Libertarians and Populists

Just a quick thought. This is admittedly almost entirely terminological in the end, but I think terminology matters.

I think it's pretty well understood that populism is a rhetorical style and not an ideological stance. On the other hand libertarianism, for all its faults, at least aspires to policy substance.

But in practice, libertarianism tends toward mere rhetoric because it is too ill-defined to resist being misused. By way of example, if you want to deregulate the financial system, it's easy to use libertarian rhetoric to advance your goals, and a "true libertarian" might argue with you but generally won't be able to deny you the libertarian label. (The same goes for populism, and that's exactly my point. In practice libertarianism, like populism, functions as a kind of rhetorical tactic rather than a substantive agenda.)

This is too bad because within the thing that we call libertarianism is a respectable policy agenda that deserves to be taken seriously. It's just saddled with (A) a bunch of ridiculous bullshit, and (B) a bunch of opportunists who selectively invoke libertarian principles to advance their hard-right agenda. (Oh, and (C) a bunch of Ron Paul racist assholes. As a demographic, self-identified libertarians are scary as hell.)

As a side note, I think you could make the case that the reasonable parts of libertarianism should really be called liberalism, and to the extent libertarians seek to distinguish themselves from liberals they tend to veer into ridiculous territory. And that's fine, I don't really care about the lines at this point. I would just like to see the Julian Sanchez's of the world shake off the opportunists and racists and formulate a policy vision that can't be dismissed by association. To some extent this has already happened, as a lot of the smartest and most eloquent libertarians have essentially shifted into the nebulous liberal/Democratic/anti-Trump camp. (Meanwhile a lot of the Ron Paul types have given up any pretense of libertarianism and are full-on white nationalist.) But anyway the term "libertarian" continues to be too broad and poorly defined as a way to describe this ideology, and I wonder what might usefully replace it. Maybe "libertarian Democrats"?

(And yes I'm well aware of the abortive attempt to launch a "liberaltarian" movement about a decade ago. I guess in retrospect I have more admiration for the project than I did at the time.)