Another election, another round of libertarians' dumping on the right to vote. I used to just find this inane and self-defeating, but now I think it's bad citizenship and affirmatively harmful. 1/n
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Libertarians will respond that there's a lot more to good citizenship than voting, and that they are highly involved in public affairs. But the fact that they're knowledgeable and engaged makes their non-voting worse. 2/n
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Their failure to go to the polls isn't because of apathy or laziness as with the typical non-voter; it's a studied repudiation of the legitimacy of the system. Many libertarians explicitly see their non-voting as part of a larger strategy of delegitimizing the state. 3/n
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But there's no such thing as delegitimizing government in general; there's only delegitimizing particular, actually existing governments. Here, libertarians are seeking to undermine the government of their own country. 4/n
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The non-voting is generally seen as quixotic, but the wider effort to trash all governments (incl. their own) as both haplessly incompetent and criminal enterprises has had a corrosive effect -- see declining trust in institutions. 5/n
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Replying to @lindsey_brink
Declining trust in institutions gives us all sorts of different things: what about the post-Nixon cynicism, Church committee, whoops, guess Vietnam was pretty bad distrust?
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You're missing the point. Not trusting institutions has given us declining trust in institutions! That's logic right there.
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. Banned in Sweden. SubGenius, Zhuangist, white-hat troll. Defrocked mathematician. Brain problems.