Liberal Universalism and the Menace of Nationalism

   

I have few disagreements with the other contributors to the symposium in honor of David Boaz. But I want to take this opportunity to highlight some common themes that run through all our essays. Most notable is the imperative of extending liberty to as wide a range of people as possible, breaking through morally arbitrary distinctions such as those of race, gender, sexual orientation, and immigrant status. The struggle for liberty also cannot stop at national boundaries, but rather must include liberal states working to oppose oppressive regimes internationally, in some cases by force.

Like most libertarians, David Boaz advocated protecting a wide range of liberties, both “economic” and personal. But he went further than many in emphasizing the importance of extending those rights to all people, without distinction. Central to David's thought was the idea that libertarianism requires both a broad conception of the range of liberties that must be protected, and a broad view of the range of people entitled to that full protection.  As Andy Craig puts it, “[n]othing offended David more than picking and choosing some people as more deserving of freedom than others, treating some people’s rights as important and other people’s rights as disposable.”

As Jonathan Blanks shows, this principle led David to reject nostalgia for an imagined past, a nostalgia which ignores the deprivation of liberty entailed by racially based slavery and segregation. Aaron Ross Powell makes similar points about the liberties of transgender people, and Andy Craig on the need to enforce a rule of law that covers everyone, regardless of identity. My own essay focuses on the injustice of migration restrictions, which deny liberty to immigrants and would-be immigrants.

Our different contributions also highlight ways in which excluding various groups from full protection for liberty harms not only them, but even members of the seemingly privileged group that the exclusion is supposed to benefit. Blacks were the principal victims of slavery and segregation. But, as Blanks explains, whites’ liberty was also severely curtailed. And the stifling of black opportunity made society poorer and less innovative, thereby also harming whites. If, for example, segregation confines a black man who might have become a great scientist or entrepreneur to the role of a janitor, that obviously hurts him. But whites are deprived of the benefits of his innovations. Similar points apply to the impact of immigration restrictions on native-born citizens of the US, as explained in my contribution.

As David Boaz recognized, denying liberty to LGBT people has a similar dynamic. If they cannot live freely and realize their full potential, “cisgender” heterosexuals suffer as well. Ultimately, denying liberty and opportunity to some groups necessarily also imperils the freedom and prosperity of the rest of us, even if to a lesser degree.

For many libertarians, the most controversial issue addressed in this symposium is that raised by Tarnell Brown’s essay on the Russia-Ukraine War. Most libertarians agree that liberal democratic states are justified in defending themselves against attack. They recognize such efforts, despite their costs, are often essential to the defense of liberty. But many are inclined to isolationism when it comes to almost all other foreign policy issues, such as countering expansionism by authoritarian states, or even just providing arms to more liberal states that resist them (as Western nations have assisted Ukraine in resisting Russia’s brutal war of aggression).

Elsewhere,  I have explained how even non-defensive military intervention against authoritarian states is often compatible with libertarian principles. I have also written on why Ukraine’s fight against Russia is a just cause that deserves Western support for both moral and pragmatic reasons. This is actually an easier case than direct military intervention, because it only requires us to provide arms and supplies, not risk American lives in combat.

Just as the struggle for liberty within any one nation must not be limited by morally arbitrary identity categories, so the international version must not be limited by morally arbitrary boundary lines on maps. The struggle for freedom is global and liberal states must sometimes use force to advance that cause. Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression is just not because state borders are somehow sacred (they aren’t), but because Ukraine, despite serious flaws, is a far more liberal polity than Putin’s brutal dictatorship. A Russian victory and resulting conquest of Ukraine means death or brutal oppression for millions. Victory for Ukraine, by contrast, means victory for much greater – even if still incomplete – liberty.

On these issues, I differed somewhat with David Boaz, who was more sympathetic to foreign policy isolationism. But he at least avoided two major international relations fallacies to which some other libertarians fall prey. One is offering excuses and justifications for America’s authoritarian enemies. Thus, David never promoted Cold War “revisionism,” which held that the Soviet Union and other communist states had no expansionist agenda, and the entire conflict was the fault of the US. Unlike Murray Rothbard, David did not celebrate the fall of Saigon, and the resulting expansion of a mass-murdering communist totalitarian regime. Even if US intervention in the Vietnam War was a mistake, the triumph of communism there was nothing to celebrate. In a 2022 podcast, David unequivocally condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supported rallying international opinion against it, even as he also opposed US military intervention.

The other pernicious fallacy is an embrace of so-called “realism,” the incredibly unrealistic view holding that all nations basically pursue similar foreign policies, regardless of regime type, with variation dictated only by such factors as relative power and geographic location. In domestic policy, almost all libertarians recognize there are fundamental differences between liberal democracies with constitutional constraints on government power (even if imperfect ones), and authoritarian and totalitarian states. The same is true in international relations. If Russia were a liberal democracy, there would be no Russia-Ukraine war. And this case is just one of many examples of the difference that regime type makes. David understood that, even if he didn’t always appreciate its full implications.

No one is right about everything, not even David Boaz. But in emphasizing the universality of liberty, he set an example we would do well to emulate.

Ilya Somin is a law professor at George Mason University, the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.