Reconciling Libertarianism and Reformism

Libertarianism needs practicality and credibility, which is what reformism is good at

Today, I am going to talk about my project to reconcile libertarianism and reformism.

On one hand, I have been sympathetic to libertarian thinking for more than 20 years, even though I have to acknowledge that libertarian immediatism is not realistic at all, and the dominance of immediatists have seriously harmed the popularity of libertarianism. I first became interested in libertarianism during the 2003 Iraq War, when the right was trying to silence anti-war and anti-Bush speech, including the infamous cancellation of the Dixie Chicks. Given that we live in a moment where the postmodern left practices cancel culture regularly, and the populist right thrives on banning books, drag queens, abortion and even masks, it is clear that society needs a big dose of libertarianism ASAP. We need to make libertarianism credible and popular again for this to happen.

On the other hand, over my observation and involvement in the Western political landscape of the past 21 years, I have gradually come to develop an appreciation of reformism. I believe the heart and soul of reformism is basically the classical liberal belief that society and people's lives can be made better via empiricism and rationality, tempered by the Burkean conservative view that any change should be based on practical needs rather than abstract ideas, and should be gradualist and consistent with a given society's traditions rather than revolutionary and abrupt. Note that genuine Burkean conservative philosophy, developed in response to the events of the French Revolution, is very different from what so-called conservative political parties represent today. I have stated this point many times in the past, but it bears repeating, because this is very important to understand. Anyway, over the years I have come to the firm conclusion that only a reformist politics can provided sustainable progress for society, by avoiding both misguided radicalism and reactionary backlash.

The first problem we have here is that most libertarian thinking that has been developed over the past few decades, especially the so-called libertarianism of the 2010s, is fundamentally faulty on some level, which makes it support the opposite of liberty some point down the line. In the 1980s-90s the beltway libertarians and their obsession with cutting government dominated. These people ended up doing nothing to advance individual liberty per se, and some even sided with the Bush administration's 2003 Iraq War, which was a total sellout of libertarian values. On the other side were the paleolibertarians, a faction that were steadfast in their anti-war beliefs but sided with far-right paleoconservatives on most other issues. This paleolibertarianism was the precursor to what became known as the 'libertarian to alt-right' pipeline in the 2010s, and was arguably the precursor to neoreaction thinking, which is clearly not libertarian at all. Later on, there was 'anarcho-capitalism', which is a very extreme form of libertarianism that opposes government in all its forms, and fantasizes about things like private police and fire departments. I think it is this kind of extremism that eventually gave rise to the conspiracy thinking that ultimately discredited libertarianism by around 2020.

The second problem we have is that most of the libertarian thinking that has been developed over the past few decades is simply incompatible with reformism. They all want government gone, and right now. This, I think, is the reason for both the unprincipledness and the tendency towards extremism. Therefore, to make libertarianism credible again, it needs to be realigned towards the reformist philosophy. And it's not as difficult as some might think. As I said before, reformism is basically liberal rationality plus conservative cautiousness and gradualism. Both the classical liberal emphasis of rationality, and the conservative emphasis that reform should be based on practical needs rather than abstract ideas, can modify libertarianism to make it more reformist and practical. This, in turn, would make it more credible, and hopefully more popular. By making libertarianism credible and popular again, we can build a strong bulwark to prevent both the illiberal left and the illiberal right from crushing individual freedom with their culture war agendas.

To reconcile libertarianism and reformism, I believe we need to further develop the philosophy of both traditions more fully. In particular, we need to separate the core strands of thinking of both traditions from what has been happening in the crazy politics of the past 10-15 years. From there, we need to identify the common ground between the two traditions, and the areas  where they might be able to supplement each other. Right now, I can think of attention to the complexities of reality, respect for different opinions, and compassion as a few areas of common ground between libertarians and reformists. I'm sure there are more to discover. This will be a major focus of my work going forward.