On July 25, more than four years after the emergence of COVID-19 and the authoritarian reaction to it by the state, the once-annual debate between the interns of the Cato Institute and those of the Heritage Foundation resumed. Two interns from each side, coached by two or three others of their number, took the floor to defend their cases, the libertarian-liberalism of Cato and the conservative-Trumpism of Heritage.

It was a splendid occasion, marked by courtesy on both sides, though spiced with some indignant eloquence and even occasional snark. If these young people are typical of the two movements, both will prosper. Perhaps a conclusion will emerge, which was the old program, blown to pieces by Trumpism, of a partial alliance between liberalism and conservatism. (It will be no surprise which conclusion a senior fellow at Cato would prefer. But let us be minimally fair.)

The Cato champions started with principles, which can be formulated as the Golden Rule of Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth supplemented by the version of Rabbi Hillel of Babylon—“Do not do unto others what you would not want done to yourself.” The two together are a loving liberalism of equality of permission.

Since colonial times, though, Americans have practiced a matched pair of angry anti-liberal replies. One of them, which the Heritage interns repeatedly charged libertarian-liberals of espousing, has been, “Don’t tread on me, because I can do anything I damned well please.” Bring my AK-47 to church, say. As the Good Book says, “Do unto others before they do it unto you.” The other pair of angry American replies to an amiable equality of permission—favored by the conservative debaters—has been since the Puritans, “But don’t do that”—where the “that” ranges from recreational drugs to second-trimester abortions.

True liberalism, though—as in the blessed Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Henry David Thoreau—is that equality of permission. It’s what my grandmother, born in the 1890s, used to say: “Do what you want, but don’t scare the horses.” It’s a true liberal bumper sticker.

As one of the Cato interns noted, the very debate was liberal—the back and forth of liberty of speech. Such debate does not fit very well with conservatism, in which faith is the alpha and the omega. Conservatives, therefore, have a hard time debating on points of fact or logic, though their two champions at the Heritage building were eloquent and quick. A true liberal notes that they turn too quickly to their faithful feelings: Don’t do that.

Part of the problem with a conservative versus liberal debate is that conventional politics has long depended on positing a left-right spectrum, from the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly in the early 19th century. It is supposed to characterize all political opinions. Admittedly, nowadays, the conventional spectrum is getting out of focus all over the place, in Britain and France and the United States, in favor of cultural warfare unpredictable from the old left-right ideologies. Yet most people still think that this spectrum is all you need to know about politics and keep forcing everyone to declare their place on it. For example, journalists of a certain age simply cannot think of Cato-style liberalism as anything but conservative. The conservative debaters know well that such a thought is false.

Every position along the conventional spectrum supposes that it is a fine idea to have a large and coercive state, larger and larger, more and more coercive. See any book by Daron Acemoglu. The only dispute is what or whom the state should coerce. In the old left-right disputes, the right wanted liberty for the boardroom yet wanted state coercion for the bedroom; the left the other way around. The middle wandered in between.

We true liberals at Cato live in a treehouse well above the spectrum, sending amiable messages down to our friends on the spectrum, saying that they might want to consider whether the state is too big, too coercive, or too careless of liberty. Consider again the authoritarianism of Anthony Fauci, which most people fell for—even, to my shame, me.

What became clear during the debate is that even in its most sophisticated form, the conservatism of Heritage is based solely on moral sentiments—what Leon Kass championed and Martha Nussbaum challenges as a politics of disgust. An analysis of homosexuality or transgender or of heroin or the welfare queen comes down to emotivism, a loudly expressed “yuck.”

True, David Hume noted that ethical convictions come from just such moral sentiments. The alleged logic is a secondary justification and comes after the fact. Yes, all right. But without secondary justifications, it’s hard to see how policy debates can proceed. If Heritage supports industrial policy, as the Heritage interns said, then in the absence of analysis—such as that any material down to pencil graphite goes into the supply chain of Chinese weapons and therefore needs policy and protection—the case amounts to “The Chinese: Yuck.” Hayek once remarked that conservatives can’t interact in a liberal way with people they disagree with. It’s not really a matter of argument. It reduces to dueling “yucks.”

The left, right, and middle, too, are enthusiastically statists, I say, very willing to expand the reach and power and sheer size of the state to accomplish their purposes—of virtue on the right and of equality on the left. Statism on the right is evident in Heritage’s recent slouch into Trumpism. The Trumpian tropes poured from the Heritage interns, such as that illegal immigrants bring crime. But at least then we go on to a serious analysis of what exactly would be wrong with much larger immigration. (Answer, based on history and the liberal logic of equality of permission and cosmopolitan ethics: nothing.)

On the matter of immigration, by the way, no one raised the question of why the international movement of people is such a special evil. Why should we not raise an alarm about the domestic movement of, say, alleged criminals from California moving into Texas? (Uh-oh: Better not give the governor of Texas that idea.) Both the left and the right think it’s a fine idea to restrict housing for poor people, and thereby radically restrict their movement, making it illegal to build apartment buildings in toney suburbs, say, or restricting the heights of buildings in London or San Francisco, or making rooming houses illegal by claiming that they are occasions for the sin of prostitution.

Astonishingly, Heritage has become so Trumpian that it approves of protection against international trade. Trade with China, Heritage says, is the moral equivalent of war. But war is the wealth of the (mega and MAGA) state. And blockades depend for their efficacy on a false vision of the economy as a machine, in which throwing a spanner into any part stops it cold. And of course, such a war, like most, hurts the aggressor as much as the defender.

Some of the older readers will remember the anti-Japanese scare of the 1980s. To protect Detroit workers against Toyota, the Federal government instituted quotas, raising prices of all cars at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars imposed on the US consumers for each job saved in Detroit.

Now the cry is against Chinese stealing intellectual property (IP). IP enriches lawyers most gratifyingly. Yet the other way of describing IP is speech, which we liberals believe should be free. In economic terms, an invention or idea for improvement has zero social opportunity cost from its inception. Mickey Mouse should be open to the use of all. Absurdly long patents and copyrights are another evil fruit of nationalism, as similar, state-sponsored monopolies once were of monarchy.

The one conservative argument that got some traction, articulated especially by a young woman on the Heritage side, was that libertarians-liberals don’t care enough about the family. “The fabric of society” was a parallel (and conservative) trope much heard at the debate, in support of traditional families and to be subsidized by the state. J. D. Vance has fallen headlong into very hot water recently, making such a case for moving back to the 1950s of Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Observe, however, that a “fabric” implies a weaver, and we are back to a constructivist, social-engineering premise, the defining characteristic of politics along the spectrum.

Democracy gives everyone the dignity of a vote, which is essential for an equality of permission. But, as many have noted, democracy also slides toward interventions to achieve an anti-liberal, and always ineffectual, equality of outcome, not of permission. H. L. Mencken observed that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard.” Beware the weaver of a social fabric, or you’ll get it good and hard.

The conservatives claim that they are taking the ethical high road. So do the progressives. All I can say is that we liberals really take it. All political theories, except true liberalism, treat citizens as children, which easily morphs into slavery. The right treats them as bad children who, for their own good, need to be policed, disdained, disciplined, and fooled. The left treats them as sad children who, for their own good, need to be policed, managed, subsidized, and fooled. The purpose of the state, according to conservatives, is to make people virtuous. The purpose, according to progressives, is to make them equal. True liberals reply that running the lives of adults is not the business of Congress or of the Harvard faculty. One of the Heritage debaters proposed “prudent protection” for strategic production against the Chinese. Does anyone here think that Congress is going to do anything “prudent”? True liberalism is a philosophy of realism that treats citizens as adults. It is the sole “adultism.”

The conservatives challenge true liberalism from “yuck” or “hurrah” about three items: (1) national security, hurrah; (2) drugs, yuck; (3) the 1950s family, hurrah. From these three comes their authoritarianism, their delight in pushing people around. I’ve never understood why people like to push other people around. I can’t understand how the state gets enough police and soldiers to do it. How, for example, does the policeman in Hong Kong go home at night to his apartment next door to the elderly couple whose grandson he has just beaten up? But my lack of understanding shows how naive I am. The state never had much trouble recruiting the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg to hunt down and murder Jews during the Holocaust.

“Virtue” is the conservative claim. A Heritage lad said straight out that “the purpose of the government is to regulate morality.” Good goal; wretched means. I say that virtue grows best when people have an adult liberty of the will, theologically speaking, and equality of permission to exercise their will, economically and spiritually speaking, subject to the equal permission of their fellows.

The conservative debaters kept coming back to the metaphor of “guardrails.” It’s like the metaphor used by the progressives against the liberty of trade, that “unfettered trade” has numerous “imperfections.” Consult Joe Stiglitz’s latest book. Why guards and fetters are such grand ideas applied to adults is left unsaid. After all, Quis custodies Ipsos custodias? Who guards the guards? On both the left and the right, it is assumed that the state is a good, wise, effective custodia. In Copenhagen, maybe it is, roughly speaking. But in New Orleans and Chicago? Moscow and Riyadh?

The debate lightning round, skillfully MCed, asked first about the problem of homelessness. The obvious and liberal solution is to build more houses against the illiberal policies of NIMBY-ism advocated along the spectrum. Listen to the messages from the treehouse.

But notice: The rhetoric of “problems” is inherently statist and anti-liberal. It arose in the early 19th century, just as liberalism was getting underway in some countries. Yet the only solver of problems in sight is lo Stato. And any adult knows that not all problems have a solution, and many of the problems arise from the attempts by the state to “solve” too many of them.

I say: Do what you want, but don’t scare the horses.