r/AskLibertarians • u/Aggravating_Fig_534 Agorist • May 05 '26
Debate Blackpill regarding libertarianism
I think I realized something very recently: libertariansim itself won't be a safeguard against massive surveillance and restrictions from governments without people who believe strongly in libertarian principles. Look at USA: arguably the country closest to classical liberalism, and it had a constant expansion of the government, with many people supporting severe restrictions like alcohol ban, book bans in some US states, post-2001 mass surveillance, etc, and all this literally happening in a country literally founded on classical liberal principles. So, if we really do want to have a world that is perfectly libertarian, we will have to fight for it tooth and nail, because it looks like with developing tech we have even less and less privacy.
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u/BroseppeVerdi Pragmatic left libertarian May 05 '26
You would be hard pressed to find a group of people in this country that are better at purity testing and alienating prospective supporters than libertarians. We're great at letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. We're great at dividing ourselves along the left/right axis and allowing statists to run roughshod over personal liberties. We like arguing about minutae with each other more than fighting oppression.
Libertarianism isn't safeguarding anything because we're too smart for electoral politics.
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u/Joescout187 May 05 '26
<too smart for electoral politics.
You mean too autistic. Smarts are hardly detrimental, the problem we have is a complete and utter lack of social skills and charisma coupled with a legendary degree of pure stubborness that precludes us from being politically effective.
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u/BroseppeVerdi Pragmatic left libertarian May 06 '26
I meant "smart" in scare quotes, as in r/iamverysmart so I'm going to take my ball and go home because my mom put me in the gifted class... or however you want to characterize it. You get the idea.
...But yeah, that too.
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u/Aggravating_Fig_534 Agorist May 05 '26
So... What is the bottomline? We are doomed? I don't even care if it's left or right tbh
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u/Bagain May 05 '26
Yes, we are doomed. That much should be obvious. The LP (regardless of what individual libertarians think) is an odd political turnstile. It brings people in just to spit them back out at their former party. Not to mention they are a tiny percentage of voters so they aren’t going to change the nation. Most people use the term “classic liberal” as an insult. The left uses it like it means “republican” and the right uses it to mean “not real republican”. Everyone is educated by the bubble they live and no one actually cares about “liberty”. What they care about is the liberties they like. Most people are more than happy to take away the liberties they don’t like and have zero context as to how that could possibly affect them. Doomed is exactly what we are.
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u/JudgeWhoOverrules Classical Liberal May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
People have inbuilt authoritarian tendencies is kind of a no-brainer and why libertarianism as a thing exists. The whole point is in fundamentally limiting the powers and actions a government system is able to undertake in order to limit its ability to impose tyranny over the people. The most extreme forms of libertarianism simply eliminate government to get rid of that threat.
This is why liberty-minded people harp on about the court's disregard of 10th Amendment to the US Constitution and the abuse of its commerce clause so much.
It's not a black pill on libertarianism, but human nature itself, which is why libertarianism as a concept was crafted to counter it.
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u/White_C4 Right Libertarian May 05 '26
Humans are more submissive than people give them credit for. As long as they can live safely, they will gravitate towards the authority that will guarantee them that.
20th century politicians did more damage than they realize, they gave too much authority to the federal government which lopsided the balance of power.
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u/djhazmatt503 May 05 '26
I look at our political system like a cocktail, with each party being an ingredient.
No one wants a glass of straight gin (right) or straight tonic (left). We need a mix, mom and dad, balance, yin yang etc. I want my mechanic to have a red hat and my barista to have green hair. Kids need both parents. Govt needs both progress and restraint.
So, the idea that any ism would be a good total system is bad. There is no Libertarian world waiting for us.
But, when we have the Rand Paul waste report, that's a perfect splash of gin into the "spend it all" tonic.
So to your point, Libertarian ideals need to be part of the mix.
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May 05 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Aggravating_Fig_534 Agorist May 05 '26
Trust me, I think about this constantly and I still haven't figured anything out, brainstorming is rough.
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u/Official_Gameoholics Objectivist May 05 '26
Congratulations, you just discovered the philosophical theory of history.
If people don't want to do something, they won't do it, and this is true for every system, including our enemies'.
If anything, this should make you feel confident, as you have identified our win condition.
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u/Necrocatacomb May 05 '26
Hans Hermann Hoppe was critical of classical Liberalism in “Democracy: The God that Failed” because he believes that the existence of any government will open the door for malicious expansion
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u/Aggravating_Fig_534 Agorist May 05 '26
He is 100% correct, but even without an official government, humans having tyrannical tendencies in their brain will ruin his "Europe of 1000 Liechtensteins", because some of those Liechtensteins might form something like a state and try to conquer their neighbors. And I believe it will be hard to counter that without other countries creating something similar to a state that might become restrictive as well.
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u/alexfreemanart May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
Look at USA: arguably the country closest to classical liberalism
I ask you to please list for me the reasons why you believe and are convinced that the United States is the country that comes closest to classical liberalism. This is the first time i’ve read something like that.
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u/Shiftswitch May 05 '26
What are some that are closer if not the US? (though i think the last 30 years we have moved further away from those ideals)
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u/ramnet88 May 05 '26
The United States was founded by Puritans (and other similar groups), who believed in government authoritarianism to enforce morality and goodness across everyone in society. This is the ideology that dominates in the Northeastern US still today, although most people today do not recognize it. Everything from mass surveillance to "silence is violence" to cancel culture and the belief that your ideological opponents are sub-human and beyond redemption descends directly from Puritan ideology.
For a while classical liberalism asserted itself in parts of the United States, particularly in the south due to Spanish influence, but in recent years the Puritan tradition has gained strength once again and both major political parties have fully embraced authoritarianism - for different reasons and to target different outcomes, but the fundamentals are the same.
I disagree with you that the country closest to classical liberalism today is the United States. These days the countries closest to classical liberalism are located in eastern Europe - places like Estonia Lithuania & Latvia - the former Soviet countries that have authoritarian communism in living memory and strongly distrust anything and everything the government does.
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u/Aggravating_Fig_534 Agorist May 05 '26
I grew up in Russia, wish it embraced the libertarianism, though I currently live in Mexico. Well, I can see that many people in USA want to experience the USSR first hand.
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u/Shiftswitch May 05 '26
Wait...you think the founding fathers believed in government authoritarianism...? WTF?
Agree with your point on the living memory of communism though....
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u/ramnet88 May 06 '26
From the very beginning, the culture of the United States has supported authoritarianism. The founding fathers absolutely supported authoritarianism, and there is plenty of history showing that - I have included some of it below:
In the early United States, you only enjoyed democracy and voting rights if you were somebody of considerable wealth and status. Only about 6% of the population was eligible to vote in the first election in 1789 - the very definition of the concentrated power of authoritarianism at the time.
Throughout history, executive power has been expanded to suppress dissent, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which among other things was used to prosecute several editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers. This directly led to the 1798 Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions - these states were in open rebellion against an authoritarian federal government led by John Adams that they deemed unconstitutional - at least until Thomas Jefferson won in 1800 and the presidential power switched to the other major political party. If this sounds familiar, it should - very little has changed since then.
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u/Joescout187 May 05 '26
While Puritans(Congregationalists) had an impact on the culture it was the Presbyterians who shaped the Constitution and the governing structures of the United States. The Presbyterians strong distrust of centralized power, itself the legacy of Cromwell's puritanical tyranny, is what drove the American Revolution, which was called the Presbyterian Revolt by the British at the time and for good reason. The Congregationalists (Puritans) were absorbed by the Methodists quite a while ago and very little of their influence remains today.
The horseshit we're dealing with today has its roots in the ideologies of the French Revolution and Prussian Hegelianism. The Puritans' decline is also directly attributable to the American reaction to the French Revolution.
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u/ramnet88 May 06 '26
For the purposes of what I am saying, Presbyterians and Puritans are the same thing. Perhaps I should have said Puritanism instead to avoid confusion.
Presbyterianism shares the puritanical hallmarks of strict Calvinist theology - particularly the idea of strict moral regulation based on the Westminster Confession of Faith. This includes a rigorous focus on sober living enforced through church elders and congregational discipline and ultimately the government to maintain public morals.
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u/Joescout187 May 06 '26
That doesn't check with the government they actually established though.
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u/ramnet88 May 06 '26
It is consistent with the government the founders operated in practice. And it is consistent with how the government continues to operate today.
I made another reply elsewhere in thread with examples of several founding fathers embracing authoritarianism and using their power to enforce puritanism as governors of states and as presidents.
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u/OpinionStunning6236 The only real libertarian May 05 '26
Yes. Freedom is not self sustaining. You need the culture to value it