Aristopopulism

Seminal movement of illiberal politics used to correct the non-sophistication of Trump's method by aligning populism, illiberal elites, lawyers, and business leaders into a happy illiberal posse - [1]

• One of those influences was the Austrian libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and two of his American disciples, Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. That trio formed the core of a group of thinkers known as the “paleolibertarians”: For von Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe, real political freedom required shrinking — and eventually abolishing — the centralized state, making way for an “anarcho-capitalist”
• John Ganz - Book - When the Clock Broke - the fall of America after Reagan.
• Peter Thiel - infamously declared in 2009 that he “no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible.” [2]
  • Distinction between natural law and positive law - important distinction to understand - [3]
  • Cato Unbound folded in 2021. Did they run out of ideas? [4] Or switched to aristopopulism?
  • Understanding arguments on the libertarian front may be important, since this front is vying for space in politics - and produces different arguments for unpopular ideas. For a change agent, it may be useful to understand different sides of the discussion by reading liberatrian arguments and comparing them to the herd mentality of the mainstream. Once libertarian ideas ('freedom') can be reconciled with democracy - we can propose solutions. OSE's solution is getting beyond scarcity thinking.
• On the surface, Deneen, Yarvin and Thiel want different things — a postliberal order grounded in Catholic social teaching; a monarchy styled after a tech startup; a stateless techno-libertarian paradise in which the only rights are property rights.
  • But they are united both by their opposition to liberal democracy and by their fundamental elitism — their shared belief that America is and always will be run by elites, but that it is currently ruled by the wrong type of elite.