Libertarians: Only now, at the end, do you understand...

Charles Koch reveals the true power of the Dark Side...

Given my history of critiquing libertarianism, it would hardly be surprising if I felt a flash of gleeful schadenfreude to see the dismay with which so many movement libertarians are reacting to the Koch takeover of the Cato Institute. But I don't. I just feel sad. Here are a bunch of smart people who truly, honestly believe in their worldview - a worldview that shares some key elements with my own - discovering for the first time that they are in fact merely a proxy army for people who don't take them or their worldview seriously at all.

To those of us outside the movement, the fact that libertarians are a proxy army has always been painfully obvious. The key piece of evidence was always the set of issues that libertarians chose to emphasize. Most Americans share the belief that civil liberties are good, war is to be avoided, and high taxes are bad. But the fact that our country's libertarian movement spent so much time fighting high taxes and so little time fighting the encroaching authoritarianism of conservative presidential administrations was a clear sign that some priorities were seriously out of place. Should we really be more afraid of turning into Sweden than turning into Singapore? The contrast between libertarians' continual jeremiads against taxes and their muted, intermittent criticism of things like warrantless wiretaps, executive detention, and torture was a huge tip-off that the movement was really just some kind of intellectual front for America's right wing.

The thing is, the soldiers in this proxy army didn't seem to realize they were a proxy army. They appeared, and appear, to truly believe in their synthetic ideology; they seemed deeply convinced of the Rand/Nozick idea that taxes and environmental regulation represented a more dire threat to human freedom than the authoritarianism that had been the bane of earlier freedom advocates since Enlightenment. 

Now, however, they are beginning to understand:

[T]he Kochtopus...threatens to swallow up libertarian scholarship in order to regurgitate it as fodder for the social activist tail that seeks to wag the GOP dog in the 2012 elections.Readers should not expect many free market think tanks to speak out against the Koch assault. Too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by Charles and David Koch through their various well-funded foundations. That pocket money comes at a significant cost. I can assure you that there is no such thing as a free Koch luncheon.

How much did libertarians blind themselves to the true motivations of the people who were throwing money at them? We may never know. But it's certain that the blinders are off now. People working at more explicitly Koch-funded think tanks (such as the Mercatus Center, headed by the econ blogosphere's own Tyler Cowen) must be experiencing some serious cognitive dissonance right about now.

Because the superpower bankrolling America's libertarian movement is simply our version of the right-wing oligarch-and-racist coalition that crops up in every nation from time to time. The American conservative movement wants a strong executive who wields many of the powers of a tyrant of old, in order to "protect" us (from "terrorists," subversive elements at home, or outsiders in general). It wants a justice system oriented toward protecting tradition, group rights, and the social order (like Japan's system). It wants to restrict immigration by nonwhite racial groups. It wants heavy government regulation of personal morality. And it occasionally wants wars of choice.

In other words, it is deeply anti-liberty. 

Some libertarians are belatedly recognizing this:

What does Cato say that no other think tank says? Militarism is… the worst foreign policy for a free market. The War on Drugs is not only unnecessary in a free market, but ending it would be a straightforward implementation of free market principles. And the freedom to buy and sell is a sick joke without robust civil liberties for all. Conversely, most people want their civil liberties partly so that they can earn a living and enjoy economic opportunities. That is what Cato is about. That is also apparently why the Kochs are trying to destroy it.

If I were a meaner-spirited type of person, I would say that this realization is too little, too late - that libertarians spent decades being apologists, water-carriers, and useful idiots for authoritarians, and only now that their masters are reeling in the leash do they suddenly want out. But instead I say: Better late than never. You guys made mistakes before, but now you see the truth. First, realize that the conservative puppeteering of the libertarian movement is not an extremely recent phenomenon, but was always present at some level. And then start thinking about what kind of political agenda and rhetorical emphasis will actually promote liberty in America. 

Freed from the conservative yoke, libertarians will have huge potential to do a lot of real good for this fundamentally libertarian country.


Update: Wil Wilkinson, libertarian writer and former Cato employee, confirms that Cato has been a proxy army for the right, and has many other insightful things to say.