No doubt, Glenn Beck's recent jihad against progressivism, starting at CPAC, where, to put it politely, he borrowed a speech from the Campaign for Liberty intelligentsia(most notably, Tom Woods), and more recently, where he devotes an entire show to dissecting the Nolan Chart, has peeved some progressives, particularly Open Left. They've been going to town lately on libertarianism. One example, here, makes the case of a "single liberalism throught the ages," borrowing heavily from the likes of The New Republic's Alan Wolfe. However, it is patently inaccurate to make the case that there has been some "unified school" in the liberal historical tome. If you are going to appeal to socio-cultural contexts to make the case for autonomy instead of liberty, and different interpretations of the former, in the 20th-21st century, it would stand to reason that the same socio-cultural contexts account for different schools of liberalism throughout it's entire history. For example, the bureaucratic French state fed a revolutionary liberal tradition that was far more radical than the British schools. Libertarianism inherits from this tradition. It is a radical branch of liberalism that rejects the so-called social contract.

Open Left's argument against libertarianism boils down to the fact that Adam Smith wasn't a laizze faire capitalist and that sometime around 1870, british liberals had soured on classical economics, and that libertarians never got the memo. This fits neatly into Paul Roseberg's third-rate intellectual school boy cognitive development level drivel. So we are told:

Libertarians have stuck to a set of beliefs that liberals abandoned because they weren't serving the true goals of liberalism. Rather than assume libertarian thinkers are unaware of this history, we must conclude that they either do not share the same goals as liberals, or lack the rational capacity to reach the correct conclusions about the empirical policy record.

No, actually, "this history," as it is referred to, is nothing more than imaginary fantasies of bloggers who are intent to to fit everything into a narrative of current partisan categories of right/left, Democrat/Republican. But rest assured, libertarians do not share the same goals as Open Left, nor suffer long the insufferable doddering of corporate liberal dementia.

It is always productive now and again just to point that libertarianism, historically, was a radical critique of the "classical liberalism." Do I need to reference, as an example Lysander Spooner's letter to Grover Cleveland,"A Letter to Grover Cleveland, on his false Inaugural Address, the Usurpations and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and the consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People,"noting that Grover Cleveland and the Bourbon democrats represented the political pinnacle of classical liberal ideas in the United States?

This leads me to Beck's hour long discussion of libertarianism and the Nolan Chart with Judge Andrew Napolitano. While I appreciate the discussion, I take issue with the historically inaccurate assertion by Napolitano that libertarianism begins with Barry Goldwater. This is a historically inaccurate identification of libertarianism with some fictional fantasy of "constitutional conservatism." Libertarianism, at root, is a school that rejects the social contract; in the United States, Lysander Spooner's "No treason" is the libertarian magnum opus that rejects "the constitution" as a legitimate social contract. The fact is, the rebirth of a self-identifiable libertarian movement in the United States in the 20th century originates out of the famous libertarian split from the YAF in the late 1960s over the Vietnam War(note the irony of the YAF-libertarian spat at CPAC which made big news). The rebirth was a result of the fusionism with the New left, which represented a return of libertarianism to it's radical roots and a break from the right. Karl Hess, the former Goldwater speechwriter who wrote "Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice" joined the SDS. When Bretton Woods collapsed a few years later, you had the birth of the Libertarian Party.

Beck is now saying the fundamental conflict is between libertarian and progressivism. Not quite accurate; it should be noted that when the individualist anarchist movement collapsed in the United States in the early 20th century, quite a few moved over to the progressive side, even while the libertarian ideas and literature were privately supported by a network that could loosely be described as the "Old Right." The real conflict is between libertarianism and communitarianism, where the latter, today, devolves into cultural fighting over the modes of the greatly expanding administrative State. It's a condition where it's impossible to create a democratic political class on the basis of any new consensus, and the temptation to rely on the state administrative machine in order to govern is irresistible. This will lead to a revival of radical class politics, which is already happening now. This will transcend the current left-right partisan categories. The collapse of the Chicago School is resulting in a new paradigm in it's stead, the insider-outsider economy. Creating a privileged middle-class around federal contracts, and so much of it around an artificial demand of national security; a dual labor market in the context of the rise of comfortable middle class security apparatus. We'll see if David Nolan can update his chart to categorize this political reality and what 'schools of liberalism' arise out of this political, cultural context. They won't be unified...