politics

The idea of a libertarian party has always been a bit self-contradictory, though not entirely. The basic idea of libertarianism (narrowly defined - not the broader use of the term in things like the political compass) is specifically to minimize but not entirely eliminate government. That's what distinguishes it from anarchism.

So there's necessarily an immediate issue - which specific functions of government need to be kept in its minimized form? And that's where a party (or something like it) can legitimately come into play. It's still a bit self-defeating though, since such a party obviously should be sharply limited in scope and influence, but that's not the nature of hierarchical organizations. It's not that the idea is immediately contrary to the espoused ideals of the movement, but that it pretty much inevitably will one day grow into something that is.

I don't and never have held with no-true-scotsmanning the supposed wing alignment of whatever it is that one or another person thinks needs to be kept in a "libertarian" system. I always leaned much more toward the left than the right as far as that goes, but I never felt any particular threat from those (the majority even 40 or 50 years ago) who leaned to the right more than the left. Like me, they were fundamentally simply opposed to the whole idea of institutionalized hierarchy, but believed that some amount of it was unavoidable, so they, like me, were prepared to argue for their preference, rather than just taking the fundamentally authoritarian position of, "This is the way it's going to be because we say so, and if you oppose us, we'll shoot you."

I think that the transition to the latter stage was inevitable regardless of which wing the US movement leaned toward. It's not really a trait of the right or the left per se, but a trait of the dominant group, when it's reached the point that its dominance is so well-established that it comes to be seen as a justified state rightfully defended. And unfortunately, as history has shown repeatedly, both political wings are entirely able to reach that point, and at that point, the specific ideology doesn't even really matter any more, since the actual point of the organization is protecting and furthering its own privilege and power, and ideology just determines the rhetoric with which they surround that entirely self-serving endeavour.

Or more simply, I think that if US libertarianism had come to be dominated by left-wingers rather than right-wingers, it's likely that all that would mean in the long run is that the current version of it would be dominated by tankies instead of... whatever the current lot should be called (neo-feudalists? anarcho-fascists? gun nuts? mall ninjas?)