Darwinian conservatives will agree with President Bush that there is a natural desire for liberty. But they will insist that one fundamental condition for satisfying that natural desire is a system of limited government in which chief executives do not have the discretionary power to initiate imperialistic wars in the name of liberty. ~Larry Arnhart

The second claim is right.  Limited government is vital to the realisation of political liberty.  Executives that can start wars on their own initiative, as Mr. Bush did, are inimical to that liberty.  Some might even call them tyrants.  But I am with Dan McCarthy when he asks: where is the evidence that there is a natural desire for liberty?  More to the point, what are we talking about when we say “liberty” here?  Ordered liberty?  “Do what thou wilt, that is the whole of the law”?  Something in between?  Who knows?  Liberty has, alas, become one of those empty words that people invoke almost as much as a moral pose as they do because they are trying to defend a particular way of life or a political good.  Everyone has to get right with the goddess Liberty, regardless of what distorted, heinous, bloody form she may take, and anyone who says anything against her, well, obviously he wants the jihadis to win, veil all our women and ban kite-flying!  Thus we are all forced to bend our knee in acknowledging the importance of liberty without ever explaining what we mean by that word. 

If we are speaking of political liberty that flourishes under a regime of limited, constitutional government in which the state performs a few necessary functions and otherwise steers clear of our affairs, not even Americans naturally desire such liberty.  No one naturally desires such liberty; it is extremely rare and the product of a particular political culture.  It is not just that a particular set of customs and habits facilitate or enable the “desire for liberty” to be realised concretely, but that until such customs have become long-established this “desire” is not ingrained and cannot be found.  There is, of course, always willfulness and a desire to have one’s own way, but that is so far removed from political liberty as our tradition understands it that it is almost not worth mentioning. 

At one point in time, Americans were extremely jealous of such liberty, which they had inherited and which they understood to be extremely fragile and easily threatened by the slightest usurpations, but in the last century we have seen people trade that birthright for a mess of pottage.  In a sense, it did not appear to be a mess of pottage to them, because what people naturally desire is security and order and they happily sought to trade some of their liberty for what they believed was greater security against the uncertainties and rapid changes in the world.  Once secure, they can begin to worry about liberty.  (This drives libertarians crazy, but it is the way of things.)  Only then can they entertain the luxury of worrying about how the government treats them and whether the government is too powerful, and usually so long as they are left alone in their daily lives they will put up with almost any amount of obnoxious taxation and dependency on the state. 

People are neither born free nor do they naturally desire to be free, except in the abstract sense that everyone might like to be free (if understood as a freedom from obligations or a kind of personal independence) in the same way that everyone might like to be perfectly content or rich or well-liked.  Even if there is such a desire, it has largely been a vain one, because desiring a thing and knowing how to acquire it are so completely different that it is almost useless to refer to them in the same sentence.  This is one of those small snags with liberal theory that a “realistic vision of human nature” could easily recognise from the historical record.  If the desire for liberty means simply the desire to be left in peace, this is not really a desire for liberty, but simply a desire to mind one’s own business.  The two are compatible, but they are not the same thing.