Greasy Kid Stuff: the Libertarian Problem
Updated November 24, 2024
Defending on how one defines the term, “progressives” have begun to gain some traction in the United States, to be come an effective political force. An important aspect of this process has been a willingness to ferret out the phonies: the recognition, for example, that while Bernie Sanders is willing to take shots at prominent rich folks or at rich folks in general, he still craves the love of the neocons and is willing to strike absurdly jingoist poses in order to woo them. Likewise, AOC and the “Squad.”
To my way of thinking, to be “progressive” is to be anti-imperialist (which today means anti-neocon), and committed to raising the living standards of those on the low end of the income spectrum, who have become very, very numerous. With respect to the latter point, I am pleased to see an increasing number of progressive voices being raised against the “green” ideology, which has unfortunately proven to be a fabulously effective marketing strategy to sell austerity to the poor.
However, we now come to the Achilles Heel of the Progessive movement, which is libertarianism. In the past, libertarianism was rightly considered to be a right wing ideology, sort of a package deal with “states rights” and “free trade.” However, with the advent of the hippie movement and the “new left”, people who identified as leftists began to embrace the doctrine of “do your own thing”; initially this meant support for drug legalization as a “human rights” issue, but it quickly spread to other legally prohibited but ostensibly “victimless” activities such as prostitution, euthanasia, and paedophilia (I am deliberately excluding abortion from this discussion, because I think it is a more ethically complex subject).
How do these libertarian issues diverge from traditional leftism? The answer lies in the fact that these various activities have social consequences that impede the desired progress toward a more just society. Leftists were once concerned that drug users could become intellectually impaired and egoistic, or could become addicts, which tends to lead to criminal behavior. Euthanasia, of course, was the entry point for the Nazi genocide policy; people were killed on the basis of cost/benefit analysis, which was then presented to the public as “compassion for the suffering.” Prostitution institutionalizes the objectivication and abuse of women, as does paedophilia with children. But in all of these cases, libertarians insist on viewing each individual case as an isolated, personal choice.
The question of pandemic disease
Two years ago, many who identify as leftists joined a campaign to oppose public health measures that were deployed against Covid-19, such as masking, social distancing, and vaccine mandates. The rationale was the same as in the 1970s: “Keep your laws off my body.”
Historically, pandemics have killed more people than wars. If the United States were subjected to a full-scale invasion by a hostile power (which has never happened, so it may be difficult to imagine), Americans might be called upon to fight in order to repel the invaders, and this would result in considerable inconvenience to those were called to arms. Yet, most people would not think of being sent into battle, from which they may not return alive, as a major violation of their “bodily autonomy”, since the greater good were at stake.
Compared to such a scenario, being asked to take a vaccine, wear a mask at the supermarket, assist in contact tracing, or avoid close contact with large groups of people, does not seem like such an oppressive request. However, it became fashionable to characterize public health measures as a form of totalitarian oppression. We now know that many of the recommendations by public health authorities were mistaken, that vaccines were rushed into production with minimal testing, but that is what you do when a global pandemic is piling up the casualties with terrifying speed. And you identify and correct the mistakes as rapidly as you can. On the subject of “Big Pharma,” there are many excellent reasons to despise it, but we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The answer is universal healthcare. When confronted with a catastrophe on the scale of a war or a global pandemic, “every man for himself” is not a viable strategy.
This “populist rebellion” against public health measures did not begin with Covid. During the 1980s, the LaRouche organization attempted, through two ballot initiatives, to have HIV added to the California state list of communicable diseases, which would have made it subject to standard public health measures such as sexual contact tracing (asking people with sexually transmitted diseases about their sexual partners, which helps identify asymptopatic carriers so that they may avoid infecting more partners). Both initiatives failed, due to a lavishly funded propaganda campaign that characterized the intiatives as being “fascist” and motivated by homophobia, and asserted that contact tracing was a violation of the right to privacy. The rest of the nation emulated California’s policy of excluding HIV from public health measures, and by 1990 the national death toll had surpassed 68,000. (Subsequently and with little fanfare, California added HIV to its list of reportable diseases on July 1, 2002.)
Covid-19 proved to be a much greater threat than HIV, and there was a highly differentiated response from different nations around the world. China stands out as the nation which implemented traditional public health measures with great consistency and resourcefulness, including the building of hospitals at remarkable speed in areas where there was insufficient capacity.
The US, on the other hand, vacillated and sent erratic and contradictory messages to the population, breeding mistrust and confusion. The US is also crippled by its medieval healthcare system, which cannot respond effectively to a major health crisis because it has been asset-stripped by Wall Street, and there is a persistent impulse to deny heathcare to the population in order to divert more funds to shareholders. During the Covid pandemic, the corporate healthcare managers in the U.S. actually shut down hospitals that were deemed unprofitable.
The resulting anxiety and rage in the US population, combined with the economic hardships caused by lockdowns, contributed to a popular rebellion against public health measures. This is a situation where progressives, while campaigning aggressively to reform the appalling corruption in our healthcare system, should also have insisted on solidarity in order to defeat the pandemic. But this brings us back to the problem of libertarianism.
Libertarianism, like anarchism, was historically encouraged by Europe’s oligarchy as a way to sidetrack and disrupt the movements for social progress that began with the Renaissance. Since effecting major changes to the social and economic order requires a commitment from society as a whole, the oligarchs set out to divide society into small, ineffectual, alienated individuals or grouplets, by insisting that any subordination of individual impulse to the greater good was a form of oppression. This is where “Identity Politics” comes from. Libertarians and anarchists also suffer from an adolescent notion of what “freedom” means; they feel that unless the individual actively goes against the requirements of the common good, then the individual’s choices are governed by something outside himself and therefore are not legitimately “free.” It is the apotheosis of “you’re not the boss of me.”
The sad consequence of these developments is that in early 2022, progressives could not rouse themselves to take to the streets against the ghastly genocide, mass deaths from starvation and freezing, being imposed by the U.S. upon Afghanistan as retribution for having successfully withstood the U.S. invasion attempt. They lacked the quality of empathy required to demonstrate against the vicious neocon war being waged against the civilian population of Yemen by the U.S./U.K./Saudi axis. But many of them responded with exaggerated, public displays of passion to the relatively mild personal inconvenience of a mandatory vaccine, or being asked to wear a mask in the supermarket.
There is no place for this sort of pettiness in the progressive movement. To occupy the moral high ground, Progressives must make clear that they are committed to the general welfare, as opposed to the adolescent self-indulgence of “doing one’s own thing.”
