's main concern is political authority operating through an agreement called the constitution.

Gillespie: To my mind, and again, I guess, when did Buchanan's ... I guess it's considered one of his greatest works, The Calculus of Consent, which he wrote with Gordon Tullock. That was around 1960, 1962, something like that?

Munger: '62, yes.

Gillespie: There was a flowering of libertarian intellectuals, including people like Buchanan and Thomas Szasz with The Myth of Mental Illness, which came out around the same time, and even Hayek with The Constitution of Liberty, that we're all very much explicitly interested in how do you regulate power and how do you disperse power and then reserve coercion for particular moments. It parallels almost perfectly people like Michel Foucault, the French social theorist, who was also obsessed and focused on issues of power.

It has always struck me that there is so much common ground between a Foucauldian reading of power and a libertarian reading of power that was coming out 15 years after World War II and both a Nazi totalitarianism that was vanquished as well as Soviet and communist totalitarianism that was still rising. It boggles my mind that people can't seem to acknowledge that, that left-wing scholars don't want to admit that libertarianism speaks to issues of power and libertarians, if you invoke somebody like Foucault or certainly almost any French thinkers, that they go apoplectic.

It seems to me that Buchanan ultimately is engaged in one of the great questions that arose in the 20th Century of total institutions, total governments in big and small ways, big businesses, giant corporations, schooling that was designed to create citizens rather than educate people and create independent thinkers. Is there something to that? In your political science work, who are the thinkers that you think Buchanan could be most profitably engaged in a dialogue with that we don't necessarily think of off the top of our heads?

Munger: There is much to what you just said. I think that it's easy for us to lose track because ... Your conclusion is right. Those conversations didn't happen, and it seems now we've split off, but during the '60s, if you look at the work of Murray Rothbard reaching out to the left, they actually thought that exactly that synthesis was not just possible, but it was the direction that libertarianism should take.

It didn't work out very well because libertarians tended to be skeptical of state power. The left has this contradiction, a complicated contradiction, between saying, "We want the people to have power. We want to be able to protect the power of people." In fact, Foucault, at the end of his life, became very interested in problems of concentration of power in the state, not just in the market, and said some pretty libertarian things.

Gillespie: He had, in some of his last University of Paris lectures, told the students to read with special care the works of Mises and Hayek. He ultimately rejected a classical liberal way of reining in power, but definitely was interested in that. I guess Hayek and Jurgen Habermas overlapped at various institutions in the '60s as well, which is fascinating to think about.

Munger: There was some contact. I think it's partly that the left turned in the direction of endorsing the state, and libertarians ... One of our problems is we tend to value purity. That sort of conversation, a lot of people just wanted to kick Murray Rothbard out of the club because we all know that the state is evil and the most important thing is property rights. Anything that in any way vitiates or questions property rights is a mistake.

Buchanan is an economist. He's worried about trade-offs and he's worried about agreements. The reason is that in a voluntary exchange, we both know that we're better off. The argument for markets is you want the state to create and foster reductions in transactions cost that multiply the number of voluntary transactions, because the state doesn't know what we want, it doesn't know what we need. We do know, but if we're able to engage in more and more voluntary transactions, we get more wealth, more prosperity, more individual responsibility, and the world is a better place.

What Buchanan's question was can we scale up from that instead of having bilateral exchanges where I pay you to do something and we're both better off as a result? Can groups of us cooperated problems, like David Hume said, where we have to drain a swamp, there's a mosquito-laden swamp? It's very difficult for us to get together to do this. We have the free riding problem. Is there some institution that will allow us to have something that looks like a tax, but it's actually voluntary because all of us agreed that we're going to pay, just like I go to the grocery store, I voluntarily pay for something. Not all payments are involuntary, not all taxes have to be involuntary. That's the direction that Buchanan took. I actually think that libertarians just dropped the ball. We stopped thinking in those terms.

The oddest thing about MacLean's discovery, and you were saying earlier on that MacLean is indicting libertarians, I suppose that's true, but she really literally thinks there's this one person, James Buchanan, and his work is the skeleton key that allows us to unlock the entire program. In fact, Jim Buchanan has not been that much of an influence in economics. In some ways, public choice theory has become dominant in political science to a much greater extent, but that's because the study of constitutions in the ways that rules, limit majorities is just orthodox.

Buchanan's contributions to increase the number of analytical tools in the toolkit for analyzing majorities, he won, but it's off for MacLean to assign herself the straw man position and give Buchanan the orthodox position. I actually think that the argument in the book is just confused.

Gillespie: Well, we were on the same agenda in an Australian libertarian conference earlier this year, and one of the things you said there which I want to bring up now because it seems like a good time, you complained to a group of [AMSAC 37:02] libertarians that libertarians are too indebted to economists and that we think too much in economic terms, in economistic terms. You yourself, although you've always worked as a political scientist, as an academic, you were trained in economics. What is the problem there? Can you run through your case against being too indebted to economic thinking?

Munger: Many libertarians celebrate something like the perfection of the market, and so we end up playing defense. When someone says, "Look at these problems with the market," we say, "No, no. Actually, the problem is state intervention, the problem is regulation. If we get rid of those things, then perfection will be restored." The argument that I see for libertarianism is not the perfection of markets, it's the imperfections of the state, the institutions of the state.

I've had some debates with my Duke colleague, Dan Ariely, about this. Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist, and he writes about how irrational consumers are. He has a point. Consumers can be manipulated in all sorts of ways. My answer is every flaw in consumers is worse in voters. Every flaw in consumers is worse in voters.

All the things that Dan Ariely points to, the fact that free stuff is too important, that advertising about general principles or things that look cool can make us want something. In markets, at least, when I buy something and it doesn't work, I can buy something else. The problem is there's not any real feedback when it comes to voting. I don't get punished for voting in a way that makes me feel good about myself because I don't really affect the outcome anyway.

I think the thing that we, as libertarians, need to spend more time thinking about is looking at actual policies and saying, "What's a viable alternative to what the state is doing?" not, "If the state does nothing, everything will be perfect," because very few people are persuaded by that. Something will happen. A magic thing called the market will grow up.

Now I understand that. As an economist, I understand that. We talked earlier about the Food and Drug Administration. What would happen if there were no Food and Drug Administration? Well, what would happen is that things like Consumer Reports or other private certification agencies would license drugs, and brand name would become more important.

Would it be better? I don't know. It would work, though. It's not true that in the absence of state action, there would just be chaos, the Wild West would govern the drug market. But to say all we need to do is get rid of the Food and Drug Administration and markets will take care of it is not very persuasive. You would need to specify an actual alternative that utilizes the incentives that people can recognize.

The short answer to your question is libertarians tend to say, "Markets are great if the state would stop interfering. Everything would be perfect because markets are terrific." No one believes that. As a libertarian candidate, I found out no one believes that.

Gillespie: What were your most successful ways of reaching out to new voters or to new audiences, I guess both as running for governor, but also in your academic work and also your work as a public intellectual? What would you recommend are good ways to enlarge the circle of libertarian believers or people who are libertarian or people who are libertarian-curious?

Munger: Well, I have found that conceding that the concerns of the people I'm talking to are valid and we just disagree about the best means of achieving that is a big step, because what libertarians tend to want to do, their answer to almost everything is we should do nothing. There's a problem with property, "Yeah, but if we do anything, it'll make it worse, so we should do nothing," or there's a problem with healthcare, "Yeah, what we need to do is nothing because as soon as we do nothing, things will get better. Saying, "That's actually a real problem, and I see what you're talking about. Here's what I think there were some difficulties with your approach and here's how my approach might work better," that means you have to know something about actual policies rather than just always saying no.

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Do Too Many Libertarians Celebrate a False 'Perfection of the Market'? [Podcast] - Reason (blog)

Young Americans are usually thought of as decidedly liberal. This is an oversimplified picture. A sizeable minority of Millennials identify as conservative. Despite some evidence that Millennial conservatives lean left on social issues, it would be wrong to write all of them off as libertarians. Some young conservatives, in fact, hold anti-libertarian attitudes, and their numbers may be increasing.

Plainly speaking, these young conservatives hold socially and culturally conservative views. On the other hand, they are wary of individualism and free markets. They are not necessarily anti-capitalist, but fear that laissez-faire economic systems can be excessively cutthroat, prizing individual material gain above the wellbeing of the community.

This strain of conservative thought is closely related to the traditionalism of Russell Kirk, the 20th-century conservative political theorist who authored The Conservative Mind. Kirk identified ten foundational conservative principles. The first principle states that conservatives believe in an enduring moral order. Moral truths do not change with the times, and neither does human nature. Conservatives are champions, he continues, of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they dont know.

Conservatives value private property because it is closely linked to freedom, but argue that getting and spending are not the chief aims of human existence. Decisions directly affecting members of a community should be made locally and voluntarily. Regarding governance, conservatives recognize that human passions must be restrained: Order and liberty must be balanced. Moreover, a conservative favors reasoned and temperate progress, but does not worship Progress as some type of magical force.

Young, anti-libertarian conservatives represent a new generation of traditionalists. And they are increasingly prominent on some college campuses.

Christian McGuire, a student at Virginias Patrick Henry College and editor-in-chief of the George Wythe Review, spoke to National Review about the schools conservative climate, saying the whole campus is fairly conservative. Patrick Henry College is a Christian school, so faith strongly influences students political views. McGuire says most students come from a background of religious conservatism, and feel as ifthey have been left out of the national discussion. More bluntly, he claims most of Patrick Henry College realizes we lost the culture war.

In response, McGuire and his fellow conservative classmates have started to turn to traditionalist thinkers such as Kirk. McGuire mentioned other increasingly popular thinkers among campus conservatives: Edmund Burke and G. K. Chesterton. Even Catholic social teaching is influencing some students. They are finding that these are rich sources of conservative thought.

When asked whether monarchist sentiments could be found on campus, McGuire responded firmly: Yes, absolutely. Though still very much a minority view at Patrick Henry College, some traditionalist-minded students are open to the idea of a king.

Traditionalist sentiments can also be found almost 600 miles northwest of Patrick Henry College, at the University of Notre Dame. Mimi Teixeira, a student at Notre Dame and vice president of the schools Young Americans for Freedom chapter, told National Review there is a sizeable group of students inclined to traditionalism. They are more interested in, and connected to, the Catholic faith and Catholic social teaching, she says. Besides Burke and Kirk, Pope Saint John Paul II is a powerful influence on this group.

The Notre Dame traditionalists are skeptical of classical liberalism. We do have a group of conservatives, she says, who dont agree with the Enlightenment. They contend classical liberalism is missing a piece.

Notre Dame isnt the only Catholic university with a sizeable number of young traditionalists. The Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., is home to many students who could be understood as profoundly traditional, according to Friar Israel-Sebastian N. Arauz-Rosiles,O.F.M. Conv., a seminarian at the university. The schools Catholic identity deeply influences how students think. He describes Saint Thomas Aquinas as probably the single most influential thinker on the university campus, in terms of his impact onstudents theological and political outlook.

Friar Israel has noticed that some students attend a yearly Mass in honor of Blessed Karl of Austria celebrated at Saint Mary Mother of God Church in Washington, D.C. A member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, Blessed Karl of Austria was the last emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. Friar Israel acknowledges this mightmerely represent a superficial interest in Catholic monarchy. Nevertheless, he has encountered a number of students who reject classical liberalism and such political theorists asThomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

At Hillsdale College in Michigan, traditionalist conservatism has many adherents. Michael Lucchese, a senior at Hillsdale, says lots of people come in libertarian, and come out hardcore traditionalist. They reject, he continues, the sort of free-markets-will-solve-everything mentality of libertarianism in favor of a more traditional conservatism. Hillsdale students are exposed to the Great Books of the Western canon, including texts by Plato and Aristotle. Russell Kirk, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Leo Strauss also influence Hillsdale students. Lucchese added that C. S. Lewis is the most uncontroversial figureon campus, beloved by everybody.

Like McGuire, Lucchese reports that some students are sympathetic to monarchism, especially in the history department. Pointedly, he says many students are dissatisfied with the modern world. They recoil at the prevalence of sexual immorality and the atomism at the heart of liberal capitalism. Traditionalism looks to higher, permanent things such astruth, goodness, and beauty. Students see that as more fulfilling than what the modern world has to offer.

Traditionalist conservatism is not establishing deep roots on all campuses. Marlo Safi, a student at the University of Pittsburgh and editor-in-chief of The Pitt Maverick, told National Review that most conservatives there are of a libertarian bent. I have only met maybe five people, she says, whom I would call traditionalists in the vein of Russell Kirk. Most conservative students prefer to talk about Milo Yiannopoulos and people who are currently on the scene, says Safi.

Similarly, Anthony Palumbo, editor-in-chief of the Wake Forest Review, told National Review theres not much traditionalist conservatism at Wake Forest. Most conservatives at Wake Forest care little about social and cultural issues, preferring to promote free-market economics.

Among students, traditionalist conservatism seems to be especially common at Catholic universities and smaller Christian colleges. These young traditionalists question the idea of Progress, and express discontent with the modern world. They find value in community, and their views are usually rooted in faith. The Left may be winning the culture wars, but these students keep the flame of traditional morality ablaze. They reject libertarianism, especially what they see as its excessive faith in free markets and individual material gain. They often look to similar thinkers for inspiration: political theorists such as Russell Kirk, statesmen such as Edmund Burke, philosophers such as Plato, numerous Catholic intellectuals, and others.

They are not quite a monolithic group. Not all of them are monarchists, for example. The degree to which they are skeptical of classical liberalism also differs. Some are very much opposed to Locke and Rousseau; others are more cautious in their criticism.

The presence of traditionalist conservatism among college students reveals that some young Americans reject the vocal liberalism and libertarianism of their peers. More than that, however, these young traditionalists fear that the modern world has gone astray. They are the vanguard of a new generation standing athwart history, trying to reorient Americans toward ideas and ideals thatnourish the whole person: community, truth, goodness, and beauty.

READ MORE: The Strange Traditionalism of the LiberalElite Did William F. Buckleys Conservative Project End in Failure? The End of Reaganism

Jeff Cimmino is a student of history at Georgetown University and an editorial intern at National Review.

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Traditionally conservative college students reject the vocal liberalism and libertarianism of their peers. - National Review