I don’t have a whole lot to say that hasn’t been covered in the several amusing responses to the normally-lucid V-Po’s annoying suggestion that libertarians who favor Kerry over Bush must be victims of false consciousness struggling to fit in with the cool kids. As the other posters observe, this mostly just betrays a failure to engage the real arguments for Kerry over Bush, which are more about divided government and strategic signalling than Kerry’s platform. But I do want to add a question: What does she think are the relevant circles people are trying to impress? If we’re talking about a student at Berkeley, maybe I’d buy this. But, perhaps terrifyingly, at least a plurality and probably a majority of the people I regularly correspond and socialize with are other libertarians. In an age of landslide counties and online communities, the group most salient in defining what’s politically fashionable isn’t going to be Hollywood and/or academic “liberal elites”; it’s going to be the ideological echo chambers we spend most of our time talking politics in. So maybe hawkish libertarians are going for Kerry in order to impress other hawkish libertarians, but that argument’s got the vertiginous feel of an Escher painting to it.