There is something fascinating about libertarianism (big or little L). It’s one of those political philosophies that sounds good — don’t tread on me and I won’t tread on you — but that inevitably seems to be picked up by humans in … a very human (i.e., screwball) fashion.
To wit, the cartoon to the right (click to see the full thing — I’m hosting a copy, so the malware problem some folks reported on the original site isn’t an issue).
It’s hilarious (and, yes, I say that realizing that I could point to several of those and see bits of my own politics in them), but it’s also kind of sad. I mean, we need alternatives to the Dems and the GOP, to conservatives and liberals. Libertarians are, in theory, off on another end of another axis (authoritarian vs. libertarian), but in practice they usually come up as crackpots, cranks, neo-anarchists, Randians, or just plain goofballs (as the cartoon spells out so gleefully).
Maybe it’s because, taken to an extreme, any ideology becomes a distorted mess, and lacking a serious political party, the libertarians are free to drift to the uncompromised extreme. Maybe it’s because liberty becomes confused with social isolation, a denial not just of government intrusion and legal busy-bodies, of but of obligations to anyone other than themselves.
I think we could use a bit of libertarianism in our society — less intrusion into our civil liberties, less nanny state and nanny society. But, like anyone else (and doubtless different from so many others) there are places where I think it is appropriate for society to wield the stick and proscribe some behaviors and actions (and prescribe others), for both pragmatic and moral reasons. We can’t all live at Farnham’s Freehold — we are, to some extent, our brothers’ keepers, and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves (with sensitivity to our neighbor’s needs as well as respect for our neighbor’s autonomy) is a difficult balancing act, but one that I think we have to strive for.
Amen.