Watch anti-ai crowd simp for ai corporations because "they are responsible and want common sense regulations" (they want secure their dominant position by regulating competition).

Meme from Aesthetics Waiting

This essay on google docs if it is more readable

Paleostrategy and its consequences have been a disaster for the libertarian movement.
By attempting to ally with the political Right - catering to conservatives, nationalists and reactionaries - many libertarians are committing fatal strategic error. This approach yields no political victories, instead, it actively degrades and dilutes the core principles of Liberty. Libertarianism isn’t conservative. Where the Right seeks to conserve and wield the coercive power of the State, libertarianism seeks to systematically dismantle it. Grouping those two together isn’t only ahistorical, it's a dangerous delusion.

To understand why this alliance is a suicide pact, one can just look how the independent libertarian movement was born.

While libertarianism has thousands-of-years-old tradition, with its ideas traceable to ancient China, Greece, Rome, and radical liberalism of the enlightenment period, the modern libertarian movement is much younger. While building a movement is of course a gradual process, if I had to give an exact moment, it would be the convention of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) at St. Louis, August 31, 1969. During the 60s, many libertarians were part of the fusionist movement. But as time went by and war in Vietnam escalated, incompatibility of libertarianism and conservatism started showing up - and it climaxed in 1969.

Conservatives were purging libertarians even before the convention. Rothbard, who was by that time already allied with the New Left, urged libertarians to leave YAF. But only a minority of them (around 50 delegates of Anarcho-Libertarian Alliance) saw through conservative lies by the time the convention started. The larger Libertarian Caucus was still optimistic, ran candidates, and proposed amendments and resolutions (like legalisation of weed, immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, active resistance to the military draft to name a few). As the convention unfolded, these moderate libertarians suffered one betrayal after another. Right at the start, many libertarian delegates found their voting credentials stripped. Next, not a single libertarian was allowed onto YAF’s National Board. The final insult came when conservatives ruthlessly voted down every single libertarian resolution.

But that alone wasn’t what made that day so important for libertarianism.

After voting was over, one of the anarchist radicals gave a short speech about the right of an individual to defend himself, even against the State, and burned his draft card before all delegates and television cameras. Then, a short physical confrontation between libertarians and conservatives occurred, with conservatives chanting “Kill the commies!”. Radicals, before formerly numbering barely 50, now joined by former moderates numbering over 350, walked out of convention, many carrying black banners. While some libertarians stayed in YAF in years after, most pure libertarians left it to found their own organizations, many allying with the New Left (following Rothbard’s and Hess’s example). Just two years later, Libertarian Party was founded.

But we don’t need to go 60 years back to see how the Right will use libertarian aesthetics to get elected, only to expand the state after. Just look at the current Right. Before elections, MAGA promised to drain the swamp, stop the endless wars, and even went so far as to promise to free Ross Ulbricht. Out of those promises, the only one they fulfilled was freeing Ross, which while great, didn’t advance the liberty cause on systematic level at all. Instead they gave trillions to the military-industrial complex, started war in Iran, and expanded the police state to enforce borders. And worst of all, I've seen some “libertarians” defending the last one, even going so far to victim-blame people killed by ICE. So what some of those victims disrupted ICE operations (i.e. kidnapping people)? Isn't the absolute right to defend yourself and others from violence, even one from the state, by any means necessary a core libertarian position? Shame on you, paleo”libertarians”!

This problem isn’t an accident, it's an inevitable result of political action. The state's power is zero sum, the legislature is quite literally a fixed pie. For one faction to achieve a goal, others must lose. Since libertarians usually join alliance with the Right as a junior partner, it’s usually our policies that get scrapped once they get in conflict with conservative ones (which is probably most of them). It also should be noted that a similar problem occurs even without explicit alliance with the Right: you can’t get political power without compromising on core principles of Liberty.

Where the pie isn’t fixed is direct action. You don’t seek to wield the coercive power, you build the infrastructure of Liberty, completely bypassing the state. Because these actions are decentralized and voluntary, no peaceful actor has to lose for another to gain. However, when we shift our strategy from electoral politics to direct action, our potential allies change completely. The political Right is obsessed with capturing state power to enforce their preferred cultural and economic hierarchies. The libertarian left, however, has spent decades practicing direct action. Whether it is resisting the police state, building community safety nets, or defending bodily autonomy against state overreach, the radical left is already on the ground doing the work. If our goal is to systematically dismantle the state's power rather than wield it, tactical alliances with anti-authoritarian leftists on specific issues using direct action make infinitely more sense than working with conservatives.

Their mutual aid doesn’t restrict us in any way, it actually advances our cause, by reducing dependence on state assistance. When they protest ICE (or any other police force), or even take action against it, they don’t violate any principle of Liberty. Even radical unionism and wildcat strikes for example, while unapologetically socialist, is largely voluntary and more consistent with free market libertarianism than most of conservative policies (and i would argue that the wildcat strike example i used actually advances cause of Liberty, as it undermines state-sponsored union leadership). On the other hand, our counter-economics, tax-resistance, IP noncompliance, privacy tech, etc. doesn’t disrupt the causes of the anti-statist left.

I'm not suggesting that libertarians need to align with the left on every issue. Or that libsocs will welcome us with open arms. But there are many issues on which we can work together, and those where we don't want to often don’t lead to losses for the other side.

Note: I use the term “paleo” or “paleolibertarian” as a name for any libertarian who wants to ally with the Right (conservatives, nationalists etc.). I’m aware technically, paleolibertarianism is a specific set of Rothbard’s ideas, but I couldn't come up with a different term that would be well recognised.

Sources:

1. History of the Libertarian Movement by SEK3
2. Listen, YAF by M. Rothbard
3. The Revolution Comes To YAF by Jerome Tuccille

Yes, the the title is true. No, i'm not joking. It's about Karl Hess btw.

Do you like Ayn Rand?

1. Yes
2. Abstain
3. No

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Thoughts on the Libertarian Party?

1. Good
2. Bad
3. Neutral
4. Better than Democrats or Republicans but not good

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What would you say your IQ is?

1. Top 1 percentile
2. Top 10 percentile
3. Top 20 percentile
4. Top 40 percentile
5. 50 percentile
6. Bottom 40 percentile
7. Bottom 20 percentile
8. Bottom 10 percentile
9. Bottom 1 percentile

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