Paleolibertarianism

Jim Antle makes an important point:

It’s worth clearing something up about the strategy that led to the Paul newsletters. Paleolibertarianism began as a way to get libertarian politics back in touch with the normal customs, habits, and mores of most people while keeping the focus on antistatism. The idea was that libertarian hostility to religion and to the nation-state was hurting the cause of more freedom and less government. Most people are to some extent religious. They don’t reject all forms of social authority. When they hear that a country is just a bunch of people who happen live in the same geopraphic location, and that there is no reason to feel more loyalty to an American than someone else, it doesn’t quite ring true to them.

Unfortunately, as evidenced by the types of people these newsletters were marketed to, some prominent paleolibertarians took these insights and then veered off into rather ugly directions with them. Ironically, by doing so they have probably strengthened the very tendencies in libertarianism they once sought to mitigate.

The paleolibertarian turn was and remains basically the right one in principle for libertarians to take.  That is, a libertarianism that is not antithetical to religion and patriotism will fare much better politically, and it will also be more in agreement with human nature.  A libertarianism that pretends that there is something unnatural or even immoral about preserving national sovereignty will never appeal to more than a handful of people, and that’s as it should be.