(Don’t take this too seriously. This is a rant and I only believe about ¾ of it, but I’m not sure which ¾.)

Libertarianism at various times became a political home for —

• patriotic white American kids who had been taught lies about slavery, Reconstruction, and American history generally;
• science-fiction nerds looking to derive human society from first principles, like Asimov’s Hari Seldon, and yet end up with a system that would accommodate Heinlein’s Jubal Harshaw;
• philosophers of economics who wanted a laboratory to experiment with their free-market theories, from Nozick to the Friedmans (Milton et seq.);
• passionate and doctrinaire anticommunists following Ayn Rand (though she hated the term “libertarian”);
• outright neoconfederates and white-supremacists, like Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul;
• post-hippie engineers looking for a safe space to sell lots of porn and High Weirdness on the Internet.

Over time, history beats philosophy. The libertarian movement fragmented. Part of it leaned into white-supremacist patriotic pisscrap and joined up with the alt-right. Part of it got woke and teamed up with the feminists, BLMs, queers, and other progressives — but only so long as it’s okay to vape weed, look at porn, and argue about the legitimacy of sex work. Part of it dug into economics and techno-weirdness and morphed into the cryptocurrency bros. Other bits vanished up the asses of the atheist movement, the open-source movement, or other specific issue-driven groups.