When Libertarians get lost.
I very much admired Reasonette Stephanie Slade’s recent take on the “postmodern right”, J.D. Vance and the Politics of Victimhood, which, like the postmodern left, believes that “power” should be pursued and exercised without regard to any supposed “rules” or “laws” of morality or justice, which are merely hypocritical constructs that have no ground in “reality”. The article is adapted from her new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, and you can watch her rapping with fellow Reasonette Nick Gillespie in the video posted above, “explaining” how the “Classical Whig” laissez faire economics of Adam Smith and Frederick Hayek and the “traditionalist” fustian of long-time non AV fave rave Russell Kirk, as blended together into a fusionist mess by logorrheic night owl Frank Meyer, a long-time editor for the National Review whose weekly effusions I found entirely unmemorable as a youth, still provide a reliable guide to political thought and behavior in this “unfortunate” time. I confess that I haven’t watched the video (I am a confirmed textualist), but I have read the first two chapters of Stephanie’s book and, based on that limited evidence, I think more of Stephanie as a reporter than as a scholar/thinker.
Fusion strikes me as little more than a rehash of the contents of a number of books on “Conservatism,” which I have already “blasted” in a very long post, The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? Part II Part 2: Matthew Continetti and The Right. Stephanie seems distressingly content to skate along the surface of things rather than digging a little deeper. She begins with a discussion of the founding of the Mount Pelerin Society back in 1947, omitting the “interesting” fact that the name of the society was adopted to conceal the fact that they couldn’t agree on a “real” name. The “John Locke Society”? Not quite. The “Adam Smith Society”? Guess not. The “Edmund Burke Society”. Seems a little off. The “League of Militant Capitalists”? A bit over the top.
There are also some amusing omissions when it comes to her discussion of uber-libertarian Frederick Hayek. When Hayek addressed the nascent society at its first meeting, he warned that in post-war Europe, “the belief is becoming more and more widespread that, if things are to get done, the responsible authorities must be freed from the fetters of democratic procedure.” Funny that in 1978 Hayek wrote a letter to the London Times saying that “In modern times there have been many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was much safer than under many democracies.” He went on to claim that “I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.”
There is a bit of a “bunny in the hat” trick going on here. Note that he didn’t say that “personal freedom was great” under Pinochet; only that it was “much greater” than under Allende, and even that is a stretch, unless you were the owner of a copper mine, which was, in fact, the kind of person that Hayek tended to hang out with. Perhaps Hayek was unaware that Pinochet’s regime was estimated to have killed over 3,000 people, imprisoned over 35,000 for political purposes, torturing many of them, and driven over 200,000 into exile. The dead are never very talkative, and I’m guessing the good Dr. Hayek didn’t spend much time in Chilean prisons. In fact, Hayek often “mused” over the possible necessity of a dictatorial government to “ram through” the appropriate, though politically unpopular, free market measures, after which democratic governing processes could safely be instituted, apparently under the assumption that there would be “so much winning” that no support for collectivist measures would ever emerge, which seems “optimistic”, not to say “simplistic” to me.
Hayek warned endlessly of the dangers of “planned societies” where government was responsible for “everything”—“When we have to choose [for example] between higher wages for nurses or doctors and more expensive services for the sick,” government necessarily becomes oppressive. Yet in 1973, Hayek, aged 74 and recovering from gall-bladder surgery, responded to an invitation from Charles Koch (yeah, that Charles Koch) to become “distinguished senior scholar” at the Institute for Humane Studies in Menlo Park, California by saying that he’d make the trip if he could be sure about receiving adequate health care. Koch had his people investigate getting private health insurance for Hayek and was told that the cost would be prohibitive. But there’s a happy ending! Hayek had taught for years in the U.S. and qualified for both Social Security and Medicare! Problem solved! Love that Medicare! This is a true story, but I guess Stephanie hadn’t heard it. (NOTE: the story is behind a paywall at the Nation, and Reason may not have a subscription.)
But my biggest complaint re Hayek and Slade’s treatment of him is his famous concept of “spontaneous order”. Slade tells us that
It is not hard to see the similarities between [Adam] Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand,” for instance, and Hayek’s notion of “spontaneous order”—the discovery that “many of the institutions on which human achievements rest,” from markets to languages to cultural norms, “have arisen and are functioning without a designing and directing mind.”
However, it is also not hard to see that Smith’s beloved “invisible hand”, in Smith’s own time (The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776), only functioned in the fortunate countries on either side of the English Channel. Where was the invisible hand in the Ottoman Empire? In the Manchu Empire? In India? In Africa? In fact, the preconditions for the invisible hand/spontaneous order so treasured by the libertarians were the result of the confluence of a wide variety of geographic, historical, and cultural factors that could easily have not occurred—not, at least, in the manner in which they did occur—leaving “civilization” stuck in the era the old “classical” slave-and peasant-based empires of Rome, the Middle East, India, and China “forever”, a “spontaneous order” indeed, but not one to Hayek’s or Smith’s or Slade’s (or my own) liking—omething I have discussed at idiosyncratic length in a post wittily titled, Yeah, I flunked Econ 101! What’s your point? Human beings exist as a result of “spontaneous order”, but if the Chicxulub Impactor hadn’t spontaneously aced the dinosaurs, we probably wouldn’t be here. There’s nothing inevitable about either capitalism or humanity, even though I’m fond of both.
Slade also talks quite a bit about noted John Calhoun fanboy Russell Kirk, notoriously the author of The Conservative Mind, a book I heartily ridiculed ten years ago in my old “Literature R Us” blog as “The Conservative Mind” turns sixty! (Sound of one hand clapping) for the “traditionalist” leg of her stool, which, by my count at least only seems to have two legs. In my liberal opinion, any movement that takes Kirk seriously is in serious trouble, because in his book Kirk makes the happy discovery over and over again that every great conservative thinker thinks—wait for it—just like Russell Kirk!
Anyone so unfortunate enough as to be familiar with Kirk’s work knows that his demigod is Edmund Burke, who Kirk, in my liberal opinion, seriously and conveniently misunderstands. If you want my “deconstruction” of Kirk’s unconscious and unimaginative Burkean construct, follow the link above.
The glory days of the fusionists came, of course, during the 1980s, when Margaret Thatchet and Ronald Reagan broke the power of the old industrial unions, ushering in a new era, and a new kind, of prosperity, while dismantling the Soviet Union and tossing the entire Marxian playbook into the ashbin of history. Not bad for eight years work!
Unfortunately for themselves, the Thatcher-Reagan fusionists triumphed their way out of relevance. Having done all they could do, having answered all the questions for which they had answers, no one needed them anymore. In the U.S. in particular, the Reaganite Republican Party fell to pieces with astonishing speed. The efforts of Bush père et fils to reinvent the Cold War, combined with a domestic policy founded on tax cutting as an end in itself, led to an astounding string of multiple disasters—principally 9/11 and the 2008 recession—that probably could not have been avoided entirely but could have been mitigated considerably by an absence of Bushian hubris, for which we continue to pay the price.
Even though many of its preconceptions are woefully outdated. here is much to admire in Reason. It is, surely, one of the few outposts of “meaningful” libertarianism left, for which “crime” they are frequently denounced as “communists” by True-Trumping fanboys, who sadly seem to form the majority of “libertarians” these days. By and large, Reasonettes still believe in such things as “progress”, “free markets”, and “free speech”, which fewer and fewer Americans bother to take seriously anymore. But Reasonettes have also displayed some seriously disappointing shortcomings, shorcomings that in the age of Trump grow increasingly unattractive. They cling pathetically to pre-conceived notions about “human nature” handed down by Adam Smith, who took most of his notions of human nature from his own reflection. They have failed to draw any lessons from the Great Recession, including the remarkable fact that it was “solved” by essentially Keynesian methods. Why, that can’t be true! Because if it is, we’re idiots! And it has taken them 10 long years to recognize the fact—the fact that was “obvious” to anyone whose eyes were not blinded by cant—that on the day Trump rode down the golden escalator here was a man without shame, without virtue, and without honor, an amoral monster the like of which the United States of America had never seen. And we are only beginning to pay the price. And libertarians, by and large, stood aside and did nothing.
Afterwords: Spontaneous Order with just a seasoning of genocide
The Sept. 7, 2026 issue of Reason contains a “nice” piece by Katarina Hall, Who Owns California's Gold?, explaining how, when California was no longer a part of Mexico but not yet a state within the U.S., hungry prospectors for gold worked out a reasonably effective set of rules for dealing with prospecting and property—“spontaneous order” at its finest, one might say.
But there is something “missing” from the piece: the Native Americans who had been living in California for thousands of years. In a “more in sorrow than in anger” message to the newly minted California legislature in 1851, newly minted Governor Peter Burnett, asking the legislature to fund militia campaigns against the Indians, “explained” the situation:
The two races are kept asunder by so many causes, and having no ties of marriage or consanguinity to unite them, they must ever remain at enmity. That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expectcd. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.
So, spontaneous order, sure, but with a little hot lead to back it up!
