Last night Rachel Maddow explored this topic, showing how the echo chamber rhetoric machine of conservatism nominally promotes the libertarian variety while masking its authoritarian roots. The authoritarian variety favors big, intrusive government while the libertarian favors small, leave-me-alone government. First she shows the obviously coordinated rhetorical echo chamber for the latter and then examples of the hypocrisy: Florida Governor Rick Scott's executive order to force all public workers to take drug tests, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's financial martial law, Wisconsin's stripping of rights to collectively bargain and several others.
You can find some integral reference to this topic via "The political compass" and this IL discussion. I found this excerpt from the latter interesting:
"Broadly speaking, it appears that free-market capitalism promotes individual rights at the expense of the rights and needs of the collective (e.g. human rights) and at the expense of environmental concerns so is therefore somewhat geared toward the dominator hierarchies of premodern enthocentrism and fascism. This is in spite of being modernist and objective and even postmodernist and pluralistic."
Part of what Maddow was getting at is that conservatives framed their agenda in right libertairan language but it masked their true intentions in authoritarian libertarianism. Their biconceptuals wanted the former but are now turning against the latter and hence if elections were held today those making such changes would not win.
ReplyDeleteAt this link* Chomsky discusses the way the term libertarian has been used in the US and what he means by it, since he is a left libertarian socialist in terms of this thread while the US conservatives are right authoritarian that use right libertarian rhetoric.
*http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RxPUvQZ3rcQ