Oh God, Another Coalition Builder…
Jan 20, 05 | 12:24 am by John T. KennedyBefore Pejman Yousefzadeh goes much further with with this Conservative/Libertarian Cyber-Coalition idea, he probably ought to check with a a few more libertarians. He thinks:
“…. conservatives and libertarians generally favor aggressive intervention in conducting the war on terrorism.”
Uh, dude? The plain fact is that libertarians overwhelmingly reject an interventionist war on terror. I had to rack my brains to try to come up with a significant pro-war segment of the libertarian spectrum and the best I could come up with is the Ayn Rand Institute. Against that balance the Libertarian Party, LewRockwell.com, Strike The Root, Anti-State.com, Reason, …it isn’t even remotely close.
What can he be thinking of? The examples he gives of libertarians include Glenn Reynolds and Stephen Green. Those are surely popular bloggers, but for all intents and purposes they are Republicans who perhaps quibble with the party on a few issues at the margin.
You know what though? Don’t even worry about it. Libertarians are overwhelmingly anti-interventionist and anti-war but they don’t matter politically. They’re not going to cost you any of your precious elections, they can’t get a dog catcher elected. A lot of them don’t have much interest in your elections.
January 20th, 2005 at Jan 20, 05 | 12:50 am
Thanks for providing an example of this fallacy.
I think the name is a little long though. How about “Essential non-essentials fallacy”, or something catchy like that?
January 20th, 2005 at Jan 20, 05 | 1:14 am
Why in the hell would the Republicans, flush with the most political success that they’ve seen in decades, tie the Libertarian anchor around their necks and jump overboard? To pick up 100K of votes? Christ, if She Who Cannot Be Named runs in ‘08, all the R’s will have to do is point leftward and say “You want her for Prez?” and a giant chunk of voting libertarians will be in their pocket.
January 20th, 2005 at Jan 20, 05 | 1:35 am
And how can Conservatives form a coalition with the likes of Reynolds and Green when these guys are already blogging their asses off for the team? These guys are a threat to jump ship for splinter candidates?
January 20th, 2005 at Jan 20, 05 | 11:53 am
I find it laughable anyone with a clear grasp of what it means to be “libertarian” could point to Prof. Reynolds as an example. I’ve been tracking his departures from even a generous reading of the standard NAP and he doesn’t fit the bill.
January 20th, 2005 at Jan 20, 05 | 4:34 pm
Charles,
I really take “libertarian” to be a catch-all category rather than a species defined by principle. So it doesn’t much offend my sensibilities if people want to call him a libertarian, any more than if you call Ghertner, Wilde and Patri Friedman libertarians, or David and Milton Friedman for that matter. None are NAPpers.
So fine, call Glenn Reynolds a libertarian, but the fact remains that libertarians overwhelmingly do not support any interventionist war on terror.
And I don’t know what he’s worried about, this past election was probably about as bad is it can get for Republicans with libertarians. Forget third party nonsense - a lot of libertarian voters were so unhappy with Bush they went for Kerry. If a real count could be done I would not be astonished to learn that Kerry won a plurality of libertarian voters over Bush and Badnarik. Worst case for Republicans, and it didn’t make a bit of difference.
January 20th, 2005 at Jan 20, 05 | 6:58 pm
You’re right, of course, about libertarian hawks being the minority. But that article makes more sense in its historical context. October 2002 was right in the midst of the whole warblogging phenomenon, just as the drums were really starting to pound in the build-up to Iraq. The major political blogs were overwhelmingly libertarian-leaning on domestic issues, and very hawkish on foreign policy.
So, if you spent a lot of time reading blogs back then, you could be forgiven for thinking this was representative of libertarianism generally. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a silly thing to say, betraying a very superficial understanding of the libertarian movement as a whole, but still.. that article’s a relic from another time. And the blogosphere’s a very different, more diverse (or more partisan, over-heated and adversarial, if you prefer), place today.
January 20th, 2005 at Jan 20, 05 | 7:37 pm
Wili,
I gotta admit I thought the piece was new. I think it came up in my feed reader (bloglines) as new. Perpahps I’m misremembering how I got there. While I think my post still stands, I would probably not have posted it if I realized the piece was from 2002.
January 21st, 2005 at Jan 21, 05 | 1:47 pm
I really take �libertarian� to be a catch-all category rather than a species defined by principle.
I understand that John. But I get riled when one’s definition of libertarian is seemingly limited to something like “sometimes tends to prefer capitalist-ish choices on a few policy issues inconsistently.”
Kinda like when Kerry called Bush’s agenda “extreme libertarianism” in 2003.