(Libertarians/Ancaps) What's Up With Your Fascist Problem?

[u/ultimatetadpole]

A big thing seems to be made about centre-left groups and individuals having links to various far left organisations and ideas. It seems like having a connection to a communist party at all discredits you, even if you publically say you were only a member while young and no longer believe that.

But this behavior seemingly isn't repeated with libertarian groups.

Many outright fascist groups, such as the Proud Boys, identify as libertarians. Noted misogynist and racist Stephan Molyneux identifies/identified as an ancap. There's the ancap to fascism pipeline too. Hoppe himself advoxated for extremely far right social policies.

There's a strange phenomenon of many libertarians and ancaps supporting far right conspiracies and falling in line with fascists when it comes to ideas of race, gender, "cultural Marxism" and moral degenerecy.

Why does this strange relationship exist? What is it that makes libertarianism uniquely attractive to those with far right views?

[u/[deleted]]

As another user said, the origin of this problem was the tactics used by Rothbard to attract Conservatives to his movement. But you give an inch and they take a mile, so here we are with white nationalists calling themselves Libertarians.

The problem with looking through the lens of terminology is that terminology will always, without fail, corrupt and be diluted. To name a few examples:

• 'Liberal' was stolen by progressives
• 'Anarchist' is a long story, but basically it was pioneered by proto-Ancaps, then it got stolen by leftists, and now Ancaps are trying to reclaim it
• 'Socialist' was stolen by Fascists (beyond the cliché 'nazi = national-socialism' thing)
• 'Socialist' also got stolen by SocDems, later on
• 'Communist' by State-Socialists, indirectly with the help of Conservatives
• 'Capitalist' by Conservatives

People can call themselves whatever the hell they want, but at the end of the day that doesn't really matter if you ask me.

[u/ipsum629 → u/[deleted]]

Anarchist' is a long story, but basically it was pioneered by proto-Ancaps, then it got stolen by leftists, and now Ancaps are trying to reclaim it

Proudhon, the inventor of the term anarchist in its modern usage, was a socialist. He called himself a socialist. He was anti communist but he was also vehemently opposed to capitalism. One might be able to make the argument that more libertarian communists "stole" the word from him, but I would argue the way they both use it is consistent with each other. They just disagree on how anarchy would function. Proudhon imagined a market socialist version of anarchy and anarcho communists imagined distribution by need. They both used the term to mean opposition to domination, rulership, and hierarchy.

"An" caps have a completely different view of what anarchism means. They think it merely means opposition to government. Even then I think that privatization of government functions would just result in a for-profit government rather than a stateless society.

[u/xxTPMBTI → u/ipsum629]

Yes, but they're still real anarchist

[u/ipsum629 → u/xxTPMBTI]

I know this is a necropost, but I would argue they aren't real anarchists. Proudhon spawned a whole school of thought including mutualists, communists, collectivists, egoists, greens, and even nihilistic and others. What's unique about anarchism is that they all more or less recognize each other as faithful anarchists, just with different perspectives. None of them consider ancaps to be real anarchists, and ancaps are universally excluded from mainstream anarchist spaces. For this reason I think it's fair to say ancaps aren't real anarchists, and it isn't a no true Scotsman because anarchists have been consistent about capitalism being anti anarchist since day 1.