My libertarian friend, the only libertarian I ever knew, believed that the only legitimate function of government was to have a police force and an army. Both, in effect, to defend private property. Certainly, it was no business of the government to build reads and bridges, to keep free markets free, to provide schools, to regulate polluters or anyone else. He had swallowed Ayn Rand hook, line, and sinker, and could regurgitate her for any occasion. It wasn’t so much that he was personally a racist (probably not, although it never came up) but that it was not his business if you were. He was a strong advocate for Goldwater in 1964 though. Clearly, he was sympatico with the Republicans even if he disagreed with them, for example, about narcotics.
Basically an opinion piece. Isn’t your own opinion good enough? 
Antiracism is now some people’s hammer, and every issue looks like a nail to them. It would also be neat to win the argument about the right degree of (economic particularly) collectivism by simply establishing that wanting less economic collectivism is racism (or sexism, or whatever other -ism or -phobia). But it just isn’t so. Economic freedom is a real thing, not a ‘dog whistle’ for some ism/phobia. It competes with perceived need to solve some problems collectively, including using govt force to take people’s money (aka taxes). No way around that, to some degree. It’s the matter of degree and advances the discussion not at all to try conflate a less collectivist position with -ism/-phobia.
Some internet loons are self proclaimed Libertarians and also white nationalists. Ron Paul in particular is an odd bird with a lot of odd and disturbing opinions and personal versions of the facts about various things. The L Party under ‘washed up liberal Republicans’ like Johnson, Weld etc though is not any kind of magnet for white nationalists. That’s a basically ridiculous accusation IMO. Though unfortunately for them they aren’t a huge magnet for any large number of voters.
Will Farnaby, before his ban, was a regular poster who was a white nationalist and libertarian by his own description. He favored open borders, removing protections against discrimination, a heavily armed population, and no federal oversight of police forces. The way things would work under his ideal system is easy to see (and he spelled it out several times) - open borders mean that people should move to areas where people like them instead of whining if people where they are now don’t like them. So black people would have a heavily armed population actively discriminating against them with a court system stacked against them with no real means of appeal, and so would be driven away to somewhere away from people like him. So we’ve had one clear example of a white supremacist favoring libertarianism on this very board.
Remember, removing protections against racial discrimination is a plank in the LP platform. It’s justified by ‘free market’ ideas so comes off cleaner than raw racist ideas, but is something actively supported by the party as it exists now.
See my previous comment that some odd people on the internet have every combination of views you can imagine, partly what that person in mind. But like I said looney tune internet Libertarians or the Party? The question is about the party. Lots of the looney types are disgusted with the party, I believe including him.
Also I don’t like to be in the position of defending the LP which I think just can’t get over the hurdle of non-seriousness. But, they have a pretty consistent position on reducing govt interference in markets, of which race preferences certainly, and even theoretically neutral anti discrimination laws, at least to them, are examples. If, as is more typical of strong govt rightist populists, they wanted the govt to get more active in some things (enforcing immigration laws, restricting trade, etc) and less in others, I think it would fairer to read a motive into that other than a belief people can sort things about better by themselves than via govt. But LP wants to do that generally, govt to back off generally, of which race preferences or some anti-discrimination laws* are just one thing among many, all going in the same direction. That’s arguably misguided or naive but I don’t think fair to impute malign -ism/-phobia motives to it.
And random internet loons aside, 99.9% of people who eg want fewer non-whites to come into the country are going to say the govt should be restricting immigration more, not opening the borders and relying on some Rube Goldberg system of civil disorder and corruption of local law enforcement to accomplish it. Open borders white nationalism is a fundamentally ridiculous concept. A party in favor of fewer immigration restrictions is not going to become the rallying point for white nationalists.
*which obviously would not repeal the 14th amendment, it’s certain more specific (intrusive in the LP view), laws.
The “looney tunes” are the party, the political platform of a powerless third party is simply empty words even more than is usual for a political party. The people are the party, not the other way around.
And the official LP platform is a bundle of nonsense that among other things would lead to a massive surge in the expression of bigotry.
In other words they offer empty words about bigotry being bad, but will stand by while people are persecuted and Jim Crow returns. They are simply less honest white nationalists.
You might imagine that Libertarians would be pro-choice – or at least opposed to the government’s power to intervene – but there are no few Libertarians who are pro-life, holding a sincere belief that the fetus is a person and thus due to law’s protection.
This is, apparently, a minority viewpoint among Libertarians, but it does exist.
I’m a libertarian (one of the pro-life ones Trinopus mentions) and have voted for republicans far more often than democrats. I didn’t vote for Trump, though.
Nailed it in one.
Republicans, because they’re both wrong. :-p
In seriousness, libertarians broadly agree with Democrats on many social issues (legalizing drugs, prostitution, etc.) and Republicans on at least some economic issues (lowering taxes). On paper, they’re about half and half. But to me personally, social issues seem more important. I can more easily be friends with someone who has different ideas about the budget than someone who has different ideas about who counts as a person. And if the major political parties swapped, and Democrats were still socially liberal but fiscally conservative, I’d be bummed but I’d still vote for them over a tax-and-spend-but-keep-kids-in-cages Republican party.
That would seem to mean that I would see libertarians as allies to the Democrats, at least where it counts. But actually, I find it hard to relate to many real-life libertarians I meet, because they don’t seem to think that side of their beliefs is more important. When forced to choose a candidate, many of them either back the Republican, or vote for a third party they know won’t win, allowing a downright sociopath to defeat the Dem who won’t slash the budget quite as much as they’d like. I just can’t relate to that mindset.
It also seems like the libertarians I’ve met get really fired up about the ways they’re personally inconvenienced, but never about the much greater problems of poor people and minorities. I told a story here recently about a libertarian acquaintance who went on a full-blown rant about City Hall taking away our liberties (in response to someone complaining about what turned out to be an issue with her HOA insisting she follow the rules). But these last few weeks, as my liberal white friends have been reckoning publicly with their privilege and even risking their health to march in the BLM protests, I’ve heard not a peep from the white libertarians. Oh, except for the ones who think the real tragedy here is how people keep maligning those poor cops. So from where I stand, libertarians look a lot like diet Republicans.
I self-describe myself as a liberal with a libertarian streak. I’ve never read Rand or anything like that, but I’ve always been well to the left on social issues, which put me more in line with Democrats than Republicans, and I used to be more to the right on economic issues, which put me more in line with the Republicans. So, for awhile, Libertarians suited me best philosophically, although I did not go for Objectivism or anything like that. I do like free markets, but within constraints, so I’m not a pure Libertarian. My economic stance has moved slightly left of what I would consider center, but my stance on social freedoms is still pretty strongly to the left.
Most libertarians I know I think come more from the Republican side of the fence, but I know some who vote Democrat (and I was one of these people when I considered Libertarian to be the closest descriptor of my political philosophy.)
Yeah, I’ve had several libertarian friends over the years who used to consistently( but not solely )vote Republican. Almost without exception they did so because they thought the country was generally trending in the right direction socially and therefore economic libertarianism was a much more pressing issue than social libertarianism. To them the more draconian social platforms of the right usually didn’t get enacted because pro-business Republicans just paid lip-service to them while campaigning, then quietly ignored their promises once they were in power. Meanwhile what they saw as the free-spending ways of the Democrats frequently did get enacted.
But also almost without exception those libertarian friends have started voting Democrat over the last decade or so as they became disgusted with the trends in the Republican party. I think they’d mostly still weakly identify as libertarian, but the Republicans have largely lost them. Granted none of them were Randians to begin with.
The ICE maybe but most libertarians agree that the police serve a purpose. Libertarians are generally big on property rights and want a legal system, including police, which defends them. It’s against the law to steal a car in Libertopia.
This has been a libertarian thing forever, as well as opposing police brutality, and I have been reading journalism produced by libertarian think tanks that has been supporting the aim of BLM and reporting heavily on racial disparity in policing and prosecution for at least 2 decades. The other comments about conservatism and white supremacists are ridiculous and just sound like bitter comments from Democrats who’ve consistently supported (bi-partisan support with Republicans, to be clear) the expansion of government power and authority and the idea that state agents can kill with impunity.
I was never a fan of the “paleo redneck alliance” or whatever that conservative outreach strategy was from the Rothbard/Paul folks in the LP. In other words I was an LP member at first but always liberal not conservative. I left some time around 2008, I think and became a registered Dem in 2016.
One of the reasons I joined the LP in 2000 and not the Ds is because I was outraged over Diallo and other incidents that were widely reported “on the internet” but not much in the mainstream media and few mainstream liberal politicians and influencers cared much about victims of police brutality and systemic racism. The ONLY people I really found were journalists (mostly funded by Kochs!) from libertarians rags and think tanks. My well-known “liberal” Dem US Sen did not appreciate my letter about how police should not be allowed to execute people as part of their job. I was told by Dems to respect authority and frankly circa 2000 most mainstream Dems would have been “Blue Lives Matter” folks who would be aghast at the idea that these fine people with badges and guns performing stop and frisk and overtargeting and over-arresting and prosecuting brown-skinned people weren’t heroes who deserved respect and benefit of the doubt in almost all circumstances.
I like the Libertarians and often vote for them, even though it’s to no avail. They are my “screw you” vote. If they weren’t such political underdogs, I’d probably have to be more considered in my vote, but I like them for protest votes.
Getting Libertarians to form a cohesive group is probably the primary example of what it’s like to herd cats. Take a bunch of strong, independent personalities who hate authority and authoritarians, and their candidate is going to have to be ineffective. They would never tolerate a powerful politician and, in order to have an effective politician, that politician has to have some power (in the form of status and accomplishment) and a firm political view.
Gary Johnson is probably one of their sanest nominees, but I agree that Gary joined them because he likes pot. He made some of the correct noises, but you got the feeling he was there to party.
Jonathan Haidt’s work indicates that Libertarians score high in reactance, and their foremost principle is individual liberty. They are not terribly emotional in their thinking, so appeals to emotion don’t work well on them. They don’t really belong to one of the two main political parties and they can’t be neatly slotted into one of the two camps.
In other words, I didn’t vote in the poll because the premise doesn’t work.
Being high in reactance, the entrenched party is the Libertarian adversary. Change the entrenched party, and the new party will be their new adversary. It doesn’t matter which party it is.
Ah, so you’re one of those ones who blame us for electing Trump, by not voting for Clinton? I don’t understand why I shouldn’t vote my conscience, and I don’t understand people like you who blindly continuing giving power to our disgusting two-party system. If you continue to persecute people who don’t vote for the status quo, then people will only ever continue to vote for the status quo, and we’re never going to escape from horrible system that they have.
Are Libertarians closer to the Dems or to the Repubs? It’s the same, and it doesn’t matter, because both parties are virtually identical, under the surface coating, at the national level.
The libertarian credo (which essentially boils down to “I don’t wanna and you can’t make me”) fits in far better with the Republican party as opposed to Democrats.
The general libertarian disdain for laws controlling personal behavior (i.e. abortion and recreational drug use) and opposition to foreign military deployments is more in line with Democratic policies.
Since Democrats tend to favor government regulation and Republicans abhor it (at least in relation to free markets*) it’s natural for libertarians to lean Republican.
*case in point - calls to drastically weaken or eliminate the Food and Drug Administration.
Persecute, eh? That’s another commonality I neglected to mention.
The idea doesn’t involve civil disorder in the sense of riots. It involves well-armed white guys going around effecting ‘citizen’s arrests’ and ‘stand your ground’ style shootings on people they don’t like. This is something that already happens, it’s not some weird philosophical construct divorced from reality and based on a Rube Goldberg connection of pieces but is instead something that has been in the news multiple times.
Being able to bring in minorities to do work but being able to beat or kill them with near-impunity has an obvious appeal to a lot of white supremacists. A lot of them are much more into fantasizing about being able to bag their own Ahmaud Arbery or Trayvon Martin than they are about open borders or economic policy.