Wimps, Boors, and Philosophers
libertarian culture clash
Conflicts within the Libertarian Party over the last few years between supporters and opponents of the Mises Caucus1 echo disagreements almost twenty years ago over Ron Paul, disagreements among libertarians set off by the discovery and publicizing of passages from his old newsletters.2 Both conflicts involve culture clash within the libertarian movement between different sorts of libertarians. Loosely speaking, the clash can be described as between people who see non-PC speech as a virtue and those who see it as a fault, between people who approve of offending liberal and progressive sensibilities ("liberal" in the modern American sense of the term) and those who share enough of those sensibilities to prefer not to offend them. The former group see the latter as wimps, the latter the former as boors.
Let me offer, as a simple example, possible reactions to the following sentence:
"According to FBI statistics, about half of those arrested for murder are black, even though blacks make up only about 13% of the U.S. population."3
As it happens, the statement is true. The question is how different people would react to it. The answer, I think, is that one group of libertarians would prefer not to state it and, if stating it, would be inclined to qualify their statement in order to make it clear that they were not racially prejudiced. A different group would state it with mild glee in order to make it clear that they were not PC, not constrained by what they view as ideological pressure to shade the truth when it contradicts fashionable opinion.
The difference showed up in the reactions of different libertarians to the quoted passages from the Ron Paul newsletters. Some condemned them with a strength appropriate in terms of current conventions of what one does or does not say but exaggerated in terms of the literal content of the quotes. In that respect it reminds me a little of the flap some years ago over H.L. Mencken's diary, although that was a more extreme case, labeling an author racist for using currently unacceptable language despite evidence, in the diary and elsewhere, that he was less racially prejudiced than most of us.4
In what sense were the newsletter quotes racist? While I may have missed something, I do not think any of them either asserted innate inferiority of blacks or expressed hatred of blacks qua blacks. What they did was express a derogatory opinion of particular blacks, Watts rioters or muggers, in a gleeful fashion. They were thus likely both to appeal to racists and to offend liberals, more generally people who accepted current conventions of acceptable and unacceptable speech. My guess is that both effects were intentional.
I myself have somewhat mixed feelings on the issue of being deliberately non-PC. On the one hand I find it disturbing that, in our society as it now exists, true statements about certain questions are likely to result in serious negative consequences for those who make them, with the forced resignation of the president of Harvard twenty some years ago possibly the most striking recent example. On the other hand, I think offending other people for the fun of it is both rude and counterproductive.
Which gets me to what I suspect is another difference between the two groups — I will label them "wimps" and "boors" — their attitude to those who disagree with them politically. The wimps, I suspect, have friends they respect who are well to the left on the political spectrum, hence are likely to think of their opponents to the left as reasonable people who are mistaken, people they do not want to offend. The boors, on the other hand, are likely to see opponents to their left as stupid or evil, rather more likely to have friends who are conservatives, even kinds of conservatives, such as religious fundamentalists or neo-confederates, whom the wimps disapprove of. In that case the pattern may reverse, with the wimps seeing those they disagree with as evil or stupid, the boors seeing them as merely holding some mistaken views. No doubt all of this is an oversimplification of a complicated situation and no doubt exceptions to the pattern I describe could be found in both directions. But I think it has a good deal of truth to it.
All of which reminds me of an old piece by Murray Rothbard on crucial questions that divide libertarians, in which he accused me of failure to hate the state. He was correct. I do not view the state as a diabolical plot by evil people to exploit innocent victims, merely an understandable and unfortunate mistake. In that regard, at least, I am a wimp, not a boor.
I take as a current example of the underlying pattern a thread some time ago on Data Secrets Lox, a web forum I am active on, one populated mostly but not entirely by libertarians and conservatives. The thread was started by a poster who came on the forum with a long post arguing that Trump’s attempt to reverse the result of the 2020 election and the associated January 6 riot were a sufficient reason to vote against him. Almost nobody was convinced, but responses divided pretty clearly between hostile ones accusing him of multiple lies and, in one case, of being a sock-puppet for an (unnamed but by implication left wing) regular on the forum, and responses disputing one part or another of his argument but treating it as a valuable contribution to the discussion. The first group were, stylistically speaking, Boors, the second group Wimps.
Trump himself is not a libertarian but his personal style marks him as a Boor. Among libertarians, wimps are almost certain to be critical of him, boors more likely not to be.
Philosophers
In an earlier post I described my exchanges with a group of libertarian political philosophers who describe themselves as Bleeding Heart Libertarians. One of my central points was that, while the BHL were offering legitimate criticisms of arguments made by fellow libertarians, they were unwilling to apply a similar standard to arguments made by academic philosophers. They spoke respectfully of John Rawls but were not prepared to actually defend his central argument which, I had long concluded, hinged on a claim about as defensible as 2+2=5, hence even less defensible than the libertarian arguments they had attacked.
Ron Paul, or whoever wrote the relevant articles, identified with and was appealing to the boors and so offended the wimps. The Bleeding Heart Libertarians are professional academics, associate mostly with people well left of center, speak respectfully of even bad arguments that such people respect, would like to revise libertarianism to make it more palatable to their left wing friends.
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Discussed in an earlier post. For more details, see the Wikipedia article on the Mises Caucus. See also my post criticizing the view of immigration shared by many members of the caucus.
The controversy was partly due to a New Republic article, Angry White Man, that quoted extensively from the newsletters. Ron Paul denied authorship of the articles, most of which appeared in his newsletters without a byline. According to multiple members of the libertarian movement the actual author of many was Lew Rockwell. For a summary history of the controversy, see Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters?
The figure is for 2019. I have not found a more current figure for arrests or any figure for convictions. In 2022 more than half of murder victims were black. If, as I suspect, murder is usually intraracial, that suggests that that at least half of those guilty of murder as well as of those arrested for it are black.
Discussed in an earlier post.
"boors" twist presumably valid stats to fit their prejudices, while "wimps" know those facts are wildly irrelevant to the underlying problem, if any even actually exists.
Ie this typical chain of argument, usually not explicitly spelled out past step 1.
1. "Black Americans commit significantly disproportionate per capita murders."
2. "This is due to some innate flaw of black people."
3. "Therefore we should ignore all complaints from black activists."
This conclusion does not follow even if 1 and 2 were face value true, because variations within a sub-population, good or bad, obviously does not justify curtailing the entire group’s political rights.
But #2 is false, the predominant cause of black murders is prohibition.
The drug war creates incentive for people with the least other opportunities to engage in low barrier market, without protection of any civil justice institutions. Knowing that people in the drug trade cannot go to police in case of theft or murder, means they are particularly vulnerable to anyone willing to risk violence to take their job or just whatever contraband/cash they happen to be holding. In America, due to several centuries of lifetime legal theft committed against blacks, they are the ones with the least capital, and eventually ended up concentrated in urban areas with convenient access to most customers. Its not that there are so many black killers, its there’s so many easy black targets.
If for some historical reason the Atlantic slave trade never occurred, and there were say 99% fewer blacks in America, but we enacted the same drug laws, then the same murders would be committed in the same turf struggles today, but by whatever white people shook out as poorest, and most willing to risk death to fill this govt-contrived niche.
So yes, black people commit many more murders, and there’s no reason for a libertarian to deny that, but instead use this as proof of monstrous government interventions, past and present, that led to their situation.
Otoh, I’m aware of very few black activists calling for full drug legalization. Instead they fixate on secondary problems like police brutality, or counter productive solutions like doubling the minimum wage.
I’m similarly not aware of any libertarian thinkers, either side, going out of their way to actually talk directly to black community about how government is making their lives worse.
So rather than dismiss the plight of black inner city dwellers, go talk to them!
This phenomenon is even worse re: immigration where the problems that boors bang on about don’t really exist. People fleeing objectively bad governments are low hanging fruit to convert, if anyone from either of our camps made the slightest effort.
I think of wimps, leftists, boors, and rightists as *guilty*. There are some responsibilities you don't get out of by caring about people, by despising people, by gushing with respect, or ignoring or satirizing ideas that smell unfamiliar to you. You don't escape intellectual responsibility by not liking, or for that matter liking, people's personalities, tribes, bank balances, or styles. And if you want to be considered a libertarian, you don't win points by spending most of your time scheming to out-politic, or fearing you're being out-politicked by, others. The people who catch my attention think and talk about people as if they were people, and try to appeal specifically to the intellectual honesty (or its potential) in people, and want to be called on it if they fall short.
An example of someone I disagree with about half the time, yet who seems to actually care to do (his version of) *the thing*, is Freddy deBoer.
The point is that *guilt*: that preference for habits, personalities, appearances, paranoia, and tribe membership... anything *except* facts, when (as often), it's facts and the best generalizations of or conclusions from facts, that matter. I love personalities, styles, obscurities, appearances, weird cultural phenomena, etc., but if there's that crater, that managing-not-to-address, right at the center of the target of what matters, that's guilt.