The Washington Times had an article on the front page of their Entertainment section on Friday, November 23, 2007 about the influence Libertarians are having on American politics. It is both amusing and favorable! Here is the article, re-published without the knowledge of The Washington Times:
It’s altogether fitting that the new host of “The Price Is Right” — a game show on which contestants try to guess the going rate of various consumer products — is a free-market enthusiast.
More intriguing is said host’s part-time job: libertarian proselytizer.
Comedian Drew Carey can be seen on a series of funny-but-not-kidding Internet-TV episodes sponsored by the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based think tank. So far, Mr. Carey has recommended the privatization of highways as a solution for metropolitan traffic congestion and criticized the federal crackdown on medical marijuana.
Mr. Carey joins the libertarian fold along with the illusionist-comedians Penn & Teller and HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, who has called himself a libertarian for several years.
It’s not at all clear, to be sure, that the latter understands what the term means.
The acclaimed playwright-intellectual Tom Stoppard most certainly does: Describing himself as a “timid libertarian” in a recent interview with Timemagazine, he complained bitterly of the nanny-state intrusiveness of the British government.
Libertarianism espouses the autonomy of the individual in both economic and social spheres — though you’ll rarely hear it described with anything like academic rigor by its mainstream adherents.
As Reason magazine Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie explains, the term “libertarian” is more useful as an adjective than a noun. “It’s an impulse; it’s pre-political or at least pre-partisan,” he says. “In any given situation, it asks, ‘Do you favor giving people more freedom or less?’ ”
Mr. Gillespie cites “South Park” satirists Trey Parker and Matt Stone as illustrative of the increasing popular discontent with a binary political system that affords no escape from governmental coercion. The only thing the duo disdains more than hidebound conservatives are self-righteous liberals.
Card-carrying Libertarians are few and far between. Yet, seen as the guiding philosophy of a bloc of dissatisfied, independent-minded voters whose views align with Republicans on economics and Democrats on social issues, libertarianism is palpably gathering steam.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s insurgent Republican presidential campaign has raised $8.5 million so far this quarter, much of it through what might be called the libertarian netroots.
In a retrospective review of Ayn Rand’s philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged, which turned 50 this year, conservative critic Terry Teachout wrote in National Review that “small-L libertarianism has now attained a measure of cultural and intellectual respectability not far removed” from the conservatism of the Reagan era.
More pessimistically, liberal writer Michael Kinsley recently opined in Time that libertarians are an ugly byproduct of self-satisfied affluence: “The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners, many of them rich and some of them complacently Darwinian, convinced that they don’t need society — nor should anyone else.”
“They are going to be an increasingly powerful force in politics,” Mr. Kinsley predicted-slash-lamented.
Mr. Gillespie chuckles at the dark images that talk of libertarianism inevitably conjures up. “We’re the Sith Lords of American politics,” he says, referring to the “Star Wars” baddies. “We can show up in any group. We’re both terrifying and devilishly attractive.”
It’s not likely libertarianism will become a true third-party alternative; it’s a temperament to which both major parties will need increasingly to appeal.
Mr. Gillespie compares the ideas that underlie libertarianism to a “marinade.”
“Our culture has been soaking in it for years,” he says.
Brink Lindsey, vice president for research at the libertarian Cato Institute and the author of The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture, says that since the end of World War II, the country has unconsciously arrived at a vaguely libertarian-ish consensus: It’s culturally tolerant and yet demands personal responsibility for socioeconomic success.
“Generally speaking, the hump of the bell curve of American public opinion is more libertarian than it is distinctly liberal or conservative,” Mr. Lindsey says.
One of the paradoxes of the consensus posited by Mr. Lindsey is that government actually grew bigger at the same time libertarianism became more popular.
Another is that social conservatives tend to be the most dependable boosters of economic freedom.
Mr. Lindsey says the first paradox may explain itself: The growth sparked by lower taxes and a more competitive economy in the 1980s onward paid for bigger government, much as surplus revenue in the high-growth years of the early Johnson administration led to a bevy of new programs from Medicare to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
As Mr. Lindsey puts it, Atlas — Miss Rand’s mythical sustainer of economic productivity — “got massively pumped up.”
Alongside Mr. Lindsey’s economic trends is a cultural crackup that began roughly with the Allen Ginsberg poem “Howl” clearing a 1957 obscenity trial.
A more inclusive social space has created favorable conditions for more libertarian politics (or more decadence, say traditionalist conservatives).
Reason‘s Mr. Gillespie says the entertainment and media industries — the Hollywood studio system, the major record labels and publishing houses and the mainstream networks and newspapers — have fallen victim lately to the leveling technological revolution of the Web 2.0 era.
“The forces of centralization and a rigid hierarchy are fading,” he says. “People are wealthier and better educated and have the means to express themselves.”
Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University says the new breed of Swiftian commentary found on shows such as “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” though not explicitly libertarian, also has contributed to the current libertarian moment.
“The way to be funny is to make fun of something,” Mr. Cowen notes.
And, while Republicans in the wake of George W. Bush have no claim on coolness, it’s simply not tenable these days to spare liberal Democrats from the scalpel of satire.
“The Democrats aren’t that strong on new ideas,” Mr. Cowen says. “It’s not like the ’60s, when they seemed cool. They seem tired to me now. I feel like their big plan is to raise our taxes. Culturally, it’s just not that exciting.”
Combine Mr. Lindsey’s prosperity-driven nonjudgmentalism with a steady diet of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and “South Park,” and you have the makings of a new “It Faction” in American politics.
“The net impact,” Mr. Cowen says, “is to make people more libertarian.”
