libertarians
Article
libertarians is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between April 01, 2021 and March 11, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “agreeable for liberals and libertarians”; “libertarians to liberty above all”; “one of those annoying libertarians”. It most often appears alongside US, Democrats, Donald Trump.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 7
- Issue count: 7
- First seen: April 01, 2021
- Last seen: March 11, 2026
Appears In
- Ambidexterity And Cognitive Closure
- Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
- Why I’m Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency
- Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality
- Links For July 2023
- Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?
- Last Rights
Related Pages
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- US (3 shared issues)
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- Democrats (2 shared issues)
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- Donald Trump (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- liberals (2 shared issues)
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- Marxist (2 shared issues)
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- New Hampshire (2 shared issues)
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- rationalists (2 shared issues)
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- Republicans (2 shared issues)
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- Russia (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- Substack (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
A fourth possibility: if you have need for cognitive closure, you only seek out information that agrees with you. If you have high need for cognitive closure, you seek out information that disagrees with you. This blog is probably very disagreeable for Marxists, and very agreeable for liberals and libertarians, which matches which of our readers are most likely to be ambidextrous. This would be a very easy hypothesis to test - just find a blog that disagrees with me about everything, and have them ask these same questions.
Haidt clearly struggles with the fairness foundation and its somewhat grab-bag nature. He eventually splits it in two, leaving the free-rider punishment part (which he calls proportionality) in the foundation called fairness, and spinning off a new foundation called liberty which is based around freedom from oppression. The revised political division is then that liberals mostly respond to care, fairness, and liberty, libertarians to liberty above all, and conservatives to all six.
“Oh, so you’re one of those annoying libertarians?” Maybe! But I’ve donated to enough Democrats to get spam texts from Nancy Pelosi. And a lot of them say things like “our democracy is in danger” or “this could be our last free election ever” . If you really think January 6 was a close call, where do you think we’d be if Trump had succeeded? Would he have just passed a few more tax cuts and built a few more miles of border wall? Or would he have actually done the fascism thing? And if he actually did the fascism thing, do you think he would have shown more restraint than the Canadians, and backed down from freezing bank deposits as a weapon against protesters?
If Nancy Pelosi’s text messages are any guide, Democrats have joined libertarians in the “actually pretty worried about the government becoming an oppressive dictatorship” club. I don’t think they can say with a straight face that there’s no chance that we ever get fascists who use financial repression as a tool of control. So they better have a plan. Crypto is the best-developed one I know. Or if you’re still not concerned about the US, at least be concerned about Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or Russia or Iran, where there are already authoritarian governments and people are already using crypto to try to get around them.
Separately in both men and women, weird-but-not-woke political groups (libertarians, Marxists, alt-right, neoreactionary) were less likely than the average person to report Long COVID, and less likely than mainstream conservatives. I find libertarians and Marxists, who I would expect to be less interested in the right-wing project of minimizing COVID than conservatives, sort of interesting. But I won’t claim to have fully debunked this concern.
8: If it’s bad to romanticize the Nazis, why do people still romanticize Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes? One possible answer: there’s still some tail risk of a Nazi resurgence, but the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat, leaving us free to wax poetic about them as a symbol of savage manliness or whatever. In extremely related news, mainstream intellectuals are now romanticizing libertarians. RIP.
The Free State Project: some libertarians made a deal that if enough other libertarians agreed, they would all move to New Hampshire and try to turn it into a libertarian paradise. They got about 20,000 people on board; the results ranged from building entirely new libertarian towns in the forest, to buying homes in Portsmouth or Manchester and keeping in touch with their libertarian friends. 7/10.
If you’re sufficiently committed, you don’t need money. You can go out in the forest with your like-minded friends and probably starve (or, like the libertarians, get eaten by bears). But if you’re insufficiently committed, money is pretty helpful! Or at least this is what I gather from my own experience. There are three reasons the rationalists have somewhat succeeded at the community-building project when so many other movements have failed.
Inline links: get eaten by bears
Libertarians/Communists/Greens/etc: Third parties are at their nadir right now. Zero state or national legislative seats are currently occupied by third parties, which is historically unusual. But increasing the size of Congress would give a shot in the arm to third parties. Getting 25,000 people to vote for you seems much more doable, especially if the whole party goes all-in on one seat. And it only takes one. I gotta believe that the Libertarians could win a Congressional seat in New Hampshire. The Communists could win one in Seattle. And once you get one seat, then it’s off to the races. Getting national recognition as one of 6,641 is really hard - joining or forming a third party is the kind of thing that gets you press. This is speculation, I have no data to back it up, but I fully expect that we would see a big upshot in third party representation and membership. The CAA is exactly what the Libertarians need to break out of their funk.