From Fardels Bear, John Jackson on libertarians in the civil rights era; and on the strange parallels between noted libertarian Baldy Harper’s writings and those of the antisemitic Right. Libertarians should celebrate Emancipation as much as they do the end of Prohibition. Will Wilkinson on how libertarian democracy skepticism infected the American Right. What are the costs of libertarianism? Claire Potter on Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, revisited (and more). The master class on the make: Andrew Hartman on how the white backlash found its academic bona fides. Brad DeLong on six faces of right-wing chain-forging economist James Buchanan.
Libertarianism and the alt-Right: Hans-Hermann Hoppe is in search of a libertarian strategy for social change. Jerry Taylor: “The libertarian-to-Nazi feeder system for the alt-right is becoming an all-too-common tale. Libertarians should think very hard about why that is”. The intellectual wasteland of libertarianism continues to provide a safe space for fascists: It simply has philosophical room for them, and no particular injunctions to turn them away. Libertarianism isn’t a “gateway drug” to the alt-Right: Those who migrate from libertarianism to the alt-Right have rejected the essence of the freedom movement and its philosophy (and more). Libertarianism has nothing to offer populist authoritarians. Libertarians are still looking for the next thing.
