i think having a libertarian phase makes sense since, it's buying all the way into the beliefs once you get past the facade and sticking with the movement that is fucked
Same. As a 17 year old kid my primary political concerns were not getting busted for weed and not going to Iraq. Ron Paul was 💯 on anti-war and pro-legalization. Then I juked hard left after the financial crisis hit and Obama bailed out the banks
A lot of people go through a libertarian phase because:
- They've figured out that mainstream Republicans and Democrats offer very little, and -- while not the same on every issue -- are effectively the same on stuff like foreign policy and criminal justice.
- For decades, the largest (and by far the most socially acceptable) political movement outside of mainstream politics was libertarianism.
Step 1 is one of the first parts of the pipeline to leftist ideas, too; there just historically wasn't the infrastructure to continue that pipeline.
I disagree. Principled libertarians feel like long lost cousins to me. I’ve met several who I thought were Socialists until they started talking about the free market. They understand power dynamics when it comes to the government and how people can be oppressed by those dynamics. Remember that guy in Austin who was marching in every BLM protest because his girlfriend was black and disabled? He got popped by a chud. He did more praxis than most of us ever has.
Libertarianism is the default ideology of political disenchanted Americans who care about the issues but see the faults of the two party system. It’s unfortunate they think the market will solve everything but we should reach out to the good ones and be friendlier with the goal of bringing them along. You know real Lib shit.
Yeah, in relation to your point about the Iraq War protests, I was browsing the libertarian subreddit during the peak of the BLM protests and there was a post of the Gadsden flag with a boot on the snake and the caption was "We will stomp". The comments consisted of "This is why when lefties ask us to join, we're hesitant." Its easy to make fun of them but they're fellow members of the working class and I think a lot of us went through a libertarian phase so I believe they're susceptible to Leftist ideas.
I don’t think the libertarian subreddit is representative of libertarians in general though
That subreddit is a psyop to actively prevent libertarians from becoming comrades. It's more anarcho capitalists than libertarians anyways. I think there's still a bit of a difference between those groups. Ancaps have fully bought into the propaganda, libertarians that don't know what ancaps are can still be redeemed.
As one of chapo dot chat's resident libertarian experts, the measure of whether a libertarian is redeemable is the question "So what do you do with poor people?"
If they have the bare-minimum amount of human empathy required to really care for people who don't have enough, you can work with them. If their attitude is basically "lmao sucks to suck," they're just a baby fascist.
Yeah many libertarians think that more capitalism will benefit working people. The main trick to disabusing them of that notion is disabusing them of the notion that more or less government isn't a valid framing to understand politics. Who the law benefits matters. Also introducing Marxism as extending economic theory to politics helps.
The main trick to disabusing them of that notion
Before you even bother with this, though, it's important to get a feel for who's persuadable and who's just a brick wall that will suck up whatever time and effort you throw at them. That's why cutting straight to "what do you do with poor people?" is helpful -- if they give a shit about other people, you might be able to reach them with arguments like the one you're describing. But if they are fine with horrific stuff like letting "undeserving" poor people go hungry and homeless in the richest country on the planet, they're a lost cause, and you're better off not even bothering.
more or less government isn’t a valid framing to understand politics
This is a useful point to raise, and you'll have even more success with it if you emphasize the distinction between parts of government that give stuff to people (e.g., schools giving education) and parts of government that point guns at people (e.g., cops and troops). "More government" that results in better education is qualitatively different than "more government" that puts more people in prison.
They also barely have politics that connect to reality from my experiences. It's all either internet stuff or they're obsessed with inscrutable legal arguments from the 1830s that prove why you don't actually need a medical license to perform surgery.
I've guessed for a while that their ideology can be directly traced to petite bourgeois settlers in the early USA upset over income taxes and real estate laws. Almost all of their concerns to me sound entirely outdated or completely impenetrable.
It’s all either internet stuff or they’re obsessed with inscrutable legal arguments from the 1830s that prove why you don’t actually need a medical license to perform surgery.
They focus on that because if they talk about stuff people give a shit about they lose. Most discussions on how libertarianism would "improve" people's day-to-day lives makes libertarianism look like shit. The big exception is kind of their take on the War on Drugs, but "legalize it" is undercut big time by "and eliminate the FDA, make it a million times harder to sue corporations over just about anything, and privatize the police."
they have a completely different lexicon and will be talking about totally different things than you think they are
We should learn from this, as we should learn from the libertarian habit of throwing tons of 19th-century philosophy books at anyone who questions their ideas. It's hard to grow a political movement this way. People are quick to write you off as a crank. At least at the outset -- when you're talking to people who aren't already bought in to the basics of your ideas -- you have to spoonfeed people a bit. You have to speak to them in their terms until they reach the point where they'll learn on their own.
I just remember liking Ron Paul because he was the only Republican on the debate stage who opposed the war. But once I did even the most basic of research it was all this nonsense about muh gold standard.
Dennis Kucinich was my guy back then. But you knew they were never going to give him a shot.
Dennis Kucinich
He seems like a socdem like Sanders but a bit less charisma.
My economics teacher in high school was a libertarian 15yrs ago and still is. Guy made us read Ayn Rand, he also made us read like 200pgs of Adam Smith which was a good foundation for reading Capital later on my own tho (and I remember complaining Smith was a better author). He dismissed Marx using pure Ricardoan criticism, we didn't read much of him. He was a total Ayn Rand fanboy and is one of those Gadsen flag types today.
Why yes, I indeed do support the Third Spanish Republic, why do you ask ?
