A very simple theory of political socialization
Peter Levine has a new post entitled “why libertarians need a theory of political socialization” in response to David Friedman’s assertion that the existence of public schools violates the First Amendment. I’m not sure at this point whther Levine’s post merits a response more for the sake of the misconceptions it repeats or for sake of extending on his larger point, which I somewhat agree with in a roundabout way.
Levine begins by quoting Friedman, who proceeds from the “evolution vs intelligent design” controversy and ends up with a condemnation of public education:
“The problem is broader than evolution. In the process of educating children, one must take positions on what is true or false. Over a wide range of issues, such a claim is either the affirmation of a religious position or the denial of a religious position. Any decent scientific account of geology, paleontology, what we know about the distant past, is also a denial of the beliefs of (among others) fundamentalist Christians. To compel children to go to schools, paid for by taxes, in which they are taught that their religious beliefs are false, is not neutrality.
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My conclusion is that the existence of public schools is inconsistent with the First Amendment. Their purpose is, or ought to be, to educate—and one cannot, in practice, educate without either supporting or denying a wide variety of religious claims”
Levine then notices the obvious:
“Friedman’s logic applies even more generally: almost all actions by a government (e.g., speeches by elected leaders, the design of public buildings, interventions in the Middle East) may make statements–implied or explicit–in favor or against religious beliefs. For instance, maintaining an army violates Quaker and other pacifist beliefs, yet citizens are required to pay for the military. Jefferson once wrote, “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” Taken very literally, this is an argument not only against public schools, but against government itself.”
Why — YES IT IS!
As Benjamin Tucker noted:
“The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least,’ and that which governs least is no government at all.”
However, Levine then proceeds to draw a false conclusion:
“To me, that’s a reductio ad absurdum.”
I say it’s false because the case for a stateless society has been made over and over again, and never in my own judgement has it been adequately refuted — else I would not be an anarchist. As a matter of fact, David Friedman has himself been an important contributor to that case, most conspicuously with his book “The Machinery of Freedom“. He has not, however, been the preeminent one.
At this point, I’d like to direct your attention to “Do You Hate the State?” by Murray N. Rothbard, originally published in The Libertarian Forum, Vol. 10, No. 7, July 1977.
I have been ruminating recently on what are the crucial questions that divide libertarians. Some that have received a lot of attention in the last few years are: anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government, abolitionism vs. gradualism, natural rights vs. utilitarianism, and war vs. peace. But I have concluded that as important as these questions are, they don’t really cut to the nub of the issue, of the crucial dividing line between us.
Let us take, for example, two of the leading anarcho-capitalist works of the last few years: my own For a New Liberty and David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. Superficially, the major differences between them are my own stand for natural rights and for a rational libertarian law code, in contrast to Friedman’s amoralist utilitarianism and call for logrolling and trade-offs between non-libertarian private police agencies. But the difference really cuts far deeper. There runs through For a New Liberty (and most of the rest of my work as well) a deep and pervasive hatred of the State and all of its works, based on the conviction that the State is the enemy of mankind. In contrast, it is evident that David does not hate the State at all; that he has merely arrived at the conviction that anarchism and competing private police forces are a better social and economic system than any other alternative. Or, more fully, that anarchism would be better than laissez-faire which in turn is better than the current system. Amidst the entire spectrum of political alternatives, David Friedman has decided that anarcho-capitalism is superior. But superior to an existing political structure which is pretty good too. In short, there is no sign that David Friedman in any sense hates the existing American State or the State per se, hates it deep in his belly as a predatory gang of robbers, enslavers, and murderers. No, there is simply the cool conviction that anarchism would be the best of all possible worlds, but that our current set-up is pretty far up with it in desirability. For there is no sense in Friedman that the State – any State – is a predatory gang of criminals.
The same impression shines through the writing, say, of political philosopher Eric Mack. Mack is an anarcho-capitalist who believes in individual rights; but there is no sense in his writings of any passionate hatred of the State, or, a fortiori, of any sense that the State is a plundering and bestial enemy.
Perhaps the word that best defines our distinction is “radical.” Radical in the sense of being in total, root-and-branch opposition to the existing political system and to the State itself. Radical in the sense of having integrated intellectual opposition to the State with a gut hatred of its pervasive and organized system of crime and injustice. Radical in the sense of a deep commitment to the spirit of liberty and anti-statism that integrates reason and emotion, heart and soul. [emphasis added]
It’s not clear whether or not Levine is aware of Friedman’s authorship of The Machinery of Freedom, or if he looked into what it’s about. He is apparently vindicating Rothbard in his criticism of Friedman above.
Libertarian positions do inevitably lead to anarchistic conclusions if followed in a logically consistent manner. That is not a reductio ad absurdum. What it is, is an airtight case against any government at all — at the very least because the countervailing arguments, if followed to their logical conclusion, lead to totalitarian conclusions. All political moderation between those two poles is pretense, misconception, self-deception and societal inertia.
People are not stupid, even when they are ignorant. Where they are ignorant, they have to be taught rather than manipulated. By seeking to accomodate and only subtly erode the flawed understanding of government non-anarchists suffer from, minimal government libertarians and milquetoast anarchists like Friedman sabotage their own avowed goal of Liberty by diluting the message. For some, this is rooted in intellectual laziness that causes them to avoid an unflinching examination of the case for a stateless society. In others, though, I believe it is a form of cowardice rooted in fear of social ostracism or potential government repression.
I find it ironic that Levine then proceeds to attempt to rationalize public schools on the grounds that there has to be some mechanism in place to forcibly indoctrinate children in libertarian values, citing this as a glaring need for a libertarian “theory of political socialization”.
Here’s your theory of political socialization…
Libertarians need to tell the truth, to themselves and everyone they possibly can — with boldness, passion, intellectual rigor and the courage of conviction.
Having said that, I perhaps owe it to readers to tackle some of Levines’ misconceptions directly, even though the above text would make a good summary for the main point of this post.
Levine states:
As a deliberative democrat, I believe that the public ought to be able to build and control public institutions without many limitations.
First, let’s accept temporarily Levine’s conflation of “the public” with “government”…
Where governments do exist, what facsimiles of Liberty that might exist in such a society are specifically due to any limitations on the power of those governments. A government utterly without limits to its power is a regime of total power — totalitarianism. While I intend no personal insult to Mr. Levine, it’s not clear on what basis libertarians ought to follow strategy advice from someone who holds some fundamentally non-libertarian views (such as the above) and whose only libertarian traits are attributable solely to muddled inconsistency on his part.
That said, I do not accept Levine’s conflation of “the public” with “government”. Government, whether based on outright fascist ideology or deceivingly cloaked in the rhetoric of warm-and-fuzzy democratic socialism, is fundamentally a tool of class oppression. In contrast to the flawed Marxist class theory, genuine libertarians (whether conscious of it or not) generally adhere to the pre-Marxian class theory of Comte and Dunoyer — which is why I and a few other people have taken to calling it Libertarian Class Theory. Under Libertarian Class Theory, the two broad and antagonistic classes are defined not by how much wealth they have, but by how they acquire that wealth — peacefully and productively, or by means of unfair privilege bestowed by government and secured by government aggression in the form of force and coercion.
When politicians disingenuously claim to be doing something in “the public interest”, it is inevitably the public in general that suffers. That’s because a parasitic elite necessarily can not be larger in scope than the victims it economically feeds upon. The “public” is no more “the government” than cows are shareholders in McDonalds corporation.
Levine continues:
However, political power exists wherever there are millions of people with opinions.
I would say that politics in one sense inevitably exists under those circumstances. Political power, though, is an altogether different matter. It exists because there are people willing to set aside their own moral judgements and carry out orders given to them by rulers to commit immoral acts of aggression. As Mao noted:
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
More Levine:
Libertarians can make arguments in favor of maximum liberty. Such arguments have been available for two centuries and may have enhanced popular support for civil liberties, yet most people have not been convinced that the economic role of the state should be minimized.
In sports terms, this confuses the scorecard with actual play analysis. Frankly, we know you folks don’t get it yet. I believe there is a role for libertarian self-criticism in that, as I have engaged in above — but it’s a matter of deciding how best to achieve political goals (such as the abolition of the state) and not a matter that in any way casts doubt on the goals themselves.
More Levine:
Libertarians might assume that people are being influenced against liberty by the state itself, especially through the institution of public education. Then their strategy would be to dismantle state schools (perhaps using vouchers) and rely on families and independent schools to raise children who value liberty above all else.
I doubt that this approach would work. First of all, I’m not convinced that today’s public schools socialize young people to favor the state.
Levine may not be convinced of it, but he demonstrated it himself with the reductio ad absurdum remark.
That said, statist indoctrination through public education is only one among many such factors. Once again, I believe that perhaps the most pernicious one is the failure of libertarians to clearly and boldly state their own position. Just as an aside, I should note that this failure has been traced back to the 1974 Dallas Accord.
“…recognize that public schools are instruments for attaining public goods such as love of freedom.”
Public goods arguments are fallacious. Please refer to Public Goods and Externalities, by Tyler Cowen.
“In making decisions about where and how to educate their own kids, most people seek to maximize their earning potential; however, in considering educational policies that will apply to everyone, they often favor more idealistic outcomes. For instance, in a 2004 poll, 71% of adults said that it was important to “prepare students to be competent and responsible citizens who participate in our democratic society” (pdf). Thus it’s possible that Americans would support better education for liberty.”
I submit that this seeming inconsistency is due to unfamiliarity with the specifics of how government is the largest drain on most ordinary people’s earning potential. As I’ve noted, that is a result of strategic failure on the part of the libertarian movement rather than a shortcoming of libertarian ideology in its most consistent form.
And finally:
“To be sure, most people (including me) do not think that “competent and responsible” citizens are those who value liberty above all else. I, for one, want to see young citizens develop a concern for equality as well as freedom.”
And speaking of failures of the libertarian movement, one of the most notable has been the libertarian rhetorical failure to adequately explain the non-antagonistic relationship between equality and liberty. Equality is a libertarian ideal, even if many libertarians fail to grasp that. One of the most thorough examinations of that point is Roderick Long’s “Equality: The Unknown Ideal“.
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Thanks a lot for this long and thoughtful comment. You are of course correct that my argument was not a reductio, because it could instead imply radical libertarianism or anarchism.
I personally am not attracted to anarchism, and perhaps the deepest reason is that I love what Benjamin Constant called the “liberty of the ancients,” the freedom to participate in a community’s self-governance (http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/000335.html). I would much rather lose a political struggle and live under laws framed by the opposite side than not to have that struggle at all. In my opinion, laws should be limited by constitutional principles, but there should be laws and policies. I don’t expect you to share that position, but it explains why I’m not drawn to anarchism.
You and I might agree about moderate libertarianism, i.e., the view that the state should exist but be sharply limited by constitutional provisions. That position will never come to pass or be sustained; it must shift either to radical libertariansm (no state) or to my conventional kind of liberalism, in which young people are educated to favor freedom. Such education may not require universal state schools, but it will need some degree of state intervention.
There is only one way in which I feel you have mischaracterized my views. I don’t conflate the public and the government. All my work, both scholarly and political, is a struggle to make the government more accountable to the public. The US government is somewhat accountable; it should be more so. Along with people like Dewey, I believe that a “public” forms only when there is some mechanism for implementing group decisions. The state is one such mechanism–not the only one, and not always the best one, but not a profoundly wicked one, either. Again, I don’t expect you to agree with that judgment.
For what it’s worth, this is the point that you make that arouses the most skepticism in my mind: “Political power … exists because there are people willing to set aside their own moral judgements and carry out orders given to them by rulers to commit immoral acts of aggression.” That does happen sometimes. On other occasions, however, people want to impose moral judgments that they sincerely believe to be correct and legitimate. That’s not a matter of following orders (in fact, it sometimes requires bravely violating orders), yet it creates political power–for better or worse.
citizens advice…
I am happy that I found a post related to citizens advice here….