I feel like an important distinction here boils down to being comitted to ones' convictions out of ideology or pragmatism.
agreed
Idealistic libertarians tend to be anarchists and reject the authority of government outright , as anarcho-capitalists. Pragmatic libertarians tend to be minarchists
I think patrissimo may be a counter-example to that. He's definitely more on the practical side than the idealistic side, although I think he leans more towards anarcho-capitalism than minarchism (not quite sure about that part). He often accuses the Libertarians of being naively idealistic for thinking that they will ever have an impact on the world by trying to change the system through voting. (His solution is to go off and start your own country in the sea.)
But yes, in general I think you're right.
I would say libertarian and not Libertarian. These are discrete groups. You also sometimes capitalize liberal or conservative, and this confuses me. Not sure if these are distinct from their lowercase forms or not.
I capitalized Libertarian in part because I feel like when it is capitalized it is more associated with rightwing libertarianism. There are also libertarian socialists, which would fall under my Leftists category, and for the purposes of this discussion I was not considering them. In the US, using the word libertarian often is synonymous with rightwing libertarianism. Of course, I realize that that is broader than just whatever the Libertarian party states is their agenda.
I capitalized all 5 categories also just to emphasize the 5 different groups and to define what I meant by each of those groups. I think if I used lowercase names for each of them, there would be a lot more overlap and confusion. So the way I thought about it was that I was sort of defining 5 archetypal points in "ideological space", and then the categories are in the neighborhood of those points.
no subject
I feel like an important distinction here boils down to being comitted to ones' convictions out of ideology or pragmatism.
agreed
Idealistic libertarians tend to be anarchists and reject the authority of government outright , as anarcho-capitalists. Pragmatic libertarians tend to be minarchists
I think
But yes, in general I think you're right.
I would say libertarian and not Libertarian. These are discrete groups. You also sometimes capitalize liberal or conservative, and this confuses me. Not sure if these are distinct from their lowercase forms or not.
I capitalized Libertarian in part because I feel like when it is capitalized it is more associated with rightwing libertarianism. There are also libertarian socialists, which would fall under my Leftists category, and for the purposes of this discussion I was not considering them. In the US, using the word libertarian often is synonymous with rightwing libertarianism. Of course, I realize that that is broader than just whatever the Libertarian party states is their agenda.
I capitalized all 5 categories also just to emphasize the 5 different groups and to define what I meant by each of those groups. I think if I used lowercase names for each of them, there would be a lot more overlap and confusion. So the way I thought about it was that I was sort of defining 5 archetypal points in "ideological space", and then the categories are in the neighborhood of those points.