This reason.tv video, about the charming old guy who owns Anchor Brewing Company and the recent increase in craft breweries in the US, kind of indirectly got me thinking about an issue upon which I break off from many members of libertarian-of-center ideological communities.

The charming old guy in question, Fritz Maytag, proclaims at one point that he is an exceptionalist: he views the American story as particularly amazing, inspiring, and beautiful. He’s a hardcore patriot. This attitude is quite widespread in this country (especially in rural areas, but just about everywhere, really), and perhaps even abroad as well, but I’m going to argue that it’s not an attitude that a libertarian ought to have.

Above all else, a libertarian ought to care about liberty, and the principles of liberty. It doesn’t matter how you cobble together your principles, from which Hayek, Mises, Rand, Rothbard, Friedman, or Locke text (or even from none of them, like me); as long as they are principles of liberty, you are a libertarian. In the words of Omar from The Wire, “a man got to have a code.” I described mine this way in a post I wrote in February about foreign policy & libertarianism:

I don’t believe governments have the right [emphasis added] to intervene in any individual’s free actions, ever. I believe every individual ought to be free to act; I believe the law ought to codify as crimes [those] actions freely committed by individuals which deny other individuals’ freedom; I believe the government ought to enforce the law by restricting the freedom of guilty individuals, but only to the extent absolutely necessary to preserve the freedom of other individuals [in the future]. […] Implicit in this belief system is that one of the freedoms guaranteed to individuals is the freedom to commit crimes. If and when they are committed, the individual faces punishment by the government.

That, in a paragraph, represents the core of my views on the proper role of government in human life, one that emerges from my moral philosophy, my code: that all self-conscious beings capable of acting ought to be free to act. (This is the moment when a bunch of practical questions scamper out from behind the couch, but just do your best to ignore those for now.)

And so I ask all libertarians this: why, from our perspective, is the American story so amazing, so beautiful, so inspiring?

Undoubtedly anyone who has attended a public school or a patriotic private school can explain with gusto that the principles of freedom and liberty are in our nation’s founding documents, that they are our national creed. But have the actions of the US government since Independence, often with the unanimous support of the polity, really preserved the freedom and liberty of individuals? (Do I really need to mention Indian removal and slavery? Or our numerous imperial impositions of military force and wars of aggression against other nations? The near constant government impositions upon the free market? The utterly selective and unprincipled applications of the law by our courts? The fact that we imprison more human beings — literally removing their freedom to act — than any other nation in the world, many of them for victimless crimes, some for no crimes at all? The fact that our executive branch today has the legal right to kill without trial? And on, and on, and on.)

In short, I’d argue that while the principles of freedom and liberty have always been in our government’s lexicon, they have not, in general, guided its behavior. We have a market freer than many other nations, yes. Individuals here can speak and assemble more freely than many other nations, yes. But the exceptions to those two generalizations from our past should never be forgotten, and they ought to help us guard against such exceptions in the present and future. Paradoxically, these exceptions reveal that the United States as a nation is not exceptional.

Nationalism is always the enemy of liberty, even when that nationalism is articulated in terms that deify liberty. Moreover, a nation is an exceedingly complex thing. It’s a multitude of individuals doing good things, doing bad things, doing mediocre things, living and dying and working and sleeping and fucking and going to the bathroom and watching sports and doing drugs and eating. That’s true of every nation. When a value judgment is made about a nation as a whole, it’s almost always a lie designed to serve the interest of someone powerful in that nation or another nation.

The incomprehensible complexity of nations, of human beings, is precisely the reason that I’m a libertarian. I’m skeptical that anyone can control us, and I’m skeptical that anyone can understand what’s best for us. Since no one can, the rule ought to be that no one has the right to. But to claim that the American story is exceptional, to claim that America is exceptional, is to claim that you are omniscient. It’s to lie, which you shouldn’t do on principle, but which you also shouldn’t do as a libertarian for the practical reason that you’re spreading a lie that helps justify some of the worst, most freedom-denying actions of the government.

Exceptionalism is a form of nationalism, and nationalism is the tool of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism and libertarianism are incompatible. Thus, libertarians should not be exceptionalists. Let that syllogism be your guide in an increasingly authoritarian US political sphere.

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