Peter Lawler on the Libertarian Heyday
A Taste of What a Lawler-on-Libertarianism Anthology Would Contain, and Why It Would Explain the Caving to the Covidians
To think about libertarianism in our time, one must first understand that the "Libertarian Moment," something much-talked-about from 2000-2015, is clearly over, fading fast after the initial events of the ongoing Disasters, i.e., the Covid/Vax Disaster of the last 3 years, and the "Woke" Disaster of 2015-ish-to-the-present. I went even further in my last post, jumping off of certain "confessions" and rethinkings of the libertarian leader of the Brownstone Institute Jeffrey Tucker, and hinted that Libertarianism As We Have Known It is now dead.
Dead, that is, as a political force, and as an ascendant cultural trend.
So it’s time to talk about what the "Politics at Libertarianism's Funeral" are going to be. No thinker could better lay the groundwork for that conversation than PostModernConservative’s intellectual father Peter Lawler, for reasons that I hope will be evident as I begin to quote his writings, mostly from the early teens, on libertarianism.
Now despite my dramatic “it’s dead” talk, I know that various strands of libertarian thought will continue. There are the hard-core libertarian ideologists, certain kinds of economists—some of whom will undoubtedly remain important—, and then there is the set of libertarian and "classical liberal" scholars whose work I am most familiar with, and have a good deal of esteem for, that in constitutional law.
And obviously, a thinker like Hayek will always remain respected and read.
Nonetheless, the question most raised by the Tucker piece was why hadn't the libertarians risen to the challenge of the Lockdowns and Vax-Mandates? I.e., why did so many of their professional leaders and institutions prove so weak on that front? For after all, this wasn't just any-old sort of weakness, but one that, and especially in the case of the mandates, was basic apostasy from the fundamentals of liberal democracy. And presumably, it was an even greater apostasy from the fundamentals of libertarian ideology.
I wondered last time if Tucker might not provide us more details on the libertarian failure here, and in an email he directed me to a piece of his this May at The Epoch Times which did just that; it is behind a wee pay-wall, but is well-worth the money. In it we learn that he feels there was a
...near-complete failure of libertarians to stand up to the lockdown and mandate regime. It was a moment in history that was tailor-made for them. Everything in their training taught them to be suspicious of government power and relentless in the defense of liberty.
Instead they mostly went silent. Worse, they became the Praetorian Guard of the lockdown Caesars, giving them cover when they deserved it least.
Tucker indicates that Robert Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, John Firey, one of its top writers, Reason magazine, the CEO of Students for Liberty, the Libertarian Party, "most organizations associated with the Atlas Network..and...The Mont Pelerin Society," and generally, "most of the top intellectuals in the libertarian space," were among these turncoats and conspicuously-silent ones; whereas Ron Paul, John Tamny, The Atlas Society itself, and the Mises Institute were among the few who stayed strong.1
How would the thought of Peter Lawler have better prepared a person attracted to libertarianism to realize that it was entirely predictable that its proponents would not stand-up for real liberty when the key test came?
I think the following thirteen pieces, by their titles alone, by my quotations, and especially if you read a number of them, show you why. Lawler’s observations about libertarianism circa 1990-2017 can be put into useful dialogue with Jeffrey Tucker’s repentant 2023 rethinking of what he calls the assumptions of "his political tribe," but they stand on their own merit.
So as there are "thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird," here are thirteen Lawler-ian takes, sure, with a lot of repeat and overlap, on the long Libertarian Moment of the age that has just ended.
1) “History, Transhumanism, and the Emptying Out of Higher Education,” (2016) chapter in American Heresies and Higher Education
Here I quote the section titled “Libertarian Securitarianism”:
Still, there many ways in which the radically liberated person experiences himself or herself as insecure. The dominant ideology of our time, in fact, is not the heroic or adventuresome libertarianism associated with Ayn Rand’s talking symbols or John Wayne’s lonesome cowboys. It’s more like what Bertrand de Jouvenal called “libertarian securitarianism.” Consider what students demand on our campuses: they claim the autonomous privilege of living exactly as they please, without being assaulted or bullied or criticized or even unaffirmed. College is a safe space, and the only rules, in fact, are safety and consent. And the result of “treating students like adults,” without the characteristic relational responsibilities of adults….is the acceleration of obsession with security…
BTW, I’ve looked up the original use of the “libertarian securitarianism” phrase in de Jouvenal, and while he is a great and neglected political philosopher, I don’t see how his little 1940s discussion of the idea helps us much with our issues or with interpreting Lawler—it’s best to just gather from Lawler’s own writings what the phrase means for him, a phrase that in our day more properly belongs to him than to de Jouvenal. For he’s thought about its implications far more.
2) “The Libertarian Threat to Human Liberty,” (2001), Ashbrook
…Libertarians, in recent years, have changed. They used to be reactionaries, pining for some past and freer America. They now believe the future is on their side. It is also only an exaggeration, unfortunately, to say that all Americans are libertarians now.
…The true libertarians—meaning the true lovers of human liberty-cannot really be against regulation of biotechnology now.
This piece also refers to Lawler’s highly critical engagement with—even outright attack upon—Francis Fukuyama’s adjustment of Kojeve-ian historicism to his famous pro-liberal-democracy end-of-history theory. That can be found in fuller form in the Fukuyama chapter in Aliens in America, or the earliest chapter of The Restless Mind, and Tucker might want to give these a look since once of his confessions was this:
I had also implicitly adopted an “end-of-history” style of Hegelian thinking that befits the generation that saw freedom win the great Cold War struggle. And so the final victory of liberty was always at hand, at least in my fevered imagination.
3) “Putting Locke in the Locke-Box” (2005) The final chapter of Stuck with Virtue.
This is the most con-law exploring of the pieces I include in this list, making a good deal of the liberal/libertarian convergence seen in the Court’s thinking in Lawrence v. Texas, the same thinking which eventually gave us Obergefell:
The efforts to restore what Randy Barnett [libertarian con-law scholar] calls the “lost Constitution” …also represents a form of Lockeanism way, way outside the Locke box.
4) “Libertarian Fantasy and Statist Reality” (2005) Stuck with Virtue
My summary: the fantasy is that the bio-enhancements promoted by many libertarians won’t eventually become mandated on egalitarian grounds by statists.
5) “Is the Transhumanist Pursuit of Immortality Coercive?” (2011) Big Think, & 324-327 of Allergic to Crazy
Here, Lawler has fun by suggesting that for our libertarians-who-are-actually-securitarians, being pro-prolonged-life will become the new pro-life.
Right now the progressives, the libertarians, and other trendy people are all pro-choice. Women should be free to choose whether or not to have babies.
Soon they will be pro-life, wanting laws supporting the eugenics that make their kids’ lives as safe as possible....
The pro-lifers will soon enough become the pro-choicers. They will clamor, probably unsuccessfully, for reproductive freedom, for the freedom to choose how they want to reproduce.
Our preference for LIFE over LIBERTY will also limit the autonomy of individual decision making in many ways....
6) “The Utopian Eugenics of Our Time,” (2005) chapter in Stuck with Virtue
Here, the elementary logic of nineties-to-teens “securitarianism” is described:
Objectively, the Bobos may be freer from death and disease than human beings ever have been, but they may be more obsessed with health than human beings ever have been. The more we fend off death in response to fear, the more fearful we seem to become. For one thing, we have more to lose. For another, death comes to seem less necessary or more accidental. It seems more terrible as it becomes more avoidable.
But one odd thing about the evidently intense desire of our 2020s elites to cover-over and not think about the advancing slaughter of “cause unknown” deaths likely caused by the Covid-19 vaccines, is that this desire runs directly counter to what Lawler is describing above. Without question, an over-active fear of death which Lawler would have tied to the “libertarian” securitarian desire to protect one’s own longevity was behind much of the hysterical response to Covid, but that fear is not kicking in at the present, i.e., during the second-stage of the Covid/Vax Disaster, when the primary threat to one’s longevity turns out not to be the (likely concocted) virus, but the very meds against it that the safety-focused experts convinced you to take!
7) “Happiness--Part 7: Why Americans These Days Are the Most Anxious People Ever” (2011) Big Think, and p. 106 of Allergic to Crazy (but there as “Part 6”)
…we have less reason than ever, for example, to be anxious about a child dying. But it seems parents are more nervous than ever. Accidental death after all is still possible at any time, and we can and we do more than ever in response to that perception of contingency with our prudent calculations.
Maybe that’s part of the key to the fatalistic and denialist response to the Covid-19 vax-harm claims: there’s no individualist rational-control exertion one can make—if the 900+ possible adverse-events from the novel gene therapy shots are going to kill or maim you in some way, there’s nothing that individualist YOU can do to stop it. As the only real response must be a CIVIC one, something that brings radical reform to the whole medical establishment, it’s not one that Bobo you would be drawn to—better to shelter one’s securitarian ideology/faith under the umbrella of Censor the Disinformationists! than to face its bankruptcy.
8) “The ‘Libertarian Moment’ Is Really An Individualist Moment” (2014) The Federalist
This may be the piece where Lawler first spoke about “libertarian means for non-libertarian ends.” In any case, it shows better than any other piece how he sees an older style of libertarianism as being fundamentally opposed to the tech-philia of the newer and dominant style:
But other libertarians are about mocking every effort by government to protect individuals from the risks embedded in the “spontaneous order” that is social life. Those libertarians, many of whom are found in the Tea Party, are about deploying libertarian means (or freedom from government) for the more natural relationships that make life worth living. They believe we’re social beings—and not free individuals—by nature; they’re, in that respect, more Burkean or Hayekian or Christian than Lockean or Randian.
Whereas those of the newer style, which he associates with Silicon Valley, hold that
There’s no foundation for thinking that anything trumps the imperative of keeping the people alive right now as secure and as free as possible.
These
…“whole-hog” libertarians seem much more securitarian than, say, those brainy Mormons who want to use libertarian means on behalf of the non-libertarian ends of their highly relational and rather patriarchal church. Consider, for example, libertarian technophilia. Cowen, Brink Lindsey, Donald Boudreaux, and many others.
That technophilia, in Lawler’s account, is religious in essence wherever it is not securitarian simply, and, it begins to take over libertarianism. Or as Tucker confessed,
Big Tech came in for massive celebration from me, even to the point that I completely ignored warnings of capture and surveillance. I had a model in mind – migration to the digital realm was emancipatory while attachment to the physical world was mired in stagnation – and nothing could shake me from it.
Or as Glenn Reynolds, libertarian wunderkind who gave the internet a decisive push forward with his (still chuggin’ along!) Instapundit, who himself felt compelled to confess his error on Covid issues, but along with so many conservatives still suppresses all discussion of the CV-19 vax-harms, so often put it:
“Faster, please.”
9) “Libertarianism and Securitarianism (and Richard Dawkins)” (2015) Post-Modern Conservative (NRO)
Here, he describes the Federalist piece in 8) as his
…case for thinking of “the libertarian moment” as actually a kind of “selective statism” rooted in what Tocqueville describes as individualism.
And he adds, in explaining why he mentioned Mormonism in that piece, that
…the Mormons have what it takes to be libertarian for all political purposes, while our only apparently more consistently libertarian hyper-technophiles who put their hope in the Singularity to come do not. Our Silicon Valley libertarianism is a mixture of extreme libertarianism and extreme securitarianism — a mixture, you might say, of Rand and Hobbes.
“Silicon Valley libertarianism!” A phrase that implies that old-school libertarianism was taken-over from the inside out by a new ideology of securitarianism, tech-worship, etc., one which would prove perfectly compatible with the Rule-by-Google tech-oligarchy, aka “selective statism,” when it came.
10) “Thielism,” (2014) Post-Modern Conservative (NRO)
A very short post in which Lawler says that Peter Thiel’s thinking may be “the highest form of libertarianism,” and that Thiel
…endorses…the impulse of Google toward total control of nature and human nature. But the goal is not merely profit. …The Silicon Valley startup monopolies are moving beyond the dog-eat-dog world of the competitive quest for survival toward higher ethical goals and finally toward the overcoming of chance or luck with the sustainability of the the singular existence of each and every person in mind. If we’re being manipulated, it’s for our good. That’s why there’s nothing more glorious than founding a startup these days…
11) “Two Reflections on Thielism” (2014) Post-Modern Conservative (NRO)
Lawler says Thiel might reply to his objections with this:
…why should he trust in a providential God who, as far as we can see, hasn’t given us much of value but our brains and our freedom? And we have lots of evidence for what we can do for ourselves. And lots of reasons to think that our techno-progress has, in some ways, only just begun. That objection isn’t nuts or even un-American. It’s pretty much Lockean. It’s also in accord with our general libertarian drift these days, which Peter wants to transform into an intelligent or industrious and rational plan.
Notice how Lawler never did the work which the old-school libertarians should have done for themselves: to distinguish the trending-toward-tech-oligarchy new “libertarianism” from the original item. (That is, he hinted at the work they needed to do, but didn’t take it upon himself.)
12) “Libertarian Means for Non-Libertarian Ends” (2015) Post-Modern Conservative (NRO)
Here Peter engages with some piece of mine which I’ve yet to go back and re-read, but it has nuggets like this:
When I say work for libertarian means for non-libertarian ends, I almost always mean encouraging the legislative choice for less-intrusive government based on the whole truth about each of us. It’s citizens also seeing themselves as creatures, friends, parents, children, free thinkers, entrepreneurs, and so forth — as more than citizens but citizens too.
13) “Contraceptives, Immigration, and the Great Libertarian Convergence” (2017) Law & Liberty
Here’s some late-era Lawlerian thought on all this:
I’m tempted to add that that means true progressivism is in the direction of anarcho-capitalism and transhumanism. And the truest progressives are futurists such as Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel and the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen. The truest think that technology and markets, by overwhelming nature and politics, benefit everyone, even or especially the poor. These progressives are for liberty and against collectivism of all kinds, beginning with democratic politics and civic devotion. [emphasis added]
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that everyone with libertarian inclinations lumps citizenship in the same category with union membership and socialist comradeship. I’m sketching the extreme or consistent position here.
...We can say that President Obama’s campaigns for the contraceptive mandate and immigration are ways of taking traditional liberals’ minds off the fact that he has no way of actually delivering bigger and better redistributive or “entitlement” government. In any case, they are policies that either are or can be framed to appeal to our more libertarian, abstracted or diversity-conscious, and post-political young.
Much truth about a common set of millennial-gen blind-spots is captured by that last series of descriptors.
So, that’s a lot, and I can’t claim my selection has been that systematic, though it did involve a bit of work—readers are welcome to remind us of other essays or posts key to his thought on this. But the gist of my interpretation, that is, the way I connect Lawler’s observations of aughties and teenies libertarianism to Tucker’s laments about its fundamental failure in our day, should already be evident. Blind-spots that typical libertarians had about the full-range of human flourishing, which one needed serious engagement with Christian and classical thinkers to notice, made them vulnerable to a take-over from within their ranks. Technophilic ends, both those of everyday securitarianism and others of religion-like hope, eclipsed and then eroded firm devotion to liberty-respecting means. I am not aware how the likes of Peter Thiel or Tyler Cowen have handled the Covidian/Woke madnesses of the 2020s, but much of what Lawler says about Thiel is in the ballpark of the horrifying sketches the excellent CV-19 dissident writer Margaret Anna Alice gave us of those she dubbed “philanthropaths,” with men like Bill Gates and Yuval Harari in mind particularly.
And this erosion of libertarianism via technophilia likely had a good deal to do with the fact that many seemed attracted to the libertarian persuasion, particularly in the aughts and teens, due to the way it helped them express aspects of, well, an anti-Christian-ire, or more positively put, aspects of a very heightened vigilance against the possibilities of a Moral Majority -style Christian populism.
And yet, whereas I believe the fears of such Christian populism had a practically bogeyman character all through the 90s, 00s, and 10s, one cannot now rule out, amid the degree of ideological tumult we are evidently about to undergo, that those who style themselves as Christian populists might not make a serious bid for power. The instant popularity of “Rich Men North of Richmond” signals that a great deal of despair is out there, and, that all bets are off. Our elites who were once “libertarian” in the hot new manner, but who then proved to be the lackeys of, and aspirants to, tech-oligarchic power, will have only themselves to blame for this likely “Return” of what they most detest.
So obviously, the hotness is long gone. Libertarianism’s political potency, and its live threat to the conservative coalition, began to diminish as early as 2015, as it became evident that the recent returns of progressivists to socialism and unreconstructed political correctness were not passing trends, which meant that any sort of “liberaltarian” project or realignment would be impossible.
But after the Covid-betrayal, libertarianism’s reputation is outright on the rocks.
Jeffrey Tucker might not agree with a good deal of my analysis here, and he might point to similar failures among conservatives, but his recent essay did demonstrate a remarkable intellectual humility. I do think that he, and many others pulled along by the general libertarian drift of the three decades previous to this one, could appreciate Peter Lawler’s analysis of what was wrong with that from the start, and his many searching observations of the trend as it progressed. They might see Lawler’s thought as a pathway to freeing oneself from a number of the ideological blinders, as Tucker has put it, that came with the ideology, and which now are so obviously in the way of real progress, or even just escape from the tightening grip of our would-be tech masters. I of course believe a turn to Postmodern Conservativism would be the most logical result of engagement with Lawler’s thought, but I can also see how some of those determined to remain libertarian might use it as a spur to purge their ideology of the various technophilic contaminations it underwent, during what now looks to have been its only-apparent heyday.
I should mention that I was not as categorically against lockdowns as Tucker apparently was from day one. I knew they were wildly experimental, and bound to prove deeply harmful to the working classes, to general mental health, and to the organic aspects of captialism, but I thought they could pass constitutionalist and fundamentals-of-liberal-democracy muster if they were implemented by ordinary representative democratic say, that is, if their implementation avoided extended reliance on emergency-powers, and took care not to trample upon Separation of Powers, Localist Democracy, and Deliberative Democracy. I.e., I was in theory willing to bow to ill-advised democratic say, and not pose supposed or on-the-borderline constitutional rights against it, to the extent lockdowns and mask-mandates were chosen according to the proper procedures of American democracy. Of course, in almost all cases, they were not. This in fact heralded what Aaron Kheriaty establishes in his book, an elite turn to wanting procedures and rulings once classified as "emergency powers" to become the main kind of future governance. And of course, I was an enthusiastic participant in the earliest anti-lockdown protests in my area. But as for the vaccine mandates and passports of 2021, they represented an entirely new level. I saw them as apostasy from liberal democratic principles, and as obviously violating a number of U.S. constitutional provisions. I could still regard someone in favor of lockdowns and mask-rules as being a supporter of liberal democracy, but it is impossible to regard those who pushed the vax-mandates as such.
Good to see Mr. Tucker saw your piece and got back with you. Very interesting sketch of the lay of the libertarian land. Not sure I learned why many betrayed the ideology. Hope you can start writing for him at the Brownson Institute, wider circulation and all that.
Amazing how much ink Peter devoted to libertarianism and related themes (including Peter Thiel). I might venture to say that, when he died, Peter both admired Thiel and thought that the Silicon Valley types were misanthrophically mad, but that reality would resist and perhaps in individual cases instruct them. I haven't seen too much of the latter. (Maybe Jack Dorsey?) I'm probably off on those recollections/impressions ... .
This is all excellent, Carl- thank you for going through those earlier Lawler pieces for us.
One other thought I have on this has to do with Trump. Even before the libertarian failures during COVID, their voice within the Republican party was losing out on topics such as free trade. And, like many others (including NeoCons like Bill Kristol), some libertarians also had "Trump derangement syndrome." They were politically alienated from the people who used to listen to them even before COVID, in other words; for that reason, it's unsurprising libertarians did not stick their necks out for anybody when the time came.
A good milestone on that earlier change is this piece by Yuval Levin, on the 3 legged stool coalition changing
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/11/republican-party-after-trump-new-coalition-will-be-more-populist-nationalist/