Guest Post by Kurt Schlichter
Libertarians are victims of their own success, and the rest of us are victims of the few remaining libertarians, who – like CrossFitters, militant atheists, and vegans – can’t seem to shut up about their obsession. The fact is that conservatism has absorbed most of libertarianism, at least the useful parts of it. I don’t have much use for a conservative who has no libertarian tendencies, but I’ve got no use at all for the self-identified libertarians we see all too often today. They are a bunch of rigid scolds with zero conception of how the world works but no hesitation to explain it to the rest of us.
The libertarian influence on modern American conservatism was a healthy and overdue development, and has opened conservatism to consideration by a much wider audience. Let’s look at old-school conservatism. The stereotype would be John Lithgow as the stick-up-his-Schumer minister in “Footloose,” obsessed with making sure that Kevin Bacon can’t bust a move.
Repressed, boring, self-righteous – that’s the worst of the old-school conservative stereotype. But that’s not conservatism today. It’s not even close. And that has to do with the libertarian influence on our movement. The libertarian streak broadened not only the movement’s possibilities, but the potential for consideration by other folks who didn’t particularly want some dude monitoring their booty calls or regulating their haircuts.
Now, conservatives are not exactly libertines, and generally prize traditional values. As for abortion, there’s no libertarianism there. You just don’t get to kill babies. If live and let live means anything, it means both people involved live.
But libertarianism provided a healthy suspicion of authority and promoted the decentralization a power down to the individual rather than retaining it in social hierarchies, government, and local busybodies. And you see a lot of that libertarian streak in conservatives wanting to be left the hell alone with their guns, home schooling, and unregulated social media ranting.
But not everything libertarians have wrought was good. The joke until about 10 years ago was that libertarians were pretty much only interested in legalizing pot. Well, they got what they wanted. Dope is legal, and our cities smell like Snoop Dogg’s humidor. We’ve made it easier for people to sit around all day ripping bong hits and gobbling Doritos on their moms’ futons. Great, just what America needs, a drug that makes people lazier and less interesting.
And now that they’ve managed to achieve their cannabis dreams, they don’t really seem to have much of an agenda other than pestering the rest of us. You would think with leftists wanting to impose their fascist vision on society, the libertarians would have their work cut out for themselves. But they don’t seem to want to bother with the leftists; they seem to want to bother with conservatives. Maybe it’s because the leftists don’t pay any attention to them and we do.
To the extent the modern libertarians get involved in the woke wars, it’s always to tell us conservatives fighting a rear guard action against it that we can’t use any kind of tactic or technique that might actually help us win. Hey Governor DeSantis, you can’t…withdraw a massive government subsidy for a Fortune 500 company. We see cancellation culture in effect, but we only hear from libertarians when we cons attempt to turn the wokes’ rules back against them.
Libertarians seem baffled by the notion that sometimes you have to actually cause your opponent pain before he stops doing bad things. We have to be illiberal to force a return to classical liberalism. Do you know how we stopped Nazis from killing? We killed them. But libertarians are notoriously fussy about getting their soft hands dirty. Purity is everything in modern libertarianism, because it’s all a pose anyway. It’s not a functional ideology. It’s a hobby for political geeks to pursue for a while until they grow up and start being Republicans.
More troubling is that now we’re seeing their nonsense manifest in the form of foreign policy idiocy. For some reason, libertarians don’t particularly care about liberty, certainly not other people’s. But they don’t even care about their own, at least not enough to protect it. They seem to believe that liberty is a natural state of man that just sort of happens. Libertarianism has now become associated with the lamest kind of pacifism, in which fashionably cynical college students babble about “forever wars” and argue that the United States doesn’t have any legitimate interests past the surf line.
Libertarianism, or at least the rump ideology that remains after its absorption into conservatism, is now the domain of glorified sophomores running their mouths like American politics is some dorm room bull session at the University of College.
They deny the existence of any kind of actual enemy. Of course, to accept the existence of some kind of enemy would require they provide an explanation of what to do about said enemy. Now, adults understand that what you do about enemies is fight and defeat them. But if you take fighting and defeating off the table when you still have enemies, well, then you get what happened to the 1,400 Israelis when the Hamas savages poured out of Gaza the other week.
Some of the most shameful libertarian nonsense has swirled around Hamas’s declaration of war on Israel. Sometimes it’s hard to tell these people apart from Rashida Tlaib’s dormtrooper corps of murderous college students. The weird fixation of libertarians on pacifism requires that it deny the necessity to ever defend anything, and an easy way to do that is to look at the victim of an aggressor and decide he’s the bad guy for not sitting there and taking it.
As it is, modern libertarianism in America is an anemic, bespoke little ideology possible only in an environment where other people have agreed to do the hard work of building and defending the society and made a safe space for them. Do you think there are any libertarians in Gaza? How do you think they’d fare with Hamas? Or in Putin’s Russia, or in China or in Iran? Well, they would fare poorly, because they can only exist in a place that other people have built and defended using the very same tactics and techniques they ostentatiously reject.
I don’t hate libertarians. I just don’t think about them very much, because anything that was useful about them we’ve already co-opted into conservatism. They remain a tiresome little fringe group of self-righteous nerds who are eager to share their received wisdom with the rest of us. Oh well. I’m just going to keep exercising my liberty to ignore them.
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Said the joker who gave us Ben Shapiro, Lindsay Graham, the Patriot act, W Bush and the Iraq war. I’ll stick with Ron Paul
“Today’s Libertarians” are just yesterday’s retread neocon leftists.
This should not be a surprise to anyone paying attention.
I had a big boy job illustrating for The Weekly Standard and several
other “conservative” rags back in the day. I got fired for submitting
work that walked off the neocon reservation. NR being the first to show me the door.
I illustrated for many non political mags and papers too, but never got fired from them.
My work can still be seen where Adobe Illustrator doesn’t hold sway.
Kurt Schlicter is super annoying, at least he is when I bother to read any of his retarded drivel.
Me too, Ed. I normally pass over his “retarded drivel” but scanned this one to determine the gist of it-which took about 2 paragraphs.
Yep. I scan his shit just to find a line to hang an insult on. I notice that his supporters have kind of faded away since I wandered off this time. Good to see that you’re still here.
The Libertarian Menace must be dealt with!
Even here in good ole’ middle America I find libertarians as rare as jackalope!……..
Why do we have to be “insert moniker here”…..type?…,for the umpteenth time.
I’m an AMERICAN and ALL that the IDEALS represent……divorced from my government and the evil THEY do in my name!!
But if you think you can be one without faith in Jesus Christ ,I believe you’re sadly mistaken……..Read our founders words!…
You see,I also believe the Constitution is a CEILING,not a floor with which to tile over ,carpet or build walls on…….NOT A FOUNDATION!….that’s what your FAITH is for…….foundation!…….America’s freedom to divide itself politically is its biggest downfall…….you’ve chopped it up into so many pieces…it’s a collage not a picture!…
Sure Kurt you are sorta right , problem is you again aren’t really willing to go back down the causal chain of events to see that a lot of the reason so much of the world is hostile towards US is because we been up in their business and screwing them over behind the facade of our surface rationale ( bait and switch ) ” promoting democracy “. Iran for instance , it really all got started between us and them when they toppled the CIA installed puppet the Shah did it not ? Pot legalization ?Yeah I’d be for that but we gotta get rid of the damn welfare state that ultimately puts us on the hook for other peoples bad decisions ( when a druggie supposedly cant cope anymore they just go on SSDI and we gat tjhe pleasure of subsidizing and incentivizing their poor decisions ) . Same with the border , ya cant have open borders AND a welfare State as the saying goes.
But hey nice try of chilling for the MIC cuz alot a people made a shit ton of money via that whole complex so “prosperity ” right ? Wrong , destroying things and killing people at others expense doesnt equal a net gain like so many other ” occupations I could obviously cite ( growing food, producing energy , building any number of things that have exponential gains written into them . But hey nice try schilling for the rotten edifice that is coming down, because well its a rotten edifice . Instead of refusing to let go maybe just make other arrangements bro , its what we do in the real world .
I find Schlichter far more annoying than any libertarians in this country. I have never written a article here on TBP but I may write one listing all the things/people that are less annoying than Schlichter, it would be a lengthy list.
That’s funny, Kurt, that you think you know how the worlds works. Nice ego.
This idiot has no idea what he is talking about. Some of the articles on Burning Platform are pure crap. They need to focus on quality and not quantity.
jdog, I doubt anyone would shed a tear if Admin stopped posting Schlichter’s retarded ramblings.
Huh? Where is he getting all this from? I’m an anarcho-libertarian myself. I want a truly representative democracy myself where everyone that gets a vote gets in office and people can hold multiple offices and everyone that is elected gets full veto authority. It’s the only way to actually have a truly representative democracy that actually protects the rights of the minority (the minority being every single individual person). But whatever.
You are not a very educated libertarian. True libertarians understand that all government is evil by its nature, and that we need much less of it, if any.
That is why the libertarian party is a joke. How can you have a political party, when you do not believe in the legitimacy of government to begin with. When you can show me the legal argument that you and whomever else agrees with you should be able to make laws that are legally binding for me to obey when I don’t agree with them maybe we can talk.
Dream on. The peasants don’t want any of that and the ruling class certainly doesn’t. Libertarianism is a fantasy
The OP is full of crap!!!!
Schlichter is the typical clueless statist who can’t figure out who the greatest enemy of humanity in the history of the world really is and has completely destroyed the world. It is none other than the corrupt, immoral, illegal, illegitimate USSA, the Great Satan and its fake politics, fake money, fake government, fake hegemony, fake power and control, and fake righteousness.
No human or group of humans should ever usurp aggressive action using power and control over others and exempt themselves from any higher authority. The Great Satan is not just the perfect title for this despicable criminal operation. It is truth, sovereignty, peace, sound money (Bitcoin), freedom that is today replacing this bankrupt, braindead, group of malignant narcissists who are doomed to hell.
Yes, it will get worse before it gets better. Make a choice and take a side. Good or Evil? What do you prefer? God or satan?
what is wrong, or undesirable, about ‘hurt no person, or their property’ as a basis for law and society?
Because then he wouldn’t be able to excuse the chosen for genocide and condemn the victims for fighting back. I’ve said for a long time now that the only property rights these people believe in is the right to keep the property they have stole.
I thought I was mostly Libertarian. I have been stacking and packing all this soap for the coming big hand dirtying. I guess now I am straightened out.
Don’t confuse being a libertarian with being a Libertarian. Small l means you have libertarian beliefs (that’s the good stuff the author writes about) and a Libertarian means a member of the political party, pretty much a joke from day one. He is correct legalizing pot was their big campaign pledge, but it is either decriminalized of legal almost everywhere now days which means they have nothing.
The two main libertarian principles are pretty simple.
1. Your rights end where mine begin, and my rights end where yours begin.
2. All taxation is theft.
Pretty easy to support.
There are two main groups that comprise modern libertarianism, though there is a great deal of overlap:
Drug users and pedophiles.
You’re either a liar or an ignoramus.
Hoping you’re a drug user.
Where were the libertarians during the Covidiocy. They put on their masks, took their shot, and stayed home. They didn’t even go to church. Gutless cowards.
Libertarians victim of their own success?? What a joke. Libertarianism has proven itself to be a political dead-end. The financial reform it calls for is never going to happen while at the same time the belief that private capital can do whatever it likes has been used to promote widespread tyranny and erosion of rights.
There’s no greater waste of time than reading something by ol’ RP, Lew Rockwell or some rehashed diatribe by von Mises. It’s like all the loudmouths on Twitter demanding the congress disband or listing their ten point plan to restructure the global economy. None of it is ever going to happen.
Not sure if this fits or not … just tossing it out there …
https://www.unz.com/article/dynamiting-the-temple-of-ayn-rand/