in the early ‘70s, the more cynical among us could usually predict the post-election hosannas that the
, the Party’s East Coast rag, would trumpet. Leading comrades ever insisted that the masses, even if subjectively anti-Communist, were on our side objectively. (“Look how many votes George McGovern got! A real slap in the face to the forces of reaction!”)
And so I come down with a bout of paramnesia whenever someone tries to make a libertarian silk purse out of the sow’s ear of electoral results. For the second time in three weeks, Lew Rockwell has tried to convince us that the recent elections demonstrated that “ideology” can trump economic self-interest. More controversially, he holds that this “should make us optimistic about the prospects for liberty, even under the current system of politics, which seems so rigged against the triumph of ideals.” (
I hope I’ve misunderstood him, because, I cannot imagine Rockwell’s holding that there’s anything about the electoral triumph of ideas (“ideology”) or ideals in itself that is cause for libertarian optimism. For the latter would require that the triumphant ideas (or ideals) of the voting majority be (at least somewhat) libertarian. But there is no evidence that they are. And I assume there’s no need to cite the previous century’s many examples of the triumph of anti-libertarian ideas.
But ideas are not libertarian just because they do not inspire mass murder, but merely trim the legislative power of a political party as punishment for an unpopular war. Surely the return to power of that party’s welfare-warfare twin puts such trimming in perspective.
Elsewhere in the essay, Rockwell defines “ideology” as “the ideas that people hold concerning their rights, the role of government, the idea of justice, the role of freedom, their perceptions concerning the right and wrong of public policy, and many other abstractions that can be conceptually separated from self-interest.” Since he does not lift the veil obscuring the content of that set of triumphant ideas, however, he has not given libertarians reason to celebrate.
Of course, it not hard to predict what the ideas are being dusted off. As one prominent newsmaker asked rhetorically the other day:
Would it not be more beneficial to bring the U.S. officers and soldiers home, and to spend the astronomical U.S. military expenditures in Iraq for the welfare and prosperity of the American people? . . . As you know very well, many victims of Katrina continue to suffer, and countless Americans continue to live in poverty and homelessness.
No, that’s not John Murtha or even Nancy Pelosi, but rather Iranian President Ahmadinejad Reuters in a
letter to his opposite number in the District of Corruption.
When Murray Rothbard wrote that the “socialist and the libertarian . . . may favor democracy as a means of arriving at a socialist or a libertarian society” [
Power and Market], he did not overstate the libertarian potential of particular elections, as Rockwell has done since November 7 (for which verdict I argued
here and
here). Rothbard exposed the emptiness of all of democracy’s myths, and his gifted intellectual heir and 2006 Schlarbaum Prize winner Hans-Hermann Hoppe (whom Rockwell dubs an “international treasure”) has expanded upon this critique and integrated it into a theory of democracy as the State’s preferred method of rule. (I recently posted a sampling of that theory
here.)
Rockwell asserts that in “leveling a political defeat against war, a majority of voters in the last election decided to think more broadly instead of in terms of their own self-interest.” Really, what is the evidence for that comparative judgment regarding the thoughts of millions of people? In the absence of any, Rockwell surmises that, there being no war tax or draft, the costs of the Iraq war have been borne only indirectly by most and directly by relatively few. Therefore, he infers, mass opposition to the war must be based on something nobler than economic self-interest.
We are frequently told today that ideology is dead, and that voters are nothing but self-interested automatons. . . . But every so often, other and more important considerations come into play. Libertarians have every reason to celebrate when ideology trumps self-interest. If interest only were to dictate political outcomes, democracy becomes nothing but a game rigged in favor of looting and pillaging through the law. But with ideology, democracy becomes a vehicle for change.
Yes, Rothbard
realizes that “[o]ne’s views of democracy . . . depend upon one’s estimates of the given circumstances.” The character of the ideology will determine the direction of the change it guides, however, and unless it is recognizably
libertarian ideology, democracy
will tend to resemble “a game rigged in favor of looting and pillaging through the law,” as Hoppe has taught. It is germane to note that Rockwell omits to name the interest-trumping ideology worthy of libertarian celebration.
(By the way, I don’t know anyone who describes voters as “self-interested automatons.” For me, the more organic metaphor of
pigs at the trough is more apt.)
Let us hear Rockwell further on the significance of ideology:
For example, it might be in your self-interest to steal a flowerpot off your neighbor's porch when he is on vacation, but you do not do it, not only because you believe it is wrong to steal, but also because you do not want to live in a society in which property is not secure. That's ideology at work. It includes considerations of morality but also something more broad: our understanding of ideal states of social order.
Rockwell here seems to be restricting “ideology” to its libertarian instance. But such usage would mean, which Rockwell surely does not mean, that when Marxists fight for a society in which private property is not secure, they’re not acting ideologically. To consistently favor a property rights-respecting “state of social order” over the enjoyment of any short-term benefit that would violate that order characterizes only
libertarian ideology. Libertarians are not necessarily more “moral” than non-libertarians—there is more to being morally responsible than favoring a long-term goal over a short-term goal when the two conflict—but sound economic reasoning informs their understanding of the relationship between a social order and the decisions of its constituent individual members.
As Rockwell acknowledges, American voters are largely bereft of such understanding, and their voting can only reflect that deficiency. I could not agree with him more than when he argues passionately for increasing the educational outreach of Austro-libertarians, organized under one roof so ably by his leadership of the Mises Institute:
This is also why education is so important to the cause of liberty. Here we are not merely talking about a professor with a chalkboard lecturing to a captive audience. We are talking about a society-wide transformation of public opinion. We need to make resources available. We need to use every means at our disposal to teach economics, raise public consciousness, instill an ethic of liberty, and draw constant attention to the reality that statism in all its forms is a destructive racket.
Until such education has “taken,” however, I’m not going to suggest that the overwhelming majority of American voters are doing anything at the polls other than advancing one or another non-libertarian ideology in the hope of getting something for nothing. Most Americans who vote know (even if they suppress that knowledge) that they are voting their neighbor’s pocketbook. Economic education is impotent to discredit egalitarianism, the polymorphic ideology that infects the value system of most voters. I will never applaud any of its victories, which is the only thing we witnessed during last month’s first week.
Slightly more than half the voters want the money now being spent on the military, not to be returned to its rightful owners, but to be spent instead on socialized medicine, just as a few years ago they wanted money that was being spent on socialized medicine to be spent on the military. Until Austro-libertarians make some serious headway in the wider culture against both of these competing preferences, the reassertion of each will only continue to alternate with that of the other
in saecula saeculorum.
December is here. If no hopes attach to last month’s public auction, none can be dashed.
