Left-Libertarianism

I've got an upcoming piece in the YDN about how the Democrats can reconstitute themselves as a majority party. I'll wait until it comes out to post any excerpt, but I will say that my principle thesis is that the Democrats have to---i.e. will fold as a party if they fail to---adopt a left-libertarian ideology in place of traditional liberalism (and neo-liberalism).

What is left-libertarianism exactly? I might go ahead and call it true libertarianism. As I discussed the issue in this post from October, it seemed to me that there was a huge conceptual error in most of the literature on libertarianism. As a result of this error, libertarians tend to gravitate towards the Republican party (or perhaps Republicans make use of this error in order to justify calling themselves libertarians).

The problem is this: there are two principles in the literature which are maddeningly confused. The first is state-minimization, the second is liberty-maximization. It's just a brute pre-supposition of most libertarian theorizing (and if you've ever had a discussion with a right-leaning libertarian, you know what I mean), that the former principle is equivalent to the latter. I think it's self-evidently true that they are not equivalent; indeed, once one puts the distinction into language, the error itself becomes transparent.

Nevertheless, the standard libertarian discourse goes on simply assuming that curtailing government spending is equivalent to expanding freedom. The left libertarian discourse, once it gets started, will initially devote itself to fleshing out that theoretical gap. Much more soon about ideology and strategy going forward.