Kontextmaschine

22nd May 2023

Post reblogged from alluring heian courtesan with 38 notes

collapsedsquid:
Quinn Slobodian in his talk is drawing the difference between Trump as the Polanyi “Double Movement” where Trump is there because people need to be protected from the market run by the liberals, and Trump as libertarian, where Trump is there because people are tired of the nanny-state government “protecting” them.
What he says in his piece is that the Trump movement was more pro-market in the beginning but has since he left office broadened to include much more of the “double movement” stuff.
I sort of see the trend as the opposite though, the hard-right has become more libertarian, and this is the frame through which I see stuff like the attempts to kill public education because it’s grooming your kids. That stuff is on the rise and has the zeitgeist, while nobody gives a fuck about Compact magazine or Rubio’s plan to put union members of corporate boards outside a handful of literati.
(Could also discuss the Trump “freedom cities” proposal which could come right out of Quinn’s book, but could also say that purely imaginary and transient.)
Hm, I disagree with this completely. I think the overwhelming trend on the right at the moment is abandonment of libertarianism, both in the fine details of policy and in the overarching philosophy: “if the government gets out of the way and does the minimum necessary to secure markets, people will be prosperous and happy” is passé, while “we need to use State Power to impose our vision of the Good Life, whether people want that or not” is in. It’s true that the latter was always more popular among the conservative base, but for a long time the libertarians were the wonks who actually steered the direction of conservative policy; they are now out in the cold while the incoming generation of right-wing wonks goes to NatCon. Even the devoted libertarians are shifting focus if not totally overhauling their beliefs: Tyler Cowen himself would say his philosophy hasn’t changed, but he sure talks about “state-capacity libertarianism” a lot more than he used to.
and this is the frame through which I see stuff like the attempts to kill public education because it’s grooming your kids.
I don’t think that’s the correct frame. I think what’s happening here is a belief that public education is an institution which can’t be captured, and only steered by state power to a limited extent, and so opting out is easier. If they thought public schools could be commanded to teach their way instead, they would do that and make them non-optional.

Well I think that say the LP Mises Caucus folks would say that over the 2010s libertarianism decanted a lot of its left-friendly or -tolerant elements (drawn largely as legacy of its 90s heyday) that strayed for essentially reasons of career (Washington “liberaltarians” at centrist think tanks) or social advancement (“wokeness”, #Resist, yada yada)