If you want a preview of just how lame
ideological mud-slinging is going to get over the next few years—or
decades, possibly—take a look at this pair of articles penned
by Mark Ames at Pando.com, a Bay Area-based website that, among
other things, aspires “to bring
more civility into the blogosophere.” The pieces
charge Reason with being not a
libertarian defender of “Free Minds and Free Markets” but a hotbed
for pro-apartheid Holocaust deniers who slavishly do the bidding of
David and Charles Koch (cue the monster-movie music,
maestro).

Yeah, seriously. A publication that just celebrated “Marijuana on Main Street: The long, hard
road to safe, legal pot,” covers the police brutality
beat like nobody’s business, and criticized George W.
Bush’s “disaster
socialism” and his
stupid wars for the entire eight awful years he was in the
White House, is really a stalking horse for reactionary politics
right out of The Turner Diaries.

However ridiculous such attacks may be, they are a sign
that broadly libertarian ideas about fiscal responsibility and
social tolerance are gaining ground in all areas of politics and
culture. Indeed, as Ames frets, libertarianism is even making
“major inroads into the disaffected left.”

As the conservative right and progressive left feel
threatened by libertarianism, such attacks will multiply in number
and intensify in venom. The main purpose is not to actually engage
libertarian ideas—including once pie-in-the-sky beliefs that
governments should be financially sustainable, gay people should be
allowed to marry one another, and that more immigration is better
than less immigration—but precisely to avoid discussing
their merits.

In his
response to the false idea
that Reason supported apartheid in
the 1970s, Reason’s Editor in Chief Matt
Welch noted that Ames is “the anti-libertarian conspiracy
theorist with a history of
generating apology
notes and speedy
take-downs among those journalistic outlets
still reckless
enough to publish him.” Click through on those links
to get a sense of just how reckless and inattentive a reader Ames
can be.

In the newer
post, Ames runs
through Reason’s February 1976 issue
that was billed as a “Special Revisionism Issue.” He has posted the
entire issue, which I had not read before, online
here (an incomplete online archive of
Reason‘s run can be found here at the invaluable Unz.org site, which compiles hundreds of
titles; we hope eventually to produce our own fully searchable,
complete archive at our own site). Ames is correct that some
of the contributors to that issue developed an interest in or were
fellow travelers with that most pathetic area of study known as
Holocaust revisionism or denialism. That scurrilous topic is not
the focus of any of the articles in the issue, but the inclusion of
contributors such as James J. Martin, who would go on to join the
editorial board of the contemptible denialist outfit the Institute
of Historical Review, is embarrassing. 

The “revisionism” under discussion in the special issue
refers to the movement that was popular especially among left-wing
critics of the Cold War such as University of
Wisconsin’s William
Appleman Williams. Rather than accepting the United
States’ self-justifying explanations for the wars it fought and the
domestic policies it pursued, revisionists typically focused on
less noble motives in ways that they believed illuminated
uncomfortable truths. In The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy, for instance, Williams argued that America’s
“Open Door” foreign policy was not about spreading democracy or
human rights but was actually a way for America’s leaders to escape
domestic issues caused by racial strife and  capitalism’s
“contradictions.” You can take or leave that particular argument,
but there’s no question that Williams and other revisionists
brought a huge amount of energy to the fields of history and
political science.

In the Reason issue,
various authors discuss, among other things, what sort of
foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Franklin
Roosevelt may have had and how actors other than Nazi Germany bear
some responsibility for the start of World War Il. Some of the
material holds up, such as the observation from then-Senior Editor
Tibor Machan that “the Nazis were worse than the Americans or
allied nations, and…the Soviet Union is a more vicious
government, even in international affairs, than is the U.S.
government. This does not mean, emphatically, that I believe FDR to
have been an angel during World War II, or Wilson to have been the
paragon of diplomatic and political virtue in World War I.” Such a
view has become the baseline of virtually all contemporary
discussions on such topics.

Much of the material from the issue doesn’t hold up, which
is hardly surprising for a magazine issue published almost 40 years
ago. Even as the various writers warn explicitly against
uncritically accepting revisionist accounts out of inborn
contrarianism, there is a generally adolescent glee in being
iconoclastic that I find both uninteresting and unconvincing.
However, to characterize the issue as a “holocaust denial ‘special
issue,’” as Ames does, is an example of how quickly he can lose his
always-already weak grasp on reality.

As is his obsession, widely shared on the left and
increasingly among centrist Democrats, with fingering the Koch
brothers as the motive force in the decline of everything that is
good and decent in the world:

Reason isn’t just any magazine — since 1970,
Reason has been backed by the richest and most politically engaged
oligarchs alive, Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are almost
singlehandedly responsible for giving us libertarianism, a
radical-right version of neoliberalism that has steered the
Republican Party agenda for decades now, and has made major inroads
into the disaffected left as well. Reason is the respectable,
“educated” blue state face of the Kochs’ libertarian
network.

Not just any magazine?
Respectable and “educated”? We’ll
take compliments, even ones in scare quotes, when we get them. As I
wrote in The
Daily Beast after interviewing the author of
the critical new biography, Sons of Wichita: How
the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private
Dynasty, there’s no question that “one of the reasons
we’re having this conversation” about the size, scope, and spending
of government “is the Koch brothers.” David Koch has been been on
the board of trustees of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that
publishes Reason magazine,
Reason.com, and Reason TV, since the early 1990s and Charles Koch
has donated over the years.

None of this is secret or in any way scandalous. While they play
no role in our editorial process we appreciate their support, which
helps us generate the sort of journalism that took home six
prizes at the 56^th annual Southern California
Awards in June (among our winning entries were a feature-length
documentary critiquing drug prohibition, “America’s
Longest War“; Matt Welch’s brilliant
essay lauding Jackie Robinson’s incredible and wrongly
forgotten 1964 oral history of baseball’s integration; and the
short video “LA
County Sheriffs Hassle Photographer, Trample Constitution, Get
Lauded by Bosses”).

Since 1968, Reason has been pushing for “free minds and
free markets” in a principled, across-the-board way because we
think those things will create not just a richer and more
interesting world but a more just and peaceful world too. I realize
that not everyone will agree with those goals or our positions on
everything (those on the right tend to recoil from our pro-choice
position on abortion just as those on the left tend to hate our
pro-choice postion on school choice). But if you give a rat’s ass
about whether policies actually work the way they are advertised,
whether your government is lying to you and spying on you,
whether bureaucrats should be in control of more and more areas of
your lives, and whether people should be given the ability to run
their own “experiments in living” (as John Stuart Mill called
them), you’ll find a lot of interesting stuff in our pages and
videos. Our 46-year history of promoting freedom has already done
and will continue to do a hell of a lot more to improve humanity
than the radical left or right, and certainly than the Mark Ameses
of the world can ever dream of doing.

Interest in our work is growing precisely because of our
willingness to engage in honest conversation and analysis rather
than fever-swamp ramblings and unconvincing arguments ad
funderam. Given the general level of exhaustion with
conventional right-wing and left-wing ideology, with Republicans
and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, there’s a real interest
in something different. To the extent that we’re providing an
alternative way to view politics and culture, we’ll bug the hell
out of folks who feel like we’re making “major inroads” into what
they took to be their own captive audience. Suffering inaccurate,
misleading, and over-the-top attacks on our credibility and
integrity is just part of the landscape of the world in which we
live. We’ll correct them when they’re wrong and take it on the chin
when they’re right. Reason is happy to
acknowledge missteps and mistakes while also forcefully pushing
back against blatant misreadings of our past and current
work.