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.
You may be right... but to the degree that you are, you have to go back quite far to find a time when the right cared about the actual substance behind liberty and freedom.
As long ago as the mid 80s I often found that conservatives talked a lot about liberty and freedom, but seemed to have defined them quite differently from the way a libertarian would. The "Sound of Freedom" was the shriek of a fighter jet, not because of how military force was used to preserve liberty but because of how it preserved national independence. Of course, you can't have the former without the latter, but conservatives have for decades thought that they were the same thing, while taking many small and medium steps to curtail freedom within the independent nation.
My point wasn't that the Right consistently espoused freedom, but rather that on the whole, they espoused it more than the Left. Historically, the Right was at least associated with "fiscal conservatism," which entailed less infringement by the state through taxation, while having more of a mixed record on social liberalism.
Yes, on foreign policy the Republican party has historically been further from libertarianism, but while libertarians lump non-intervention under the same umbrella of liberty, the issues are distinct (for reasons I won't elaborate on here) and promoting some foreign intervention isn't inherently contradictory to the ideals of liberty, the same way that promoting the suspension of civil liberties, unbounded power by Trump, ICE, etc. are, even if in practice, intervention was used to promote liberty, or wasn't motivated primarily by that.
More significantly, the point is that the terms 'liberty' and 'freedom' have long been associated with the right (whether justifiably, or not) who continued using the terms even while they strayed further from it, and I contend that the modern self-styled libertarians are simply an extension of that - Rightists continuing to carry a banner long after they moved away from the ideals it describes.
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.
You can talk to a conservative until you are blue in the face about how just because you are pro-choice does not mean you like abortion, and they will still call you a "baby murderer".
Most people are for or against things: "There outta be a law!!!"
If abortion is really taking a human life, as conservatives usually insist, then it should be illegal and libertarians should have no problem with it being banned. Libertarians don’t complain about government criminalizing theft, assault, or murder. To say otherwise one must say that a fetus isn’t really a living human. This is why libertarians are on both sides of this issue.
A zygote (a literal clump of cells) is most certainly not a human being. Neither is an brainless embryo. A fetus could possibly be a human being - who knows?
But you can't justify creating laws to disenfranchise women of their bodily rights based on "possibly".
So we get the semantic trickery of "life begins at conception!"
First, I want to say that I find this conversation genuinely interesting, and I don’t have a firm view on abortion myself. I think both abortion-rights positions and anti-abortion positions can be logically consistent, and I’m not confident enough in my own arguments to decisively come down on one side or the other.
“Life begins at conception” is not semantic trickery; it is a substantive moral claim that many people sincerely believe to be true. I understand that you think it’s ridiculous, but many serious and educated people disagree. If abortion might be the taking of a human life, then bodily rights alone may not justify it. I can also see why others disagree with that conclusion. I used to think that being pro-choice meant believing life begins at birth—and that in my view remains the strongest point in favor of abortion rights—but it’s clear that the position today is more nuanced than that.
I think libertarian movements do not need shared views on moral or social issues where the state has no legitimate role. Questions like premarital sex, pornography, prostitution, or assisted suicide fall outside the proper scope of government, and libertarians shouldn’t be fighting political battles over them.
Abortion is different. Many libertarians believe that life begins at conception, and the destruction of human life is clearly within the purview of the state. Under that understanding, abortion should be outlawed. Those who disagree can also appeal to libertarianism—not because they reject libertarian political theory, but because they disagree on the core moral question of whether abortion is murder. In that sense, both sides of the abortion debate are compatible with libertarianism.
One thing I’ve noticed and find genuinely curious: a large portion of pro-choice advocates admit that a fetus may be a human being, or say they don’t know when life begins (which is effectively the same admission). These are arguments in favor of the right to kill what may be a living human. There are sophisticated philosophical defenses of this position (for example, arguments associated with Peter Singer), but they feel inherently wrong to me.
It is semantic trickery because they really don't think that a fertilized egg is a human being. Have you ever been to a funeral for an embryo? What do most evangelical women do when they have a small miscarriage in the toilet? They flush.
By the very nature of how we treat early stage embroys pro-life people show with their actions that they don't really follow the logic of this belief they claim to have.
That is why I say it is semantic trickery.
What pro-life people really mean when they say this is "We are against abortion because we believe that God has ordained this woman to be pregnant, and furthermore we believe that God designed women to be mothers above all. We reject a modern world where women can choose to have careers or whatnot instead of engaging in procreation."
But if they said what they really thought, they would lose.
As for Libertarians that are pro-life, these people are clearly conservatives that merely enjoy the aesthetics of Libertarianism.
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.
I used to have a good friend, a fairly devout Evangelical, who always called himself a Libertarian, but when I went down the list of issues - legalize pot? NO. pro-choice? NO. legalize prostitution? NO, and so on, he just didn’t seem very Libertarian.
When I asked what actual Libertarian things he was for he basically told me guns and small gov't. I'm like "Dude, you're a conservative."
He disagreed, but couldn't actually articulate how he was Libertarian. It was this experience along with so many other "libertarians" I had met in my life that convinced me that most of these people were just in love with an aesthetic. Or else just really thought of themselves as “out of the box thinkers” that needed a political identity to match.
I actually went through a phase when I left conservatism where I called myself an independent and registered as an independent and such, because I loved the idea of being “independent” and it also allowed me to distance myself from the Republicans without “betraying my family and religion” by becoming a Democrat.
But in 2016 I happened to take an online quiz based on my views on political subjects and I was shocked when it said “Hillary Rodham Clinton” was the candidate that best matched my answers. I was in disbelief, but my answers matched her stated positions better than Trump or Gary Johnson by a mile.
So you could argue that in this time period I was doing the exact same thing as my “Libertarian” friend.
Libertarians do not want to "ban" anything other than the initiation of force against a peaceful party. Anyone can call themself a libertarian but that does not make them one. I am disgusted by such people who have corrupted the image of libertarians.
What is this utilization of NTS? Based upon this logic you can't deny that North Korea or most other communist regimes that referred themselves as "Democratic" are in-fact, not democracies.
NTS would be true if democracy or Libertarianism in either case were to be defined arbitrarily (The entire purpose of the former). Neither which is the case in Junes example. Nor is it demonstrated.
Further, libertarians say that the state interferes with their freedom to support socially conservative (or other) values because (1) the state has an unfair taxpayer-funded, control-of-institutions advantage in pushing statist/progressive values (2) we're underpaid because we spend so much time working for Uncle Sam, that it's hard for us to spend a day a month volunteering, campaigning, self-publishing, or whatever channel we'd use to support our values.
It depends on what the left in your society prioritises. Affirmative action for example is a socially left wing policy, but is difficult to justify on libertarian principles.
Affirmative action by a private entity is totally compatible with libertarianism. State affirmative action is not as it involves forcing those who think it is a bad idea to accept it.
I really dislike the whole idea of referring to things as left or right. If you have ever looked at the Nolan chart (as represented in "the World's Smallest Political Quiz" (https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/. It's easy to see that the so-call left/right spectrum is just the horizontal projection of ideas that can come from either Personal Freedom or Economic Freedom. The meaningful projection is the axis that goes from Libertarianism to Authoritarianism. True libertarianism is the total opposite of authoritarianism. No one who supports authoritarian action on anythings deserves to be called a libertarian whether they are talking about economics or social issues.
Exactly! Libertarian is the exact opposite of authoritarian which is why it’s so baffling to see so many so called “libertarian” align with Trump. Tariffs, closed borders, govt stakes in private companies, persecuting speech of foreign students, secret police violating civil liberties. How the hell could anyone call any of that libertarian?
Government, like any entity, should be free to "encourage" any action. The dividing line comes when they implement laws or conditional subsidies to make it happen.
Reading the other responses here I realize that I should have been more clear. To me the government encouraging anything means using the bully pulpit to encourage private action. Of course threats of aggressive government action are not acceptable. Unfortunately it is Trump's prefered way of getting things done.
When government “encourages” it is either the monetary incentives, direct force, or implicit threats. When politicians say a private company should do something they are really threatening a company if they don’t comply.
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.
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.
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.
But neither one radically altered the political orientation of Democratic party the way Trump did to the Republican party. Republicans basically did a 180 on trade.
Don't get me wrong. I fantasize about some centrist-libertarian coming along and turning the Democrats into a center-libertarian party, but I just don't think it's going to happen. It's much easier to make parties more radical than to make them more centrist in our political system.
The best national political leaders are actually pragmatic non-idealogues (FDR, Clinton). This is why I think so many people got fooled by Trump because this is what they thought he was. But he was actually something else entirely. And now that he has spent the years since his 2020 loss getting high on his own supply of conspiratorial nonsense, he has become a sort of dimwitted chud-idealogue.
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.
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.
Your understanding of fascism is completely at odds with how historical fascism actually worked-- "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state."
"The liberty of a people" is meaningless. Liberty is something only individuals can have.
Yes, and the so called libertarians in support of the current regime are within the state, or in the service of the state. As FDR understood in the quote I cited, ...'Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.'
This is clearly something we have now and which continues to grow. Not only our homegrown oligarchs, but the members of the Administration, profiting from their position.
As for individual vs. the liberty of a people, that's semantics; obviously, our liberty as US citizens are under threat from a radical administration seeking to deprive liberty from certain individuals, as well as groups, and eventually all of us. When they come for you or yours, perhaps you will understand, but by then it may be too late.
FDR understood a great deal about the fascist program indeed, having replicated it in ways the current administration can only dream of. His quote doesn't demonstrate that understanding, as no group that owns a government CAN be private.
I take it you believe the danger came from the New Deal that ushered in our modern age, and therefore which is finally being addressed by Trump's administration today. And it's true that FDR was accused, perhaps correctly, of abusing his power, as he knew very well: "Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else."
Substitute Substack for 'newspapers' and you have a point. Lincoln took even greater steps and justified them in order to win a war and save the nation. So he might reasonably be called out for that. After all, what gives a President the right to take away private property, even if that property be in the form of slaves? In fact, what gave the Founders the right to revolt in the first place? Isn't that treason? It would be a great relief to all of us if Trump's actions were to prove beneficial to our nation. But I doubt that will turn out to be the case.
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.
There is another option. Stop backing either the Ds or Rs and back the Libertarian Party now that the false libertarians have been swept from the party's internal administration. Supporting Democrats might buy you a little short term social liberty but it will produce an economic disaster if they are in power for very long.
I thought I had already replied to this but apparently it got lost.
Libertarians can not win under our current first past the post electoral system. We need Ranked Choice Voting and Proportional Representation. Right now too many people believe that if they vote for a Libertarian they are wasting their vote. RCV changes that dynamic. As I said, there is only the potential for short term gain on the social side of things by supporting Democrats. So if you are determined to do that at least also join in the movement to change the system. At the national level Fairvote (Fairvote.org) is leading the charge. There are several bills already in Congress trying to ban RCV. Most states also have an organization trying to change things locally.
Here in CA where I live that effort is focused on changing things city by city and county by county to build the case for replacing Top 2 statewide. Still, it will likely take an initiative to get it before voters. The coalition championing those things here is Californians for Ranked Choice Voting (CalRCV.org).
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.
Democracy isn’t the opposite of authoritarianism. Liberty is. Democracy can coexist with huge restrictions on freedom, and un-democratic systems can have a great deal of freedom. It is true that almost all free states are also democracies.
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.
Yes, we should be focusing of devolving as much power as possible from the federal to the local level with the ultimate local authority being the individual.
Historically local governments often have a worse record on liberty than governments covering a broader geographic area. the notion that the individual is "extremely local government" is simply a misunderstanding-- the individual can travel the whole world and generally governs none of it.
The only people that libertarians seek to "govern" are themselves, to be free from the governance of others. Yes, local government can be as bad as any other government which is why devolution needs to move even lower to the individual. At least it's easier to move to the next city , town or state than to another country.
That, at least in theory, is why we are a democratic Constitutional Republic, Pure democracy can be defined as 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The whole idea of the Constitution, especially the bill or Rights, is to keep the wolves hungry. It is an imperfect document that deserves some revision but the founders deliberately made that hard to do so that adequate though went into the process.
The reason libertarianism attracts conspiracy-minded people is that it places emphasis on individual agency to the point of excluding systemic analyses of institutions and incentive structures. Liberals tend to explain variance in terms of structural biases and therefore have a tendency to downplay the role of individuals. For example, Acemoglu and Robinson attribute the disparate development outcomes of the world to differences in the institutions they inherited rather than to leadership or policy decisions. Conservatives place relatively more emphasis on the latter factors. When explaining poverty or crime, conservatives say the outcomes reflect personal choices. Libertarians take this conservative instinct to the extreme and attribute everything to individual agency, including mass societal and economic developments. Hence, Dave Smith will say the Great Awokening started because a cabal of elites got intimidated by Occupy Wall Street and needed to devise a false consciousness to distract the masses.
It's not quite accurate to say populist libertarians don't emphasize economic issues. People like Dave Smith spend a lot of time talking about cryptocurrency and ending the Fed. Populist libertarians also call everything they don't like socialism and describe California as if they were talking about the Congo.
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.
The thing about libertarianism is that it is not a complete ‘system’ or ‘worldview’ but an anti-government attitude towards policy - that can be applied selectively by any kind of political authority. A king, for instance, might ordain free markets or speech from the throne just as a parliament might vote such policies into law. What frequently happens in an electoral democracy, however, is that certain factions that object to a government action will adopt ‘full-spectrum libertarianism’ as a broad tent from which to object to that action without disclosing their own allegiance. It is no surprise, then, that in America the 30’s Anti-New Dealers, 60’s counterculture, 90’s free market warriors and 00’s marriage equality movement all used libertarian talking points -
because they were each trying to shelter from an opposing administration holding power at the time.
As the world of ‘principled, consistent ideology’ begins to be replaced by a 21st century world of tribes and ethnoi justifying their self-interest post-hoc, I predict that the historical accident known as ‘libertarianism’ will slowly wither away.
You are correct that libertarianism is not a complete system. It makes no claim to being a "philosophy of life". It is only a political philosophy that defines the rule by which individuals who disagree on matters of faith and lifestyle must interact, that being to advance their views only by moral suasion rather than the force of government imposed laws.
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.
Alot of conspiracy theories circle around government or elites, and therefore libertarian/anti-government in their mind means being opposed to them, and therefore are drawn in to the label.
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
Even better, go back to when Rothbard allied with right-populists, and the fact that crypto-Nazis like Lew Rockwell have had power for a long time.
I'm curious, why do you think Lew Rockwell is a crypto-Nazi?
https://x.com/fakertarians/status/1468043535056347136?s=46
Oh, and he’s published more than that.
https://x.com/fakertarians/status/1891647762120180000?s=46
https://x.com/fakertarians/status/1741870738280202542?s=46
https://x.com/fakertarians/status/1772424276248821765?s=46
You may be right... but to the degree that you are, you have to go back quite far to find a time when the right cared about the actual substance behind liberty and freedom.
As long ago as the mid 80s I often found that conservatives talked a lot about liberty and freedom, but seemed to have defined them quite differently from the way a libertarian would. The "Sound of Freedom" was the shriek of a fighter jet, not because of how military force was used to preserve liberty but because of how it preserved national independence. Of course, you can't have the former without the latter, but conservatives have for decades thought that they were the same thing, while taking many small and medium steps to curtail freedom within the independent nation.
My point wasn't that the Right consistently espoused freedom, but rather that on the whole, they espoused it more than the Left. Historically, the Right was at least associated with "fiscal conservatism," which entailed less infringement by the state through taxation, while having more of a mixed record on social liberalism.
In the early 20-teens, there still existed a solid movement on the Right promoting fiscal conservatism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Path_to_Prosperity), with Democrats who espoused that needing the qualifier "blue dog" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition).
Yes, on foreign policy the Republican party has historically been further from libertarianism, but while libertarians lump non-intervention under the same umbrella of liberty, the issues are distinct (for reasons I won't elaborate on here) and promoting some foreign intervention isn't inherently contradictory to the ideals of liberty, the same way that promoting the suspension of civil liberties, unbounded power by Trump, ICE, etc. are, even if in practice, intervention was used to promote liberty, or wasn't motivated primarily by that.
More significantly, the point is that the terms 'liberty' and 'freedom' have long been associated with the right (whether justifiably, or not) who continued using the terms even while they strayed further from it, and I contend that the modern self-styled libertarians are simply an extension of that - Rightists continuing to carry a banner long after they moved away from the ideals it describes.
I always thought socially conservative libertarians were an oxymoron. Libertarians are supposed to be, by definition, socially liberal.
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.
You can talk to a conservative until you are blue in the face about how just because you are pro-choice does not mean you like abortion, and they will still call you a "baby murderer".
Most people are for or against things: "There outta be a law!!!"
If abortion is really taking a human life, as conservatives usually insist, then it should be illegal and libertarians should have no problem with it being banned. Libertarians don’t complain about government criminalizing theft, assault, or murder. To say otherwise one must say that a fetus isn’t really a living human. This is why libertarians are on both sides of this issue.
A zygote (a literal clump of cells) is most certainly not a human being. Neither is an brainless embryo. A fetus could possibly be a human being - who knows?
But you can't justify creating laws to disenfranchise women of their bodily rights based on "possibly".
So we get the semantic trickery of "life begins at conception!"
First, I want to say that I find this conversation genuinely interesting, and I don’t have a firm view on abortion myself. I think both abortion-rights positions and anti-abortion positions can be logically consistent, and I’m not confident enough in my own arguments to decisively come down on one side or the other.
“Life begins at conception” is not semantic trickery; it is a substantive moral claim that many people sincerely believe to be true. I understand that you think it’s ridiculous, but many serious and educated people disagree. If abortion might be the taking of a human life, then bodily rights alone may not justify it. I can also see why others disagree with that conclusion. I used to think that being pro-choice meant believing life begins at birth—and that in my view remains the strongest point in favor of abortion rights—but it’s clear that the position today is more nuanced than that.
I think libertarian movements do not need shared views on moral or social issues where the state has no legitimate role. Questions like premarital sex, pornography, prostitution, or assisted suicide fall outside the proper scope of government, and libertarians shouldn’t be fighting political battles over them.
Abortion is different. Many libertarians believe that life begins at conception, and the destruction of human life is clearly within the purview of the state. Under that understanding, abortion should be outlawed. Those who disagree can also appeal to libertarianism—not because they reject libertarian political theory, but because they disagree on the core moral question of whether abortion is murder. In that sense, both sides of the abortion debate are compatible with libertarianism.
One thing I’ve noticed and find genuinely curious: a large portion of pro-choice advocates admit that a fetus may be a human being, or say they don’t know when life begins (which is effectively the same admission). These are arguments in favor of the right to kill what may be a living human. There are sophisticated philosophical defenses of this position (for example, arguments associated with Peter Singer), but they feel inherently wrong to me.
It is semantic trickery because they really don't think that a fertilized egg is a human being. Have you ever been to a funeral for an embryo? What do most evangelical women do when they have a small miscarriage in the toilet? They flush.
By the very nature of how we treat early stage embroys pro-life people show with their actions that they don't really follow the logic of this belief they claim to have.
That is why I say it is semantic trickery.
What pro-life people really mean when they say this is "We are against abortion because we believe that God has ordained this woman to be pregnant, and furthermore we believe that God designed women to be mothers above all. We reject a modern world where women can choose to have careers or whatnot instead of engaging in procreation."
But if they said what they really thought, they would lose.
As for Libertarians that are pro-life, these people are clearly conservatives that merely enjoy the aesthetics of Libertarianism.
False equivalency. If abortion is murder, then it’s entirely different from bad things that should be legal, like being a jerk.
The libertarian can be against something *without* saying "there outta be a law".
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.
Or they can see that a huge proportion of the welfare class are obese.
Yeah for a while now I’ve seen libertarianism as a retreat position for both Left and Right depending on who’s in power or has more social influence.
I used to have a good friend, a fairly devout Evangelical, who always called himself a Libertarian, but when I went down the list of issues - legalize pot? NO. pro-choice? NO. legalize prostitution? NO, and so on, he just didn’t seem very Libertarian.
When I asked what actual Libertarian things he was for he basically told me guns and small gov't. I'm like "Dude, you're a conservative."
He disagreed, but couldn't actually articulate how he was Libertarian. It was this experience along with so many other "libertarians" I had met in my life that convinced me that most of these people were just in love with an aesthetic. Or else just really thought of themselves as “out of the box thinkers” that needed a political identity to match.
I actually went through a phase when I left conservatism where I called myself an independent and registered as an independent and such, because I loved the idea of being “independent” and it also allowed me to distance myself from the Republicans without “betraying my family and religion” by becoming a Democrat.
But in 2016 I happened to take an online quiz based on my views on political subjects and I was shocked when it said “Hillary Rodham Clinton” was the candidate that best matched my answers. I was in disbelief, but my answers matched her stated positions better than Trump or Gary Johnson by a mile.
So you could argue that in this time period I was doing the exact same thing as my “Libertarian” friend.
Libertarians do not want to "ban" anything other than the initiation of force against a peaceful party. Anyone can call themself a libertarian but that does not make them one. I am disgusted by such people who have corrupted the image of libertarians.
No True Libertarian...
What is this utilization of NTS? Based upon this logic you can't deny that North Korea or most other communist regimes that referred themselves as "Democratic" are in-fact, not democracies.
NTS would be true if democracy or Libertarianism in either case were to be defined arbitrarily (The entire purpose of the former). Neither which is the case in Junes example. Nor is it demonstrated.
Not sure if you understood my jest: I was referring to the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Many support socially conservative values without supporting using the state to enforce such values
Further, libertarians say that the state interferes with their freedom to support socially conservative (or other) values because (1) the state has an unfair taxpayer-funded, control-of-institutions advantage in pushing statist/progressive values (2) we're underpaid because we spend so much time working for Uncle Sam, that it's hard for us to spend a day a month volunteering, campaigning, self-publishing, or whatever channel we'd use to support our values.
It depends on what the left in your society prioritises. Affirmative action for example is a socially left wing policy, but is difficult to justify on libertarian principles.
Affirmative action by a private entity is totally compatible with libertarianism. State affirmative action is not as it involves forcing those who think it is a bad idea to accept it.
I really dislike the whole idea of referring to things as left or right. If you have ever looked at the Nolan chart (as represented in "the World's Smallest Political Quiz" (https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/. It's easy to see that the so-call left/right spectrum is just the horizontal projection of ideas that can come from either Personal Freedom or Economic Freedom. The meaningful projection is the axis that goes from Libertarianism to Authoritarianism. True libertarianism is the total opposite of authoritarianism. No one who supports authoritarian action on anythings deserves to be called a libertarian whether they are talking about economics or social issues.
Exactly! Libertarian is the exact opposite of authoritarian which is why it’s so baffling to see so many so called “libertarian” align with Trump. Tariffs, closed borders, govt stakes in private companies, persecuting speech of foreign students, secret police violating civil liberties. How the hell could anyone call any of that libertarian?
Affirmative action was encouraged and enforced by the state
Government, like any entity, should be free to "encourage" any action. The dividing line comes when they implement laws or conditional subsidies to make it happen.
Reading the other responses here I realize that I should have been more clear. To me the government encouraging anything means using the bully pulpit to encourage private action. Of course threats of aggressive government action are not acceptable. Unfortunately it is Trump's prefered way of getting things done.
When government “encourages” it is either the monetary incentives, direct force, or implicit threats. When politicians say a private company should do something they are really threatening a company if they don’t comply.
Leftist nonsense. This is concern trolling.
The government suing companies and colleges with executive orders is anything but “free”.
Was referring to state implemented affirmative action, especially in federal contracting
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.
Libertarianism and populism aren’t inherently at odds, though they usually are in practice.
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.
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.
Obama was quite popular and a big time centrist. Same goes for Bill Clinton.
But neither one radically altered the political orientation of Democratic party the way Trump did to the Republican party. Republicans basically did a 180 on trade.
Don't get me wrong. I fantasize about some centrist-libertarian coming along and turning the Democrats into a center-libertarian party, but I just don't think it's going to happen. It's much easier to make parties more radical than to make them more centrist in our political system.
The best national political leaders are actually pragmatic non-idealogues (FDR, Clinton). This is why I think so many people got fooled by Trump because this is what they thought he was. But he was actually something else entirely. And now that he has spent the years since his 2020 loss getting high on his own supply of conspiratorial nonsense, he has become a sort of dimwitted chud-idealogue.
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.
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.
Your understanding of fascism is completely at odds with how historical fascism actually worked-- "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state."
"The liberty of a people" is meaningless. Liberty is something only individuals can have.
Yes, and the so called libertarians in support of the current regime are within the state, or in the service of the state. As FDR understood in the quote I cited, ...'Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.'
This is clearly something we have now and which continues to grow. Not only our homegrown oligarchs, but the members of the Administration, profiting from their position.
As for individual vs. the liberty of a people, that's semantics; obviously, our liberty as US citizens are under threat from a radical administration seeking to deprive liberty from certain individuals, as well as groups, and eventually all of us. When they come for you or yours, perhaps you will understand, but by then it may be too late.
FDR understood a great deal about the fascist program indeed, having replicated it in ways the current administration can only dream of. His quote doesn't demonstrate that understanding, as no group that owns a government CAN be private.
I take it you believe the danger came from the New Deal that ushered in our modern age, and therefore which is finally being addressed by Trump's administration today. And it's true that FDR was accused, perhaps correctly, of abusing his power, as he knew very well: "Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else."
Substitute Substack for 'newspapers' and you have a point. Lincoln took even greater steps and justified them in order to win a war and save the nation. So he might reasonably be called out for that. After all, what gives a President the right to take away private property, even if that property be in the form of slaves? In fact, what gave the Founders the right to revolt in the first place? Isn't that treason? It would be a great relief to all of us if Trump's actions were to prove beneficial to our nation. But I doubt that will turn out to be the case.
You keep bringing up Trump. I have no objection to criticizing Trump. I merely object to characterizing him as a "private" actor.
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.
There is another option. Stop backing either the Ds or Rs and back the Libertarian Party now that the false libertarians have been swept from the party's internal administration. Supporting Democrats might buy you a little short term social liberty but it will produce an economic disaster if they are in power for very long.
I though libertarians were supposed to be good at math.
Adorable that you think a Libertarian canddiate ever has a chance of winning a national election.
I thought I had already replied to this but apparently it got lost.
Libertarians can not win under our current first past the post electoral system. We need Ranked Choice Voting and Proportional Representation. Right now too many people believe that if they vote for a Libertarian they are wasting their vote. RCV changes that dynamic. As I said, there is only the potential for short term gain on the social side of things by supporting Democrats. So if you are determined to do that at least also join in the movement to change the system. At the national level Fairvote (Fairvote.org) is leading the charge. There are several bills already in Congress trying to ban RCV. Most states also have an organization trying to change things locally.
Here in CA where I live that effort is focused on changing things city by city and county by county to build the case for replacing Top 2 statewide. Still, it will likely take an initiative to get it before voters. The coalition championing those things here is Californians for Ranked Choice Voting (CalRCV.org).
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.
Democracy isn’t the opposite of authoritarianism. Liberty is. Democracy can coexist with huge restrictions on freedom, and un-democratic systems can have a great deal of freedom. It is true that almost all free states are also democracies.
But this requires a lot of faith in the nondemocratic leaders. Historically, unaccountable leaders do not have a good track record.
Agreed. That is why I support democracy, though I feel certain limits on democracy enhance freedom.
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.
Yes, we should be focusing of devolving as much power as possible from the federal to the local level with the ultimate local authority being the individual.
Historically local governments often have a worse record on liberty than governments covering a broader geographic area. the notion that the individual is "extremely local government" is simply a misunderstanding-- the individual can travel the whole world and generally governs none of it.
The only people that libertarians seek to "govern" are themselves, to be free from the governance of others. Yes, local government can be as bad as any other government which is why devolution needs to move even lower to the individual. At least it's easier to move to the next city , town or state than to another country.
the notion that "authoritarianism" is the opposite of democracy is simply a linguistic misunderstanding.
It would be more accurate to say that monarchy is the opposite of democracy, with oligarchic republics somewhere in the middle.
Authoritarian-libertarian is a distinct, if possibly not entirely independent, axis.
Many libertarians are anarchists, so no the opposite.
That, at least in theory, is why we are a democratic Constitutional Republic, Pure democracy can be defined as 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The whole idea of the Constitution, especially the bill or Rights, is to keep the wolves hungry. It is an imperfect document that deserves some revision but the founders deliberately made that hard to do so that adequate though went into the process.
The reason libertarianism attracts conspiracy-minded people is that it places emphasis on individual agency to the point of excluding systemic analyses of institutions and incentive structures. Liberals tend to explain variance in terms of structural biases and therefore have a tendency to downplay the role of individuals. For example, Acemoglu and Robinson attribute the disparate development outcomes of the world to differences in the institutions they inherited rather than to leadership or policy decisions. Conservatives place relatively more emphasis on the latter factors. When explaining poverty or crime, conservatives say the outcomes reflect personal choices. Libertarians take this conservative instinct to the extreme and attribute everything to individual agency, including mass societal and economic developments. Hence, Dave Smith will say the Great Awokening started because a cabal of elites got intimidated by Occupy Wall Street and needed to devise a false consciousness to distract the masses.
It's not quite accurate to say populist libertarians don't emphasize economic issues. People like Dave Smith spend a lot of time talking about cryptocurrency and ending the Fed. Populist libertarians also call everything they don't like socialism and describe California as if they were talking about the Congo.
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.
The thing about libertarianism is that it is not a complete ‘system’ or ‘worldview’ but an anti-government attitude towards policy - that can be applied selectively by any kind of political authority. A king, for instance, might ordain free markets or speech from the throne just as a parliament might vote such policies into law. What frequently happens in an electoral democracy, however, is that certain factions that object to a government action will adopt ‘full-spectrum libertarianism’ as a broad tent from which to object to that action without disclosing their own allegiance. It is no surprise, then, that in America the 30’s Anti-New Dealers, 60’s counterculture, 90’s free market warriors and 00’s marriage equality movement all used libertarian talking points -
because they were each trying to shelter from an opposing administration holding power at the time.
As the world of ‘principled, consistent ideology’ begins to be replaced by a 21st century world of tribes and ethnoi justifying their self-interest post-hoc, I predict that the historical accident known as ‘libertarianism’ will slowly wither away.
You are correct that libertarianism is not a complete system. It makes no claim to being a "philosophy of life". It is only a political philosophy that defines the rule by which individuals who disagree on matters of faith and lifestyle must interact, that being to advance their views only by moral suasion rather than the force of government imposed laws.
Libertarians outside the US especially in Latin America tend to be way less populist and isolationist.
Javier Milei isn’t isolationist, but he is populist and, at times, socially conservative
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.
Alot of conspiracy theories circle around government or elites, and therefore libertarian/anti-government in their mind means being opposed to them, and therefore are drawn in to the label.
RE: The Von Mises Caucus:
https://www.jamesgillen3.com/?p=1365