Perhaps a more plausible explanation for the recent eagerness to embrace elements of modern liberalism is that libertarianism has become too popular to concern itself with controversial views. There are now many self-identified libertarians who wake up in the morning and go to work advocating smaller government and public policy changes. Some of them even run for office. The current transformation of libertarianism is similar to what happened to classical liberalism in Europe. We are inclined to think that ideology shapes politics but we should not ignore the fact that politics shapes ideology as well. What is urgently needed is a “public choice of political ideology.”
It is also interesting to note that small government libertarians are more vulnerable to the racism charge than anarchists. I am not aware of any claims that anarchists are “racist” because they advocate abolishing all laws, which necessarily will also include laws against racial discrimination. This feature of anarchism might explain why socialist anarchism is all but dead though. After all, it is hard to imagine how a stateless society will produce radical egalitarianism across the globe.
The libertarian critics of Rand Paul are correct that libertarianism should not be conceived as a sterile rationalist ideology. If there is any chance for libertarianism to survive it should be conceived as a form of rational choice firmly rooted in empirical reality. But it does not seem that these are the changes that the reformers of libertarianism have in mind. If Ben O’ Neill’s Independent Review article “The Antidiscrimination Paradigm: Irrational, Unjust, and Tyrannical” is any indication, the practice of discrimination can be reconciled with rational individual decision making.
