The American Conservative

The following speech was delivered by Jack Hunter at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC, Friday Feb. 11, 2011. The event was sponsored by Young Americans for Liberty.

Considering that we’re at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference it might be worth reflecting on what it means to be a conservative, at least in the popular sense. After all, the term is not static and let’s face it, throughout most of the last decade being a mainstream conservative pretty much meant one thing—support for the War on Terror. There was little outrage from conservatives when a Republican president doubled the size of government and the national debt, gave us the largest entitlement expansion since Lyndon Johnson in the form of Medicare Plan D, and through “No Child Left Behind” doubled the size of the Department of Education, something Ronald Reagan once pledged to abolish. Under the so-called “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush, a Republican administration that controlled all three branches of government for a significant period of that time delivered virtually nothing recognizably conservative, socially, fiscally or otherwise.

It was always easy for conservatives to say, mostly implicitly but sometimes explicitly, that in a time of war none of this big government stuff matters, but sadly for most of the last decade the only thing that mattered to conservatives was war—the promotion of it and complete devotion to a president willing to wage it. It was a strange dynamic considering that conservatives, by the very nature of their philosophy, are supposed to question government, and yet just a few short years ago the Right would lash out most viciously at anyone who dared question President Bush and his foreign policy. Just ask Ron Paul.

Yes, while a strict constitutionalist like Congressman Paul wasn’t even allowed in the door at the 2008 Republican National Convention, Al Gore’s former running mate Joe Lieberman was given a prime time speaking role. Talk host Sean Hannity would constantly call Lieberman his “favorite Democrat,” and when Hannity wasn’t campaigning for socially liberal Republicans like Rudy Giuliani for president, the former New York mayor could always count on conservative cover from men like evangelical leader Pat Robertson, who endorsed Giuliani for president. So why was there so much conservative love for fairly liberal guys like Lieberman and Giuliani? Because they agreed with Bush’s foreign policy. Why was there so much vitriol for a genuine conservative like Ron Paul? Because he dared to dissent. Read More…

As the Tea Party continues to set its sights on astronomical and unsustainable government growth, Republicans have been eager to sing the movement’s tune. Promising to slash spending and balance budgets, the GOP’s newfound right-wing fiscal rhetoric has been characterized by mainstream pundits as a once “respectable” Republican Party kowtowing to conservative “extremists” for whom the debt crisis continues to represent the one and only crisis.

But mainstream defenders of America’s economic status quo (aka broke) can rest easy. Washington’s political establishment has nothing to fear from the Republican Party. Though good at talking the conservative talk, when it comes down to actually walking the walk—the GOP remains handicapped as ever.

Just ask the man The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart recently described as the “walkiest” of Tea Party Republicans, Senator Rand Paul. Paul rejected the budget proposals of both parties this week, pointing out that the GOP countering a Democratic plan which features a $1.6 trillion deficit with a Republican plan which features a $1.5. trillion deficit, is no counter at all. Said Paul on the Senate floor: “The president’s plan will add $13 trillion to the debt, and the Republicans say ‘oh, well ours is a lot better.’ Theirs will add $12 trillion to the debt. I think it’s out of control, and neither plan will do anything to significantly alter things… they also pale in comparison to the problem.”

Pale indeed. While Democrats, predictably and laughably, could only come up with $4 billion in budget cuts, Republicans—whose “Pledge to America” during the midterm election promised to slash spending by $100 billion—could only come up with $57 billion in cuts. To put this in perspective, recently deposed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak received over $60 billion from the United States during his reign. To further put this in perspective, when Sen. Paul proposed we cut foreign aid last month, critics—including most Republicans—dismissed his proposal immediately and pointed out that what America spends on foreign aid is too small to substantively address our debt. Now many of these same Republicans expect grassroots conservatives to be satisfied with a paltry $57 billion in cuts. Read More…

A casual reader is irked by Jack Hunter telling social conservatives that war and statism are not pro-family. Of course, that was something the libertarian great Murray Rothbard always understood, which is one reason why traditional conservatives can profit from reading him, despite any qualms they have about his broader philosophy. The current issue of The American Conservative features essays from two of Rothbard’s most distinguished friends and colleagues — Sheldon Richman on the decentralist, pro-worker radicalism of the libertarian left and Ronald Hamowy reviewing Marco Bassani’s Liberty, State, and Union: The Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson. TAC stands for peace, liberty, and traditional conservatism; Rothbard and the Rothbardians are exemplars of the first two.

That seems to be David Frum’s line. After making a career out of attacking paleos and antiwar conservatives, Frum — who was himself purged from AEI — now bemoans the intolerance of the Right as displayed in the apparent firing of liberaltarians Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson from Cato. Says Frum:

The Cato Institute is soon to part ways with Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson, exponents of the libertarian-liberal fusion (and all-around bad idea) known as “liberaltarianism.” Even a good Burkean might find something of value in an compound of the best elements of the Left and libertarianism, but what Lindsey and Wilkinson seemed to be headed toward was a hybrid of a worst. Lindsey had even been a “liberventionist” in the days when the Iraq War was aborning. I suppose he’s still one today. (See comments.)

I find myself largely agreeing with Joseph Lawler at First Things:

Lindsey’s brand of liberaltarianism, especially, proscribed conservative priorities and values to such an extent that it almost seemed, to me at least, to exclude almost all movement libertarians. Take, for instance, Lindsey’s 2007 denunciation of libertarian hero Ron Paul. Lindsey claimed that Paul’s conservative personal viewpoints (“his xenophobia, his sovereignty-obsessed nationalism, his fondness for conspiracy theories, his religious fundamentalism”) indicated that Paul had a “crudely authoritarian worldview.”

Paul, to say the very least, is far from an authoritarian, as anyone with a passing knowledge of anarchist-tinged brand of politics will tell you. In criticizing him for having what are in Lindsey’s estimation backward values, Lindsey has somehow forgotten the fundamental tenet of libertarian ideology: that diverse worldviews are easily compatible when the government stays out of personal affairs.

Actually, there’s plenty of debate among libertarians on that last point, and the question is less about whether a libertarian order can tolerate “diverse worldviews” than whether a particular kind of worldview is necessary to have a libertarian order in the first place. But Lawler is right that many libertarians, no less than conservatives, find Lindsey’s pronouncements objectionable.

Was that enough to get him fired from Cato? There’s no tenure at any think tank that I know of, which means that just about anyone can be dismissed for any reason at any time. I’ll miss Wilkinson as the editor of Cato Unbound, which set a standard for online-only journals.

Update: Thomas Knapp has a smart post about why liberaltarianism was doomed as a political strategy — libertarianism has been a reaction against the party in power, and for most of the 20th century, that party was the liberal party. I would add that while Washington has been more Republican and “conservative” in the decades since LBJ, the perception of big government as a liberal problem (rather than a deficit-spending-and-militarism Republican problem) still survives.

President Cleveland was the exemplar of what was once called a “Bourbon Democrat” — the wing of that party that favored the gold standard against inflationary bimetallism, small government (Cleveland famously vetoed federal aid for drought-stricken Texas farmers), and a relatively anti-imperial foreign policy. In other words, Bourbons were classical liberals or something close. In the eyes of populists and progressives — the William Jennings Bryan and later Woodrow Wilson factions of the party — they were conservatives, even reactionaries.

Grover Cleveland is also the nom de Web of the political scientist behind the smart new Pileus blog, where Free State Project founder Jason Sorens, Stanford law professor Marcus Cole, and other contemporary classical liberals congregate. The site is well worth checking out — and I don’t just say that because Sorens has a thoughtful post about my recent Red Tory article there.

After more than a decade of trying, the District of Columbia City Council voted today in support of medical marijuana for residents of the nation’s capital. If it is signed, this will make 14 states and one district in the union that allow its residents to access cannabis for medicinal purposes, and one step closer, I say, towards ending the catastrophic War on Drugs.

From the Marijuana Policy Project today:

“A well-working medical marijuana program in the nation’s capital will also provide members of Congress who have never seen such programs up close with a unique opportunity to do so,” [Karen] O’Keefe [Director of MPP policy] said. “Once they see for themselves that these laws do nothing but provide compassionate care for seriously ill patients, hopefully they will understand the need to create a federal policy that no longer criminalizes patients in any state who could benefit from this legitimate treatment option.”

Under the District’s law, physicians will be able to give medical marijuana recommendations to patients suffering from HIV/AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, and other serious conditions that can be alleviated through marijuana. Qualified patients will have safe access to their medicine through a limited number of dispensaries within the District.

The group also notes that South Dakotans and Arizonans will be voting on similar bills in the fall, and that 81 percent of Americans support medical marijuana, according to the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. Mayor Adrian Fenty is expected to sign the measure, and then it goes to Congress, which has 30 days to review it. Not sure what will happen there (but MPP tells me they do not expect a veto). Congress thwarted a voter referendum approving medical marijuana in 1998. Ironically, it was then-Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, still a Republican, who put the brakes on it that time with what is now referred to as the Barr Amendment. Since then, he has renounced his party, gone Libertarian and actually worked with the Marijuana Policy Project to get his own amendment lifted after he left congress. That amendment was lifted last year, which is why MPP doesn’t expect a big fight in congress — though it will be interesting to see if the usual Republican Drug Warriors like Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK.,  and Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., will want to put up any roadblocks.

Peel away the condescension in David Boaz’s column criticizing Jacob Hornberger and other libertarians for failing to talk enough about slavery and there is, under all the score-settling, a point worth arguing. While disclaiming any belief in a historical “Golden Age” of liberty — but who does believe in such a thing? — Boaz nevertheless makes clear that Americans have won important new freedoms since the Founding, in part because freedom now applies to racial and sexual minorities who were discriminated against, and worse, in the past. The government in Washington may have more departments, but Boaz argues that “the number of federal agencies” is less important a measure of freedom than is the amount of personal autonomy that everyone enjoys.

Boaz still opposes high taxes and the “alphabet soup of federal agencies, transfer programs, drug laws, and so on.” But a few questions need to be asked: aren’t high taxes worth it, if they are the price to be paid for a federal government large enough and powerful enough to guarantee individual rights to unpopular minorities? Indeed, wouldn’t it be worth paying even higher taxes and increasing the scope of the federal government even more in order to reduce discrimination still further? And if, as Boaz says at the end of his column, more police in a small town might help reduce crime, which is of course good for liberty, then should we complain about the TSA, no-fly lists, body scanners, etc.?

Presumably part of the answer to these questions is that Boaz believes rights of minorities can be sufficiently protected, and crime prevented, detected, and punished, without an indefinitely large government — the things he likes about our vast tutelary state can be preserved and made more efficient, and the things he dislikes can be discarded without damaging the framework. I’d say his vision is close to what Ed Clark proudly called “low-tax liberalism.”

If that’s what Boaz and liberaltarians like Will Wilkinson want, what about people like Jacob Hornberger? They are not indifferent to or unaware of the evils of slavery and bigotry, rather they want to purge the older American model of government, with its emphasis on states’ rights and decentralization, of its defects — racial injustice, etc. — just as Boaz wants to purge the present tutelary state of its defects. Hornberger is no more forgetful of the evils of past forms of government than Boaz is unaware of modern government’s infringements of liberty. If Hornberger doesn’t reiterate those old evils at every opportunity, it’s because in the year 2010 everyone recognizes those evils for what they are.

Which model provides a better starting point? Should a libertarian prefer a decentralized republic along broadly Jeffersonian lines, but without slavery and government discrimination (though this may mean tolerating private discrimination) or a large and centralized rights-enforcing government akin to the New Deal state but with an emphasis on personal liberties instead of redistribution? And of these two models, is one more inclined than the other to decay into its illiberal form? That is, would slavery or segregation re-emerge in a restored Jeffersonian republic more readily than redistribution and other evils would arise in a purified New Deal state? Read More…

Matthew Yglesias suggests that out-group bias against environmentalists explains why libertarians, in contradiction to their own ideology, so often defend sprawl. (Jim Henley, Erik Kain and David Schaengold and others also had interesting reactions to my earlier post.)  There’s something to that, though I’d like to add two more factors that may be at work.

The first is relatively benign, namely, availability bias. That sprawl opponents want to restrict development is well-known; less well-known is that existing laws make it impossible to develop anything but sprawl. To save cognitive resources, libertarians rationally overestimate the importance of available information (being anti-sprawl means being anti-development!) at the expense of information that takes time and effort to gather (being anti-sprawl also means being anti-central planning). This doesn’t excuse John Stossel, who presumably had time to research his vindication of sprawl before broadcasting it, but it does explain why others make similar mistakes. Indeed, the availability heuristic explains why both libertarians and their opponents so often assume that the free market causes sprawl. 

Even relatively well-informed sprawl defenders are misled by more readily available information. In various comments, for example, some argued that Houston, which famously has no zoning code yet looks just like every other place in America, proves that consumers prefer sprawl.  Even without zoning, however, Houston’s land use rules still mandate sprawl. Here, for example, are Houston’s street design ordinances. Among other things, they require that major streets be 100 feet wide and that intersections (which must have a 25 degree turning radius) be spaced 600 feet apart. Imagine yourself strolling down a block three football fields long next to a road packed 100 feet across with moving vehicles. Wouldn’t you rather be safe within your car? I would. Houston, like most other places in America, has driven pedestrians away.  The Houston example proves the opposite of what sprawl defenders think. Not only does the government mandate sprawl, but sprawl is legally over-determined. That is, any number of laws, even without the others, suffice to make sprawl the only possible form of development.

Second, libertarians defend sprawl because they have ideological commitments other than to limited government. In sprawling neighborhoods, people only go out in public (and then of course only in their cars) to buy stuff.  In traditional neighborhoods, by contrast, people go out to buy stuff, but also to people-watch, gossip, stroll, or maybe all these things at once.  Sprawl restricts the range of human activities to the purely commercial. Indeed, the sprawling business and shopping district, with its strip malls, office parks, parking lots and massive road signs, is the very image or “ideal type” of commercial life.  Libertarians know that have no problem with meretricious commercialism. They therefore feel compelled to embrace sprawl, which allows nothing else.

Of course, traditional neighborhoods do not actually prohibit commerce. Indeed, the intellectual hero of the New Urbanists, Jane Jacobs, passionately defended commercial values, which she believed flourished most of all in cities. (See her quirky homage to Plato’s Republic, Systems of Survival.) More importantly, just because you oppose sprawl does not mean that you despise people who shop at Walmart, any more than if you oppose rent control you despise people who can’t find housing.  The ubiquitous commercialism you see as you drive through America is not in itself deplorable. What’s deplorable is that Americans aren’t free to do anything else.

CPAC 2010 was my first CPAC ever. For most of my life I have run in local conservative circles, but never really had any interest nor ambition to throw myself into the chaos of CPAC, but when I did, I was taken for quite a ride. The highlights of the event for me were watching your typical establishment, beltway conservatives try to hide their unease and even disdain for the energetic youth of Campaign for Liberty, Students For Liberty, and the Ladies of Liberty Alliance. These three, mostly youth based, organizations made their presence thoroughly felt at CPAC.

Campaign for Liberty dominated the libertarian and antiwar presence. Congressman Ron Paul spoke before a packed crowd, and the cheers reverberated throughout the building as he spoke. The energetic followers of Ron Paul went on to propel him to victory in the CPAC straw poll with 31% of the vote – Mitt Romney came in second with 22%.

Students for Liberty, an international libertarian organization drew a diverse and colorful crowd to a CPAC that was dominated by older establishment activists. Between the hordes of pudgy Dick Cheney fans, you would occasionally run into a 20-something-year-old with long hair, sometimes bearded face, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Yet while the Cheney crowd was only interested in getting Ann Coulter to sign a book, or finding the next free buffet, these youth were moving about the crowds handing out literature about the illegality of the wars, the government’s clampdown on civil liberties, and other issues dear to libertarians.

The Ladies of Liberty Alliance provided perhaps the most shocking clash, at least in fashion, with your typical CPAC’ers. Their members had variations of pink hair, tattoos, piercings, and other characteristics one would not normally think to find at CPAC. They even convinced me to buy a LOLA Calendar, featuring some of their members in suggestive and, in a few instances, down right risqué spreads, though each page contained a fun but serious message about the Constitution and freedom.

With the libertarian contingent out in full force – and despite the rather harmonious weekend at CPAC – there was bound to be a scuffle or two, but I do not think anyone thought it would go down in front of CSPAN cameras. Proceeding Ron Paul’s fiery speech on Friday night, CPAC had a feature called “Two-Minute Activist: Saving Freedom Across the Nation”. Thirteen youth each were given two minutes to give a speech describing their different causes across America, expressing how they became student leaders, and where they saw the conservative movement in the years to come. Students for Liberty Executive Director Alexander McCobin took the stage and praised CPAC for reaching out to GOPride (A Gay Republican group), suggesting that freedom cannot come in pieces, but is a unified force. McCobin’s speech was met with cheers from the audience. Following McCobin was Ryan Sorba of California Young Americans for Freedom. Sorba angrily denounced CPAC, received boos from he audience, and shouted back at his hecklers, “The lesbians at Smith College protest better than you do!” Additionally, Sorba ended his vindictive rant by launching a confused attack against Young Americans For Liberty (a subsidiary of Campaign for Liberty) and their Executive Director Jeff Frazee. The only apparent reason for Sorba’s concluding comments was that he could not discern Young Americans for Liberty and Students for Liberty. Note: Sorba I was informed does not reflect YAF in general, many YAF members spent Saturday trying to mend any wounds Sorba may have caused. Read More…