After five years of reckless spending, aggressive war and an advancing police state, Bush’s approval rating hit record lows, apparently because his administration initially signed off on Dubai Ports World’s acquisition of several American ports maintained by a British company. So for millions of Americans, where death, deficits, detainments and destruction failed to lose the president his credibility, his insufficient anti-Arab posturing finally did the trick. Wow.
It is easy to become disillusioned. In recent years, the U.S. government has made a shambles of the rule of law and squandered most of America’s remaining international sympathy. It has driven itself into enormous debt. It has trampled the lives of many. The leading Democrats offer only to make the war machine run more smoothly, seal America off from peaceful commerce, internationalize foreign aggression, and distribute more graft to their constituents.
Meanwhile, the libertarian movement – which should always and everywhere stand as the most recalcitrant check against state power – remains divided, confused, disorganized. The priorities are all askew. Few libertarians speak out as loudly as the left against the torture and occupation. It’s fine for us all to hold hands in criticizing Social Security and Medicare. Dropping explosives on children and pulling the nails out of brown people’s fingers are much harder, more controversial, less profitable policies to put one’s stake in to criticizing.
Some conservatives are slowly realizing that the doctrine of absolute executive power during wartime to which they’ve devoted themselves might come back to haunt them in the apparitional form of Hillary Clinton or one of her spooky fellow travelers. Most conservatives, however, appear to believe the president will always be with them in spirit. Thus do they continue to enchant and charm the central state.
Much of the left has failed to learn the fundamental problems with government power, even on foreign policy. This year’s election might move the dividing line in Congress over a few seats, providing at last some gridlock in Washington. Yet, as we can see from the Reagan years, a Republican president and a Democratic congress do not exactly spell out fiscal solvency and military restraint. And that was before 9/11.
For libertarians, it might seem that there is no hope. This is especially true if one’s outlook is short-term.
In the long term, however, we have human nature on our side. Totalitarianism is not sustainable. People resist oppression and central administration. Even in fascist and communist countries, most human interaction is not directed by the state. The majority of human relations are peaceful. If it weren’t for this, commerce would cease and culture would die.
If Americans followed all the laws on the books and relied wholly on the state’s services, society would crumble. Small businesses would collapse. The sick would keel over. Children wouldn’t learn anything. Life would be less fun.
Most Americans hate to be governed. They might like to tell other people what to do. They might like to play follow-the-leader when they’re scared of outside threats. But the whole reason there are so many coercive designs concocted every minute is because people will not do what they’re told if they don’t want to, unless they’re forced. They often find a way to avoid the intended consequences of breaking the law. This inspires people to write more laws, double budgets and deploy more police and regulators. The bigger the system gets, however, the stupider it gets. The inner-contradictions become more obvious. Laws conflict with one another. People continue living their lives.
The long-term goal of liberty needs a long-term strategy to obtain it. It must principally be concerned with education. People need to learn that initiating force is not the answer, and yet it is the only tool offered by the state to achieve anything. The more the state blunders, the easier it is to accept this axiom of life.
In fact, Americans are, in many ways, easier for the state to displease than before. They tolerate less censorship and draconian enforcement than they did during the world wars or the Cold War. It takes fewer body bags to give them second thoughts about foreign intervention. Only about a third of Americans are still deluded into thinking the Iraq war is going well. Socialism of the old-school variety is extinct. This is all to the good.
Once this is recognized, hope seems not so shallow. Civilization, overall, has progressed. Chattel slavery has been done away with. Women aren’t treated as property as uniformly throughout the world as they were. In industrialized nations, people enjoy living conditions that far surpass those of their ancestors. They die of cancer, not diphtheria. The poor have problems with obesity, not starvation. In might not be a total consolation, but the middle class in modern civilization has the luxury to have many of the problems it does. Most of its children survive past the age of five.
All of this progress was born from liberty. Indeed, civilization itself is the process of tolerating peaceful differences among human beings and removing coercion from human affairs. Civilized order is synonymous with rightful liberty. Just as much as the state continually proves its own ineptitude, the case for freedom is made simply by the nature of humanity. The fabric of reality contains the argument for liberty. All we need to do is not obscure it, and, when it is under grave attack, come to its defense. The hardest thing for many libertarians is simply to trust in freedom and refrain from second-guessing its virtues and rightness.
The state of American politics is indeed sorry. It will always be, insofar as there is politics. To the extent that questions become politicized, handed over to state deliberation and central management, politics will be terrible. The realm of institutionalized coercion can never be made good, only smaller.
There’s a bright side, far brighter than the dark side of political affairs. It is so bright that it is blinding. Some people fear looking at it. Others never look away. Sometimes it makes it hard to adjust back to peering at politics. This bright side is all around us. It emanates from the astronomical sum of voluntary human action, whose peaceful nature tirelessly testifies to the possibilities that can and do spring from the conditions and culture of freedom.
Keeping in mind that politics has always been a racket, a means of oppression and looting; that coercion has always been a part of the human condition but so has the natural tendency to avoid it, resist it, and circumvent it; and that most human action is peaceful can do wonders for maintaining hope. Hope is essential. It is what kept humanity striving against its rulers for thousands of years, widening the sphere of liberty at every opportunity.
