The Libertarian party has never been particularly libertarian (I discovered that when I briefly worked for them back in the '80s).
For a while there, through the 90s, the libertarian movement in the US was still relatively libertarian, which is to say, advocates for the liberty of each and all, and it was fairly common to see a distinction made between “libertarians” - advocates of the ideology - and “Libertarians” - followers of the party, who were pretty much just misled idealists and the opportunists who were misleading them.
That all started to change with 9/11 and the Bush presidency, as the movement as a whole started shifting toward right-wing authoritarianism and the party stopped pretending that it had ever been anything else.
Even then though, there was still a vestige of true libertarianism here and there.
That ended though when the GOP co-opted the Tea Party movement and transformed it from a series of protests against Bush’s Wall Street bailouts to a traveling right-wing carnival of hate. Virtually overnight, any pretense that US libertarians valued individual liberty (other than their own) entirely vanished, and the few remaining genuine advocates of liberty abandoned the movement.
At this point, the US libertarian movement as a whole has morphed entirely into an especially toxic version of right-wing authoritarianism, and I would fully expect them to support whoever seems most likely to let them shoot people. And that’s Trump.
Perhaps it was pre McCarthyism. Though even that would be stretching it. Perhaps McCarthyism helped them coopt what was a solidly left wing ideology. As actual ideological libertarians are against the concept of a party pushing their ideals onto others. Which is just another red flag that American libertarians aren’t.
The idea of a libertarian party has always been a bit self-contradictory, though not entirely. The basic idea of libertarianism (narrowly defined - not the broader use of the term in things like the political compass) is specifically to minimize but not entirely eliminate government. That’s what distinguishes it from anarchism.
So there’s necessarily an immediate issue - which specific functions of government need to be kept in its minimized form? And that’s where a party (or something like it) can legitimately come into play. It’s still a bit self-defeating though, since such a party obviously should be sharply limited in scope and influence, but that’s not the nature of hierarchical organizations. It’s not that the idea is immediately contrary to the espoused ideals of the movement, but that it pretty much inevitably will one day grow into something that is.
I don’t and never have held with no-true-scotsmanning the supposed wing alignment of whatever it is that one or another person thinks needs to be kept in a “libertarian” system. I always leaned much more toward the left than the right as far as that goes, but I never felt any particular threat from those (the majority even 40 or 50 years ago) who leaned to the right more than the left. Like me, they were fundamentally simply opposed to the whole idea of institutionalized hierarchy, but believed that some amount of it was unavoidable, so they, like me, were prepared to argue for their preference, rather than just taking the fundamentally authoritarian position of, “This is the way it’s going to be because we say so, and if you oppose us, we’ll shoot you.”
I think that the transition to the latter stage was inevitable regardless of which wing the US movement leaned toward. It’s not really a trait of the right or the left per se, but a trait of the dominant group, when it’s reached the point that its dominance is so well-established that it comes to be seen as a justified state rightfully defended. And unfortunately, as history has shown repeatedly, both political wings are entirely able to reach that point, and at that point, the specific ideology doesn’t even really matter any more, since the actual point of the organization is protecting and furthering its own privilege and power, and ideology just determines the rhetoric with which they surround that entirely self-serving endeavour.
Or more simply, I think that if US libertarianism had come to be dominated by left-wingers rather than right-wingers, it’s likely that all that would mean in the long run is that the current version of it would be dominated by tankies instead of… whatever the current lot should be called (neo-feudalists? anarcho-fascists? gun nuts? mall ninjas?)
No. That’s anarchism and only the most intransigent ideological wings of it at that. That in no way describes libertarianism as originally outlined. It was about maximizing social freedom. As well as public ownership of natural resources. Something right wing Libertarians abhor in practice.
And no there is not a no true Scotsman conundrum when it comes to right wing libertarianism. You cannot be both capitalist and actually libertarian. Capitalists and right wing libertarians reject public ownership of natural resources. And have replaced freedom. With an imaginary concept of personal freedom. No freedom is personal. Freedom belongs to everyone or it isn’t freedom. If it belongs to you personally, it’s called privilege. And if something is a freedom. And anyone is unable to access it. Then they are being denied their freedoms. It’s a basic core incompatibility.
It’s not surprising at all.
The Libertarian party has never been particularly libertarian (I discovered that when I briefly worked for them back in the '80s).
For a while there, through the 90s, the libertarian movement in the US was still relatively libertarian, which is to say, advocates for the liberty of each and all, and it was fairly common to see a distinction made between “libertarians” - advocates of the ideology - and “Libertarians” - followers of the party, who were pretty much just misled idealists and the opportunists who were misleading them.
That all started to change with 9/11 and the Bush presidency, as the movement as a whole started shifting toward right-wing authoritarianism and the party stopped pretending that it had ever been anything else.
Even then though, there was still a vestige of true libertarianism here and there.
That ended though when the GOP co-opted the Tea Party movement and transformed it from a series of protests against Bush’s Wall Street bailouts to a traveling right-wing carnival of hate. Virtually overnight, any pretense that US libertarians valued individual liberty (other than their own) entirely vanished, and the few remaining genuine advocates of liberty abandoned the movement.
At this point, the US libertarian movement as a whole has morphed entirely into an especially toxic version of right-wing authoritarianism, and I would fully expect them to support whoever seems most likely to let them shoot people. And that’s Trump.
Perhaps it was pre McCarthyism. Though even that would be stretching it. Perhaps McCarthyism helped them coopt what was a solidly left wing ideology. As actual ideological libertarians are against the concept of a party pushing their ideals onto others. Which is just another red flag that American libertarians aren’t.
The idea of a libertarian party has always been a bit self-contradictory, though not entirely. The basic idea of libertarianism (narrowly defined - not the broader use of the term in things like the political compass) is specifically to minimize but not entirely eliminate government. That’s what distinguishes it from anarchism.
So there’s necessarily an immediate issue - which specific functions of government need to be kept in its minimized form? And that’s where a party (or something like it) can legitimately come into play. It’s still a bit self-defeating though, since such a party obviously should be sharply limited in scope and influence, but that’s not the nature of hierarchical organizations. It’s not that the idea is immediately contrary to the espoused ideals of the movement, but that it pretty much inevitably will one day grow into something that is.
I don’t and never have held with no-true-scotsmanning the supposed wing alignment of whatever it is that one or another person thinks needs to be kept in a “libertarian” system. I always leaned much more toward the left than the right as far as that goes, but I never felt any particular threat from those (the majority even 40 or 50 years ago) who leaned to the right more than the left. Like me, they were fundamentally simply opposed to the whole idea of institutionalized hierarchy, but believed that some amount of it was unavoidable, so they, like me, were prepared to argue for their preference, rather than just taking the fundamentally authoritarian position of, “This is the way it’s going to be because we say so, and if you oppose us, we’ll shoot you.”
I think that the transition to the latter stage was inevitable regardless of which wing the US movement leaned toward. It’s not really a trait of the right or the left per se, but a trait of the dominant group, when it’s reached the point that its dominance is so well-established that it comes to be seen as a justified state rightfully defended. And unfortunately, as history has shown repeatedly, both political wings are entirely able to reach that point, and at that point, the specific ideology doesn’t even really matter any more, since the actual point of the organization is protecting and furthering its own privilege and power, and ideology just determines the rhetoric with which they surround that entirely self-serving endeavour.
Or more simply, I think that if US libertarianism had come to be dominated by left-wingers rather than right-wingers, it’s likely that all that would mean in the long run is that the current version of it would be dominated by tankies instead of… whatever the current lot should be called (neo-feudalists? anarcho-fascists? gun nuts? mall ninjas?)
No. That’s anarchism and only the most intransigent ideological wings of it at that. That in no way describes libertarianism as originally outlined. It was about maximizing social freedom. As well as public ownership of natural resources. Something right wing Libertarians abhor in practice.
And no there is not a no true Scotsman conundrum when it comes to right wing libertarianism. You cannot be both capitalist and actually libertarian. Capitalists and right wing libertarians reject public ownership of natural resources. And have replaced freedom. With an imaginary concept of personal freedom. No freedom is personal. Freedom belongs to everyone or it isn’t freedom. If it belongs to you personally, it’s called privilege. And if something is a freedom. And anyone is unable to access it. Then they are being denied their freedoms. It’s a basic core incompatibility.