Claremont’s web journal The American Mind, though, was launched in 2018 with a more provocative agenda: to “rethink the ideological framework of the American Right.” The animating idea, founding editor Matthew Peterson explains, is that traditional right-of-center groups are out of touch: They don’t even realize that their own staffs include “people under 35” who “fundamentally disagree with supposedly fundamental [classical liberal] tenets of their organization. No one wants to hear or deal with it. They want to stick their heads in the sand.” A vibrant and ideologically adventurous new conservative movement, Peterson says, is “bubbling beneath the surface, or even online all over the place. We are not supposed to talk about these things or engage that movement?”
Yarvin is perhaps better known for the pen name under which he rose to internet fame in the late 2000s and early 2010s: “Mencius Moldbug.” At his Unqualified Reservations blog, Moldbug, a software entrepreneur by day, unspooled head-spinningly long-winded “neoreactionary” screeds. . .
I think that Wikipedia credits me with coining the term “neoreactionary.” Doherty shares my concern that national conservatism is neoreactionary and throws libertarians under the bus. His essay connects Peter Thiel to the neoreactionary view, but Doherty admits to being unsure about exactly where Thiel stands.
To the neoreactionaries, the libertarians are too soft to fight a war against the religion that identifies and persecutes heretics. To libertarians, a war to the death between neoreactionaries and that religion would be a war with no winner.
I think of the war as having three fronts.
1. The media. There, the social justice warriors have captured the most famous brands, but the Internet has diluted the importance of those brands. I might resent the NYT, but I do not fear it.
2. Politics. To me, this is a weird front, because I think most voters don’t think they have a dog in the fight, so that the outcome of elections does not tell us how much people like or don’t like the social justice religion. This November, I think that as long as there is a clear winner, the post-election period will find the social justice activists and the more reasonable left battling one another. It would be nice to let the fight play out, rather than to have an all out right-vs.-left battle. My worst fear, though, is that there will be no clear winner in November, in which case the social justice activists and the center-left will stick to one another like glue as they fight for Biden to defeat Trump in the contested aftermath.
3. Intellectuals. Here, my hope is that universities will go down the path of the media. That is, the famous brands will lose their luster, and alternative arenas for developing and debating ideas will become increasingly influential. Personally, I would rather fight the religion on this front than on the other two.
While Kling has been saying that everyone is throwing libertarians under the bus, he is throwing the large libertarian efforts of the Trump Administration under the bus.
I find this persuasive: https://economics21.org/trump-deregulation-unnoticed-experts
Even former co-blogger David Henderson has praised the Trump Administration’s deregulation successes. The Trump Administration is supposed to combine reasonable libertarian policy with a populist frontman and appeal. This blog doesn’t live up to the tagline of, “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”.
lastly, Peter Thiel was always neo-reactionary. Of course, those category labels are highly subjective and malleable.
Those deregulatory efforts are laudable and important, but do they outweigh the non-libertarian tariffs, which cost consumers a bundle and reduce economic freedom? Not to mention the explicit cost, such as $40 billion over the past few years to support farmers impacted by tariffs?
The libertarian fixation on tariff revenue is curious. Going to table 2 of the monthly treasury report, we see that customs duties as of July amounted to $57 billion compared to $53 billion of excise taxes, $14 billion on estate and gift taxes, $1.1 trillion in taxes on domestic labor, $160 billion in corporate income taxes the incidence of which largely is inflicted on domestic labor, and $1.4 trillion in individual income taxes. And then there is the $2.8 trillion in deficit spending. Of all the figures listed, it would seem the customs duties would be the least deleterious to the flourishing of US citizens, no? Libertarians are clamoring for a carbon tax, don’t the tariffs on goods from the largest carbon emitting nation in the world, China, act as a carbon tax? By way of comparison, in July of 2015 the Treasury had taken in $30 billion in customs duties. Does the center of the libertarian universe really revolve around this $26 billion difference?
Yes, this is an excellent comment. Tariffs are one of those libertarian manias whose only plausible explanation is ulterior motives.
The cost of tariffs isn’t just the cost of revenue transferred to the government. You also have to include the dead weight loss, on the one side from consumers who are not able to purchase the goods they otherwise would like to, and on the other side from wasteful use of domestic resources that could be used to produce something else instead of a more expensive version of an import.
At the extreme, tariffs could be so high that there is zero revenue generated because no one tries to import affected goods, but that just means that all of the costs to the consumer are dead weight losses, even less efficient than giving some money to the government.
This is true of all taxes.
But isn’t dead weight loss and a reduction in the tax base a problem for most types of taxes?
I would understand the criticism if there were 100% or 200% tariffs on all foreign trade, but I believe we’ve been talking about 10%-25% tariffs on a selection of imported goods from one country.
“wasteful use of domestic resources that could be used to produce something else“
– This would be a persuasive argument if anything actually moved back to the USA. But it hasn’t Trump notably has raised taxes on aluminum imports, yet USA aluminum production continues to decline. I would argue, and you might agree, that this has done far more damage to USA employment than it has advanced any protectionism, yet it can be persuasively argued that an enormous country like the USA, with its myriad defense commitments, needs an industrial base for its military needs and possible challenges. With steel production the tariffs have worked to at least stabilize the industry.
– A far worse distortion of resource uses are the tax exemptions for “non-profits “ and the education credentials peddling industry. Far too many young people’s talents are squandered in the non-profit cults that wouldn’t exist without the tax exemptions. And the USA wastes far more of its resources per capital on credentials than any other country than Luxembourg. This waste is another distortion of tax exemptions.
“the dead weight loss, on the one side from consumers who are not able to purchase the goods they otherwise would like to”
– I am not sure how that is any different than any other tax. Don’t excise taxes do the same thing? Yet where is the libertarian crusade against excise taxes?
– If you mean that there is a deadweight loss due to a tariff making it impossible to import some particular good that is only produced in one place, generally such goods are shipped to another place outside the tariff, and repacked and then exported to the USA. It is a wonder that any revenues are collected at all. But they are primarily because even under Trump, USA tariffs are on average among the lowest in the world. In the EU, that libertarian nirvana in which the smartest and best of the best govern freely with well-informed solicitude over the appreciative masses, average tariffs on non-EU imports are higher than average USA tariffs.
Criticizing the tariffs is a valid point. Tariffs are tied to foreign policy, which is complicated. I feel like there are valid arguments on both sides, and it’s hard to judge foreign policy.
This $2 trillion dollar virus stimulus package (and counting) is a far greater anti-libertarian red-flag than the tariffs. I frown on the $40 billion farming assistance aid, but that is peanuts compared with $2 trillion. Sure, there are some arguments in favor of the virus relief money: The government forced companies to close and forfeit revenue for public health reasons. Some compensation isn’t unreasonable. I believe the $2 trillion+ Virus Aid packages are peanuts compared with the spending that I expect the Democrats to do when they get power.
Read this Tyler Cowen post, and tell me if Tyler’s support for Warren is more or less libertarian than the current Trump Administration:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/the-economic-policy-of-elizabeth-warren.html
I went back and read Arnold’s original post “The Neo-Reactionaries”.
Doherty rightly focuses on the complete lack of belief in any of the principles of American democracy: pre-enlightenment, authoritarian, anti-democratic.
Arnold’s essay is blind to any of this. He can only see the movement’s reflection on libertarianism and its shared hatred for the religion that identifies and persecutes heretics.
Random thoughts.
* Yes. Wikipedia does credit Dr. Kling with coining “neoreactionary.” “In July 2010, Arnold Kling, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, coined the term “Neo-reactionaries” to describe Yarvin and his followers.[“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
* “ I think most voters don’t think they have a dog in the fight, so that the outcome of elections does not tell us how much people like or don’t like the social justice religion. “ Or how much they like much of anything else for that matter. Shout it from the roof tops.
* “National conservatism is neoreactionary. “ Its not just “national conservatism” but just about every flavor of conservatism that one can imagine,, as well as progressivism and libertarianishm that shares neoreactionary opposition to democracy, contempt for the common people, and opposition to egalitarianism. In general, people want peace, prosperity, and personal autonomy, and none of these ideologies is able to deliver.
* For conservatives, it generally all begins with Burke who opposed democracy for three basic reasons: (1) the common people are stupid, (2) the common people will elect demagogues who might upset the settled order by authoritarian means, and (3) the common people might tyrannize unpopular minorities. Burke is thus the father not only of conservatism, but progressivism, libertarian-ism, and neoreactionarianismm as well. Progressives see the common people as a racist, ignorant mob, in desperate need of more government programs to accustom them to a servile role at the direction of farsighted visionaries. Libertarians, like for example, Randy Barnett, believe wise judges can strictly interpret the constitution and limit its activities to a bare minimum of essential activities that will prevent common people from forming tyrannical associations. And you have your neoreactionariiess whose misanthropy is an all encompassing ideology in itself.
* Perhaps I am so much of a lateral thinker that anything I happen to be reading at the time reminds me of the post of the day, yet, yesterday, I had just dug out of the boxes and was rereading,Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, and I was struck again by how feeble, cloddish, and irrelevant, is the left-right axis. So far it seems Levin basically says that Burke was conservative and disagreed with Paine, therefore Paine represents the left. I dug out Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution in which as I recall, distrust of power was the animus behind the highly anti-democratic US constitution.
* Libertarians are never thrown under the bus. Libertarians are the bus. By writing the constitution in Philadelphia, they locked the nation into a form of government that is difficult to control and whose errors are largely unable to be corrected. The fate of the US is squarely in the hands of a self-serving, self-dealing elite that cannot be held democratically accountable. The libertarians got what they wanted early on. Now they don’t want to have to life with it.
* The in-fighting among elites that is the religion that persecutes heretics is a distraction from the larger reforms that matter to human flourishing. These are constitutional reforms: (1) restore the rule of law by adopting a European style Supreme Court consisting of random panels drawn from several hundred of the most senior federal appellate judges supplemented with lay judges from which random panels are selected to decide whether to review cases and then separate random panels selected to hear the selected cases, (2) proportional representation, (3) replace the presidential system with a parliamentary system with an executive council instead of a prime minister, and (4) articulate the 10th Amendment right to secession retained by the states so that many sustainable phoenixes might arise from the ashes of our bankrupt behemoth.
By the gods I swear I wish I could correct misspellings in this comment. apologies for the atrocities.
Burke opposed the excesses of the French revolution and not democracy as such.
He was himself a member of the House of Commons for 28 years.
He spoke against the dogmatists of every stripe and for for traditional forms of government with provision for small, incremental changes.
Libertarianism was blind to the fact that it was basically a white mans ideology.
Non-whites don’t share it.
Even white women don’t share it.
East Asians are “pro civilization” but not necessarily “libertarian” (if you ask if Lee Kuan Yew is libertarian the answer would be “no, but he takes some of the good parts”).
So where is libertarianism now. The electorate of the future is mostly non-white. K-12 education is about to get really WOKE. Anyone that has been to university in the last decade is already WOKE.
How is libertarianism going to thrive in that environment.
It’s going to go Niksean Center, which is to say its going to get very woke and practically indistinguishable from progressivism, cause face it housing is expensive for policy analysts.
I have gone to lots of libertarian events, and very much look forward to doing it again when the pandemic is over. For now there is Zoom, and taking a look at the typical grid of pictures would make Rachel Maddow ask, “What’s up with the dude wall?” There is not much demographic difference between people who call themselves libertarians and people who call themselves neoreactionaries or national conservatives.
Why not? Is it just like Krein says? The progressives are the high status winners, and so all the non progressive movements are a bunch of losers, and the intellectual leadership of the loser groups are those for whom no non-self-abasement place is made in progressivism? Could be!
Libertarians have stories for why libertarianism isn’t popular in general, but not why the popularity they have has a narrow profile. They have a story for the less narrow profile for Republicans, because they apparently alienate minorities and stuff by half of them – the loser half! – being (recent) immigration skeptics. I.e. racists.
But libertarians aren’t racists, are all about open borders, and caved on anti-discrimination law and even some welfare a long time ago. They also don’t like the police.
And yet somehow they don’t “look like the country.” They look like that famous Solvay Conference photo. A dude wall.
That this is a fact of p<0.00001 statistical significance is indisputable. I'm sure they are aware of this fact. What's the story they tell themselves about why this is?
Libertarians tend to be wealthier and less religious than other ethnicities. Both cohorts skew significantly white. Individualism and ‘mere’ equality before the law – libertarian positions – appeal disproportionately to white people (especially men) in the era of ascendant affirmative action. So it’s not particular interesting that libertarians tend to be mostly white and male. Leftism appeals to non-whites and women because their it’s clients; conservatism even appeals to some minorities because they’re culturally conservative and religious.
One reason why I find the argument that libertarians should join hands with national conservatives because classical liberal norms can only be salvaged in a predominantly European society is that the white national conservative base is thoroughly illiberal. It wouldn’t be compromising to salvage what we can of liberalism; it’d be throwing the game and expecting libertarians to just care about white rural welfare queens instead of inner city black ones. What differentiates Singapore from Libertarian utopia is not what separates libertarians from American populists, the latter being closer to the opposite of Singaporeans in most relevant characteristics (and much more closely resembling poor Bosch inner city communities than they’d care to admit).
“the white national conservative base is thoroughly illiberal.”
In what way? I wouldn’t call Steve Sailerism “illiberal”.
“white rural welfare queens instead of inner city black ones.”
Probably the biggest example of white welfare is Appalachia, but Appalachia has swung really far to the right over the last twenty years. A chief reason for this, documented well by many sources, is that the middle classes have been turned off by the effect welfarism has had on their families and communities. I suspect that federal based welfare income thresholds are particularly ill fitting for lower cost of living areas like Appalachia.
“What differentiates Singapore from Libertarian utopia is not what separates libertarians from American populists, the latter being closer to the opposite of Singaporeans in most relevant characteristics”
It’s not clear what you think American populists support or how it’s different from Singapore.
Singapore tightly controls immigration. It enforces lots of conservative cultural norms with teeth. It has lots of “economic planning” even if they’ve been smart enough to try to make sure that planning happens in more market oriented contexts.
“and much more closely resembling poor Bosch inner city communities than they’d care to admit”
I literally had a community of poor Scotts Irish and a community of poor blacks in pretty close proximity to my old place. The blacks were five thousand times worse. It wasn’t even a comparison.
As for conservatives, nationalists, and libertarians being on the same side, try reading Buckley’s “Sharon Statement” for YAF. Believe it or not, that made sense to a lot of people in the America of 60 years ago and for nearly two generations. Oh well, all gone now.
But as for “skews”, give me a break Mark. Those are nowhere near sufficient to explain the statistical disparity. Go ahead, try to multiply the probabilities out to get above 90% if you really think you can demonstrate no statistically significant deviation from that Null Hypothesis.
The big winner cities and the dozen major universities in a 20-mile radius of Cato are *full* of rich people who don’t attend church regularly and who are approx. half women who look *nothing close* to that dude-wall profile, and the many Asians among them are usually hurt by affirmative action too.
There are lots and lots of them, including lots of white women who might have some interest in the social and professional prospects of white men like their husbands and sons, but they just don’t show up. Why do you think Cowen tried to change the subject to “State Capacity Libertarianism” a few months ago? Sounds a little like “throwing themselves under the bus”.
I work within that radius among wealthier, highly educated, and godless types, and the teleconference grids look nothing like the dude walls either despite the ‘skews’. How mysterious!
Those non-whites and non-dudes are all conforming to non-libertarianism, and that’s because there is something else important going on. Conforming is normal, and not conforming is always a little weird and strange, even in societies which tolerate and encourage a lot of independent eccentricity, which ours no longer does. That why most “heterodox contrarians” have serious mental problems and dysfunctional personal lives without any track record of real accomplishment.
The ones who don’t have problems, who are socially well-adjusted, successful, with stable family lives and who and have healthy amounts of intellectual firepower to actually rigorously reason their way through incoherent cant and groupthink are still usually quite quirky, disagreeable, and quarrelsome, but more to the point, *vanishingly rare*.
Should we be surprised that when they flock together, they turn out to be birds of a feather?
Look up the ranking of states by personality trait, most disagreeable are Alaska, Wyoming, and DC, but unlike those other two, DC is a lot more normal on the other factors. Can you see why?
Doherty quotes Friedman about “heads in the sand, they don’t want to deal with it”, but this is a topic that most libertarians prefer to avoid (not to mention the problem of the views of their “under 35s”, both of them.)
These days libertarians bend over backwards to be suicidally pro-immigrant, the legal wing has capitulated to anti-discrimation law and “14th Amendment Libertarianism” over federalism, and they spend very, very little time and energy criticizing affirmative action. Bleeding heart liberaltarians are cool with high taxes, redistribution, and the welfare state progams. Niskanenites are trying to pull everything as far woke as possible , and *still* has an “our people” page that is more like a dude wall than even the Heritage Foundation’s.
As one looks at recent articles about AA in libertarian outlets it is mostly summaries of legal developments without editorial comment. There is no category for it in Reason’s “policy areas – all topics”, though there are four drug policy sub-topics. Priorities! Look, I get it, we all live under the same threat. Advocating for drugs is safe. Publishing mushy-brained, anti-policing articles from Rand Paul is safe.
At any rate, consider the implications if it were true that, because of affirmative action, libertarianism only appeals to white men. First we have a chicken and egg problem. If affirmative action is the chicken that lays the egg of aggravating distortions that lead white men to libertarianism, then despite its low level, it is still at its full potential for popularity and influence, and without AA it would appeal to no one at all. If there are untapped hordes of minorities and women and young people who would be writing checks to Cato and Reason but for their fairly mild and inconspicuous stance against AA, then libertarians can only expand their appeal by going Full Progressive on identity group preferences, but then lost any coherence regarding individualism. Of course they don’t have to, because that scenario is utterly implausible.
The ugly truth is that progressives are the high status winners who are anti-male and, with increasing viciousness, anti-white and thus both implicity and explicitly promise to raise the social status and life prospects of non-dudes and non-whites. Any non-progressive movement has no choice but to pick from the smart fraction of people who are not down with that program, who have to lead people who are mostly losers, and who are all birds of a feather.
But the trouble is this: if one is not down with the anti-dude-wall program, then one is going to want his movement to be willing to do something other than pay lip service, but stubbornly insisting on the unilateral disarmament of a naive pacifist, in opposing it. At the very least, the movement could refrain from aggravating and exaverbating the situation from putting a ton of energy into bringing in more people who *are* down with that wicked program, and who the libertarians have a well-established track record of zero success in terms of converting even the tiniest fraction of the many millions of them into a new generation of libertarians, not even enough to generate the numbers needed for mere replacement of just handful of people.
Which is to say, contemporary mainstream libertarianism, which Doherty plays an influential role in defining, threw those people under the bus. Where do you think all those “national conservative” or “neoreactionary” or whatever types *came from*? They were standing right there with the libertarians before that bus came rolling by.
I’ve been paying close attention to those scenes for a long time, and it’s hard to express the insane tragedy of the worst strategic mistake that any ideological movement has made in the last hundred years. They threw their natural friends under the bus, and took up the cause of their natural enemies. That’s all it takes for a faith to die by its own hand.
It was *this* position that was several orders of magnitude more consequential for the prospects of libertarianism than anything having to do with their take on Affirmative Action. They were losing money on every sale when 10% of their base would split as they tried to be 1% more respectable or popular. Were they making it up on volume?
The vast majority of those the people who were not down with that program started out as self-identified libertarians, eagerly absorbed all the seminal works of the titans of the libertarian canon and even today still approach many questions from a presumptively libertarian starting point. All they needed to stay and put their shoulders to the same wheel was a movement committed to doing what was necessary to “keep the country safe for libertarianism”.
But that’s the problem. There is no place in libertarianism for these libertarians. So they went elsewhere. Doherty has to wonder what happened to Thiel, but Thiel knows *exactly* what happened to Doherty.
2. Politics
As they say, Biden is a transition candidate. An old white dude that rejects full wokeism but will replaced by his Brown Bernie VP in 4-8 years.
How does Biden reject full wokeism? He’s just old, white and familiar, so disengaged voters assume, with the encouragement of the media, that he is somehow “moderate.”
He’s not Bernie, in that he doesn’t dream of relieving the oligarchs of their billions, but wokeism is a revolt against the middle class, not against the funders of the Democratic Party.
Is this not libertarianism throwing national conservatism under the bus, the same way they threw Reaganism under the bus?
Maybe it is just tribal, Girardian-mimetic bus-throwing, such that I can discount and dismiss what libertarians like Doherty are doing as not genuinely intellectually serious or well-founded, as he is just following primitive instincts of social-psychology? An eye for an eye, a bus for a bus?
The bus-throwing is tragic and silly at the moment, as there is a massive freight train coming right at all of us and it will just plow through all our buses. Shall we hang separately?
The truth is, libertarians are throwing themselves under the bus. They need no help. Doherty’s article is just another example of that violation of the first law of holes.
Even putting aside the claim about media, which I do not accept, and which has not been proven, what if they won’t let you fight them on this front? Then what? How are you going to fight, with words? Why won’t they put those words outside the ‘parameters’?
The parameters include protection of the parameters. That’s the problem. That’s “Social Failure”, akin to “Market Failure”.
There is no way to fight on any front if you abjure fighting to preserve the capacity to fight. If a man strikes you on the cheek, you may turn the other cheek. If he cuts out your tongue, you don’t have another tongue. “Speech Is Special.”
Try to work through what it would take to persuade people that the universities are no longer adequate arenas to debate ideas.
Your opponent says, “Universities are just fine. Did you not see the latest research and publications highlights newsletter? Fantastic! All we ask is for people to be civil and courteous to everyone, which is indispensable to productive dialectic. Identity-based bigotry and discrimination are not consistent with those values, so we police that up. Why is that a problem? What exactly do you propose as an alternative? Mostly what we are doing, but no rules against bigotry? Really, all we are doing is insisting that people not be jerks. You’re not going to do the same thing?”
The problem is, there is no way to talk about the problem, because any attempt to do so leads right into the minefield of the parameters.
“Libertarians generally agree with the new nationalists that the parameters for what is considered acceptable debate should be expansive. They just don’t want to use government as a crowbar toward that end.”
I don’t understand, what ‘parameters’? The First Amendment says there are no parameters, and today’s ‘libertarians generally agree’ that whatever any private entity does in that regard is not coercive by definition so not worth regulating. But then, how did we get to the point where debate is not expansive, and getting less and less expansive all the time, such that even Doherty recognizes the problem of overly constrictive ‘parameters’?
Well, maybe I can persuade whoever sets the parameters to loosen the parameters.
But again, what if the parameters exclude criticism of the parameters? Uh oh, then I’m stuck, and I have no crowbar to get unstuck. Being stuck is bad, but crowbars are bad, so I’m meta-stuck. That’s why “Speech Is Special”. If I can’t use the state as a metaphorical crowbar, then what alternative is there to grabbing some actual crowbars? Is that more ‘libertarian’? (Spoiler: it’s not).
How about a war “to the cease-fire” between libertarians and The RIPH? That would be a war without libertarians being the losers. But what exactly is the plan?
There are three possibilities. Either:
1. There is no big problem worth worrying about, or
2. There is, but:
2.a. It’s better to lose than to do what it would take to win, or
2.b. It’s better to do what it would take to win, than to lose.
Is hope the plan?
You know what else has luster? Gold. As in money. So here is a way, compatible with libertarianism (at least, what anyone in the 1980’s or 90’s would recognize as ‘libertarian’), and riding the wave of contemporary meme slogans, to take that source of luster out of the universities.
“Defund College”.
Entirely.
If we are going to neutralize the police, then just like Warren Meyer says, “Do Professors Next”.
Not a single tax dollar to anything associated with higher education. No more grants, research money, financial aid, student loans, non-profit status – no more of any of it. No more Department of Education or ROTC or anything. Everyone must go “Full Hillsdale” and fund themselves 100% from tuition and donations and pay income and property tax, just like any business. “Libertarianism to universities: drop dead”. Faster Please.
The funny thing is that most ‘neoreactionaries’ – and probably plenty of mainstream conservatives these days – would be quite happy with this outcome, and they might even be more libertarian than what is now passing for mainstream libertarianism.
Indeed, hasn’t this been the implicit warning to university administrators in a lot of commentary for a while? “Hey, you need to start reigning this stuff in, or a lot of people are going to start thinking that maybe they shouldn’t fund their enemies if those enemies are going to be able to get away with playing double-standard games.”
I am hoping to see that Reason article soon. If they want me to, I volunteer to write it.
Handle, you are an excellent writer. Please write this article and submit it to Reason. If they won’t take it, submit it elsewhere, or post it on your own website (which I still check from time to time in hopes of finding a new post, and I can’t imagine I’m alone in that).
I find the emergent party line among ‘new’ conservatives (including around here), “scratch a libertarian, find a progressive,” is almost too obviously rote tribalism to take seriously. The chosen synecdoche for libertarianism I guess is the Niskanen Center… which openly repudiates the libertarian identity. Meanwhile, on the frontpage of Reason we see articles vehemently criticizing Kamala Harris, mocking the National Nuclear Lab for characterizing hard work as a “white male” value, a piece criticizing the mainstream media for trying to keep schools closed, a piece by John McWhorter, an interview with Greg Gutfield. And yeah, some pieces critical of police and Mike Pence for marijuana stuff (and as far as I can tell, Reason still doesn’t capitalize the ‘b’ in black, where Frobes as caved). The issue seems to be more irritation that major libertarian institutions haven’t ‘picked a side’ and gone all in for the right.
Doherty writes
Are unlimited immigration and “no tariffs” really good litmus tests for a libertarian or a globalist Progressive?