For a New Liberalism

Individual freedom in an age of authoritarianism

In June of 2021, after an almost ten-year run, the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog came to an end. The decision to shut it down wasn’t an easy one. But between family commitments and better paying (X>0) gigs, most of the people involved were getting too busy to write much for the blog. And besides, I figured, we’d pretty much said what we wanted to say.

I now think that decision might have been premature.

The prospects for liberty were already looking grim by the time we shut down. Between COVID lockdowns and a surging wave of populist nationalism, American ideals of individual autonomy and peaceful self-governance were under serious threat from both the political left and the political right. And the global situation wasn’t much better. With Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, Xi Jingping in China, AND Putin in Russia, it wasn’t too early or to difficult to conclude that “the bad guys are winning.”

Thankfully, there are now some great sources out there working to defend individual freedom against these new authoritarian threats. If you haven’t checked them out already, I highly recommend the Shikha Dalima’s The UnPopulist and Adam Gurri’s Liberal Currents. Both of these sources are devoted to a defense of a liberal political order, broadly understood. Most of their contributors identify as classical liberals who draw inspiration from the likes of Smith, Mill, and Hayek, as opposed to the progressive liberalism of Hobhouse, Dewey, and Rawls. But my sense is that in today’s political context, they (rightly) see the gap between Hayek and Rawls as much less significant than that between Hayek and Rawls on the one hand, and Trump and Putin on the other. When authoritarians are knocking at your door, internecine liberal conflicts probably aren’t the most effective use of one’s time and energies.

So where do libertarians fit in all this? Shortly after the BHL blog shut down, the Libertarian Party of the United States was captured by a group that has sought to curry favor with the Trumpist, populist right. The Twitter feed of the national party and the perversely misnamed “Mises Caucus” has espoused a vile mixture of nationalist, anti-democratic, anti-semitic, and transphobic rhetoric. Rather than speaking out against the authoritarian threat to liberty worldwide, they have actively signal boosted Russian propaganda, depicting Ukrainians as neo-Nazis while steadfastly avoiding any criticism of Putin or his military invasion of a neighboring country. (So much for the Non-Aggression Principle, it seems)

That’s what libertarianism looks like in the United States today. But it doesn’t have to look this way. And, as John Tomasi and I tried to show in our recent book on the history of libertarian thought, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, it hasn’t always. Libertarianism once was, and could be again, a radical, progressive ideology devoted to the cosmopolitan ideal of maximum equal freedom for each and every human being.

My writings here will explore what this kind of libertarianism might look like, how it can be defended and what its implications are for some of the pressing social, political, and economic issues of the day. I’ll share my reflections on what I’m reading, and respond to some of the thoughtful and interesting reviews of my own book that are starting to come in.

These are challenging times for us individualists. But we’ve been here before. In the 1930’s, liberal democracies were threatened by socialist tyranny on the left, and fascist tyranny on the right. But it was in exactly this context that an incredible flourishing of libertarian thought took place: Ayn Rand’s individualist novel, The Fountainhead, was published in 1943, the same year as Rose Wilder Lane’s libertarian history The Discovery of Freedom and Isabel Patterson’s paean to the creative powers of a free society, The God of the Machine. Just one year later, in 1944, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom and his mentor Ludwig von Mises published both Bureaucracy and Omnipotent Government.

So, yes, these are dangerous times for human liberty. But it might be precisely that danger that provides the necessary motivation for a new renaissance of liberal thought. We can draw inspiration from the words of Friedrich Hayek, writing in a similarly dark context in 1949:

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty…which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible….Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its greatest, the battle is not lost. The intellectual revival of liberalism is already under way in many parts of the world. Will it be in time?