Alex Massie Alex Massie

How many types of libertarian can there be?

Many, many, many. If the GOP increasingly suffers from a suffocating orthodoxy, the libertarian movement (if that’s not an oxymoron) is amusingly/alarmingly/pedictably/irrelevently heterodox. As Brian Doherty explains:

Joining the former, and previous more or less useful classifications such as anarchist and minarchist, paleo and cosmo, utilitarian and natural rightsers, is the division between “policy libertarians” and “structural libertarians,” explicated by Jacob Lyles over at “Distributed Republic.”

Then again, since libertarianism is as much a sensibility as anything else, it’s scarcely surprising it should be such a divided house.

UPDATE: Dave Weigel has a characteristically good – and entertaining! –  review of “a thrilling and dispiriting year for libertarian politics” under the never-out-of-fashion headline Where Did It All Go Wrong?

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