Matt Zwolinski’s reply to my critique of his earlier piece on libertarianism and democracy
On October 4, I released a post titled “Libertarianism and Democracy,” in which I challenged political philosopher Matt Zwolinski’s prior Liberalism.Org essay on the same subject. Matt has submitted a response, which I have agreed to publish on this site. The rest of this post’s paragraphs were written by Matt Zwolinski, not by me (Ilya Somin). I have also posted a counter-reply to Matt’s thoughtful response here.
Who Ought to Defend Democratic Governance?
A reply to Ilya Somin
My recent Liberalism.org essay, “Democracy Belongs on the List,” argued that classical liberals should place democracy among their core commitments, alongside private property, free markets, and the rule of law. And it belongs there for the same reason. Like property rights and markets, democracy is a crucial mechanism for keeping power in check.
Ilya Somin has offered a generous and thoughtful response to that piece. And I suspect he agrees with me on more points than his framing might reveal. He concedes that democracies are generally freer and more prosperous than their alternatives, that democracy functions as “a valuable check on power,” that libertarians should arguably emphasize these points “more often,” and that “in much of the world today, right-wing nationalists pose a greater threat to libertarian values and priorities than the political left does.” The remaining disagreement centers on two questions: what counts as a libertarian critique of democracy, and who should be responsible for defending democracy.
Before addressing those substantive issues, however, there is one terminological point worth clarifying. Ilya contends that nothing significant hinges on whether we label our view as “libertarian” or “classical liberal.” In most matters I would agree. On this particular issue, though, the distinction matters. In The Individualists, John Tomasi and I distinguish strict libertarians from classical liberals. The former group treats liberty as an absolute moral principle and grounds their politics in a single overarching tenet like the non-aggression axiom—think Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand. The latter regard liberty as a strong yet defeasible presumption and adopt a more empiricist and pluralistic approach—think Friedrich Hayek or Richard Epstein.
My sense is that these two currents within the broader “liberty movement” have adopted notably different attitudes toward democracy, with strict libertarians taking a far more critical stance than their classical liberal counterparts. Even in the 19th century, you could find Benjamin Tucker insisting that voting is always a form of aggression, and Lysander Spooner declaring that women “have just as good a right to make laws as men have, and no better: AND THAT IS JUST NO RIGHT AT ALL.” Herbert Spencer even backed away from his support for women’s suffrage once he concluded that women would likely use their votes to expand government. That stance stands in stark contrast to anything you’d encounter in Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich Hayek (more on whom later), let alone in John Stuart Mill.
That brings us to the first substantive issue in dispute. Ilya argues that recent events have heightened the importance of libertarian critiques of democracy, and that libertarian responses to democracy’s flaws should be “primarily about limiting and decentralizing government power.” I share that assessment, but I would contend that this does not settle—and perhaps does not even directly address—the broader debate about democracy. Limiting and decentralizing state power concerns the scope of the state—how much government should do. This principle would apply to any form of government, democratic or not. Crucially, it does not by itself argue against democratic control of whatever the state does.
That distinction lies at the heart of my essay. Building on Jacob Levy, I argued that classical liberals have allowed a perfectly sound critique of excessive government to slide into a skepticism about democracy itself, treating democracy, in Levy’s words, “as if the contrast to ‘democratic’ were ‘economic’ rather than ‘autocratic’.” One can pursue a radical program to shrink the state and still insist that its agents remain answerable to the people they govern. Much of what Ilya calls the libertarian critique of democracy is, in fact, a critique of big government. I largely share that position, as far as it goes. The problem arises when we mislabel it. If we blur the line between critiques of state power and critiques of democracy, we shouldn’t be surprised when people conclude libertarians oppose democracy.
That brings us to comparative advantage, the area where I find Ilya’s argument most interesting—and most mistaken. He contends that libertarians form a small minority and that “we have no comparative advantage in extolling the virtues of democracy relative to authoritarianism. Other kinds of liberals can do this work just as well as we can, perhaps better.” Thus, we should focus on what we do best, which is analyzing democracy’s flaws.
This line of reasoning may make sense in certain contexts. Yet as a general rule, I find it misguided—especially when the intended audience is classical liberals and libertarians themselves. After all, that audience is precisely where the skepticism about democracy has taken hold. Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed argued that monarchy is preferable to democracy, and lamented that “habitual democrats” were tolerated rather than “isolated, excluded and expelled from civilization.” Curtis Yarvin, who arrived at neoreaction through libertarian channels, credits Hoppe with opening “a kind of door to the pre-revolutionary world” for him. And in 2009, Peter Thiel wrote in a Cato Institute publication that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” None of this follows from libertarian critiques of voter ignorance, and nothing Ilya has written points in that direction. Yet this sentiment grew within a movement in which, as Janet Bufton recently observed in Liberal Currents, “even liberal libertarians were taught arguments about why democracy fails,” while hardly anyone argued for democracy on libertarian terms. Any generic liberal can explain to the public why democracy outperforms dictatorship. But a libertarian veering toward Hoppe or Yarvin isn’t going to listen to such arguments. Only libertarians can tell libertarians that democracy belongs to them.
So if democracy is a libertarian value, what exact type of libertarian value is it? Ilya argues that democracy shouldn’t be treated as a first-order libertarian priority—on par with liberty, constraining coercion, property rights, and the aim of increasing human happiness—because its value is instrumental rather than intrinsic. I grant that democracy’s value is instrumental. In that respect, it occupies the same position as several items on the classical liberal agenda. Free trade, federalism, judicial review, and the rule of law are all instrumental as well. What I resist is the claim that because democracy is only instrumentally valuable it is therefore dispensable—something that can be traded away whenever we imagine something better. Yet our imagination is not a reliable guide to what actually works. The more informative question, following David Schmidtz, is what has a demonstrable history of leading self-interested actors to act in ways that are useful and agreeable to those around them, and by that measure democracy has remarkably few rivals.
That brings us to Hayek. Ilya defends Hayek’s preference for “a liberal dictator over a democratic government lacking liberalism” as a remark about exceptional hypothetical cases, and he suggests that transitional non-democratic rule “may be necessary” in places like Russia and China, citing the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan. But those occupations were conducted by democracies accountable to their own voters, and they ended. Russia and China, by contrast, have no external power capable of imposing a transition and then handing power back. The only plausible candidate for transitional authority in those countries would be a domestic strongman, which is precisely the scenario Hayek faced. Hayek wasn’t musing about hypotheticals; he was addressing Chile.
Ultimately, Ilya and I want the same objective. We both support a form of libertarianism that resists concentrated power wherever it appears, including when it arrives through the ballot box. Where we diverge is on whether democracy should be explicitly defended as part of that resistance. I contend that it should be, and I believe libertarians are uniquely suited to articulate that stance, since the people who most need to hear it are our own ranks.
