Okay, my apologies for being so tardy in responding to Will Wilkinson. So many others have said worthwhile things, I fear anything I might add will be a bit stale. So I’m going to concentrate on some disagreements to the detriment of where we might find common ground.

I’m also going to bury this under the fold because it’s unpardonably long.

It’s no secret that I am a fan of Will Wilkinson, but I have to say I found parts of his response to my initial post on “Liberaltarianism” to be problematic. There are two things going on here. The first is Will’s discussion – dismissal really – of contemporary partisan politics. The second is his much more abstract long term “project.”

He writes:

I’m not sure what it is about that project that would that lead Jonah to think Brink or I should be vexed by the behavior of the Democratic Party and it’s operatives. The stimulus bill vexes me not at all. It’s what you’d predict knowing the current extent of Democratic power, the opportunity that the perception of crisis creates, and the composition of the Democratic coalition. As a student of James M. Buchanan, I’m no romantic about democracy.

I fear there’s something clever — or perhaps too clever — at work here. I’ve listened to quite a few of Will’s Marketplace commentaries and I could swear he said that the stimulus won’t work and approved of Robert Barro’s assessment that it is “garbage.” His own blog posts also seem to confirm that he thinks the stimulus bill is a train wreck of one kind or another. And yet, the suggestion that the stimulus bill vexes him seems to vex him more than the stimulus bill itself. I’m not entirely sure why.

Then he goes on:

Moreover, what is it about the era of George W. Bush that makes Jonah think that conservatives and libertarians see eye to eye on the large questions of political economy? I understand it is now politically expedient for Republicans to oppose whatever Obama is trying to do. But, frankly, the recent performance of the Republicans in Congress has been pathetic, managing to do little more than fight to get a bit more for their constituencies and a bit less for the majority’s. I do not remember hearing a plausible, principled alternative powerfully articulated by the Congressional Republicans. Maybe that’s because the great success of the GOP over the last eight years has been to destroy the reputation of free markets and limited government by deploying its rhetoric and then doing the opposite. Partisan Republicans choke on the truth that the emerging shape of the Obama era is the aftemath of the GOP’s successful, if unwitting, campaign to destroy the political economy they proclaimed.

Note how Will refers to “Congressional Republicans,” George W. Bush and “partisan Republicans.” Whatever the merits of his animosity toward these people (and I’ll visit those merits in a moment), it strikes me as a convenient distortion for him to use these terms as synonymous with conservatives and conservatism.

I understand that since the libertarian caucus in the Congress amounts to Ron Paul, an idiosyncratic libertarian to say the least, libertarians are not as accustomed to making these distinctions as conservatives are. But this is a distinction Will nonetheless surely understands (not least because he works at Cato) and yet he deliberately obscures it.

Conservative intellectuals and journalists criticized a great many of the Republican policies Will disparages (If Will disputes this point, I’d be glad to provide examples). Conservatives might not have been as homogenously pure as libertarians – no one ever can be – but the libertarian and conservative critiques aligned and overlapped to a high degree and stemmed from the same first principles. Will avers that there’s a lot of diversity among libertarians, but makes it sound like conservatives and Republicans are one giant monolithic bloc. The reality is that as a matter of practical politics, the vast majority of libertarians in this country are, in fact, Republican-voting conservatives.

Meanwhile, there is simply nothing like this kind of convergence between libertarians and liberals on political economy. Indeed, to the extent many liberal intellectuals, wonks, and activists disagree with the stimulus, it’s on the grounds that it’s not sweeping enough. You’ll find very few libertarians who subscribe to that perspective.

In short, you can point to Congressional Democrats as evidence of where liberalism’s head is at on economics. And that’s precisely why I thought the debate over the stimulus would/should vex liber(al)tarians. It demonstrates that statism, planning, whatever you want to call it, still defines liberalism in ways that will make it impossible in the near, middle, or (I would argue) long term for libertarians and liberals to forge a new lib-lib fusionism that maintains the classically liberal conception of political economy Will and Brink wish to proselytize.

Meanwhile, there’s another problem with Will’s pox-on-both-parties stance. It simply gets the facts wrong in a non-trivial way. The Republicans were better than Democrats on economics from a libertarian perspective. Just a few examples of what I mean: The Democrats’ prescription drug plan was more expensive and had price controls; the Democrats have gotten worse on trade over the last 15 years while the Republicans have gotten better; George W. Bush tried very hard to implement something very close to Cato’s vision for Social Security, while Democrats shrieked like teenagers in a horror movie over it; more Democrats voted for No Child Left Behind than Republicans did, etc. Across a vast array of issues, liberals are moving away from markets and freedom at precisely the moment libertarians want to find common cause with them. I find that odd.

Will is free to say that he isn’t interested in partisan politics, but if he’s going to then talk about partisan politics he should get it right. Pretending that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the parties (The Nadarite-Buchananite position, by the way) is not true and doesn’t help the liber(al)tarian project at all. And the more libertarians pick up this talking point, the more ineffective they will become in persuading the only party willing to listen to libertarians at precisely the moment they need to hear from them.

As for Will’s longer term project of creating a new political identity, forged from a liberal-libertarian fusionism, that just happens to mirror Will’s own quirky political and philosophical outlook, I remain deeply skeptical that such a project is either possible or desirable. One reason I think it’s unlikely is that liberals are not libertarians on social issues, a point of mine Will chose to ignore.

As for it being undesirable, I am consistently amazed when liberals and libertarians (and even some conservatives) want the right to abandon its dogmatic aversion to statism in favor of some more nuanced and compassionate gumbo or some kind of rightwing progressivism. If the right ever loses its anti-statism, we will have a race-to-the-bottom between two statist parties, one cosmopolitan and socialistic one nativistic and nationalistic. Neither is very appealing to me. And bipartisan consensus between nationalists and socialists is never pretty.

If Will can persuade progressives to be more libertarian, huzzah and wahoo. But I fear liberaltarianism — if it ever makes it out alive from Will and Brink’s drawing board — is more likely to become a mechanism for making libertarianism more progressive, without getting much, if anything, in return. If libertarians think they’re treated like cheap dates in the Republican tent, just wait until they spend some time in the Democratic tent.