While I'm yelling advice at the Democratic Party, here's another one: Please abandon whatever instinct is driving you to cozy up to libertarians.
I know Matt Welch's head probably just exploded, so let me explain: I've written before about why I don't think libertarianism is promising as a philosophical direction for Democrats. As Matt Yglesias has pointed out, liberalism is largely about using government to help people. As Jon Chait has observed, liberalism is also largely non-ideological. Both of these stand fundamentally opposed to liberalism, which is basically an ideological aversion to using government to help people. So we can embrace libertarianism, I guess, but if we do, we'd better explain why it's okay to shout about getting government out of your library records and abortion decisions, but it's fine to keep government's hand in your pocketbooks. Libertarianism elevates "freedom from government" to paramount ontological importance over other values, like freedom from fear and freedom from want. As liberals, we have to believe that in some cases, these latter freedoms are more important than the former. I think this distinction can be made forcefully, but that's not libertarianism, it's just prudentialism.
But my point here, while related, is a little more procedural. Democrats shouldn't embrace libertarianism because it engenders an abject fear of government that's electorally bad for Democratic causes. The thing about libertarianism is that it doesn't just think government does a bad job at some things, but instead fundamentally distrusts government in principle. It makes government seem remote and inaccessible, and when people see government like that, they give up trying to change it. Libertarianism doesn't believe that government's problems are fixable, and if liberalism is going to have any future, people have to believe that government is fixable. Too much of this impulse, and you just form a disconnect between Washington's performance and your own life. Remember being stunned by polls that showed voters overwhelmingly disapproving of President Bush's performance, but also overwhelmingly unwilling to hold him accountable for it? This is why. When people stop trusting government, they stop trying to change it. When people stop trying to change government, corporate lobbyists are the only guys left in town, and we all know how that shakes out. (COUGHbankruptcybillCOUGH)
This is hard to explain to someone who's never ridden a cab in NYC. Jerry Seinfeld does a bit, the truth of which I can personally vouch for, in which he explains that no one is ever worried about being in a cab with a reckless NYC cabbie, because the little glass window makes it all seem like a movie. You can't communicate with the driver, and you can't physically inhabit the front seat, so instead you just sit back and watch the ride. Libertarianism is the Little Glass Window of American politics: It makes government seem too distant, too inaccessible, and too complicated to be worth trying to engage. When that happens, liberal interests overwhelmingly suffer.
What can Democrats do, then, to win over western and southwestern voters, who are decreasingly reliable Republicans but also fairly libertarian? Here's one idea: Embrace "Howard Dean libertarianism." This is the idea that people need to be reminded that they are the government, and that there's no reason to sit around fearing the government when you can just change it instead. This kind of libertarianism asserts that government doesn't deserve our trust when it's not acting in our best interests, and that the solution is not to abandon government, but to reclaim it. If the motto of regular libertarianism is "get government off my back," the motto of this kind of philosophy is DC's famous license-plate refrain: "No taxation without representation!" This is the kind of libertarian sentiment that America was founded on.: Government's trustworthiness is proportional to the amount of control the people exert over it. Reagan's famous assertion that "government is the problem" is analytically meaningless: We are government, and government is only ever as problematic as we let it get.
What does this mean, policywise? Something like Clinton's post-bureaucratic vision of government, which Andrei Cherny has chronicled, seems like as good a starting point as any. More aggressive campaign finance reform also seems like a good avenue to pursue. I'm open to ideas. The guiding philosophy here is that government isn't automatically trustworthy or trustworthy; it deserves as much trust as it earns. What could be more compatible with liberalism and libertarian impulses than that?
Maybe libertarians really don't want government on their backs. I have to say, it's an instinct I just don't understand. I love when government is on my back, because it's only when government is on my back that I get to control where it goes.
