 It's an election year out there, folks, and while we mostly stick to economics here at the Mises Institute, it's getting awfully hard to ignore all the political campaign rhetoric and political news swirling around out there. Recently I had a conversation with Tom Woods where we both lamented the fact that Murray Rothbard is no longer around and alive to give us his play by play on Trump and Bernie and Hillary. But what I'd like to talk about this weekend is the left, a.k.a. progressives and how libertarians often fail to understand and thus properly engage with the left. And before you accuse me of bias, please understand that next weekend we are going to have a very similar show entitled The Trouble with Conservatives. So if you're interested in progressivism and social justice warriorism and how we should be counteracting both, stay tuned. Welcome back to Mises Weekends. I'm your host Jeff Deist. As I mentioned during the introduction, we are talking this weekend about the trouble with progressives. And of course, next weekend we are going to do the same thing and examine our conservative friends. But there's a lot going on with progressives today. We have this fight between Bernie and Hillary. And I'd like to just set the stage by bringing up a couple of recent events. You may have noticed that just a couple of evenings ago there was a big Trump rally in Salt Lake City where there was quite a bit of violence. And while I don't think Trump really represents the right per se, I do think that the protesters and the bomb throwers, so to speak, do represent the modern left very vividly. So there were some rocks and bottles and tomatoes thrown, some eggs thrown at one woman apparently, some arrests made. But perhaps the biggest news item to come out of it was that the Salt Lake City mayor, who is apparently a Hillary Clinton supporter, said, well, gee whiz, Trump has to expect this sort of thing at his events given his rhetoric. So that seemed like a tacit endorsement of this. And to my knowledge, we haven't heard anything in particular from the Bernie and Hillary camps on this violence. And it's brought up some questions about whether this plays into Trump's hands, right? Is this something akin to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where there were big riots that were televised and this all awakened a slumbering giant in the American electorate who went out and elected by a wide margin the law and order Nixon and actually swept him into office for two consecutive terms because they were so turned off by these violent left wing protests. I'm not entirely sure that that analysis holds up simply because America's changed so much since then. When Romney said in 2012, his infamous gaffe, i.e. when a politician inadvertently tells the truth, he said, you have to understand something like 47 percent of the country are direct beneficiaries of all these government programs. He was entirely right. And, you know, not just the demographic shifts since 1968, but also the entitlement and welfare landscape has shifted so dramatically since then. And I'm not convinced that there's this bourgeois cohort out there that is going to watch these protesters and be so antagonized by this that they go out and vote for Trump. I'm just not sure that there's enough of those people left in America. And then a little earlier last week, we had another example of modern liberalism or SJWism in action on the Yale campus where the bunch of students demanded that the English department change its curriculum to stop featuring so many dead white male authors like Shakespeare and Milton and Chaucer, who presumably exemplify colonialism and racism and ableism and sexism and homophobia, et cetera, and that we can't be forcing these poor kids to study this dead white male canon of literature any longer. So I really think these two events typify the modern left, identity, politics, Trump, everything, all political and news matters really. In fact, all human affairs have to be viewed through these filters, through these lenses of history and racism and colonialism and classism and genderism and, you know, Republicans or conservatives or right-wingers are almost evil by definition. And that's really where the modern left is. It has gone, gotten away from your grandfather's democratic party, which concerned itself with trade and labor issues and was concerned with civil liberties and was definitely concerned with the First Amendment speech rights. Modern progressives, modern liberals are really quite totalitarian outlook. They're not at all concerned with free speech. In fact, they advocate hate speech laws and they're much more concerned with identity politics and social issues, gay marriage, abortion, privilege, race, class, et cetera. So it really is a different landscape than in 1968 today. So what does all this have to do with libertarianism? I'd just like to make the case that too many libertarians remain naive and deluded about progressivism in my opinion and who's behind it and what it really seeks in America. You know, this dovetails with the recent libertarian party convention. Tom Woods has already discussed this at length, some of the deficiencies and infirmities of the Johnson-Weldt ticket. I'm not really that interested in who the libertarian party chooses as its nominee in any given election. And I completely understand people who say, look, I'm not necessarily voting for Gary Johnson, but I'm voting for a third party that has libertarian in its name, and I want that third party to upset the apple cart by getting five or 10 or 15 percent of the popular vote because we need to do something about this terrible two-party duopoly and that this is no time to be overly purist. And I get that argument. I don't necessarily accept it, but I certainly understand it and I have no trouble with it. But I do think that there's a couple important takeaways from last weekend's libertarian party convention. I wrote a blog piece on it. We can link to it in case you'd like to read it. But first and foremost is that the libertarian party has sort of rooted out any place for social conservatives or religious folks because they've taken stances on social issues. We're in the past. The libertarian party often counseled neutrality because libertarianism, per se, has nothing to say about one's particular lifestyle. It's just a political philosophy dealing with the use of force and the proper role of government. But this year's LP convention had a decidedly left flavor on social issues, gay marriage, drugs, marijuana, et cetera. So it really seems like there's no place necessarily for disaffected conservatives in the LP. If they're animated, at least by social issues. The second point that I'd just like to make quickly about the LP is that I really think that they missed a chance to offer up a real alternative to the American people, an alternative to organizing society around Washington, D.C. and the federal government. In other words, they just said, well, we'll organize a little differently. They had a chance to offer up a truly populist message, I think, an anti-fed and anti-war pro-succession and pro-local control. And most of all, an anti-D.C. message to people as opposed to just saying, well, we'll take the good parts from the Democrats and the good parts from Republicans and kind of seam it together into this third party. And in that sense, I think that the Libertarian Party missed an opportunity. But the point is that the Libertarian Party has decided that it needs to reach out to progressives. It needs to try to appeal to disaffected Bernieites, let's say, assuming Hillary gets the nomination. But I'm not sure that Libertarians really understand what progressives think and I'm not sure that Libertarians really understand how to talk to progressives. So let's go into a little bit about the progressive mindset and the progressive worldview. And from my perspective, it is almost entirely based on social contract theory. Now that's either implicitly or explicitly in the mind of a particular progressive that you're talking to, but they definitely believe in social contract theory that just by being born and existing here in the geographical confines of the United States that we tacitly accept to live under the rule of the Constitution, which they don't care about. And just because we don't leave that we agree to abide by certain rules and social conventions in the political realm, I don't think that's true. I'm sure most of you have heard the argument of the bully on the playground who says, if you don't like it, why don't you leave? And that's really what the federal government is, is the bully on the playground. But nonetheless, it's important to understand that social contract theory is part and parcel of the progressive worldview and many libertarians are coming at this from a much more individualist perspective. So speaking for myself and many libertarians, we don't believe in social contract theory at all. We feel that Lysander Spooner has completely eviscerated any argument for a constitutionalism, that sort of thing, but that's not necessarily helpful when you're dealing with progressives or trying to reach out to them. So when you accept social contract theory, a lot of things that libertarians hold near and dear, all of a sudden go out the window, right? When you tell a progressive that taxation is theft, well, they're not buying it because they don't really believe in property in the way Mises did. And so they don't really believe that you own your property in the sense that you can use and control it in any way you see fit. They see a greater social contract overlay to all this. So when you say, well, I think taxation is theft, they're viewing that as just an absurd conclusory statement rather than a coherent argument. When Obama says, you've got that small business, but you didn't build that. And a lot of people, a lot of libertarians and people on the right sort of roll their eyes and groan when he says that, that makes perfect sense in the progressive worldview, right? In the progressive mindset is that you didn't build that. That was part of society and your business exists because there are roads and police and fire services and all this sort of thing. I think part and parcel of the progressive worldview along with social contract theory is egalitarianism, right, egalitarianism above all. This is really central to what progressives are all about today. And this is distinctly illiterarian. If you've read Rothbard's great essay on egalitarianism as revolt against nature, you will understand what I'm talking about. But egalitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with liberty. So, you know, libertarians are in a position where it's awfully hard to reach out to people who believe in egalitarianism over all this. And along with egalitarianism is the consequentialist outlook of most progressives, right? When I say consequentialist, I mean that they want to judge policies or ideology based on the real world effects that policy or ideology will produce. This is sort of a utilitarian argument and we've seen throughout history that progressives are more than willing to break a few eggs to make an omelet, so to speak, right? If we have to bomb Hiroshima to end World War II, well, so be it. If we need to take 15% of your paycheck in order to provide transfer payments to a relatively wealthy cohort of senior citizens, so be it, right? That's the great thing about being a progressive is the ends justify the means. But we shouldn't be too arrogant here, right? I mean, there are splits in the libertarian world and in the Austrian economics world over this too. Mises himself argued for a utilitarian approach to justifying laissez-faire to justifying free markets. And Rothbard came along and strongly challenged that and said, no, we need an explicitly normative natural law viewpoint to justify liberty. So there have always been these questions about utilitarianism and consequentialism versus strident natural rights theory. And I think it's safe to say that progressives fall firmly in the former camp or the latter. But here's the interesting thing about this, of course, is that being a progressive means never having to take responsibility for the actual consequences. So even as they say they live in the real world, we know that progressive policies always produce bad results in the real world. And we know that progressives are forever patting themselves on the back based on good intentions. So there's kind of this irony in the progressive outlook that on the one hand, we're consequentialist, but on the other hand, all that matters is good intentions, consequences would be damned. But on this topic of progressivism, I think we have to touch on left libertarianism. And I'm not sure I'm even comfortable with the term. I agree with Walter Block that there's just libertarianism, meaning anti-state libertarianism. There's no such thing as right or left. But nonetheless, there is now an identifiable group of people and an identifiable grouping of literature that we could loosely term left libertarianism. And I think left libertarianism fails for the same reasons progressivism fails. It accepts the wrong premises, and therefore it asks the wrong questions and unfortunately leads most people to the wrong conclusions. Now, what do I mean by that? When libertarians, left or otherwise, try to reach out to the left and say, we're concerned with the same things as you are. We want to create a fairer, more equal society. Well, that's a very dangerous road to go down. The problems that face us in America today, in my opinion, are war and peace, central banking, and state power. In other words, this terrible foreign policy that is engulfed Washington DC, the terrible effects of the Fed and central banks around the world, and the terrible effects of Leviathan states, the snooping, the spying, the regulating, the taxing, those are the three political issues that face us. But left libertarians tend to side with progressives on this, say, no, no, no. The big problems in the world aren't state power, they're corporate power, and global warming, and inequality, and classism, and racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and transgender discrimination. So what Hapa terms Viagra for the state is this accepting the premises and the language of the status, and progressives are certainly status. So if you go around telling people, I'm a libertarian, but you know what, I agree with you, the big problems are racism and homophobia and inequality. Most people are not gonna say, well, okay, tell me how we can get rid of these by getting rid of government, right? Most people are gonna say the opposite. They're gonna say, you're right, these are huge problems and we need the government to fix these things because men aren't angels. So I think when you accept these false premises, you tend to lead people down a status path. And when I say false premises, I mean false. America's not a deeply racist country. It's not a deeply unequal country. We wouldn't want it to be equal. That would be a terrible country. America's not deeply classist or sexist or anything else. These are hobgoblins of the progressive mind and we shouldn't adopt them in the libertarian movement because it leads to a bad end. What we need to adopt is a Misesi and Rothbardian approach to natural law and to property as the fundamental axiom of a free society. So my final point really is that justice and efficiency are not the same thing. Now, they may go together and thankfully they often do go together. And we know that a libertarian society actually produces far better results across the board. It's more fair. It's in many ways more equal. It's certainly richer. But we need to stick to the moral case, the natural law case, the property rights case for liberty because if we don't, we risk providing viagra for the state. We risk becoming social justice warrior light. I think we make a mistake when we do that. I think we make a mistake when we take sides in the culture war. And I think we especially make a mistake when we fail to tie human liberty to property rights. And we have to be honest with ourselves that progressives simply don't believe in property rights. So to wrap this up, if you're interested in my notes and thoughts on the Libertarian Party Convention and progressivism, we will post a link to that. But more importantly, we will post a link to Mises's great 1927 classic entitled liberalism. It's a free PDF or HTML file. I encourage you to take some time this weekend and give it a look because if you do so, you will understand what real liberalism is all about and how distinctly illiberal modern progressives really are. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks and have a great weekend.