> I've had several friends take the libertarian turn recently,
> and they all imagine that they've ended up closer to me
> politically. It's very disturbing and makes me wonder how
> (un)clearly I've experienced myself in the past. My
> familiarity with libertarianism is not that great and
> consists mostly of the more theoretical stuff, and so I've
> been a little surprised at how obviously nationalist these
> people are. They clearly aren't sophisticated enough to
> hide that and so don't even try. It makes me very
> uncomfortable.
When John McCain looked to Weekend at Bernie's for instruction at the death of Alan Greenspan, I thought he meant his physical carcass not his ideological corpse. I should have known.
Are these friends identifying with Ron Paul? Someone else? Are their views shifting because of the recent crisis or in spite of it?
What you said about nationalism and propertarians sounds familiar. From a set of book reviews by James Galbraith:
James Arnt Aune, until recently affiliated with the George Bush School at Texas A&M University, summarizes the libertarian philosophy behind free-market political prescriptions:
"Libertarian policy prescriptions are based on just a few principles, outwardly appealing in their seeming simplicity ...'simple rules for a complex world.' The first ... is that social problems can be resolved by creating a market. Are schools failing? Create a free market in education. Is there pollution or waste of resources? Create a market in the resource or the right to pollute; ... Is there a shortage of human organs for transplants? Let people sell their body parts. Not enough babies for adoption? Allow people to sell their babies ... "
And with equal deftness, Aune fingers the trouble: "These principles of 'economic correctness' are increasingly mouthed in the universities and especially in conservative think tanks, but their obvious long-term implications may strike ordinary Americans as horribly cruel. They need to hear this economic gibberish first-hand... Free-market rhetoric is powerfully persuasive only to a certain kind of elite audience; uncoupled from nationalist appeals...it begins to lose its power to motivate general audiences in a positive way."
Aune goes on to focus closely on the rhetorical practices of several major libertarians: the legal scholar Richard Posner, the novelist and Greenspan mentor Ayn Rand, the philosopher Robert Nozick, and the polemicist Charles Murray. He shows how the "realist style" of economic argument works, combining the definition of any "object, person or relationship as a commodity"; reliance on quasi-logical argument; appeals to irony (via reference to the "inevitable perversity of well-intentioned social programs"); failure to respond to opposing arguments (because "in real science, when fundamental questions are settled, only cranks dispute them"); and perhaps above all, the avoidance of empirical investigation.
Once one decodes these devices, cracking the arguments becomes a parlor game, not more difficult than crossword puzzles nor less routine. Having once "solved" the sophistry of, say, Nozick, or seen the contradictions built into the speeches of Newt Gingrich, you will put them down and never look at them again. The remaining mystery is only why they held up for so long. In the case of Rand, the answer, as Aune explains, lay partly in her romance-novel sensibility and in the sex. Murray's underlying appeal was to "the superior morality and sense of social 'place' of the Old South"---to put the matter very delicately indeed. The others survived by shouting loudly from pulpits at Chicago, Yale, and in Washington, and for this, tenure is useful. Just as soon as Gingrich lost his, he disappeared, and the same will certainly be true of any other modern Republican political leader, including our new president, as soon as the trappings of high office are removed.
<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0103.galbraith.html>
I have read James Arnt Aune's book, Selling The Free Market. It is a decent book if you want a guide from the outside.
<http://www.amazon.com/Selling-Free-Market-Rhetoric-Correctness/dp/1572307579/>
Shane