Monday, June 27, 2022

Someone who takes her libertarianism far too seriously is haunted by a hobgoblin, amusingly faults so-called folk libertarians for inconsistency and channels her inner liberal Lionel Trilling to jeer at their "irritated" jerking

 Real libertarianism like hers is a creature of liberalism and the left, not of the right, and so is primarily critical in nature, distinguishing as she does no fewer than five different types in her short polemical foray against Ron DeSantis.

Put a hundred of these people in a room and none will find another person with whom to agree about libertarianism, except maybe that the buffet was OK. 


In The Daily Beast here:

Yet even linking this impulse to that new center may suggest a more formal political program than folk libertarianism entails. Douthat characterized it as “a reflexive individualism disconnected from the common good,” and the reflex is fundamentally reactive, a series of irritated jerks away from unwanted strictures as they come. Folk libertarians have “an instinctive dislike of being bossed around,” as my former colleague Samuel Goldman has observed in The Week, but they lack the broader principle of opposition to bossing others.