No doubt neoconservatives no grounds for complaint, and I have been only too glad to point out the sheer stupidity of the “Islamofascist” rhetoric on multiple occasions. But I was criticising a very real habit that I had seen becoming more and more common at Lew Rockwell’s site and Antiwar. It goes something like this: “The jihadis aren’t fascists; the neocons are the real fascists!” I acknowledge straightaway that people at LRC and Antiwar are not entirely representative of a lot of other libertarians, and I should have specified that it was to these libertarians that I was referring. This post was the reaction to the habits of people at LRC, so I should have been more clear that it was mainly their habits that I was going after when referring to the use of the “fascist” language.

I confess I don’t really agree with the premise of your main question. I don’t see the harsh and unfair treatment of Buchanan you describe (aside from the one quote that started this whole discussion). Libertarians are hardly guilty of “immediate resort[s] to Nazi parallels,” nor a “habit of denouncing everything they oppose in modern conservatism in the most extreme terms as revived fascism and Nazism.” And, after all, neoconservatives — who delight in throwing around vacuous terms like “Islamo-fascist” — have little gronds for complaint on this score.

Finally, as to your claim: “Liberty may be one of the aspects of a well-ordered society, but the end of politics is something else pertaining to the life of virtue and the eunomia of a life lived in accordance with nature. Political life is organised to make that possible.” I think we disagree only in the use of the term “political.” I’m reserving the term strictly for the state, the organization with the legal monopoly on coercion (to use Mises’s definition). “Political,” as used here, does not mean “social.” It does not refer to the (legitimate) authority of family, church, community, and so on. If by “politics” you mean “the life of the community as a whole,” then most libertarians would agree that liberty is not the highest “political” end.

Obviously this is why libertarians and conservatives clash most often over these kinds of questions, both because conservatives see a legitimate use of public authority/the state in many cases that libertarians don’t and because conservatives propose a definite vision of good order for the organisation of society. While I agree that libertarians can be in either camp with respect to the importance of nationality and kinship, etc., this “neutrality” only goes so far, since it positively limits the means at the disposal of the culturally conservative libertarian and effectively strengthens the argument of the “open borders”/anti-national libertarian by making the preservation of national identity–something which may necessarily involve the use of state power to enforce borders–all but impossible on libertarian grounds.

But suppose that Buchanan were not calling for any measures of state action, but was simply making a claim about what constitutes national identity. If it is granted that libertarians are not all going to take one side or the other, why does it seem to be the case that so many libertarians are almost instinctively drawn to arguments that impute the worst motives or make the most damning parallels to Buchanan’s rhetoric? If the problem with his immigration views, for example, was that he was supporting “statist” methods, I could better understand the opposition, but political libertarians seem very often to also be cultural libertarians who not only see no problem with mass immigration but positively loathe the people who do see problems with it. It is this aspect of the response that I am trying to understand.

A cultural conservative is a libertarian if he favors volunatry social interaction. As soon as he advocates state control of culture or identity, or government action to enforce one or another social or cultural norm, then he ceases to be a libertarian. Buchanan’s views are mostly anti-libertarian and statist, not because he supports the idea of national identity, but because he favors tariffs, quotas, and other “nationalistic” economic policies. It his means that are incompatible with libertarianism (and classical liberalism, historically understood), not his ends.

I know that there have been libertarians who make precisely these sorts of credible arguments, as I acknowledged near the start of the post: “Now I happen to know that a lot of libertarians, especially paleolibertarians, do value kin and place and typically do not go galloping off into the wild and wooly regions of abstract theory in which nations are merely conventional demarcations on a map with no inherent significance and where a people with a similar way of life and similar customs has no moral claim to preserve the character of their country.” I know Rothbard was one of the leaders in taking these sorts of questions seriously and acknowledging the importance of natural affinities and nationality–hence my emphasis on paleolibertarians being particularly aware of these things.

On the other hand, you have Will Wilkinson, who says things like this: “Outside of the love, solidarity, and altruism of family, trade is the paradigmatic human moral relationship.” So families are acceptable, but nothing much outside of that. Consider those words: “trade is the paradigmatic moral relationship.” I find this view vaguely horrifying, but no matter. It sounds an awful lot like the position I parodied in my rhetorical question: “Do they have any coherent model of society that rises above the level of the mass of individuals or the exchange mechanism of the market?” Mr. Wilkinson would say, “Don’t forget families!” Other than that, he does not seem to have any coherent model of society that goes beyond the things I mentioned. If he is unrepresentative of contemporary libertarian thought, I would be very happy to know it.

http://surfeited.net/blog/morality-markets-and-me.html#comment262693

But even if Rothbardian wisdom is the norm, why is it then when it comes to immigration debates many contemporary libertarians seem to respond with nothing but absurd canards about nativism and Nazis (Mr. Weigel’s and Mr. McCracken’s positions respectively)? Why is that so many of them argue as if they believed culture and national identity were little more than arbitrary or politically irrelevant constructs? If stereotype of libertarians as atomised individualists is a purely false charge, why do so many contemporary libertarians seem so happy to live up to the stereotype? It may indeed be the case that Mises, Rothbard and, more recently, Hoppe advance sound libertarian arguments about nationhood and, notably in Hoppe’s case, immigration controls that paleolibertarians claim to approve of, but it seems to me that a lot of people running around calling themselves libertarians are as familiar with these aspects of the libertarian tradition as most conservatives today are familiar with the anti-corporate and agrarian aspects of the conservatism of Kirk, Bradford and Weaver, which is to say not at all. And when it comes right down it, even Hoppe cannot resist effectively labeling Buchanan a national socialist.

Perhaps I stated it poorly, but I suppose my question would really be this: if libertarians believe that there are such things as natural nations, and that these groups can legitimately define their membership, why isn’t the first thought that comes out of Mr. McCracken’s mouth when he hears Buchanan’s “blood and soil” reference related to national identity, “Oh, yes, that’s somewhat similar to what Rothbard was talking about”? Instead of making that connection, which would show some awareness of what Mr. Buchanan was saying and some awareness that natural nations do exist and can legitimately be defined by such things as common ethnicity, he makes the immediate leap to Nazi parallels. Perhaps Mr. McCracken is also unrepresentative or simply is being lazy in this instance, but if people at three of the more prominent flagships of modern libertarianism (Wilkinson being closely associated with Cato; Weigel at Reason; McCracken at LRC) all seem to be missing the boat or seem otherwise entirely unaware of Rothbardian and Misesian insights on these questions, would that not make my questions relevant? Can you see how I would be skeptical about modern libertarian respect for natural affinities and natural communities and troubled by their apparent lack of an account for national identity?

You need to read a little more widely. Ludwig von Mises wrote extensively about the nation, society, and culture. See his books Nation, State, and Economy (1919) and Socialism (1922). The idea that libertarianism per se upholds some sort of “atomistic individualism,” with individuals and their liberties detatched from the concrete bounds of time and place, is a canard that deserves to be put to bed once and for all.

For a recent, brief discussion of some of these issues see Murray Rothbard’s “Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State.” I blogged about it at Organizations and Markets:

Rothbard distinguishes sharply between the state, as a political entity, and the nation, a “complex and varying constellation of different forms of communities, languages, ethnic groups, or religions.” He goes on to develop a theory of appropriate national boundaries, based on the principle of volunary association and the empirical claim that people tend to associate with particular familial, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups. “One goal for libertarians should be to transform existing nation-states into national entities whose boundaries could be called just, in the same sense that private property boundaries are just; that is, to decompose existing coercive nation-states into genuine nations, or nations by consent.”

A March 2006 NBER Working Paper by Alberto Alesina, William Easterly, and Janina Matuszeski, “Artificial States,” proposes several measures of the degree to which state boundaries are “natural” — corresponding roughly to Rothbard’s nations — or “artificial.” One measure identifies state borders that split ethnic groups into separate states, while another uses fractal geometry to characterize borders as straight or squiggly, assuming that straight borders are more likely to be articifially drawn and not corresponding to natural geographic or ethnic boundaries. The authors show that their measures are closely correlated with the usual measures of national economic performance (the more natural, the better).