The Libertarian Principle

^{See also: What is a Libertarian?}

Michael Kinsley. Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images.

Pundits tend to divide America in two on a tidy, linear scale: Either you're conservative or you're liberal. Differences between one conservative and another conservative can be explained by describing one as "more conservative" or "less conservative" than the other, and the same applies to liberals. And if you don't fit neatly into the conservative or liberal camp, you're described as a "moderate" or "centrist"--someone who has no particularly strong opinions on politics, favors compromises, and is highly susceptible to the cultural flavor-of-the-day.

The trouble is that "conservative" includes a pretty huge spectrum of ideas, some of them great, some of them lousy--and the same applies to "liberal." You don't have to be a "centrist" to be anti-abortion ("conservative"), anti-gay rights ("conservative"), anti-war ("liberal"), anti-death penalty ("liberal"), and pro-immigrants' rights ("liberal"), for example, unless you consider the Roman Catholic Church to be a centrist organization.

So whenever people start experimenting with new ways to describe political movements, I listen. In a recent article in Time magazine ("Libertarians Rising"), former Crossfire co-host Michael Kinsley--always introduced as "on the left," ironically enough--agrees that the liberal-conservative labels are a little worn out, and proposes a dichotomy that is in some ways more useful, and in some ways much less useful, than the "liberal" and "conservative" terms we're using now:

Libertarians are against government in all its manifestations. Domestically, they are against social-welfare programs. They favor self-reliance (as they see it) over Big Government spending. Internationally, they are isolationists. Like George Washington, they loathe "foreign entanglements," and they think the rest of the world can go to hell without America's help. They don't care--or at least they don't think the government should care--about what people are reading, thinking, drinking, smoking or doing in bed. And what is the opposite of libertarianism? Libertarians would say fascism. But in the American political context, it is something infinitely milder that calls itself communitarianism. The term is not as familiar, and communitarians are far less organized as a movement than libertarians, ironically enough. But in general communitarians emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities (to family, community, nation, the globe) should trump individual rights.

The biggest problem with this dichotomy is that both labels represent points on a libertarian-communitarian scale that don't really represent anybody. But then the same could certainly be said of the "liberal" and "conservative" labels.

The second biggest problem with this dichotomy is that "communitarian" is not an idea that people are likely to self-identify with. While it's vastly superior to "fascist" or "authoritarian"--and Kinsley is right to reject that terminology--a true communitarian would have a Religious Right social policy, a socialist fiscal policy, and a foreign policy that is simultaneously pro-U.N., pro-foreign aid, and neoconservative.

But we have also reached the point in American politics where we have absolutely no idea what a "true" conservative (for example) would believe. Isolationism or unilateral intervention? Fiscal discipline or supply-side tax breaks? Moral federalism or federal moralism? It's hard to see how "libertarian" or "communitarian" would be any less useful than the terms we've got now.

The best solution would be to look at people as individuals, and at their platforms on a point-by-point basis, rather than judging them based on two simple categories. But in contemporary American politics, driven as it is by party affiliation and multi-issue coalition-building, this doesn't really work.

A better option might be to get rid of political parties entirely, let everyone run as independents in open primary races, and force individual candidates to build multi-issue coalitions from scratch every time they start a campaign. But what am I saying? That's crazy talk.

As long as we have a two-party system, we'll probably have a two-category liberal-conservative dichotomy to explain how well someone fits within each party. When we say "more liberal," after all, we generally mean "more Democratic"; and when we say "more conservative," we generally mean "more Republican." The two terms are, by and large, nonsense words.

But the next presidential cycle may present us with a new opportunity to review the way we describe political campaigns. If Rudy Giuliani wins the nomination and rejects the Religious Right framework that has defined Republican campaigns since 1980, even as the evangelical movement in America becomes less politicized (see "The Evangelical Crackup"), then voters will need to be armed with a better political vocabulary. Whether voters talk in broad libertarian or communitarian terms or not, Kinsley's article is part of a national conversation that we need to have.

See also:

• What Kind of Libertarian Are You?