Personally, I think it’s part of the petty-bourgeois delusion that a person can become part of the capitalist elite instead of realizing that they have more in common with the working class.
A lot of it is due to the ideological education of this society. They can see, as anyone who bothers to look, that this country is messed up. The problem though is the immense anti-communist ideology in this society. So they are cut off from real solutions from the start. They’ve been taught that the solutions to the problems are the causes of the problems. The only answers they can see are down roads that will only make things worse instead of better.
False Consciousness. Some people clearly see the problems with capitalism and blame the Jews, some immigrants (and many both), and some people really believe the things they were taught in econ 101 and wind up blaming the problems of capitalism on not enough capitalism.
I think libertarianism as we see it in the US is a uniquely American phenomenon (which occasionally gets exported abroad like in Argentina) that’s born out of our quasi-religious worship of the constitution and the founding fathers. Every US child is taught in school that the founders were all once in a generation geniuses and that the constitution is a masterwork of politics and not a badly outdated document that is only ever invoked by the ruling class to consolidate their own power. The founders believed that capitalist markets were a force for liberation, so we get taught that in high school - although ironically the modern version of that idea of a completely unfettered market is not at all what the American founders had in mind, it’s the extreme that you get to by following their logic.
The motivations of wealthy libertarians are material, they don’t want to give up their wealth or ability to control resources. However, poorer libertarians don’t have that problem. They don’t have any wealth to give up. Therefore the ideology has to be tied to immaterial things like abstractions. It becomes about liberty, individualism, divine right, etc for them. The wealthy mystify their own relationship with labor and capital because it gives the workers a reason to join them rather than achieve class consciousness.
I agree with some of what you said but mainly disagree with your analysis of poor libertarians. I will use the USA as a model for my post.
Historically we should expect to find more economic fluidity amongst white people, meaning they’d be able to move from worker to labour aristocracy/petty bourgeoisie. The classic example would be for a white worker to labour for a time at a decent paying job, save money, buy a house, and start a business.
So as we see, the class lines would be more blurred in the past because of the stronger wages and free time of labourers, and so there becomes no real need in the present to tie poorer libertarians historically to immaterial things since their interests in the past were absolutely material and aligned.
With the polarization of the economy the class lines become more defined. So then the poor libertarians, stuck without any mobility as workers, become very reactionary and oppose any groups that threaten their elevated or once elevated position. Those who are petit bourgeoisie themselves, even though they may not be poor, are threatened with becoming workers again.
This plays out nowadays as the libertarian to fascist pipeline, though American libertarianism is already inherently reactionary by being supported by colonialism and imperialism (as opposed to, for instance, a petit bourgeoisie in another country trying to rid itself of the shackles of colonialism).
In the American case libertarianism is a petit bourgeois (and white i.e. settler, very key here) ideology that fits very well with the standard Marxist model of the petit bourgeois being the source of fascism.
Has anyone realized most of the right libertarians come from settler colonial states?
A lot of it is atomization. If you are fully atomized like we are in the US, liberatarianism doesn’t seem as silly as it obviously is. Its a logical fantasy caused by these conditions. Similar to wanting a homestead to be “totally self sufficient.” Its a fantasy obviously no one can be “totally self sufficient,” but when you’re immersed in an atomized siciety ot makes perfect sense that people would want that.
