Comments Elsewhere

Jill,

It’s not just me, personally. I may be an ultra who enjoys quibbling about definitions and calling out other libertarians on questions of doctrinal purity, but the views that Coulter spends her time endorsing are outside of, indeed directly contrary to, the views espoused by anything that could plausibly count as a mainstream of American libertarianism. I can’t find much love for Ann Coulter at Reason, or from Radley Balko, or from the Libertarian Party. (Fun fact: back in 2000, Coulter briefly tried to use the Connecticut LP as a platform from which to run as a spoiler candidate against liberal Republican Chris Shays. The state party rejected her candidacy, on the grounds that, well, she wasn’t a libertarian, and refused to endorse either libertarian positions or LP candidates. Coulter responded by writing a nasty little screed against libertarianism. This was back when she was mainly just grousing about the Clinton impeachment and the Evil Liberal Media, before she had even launched into doing the bomb-the-world/Ihre Papiere Bitte shtick full-time.) Based on my experience with quite a few libertarians, I think it would be pretty accurate to say that the typical American libertarian finds Coulter to be perfectly despicable.

There may very well be some people calling themselves “libertarians” who like Ann Coulter, or who endorse the views that she expresses in her columns. There may even be “hundreds” or “thousands” of them, what with 300,000,000 people in the country. (Although, again, it would help to name names and point to specific views.) But in any case there are also probably hundreds or thousands of people who call themselves “feminists” and embrace Christina Hoff Sommers. But we know something about what “feminism” actually means, and about what the feminist movement has historically stood for, and what the mainstream of people in the feminist movement actually think. It would be grossly unfair to make blanket claims about feminism simpliciter on the basis of what Christina Hoff Sommers-embracing, self-declared “equity feminists” go around saying and doing.

I don’t think people who nod along with squarely anti-libertarian positions usually count as libertarian. They may call themselves that; hell, Glenn Reynolds thinks he’s a libertarian. But calling yourself a libertarian is not the same thing as being one. And those who, like Coulter, rabidly endorse imperial wars, a domestic police state, Berlin border-crossing policies, and the rest, are pretty far outside the mainstream of libertarianism.

Similarly, when Phyllis Chesler blogs at Pajamas Media or publishes tracts with endorsements from David Horowitz, I don’t take this as a reason to make blanket claims that Coulter or Horowitz or the rest of the bomb-the-world crowd are saying what a lot of feminists think, deep down.

I also don’t think that libertarianism is a branch of conservatism. If one actually tries espousing libertarian positions at a conservative event (e.g. decriminalizing drugs, completely open immigration, abortion on demand), one will find out pretty quickly how much libertarians get embraced by conservatives.

As nuts as she is, Coulter is embraced by mainstream conservatives. She is regularly invited to speak at conservative conferences, and she goes on TV representing her movement. It’s easy to write her off as a fringe wacko — and she is a wacko — but she’s saying what a whole lot of Republicans and Libertarians are thinking.

Did you have any particular libertarian in mind when you wrote this?

Most libertarians that I know don’t often find themselves nodding along with anti-choice, anti-immigration, war-mongering, police statist demagogues.