Justin Raimondo is cool

Libertarians of the Rothbardian type can be annoying, but they're usually annoying in colorful ways. If you spend much time in libertarian circles, you grow weary of the More Libertarian Than Thou gamesmanship. Rothbardians are not immune to this tendency, but they're seldom as humorlessly puritanical as, say, the hard-core Objectivists.

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com is a good example of this. He is a free-speech absolutist with a mirthful disdain of political correctness, and a consistent foe of the Welfare-Warfare State. This generally aligns him (and most other Rothbardians) with paleoconservatives: People of the Right who don't have much use for the GOP mainstream (cf., Bill Kauffman).

However, in his 2009 annual awards, Raimondo takes aim at the Spengler-type doomsaying tendency of some paleoconservatives:

The old ways are gone, and nothing can bring them back, they keen: we’re doomed! Doomed, I tell you! And no one of this tribe is gloomier than Daniel Larison, the Eeyore of the paleo-right.

Exactly. Larison's posture of radical despair amounts to nothing less than an argument for political inertia and irrelevance.

From what we might call the Larisonian perspective, the modern world -- and especially the average Republican voter -- is so hopelessly degenerate that no one who might possibly obtain political power could do anything to repair the breach. This is the politics of auto-marginalization, less of an ideology than a mood disorder.

However doomed we may actually be, persistent negativity is a self-fulfilling prophecy: "Can't never could," as my father always said. And even my neocon friends -- attention Pamela Geller -- can benefit by reading the rest of Justin Raimondo's column.