Don’t Worry About the Government
1) I never absorbed the libertarian critique of the state’s war power.
2) In fact, I don’t recognize, right this instant, that I never absorbed it.
3) I run a blog called vodkapundit but somehow find Nick Gillespie too “hip, arch, fun — and ultimately unserious.”
Meanwhile, when I’d merely read a report that Glenn Reynolds was declaring himself “no longer a libertarian,” I felt surprisingly sad, like the boy who finally has to admit that Mommy and Daddy never will be getting back together. But the actual item doesn’t amount to much – it’s the same disavowal of “capital-L” Libertarianism (presumably membership in the Party – “card-carrying”) that Reynolds made years ago. I don’t know whether Glenn Reynolds still considers himself a lower-case “libertarian” or not. I doubt it matters. In a corrupt political discourse, no label is much use.
Comment by matthew hogan —
October 25, 2007 @ 10:32 pm
Never got your fondness for Reynolds.
Comment by Gary Farber —
October 25, 2007 @ 10:48 pm
“Never got your fondness for Reynolds.”
It’s hard for folks who weren’t blogging immediately after 9/11, for, say, at least six months after that, to understand the blogging atmosphere then. There was relatively little dissension in views for a while, and what ideological splits there were pretty well papered over temporarily, with a certain amount of non-obviousness that they’d re-emerge so completely, after people started to get over their dazed and confused period.
And there was a considerable over-representation, proportional to population, of libertarian-inclined, or at least those who claimed to be, bloggers, which I’m not at all criticizing, but am noting to help explain the immensely different environment.
By the end of 2002, things were changing considerably, but the first half of that year? Not all that much of a left-right, or pro/anti-war split in blogging yet.
At least, that’s the way I recall it. Since everyone has their own perspective, doubtless some viewed it quite differently.
(My six year blogging anniversary comes up in late December.)
Anyway, Glenn didn’t seem visibly crazy back then, at least to a lot of us.
Very different than in recent years, to be sure. Hard to understand, I know.
Things change.
Trackback by VodkaPundit —
October 25, 2007 @ 10:59 pm
Weak Assault…
Andrew Sullivan characterizes my characterization of Libertarians as “silly.” Of course, Sully then goes on to accuse me of “defending……
Comment by Reid —
October 25, 2007 @ 11:20 pm
Gary: “…the immensely different environment…”
Yes, in late 2001/early 2002, there were tens of thousands of bloggers, who mostly got links and traffic for actual thoughts that came out of their head. Today, there’s tens of millions of bloggers, who mostly compete for links and traffic by stripping naked, painting themselves blue or red, and then engaging in perfomance art at a pitch so high only their partisan peers can hear it.
So, we all watched Instapundit paint himself red, about a dozen coats plus primer and a varnish on top, and then we watched him deny that he was anything but gray. It’s hard to see that and take anything he says seriously anymore.
But, no, it wasn’t always that way.
Comment by Leonard —
October 26, 2007 @ 12:43 am
Green is a militarist first, and libertarian second. He has not changed at all, at least according to his account of his feelings in 1990 or so:
Yes we do. War is the health of the state.
What’s sad is, “defense” cuts are the easy part of our program. Cutting spending, ceasing to intervene in remote places very few Americans can even locate on a map. As a program, those two items can actually be sold politically. Compare their political feasibility to, say, abolishing taxation, or abolishing social security, or separating school and state as purely as we separate church and state.
Green could apparently support all the hard stuff, but balked at the easy.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 26, 2007 @ 8:57 am
As Gary says about the post-9/11 blogging environment, with this additional feature (implicit in his comments): very nearly everybody who was blogging and commenting at the time wanted to know what the heck happened? The thing was a surprise, and then there was the usual cloud of rumors, incomplete information, garbled transmission, and so on. Glenn’s early willingness to read widely and link widely was a real service in spreading news and interpretation around.
These days there’s less call for that partly because more of us have a fairly good understanding of what’s going on, or at least have the opportunity to do so, and the so what are we going to do about it? question looms larger. This is in addition to the problem of people who used to be libertarian, liberal, conservative, other, or uncommitted who basically went mad with fear and surrendered to the would-be totalitarians.
Comment by Jim Henley —
October 26, 2007 @ 10:42 am
Note to Hit & Run habitués: If you follow the trackback above to vodkapundit there’s a drink! cue.
Comment by AC —
October 26, 2007 @ 11:14 am
Note to Hit & Run habitués: If you follow the trackback above to vodkapundit there’s a drink! cue.
A guy called vodkapundit creating a drink! cue? It’s almost too surreal.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
October 26, 2007 @ 12:10 pm
It’s depressing to find myself thinking back to those “good old days”, long before the partisan transformations. (And even a bit before Bruce here pointed UO out to me when I asked if he knew of blogs not quite as enthusiastic about interventionism as folks were starting to get, back before I started sipping that Kool-Aid myself…)
The funny/horrible thing is that I can imagine an experiment involving bringing Reynolds and Green of that time to the present, letting them absorb a sketch of the last 5 years of history, then letting them interact with the modern Red blogosphere under different aliases. I think they’d freak out at what’s happened and what their compatriots think, and I think Reds would react to the sort of wary, critical things they said back then and brand them “left-wing defeatocrats”.
Comment by P. George Stewart —
October 26, 2007 @ 3:40 pm
Meh, the point is 9/11 concentrated peoples’ minds wonderfully, now their minds are wandering and they’re reverting to stereotype and habit (something the Left never got out of even after 9/11, in fact something they took refuge in). At the point of aftershock, Republicans remembered that part of the point of America was its freedom, even if it meant freedom to do things they weren’t personally into, and libertarians remembered that collective self-defence is just about the only legitimate “public good” function of a State (even a rump State), and something even pure anarcho-capitalist theory can’t get around.
If there were ever another attack comparable in surprise and importance to 9/11 you’d see the same unity again. Now everyone’s mind’s wandering because people are all comfortable and fat again.
Which, after all, is a good thing.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 26, 2007 @ 6:18 pm
Eric, I’ve often wondered what would happen if a reliable record of events since then could be delivered to the public on 9/11/2001. I don’t really have a good sense of who’d embrace the developments and who wouldn’t, beyond some obvious cases on both sides.
Comment by roger —
October 27, 2007 @ 10:23 am
I don’t think the bloggers after 9/11 or most Americans today have accepted what happened – I think, instead, they have papered it over with fantasy. What happened is that, after spending ungodly trillions of dollars to make America invulnerable, 19 guys using the most lowtech of tools blasted the highest building in America out of existence. Into this fact Americans rushed the fantasy that really, we had to protect ourselves from high tech tools, action movie props like suitcase nuclear bombs (touted, no doubt, by terrorists with the musculature of Godzilla), and in the meantime we had to attack the one nation in the Middle East that we were pretty sure had the most distant relationship to the hijackers – Iraq – and we had to bribe the nation that had the second closest, or even closest relationship, to the hijackers – Pakistan.
That this is what happened, and this is what we did, has still not be accepted by the American people. Glenn Reynolds, of course, did his best to promote the diversion from what happened in every respect, so I have to give him a lot of credit as a disinformer. When flight from reality to this extent happens to an individual, it is usually a sign of mild psychosis. It is no surprise that post-9/11 political discourse exhibits all the signs of psychosis, too.
Comment by Gary Farber —
October 27, 2007 @ 3:54 pm
“and in the meantime we had to attack the one nation in the Middle East that we were pretty sure had the most distant relationship to the hijackers – Iraq”
Israel had a closer relationship with them than Iraq? That’s fascinating.
Comment by "Charles Dodgson" —
October 27, 2007 @ 6:30 pm
It’s not just that ideological differences got papered over — some positions just changed. Immediately after 9/11, Reynolds posted quite a few items warning about how overreaction might cramp civil liberties. (See this one, for instance, pulled nearly at random from his archive that month). That guy was a good read in ways that his later self was not.
Comment by roger —
October 27, 2007 @ 7:55 pm
Gary, I stand corrected. Israel and, perhaps, Kuwait had further degrees of separation from al qaeda than Iraq. I should have said most of the Arabic Middle East. Yemen, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria – they all had many more connections to al qaeda, either through money transfers, personnel, providing meeting places or what have you than Iraq. But of course there was always phantom Mohammed Atta’s meeting in Prague with an Iraqi ghost. As we know, Atta was gifted with clairvoyant bilocation.
Comment by Walt —
November 1, 2007 @ 5:23 pm
P. George Stewart’s comment is a lie. Lying in comment threads is so common that it’s not worth mentioning, but since the original post triggered in me a strange sense of nostalgia for the post-9/11 moment, the lying was unusually jarring.
The “Left” had two reactions to 9/11. The further-left reaction was “the administration is going to use this to advance unrelated goals and murder innocent people.” (To my incredible surprise, they were 100% right about this. If anything, it’s the one time stereotype and habit served them well.) The moderate left mostly supported the early stages of the war on terror. What split the left and right blogospheres was the leadup to the Iraq war.
Comment by 1arryb —
November 2, 2007 @ 2:12 pm
Gary,
Assuming you really meant “That’s bulls**t”…
This one is actually pretty easy: Saddam’s Stalinist, secular regime had NO relationship with Al Queda, except for them being somewhat distant ideological enemies. Israel is THE enemy of Al Queda and is also viewed by them as an extension of the U.S. Ergo, Israel has a closer relationship to 9/11 than Iraq.