(EXTRA LIBERTARIAN IDEOLOGY VS INTRA-LIBERTARIAN IDEOLOGY AND INTERNECINE WARFARE AS EVIDENCE OF INTELLECTUAL FAILURE)
(Re-Posted from elsewhere)
Tom DiLorenzo’s generation along with Rothbard, was trying to illustrate contrasts – to create a revisionist history to support libertarian ideology. Ideology changes VALUES, and motivates passions so that people ACT.
All I see from this nonsense is both CATO and BHL trying to whine that they don’t get the attention the ideological libertarians do.
Of course, that envy displays greater ignorance of the structure of political movements than does any revisionist history, shoddy or not. Ideology obtains participation. Intellectuals only battle other intellectuals. Reason is insufficient for motivation. Empiricism is insufficient for persuasion. That’s why we have ideology – passions.
Given the absolute failure of the classical liberals and the left libertarians to provide alternative solutions to the demonstrated failure of the classical liberal model’s means of preserving freedom – a desire that is a minority desire in the first place – it’s understandable that they retreat into intra-libertarian criticism.
I can understand Cato’s position. Their funding stream and interaction with the existing state is something that they have to stick with.
I can understand the investment that the Mises group has made in Rothbardianism, despite its demonstrated failure to enfranchise the moral values of classical liberals.
But I can’t understand attacks by BHL’s on anything given that they haven’t contributed a SINGLE DAMNED IDEA to the discourse other than ‘we aren’t them’.
Well, ‘them’ created an effective ideology that enfranchised a generation of zealots. ‘Them’ did more with one sound-bite speaker named Ron Paul than all the work of scribblers have done in sixty years.
So ‘them’ understands ideology – so to speak.
And this whole argument is a generation out of date. It’s as though we have to abandon the entire postwar liberty and conservative framework, and wait until the past generation of authors die off before we can advance the cause of liberty. Why?
OUR GENERATION’S FIGHT IS AGAINST POSTMODERNISM. NOT SOCIALISM. NOT RIGHT LIBERTARIANISM. NOT EVEN SECULAR REDISTRIBUTIVE SOCIALISM.
The war is being won by a state religion, articulated as if it’s rational, and functioning as an ideology, despite it’s FALSE CONTENT.
SO PLEASE STOP WASTING BREATH ON INTERNECINE ATTENTION-GETTING AND DEVELOP INSTITUTIONAL SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM OF A HETEROGENEOUS SOCIETY UNDER MAJORITY RULE WITHOUT THE EXISTENCE OF POPULAR MONOGAMOUS MARRIAGE TO ACT AS A COMPROMISE BETWEEN COMPETING MALE AND FEMALE REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGIES.
The criticism of DiLorenzo as poor scholarship in an article written at the sophistication of a grocery store rag is embarrassing to our entire movement. And it certainly doesn’t advance the BHL cause of trying to get attention by actually contributing something to the debate.
It’s absolutely ridiculously childish. “Mee-too-ism”.
Some of us are out here on the fringe actually working on something other than ‘ideology’ and ‘belief’, as if we need to replace one secular religion with another, instead of replace both ideology and belief with practical institutional solutions. The very fact that you have to argue in favor of belief, rather than institutions, is an admission of failure.
Leave hokey religions to the Postmodernists and the Continentals. They’re better at it anyway.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev