Why does libertarianism feel so 20th century?
Imagine you are defending a castle. When the north wall gets assaulted, you defend the north wall. When the east wall gets assaulted, you defend the east wall. It is not that you changed your opinion or priorities. It is not your choice to make. Your actions are reactive: you defend whatever your opponent chooses to attack. You have little choice.
There is a castle called The Way Things Used To Be. TWTUTB. The defenders are broadly called conservatives or “Right”. They also tend to call the place Castle Normalcy. Then there are the constant attackers. They are called progressives or “Left”. They call it Castle Oppression.
It is important to see that the Left cannot be defined simply as people who want socialism. It is rather the people who want that castle to fall, and will attack any of several entirely different walls of it. Sometimes they attack the economic wall through socialism, then ease up on that, make a temporary truce with a market that was only halfway regulated to death, and attack something else.
So when they choose to storm the wall called “religious morality”, the defenders erect defenses of “social conservatism”. When they choose to storm the wall “private property”, they defenders erect defenses of “fiscal conservatism”.
They are very often different people but it is fundamentally not a different thing. It is just defending whichever wall is under attack. It is not their call.
Who are libertarians? In many ways, they are people who want a different castle. They have a complete political philosophy. They have their own set of disagreements with, for example, social conservatives. They want a castle where no one legislates religious morality. They have a neat Nolan Chart telling you they are really not the Authoritarian Right. But mostly all this wanting of a different castle is just wishes. It bears little relation to reality.
In reality, the horn sounds, and the ground shakes under marching boots. Another wall is under attack. Libertarians sigh, and they man the walls of “private property”, engaging in “fiscal conservatism”. It is that wall they defend. You could say they would gladly redesign and partially even demolish many other walls. Especially that religious wall tends to really irk them. Even their own wall, “private property”, or more precisely, “19th century-type economics”, they would not leave entirely unchanged if it was up to them. There are holes to patch there, certainly.
But it is not up to them. The bugle sounds. The attack is commencing. The real choice is to join the attackers, join the defenders, or buzz off. And in 90% of the cases, they choose to defend the wall of economics. Private property. Free markets. Capitalism.
Well, it seems for the last 10 years, it is primarily not the wall of economics being stormed. It is immigration and the ethnic makeup of Western nations. It is culture. It is how people see each other and behave toward each other with regard to race, sex, and sexual orientation. It is “minorities”. It is way beyond mere tolerance now. It is not that you must let people be gay anymore, it is more like having a whole gay pride month, and heteronormativity must be condemned, and you must be ashamed if you are a cishet white male and and…
The economic wall seems a bit deserted now. In fact, even the currently most active defenders, the Alt-Right, took some stones from the economic free-market wall to strengthen one of the walls currently under attack: buttressing nationalism through protectionism. This leaves libertarians less than happy.
When it was the economic wall being attacked by socialism, the white working class was also promised some goodies. Now that it is the culture, race, identity wall, the white working class is reviled. Maybe it will change again. One could easily see how Corbyn and Sanders could put economics in focus again, ease the hate on the white working class, present them as victims of capitalism, tone down all this rhetoric that if you are not 100% as accepting of transsexuals as a liberal intellectual then you are a monster, tacitly accept some of the lifestyle conservatism of the white working class, so do this regrouping and enlisting white working class allies, and storm the economic wall again. Then libertarians will have a fight on their hands again.
But now it seems they are out of this battle.
So let me ask you libertarians something while you are at rest. Basically you are considered the political philosophers who have a particular strength in economics. Figure out how to defund the Left! Find a way to make being an SJW a poorly paying job.
It is other people on the walls now, most notably the frog-men. Libertarians could use this pause in fighting for some strategic thinking.
-- https://dividuals.wordpress.com/2017...-20th-century/
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