I don’t think there are any short cuts or that conservatism is much more than an idiomatic way of thinking about politics rather than a full-fldged philosophical account that provides answers to particular political, moral, and cultural questions. So in that sense I think conservatism, at least I understand it, avoids this particular “rationalist” vice of libertarianism and other philosophies that claim to provide a formula for successful and just politics without the admixture of intuition, historical perspective, common sense, and all the rest that are needed to make actual political decisions.

Finally, even if the political approach I advocate could come to pass, I don’t think problems would disappaear from America or the lives of individual Americans. Life is funny, full of tough decisions, uncontrollable trends, and the quest for individual and collective meaning. I simply think that a conservatively inclined American politics more properly balances these individual and collective yearnings than the ideological and liberal one that we find ourselves in. Let’s not forget, it as in the “bad old days” of the America of yesteryear that the beats, Whitman, and these other interesting characters emerged. Eclectic individuals emerged then as they always do in response to a broader more widely practiced morality. But political and cultural nihilism and relativism are not a formula for anything interesting; instead, a faux sense of superiority emerges in culture, literature, and individual people. I think this is where someone like Alan Bloom was spot-on in his diagnosis of what is going wrong at would should be the citiadels of American high culture, its universities.

You’re being unfair. I called Howard Stern “worthless” and am proud to back that up. I called Willie a “country music pothead,” which he is (can’t we agree that 5 joints a day = pothead?). My point in that comment was to point out something perverse in Gene’s apparent acceptance of a disgusting character such as Stern and a pothead talking about the virtues of pot-smoking, but his apparent distaste for a doctor warning about pot’s negative effects.

In truth, I’m a Willie fan.

You, on the other hand substitute your own Herculean account. This one requires the decisionmaker to act with fine and sagacious attunment to particular mode of “justice” instantiated in a “historically realized” “way of life.” You then criticize libertarians, who are obsessed with bloodless abstractions and deductive reasoning, for lacking the wisdom of recognizing this “way of life.” In its own very different way, this is just as much an exercise in epistemic heroism as what your criticizing.

It also seems to have its own blind spots. You celebrate a kind of rural red-state version of America as your account of the instantiated way of life (God, Guns, and Guts) that is American, but don’t seem to give any recognition or celebration of the competing traditions that are no less American–its all William Jennings Bryan and no Clarrence Darrow. It’s all Waylon Jennings and no Charlie Parker; no place for Lenny Bruce, the Beats, or Whitman. In Wade’s view–although I wouldn’t want to suggest you share it– its a world in which Willie Nelson is just a worthless pot-head–that’s a pretty impoverished view of what it means to be aesthetically American. You can dismiss this as just aesthetics but your account of political judgment is in part aesthetic (as you suggest appreciating what is just is no different from, and is indeed tied up in, appreciation of a “way of life”). That’s why your aesthetic myopia says something just as telling as Radley Balko’s blindspot for the tragic: underscores why your approach to things smacks in its own way of the hubris of unconstrained vision.

Isn’t there a middle way lurking here, that two Herculean camps are ignoring, one much more modest and humble about our capacity for knowledge, either of our “historically realized” justice or of the iron princples of natures, that is neither purely traditionalist or libertarian, one that it is process-based, epistemically skeptical, pluralist, and that might be consistent with a political philosophy that is susceptible to being portrayed as either libertarian and conservative?

If I may summarize at least part of your position with which I agree: It is an important difference to note that liberal regimes must sometimes do illiberal things to preserve themselves–immigration policy, support education–than to say that they may do anything they wish for any reason, including the classical product of using a regime directly and explicitly to make men more virtuous. In other words, I’m concerned with public morality and less so with private morality with no social effects. As a practical matter, like libertarians, I think that what people do in their own homes, discretely should not occasion too much concern of the government.

I wrote not too long ago, “some notion of the public and private realms should temper how laws are enforced and how “morals legislation” generally should do its work. In other words, legislation against gambling halls, strip clubs, sodomy, or whatever–setting aside the merits of any of these laws–tends to prevent the public and open exercise of these things. None of these laws necessarily affects private behavior, which should continue to have its traditional constitutional protection. This is important because public and open behavior tends to make things that are otherwise harmful or looked down upon more normal and therefore less shameful; ultimately, these behaviors will be more widely practiced if they are done so openly. Tthe community, by permitting them, may be seen not to condemn these behaviors. Thus, if the effect of these laws is merely to move certain behavior into the private realm, that would count as a victory and a useful outcome–consistent both with people’s rights and the community’s need for order and standards. I believe this is a fair assessment of how much of this legislation has worked both in the past and in the present. A broad notion of tolerance for what goes on in private, even for petty illegal behavior, that does not openly show contempt for the community and its laws, is an important concomitant of a free society. Even if there were no laws on any of these subjects, what one should feel free to do in public as a matter of prudence and respect for the need for community values should be more circumscribed than what one does in private.”

What I mean here is that I believe there is cause for public funding of education. Now, that does not mean that I require public schools, but rather that I would support the use of tax dollars to fund education, even if that education funds scholarships to private schools. If there was a way to achieve the same results without public funding (as some assert is possible with education tax credits), then I would support that. But in my cost-benefit analysis comparing the loss of individual rights from taxation to the gains created by there being a better educated populace (gains that I believe would include individual rights, as people with more education would be better able to employ and defend their own rights as well as the rights of others), I think the balance weighs in favor of education being a public good. The doctrinnaire libertarian would put all the emphasis on the taxation side of the ledger — effectively arguing that even if there are substantial gains to be had, it’s not worth the loss in individual liberty to take the taxation money in the first place. It’s sort of a “the later good does not mollify the earlier sin” argument in keeping with the ends-not-justifying-the-means bit I mentioned before. But since I think that individual rights will, in the aggregate, increase as a result, I am willing to make the exception.

To bring this to your next point regarding roads verses marriage, what it mostly comes down to here is that the gains from morality-based legislation and such other social institutions are much harder to quantify, and such laws are much more likely to result in negative effects that far outweigh whatever subjective good is achieved and individual liberties lost. To remind you of my position on gay marriage, my view is that “marriage” is already defined as being between a man and a woman, so there is no need to change that definition. But I see no compelling reason not to allow gay couples to have access to civil unions that, in all constructive ways, are the same legal institutions as marriages. The dire warnings from conservatives about the threat to heterosexual marriage and the like all turn up rather empty, in my view. Policy arguments that compel me to agree that there should not be the ability for one person to marry more than one other person, or that they cannot marry a child, aren’t present when it comes to civil unions. Now, I don’t think it would be fruitful for us to debate the merits of this issue here, but I felt I had to flesh things out so that you could see that it’s not a personal preference issue on my end. I am weighing both sides of the debate, and finding the pro-civil union side to be the strongest one.

Roach: “…perhaps you’re less doctriniare and thoughtful than your peers, James…”

Less thoughtful? I’ll take it as a typo.

Roach: “…outside of a few undeniable and absolute liberties on which there is broad agreement (at least on the right)–to the fruits of one’s labor, to due process, to life, to be free from violence–isn’t it somewhat counterproductive to short-circuit debates on things like gay marriage, drug criminalization, antitrust laws, public health laws, governemnt discretionary spending etc. with discussion-ending invocations of liberty and coercion[?]”

Sure, but I don’t think that I “short-circuit” such discussions. My position is arrived after a weighing of liberties involved. What makes me a libertarian is that I value the individual liberties more than most people when I do my calculus, and I have found that, as a general rule, government would be best off sticking to the defense of individual rights rather than becoming immersed in practically every facet of our life today. The overall thing that I am interested in is the maximization of human liberty, as I believe that this will lead to maximization of economy, wealth, and happiness, and laws that reduce liberty must thereby be demonstrated to provide benefits that far outstrip the loss of liberty. I think that American conservatism and American progressivism both believe in “liberty,” but in the end they find some liberties to be valuable and others to be of negligible value. Libertarians do not so judge things, viewing the liberty to engage in things of obvious merit (like speech) as just as worthy of fighting for as the liberty to do things that aren’t so palatable, like smoking pot.

I think the reason that you perceived me as a doctrinnaire libertarian is because you mostly see me writing on your blog and not elsewhere. And when I write on your blog, it’s mostly to disagree with you since I see little use in a “I agree, Roach” post. You wouldn’t tend to see my disagreements with more strident libertarians, or my disagreements with progressives. For example, my first article for Brainwash, where I argued that atheistic libertarians like myself shouldn’t have a problem with references to God in the Pledge of Alliegence or other such public ceremonial deism displays, was followed the next week by an article by now-Reason writer Julian Sanchez arguing the opposite. I don’t expect you to keep up with that, after all, but there is more to my position than what I write here.

In other words, outside of a few undeniable and absolute liberties on which there is broad agreement (at least on the right)–to the fruits of one’s labor, to due process, to life, to be free from violence–isn’t it somewhat counterproductive to short-circuit debates on things like gay marriage, drug criminalization, antitrust laws, public health laws, governemnt discretionary spending etc. with discussion-ending invocations of liberty and coercion, particularly when the liberty invoked is not an historical freedom of Americans but an abstract no-physical-harm-test kind of liberty that would decry public roads, nuisance law, etc.

You’re not doing this now, James. And you acknowledge that it’s sometimes down in an overwrought way by your peers who cry statist at the least infringement on freedom of action. You also acknowledge a “Gray Area” for reasons of practicality and because of the incompleteness of libertarian theory on certain questions. I don’t mean that mockingly or critically either, it’s just that the theory does not by itself answer all political questions, such as how to secure a national defense. So wouldn’t it be better just to discuss some of these issues on the merits to see if they’re more like or more unlike other restrictions on our freedom that are necessary and beneficial to us because they permit a stable, wealth-creating, and just society? I don’t decry starting with a strong liberty presumption, but ultimately we’re debating in the murky territory of better and worse, efficient and inefficient, unintended consequenes, and all the rest.

To embrace a near-religious faith that the libertarian regime would always, or almost always, lead in the positive direction and that those who favor more energetic government more often do harm is unsustainable, or at least I would say it is if we do not distort the historical record. Consider the chaos of a Somalia, the devolution of the Kerrensky regime, likewise with Weimar and the Articles of Confederation.

In other words, we must study history, public policy, social sciences etc. and see what is able to achieve our agreed upon ends, when we are in fact agreed. We’ll find, no doubt, that many government interventions are positively harmful. But we’ll also find that some are sound. And we’ll find others that are sometimes good and sometimes bad. And we’ll find others on which the jury is still out. Finally, we’ll find other situations where our fundamental values dictate who thinks the outcome is good or bad, whether something like Korematsu was worth it, or the Civil War for that matter.

I suppose I’m suggesting that libertarian theory, at least as advocated by many libertarins, short-circuits debates that are necessarily fact-driven and should be conducted on the compare and contrast level rather than on the level of clashing absolutist pronouncements.

I’m not surprised that a moderate libertarian, who subjectively values commerce, would take the position on early roads that you have. But it’s no different from a conservative doing the same regarding marriage. The overarching “no government force” principle doesn’t help us; the debate is really a subjective one about values and preferences, and an empirical one about what method works best to implement or preserve those values and preferences.