James Delingpole
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The problem is that hardly anyone seems to understand what the ‘l’ word actually means, least of all ‘libertarians’. In Standpoint the other day, for example, there was a letter that began: ‘As a libertarian Conservative I have gone off Katharine Birbalsingh…’ It went on to argue that children shouldn’t be punished for the ‘victimless crime of not doing homework’. And that they shouldn’t have to do up their ties or tuck in their shirts, either. After all, being scruffy and not doing his homework hadn’t done the correspondent any harm. He had ‘ended up a graduate’.
I think the word the graduate was striving for was anarchist, not libertarian. How, exactly, does encouraging a child to indulge its natural preference for Call of Duty: Black Ops over homework offer meaningful freedom? Surely what you’re really doing is narrowing the child’s options by denying it the literacy and numeracy it will need to do everything from earning a living to calculating whether it has been ripped off by its dealer.
As for the scruffy thing, I’m a scruff myself but I don’t think I can decree that all others should be scruffy too. What about the kids who like uniforms? (Which I do, too, in both a kinky and non-kinky way.) What about the pressure put on kids in uniform-free schools to show how much cooler/richer/trendier they are through the medium of casual dress?
Libertarianism is not some free-for-all where the only badge of authenticity is how far you are prepared to let it all hang out. But there are quite a few self-professed libertarians who think it is. If you don’t want Dutch donkey-porn broadcast on BBC1 before 9 p.m., if you don’t want heroin vending machines in every classroom, if you’re not fighting to help enable Islamist suicide bombers to blow themselves up when and where they want, then you’re not keeping it real.
I exaggerate only slightly with the last example. One of the things that really puzzles me about the Tory MP David Davis, a man whom I’d desperately like to admire more than I do, is that the notionally libertarian issue on which he chose to resign and then re-fight his seat was probably the least worthy libertarian cause imaginable.
David could have staked his career on Criminal Records Bureau checks, on the democratic unaccountability of the European socialist superstate, on any number of issues where big government has elbowed its way into our lives and stolen our money and freedoms. Instead, he decided to fight for the right of suspected terrorists to be detained without charge for a fortnight less than the government preferred.
Thanks for that one, Dave. Really struck a blow for freedom there, didn’t you? Because, obviously, as the 7 July bombings and the countless plots interrupted by MI5 since prove, the threat from Islamist terrorism is illusory, and the more often we show our extremist Muslim brothers just how nice we are the more they will like and respect us.
That’s another thing that bugs me about the ‘l’ word: the way you can write a paragraph like the one above and some bright spark will try to argue — as an aspirant Lib Dem politico claimed about me in the letter to the Spectator the other week — that if you have forceful opinions you’re not so much libertarian as a borderline Hitler.
Look, libertarianism is not about turning the other cheek. (That’s Christianity, I believe.) Nor is it about being non-judgmental (that’s therapy-speak or, so it is wont to delude itself, liberalism). Nor even — contra that letter — does it preclude contempt, or the expression of contempt, for the kind of sloppy thinking and servile mentality which have allowed successive governments to enslave us. (I’d call that brain-death; or, if it’s not tautological, liberal democracy.)
So what do libertarians believe? Well I like this definition, courtesy of the US Libertarian party, America’s third largest: ‘Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.’
Beyond that, it’s all up for debate. America’s most famous libertarian, the Republican Congressman Ron Paul, is a believer in nonintervention. (He was the only 2008 Republican presidential candidate to have voted against the Iraq War Resolution.) But his libertarian son, the Republican Senator Rand Paul, takes a more hawkish line. The greatest libertarian US president that never was, Barry Goldwater, campaigned on a foreign policy manifesto entitled Why Not Victory?
This is as it should be. Arguably the most important libertarian movement in political history — the Tea Party — is going to stand or fall on how well it understands its need to be a broad church, in which interventionists and isolationists, pro-choicers and pro-lifers, believers and atheists can put aside their differences to unite against the common enemy. Let none of us ever forget what the real goal is — liberty to live our lives as we wish, so long as we respect the equal rights of others. And let us never forget what stands in our way: big government.
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