“The Nationalist Threat to Liberty” – My Final Contribution to the Liberty Fund Symposium on “The Legacy of David Boaz”
The Liberty Fund symposium on “The Legacy of David Boaz” – prominent libertarian thinker and longtime Cato Institute leader – has now concluded. There were initial essays by five participants – Andy Craig, Tarnell S. Brown, Aaron Powell, Jonathan Blanks, and myself. Each participant has now also posted two response essays. My final response essay is entitled “The Nationalist Threat to Liberty.” Here is an excerpt:
Once again, I have few disagreements with the other contributors to the symposium. So I will take this opportunity to draw out a few common themes, and their implications. As before, a common theme of the various contributions is the need to extend liberty to all, without arbitrary exclusions based on factors like race, immigrant status, gender, sexual orientation, and the like.
In one of his response essays, Tarnell Brown mentions the Marquis de Lafayette as an example of the cosmopolitan nature of the struggle for liberty, and how immigrants and foreign allies contributed to the founding and growth of America. It’s worth noting that, in addition to fighting for liberty in the American Revolution, Lafayette was also a longtime advocate of the abolition of slavery who unsuccessfully urged George Washington and other Founding Fathers to do more for that cause. Lafayette understood that liberty must be extended to all, regardless of race and ancestry. So should we.
Another, at least implicit, common theme, is the menace to liberty posed by the resurgence of illiberal and authoritarian nationalism. This is most obviously true in the cases of nativist and xenophobic attacks on immigration and trade, and Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine (motivated primarily by Russian nationalist imperia
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