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Traditional conservatives have a set of beliefs and practices, at the family level, which they have grown up with and which they "know" work for them. They practice and teach those values at home. It used to be that there was nothing in the environment outside the home to contradict those values and so the world was fine. Today, however, those values are not practiced or taught outside the home. Slowly and steadily, the state has imposed it's own set of values. So they ask themselves in essence, what do we do? Implicit in their answer is the notion that if you can't beat them, join them, so they seek to change the values mandated by the state to match the values they practice and teach. They don't believe that they can undo the state and many don't want to because they've been sold on the "good" things the state does. Many conservatives (mostly religious, but not necessarily so) accept welfare as something of a "tithe" since they are charged to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, etc. Overturning the state would mean in a real sense, going against that part of their values. Thus, they merely want to change the mandates on the others -- prohibiting this (intoxicants) or requiring that (prayer) which they believe will allow them to once again practice their conservative values as they believe should be. They want the state to be modeled after the family structure which they know, accept, and love. In the traditional conservative family, the members know their roles within that structure. Individuals are molded (forged?) by those values, not necessarily directed towards tasks or careers, but rather to ways of life with which to pursue those tasks and careers.

To argue then that Libertarians should embrace traditional conservatism seems to fly in the face of what the conservatives are trying to accomplish, namely the takeover of the state replacing much of it's current mandates and prohibitions with others. Left-leaning Libertarians are trying a different track to undo state power. What they propose is simply that if the state mandates many (or even all) things within a given arena (say intoxicants), then the mandate basically has no power and state authority has been effectively blunted. In order to effectively argue that more things should be mandated (or simply allowed), they appeal to the left-leaning crowd for support, not the traditional conservatives whom they view as merely wanting to replace one set of mandates with another. The trouble here, as I see it, is that they are only appealing to those who are already active. They fail to recognize that the vast majority of people in the country really do fall into the traditional conservative mold -- wanting to be left alone -- and so choose not to participate in the process. (Those who are getting something from the state tend to want to keep it coming and so do participate to make sure it doesn't stop.) The trouble with mandating more than one thing in a given arena is there must inevitably be some bureaucracy thrown up to verify what is "right" and what is "wrong" rather than leaving it to the individual. Whether such an approach leads to more liberty remains to be seen.

The other way to blunt state authority is to simply mandate nothing. Libertarians advocating this approach typically want to eliminate this (Dept. of Energy) or repeal that (income tax), but don't provide any sort of blueprint for accomplishing their goal, nor any realistic expectation of the consequences either immediate or intermediate which would result from the success of their activity. I'll call these philosophical Libertarians.

Thus it is that the left-leaning Libertarians are the ones having success while the philosophical Libertarians are not -- and it's grating on them. (As an aside, this, I believe, is the fundamental cause of friction in the party and the movement as a whole.)

What I believe we must do, then, is to figure out how to take the approach of the left-leaning Libertarians and apply it to the problems of the philosophical Libertarians. Do we need the traditional conservatives to reach this goal? Perhaps. This is not the conservative crowd which has bought into the notion of if you can't beat them, join them, but the traditional conservatives who don't bother. We can continue to recruit and convert people from other movements, but I've not yet figured out how to reach the philosophical libertarians and sell them on a practical approach to achieving their ends. These folks want to somehow believe that in order to escape from Shawshank prison, they won't have to crawl through 500 yards of shit in a sewer and it just ain't so.

To come full circle, I hope, traditional conservatives are much like the philosophical Libertarians in that both groups really want a "return to the way it was", but neither group knows how to get there. This, I believe, was the unstated point of the entire (lengthy) article. To put it another way: They're just like us, so we should embrace them since we all have something in common. We won't be able to do that, however, until the left-leaning Libertarians figure out how to embrace their philosophical brethren and the philosophical Libertarians accept that perhaps the left-leaning Libertarians may have a decent approach to undoing state authority. Only then, with a coherent effort, can the movement begin to effectively reach out to groups like the traditional conservatives and make a real difference in the way we all live.

Allen Glosson, PhD
aglosson@earthlink.net

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