Musings on Variations in the Political "Right" and the Political "Left"

If the radical right has its cultural origins in Christianity, populist violence, and theocratic laissez-faire liberalism, libertarianism has its origins, like liberalism, in the Enlightenment. This makes libertarianism very different from conservatism since conservatism was a reaction against the Enlightenment.

Libertarians are also different from the radical right. They have different historical origins and libertarianism has never really been fully theocratic in its conception of the limited state or in its its morality and it has had a long intellectual, including a secular intellectual, culture. As a result, there have long been tensions between libertarians and the religious right. After all the radical right favours a regulatory state that regulates, for example, morality.

As I noted, the radical right, historically speaking, has engaged in and continues to engage in all sorts of regulatory legislation from, for example, not allowing Austin, Texas to pass laws that it wants and which its legislators were elected to pass by having the Texas legislature cancel it, to moral regulation such as, for example, religious based discrimination and laws against trans people. Historically speaking the radical right pushed for and often passed legislation against "sodomy", mandating the "missionary position" in sex, making alcohol illegal, making pot illegal, and cancelling certain types of political discourse such as communism and anarchism. Libertarians, it seems to me, should be very concerned about such a regulatory or paternalistic nanny state.

This regulatory aspect of the radical right is one of the axes that separates libertarianism from the radical right. These regulations are all examples of the paternalistic nanny state. By the way, I think one can argue that historically all nanny states, regardless of political persuasion, are equivalent in form though sometimes different in content. If forced to choose I would take a secular nanny state over a religious theocratic one including that of the Bolsheviks, who instituted a new religion and religious like culture in the USSR. Religious nanny states have a tendency to go all inquisitorial a la The Handmaid's Tale, a la the Spanish Inquisition (which everyone should expect from right wing theocrats), and a la the Stalinist purge trials.

Liberals and the left, like the radical right and libertarianism, have very different origins. Liberals are the product of the early Enlightenment whether they are the laissez faire liberals of Smith or the more regulatory liberals of JS Mill (greatest good for the greatest number). Regardless, of their type of liberalism they are capitalists as Democrat Nancy Pelosi noted in a famous remark. Democrat social liberal FDR saved capitalism from, some would argue, its boom-bust self.

The left whether Christian communalists (the first socialists I know of along with the Essenes though they did not call themselves socialist) or the modern Christian socialists, communal socialists, collectivist socialists (the most successful being the kibbutzim), democratic socialists a la the Nordic countries, or communists, all the product of the later Enlightenment, want to move beyond capitalism whether through reform or historical "progress". This makes them very different from liberals. It also makes them different from conservatives who are generally much more skeptical of notions of "progress" compared to the left and to liberals. Liberals, of course, argue that capitalism in either its "free" or more regulated form will bring about heaven on earth, utopia

There are, by the way, places where libertarianism and communist varieties of "scientific" socialism meet. Marx claimed that the state would wither away when communism triumphed. This makes him a kind of anarchist, a left libertarian, and perhaps more libertarian than many contemporary libertarians.