"I'm as radical as libertarians come"
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A provocation disguised as a shrug, "I'm as radical as libertarians come" is less a policy statement than a claim to identity and status. L. Neil Smith, a writer steeped in science fiction’s long flirtation with anti-authoritarian futures, uses "radical" as both warning label and credential: he is not the dinner-party libertarian who wants lower taxes and polite debates about regulation. He’s staking out the edge-of-map version, where the state is not a fixer-upper but a demolition site.
The line works because it compresses a whole intra-movement argument into seven words. Libertarianism already markets itself as dissent from the mainstream; calling oneself the most radical among dissenters is a bid for purity, a way to preempt compromise as moral weakness. It’s also a soft challenge to the listener: if you think you’re libertarian, are you ready to go where this logic leads? The phrase "as ... come" has the cadence of folk bravado, a plainspoken register that tries to normalize an extreme position by sounding conversational.
Context matters: Smith wrote in an era when American libertarianism was splintering between beltway pragmatists, anarcho-capitalists, and culture-war refugees. Declaring maximum radicalism is also a way to keep the authorial brand intact: in a crowded ideological marketplace, extremity becomes differentiation. Beneath the confidence sits an anxiety familiar to subcultures: that the movement’s core idea could be diluted into another flavor of conventional politics.
The line works because it compresses a whole intra-movement argument into seven words. Libertarianism already markets itself as dissent from the mainstream; calling oneself the most radical among dissenters is a bid for purity, a way to preempt compromise as moral weakness. It’s also a soft challenge to the listener: if you think you’re libertarian, are you ready to go where this logic leads? The phrase "as ... come" has the cadence of folk bravado, a plainspoken register that tries to normalize an extreme position by sounding conversational.
Context matters: Smith wrote in an era when American libertarianism was splintering between beltway pragmatists, anarcho-capitalists, and culture-war refugees. Declaring maximum radicalism is also a way to keep the authorial brand intact: in a crowded ideological marketplace, extremity becomes differentiation. Beneath the confidence sits an anxiety familiar to subcultures: that the movement’s core idea could be diluted into another flavor of conventional politics.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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