The Nationalist Threat to Liberty

   

Once again, I have few disagreements with the other contributors to the symposium. So I will take this opportunity to draw out a few common themes, and their implications. As before, a common theme of the various contributions is the need to extend liberty to all, without arbitrary exclusions based on factors like race, immigrant status, gender, sexual orientation, and the like.

In one of his response essays, Tarnell Brown mentions the Marquis de Lafayette as an example of the cosmopolitan nature of the struggle for liberty, and how immigrants and foreign allies contributed to the founding and growth of America. It’s worth noting that, in addition to fighting for liberty in the American Revolution, Lafayette was also a longtime advocate of the abolition of slavery who unsuccessfully urged George Washington and other Founding Fathers to do more for that cause. Lafayette understood that liberty must be extended to all, regardless of race and ancestry. So should we.

Another, at least implicit, common theme, is the menace to liberty posed by the resurgence of illiberal and authoritarian nationalism. This is most obviously true in the cases of nativist and xenophobic attacks on immigration and trade, and Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine (motivated primarily by Russian nationalist imperialism). In addition, nationalists often (though not always) ally with social conservatives in seeking to repress the liberty of LGBT people, and others who deviate from rigid traditional social mores. That is obviously true in Putin’s Russia, and (at least with respect to transgender people) in Donald Trump’s America.

Nationalism obviously threatens liberty by restricting the range of people allowed to enjoy it. It also imperils freedom by promoting government central planning of the economy, through a combination of protectionism (as with Donald Trump’s massive new trade war), immigration restrictions, and industrial policy. In these respects, nationalism is – as my Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh and I explained in “The Case Against Nationalism,” – very similar to libertarians’ other traditional rival: socialism. As Alex likes to put it, nationalism is socialism with more flags. Despite differences in rhetoric and emphasis, nationalist central planners are little better than their socialist counterparts.

Libertarians of my generation (I was born in 1973) and even more so those of David Boaz’s generation, came of age in a world where socialism and the progressive left more generally were the greatest threats to liberty. It may be psychologically difficult for some to adjust to the new reality where the greatest threat to our values now comes from the political right, in the form of nationalism. That adjustment may be especially painful for those most emotionally attached to the old “fusionist” alliance between libertarians and conservatives. But adjust we must. Elsewhere, I have made the case that the nationalist threat to libertarian ideals is now a far greater one than that of “woke” leftism. David Boaz, especially in his later years, understood this reality.

David also understood that addressing the danger from the right doesn’t entail blinding ourselves to the flaws of the left. The “democratic socialism” popular on the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party and in some European nations remains dangerous, sharing many of the flaws of its authoritarian counterparts. It is, today, less widespread – and thus less immediately threatening – than right-wing nationalism. But that could change.

David Boaz knew that libertarians must be alert to dangers to liberty from both right and left, and that we should strive to avoid becoming too emotionally attached to either side of the conventional political spectrum, even though tactical alliances on particular issues are often useful. On this, and much else, we should learn from his example.

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.