Us liberty-minded folks are endlessly frustrated that our ideas get so little traction, that there isn’t a society we can point to as a much of a libertarian society, or even a perceptible movement toward liberty in our own societies.  Sure, people will agree with us on some big-picture principles, but there’s just something about libertarianism that doesn’t “take”.  Allow me to propose a fundamental flaw with libertarianism (and/or perhaps with libertarians).

Warning: massive generalizations follow; counterexamples can no doubt be cited.  But I think the overall perspective still holds.  Caveat:  I’m not entirely happy with this post, but Swiss needs content, so here you go.

That flaw is this:  Libertarianism as currently proposed is contrary to human nature, and in a kind of mirror-image way as communism.  As the Soviets realized that communism can only work with the creation of New Soviet Man, libertarianism can only work with the creation of New Libertarian Man.  The communists had a blind spot – that the pursuit of self-interest was an essential, inherent part of human nature.  Libertarians also have a blind spot, and that blind spot is community, how (most) people crave it, and how community works.

Allow me to set up a couple of binary continua: economics – communities, and transactions – relationships.  I posit that the sweet spot for society, and thus for people generally, is somewhere in the middle of these continua.  Of course, individuals will find their particular sweet spots at various points on these continua.  But a society, or a political philosophy, that overweights one end or the other is not going to succeed.  One imagines that a hunter-gatherer society is going to overweight relationships and communities – after all, there’s not much of an economy, and thus not much to transact.  While such a society can persist for quite some time, it is stagnant and will be overtaken and subsumed by one which moves the needle more toward economics and transactions.

Libertarians tend to have something in common with Marxists, and that is the belief (acknowledged or not) that economics is the bedrock of human society, from which all else flows.  Our society, I believe, has gotten increasingly transactional, and as a result the civil society that requires a great deal of relationship-driven behavior has weakened.  Libertarians, with their focus on markets and thus economics, tend to embrace the transactional view of human relations.  We are prone to talking about the market as the cure-all for every societal ill.  We default to economic relationships when talking about society.  You know who else defaults to economics when talking about society?  No, not him.  Commies, that’s who.

The attraction of an economic/transactional society is that the marketplace is a very voluntary place.  In a free(ish) market, no one can coerce you do a deal.  It is this freedom that attracts and holds the attention of the liberty-minded. And, indeed, I don’t think anyone would deny that our current society is very economic/transactional (often called “materialist”), and I think has gotten more so over time.  Libertarian moment, yay?  Of course not.  Because civil society has been squeezed brutally by transactionalism on the one side and, of course, the growth of the state on the other.

Communities come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from, perhaps, the family through various civil institutions of various structures and formality (the church, clubs, even neighborhoods) to the nation-state.  Communities are defined and created by similarity in belief,  behavior, and expectation – we all believe in this god, and worship him this way; we all enjoy cigars and darts; we all want to live in a neighborhood of well-maintained homes and courteous, respectful neighbors, that kind of thing.  Now, one of the difficulties in discussing “community” is that it is a very slippery concept, hard to define with rigor, but I’m sailing right past that at least for now.

What this means is that communities are about setting and enforcing (one way or another, ranging from the raised eyebrow to the jackboot) expectations about certain behaviors.  Libertarians tend to reflexively object to? flinch from? the whole enforcing, and sometimes setting, expectations thing.  But you can’t have a completely open community, one with no expectations or requirements, open to all regardless of how they act (which in turn will reflect what they believe).  In intellectual terms, a completely open/public community is a category error because it erases the ability to choose who you associate with – what results is not a community at all.  Simply put, there is no such thing as a completely open, completely public, community.  At a more human level, its always “my community”.  Communities are defined as much by who is out as by who is in.  There is always an “us” and a “them”, and your ability to make money from “them” in economic/transaction mode doesn’t make them a member of your community.

Communities are (almost?) by definition composed of like-minded people, people who broadly share a worldview, values, ways of behaving with each other.    Libertarianism has very little to say about the value of the kind of community built on relationships with like-minded people (other than pro forma griping about restrictions on private clubs). While libertarians may oppose forcing all-male private clubs to accept women, many have no problem with forcing communities (ranging from the nation-state to a small town or even neighborhood) to accept (and here’s the third rail of this post) immigrants.  People want to walk down the street, go into a store, whatever, comfortable knowing that the people they encounter are like them.

Sure, we scoff at the wokist motto “diversity is our strength”, but is our disregard for communities of like-minded people, people who grew up in a certain culture, really all that different? Mock the cosmotarians all you want (really, please do), but its hard to see how their radical multi-culturalism, and resulting disdain for “small-minded” bitter clingers, wasn’t intellectually consistent with a libertarianism too focused on openness without concern for cohesion.

So, lets look at immigration.  The libertarian view is that immigration is good because it consists of a willing seller (of services) finds a willing buyer (of those services), and that the mere crossing of a national border (which is easily dismissed as a mere social construct) should not impede this market function.  Economics, much?  Naturally, we oppose giving welfare to immigrants, but this purely economic view of immigration obtains even in the absence of welfare.  After all, that cheap labor means lower prices (and/or higher profits, and nothing wrong with that), so its all good, right?  For those Americans who find themselves undercut on the labor market, well, “learn to code” is pretty much the only answer libertarianism offers.  Economics uber alles, no?

Closely related to this is the idea that the people hiring immigrants are just exercising their freedom of association.  And this is where the discontinuity with community really starts to become visible.  Libertarianism is ordinarily quite comfortable with the idea that freedom of association necessarily means freedom to not associate.  Don’t bake that cake if you don’t want to, right?  (Note how even that refers to an economic transaction.)  But when immigrants, from another culture, speaking another language, with a bundle of different values and behaviors, move in because somebody gave them jobs, the members of that community are now associating with them, whether they like it or not.  What happened to the freedom not to associate?  Sure, you may not mind having neighbors with . . . interesting . . . ideas about private property, the age of consent, quiet enjoyment of your home, and so forth, but what about people who have other desires about who they associate with day and day out?

Yes, freedom not to associate gets messy in a hurry.  People are like that.  And, yes, I know that allowing communities to exclude people opens the door to racism or tribalism, but, at a deep human level, there’s no such thing as a completely “public” community.  To put it in, perhaps, ugly terms, tribalism is hardwired into people.  And you disregard that, like disregarding any other part of human nature, at your peril.

Remember what I said about healthy societies finding a balance between economics/transactionalism and communities/relationships?  It’s a balance, inherently somewhat unstable, that is needed.  Can a society that overweights communities/relationships be stifling and stagnant?  You bet.  Can a society that overweights economics/transactions be fulfilling?  Look around at the epidemic of dysfunction in our society, and see if you can honestly say “yes”.  Repressing or even suppressing the desire for a community of like-minded people, and the kind of expectations and exclusion that is absolutely necessary for that, will not end well.  Either that desire will express itself in brutal tribalism, or it will wither into anomie and depression.

I believe there is a deep human craving to live in a community of like-minded people, that the heavily economic/transactional worldview is corrosive to these kinds of communities, and that people sense this in libertarianism.  Which is why libertarianism, in its current form, isn’t viable in the absence of New Libertarian Man.  In many ways, the growth of the Total State is an expression, as well as a cause, of the lack of community in our society.

I’ve gone on long enough.  I don’t have an answer to how to find a healthy balance, but I know it needs to be found and, sadly, at this point libertarianism isn’t going to provide it without a comprehensive, dare I say fundamental, transformation.