Last week, two of my fellow Lions of Liberty contributors weighed in on the term “Conservative” and it’s utility in regards to advancing the ideas of liberty. Over at Economic Policy Journal, Chris Rossini argued that libertarians should “ditch” conservatives, citing how “conservative” pundits such as the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks will claim to stand for liberty while advocating such policies as government “education reform” under the guise of “social justice.” He quotes Lew Rockwell’s take on conservatism from 2008:

What does conservatism today stand for? It stands for war. It stands for power. It stands for spying, jailing without trial, torture, counterfeiting without limit, and lying from morning to night. There comes a time in the life of every believer in freedom when he must declare, without any hesitation, to have no attachment to the idea of conservatism.

It’s certainly true that the “conservatism” advanced by the Republican Party of today does indeed stand for the war, the spying, the torture, and all of the other terrible things perpetrated by an increasingly totalitarian government. The Republican Party and “conservatism” are largely one and the same in the eyes of the American public, and for that reason associating them with the ideas of liberty can indeed prove dangerous as Rossini points out.

James E. Miller has another take, and argued here at Lions of Liberty that conservatism shouldn’t be ditched all together. He attempts to make the distinction between what the idea of “conservative” has come to mean in the political realm as opposed to what it means as a cultural viewpoint. He sees conservatism as a value system that stretches far beyond the political philosophy of libertarianism. Miller writes:

Given its history, having a reluctant or even cynical view of the political process is perfectly healthy. Libertarians don’t trust political actors to adhere to strictures. Neither should conservatives who cast a wary eye on anyone crying for progress. Conservatism, at its best, is the wisdom to be suspicious of grand proclamations of the state’s efficacy. But it also extends further: it’s a disposition that recognizes man’s flawed abilities and doesn’t heartily celebrate progress, whether it be material, scientific, or knowledgeable. It holds onto tradition because of the guiding light it has provided for centuries before. That doesn’t mean a conservative is correct to oppose all new declarations of liberty. But it acts as a strong bulwark against the insidious longings of thought leaders who want tyrannical lordship over freedom.

He concludes:

Rossini is wrong to say conservatives should be ditched. In fact, many libertarians have a conservative streak to them without even knowing it. They understand full well the unintended consequences of government power. And nothing is more conservative than taking a step back from proposed reform and querying who benefits and why. Certainly that’s a wise disposition for anyone suspicious of man-made authority, including the most principled of libertarians.

As someone who has come to understand the political viewpoints of both Chris Rossini and James Miller in my time as editor-in-chief of Lions of Liberty, I can say with fair confidence that the political philosophy – that based on the libertarian non-aggression axiom – held by both is nearly indistinguishable from one another. So this is largely a question of strategy – of how best to convince others to adopt the libertarian philosophy.

I have my thoughts on this, but this is Mondays with Murray, not Mondays with Marc (don’t give me any ideas!), so first I will check in with Murray Rothbard. In the first chapter of his libertarian manifesto For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto , Murray discusses the origin of the word “conservative” in American politics.

…we must first remember that classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to the political and economic interests — the ruling classes — who benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military machines, the State bureaucracies. Despite three major violent revolutions precipitated by the liberals — the English of the seventeenth century and the American and French of the eighteenth — victories in Europe were only partial. Resistance was stiff and managed to successfully maintain landed monopolies, religious establishments, and warlike foreign and military policies, and for a time to keep the suffrage restricted to the wealthy elite. The liberals had to concentrate on widening the suffrage, because it was clear to both sides that the objective economic and political interests of the mass of the public lay in individual liberty. It is interesting to note that, by the early nineteenth century, the laissez-faire forces were known as “liberals” and “radicals” (for the purer and more consistent among them), and the opposition that wished to preserve or go back to the Old Order were broadly known as “conservatives.”

It’s important to understand that the “classical liberalism” to which Rothbard refers here are is the label associated with those that pushed for the ideas of individual liberty – the Thomas Pains, the John Adams’ , the Thomas Jeffersons. The classical liberals were opposed to the system of mercantilism and crony capitalism; the conservatives were the ones trying to preserve the mercantilist system.

And so, in the late nineteenth century, statism and Big Government returned, but this time displaying a proindustrial and pro-general-welfare face. The Old Order returned, but this time the beneficiaries were shuffled a bit; they were not so much the nobility, the feudal landlords, the army, the bureaucracy, and privileged merchants as they were the army, the bureaucracy, the weakened feudal landlords, and especially the privileged manufacturers. Led by Bismarck in Prussia, the New Right fashioned a right-wing collectivism based on war, militarism, protectionism, and the compulsory cartelization of business and industry — a giant network of controls, regulations, subsidies, and privileges which forged a great partnership of Big Government with certain favored elements in big business and industry. Something had to be done, too, about the new phenomenon of a massive number of industrial wage workers — the “proletariat.” During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, indeed until the late nineteenth century, the mass of workers favored laissez-faire and the free competitive market as best for their wages and working conditions as workers, and for a cheap and widening range of consumer goods as consumers. Even the early trade unions, e.g., in Great Britain, were staunch believers in laissez-faire. New conservatives, spearheaded by Bismarck in Germany and Disraeli in Britain, weakened the libertarian will of the workers by shedding crocodile tears about the condition of the industrial labor force, and cartelizing and regulating industry, not accidentally hobbling efficient competition. Finally, in the early twentieth century, the new conservative “corporate state” — then and now the dominant political system in the Western world — incorporated “responsible” and corporatist trade unions as junior partners to Big Government and favored big businesses in the new statist and corporatist decision-making system.

The parallels to today are stunning if not unsurprising. Understanding that much of the voting public actually liked the progress of the Industrial Revolution and were in no way interested in returning to the days of old, the “conservative” politicians of the time simply began to co-opt some of the rhetoric used by classical liberals. The were paying lip service to free markets and all of that wonderful stuff, all the while crafting the corporatist state we see today.

Today, as the ideas of liberty become more popular, we once again see many conservative politicians adopting more libertarian rhetoric – but do they mean it any more than their mercantilist predecessors?

History may be on Rossini’s side in the great debate between the two Lions – in terms of the political realm, conservatives were never principled advocates of individual liberty; not even of the much tamer “small government.” The conservatives were protectors of the crony capitalists all along.

The classical liberals had it right, largely – but we all know what has happened to the term “liberal” since then as well.

The lesson: don’t let a politician get a hand on your political labels, because they will distort and destroy them!

The important thing to consider, as always, is the meaning and principles behind the terms we use. While Rossini is correct that we should be highly suspicious of any politician or pundit labeling themselves “conservative” and to reject their ideas when there are antithetical to liberty, Miller has a valid point in the context of winning others over on the ideas of liberty.

We should not reject outright any such individual who identifies as conservative, per se. Many of these individuals are well-meaning people who truly do believe in individual liberty and reducing the effects of tyrannical government in our lives. These people may have been duped by the political rhetoric of today to associate their already-held beliefs with the term “conservative”, but if anything that makes them potential allies, ripe for further education and conversation on the ideas of liberty.

It’s up libertarians to awake the masses – whatever political labels they may adhere to – and snap them out of their “left-right / progressive-conservative” paradigms. This is a message that I’m confident great liberty advocates such as Chris, James, and Murray can all agree with.



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