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.
I agree with you entirely, and it doesn't help for their ideology that America itself is all about individualism with our culture and society through capitalism.
I quit keeping up with Libertarianism around 2014. I gave up on it entirely around 2013 and started venturing into Marxism. To many of us though, like I can relate in a way from being in high school and seeing young people who it appealed to. I grew up in Alabama and the Mises institute is in Auburn.
I can tell you from living there, Alabama pretty much is a Libertarian's wet dream in terms of law. There are little to no unions there. It was one of the first states to enact anti-union laws in the 1960s under the guise of 'Right To Work'. Republicans have run it into the ground and in the early 2010s, AL was one of the few states run by the GOP who decided not to expand medicaid or any other benefits. It don't help that the Dems here are cowards and don't even bother campaigning outside the big cities they have control over, so it's pretty much a Libertarian hell hole with how the state GOP have transformed.
I could never be a liberal cause growing up in a deep red southern state, the smugness that liberals have towards working class people down here like me, always turned me off. There is a reason why southerners do not want to listen to their BS. Libs can't help but so condescendingly talk down to us, much like how they talk down to minorities. I listened to the Libertarian stuff when I was in my teens and early 20s trying to find something out of it, but all it did was leave me confused but it helped set me on the path to Marxism. After hearing them talk all this conspiracy nonsense about communism, I wanted to sit down and start reading Marx and it opened new doorways for me in terms of philosophy.
One of the biggest appeals of Libertarian stuff from the late 2000s was how it was anti-government and seen as something against the ruling class and status quo. There is some serious populism in the rural south cause the people there legitimately feel forgotten by the federal government. It would be a breeding ground for a real Marxist movement because the Dems have long abandoned those states and allowed the GOP to use them as a playground for whatever they want. When Sanders started his campaign last year, he did some speeches in Alabama and got positive reception. Sanders isn't a radical leftist, I know, but it still goes to show, the people here want something different, and it's unfortunate that all we got back then was Libertarian propaganda aimed at us.
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.
I agree with you entirely, and it doesn't help for their ideology that America itself is all about individualism with our culture and society through capitalism.
I quit keeping up with Libertarianism around 2014. I gave up on it entirely around 2013 and started venturing into Marxism. To many of us though, like I can relate in a way from being in high school and seeing young people who it appealed to. I grew up in Alabama and the Mises institute is in Auburn.
I can tell you from living there, Alabama pretty much is a Libertarian's wet dream in terms of law. There are little to no unions there. It was one of the first states to enact anti-union laws in the 1960s under the guise of 'Right To Work'. Republicans have run it into the ground and in the early 2010s, AL was one of the few states run by the GOP who decided not to expand medicaid or any other benefits. It don't help that the Dems here are cowards and don't even bother campaigning outside the big cities they have control over, so it's pretty much a Libertarian hell hole with how the state GOP have transformed.
I could never be a liberal cause growing up in a deep red southern state, the smugness that liberals have towards working class people down here like me, always turned me off. There is a reason why southerners do not want to listen to their BS. Libs can't help but so condescendingly talk down to us, much like how they talk down to minorities. I listened to the Libertarian stuff when I was in my teens and early 20s trying to find something out of it, but all it did was leave me confused but it helped set me on the path to Marxism. After hearing them talk all this conspiracy nonsense about communism, I wanted to sit down and start reading Marx and it opened new doorways for me in terms of philosophy.
One of the biggest appeals of Libertarian stuff from the late 2000s was how it was anti-government and seen as something against the ruling class and status quo. There is some serious populism in the rural south cause the people there legitimately feel forgotten by the federal government. It would be a breeding ground for a real Marxist movement because the Dems have long abandoned those states and allowed the GOP to use them as a playground for whatever they want. When Sanders started his campaign last year, he did some speeches in Alabama and got positive reception. Sanders isn't a radical leftist, I know, but it still goes to show, the people here want something different, and it's unfortunate that all we got back then was Libertarian propaganda aimed at us.