Nobody really likes libertarians, including other libertarians. The last few weeks have demonstrated this as they’ve alienated almost everyone who was even remotely sympathetic to their nonsense. These glorified college sophomore know-it-alls have gone from being fringie characters who talk too much but have a few interesting ideas, to being fringie characters who never shut up – and nothing follows. Terrified of potentially gaining political power, and thereby responsibility and accountability, they’ve done everything they can to ensure that the right, which has been most receptive to their ideas, wants nothing more to do with them. It is time for them to go away.
The principle that the government should generally stay out of our business is a good one. When in doubt, let the citizen figure it out. But there are a lot of things we’re not in doubt about. There are a lot of things that we do need to deal with. People are stupid, greedy, and incompetent – and that’s just Californians. I want to live in a civilized society, not a dorm-room, pot-fueled thought experiment. I don’t want to have to spend my life dealing with idiots doing idiotic things more than is absolutely necessary. But libertarianism is about empowering the idiots; the only right they aren’t going on and on about all the time is the right to remain silent, which is ironically the one I wish they’d exercise more.
In some ways, libertarians have been very successful in pushing the non-interference principle. So, what do we have to show for it? Is America a paradise? Is America full of people pursuing their passions without interfering in other people’s lives? Is America better than it was before we started the libertarian experiment? If you think so, I submit you’re taking advantage of the libertarian drug legalization trend.
It’s not Eden. It’s Hades. We have lunatics wandering the streets, raping and killing people. We have drug addicts drug-addicting it up all over our cities. Remember when we were promised that if you legalize drugs, a few pleasant stoners would occasionally puff a doob on the couch in their moms’ basements while they gobbled Doritos and watched videos? Of course, that turned into a pot shop on every street corner and an impenetrable fog of dope haze hanging in the air in our major cities. Just what Americans needed – easy access to a drug that makes people lazier, dumber, and less interesting.
The longtime libertarian goal of drug legalization has turned into a nightmare. So has the toleration of bizarre social pathologies that infect our society. Somehow, we’ve gone from not hassling freaky weirdos to having the freaky weirdos hassling us. If you’re some sort of transvestite, you should at least have the decency to be ashamed of yourself. But now, they’re trying to skeeve on your kids. Now, you’ve got the libertarians defending every kind of sick perversion while slouching toward Bethlehem arm-in-arm with the Democrats, who don’t like any freedom that doesn’t involve genitals.
The libertarians don’t like wars either, especially ones that are in America’s interest. We’re supposed to pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist, and if people hate us, it’s got to be because we are uniquely hateable. Remember, to a libertarian, everything exists in theory, including foreigners. They aren’t real. They don’t actually believe in anything. They’re not serious about their bizarre religions. They are simply NPCs in the libertarian fantasy. That’s why libertarians can’t accept the fact that there are bad people in the rest of the world, that those bad people want to enslave or murder us, and that we’ve got to defend ourselves against those bad people. It messes up the whole narrative of libertarianism, in which they are the one lonely voice standing for freedom, surrounded by all sorts of people oppressing them.
Libertarianism really is an ideology of immaturity and narcissism. It seeks to make heroes of nerds. Whether libertarianism is a functional way of governing a society doesn’t matter because its purpose isn’t actually to govern society. They know they’re never going to get enough power to go; it’s the posing that counts. Conservatism, on the other hand, has a realistic understanding of how human beings are and takes into account that complete freedom becomes complete anarchy, which itself becomes the rule of the strong over the weak. Now, that’s a pretty good deal if you’re strong, but libertarians mostly can’t do a push-up. This is why the only place a libertarian can survive is in a conservative environment, where other people do the hard things necessary to build a society while the libertarian sits on the sidelines and whines about them.
Oh, and what could be more libertarian than a bunch of semi human communist savages burning, looting, and attacking federal authorities? That’s what the Libertarian Party candidate for president last time asked in a tweet so mindlessly ridiculous it could only have been generated by a libertarian: “If you are protesting ICE in your city, carry an American flag with you and wave it proudly. Let the media see the state trying to crush dissent when it’s carrying our national flag. A flag that came out of a revolution against tyranny.” Yeah, there's nothing like the tyranny of enforcing duly-enacted laws. Sheesh.
Libertarians used to at least pretend to be concerned about issues like taxes. Not anymore. They couldn’t care less about taxes. Tax cuts aren’t enough to get Rand Paul, who was occasionally sensible, to support the Big Beautiful Bill. Nor are the immigration provisions, which will help us throw the teaming hordes of illegals out of our country. He doesn’t want that either. Libertarians don’t like borders. But the real reason he doesn’t want to support the BBB is because to support it requires him to vote to increase the debt limit. It’s a point of pride for him not to vote for debt limit increases. He knows that the debt limit will have to be increased. He just doesn’t want to break his streak of never voting for an increase. He’s perfectly happy to let other people do it. His dumb suggestion is that we have a standalone debt increase that he can piously vote against, but that would require meeting the 60-vote filibuster threshold. This little vanity project of his is more important to him than paying whatever obnoxious price it would take to get Chuck Schumer to agree to a standalone debt increase.
Again, it’s all about narcissism, and it’s all about posing. But enough about the ridiculous Thomas Massie. Yes, he says all the right things about federal spending. No, he never does anything about it and never will because that’s not the point. The point for Thomas Massie is to show the world that he stands alone on his principles, a posture made possible because other people do the hard things he won’t. Oh, and he doesn’t like the Jews either, if you didn’t find him annoying enough already.
And then there’s the Cato Institute, which has decided, for reasons that remain unclear, that the borders must be thrown wide open to every Third World peasant who wants to set a fire and wave a foreign flag here in America. For some reason, in the Cato version of libertarianism, the United States doesn’t exist as a sovereign nation. Since they can’t point to any actual benefit to embracing this paradigm, they fall back on the usual libertarian flex, which is to tell anyone who doesn’t sign on with their agenda that they are bad people because of reasons and shut up. Now, it’s unclear where the Cato Institute stands on the Jews, but what they lack in grubby antisemitism they make up with morally bankrupt statements about how American veterans are, at best, suckers and, at worst, imperial stormtroopers hard at work for the Empire.
Again, you might wonder why libertarians are so intent on making themselves loathsome to normal people. Wouldn’t that alienate normal people from being sympathetic to their cause and embracing libertarianism? Precisely! They don’t want people embracing libertarianism. Libertarianism is their thing. They don’t want to popularize it. They feel about libertarianism like a hipster feels about an obscure band: “Murray and the Electric Rothbards rock, but you probably never heard of it.” It’s niche politics for incels and dorks, and no conservative should pretend otherwise. The libertarians should summon up their little remaining dignity and just go away.
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