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.”
