Matt Bruenig and Demos have thrown down the gauntlet against libertarian ideology. Trevor Burrus at Cato has picked it up. Should be worth tuning in.
Matt pulls no punches. He’s emerged in the last year as one of the mediasphere’s most convincing voices for progressive ideas and policies, based (IMO) on air-tight arguments and thinking, backed by solid, well-presented facts and data. He’s front and center for Demos‘ Gordon Gamm Initiative to counter libertarian ideology.
Matt’s not fussy about “civility” when incoherent, self-contradictory, bad-faith arguments are thrown in his face.
Trevor is one of those “voices of reason” at Cato (like Tyler Cowen, front-man for Mercatus) who mask the dark underbelly of libertarianism behind a facade of judicious, Reason-able moderation.
I’d like to offer up one knife for this fight. Trevor:
Libertarianism is the only prominent political ideology that consistently has to deal with questions about the imperfectness of our solutions as if they were de facto refutations of our position.
What cave has he been living in? Progressive ideas have been under unremitting and steadily-escalating attack by conservatives for four decades — actually since well before The New Deal — with many of those attacks based on the “imperfectness” of progressive policy solutions. (With all those attacks built on a scaffolding of libertarian truisms.)
“There’s Medicare fraud!” So progressive thinking must be incoherent. Progressives have been forced into an endless game of “imperfectness” Whack-a-Mole, with hundreds of billions in libertarian-enabled corporate funding backing the moles.
This reality is apparently invisible to Trevor, which speaks volumes about the reality orientation of libertarian ideology, and of its adherents.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.