I consider political labels mostly just shorthand signifiers rooted in pragmatic communication and "abolitionist" has increasingly become the shorthand most useful to me in discovering people with similar views, values, and priorities.
I quite like "abolitionist" because it 1) immediately draws parallels between slavery and modern day prisons/police/borders/armies and 2) emphasizes the immediate moral urgency of such opposition that reformist approaches often defang.
But I also worry that "abolitionist" can suggest a view of social change in which structural violence disappears overnight via top-down decree, which couldn't be more foreign to abolitionists who embrace direct action, mutual aid, & building the new world in the shell of the old.
Most abolitionists seem to endorse a gradualist view of social change in which individuals & communities slowly but surely create viable alternatives to the status quo, helping nudge along material/cultural factors that wither away the institutions of structural violence.
I'm not sure what a good term for this more "evolutionary" view of social change would be. But it's worth emphasizing the ways in which abolitionists view abolition as fundamentally a bottom-up, piecemeal project.
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Strong disagreements over the term "right" seem often riddled with miscommunication and misunderstanding. Fewer terms are subject to as much variation in meaning. You have moral rights, legal rights, natural rights, property rights, de jure rights, de facto rights, etc. etc.
In the sense that seems most common to political philosophy, which is a "morally enforceable claim" I think it makes sense to be a kind of monist and try to formulate compossible claims to free action rooted in both naturalistic and constructivist aspects of human society.
On this view I think there is really just a single right shared by all rational agents and which is compossibly realizable between them: the right not to be coerced i.e. the right to one's own sphere of justified free action that extends as far as their own autonomy.
pretty much everything that apparently excludes ayn rand from the category of "philosopher" applies to every single philosopher in the canon, she was: a terrible bigot, did some really bad philosophy, wrote lots of fiction, uncharitably interpreted interlocutors, etc.
everything leveled at her can be just as much if not more so leveled against pirsig, camus, stirner, nietzsche, marx, kant, aristotle, plato, etc., etc.
there's two things that set her apart from these thinkers
the first is being a woman (especially the kind who didn't conform to conventional notions of femininity) which imo plays a part in not only the amount but the kind of widespread vitriol liberals (usually men) spew at her
anarchism is NOT the proposition that eliminating states would be costless
it’s the proposition that it’s worth the effort to *reduce* those costs by creating alternative, horizontal ways of providing the few good things states do: defense, arbitration, social insurance, etc.
it’s in this way that anarchism at its best is a radical reimagining of politics as an *imminent* project, connected more to interpersonal ethics than abstracted policy ideas, thus bringing political philosophy “down from the clouds” to the real world of flesh-and-blood people
as an example: non-anarchists view “immigration” as a policy area concerning appropriate regulations, quotas, security, etc. whereas anarchists view “immigration” as a moral area concerning the just treatment of non-Americans
Perhaps: philosophy is a particularly nebulous concept that in the public sphere has broad associations with 1) radical, or to-the-root, thinking and skepticism that opens the door to unpopular ideas and, by extension, conspiracy theories and 2) spiritual/personal improvement.
But in the context of social media they are easily weaponized by 1) people disguising insane conspiracies as products of an "open-minded philosophy" and 2) grifters disguising New Age/self-help products as the "one true philosophy."
The result: people who are at first genuinely interested in a philosophical way of thinking, but don't know how to best utilize mechanisms of knowledge/discourse, get led astray and swept up in the Big Promises offered by the likes of Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, David Icke, etc.