• Jerry: “I think of spontaneous order as molecules forming dna. As fines reducing speeding. As incentives encouraging good behavior.”

Look, I don’t want to be a dick about this, but if this is how you think of spontaneous order, then you don’t have a very good grip on the concept of spontaneous order.

If a government agency decides that it wants to reduce speeding, and in order to reduce speeding it institutes a fine for speeders, and, due to the threat of that fine, people don’t speed as much as they used to, that’s not an example of a spontaneous order. It’s a paradigm case of a designed order: legislators wanted a different social outcome, so they instituted a law in order to achieve it and people complied with that law in order to avoid the penalty.

Whether “incentives encouraging good behavior” counts as an example of a spontaneous order or not depends on what the incentives are and why those incentives exist. If those incentives are the unintended byproduct of things that are done for reasons other than producing those incentives, then you have a spontaneous order (for example, when ATM card issuers standardize on a common shape and size for ATM cards, not because anybody set out to encourage standardization by creating specific incentives for it, but rather because, without anybody setting out to make it that way, it turns out to be most cost-effective to make ATM cards that fit existing wallets and ATM card readers). But if they exist because someone who plans to bring about a particular social outcome is deliberately creating those incentives for that kind of behavior, then what you have is an example of a designed order, not a spontaneous order. (As, for example, in the case of fines deliberately instituted to reduce speeding, or in the case of, say, offering to reward children with honors or money for good performance in school.)

• Jerry: “Instead of ad hominem arguments against me …”

Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of criticizing an argument by appealing to properties of the person advancing it, instead of assessing the argument on its own merits. As far as I know I have not used an argumentum ad hominem against you at any point. If you want to accuse me of doing so, you had better actually produce an specific example to substantiate the charge.

• Jerry: “since you have ignored other arguments against your theory (rape in mammalia, …”

I have no idea what the ethological argument is supposed to be refuting. Are you trying to make a claim that human men are biologically predisposed to rape? If so, I think that’s absolutely false (as does Brownmiller: http://www.susanbrownmiller.com/susanbrownmiller/html/review-thornhill.html), but it doesn’t constitute an objection to Brownmiller’s theory as discussed in my post. The part of Brownmiller’s theory under discussion is about the social effects of rape, not the causes of an individual man’s decision to commit rape, and rape could have those effects whether or not it is rooted in some underlying biological predisposition.

If you aren’t trying to make the claim that human men are biologically predisposed to rape, then what claim are you trying to make, and how does it relate to Brownmiller’s claim about the social effects of the systematic threat of stranger-rape against women?

• Jerry: “mothers protecting children”

I have no idea what the objection here is supposed to be. Is the claim supposed to be that mothers don’t gain social power over children in virtue of their role as protectors against certain kind of danger? Of course mothers gain social power over children that way. Parents enjoy immense social and political power vis-a-vis children, and most of the reason for that has to do with the “protector” role that they play.

If, alternatively, this case is supposed to demonstrate that, even though mothers do gain power over children, it’s not always a bad thing for one group of people to gain power over another by serving as their protectors–well, that much is certainly true. But I don’t think that the relationships between adult men and adult women ought to be like the relationships between parents and their children. Do you?

• Jerry: “rape decreasing with increased pornography and legal prostitution”

Again, I have no idea what point of mine or Brownmiller’s this is supposed to be responsive to. If you’re right about there being a direct causal connection here (again, I don’t think you are, but even if you are) how does that refute or even respond to absolutely anything in Brownmiller’s claims about the social effects of the systemic threat of stranger-rape against women?

Suppose it were true that the best way to reduce rape would be to make pornography and prostitution as widely available to all men as you possibly can. O.K.; what then? Does that logically undermine Brownmiller’s claim that the threat of stranger-rape has the effect of substantially limiting women’s freedom and substantially increasing men’s power over women? If it does undermine that claim, how does it undermine it? If it does not undermine that claim, why bring it up?

Generally speaking, you seem to want to make this into a broad discussion about feminism and radical feminist theories of patriarchy generally, rather than about the much more specific topic (Susan Brownmiller’s analysis of the social effects of stranger-rape) that my post addressed. If you want to argue about that other stuff, fine; there are lots of arguments about that kind of stuff on the Internet and I’m not about to get in your way if you propose to have another one. But that kind of argument is not actually a reply to the points that I was making in my post, and I for one have better things to do with my time than try to rehash those other arguments yet again with someone who obviously doesn’t have much interest in or sympathy with the perspective that I’m coming from. My interest here is only with making sure that as many people as possible understand a much more narrow and specific argument.

• Jerry: “I am still curious to why you think mothers collaborate with bullies as part of their invisible fist and spontaneous order.”

I think that there is no empirical basis whatsoever for treating this as a social problem of a comparable scope to rape and its effects on women. But if there are men out there who stay in a bad relationship because they are afraid of losing a relationship with their children, should they leave, and if being legally deprived of a relationship with your children is an example of violence against the person thus deprived — a claim that I’m not at all sure I’d be willing to endorse — then, sure, I’d say that IF both those things are true, then those men’s decisions to stay in those relationships is an example of an invisible fist process. There are lots of invisible fist processes in this vale of tears; my aim was only to explain one of them, partly for its own sake and partly for the sake of making something clear about the concept of “spontaneous order” than most libertarian writers have thus far failed to make clear. It was not to discuss each and every invisible fist process in the world.

Eric:

It’s a criticism of the idea that this point is some shocking revelation to libertarians.

Well, I don’t know about “shocking revelations.” But I think that we can safely infer from the number of comments, by self-described libertarians, describing the article as making an interesting connection that they hadn’t thought of before, that this does come as “news” to at least some libertarians. It may not come as news to you, but you are not all libertarians.

Leonard:

Still, I find the tone of Johnson’s article off-putting. Part of it is the confrontational tone of it, combined with the lack of actions offered, that are any different than anything libertarians already say. How, specifically, are we supposed to “fight rape” with our new understanding of “rape culture” or whatever? Johnson doesn’t even offer the libertarian standby, of trying to convince women to arm themselves.

I understand that it can be frustrating to have a discussion of some big problem dumped in your lap without having much said about what you can do about that problem. But keep in mind that the post had a specific purpose, which was to consider Susan Brownmiller’s “Myrmidon theory” of stranger rape and the Hayekian notion of spontaneous order in relation to one another, as a means to getting a clearer understanding of each. It’s an intellectual exercise, not an attempt at offering either political strategy or personal advice. If you want to know what kind of antirape or more broadly feminist I think people should be doing, I’ve talked about that in many other places (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. etc. etc.), one of which I linked from the post, but honestly it’s a very big topic and a very hard problem, and it’s not something you can treat comprehensively, or even make much of an approach to, in the course of one article on the Internet which is already trying to deal with a related but distinct subject.

I also think that there are many sources other than me who can do a much better job than I can in providing ideas on what to do — especially women who are involved on a day-to-day basis in local antirape or feminist activism in or near your own community. My goal, as far as concrete actions are concerned, is mainly to get more libertarians to a place, in our analysis and in our priorities, where we are ready and willing to seek out those people and those groups, to ask them what they are working on and what they need help with, and to get involved. I think that’s unlikely to happen unless and until more libertarians have a sympathetic understanding of the feminist analysis of rape culture. Since that’s something I feel I’m in a good position to try to address, by means of trying to translate feminist analysis into terms that some of my readers may more readily understand, that’s where I’m trying to devote my labor and exploit my comparative advantage.

As for women arming themselves in self-defense, I think that’s a perfectly fine idea, as is organizing other forms of women’s self-defense training (e.g. Rape Aggression Defense and similar mixed martial arts systems for women). Neither is a comprehensive solution, or ideal for every woman’s individual needs, but, then, nothing is; I think that what we need are a bunch of small parts, loosely joined with each other, attacking many different aspects of the problem from many different angles.

That is, something undesigned is as evil as something designed, something intended. No. Evil requires intent: mens rea. This is a category error.

The word “evil” has many different usages in the English language. Some of them require specific individual intent and others do not. (Many do not involve individual action at all; for example, “natural evils,” often used in English to refer events like hurricanes or earthquakes, or “social evils,” often used to refer to conditions like ghettoized urban poverty, without any suggestion that the evil in question is the result of anybody’s conscious intent.)

Of course, if I were using the sense of evil you have in mind (something along the lines of a deliberate sin of commission), then I would be committing a category error. But I wasn’t. So, as far as I can see, I’m not.

Consider a village, in India perhaps, where a man-eating tiger is loose in the neighborhood. People there are constrained by fear, in just the same way as the fear of rape restricts women. They don’t go out far alone, or at night, etc. Is this a “coercive” social order?

No. Tigers are not deliberating moral agents. They aren’t the sort of being which could be said to have either coercive or consensual interactions with human beings.

Men who commit rape, unlike tigers, are deliberating moral agents, and, unlike tiger attacks, rape is a deliberate, coercive act committed by men who are morally responsible for their actions.

A spontaneous social order that emerges in response to the danger posed by a natural evil, such as random tiger attacks, will have some things in common with the spontaneous social order that emerges in response to the danger that some people within the society force on other people by committing deliberate acts of violence. It will also have some important differences, both in terms of how appropriate certain kinds moral and political criticism are, with respect to that social order, and also in terms of the best way to try to deal with the situation.

Jerry: Your theory is that the non-rapists put up with a certain amount of rape of their daughters and wives because it helps keep women down, and keeps women seeking the protection of the non-rapists.

I doubt that this is Queequeg’s theory. I know that it is not mine. Nor, on my understanding, is it Susan Brownmiller’s.

Jerry: I am talking about the explanation that rape is due to some overt/covert conspiracy of men to keep women down.

Then you’re not talking about my post, but rather something else.

Much of the explicit purpose of the post was to reject interpretations of Brownmiller’s position which, quote:

… treat this kind of analysis as if it were some kind of conspiracy theory about rape — as if Brownmiller were claiming that, say, every first Monday of the month, all the men got together in a big meeting at the Patriarchy’s underground headquarters and decided to have some men commit stranger rape as a way to keep women down. Or, to be more charitable to uncharitable critics, as if Brownmiller were claiming that ‘police-blotter rapists’ and other men who do not commit rape are consciously collaborating with one another, in some kind of social plan, promulgated from the top down, to intimidate women and bring about and sustain male supremacy.

My alternative interpretation of Brownmiller’s theory rejects this in favor of a “spontaneous order” theory, as that term is used by economists such as Friedrich Hayek. It is a hallmark of spontaneous order theories that the individual people participating in a spontaneous order do so by engaging in self-interested actions, for reasons of their own, without needing to make any conscious effort to create or sustain that form of social coordination. (Hence “spontaneous,” in the sense of “undesigned,” as opposed to forms of coordination created by many people consciously following a single plan.) In this case, I read Brownmiller as arguing that men who commit rape do so for reasons of their own, without conscious coordination either between each other or with men who do not commit rape, but that the rapists’ actions nevertheless redound to the benefit of — serve the class interests of — men, including the majority of men who do not commit rape, and who (I presume) consider rape a serious evil and wouldn’t consciously seek to benefit from it. The idea is that when the threat of sexual violence against women is intense, pervasive, and random enough, this produces systematic effects on all women’s freedom, as well as the balance of social power between women and men, whether or not any of the individual people concerned had that outcome in mind, or would have accepted that outcome if they thought about it, when they made their choices about how to act.

Maybe that explanation is right and maybe it’s wrong, but it is what it is, and not something else. You’ll have to engage with that if you want to actually join the conversation, rather than just shouting irrelevancies at it, and the fact that your summary of the explanation reads more or less exactly like a condensed version of precisely the strawman view I was explicitly repudiating, and to which I was trying to suggest an alternative, indicates to me that you haven’t done yet gotten that far.

In any case the primary purpose of the original post was to help explain what Brownmiller’s claims are, as against a common and extremely uncharitable reading of them, not to provide a comprehensive defense for the claim. If you want a comprehensive defense, then you’d be better off actually reading the book (which covers a lot of ground over the course of 407 pages of text) than trying to find it my attempt to provide exegesis of four paragraphs in which she summarizes a couple of her conclusions. But before you can understand the defense, you will need to exercise the care and charity needed to understand what the claim being defended is in the first place.

As for the sanctimonious women’s studies set, yeah, O.K., you got me, I’m a sanctimonious Women’s Student. I’m also anti-male, anti-sex, anti-America, and anti-life. Let’s move along and talk about the argument as it was actually presented.

O.K., James, you got me. I’m a poisonous hate-filled politically-correct man-hater. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m also anti-sex, anti-America, and anti-life.

Let’s move on to empirical data.

Here’s what you say:

Acquaintance rape is indeed common – but rape by intimates quite uncommon.

Here is what Tjaden and Thoennes (2000) say in the report on their randomly-sampled survey of 8,000 U.S. women and 8,000 U.S. men:

Nearly 10 percent of surveyed women, compared with less than 1 percent of surveyed men, reported being raped since age 18 (exhibit 21). Thus, U.S. women are 10 times more likely than U.S. men to be raped as an adult.

The survey found that most women who are raped as adults are raped by intimates. Nearly two-thirds (61.9 percent) of the women who reported being raped since age 18 were raped by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date. In comparison 21.3 percent were raped by an acquaintance, 16.7 were raped by a stranger, and 6.5 percent were raped by a relative [other than a spouse] (see exhibit 22). The number of male rape victims was insufficient to reliably calculate estimates for men.

Tjaden and Thoennes (2006) breaks out the data into different categories of intimate partner rapists. (The prevalence rates don’t add up the same way as in [2000], because in this passage the data is broken out by victim-perpetrator relationship but not controlled by the age of the victim.)

Information from NVAWS confirms previ­ous research that shows most rape vic­tims know their rapist. Only 16.7 percent of all female victims and 22.8 percent of all male victims were raped by a stranger (see exhibit 13). In general, female victims tended to be raped by current or former intimates, defined in this study as spous­es, male and female cohabiting partners, dates, boyfriends, and girlfriends. In com­parison, male victims tended to be raped by acquaintances, such as friends, teach­ers, coworkers, or neighbors. Among all female victims identified by the survey, 20.2 percent were raped by a spouse or ex-spouse, 4.3 percent were raped by a current or former cohabiting partner, and 21.5 percent were raped by a current or former date, boyfriend, or girlfriend.

Age has a major effect on the risks from different groups of men. If you look at victimization rates for girls under the age of twelve, the greatest danger of rape comes from relatives (67.8% of female victims who were raped when younger than 12), followed by acquaintances (24.5% of under-12 female victims), followed by strangers (10.8%). If you look at adolescent women, aged 12-17, the greatest danger of rape comes from intimate partners (35.9% of female rape victims who were raped when 12-17), followed by acquaintances (33.3% of female victims age 12-17), followed by relatives (19.4%), followed by strangers (15.8%). Women raped in adulthood are overwhelmingly more likely to have been raped by a current or former intimate partner than by any other man — as seen above, more women are raped by current or former intimate partners than by all other categories of perpetrators put together. It shouldn’t be surprising that rape by dates, boyfriends, and husbands is much more common among adult women than among adolescent women and young girls, of course; adult women are more likely to be exposed to dates and boyfriends in the first place, and much, much more likely to have husbands, than women aged 12-17 are, let alone girls under the age of 12.

Them’s the facts, as far as I am aware of them. If you have empirical studies of the prevalence and incidence of sexual violence against women which indicate something different, then your mission, should you choose to accept it, is actually to produce the specific studies in question, and demonstrate how they contradict or undermine the findings from the NVAWS. Or I guess you could just impugn my intellectual honesty again without providing a reference to any specific data.

Now, if Tjaden and Thoennes’s findings are accurate, I guess you could ask why the facts hate men so much, but the truth is that I really have very little idea what, if anything, in my remarks was supposed to be “man-hating” in the first place. At most it is boyfriend-and-husband-hating, and it’s really not even that. Lots of boyfriends and husbands are violent towards their girlfriends and wives. Does it follow (1) that there’s something intrinsically wrong with boyfriends or husbands as such, or rather (2) that there’s something deeply wrong with how boyfriends and husbands are expected to conduct themselves in this particular society as it actually exists, or rather (3) that there’s something deeply wrong with how a large minority of boyfriends and husbands in this particular society expect themselves to act, which doesn’t necessarily apply to the majority of boyfriends and husbands who don’t commit rape? My own view is (2), although for all I’ve said so far, you could just as easily take option (3), and neither case seems to me like something that you could fairly call “man-hating” or anything of the sort. (For comparison, during the 1910s black men in Mississippi were overwhelmingly more likely to be lynched by white men than by black men, white women, black women, or children of any race. Is it somehow anti-white or anti-white-male to point that fact out, or to point out that it might have had something to do with the norms and ideals accepted by the majority of white men in the racial system of Jim Crow?)

Micha,

I’m not sure I’ve succeeded in making my point clear to you.

Sure, and that’s an argument against the government being selective in how it sells/promotes/distributes the technology.

(1) My primary concern about this scheme is not with the actions issuing government (the U.S.). If the U.S. government started issuing some form of international biometric ID, it might very well do something fucked up with that (like incorporating that into its border-Stasi system). But the primary concern I was expressing has to do with how the issuing government would be facilitating more intensive government surveillance by other governments in the name of “security.” The point is that the more or less inevitable outcome of the U.S. government providing this kind of ID according to the political and state-security incentives that it faces is that other governments would take advantage of it by beefing up their surveillance regime and forcing their own citizens to become unwilling clients for state-security purposes.

(2) I’m baffled by your suggestion that you could somehow prevent the government from being selective in how it sells/promotes/distributes these ID cards. How? No government “service” in the world is like that. And now government “service” is ever likely to be. Especially not a government service that most directly impacts the fortune of this governments primary allies, beneficiaries, and partners in crime — viz., other governments.

But the technology itself is not objectionable,

I didn’t say that the technology was objectionable. I said that having the U.S. federal government promote and distribute it is objectionable. If some private company were issuing IDs like these, I probably wouldn’t buy one (I don’t need that kind of ID for anything that I currently do, and I’m very impatient with paperwork), but I wouldn’t be lodging the same complaints against it.

Of course, government abuse is a serious and very plausible worry. But that’s true with anything the government does.

Sure, I agree with that. There’s a simple solution: don’t propose for the government to do anything at all.

Government “services” are never going to be anything but corrupt, stupid, inefficient, selective, tilted to political advantage, and often quite dangerous. Why waste one’s breath on proposing new ones, or let government off the hook by pretending that they could somehow be done “right” this time?

If you want biometric ID cards, start trying to sell your idea to entrepreneurs or start designing your own. Nobody’s stopping you. What possible benefit is there to pushing the idea of having the U.S. federal government do it instead?

In any future system of fully private, fully free-market law and contract enforcement, technological and social advances in identification, reputation, and security will all be a boon for liberty.

Sure. But the first clause of that sentence is the most important part, and it’s precisely the part that’s dropped in the proposal I’m objecting to.

Technological and social advances are, as a rule, only broadly beneficial when people are free to accept them, reject them, modify them, or adapt to them on their own terms and at their own pace. The uptake of cell phones in impoverished areas is a good example. The emergence of signature-confirmed credit cards in the U.S. and Europe is another. New ID schemes pushed by the government and implemented for their “positive security implications” are not. The “security implications” for which these IDs would be have nothing to do with ordinary people’s uncoerced choices or everyday needs, and everything to do with new surveillance and new requirements imposed on them by a government “security” apparatus.

Micha:

And it often seems like these kinds of advances in reputation verification move us closer from a statist world of contract enforcement to a free, market-based world. Government policemen have less to do (well, less legitimate things to do) …

Like that’s ever stopped them.

Anyway, the proposal wasn’t a proposal for giving government agencies fewer things to do. It was for giving a government agency more things to do (viz. designing and issuing biometric ID for absolutely anybody in the world).

Thoreau,

Thank you for your kind words. I’m glad if you found what I wrote useful.

I understand that it’s easy to get defensive, and hard to know how to deal with the conversation, when something like the rape culture comes up. It’s natural to want to defend yourself when it seems like you’re being implicated (morally, if not legally) in crimes that you didn’t personally commit, and which you personally would oppose and condemn. What I’d want to say is that — while obviously I can’t speak for people that you’ve talked to and I haven’t — I know that, in my experience, most feminists who talk about a rape culture are much less interested in ripping on random men than they are on trying (1) to shake up a settled power and a kind of institutional inertia among the administration, (2) to make certain kinds of unhelpful responses to rape (apathy, victim-blaming, etc.) publicly unacceptable, and (3) to make it clear to their audience (sometimes men, but also, keep in mind, other women on campus) how certain sorts of danger and violence, imposed on women by a hard to identify but always present subset of the men on campus, are connected to a broader set of issues. There’s a necessary element of urgency, and impatience, and of very real and very justified anger, which may make something seem like a personal accusation when it’s not really intended as such, and would be better understood if not taken as such.

Robin Warshaw wrote a very good book, some years ago, called I Never Called It Rape, which offers a good overview of some of the research on acquaintance rape and offers a gentle introduction to some of the feminist critique of rape myths, and the role of common norms in heterosexual dating and sexuality, in particular, and rape culture. (By “gentle” I mean it doesn’t presuppose much about your ideological or academic background. It’s an unpleasant book to read, given the topic.) It may help explain in more depth part of what I’m talking about, in one area. It also provides a good walk-through of Mary Koss’s 1985 study of rape on college campuses, which has been the object of quite a bit of ill-founded, uncharitable, and sometimes downright dishonest criticism, including an unfortunate amount of it in self-described libertarian forums.

One thing I should note is that in my post and in these comments, I’ve mainly been talking about one direction of causation: the way in which certain social phenomena may be unintended ripple-effects of the prevalence of rape and the threat of rape. But feminist who write about a “rape culture” have something to say about both directions of causation: they think that what they call a “rape culture” is not only partly the effect of rape, but also a contributing cause, in that it promotes cultural norms that partly motivate rape (and encourage rapists to justify their crimes to themselves), makes it easier for rapists to act with impunity, encourages non-rapist men to dismiss or smear rape victims and make excuses for rapists, and very strongly discourages women from speaking out about their experience of rape except in those limited cases where it conforms to a stereotypical script and serves the interest of one group of men as against another group of men. So the view is not just that rape culture is the effect of rape, but that the two are mutually reinforcing of each other.

Hope this helps.

Patri:

Uh…it’s the difference between forced and voluntary. … You know, like the difference between the FDA and a private certification agency.

See above.

The proposal was to issue “hard” biometric international ID cards for their “positive security implications.” Who do you think are going to be implementing the “security” procedures that require ID cards like that to be presented — private businesses or governments?

Who implements most security procedures and imposes most ID requirements now?

The reason I currently have to present my papers at the airport, or when I open a bank account, or when I start a new job, or when I go to a bar, or what have you, almost never have anything at all to do with policies voluntarily adopted by private businesses. How about you?

Micha:

The author explicitly structures his scenario as voluntary.

I hear that you don’t, legally speaking, have to sign up for a Social Security Number, either. The problem is just that, if you refuse to, there are a lot of things that the government will just happen to keep you from doing.

Suppose that the U.S. government gets into the business of producing biometric identification cards aimed (as the author explicitly suggests) especially at developing countries where the local regime doesn’t really have the resources to issue those kind of “hard” identification papers without help from richer and more efficiently organized states.

Who do you suppose would be the primary “customers” for a “service” like that? (1) Willing customers who just happen to want an absurdly detailed ID card for “security” in their day-to-day business, or (2) unwilling customers who are either directly or indirectly forced to get that absurdly detailed ID card because the regime in the country where they live now requires everybody to get this biometric ID card as part of its coercively imposed “security” procedures?

A “service” like this is sure to have “positive security implications” for the primary consumers of “security” technology today. But those are governments, not ordinary citizens, and the degree to which they are able to carry out their “security” schemes has little or no connection with positive outcomes for ordinary citizens’ safety or quality of life.

Simply replace “U.S. government” with “trusted third party institution”, like Visa or Mastercard.

Oh, come on, you know better than that. I may as well argue that government welfare is a great idea, because, hey, if you replace “U.S. government” with “voluntary mutual-aid societies,” then I’d be describing a voluntary and potentially valuable service.

Governments don’t have the same incentives, the same structure, or the same partners and allies as private organizations. Not surprisingly, even though Visa or Mastercard could in principle already be issuing “hard” global biometric identity cards like this, they aren’t, because it doesn’t pay to do so, if your incentives depend on voluntary customers, and are based on making money rather than on geopolitical power and “security.”

Either way, I don’t see how better identification is necessarily inimical to liberty.

It’s not. However, more relentless government surveillance is. And that’s the primary thing that any government-issued biometric ID scheme being put into effect for its “security implications” is going to facilitate.

Micha:

I have never heard it claimed that the terms “hard-working” and “law-abiding” are Southern strategy code words,

They are. They’re especially closely associated with Nixon- and Reagan-era efforts to pull in working-class, often unionized white men (“hardhats,” “Reagan Democrats,” et al.) for the Southern Strategists’ racially-charged anti-welfare and Law-n-Order kicks.

Try thinking about it in reverse, if that helps. “Hard-working” and “law-abiding” are deliberate contrast terms for “lazy,” “shiftless,” and “criminal.” These terms were all deployed with pretty clear racial dimensions during the political debates in question.

(Personally, I’m all for an anti-welfare kick; but the Law-n-Order kick has been one of the single most politically toxic positions in mainstream American politics for the past several decades. And in either case the deliberate use of racial resentments for political ends is a nasty business.)

Maybe that’s why I can’t get into thick libertarianism: it sounds like a totalitarian nightmare to me.

Yes, you got it, it’s just like that, except without the totalitarianism.

Getting criticized over the alleged social connotations of your word choice, in light of recent political history in America, is not “totalitarianism” by any conceivable stretch of the imagination. In real totalitarian states people are jailed or killed over the language that they use. Get a grip.

You may not like a particular practice, but there’s no need to use this kind of melodramatic language to describe it. Particularly not when the melodrama distorts the position that you actually intend to criticize. (There are no left libertarians who believe in government speech restrictions. If someone believes in that, they’re not a left libertarian, but rather something else.)