Why libertarians so readily ally themselves with evil and enemies

In the thread on Ron Paul, Alan Levine writes:

I fully agree with your remarks on the Ron Paul / Murray Rothbard-type obsessions and these men’s fixation on alliances with “the enemies of the enemy.” It seems to me that this is a basic characteristic of the libertarians. To them, all government is nominally “the enemy,” but in fact the real enemy, or rather the only enemy they can get worked up about, is the United States along with other Western democracies (or what used to be such). They are entirely consistent in this, so they always wind up apologizing for Nazis, Communists, etc., in preference to conservatives, democratic socialists, and the rest of the political spectrum. I have observed that when libertarians deal with history (from which they are basically alienated), they get far more emotional about the American Revolution and the evils of George III than about any modern tyranny. They only sound “patriotic” about that; the rest of American history is meaningless to them.

See my reply to Mr. Levine, in which I argue that the reason libertarians are so unprincipled is that, far from being opposed to liberalism, they are super-liberals, and thus super-relativists.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 07, 2012 01:39 PM | Send