True enough, he did! But this match made in heaven can't rise
above tryst level. Amidst all the heavy breathing, the central
linkage-point between liberals and libertarians isn't political at
all, but a strain of cultural libertarianism. Liberals would have
to surrender their venerable desire to accomplish social
unfetterment by state power, and "merely" political libertarians
would have to sign on to social unfetterment as a positive, not
negative, good. This is something like asking a paleocon to hang a
framed, limited-edition dual portrait of Wilson and Truman in his
den.
The unholy union of Hayek and Rawls requires an annihilation of
cultural authority. But the blind substitutions of the inarticulate
market and the inarticulate polity can, ironically, only agree in
the realm of culture: the mores, norms, and attitudes that shape
human behavior. Not old-style liberal "equality" but new-style
"interchangeability" characterize cultural libertarianism. When
mixed in with the inevitable "public safety" component which
becomes the political conscience of an effete corps of lite
libertines -- with no locus of authority other than health and
pleasurable feelings, free to all -- the product this machine
produces at the elite level rhymes, I think, with "Bloomberg."
PS in case anyone'd be sorry to miss it, my uproarious
disquisition on this topic has made a semi-stir here.
topics:
Libertarianism
About the Author
James Poulos is a doctoral student at Georgetown and the former Political Editor of Culture11. His writing has been published by The American Conservative, The National Interest, The New Atlantis, Partnership for a Secure America, and The Weekly Standard. In addition to AmSpecBlog, he has blogged at The American Scene, Doublethink, and Postmodern Conservative, which he founded. With degrees in political science and law from Duke and USC, he is currently at work on a dissertation about life after Napoleon. In his spare time he anti-blogs at Pish Tosh.
