I’ve only known half a dozen or so Libertarians, but the commonality seems to be that I would call all of them ‘pseudo intellectuals’. They’re all a lot dumber than they think they are, and WAY dumber than they try to project.
My bolding.
It’s difficult not to imagine this being the case for a lot of people. I can’t see how to account for all the blustering, red-in-the-face nonsense we saw from the Tea Party without it being largely a racist response. How many of those people were previously Libertarian is harder to say. Whatever it was, we find ourselves today with many people in power from that bloc.
Right, from where I sit it looks like the Libertarian Party organizations in multiple states were subject to an even more succesful extremist takeover than the Republicans. “Traditional Libertarians” did not really stand a chance. Being already such a small group it did not take that many motivated radicals to overrun them.
In the 80s when I first encountered the LP, yeah, I got how people could imagine they’d found an alternative to the “demopublican uniparty”. I could see how it spoke to the proverbial “republican who wants to smoke pot” type who was all for the laissez-faire economics and survival-of-the-fittest sociology but did not care for the drug war or the religious-based “moral” (meaning sexual) uptightness.
But by now it seems that’s all Boomer nostalgia.
Good post. It seems that the gap between “Tell me what the appeal was about the Libertarian Party” and “Tell me what the appeal is about the Libertarian Party” dwarfs the Grand Canyon at its widest point.
The gulf is wide, very true. But the elements that make the current leadership repugnant were absolutely present previously. Just that they were emboldened by Obama and Trump 1.0 (especially some of the Covid mitigation steps!) and basically purged the other factions of any political power.
So absolutely - I don’t think there’s much remaining appeal about the Party as it is run today, unless you’re one of the Right Wing types that don’t want to be tethered to the MAGA name and/or consider yourself a “freethinker”.
Was there ever a subgroup of Libertarians passionate about ranked choice voting, approval voting, or other alternatives to winner-take-all voting? My perception is, “No, or at least not significantly.” Which makes me dubious about the entire enterprise and drawn to more cynical reasons regarding the appeal of the Libertarian Party, past and present.
Within the voting reform crowd, I’ve noted that libertarians often have a strong preference for approval voting over ranked choice voting. Empirically, approval voting tends to lead to electoral ambushes, which I’m guessing is the point.
I thought the Libertarian party was for agnostic Republicans who are pro-choice and want weed to be legal. They’re okay with LGTBQ+ stuff, but they still hate the poor, and consider taxes theft.
It’s all about money for these people, not God.
Right. The motto that they profess is something like “I should be free to do what I want as long as I’m not hurting anyone else”, without realizing that greed is something that hurts others.
Do they still profess those principles? I thought that was the old, pre-takeover Libertarian Party.
That is how I read the platform: https://lp.org/platform-page/
We do tend to value private property rather more highly than the leftists who make up most of the dope.
Well, your own private property, as you individually define it, at least.