In Dale Amon‘s article about his libertarian road to Damascus, he quite correctly points out that we are neither left nor right. For this reason the path by which the Samizdata people came to our respective forms of hyphenated libertarianism is often quite different.
Like Dale, Natalie Solent came to libertarianism from the left, in her case the overtly socialist British left (the ‘unequivocal left’ as I often call it). Although I do not know Natalie personally, we do have friends in common, one of whom I am dinning with tonight. However I read her blog daily and have seem many of her posts to an e-forum of which we are both members, thus I feel I have a very good idea of where she stands. Clearly socialism found her critically rational mind a poor place to set down roots.
Natalija Radic, having grown up under communism and living under that system until 1991, came to libertarianism perhaps more directly via the ‘dissident’ route. Unlike many, she was never an ethnic nationalist but rather an anti-communist. As she once put it to me, “Libertarians were the only ones who actually had anything interesting to say about liberty, rather than just economy, and why true liberty requires true capitalism”. As I was one of the first self-described libertarians she ever met (in 1992), I take partial credit/blame for spurring her off in the overtly libertarian direction.
However others on this forum have taken a vaguely similar path to me. David Carr and Tom Burroughes both have British Tory Party ‘history’. I too was very much one of ‘Thatcher’s children’, seeing her rise as nothing less than the start of a new Enlightenment.
However my political background is very transatlantic (my mother was American, my father British). Back when I decided to go to university in the USA, I fell in with the inimitable Walter Uhlman via our mutual fascination with guns, interesting women and unusual beer (or was that unusual women and interesting beer…my memory is a little fuzzy there). We both moved in very ‘Reagan Republican’ circles, as did pretty much all our extended circle of friends. Most of that circle in the USA still are voting Republicans yet nearly all are at the emphatically libertarian end of the party. I think I can safely say Walter votes Republican these days for entirely negative reasons, i.e. they are the lesser of two evils. I recall seeing a pithy quote to the effect ‘The Republicans support Big Government whereas the Democrats support really big government’. This is certainly a view that would produce a grim nod of agreement from most of my Republican friends who regard voting Republican as a rear guard action to be done with little true enthusiasm. Unfortunately I do not see any point whatsoever for voting Conservative in the UK at the moment. Unless someone like Oliver Letwin gets control of the top echelon of the Party I am unlikely to change my mind even under the ‘lesser of two evils’ principle, not that Letwin is much to get excited about to put it mildly.
Like many UK libertarians, I abandoned the Tory Party after Thatcher, who was in truth an actuator of liberty without being a libertarian herself, and I moved out of the political mainstream altogether. Certainly with the defeat of Michael Portillo in the leadership battle to succeed William Hague, any last fantasies that the Tory party might rediscover any affinity for liberty was harshly disabused. It definitely had a very radicalizing effect on me.
My business background is in various aspects of international finance, though I am not doing that these days, and so it would be fair to say my attachment to capitalism began as self-evident axioms, like most practicing capitalists and serial entrepreneurs. Only later did I acquire deeper philosophical and theoretical understandings of a less intuitive and practicle nature. It was through this process that I think I began to see the glaring philosophical holes in conservative thought, with its largely intuitive underpinnings that sow the seeds of its own failure. When I read remarks by some conservatives that ‘libertarianism is a weaker form of conservatism’ I find it hard to keep a straight face and can only assume these people have done little more than timidly stick a tentative toe in the vast ocean of libertarian theories lying beyond the arid shores of the constitutional legalisms they mistake for society’s bedrock.
Yet that is also why I see things differently to Dale. I don’t despise conservatives, at least not all of them. Where as I regard socialists (or ‘liberals’ to use the weird American euphemism) as entirely wrong, I regard some conservatives as half-right (no pun intended).
