In Offended Freedom: The Rise of Libertarian Authoritarianism, two Swiss sociologists, Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey, indulge in a common academic habit: blaming libertarians for an intellectual and social phenomena that they find alarming. Their bill of particulars fails to stick because of conceptual incoherence, mistaking radical opposition to any government policy—even one that allows more liberty than the disgruntled person wants—as “libertarian,” and categorizing perfectly understandable anger at government overreach as inherently “authoritarian.”
The authoritarians the authors study—those angry at more open immigration—are not at all libertarian. The study’s libertarians—those who opposed COVID-19 restrictions—are antiauthoritarian. Even while granting that the latter “do not primarily yearn for the reinstatement of traditional values, nor do they submit uncritically to leaders,” the authors lump them into the authoritarian category, trotting out the leftist writer Theodor Adorno’s hoary old ideas about the “authoritarian personality.”
The authors have found a genuinely interesting phenomenon—people formerly of the left, who “were once committed to an emancipatory transformation of the existing order,” who have pivoted to hostility toward openness to foreigners and the wider world and to anger at what presents as scientific authority.
Their specific examples are German, but Americans will recognize the type: people radicalized against regnant Western political and cultural authorities over COVID restrictions and the allowance of wider immigration. Indeed, many of the same people share those attitudes. But lumping them together as “libertarian authoritarians” misreads both groups in ways that should have been obvious.
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