{"id":20666,"date":"2013-06-14T08:46:21","date_gmt":"2013-06-14T13:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20666"},"modified":"2013-06-14T08:46:21","modified_gmt":"2013-06-14T13:46:21","slug":"the-only-truly-new-political-idea-in-the-last-couple-thousand-years-is-this-libertarian-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/06\/14\/the-only-truly-new-political-idea-in-the-last-couple-thousand-years-is-this-libertarian-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"“The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In National Review Online<\/em>, Jonah Goldberg<\/a> responds to a recent Salon<\/em> hit piece on libertarianism:<\/p>\n

In a much-discussed essay for Salon<\/em>, Michael Lind asks: \u201cIf libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?\u201d<\/p>\n

Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

That phrase, \u201cthe wave of the future,\u201d became famous thanks to a 1940 essay by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She argued that the time of liberal democratic capitalism was drawing to a close and the smart money was on statism of one flavor or another \u2014 fascism, Communism, socialism, etc. What was lost on her, and millions of others, was that this wasn\u2019t progress toward the new, but regression to the past. These \u201cwaves of the future\u201d were simply gussied-up tribalisms, anachronisms made gaudy with the trappings of modernity, like a gibbon in a spacesuit.<\/p>\n

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it\u2019s still unfolding.<\/p>\n

Indeed, what\u2019s remarkable about all of the states Lind identifies as proof that libertarianism doesn\u2019t work is that they are in fact proof that it does. What made the American experiment new were its libertarian innovations, broadly speaking. Moreover, those innovations made us prosper. Even Sweden \u2014 the liberal Best in Show \u2014 owes its successes to its libertarian concessions. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m actually not a full-blown libertarian myself, but it\u2019s an ideal I\u2019d like America to move closer to, not further away from as we\u2019ve been doing of late \u2014 bizarrely in the name of \u201cprogress,\u201d of all things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg responds to a recent Salon hit piece on libertarianism: In a much-discussed essay for Salon, Michael Lind asks: \u201cIf libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,10],"tags":[550,576],"class_list":["post-20666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-liberty","tag-libertarianism","tag-philosophy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5nk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20666"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20667,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20666\/revisions\/20667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}