Thread by @Doc_0

Libertarian ideas will never become more influential as long as the U.S. has a globalist foreign policy, insecure borders, and unlimited deficit spending. Frustrated libertarians should devote their efforts to changing those three conditions.

Globalism is antithetical to libertarianism because it sets the U.S. up for the kind of open-ended foreign interventions that libertarians despise. Only in a secure nation-state do libertarian ideals have a chance of flourishing on a large scale.

Also, globalism makes the U.S. interdependent with countries that are, to put it mildly, far more interested in centralized power than America is. We tend to become more like them because, sadly, authoritarianism is much more viral than libertarianism.

I know we all thought it would be the other way around. We were promised globalist trade deals would liberalize the world. We hoped the Internet would spread intellectual liberty like wildfire. The reverse turned out to be true in both cases.

For similar reasons, libertarianism cannot flourish without secure borders and careful immigration policy. It should be painfully obvious by now that mass migration applies crushing pressure against libertarianism. There is nothing libertarian AT ALL about open borders.

If libertarians don't want endless foreign wars, and economic and political entanglements that nourish authoritarian centralized power in the U.S., they absolutely must secure the border, or else the world's anti-libertarian crises and authoritarian ideas will be imported here.

Lastly, unlimited deficit spending nullifies libertarian ideas on a practical level. The central state's ability to spend without limit, far in excess of its revenue, without cutting one thing to spend more on another, provides rich fertilizer for authoritarianism.

Libertarianism falls upon too many ears as an airy theoretical discussion when they have cold, hard government cash in their hands. Convincing them the cash is neither cold nor hard is nearly impossible, as the debt battles of the Obama years demonstrated.

The size of modern American government is utterly incomprehensible to most citizens. People have a hard time rebelling against something they cannot comprehend, which is why successful politicians use heated populist rhetoric to give them fixed, polarized, personalized targets.

Deficit-fueled government growth takes too many issues completely out of the hands of voters. The list of things done without our consent, the list of things we're not even allowed to DISCUSS any more, grows daily. Libertarianism is just unhappy whispers into that hurricane.

Also, massive deficit spending makes it possible for the bloated central government to prop up inefficient, anti-libertarian state governments. There is no real penalty for the socialist elite in failing states.

Because the central government subsidizes irresponsible state and local spending, the end result is never a smoldering ruin of authoritarianism in which the seeds of libertarianism might blossom.

Libertarians never get to win a hand of policy poker because authoritarians always have more debt-financed chips to slide across the table. There are no consequences for authoritarian failure, so they always look like the "safe" and "stable" choice vs. "risky" libertarianism.

There is no swift or easy way to remedy this situation, as it was allowed to develop over decades and involves incalculable amounts of money, touching countless millions of lives. Your best bet is to carefully nourish the public's appetite for free market capitalism.

The swing of the pendulum toward authoritarian collectivism must be halted before it can be reversed. Right now you face a world where too many people think even their right to free speech is scarcely worth fighting for. They see it as a privilege not everyone deserves to have.

Here again, the libertarian ideal has been made to seem frivolous, theoretical, and academic, while the authoritarian position - severely curtail free speech in the interest of social harmony - is presented as practical and loaded with immediate real-world benefits.

Libertarians should look at every place the authoritarian Left wants to spread anarchy, and there you should support reasoned and measured order. Look at every freedom the Left sees as cheap or obsolete and celebrate its timeless value. Change the rules of a game you can't win.

The forces of authoritarianism and libertarianism are not lined up on the 50-yard line waiting for the snap. We're in overtime and the authoritarians cannot be allowed to score another touchdown. Think about the next play, and the one after that. Be ready to play rough. /end.