Moderation to fix what ails libertarianism

What's the matter with libertarians? You'd think that being able to appeal to people on the left, right, and center with principled support of a broad array of issues would make libertarians popular (and useful!). But they aren't, and it seems that a special kind of hatred and disgust is reserved for libertarians by the more activist partisans on the Left and Right. I think it comes down to ideology for the hated and the hater both.

Jerry Taylor at Niskanen Center digs in from a slightly different perspective. He diagnoses ideology as problematic, primarily because it encourages motivated cognition and prevents people working together to get stuff done. He calls for moderation. I don't like that word in this context, and I'm struggling to understand why. It's not that I'm against moderation per se. I just don't see it as much of a grounding philosophy as, say, balancing open mindedness with skepticism.

Adhering to a directional libertarianism can be a moderating influence on one's thinking and actions. If some policy moves in the direction of greater freedom, then it just might be OK to support it, even if it's not full-on anarcho-capitalism or whatever. As much as folks like to harp on the socialists who bleat real socalism has never been tried, well you get similar bleating about all sorts of Utopian if-onlys from libertarians, too. I'll take universally honest cops as a goal rather than no cops at all.

I guess there is no single word that combines pragmatism, justice, skepticism, and empiricism. Justice has to be in there, because without it, it sounds a lot like science, but that's not right. It's not a problem science can solve.

Taylor's piece is a compelling whole, which he finishes with a beautiful quote from Norberto Bobbio:

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 inquiry, 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.

Love that.