I Was a Card-Carrying Libertarian: Confessions of a Black Sheep Republican
YES! Yes, dammit. What you said. There is actually a term for people like you and me: neolibertarian. I felt tremendous relief when I found that this view is not unique.
“too little room for principle in such a violent world” – I disagree. I think neolibertarianism is far more logically consistent, and principled, than isolationist libertarianism. If freedom is such a good idea, why not freedom everywhere? And if getting that to happen takes going to war, so be it. Non-initiation of violence? Sure, those governments (Saddam, Mugabe) and gangs (Darfur) are already at war with the local population, anything we do would be just a response to that and not “initiation” (a view also expressed for example here). Small government? Sure, if our government grows by (for example) 500,000 more people in the military and $100 billion per year, but their government goes from a totalitarian dictatorship to a more-or-less democracy, that’s a huge net decrease. In this way, not only is neolibertarianism consistent, it is actualy far more libertarian – albeit in a steely-eyed, unflinching, count-the-bodies way – than the isolationist position of the libertarian party today.
Morally, isolationism is selfish – again, if freedom here, why not everywhere? Lines on a map seem like a paltry reason for some people to be free and others not. It should also be noted that America has a long and honored tradition of bringing freedom around the world, often at gunpoint, and often with far more “collateral damage” than what we are seeing today. Pragmatically, isolationism does not work in the 21th century – it may have worked in the 19th, but at some point in between the world shrank so much that nobody and nothing can truly be isolated. Today, isolationism is simply passivity. (As an aside, the Islamists/Wahhabists are keenly aware that no society can be truly isolated, and also that if they do not go on the offensive, in a mere generation the American cultural barrage blasted over satellite, radio, tv and everything else – Britney & McDonalds, “democracy, whiskey and sexy” – will render them entirely irrelevant; and this barrage is impossible to censor or block, unless it is stopped at the source; this is why they attack us, not “just because we exist”).
The alternative to isolationism is an unapologetic, unflinching, selfless dedication to furthering freedom everywhere, by any means from economic and diplomatic, to propaganda, to fomenting and directly assisting rebellions, to assassination of dictators, to destruction of government facilities, to outright military invasion. Unapologetic – we do not need UN approval, or sanction from anyone or anything other than all the dead in the mass graves in whatever hell-hole we may go into. Unflinching – people will die as a result of what we do, and most of them will be innocent, but a lot fewer will die than if we do nothing. Selfless – it will cost astronomically, both in American lives and in money, but we will pay whatever it takes. And above all, we will not apologize for any of it.
