Updated 2 years ago
I used to be an Ayn Rand Libertarian (and Randians looked down on Libertarians as misshapen amoral lumpenproletariats) and worked for Ron Paul while attending college in Texas. Turns out, his son is an odious POS, but he was also kinda halfsies anyway.
It was all fine and dandy til 2016. I took the Tea Party at their word, and assumed they would continue to push for fiscal conservatism once Obama got out. I was wrong. And the ambivalence of the party towards Trump really turned me off, but the real i-ching on the cake was the advent of Covid-19, which made me really fucking hate libertarians. If I hear one more antimask jackass complain about “their freedoms” I’m going to puke. Turns out the libertarian strain in America is inhabited by people that embody what is wrong with America.
So basically, libertarianism, like its more genteel cousin Objectivism, was fine being a naive young man unschooled in reality, but when the real world intruded, I could see the naked emperor.
And in hindsight, the Objectivists were correct in their assessment of Libertarians. Many of those lumpen masses were indeed malleable by the next petty dictator that came along. It’s just too bad the Randians are a cult built on an industrial age solipsism, and have zero place in the 21st century, which demands cooperation and collaboration – and collective action against pandemics and climate change. We really are all in this together, ultimately.
Which gets to the heart of the problem. Objectivists and Libertarians have no answer to the excesses of nature. The Tragedy of the Commons straw man quickly fell apart in the face of millions of corpses.
Any ideology that does not incorporate nature itself is built on a house of cards.
