IIRC, the line about UKIP being Crypto-Fascist comes from one of the Samizdata posters at the time of the European elections. At the last UK election, I found the election leaflets from UKIP and the BNP virtually indistinguisable. If they don’t want people associating them with fascism-lite, then they shouldn’t produce election literature that makes them look that way.

Moreover, I can only assume you have not been reading us much as we attack the Tories FAR more often than the LibDems, who though hardly a party of civil liberties, they do at least oppose ID cards and panoptic databases.

By describing the UKIP as crypt0o-fascist you tell us rather more about yourself than them. Sure, there are some real jackasses in that party who are just old fashioned bigots and isolationists but the leader is pretty much the only person in visible politics in the UK to be calling for a drasticly scaled down state, hardly a feature of a fascist state. I would not describe UKIP as liberatian by any means but please stop using ‘fascist’ when what you really mean is “someone who I do not agree with and I don’t like”.

What really made me eschew any identification with libertarianism (and causes me to look askance at anyone who calls himself a libertarian) is the sort of folks Rosenfelder describes. To put it bluntly, I can’t recall ever meeting an honest-to-God Libertarian (as opposed to someone who just has a certain amount of affinity for the libertarian position) who was not a complete asshole. Every self-identified dyed-in-the-wool Libertarian I’ve encountered, in real life or on the net, has been a smarmy I’ve-got-all-the-answers prick.

Maybe not a very scientific basis for disdaining an entire political movement, but empirical evidence tells me that if this is the sort of people they attract, then it’s probably not a movement likely to make the world a better place.