Why Libertarians™ Aren’t

“Libertarian” vs. “Libertarian™”

America, we need to talk about this word “libertarian.”

If you live outside the US and are engaged enough to bother having a thought about it, you understand “libertarians” to be broadly defined as “the opposite of authoritarians on one axis of a multi-dimensional political-ideological grid.”

If you live inside the US, the word “libertarian” conjures a pretty specific set of images.  What the marketing would like for you to think of is Rugged Individuals™ with Lots Of Large Guns™ living in The Big Open™ free from Government Tyranny™.  What you actually should be thinking of is a collapsed ecosystem, maybe survivable by creating dome cities or something, but probably not, at the hands of rapacious and unregulated industrialists.  Add to that the economy (for most of us), because the only ethic of business is profit, and without government acting in place of the conscience business doesn’t have to protect the interests of the public, business will destroy this planet all the way to the bank.  Has done.  Is doing.

Typically in discussions on the subject I’ll create a distinction between classical libertarianism and US-style libertarianism.  We’ll examine that distinction, and how to make it when communicating, below.  I’d also like to just look at the “brand” as it’s sold here.  As a student of language, communication, and propaganda the phenomenon of the Libertarian Party in the United States absolutely fascinates me.  Students of political science will be aware that there are many points of nomenclature where the US is significantly out of step with the rest of the world, but in my opinion there is none so glaringly obvious, egregiously contrary, and propagandized as the concept of libertarianism.

Putting Out The Gaslight

As one might expect from an organization whose core philosophy includes lying to people at will, there’s a well-developed series of gaslighting tactics employed by those trying to sell it, so let’s knock a few of those out right at the top and save my comment sections the abuse.

• “Statist.” – Idiot.  States are things, they’re always gonna be things, they’re not going away.  Next.
• Nanny state/big brother/bootlicker – meh.  Barely worth responding to, for me; if that was me I wouldn’t be me.  Wouldn’t be writing this article.  Next.
• Shill for [x] – yeah, that’s why I have to remind people almost daily that this is how I make my living and I need their support or I’ll be homeless and starve.  Because I’m “shilling” for someone, and they pay me so well for it.
• “You don’t get it.” – I’ve been getting it since the Libertarian Party hit me up to run for local office in 1990.  When you have been an activist for thirty-five years and earned a minor in political science, you’re qualified to suggest I am missing something…and you’ll need to explain what, in detail, and be prepared to defend your position, ideally with citations and valid reasoning.  Until then, it ain’t me that isn’t getting something here. This is an argument on the internet to you. It’s one of my professions – not because I watched a couple of YouTube videos and decided I was a political scientist, but because I put the time in both on the streets and in the classroom. The chances any given random person is qualified to tell me what I don’t get about any of this are very, very low. The chance that person is going to be a self-appointed expert whose entire political philosophy comes from old Ron Paul newsletters recycled fifty or sixty thousand times through internet comment sections? Zero. Sit.
• “Fake two-party system” – It’s not fake, it’s math, and there’s pretty much no way around it. First see Duverger’s Law. I’m going to look at this in depth in a later article; I’ll try to remember to link it here when it’s up.
• “Party loyalist” – I’ve never been registered as anything but independent. I did vote in the Democratic primary in 2020. For Bernie Sanders. I’ve never voted for a Republican that I know of; I have voted for Democrats multiple times, but have never considered myself a party member. My loyalty is not to a party or even a nation, but to the fundamental concepts that ensure the highest quality of life for the living, and thereby ensure the greatest possibility of the survival and propagation of the species, which is the whole point of everything ever.
• Hate freedom, afraid of liberty, etc. – no, just noticed that unless it’s hookers, guns, or drugs, the only freedom the Libertarian Party cares about is the freedom of industrialists to unsustainably exploit natural resources for profit.
  • When those natural resources are human the exploitation is also invariably inhumane. This includes both employees and customers, groups which also typically have significant overlap.

That takes care of the broad classes of argument and establishing what the conversation’s about, so let’s move forward shall we?

History of Libertarianism

First we have to discuss the distinction between “true” libertarian philosophy and what travels under that label in the US. In writing, I’ve come to refer to this as “Libertarianism™,” and defining that term is why I’ve included this post in the Lexicon. To understand what separates the two, how it happened, why, and why it matters, some background is in order

In the video that you’ll see either linked or embedded above (depending on YouTube’s mood at the moment), noted linguist and highly regarded writer and speaker on broader social and political issues Noam Chomsky refers to the original libertarian movement as “the anti-state wing of the Socialist movement,” which is as good a frame as any, particularly because it brings one part of the current conflict into focus: socialism is broadly understood to be a “state-run” system, so how do you have anti-state socialism?

This comes from the mentality of separation between government and governed; that “the government” is some far-off, detached, separate entity that has power over the governed. In western democracies this is nothing but a socio-psychological hangover from long-dead systems like monarchy; by definition in a democracy there is no separation between “the government” and “the governed,” as President Biden quite ably pointed out in his first address to Congress:

Our Constitution opens with the words, “We the People”. It’s time we remembered that We the People are the government. You and I. Not some force in a distant capital. Not some powerful force we have no control over. It’s us. It’s “We the people.”

President Joe Biden, April 28, 2021 Address to Congress

So the early libertarians were not trying to “dismantle the welfare state,” they were fully supportive of the notion. What they weren’t supportive of was the authoritarian state. Unfortunately the two can be confused, and sometimes that confusion is intentional, leading to an artificial sense of obligation to show obedience or agreement toward an invalid authority or one that abuses their power. My own dad had a big streak of this type of libertarianism; he refused to accept even his veterans’ benefits because he figured then he’d owe somebody something, and by his reckoning him and the US government were even when he served four years in the Marines and they paid him for it. To his way of thinking – and I understand the logic, whether I agree with it or not – to “take” anything from “the government” was to give “the government” power over you beyond what they deserved or could be trusted not to abuse.

This, fundamentally, is the root of libertarianism; keeping “the government” out of the affairs of private individuals so long as the conduct of those affairs doesn’t cause harm. When one extends this to business and industry, the same statement is true, it’s just been manipulated in the US.

If that was where things stayed here in the US, I’d be the biggest flag-waving card-carrying Libertarian you know but it didn’t.

History of Libertarianism™

Here in the US, Libertarianism™ began in Colorado in 1971, and from the beginning it was deeply flawed and divergent from the core principles of libertarianism. Born in the midst of Nixon and Vietnam, amid rational concerns about the draft and less rational concerns about the final separation of the US dollar from the “gold standard,” organized “Libertarianism” in the US has always been its own animal with primary focus of “liberty” concerns for the individual focusing on the recreational use of drugs and the use and ownership of firearms, and a great lot of misinformed babbling about economics, a lot of hypocrisy toward their own authoritarianism, and a deliberately contrived blind eye to the ability of capital to both hold and abuse power.

Ironically the party’s membership model itself immediately betrays the fundamentally fascist nature of its strange interpretation of the “libertarian” idea – to join the party, you have to pay. To have a voice in the party, to participate in governance decisions, you have to be a “bylaw-sustaining member,” according to their rulebook.

So from the very start, this “libertarian” party is demonstrably a plutocracy. And it doesn’t stop there. Within a decade of the Party’s foundation, it had been basically overtaken by David Koch, who saw in the party’s misguided interpretation of “liberty” as “corporations can do anything they want” an opportunity to mainstream and strengthen ideas and concepts beneficial to the business interests of David and his brother Charles, and as collateral damage also beneficial to other industrialist and capitalist interests when those interests benefit from doing harm to the general public.

By 1980, the misguided distrust of “fiat money” and the overwhelming influence of literally one of the world’s richest men had entirely stripped away any vestige of “socialism” from the original “anarcho-socialism” that is the root of libertarianism, and turned it instead to an advertising vehicle by which fascists and plutocrats advertise and perpetuate themselves to “those of like minds” by wrapping themselves up in a nice, if thin, facade of “you’re not the boss of me” and “the man’s not gonna stop me from getting high.”

To present, the Libertarian Party appeals primarily to college age white men who are usually affluent or at least semi-affluent, middle-aged white men who like guns and hate Washington (but love America), and a disjointed smattering of genuinely libertarian folks across the social spectrum who are new to the party and haven’t caught on yet but love the anti-authoritarianism thing.

The influence of Koch and through him economist Milton Friedman (the fundamental architect of the whole “money = political power and that’s just fine” philosophy) not only stripped the US Libertarian Party of any credible claim they had to genuine libertarianism, it set the stage for a cascading series of bone-headed political decisions that are crippling political processes in the US to this moment: without the Libertarian Party’s efforts to demonize government and propagandize capitalist greed as rightfully earned political power, Citizens United would never have been granted cert by the Supreme Court, nevermind decided in favor of plutocracy.

The US Libertarian Party is fundamentally a capitalist-industrialist-authoritarian-plutocrat party disingenuously selling itself on “liberty” when the only liberty it really cares about is the liberty to let you be stupid enough to die early (yeah, let’s make cocaine and heroin not just legal but unregulated, let’s see how “free” those folks feel after a couple of years) and to let giant corporations crap all over the planet until we’re all dead, except for them because they’ll be able to afford the escape pods. Meanwhile the morons who sold those newly-minded monkey-tenders out don’t realize they’ve got a much bigger jones called “money,” and it’s just as destructive, leads to just as much crappy and selfish decision-making, and hurts just as much people when you let it get hold of you. Ahem, Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos, Mr. Zuckerberg, et. al.

What US-style Libertarianism misses is two key features that prevent it from being libertarian at all. First, they leave out (reject, with hostility!) the socialism – the notion that all of this is for the collective good of all of us – and second they ignore the part about “not harming anyone.”

Government And What It’s For

Determining if harm was done, if that’s in dispute, and how to correct that harm both through reparation to the harmed and legislation to ensure everybody knows going forward that this thing isn’t cool, is one of the key jobs of government, which the Libertarian Party seeks to undermine or eliminate. This is the process by which an insoluble conflict is solved; the facts of the conflict are presented to the people, represented by the judge and jury. The people hear and contemplate the facts from as many angles as they can find, and arrive at a conclusion hopefully based on best public interest, best moral and ethical practice, and best human inclination regarding if this conflict created harm, if that harm is worthy of recompense, how that compensation should be communicated, and whether there need be a written rule to forestall this sort of conflict in the future and, in the event it arises again, make the resolving of it much more efficient because now there’s precedent and rules to look at.

This is a process the Libertarian Party wants to break beyond recognition or destroy completely. They focus on legitimate complaints about the “broken system” but then they recognize that they tend to benefit greatly from that “broken system,” so they keep us focused on fixing “the system” and not fixing the people running it, i.e. not electing fascists, making sure people are educated and as capable as their natural ability can make them of clear critical thought, etc. Because “the system” isn’t the problem, the people running it are, and fundamentally the Libertarian Party is a part of people running the systems. They want government out of the way the same reason a cheating husband wants his wife out of the way – so they don’t get caught and held accountable.

The second key function of government is to act in place of the conscience that business does not have. What we call “conscience” is the series of ideas we’ve constructed to support the universal ethic – the perpetuation and propagation of life. The universal ethic of business is not life but profit – more and more, all the time, ad inifnitum, damn the torpedoes full speed ahead. This creates an obvious conflict; the perfect world for business is an unimaginable hell for human beings and ultimately isn’t even self-sustaining because it kills its own consumers, upon whom it relies for those ever-increasing profits.

It is government’s job as the voice of the people to step in and say no you can’t destroy that river, no you can’t pollute the air, no you can’t refuse or fail to protect your employees from known job risks like inhaling poisonous vapors or cutting their arms off, no you can’t hire nine year olds to mine coal, etc. Because demonstrably and consistently, business and industry – more to the point the broken humans who run them and hide behind the notion that a business isn’t just a collection of human beings making decisions – will decide in favor of profit without regard to public impact or even the long-term damage it does to itself.

That is what actual libertarianism looks like – and we have a phrase for it in the US, it’s called “democratic socialism.” Not “you’re free to get hooked on deadly drugs we can profit from, you’re free to die of environmental poisoning because being careful is expensive, you’re free to live at the wrong end of the biggest barrel held by the biggest psycho.” We the people are free from being told what we can do as long as we’re not inflicting harm; profiteers are prevented by legislation and enforcement from inflicting harm. Remember what I said at the beginning? It’s still the same thing, the US people who bought the label just twisted it all out of shape to benefit the wealthy industrialists and keep the rest of us stoned enough to not notice.

This is also part of what the US Libertarian Party wants to break. Fundamentally, before anything else, it’s about deregulation. Abolish the IRS, abolish the EPA, etc. and everyone will just be good and all the corporations will naturally start acting in a forthright, sustainable way. Which, of course, is pure nonsense that flies in the face of literally every possible example of an attempt that you can find anywhere in history…and it’s the entire purpose of the US Libertarian Party. Not to create liberty for individuals, but to ensure that they are holding the chains and keys in which those individuals live; to entice them, through mostly baseless appeals to ego and fun and greed, to do the very labor of forging their own shackles, with a smile.

I don’t know what the current state of the party’s inner core is nor how possible it would be to take it over, but I frankly doubt it’s super vulnerable. A lot of money went into it, and a lot of money goes in to protecting it. Maybe it could happen, maybe not. It would be neat to see an actual leftist libertarian presence in American politics since that’s generally where people in this country fall on an objective political spectrum.

As things stand now, though, it absolutely must be said: if you’re a libertarian, a Libertarian™ is the last thing you want to be.