I was thinking today on libertarianism. If I were more pretentious and subsequently more obnoxious, I would say that I was thinking “On Liberty” today, but of course I wasn’t. Nobody who isn’t in a political thought class thinks “On Liberty” and then they only do it because they’re expecting a reading quiz. Usually we think of issues on liberty very selfishly, also, superficially. Am I able to smoke, can I buy a gun or liquor, how does your smoking/gun/liquor impede on my liberty?

I have always been very sympathetic toward the libertarian line of thinking. Thursday, I was re-reading P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores. As a work of humor it is timeless but as a political tome, it reads like a relic. The government that O’Rourke is ridiculing is one that simply doesn’t exist anymore. The whole world may not have changed because of 9-11, such a thing is impossible for us now to measure, but our government has certainly changed and this is likely at the expense of the individual.

Parliament was written in the early nineties when libertarianism was a predominant ideology within the Republican Party. The mantra then was that government wasn’t the solution to the ills of society but that in our culture the individual must be predominant in value over the collective. O’Rourke says clearly:

"This book is written, of course, from a conservative point of view. Conservativism favors the restraint of government. A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them. Also, conservativism is, at least in its American form, a philosophy that relies upon personal responsibility and promotes private liberty. It is an ideology of individuals."

This is not a conservative now. There is no mention of gays, abortion, terror or torture. Quite the opposite in fact. There is an emphasis on private liberty (right to privacy so vehemently opposed by religious fanatics) and restraint as well as the rule of law and the sanctity of the individual. It’s a weird combination of Emersonian Self-Reliance and John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism. It also reeks of the ghost of Tom Paine, “government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”

To O’Rourke, after the failure of the Great Society, where government had invested much and accomplished little, we needed to go back to basics. This new/old approach focused on the individual, gently guided by government in some cases, to improve their lot in life. In his book O’Rourke shows us the corruption in big government, the wastefulness, and how the earnest intentions of societal do-gooders from the 60’s failed. It is a political text intent on poking fun of fellow boomers and politicians while also espousing a more passive alternative of individual liberty. If government can’t solve our problems then who can? We can.

I loved this philosophy and I still do. It used to be a Republican ideology but it isn’t anymore. If you go to a Republican committee meeting you’ll hear some lip service for some of this but nobody takes it seriously. Our elected officials, who vote year after year to increase pork spending and the federal deficit, certainly don’t. Our president, who believes so strongly in the PATRIOT Act (never has there been a greater irony in acronym), torture, and federal intervention on lifestyle choices, surely doesn’t care for personal liberty. According to my exhaustive research in the parking lot of the local Sheetz, the only people left who openly toe the libertarian line are the gun nuts and chain smokers. People have a hard time listening to arguments, how effective they may be, from a person in sunglasses with a pistol on their belt and a heater in their mouth, smoking next to a propane tank outside of a gas station.

So have we reached a point where libertarianism is dead? If not dead, it is certainly archaic. As out Executive Branch of government continues its climb up the imperial ascendancy of Olympus, then we are left with a weak Congress content with expanding the role of a paternalistic and parasitic government in our society. Where is the individual in this? Our first great intellectual movement as a nation was rugged individualism. It’s a part of who we are as a collective society. Maybe its time we remembered it and got back to basics.