How the Libertarian Movement Missed the Authoritarian Moment

This is a longform interview with Shikha Dalmia of The Unpopulist/Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. To give some background on Shikha Dalmia, she worked at Reason Magazine, however her anti-Trump stance proved to be a step out of line for Reason which is why she has been raising the alarm regarding right-wing cancel culture and authoritarianism which has been dangerously overlooked, even more so from many "libertarians" who were able to spot authoritarianism with an eagle eye from healthcare reform to campus speech restrictions but were not able to do the same for Trump whose authoritarianism has been blatant.

Here are the highlights below, the rest of the article can be found in the link above.

Shikha on her break with libertarianism

My break with libertarianism happened when Trump arrived on the scene. I was working at Reason magazine at that time and, the minute Trump came down the golden escalator, it was clear to me that he was a different kind of politician: he was a demagogue and an authoritarian, he didn’t really understand liberalism, and he didn’t understand America’s core commitments. He was closer to demagogues that I had seen in India, like Narendra Modi, who preceded Trump by a few years. Given this, I was a little bit more sensitized to demagogues in general and Trump in particular, so it was pretty clear to me that the libertarians around me were just not seeing him as the same kind of threat as I was.

In fact, there was general chuckling at the way he was sticking his finger in the eye of the left and going after liberals. It is not that libertarians were completely unconcerned about Trump; it’s that they were just not taking the threat seriously. They were treating him as a normal politician, just bad in a different kind of way and, at best, maybe a corrective to the excesses of the left. This chasm between me and libertarian circles just kept growing, and it was getting hard to get my point of view taken seriously.

On Libertarian Hypocrisy

Before Trump, libertarians would start warning of slippery slopes at a president’s use of the state for any goal. I, personally, wrote a gazillion pieces about Obama and Obamacare and how it represented a “road to serfdom,” in Hayek’s famous phrase, because it involved forcing people to buy healthcare. I wrote a piece encouraging a civil disobedience movement against Obamacare’s mandate. The thought was if a president can force you to do this, what else would be required?

But Trump was infinitely worse than any of them—in a league of his own—and I just didn’t see the alarm. He didn’t even bother to couch his agenda in some high-minded language. He divided the population into “us versus them” and promised to use the draconian powers of the state to help “us” and hurt “them”—a complete violation of the fundamental neutrality of the state, which is a basic commitment of liberal governance—and libertarians merely shrugged.

That got me thinking: Why is this? The reasons are partly political, partly sociological, and partly theoretical. Politically, since libertarianism arose in the heyday of the Cold War and made an alliance with socially conservative traditionalists and neo-conservative foreign policy hawks, it got inflected with a certain right-wing flavor. Libertarians became so attuned to fighting the leftist threat abroad that, once Communism fell, like the rest of the right, they had to find a new leftist threat at home, which primed them to be receptive to Trump’s message and his preoccupation with the leftist enemy.

The Difference Between the Far-Right and Problematic Social Justice

When I was in my libertarian days, I wrote my share of columns against the progressive left, arguing that there have been so many excesses and stupid notions that they have flirted with. I remember, at one time, there was this push for something called “affirmative consent,” the idea that, given the differential power structure between men and women, men can never assume that women are consenting at any stage of the sexual act until they have obtained affirmative consent. I wrote a piece pointing out how stupid this whole idea was, and I got attacked in Jezebel as somebody who likes being raped, so I’m very familiar with these leftist excesses.

However, I still think that leftists very often have the right cause; their means are just over the top and illiberal. Whereas with the right, I think both their ends and their means are illiberal. Basically, the progressive insight is that individual self-actualization requires certain conditions to be achieved. In societies riddled with say, class, caste, gender, and racial hierarchies, members of those groups can’t actualize themselves without first jettisoning systems of oppression and exploitation. Moreover, in any society, no matter how lofty its principles, the initial distribution of rights and privileges always favors dominant and powerful groups. So, the important task for any liberal society is to dedicate itself to creating a level playing field by dismantling these structures and make the systems work in a neutral, impartial, fair, and non-oppressive fashion for all.

America has been constituted on the notion of freedom and individual liberty for all. Yet racial slavery continued for 100 years after its founding and the structures and legacies of racism persist to this day. To the extent that groups have been subjugated and oppressed by virtue of immutable characteristics, whether that is race, gender, sex, or sexuality, this discrimination has to be challenged collectively, otherwise we cannot achieve individual freedom or actualization. So, progressives are right about that. Where the problem emerges is when they embrace illiberal means or they don’t want to make the political case for their cause and bring people along. They are in a hurry because these injustices are so intolerable that they want results now.

But, for all the social levers that the woke left has used to accomplish its causes, it has never become powerful enough to control the levers of the state in the way the right has. Hence, the excesses of these progressives can be fought through normal liberal channels, and we have seen that happen repeatedly. For example, on the issue of gay rights, religious conservatives have won a number of victories, like obtaining religious exemptions for businesses who wish to refuse baking cakes for gay marriages because doing so goes against their conscience. The left can be a problem but, until you’ve got a Jacobin takeover of this state, I’m less worried about them.