re: #260 Unabogie

Libertarians believe in maximal freedom, which is why they support a guy who wants to ban protests, track women who may be pregnant, and force Christian religion on people who don’t believe in it.

The problem with party platforms in general is that each person is carrying around a personal definition of “freedom” and it’s only when the bullet hits the bone that you find out exactly how much they value their personal “freedom to…” relative to other’s “freedom from.”

Since libertarians really lean into individual freedom as the basis of their beliefs, that mated with terminal capitalism brain rapidly becomes “I need a state structure exclusively to enforce my property rights, which coincidentally looks a lot like an oligarchy.” When a libertarian is formed, the heavens flip a coin.

But also I’d observe that fascism has broad-spectrum appeal because it’s not an ideology, it’s a cocktail of magic thinking and heightened emotion that provides “solutions” for whatever ails you. “We can solve problems by throwing somebody in the Moloch, trust us you wouldn’t like them anyway and they deserve it” is built into the world order already, so it’s not super hard to elaborate on that process— if Omelas had four tormented children you wouldn’t have a mortage to service.

All fascists, regardless of their starting point, have decided that they’d rather win then stay consistent*, and because ideas are infinitely mutable they can take whatever they believe in and glue on fascism. A bunch of British suffragettes became Black Shirt auxillaries. Communazis aren’t just a joke from The Simpsons. Lots of liberals go fash because they feel their normal lives have been threatened and decide “the smart thing” is to back somebody that will put the steel toe into people that scare them and/or scrape back the money being handed out to people with low SAT scores.

[stares in Patriot Act, but also in welfare job requirements, but also The War on Terror]

If you want to fash libertarians, you lean into their hyperindividualism and present all alternatives as dangerous collectivism…ironically selling collectivism of the inherently superior as the only remedy. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to feel comfortable. And if you’re willing to squint you can turn Donald Trump into a rugged individualist: he doesn’t moderate what he says, he respects property rights, he’s a supporter of free markets, etc.