In ‘I Know a Bear’, a children’s book by Mariana Ruiz Johnson, a little girl listens to a bear tell her all about where he’s from, a place where “the breakfasts are sweet, the trails are lush, and the rivers are like bathtubs. It is a place both vast and wondrous.” At the end, you realize that the bear is sad because now he’s in a zoo and cannot go back to the land of the bears. And then, the little girl looks at her bird in its cage, sets it free, and says doing so “felt both vast and wondrous.”
In under 100 words, the book teaches a powerful lesson on kindness and humility. Rather than merely hearing the bear’s story and feeling sorry for the bear, she comes to understand that every creature denied freedom is a creature denied happiness. Furthermore, she realizes that if she really wants what is best for her bird, she can’t be in control, she has to allow the bird to write its own story.
These three concepts (kindness, humility, and a commitment to self-authorship) ought to be cornerstone emotions in our politics. Sadly, too often they are not. Neither of the two major parties practice these principles with any sort of consistency. There should thus be an opening there for an effective Libertarian Party. Instead however, the new Mises Caucus-led Libertarian Party is determined be at least as devoid of these political emotions as the the main parties, if not more so.
The Democratic Party’s kindness is -even by a generous reading- selective, paper-thin, and frequently drowned-out by rivers of envy and outrage. The Democratic Party’s humility is non-existent. Elizabeth Warren’s ‘I’ve got a plan for that’ schtick is emblematic of just how deeply many Democrats believe that everything would great if only they were in charge of everything. Meanwhile, their constant insistence that experts be deferred to shows the extent to which they believe that they know what is best for people better than those people themselves do. And so, Democrats in many ways will not let people write their own stories. ‘No, you can’t build a house there.’ ‘No, you can’t open that small business without filling out 900 forms and getting the permission of the other people and businesses in the area.’ ‘No, you can’t go the school of your choice; you have to go to the one where you live.’ ‘No, you can’t import that kind of European baby formula; it has slightly different label.’ On and on. Between the red tape, the technocracy-worship, and the confiscatory populism, the Democratic Party just cannot plausibly claim to be a party emotionally driven by kindness, humility, and a commitment to self-authorship.
The Republican Party is just as bad or worse along every dimension. Donald Trump bathed in anti-kindness. The thing that he did that made him so beloved by the Republican base is that he told them that he was going to be relentlessly cruel to their enemies, and they ate it up. George H.W. Bush called for a kinder, gentler America. If a candidate in the 2024 Republican primary says that on stage, they are likely to get booed. It is difficult to imagine even people who vote Republican describing the Republican Party as a kindness-oriented party. This anti-kindness is married to a social conservatism and a nationalism that champions big government overriding people’s individual preferences whenever and wherever they consider those preferences to be too libertine, too progressive, or too cosmopolitan. Like the Democratic Party, the Republican Party cannot plausibly claim to be a party emotionally driven by kindness, humility, and a commitment to self-authorship.
There should be an opening there for an effective, popular Libertarian Party that really does walk the walk on these three values, a party that looks every American in the eye and says ‘we love you, we accept that you know what is best for you, and we are committed to you being able to write your own story.’ This past weekend, the Mises Caucus took control of the Libertarian Party. They’re not going to do any of that. They revel in performative meanness, think earnestness is cringe, haven’t the first inkling of humility, and are fine with enormous curtailments of self-authorship if that self-authorship is coded as ‘woke.’ One of their first acts was to remove language from the party platform saying “we condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” They oppose the idea that the 14th Amendment means that state and local governments have to respect the Bill of Rights, a position that is essentially indistinguishable from segregationists’ states’ rights arguments from half a century ago. They’ve said that “it’s time to rethink Hitler.” They’ve advocated for the abolition of child labor laws and doubled down after Gary Johnson, the most successful Libertarian Party presidential candidate ever, called them out on it. They’ve said "John McCain's brain tumor saved more lives than Anthony Fauci." They’ve gracelessly compared private businesses’ COVID-safety measures to racially-segregated water fountains from the Jim Crow South. On MLK Day, they said "America isn't in debt to black people. If anything it's the other way around." These are small, petty, stink-bomb throwing sorts of people. These are the kinds of people who would, after hearing the bear’s story in that children’s book, tease the bear and think it was funny and mock freeing the bird as ‘virtue signaling.’
Where those of us committed to a politics of kindness, humility, and self-authorship go is unclear. The Republican Party has no place for us. The new Mises Caucus-dominated Libertarian Party does not deserve our support and doesn’t want us around anyway. Consistent political independence is an option. I can easily see many Reason Magazine and Cato Institute libertarians taking that approach. Another option, one that I think is probably the most fruitful, is to be Neoliberal Project Democrat and try to drag the party in a pro-market direction. The emerging concept of an Abundance Agenda might be a nice way to sell that.
Though the institutional challenges are formidable, it remains the case that a libertarian-informed centrism that’s comfortable with both markets and with social progress holds out great promise for building a country where there can be 330 million successful pursuits of happiness, a country where the politics are guided by kindness and humility rather than vindictiveness and a thirst be in charge, a country where 330 million people get to write their own stories, a country both vast and wondrous.