Must… Destroy… Milton Freedman

by Will Wilkinson on January 25, 2008

Benjamin Storey & Jenna Silber Storey: “The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life.” Translation:

Libertarianism is dangerous because it discourages juvenile romantic attachment to higher things — meaningful things – like Honor, Virtue, and the indescribable joy of sacrificing one’s life to the service of the American Volksreich. All libertarians care about is superficial shit like not starving, living a long time, and being creative and happy. Blah blah blah. But, really, what’s the point of living to 200 if all you do is enjoy yourself the whole time? I mean, don‘t you want to know what it is like to kill a man? DON’T YOU WANT TO TASTE BLOOD!? Besides, virtue.

Vote John McCain.

Oh, goodness that’s not fair! But, really, that whole thing is just as embarrassing as misspelling ‘Friedman’. I am more and more coming to the conclusion that National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager’s fantasies about what it means to be a grown up. The fundamental moral decency of liberal individualism seems, to the unserious mind that thinks itself serious, completely insipid next to very exciting big boy ideas about shared struggle, sacrifice, duty, glory, virtue, and (most of all) power. And reading Aristotle in Greek.

I sometimes think that liberal individualism is something like the intellectual and moral equivalent of the best modernist design — spare, elegant, functional — but hard to grasp or truly appreciate without a cultivated sense of style, without a little discerning maturity. National Greatness Conservatism is like a grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire. Only the most vulgar tuck in next to that fire, light a fat cigar, and think they’ve really got it all figured out. But I’m afraid that’s pretty much the kind of thing you get at the Committee on Social Thought. If you declaim the importance of virtue loudly enough, you don’t have to actually think.

  • Keelay
    Sorry - that comment was in reference to this

    "I am more and more coming to the conclusion that National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager’s fantasies about what it means to be a grown up."
  • Keelay
    <>

    That is precisely the reason I was originally drawn to it as an adolescent.

    And I also had framed prints of Labrador retrievers with dead ducks in their mouths.
  • Joel
    Will,

    National greatness conservatives are like alcoholics who spike the near-beer with the real stuff, worst of both worlds, so I agree with you there.

    Yet just as the neocons inappropriately place private virtues in the public sphere, you seem to be doing the reverse, when you celebrate the tasteful "functionalism" of liberal individualism. It may be admirable to caution restraint in government, but I'm not sure why this is a fundamental argument rather than a practical one.

    At any rate, I'm more comfortable to calls for the "fundamental decency" of liberal individualism when it comes from someone who went through that over-romantic adolescent phase. Like Shaw said (I think it was him, and not Churchill) about being a liberal at 20 and conservative at 40 (or was it 30? 50? so many different versions of that anecdote...)

    Anyway, wonderfully written piece even if I have some caveats.
  • Egypt Steve
    Jason: Swedish modern. Upscale, not the Ikea version.
  • Egypt Steve
    I'm a liberal, in fact, quasi-socialist and quasi-pacifist. I hate and reject National Greatness Conservatism and all other quasi-fascist movements. I have, however, read Aristotle in Greek. Does that make me a bad person?
  • Jay
    Oh, my... This is the best exhibit they have in their argument against self-interest?

    Recent congressional history has laid bare the fallacy of this argument. Republicans who proclaimed from the stump that greed was good turned out to believe it when they got into office, amassing earmarks and bridges to nowhere by means of their newfound powers. Why should we be surprised?

    Really? It would seem that this example defeats -- rather than supports -- their own argument. What do earmarks and bridges to nowhere have to do with the free market? Nothing.

    If anything, these examples highlight the danger of centralizing power, even if done supposedly to serve a higher purpose. As Hayek said, the worst always come out on top in this sort of system.
  • chris
    Very well done, sir. Succinct. You helped me put words to what I couldn't.

    "And the problem with most modernist buildings is that nobody could live in them."

    Modernist architecture was an attempt to draw *everyone* together into a simplified liberal individualism. Unfortunately, not everyone can live like that; some would rather go to war for a cause regardless of their apprehension of it. And some need to live/work in a building that pretends to give them meaning and culture. And a laundry room.
  • America Uber Alles
    National Greatness Conservatives are like Kevin Spacey's next door neighbor in American Beauty, standing in your garage with a rifle.
  • Jack
    The least we can do for the memory of the late Milton Friedman is to spell his name correctly . . .
  • oddjob
    a grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire. Only the most vulgar tuck in next to that fire, light a fat cigar, and think they’ve really got it all figured out.

    LOL!

    If you have not, the next time you're in the NYC area you should visit Sagamore Hill, Teddy Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay, NY.
  • David
    Overheard at CATO:

    Mr. Wilkinson muttering in the hallway,

    "DAMMIT, YOU CONSERVATIVES, ORNAMENT IS CRIME!"

    ;)
  • mk
    As brilliant as the analogy is, I think National Greatness Conservatism (or "NGC" as it appears in rap songs) is just as self-congratulatory but not as static or navel-gazing as the analogy suggests.

    Or I guess, it depends on what idea or practice is giving us greatness. Sometimes, I assume, it's war. And while that's kitschy, it also has real consequences such as death.
  • "National Greatness Conservatism is like a grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire. Only the most vulgar tuck in next to that fire, light a fat cigar, and think they’ve really got it all figured out."

    Ha! What a great line! It's like something out of a Wodehouse novel.
  • Greg Newburn
    What do you embrace, Julian? National suckiness?
  • You probably could have saved yourself a fair amount of time (and perhaps a modicum of embarrassment) by just Googling "national greatness conservatism".
  • John
    What exactly do you mean by "national greatness conservatism". If your bitch is about Iraq, which it always is, fine. But a commitment to free markets has nothing to do with that. Lots of people who have no use for free markets or individual freedom object to interventionism and lots of people who do believe in the market don't object to interventionism.

    Are you guy saying that you don't believe in anything beyond "the market" and have no attachment to country you grew up in beyond happening to live here? If you don't embrace national greatness, what do you embrace, national suckiness? Why can't you be a libertarian and embrace national greatness? Ron Paul certainly seems to. He embraces patriotism and US sovereignty and the need to keep the US separate and distinct from a North American Union and so forth. I disagree with Ron Paul but I would never question his patriotism or his commitment to making this country great. Does that make him a "national greatness conservative"? If it doesn't, just what the hell does the term mean other than anyone who disagrees with you? The whole thing is just a bunch of crap.

    Lastly, liking modern architecture is in no way a sign of discernment. I am not sure what is more sad, that someone who occasionally writes for serious magazines could make such a lame post or that a herd of sycophants would all run and tell him how cool he is.
  • Greg N.
    This is one of those rare moments of genius that just gets it EXACTLY RIGHT, and leaves the reader totallysatisfied. Your description makes me think of the right-wing talk radio character from "The Last Supper."

    Nice job, Will.
  • I am more and more coming to the conclusion that National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager’s fantasies about what it means to be a grown up.

    Amen.
  • What it comes down to is that people are uncomfortable with the idea of other people (and themselves perhaps) doing what they want in an undirected manner.

    Your post goes great with the Dan Klein paper (which I've recently been acquainted with) "The People's Romance."
  • erik
    Spend 15 minutes reading andrewsullivan.com for proof-positive that "liberal individualism" is no recipe for "discerning maturity."

    And of course, it's closed-minded and lazy (and also bespeaks a kind of historical parochialism) to chalk it all up to a concern for "power" (the lip-service you pay to other concerns notwithstanding). It's also just weird to think that's the true motivation of people who chose to spend a big chunk of their lives in grad school.
  • Reality Man
    "National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager’s fantasies about what it means to be a grown up."

    That might be the best description of it I heard. Then again, it might be giving them too much credit in the sense of "say what you want about national socialism man, at least it's an ethos." Fukuyama pointed out on bloggingheads that in the 1990's the neocons at the Weekly Standard and elsewhere were searching for an enemy under the rubric of "national greatness conservatism" to help Republicans win elections. They chose China over radical Islam before 9/11, but that day changed all that. Then again, NGC is probably in part what makes Brooks feel that he is different from the existential poets and subaltern studies specialists a couple of buildings away at Harvard. He probably thinks real men teach at the law school while weaklings teach poetry.
  • Ben A
    Will,

    Thanks for the reply. The Storeys would have done better, I agree, had they said that the value of a free market is for enabling human flourishing, rather than human excellence. Phrased that way, do you agree, or would you still value certain aspects of the free market even were evidence to suggest they were not connected to human flourishing?

    I am also intrigued by this sentence of yours:

    "There is no evidence that commitment to “a cause higher than yourself” is a necessary component to flourishing."

    I incline Aristotelean myself, but would confess that the difficulty of defining or describing the qualities that create a flourishing life (beyond a "I know it when I see it" reaction). It is likewise difficult to identify what would count as "evidence" for anything -- creativity, longenvity, subjectively reported happiness -- being an important, or necessary, component of human flourishing. Are there qualities of a life for which you think such evidence exists (and which the quality "devotion to something higher than yourself" lacks)? What are these qualities and what form does the evidence in their favor take?
  • a Duoist,

    Be careful in what you mean by fascism being anti-liberal. The liberalism that Mussolini ranted against was classical liberalism, not what we call liberalism today in the United States. In fact, Mussolini would have few issues with the majority of what modern "liberals" advocate.
  • You know that the Committee on Social Thought was the department that Hayek worked in, right? I'm sure it's changed since then--apparently for the worst--but it wasn't always this way.
  • A defense of "libertarianism in one country" Paulism from a person with no ideals (or "fixed ideas" or "geists") above himself:

    LIOC is simply more workable, just as Stalin's "socialism in one country" was in comparison to Trotsky's worldwide revolution. The Anglosphere countries in particular have a long tradition of liberty (usually referred to as "classical liberalism") that is difficult to export or impose on others. Even here the government is incompetent in managing our lives, and when meddling in countries it knows even less about it is all the more likely to foul up. If you really want to spread liberty, it is better to be a "city on the hill" setting an inspiring example for the rest of the world than a Jacobin trying to violently overturn the order in other nations.
  • John Thacker
    The main reason is that the average person living under free markets can expect to live longer, more satisfying lives than they would otherwise, excellence or not.

    There is no evidence that commitment to “a cause higher than yourself” is a necessary component to flourishing. I think a lot of people crave such a thing, but I also think this is very often an atavistic impulse that it is better to resist.

    It seems to me that commitment to the cause of having the average person live longer, more satisfying lives than they would otherwise is commitment to "a cause higher than yourself," and that libertarians are remiss not to make that case. Libertarians have plenty of commitments to causes higher than themselves, they simply disagree about the best methods to obtain them.

    The smearing at libertarians for lacking moral foundation and being concerned only with themselves is deplorable, unfair, but all too common. While certainly there are those who favor libertarian policy simply because it's convenient for them and who don't care at all about others, it seems to me that Will has consistently pointed out than he grounds his support in its ability to promote negative and positive liberty for the average person, regardless of accidents of birth.

    On the other hand, simply because others are wrong and unfair to see a lack of moral seriousness in libertarianism does not make it any more "fair" to accuse them of the same and of bad faith. Most neoconservatives are concerned with the rights and freedoms of those in other countries; they simply disagree about the possibility of military solutions. In some senses, I have much more sympathy with them than I do with the "libertarianism in one country" Paulites for whom "the place in which a person was born becomes the key factor in whether you care about them." But then in politics, one rarely has the luxury of only supporting people who support the right policies for the right reasons.
  • Fascism is not racist; Nazism is racist, virulently so. Mussolini only adopted racism very late and most reluctantly after Hitler's rants forced the issue. Jews never experienced in fascist Italy what Jews experienced in Nazi Germany.

    As for 'parallels,' fascism is not an economic system. There is little economic theory in fascist literature ('Be on time, or else' pretty much describes all of fascism's economic theory). Fascism is not merely a difference in degree from the modern regulatory state; fascism is a wholesale difference in "philosophy of life" (Hitler's term), governance ('totalitarian' is Mussolini's word), and intent (deliberately murderous). Fascism is another "permanent revolution" (Trotsky's term) like Marxism, but without any of Marxism's significant economic theory.

    With an economic theory underpinning its ideology, Marxism 'normalized' as it captured control over a government. Fascism and Nazism never normalized; they had to be killed in order to defeat them.
  • I think fascism differs from socialism *meaningfully* just in the way it controls the means of production. Other differentiators are less important (socialism can be just as racist and nationalist as fascism).

    Both have a similar collectivist meta-context of state. Socialism nationalises the means of production directly, in effect denying any notion of non-collective ownership. Fascism allows nominal private ownership but decouples responsibility from control. You can 'own' means of production as long as you use them in accordance with national objectives, which is to say you have 'control' as long as you do what they want you to do (which is actually just liability masquerading as control).

    That is why I do not think it is wrong at all to draw the obvious parallels between fascism as an economic system and modern regulatory statism. They only differ in degree. The difference between a true fascist economic system and modern Big Government Conservatism (i.e. the Republicans and Tories)/Big Government Social Democrats (i.e. the Democrats and Labour Party) is... twenty more uninterrupted years of pervasive regulations.
  • The word 'fascist'--as in "quasi-fascist"--is getting an awful lot of use lately, from both the Right and the Left and now, libertarians. Accusing someone of fascist tendencies is becoming the new form of PC: intimidate an alternative opinion into silence by blackmailing it emotionally.

    There are well in excess of 24,000 scholarly volumes written on fascism, and even reading only a few of the best scholarship posits that fascism is BOTH anti-conservative and anti-liberal. Fascism might well be right-wing socialism, but it is decidedly anti-conservative as much as it is anti-liberal.

    Like the tale of the boy who cried "wolf," the more we carelessly bandy the term 'fascist' around, the less impact it will have when an actual fascism captures a democratic government (one of Paxton's defined pre-requisites for a movement to be accurately described as being "fascist").

    Liberals and neo-cons are not going to give up using the word to describe whom they fear; it would be nice, however, if we libertarians were better read and intellectually more accurate about our psychic fears.
  • AQ
    The most satisfying Wilkinson post in months. Love it!
  • "grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire."

    Sounds a bit like my dinning room, Will. I am hoping to add the Mayor of London's head to my collection one day.
  • Hmm, that den doesn't sound bad to me. I also think there is a deep-seated among men to kill enemies with the support (even if only moral) of their community. That's one reason I find Storm of Steel such an engrossing book. Realistically however, the results of war are terrible and leave a ratchet effect in which the state expands at the expense of its people. I've mentioned elsewhere that "part of being a libertarian is recognizing that public policy is not a fantasy story in which you may enact your whims, especially the more spiteful ones". Some other reasons I can't go along with NGC are my atomistic individualism and disbelief in virtue (or any kind of objective morality).

    When did Milton Friedman attack virtue? I know he wanted to replace a draft army with a volunteer one but he thought the latter was still patriotic.
  • "The Weekly Standard article is also a useful reminder of how little neocons have strayed from their roots- neoconservatism is still liberalism’s thuggish little brother."

    I've long thought of neocons as liberals who have simply dropped the pretense of good will.
  • Will wrote: "National Greatness Conservatism is like a grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire. Only the most vulgar tuck in next to that fire, light a fat cigar, and think they’ve really got it all figured out."

    This is the funniest thing I've read in weeks! I'm not sure what the appropriate interior design analog is for liberal individualism, but this seems dead on for National Greatness Conservatism.
  • Will Wilkinson
    Ben,

    That free markets allow individual excellence to flourish is an excellent reason to defend them. But it is completely obtuse to make it the main reason to defend them. The main reason is that the average person living under free markets can expect to live longer, more satisfying lives than they would otherwise, excellence or not.

    There is no evidence that commitment to "a cause higher than yourself" is a necessary component to flourishing. I think a lot of people crave such a thing, but I also think this is very often an atavistic impulse that it is better to resist. Of course, when John McCain, scion of an elite military family, says it, the cause he is thinking of is the state. He really seems to think his life was enobled by having been tortured, just because it happened while he was doing the bidding of the state in a war. It wasn't ennobling. It was just awful. Which is one reason we ought to stay away from war, and John McCain.
  • Ben A
    Will, I'd be interested to hear what you think of this line in the Storey piece:

    "Conservatives need to defend free markets not as an ideology but as an aspect of policy that serves the purpose of allowing individual excellence to flourish."

    I'm interested primarily because I think this is also a position you hold (based on your comments in other posts about the importance of positive rights).

    The disagreement between you and the Storeys would then seem to be about the definition of human flourishing. Their implicit claim is that human flourishing does include a commitment to, as McCain might say, "a cause higher than yourself." Ridicule aside, do you agree?
  • Tim
    Here's a thought. Or maybe it's a thought experiment.

    There is a lot of political discussion from the right, left and where ever that the nation state is on the way out. Or if not out, in some kind of decline. Or otherwise not feeling quite itself lately. Still it's definitely not clear that some kind of world government will replace it, somehow Mad Max's Thunderdome seems more likely than Star Trek's Federation.

    Maybe a thousand years from now, historians will look back on the period 1750-2050 as "the national moment". Let's face it, for most of human history prior to 1750 "nations" may have existed, and we more or less call them ethnic groups today, but the "nation state" was actually a rare bird. It did become a great cause in enlightenment / liberalism thinking, and "nation states" of a sort proliferated, although on closer examination most of them failed to meet the defining characteristics that the founding fathers of the nationalist idea imagined.

    So maybe the "natural" form of state is the multi-ethnic patchwork a la the Austro-Hungarian empire, the modern US or the USSR/CIS/Russian Federation.

    If these ramblings are even half correct then McCain and the "national greatness" guys are really "imperial greatness" advocates, the "national" part is really just nostalgia to win the voters.
  • Excellent post. I’ve long considered McCain my least favorite Republican, and that Weekly Standard article is a nice reminder of why.


    I think you’re right about the adolescent quality of this sort of conservatism. It’s like some rebellious kid who thinks that normal bourgeois adult stuff- earning a living, taking care of your family, enjoying day-to-day life- is for squares and sell-outs. Though in defense of adolescents, the ones I’ve known usually express this sort of sentiment by getting something pierced or going to an arts college, rather than, say, burning down Iraqi cities and calling for universal conscription.

    The Weekly Standard article is also a useful reminder of how little neocons have strayed from their roots- neoconservatism is still liberalism’s thuggish little brother. (Which would, I suppose, make “national greatness conservatism” liberalism’s juvenile delinquent nephew.) The article is an outstanding distillation of what standard liberal commentary on the subject is like: The idiotic oversimplifications and distortions of what economists believe, the insistence that having good-willed people in office is all that matters, the ridiculous pretense of having no ideology, the belief that depriving people of economic freedom is a purely technocratic question with no moral content, and of course, as you pointed out, the contempt for the idea of people seeking individual success and fulfillment instead of gloriously dissolving themselves in some collective moral crusade. Make the language a little more gender-inclusive, replace “McCain” with “Obama,” remove the disapproving reference to pornography, and throw in the word “compassion” a few times and you’ve got something your average Democrat would whole-heartedly endorse.
  • Sigivald
    You're right on what matters here, Will, but I kinda like the idea of "grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire" combined with a comfy chair and a nice fat cigar and some whiskey.

    Though I'd add rifles to the wall.
  • none
    The weak point of the analogy is the number of libertarians who like Ayn Rand (not that I'd ever accuse you of that, Will!)
  • Will Wilkinson
    Maybe a bad analogy. The point is that these people are extremely intellectually an morally vulgar. Liberal market order may not appeal to juvenile taste, but it is functional -- it leads to happy, healthy, wealthy, lives -- and is in that way stirring and beautiful. People on the left and right who worry this is empty or makes no room for excellence or destroys community, or whatever, are just talking out their asses.
  • Rue Des Quatre Vents
    Awful analogy. Not that I have anything against Modernist design and architecture, aesthetically. But politically, the International Style and the Modernist movement in architecture deliberately grew out of a socialist programme. See Gropius's writings. For an amusing history, I recommend Wolfe's Our House To Bauhaus.

    In effect, these artistic movements were anti-Hayekian: if some ornament could not be justified, then it was condemned as "bourgeois", and eliminated. But the truth is that many older styles developed from the accumulation of knowledge across time and from disparate sources--mainly through an invisible hand process.

    The International Style is rationalist in the strictest Hayekian sense.
  • Steve Horwitz
    National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager’s fantasies about what it means to be a grown up.

    I'd make one change Will: "a weird romantic TEENAGE BOYS' fantasies..." National Greatness Conservatism is nothing if not evidence that sometimes radical feminism's worst stereotypes have some basis in fact.
  • bjk
    And the problem with most modernist buildings is that nobody could live in them.
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