Christopher Beam has a long feature in New York magazine on “The Trouble with Liberty,” that is, with libertarianism. I liked the piece, but then, I guess I’m disposed to like such pieces.
Radley Balko, a senior editor at the libertarian Reason magazine, is not. He’s upset that Beam wasn’t fair and balanced. Balko says Beam could have “provided sound critiques of libertarianism by asking prominent people on the right and left to explain the faults of libertarian approaches to various issues,” but he didn’t need to “step in and call the fight himself.”
Of course, stepping in and calling the fight yourself is known as opinion journalism. Both Balko and Beam, from what I know of their work, are opinion journalists. They’re allowed and supposed to have different opinions. Does Balko want other journalists policing the pages of Reason on the same terms that he’s policing New York?
But, Balko also suggests, the real problem with Beam’s piece is that he’s not entirely forthright about the fact that he’s doing opinion journalism. Balko says that Beam’s article is “a thrashing disguised as a primer.” Now, I won’t deny that, in the closing pages of his article, Beam takes issue with libertarianism more directly than he does in the beginning. But it’s pretty far-fetched to think that some innocent reader is going to think he’s reading straight journalism. First, the article is in New York magazine. Second, it’s entitled “The Trouble with Liberty.” And third, it’s filled from start to finish with a strong authorial voice. You’ll have to read it yourself to see the proof on that last count.
It seems to me that Balko’s protest doesn’t have to do with Beam’s article in particular, but with the general complaint that “it’s okay to step outside the boundaries of decorum and fairness to make sure everyone knows how nuts libertarians really are.” But Beam’s article hardly seems like foul play to me. It looks to me like Balko just doesn’t like being called nuts, which is an understandable but different objection.
By the way, if we actually want to talk about the substance of Beam’s piece, I thought a couple of the things he said about libertarianism were overly generous. For instance, he thinks the Constitution is a “libertarian document.” John Vecchione at FrumForum has a nice response to that one. Beam also buys into the idea that libertarianism “is more internally consistent” than either conservatism or liberalism. This is a pretty simplistic idea, which seems to arise from the consideration that, crudely speaking, libertarians want government to do next to nothing, whereas conservatives and liberals each want government to be particularly involved in certain domains of life (whether economic, international, or social affairs) but not others. But there need be nothing internally inconsistent about these approaches. Conservatives and liberals just need to find ways to distinguish the different domains from one another. Perhaps government is well-suited to perform only certain roles or tasks.