I’d just written an article about details when I became perplexed by some details of others’ writings at Splice Today. I was struck that Tom Joyce’s piece “Catholics for Trump” seemed to endorse “the Catholic viewpoint” on abortion: “Yes to treating miscarriages and abortions that protect the mother’s life, but otherwise, no.” That differed from an earlier Joyce piece allowing various exceptions, which I’d criticized as requiring impractical oversight by government-sanctioned authorities, and now I posted comments inquiring about Joyce’s apparent change of position. As of this writing, I’ve gotten no answer.
Todd Seavey’s “Weimar-a-Lago” included criticism of Timothy Snyder’s new book, On Freedom, which I happen to be reading (or “reading,” in that I’m doing so out of order, much as I read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as a kid, opening to parts that interest me most, final chapters first). Todd, whom I recently had lunch with to introduce him to my son on the third day of the Star Trek timeline’s Bell Riots, wrote: “Not only does his brand-new book On Freedom peddle the usual Political Philosophy 101 half-truths about how we need a big welfare state and a whole scheme of ‘positive liberty’ because property rights don’t guarantee you won’t end up sleeping under a bridge etc., but in his embarrassingly unphilosophical effort to blame his present-day ideological foes for the deep wrongs of Ukrainian history, he has even described the Nazis as pursuing a program of libertarianism in that land.”
I looked through Snyder’s book to see where the Nazi occupation of Ukraine’s described as libertarian, and didn’t find it, and while it’s possible I haven’t looked hard enough, I then realized Seavey wrote that Snyder “has” described it that way, which raises the possibility he was invoking something Snyder wrote or said some other time, which makes fact-checking it that much harder. (Sometimes, in my professional fact-checking, I’m tasked with a verification needing massive effort, such as a manuscript I saw recently that mentioned various things allegedly somewhere in a collection of 38 PDFs about UFOs, and after a quick perusal I submitted a query suggesting that the authors provide a little more specificity.)
Snyder is critical of libertarianism, writing: “Deniers of climate change and oligarchal escapists often call themselves ‘libertarians.’ If libertarianism means that liberty is the value of values, then this is a libertarian book. As generally formulated in the United States, however, libertarianism is an ideology of submission to the nonexistent ‘free market,’ based on contradictions and lies.” Noting that government research and subsidies have been crucial to digital technologies and fossil fuels, Snyder argues that libertarians promote a “mindless binarism: ‘free market’ good, government bad,” and: “Like Marxism, libertarianism functions as both science and religion.” I can see why Todd doesn’t like this book.
For my part, as an ex-libertarian, albeit one who thinks “free market” a useful approximation for prices and transactions set mainly by buyers and sellers, I agree liberty can’t be seen solely in negative terms (as freedom from government coercion). In a 2011 piece for David Frum’s webzine FrumForum, I championed government spending on science and infrastructure, for example: “It’s hard for me to see how terminating research projects that are too large-scale or long-term for the private sector would yield greater choices of technologies and careers. It would produce more freedom only in the sense that a man stranded on a tiny desert island is wonderfully free because he doesn’t have to pay any taxes.”
Based on partial reading, I’ll refrain from opining whether Snyder’s vision of positive freedom appeals to me, though I note that he breaks it into the following elements: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality and solidarity. I’ve long thought physical mobility’s a key part of freedom, as my desert island example indicates; this has factored into my skepticism about an anarcho-capitalist vision in which streets would be privately owned, and also about libertarians who look favorably on mass deportations as a way to boost liberty, since the expellees are presumed to be dependents on the welfare state.
The Harris-Walz campaign, for which my lawn sign recently arrived, has taken a rhetorical tack of emphasizing “freedom.” This is contested by Republicans who argue the candidates, and the Democrats more broadly, aren’t reliable defenders of free speech, or are inclined toward excessive regulation and authoritarianism more broadly. That counter might’ve been deployed more effectively by some other Republican ticket, or other version of the Republican Party, which hadn’t shown an enthusiasm for destroying woke books, overturning elections, and setting abortion bans with few if any exceptions.
—Follow Kenneth Silber on X: @kennethsilber
