Scenes from a libertarian journalism conference.
By Stan Alcorn, Yale University
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
On a hot Saturday afternoon three weeks into summer vacation at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, more than 70 students and a smattering of professionals filed into a physics lecture hall to begin a week of academic lectures, discussion groups, and nightly open bars. The occasion was an exploration of “Journalism and the Free Society,” one of 13 free seminars this summer to be put on by the Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian nonprofit organization. Participants had come from as far as Mongolia and as nearby as Philadelphia, all looking for a chance to socialize with other young journalists and develop their journalistic skills.
The reasons the IHS bankrolls free seminars and spends upwards of $400,000 on student scholarships and fellowships are more complicated (full disclosure: I’m receiving one such fellowship). “There is no IHS party line,” Seminar Director Kevin Williamson told the quiet lecture hall. “We’re not here to convert you to any way of thinking.” He then distributed a survey to determine our level of agreement with a variety of statements: “The best way to increase economic growth and create jobs is to cut taxes.” “Wealthy people should pay a larger share of taxes than they do now.” “Private property should be protected and respected as much as possible.” At the closing session the same survey would be distributed, measuring whether the attendees had embraced the libertarian agenda of small government and free markets.
Many progressives I know often associate the “L” word less with liberty than with the political right. Following the money reinforces this impression: the IHS draws funding from sources such as the Scaife Foundations, known for their support of right-wing causes, and conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. But it would be an oversimplification to agree with essayist Bob Black that “a libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs.” The thesis of Black’s article “The Libertarian as Conservative” may have rung true when it was penned in the middle of the Reagan presidency, but the “small-‘l’ libertarians” (in contrast to the political party) I met at the IHS conference were typically anti-war, pro-choice, and pro-gay-rights. As has been argued in Campus Progress before, progressives may be replacing social conservatives as libertarians’ strange bedfellows.
According to IHS’ Marketing Director, Keri Anderson, the group sought “to bring in open-minded students who want to engage in these [libertarian] ideas—whether or not they agree with them.” As seminar attendees shook each other’s hands, memorized each other’s nametags, and asked the requisite questions—“Where are you from?” and “Where are you working this summer?”—the consequences of such a mixed coalition took form. Politics aside, everyone would leave with a new network.
Each seminar day started with an increasingly sparsely attended 8 a.m. breakfast. By 9, it would be time for the first of four daily lectures, typically that of economist and former AEI Research Fellow Mario Villarreal. His lectures introduced basic ideas of opportunity cost and using statistics in news pieces, albeit with an emphasis on “free market” solutions.
The majority of the 20 presentations were given by working journalists, several of whom made no mention of “personal liberty” or the “free market” at all: The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dan Biddle told stories of corrupt judges from his years in investigative journalism; Carolyn Lochhead conducted a lively question and answer session on her rise from covering ladies teas in Louisiana to presiding over the San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington bureau; Reason’s editor-in-chief, Nick Gillespie, broke us into small groups, asking each to critique the “world” created by a different magazine, from Vanity Fair to Ty Pennington At Home.
Other journalists spoke from more overtly political positions. Dom Giordano’s lecture, delivered in the meandering, interactive style of his talk-radio show, touched on his filling in for Bill O’Reilly, as well as the relative newsworthiness of Paris Hilton getting out of jail and the new immigration bill (on his show, he ultimately came down in favor of the former). Columnist Deroy Murdock was avowedly libertarian, saying of his work: “Much of what I do is making the case for free enterprise, making the case for the free society.”
Murdock’s second lecture expressed the conference’s mix of the professional and the political, covering two topics: “Networking and the Golden Rule” and “Libertarian Citizenship.” Outside of the lectures and discussion groups, the focus was solidly on the former. Whether over soccer and basketball games during the afternoon “free time” or over free Coors Light and popcorn at the nightly “social,” discussions were as likely to center around movies, mutual college friends, or journalism as anything related to the “Free Society.” By the end of the week, cliques had formed and at least one spontaneous late-night dance party had erupted in the dorms.
During the last meal in the Bryn Mawr cafeteria, I compared my experience with IHS to the Campus Progress conference I attended two summers ago. I’d seen memorable speeches but hadn’t met anyone who would, say, engage me in an argument over the merits of legalizing crack cocaine (as one IHS staffer did). Here, I thought as we milled around to each other’s tables to say our goodbyes, was a conference that brought people in contact not only with ideas, but with each other. In this respect, at least, progressives might have something to learn from libertarians.
Stanley Alcorn graduated from Yale University in 2007 and will be spending this summer as an IHS Journalism Intern at the Orange County Register.
--------
Comments
The oldest rule of journalism, and the most forgotten, is to tell the customers what is really going on.
Serial Liars: How Lawyers Get the Money shows what is really going on in the justice system.
It can be downloaded free from http://abetterlegalsystem.com
Best regards,
Evan Whitton
— Evan Whitton - Jun 20, 01:12 AM - #Careful. Don’t portray us libertarians as Anti-War, or in any way aligned with Progressives. In fact, a solid minority of libertarians are staunchly Pro-War on Islamo-Fascism. We see Radical Islam as the greatest threat to our liberties these days, even greater than the government.
We are solid Goldwaterites: Pro-Tolerance, Pro-Economic Freedom and Pro-Defense.
For Pro-Defense libertarian views check out www.mainstreamlibertarian.com
— Eric Dondero - Jun 20, 07:07 AM - #Why didn’t you stop at the Students for Sensible Drug Policy table at the Campus Progress conference? We would have been happy to talk with you about the merits of putting violent criminal cartels out of business by ending prohibition and taking control of drugs by putting them into a regulated system.
:-)
— Tom - Jun 22, 01:11 PM - #Progressives have very little in common with libertarians. Civil libertarians may share many of the same concerns, but even small-l libertarians are in the pocket of big business and could hardly care less about the welfare of the working American man or woman. Most libertarians will sweet-talk progressives to mask their economic agenda, but when you put the smoke screen of ‘culture war’ issues aside, libertarians are just free-market capitalists out to gut regulatory agencies and slash social spending, like any other right wing ideologues.
— Charles - Jun 22, 01:22 PM - #I think it’s still really worthwhile for us and for journalists to make a distinction between right-libertarians and left-libertarians (most other countries do). The term “libertarian” up until very recently (~1970s) meant someone along anarchist/non-state socialist lines, and still means that for most of the world, but in the U.S., anti-government regulation folks took the name and formed a party (they’d be more accurately named the Propertarian Party).
I think Charles nailed the definition of right-libertarians in his comment; that’s exactly it.
— Patrick St. John - Jun 22, 01:43 PM - #It’s also worth noting that one of the speakers mentioned in the article was an editor at Reason magazine. Reason is one of the most laughably named publications I’ve ever encountered. They are a reliable source of global warming ‘debunking’ and slavishly pro-corporate articles on tort restrictions and environmental deregulation. Not coincidentally, they are in bed with ExxonMobil, Phillip Morris, and other companies including Enron and Phizer. More on Reason can be found here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundation
— Charles - Jun 22, 02:05 PM - #I agree with Patrick St. John, above — the distinction is important, both in understanding US LIbertarianism and their relationship to US progressives. The reason it confuses so many people is that most view political issues on a simple liberal-conservative axis. One (still simplistic) extension is the political compass which demonstrates that adding an axis of “state control” to the left-right axis reveals new political philosophies — among them US Libertarianism. On this compass, US Libertarians would be part of the “Libertarian Right,” whereas non-state socialists and anarchists would be part of the “Libertarian Left.” So while the Libertarian Right does have some things in common with the less-statist progressives (e.g. in favor of lgbt rights), historically in the United States they have been aligned with conservatives for economic reasons.
So all that is to say, good comment Patrick, and I hope future writers take it into account.
— ivan - Jun 22, 03:31 PM - #Re: Eric’s comment, my understanding of the libertarian position on war is that coercive use of force is not wrong – only the initiation of the coercive use of force. The problem with that satisfyingly bright line of moral demarcation is that, historically, the question of ‘who started it’ has always been murky, particularly when the term ‘war’ is stretched to include economic rivalries and cultural conflicts, e.g. ‘Islamo-fascism’ versus globalized corporate fascism.
Re: the ‘left libertarian’ vs ‘right libertarian’ distinction, back when I classified myself as a left libertarian, the definitive criteria I saw were that ‘personal property’ and ‘private property’ are not always the same thing, private property (particularly when it’s the absentee ownership of the means of production) doesn’t deserve the same protection as personal property, and corporations are not persons, and therefore don’t possess the rights of natural persons. Until libertarians explicitly embrace those distinctions, they really are just corporate fascist fellow travellers – and Ill remain a Green.
— G.P. Franck-Weiby - Jun 22, 08:44 PM - #GP: I think your points are mostly right (on the second half of your comment) except that many “left libertarians” in the rest of the world would be against private property of any kind (they’d also be against state-owned property, of course). Pierre-Joseph Pruudhon, he of the “property is theft,” considered himself a “libertarian socialist” — that is, an anarchist. The term libertarian socialist was actually the primary usage until at least the Spanish Revolution, and even then, although using the new term (anarchismo) they specifically described themselves as socialists against both capitalist powers and Stalinist soviets — in other words, as libertarian socialists.
Additionally, I don’t think the idea that corporations are not persons is clearly defined within the libertarian-authoritarian framework — support for the 14th Amendment (which is where the theory originated) and subsequent support for its reinterpretation (corporations as persons) stretched across political parties and helped usher in the Gilded Age. Opposition to that interpretation was at least as potent among the Populists (from whom most small-government conservatives are descended). Though I think, given your party affiliation, you probably realize that the corporation-person belief is embedded in most of the parties (Dem, Rep, Lib and probably, for that matter, Reform) although elements of the parties may periodically speak against it.
US Libertarians are overwhelmingly corporate free-market libertarians — that’s what makes the discussion so confusing, and so different from dynamics in the rest of the world.
— ivan - Jun 23, 01:09 AM - #I’d have to agree with Charles (#4) and say that you can’t throw progressives and libertarians (the way the US interprets it, at least) in the same bag. Ok, on the civil side it does line up for the most part, however the concern for others part is very different. Not to say that libertarians are big meanies who hate human beings, it’s just that they think that the rags-to-riches “American Dream” is actually possible in a system where tax cuts are given to the very wealthy.
And yeah, part of the problem is that not everyone defines all of these terms in politics the same way, either in the US or in the rest of the world.
— Lauren - Jun 23, 05:54 PM - #