4/11/2018 The Alternative to Ideology - Niskanen Center

OCTOBER 29, 2018

THE ALTERNATIVE TO IDEOLOGY

BY JERRY TAYLOR

When we launched the Niskanen Center in January 2015, we happily identi ed ourselves as libertarians.
Sure, we were heterodox libertarians, but there are many schools of libertarianism beyond those
promoted by Charles Koch’s political operations. The school we identi ed with was a left-libertarianism
concerned with social justice (a libertarian perspective that I’ve defended in debates with more orthodox
libertarians here and here). That worldview lacked an institutional voice in 2015. Our ambition was to
create a space for it and, in so doing, rede ne what it meant to be libertarian in the 21st century.

I have abandoned that libertarian project, however, because I have come to abandon ideology. This
essay is an invitation for you to do likewise — to walk out of the “clean and well-lit prison of one idea.”
Ideology encourages dodgy reasoning due to what psychologists call “motivated cognition,” which is the
act of deciding what you want to believe and using your reasoning power, with all its might, to get you
there. Worse, it encourages fanaticism, disregard for social outcomes, and invites irresolvable
philosophical disputes. It also threatens social pluralism — which is to say, it threatens freedom.

The better alternative is not moral relativism. The better alternative is moderation, a commodity that is
rapidly disappearing in political life, with dangerous consequences for the American republic.

My hope is that I might best convince you to leave ideology behind by holding up a mirror to an
ideological culture that is likely not your own — the world of libertarianism — and discussing the reasons
why I left it behind. I suspect that, for those who hold to an “–ism,” the ideological culture of my old world
doesn’t look too terribly di erent from your own.

I do not aim here to settle old scores or to criticize friends and former colleagues. After all, the beliefs
that I nd wanting today are the very beliefs that I myself held for most of my adult life. I simply mean to
put in stark relief the pitfalls of ideological thinking, to illustrate those pitfalls in the world I know best,
and to make the case for something better.

IDEOLOGY = MOTIVATED COGNITION

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The rst pangs of doubt about my old ideological
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to Ideology - Niskanen from my loss of faith in the case
against climate action. As I began to express doubts about the narratives o ered by climate skeptics, I
found it impossible to o er an argument that resonated with my libertarian colleagues. But just how,
exactly, does an ideological commitment to limited government, free markets, and individual dignity
inform an understanding of atmospheric physics or paleoclimate records? And what does libertarianism
have to contribute regarding the case for hedging against incredibly dangerous risks stemming from the
misuse of a common pool resource, such as the atmosphere?

Libertarians have nothing at all to contribute to the conversation about the science of climate change as
libertarians. They could, however, marshal ideological insights to suggest the best means of addressing
global warming if it indeed turns out to warrant a policy response (as I believe it does). For libertarians,
that could mean a carbon tax, but for other, more hardline libertarians, it could mean that greenhouse
gas emitters should be held liable for climate-related damages via common-law legal proceedings.

But my old colleagues at the Cato Institute (where I worked at the time) were not interested in engaging
in those “if/then” conversations. They were only interested in a ght to the death over climate science.
Carbon tax advocacy was removed from the institutional table in 2007 when my former colleague David
Schoenbrod used the institute’s byline in a Wall Street Journal op-ed suggesting a carbon tax, an act that
infuriated management and led to his resignation. The common law approach to address climate change
was rejected once and for all in 2010, when the Cato Institute led an amicus brief in American Electric
Power Company v. Connecticut, arguing that “it is unconstitutional for courts to make complex policy
decisions that should be left to the legislature — and this is true regardless of the science regarding
global warming.” Cato’s institutional position was thus adaptation (learning to live with warming), which
is only defensible if scienti c alarm over the risks posed by climate change is unwarranted.

This problem extended beyond the realm of climate change. Over and over again, libertarian friends and
colleagues were engaged in erce, uncompromising debate about empirical matters that had nothing to
do with libertarian principles or commitments. Is the Keynesian multiplier consequential? Is Thomas
Piketty correct that returns to capital are greater than the rate of growth? Do tax cuts pay for
themselves? A libertarian could take either side of those disputes without having to recant any of their
principles or fundamental beliefs. But to cross the party line on these or an ocean of similar empirical
matters was to risk unemployment.

The point is that what ideologues ercely believe about empirical arguments has little to do with their
ideological priors. It has to do with the policy implications of those empirical arguments given their
ideologically-driven preferences.

We should not shrink from the truth based on what that truth might mean for our pre-existing beliefs. I
know libertarians well and they tend to accept this in theory, but like all ideologues, they have di culty
accepting it in practice. Libertarians do not care for government because they believe it is inherently
coercive and destructive of individual liberty. Hence, they are highly motivated to dismiss arguments that
might suggest an important need for government, or evidence that o ers a cautionary warning about
the negative consequences that might follow from a curtailment of governmental power.

Reason, as David Hume famously noted, is a slave of the passions, and libertarian passions point in one
direction and one direction only: hostility to government. This passion is a powerful engine of motivated
cognition, which invariably leads to weak policy analysis and dogmatism.

PRINCIPLES, COME WHAT MAY

Some of my old colleagues maintained that their ideological commitments were anchored in moral
principle regarding how society ought to be ordered (for libertarians, “freedom, for good or ill!”). When
pressed, however, they usually conceded that they thought their ideological commitments would
produce better social outcomes, and that if that turned out to be false, they would have to reassess their
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principle must have good outcomes. As John Rawls once argued, any ideology that does not concern
itself with the real-world impact of its ideas on society is a thing of madness.

That madness, however, often arises in ideological communities because their attachment to principle is
so powerful that it becomes an end unto itself. For instance, in my old circles, libertarians will argue
passionately against the state but marshal little evidence about what sort of society might actually arise
in the modern world were the state to largely disappear. Perhaps the most impressive intellectual ever to
take up the libertarian cause — Robert Nozick — had absolutely nothing to say about that in Anarchy,
State, and Utopia (my bible for most of my adult life).

There is a good reason for this omission. Wherever we look around the world, when we see
inconsequential governments with limited power, as libertarians would prefer, we see “failed states.”
How much liberty and human dignity can be found there? Very little.

That, in fact, is the main point of one of the best contemporary rejoinders to libertarianism — Mark
Weiner’s The Rule of the Clan. Weiner’s argument is that without government, we don’t usually have
unconstrained freedom and autonomy. We have instead the rule of family, caste, church, criminal
syndicates, or any number of nongovernmental agents. Historically speaking, those nongovernmental
agents have done far more violence to individual liberty and autonomy than have modern welfare states.
The modern welfare state, Weiner argues, has tended to expand liberty by using its power to free people
from the oppression and deprivation that so often followed from the rule of nongovernmental actors.

How much liberty and human dignity can be found in the world where state power breaks down and is
overcome by private power? Very little. That point was well made in episode 23 of HBO’s The Sopranos,
wherein a man comes forward as a witness to a crime without knowing that it was committed by New
Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano. He sits in his living room reading Anarchy, State, and Utopia when his
lawyer calls to tell him that he has inadvertently put himself in the crosshairs of the ma a. Our
concerned citizen turns white, puts the book down, and frantically calls the police to retract his
statement. The message, echoed by political scientist Bo Rothstein, is clear: “In a ‘stateless’ Robert Nozick
type of society, where everything should be arranged by individual, freely entered contracts, markets will
deteriorate into organized crime and corruption.”

For ideologues, adequate concern about the real-world implications of their visions moving from
(beautiful) theory to (messy) practice is rare indeed.

THE LIMITED UTILITY OF PRINCIPLES

How should we interpret and apply our ideological principles? It is often far from clear. It turns out that
applying general nostrums in the real world is not such an easy task. Despite the fact, for instance, that
most libertarians o er principled objections to state-mandated racial preferences, one can also nd
libertarians repairing to those very same principles to defend a rmative action and reparations to
African-Americans. Despite the fact that most libertarians object to labor unions as coercive, socialist
enterprises, libertarian principles have also been marshalled to justify opposition to antilabor laws like
the Taft-Hartley Act and right-to-work statutes.  

Moreover, all libertarians agree that there are exceptions to their ethically-driven opposition to the use of
government coercion and force. If there were not, there would be no libertarians; there would only be
anarchists. But what are the scale and scope of those exceptions?

Once again, it is unclear. Some libertarians adhere to a version of the “night-watchman state,” which
o ers few exceptions to libertarian principles, while others endorse all kinds of exceptions. John Stuart
Mill’s On Liberty (a book celebrated as required reading in most of the libertarian world) includes clarion
calls for state action against social injustice. Plenty of in uential libertarian academics and public
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health care coverage, a universal basic income guaranteed by the state, and a number of other
progressive-friendly policies.

Debates within the libertarian community about how liberty should be understood, how liberty should
be applied, and how to adjudicate exceptions to the rule against the use of government force are erce
and unending. Internecine libertarian disputes in ame passions to the same degree as do disputes
between liberals and conservatives about the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Factionalism within the
libertarian world is rife and irresolvable because the principles themselves say less than you might think
about what public policy ought to be (a point made with great force by my colleague Will Wilkinson).

ONE PRINCIPLE TO ULE THEM ALL?

What I’ve lately come to appreciate is that marshalling libertarian principles (no matter how thoughtfully
or liberally considered) to referee public-policy disputes is di cult to justify in the rst place. Why, after
all, is liberty objectively more important than other considerations that millions of people in this country
hold dear, such as the pursuit of social justice, equity, community, virtue (“statecraft as soulcraft,” as
George Will once put it), pluralism, material well-being, or any number of concerns that animate people
in politics? Ideology is nothing if not the elevation of one particular concern as more important than
others. As Michael Oakeshott noted, however, “Obsession with a single problem, however important, is
always dangerous in politics; except in time of war, no society has so simple a life that one element in it
can, without loss, be made the centre and circumference of all political activity.

There is nothing wrong with policy advocacy that is informed by a commitment to principles. In fact, it is
almost impossible for us to do otherwise given that principles are the projection of personal values into
the political realm. Thinking about politics without principled considerations is to think about politics as
the exercise of power without moral limit.

But there is no obvious reason why we should hold one principle to be more important than any other in
nearly every single policy context. All of the worthy principles marshaled in American politics are
important, but some will be more important than others depending upon the circumstance. They cannot
all be fully realized at the same time with any given policy proposal. Ethically di cult trade-o s are
necessary, and those trade-o s must be transparently considered on a case-by-case basis. There is little
room for ideology in this undertaking.

There is a word for the monomaniacal pursuit of a single idea. And that word is fanaticism.

IDEOLOGY VS. PLURALISM

Even if you disagree and wish to hold fast to one principled concern above all others, you would still have
to confront the fact that your attachment to that primary concern — whatever it is — is largely personal
and subjective. I cannot, after all, objectively and conclusively demonstrate that you should care more
about individual liberty than other reasonable concerns. Brilliant philosophers and theorists have
disagreed with each other throughout the ages about which principles could best rule society, and
disagreement today among minds far more thoughtful than mine is as common as it has been since the
beginning of time.

Accordingly, any attempt to govern with an ideological compass runs aground given the extreme
unlikelihood that there will ever be a social consensus about which ethical principle should be rst
among equals in political deliberations. Ideological doctrinairism fails to acknowledge and respect the
pluralism of social and political life. It is pregnant with the prospect of political oppression, particularly
since the passions stirred up by monomaniacal moral or ethical commitments breed fanaticism,
Manichean thinking, and political extremism.  
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to promote human well-being (ideology as a pattern-recognition device), we run into di cult problems.
The incredible complexity of social and economic relationships, the heterogeneity of human beings, and
the ubiquitous and irresolvable problem of unintended consequences will frustrate dogmatic shortcuts
to problem-solving. Given our very human tendency to lter out information that does not comport with
our worldviews — and excessive attention to information that comports with the same — the more we
repair to our ideological lenses, the more distorted they become thanks to a spiraling process of
con rmation bias.

Most importantly, the defense of ideology as a lens for measuring policy e ects on well-being begs the
question of how, exactly, we should de ne human well-being in the rst place. An equity-grounded
ideologue will de ne it in one fashion, a utilitarian will de ne it in another, a libertarian ideologue in
another, a conservative ideologue in yet another, ad in nitum. In short, any ideological crusade is a
crusade of conquest by political force.

THE ALTERNATIVE TO IDEOLOGY: MODERATION

The problems I’ve identi ed in my old world are universal across the ideological spectrum. Ideology
corrupts caring, idealistic, educated, and intelligent people … and turns some of them into monsters.
Ideologies breed dogmatic thinking and lazy, decoder-ring policy analysis. They encourage motivated
cognition. They give birth to excessive certainty, crowding out healthy intellectual skepticism. They
moralize political con ict in an unhealthy fashion, yielding incivility, extremism, and social discord. They
ignore the complexities of the modern world. They threaten the pluralism that a (small-l) liberal society is
obligated to respect and defend.  

What is the alternative to ideology? There is no easy answer. Without some means of sorting through the
reams of information coming at us every day, we would be overwhelmed and incapable of considered
thought or action. Without any underlying principles or beliefs whatsoever, we are dangerously
susceptible to believing anything, no matter how ludicrous, and to act cruelly without moral constraint.
Yet any set of beliefs, if they are coherent, are the wet clay of ideology. Hence, the best we can do is to
police our inner ideologue with a studied, skeptical outlook, a mindful appreciation of our own fallibility,
and an open, inquisitive mind.

Politics and policymaking without an ideological bible is incredibly demanding. It requires far more
technocratic expertise and engagement than is required by ideologues, who already (they think) know
the answers. It also requires di cult judgments, on a case-by-case basis, about which ethical
considerations are of paramount concern for any given issue at hand, and what trade-o s regarding
those considerations are most warranted.

To embrace nonideological politics, then, is to embrace moderation, which requires humility, prudence,
pragmatism, and a conservative temperament. No matter what principles we bring to the political table,
remaking society in some ideologically-driven image is o the table given the need to respect pluralism.
A sober appreciation of the limitations of knowledge (and the irresolvable problem of unintended
consequences) further cautions against over-ambitious policy agendas.

This leaves us with modest ambitions, which will undoubtedly leave the idealist cold. But those ambitions
need not be trivial or rudderless. We are not cyborgs. Our ambitions will be driven by our principles,
which are idiosyncratic and weighted di erently by each of us. And while principles may be the wet clay
of ideology, they need not harden into walls. Those whose principles are strongly weighted in particular
directions might use “moderate” as an adjective. Those whose principles are more varied (like mine)
might use “moderate” as a noun.

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Intellectual
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to Ideology - Niskanen CenterBut it is compromise with a

purpose. “If moderates are sometimes prepared to sacri ce the better for what is decent,” argues
political scientist Aurelian Craiutu, “they do it in keeping with a larger goal, defending the pluralism of
ideas, principles, and interests essential to maintaining and nurturing freedom in modern society.”

Compromise, however, has limits. Compromise with theft, murder, slavery, or gross infringements on
human dignity is indefensible. As Martin Luther King wrote in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, we
do not want to adopt the position of the white moderate of the 1960s, “who is more devoted to order
than to justice; who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which
is the presence of justice.” Nor should we compromise with lying, the use of dubious means to achieve
commendable ends, or over matters of scienti c truth, or what is universally acknowledged to be beyond
dispute. Firm positions and tough stances are sometimes required. And when necessary, moderates
must have the stomach for a ght.

MODERATES & POLITICS

Moderation has a poor image in American politics. Sco ed at by politicians (“there’s nothing in the
middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos”), moderates have been nearly wiped out of
the Republican Party and are ercely scorned by a growing number of Democrats in that party as well.
Moderates are seen as shallow, milquetoast dealmakers, who stand for nothing save for giving o ense to
the fewest number of voters possible.

Few public intellectuals, for their part, y the banner of moderation or pay it much rhetorical heed. Moral
clarity, powerfully argued, is the currency of the intellectual realm (currency that I myself tra cked in for
a very long time and still struggle to put down). The low regard we have for moderation in public life
consequently fuels the ideological and partisan zealotry that is tearing this country apart.

But moderation has a noble pedigree. Many great presidents, such as George Washington, Abraham
Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, were moderates of their day. The two most
popular governors (by far) in the United States — Charlie Baker (MA) and Larry Hogan (MD) — are
moderate Republicans. And more voters identify themselves as moderates than as anything else. As far
as public intellectuals are concerned, the kind of moderation discussed here is central to the arguments
forwarded by Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Michael Oakeshott, Karl
Popper, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Judith Shklar, among others.  

The main challenge for moderates is the limited amount of connective tissue that binds them together.
How does one encourage rebellious minds whose only common denominator is a distrust of ideology to
huddle together for warmth and to act in their collective interest against genuine ideologues, who are
easily united by their causes and whose zealotry and passion is o the charts?

While that is a rich and interesting conversation for another time, the essential requirement now is to
identify a ghting cause that comports with the aims of moderation while energizing a large enough
subset of moderates to compel action. If moderates are not as passionate as ideologues, they will be
steamrolled in American politics. My colleague Brink Lindsey has a few ideas on that front (ideas derived
from the growing resurgence of interest in the political philosophy of republicanism) that will be
published in National A airs next month, so I invite you to stay tuned.

At this (rather late) point in my intellectual journey, I am of the same mind as the Italian political
philosopher Norberto Bobbio:

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4/11/2018 The Alternative to Ideology - Niskanen Center
There were only a few of us who preserved a small bag in which, before throwing ourselves
into the sea, we deposited for safekeeping the most salutary fruits of the European
intellectual tradition, the value of enquiry, the ferment of doubt, a willingness to dialogue, a
spirit of criticism, moderation of judgment, philological scruple, a sense of the complexity of
things. Many, too many, deprived themselves of this baggage: they either abandoned it,
considering it a useless weight; or they never possessed it, throwing themselves into the
waters before having the time to acquire it. I do not reproach them; but I prefer the company
of the others. Indeed, I suspect that this company is destined to grow, as the years bring
wisdom and events shed new light on things.

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