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I have seen a lot of surprise/confusion as to why so many libertarians became reactionaries, but I think there is a consistent deep structure here 1/
The core value they hold is an *aversion to violence*, whether rooted in personal fear or the harms to society or whatever 2/
The libertarian solution is to have everyone voluntarily abstain from violence (the non-aggression principle). This does seem to work well among small, self-selected groups. I don’t know almost any libertarians who have gotten into fist fights 3/
But if you take the problem of violence seriously, and then your beliefs change such that you no longer believe the NAP is sufficient to produce a peaceful world, you look for a new solution 4/
The reactionaries have a ready answer: cultural evolution + state formation is the process of bringing violence under monopolistic control and reducing output of that good like other monopolies do 5/
It’s a sad loss of a utopian vision of zero violence into a regretful local minimum of violence achieved by some use of violent force 6/
Notably, most libertarians fall into two camps already: the natural rights libertarians who take the NAP as an axiom, and the utilitarian libertarians who were just solving for minimum violence all along and got to that answer 7/
And thus the utilitarian libertarians were much faster to come around to reactionary positions as they were completely consistent with their worldview and optimization target to begin with 8/8
