Encouraging constructive engagement between libertarians and progressives is a cause I’ve long championed. Back in late 2006, as a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, I wrote a piece entitled “Liberaltarians” for The New Republic that called on liberals and libertarians to explore common ground in light of shared opposition to much of what the Bush administration was up to. And starting in 2008, Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins University (and now my colleague at the Niskanen Center as well) and I started hosting a series of roundtable “liberaltarian” dinners in Washington, D.C., bringing writers and thinkers from both camps together to explore areas of agreement while also working on disagreeing agreeably. Over a hundred dinners later, the series has continued to the present day (though with frustratingly long gaps of late due to the pandemic). When I was still at the Cato Institute, Steve and I teamed up in 2016 to write a book, The Captured Economy, that highlighted how libertarians and progressives have distinctive but complementary reasons for opposing rent-seeking and regulatory capture.
Since leaving Cato for the Niskanen Center in 2017, living through the Trump years and their aftermath, my own thinking has evolved to the point that I no longer consider myself a libertarian. As I explain in this series of essays, when it comes to economic and social policy, I don’t believe that libertarianism’s exclusive focus on shrinking government is well matched to many of the biggest problems now confronting us. And further, the way that libertarian influence on American politics has actually worked out in practice now strikes me as deeply unhealthy: in particular, the incessant, indiscriminate denigration of the public sector has contributed to the falling trust in established institutions that has rendered our country so deeply vulnerable to authoritarian demagoguery.
Even so, I continue to believe in the promise of bringing the libertarian and progressive sides together. Recent years have seen libertarians and progressives working together on important issues of common concern: criminal justice reform, marijuana legalization, and the YIMBY movement to loosen restrictions on housing, among others.
Bringing libertarian and progressive activists together on specific issues can accomplish significant good, but the real prize lies in bringing their ideas together. Rather than an alliance between people whose ideologies are both deeply flawed and regularly lead their partisans astray, what is most needed is a new ideological synthesis that draws the best from libertarian and progressive thought while avoiding their errors and omissions. A new vision of politics and policy that transcends our current, intractable divisions offers the best hope we have of rising to the serious challenges that now face our country. At the Niskanen Center, we are dedicated to developing, articulating, and applying such a vision.
The synthesis we have in mind accepts both the progressive case for wide-ranging and activist government and the libertarian case for entrepreneurship, private enterprise, and competitive markets. The progressive case, however, needs to be tempered with libertarian insights – namely, that government action, however well-intentioned, is highly vulnerable to going awry due to capture by insiders, dysfunctional interaction with other policies, or other unintended consequences. Likewise, the libertarian case needs to be tempered with progressive insights – namely, that free-markets are neither self-executing nor self-sustaining, but instead can function properly only when supported by the proper legal infrastructure and other market-enabling public goods, including robust social insurance. The resulting policy vision thus upholds the hybrid ideal that we refer to as a “free-market welfare state.”
The long-running American debate over the size and scope of government has featured a “pro-market” right pitted against a “pro-government” left – as if there were some fundamental, unavoidable antagonism between the public and private sectors. We reject the choice posed by the prevailing ideological categories as a false dichotomy: a thriving, prosperous, inclusive society requires both a vibrant, dynamic private sector and a strong and effective public sector. Far from being antagonists, the two sectors are complementary and mutually reinforcing. Only an entrepreneurial, competitive economy can generate the wealth needed to pay for a robust, well-functioning welfare state. Meanwhile, free markets work best when supported by a welfare state that regulates to align private profit-seeking with the public welfare, provides education and social benefits to lift up people’s capabilities, supplies market-enabling public goods like scientific research, and protects people from uninsurable hazards.
Once you break free of the stale divisions of this particular debate, you start to notice that many other policy debates are similarly foundering on false choices. This opens up the possibility of a broadly transpartisan position on the American political spectrum. This is not to be confused with simple bipartisanship, which takes the existing policy preferences of both sides as given and then searches for some difference-splitting compromise in the middle. Rather, the transpartisan approach takes seriously the values and interests of both sides, but then looks past current battle lines to devise policies that can appeal to progressives for progressive reasons, libertarians for libertarian reasons, and conservatives for conservative reasons. This is the ground that we seek to occupy at the Niskanen Center.
Going beyond our advocacy of a free-market welfare state, you can see this transpartisan approach in all of the policy work we do at Niskanen. Our distinctive contribution is to take what we consider to be the strongest ideas from the left and the right and then combine them into new policy solutions that hold the potential of breaking through old political impasses and delivering constructive change. On immigration, the left champions openness to new immigrants while the right calls for improved enforcement; we believe that progress on the latter is essential to securing the former. On crime, the left emphasizes the ills of mass incarceration while the right stresses the need to deter wrongdoers and keep people safe. Our work on criminal justice reform is based on the idea that swift, certain, and moderate punishment is a much more effective deterrent than spotty enforcement and draconian sentences; therefore, less crime and less punishment are compatible and even mutually interdependent. On regulation, we focus on the problem of the “captured economy,” taking aim at regulations that simultaneously undermine economic dynamism (opposed by the right) and exacerbate inequality (opposed by the left). And in the debate over climate change, we reject the widely assumed tradeoff between clean energy and economic growth; in our view, a well-constructed path toward decarbonization is key to ensuring long-term dynamism. We refer to our transpartisan stance as one of “bold moderation” – moderate in its willingness to look past partisanship in search of common ground, and bold in its recognition that big and deep reforms are needed to address the problems and exploit the opportunities before us.
In occupying and developing this new terrain on the ideological spectrum, we regularly work with libertarians, progressives, and conservatives to advance common policy positions. Accordingly, the project of this series of papers – to highlight what libertarians and progressives have in common and how they can learn from each other – is very much in sync with what we are trying to accomplish. But our ambitions are even larger: to articulate a new vision of politics and policy that is distinct from either libertarianism or progressivism, but influenced by both. Our ultimate goal, then, isn’t merely to get libertarians and progressives to work together, but to get them to abandon their old camps and join us under the banner of bold moderation.