Libertarians in 2008-2012 were mostly just a reaction to how shit the democrats are. Like back then no one in mainstream politics supported legal weed or gay marriage.
It was also about the discontent around the foreign policy consensus that dominated both the Bush and Obama administrations.
I don't really think most people thought much about the economic side of it.
This is true from what I remember. I was in high school in 2008 when the Ron Paul stuff happened, and by 2010-2012, the disappointment of Obama was truly being felt, and people were willing to listen to the Libertarian stuff around then. The Libertarians pretty much took up the anti-war side when Obama was continuing Bush's wars.
I also remember that Libertarians and conspiracy theorists were literally the only people in media who said anything bad about the NDAA when that was passed. Trump has been using that with the DHS hauling off protesters in Portland, but when Obama passed it, no one said a word except the Libertarian crowd. They were definitely different back then to some extent.
Like Mike Gravel found a legitimate spot for himself within the libertarian party back then, the whole movement was different.
I would say a sizeable portion of new (younger) socialists came from that libertarian era. That's why it sucks now, all the non-psychotic people left for a more coherent ideology.
a more coherent ideology
You really hit the nail on the head here: libertarianism is an incoherent ideology, and anyone who (1) engages with it beyond a meme level and (2) is bright enough to recognize the contradictions will eventually leave for something that is at least internally consistent.
The upside of this is that the ones who at least give a little bit of a fuck about other people sometimes turn towards socialism. The downside of this is that the rest turn to fascism, which is all of the full-throated praise of capitalism you get with libertarianism with none of the protections for minority groups. If you want some easy dunks and want to potentially steer some folks away from fascism, /r/libertarian is not a bad place to do it.
Libertarians are just as likely to become normal liberals as they are to move further right. The legalize gay weed types were always just liberals who didnt like how socially conservative the democrats are, there was a similar phenomena with the lib dems in the UK during the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown years.
Additionally among the right, they tend to be non interventionist which is what the American right was before the internationalism of the Reagan administration.
The legalize gay weed types were always just liberals who didnt like how socially conservative the democrats are
In my far too extensive experience with libertarians, it seems like the majority are conservatives (certainly on economic issues) who have a pet issue or two that differs from Republican party orthodoxy (pot and LGBT rights are the classic examples). I think that's a strong predictor of where they're likely to go when they realize libertarianism is nonsense.
they tend to be non interventionist which is what the American right was before the internationalism of the Reagan administration
There was certainly an interventionist wing of the Republican Party before Reagan, but party orthodoxy was firmly imperialist. Look at Eisenhower and Nixon, and look at how a recurring attack on Democrats was that they were "soft on communism [abroad]." From about the start of WWII through at least the end of the Cold War (and still largely up through today) there was this bipartisan idea that "politics should stop at the water's edge." Sure, candidates would make hay out of foreign policy blunders during election cycles, but both parties were broadly in favor of using the military to attack anything hostile to capitalism wherever it might crop up.
The american right pre Reagan was not really tied to the Republican party in the same way that it became, there was a movement post Nixon though to make the party more conservative. Republicans were a liberal party and democrats were a segregationist social democratic party. The john birch society right and the kkk right were different on their views around foreign intervention.
Also being a conservative who supports LGBT rights and supports legalizing drugs makes no sense unless their a single issue gun voter or something.
Libertarians in 2008-2012 were mostly just a reaction to how shit the democrats are.
I got a lot more Both Sides energy from 2008 Libertarians. Nevermind the Buttcoin / End The Fed hype. Libertarians genuinely believed they had an answer to everything and a legitimate third way between Socialism Obama and Military Industrial Complex McCain. Lots of "How I became a millionaire overnight and you could too if you just worked harder" stories and attitudes. Uber was going to save us. Gold backed privately issued 3rd party currency was going to save us. Elon Musk's business genius was going to save us. The American Dream was still strong in Libertarian communities.
Modern Libertarians mostly just seem to care about weed and guns. There's no strong underlying theory of economics. There's far less Business Cult style wanna-be-entrepreneurship. They're all feeling as helpless as the rest of us.
Libertarians in 2012: I want to fuck minors.
Libertarians in 2020: Trump should give me a state-issued minor to fuck.
Nothing about Libertarians changed. They always were against unions and pushing for violence against workers. I guess the only difference was in aesthetics. Back in 2008 and up to 2012, they tried to market themselves as being cool with the Ron Paul shit.
As someone who went through this pipeline, here's how I'd describe it. Libertarianism from 2008-2012 was a diverse group of people frustrated by the vast malevolent consensus of the two ruling parties. There were a lot of disappointed Obama voters and baby leftists in that group who lacked a theoretical understanding of what was taking place (not like our education system or commercial culture would point us in the right direction). Libertarianism by 2020 are the few remaining hold-outs who either stopped paying attention, never did any further research into the causes of state oppression, never critically analyzed the candidates running under the Libertarian banner, or are fundamentally happy about social darwinism. The only people left are the ones who want to watch the state burn and smoke a joint on top of their stockpile of Chef Boyardee cans while shooting anyone who looks at it.
It only takes a matter of time to realize getting rid of the state just means we will be ruled directly by Amazon, Palantir, and Blackwater instead, while ceding any modicum of democratic input we currently have.
I feel you there. I had many friends in high school who went through Libertarianism. Many of them had already started out down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole in their teens and that often went hand in hand with Libertarianism.
The people I knew who started out as Libertarians; one of them turned into a full scale neo-nazi by 2015, another one managed to snap out of it and got into Marxism years down the line after the Trayvon Martin shooting, which was when Libertarians went full mask off with their racism and didn't bother trying to hide it anymore.
I remember in the late 2000s/early 2010s, Stefan Molyneaux had some weird cult online with his radio show and Libertarian stuff. This was years before he went into the Nazi stuff he's into now. There was another Libertarian guy online around 2012-2013 I remember called Chris Duane, who had this series of short videos called 'the greatest truth never told'. Duane from what I remember, got caught up in some silver scandal with another Libertarian, and he basically got his money and got out before more people realized what his game was.
Main thing I remember back then was Libertarians used to scream about the impending dollar collapse and how you needed to buy silver and gold.
LOL yeah the Fed/monetary stuff was one of the more funny points. Like yeah, the Fed is scheming. It is an oligarchical institution making political decisions about monetary policy... but gold? Silver? You want to return to specie? Uhh, good luck I guess.
Ultimately I think they came to terms with the contradiction between their infatuation with free market capitalism and its mandatory requirement for endless growth vs. using a finite resource as currency, but Bitcoin popped up just in time to give them a whole new wave of brainworms.
100% agree with you. The gold/silver stuff never made any sense to me, cause they would talk about a dollar collapse and potential anarchy and full scale violence. In that scenario, people aren't going to be worried about currency, they'll be trying to get food which will prove to be more important than their gold and silver.
My grandfather from my dad's side was into collecting coins and he was a conservative, so I went to him about the Libertarian stuff, and he flat out told me the gold and silver thing was a waste of money and laughed over it. He explained to me that anyone investing in that stuff is just going to hold onto it and finally sell during a recession when gold and silver is up. He thought they were con artists and flat out told me that, and he was right.
Bitcoin pretty much killed their whole interest in massing gold and silver. Suddenly they were all into cryptocurrency and I remember the Youtube Libertarians would make all these videos about how great Bitcoin was.
I mean, it's really funny because if they looked back at history they would see there was a whole populist movement waged by yeoman farmers - their prototypical independent free citizen - to get paper currency introduced. Because what was happening was that specie was scarce, sitting in vaults, and all the regular people were subject to even worse forms of arbitrary financial manipulation.
From my experiences with Libertarians back in the day, most of them were not well read on history at all. They studied American history and most of that revolved around the federal reserve and them mythologizing the industrial era and how amazing it used to be back then when there were no unions or labour rights and how child labour was some how good. I will never forget getting into a huge argument some years back with a Libertarian who talked about Andrew Jackson and was glorifying him as "one of the best presidents ever". His entire reason why, hinged on conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the banks and how Jackson dismantled the federal reserve.
I've noticed old school Libertarians more and more on r/collapse when I browsed there this past month, usually arguing with Marxists and talking about the evils of the federal reserve and how this country has been set to fail ever since the US moved away from gold and went to the dollar.
They don't care about the abuses regular people go through cause Libertarians have it in their mind that one day they are going to be rich and get to exploit people. The old meme of the guy with the boot on his face and it says "one day I'll own this boot", that's their thinking in a nutshell.
The problem is, at the end of the day it is a hyper-individualist ideology. People are happy with it as long as it works in their favor, and they are dissatisfied with it if it doesn't. Unfortunately for them, an orthodox libertarian society would work for even fewer people than the hellscape we know as neoliberalism. I had reverted to Liberalism for several more years before I eventually ended up becoming a Marxist, and learning history in more detail is ultimately what did it for me.
Edit: It just does suck that the Fed is ultimately evil. They're not wrong about that point, but they completely lack the historical context or material analysis to come up with a solution. No, Gold was not a better system. No, it's not the Jews. It is evil because it will tip the scale whichever way it needs to in order to preserve stability for the ruling elite and global capitalism. It will print free money when the oligarchs are in trouble, and it will constrict supply when it can strangle the smallholders. And no, burning down the planet with Bitcoin farms isn't the solution either. Monetary policy is only one aspect of economic justice, and a system dominated by early adopting tech bros is not going to deliver us economic justice. No more than a financial system dominated at its inception by Hamiltonian slaveowners can.
Libertarians actually think that everything should fundamentally be "for sale" be it your life, your labor, your children, your sex organ, your blood, your DNA, the very land littered with the bones of your ancestors. The value of human life under Libertarianism is always negotiable. When threatened, they cheapen it.
What changed? Was this a natural progression of a poisoned ideology? Shitty propaganda from Shapiro types? Excessive online radicalization?
