by Matt Barr

Yes. Yes, that's true.

Comment by "subscriber" at Hit & Run:

Being a Libertarian is starting to mean; figure out what everyone is saying, then be a smartass enough to find an angle on why they are idiots for saying it. Bush is wrong, Kerry is wrong, Lieberman is wrong, Lamont is wrong, Move-On is wrong, Left is wrong, right is wrong, Hollywood is wrong, Israel is wrong, did I say right is wrong?, everyone is wrong, everything is wrong, wrong, wrong....except me.

I say forget about why everyone is so goddamned wrong for a while and just focus on what we think is right. That way, what is wrong will get worked out in the wash.

Of course, we can always just stay the cool motherfucker in the back of the class that is too smart to hang out with everyone else...and continue to get 2% of the vote and continue to be absolutely meaningless. You don't get people to join a movement be telling them how fucking idiotic they've been about everything they've thought their entire existence.

This, along with promoting views that are adorable in other people's teenagers (say! In that old post, libertarians were in the back of the class, too), is very frustrating about modern libertarianism. It's morphed into contrarianism. I'm a contrarian, but I'm not hoping to contribute to influencing policy in America, like I assume Reason is. I'm also an asshole a lot.

I don't care about whether anybody is politically irrelevant or not, just that taking a contrarian position on everything and calling it libertarianism is aggravating. And it's not just the article subscriber is commenting on: the stupid David Weigel teaser says, "Katherine Mangu-Ward discovers that Ray Nagin, and not that Time magazine guy, is the real America's Mayor." Well, no, the article doesn't actually say or argue that. But it probably seemed to Weigel like a libertarian thing to say.

Browse books from Amazon.com: