I really don’t know why some people are having some difficulty with this very salient point. This is not to say that such a thing hasn’t or can’t exist. It can. It’s just that this is not and really has never been a real problem in the US, in terms of taking the country over, at least.
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It always amuses me when these libertarian types inevitably think the solution is to escape to an island or to a yacht and only THEN will they FINALLY be free of the lesser thans. It all works fine up to the point when the real libertarians (aka pirates) arrive and then it probably won’t be so libertarian-y, will it?
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Except Thiel’s solution is to install a fascist dictatorship in the US.
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That’s a funny way to spell collectivist anarchists.
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I may have cut corners on that. Thanks for the link.
That bit about Thiel growing up in Namibia where his father ran a uranium mine, where it was illegal for the poor native Africans to leave the job, is telling. “Freedom” for the exploiters to exploit, nothing for everyone else. The masses of American conservatives and beer-belly Trumpers don’t ever hear about this. They think “communism” is going to take away their freedom through unions, socialized medicine, welfare benefits, public education and public transit, when plainly those things give us more freedom-- freedom from exploitation, freedom to quit a shitty job, freedom of movement, etc.
We live in a slowly growing oligarchy. People like Thiel just want to take off what few shackles the law still places on them. Libertarian “freedom” has always been about the individual’s freedom, and screw society as a whole, these “Dark Enlightenment” nerds realized they were never going to get to their libertarian utopia without totally destroying democracy first.
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This is a victory of right wing propaganda, IMHO. They’ve worked very hard to make people think left authoritarianism is somehow so close at hand that embracing right authoritarianism is the only defence. It’s classic snake oil salesmanship– create a problem, then sell people the solution.
This goes back to Reagan, I think. Conservative war pigs spent all of the 80s invading small communist countries with elected leaders and replacing them with their own despots, while holding up these communists as existential threats. Many of them were not good people, sure, but none were the next Hitler (as often presented). However a whole generation of conservatives grew up thinking left wing authoritarianism is somehow a genuine threat on the world stage, instead of a weird anomaly that sprouts up at a small scale on rare occasion.
This has been so successful that I sometimes hear people espouse that fascism is a left wing ideology. A statement so stupid that my brain shorts out trying to formulate a response (which is I guess how they win now).
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‘Freedom’ as an ideal only really works as applied to others. Even the world’s greatest despots believed in their own freedom; it’s entirely meaningless.
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Sure. That’s been part of their playbook since the Cold war era. Even though the Democrats were just as much hawks on the issue of communism (it was a Democratic administration that made Vietnam into the full-fledged war that it actually was, for example).
In terns of it being mainstreamed, yeah. But of course before that, it was McCarthy, Goldwater, and pretty much any far right group (the John Birch Society) who tied pretty much anything to the left of themselves directly to Stalinism.
Yeah, people who try that shit here tend to hear an earful from me. That kind of ahistorical BS will not fly.
But even people who claim to be somewhere on the left and consider themselves to be educated fall into this bothsiderism far too often.
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Subtly reinforced by the Aristotelian idea that virtue is the moderation between two extremes?
i mean i think that can be a valid definition. it just depends on who gets to pick the two extremes. a christian theocracy and a libertarian kleptocracy are two extremes with no moderate middle. the whole axis is evil, if it’s okay to repurpose the words of a talking shrub
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Freedom of course should mean for everyone. But lots of monarchs and even tyrants believed in a duty to their country or some kind of noblesse oblige, even if that was entirely on them to decide how to fill it. Thiel doesn’t even believe in those; his ideal is purely selfish.
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The solution is to do away with capitalism and people like Peter Thiel.
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As they say in Italy, you’re kicking down an open door. Quite a few people here are very much on board with that 
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Lead the way, comrade.
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It’s quite remarkable. It’s like 1/6 when they want to blame it all on Antifa, but everyone anti-Trump stayed away. They’re so far right that they’re pushing against things, that were center in the 1950s, as “far left”.
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George Soros, of course. And Killary too. /s
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