Posted on 05/03/2002 11:22:28 AM PDT by H.R. Gross
May 3, 2002
Today's Wall Street Journal [May 2] proclaims, with a flourish of editorial trumpets, "The Fall of the Libertarians." The cause of the movement's alleged demise? 9/11. Oh yes, "everything's changed" since that awful day, including the possibility of getting Big Government off our backs:
"The great free-market revolution that began with the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at the close of the 1970s has finally reached its Thermidor, or point of reversal."
THE END OF 'THE END OF HISTORY'
The great irony of this exceedingly odd little screed is that it was written by someone whose philosophy most definitely bit the dust on 9/11: Francis Fukuyama's "the end of history" thesis was blown to smithereens along with the World Trade Center and lost amid the smoking rubble on that fateful day. In essence, the central argument of his famous article, published in the summer of 1989, is summarized in a single sentence:
"What we may be witnessing in not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
While he was careful to note that "the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world," this qualification only underscores the colossal scale of Fukuyama's error. For it seems no one informed the 9/11 hijackers of this alleged "victory" over their consciousness. Their terrible act was a dramatic (and unanswerable) refutation of Fukuyama's deterministic evolutionism. Yet now this recycled neoconservative has-been is being dragged out in the service of – what? War, naturally, the chief preoccupation and joy of every neocon.
WARMED-OVER HEGELIANISM
Set down as the Soviet empire was tottering into oblivion, Fukuyama's warmed-over Hegelianism soon became the favorite intellectual cliché of Marxists-turned-neocons from Commentary to National Review. Fukuyama's giddy triumphalism provided a fitting backdrop for the unabashedly neo-imperialist flights of fancy indulged in by the post-cold war, post-9/11 neoconservative right. Bill Kristol's clarion call for "benevolent global hegemony" and National Review's crazed campaign demanding that George W. Bush invade and occupy the Saudi oil fields come immediately to mind. As neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer proclaimed in the pages of The National Interest [Winter 1989-90]:
"The goal is the world as described by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama's provocation was to assume that the end [of history] – what he calls the common marketization of the world – is either here or inevitably dawning; it is neither. The West has to make it happen. It has to wish and work for a super-sovereign West economically, culturally, and politically hegemonic in the world."
The triumph of the liberal values supposedly represented by the US government is inevitable, according to Fukuyama, but, just in case it isn't, Krauthammer and his fellow neocons want to use the American military to "make it happen." Like Marx, who also posited the inevitable victory of his adherents, Fukyama is more than willing to go along with this. Fukuyama recently signed on along with a passel of neocon intellectuals to a call issued by the Project for a New American Century calling for the outright invasion and military occupation of large swatches of the Middle East.
FUKUYAMA VERSUS THE LIBERTARIANS
Libertarianism is an obstacle to Empire, and, as such, must be removed: conservatism, says Fukuyama in the War Street Journal, has "matured," and it's time to cast away the youthful chrysalis of libertarianism:
"Like the French Revolution, it derived its energy from a simple idea of liberty, to wit, that the modern welfare state had grown too large, and that individuals were excessively regulated."
To begin with, it is absurd to identify the free-market "revolution" that supposedly triumphed in the 1980s with the electoral victories of either Thatcher or Reagan, since neither reduced the size, scope, or arrogant presumptiveness of government power, but only – at best – momentarily slowed the rate of increase. And I would argue that Reagan, in pursuing a military build-up unprecedented in our history, did more to increase the power of the public sector than any other President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But then this confusion on Fukuyama's part is unremarkable in someone who sees libertarianism embodied in the complaint that "the modern welfare state had grown too large." Libertarians abhor the day the welfare state was spawned, and have called for its complete abolition ever since. As for Americans being "excessively regulated," it is not the degree but the presumption that regulation is required that libertarians have always contested.
RED RHETORIC
"Yet the revolution entered a Jacobin phase with the election of Newt Gingrich's Congress in 1994," Fukuyama continues – hey, wait a minute! This guy is supposed to be a (neo)conservative, I know, but how come he writes as if he were Leon Trotsky? His prose is chockfull of references right out of some Trotskyist tract: "Thermidor" (Trotsky's term for what called the "degeneration" of the Soviet "workers state"), "Jacobins," and comparing the conservative-libertarian ascendancy to the French Revolution. What is this – the Wall Street Journal or the Socialist Worker? With Fukuyama and his neocon fan club, it's often hard to tell.
LIBERTARIAN 'JACOBINS'?
Okay, so this "Jacobin" phase of the alleged free-market revolution, according to Fukuyama, went too far, allowing the Clintonites to seize the vital center. "For many on the right," he avers,
"Mr. Reagan's classical liberalism began to evolve into libertarianism, an ideological hostility to the state in all its manifestations. While the dividing line between the two is not always straightforward, libertarianism is a far more radical dogma whose limitations are becoming increasingly clear. The libertarian wing of the revolution overreached itself, and is now fighting rearguard actions on two fronts: foreign policy and biotechnology."
Well, he's right about one thing: libertarianism, while most emphatically not a "dogma," is indeed radical, in that its critique of the status quo strikes at the very root of the evil that besets us, which is the State. If Reaganism represents "classical liberalism," in any sense, then perhaps Fukuyama means classical liberalism at the end of its tether, after a long decline into utilitarianism and gradualism. In any case, Fukuyama's conflation of Reaganism and libertarianism is interesting only because it prefaces the real point of his piece:
"The hostility of libertarians to big government extended to U.S. involvement in the world. The Cato Institute propounded isolationism in the '90s, on the ground that global leadership was too expensive. At the time of the Gulf War, Cato produced an analysis that argued it would be cheaper to let Saddam keep Kuwait than to pay for a military intervention to expel him--a fine cost-benefit analysis, if you only abstracted from the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a megalomaniac."
Of course, the reality is that Saddam and Kuwait have kissed and made up, forming a common front, along with the Saudis, against the US. So it turns out that it would indeed have been cheaper – in terms of lives, both American and Iraqi, as well as dollars – to let Saddam keep Kuwait after all. As for weapons of mass destruction being in the hands of a Middle Eastern megalomaniac, I, too, am disturbed that Ariel Sharon has his finger on the nuclear trigger, but are we going to blame the Iraqis for that, too?
So there was the "isolationist" (i.e. pro-peace) Cato Institute, daring to question Washington's pro-war consensus. Ah, but then along came 9/11, when "everything changed" – and the rug was ostensibly pulled out from under the libertarians:
"Contrary to Mr. Reagan's vision of the U.S. as a 'shining city on a hill,' libertarians saw no larger meaning in America's global role, no reason to promote democracy and freedom abroad. Sept. 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports."
Oh, thank God for the US government! They did a great job of screening, now didn't they? Why, if not for them, the 9/11 hijackers would've wriggled through our security nets and managed to smuggle weapons aboard four aircraft, hijack the planes, and ram them into the – hey, uh, hold on there, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't something terrible happen that day in spite of all the warnings, all the precautions, all the "anti-terrorist" task forces and government studies, all the billions poured into "security"? It's pathetic, really, that the neocons are now imitating the Daschle Democrats in proclaiming that big government, post-9/11, is back in style. Good lord, we may not have reached the end of history, but surely we have reached the end of our patience with Fukuyama's sloppy polemic. What makes it interesting to begin with, however, is that this attack on the Cato Institute is completely gratuitous.
True, the Cato folks were once committed to the cause of noninterventionism, because they, like all authentic libertarians, know that war is the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne famously put it. The centralizing effect of military priorities in wartime, the comprehensiveness of state controls for the duration of the conflict, necessarily shrinks the sphere of liberty and increases the role and reach of government. Even more importantly, just as libertarians oppose the consolidation and expansion of the public sector at home, so they must logically oppose its geographical extension abroad. This view was held by Murray N. Rothbard, the real intellectual founder of the Cato Institute, and advocated in one form or another by Cato (in spite of their break with Rothbard in the early 1980s) up until 9/11.
Oh yes, and they also hold "reason" as their "highest virtue." Yeah, right....
I would say that they are losing what libertarian qualities they had by ceasing to be conservative. However, my view is that the NeoCon Journal's argument was a straw man because the US Government never went very far and certainly never very deep in any libertarian direction. Beyond a few well-spoken words by Reagan, when has the Government shown any libertarian leanings? Since they have never practiced such restraints, the actions on 9/11 can hardly be laid at the feet of libertarians.
The truth of the matter is that neocons will say that whatever happens proves their point and disproves libertarianism.
Tuor
I, on the other hand, was merely referring to those "libertarians" who have given this administration a blank check on military action abroad post-9/11.
What makes you think that those libertarians who support military action are likewise in favor of giving the government a "blank check" as you call it?
While I sometimes agree with positions put forth on your website, I do not condone painting people with such a wide brush. I object to being characterized as in favor of war in the broad sense, and of saying that I support giving the government carte blance to do whatever it wants. Those are both gross mischaracterizations of my positions, and statements worthy of leftists.
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