Violence and the Fake Libertarian

Amanda Marcotte recently noted that fake libertarians “are straight men who like to fuck without making babies and therefore oppose the wingnut push to legislate the bedroom. But they don’t oppose it in any meaningful way, such as supporting politicians who, you know, agree with their beliefs about personal freedom. Instead, they keep supporting wingnuts and relying on liberals to do their fighting for their civil rights for them.” True enough. But as Mithras notes, there’s an even more important component:

I think what Amanda is missing here is that, in addition to fucking without reproducing, straight libertarian males also like people who Blow Shit Up. Toughness is of a piece with the straight male libertarian ethos, usually because the adherents were beaten up in high school for being huge Star Trek nerds. Joining the Republican Party and making scads of money in technology industries is their form of revenge, never mind that the Party is run by the same sort of jocky meatheads and alpha bitches who tormented them in their youth.

Exactly correct. Most of the fake libertarians of the blogosphere (and I should make clear that this doesn’t refer to principled libertaians like Jim Henley and Arthur Silber) seem most attracted to Republican militarism. Glenn Reynolds will make every excuse in the book for the Republicans’ reactionary social policy, but if they stop being the Blowing Shit Up party his partisan hackery would be abandoned post hatse. Fortunately, Mithras offers a remedy:

What the Democratic Party must do is undercut the GOP’s science-fiction-based comparative advantage. First, it must promote the right candidates. Ladies and gentlemen, consider Picard/Data ’08. Yes, yes, I know neither are eligible to the Presidency, on account of foreign birth and being fictional, but these are minor details that can be swept aside with a pliant press – after all, they didn’t say anything when a man with the intelligence of a small woodland creature was twice elected President and then dragged the nation into war under the barest of flimsy excuses. Second, we must transform ourselves into the party of Killer Robots That Can Blow Up Other Killer Robots With Lasers. Our strategy will be to disperse the robot and laser factories in low-income areas of major cities, divert the funding from places like Alabama and some of those other states in the middle of the country – I can never remember their names – and then stream the video of “tests” of competing robot armies over the internet. No one will be killed, there will be full employment and high-tech job training, and campaign contributions from tech companies will pour into Democratic hands. The Republicans won’t stand a chance. It’ll be a rout.

I think it would help to get Jeri Ryan on the ticket somehow–thus uniting both elements of the all-important fake libertarian demographic–but that’s heading in the right direction!

Hat tip: iocatse.