An important element of the history Brian Doherty recounts in his new book Modern Libertarianism is the sheer isolation and abnormality of mid-20th-century libertarians. If you think it’s lonely today being the only libertarian in your college dorm—but having access to millions of them online, perhaps more than you’d like—imagine a world, as recent as World War II, in which people we now regard as the leading libertarian intellectuals of their day would meet and each think, “I thought I was the only one.”
Doherty has written books about multiple slightly fringy subcultures now, including libertarians, participants in the annual Burning Man art festival, avid gun-owners, cartoonists, and libertarians again. Would that each of these subcultures would read all his books so it could learn about its own shortcomings and take some lessons from the other subcultures.
Socially isolated libertarians might learn a thing or two from Burning Man’s open-ended creativity, for instance, and if my casual observations of the Net over the past several weeks are any indication, the Burners, even more than most humans, could learn a lot about economics and politics from the libertarians. I haven’t encountered too many people online who want Elon Musk arrested for trying to trim government’s budget, but a disproportionate number of those I did see were Burners—and no doubt think of themselves as tolerant.
At some point, though, when you’ve seen your 100th totalitarian artist, you have to admit that flaky creative mavericks aren’t in fact natural libertarians but, counterintuitive as it might seem, quite the opposite. Liberty may dwell more comfortably in the hearts and minds of bourgeois, necktie-wearing employees—mindful of others’ property rights and contracts—than it does in the crazed craniums of puppeteers and musicians, though of course I want a world in which people see that liberty’s good for everyone.
In the meantime, you should frankly admit, even at the risk of sounding conservative, that your risk of being executed by guillotine probably goes up, not down, if you leave a convention of hardware store managers you were attending and try bonding with people who perform with flaming hula-hoops—at least at this juncture in cultural history.
Similarly, I hope Doherty’s fellow Reason magazine employee Nick Gillespie—who was interviewed by a cordial but market-averse Jon Stewart not long before chatting with Doherty onstage in Manhattan last week—recognizes that even when they’re chuckling in friendly fashion or, more frequently, smiling tight phony smiles, mainstream media folk, particularly the slightly hip or offbeat ones, are perhaps the most vicious and hostile anti-capitalists still roaming the planet.
Whether it’s an Elizabeth Spiers from Gawker or a Katrina Van Den Heuvel from The Nation, these people hate us libertarians with a passion you probably can’t find even in nominally-Communist China anymore. Scratch a chummy-sounding Jon Stewart and nine times out of 10, you’ll still find a rage-fueled, power-worshipping Keith Olbermann underneath, even as the Soviet Union recedes into history.
Stewart has an admirable moderate streak, but like their Stalinist forebears, much of today’s artistic and media elite still hew to the theory that anything that’s not left-socialist must be fascist. That attitude makes it that much easier for them to condemn someone like Elon Musk as a fascist even as he calls for reducing government’s power, or to smear Vice President Vance’s defense of free speech in Europe as a prelude to Naziism, as if the Nazis liked free speech. Nazis only liked speech with which they agreed—and in this they are not so unlike many activists and politicians today, not all from the right and, not all operating at the fringes of society.
If good theories are, like science, supposed to prove themselves true by being predictive, it may be time to abandon the hypothesis that the creatives are likely allies of freedom, perhaps testing instead old mainstream-conservative hypotheses—such as expecting weirdos to have designs on your possessions or expecting people who admire government rules and welfare-state bureaucracies to be dismissive of your civil liberties. Why keep cutting MSNBC hosts or interpretive dance troupes slack after all these decades of their East Germany-like statist chicanery?
Socially liberal? Probably not fiscally conservative, then, I’m sorry to say. Then again, the real hippies were often willing to fight the government decades ago, whereas those hardware store managers likely would’ve sat around during riots awaiting instructions from the cops. There’s hope the artists will one day wake up to the fact that government isn’t cool.
And many libertarians eventually recognize the fact that Burning Man-attending, orgy-going latter-day hippies usually want to censor, tax, regulate, fine, and otherwise harass most of the populace. Thinking that a liberal totalitarian is anomalous or illogical in theory is fine, but if you haven’t by now noticed that it’s a frequent pattern—possibly the norm—down here in empirical reality, you are failing at your job as a political analyst and endangering the world in the process.
Luckily, in the new book Doherty touches on the whole broad range of libertarian subcultures, left-leaning, right-leaning, and too strange to easily categorize. The familiar thinktanks—such as Cato, which published the book, and Reason, for whom he and Gillespie and even me on occasion have written about things admirable and things abhorrent while keeping in mind the old libertarian rule “anything that’s peaceful”—are just the tip of the iceberg.
Libertarians in their dizzying variety will continue trying to find ways to perform outreach on behalf of free-market, individual-liberty-respecting ideas without ever, I hope, adopting that most cynical and collectivist of tactics: namely, saying, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Better to be the least popular person in your dorm, parish, or cell block than that.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey