The New Libertarian Generation?
Mark Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University, where he specializes in the history of ideas — in particular, the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment. Now, one of the principal intellectual legacies of the Enlightenment is the libertarian tradition, so it was not at all inappropriate that Lilla’s article in the May 27, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books is on the growing influence of libertarian ideas in American society. Lilla writes of the “libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now.” He writes of “the libertarian spirit [that] drifted into American life [over the past 50 years], first from the left [during the 1960s], then from the right [during the Reagan '80s].” He writes pessimistically of how this “libertarian spirit has spread to other areas of our lives,” but he reserves his main pessimism and hand wringing for the impact of this libertarian spirit on our national political life. “Welcome,” he writes, “to the politics of the libertarian mob.”
The “politics of the libertarian mob,” according to Lilla, is “[a] new strain of populism” that is “anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither.” He points out that “[h]istorically, populist movements [have] use[d] the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that ‘the people’ can exercise it for their common benefit.” But the “populist rhetoric” of the “libertarian mob” is “something altogether different.… It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice.”
More important, according to Lilla, this new populist rhetoric of the libertarian mob is “all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.” This rhetoric, Lilla tells us, “appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that.”
And, in Lilla’s view, such “petulant individuals” are legion in America today. “Many Americans,” he writes, “a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites — politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers — are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop.” Read More