Understanding What You're Criticizing

It's kinda important.

For some reason, a number of smart people saw something interesting in this extended exercise in straw-man swatting by Robert Locke: "Libertarianism: The Marxism of the Right." It's made up of a bunch of unsupported assertions about libertarianism, written in the sort of exasperated tone you might expect from someone who just spent a long afternoon at the DMV in line behind a proselytizing teenage Randroid.

Now, it's quite possible that Robert Locke knows something about libertarianism that he actually read in a book. But you wouldn't know it from this essay. He's too lazy even to drop a few names of libertarians cherry-picked from the wider pantheon to support his points.

If I decided to write up an extended critique of conservatism, I'd bother to mention some, you know, conservatives. In any event, 40-some years ago, Ralph Raico had a pretty effective pre-response to some of the french ducks Locke trots out.

Here's another example: In Techcentralstation yesterday, neolibertarian Pejman Yousefzadeh threw down the gauntlet to libertarian opponents of the Iraq War, writing:

I hope to see a comprehensive attempt at a rebuttal of realist theory by the libertarian minimalist school. It will take the debate over the intellectual rigor of realism to a whole new level, and it will allow libertarians in general -- and libertarian minimalists in particular -- to find their own voices on foreign policy.

The rebuttal PY hopes for would be an odd thing to see from libertarian"doves," given that they tend to operate within the realist tradition. (For those of you who don't speak IR--I'm just learning meself--here's a decent primer if you can get access to it, and here are definitions to more of the argot than you want to know).

Like the Framers, and in keeping with the earliest traditions of American foreign policy, most libertarian war-skeptics are realists. If you're not clear on this, you might try, say, going to the website of the leading libertarian think tank, typing in"realism" in the search window, and reading the first thing that comes up.