RAMESH PONNURU HAS A PIECE in the latest issue of National Review (the dead-tree version, not the online version, alas) about libertarians and the war. The blogosphere plays an important role. Here’s an excerpt:
The anti-war absolutists tend to depict less doctrinaire libertarians as sellouts. But this time, the anti-war crowd is facing a new and aggressive challenge: the rise of the blogosphere. There are bloggers — i.e., individuals who offer regularly updated commentary via their websites (“weblogs”) — of all political descriptions, even Luddites. But libertarians, and articulate hawks, seem to be disproportionately represented among them. Glenn Reynolds, one of the most important bloggers, is a fellow traveler of libertarianism and a proponent of regime change in Iraq. A small army of like-minded web pundits have made the case for what might be called a muscular libertarianism. Indeed, someone whose knowledge of libertarianism came from the web might be forgiven for assuming that it is a fighting faith. One gets the sense, reading the anti-war sites, that these bloggers are the final straw: Now they really feel beleaguered.
Reynolds sums up the differences this way: “I think there’s a split among libertarians between those who view government as the enemy and those who view individual self-defense as the most important right. There’s a lot of overlap in political positions between people who take those views. To a lot of libertarians, the war looks like self-defense writ large. Whereas to another class of libertarians, anything that strengthens the state is wrong, even in self-defense.”
On his site, Brink Lindsey has taken on the anti-warriors’ premises. He argues that they are wrong to regard foreign military intervention as analogous to governmental intervention in domestic markets. The case against the latter rests on the existence of equilibrating mechanisms that intervention would disrupt. By contrast, “there is no invisible hand in foreign affairs.” Other libertarian bloggers have declared themselves agnostic on the question of Iraq. Jacob T. Levy probably speaks for many libertarians when he writes that “the last year has made me more interventionist than I had ever thought conceivable, by convincing me that even the internal affairs of other states can pose a mortal threat.”
In arguing for pre-emptive action against Iraq, the bloggers have not only broken with the anti-war libertarians. They have also implicitly gone beyond organized libertarianism (to the extent that such a thing exists or can exist). The Cato Institute, the Libertarian party, and Reason are all against a pre-emptive strike. Small as their numbers are, then, the libertarians have divided into three camps of roughly equal strength: the anti-war absolutists, the hawks, and a libertarian mainstream that endorsed action in Afghanistan but opposes war with Iraq.
Ponnuru suggests that this debate is more important to conservatism than many might think.
“The Final Straw” would be a pretty cool name for a blog, wouldn’t it?