Kennedy,

In that is it any more offensive or dangerous than a reverence for majoritarian democracy?

Maybe more offensive; probably not more dangerous. How offensive a particular view is, on the whole, depends on a lot of factors, not merely how dangerous it is to individual rights. Vices aren’t crimes, but they are vices, and sometimes a vicious attitude merits taking offense.

Nobody gets atwitter about advocacy of democracy, so why should racism be any more alarming?

I don’t know what counts as getting “atwitter” or what domain you’re quantifying over when you say “nobody.” Most libertarian writers that I know are fairly contemptuous of majoritarian democracy. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three libertarians whose criticism of Ron Paul (Micha Ghertner’s, Wendy McElroy’s, and Brad Spangler’s) has specifically revolved around how the campaign promotes the myth that freedom can come about through majoritarian democracy.

As for Long, as far as I know, his position is not that racism is somehow worse or more alarming than political majoritarianism. The claim is just that racism is objectionable from a libertarian standpoint, not that it’s more objectionable than something else.

Micha: And I see the milquetoastiness of IHS as a feature, not a bug. Inforcing ideological uniformity entails devolving into a cult, ala Ayn Rand’s inner circle.

I don’t understand this argument at all, Micha. Arthur was referring to the way in which the so-called “urbane” libertarian outlets tend either (1) to shy away from hard or unpopular applications of libertarian principles — such as anarchism or criticism of bayonet-point Unionism — in the name of public relations, or else (2) to hold positively the wrong view on what libertarian principles entail. If (1) they are dissembling about their views in order to avoid public embarrassment, and if (2) they are being inconsistent. In either case, criticizing dissembling or criticizing inconsistency is a distinct issue from intolerance of dissent, n’est-ce pas?

This is not to say that the paleos in particular haven’t been intolerant of dissent on many occasions. They certainly have been. But I think the reasons have to do with something other than the radicalism of their views.

Micha: I’ll take the minarchist, pro-interventionist deviationism of Beltway libertarians over the not-so-thinly veiled racism, homophobia, goldbug-crankism, evolution-denial, fundamentalist Christianity and Confederacy apologetics of the Paleo alternative any day of the week.

Well, O.K.; it’s your business which features you choose to treat as decisive or defeating for dealing with someone as a friend, ally, or comrade. But I don’t understand how this meshes with your previous argument. As far as “enforcing ideological uniformity” goes, how is treating anti-racism, gay-positivity, evolutionism, “urbanity,” “cosmopolitanism,” or whatever as a litmus test different in kind from treating anti-interventionism or Civil War revisionism as a litmus test? Surely both of these involve demanding a certain degree of ideological uniformity; it’s just that they differ in the particular ideological features that they require.

This is not to adjudicate whether the paleos are right about their litmus tests, or whether you’re right about your litmus tests, or whether you’re both wrong, or whether it’s just a matter of taste. But I don’t see that the difference between their standards and your standards amounts to what you seem to suggest it amounts to.

(Personally, I tend to think that you’re both right, or both wrong, depending on the level and purpose of association that you’re talking about — who you’re willing to form issue-based coalition with, who you’re willing to read and cite, who you’re willing to consider yourself part of a common movement with, and who you’re willing to be friends with are all quite different questions.)

Micha,

Two things.

1. You write: “If people who suffer from mental illnesses believe (or are convinced by believing friends and family) that mental illness is a myth, they may not get the help they need, and suffer greatly as a result.”

But Szasz’s views, if implemented, would not deprive the people currently labeled “schizophrenic,” “bipolar,” “depressed,” etc. from “getting help” for their problems. The notion that it would is based on a common but extremely careless misreading of Szasz’s argument. Szasz is quite explicit that the symptoms on which a diagnosis of these pseudo-“diseases” are based are quite real, and pose real problems for people’s lives. What he objects to is the philosophical and political leap of organizing the understanding and “treatment” of those symptoms under pseudomedical terms like “schizophrenia,” “bipolar disorder,” “depression,” etc., which ultimately have a lot more to do with the legal requirement that someone have a diagnosed “disease” in order to get most drugs, than they do with any real scientific basis for the claim that all these symptoms trace to a single, identifiable disease.

In Szasz’s ideal society, people who are suffering from what is now mistakenly called “mental illness” would in fact have far more access to help than they have now, since the abolition of pharmaceutical laws and government licensure laws would remove a couple of the major barriers to entry and price floors on psychiatric “help.”

Szasz also believes that psychiatrists should not have the power to force “help” onto their “patients” against those patients’ wills. But the power to force “help” on unwilling “beneficiaries” is quite a different issue from the ability to “get help” when one needs it.

1. You write: “But shouldn’t one of our goals be truth?”

Sure. But summary dismissal of an argument based on an unsubstantiated assertion that it is “backwards, anti-science, and ignorant” is not, as I see it, a reliable method of getting to the truth. Especially not when there are specific historical reasons to be cautious of “consensus” in the field in question, and when the person whose arguments are being thus dismissed without discussion is in fact a dissenter within the same community of experts whose authority is supposedly being referred to. (In this respect, Szasz’s position, as a professionally trained medical psychiatrist, is quite different from that of creationists who have no training in paleontology and evolutionary biology, or Holocaust deniers who have no training in history. That makes an appeal to authority, rather than an critical engagement with Szasz’s specific arguments, rickety in the extreme.)