What Libertarians Teach Conservatives and Where the Two Part Ways

Nobody throws a chair in the best argument in American politics. It goes on for hours, the coffee goes cold, and at the end each of you walks out convinced that the other is ninety percent right and dangerously wrong about the last ten. That is the conversation between conservatives and libertarians, and it has been going on in American politics for more than sixty years, always between people who like each other.

I want to have it with you now, because it is worth having. The libertarian is the conservative's closest cousin and sharpest critic. He agrees with us about taxes, spending, regulation and the folly of central planning. He thinks we are sentimental about tradition, soft on the drug war, and far too trusting of the state when it is armed with our own pet causes. We think he is sometimes a man who has read a great many books about liberty and never raised a child, run a church supper or buried a parent. Each is partly right about the other.

My thesis is a simple one. Conservatives and libertarians share a deep distrust of concentrated power, but they disagree about where freedom comes from and how it is kept: the libertarian starts from the individual and a principle, the conservative starts from inherited institutions and experience. If you understand that single difference, most of the specific fights, over drugs, immigration, wars and the role of religion in public life, begin to make sense.

What they agree on

Start with the common ground, which is bigger than the headlines suggest. Both reject the idea that a wise central authority can run a complicated society. Both believe that markets, property rights and the rule of law produced the most prosperous civilization in human history. Both want lower taxes, restrained spending, limited government and a Constitution that means what it says. Both fear the person who says "trust us" while reaching for more power.

The founders gave them a shared ancestor in James Madison, whose account of a government built to check itself is in Madison's Plan for a Government That Fights Itself on Purpose. And the alliance has been productive. The modern conservative movement of the 1950s and 1960s was built in large part by a bargain between the two camps, a bargain that Frank Meyer of National Review named fusionism and that is described in Fusionism Was the Deal That Made the Modern Right Possible.

Two thinkers, two starting points

To see where they part, put two books side by side.

In 1859, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty. Its core is what is usually called the harm principle: the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over a member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. A person's own good, physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. That is a clean, portable test that can be applied to any law in any country, and it is where many libertarians begin.

In 1790, Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke did not begin with a test. He began with a warning about men who tear down an inherited order because it does not fit a theory. He argued for what he called prescription, the idea that long use and long experience give practices a standing that a clever argument cannot simply wipe out. In the same book he praised the "little platoon," the small circle of family, neighborhood and church to which a person is attached, as the first school of public affection. To Burke, freedom is a thing a people inherits and tends, like a garden, and the garden includes institutions that no individual chose.

The two are not enemies. Mill's principle protects the dissenter, and the conservative has reason to be glad of that when the majority turns on him. Burke's caution protects the community from the reformer's zeal, and the libertarian has reason to be glad of that when the reformer comes with a plan. But they start in different places. One says: show me the harm. The other says: show me why this fence came down. For that second idea, read Chesterton's Fence Is the Best Argument Against Rushed Reform and Edmund Burke and the Case for Changing Things Slowly and Carefully.

In 1960, F. A. Hayek, the Austrian economist and a hero to libertarians and conservatives alike, felt the difference strongly enough to add a postscript to his book The Constitution of Liberty, titled "Why I Am Not a Conservative." His complaint was that conservatives were temperamentally attached to the existing order and had no compass of their own, so they could be dragged along by whatever direction the current was running. It is a fair hit. A conservative who defends only what is, and has no principle for deciding what ought to be, deserves to be teased by it.

The 1969 split inside Young Americans for Freedom

History shows the difference more clearly than theory. In September 1960, a group of young conservatives met at the Connecticut estate of William F. Buckley Jr. in Sharon and adopted what became the Sharon Statement, founding Young Americans for Freedom, or YAF. The statement united a love of liberty, markets and limited government with a belief in transcendent values and a hard line against communism. It was fusionism written as a student manifesto.

But the marriage was strained from the beginning. At the YAF national convention in St. Louis in August 1969, the tension came to a head. By most accounts, the libertarians and the traditionalists clashed openly, over the Vietnam War, over the military draft, and over the question of whether the state may ever use force to enforce morality. The two sides split, and a number of the libertarian-minded members walked away. A few years later, in 1971, a group of activists formed the Libertarian Party.

I do not recount that to score a point for either side. I recount it because it shows the pressure point. The libertarians believed that the first duty of a free society is to leave people alone. The traditionalists believed that a free society rests on virtues that no one is born with and that the community must sometimes defend. Neither was wrong. Each was incomplete.

The big three fights

Now let me look at the three issues where the quarrel comes up again and again, and try to state each side fairly.

Drugs

The libertarian argument: adults own their bodies, prohibition creates black markets and violence, and the war on drugs has filled prisons and cost a fortune. Milton Friedman made the argument for decades. The traditional conservative reply: addiction destroys families and communities, laws shape norms as well as behavior, and a society that shrugs at drug use will pay in broken homes.

Here is the interesting thing. This is a place where the line between the camps is not clean. William F. Buckley himself devoted an issue of National Review in February 1996 to a symposium titled "The War on Drugs Is Lost," and argued in it for rethinking prohibition. Many conservatives today support treatment courts, state-level experiments and sentencing reform without endorsing legalization. The honest position, I think, is that this is a prudential question, not a question of first principle, and that the federal system lets different states try different answers.

Immigration

Many libertarians, following the logic of free labor markets, favor very open immigration. Milton Friedman argued that open immigration and a generous welfare state are hard to combine, a point worth knowing. Conservatives generally answer with three points. A nation is a political community, not just a market, and it has the right to decide who joins it. The rule of law means little if the border is optional. And assimilation, the process by which newcomers become Americans, depends on pace and on shared civic habits. We have a full discussion in our border series; for a place to start, see Four Decades of Republican Immigration Fights, From Reagan to the Gang of Eight. The distinction to hold onto is between immigration as an economic good, which many conservatives grant, and immigration as a question of sovereignty and order, which most weigh more heavily than the libertarian does.

Foreign wars

Here the libertarian is closest to an older American right. Skeptics of foreign intervention have a long line, from the "Old Right" that opposed entry into the Second World War to Senator Robert Taft's wariness of NATO. In recent decades, the libertarian wing has been the party's most consistent critic of foreign wars and of the surveillance state that grew alongside them; Ron Paul's presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 made that case to a national audience. The hawks answer that weakness invites aggression and that Reagan's peace through strength worked. For the lay of the land, see Hawks, Restrainers, Realists and Nationalists on the Right, Compared.

My own view: every conservative should be glad the libertarian is in the room asking, before a war, what the objective is, what it costs and how it ends. That is not weakness. That is the question a responsible person asks before spending other people's sons and daughters.

The strongest case for the libertarian

State it fairly. A libertarian would say: you conservatives hate big government when it is used against you, and then you want it to enforce your own preferences when you hold power. The machinery you build for your causes will be inherited by your opponents. Freedom is indivisible, he says. If you grant the state a power over private life, you will eventually see it used against the things you hold dear, including your church, your school and your speech.

That is a powerful argument, and the history of the last century gives it support. Every conservative should feel the force of it.

The answer, in numbered points

1. Law and culture are different tools. Much of what conservatives care about is not best done by statute. Marriage, work and church attendance respond to example, to schools, to civil society and to stories. A conservative can agree that the state should keep out of a matter and still argue that a free society needs people to take it seriously. See The Family Is the Original Welfare State and the Cheapest One.
2. Liberty depends on habits it does not create. A market works because people mostly keep their word, tell the truth and obey the law when no one is watching. Those habits come from family, faith and community, which is what Alexis de Tocqueville saw in the American towns of the 1830s. The libertarian may take them for granted. The conservative guards them. See Tocqueville Found America's Secret in the Barn Raising and the Town Meeting.
3. Some order is not optional. Property needs courts, contracts need enforcement, and a nation needs borders and defense. The libertarian generally agrees about courts and defense, and the disagreement is about where the line falls. That is an argument about prudence, not a clash of principle.
4. Federalism and subsidiarity soften the clash. If decisions are made as close to home as possible, then a community that wants stricter norms and one that wants fewer rules can each have what it prefers. See Subsidiarity Is the Old Idea Behind Keeping Power as Close to Home as Possible.
5. The burden of proof rests on whoever proposes the new power. Here the libertarian is right and the conservative should say so. When a conservative proposes to use the government to promote a good end, he should be able to say what the cost to liberty is and how the power will be limited.

What conservatives rightly absorbed

An honest ledger gives the libertarian credit. A number of ideas that began in libertarian circles are now conservative common sense.

• School choice. Milton Friedman proposed the voucher in a 1955 essay on the role of government in education. It is now one of the most active areas of conservative policy.
• The all-volunteer military. Friedman served on the commission President Nixon appointed in 1969 that recommended ending the draft, and the authority to draft men lapsed in 1973.
• The knowledge problem. Hayek's argument that no planner can gather the dispersed knowledge held by millions of people is now the standard conservative reply to any large scheme. It is covered in Hayek Explained Why the Smartest Planner in the Room Always Loses.
• Skepticism about licensing, forfeiture and regulatory capture. Libertarian think tanks pushed these issues long before they became bipartisan.
• The negative income tax, which became the Earned Income Tax Credit. Friedman's idea of supplementing low earnings through the tax system, rather than through a maze of programs, is an ancestor of a credit that conservatives came to support.

The verdict

Here is my blunt verdict. Conservatives need libertarians the way a house needs a building inspector. They keep us from giving away freedom in exchange for a short-term win. Libertarians need conservatives the way a garden needs a fence. We remind them that the liberty they cherish is held up by things they did not build and cannot easily replace. The right is stronger when both are in the room, and weaker when either one is gone. That is the lesson of 1960 and of 1969. It is also the argument for civility. The man who disagrees with you about drugs is probably agreeing with you about taxes, spending, the Constitution and the folly of central planning, and that is a very large amount of agreement.

The bottom line

• Conservatives and libertarians share a distrust of concentrated power. They differ on where liberty comes from: a principle for the libertarian, and inherited institutions for the conservative.
• Take the libertarian's test seriously. Before you back a new power, ask what it costs in liberty and who will hold it after you.
• Take the conservative's reminder seriously too. Freedom rests on family, faith and community, and these need tending.
• On drugs, immigration and war, argue the policy on its merits and keep your friends. Much of the dispute is about prudence, not principle.
• When you meet a libertarian at the county meeting, start with what you agree on. It will take a while to run out.