The Rise of the Left-Libertarian

 

Why some liberals are becoming libertarian about power without becoming conservative about government.

Something is shifting inside liberal politics, but the old labels do a poor job of describing it.

My read does not come from a party platform or a neat ideological manifesto. It comes first from listening: watching the news, following social media, and paying attention to how people are arguing in real time. What stands out is that I keep hearing arguments that sound strangely libertarian coming from sectors where I would not normally expect them.

Not libertarian in the traditional economic sense. Not “abolish taxes,” “deregulate everything,” or “government is always the problem.” That is not the shift.

The shift is civil-libertarian: suspicion of centralized power, concern about surveillance, resistance to censorship, fear of digital control systems, distrust of public-private coordination, and a growing demand for privacy, autonomy, due process, and limits on authority.

What makes this interesting is where the language is coming from. Liberals worried about reproductive data. Progressives concerned about police surveillance. Younger Democrats skeptical of platform censorship and algorithmic control. People who still support public programs but do not want digital ID systems, age verification laws, or automated enforcement tools becoming access gates to ordinary life.

Social media is not proof by itself. We know it can make a handful of loud people look like a movement. But it is useful as a listening post. It shows what arguments are emerging before they harden into formal politics. And right now, the pattern is hard to miss: people who would never call themselves libertarian are making arguments about privacy, speech, surveillance, bodily autonomy, and institutional overreach that strongly resemble libertarian arguments.

The funny part is how strange some of the conversions look. I am seeing people with basically Trotskyist instincts drifting into prepper logic. The same people who once sounded like they wanted a central committee for every inconvenience are now talking about backup generators, cash on hand, water filters, canned peas, and enough instant ramen to survive six months of institutional failure. That is not a small vibe shift. That is an ideological witness protection program with a pantry.

Democrats are not becoming libertarians in the traditional sense. They are not suddenly abandoning healthcare access, labor protections, environmental rules, antitrust enforcement, or public investment. The old right-libertarian package still does not fit most of them. They are not becoming anti-government across the board.

But many are becoming more suspicious of control.

That suspicion is showing up across issues that used to be treated separately: digital privacy, reproductive data, platform censorship, police surveillance, AI scoring, banking access, age verification, biometric identity, emergency powers, and corporate control over speech and participation. Taken one by one, these look like isolated debates. Taken together, they suggest a new political temperament forming on the left.

Call it big-government, small-surveillance politics: a left-leaning instinct that still believes in public goods and regulation, but rejects the expanding machinery of tracking, censorship, digital identity, automated scoring, and permission-based access to ordinary life.

This type still supports public goods, but is less willing to trust institutions with systems that can monitor, restrict, rank, identify, or punish ordinary people. Government healthcare can make sense; medical surveillance cannot. Regulation can be necessary; bureaucratic black boxes are another matter. Safer online spaces may remain a goal; censorship tools create suspicion. Social programs still matter; digital identity systems that become access gates raise alarms. Corporate accountability remains central, but so does fear of banks, platforms, employers, and payment processors becoming private governments.

That is not traditional libertarianism. It is something more modern and messier.

The old libertarian model focused mainly on the state. The new anxiety is about networks of power: government agencies, tech platforms, banks, data brokers, universities, employers, NGOs, intelligence contractors, health systems, insurers, and AI vendors. No one has to declare tyranny for the system to become coercive. Control can arrive through compliance rules, risk scores, account suspensions, identity checks, automated flags, payment restrictions, and polite emails from departments with names like Trust and Safety.

This is why institutional trust matters so much. For years, many liberals accepted institutional power because they believed the institutions were mostly legitimate. That belief has weakened. People have watched public agencies reverse themselves, media institutions lose credibility, tech platforms moderate speech unevenly, universities moralize, employers police expression, and political leaders demand trust while offering little accountability.

When trust declines, people become less generous about granting new powers.

That is the hidden thread connecting many current debates. Digital ID is not just about identity. Age verification is not just about children. Platform moderation is not just about misinformation. Reproductive privacy is not just about healthcare. AI governance is not just about efficiency. Each issue raises the same underlying question:

Who gets to decide whether you can participate?

Once that question becomes visible, liberal politics changes.

Even Second Amendment language is beginning to cross strange boundaries. After the killing of Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis ICU nurse shot by federal agents, I noticed people who would normally reject gun-rights rhetoric making arguments that sounded almost Second Amendment-coded. Much of it began as a challenge to conservative consistency: if the right defends the Second Amendment, how can it justify a state response that treats lawful gun possession as an inherent threat?

But the discussion did not always stop at exposing hypocrisy. In some cases, it crossed into something more paradoxical: liberals known for opposing gun ownership began defending the logic of the right to bear arms, at least in that specific context. This was not old-school gun culture suddenly converting liberals into NRA lifers. It was distrust politics. In that frame, the right to bear arms stops looking like gun culture and starts looking more like the jailkeeper handing you the keys to the cage.

That is the deeper shift. People were watching a constitutional right become conditional in real time, and conditional rights have a way of making even institutionalists nervous. Once people start asking that question, they are already stepping outside the unwritten but mandatory liberal decalogue: the quiet list of positions one is expected to hold before being allowed to remain in good standing.

Reproductive politics may be the strongest accelerant. After the fall of Roe, privacy stopped being abstract for many women and liberals. Location data, period apps, pharmacy records, search history, payment trails, medical files, and travel records became part of the political battlefield. The lesson was simple: data collected for convenience can become evidence. A phone can become a witness. A platform can become a checkpoint.

That realization naturally pushes people toward stronger privacy instincts. Not as a niche tech issue, but as a civil-rights issue.

Speech is moving in a similar direction. Many liberals accepted aggressive content moderation when they saw it as a defense against extremism or dangerous misinformation. But censorship tools do not remain ideologically loyal. Once built, they can be expanded, privatized, redirected, or captured by a different administration. More liberals are likely to rediscover a very old civil-libertarian principle: powers created for emergencies rarely stay in their original box.

Corporate power also looks different now. The left has long criticized corporations for greed, inequality, and monopoly. But the newer concern is access. Banks, platforms, payment processors, app stores, employers, insurers, data brokers, and cloud providers can shape ordinary life without the constitutional restraints that apply to government. They can suspend accounts, throttle visibility, deny services, flag risk, sell data, and enforce norms at scale.

A private company can now do things that feel governmental, while still saying, technically, it is just business.

This is where a new liberal civil-libertarianism begins to make sense. It does not reject public power entirely. It rejects power without friction. Power without appeal. Power without transparency. Power without exit.

The likely platform of this emerging faction is not hard to imagine: strong privacy rights, limits on data brokers, encryption protections, medical data firewalls, police surveillance restrictions, due process before account or banking bans, transparency in AI decisions, protections for anonymous speech, and real alternatives to mandatory digital systems.

That platform would still sit on the left economically. It would support public investment, labor protections, healthcare access, antitrust enforcement, and consumer protections. But it would break sharply from establishment liberalism on trust. It would ask for proof, limits, audits, opt-outs, and enforceable rights before allowing institutions to build deeper systems of control.

This will create tension inside the Democratic coalition.

Institutional liberals will argue that modern problems require modern systems: digital infrastructure, expert administration, coordinated platforms, identity verification, content moderation, and automated enforcement. The left-libertarian answer will be that the more powerful the system, the stronger the restraints must be. They will not accept “trust us” as a governance model.

Both sides will claim to defend democracy. They will simply fear different failures. Institutional liberals will fear disorder. The left-libertarian faction will fear managed life.

That divide is likely to grow because the technology is not slowing down. Digital identity, AI scoring, biometric verification, financial surveillance, platform governance, and automated compliance are all expanding. Every expansion creates a new argument over convenience versus freedom, safety versus autonomy, inclusion versus control.

The old categories cannot contain this cleanly. Some liberals will still want more government in economic life and less government in personal life. Others will want regulation of corporations but strict limits on data collection. Some will favor public programs but reject centralized identity systems. Some will support safety rules but oppose speech enforcement.

The crossing is happening in the other direction too. Around AI, some conservatives and traditional libertarians are beginning to sound unexpectedly comfortable with state regulation. The same people who would normally flinch at government intervention now look at algorithmic control, synthetic media, job displacement, surveillance, and corporate AI power and ask whether the state has to step in. That is not a small contradiction. It shows that the old map is failing on both sides: liberals become more libertarian when public power turns into surveillance, while libertarians become more statist when private power starts looking like government.

To older political maps, that looks inconsistent.

It is not inconsistent.

It is a recognition that power has changed shape.

The next major ideological split may not be left versus right in the usual sense. It may be institutionalists versus big-government, small-surveillance politics. People who trust centralized systems versus people who believe those systems must be restrained before they become permanent.

A growing number of liberals are moving into that second camp. Quietly at first. Issue by issue. Privacy here. Speech there. Reproductive data. Police surveillance. AI scoring. Digital ID. Banking access. Platform control.

At some point, scattered instincts become a politics.

And when they do, the Democratic coalition may discover that its next internal rebellion does not come from the right. It comes from liberals who still believe in public goods, but no longer trust powerful institutions to define the terms of ordinary life.

A Nation with a Tired Playbook

 

On national identity, threat, and how deep the blade went under the skin

When I first moved to the United States, one of the things that struck me most was the country’s humor and vernacular optimism. Americans seemed trained to turn discomfort into jokes and uncertainty into possibility. Coming from a society with a different emotional weather, that was not a small difference. It felt structural.

For years, liberal comedy did this especially well. It made absurdity breathable. It took hypocrisy, bureaucracy, corruption, bad faith, moral panic, and institutional stupidity and turned them into oxygen. The joke did not erase the danger, but it created enough space to survive recognizing it.

That is why I do not observe the thinning of that humor as a minor cultural detail. In my view, humor and optimism were part of the American operating system. When a society that once metabolized absurdity through jokes begins preserving dread at full strength, something has changed.

The problem is not that Americans, or liberals in particular, suddenly became less funny. The problem is that politics became too compelling, too consequential, and too deranged to remain safely comic.

Every day delivers a fresh spectacle: courts, billionaires, executive orders, corruption, cruelty, constitutional dread. The material arrives pre-satirized. You do not even need to get creative. Reality keeps walking onstage wearing the costume.

That sounds like a gift to comedians, but it is not. Comedy needs absurdity with a little room around it. It needs enough distance for the body to say: this is insane, but I can breathe around it. When the absurdity has legal force, police force, market force, or institutional consequence, the laugh does not fully release. The body knows the joke can still hurt you.

So the tone changes. The comedian becomes a witness. The satirist becomes an archivist. The late-night monologue becomes less a release valve than a nightly inventory of damage. What used to make absurdity breathable now often preserves danger at full strength.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of distance. You cannot live every evening inside “their finest hour.” A nervous system cannot afford a daily version of Churchill announcing Britain’s entrance into World War II, even when some of the alarms are real.

America is not merely polarized. It is trying to regulate itself on a dancing landscape.

Everything that should provide ground has begun to move: parties, courts, platforms, media, prices, borders, identity, work, truth, expertise, even the weather. The result is not just disagreement. It is a national nervous system running threat detection at high volume.

The American model is legacy software running on that dancing landscape. It was built for another era, when the United States reigned more confidently, industry occupied more of the social imagination, and adulthood could still be narrated as a sequence: job, house, savings, retirement, inheritance. That world was never as fair or universal as nostalgia claims, but it was stable enough to make the model believable.

Now the ground moves, but the script remains. Households are still told to optimize, invest, hustle, insure, retrain, borrow, and believe in the future, while ordinary life becomes a sequence of cliffs: rent, medical bills, childcare, debt, layoffs, insurance, groceries, one missed paycheck, one broken car.

This is where the stock market becomes offensive.

Not because a rising market is bad in itself, but because of what it is asked to symbolize. Survey after survey says roughly a third of Americans lack even a few hundred dollars of emergency cushion; many could not cover a $400 or $500 shock without borrowing, selling something, or moving closer to the red line. And yet the Dow, the Nasdaq, and the S&P keep smiling from their evergreen all-time-high peak, as if the dashboard were proof that the machine is healthy.

The split screen is obscene.

The chart says abundance.
The household says threat.
The index says historic high.
The kitchen table says one more bill.

This is not simply inequality. It is a crisis of interpretation. The country is told to read market highs as national health, while millions of households experience the same economy as fragility, exposure, and triage.

Automation sharpens the contradiction. If the old model depended on labor scarcity being solved by more labor, the new model is less clear. Machines, software, and AI do not eliminate the need for workers everywhere, but they do change the social imagination of work. Stable labor positions begin to feel less abundant, less durable, less able to absorb everyone.

In that environment, the cons of immigration become easier to dramatize than the pros. The immigrant may still be economically useful, even necessary, in whole sectors of the economy. But politically, the figure begins to look less like labor and more like pressure.

 A society under that much contradiction needs an explanation it can touch. So it turns toward the immigrant.

This is not an accident. Immigrant labor has long been useful to the economy alive: in fields, kitchens, construction sites, care work, cleaning, delivery, meatpacking, warehouses, hotels, and all the places where the official economy prefers not to look directly at its own dependencies. The immigrant body has been used as infrastructure: underpaid, overworked, politically exposed, socially deniable.

But at a certain point, the value changes.

The economy once needed the immigrant hidden in the kitchen, field, warehouse, or care home. Now power can use that same body as evidence, warning, spectacle, and offering. The worker who helped keep the machine running becomes proof that the machine was invaded.

This is the sacrificial logic. The legacy model is failing, but the failure is too large, too distributed, too abstract, too implicated in everyone’s arrangements. Financialization cannot be shouted at from a rally stage with the same visceral satisfaction. Asset inflation does not have a face. Deindustrialization is too historical. Healthcare is too bureaucratic. Housing scarcity is too local and too national at once. The dancing landscape has too many causes.

The immigrant simplifies the landscape.

Here is a body.
Here is a border.
Here is a story.
Here is the thing that crossed.
Here is the reason you are afraid.

The cruelty is that both legal and illegal immigrants can be absorbed into the same ritual. Legality matters administratively, but politically the category can be blurred whenever the machinery needs a larger offering. The point is not accuracy. The point is conversion: anxiety into anger, precarity into blame, structural failure into a human target.

The immigrant is made to carry a contradiction the society cannot metabolize. A country that depended on the labor now performs outrage at the presence. A market that benefited from the worker now lets politics treat the body as contamination. The person who helped keep the machine running becomes evidence that the machine was invaded.

That is why the sacrifice is propitiatory. It does not solve the crisis. It gives the crisis a victim.

The old model cannot admit that the ground has changed. So it asks for a body.

There. That is why the gods are angry.

The armor failed, but the forge is not gone

What worries me most is not any single item on this list. Not the market, not the media, not the border, not even the politics of blame. It is the possibility that all of it has gone under the skin.

A country can survive bad policy, bad markets, bad leaders, bad news cycles. What is harder to survive is a change in temperament: when humor stops functioning as oxygen, when optimism becomes performance, when precarity becomes identity, when politics becomes weather, when sacrifice becomes explanation.

That is why noticing the change matters. Noticing is not enough, but it is not nothing. A society cannot repair what it keeps misnaming. If dread has replaced humor, if spectacle has replaced explanation, if scapegoating has replaced diagnosis, then the first constructive act may be to say so clearly.

The point is not to recover a naive optimism. The old optimism belonged to an older landscape. But there may be another kind: not the optimism of denial, but the optimism of refusing the sacrifice. The optimism of insisting that the dancing ground is real, that the model is old, that the anger has causes, and that no body should be asked to carry them all.

The World´s New Disorder

Cover of The Newyorker Magazine
on Flickr under Creative Commons License

The following thoughts are the result of brainstorming two articles that have quite opposite stances. One of them is Yascha Mounk's "The Best-Case Scenario for the Trump Presidency" the other one is Simon Kuper's How to avert catastrophe" published in the Financial Times.

I have to agree with Mounk when he says that "confident predictions of doom are as simplistic as mindless optimism". However, I cannot do other than admit that there is a lot of truth in Kuper's affirmation when he says that "Today’s elites are often mocked for failing to foresee the financial crisis of 2008 but, in fact, such blindness is standard. In 1914, few people expected the first world war: the historian Niall Ferguson has shown that bond prices held up that summer, meaning that investors didn’t foresee higher government borrowing. Forecasters also missed the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution and September 11."

I have to admit that, for as badly as I intend to opt for Mounk's approach to today's reality, I'm inclined to make a catastrophe-prediction: the World will give us a long-lasting lesson. Globalization is way too advanced. Betting against it, a loser bet. Free market can be a double-sided knife. Anybody, any country, allies or enemies can bubble you up and pinch you down. If they didn't do it so far is because we have been good boys, great consumers; because it's more profitable let's being prosperous and play inside our markets than bet against it. But, change those rules, bully the World around with your military power, alienate your traditional allies, and we'll have a huge retaliation. 

Globalization is the logical corollary of free society and free market. Globalization is the brain-child of liberal capitalism. In a trade war against China or Russia, with their market regulations and laws about who can own stocks or bonds, they will be the indisputable winners. 

Buckle up your seatbelt: The World in 2017

Image by WikiMedia Commons

The World is shifting."McCarthyism" or "War on Terror" will not longer be sufficient models to explain the complexity of what's going to happen in next years.

Israel standing with Trump while Trump is standing by Putin? In political terms, Putin's goals in the Middle East commune with those of Iran. And in Economic terms, China cannot hide anymore its purpose of being a player in this game. A possible China/Russia/Iran axis is what I fear. Internal divisions in the United States will look small next to the whole World's division. Then, there is the surge of incendiary propaganda: both from Russia and from other groups inside the United States. There is more, much more. Just watch the news, with an open-mind, with no assumptions that things will tend to be pretty much the same as they have been so far.

United States 2016 Elections Takeaway

Image by DonkeyHotey under Creative Commons License

One of my takeaways from 2016´s election is that Sanders´s campaign proved that "Socialism" is not a bad word in America, anymore. But, does socialism really belong into the Democratic party? I don´t think so. Also, Trump´s campaign proved that white supremacist rhetoric has room in the political arena. But does Neo-nationalism really belong within the GOP? I don´t think so either. I think that the two-parties system is coming to an end in America, and we´ll witness soon the surge of some other parties.

A spectre is haunting America

A spectre is haunting America — the spectre of a growing viral xenophobia, of a raging reinforced conservatism. The political arena seems more agitated than ever, while police are shot every other day, minorities claim for the value of their lives in public demonstrations, and State Clerks are imprisoned for refusing to issue marriage license to gay couples. The nomination of a black-american president seems, somehow, to have over-stretched the society's bonds. It seems like liberal forces in America are going to a rushing pace while a big part of the society is not willing to embrace these changes. That's maybe why antagonic voices are growing in number and speaking out louder. For the sake of the country I wish that social changes will be delivered in more moderate intakes and that tolerance and good judgement will prevail.

Ferguson Aftermaths

Picture by Peoples World under
Creative Common License

It took as long as some centuries to conquer a sort of racial balance in the United States. Most of us thought that the election of an Africa American president in 2009 was the definitive prove of that mutual understanding. However, in spite of that common belief, the recent shooting of a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the following reactions that the shooting triggered, cast some doubts on that belief.

Is there a threat of Neo-Racism in the United States?

It seems like the social balance is going nowadays through a crisis. As any other crisis, this might carry on an opportunity for individual and collective growth. Whether the recent events in Ferguson will ignite a negative or positive change, depends a great deal on the future reactions of the social groups involved, i.e. the whole American community

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Bellow there is a painful expression of some of the cultural waves and tides that the events in Ferguson has risen among the color community.