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Here are some thoughts in reaction to the many interesting comments on my post on Peter Thiel.

1. Is libertarianism elitist?

I believe so. I think that most people value their own liberty, but they have a hard time extending this value to strangers who they do not entirely trust. It takes a lot of sophistication to appreciate enumerated powers, free speech, and the emergent order of market competition. Instead, I think that Fear Of Others’ Liberty is the norm. I believe that America’s Constitution was designed by elites, and as we gradually extended the franchise to include more FOOLs the Constitutional safeguards have been crushed under the weight of popular opinion.

2. Is libertarianism a white male ideology?

I don’t know whether there are racial differences, but I think I that empathizer-systemizer theory can explain statistical differences in male-female attitudes. To be libertarian, you have to look at the super-Dunbar world from the perspective of a systemizer rather than an empathizer, which means that libertarians are more likely to be found among males than among females.

3. Why are libertarians unwilling to sign up as conservatives or progressives?

Conservatives make concessions to FOOLs in order to get elected. Currently, these concessions include tariffs and immigration restrictions. Even worse, these concessions have for a long time included deficit spending and expansion of state power in the name of providing safety and security. Worst of all, conservatives long ago abandoned the doctrine of enumerated powers.

In practice, conservatives usually do not overturn progressive initiatives. Obamacare is the latest example.

Progressives propose government policies from an empathizer perspective. They will gladly toss away personal liberty in order to “help” people. Lockdowns are the latest example.

4. I think that many (most?) libertarians feel culturally in tune with college-educated progressives. I am an exception to that. I find that you can be smart and nice without a college degree, and you can be intellectually uninteresting and/or personally nasty with one.

My wife and most people in our social circle are not academics. On occasions where I have to spend a lot of time with a group of college professors, I am relieved when the gathering is over. When I was at Freddie Mac, I became bored with other economists, and I eventually gravitated toward people with experience in the mortgage business and/or information systems. When I started my Internet business, after about a year I found a partner who had only a high-school equivalency degree.

In business, I noticed that I did not like meetings attended primarily by males, nor did I like meetings attended primarily by females. At parties, when men congregate in one room and women congregate in another room, I find myself unable to engage in either conversation, and I usually end up talking to someone else who is feeling left out.

The bottom line is that I seem to get along ok with various types of people, without feeling especially sympatico with people in my field or with my level of education. Perhaps that leads me to be less inclined than other libertarians to side with progressives.

A reader asks,

I’m curious which writers you find best among the other tribes. Who do you read regularly so that you can take the most charitable view of those who disagree with the libertarian perspective?

1. I give points to anyone who looks at the virus crisis without saying that President Trump was a dominant causal factor. For example, Raj Chetty listening to the data tell him that individual responses preceded government lockdowns. I also give points to Chetty and to Amir Sufi for looking at the economic impact of the crisis without using a GDP factory framework.

2. I take points off from anyone who bashes libertarians as being responsible for things being in a bad state. If you ask me, there are many more opportunities to improve public policy by making it more libertarian, and there are very few opportunities for making public policy better by making it less libertarian. Feel free to make specific criticisms of libertarian points of view, but don’t disgrace yourself a la Niskanen Center.

3. For progressives now, I am most focused on their willingness to stand up for old-fashioned liberal values, such as free speech. So I give credit to Jonathan Haidt and Bret Weinstein and I enjoy listening to them. I like progressives who are willing to speak out for policy positions that go against their own tribe. In the past, I have mentioned William Galston and the Progressive Policy Institute as examples. Jason Furman would be another example.

4. For conservatives now, I am focused on their willingness to stand up for old-fashioned conservative values, such as fiscal responsibility and civility. Yuval Levin. George Will. Megan McArdle. I am probably overlooking many others.

5. These days, it is important to me to see writers who are not heavily dug in on President Trump. Some conservatives are too intent on supporting him. Many progressives are too insistent on attacking him.

Brian Doherty writes,

Claremont’s web journal The American Mind, though, was launched in 2018 with a more provocative agenda: to “rethink the ideological framework of the American Right.” The animating idea, founding editor Matthew Peterson explains, is that traditional right-of-center groups are out of touch: They don’t even realize that their own staffs include “people under 35″ who “fundamentally disagree with supposedly fundamental [classical liberal] tenets of their organization. No one wants to hear or deal with it. They want to stick their heads in the sand.” A vibrant and ideologically adventurous new conservative movement, Peterson says, is “bubbling beneath the surface, or even online all over the place. We are not supposed to talk about these things or engage that movement?”

Yarvin is perhaps better known for the pen name under which he rose to internet fame in the late 2000s and early 2010s: “Mencius Moldbug.” At his Unqualified Reservations blog, Moldbug, a software entrepreneur by day, unspooled head-spinningly long-winded “neoreactionary” screeds. . .

I think that Wikipedia credits me with coining the term “neoreactionary.” Doherty shares my concern that national conservatism is neoreactionary and throws libertarians under the bus. His essay connects Peter Thiel to the neoreactionary view, but Doherty admits to being unsure about exactly where Thiel stands.

To the neoreactionaries, the libertarians are too soft to fight a war against the religion that identifies and persecutes heretics. To libertarians, a war to the death between neoreactionaries and that religion would be a war with no winner.

I think of the war as having three fronts.

1. The media. There, the social justice warriors have captured the most famous brands, but the Internet has diluted the importance of those brands. I might resent the NYT, but I do not fear it.

2. Politics. To me, this is a weird front, because I think most voters don’t think they have a dog in the fight, so that the outcome of elections does not tell us how much people like or don’t like the social justice religion. This November, I think that as long as there is a clear winner, the post-election period will find the social justice activists and the more reasonable left battling one another. It would be nice to let the fight play out, rather than to have an all out right-vs.-left battle. My worst fear, though, is that there will be no clear winner in November, in which case the social justice activists and the center-left will stick to one another like glue as they fight for Biden to defeat Trump in the contested aftermath.

3. Intellectuals. Here, my hope is that universities will go down the path of the media. That is, the famous brands will lose their luster, and alternative arenas for developing and debating ideas will become increasingly influential. Personally, I would rather fight the religion on this front than on the other two.