Look up "late to party" in dictionary, find this post

Pnin, writing under his real name at his own blog, wrote an interesting blog post a few weeks back in response to Kerry Howley's Reason essay on libertarianism and culture. Short summary of Kerry's thesis: that libertarians ought to spend more time focusing on cultural threats to freedom, rather than merely focusing on the evils of government coercion. Kerry Howley's response to that post is here; Ilya/Pnin's response to Kerry's response is here: and, because the blogging world clearly needs more incest and not less, here is Will Wilkinson's response to all of the responses.

Ilya and I hashed this argument out at some length in real life last month, thus my letting this post languish in draft form. But one of the articles I link to in my second point reminded me of it, so I figured I might as well resuscitate it.

1) Regarding Ilya's first pointI see little sense in distinguishing between "libertarianism" and "subjects discussed by individual libertarians." There isn't much consensus over what libertarianism ought to be, and that's as it should be.

There is also a structure of social change issue here. As I understand the liberaltarians' vision of their project, they see themselves at Stage 1 of the pyramid. They envision themselves engaged in conversation with our intellectuals, hashing out ideas at some safe remove from the rough and tumble of day to day politics. They most emphatically are notinterested in marketing their ideas to large audiences, or figuring out whether their ideas are politically saleable.

Or in other words, they really are just a bunch of individual libertarians writing to other libertarians and talking to them about culture. They are not interested in the work of communicating a platform -- call it libertarianism -- to a mass audience just yet. That's okay. There's room in the world for Stage 1 movements. Some of them don't make it to Stage 3. That's fine too.

2)Here is the part which makes writing this post weeks after the initial debate defensible: I admit that I am armchair psychologizing and possibly being completely obnoxious in doing so, in which case I apologize in advance, but I suspect part of what is animating Howley, Wilkinson and the liberaltarian project more generally is visceral disgust at the type of milieux described in this recent Marty Beckerman piece in Salon. Or, at least, I'm detecting echoes of frustration at them in an earlier post in the Howley-Seavey debate, in which Howley groused that "Most libertarian cocktail party critiques of feminism are utterly insipid and incoherent." So the liberaltarians are attempting to articulate a positive vision for a pro-liberty movement that utterly reads Beckerman's old friends out of the pro-freedom camp.

I share the liberaltarians' disgust for spiteful, narrow-minded, fire-breathing lunatics. And I also admire their attempts to stop kvetching about the more hateful elements within our own coalition and build something new instead. But for all the reasons that Ilya, Todd Seavey, etc. bring up, I wonder if it wouldn't be better and more honest to just resign ourselves to being negative for awhile. Put another way, I'm not particularly troubled that libertarian institutions aren't full-throatedly feminist. I am troubled that many of them have formed tactical alliances with more conservative groups that spew the kind of nonsense Beckerman described in that article. If most great popularizers of free market ideas and property rights really just stayed quiet on feminism, as Seavey would have them do, I'd be happy. I fear that in practice, most such popularizers aren't.

I should note that Ilya and I have disagreed in in-person conversations on the extent to which the kind of vile anti-feminists that Beckerman describes hold sway over the libertarian movement. He's claimed that most of these people self-identify as social conservatives or Republicans, not libertarians, and that most real libertarians like us know better than to listen to them anyway. Maybe that's true. All I can say is that I have spent more time in the free market activist movement proper than he has, and that I've encountered plenty of them. And I've felt repelled by them, and I find this repulsion sad. It's possible that he's run in more rarified circles in the movement than I have. He's certainly less scared of cold-approaching VIPs at libertarian social events, so he's probably spent less time talking to not particularly bright twenty-three-year old fusionists. It is also possible, even likely, that far fewer said not particularly bright twenty-three-year old fusionists want to hit on him. He also grew up in a left-liberal area of the country, whereas I did not, and runs in professional circles that are far less left-liberal than I do.

So: yes, liberaltarians, develop your project at the Koch Stage 1 level! But in the meantime, make more modest efforts toward a less stupid, less anti-feminist libertarian movement. That may bear fruit, even if the big project doesn't.