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Get Four
|  | JANUARY 27, 2004
By Thane Peterson Where Can Liberals Go to Get Respect? Our ideas are better, we're compassionate, and history is on our side. With conservatives running wild in D.C., America needs us After reading last week's column on farming, an old pal sent me an e-mail laying out a libertarian critique of my position (see BW Online, 1/21/04, "Saving the Family Farm, Organically"). Why is the consolidation of the farm economy a bad thing? he asked. Why do we need so many farmers, anyway? I didn't fire off my initial pointed reaction, which would have been: "These are hard-working families you're talking about in such harsh terms. How would you feel if I asked, 'Why do we need so many 8-year-olds (he has three kids)? What's their economic utility?' Or, perhaps more to the point, if I asked, 'Why on earth do we need so many magazine editors (his profession)?' I sure have my doubts about your economic utility." LIBERAL SMARTS. Joking aside, the more I thought about this imaginary exchange, the more I realized that it explains why I'm not a conservative. As a business reporter for 25 years and a hater of bureaucracy, I should by all rights be a libertarian like the many BW Online readers who regularly hammer me in critical e-mails. Yet -- horror of horrors -- I'm a leftie instead. Yup, the cat's out of the bag. I'm one of them -- that dreaded bete noire of Rush Limbaugh and conservatives everywhere -- a liberal journalist. How can I be so stupid, so naiïvely retro in my beliefs? Read on, and you may find some ideas you don't hear much anymore in today's careerist- and conservative-dominated U.S. news media. I think any intelligent citizen should have liberal leanings at this point. First, let's define our terms. Basically, there are two kinds of American conservatives: libertarians and traditionalists. And, though author and TV talking head Ann Coulter would rather give birth to kittens than admit it, each has something in common with liberals. Traditional conservatives, like liberals, often favor government activism. It's just that they want the government to promote stability and tradition, while liberals want it to promote equality. A good example of traditional conservatism is President Bush's recent proposal to spend $1.5 billion in government money on promoting heterosexual marriage. MARKET FAILURES. Libertarian conservatives, on the other hand, have an almost religious faith in the power of competition and individual enterprise. To that end, they advocate maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of government in people's lives. This, obviously, is very different from liberalism, but it often leads libertarian conservatives to take liberal-seeming positions. For instance, the libertarian New York Times columnist William Safire is in favor of gay marriage because he thinks government should butt out of citizens' private lives and believes heterosexual marriage might benefit from some competition. Though I agree with Safire on gay marriage, I think his form of conservatism is even more damaging to the national good than the traditional kind. Traditional conservatism obviously has had a big effect on American values, but polls show that most Americans remain refreshingly tolerant and centrist in their social views. By contrast, it seems to me that an almost fanatical belief in the power of markets -- the basic tenet of libertarianism -- now permeates American thought. And I think a major reason the nation is pursuing so many idiotic policies is that Americans so often substitute blind faith in markets for rationality. My first problem with libertarianism is that its internal logic is circular. If something isn't working, the solution is always the same: We need even freer markets and even less regulation. If you don't start with a mystical faith in free markets, the arguments fall apart. And to a libertarian, it's sacrilegious to look at the real world and conclude the obvious: That market dynamics alone simply can't solve every social and political problem. COMMON PROBLEMS. Libertarianism is also based on a fictional model of society that denigrates the importance of community and cooperation to our safety and happiness. It posits a sort of jungle competition in which individuals strive alone for advantage. The problem is that Americans haven't lived that way since colonial times. We're crammed into cities and towns, where we need police and fire protection, roads, and mass transit, and where pollution, crime, and other common problems can blight the lives of individuals. Libertarians don't acknowledge that the best way to deal with these evils is communal action based on common values (i.e., "liberal" policy initiatives). They also refuse to acknowledge how much society depends on what, in economic terms, are "irrational" sacrifices by others. Examples are the firefighters and police officers who rushed into the World Trade Center on September 11, teachers and nurses who work long hours for relatively low pay, and the soldiers now risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan for the common defense. That brings us to my third major problem with libertarianism -- that many forces in human affairs (love, hate, tribal loyalties among them) -- are far more powerful than material greed, the motivation to which market theory gives primacy. I fear we're going to discover that the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, where hate and tribalism may trump the market forces we are counting on to peacefully revolutionize those nations.
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