SmartRemarks

The internet has long been known as a hotbed of libertarian thinking—a bunch of rugged individualists sitting in their home offices tapping away at keyboards about their right to live unbounded lives. It has seldom spilled over into modern real-world politics, however, because there’s too much internal disagreement over what libertarianism is really about, and what its proponents’ priorities ought to be.

There are occasional surges of near-relevance—Ron Paul’s dark horse run for the GOP presidential nomination last winter, for instance, which generated much greater enthusiasm from the netroots than from any other demographic—but they always fade away again. (America loves to give lip service to liberty, but starts to squirm when anyone gets serious about the implications.) Thus, the relevance of libertarianism to American politics remains, shall we say, contested.

Most recently, this dispute has been dragged into the open again by the spat between Jacob Weisberg of Slate and Megan McArdle of The Atlantic over the implications of the ongoing financial crisis for libertarianism in America.

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