WHY YOU ARE NOT A CONSERVATIVE.

AuthorMcCloskey, Deirdre Nansen
PositionIDEAS

I GET THIS all the time: "Oh Deirdre, you're such a conservative." My friends seem to think politics operates exclusively on a left-right spectrum. They therefore suspect me and other self-described "libertarians" of being sneaky versions of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

In truth, libertarians sit nowhere on the left-right map, which merely captures a dispute about how to use the government's monopoly of violence. The right wants to use violence to support 800 U.S. bases abroad. The left wants to use it to boss poor people around. Libertarians want neither.

What is the difference between libertarians and conservatives? It is our unique belief in liberty and its spontaneous ordering, in the way that language or art or science is ordered. We see a world ordered by people having a go within a loose framework of honest rewards. Conservatives (and socialists and most people in the middle) believe in top-down order, as in a loving or authoritarian household.

You book-reading types know that I'm getting "spontaneous order" from Friedrich Hayek and borrowing my title here from his essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative," reprinted at the end of The Constitution of Liberty (1960). Hayek argues that both conservatives and socialists believe, along with most lawyers and soldiers and bureaucrats, that "order [is] the result of the continuous attention of authority." The extravagant modern growth of law as legislation embodies such a belief, to be contrasted with the older tradition of law as the discovered customs of our community. Problem? Make a law, and then go on holiday.

All points on the conventional spectrum, Hayek continued, "lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment." That's why they think they need to extend the government's monopoly of violence: to compel the barbarians and blockheads to get organized. "The [real] liberal," by contrast, "accept[s] changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about."

No one in 1970 anticipated the internet. No one in 1900 anticipated that autos could safely whiz past each other on two-lane roads at a combined speed of 120 miles per hour. Almost no one in 1800 anticipated that liberalism was about to produce a 3,000 percent enrichment of the West. And almost no one in 1700 anticipated liberalism.

The conservative admires evolution up to a couple of decades before the present, but unlike libertarians he is fearful and angry about any...

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