What those big money, snarling-headed libertarians won’t permit

While there doesn’t seem to be much in terms of earth-shaking news yet today, over at Memeorandum I found a thoughtful and amusing essay, even if it sometimes borders on the outrageous. The author “Freddie” is primarily irritated at the mainstream left for excluding genuine leftists (the sort who are honest enough to admit to being socialists, or, I suppose, Communists). He certainly has a point, because what we call “the mainstream” tends to be about getting and keeping power, and appearances are always important if power is the goal. Which means that self-identifying as a socialist is not a good idea, even if you are a socialist.

But Freddie is not just mad at the mainstream left; he is also mad at mainstream libertarians. While he doesn’t use the term “Big Libertarianism,” he thinks libertarians are small in number, but have disproportionate influence primarily because of money:

…while libertarians are tiny in number they are mammoth in influence. This is the case because they’ve got money, money to fund enterprises like Cato or Reason or smaller outfits. I’m not saying that this is illegitimate. (There’s something awfully poetic about libertarianism getting influence by buying it.) I’m just saying that there’s no sense in which the lack of a leftist blogosphere is necessarily the product of small demographic representation.

If there was a different libertarianism…. I frequently imagine that an ideology with “liberty” right in the title might be a mad, teeming collection of every flavor of crazy and dreamer, a loose confederation rife with difference and disagreement. Difference so vast that it might, by god, lead some to find common ground with someone like, well, me.

Well, this blog is not funded by anyone except myself. I’ve been accused of being a Karl Rove front, and while I have repeatedly asked Rove for money, he has never responded or paid. Furthermore, not only have the billionaires at CATO and Reason not given me a cent, I pay for my own subscription to Reason magazine. (I think they just sent me a nagging letter saying it had expired.) As to who is buying influence from whom, I don’t know. No one at Cato or Reason has ever tried to tell me what to say or think. Nor have any big-money libertarians in any minarchist hierarchy of which I am aware tried to influence me.

Perhaps, though, by calling myself a small-l libertarian, I have placed myself outside the ideological boundaries of what Freddie sees as libertarian orthodoxy — policed primarily by Matt Welch, “the snarling head of Reason”:

Instead, we have only the libertarianism that exists. And that libertarianism is the America ideology least accepting of difference, most committed to policing orthodoxy. It is, on balance, a model of lockstep adherence to the standard libertarian cause. Who could be a better symbol of today’s libertarianism than Matt Welch, the snarling head of Reason, a man notorious for keeping those under Reason’s banner within the small grounds of the libertarian reservation? I have searched but found no libertarians particularly amenable to seeing the tension between an ideology dedicated to freedom and an institutional apparatus that enforces orthodoxy. I bring all this up because I have always thought that there is room for libertarians to at once disagree totally with left-wing policy but to support the idea that the left-wing should be given a seat at the table. The reality, I’m sorry to say, is the opposite. I find it so hard to take, when libertarians complain about how misunderstood and oppressed they are, because nobody redbaits like libertarians do. Nobody. Nobody is more eager to excise the dirty commies from the realm of acceptable opinion than your average libertarian, while the similarly berate the powers that be for confining them to the intellectual ghetto of their imagination.  

I am by no means an orthodox libertarian, but in nearly eight years of blogging (unless there’s something nasty in my unopened overdue subscription notice), not once has Matt Welch deigned to utter even a growl at me, much less a snarl.

As to offering leftists a place at the table, what table would that be? It is all libertarians can do to get a place at the conservative table — a table over which they are not in charge and have very little control. Surely Freddie doesn’t think libertarians should be demanding a place for leftists at the conservative table (or the “Tea Party table,” if such things be). Or does he mean leftists should have a place at the libertarian table? That would be a little silly, for libertarians are libertarians and socialists are socialists. I can imagine that they might be able to eat together at a luncheon (I have left-wing friends), but people who simply do not share the same opinions cannot be expected to join (or to want to join) each other’s organizations or write for each other’s magazines, journals or blogs. If, say, Mother Jones started running pieces from the writers at Reason, and vice versa, they would both cease to be what they are. People read Reason because it does not promote socialism, and if Matt Welch hired a prominent socialist as a writer, pretty soon the grass roots (in the form of subscribers) would be calling for the board to cut off his snarling head. (Ditto for the editor of Mother Jones.)

Should I add a leftie socialist co-blogger here? I don’t see why — any more than I should add an anti-gay, pro-drug-war social conservative. People who want that stuff can find it at plenty of other blogs.

And that touches on something that Freddie (despite his apt observations about the left) does not seem to get. No one is in charge of the blogosphere. Yet he thinks “it” is some sort of monolithic superstructure with the ability to permit or not permit a genuine left wing:

I’m not a proponent of any kind of a Fairness Doctrine. Yes, it’s true; I think the blogosphere would be a truer, more productive, more interesting, more entertaining, more generative, more self-effacing, more American place, were it to permit an actual left-wing. 

Anyone can start a blog about anything, just as I started this one. And I think that Freddie is a pretty articulate advocate for the actual left wing he claims is not permitted. I was drawn to his post by the Memeorandum link, and I don’t doubt that many others will read it too. If something is interesting and people like it, there is no way to stop it. 

Hell, I’ll even stick my neck out and say that I am willing to permit an actual left wing in the blogosphere! And I am willing to allow Freddie be the Head Honcho of the Actual Left Wing, but unfortunately I can’t make him a “snarling head” as long as Matt Welch still holds that title.

And if these things are not for me to permit or allow, that’s not fair!

I am sick and tired of being misunderstood and oppressed, excluded from virtually all tables, and confined to the ghetto of my imagination!

Time for some libertarian liberation!