Comments Elsewhere

Punditus Maximus:

I’m sorry, but the libertarian failure to bolt the Republican Party during the Bush power abuses . . .

What about libertarians who were never in the Republican Party to begin with?

If you’re starting out by using the word “libertarian” to mean the smaller-government types and “fiscal conservatives” within the GOP, well, then, I agree that there is little or no consistent philosophy behind what those people say or do, other than apologia for a certain subset of actually-existing power structures (e.g. softer or harder versions of bail-out capitalism, American nationalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and law-‘n’-orderist violence against immigrants and minorities).

I would like it, though, if you recognize that other people might use the word differently, and, in particular, that many self-identified libertarians use it very differently from the way that you’re using it. Gracchus:

First, I’m talking about public perception by non-libertarians, here, not wonks or insiders. In other words, I’m talking about the people we see on TV, in newspapers, in books, in politics, in public protests, in the A-list blogosphere, in Pandagon’s comment section . . .

Why?

I mean, this is all very interesting as a discussion of, for example, why libertarians might have a public image problem among self-identified liberals and progressives. But the conversation began with some remarks that were supposed to offer insight into the motives behind libertarianism as a political movement, and it seems to me like if that’s the goal, then it would be far more useful to consider insiders’ perspectives on who the movement is and what they do then an impressionistic survey of what “public perception” (or the perception of liberal or progressive bloggers) indicates about a grab-bag of people who have nothing really in common even with each other (e.g. Lew Rockwell, Radley Balko, Bob Barr, the NRA, orthodox Objectivists, and nWo-conspiracy theory survivalists). I don’t expect people who aren’t libertarians to follow much, or to care much, about the different origins, or different views, or weird internecine feuds that go around within the libertarian movement, but I would suggest that not knowing about them will undermine the insightfulness of analysis about what libertarians as a group really care about or what motivates them. I mention this not only as a libertarian but also as a radical feminist — as someone, specifically, who’s spent more than enough time for one life trying to deal with the bizarre notions that people concoct about the motives, goals, and intellectual structure of feminism based on “public perception” and some random grab-bag of figures that happen to have popped up in the malestream media (say Gloria Steinem, Kim Gandy, Hillary Clinton, something they saw on TV once about the Miss America protests, and maybe something that they heard at a party once about a column that somebody once wrote about Catharine MacKinnon). Having tried to have these discussions in the past, I have invariably found that they tell you a lot more about TV, newspapers, books, political debate, and the A-list blogosphere than they tell you about feminism. And I think that the same is true of libertarianism.

As for my own list: you originally asked for “the most hardcore and prominent libertarians;” now you’re asking for “prominent mainstream representatives of more intellectually honest and broad-based libertarianism in the popular mind.” These seem to be different requests, since the first one stressed being ideologically “hardcore” and the second one now stresses being “mainstream,” even though the most mainstream views are typically quite different from the most “hardcore” views. Be that as it may, I would say that if you’re looking for representative examples of libertarianism, for the purpose of understanding libertarian motives (rather than, say, understanding the selection biases that determine which libertarians are most likely to get heard in public debate), I’d suggest some of the following: Will Wilkinson, Kerry Howley, Radley Balko, Lew Rockwell, Sheldon Richman, Roderick Long, Brad Spangler, Kevin Carson, Carol Moore, William Gillis, and, if we’re going to throw dead people into the mix, there’s also Karl Hess, Murray Rothbard, Bob LeFevre, Benjamin Tucker, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lysander Spooner, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and (God help us all) Ayn Rand. (I am not at all a fan of Ayn Rand, and I wish she were less representative of libertarian thought than she is, but if you think that she is narrowly concerned with economic issues to the exclusion of any other issues of social or cultural import, then I wonder how much of her work you’ve read.) Note that the people I named are all very different people, with very different takes on libertarianism and on broader cultural issues. Most of the ones I’ve mentioned are people I’d consider to be on the right side of the broader cultural and social issues that they write about; others I consider to be mixed bags at best or open enemies at worst (how bad Rockwell gets depends a lot on the subject that he’s writing about; one some subjects he can get very, very bad). Maybe some of these people don’t count as “prominent” or “mainstream”; I’m sure that several of them don’t count as “in the popular mind.” Many of them are prominent only among libertarians and are not known by much of anyone else; some of them are prominent only among certain groups of libertarians (e.g. most libertarian anarchists know something about Roderick Long, Lew Rockwell, and William Gillis; very few minimal-statists, Constitutionalists, or whatever know much of anything about any of them, unless they found out about Lew Rockwell through his anti-war work or his work in the Ron Paul campaign). But, again, if the discussion is about libertarianism rather than about the popular mind I’d question which selection criteria are the most relevant here — prominence and deference among libertarians, or prominence and deference among outsiders looking in. I certainly agree with you that if the contours of your experiences with self-identified libertarians are set by what you see in the mass media or on the blogs you read, then you’ll get a lot of people who are heavily focused on economics, maybe on civil liberties a little, and on not much of anything else. (For one thing, libertarian economists are some of the only libertarians whose views are ever printed in major newspapers or solicited by the television news; hence the outsize influence of, for example, Milton Friedman.) But I would like to suggest that there is more going on in libertarianism, as a political and intellectual movement, than what you are likely to see emphasized in the venues that you mention.

Gracchus:

The problem is, the most hardcore and prominent libertarians are so narrowly focused on the economic aspect that not only do they brush aside the social aspects as “nice to have, but not central,” but also their viewpoint that every bloody activity, including male-female relationships, is a financial transaction leads to some extremely misogynistic views.

Could you tell me who, specifically, you’re thinking of when you mention “the most hardcore and prominent libertarians”? (Obviously, I don’t need an exhaustive list, but some representative examples would help.) It’s easy to talk about your impression of amorphous groups, but I suspect that discussing specific people might be productive for mutual understanding. In part because I also suspect that your list of “the most hardcore and prominent libertarians” might be different from the list that people who are more directly involved in the libertarian movement would offer.