Shorter Ed Kilgore: “Libertarians are just a bunch of Rand-quoting misanthropes. They’re also inherently sympathetic towards a movement of the rabidly God-’n'-Country obsessed.”
What little participation by “libertarians” in the Tea Party stuff can be explained rather easily, at least from my reading of their activities. Some percentage are people wading fruitlessly into those waters in attempts to clarify to the unfocused angry what the real problem with government is. The rest are only calling themselves “libertarians” because they think it sounds cool, when they’re really just hard-right Republicans.
I’ve been linking to the observations of others concerning this (at least until I got bored with it for awhile), as examples of why I haven’t taken any movement using the word “tea” as more than a laughing stock since Tom Knapp dropped his (completely ideologically unrelated) concept. The only place I can recall seeing “libertarian” sympathy for the Tea Party remaining is at a certain site that has gone missing from my blogroll.
Browsing through the comments, I came across this gem:
‘”One problem I have with libertarianism is that it is an inherently adolescent philosophy:
“If Dad would just get off my back, and let me do whatever I want, I could accomplish so much!”
Which is soon followed by Sonny Boy plowing the family car into a concrete piling. Sometimes Father DOES know best, and you better damn well listen to him… or else.’
So is it fair to say, then, that liberalism is an inherently infantile philosophy (“If I just do what mommy and daddy tell me to do, nothing bad will ever happen to me”)?
People who swipe at libertarianism using parent/child relationship parallels clearly aren’t paying attention to the gist of it. We’re essentially saying both “parents” are worthless drunks that constantly abuse the “kids”, meaning they’d actually be better off on their own.
As for this remark from the same comment:
We’re already under corporatism AND have no control over government, the distinction being made has no basis in reality. You want control of something then you break it down to parts small enough to fully understand and watch — at which point you can’t possibly be talking about a state.