Conservative libertarians are in it for the zero welfare. The idea of poor people starving to death keeps them warm at night. But keep in mind that these "libertarians" also want to ban pot, porn, and premarital sex.
Libertarians are supposed to support individual liberty. But there’s a distinction between believing the government should prevent some act that doesn’t harm others (not libertarian) and believing people should not engage in that act (perfectly comparable with libertarianism).
E.g. the difference between wanting the state to ban prostitution and being personally morally opposed to the practice or even attempting to convince people not to engage in it.
This vice-signalling explanation looks at the phenomenon of illiberal self-styled libertarians as though it emerged in a vacuum.
However, I think a more parsimonious explanation would focus on The Right historically having genuinely been much more libertarian. As the country, as a whole, moved in a populist and therefore less libertarian direction, with the Right being hit especially hard (Low Human Capital Party), the movement shifted away from libertarian ideals, while retaining its symbols and imagery.
Thus, on the Right, words like 'liberty' and 'freedom' retain positive valences, even if the people touting them abandoned the actual substance behind them.
[To a degree, the same is true on the Left, with words like 'equality' and 'justice.']
This contradiction between word and deed isn't limited to self-styled libertarians. The vast majority of those identifying with the Right would probably react positively to words like 'liberty' and 'freedom' even if they don't actually espouse those ideas.
To be sure, there's still discussion to be had about those who retained not just the more general words of 'liberty' and 'freedom', but also the more particular label 'libertarian,' but I think it should be viewed as part of this larger phenomenon, rather than being a discrete phenomenon in which the libertarian label is used as a form of vice-signalling.
I don't think even the latter requires the vice-signalling explanation. Historically, the Right was generally more supportive of classical liberty (if inconsistently), so libertarians were Pure Right.
Today, the Right is primarily a populist cultural movement, heavily associated with Donald Trump, the person, rather than any consistent ideals, but the label "libertarian" can still be touted to signal being the real deal and undistilled, though in practice, among the Retard Right, being undistilled largely entails going full retard.
In examining the evolution of self-identified libertarians, attention should probably be paid to the Ron Paul movement, which I think associated the libertarian label with a more populist-Right less ideological movement long before Angela McArdle.
Libertarian today means tech bro oligarchs who want to do what they want without rules or regulation from the state or anyone else. This is appealing to anyone who grew up watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and rooted in vain for Jack Nicholson, or the two pals in Easy Rider (who ended up dead), or Thelma and Louise (ditto). This is something to grow out of, like enthusiasm for Howard Roark. The state is the bad guy even when it's the good guy, and vice versa as we have today.
The messy nature of democracy, ours in particular, requires a government to work on behalf of the people, as FDR told Congress in 1939:
'Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.'
The issue with our government is that it is led by a corrupt administration. Most of our major institutions need reform in the 21st century, a messy endeavor not yet even in its infancy. The power of the tech bro libertarians masks the fact that they are not libertarians, but budding fascists. They are part of the problem, not the solution.
Agreed. But the difficult thing is that the Democrats have their own chud faction of populist leftists who still deeply hate markets, and those people are a bigger faction than the "abundance" Democrats, who do seem to have a decent grasp of market economics. Ob the plus side with libertarians up for grabs there's an incentive to try to woo them into the coalition. I think a stable coalition could be found in adopting deregulatory pro-market policies combined with a tax and spend welfare state. Just write people checks to buy market rate goods and don't fuck with price signals. I.e. no rent control, yes section 8. No price controls, yes food stamps. No minimum wage, yes EITC.
But similar to the right-wing chuds, the left-wing snowflake idiots are easily led and changable. The Dems just need a strong popular leader to course correct.
I thought about that too, but strong popular leaders tend to be populists. Trump appealed to the populist chud base of the Republican party. The mirror charismatic populist Democrat would be a Democratic Socialist, not a centrist.
I think the current trend in the Democratic party to "just nominate someone who can win" is probably better. Nominate someone on the center left who can obtain the widest possible popular support. Don't go for a charismatic idealogue. That way will just deepen polarization and tribal political warfare.
My take on Libertarianism is that no two libertarians are alike. And that most libertarians are in it more for the aesthetics than the ideas. Libertarianism for most is conservatism without the religious stuff.
But that being said I have to agree that I have been convinced by the events of the 2020's so far that social democracy will probably continue to be unworkable (unless AI changes things), and thus free market capitalism is really the only option, as well as the path of least resistance (being the one we have been on for some time).
Does that make me a Libertarian? I don't think so. I identify as a moderate liberal, who is annoyed by infantile progressives and appalled/disgusted by dumb & evil MAGA conservatives.
I think Libertarianism is dead (the real ideology, not the aesthetic), not because it failed, but because it was so successful that its values were absorbed by old school conservatism and liberalism.
I agree with RH that for any true-believing libertarian, backing and influencing the Democrats is really the only option. Trying to be part of the Republicans is like dancing with the Devil, he doesn't change, he only changes you.
To be fair, democracy DOES threaten individual rights and liberty. Your property and even your life in some cases (like criminal justice stuff) is up for a vote. It's a garbage system that no true libertarian could defend.
Ideally, power is delegated as locally as possible and people buy into it, like a corporation. Everyone associates with who they want to associate with and can leave if they don't. No one is forced to fund stuff they don't want to buy into and parasites can be cut off. Localities could become like little corporations.
You could have written a book about this. A section of Dave Smith's love of the police state with libertarian language and his sad comedy routine stuck in 2020 would be a wonderful chapter. Murray Rothtards, I mean Rothbard, and his descent into support for David Dukism. Curtis Yarvin's libertarian period before going full idiot, which is exactly when Garett Jones became interested in him. McCardle lying to my face about her immigration opinion and then sabotaging her own political party to help RFK and Trump, of all people. And then the ancient history of when Tim Carney and others called themselves "libertarian populists" - an oxymoron for the ages.
Applying Occam's Razor to this problem can give us an easier answer, i.e. a lot of those "Tradwife Libertarian" handles on Twitter" or communities like r/libertarianmeme on Reddit were just grifters.
They never really believed in libertarian ideals as such. Not even the basic ones. They just wanted an excuse to be racist & anti-immigration.
I might be wrong, but grifting can be a legit answer to a lot of questions about today's American right wing overall, of course barring few exceptions.
As to how the two ideologies (Elite and Populist) can share the same label: there is an interesting parallel to the transition from Classical Liberalism to Progressive Liberalism in the early Twentieth century. Progressives claimed to share the same values but claimed that enlightened government could make people’s lives better. It seems that this is exactly what Populist Libertarians are doing.
There's a simpler explanation behind many of these "libertarians" drinking populist/statist Kool-Aid: They are ex-leftists who came to the MAGA movement via the anti-war route and never had any ideological commitments to free markets.
In the aughts, it was of course the Iraq War that polarized American politics, not immigration. On one side, you had conservatives who figured that since we'd just been massacred by a bunch of Muslim barbarians, there were obvious benefits to toppling the most barbarian regimes in the Muslim world. On the other side, you had liberals who were absolutely terrified that if America actually won a war, Republicans would be as popular as George H.W. Bush was after the first Gulf War and that Democrats would never win another election. So they set about to sabotage the war effort and scream so loudly about it that even the most hard-line partisan Republicans gave up defending the war effort - anything to get that screaming to stop. Then in 2016 the Republicans managed to put up a candidate so disassociated from the war effort that all sorts of people who had previously been on the Cindy Sheehan wing of the Democrat Party flocked to join MAGA and became a major part of the MAGA base.
I have always suspected that Trump found this terribly inconvenient, because as someone who envies strongmen, there's nothing he'd like more than to topple a few strongmen and take a few military victory marches, but his hands are tied - too much of his base is with Tulsi and not with him.
I think throughout history, you often see rural people wanting big government to stay out of their way, but also having instincts towards wanting an authoritarian king and xenophobia instead of urban elites ruling them. Good tsar, bad boyar beliefs were common. I think libertarian cranks are just an extension of that ancient instinct.
There's another strand to populist libertarianism, which is that on the assumption elites control the government,* libertarianism or anarchism of some form should be the default populist position. Attacking that thing elites control which takes a chunk of your paycheque, monopolises force and can tell ordinary people what to do is way more straightforward than attacking a vague uncoordinated nebula academics and tastemakers whose impact on ordinary people is indirect and hard to quantify.
I think this explains two further puzzle pieces. First, the libertarian-adjacent aspects of European populists in spite of them not having much of a libertarian intellectual framework (although some of this is copy-pasted from the US and East of the Elbe it's largely anti-communist). Second, the 180 you point to as soon as the government is "non-elite" is because that's when libertarian=populist breaks down. Ironically, kakistocracy has largely been the trigger for a lot of people to finally learn to love the government because it finally looks like them.
The killer jujitsu move now would be to libertarianise the left using ICE authoritarianism and whatever decaying remnants of woke capital are still lying around. "The more money woke Google keeps for Gemini, the less Drumpf has to spend on concentration camps" or something.
*Whether this is a tautology or not depends on which of the varying definitions of elite you're using. Here it should have the reference of well-socialised industrious upper middle class people but with the sense of smug metropolitans who look down on ordinary people.
I always thought socially conservative libertarians were an oxymoron. Libertarians are supposed to be, by definition, socially liberal.
Conservative libertarians are in it for the zero welfare. The idea of poor people starving to death keeps them warm at night. But keep in mind that these "libertarians" also want to ban pot, porn, and premarital sex.
Libertarians are supposed to support individual liberty. But there’s a distinction between believing the government should prevent some act that doesn’t harm others (not libertarian) and believing people should not engage in that act (perfectly comparable with libertarianism).
E.g. the difference between wanting the state to ban prostitution and being personally morally opposed to the practice or even attempting to convince people not to engage in it.
This vice-signalling explanation looks at the phenomenon of illiberal self-styled libertarians as though it emerged in a vacuum.
However, I think a more parsimonious explanation would focus on The Right historically having genuinely been much more libertarian. As the country, as a whole, moved in a populist and therefore less libertarian direction, with the Right being hit especially hard (Low Human Capital Party), the movement shifted away from libertarian ideals, while retaining its symbols and imagery.
Thus, on the Right, words like 'liberty' and 'freedom' retain positive valences, even if the people touting them abandoned the actual substance behind them.
[To a degree, the same is true on the Left, with words like 'equality' and 'justice.']
This contradiction between word and deed isn't limited to self-styled libertarians. The vast majority of those identifying with the Right would probably react positively to words like 'liberty' and 'freedom' even if they don't actually espouse those ideas.
To be sure, there's still discussion to be had about those who retained not just the more general words of 'liberty' and 'freedom', but also the more particular label 'libertarian,' but I think it should be viewed as part of this larger phenomenon, rather than being a discrete phenomenon in which the libertarian label is used as a form of vice-signalling.
I don't think even the latter requires the vice-signalling explanation. Historically, the Right was generally more supportive of classical liberty (if inconsistently), so libertarians were Pure Right.
Today, the Right is primarily a populist cultural movement, heavily associated with Donald Trump, the person, rather than any consistent ideals, but the label "libertarian" can still be touted to signal being the real deal and undistilled, though in practice, among the Retard Right, being undistilled largely entails going full retard.
In examining the evolution of self-identified libertarians, attention should probably be paid to the Ron Paul movement, which I think associated the libertarian label with a more populist-Right less ideological movement long before Angela McArdle.
Great comment
Libertarian today means tech bro oligarchs who want to do what they want without rules or regulation from the state or anyone else. This is appealing to anyone who grew up watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and rooted in vain for Jack Nicholson, or the two pals in Easy Rider (who ended up dead), or Thelma and Louise (ditto). This is something to grow out of, like enthusiasm for Howard Roark. The state is the bad guy even when it's the good guy, and vice versa as we have today.
The messy nature of democracy, ours in particular, requires a government to work on behalf of the people, as FDR told Congress in 1939:
'Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.'
The issue with our government is that it is led by a corrupt administration. Most of our major institutions need reform in the 21st century, a messy endeavor not yet even in its infancy. The power of the tech bro libertarians masks the fact that they are not libertarians, but budding fascists. They are part of the problem, not the solution.
Agreed. But the difficult thing is that the Democrats have their own chud faction of populist leftists who still deeply hate markets, and those people are a bigger faction than the "abundance" Democrats, who do seem to have a decent grasp of market economics. Ob the plus side with libertarians up for grabs there's an incentive to try to woo them into the coalition. I think a stable coalition could be found in adopting deregulatory pro-market policies combined with a tax and spend welfare state. Just write people checks to buy market rate goods and don't fuck with price signals. I.e. no rent control, yes section 8. No price controls, yes food stamps. No minimum wage, yes EITC.
But similar to the right-wing chuds, the left-wing snowflake idiots are easily led and changable. The Dems just need a strong popular leader to course correct.
I thought about that too, but strong popular leaders tend to be populists. Trump appealed to the populist chud base of the Republican party. The mirror charismatic populist Democrat would be a Democratic Socialist, not a centrist.
I think the current trend in the Democratic party to "just nominate someone who can win" is probably better. Nominate someone on the center left who can obtain the widest possible popular support. Don't go for a charismatic idealogue. That way will just deepen polarization and tribal political warfare.
My take on Libertarianism is that no two libertarians are alike. And that most libertarians are in it more for the aesthetics than the ideas. Libertarianism for most is conservatism without the religious stuff.
But that being said I have to agree that I have been convinced by the events of the 2020's so far that social democracy will probably continue to be unworkable (unless AI changes things), and thus free market capitalism is really the only option, as well as the path of least resistance (being the one we have been on for some time).
Does that make me a Libertarian? I don't think so. I identify as a moderate liberal, who is annoyed by infantile progressives and appalled/disgusted by dumb & evil MAGA conservatives.
I think Libertarianism is dead (the real ideology, not the aesthetic), not because it failed, but because it was so successful that its values were absorbed by old school conservatism and liberalism.
I agree with RH that for any true-believing libertarian, backing and influencing the Democrats is really the only option. Trying to be part of the Republicans is like dancing with the Devil, he doesn't change, he only changes you.
To be fair, democracy DOES threaten individual rights and liberty. Your property and even your life in some cases (like criminal justice stuff) is up for a vote. It's a garbage system that no true libertarian could defend.
So authoritarianism then? Not so libertarian.
Ideally, power is delegated as locally as possible and people buy into it, like a corporation. Everyone associates with who they want to associate with and can leave if they don't. No one is forced to fund stuff they don't want to buy into and parasites can be cut off. Localities could become like little corporations.
You could have written a book about this. A section of Dave Smith's love of the police state with libertarian language and his sad comedy routine stuck in 2020 would be a wonderful chapter. Murray Rothtards, I mean Rothbard, and his descent into support for David Dukism. Curtis Yarvin's libertarian period before going full idiot, which is exactly when Garett Jones became interested in him. McCardle lying to my face about her immigration opinion and then sabotaging her own political party to help RFK and Trump, of all people. And then the ancient history of when Tim Carney and others called themselves "libertarian populists" - an oxymoron for the ages.
This could be a book.
Applying Occam's Razor to this problem can give us an easier answer, i.e. a lot of those "Tradwife Libertarian" handles on Twitter" or communities like r/libertarianmeme on Reddit were just grifters.
They never really believed in libertarian ideals as such. Not even the basic ones. They just wanted an excuse to be racist & anti-immigration.
I might be wrong, but grifting can be a legit answer to a lot of questions about today's American right wing overall, of course barring few exceptions.
As to how the two ideologies (Elite and Populist) can share the same label: there is an interesting parallel to the transition from Classical Liberalism to Progressive Liberalism in the early Twentieth century. Progressives claimed to share the same values but claimed that enlightened government could make people’s lives better. It seems that this is exactly what Populist Libertarians are doing.
There's a simpler explanation behind many of these "libertarians" drinking populist/statist Kool-Aid: They are ex-leftists who came to the MAGA movement via the anti-war route and never had any ideological commitments to free markets.
In the aughts, it was of course the Iraq War that polarized American politics, not immigration. On one side, you had conservatives who figured that since we'd just been massacred by a bunch of Muslim barbarians, there were obvious benefits to toppling the most barbarian regimes in the Muslim world. On the other side, you had liberals who were absolutely terrified that if America actually won a war, Republicans would be as popular as George H.W. Bush was after the first Gulf War and that Democrats would never win another election. So they set about to sabotage the war effort and scream so loudly about it that even the most hard-line partisan Republicans gave up defending the war effort - anything to get that screaming to stop. Then in 2016 the Republicans managed to put up a candidate so disassociated from the war effort that all sorts of people who had previously been on the Cindy Sheehan wing of the Democrat Party flocked to join MAGA and became a major part of the MAGA base.
I have always suspected that Trump found this terribly inconvenient, because as someone who envies strongmen, there's nothing he'd like more than to topple a few strongmen and take a few military victory marches, but his hands are tied - too much of his base is with Tulsi and not with him.
I think throughout history, you often see rural people wanting big government to stay out of their way, but also having instincts towards wanting an authoritarian king and xenophobia instead of urban elites ruling them. Good tsar, bad boyar beliefs were common. I think libertarian cranks are just an extension of that ancient instinct.
Libertarians outside the US especially in Latin America tend to be way less populist and isolationist.
There's another strand to populist libertarianism, which is that on the assumption elites control the government,* libertarianism or anarchism of some form should be the default populist position. Attacking that thing elites control which takes a chunk of your paycheque, monopolises force and can tell ordinary people what to do is way more straightforward than attacking a vague uncoordinated nebula academics and tastemakers whose impact on ordinary people is indirect and hard to quantify.
I think this explains two further puzzle pieces. First, the libertarian-adjacent aspects of European populists in spite of them not having much of a libertarian intellectual framework (although some of this is copy-pasted from the US and East of the Elbe it's largely anti-communist). Second, the 180 you point to as soon as the government is "non-elite" is because that's when libertarian=populist breaks down. Ironically, kakistocracy has largely been the trigger for a lot of people to finally learn to love the government because it finally looks like them.
The killer jujitsu move now would be to libertarianise the left using ICE authoritarianism and whatever decaying remnants of woke capital are still lying around. "The more money woke Google keeps for Gemini, the less Drumpf has to spend on concentration camps" or something.
*Whether this is a tautology or not depends on which of the varying definitions of elite you're using. Here it should have the reference of well-socialised industrious upper middle class people but with the sense of smug metropolitans who look down on ordinary people.
RE: The Von Mises Caucus:
https://www.jamesgillen3.com/?p=1365