Are Libertarians Small-D Democrats?

The GOP primary debates have provided me with a whole lot of material on contemporary American politics, but I keep coming back to the Tea Party and libertarianism, in no small part because there’s a political philosophy element to be explored there. What I wonder about is whether or not libertarians even hold the same view as most of us regarding the American political system, namely that the result of a democratic vote is not tyranny?

Now, it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to understand the current level of enthusiasm for libertarianism, especially those aspects of the philosophy that call for an end to taking the hard-earned money of some people to pay for services that benefit other people. This is quite appealing to people with a certain level of education and a certain amount of money in the bank. What’s more, the terrible economy makes us want to clutch ever tighter those things for which we feel we’ve worked so hard. The prospect of the government taking anything from us in times like these feels like the most dangerous sort of tyranny.

I get it. Like everyone else, I don’t like paying taxes … and, what’s more, I have the good sense to know that I’d like paying them a whole lot less if my job was any less cushy than it is. As it stands, I get paid to do something I love and so parting with some of my money doesn’t seem so desperately terrible, especially when I consider that some of it is used for services I strongly believe should be guaranteed to everyone.

But here’s where the rubber meets the road, I think, and here’s where all of this gets controversial. As I mentioned in a recent blog post (which drew quite a lot of commentary, thanks in large part to Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog), “At first I thought we were just talking past each other, that we had fundamentally different values and beliefs, but perhaps I should be wondering instead if these people (who prize individual choice so highly) simply don’t respect my choices. Maybe the choices in which they’re seemingly so invested are only the choices they make.”

Now I want to push on this idea a little bit more. The issue is that they have a policy preference and I have a policy preference. Then we vote. My preference is the winning one, insofar as the majority of citizens elect politicians who hold the same preference that I have and do not hold the policy preference that libertarians have.

What we get, then, is a system that taxes people and provides services to people. It is this system for which the majority of people are voting each time they vote; they have the option to cast their vote for politicians for favor a different system, but they choose not to vote for those politicians.

The libertarian response to this outcome is that my policy preference –- which is also held by a majority of voters -– is tyrannical and, therefore, illegitimate. My response is that this is how democracy works: We have a range of candidates who hold a variety of positions, we all get to vote, and then the winners put into practice the positions behind which we’ve thrown our support.

If my position -– the one by which people are taxed and services are provided –- was the losing position in the next election, I have the sense I would be unhappy about that. I might say that the outcome we selected was an unjust one, given my position that justice requires us to provide some level of care for the least well-off in our society.

As my good friend Michael Tofias argues, “People don’t care about institutions. People care about outcomes.” In other words, I’m more than willing to go on and on about the virtues of democracy when my side is winning, but perhaps I won’t be crowing as loudly when my side loses. Thus, I shouldn’t pretend to be so surprised when the losing side doesn’t feel the same way that I do about particular congressional or presidential elections.

And indeed, I’m more than a little unhappy that we spend money on the death penalty in this country. I would rather elect politicians who would do away with what I regard as a terrible injustice that also wastes an incredible amount of my money. So I try to find politicians who take the same view on the death penalty, though they are very difficult to find, and I try to convince others that they ought to hold my policy preferences as their own.

But here is a key difference, I think: If I fail to convince a majority to vote with me, insofar as I am a committed small-d democrat, I wouldn’t refer to the resulting policy (or policy shift, in the case of libertarians hoping to do away with most taxes and social safety nets) as a tyranny. Unless, of course, I’m committed to the idea that all government is tyrannical and that democracy is just a tyranny of the majority over the minority. I don’t hold that position; a tyranny, by my lights, is a government in which I have no say.

Instead, if everyone can vote in a free and fair election, and if there is a full range of options available on which we can vote, I think the result of an election that doesn’t go my way is simply a bad result, one that I’ll hope to fix in the next election. But this doesn’t seem to be the way that libertarians view elections.

From their perspective, the choices made by a majority of the society –- choices that emphasize a willingness to be taxed in order to ensure some services for themselves and others -– are not simply bad choices but unjust ones. They regard the result as tyrannical for themselves as citizens who did not agree to it. But, insofar as they are small-d democrats, haven’t they agreed to be bound by the results of these election, just as I agree to be bound by the results of an election in which their candidate is elected and from which their policies become law?

Looking at things from this angle, am I right to conclude that libertarians simply don’t have the same central democratic value that most of us have? And, if they don’t, how can we even begin to have a conversation about what we ought to do as a society?[1]

[1] An edited version of this blog post appears as the second in a monthly series of columns on the problem of justice in contemporary politics and pop culture that I will be writing for the Daily Nebraskan this semester.