Five Differences Between the Alt-Right and Libertarianism
by Jeffrey Tucker
"Why the defections from libertarianism to alt-right? My theory is that this generation of libertarians were not prepared to deal with a hard challenge from the right (the socialists of the right). The wisdom that liberty rejects authoritarianism from the right and the left skipped a full generation. Hayek's Road to Serfdom, Mises's Omnipotent Government, and Flynn's As We Go Marching all came out in 1944, and all three issued dire warnings that the real danger comes not from Soviet-style socialism but from crank, populist, top-down planning ideas from different forms of socialism (many of which market themselves as anti-leftist). Mises, Hayek, and Flynn knew. They lived it. They warned us. But this knowledge dropped out as the decades went on. By the end of the 1980s, thanks mainly to the Reagan coalition, libertarians had come to believe that the left was all that stood between us and utopia. Lacking the intellectual equipment to recognize other dangers, naive young liberty enthusiasts were left vulnerable to being swept up by the latest, un-PC brands of collectivism. It is a real intellectual failing and we are seeing the results today. It's tragic in many ways, but there is something very good about the defections. I would rather see people admit that they no longer believe in liberty as the primary driving force of history than pretend to be something they are not. For my own part, I admit to finding all their arguments tedious simply because I've read ALL THIS SAME STUFF in writings from 100 years ago by Darwin-obsessed eugenicists and these were the very people who built the institutions that libertarians exist to oppose. It's painful to watch intellectual history repeat itself solely due to ignorance of the past."
Five Differences Between the Alt-Right and Libertarianism | Foundation for Economic Education
https://fee.org/articles/five-differences-between-the-alt-right-and-libertarians/