Now it’s certainly true that socialists and communists and their fellow travellers can spent endless hours discussing theoretical matters that have little or no relevance to our current political situation. To normal people, the debate about e.g. whether or not the Soviet Union was a state capitalist society or a degenerated workers state must seem not only pointless, but slightly offensive in how it neglects the real truths of Stalinist oppression. But at least these discussions, no matter how ritualistic they’ve become over the years, can serve some purpose in analysing where the 1917 revolution went wrong and how to prevent that next time. Can the same be said about the debate currently raging in libertarian circles about whether or not the 1880s should be considered the closest any society has come to a libertarian utopia?
I mean, for any sane non-libertarian person the 1880s, with its oppression of anybody other than white, protestant, heterosexual males, is not exactly a good era to want to emulate, even if it is slightly better than libertarianism’s previous utopia, the 1850s. It should be a given even for libertarians that, though there is genuine reason for concern, 21st century America is much freer for a majority of its inhabitants than the 1880s ever was, simply due to the fact that non-white, protestant heterosexual males are no longer considered second rank citizens under law. But apparently for libertarians this is not so obvious.
Crooked Timber has two nice posts up about the handwringing in libertarian circles on this subject: adventures in libertarian blindspots and the more libertarianism thread.
Those are great reads, especially the comment threads, but it’s the third post on the subject where it gets silly, as CT reports on one Bryan Caplan trying to partially rescue this libertarian utopis by arguing that actually, women were too free in the 1880s and what freedoms they didn’t have weren’t important anyway:
In what ways, then, were American women in 1880 less free than men? Most non-libertarians will naturally answer that women couldn’t vote. But from a libertarian point of view, voting is at most instrumentally valuable.
This is stupid enough on its own, especially when you consider that voting is only one part of political participation, but it gets worse. Caplan continues his post by considering the legal position of women in the 1880s, concentrating solely on his own limited understanding of the law at that time, as researched via Wikipedia and explaining why this doesn’t mean women were less free then. He acknowledges that women who married lost their legal standing as a person in her own right, but argues a) that women who wanted to could get exceptions to this rule if their future husbands consented, b) people expected this “division of labour” as he calls it anyway, so didn’t care about its unfairness, c) this traditional understanding “made a lot of sense” back then anyway and d) ” the letter of the law rarely makes a difference in marriage” anyway. No wonder he concludes:
I know that my qualified defense of coverture isn’t going to make libertarians more popular with modern audiences. Still, truth comes first. Women of the Gilded Age were very poor compared to women today. But from a libertarian standpoint, they were freer than they are on Sex and the City.
One wonders if women were so free why feminism ever got started…
Caplan focuses monomanically on political/legal theory as if by parsing this you can decide people are free without taking into consideration the whole reality of the society in which they live. If some women could keep control of their finances that means all women were free and the failure of the vast majority of women to do so is their own personal fault. This is of course a logical consequence from believing in libertarianism, which at its core maintains that in the absence of governmental interference, anything an individual does is of their own free choice and which does not recognise any non-governmental pressures. Now of course most libertarians are bright enough to not quite believe it, know enough history to know that people do not need governments to oppress each other and hence are slightly more pragmatic in their beliefs. But a post like this, which is actually taken serious by other libertarians, is good in re-exposing this reality that libertarianism at its core only makes sense if you’re a bright twelve year old sociapath.