Libertarianism Ate Itself

No one defeated Libertarianism; Libertarianism defeated itself, inviting the enemy into their camp and taking a stand on a low hill of principle while ignoring the mountain of empirical evidence.

Hello, and welcome back to my Minds blog. Today, I am sharing my thoughts over the last week about what happened to Libertarianism over the last few years. Just as “cultural libertarianism” seemed to be gaining momentum and preparing to storm the scene with a wave of cultural dominance, it faltered and was ebbed away with alarming rapidity by a shifting cultural conversation, one embodied by identitarianism and the Alt-Right. This ebbing was visible at the top, as leading voices in the Libertarian community began to part ways over certain significant differences that were already splitting the body of the libertarian movement.

This split could be understood as being between universalism and tribalism, with the universalists on the one hand acting on the principle that libertarianism is a universal value, and attempting to grow the movement through building a big-tent inclusivity, pandering to the desires of others and inviting everyone to join, while on the other hand some recognized that there are those who share their values and other who do not, and that this difference is largely innate and cannot be resolved through education. The former group attempted to identify compatibilities and shared values with the left, invited them to join while watering down their message, seeking a “middle ground” position with the expectation that this would bring in people from both sides. They distanced themselves from Libertarianism’s historical association with racism, embraced open borders, and resisted the growing conversation about biological differences between people. In so doing, they actively invited infiltrators and enemies into their camp, rendering them impotent and compromised.

The tribalists, meanwhile, embraced the conversation about biological differences, some even embracing the label of racist, and in recognizing that certain people are not compatible with their own values allied themselves with those that are. They recognized that the realization of the kind of society that they want requires compatible people, and the exclusion of incompatible people. They recognized the need for defending a territory within which to build and sustain their communities. They recognized that the differences between themselves and their ideological opponents run deeper than differences in knowledge, and they recognized that group solidarity is strongly tied to group homogeneity. As the core of the libertarian movement sperged out over individualism and invited the leftists into their camp, these people found themselves holding more in common with the identitarians than with their former libertarian allies.

Libertarianism Ate Itself:

Liberty exists in a context. As I have often pointed out, a person’s experience of their own freedom and happiness has much more to do with being in a context in which they can live a fulfilling life than it has to do with the absolute measure of how much freedom they have. Ideological inflexibility on points of abstract principle has been the hill that one after another liberal movement has been dying on lately, especially around hyperindividualism. This is a selective choosing of principles, because the founders of liberal ideology themselves recognized differences amongst peoples and the need to be surrounded with others of one’s own kind, mutual defense, and territorial sovereignty in order to realize these ideals. In politicking for converts, libertarianism abandoned its origins and base. They recognized a need for numbers, but failed to recognize the importance of innate compatibility.

Embracing ideas such as multiculturalism, even multiracialism, open borders, etc. are a guarantee of conflict and are potentially suicidal. There is a long history of conflicts within Africa, Southwest Asia, and the middle East, and borders drawn without regard to the distribution of peoples within those borders has been a significant contributing factor to strife within these countries over the last century. As the world’s problems have arrived en masse at our doorstep through migration, and as more and more people are waking up to an explicit anti-white agenda, many former libertarians have moved to identitarian politics in recognition of what is needed to create and preserve societies that will ensure our well being and that of our future generations, while the mainstream of the movement has spun itself into a death spiral of misplaced ideological purity.

What killed the libertarian movement, just as it was approaching a new high in acceptance? It was not defeated by the communists, but rather it defeated itself, by inviting its enemies into its own camp and resisting the winds of change and the call of reality. It sold itself out, pandering to ethics of the dying globalist order while counter-signaling the growing neo-traditionalist order. It clung to an ever more sperged out notion of individualism in a time of growing recognition for the need to band together. It adopted an ever more universalist approach at a time when the older generations’ recognition of innate tribal differences is returning to our collective consciousness. It betrayed its base for the sake of inclusivity.

Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts. As one of many former libertarians that has found myself within the identitarian camp in recent years, and in my own case since less than a year ago, I sometimes reflect on the phenomenon of mass ideological migration that has taken so many in this direction, leaving behind an ever more hollowed out and irrelevant libertarian movement. I welcome your feedback in the comments section, Subscribe if you enjoy my reflections. I’ll be back next week with a brand new blog post, and in the meantime, until then, all the best.