Confessions of a recovering Libertarian: How I escaped a world of Ron Paul hero worship [View all]

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http://www.salon.com/2014/09/03/confessions_of_a_recovering_libertarian_how_i_escaped_a_world_of_ron_paul_hero_worship/



When I was 15, I was that kid people wanted to punch in the face. I sent emails to Wolf Blitzer and Glenn Beck asking them just how in the world they could’ve said the Libertarian Party was “fringe.” I booed when my classmate mentioned the New Deal in a presentation on “The Great Gatsby.” When my Ron Paul 2008 sweat shirt went missing on a family vacation, I immediately implicated the CIA in the abduction.

I am not that kid anymore, which bodes well for the continued integrity of my facial structure. My views haven’t changed as much as you might expect; I maintain that centralized government power, whether in the economic or social sphere, results in corruption and abuse more often than not. But when people ask me where I stand ideologically, I cringe at the thought of responding with “freedom” or “limited government,” phrases that I once seemed destined to have tattooed on my forehead. Now, I’m more likely to stammer for a few seconds before coming up with something like, “Hey, uh, it’s pretty sunny out there today, no?”

People always told me that my staunch libertarianism would erode when I went to college and saw the world through a wider lens. I didn’t believe them, just like I didn’t believe their claims that Ron Paul would fall short of the presidency, but we know how that turned out. Contrary to how the story often goes, there was no professor, classmate or piece of reading that exhorted me toward neoconservatism or Marxism. Instead, it was consorting with my fellow libertarians that drove me away.

My realization of the libertarian tragedy began, as most tragedies do, with social media. I attended college in Washington, D.C., a place that may not appeal to libertarians as much as it does to mainstream partisans, but still has a fair number of freedom-minded folks who call it home. When I was accepted for study, I connected with my school’s College Libertarians Facebook group. They were a tight-knit bunch, but they embraced my eagerness to join their ranks. Soon, my Facebook feed was filled with all kinds of Ayn Rand quotes and Gadsden flags. Posts like the one claiming that public schools, the very institutions that employed many of my family members, were “replete with agents of state-orchestrated indoctrination” (good job with the SAT words there, guys) were enough to keep me from ever showing up to a College Libertarians meeting.