Back (say in the 1970s) when libertarianism was understood as “left on social issues, right on economic issues” libertarianism was, if anything, an antidote to tendencies such as alt-right and other forms of nationalism.
Somewhere along the way, libertarianism became the philosophy of “private sector good, public sector bad.” Has this affected the libertarian position on, say, queer rights? Perhaps in a time when the main threat to queer rights was the police, it was obvious to queers and libertarians alike that they were natural allies. If the main concern is employment discrimination, libertarians start framing things in terms of “freedom of association.” Since their concept of liberty is “negative liberty,” what they actually mean by “freedom of association” is “freedom from association.” That’s fair enough, as I see it, since libertarians are hobgoblins for consistency. But I don’t consider them my allies. If someone simultaneously believes that “the world doesn’t owe you a living” and “the world doesn’t owe you a job,” they are a social darwinist. When the “socially liberal” part of libertarianism consists of nothing more than opposition to literal persecution by the state of minority or other groups, while the “economically conservative” portion consists of nothing less than a demand for an unmixed economy completely cleansed of a civilian public sector (in the case of the night watchman STATISTS, or any public sector in the case of the “ancaps”), then we have a particular form of libertarianism whose platform basically translates to “it’s better to be strong than to be weak.” Does that make it a potential on-ramp to brown-faction nationalism? How could it not?
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