Right-wing libertarianism has always been a deeply authoritarian political philosophy. [View all]

[pampango]

It claims to value liberty in some general and all-encompassing sense above all other principles, but the particular types of freedom libertarianism seeks to defend and extend are always, tacitly and implicitly, forms of liberty for the few at the expense of the many. Thus libertarianism stands for the unfreedom of the majority.

The most important thing to grasp about libertarian thinking, however, is that its particular, very narrow, understanding of liberty is an indication of its class basis. Liberty is defined almost exclusively in terms of private property rights. When approaching issues such as progressive taxation, trade unions, welfare and economic regulation the libertarian will present all of these things as threats to individual liberty. But whose liberty in particular do these things plausibly threaten? All of these measures, in fact, can be regarded precisely in terms of the expansion of freedom – for employees, the poor, the unemployed and so on.

But it's not merely class hierarchy that libertarianism implicitly defends – it's also committed to other forms of domination. Take "race" for example. Libertarian thought has been marked by a distinctly racist dimension from its very beginning. It is entirely in keeping with libertarian tradition, then, that Ukip is radically hostile to immigration and to "multiculturalism" (a familiar dog-whistle term for the racist right).

Ukip is also committed, of course, to the defence of uncompromising heterosexism. ... In both cases – immigration and gay rights – Ukip is seeking to tap into an aggrieved sense of rightful superiority on the part of relatively privileged groups and to bolster it through various forms of discrimination against inferior others.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/19/ukip-conservatives

The author is writing about the right-wing, anti-EU UK Independence Party, but the right wing libertarian antipathy towards gays and immigrants reveals their authoritarian streak which applies to much of our republican base also.