Farewell, Lew Rockwell
The final word.

By Jonah Goldberg, NRO editor
March 7, 2001 6:00 p.m.

here's the old Murphy's Law, "Never argue with an idiot, people may not be able to tell the difference." But what exactly is the rule governing arguments with very smart and committed people so ideologically bound up, you'd need a truckload of Metamucil just to get them off a minor point? Frankly, I have no idea, so I'm just gonna wing it — which accounts for the unforgivable length of this article.

First, let me bring out-of-the-loop readers up to speed. Last week I wrote a column addressing several columns written about me or referencing me, on a site called LewRockwell.com, which bills itself as the "anti-state, anti-war, pro-market news site." LewRockwell.com features regular diatribes against National Review, neoconservatives, The Weekly Standard, William F. Buckley, and other icons of what most people consider mainstream conservatism in America.

The site also features regular screeds about how Abraham Lincoln was a murderous war criminal, how the American military is a hotbed of criminal imperialism and murderous warmongering, and why Southern secession not only was honorable and noble but how it still is a viable option.

So before I get started, let me offer an apology. In my article I referred to LewRockwell.com as a haven for "angry" and "cat-kicking" libertarians. That's not entirely fair — to libertarians. Most of the libertarians I know want nothing to do with LewRockwell.com (if they've heard of it at all). This is not the primary home for the sort of optimistic classical liberalism you might find at the Cato Institute or Reason magazine.

And while I still take issue with much that goes on at those places, it is unfair for me to imply that all libertarians fed up with conservatives or the Republican party or a bloated federal government would want to associate themselves with a forum that joyfully dances back and forth across the line separating anti-statism and anti-Americanism.

Of course, it's also unfair for me to say that everybody writing for LewRockwell.com or everybody reading it is a crank. That's simply not true. But you'll forgive me if I don't go diving for pearls in the manure.

"It's My Tone, Stupid"
Mr. Dieteman, who doesn't seem like a crank, wrote me a nice note explaining how he disagreed with my column. He wrote that he was "greatly disappointed in the abrasive tenor" of my article, and that he had "lost a degree of respect for National Review. Conservatives and libertarians disagree over the role of government, but there is no need for rancor."

This was actually a fairly common response from several LewRockwell.com readers as well. Many were shocked that I would be so "mean" or "disrespectful," so willing to "take cheap shots" and "avoid serious arguments." I'll get to the "serious arguments" in a bit. But as for the first part. I am tempted to borrow a line from Sgt. Hulka to Psycho in Stripes and simply say: Lighten up Rockwellites.

"I Excommunicate Thee"
It is impossible to exaggerate the degree to which these people take themselves too seriously. They accuse me of pomposity, but I swear I can't even climb the pedestal they put themselves on. The problem is that by taking themselves too seriously they wind up taking me too seriously.

There's simply no other way to explain the endless torrent of overwrought, mutually contradictory self-parody going on over there.

For example, Daniel McCarthy writes a piece calling me "The Excommunicator." Writing about a speech I gave at C-PAC to a Young America's Foundation luncheon, he paints me as slyly trying to pollute the minds of these naïve and insufficiently conservative young'ns. Summarizing the intent of my brainwashing he says, "Pre-Enlightenment values are not welcome in Jonah Goldberg's conservative movement. Or to put it more accurately — pre-Enlightenment values are not welcome in the conservative movement at all if Jonah Goldberg gets his way."

Dear God, it's Munich all over again, Goldberg must be stopped! (Oh, wait. That might be a bad analogy; Do Rockwellites believe fighting WWII was justified? It's not clear).

This is what I was getting at. These guys aren't even reliably libertarian. For the record, libertarianism is supposed to reject pre-Enlightenment values much more than conservatism does. Indeed, this embarrassing squabble largely stems from an argument — and general agreement — with Messrs. Kantor and Dieteman over the fact that Friedrich Hayek would not call himself a conservative because he thought the label was too accommodating to pre-Enlightenment conservative values.

In the course of a week, I've gone from being a scoundrel for trying to claim the pre-eminent twentieth-century critic of pre-Enlightenment values as a conservative, to being a scoundrel for attempting to purge such values from the conservative movement. Still, it's given me an excuse to buy those "The Excommunicator" business cards I've always wanted.

But yes, for the record, if I were cracking the whip on the movement there would be a significant bias against many if not most pre-Enlightenment values — and not just racism, but also the rejection of science, capitalism, universal humanity, and Truth, etc. Mr. McCarthy conveniently leaves out the fact that it was specifically these attributes of pre-Enlightenment thinking that I was denouncing at C-PAC. It would be nice to know which of them he'd like to keep in the movement.

By the way, I was also explicitly not making an anti-religious argument. I pointed out that so many Enlightenment thinkers were committed to understanding God's will and God's universe. I bring this up because I don't trust these guys not to turn me into some atheistic-secular bigot.

So there's this guy Bob Murphy (who actually takes pride of ownership in the "technique" of beginning sentences "So there's this…"). He clearly thinks a great deal of himself. And, if Mr. Rockwell is true to his word that he doesn't like my column because it has become "transmogrified into self-important serio-pomposo items," then he should bar this no-talent ass-clown from writing for his own site ever again.

To be honest, I think his assault on me is so dumb — especially in light of McCarthy et al.'s whining about how mean my "tone" was — that I cannot imagine even wasting the time to mock it. He spends the first stretch making fun of me because I wear glasses and because my outdated picture shows me in a goatee. He then suggests I was lucky that he had to wait a full 24 hours before responding to my "idiot attack." Because "I knew if I wrote it right after reading your attack for the very first time, I would have scared even Lew Rockwell." [Emphasis in original.]

I don't know what to say, except maybe his response could have used a few more minutes in the oven. See for yourself.

As for Mr. Dieteman, I was probably unfair when I portrayed him as an hysteric (like Mr. Murphy). He seems quite the opposite: earnest and serious to a fault. That said, the profound offense taken by several other LR writers and even more of its readers, is bizarre.

I try to avoid "they started it arguments" but let us note for the record that what got my attention was a column entitled, "Stop Being a Schmuck, Jonah." Also, the fact that LewRockwell.com writers are fond of calling mainstream conservatives "socialists," "warmongers," "imperialists," etc. — amidst fevered screeds about CIA plots and neo-secessionist outbursts — didn't exactly make me feel like I was throwing the first stone.

Frank Meyer & Dieteman v. Kantor
As for the substance of what I wrote in that column, I don't retract a thing. Though I do owe an explanation on the bit about Frank Meyer's conversion, which was poorly phrased. As both the founder of fusionism and a libertarian, Meyer believed you could believe in a transcendent universal morality and advocate the maximization of human freedom. Not surprisingly, his chief critics were Catholic social conservatives. When Meyer had his deathbed conversion to Catholicism, some took it at as an explicit reversal of positions. By no means do I believe that religion and libertarianism are at loggerheads.

Anyway, Mr. Dieteman asserted in his piece that it was "very strange" for me to place Hayek's The Road to Serfdom at the core of the modern conservative canon — as if he'd never heard this argument before. I explained how there was nothing strange about my assertion, and I have nothing to add, except that it was Dieteman's tone regarding how "very strange" it was for me to make the suggestion that annoyed me so.

As for Mr. Kantor, well, his entire article seemed designed solely to justify using the word "schmuck." That aside, his only real accusation was that I don't know much about von Mises and that in and of itself is schmuck-worthy.

But not only do I admit this, he wouldn't know it if I hadn't said so. Various Rockwellites call me arrogant, but here I thought I was being humble. To date, I can't really figure out what Kantor's original complaint was. Maybe I just can't cut my way through the gratuitous, prison-philosopher ten-dollar verbiage. But in his clarification yesterday, Mr. Kantor said it wasn't my professed ignorance of von Mises that ticked him off. Rather, "I would simply prefer that he not caricature libertarians as a gaggle of loopy devolutionists" who "logically criticize Hayek for his un-libertarian positions."

Okay, the wheel turns again. So Mr. Dieteman seems to be saying that Hayek's not a conservative and belongs firmly in the libertarian pantheon (even though he concedes that Hayek lent theoretical support to the concept of the welfare state). And Mr. Kantor is simply concerned that I not malign Hayek's libertarian critics as zealots; they're just being "logical." So, now I'm wrong for saying that Hayek can be associated with conservatism and I'm also wrong for suggesting that it's anything but rational for libertarians to have serious problems with Hayek.

In other words the libertarians should be free to beat up on Hayek but the conservatives are wrong to embrace him with open arms. This seems to me the kind of talk you hear from a husband who beats his wife but doesn't want anybody else to have her. Maybe now readers can understand why I say that most people don't care about these arguments.

The Ghetto
Getting past these guys, there's another interesting theme in the e-mail pudding (as well as posts over at FreeRepublic.com, with which I have no quarrel). It's been suggested that National Review or National Review Online or simply myself, are just "scared" of LewRockwell.com's growing influence, hence my dismissive tone.

Now I know that my word doesn't travel too far in these circles, but I swear to anyone who cares to believe me that this is pure fantasy. I mean literally, it's not even a little bit true. Lewrockwell.com may have legions of brilliant readers, it may be of unsurpassed influence with millions of people, I don't know — but I surely doubt it. Nonetheless, I can assure you its presence simply isn't strongly felt by pretty much anybody I know — and that includes numerous card-carrying, professional libertarians.

You could read National Review Online or National Review for months or years without finding a single reference to LewRockwell.com (indeed, a Nexis search reveals that it's only been mentioned 12 times by any publication ever). But, at LewRockwell.com you can't swing an effigy of Bill Buckley without hitting some hissy fit about some article at National Review or National Review Online. That's fine with us, but they shouldn't be deluded that the attention is reciprocated. Because it's not. I'm not saying I'll never write about Lewrockwell.com again — and the libertarians are always fair game — but this is not a rivalry, it's simply a silly mess I've stepped in.

Which gets to the heart of my original argument. The tendency of libertarians generally and the Rockwellites specifically, is to get so hung up on ideological hair-splitting and irrelevant and often lunatic sectarian squabbles that they let the world continue creeping in a direction they don't like. Then, they have the unmitigated chutzpah to scream at conservatives and Republicans for not doing enough to stop the creep. This purist approach to politics is quite simply juvenile. Nobody cares in what direction you want the wagon to go if you won't get out of it and help push.

Coming tomorrow: "Why Harry Browne Is Wrong."