Salon’s Psychoanalysis of Libertarians

Many leading lights of our media had hoped to avoid grappling with the ideas of Ron Paul, which represent such a challenge to the status quo, largely by pretending he didn’t exist. If they refused to take his candidacy seriously, maybe no one else would either.

However, in the wake of Ron Paul’s surprising $4.2 million fundraising haul on November 5^th, the press had to say something. And although some of the usual suspects were actually quite reasonable about it, for most others you could almost hear the smug chortling as they typed their stories. No more willing to face Paul in a battle of ideas than they had been on November 4^th, but forced to acknowledge that ignoring him didn’t appear to be working, they have resorted to character assassination as their best bet. An excellent case in point is Andrew Leonard’s treatment on Salon, entitled "Ron Paul’s Internet cha ching."

Now when you’re writing an article trashing Ron Paul’s supporters, you can go one of two routes. You can either paint them as violent thugs and white supremacists, or you can ridicule them as pointy-headed geeks. These appear to be mutually exclusive tactics, for the obvious reason that no one wants to admit being afraid of a geek. Yet we point out for purists that technically many geeks are racist, in that they do not believe Klingons should have unrestricted access to Federation territory. But we digress.

Andrew Leonard explains Paul’s online success through the simple formula that geeks master the Internet, and geeks tend to be libertarian. Hence, Ron Paul owns the Internet:

And you can wonder, who are these people? Where did they come from? Is this stream of [Ron Paul donors] some kind of roll call for techno-libertarian America? Because that’s supposed to be the explanation for all this, right? Geeks skew libertarian, and so the technically savvy swoon for Paul, a one time Libertarian Party candidate for president. From its initial emergence, the Net has always provided a nurturing home for libertarian sympathizers. That equation may have been diluted as the Internet became more mainstream, but the passion still lingers: In a very straightforward way, the Ron Paul campaign represents the revenge of libertarian cyberspace. We have the technology, we can rebuild society! Better, stronger, less government!

Fortunately, Leonard doesn’t stop there. He pushes further than other hatchet jobbers, and explains exactly why it is that geeks tend to be libertarian:

By the nature of their work, programmers count on being able to precisely manipulate reality through their manipulation of code. When it works, when the computer does as it is told, it is an intoxicating experience, as anyone who has written so much as a "Hello World" script knows. Absolute power! It’s the best! And if something goes wrong, it’s not because there was something wrong with me, it’s because there was something wrong with the code. So tweak it, figure out the correct algorithm, and all ambiguity will be erased, all problems solved.…

But there is a point at which this analogy does not hold. Because computers don’t always do exactly as they are told, especially when they are networked together. Software is buggy, and reality can never be anticipated perfectly enough to capture once and for all in an algorithm. Just ask the hedge fund quants who got burned on Wall Street in August. Software is hard, and so is government. Cruft accumulates.

At this point we must warn our readers: As far as we can tell – and we’re experts at this, folks – in the above quotation Leonard has somehow contorted himself into using an incorrect stereotype as the basis for an invalid argument, where the conclusion applies to himself rather than his opponent. More succinctly, it is a hypocritical non sequitur anchored in a falsehood. Consequently, you may get lost in our delicate unraveling of the nonsense, but please keep in mind that Leonard left us no choice.

First: Is Leonard’s depiction of computer programmers accurate? Because one of us was actually a professional programmer on Wall Street, we can confidently say "no." How does Leonard go wrong in his caricature? Let us count the ways:

1) "Something wrong with the code" IS "something wrong with me," for pretty much every programmer we’ve ever known. Programmers are tormented by bugs they can’t find or that cause serious errors in their programs. If you are a professional programmer and a bug is found in one of your programs, it means that you made a mistake, you failed to think some issue through all the way. Leonard’s portrayal of this situation is as fatuous as contending that professional baseball players don’t think they’re at fault when they strike out with the bases loaded, since, after all, it was their swings, not themselves, that are to blame!

2) "Because computers don’t always do exactly as they are told, especially when they are networked together." Networking computers makes no theoretical difference whatsoever. All modern digital computers are mathematically Universal Turing Machines, which means they all have the same theoretical capabilities and determinism. Five computers hooked together in a network are no different (theoretically) than one big computer performing all of the functions of the networked quintet. (There are, of course, numerous practical considerations that might favor one or the other of the above pair of configurations, such as performance, cost, security, crash resistance, and so forth. But there is no task that one of those setups is theoretically able to perform but not the other.)

3) "Software is buggy..." The introduction of this here is absurd, since he just handled it totally differently in point number 1!

As we have made clear, Leonard doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to computer programmers. But okay, let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that computer geeks are power hungry control freaks who want to set up rules for everyone else to follow, even though the real world is complex and human beings can’t be controlled as easily as machines or lab rats. Does it follow then that these people would be attracted to libertarianism, and in particular to Austrian economics? That is a far-fetched proposition, given that one of the central arguments used to support a libertarian approach to politics – especially emphasized by the Austro-libertarians, of which Paul is an example – is that human social life is way too messy and unpredictable for any effort by the government to "engineer." Attempts to centrally plan a society are doomed to failure.

And now for Leonard’s hypocrisy: Except perhaps for some hardcore individualist anarchists who object to the very idea of running for political office, the people who oppose Paul’s policies do so because they believe that they have a set of rules for people to follow, that will give a better outcome compared to the spontaneous one that would occur in Ron Paul’s deregulated vision. In short, it is Andrew Leonard and the other smug commentators, not the libertarian geeks, who have "control issues."

In closing, we will provide our own explanation for the undeniable connection between geeks and libertarianism. First, geeks are more introverted than, say, football players and so spend more time thinking about weighty topics like a fiat monetary system. Second, geeks (and particularly fans of fantasy and science fiction) are dreamers, who like to imagine a better world. Third, nerds (this is distinct from geeks – nerds are smart, whereas geeks merely have geeky interests) are independent and self-reliant, and would do well in a world based on individual merit rather than a popularity contest.

Andrew Leonard is right that the Internet is home to the geeks. But he gets just about everything else wrong. If he wants to smear Ron Paul’s supporters, we hope he tries harder next time. For encouragement, he should ask himself: What would Spock do?