But I want to talk about the Libertarians sociologically before I discuss the contradiction at the heart of their political philosophy.
The fact of the matter is that Libertarianism—both as a party and as a political philosophy—offers more individual liberty than either the GOP or the Democrats. The big caveat to this is that they are also sold out almost entirely to the idea that, in a perfectly free market—which they maintain has not yet really existed in the modern world—corporations and wealth would be entirely unable to impose any limits on individual liberty. Thus, on an economic level, Libertarians tend to be more radical than most Republicans, while on the level of social freedoms, libertarians are—on average—more radical than the majority of Democrats. It is worth noting that the Libertarian party supported same sex marriage and drug legalization long before the Democratic party did. This is important because that radical nature of the Libertarian party plays a significant role in the operation of the LP as a transition ground.
The long and short of this is that the Libertarian Party in the United States is probably best understood as a transitional structure. Said another way, to be a Libertarian in the US is usually to be on your way to something else, it is the rare libertarian who will end up as a lifelong registered member of the Libertarian Party.
This is, I want to argue, an important way to think about libertarians—not only because it is the most accurate way to think about them—because pragmatically structuring libertarianism as a transitional political identity allows us to make sense of some of the contradictions within the party itself and also to interact with libertarians in a way which will allow for the greatest chances for conversion to healthier, more informed political positions. For the purpose of clarity lets therefore distinguish between Transitional Libertarians (TL)—those libertarians who will eventually transition to some other political affiliation—and Lifetime Libertarians (LL)—those libertarians whose Libertarian affiliation will last their lives—while acknowledging that in the present every Libertarian has to be granted the respect we would want if we were in that position. Nobody likes to be told that their political identity is "just a phase" and we will do no good by insisting on the point viz. any individual libertarian. My recommendation is therefore to add a third category, let's call them Schrodinger's Libertarians (SL)—people who identify as libertarian or libertarian-ish and but who will eventually resolve into either Transitional or Lifetime Libertarians. This category should allow us to maintain the realist awareness that many libertarians will ultimately transition to something else without requiring us to insult individuals who have chosen their politics in good faith and not intend to ever transition to some other politics.
With all of that structure in place, I want to look at the common doors out of Libertarian affiliation and make a few observations about the forces which seem most at play in determining which door will be chosen by any given SL.
The Democrat Door
I suspect that it is actually fairly uncommon for libertarians to transition directly into mainstream Democrats even when their views have shifted towards the left economically mostly because—and this is going to be a recurring theme—political edginess is a significant draw factor towards becoming a libertarian in the first place. Keep in mind that there are very few libertarian households in the country and so the number of children who are raised in libertarian families and unreflectively register as libertarians because "that's what my parents believe and its what I was raised with" is vanishingly small. My experience has been that most of the SL's who transition to mainline or progressive Democrats are Christians (often but not always of the ex-evangelical or ex-fundamentalist variety) for whom libertarianism ends up serving as an acceptable way out of being a Republican. In the Evangelical world, to announce that you are a Democrat is to invite significant social stigma if not outright religious hostility, whereas to announce that you are a Libertarian usually results in little more that being treated as a little eccentric. Certainly, this was my experience. While I did not end up taking the Democrat door out of libertarianism, I did come in through the Republican door and even in the Bible Belt I found that proclaiming my libertarian-ness did not meet with significant resistance.
Now the some of reasons that libertarianism is acceptable in the southern Bible Belt are more than a little troubling including a history of Libertarian-Christian Nationalist alliances, and the opportunity to present an inclusive face to the world while working towards a state-run oppression (see the alt-right door below) as well as an application of the separation of church and state which is frankly more consistent than what is offered by the GOP. A good many of the Christians—and I again include myself here—who are now on the side of marriage equality took a first step in that direction based on the libertarian understanding that the a person's right to civil marriage should not be denied by the state. Christian Libertarians making that case in 2011 were often given a far more gracious hearing than Christian Democrats.
When these folks leave libertarianism through the Democrat door—progressive or moderate—the shift is often contemporaneous with a "official" move out of White American Evangelicalism or Fundamentalism.
The Alt-Right Door
I want to spend a little extra time on this door because I think it can be one of the hardest to understand, but is also one of the most important and influential insofar as this path through libertarianism is one which I take to be one of the broadest paths into American style fascism, particularly for Christians in the United States. It is, of course, rather ironic that libertarianism—a political ideology which prides itself on being a maximalist defender of individual rights over and against government—has turned out to be one of the best, most effective tools for American fascist recruitment over the last thirty to fifty years, but it makes sense once we understand the history of certain movements; the explanation is not so much logical as historical.
The Libertarian party was founded in 1971 as a party representing radically free market economics and as well as individual liberties. Essentially, at a time when Barry Goldwater and his new Republican Party were using the language and thinking of limited Austrian economics, the Libertarians went in for a double helping of what was, for the Republican party of the 70's, a political/economic seasoning. The big innovation of the Libertarian party was the addition of maximal individual liberty and anti-interventionism (views which put them at odds back then with the Goldwater/Nixon Republican ideology). While they don't love to be reminded of this, official Libertarian ideology exists as a mid-point between Goldwater republicanism and Anarchocapitalism. What is important for our purposes is that Libertarians are, from a particular point of view, radicals who are really committed to the politics which Republicans mostly only pay lip service to. It is incorrect to think of them as extremist Republicans but, because so many actual Republicans think of them that way, it is also important to understand that Republicans who are looking to be more hard-core in their politics are likely to be drawn to Libertarianism specifically because it is less compromising on ideals which, for the GOP are usually pretexts for critique of Democrats rather than real values.
Then came the Christian Nationalists. The intellectual origins of the contemporary Christian Nationalist movement in this country largely go back to Paul Weyrich and R.J. Rushdoony. Of the two, Weyrich was the politician and Rushdoony was the academic. Both were evil, Machiavellian men and both were fond of libertarianism. Economically the hard-core free market views of the libertarians seems to have appealed to both Weyrich and Rushdoony, but Rushdoony also seems to have valued libertarianism because of it's hard core commitment to federalism and individual rights.
It is a matter of his record from his own published books that Rushdoony was a huge booster of "lost cause" history, admired the mythos of the "genteel" confederacy and even believed that race-based slavery was a justified and Christian practice. He was also aware of the fact that these were views with little to no mainstream acceptance in the 70's and 80's. And here comes the key to understanding the appeal of libertarianism to American Fascists. In the context of a country which treats blatantly racist and fascist views as anathema and taboo, the ideology which will offer the most functional support for someone who holds those views is the party which, honestly, intellectually, and consistently, stands against federal authority, and against the suppression of views which even they find most abhorrent. Any Libertarian will be against federal guidelines around what should appear in history textbooks even if that means that history textbooks in southern states contain blatant falsehoods and misleading omissions on the subjects of slavery, the civil war, jim crow, and the civil rights movement. Any Libertarian will be against federal overreach including hate crimes law Any libertarian will be against restrictions on free speech, even restrictions on the public expression of racist, homophobic, sexist or transphobic incitement. Of course the flip side of this among Lifetime (genuine) Libertarians, is consistent support of Libertarians for very good causes (see the beginning of this post), but among Christian Nationalists and other fascist-leaning or full-fascist groups, Libertarianism provides a socially acceptable platform for opposing anti-fascist measures. Rushdoony recognized this and, knit his racist, Christo-fascist following (you will most often see them referred to as dominionists or theonomists these days) into Weyrich's moral majority as an anchor to the "libertarian-ish" wing of the Republican Party, with significant periodic spillover into the Libertarian party of the USA.
The upshot of all of this is that there are a significant number of Christo-fascists and other alt-right ghouls hanging around Libertarian spaces both using Libertarianism as a stalking horse for their authoritarian goals, or working to recruit folks who are radicals by temperament and who are inclined to feel that mainstream America is both too tepid and paradoxically too hostile towards their concerns.
The Republican Door
This door is, I think, the most boring—though not the least used—primarily because it fits a common trope in American political culture. The Republican door is the one that TL's mostly age out through. The standard American trope is that we mellow and grow more conservative as we age. While Millenials and, to some extent Gen-X—they got wierd—seem to be resisting this trend, the trope itself remains as a bit of conventional wisdom. and the fact remains that it is not that hard to find Republicans who will talk about having been libertarians when they were younger but who "realized it just wasn't that realistic" as they aged and moderated themselves into the Republican party. I know of a very few Democrats with this story but my time as a registered Libertarian introduced me to quite a few Republicans in this category. My own impression (and this is now entirely anecdotal) is that ex-libertarian Republicans who aged out the Republican door are likely to be more reasonable on social issues in general and tend to get uncomfortable around the alt-right crowd. Some have become #neverTrump Republicans but they are more likely to have stopped paying all that much attention to politics and "the culture war" leave their bank accounts alone and they aren't likely to interfere with the youth or the left so long as it doesn't interfere with their lives too much.
The Weird Door
I am using this as a catch-all for the other politics people end up with as they transition out of Libertarianism. It includes a wide variety of Anarchists and communists, as well as a few Greens, and some religious non-particpants. In my own case, I left Libertarianism in a vaguely leftward direction and after a few years trying to figure things out, ended up a weird sort of overly political anarcho-pacifist. Obviously, there will be a lot of variety among these folks but I suspect that we have a few strong commonalities. I suspect that a lot of us who leave Libertarianism by this door entered through the GOP—which is by far the largest door into the Libertarian Party. In this we share a commonality with the Democrat door people insofar as libertarianism offers a socially acceptable alternative to a Republicanism which no longer fit. At the same time, like the fascists, we are drawn to libertarianism for its radicalism and its refusal to compromise in the face of GOP ideological torpidity. This is why those on the left who reach out and dialogue with SLs in good faith are doing good work insofar as they are interacting with someone who is already likely to be radicalized in some direction and who—if approached honestly and with robust and rigorous political and ethical debate—may well choose to focus that passion and energy on behalf of justice and the marginalized, but who is also supremely vulnerable to alt-right propaganda.
Conclusion
I am sure there are other doors (at a minimum, there are a percentage of SLs who turn out to be Lifetime Libertarians, but that gets beyond the scope of this post) which could be imagined and other taxonomies which might turn out to be more accurate and more helpful. The great strength of this analysis is, I hope, its capacity to help us relate to libertarians in a more helpful way. There is, on the left especially, a bit of a tendency to be dismissive of libertarians on the understandable but ultimately unjustified grounds that they are nearly all crypto-fascists. That is, the Left had a tendency to treat all libertarians as transitional libertarians who are inevitably going to choose the alt-right door. This belief can be self-fulfilling since a Schrodinger's Libertarian who is dismissed by the left and whose honest questions are—again understandably given the well established tactics of the alt-right—treated as bad faith trolling techniques, but who is treated with sympathy by the alt-right, is far more likely to ultimately leave through the alt-right door.
My recommendation is that Libertarians ought be be granted a greater degree of the benefit of the doubt. I want to urge all non-libertarians to really consider adopting the Shrodinger's Libertarians category and beginning from that stance when interacting with people who claim a libertarian political identity. My only further caveat is that it is vitally important—for reasons of common decency as well as effective persuasion—to treat libertarians as serious political thinkers who are operating in good faith just as long as it is reasonable to do so.
In the next installment in this series I hope to take a close look at what Libertarians actually believe and why I have concluded that there is a contradiction at the heart of libertarianism.
Post Script
If you haven't already done so, please watch the Innuendo Studios video How to Radicalize a Normie as it is one of the more important pieces of anti-fascist work I have encountered recently and has a significant impact on this topic.
