Words can be tricky, particularly political messaging. If you’re not careful you might have a gaffe, in the sense of accidentally telling the truth.
There’s a particular example of that kind of gaffe which I’ve seen a lot of recently. A group that says it is fighting “the left” among the majority of current Libertarians. It derives from the same habit at the more intellectual end of denouncing “left-libertarians.”
Now, I’d get it if they were talking about some hard-left gaggle of kooky Anarchist Communist. And I’d get it if it was aimed at a kind of moderate libertarianism veering towards the technocratic center-left. There are people who hold those views and it’s fair to say they’re to the left of most Libertarians.
But that’s not ever who they’re talking about. Instead it’s talking about... well, people like me, among others. Plumbline orthodox ideological libertarians. Free-market, anti-tax, anti-war, private-property, hard-money, freedom-of-contract, anti-welfare-state, non-aggression, no-victim-no-crime, individualist libertarians. Folks who are perfectly familiar with Hayek and Friedman and Mises and Rand and Rothbard, and who’ve been involved in regular movement libertarianism for years. People who are not, in any sense, “left-libertarians,” much less “leftists.” We certainly don’t represent any kind of “turn to the left” for the Libertarians.
But here’s the thing about calling somebody “left” — it’s a relative term. It implies, straightforward enough, that you consider yourself as somehow to their right.
Well, what issue is it that places these folks to the relative right of most Libertarians? It’s not taxes or spending or free markets or monetary policy or labour unions or regulations or welfare or education or abolishing umpteen dozen government agencies. We’ve already got all that good radical free-market, smaller-government stuff turned up to 11. There’s nothing “left” on economic policy or size of government here to denounce.
And what does that leave? A bunch of stuff that’s really hard to defend as “more libertarian” rather than being obviously a position of the illiberal right. Immigration, or LGBT rights, or church and state, or nationalism, or “social issues” more broadly (or as they prefer to dismiss it: “lifestyle” issues). Not that it necessarily has to be all of those, but it has to be something along those lines. If you’re going to explicitly place yourself to the right of most LP members, those are the only issues where there’s any space to our right.
It makes senses for conservatives, nationalists, theocrats, and right-wing populists to denounce Libertarians as being to their left. We are! Proudly! But it doesn’t make much sense to denounce Libertarians as leftists and then protest that it’s unfair for people to say you’re to the right of most Libertarians.
