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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30638 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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My reading of American "libertarianism" is that apart from the small true libertarian core a lot of people describing themselves as "libertarian" were just right-wing (vaguely or strongly), but didn't share what used to be one of the most crucial components of American right-wing thought - religiousness. Since Trumpism and other nationalist/populist movements and general secularization have created more alternatives to be right-wing and not religious, former libertarians gravitate to those movements, and would probably feel them to be in some way equivalent to their own libertarianism, even if they can't necessarily fully articulate how.

My personal and most likely extremely uncharitable take was that libertarians were simply people who are aware at some basic level that the government is hostile to their interests and the interests of people who are prone to believing in libertarian ideals more generally - but they're unable to articulate this due to the complicated and arcane ways in which power is both wielded against them and used to prevent them from voicing their objections. Their opposition to government power is based on that dim understanding that government is hostile to them, and so they want to reduce the ability of the government to harm them further by simply weakening it.

A lot of self-identified "libertarians" from the Ron Paul (appropriate enough given that I'd describe Paul as more an anti-federalist than a libertarian, even though he ran on the LP's ticket once) era were just disaffected paleocons (think Pat Buchanan) who'd lost the power struggle with neoconservatives in the 90s. Trump rolled in an more or less ran on a Buchanan style platform and ran away with that group.

As an American libertarian, absolutely not. I hate the rise of trumpism because it's opposed to my principles in many ways

As I implicated, I'm not talking about all the libertarians, certainly not the actually consistent ones, but folks who at one time saw fit to call themselves "libertarian" despite not actually being such, at least in an ideologically coherent way, and now might or might not do so.

I’ve always thought libertarian in practice = conservatives wanted to brand away from conservatives And things like rationalist = democrats trying to not brand as democrats

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