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The Libertarian Party of Michigan on Wednesday posted an antisemitic cartoon depicting Jews as puppet masters who control both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US.

The graphic was posted on multiple social media platforms, but gained particular traction on X/Twitter, where it received widespread blowback but also a chuck of support garnering over 1,000 likes before it was ultimately deleted.

The Libertarian Party of Michigan did not respond to The Algemeiners request for comment for this story.

I know some people think of me as libertarian. I have used that word to describe myself at times, journalist Brad Polumbo wrote in response to the graphic. But please understand that I have no affiliation whatsoever with whatever the fk this is.

Max Abrahms, a professor of political science at Northeastern University, wrote, Ive found that foreign policy libertarians are more likely to (1) view themselves as smart, (2) view themselves as smarter than they are, (3) condescend when theyre dilettantes on national security issues, (4) and yes have issues with Jews.

This is not the first time the Libertarian Party has been accused of promoting antisemitism. In August 2022, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire posted a now-deleted tweet reading, Six million dollar minimum wage or youre antisemitic, in a reference to the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Then, a few months later, the national party tweeted out a depiction of Sam Bankman-Fried the fraudster who ran FTX that many argued was antisemitic.

Additionally, the Mises Caucus wing of the Libertarian Party invited an activist named Bryan Sharpe (or Hotep Jesus), who many consider antisemitic, to speak at its convention back in 2021. A Mises Caucus leading member said, regarding the invitation: I dont actually think that someone who is trying to be a truth-seeker and understand whats going on and asked the question about whether or not Jews run Hollywood is an antisemite.

Many observers have pointed out that it is important to make a distinction between the Libertarian Party and people who generally think of themselves as libertarian, arguing the latter merely describes a worldview that prioritizes liberty in economic and social affairs. Meanwhile, the party is seen by many to have been taken over by extremists.

Liz Wolfe, a journalist at Reason, noted she believes the better question is Whats going on with the Libertarian Party? Certainly not the same as libertarianism.

I mean, I dont feel like their antisemitic posting represents what I value, she continued. Far from it.

The rest is here:
'The Zionists Always Get Their Way': Libertarian Party of Michigan Posts Antisemitic Cartoon Depicting Jews as Puppet ... - Algemeiner

Dear Reader (including Aruban baseball players for whom ignorance was bliss),

With the news that libertarian advocacy group FreedomWorks is going the way of Blockbuster, the Tea Party era is officially over. Of course, its been functionally deador mostly deadfor a while. Its been a while since anyone in national Republican politics of any note talked like a Tea Partier, never mind associated themselves with the cause. Im sure there are some whove gone to ground, like old-style Communists keeping their heads down in various backwaters, hoping no one recognizes them.

For a sense of how the Tea Parties were like St. Elmos Firesuddenly lighting up the firmament and burning out just as quicklyconsider that in 2010 The New York Times Magazine introduced Marco Rubio to the country with a cover story titled, The First Senator from the Tea Party?

The question mark referred to whether or not Rubio would successfully defeat Charlie Crist in the primary to become a senatornot whether he was a Tea Party guy. Funnily enough, that deserved a question mark, too. Or at least an expiration date. Today, Rubio is a devout industrial plannerbut only when done right.

Indeed, the Times profile, written by Mark Leibovich, is a fascinating historical snapshot. If there is a face for the future of the Republican Party, it is Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee told Leibovich. He is our Barack Obama but with substance.Today Huckabee talks about anything that smacks of the Tea Party-style libertarian principles like theyre nothing a course of penicillin cant clear-up.

There were other Tea Party-fueled victories that year. Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Mike Lee, rode that wave, as did many of the GOP candidates who gave Barack Obama a shellacking in the midterms and helped Republicans pick up 63 seats in the House. For the next couple of election cycles, aligning oneself with the Tea Parties was a surefire path to Republican success.

I think Dan McLaughlin gets it basically right in his modest obituary for the Tea Party movement, though I think you could just as easily argue that the movement died when the Tea Party Caucus in the House effectively dissolved in 2016 and more or less absorbed by the House Freedom Caucus. With the rise of Donald Trump, the House Freedom Caucus basically became the House Trump Caucus. Leaders of the initial Tea Party Caucusthe brainchild of Rand Paulincluded Michele Bachmann, Allen West, Louie Gohmert, Steve King, as well as a few normal people.

Now I should say (again) that the Tea Parties were the one exception to my longstanding opposition to populism. I spoke at Tea Party rallies, and for the most part, I liked what I saw; even most of the cranks and oddballs were charming. (I remember at one Tea-Partyish event, an Eastern European fellow pulled me aside, with a stack of books under his arm, to make the case for the restoration of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania.) As I used to joke at the time, I thought that the Tea Parties might actually constitute the fulfillment of the ancient prophecy that the libertarians would rise up, seize power, and leave everybody alone.

Its difficult to exaggerate how excited some folks were back then. Glenn Reynoldsof Instapundit famesaw it as the fulfillment of his own prophecy: that an Army of Davids would rise up and restore common sense, good government, fiscal rectitude, and all good things. The new libertarian populism was hotly debated, celebrated, and denounced.

Jonathan Rauch wrote a great piece for National Journal in 2010 marveling at how the Tea Parties were perhaps the first modern networked, crowd-sourced, or open-sourced movement. Hierarchies are at a loss to defeat networks, Rauch wrote. Open systems have no leader or headquarters; their units are self-funding, and their members often work for free (thinkWikipedia). Even in principle, you cant count or compartmentalize the participants, because they come and go as they pleasebut counting them is unnecessary, because they can communicate directly with each other. Knowledge and power are distributed throughout the system.

As a result, Rauch continued, the network is impervious to decapitation. If you thump it on the head, it survives. No foolish or self-serving boss can wreck it, because it has no boss. Fragmentation, the bane of traditional organizations, actually makes the network stronger. It is like a starfish: Cut off an arm, and it grows (in some species) into a new starfish. Result: two starfish, where before there was just one.

Alas, Jonathan was wrong. So was Glenn. And so was I.

The media and Democrats figured out how to convince people that the Tea Parties were actually racist and fascist and all that. I think that helped radicalize a lot of Tea Partiers, causing them to embrace things like nationalism and statist power politics. Im here to write about a different cautionary tale, but I should at least acknowledge another. The elite medias moral panic over the Tea Parties succeeded in helping to destroy the movement, but what replaced it was far worse. Ive lost count of the progressives who simultaneously tell me theyre nostalgic for the libertarianism of the pre-Trump right and rejoice in calling conservatives hypocrites for abandoning it. Maybe if they responded in good faith at the time, it would have endured.

Then again, maybe not. Back to my point.

First of all, as Tim Carney gently intimates, the key to libertarian populism wasnt actually the libertarianism, but the populism. And populism is a bit like rushing water: It looks libertarian when it goes in a libertarian direction, but when it hits an obstacle, it will veer in the direction of least resistance. Or it will just pool up and eventually evaporate, dissipate, or get sucked up by creatures looking to wet their beaks.

Speaking of such creatures, Dick Morris saw the payday early. But many others followed him.

One of the problems with political passionparticularly novel passion detached from institutions with the knowledge and experience to channel it constructivelyis that it attracts opportunists and grifters. Its always easier to separate people from their money when they are very excited and not thinking clearly.

As Jim Geraghty chronicled in 2019, the Tea Party quickly became a textbook illustration of Eric Hoffers observation that, Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Back in 2014, Geraghty wrote, Politico researched 33 political action committees that claimed to be affiliated with the Tea Party and courted small donors with email and direct-mail appeals and found that they raised $43 million74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals, compared to $39.5 million on operating expenses, including $6 million to firms owned or managed by the operatives who run the PACs. The kind of self-dealing cronyism the Tea Parties were inspired to fight became the defining feature of the Tea Parties.

A bit further on, Jim added:

Back in 2016, campaign finance lawyer Paul H. Jossey detailed how some of the PACs operated andlamented, The Tea Party movement is pretty much dead now, but it didnt die a natural death. It was murderedand it was an inside job. In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form ofpyramid schemethat transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural, poorer Southerners and Midwesterners to bicoastal political operatives.

One of the amazing things about the MAGA movement is it kind of got Hoffers sequence backward. It more or less started as a racket, but that hasnt stopped various people from trying to turn it into a movementlike pimps and madams swirling around an old prostitute with make-up, nice clothes, and flattering lighting to fool the johns. Thats why FreedomWorks closed shop: MAGA is better at monetizing the johns because it bypasses the formalities and etiquette of the better brothels.

I want to be clear: Although I didnt always agree with FreedomWorks, Im not accusing the group of corruption or likening it to a brothel. It actually tried to stick to a coherent principled agenda, and thats what killed it. Or rather, thats what drove FreedomWorks to suicide. Because thats not what the customers wanted. Now I think donors are saying, What are you doing for Trump today? Paul Beckner, a member of FreedomWorks board, told Politico. And were not for or against Trump. Were for Trump if hes doing what we agree with, and were against him if hes not. And so I think weve seen an erosion of conservative donors.FreedomWorks didnt die from a lack of supply of coherent principles but from a lack of demand for them.

Of Courage and Cowardice

Okay, now that Ive played this fairly straight, let me put on my G-File hat and put this in some broader context.

I recently had the (great) historian Robert Kagan on The Remnant to discuss his new book, Rebellion: How Anti-Liberalism is Tearing America ApartAgain. I wont reprise my areas of substantial disagreement (or agreement) in full here, but he makes one claim that seems relevant. He thinks wokeness is the natural unfolding of the liberalism inherent in our founding ideals. Heres how he puts it in the book:

Today, the main target of antiliberal conservatism is wokeness. But what is wokeness? To some extent, it is the inevitable by-product of the liberal system the founders created. When groups that have been struggling for recognition of their fundamental natural rights finally succeed, they invariably seek more than just acknowledgment of those rights. They seek the respect and dignity that come with being fully equal members of society, no more or less privileged than those who used to oppress and look down on them and diminish them with disparaging language and stereotypes.

I think he has a point about some things that get called wokeness or political correctness. Some changes in language and customs are simply an advancement in good manners and liberal principles of equality. Using new terms that show respect and acceptance is consistent with the desirable expansion of what you might call the liberal spirit. In the 1960s, for instance, black people decided that they didnt want to be called Negroesand decent white people came to accept that, regardless of their ideological orientation. I have no objection to that, and I dont knowand have never knownany normal people who would call Clarence Thomas or Tom Sowell a Negro.

Where Kagan goes wrong is in thinking that wokeness is only an extension of that kind of thing. Wokeness-in-power is fundamentally anti-liberal, seeking to use not just language, but institutional power and resources, to enforce groupthink. Heck, groupthink is the idealthe Mandarins of Wokeness will settle for compliance. Requiring mandatory DEI statements for job applicants is not liberal in any way, as schools are finally starting to realize. Ibram Kendis anti-racism is a bullying tactic to force acquiescence to illiberal policy preferences. Selectively enforcing free speech rules to privilege antisemites while silencing other groups is not liberal.

In fact, the intellectuals behind wokeness, critical theory, and intersectionality are open and honest about their opposition to liberalism. They write books and papers attacking liberalism as a system of white privilege or supremacy. Colorblindnessa key concept for liberal equalityis deemed a tool of oppression. And of course, liberalor neoliberaleconomics is rejected as systematized greed and tyranny.

The government using its power to impose woke policiesparticularly through executive orders, bureaucratic mandates, or even judicial diktatsis also not liberal, or its certainly not libertarian, if that makes it easier to grasp the point. (To take one example from the headlines, New York just announced $2.3 billion in contracts to improve JFK airport. The hitch: white-owned businesses are barred from bidding on any of the projects).

So what does this have to do with the end of FreedomWorks? The libertarian populism of the Tea Party era died because the animating passion wasnt really libertarianism in the first place. Tim Carney beat me to the punch by quoting Rep. Thomas Massies Tea Party replacement theory: All this time, Massieexplained in 2017, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they werent voting for libertarian ideasthey were voting for the craziest son of a bh in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class.

If all those supposedly principled libertarians were actually principled libertarians, they would not have surrendered to Trumpism, in the same way that all those supposed classical liberals committed to the liberal arts, of all things, would not have handed the keys to their temples to the forces of illiberalism.

Indeed, to take Kagans claim seriously, the lefts long march through institutions was a fulfillment of liberal principles and the democratic process. It wasnt. It was, on campus after campus, newsroom after newsroom, foundation after foundation, a systemic rout of the forces of liberalism by an illiberal insurgency. As a reader recently said to me, I think that the illiberal rights fallacy is their claim that liberalism failed to defend itself, as if ideas were sentient beings capable of action. I think this is exactly right. Liberal idealsfree speech, free exchange, freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, limited government, etc.cannot defend themselves. Peopleparticularly people in powerwho believe in them can. When those people refuse to fight for those ideals, they are left defenseless.

Once abandoned, these ideas arent really defeateddefeat suggests resistance, after allthey are discarded like idols to some forgotten or defunct deity. As I put it in the last lines of Suicide of the West, Decline is a choice. Principles, like gods, die when no one believes in them anymore.

Ive long quoted T.S. Eliots famous line about there being no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. What I always took from this is that causes endure so long as people continue to believe in the cause and are willing to fight for it. This is why C.S. Lewis (echoing Cicero) was right when he said, Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. Its easy to be for libertarianism or liberalismor any other ismwhen it makes you popular or rich or gets you elected. The test is when it makes you none of those things.

What weve learned in recent years is that that is a lot to ask of a lot of people. And to borrow another line from Eliot, that is why the Tea Parties died not with a bang, but a whimper.

Canine Update: After enduring the outrage of interminable abandonment with multiple caretakers for about 48 hours while the Fair Jessica and I went off to NYC to celebrate her birthday, the girls are now fine. I came home a day earlier than the missus, and I tried to atone by taking them on a series of adventures. Bunnies were chased, balls fetched, Very Important Things sniffed and duly marked. When TFJ returned, they were happy. But several people asked why she was not chastised with an aroo. I have no answer to that; Ive learned not to question the deeper mysteries of dingo-ness. Others asked whether Zo heard TFJ arrive or whether a mere whisper from me set her off. The answer is the latter. If either of us whispers Who is it? Zo and (often) Pippa will race to the door either to greet a missing human or to ward off crows, dogs, bears, gnus, ninjas, whatever. Theres really not much more to report. Yes, I appeased Chester in my wifes absence. Yes, Zo is a good girl who, despite not liking company in the front seat, is no longer the sort of beast that punishes other dogs for it (at least not ones in her extended pack). So theres no need for Kristi Noem to shoot her. And Gracie remains the Queen.

Continue reading here:
The Tea Party Movement Died With a Whimper - The Dispatch

The independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. challenged former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday to debate him this month during the Libertarian Partys national convention in Washington, where both men are set to deliver remarks.

With Mr. Trump escalating his attacks on him on social media, Mr. Kennedy, who is seeking ballot access and voter support in all 50 states, issued his challenge in an open letter on X. Mr. Kennedy cited his performance in two national polls, saying he was drawing a lot of voters from your former supporters.

They are upset that you blew up the deficit, shut down their businesses during Covid, and filled your administration with swamp creatures, he said. So Id like to make you an offer, he said, adding that their campaign schedules made for a logical showdown. Its perfect neutral territory for you and me to have a debate where you can defend your record for your wavering supporters.

A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the Libertarian Party did not immediately provide a comment.

The partys convention is set for Memorial Day weekend in Washington. Mr. Kennedy is set to speak on May 24, his campaign said on Tuesday; Mr. Trump is scheduled for May 25. Both candidates are trying to appeal to a broader base of support in the election, but neither is expected to be on the partys ballot line in November.

Mr. Kennedy previously ruled out running as a Libertarian, though he has courted party members since he became an independent last fall. The party is among the more established third parties, and as of last week was on the ballot in 37 states; Mr. Kennedy is mounting a state-by-state effort to get on the November election ballot.

As for Mr. Trump, Angela McArdle, the chairwoman of the Libertarian party, said last week that it was not possible under the partys bylaws to nominate him.

Several candidates seeking the Libertarian Partys presidential nomination have condemned the groups decision to invite Mr. Trump to speak at the gathering. One of them, Jacob Hornberger, called it an abomination.

The gamesmanship by Mr. Kennedy, a liberal scion and environmental lawyer who has recently become better known for his anti-vaccine activism and promotion of conspiracy theories, appears to have added to growing hostilities between him and Mr. Trump.

The former president has sharpened his attacks on Mr. Kennedy as more polls show signs that his candidacy could take votes away from Mr. Trump. For many months, Democrats had argued the opposite: that Mr. Kennedy could wind up playing the role of spoiler for Mr. Biden.

Last week, Mr. Kennedy proposed that his campaign and Mr. Bidens jointly conduct a poll in October to see who would do better against Mr. Trump in a hypothetical two-way race; he suggested that the underperformer should drop out.

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R.F.K. Jr., Invited to Libertarian Convention, Seeks Trump Debate - The New York Times

SUBMITTED PHOTO/Avens O'Brien

By Thomas L. Knapp

Thomas L. Knapp is a director and senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, where this was first published. He lives in north central Florida.

In early May, the Libertarian Partys National Committee announced a prominent speaker at the partys convention over Memorial Day weekend in Washington, D.C: former U.S. president Donald Trump.

A few days later, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a post on X, issued a challenge:

Were both going to be speaking at the upcoming Libertarian convention on May 24 and 25. Its perfect neutral territory for you and me to have a debate where you can defend your record for your wavering supporters.

The party hasnt publicly confirmed any invitation (offered or accepted) to Kennedy, but maybe thats coming.

Im not going to argue here, anyway over the wisdom of a political party inviting two of its most prominent opponents to use its national convention as a campaign rally location or debate venue.

I do, however, want all you voters out there to know three things about this things that the media coverage seems to either leave unmentioned or gloss over:

Weve got a pretty big field of announced candidates for that presidential nomination.

Neither Trump nor Kennedy have declared for that nomination (in fact, after flirting with doing so, Kennedy publicly rejected the idea).

Neither Trump nor Kennedy are eligible for that nomination or at least they wont be if they address the convention prior to the nominee being selected. According to the Libertarian National Committees policy manual:

No person shall be scheduled as a convention speaker unless that person has signed this statement: As a condition of my being scheduled to speak, I agree to neither seek nor accept nomination for any office to be selected by delegates at the upcoming Libertarian Party convention if the voting for that office occurs after my speech.

Since we havent selected our nominee yet, Im not going to sing his or her praises to you or try to convince you to vote Libertarian. I just dont want you to be surprised when you look at your ballot in November and dont see the name Trump or Kennedy next to the name Libertarian Party.

Between now and November, I hope youll take time to familiarize yourself with Libertarian ideas and with the Libertarian Partys candidates for office across the U.S. They deserve your attention and consideration.

Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.

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Knapp: No, Trump and Kennedy aren't Libertarian candidates - Bay to Bay News

Who were the libertarians? Nowwhen the movement has reached its nadirseems like a good time to consider the question.

I recently received an email from an old friend, an esteemed academic who is foundering miserably in retirement and senescence. Like many men of his kind, he has taken up politics with a social-media-driven religious devotion and, having tried Donald Trump on for size for a few years, has undergone a conversion to the cause of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, like Donald Trump, has vermin on the brain.

Kennedy is, of course, a charlatan and a huckster, but more to the point here is that he is a left-wing charlatan and huckstera man with a view of government and national life that is something akin to that of Sen. Bernie Sanders or an old-fashioned campus Marxist. My old friend isnot was, but isa doctrinaire libertarian, one of those gentlemen I could go to and commiserate about what a terrible idea the Interstate Highway System was and why we dont really need an FDA. Oh, sure, Bobby is all wrong about the economics and most everything else, hell say, butand Ill bet you know where this is goinghe got it right about COVID-19 and the vaccines. Donald Trump, hell tell you, went along with the worst abuse of American civil liberties since Abraham Lincoln illegally suspended habeas corpus, practically turning these United States into a medical gulag.

Some people would like to forget the COVID era. Some people still can think of little else. The pandemic really was a radicalizing experience for a large number of Americans.

There has, in fact, been a cascade of radicalizing experiences since the end of the 20th century: the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2007-08 financial crisis and subsequent bank bailouts, and the COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine controversies chief among them. These events have had parallel, but unequal, effects on the right and the left.

September 11 in many ways brought Fox News to life and gave rise to a new kind of Republican tendency that psychologically conflated national-security projects abroad with culture-war projects at homeas in the matter of the Islamic Cultural Center on Park Place in Lower Manhattanwhile on the left the attack gave rise to an illiterately conspiratorial account of politics (Bush knew! Halliburton!) and a reinvigorated connection with 1960s-style radicalism as the movement protesting the Iraq War looked back to its Vietnam-era precedent. The financial crisis gave rise to the Tea Party movement and its progressive doppelgnger, Occupy Wall Street. The pandemic saw the right adopt a conspiratorial view of vaccines and pharmaceutical companies that once had been mainly a left-wing tendency while the left embraced a Kulturkampf approach toward symbolic public-health measures such as masking and deepened its fondness for expert authoritarianism.

Over the past two decades, the right adopted a more libertarian critique of many institutions and practices and then rallied behind an autocratic would-be caudillo with a distinctly etatist approach to economic policy. The left, meanwhile, has adopted a more radically egalitarian rhetoric even as the Democratic Party got very comfortable with its new role as the party of moneyed professionals and urban elites. Strange times, indeed.

One can see, without much difficulty or strain on the moral imagination, how each of those events would have a radicalizing effect on a certain kind of person. But one can also see that there is a certain kind of personlargely, but not exclusively, Americanslooking for an excuse to become radicalized. Tucker Carlson is one such example, but so is Nigel Farage, those angry Dutch farmers, the people (some of the people) who elected Giorgia Meloni and Javier Milei, etc. The desire to be radicalized is fundamentally a way to emotionally accommodate social alienation. It is the price that has to be paid to indulge hatred.

That distinctive, of-the-moment alienation is, ironically, what we feel when we are all stuck too close together. The modern world is too close and too intimate, and it is, for that reason, full of people who hate their neighbors and require a respectable reason for hating themwhich is why everybody says the people on the other side of whatever issue it is that they are pretending to care about are Nazis. Thats the great lesson the Indiana Jones movies taught us: There isnt anything socially safer than cheering against Nazis, even if you have to find them where there are none.

It is easier to see how this works if you take it out of your own national context. Can you imagine that there were perfectly good reasons for some British people to wish to reestablish their own democratically controlled national sovereignty over British affairs without being superintended by the European Union? Can you imagine that there were other Britons who had perfectly respectable reasons to want to maintain the benefits and privileges associated with living in an EU country? My own sympathies were with the Brexiteers, but there is much that is attractive about being a member of the European Union, and it is not difficult to see why many British people would have preferred to remain so.

There are many Americans who have enough sympathetic imagination to do that, but fewer who can view both sides of the various COVID-19 controversies with similar equanimity. I find myself pulled in different ways, as usual. The anti-vaccine activists are dangerous cranks, and the people who compare the COVID-19 shutdowns to the Soviet gulag are not to be trusted. At the same time, I recently had an appointment with a medical professional who insisted on wearing a mask for the entirety of our conversationwhich happened over Zoom, with each of us in otherwise empty rooms.

Of course I wanted to strangle him a little bitwho wouldnt?

COVID-19 radicalization is something one would expect to see more of among people who already had libertarian inclinations, which includes both the self-conscious libertarians with their Hayek books tucked under their arms and the more traditional Youre not the boss of me! American types. The weird thing is that COVID-19 radicalization has made so many of these libertarians less libertarian rather than more so. They havent moved from Free to Choose to The Machinery of Freedom, from Milton Friedman to David Friedman, from Ayn Rand fantasies to anarcho-capitalist fantasies. No, theyve moved from Reason to Breitbart to Mother Jones circa 1985, keeping the radical urgency but giving up on the part of libertarianism oriented towardwhat was it, again?liberty.

Part of this is our aging population: We have all seen relatives lose their minds to Fox News brain (which is a close relative of Facebook brain and Washington Post comments-section brain). In 1920, only 1 in 20 Americans was 65 or older, while today the figure is 1 in 6. And as our population gets older, our politics is going to get dumber and crazier and crankier and more disconnected from everyday reality.

Maybe I should not be very surprised.

We used to joke that libertarianism was for Republicans who liked weed and porn, or that it is what you get when you slip 5,000 micrograms of LSD into the punch bowl at the Chamber of Commerce. Less jokingly, we would observe that libertarian was an adjective preferred by conservatives who were understandably embarrassed to be associated with the Republican Party. (My first presidential vote was for Andre Marrou of the Libertarian Party over incumbent George H.W. Bush, possibly the most sensible president of my lifetime. But there were reasons to be embarrassed by Republicans even back in the golden days of 1992.) To be a small-l libertarian (as opposed to an activist in the Libertarian Party) was to liberate oneself from having very much dumb political stuff to defend for the sake of party solidarity. And the libertarians had (and have) most of the good ideas, as much as I can appreciate Ramesh Ponnurus wise line about libertarianism being the perfect political philosophy provided you live in a world with no foreign policy or children. But perhaps the libertarians did not take those libertarian ideas as seriously as I had thought they did.

It may be that libertarianism simply was what was politically and socially available for the would-be right-wing radical from (approximately) the 1970s through the turn of the century. If you were right-ish leaning and had a hankering for something radical-feeling, then libertarianism was where it was at. Surely there is something to that. And here it is probably worth bearing in mind that many important and embarrassing links between the mainstream conservative movement and fringe, conspiracy-minded, and antisemitic movements were championed by erstwhile libertarians: Murray Rothbard and his daft effort to recruit David Duke and the radical left into a unified front against the welfare-warfare state; Ron Paul and his bigoted newsletters; Sam Francis and his long journey (but not as long as one might have thought or hoped) from the Heritage Foundation and the Mises Institute to the crackpot-racist lecture circuit.

Maybe libertarianism never was a school of political thought at all.

Schools of political thought are the work of many hands. Political auteurssui generis great-man figurestend to be dictators such as Napoleon Bonaparte or Henry VIII. Politics that take any account of consensus or pluralism tends to be by nature based on coalition-building, and coalition-building politics, in turn, tend toward consensus and pluralism, at least in many cases and to some degree. (Which isnt to say that collective leadership is a guarantee of decent policy: The Soviet Union was already a brutal mess before Joseph Stalin got hold of it.)

Schools of political thought may be the product of a kind of apostolic succession (Socrates begets Plato, Plato begets Aristotle) or, in a more practical configuration, coalitions of contemporariesaligned if not necessarily unanimoussuch as the American founders or the leaders of the French Revolution. American conservativesI mean intellectuals in movement conservatism, not Republican-leaning voters at largelong thought of themselves as being more like the philosophers in succession (National Review still calls its seminar program From Burke to Buckley, Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. being two points defining a line from which Trump-era conservatism, such as it is, departs at a 45-degree angle) and less like members of a political party. Conservatives thought that conservatism meant adherence to a philosophy (or an ideology, if you arent allergic to the word) rather than loyalty to a coalition.

But as it has turned out, coalitional loyaltyas expressed through prone self-abasement in the Donald Trump cultis the defining characteristic of politically engaged conservatism in our time. Funny how that worked out.

Many conservatives, including a few leading neoconservatives, could never quite come around to the Republican Party even in its pre-Trump incarnation, and a great many held the GOP at arms length. The libertarians had even less to defend in the way of party apparatus: Either they were a small minority tendency within the Republican Party and the wider conservative movement or they were big fish in the minuscule pond that is the Libertarian Party. (David Koch was each of those things at different points in his career.) The libertarians were free to be thinkers rather than party men, caf philosophes rather than street-fighting sans-culottes. And that was fineprovided you didnt feel some deep and abiding need to be relevant.

Radicalism for the sake of radicalism is, of course, the dead opposite of conservatism.

Without going too far into the factional Kremlinology of the American right, the prefix paleo is useful here: Take the paleo-libertarians and the paleo-conservatives back far enough and you are mostly talking about the same people, a motley collection of Taft-ites and Southern agrarians, anti-New Dealers and premature anti-New Dealers, America First-ers, Lindbergh-ites, et al., with Albert Jay Nock representing the better sort and H.L. Mencken and the American Mercury crew the inferior sort. That conjunction gave rise to a style of political rhetoric that was very, very good at providing a little pleasurable frisson to the Chamber of Commerce men. It gave rise to more than that, of course, but that seems to be the part that remains most attractive. It goes nicely with three fingers of 16-year-old Macallan.

The economist Tyler Cowen writes about mood affiliation, which he defines as a logical fallacy in which people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood. An example from Cowen: People who see a lot of net environmental progress (air and water are cleaner, for instance) and thus dismiss or downgrade well-grounded accounts of particular environmental problems. Theres simply an urgent feeling that any pessimistic view needs to be countered. In our catastrophizing time, the urge to counter pessimism is much weaker than the urge to counter optimism. It is remarkable how easily people move from one issue to another, from one position to another, from one school of political thought to another, without ever changing in the slightest the underlying emotional scaffolding of their politics.

The most obvious example of that used to be the Cold War-era left and U.S. foreign policy: It didnt matter what happened, what the issue was, or what the outcome was, as long as you told a story in which the United States ultimately was the villain. Many progressives took a similar attitude toward business: If Americans eat too much sugar, take too many opioids, or take out loans they can never possibly hope to repay, it must be the fault of Big Business, somehow.

On the right, you can see the same thing when it comes to illegal immigrants: Medicare would be fine without the illegals, Social Security would be fine without the illegals, the schools would be fine without the illegals, housing wouldnt be a problem if not for the illegals, etc. (I didnt get a harrumph out of that guy!) Today, the thing that really matters for a certain kind of libertarian-ish crank is that government at many levels was excessively risk-averse and heavy-handed during a worldwide viral epidemic a few years ago. There were things to be learned from the successes and failures of the COVID-19 era. We managed not to learn mucheven with all that time on our hands.

And what we have learned is that Grandpa probably needs some real-life friends who can gently tell him how crazy he sounds when he starts going on about Bobby Kennedy and the vaccines. And maybe to forgo that third glass of wine with dinner and to switch off Fox News from time to time. Writing a vicious obituary of libertarian crank Murray Rothbard not very long after the infamous events in Waco, Texas, William F. Buckley was acid: Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom. And, yes, David Koresh believed in God. True. But what they both really believed in was believing, that beliefs per se could transform a life and give it meaning.

Does belief transform lives? Does it save them? If you are talking about the career of Jesus of Nazareth, then, yes; if you are talking about the career of Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, then, no. I know a few people who still take Osho (the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) very, very seriously. Osho bought a fleet of Rolls Royces with this sort of thing:

The whole of life is dialectical. The logos is dialectical and reason is a process of the same. You can think of it in these terms. Dialectics is heterosexual; reason, rationality, is homosexual. Rationality is homosexual. Thats why homosexuality is growing in the West because the West has accepted Aristotle, reason. Heraclitus is heterosexual. He will include the opposite. If you listen to reason you will be homosexual.

Osho, it bears noting, was not anti-homosexuality, in spite of what you might think from the above. He described homosexuality as pure fun, an alternative to dangerous heterosexuality; his ideal man was a kind of enlightened sensualist he named Zorba the Buddha. Is that sillier than Ayn Rand? More meretricious than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? It isnt obvious to me that it is. It is the kind of thing that pushes the same buttons and scratches the same itch, albeit for people with a different sensibility and ethos. (Zorba the Buddha is also the name of a very good vegetarian restaurant run by Osho cultists around the corner from the Taj Mahal.)

If you think I have wandered too far afield here, I havent: The point is that it isnt the doctrine that matters to Americansit is how reciting the tenets of the doctrine makes them feel. That is why sentimental Evangelical megachurches succeed where all the enlightened scholarly Catholics and upright rigorous Calvinists and others of that ilk failin marketing, I mean, not in theology. That is why people who are committed free-market men on Monday morning are Trumpist industry-policy men on Wednesday afternoon and howling at the moon with Bobby Kennedy on Friday night.

It is not the case that if you look long into the abyss of American political idealism that the abyss looks into youthere is nothing there to look back, because there is nothing there to see. Only chaos. Typewriters may be a thing of the past, but we still have Facebook and Elon Musks depraved X thing, and here we are, the infinite monkeys trying to work out the Declaration of Independence or Democracy in America or maybe at least a brief poetical account of the life and times and peculiar habits of an old man from Nantucket. Infinite monkeys, monkeying infinitely.

The plague has come and gone, and all we remember is how inconvenient it all was, how it made us feel small and put-upon and bullied. And the people who felt that way werent always wrong to feel that way. It just doesnt matter as much as they think it does. Good stoical republicans dont worry too much about that sort of thing, dont drive themselves bonkers obsessive about about what it all means. Others, lacking the benefit of philosophy, require some fixed point in the universe to orient themselves, and that point invariably takes the form of a man. Bobby Kennedy is a damned peculiar choice for an idol, but these are damned peculiar times, and strange things are afoot at the Chamber of Commerce.

The rest is here:
Long (Political) Covid - Kevin D. Williamson - The Dispatch