Cold War-era fusionism is the original sin of libertarianism and was its downfall. Spending decades making common cause with right-wing nutjobs, minimizing the existential threat to pluralism they so clearly pose, and painting left-of-center moderates as somehow indistinguishable from Stalin—none of that was without consequence. Reactionary ideology permeated the entire project and eventually displaced all¹ the liberal strands.² In fact, the thing called libertarianism today is not a strain of liberalism at all. It’s a thin veneer plastered over Trump-style reactionary authoritarianism.

Anyone seriously committed to any form of liberalism, classical or otherwise, must reject it.

Mind your own damn business, Tim Walz’s rallying cry, is far truer to the principles libertarians claim to hold dear than the fascism, but we’ll let you smoke pot on your way to the gas chamber bullshit they actually fight for these days.

Notes

1. Okay, not literally all of them: Radley Balko is still keeping it real. ↩
2. There were attempts in the aughts and teens to disentangle libertarianism from its death pact with the right, like Wilkinson-style liberaltarianism or the whole bleeding heart libertarianism thing, but it was too little, too late. The disease had decades to metastasize. ↩