It's true that this particular web community is a little more reasoned than many online outposts of "left" or "right." Libertarianism is an important thread in the overall Western political tapestry, and like liberalism, conservativism, socialism and freemarketeerism it's home to intelligent people and fools alike.

Which is why the term "idiotarian" is useless, in addition to being insulting. To recap: the sum of the argument here seems to be that the "idiotarian" is a person who chooses wrong over right, evil over good, dumb over smart, etc etc. The group can't seem to decide whether they are hoodwinked (like Lenin's "useful idiots") or conscious cultural saboteurs, but the bottom line of the definition is that idiotarians support what the anti-idiotarian considers wrong.

By this definition, there is an idiot in every occupied chair. Everyone is doing something wrong by someone's definition. Just as every political philosophy becomes idiotic when extended to its logical extremes.

Personally, the word suggests to me a person who has reached the illogical fringe of his or her ideological passion, and remains unable to see it. This would include lefties who preach world revolution, or righties who preach world domination, or libertarians who rail against government, etc etc. But the words "extremist" or "fundamentalist" or "ideologue" are much more descriptive, accurate, and useful in these cases. "Idiotarian" is an insult, nothing more, telling me nothing about the individual referenced and everything about the speaker's opinion.

So back to my original point: "idiotarian" is primarily useful for insulting people with whom one disagrees. It is dismissive, reductive, and, while catchy, juvenile. It implies that the "right" positions are so self-evident that only an idiot would fail to embrace them.

In fact, the "right" positions - on everything from military intervention to abortion to taxation to internationalism - are anything but clear. The jury is still way, way out on the dominant neoconservative American ideology of the day, whose rabid anti-tax, anti-state domestic policies would seem to be on a collision course with its overtly interventionist, strong-state foreign and anti-terror policies. And that is only the tip of an iceberg of confusion. As we globalize, nothing is clear, besides the fact that the competition for wealth, power and resources will only get more intense.

Which leads me to conclude that anyone who walks around laying blanket terms like "idiotarian" on anyone is as likely to be an idiot as they are to be right. Why would someone take such a chance? Because it is fun and a rush to insult people. It makes the user feel large and in charge. It's a boner word. Some may use it in good faith and with reasoned justification (as there are, in fact, idiots in the world),
but as I surf the net and the "anti-idiotarian" screeds that abound, it seems that the majority use it as a schoolyard dismissal for those whose opinions differ from their own.