Jeremy, I think I want to hug you. 😉 My experience exactly. And my experience i

Jeremy, I think I want to hug you. 😉
My experience exactly. And my experience includes the MI and PFS groups directly, as well as the broader libertarian movement, since the 1980s.

Our original inclination, as most of us were classical liberals (hayekian libertarians, or Friedmanian, but not rothbardian), was almost entirely anti-socialist and anti-democratic socialist economics. And for a long time that spectrum of libertarians produced the thought leadership that the conservatives could not. They were and still are, intuitionistic traditionalists whether secular or christian and decidedly anti intellectual. They could not systematize anglo-american conservatism sufficiently to compete with the marxists-sequence or the libertarians.

In fact, the majority of progress in conservative thought has occurred among laymen during the internet age – in part because the academy, publishing, and media are fully captured by the opposition. (I certainly could not work in the academy, and I’m not sure I could work in the UK at all without prosecution.)

This led conservatives to double down on their moralizing – which did work we should remember. But not produce ideas or solutions. Libertarians were not anti-intellectual, and at least trying.

At the same time the rothbardians were the first successful political ideology to make use of the internet, beginning in the 90s. First with mises and then with cato and the rest followed. This new technology let libertarian thought reach “many more marginal young men”, as you say, “trying to play status games.”

While it was visible that libertarianism as a movement died with Ron Paul’s failed campaign, I left libertarianism, deliberate, in the fall of 2012, when other members of Hoppe’s PFS supported my position.

My work is highly scientific, empirical, and analytic – it’s an intellectual project – and there are too many uncomfortable truths found within it (I suspect you would be unhappy with some of them. I certainly was.) And so, we can’t ‘sell’ the science and the logic – but we can sell the institutional, legal, and policy reforms that come out of it.

And perhaps the one easy pill to swallow among those uncomfortable truths, is that at the most abstract scale, we are suffering from the sequential introduction of labor, then women, then aliens, into the economy and polity of european civilizational strategy, when that strategy consists of institutionalizing the maximization of individual responsibility for the private and common – and while the laboring class could be brought into that tradition, it is the very opposite of the feminine instinct, intuition, and behavior, which seeks the opposite. And others, from other civilizations, other than in their upper classes, appear nont only unwilling to integrate into that psychologically costly strategy – but unable to.

As such our problem is fixable by legal and policy reform combined with restoring that discipline in education – training the whole person for participation in a high trust society with individual sovereignty, and the demand for truth before face.

But it will not occur by persuasion. Like the civil rights movement (good or bad) and like the english revolutoin, it’s going to take a few million men to stand in DC, (London, Berlin, etc) for the ninety days it will take for the veiled threat of our presence to serve as a vehicle for explaining our solutions to the crisis of the age, such that all but the fringes grasp that these are solutions that solve everyone’s problems – and most importantly – by requiring (and yes we can do it) our politicians and public intellectuals avoid using the means of manipulation, deception, and baiting into hazard, leaving them only with truthful reciprocal speech.

Affections
Thanks for the great post and the inspiration.
CD