doing it for far longer—this promise that the government is
there to love and take care of you. That’s the “Life of Julia”
bullshit. That’s the opening sentence from the Democratic
convention in 2012, which said, “The government is the one
thing we all belong to,” which is creepy. That’s the “politics of
meaning” stuff that Hillary Clinton used to talk about.
What happens when you feel powerless, on your own,
alienated in a corner of suburban America or in the inner city,
where you don’t have many social connections? You start
looking to Washington. That “government is the one thing
we all belong to” line, I’m sure, was focus-grouped to death.
There are an enormous number of people who feel like they
want to belong to something.
Say we push power down to the lowest level possible.
That’s all well and good. But how does that play out in a
way that doesn’t immediately turn to the worst kinds of
tribal instincts that you document in the book and that
you say are destroying America? What is the positive vision
where people have local belonging but also understand
that they’re part of something larger and more diverse?
One of the great things about the miracle of liberal democratic
capitalism is it allows us to have a multitude of identities.
We have allegiances to different institutions, but they don’t
wholly define us, and they allow us to exit one and go into
another, try on one, leave that one.
The problem with the identity politics mindset is it says,
“I can reduce someone to a singular thing.” And when you do
that, you sort of flip the switch of the tribal mind to “anybody
who isn’t me is the enemy.” One of the reasons I think this
identity politics mindset, which breaks my heart, is getting
more and more popular on the right and has been instantiated
on the left for a very long time is that we are teaching people
that they can’t assimilate, that they can’t break out of the iron
cage of their identity.
Are you going to come out as a libertarian right now?
Because what you’re saying is so fundamentally
libertarian: You now are talking about overlapping
identities, a movement toward freedom and self-
definition, and mongrelization vs. purity.
I will not. Not right now. Look, William F. Buckley wrote a book
subtitled Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist. There are
many things which I am a libertarian on, and there are some
things which I am a conservative on. I’ve argued for 25 years
that no meeting of policy makers should ever gather or con-
sider a question without a libertarian in the room. Libertarians
will often be wrong. But the libertarian will always ask as the
first question, “Should we do anything at all?” You get so much
groupthink in policy making shops where they just assume
that of course we’ve got to do something. The libertarian says,
“Wait a second. Maybe the system itself can fix this.” That’s
also a very conservative position. I’ve always thought fusionist
conservatism was a cousin of the libertarians.
I wrote a piece for National Review, “Who Lost the Liber-
tarians?” As I started thinking about it and reading about it,
I decided the [prevailing] frames are completely wrong. In
reality, the libertarians are a much older tradition than the
conservatives, and modern American conservatism is argu-
ably the youngest significant ideological phenomenon in
American politics. Socialism is much older, obviously. Liber-
tarianism goes back to Spencer. Meanwhile, modern Ameri-
can conservatism basically begins after World War II. Even the
Old Right doesn’t look a lot like modern conservatism or even
modern libertarianism.I feel like we’ve made some real headway. Libertarians
always used to be considered the punk younger brother of
conservatives, and now we’re the cousin, and maybe even
the forefather.
Yeah. Maybe.This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and style.
For a video version, visit reason.com.REASON 57“My position has long been that Trump is
not the author of all of our problems—he’s a
symptom of our problems—but he’s making
a lot of those problems much worse.”