Judge Andrew Napolitano, who exemplifies left-libertarianism on many issues (not least immigration, civil rights law, etc), believes that freighting men with females in combat is a great step toward the ideal of judging individuals based on their merits and not their group.
To left-libertarians liberty is an abstraction. Apply it “properly,” and it will work everywhere and always. Enforced by the state, this egalitarian abstraction has culminated in the idea that women belong alongside men on the battle field. You know, only the right kind of women—the kind that is as physically able, and will not introduce sexual dynamics to what has been the business of brothers-in-arms since time immemorial.
A crucial difference between left libertarians and the Right kind (the paleolibertarian) is that left-libertarianism is egalitarian; its idea of liberty is propositional–a deracinated idea, unmoored from the reality of history, biology, tradition, hierarchy.
The paleolibertarian, on the other hand, grasps “Liberty’s Civilizational Dimension”; he understands that liberty cannot be reduced to the non-aggression axiom, and that it has a cultural and civilizational dimension.
A paleolibertarian gets that, as an arm of the state, the military is already manacled by doctrinaire mediocrity, multiculturalism, feminism, affirmative action (fem and other), and every postmodern pox imaginable. So now you want to further tweak it in this direction?
As Pat Buchanan puts it in his latest column (“Obama has hijacked the American Revolution”), “The freedom of all Americans to compete academically, athletically, artistically and economically must inevitably result in an inequality of incomes, wealth and rewards. Why? Because all men and women are by nature and nurture unequal.”
But not if liberals and left-libertarians can help it.
UPDATE (Jan. 28): Jack Kerwick writes on some of the Judge’s other left-libertarian positions:
The Judge eviscerated Arizona Governor Jan Brewer when she signed SB 1070 to help Arizonans deal with the ravages of illegal immigration that it had been suffering for years. And he also has never put up any kind of resistance to amnesty. Instead, Napolitano has remarked that if “our rights come from our Creator—as the Declaration of Independence declares,” then “how can they differ because of where our mothers were when we were born?”
With respect to the administration’s decision to lift the ban on women in combat, Napolitano claimed to be “thrilled.” While on a Fox News panel last week, the Judge noted what he perceived to be the irony involved in the fact that it is a “collectivist president” who has decided “that people should be judged as individuals and not as members of groups [.]” Napolitano lavished praise upon the President for relegating to the dustbin of history “the old military prejudices against…women,” ideas rooted, “not in facts,” but “often…in ignorance, bias and prejudice [.]”
This latest development, Napolitano believes, is a victory for liberty and individualism, for “each person in the military will [now] be judged for combat, leadership and command based on their skills and ability—not some group they are a member of based on the consequence of birth” (Emphasis added).
