Comments are completely “JOOO!” free as of 6:30 am ET, but a few of my “fans” from the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club are up early…
Tucker’s point, if I understand it—that objectivists can be brittle, juvenile boors—could have been easily and convincingly made without his shaky foundational metaphor: the too-clever conceit of dragging an unfashionable mid-century architectural style into his argument.
You see, Brutalist architecture “asserted that a building should be no more and no less than what it is supposed to be in order to fulfill its function. It asserted the right to be ugly.…”
Being stupid (see above), I don’t know enough about architecture to judge whether or not Tucker’s definition of Brutalism is accurate and therefore an appropriate lens through which to view “brutalist” libertarians.
Remove that central conceit, and his essay is just another meditation on the eternal tension between harsh ideological purity and accommodationist pragmatism. Tucker spills hundreds of words to champion what sounds like “compassionate libertarianism” and essentially say, “Hey, people should be nicer.”
And he’s wrong.
