this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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It's funny, because I watched it play out in real time on Reddit.
It all changed with the Tea Party. Not at first - a fact that the statists on both sides of the aisle want to bury is that the first couple of Tea Party protests were genuinely libertarian, and were in fact against the Bush administration.
But when Obama was elected, the Republicans moved to co-opt the Tea Party, and succeeded, and both they and the statists on the left were then more than happy to pretend that it was always a Republican thing, since as much as they might differ on the details, they both agree that the idea of being free of government entirely cannot be allowed to prosper.
And almost immediately, r/libertarian went to complete shit, as it was taken over by overt authoritarians who just want to eliminate all of the bits of the government they don't like - like gun laws and public assistance of any form - so the rest of the government can then focus entirely on punishing people for being too liberal or too brown or too smart, and they themselves can be free to just shoot anyone they want.
It took me a while to figure out that that change wasn't limited to just Reddit - that libertarianism as a whole had been co-opted by those violently authoritarian shitstains.
And it's certainly not a coincidence that the net result of that is that there's no longer an umbrella term in the US for people who just want people to be more free, and "libertarianism" has become just another variety of authoritarianism.
Its important to keep restating these histories. Its easy to think of the past as monolithic, but instances like these are a reminder that its actually a tapestry of individual threads, none of which were predetermined at the outset.
This is why things like the modern tanky movement concern me. Effectively, they are the same people who pre-supposed the modern neofacist movement: young edgelords and older dumb edgelords who never matured in their world view. Movements like this are easily coopted towards broader political goals by people who understand how to operate them far better than their originators. The Koch brothers looked at the tea party and went full youmadethis.meme on it.
I'm of the belief that the libertarian philosophy must be defended. We cannot roll over and let it be twisted and contorted to the wills of another. The same goes for the Gadsden Flag.