Pun Salad

This week in these pages, Edward Ring argued that voting Libertarian does nothing but hand elections to Democrats. “The disunity, imperfections, and failures of Republicans don’t justify their collective destruction,” he wrote. As someone who formerly took exactly this point of view, I’d like to explain why I’ve changed my mind.

I understand the logic of Ring’s approach: Republicans are better, on the whole, than Democrats. Therefore, while the GOP candidate may only be our second choice, it’s still better than getting our last choice. As Ring put it, “Right now, the fact that Republicans are not Democrats should be enough.”

But it isn’t.

Looking at the behavior of the Republicans over the last two years, I no longer believe there is a functional difference between the career politicians of either party. They favor different special interests, but that is all.

Reading the mainstream media, one would be forgiven for believing that the upcoming midterms are part of a Manichaean struggle for the soul of democracy, pitting righteous progressives against the authoritarian “ultra-MAGA” hordes. The truth is nothing of the sort. Even today, the vast majority of Americans are moderate and pragmatic, with fewer than 20% combined for those identifying as either “very conservative” or “very liberal”. The apocalyptic ideological struggle envisioned by the country’s elites has little to do with how most Americans actually live and think. For most people, it is not ideology but the powerful forces of class, race, and geography that determine their political allegiances — and how they will vote come November.

Of course, it is the business of both party elites — and their media allies — to make the country seem more divided than it is. To avoid talking about the lousy economy, Democrats have sought to make the election about abortion and the alleged “threat to democracy” posed by “extremist” Republicans. But recent polls suggest that voters are still more concerned with economic issues than abortion. The warnings about extremism, meanwhile, are tough to take seriously, given that Democrats spent some $53 million to boost far-Right candidates in Republican primaries.

Joe Biden presents something of a challenge for me. I’ve been making Joe Biden jokes for a very long time. Two decades ago, when Biden was a youthful fiftysomething, I was pointing out that he was the rhetorical equivalent of a Dada painting. His sentences would go on and on like a drunk guy chasing a blind spider monkey through a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit. And when he’d catch a moldering teddy bear that had been left at the bottom of the pit he’d show it to you and say something old-timey, like, “And you can take that to the bank!” Or when he was acting like the verbal equivalent of a melting clock with caveman feet, he’d stop dead in his tracks and say something in the loudest whisper you’ve ever heard: “And that’s why unicycles don’t have wings.” A few things have changed since the old days. He has more hair than he used to. That’s true for many of us, but usually the new crops sprout up elsewhere. Also, he doesn’t flash his new teeth the way he used to. I don’t intend this to be mean, it’s just that he used to do this thing where he would punctuate his monologues with these giant oral semaphore flashes of teeth that he didn’t have as a younger man. It was almost like his teeth were in a kind of open rebellion with his mouth, like an untrained rider atop a stampeding elephant, screaming for all to hear, “I’ve got no brakes!” To his credit, it does seem like the teeth eventually won the battle, because he’s not nearly the loquacious talker he once was. He still produces gaffes—he’s called himself a “gaffe machine” for years. He also said chipmunks taste blue. Actually, no he didn’t. But you believed me for a second, didn’t you?

Classical liberals are on the precipice of political homelessness. America’s animating philosophy, which emphasizes individual liberty, the rule of law, free enterprise, and equal dignity for all, is getting swept away by torrents of illiberalism. On both the Left and Right, winning political coalitions have little use for those who pledge allegiance to our nation’s historical creed.

As classical liberals, we cannot hide our dismay with contemporary politics. On the Right, the fusionist coalition that once offered old-fashioned liberals a voice within the GOP is falling apart. On the Left, Democrats treat as enemies of the state anybody who dares dissent from extreme progressivism. Now, even elements of the Libertarian Party are turning against classical liberalism, preferring outrage-stoking and noxious racialism to a principled defense of human freedom.

In markets, the allocation of resources is guided by prices confronted by, profits earned by, and losses suffered by individuals spending their own money. And because what is ‘destroyed’ by market-driven creative destruction isn’t anything physical or biological – because what is destroyed isn’t human lives – because this ‘destruction’ is merely of economic value and is the result only of peaceful and productive choices rather than of war or famine or disease – the process of creative destruction is a blessing for humanity. To the extent that it is allowed to operate, the process of creative destruction brings us ever-greater prosperity.

Advocates of industrial policy imagine that, by some miracle, government officials can allocate resources in ways that either do not cause losses to anyone, or that cause only particular losses that are less burdensome or more acceptable than are the particular losses caused by creative destruction. But this imagined miraculous ability of government officials is purely fanciful. Why should we suppose that whenever industrial-policy mandarins order that resources be shifted from Here to There, that the particular losses suffered by those persons who are Here will be both more than offset by the resulting gains to the persons who are There, and be less troublesome than are the losses suffered by those persons whose firms or jobs are ‘destroyed’ by market-driven creative destruction?