As for the Kelley article, I haven’t any philosophical training and so must defer to you on that point. By “excellent primer” I meant to say that it does a great job of explaining the standard libertarian rights view on positive rights.

There was a large minority of libertarians – or claiming to be – you’ve seen the sort who claim this, but really like the GOP. If your picture of US politics was derived from the internet, it’d have been very, very far from reality. Part of this was the computer science/academia getting there earlier, part was the white, educated middle-class male thing (IMHO).

Today, I think that there’s another factor involved – the right-wing/libertarian split. Back in the USENET days, I noticed that oh so many of these ‘orthogonal’ libertarians really hated Democratic politicians, but were tolerant to supportive of GOP politicians. By now, the libertarians who were actually Republicans have openly left, and a larger proportion of the actual libertarians have found that they don’t like the Republican Party. This has put liberals and libertarians in closer alignment – we have a common opponent. In the meantime, both sides have a harder time talking with a formerly triumphant, now ‘dead ender’ GOP. I’m pretty sure that liberals read liberal blogs, and some libertarian blogs, but only a few right-wing blogs – and those would be conservatives, not actual right-wingers. I’d be unsurprised if libertarians have a similar pattern. You’ve probably read some right-wing blogs, and decided that these people just aren’t in the same universe as you. Talking with them would be futile, since they can’t accept reality.

The rise of right-wing radio, TV and magazines have helped this along. One can spend a lot of hours listening to a world where Bush is an inspired genius, patriotic American, Christian of good character, etc. Where we are winning the war in Iraq, to save those poor people (who deserve anything that we do to them since they’re all foreign Muzlim terrs, not that we do, but they deserve it anyway….).

As the Bush administration and this war keep crashing down the highway of disaster, I expect this to continue, since a paranoid ’stab in the back’ theory is well developed, and anybody who doesn’t buy into their lies is an enemy – not an opponent, but probably a charter member of Al Qaida.

Or, libertarians are now, as always, geeks. Geeks talk on the Internet. Voila.

Julian,

If you are right, that’s pretty depressing. I mean, I’ve always thought our wonks were better than other peoples’, which gave us a disproportionate voice in certain policy discussions. If, across a broad “middle” range of issues, people’s views are substantially malleable, we are doing even worse than I’d thought.

Other Ezra-
I think there’s very probably something to that.

Is the argument that for practical purposes wonks and their readers constitute a majority of votes?

I don’t think a great majority of voters are ideological at all. Most people who vote Democrat aren’t liberals, for example. They just want, say, abortions to remain legal.

It seems to me that recent history has libertarians continually surprised our issue specific coalition buddies turn out not to be libertarians after all. You see this in the seemingly endless ‘I thought Republicans were the small government party?’ stories we get from libertarian publications.

Regarding libertarianism in the age of blogs, I suspect that mostly what has happened is the internet is now characterized by a disproportionate libertarian population. It is likely a mistake to believe that libertarian ideas have any more traction on Main Street than they ever have.

Bloggers yell at each other, and liberal bloggers have to argue with libertarians just as a matter of numbers.

What strikes me as odd about Ezra’s argument is he seems to believe that liberals (as opposed to Democrats) are substantially more relevant than libertarians. I’m not sure that is the case.