re: #244 HappyWarrior

The Libertarian Party has problems deeper than nuance.

It’s larded with kooks, racist kooks, and people get a thrill from the idea they’re smarter than conventional politics. It’s also the home of the people too insufferable to play the conservative game of “my personal benefit is actually morality if we don’t look at the details.” And there’s a standard array of people so narcissistic that they don’t really have an ideology regardless of what they say, except more naked and more admired than the equivalent camps anywhere else.

There’s also the individualist trip they’re all on which amounts to a palingenetic fantasy where if there weren’t “the rules” then the True Meritocracy would result in each on them being John Rockefeller or Immortan Joe. Which is why libertarianism is a pipeline to fascism—no seriously there’s so much damn crossover into racism and tribalism. Individualism as an ideology is self-defeating: eventually the need for affirmation creates groupings guided by aesthetics more than morals—each individual “individual” in a way that gains acknowledgement and praise from other “individuals”—and radical distinction from the outgroup of “not-individual-enoughs” feeds into a sense of tribe.

Not everything horseshoes out such that every position has the same issues.