The tribal scale argument is not a magic cure, but it does seem to minimize the need to get entangled with most of the other arguments. As long as people are convinced states need to be much smaller, I don’t really care what their politics or economics are like - I can always move somewhere else.
Taking the point of the tribal scale argument seriously either eliminates this objection or converts it into the third one below.
Democracy (or whatever) at a tribal scale - sounds fine to me. This one also seems like it can be overcome simply by harping on the main point.
This is exactly where I’d like the debate to be. The proponents would then be at a fundamental disadvantage in that they would be arguing that we need to compensate for the tendency to simply scale tribalism upwards . . . by essentially creating a system that is an upward-scaled tribal model, a tribe writ large. The libertarian side then seems a very comfortable position to argue from.
Again, this is a very nice place for the argument to take place. Conceding this point just leaves us with small city-states, which would be a huge improvement.
All in all, focusing the statism vs. anti-statism argument on how to compensate for the evolutionarily discordant conditions of the modern world seems to vastly limit the argument space and cast a steady light on those ever-hidden tendencies that are fundamental to the insidious plausibility of statist thinking. Tribe size has grown by literally about a million times. Once the evolutionary position has been presented and understood, it seems extremely difficult to argue against the need to compensate for our innate tendency to look up to “tribal elders” at that scale by simply doing the obvious: stop respecting and enabling large tribe-like structures. Whatever else need be done to compensate is surely readily seen as pailing in comparison to this. No other factor is anywhere near as evolutionarily discordant as the sheer size of the tribes.
In fact, where I see this argument going is to the middle ground. Ancient-tribe-sized state structures of 150 people could be argued to be too small for various reasons, so we may conclude that the ideal size is a few thousand, a few tens of thousand, or whatever. In any case it just seems hard to arrive at anything other than a massive reduction in the size of states, perhaps by micro-secession if this evopsych meme propagates, when one takes seriously the tremendous disparity between the size of ancestral tribes and that of modern “tribes.” The enormity of the difference means that to simply raise the question and take it up for debate is to make the main compensating adjustment default to, “Whatever you do, make these tribes a whole hell of a lot smaller.”