Punditus Maximus:

That’s not a ton of movement away from President George W. Bush toward the Libertarian Party there.

As if the only options of which libertarians might partake were (1) voting for the Republican presidential candidate or (2) voting for the Libertarian Party candidate. In 2000, I voted for Ralph Nader; in 2004, I voted for John Kerry, and in 2008, because I had given up on both third-partyism and lesser-evilism and, in fact, electoral politics as a whole, I voted for nobody at all. In fact, many libertarians reject electoral politics and don’t vote. None of this, by the way, has to do with insisting that I am (or that other non-GOP-voting libertarians are) the One True Libertarian; it has to do with the fact that you made a blanket statement about libertarian political behavior which actually has nothing to do with the political behavior of many actually-existing libertarians. If you want to sit around and complain about so-called libertarian GOP voters, feel free to do so — I do so all the time, and, hell, I also complain about most so-called libertarian LP voters. But don’t pretend as if this is a meaningful indictment of libertarianism as a philosophy, or the libertarian movement as a whole.

Apparently, once Bush was off the ballot, the Republican Party became significantly less attractive to libertarians.

Actually third party vote totals are affected by a lot of different things, including the fact that absolute number of votes for all parties tends to rise from one election to the next (since the total voting population is constantly growing). It’s also dramatically affected by the peculiarities of the candidate in any given year (Badnarik was a much less competent campaigner than either Browne or Barr), by how many other prominent third party candidates are in the race, by how close the general election is likely to be (slam-dunk elections tend to favor third party candidates, since fewer people are worried about trying to tilt the outcome for their less-hated big party candidate), etc. In percentage terms, Barr’s miserable failure in 2008 was about equivalent to Harry Browne’s miserable failure in 1996; the difference in the interim had little to do with some special fondness for George W. Bush and his “compassionate conservatism” or bomb-the-world antics, and a lot to do with a bunch of minor factors that can have little effects that seem large only because we are dealing with such a small number of voters to begin with.

Punditus Maximus:

There will never be a free market, ever, since one basic assumption of a free market is of participants each with an infinite quantity of information and infinite computation time. Said persons are also perfectly aware of future events (or their probabilities) and are never at any time liquidity constrained. Seriously, the economic models of free markets require this. . . .

No, they don’t. You seem to be confusing the neoclassical general-equilibrium analysis (especially modeling of markets under the ideal conditions of so-called “perfect competition) with free market economics. But these are two separate topics: freed-market economics per se are not the same thing as perfect competition or general equilibrium modeling. Some free market economists make use of the neoclassical modeling; but many, notably those associated with the “Austrian School” in economics, do not, and in fact specifically criticize that kind of idealized reasoning about competitive markets as some sort of frictionless plane. For a broad overview, you might read over the essays in the Austrian School section of David Prychitko’s Why Economists Disagree. In fact, if you look at Mises’ and Hayek’s work on the role of price as a decentralized information network, or Israel Kirzner’s work on entrepreneurship, you’ll find that Austrian economists (typically among the most radical of free-marketeers) generally think that the facts of imperfect information, limited time, and uncertain futures are central to the case for economic freedom (because knowledge problems are inherent in any form of resource allocation, and because the decentralized, trial-and-error processes of the market provide a way to move ahead in spite of uncertainty and ignorance, in ways that centralized bureaucratic planning, which depends on an unrealistic faith in the capacity to discover and aggregate information about people’s wants and needs, cannot).

Libertarians are people who believe that these assumptions could under some circumstances be valid.

If your notion of libertarianism is such that Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard wouldn’t count as a libertarian, then your notion of libertarianism probably needs to be revised.

Gracchus:

No, she’s offering insights into what attracts misogynists and her patented NiceGuys® . . . to the prevalent mainstream form of economics-focused libertarianism.

Just so we’re clear, besides being a radical feminist I have also been corresponding with Amanda since she was at Mouse Words. You don’t need to spell out basic terminology for me.

That said, I do not think it’s at all obvious that a statement like this:

Even libertarianism doesn’t really function without anxious masculinity to fuel it, and Ayn Rand knew it and used phallic fantasies to lure in her followers.

is in fact a statement about libertarianism as publicly perceived rather than a statement about libertarianism as internally understood. If it is, then, again, it seems to me that there’s a basic problem in trying to figure out what “fuels” libertarianism based on public perception and that insiders’ understandings of the movement are, in fact, more useful than “public perception” in figuring that out. You, of course, have been clear that you’re talking about “prominent” libertarians throughout; but “prominent” is not a univocal term.

If you want to say that there are lots of self-identified libertarians with a superficial understanding of libertarianism, and those people are often exclusively concerned with a specific range of economic issues, to the exclusion of other important social and cultural issues, then I’d agree with you. I complain about and argue with them all the time. This certainly justifies a claim about “libertarians I see on the TV” or “libertarians I deal with in my blog comments.” But it doesn’t justify a claim about libertarianism, which like any movement has more and less peripheral figures, and which like any philosophy has more and less consistent and well-informed advocates. As for whether it justifies a claim about prominent libertarians, the “prominence” of those people is not necessarily prominence within the particular community you’re trying to address; and it’s often the case that the intellectual or social structure of non-“mainstream” movements are not very well understood by trying to glean something based on the figures who are most prominent among people outside the movement, because the reasons for their prominence (and for the prominence of the specific things about them that are prominent outside the movement) typically has little to do with what “fuels” the movement, and a lot to do with what fuels the institutions which are choosing who to report on and who to engage with.

Which “insiders”? The comparitively small group of libertarians who read Reason, understand who some of the people on your list are, and see beyond the economic facet? Or the much larger group of self-professed libertarians who are beta-grade Gordon Geckos looking to save their future imaginary millions from the tax man?

1. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not wanting to pay taxes.

2. A lot of libertarians read Reason. As far as I know it is the highest-readership libertarian magazine currently being published.

3. I don’t know who this amorphous group of polemically-defined libertarians is, and I don’t know any way of reckoning how many of them there are compared to other groups. I do know that you get a better idea of what a philosophy is by looking for the most consistent and best informed advocates of it, and you get a better idea of what a movement is by looking for the most influential people within it. There are other criteria that you also may want to weight: for example, influence among the least consistent and well-informed, or among newcomers to the movement, may be less important than influence among the more consistent and better-informed, or among people who have spent years or decades working within the movement. Movements are structured social entities, not just heaps of people, and if you want to make statements about a movement it’s often a tricky matter trying to get a grip on that structure — a matter which is certainly not well served by simply depending on what’s most visible in the media or in your personal corner of the Internet. Of course there’s an easy way around this: to talk about specific people’s views rather than about the views of a movement as a group. Part of the reason I think it would be useful to talk more about that — what motivates Ayn Rand (certainly, there’s a lot of misogyny there), or Lew Rockwell (certainly, there’s a lot of patriarchy there), or (ugh) Bob Barr, or Will Wilkinson (a feminist), or Kerry Howley (a feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism), or Carol Moore (a radical feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism) — and less about what “fuels” amorphous collections of people, especially amorphous collections that are defined by polemical terms or by contestable and easily-shifted terms like “prominent” or “mainstre am.” (Of course, the fact that, as a radical and an anarchist, I happen to think that the most consistent libertarians are typically the least “mainstream,” is part of the reason for my disliking that as a criterion for selecting who to discuss.)

Gracchus:

Which “insiders”? The comparitively small group of libertarians who read Reason, understand who some of the people on your list are, and see beyond the economic facet? Or the much larger group of self-professed libertarians who are beta-grade Gordon Geckos looking to save their future imaginary millions from the tax man?

1. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not wanting to pay taxes.

2. A lot of libertarians read Reason. As far as I know it is the highest-readership libertarian magazine currently being published.

3. I don’t know who this amorphous group of polemically-defined libertarians is, and I don’t know any way of reckoning how many of them there are compared to other groups. I do know that you get a better idea of what a philosophy is by looking for the most consistent and best informed advocates of it, and you get a better idea of what a movement is by looking for the most influential people within it. There are other criteria that you also may want to weight: for example, influence among the least consistent and well-informed, or among newcomers to the movement, may be less important than influence among the more consistent and better-informed, or among people who have spent years or decades working within the movement. Movements are structured social entities, not just heaps of people, and if you want to make statements about a movement it’s often a tricky matter trying to get a grip on that structure — a matter which is certainly not well served by simply depending on what’s most visible in the media or in your personal corner of the Internet. Of course there’s an easy way around this: to talk about specific people’s views rather than about the views of a movement as a group. Part of the reason I think it would be useful to talk more about that — what motivates Ayn Rand (certainly, there’s a lot of misogyny there), or Lew Rockwell (certainly, there’s a lot of patriarchy there), or (ugh) Bob Barr, or Will Wilkinson (a feminist), or Kerry Howley (a feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism), or Carol Moore (a radical feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism) — and less about what “fuels” amorphous collections of people, especially amorphous collections that are defined by polemical terms or by contestable and easily-shifted terms like “prominent” or “mainstream.” (Of course, the fact that, as a radical and an anarchist, I happen to think that the most consistent libertarians are typically the least “mainstream,” is part of the reason for my disliking that as a criterion for selecting who to discuss.)

Me:

trying to deal with the bizarre notions that people concoct about the motives, goals, and intellectual structure of feminism based on “public perception”

Gracchus:

And yet this is where newcomers to a movement arrive from.

Well, no, not necessarily; I arrived at ideological feminism from conversation with friends of mine who were themselves feminists, not from newspapers or A-list blogs. But in any case, where “newcomers to a movement arrive from,” while interesting, is not necessarily more interesting than where they end up after they have kicked around the movement for a while and thought more deeply about the things that they believe.

Public perception counts, and so do those incumbent insiders who define and dominate that perception

Counts for what, specifically? What’s the specific problem you think that libertarians need to solve by fixing “public perception” and by (somehow or another) changing out the “incumbent insiders” who happen to be prominent in media outlets and other institutions that operate according to criteria that are largely outside of our control.

BlackBloc:

Their problem is one of praxis, where they naively think that the projects they’re shooting for will *remove* state interference instead of *changing its nature*, and that by removing the state they will somehow eradicate large capital accumulation. The likely outcome of their projects, if they were to miraculously pass a ballot to eliminate all forms of state interference in the economy . . .

BlackBloc, I agree with you about this, more or less entirely. That’s part of the reason why, besides being an anarchist, I am specifically an agorist, and why I advocate means of social change other than electoral politics. But what makes you think that libertarians as a group are committed to electoral politics as a means of change? Certainly the Libertarian Party is, but not all libertarians are involved with the Libertarian Party, and historically many prominent American libertarians have been specifically opposed to electoral strategies for checking, rolling back, or abolishing the State. (I actually disagree with a lot of the non-electoral strategies that have been proposed by folks like Nock, Chodorov, Read, LeFevre, et al. — but for reasons quite other than thinking that they are naively putting their trust in electoral politics.)

Hector B.

So true. Whenever I question the value of the free market system, a libertarian will point out that we have never truly had a free market system in recorded history.

Well, but we haven’t, have we?

Whether or not that’s an appropriate response depends of course on the argument that it’s made in response to. If you’re trying to use historical, empirical examples to question the value of a free market system, then surely it does matter how far, and in what aspects, the examples you’re citing actually are empirical examples of a free market, n’est-ce pas?

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.

cookie: History, in case you failed to read the other posts( which clearly you didnt read) We dont know what happened to start the arrest. Did she assault him, tell him to go pack sand?

If she did tell him to go pack sand, or “assaulted” him when the meathead tried to grab her, then she’s my fucking hero.

It takes a lot of courage to stand up to a domineering bully who is bellowing senseless orders at you and trying to use both his physical advantage over you and his official position to intimidate you into complying. Standing up to someone like that, when he has a good 100 or 150lbs on you, is very brave. She had every right to tell him off and, for that matter, every right to defend herself against his attempts to physically grab her.

Indy: “Well, that, and there are a bunch of corporate whore economic libertarians who are trying to kill america.”

Please don’t use the word “whore” as a slur when what you mean is “unscrupulous apologist.” Women in prostitution are doing a job, some of them in quite desperate circumstances, and don’t deserve being used as part of your derisive vocabulary.

Mike T.: “My problem with Libertarians (whichever style of grammar they use for the “l”) is I’ve never met one who doesn’t think that the Government and the Buisness World are two diametricly opposed forces, instead of two barely disseperate groups working in collusion to keep the status quo right where it wants to be.”

Well, expand your horizons.

Historically, libertarianism was a movement of the economic and social left, associated with wildcat unionism, opposition to mercantilism, and anti-imperialism, as well as abolitionism and radical feminism. Some (Benjamin Tucker’s circle) went so far as to describe themselves as “anti-capitalist” or “voluntary socialists.” For various reasons, a few of them good and most of them quite bad, libertarians drifted from their roots in the left into intellectual and political alliances with the Right during the 1930s-1950s onward. There are many of us making deliberate efforts to reverse this trend, for both theoretical and strategic reasons. (I happen to think that trying to pitch radical change to the existing cultural elite is a damned fool project. I also happen to think that anti-racism, feminism, wildcat unionism, populism, anti-authoritarianism, etc. are the right positions to hold, and essential parts of any sane politics.)

Hope this helps.

Phalamir: “Know-Nothings”, “jingoists”, Klu Klux Klansmen” – or simply “cunts”.

… because being compared to female genitalia is insulting. Ho ho ho. Overt misogyny is funny.

Craig R.: “Fucktards” would work for me, …

… because being like someone with mental retardation is contemptible. Ho ho ho. Overt contempt for the disabled is funny.

It is possible to make fun of, or express contempt for, the guilty, without meanness to innocent people who have nothing to do with whatever it is you’re on about. Maybe you should try some time.

I just call them “Right-wing statists.” The fact that the creeps insist on referring to themselves as “libertarians” has exactly as much effect on me as the fact that Stalinists insisted on describing themselves as democrats (indeed, as the only defenders of true democracy).

If you really need a term, Kevin Carson coined the term “vulgar libertarianism” a while back to describe unprincipled apologetics for corporate interest posing as libertarianism. It could reasonably be expanded to apply a bit more broadly so as to include Presidential royalists who imagine that they are libertarians by dint of their mild opposition to government welfare programs.

Excellent post, Amanda. This is part of the reason that I very quickly came to hate the way that University panels on rape would always feel obliged to invite a campus cop as one of the “experts” on rape. Their (that is, his) talk would inevitably consist of a bunch of know-nothing hectoring of young women to keep to well-lit areas (there was very little talk of the University shelling out to improve the lighting of course), to keep their keys out for slashing an attacker and jog without headphones on. I’m sure that’s decent advice, but it’s not like they haven’t already posted this all over campus, it makes stopping rape a matter of constraint on individual women rather than working together for the freedom of all women, and it generally wasn’t even the point of the damn panel. (They were almost always convened by the sexual assault counseling center to talk about acquaintance rape. But, of course, the campus counseling center is hostage to campus bureaucratic politics, so they have to invite a cop to make sure that everyone feels like their “expertise” is being respected.)

Anyway, this post reminded me of the passage in Susan Brownmiller’s chapter on “the police-blotter rapist,” i.e. men who rape or gang-rape relative strangers in everyday circumstances:

The Greek warrior Achilles used a swarm of men descended from ants, the Myrmidons, to do his bidding as hired henchmen in battle. Loyal and unquestioning, the Myrmidons served their master well, functioning in anonymity as effective agents of terror. Police-blotter rapists in a very real sense perform a myrmidon function for all men in our society. Cloaked in myths that obscure their identity, they, too, function as anonymous agents of terror. Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, the actual attentat, to other men, their superiors in class and station, the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued.

A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn to a weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent. Myrmidons to the cause of male dominance, police-blotter rapists have performed their duty well, so well in fact that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed. Rather than society’s aberrants or “spoilers of purity,” men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.

— Against Our Will (1975), p. 209.

JenK:

I never looked for ‘gay’ men’s shelters, only men’s shelters. There still are no men’s shelters for straight men. … And the second is a hotline, not a shelter.

If you’d bothered to follow the link, you would see that Battered Men’s Helpline has built a shelter providing refuge services to battered men. The scheduled opening was on April 15. In any case, there are several shelters already existing for gay and trans men besides the one I pointed to in Massachussetts and it’s a bit irresponsible to categorically claim that there are no shelters for battered men without having done enough of the basic homework to find this out.

Me:

Primary funding came from local women’s groups, private donors, and some national nonprofit groups like the Ms. Foundation for Women.

JenK:

And where do you think this money came from?

I just told you. From local women’s groups, private donors, and some national nonprofit groups like the Ms. Foundation for women.

Women were not working at this point in large enough numbers to support this. This money came from male donations to charities, or widow’s donations, which amounts to male donations.

You have absolutely no evidence for this claim whatsoever. As it happens, the paid workforce participation rate of women in 1972 (the year that the first modern shelters opened in the United States) was 44% (Source: BLS). That’s fewer women than are in the paid workforce today, but it’s certainly a lot of women with a steady paycheck. If you have some empirical evidence to demonstrate that women were not, in fact, the primary funders of local women’s liberation groups or the Ms. Foundation for Women (for example), you’re free to cite it, but in the meantime I don’t see much reason to take the suggestion seriously.

There is no shame in knowing good men fought along side women for a cause which obviously needed doing. Just as there would be no shame in having good women fight alongside good men.

Nobody denies that “good men” helped in the development of the early battered women’s shelters. However it is quite obvious that men—whether private citizens or men in government—were neither the primary advocates, nor the people actually doing the work of building the shelters, nor the primary funders. Women did that, and (not to put too fine a point on it) feminist women did it. (Some Brits supported the American Revolution; that doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate to say that Americans were the ones who made it.)

The women who fought for these shelters also had free time-they were not working. Men today do not have that luxury. Feminism has always been a white, upper middle class project.

This is, frankly, nonsense. If you would take the time to study the history of the battered women’s movement, you would know that it is nonsense. Most of the early shelters were founded by battered women themselves (Boston’s Transition House, for example, was started in Chris Womendez’s and Cherie Jimenez’s apartment. Womendez and Jimenez had moved in together after fleeing abusive relationships). We are talking about women who fled beatings themselves, worked outside of the house to keep a roof over their heads, and turned over their own apartments and homes to help fellow battered women. (You might point out that they got a lot of help from women’s liberation groups that included many women who had not been battered. That’s true; it’s also true that the women in those WL groups were mostly unmarried and working on their own to keep roofs over their heads.)

I know that you, like most people in our culture, have been given a set of lenses through which to view the history of the women’s movement, and that one of those lenses is the stereotype of feminism as a response to the existential crises of bored white housewives. I think that’s actually uncharitable to Betty Friedan, NOW, and the other liberal feminist targets it’s aimed at, but when I say that feminists build the battered women’s shelter network I don’t mean liberal feminists in the first place. I mean the radical women’s liberation movement. More than one early shelter was formed directly out of a WL consciousness-raising group (the c-r group provided an understanding of battery and also a group of contacts for funding and volunteering). That’s not to say that the radical feminist movement didn’t involve lots of people who had their own forms of privilege; it is to say that if you’re going to try to identify what sorts of privilege aided their success, you’re going to need a different set of templates than the ones you use to talk about NOW and liberal feminism. And if you want to talk about the feminists who played a leading role in the movement to build battered women’s shelters, you are going to be talking about WL, not NOW.

Badger:

Is it not interesting that of all the hate speak quoted above the only person they selected out of all to address was Valerie Solanas. All others were conviently ignored as if they didn’t exist. Says alot.

What it says is that there are diminishing marginal returns to spending a long time discussing each and every quote on a lazily cut-and-pasted “horror file” list of arbitrarily selected quotes from arbitrarily selected women, some of whom are feminists and others of whom aren’t. I’ve already discussed several of these “quotes” elsewhere; besides the Solanas quotes, the list includes several quotes which are dishonestly selective (including at least two quotes that are taken from characters in novels but dishonestly attributed to the author of the novel) and at least one which is completely fabricated. It’s not worth spending a lot of time arguing back and forth about this or that quote and this or that author’s position and influence unless there is a basic level of honesty on the part of the person citing the quotes. So far people spewing out these cut-n-pasted “horror file” lists have not risen to that basic level of honesty.

Trish: “I first learned about Valerie Solanas as an art student when I wrote a paper about Andy Warhol. She wasn’t part of the feminist movement, and she was the founder and lone member of her “organization,” SCUM. She was trying to break into the entertainment/art scene. She shot Andy Warhol because he wouldn’t produce a script she had written. I don’t know why men’s rights activists constantly cite her as a feminist, because she wasn’t one.”

Amanda: “Ah yes, crazy Valerie Solanas, the spokesperson for all feminists in the fantasies of anti-feminists. By the same logic, Charles Manson is the spokesperson for the hippies of the 60s.”

Well, to be fair, Valerie was not part of the organized Women’s Liberation movement (the SCUM Manifesto predated the first WL actions), but some prominent early feminists defended her — Flo Kennedy and Robin Morgan in particular — even though the ideas in the SCUM Manifesto, if taken seriously, are quite different from what they believed at the time. That’s why, e.g., Morgan refers to Solanas a couple of times in “Goodbye to All That” and why excerpts from the SCUM Manifesto are anthologized in “Sisterhood is Powerful.”

One of the problems with Valerie is that she was both clearly a deeply disturbed woman who slid into paranoid schizophrenia but also someone with a wicked sense of humor, and it’s hard to tell which parts of the SCUM Manifesto are satirical, which are seriously meant, and which are the products of madness. So simply treating the Manifesto as if it were a straightforward statement of Valerie’s opinions (or reading her later paranoid delusions back into the whole thing) is problematic at best. Of course the other problem is that no matter how many feminists publicly defended her, that doesn’t mean that their views were the same as her views in the first place.

(Also, to be fair, The Weathermen — a violent splinter of Students for a Democratic Society — did at one point cheer Manson as a hero.)