At this point, I honestly have no idea what an-caps think. I presume that most of them don’t think.
I actually stopped paying attention years ago, and before that I was only paying attention to argue with them.
They had some valid points early on, and actually including the observation that the unregulated exchange of goods and services is a natural human behavior. They just went wrong pretty much immediately after that observation, when they conflated that unregulated exchange with “capitalism” and expanded it out to the stipulated system to which each and all would be necessarily subject. They could never seem to wrap their heads around the fact that that position necessitated the institutionalization of authority, even though they spent most of their time and effort trying to dream up “anarchist” states with “anarchist” laws that would be enforced by “anarchist” police and an “anarchist” legal system. That and spluttering self-righteously about how it all didn’t actually count as a state because blah blah blah.
But in the wake of the Great Overton Window Shift of 2009, when the Republicans co-opted the Tea Party protests and turned them into a traveling carnival of hate, a bunch of conservatives started identifying as libertarians, so a bunch of libertarians started identifying as an-caps, and the intellectual level of an-caps went from amusingly mediocre to frustratingly low.
Presuming that that trend has held (and judging by the rest of right-wing politics, it’s likely that it’s not only held, but accelerated), yeah - I would presume that most don’t even know.
Ancaps don’t really know what they think, either, because they have no actual political philosophy. The only reason for the project is to try to do to the word “anarchism” what they did to the word “libertarian”.
At this point, I honestly have no idea what an-caps think. I presume that most of them don’t think.
I actually stopped paying attention years ago, and before that I was only paying attention to argue with them.
They had some valid points early on, and actually including the observation that the unregulated exchange of goods and services is a natural human behavior. They just went wrong pretty much immediately after that observation, when they conflated that unregulated exchange with “capitalism” and expanded it out to the stipulated system to which each and all would be necessarily subject. They could never seem to wrap their heads around the fact that that position necessitated the institutionalization of authority, even though they spent most of their time and effort trying to dream up “anarchist” states with “anarchist” laws that would be enforced by “anarchist” police and an “anarchist” legal system. That and spluttering self-righteously about how it all didn’t actually count as a state because blah blah blah.
But in the wake of the Great Overton Window Shift of 2009, when the Republicans co-opted the Tea Party protests and turned them into a traveling carnival of hate, a bunch of conservatives started identifying as libertarians, so a bunch of libertarians started identifying as an-caps, and the intellectual level of an-caps went from amusingly mediocre to frustratingly low.
Presuming that that trend has held (and judging by the rest of right-wing politics, it’s likely that it’s not only held, but accelerated), yeah - I would presume that most don’t even know.
Ancaps don’t really know what they think, either, because they have no actual political philosophy. The only reason for the project is to try to do to the word “anarchism” what they did to the word “libertarian”.