There seems to be an assembly line straight from the Von Mises Institute to the Dark Enlightenment.
A large amount of the increasing number of people who describe themselves as "(Neo-)Reactionaries" have a history as extreme right-libertarians if not anarcho-capitalists. Paying attention to only the surface level of politics, this seems like some kind of contradiction or at least evidence of some emotive mass-convertion. Why the hell should an ancap, supposedly immunized against all forms of "statism," come to support the Reaction, which is superficially radically pro-state, pro-autocracy, anti-individualist etc.?
In fact, if you ask me, historically being a libertarian is practically a precondition to being a good Reactionary. There are some nationalist knuckle-draggers and Christian dominionists in the Reaction, never having read the Gospel of Rothbard, but pretty much all Reactionaries of intellectual note since Moldbug have gone through at least a phase of libertarianism.
Now the fact is, even though their policies my vary tremendously, libertarians and Reactionaries see the same specific flaws in the Progressive social engineering program, and Reactionaries have taken these to their logical conclusion which libertarians dare not do. At least, a true libertarian opens an intellectual can or worms in his development and it's only a matter of time until those worms to their work.
As a caveat, when I say "libertarian," I mean a true-blue libertarian, not a "minarchist who believes in democracy" and certainly not one of the vapid, suit-clad and Koch-kosher "moderate "libertarians"" that hang out in D.C. LARPing and pretending that they actually have an effect on policy. I'm talking about a true ancap praxeologist who won't shut the hell up about spontaneous order.
Spontaneous order, as it happens, is where the magic happens, where libertarians become Reactionaries. One of the elementary aspects of libertarian economics is that the economy is an emergent and naturally ordered instrument, where prices and products arise from a subtle and constantly shifting interaction between individual subjective valuation and material inputs.
The human mind, on the other hand, is relatively nude of concept and metaphors for understanding economics. Aside from the "data" required to make centralized economic decisions being infinite and inaccessible (unless the State starts mind-reading), we simply have no intuitive understanding of what is good and bad economically. State engineering and meta-decisions creates scarcity they purport to alleviate and there's overwhelming evidence that purposeful interference in the complex system of the economy bring ruin, destruction, etc. in various forms (citation: the entire 20th century).
All libertarians understand this, and their research into economics is mostly an enterprising of creating accessible metaphors for making sense of economic action, the underlying principles of decision being still far beyond our design. At the heart of it, someone who understands laissez faire in its most extreme and relevant variety understands that the economy is an emergent and self-organizing engine, and action taken to modify its output, worse than being ineffectual, is inevitably counterproductive. This is just spontaneous order. And if you're reading this, I assume you know your Hayek, so I won't belabor the point further.
Understanding the spontaneous order of the economy immediately crushes the intuitive idea that we can graft our desires onto the macroeconomy in any straight-forward way. This libertarians understand, and for that reason, interventionism, Socialism, economic nationalism, etc. are all a bore and are intellectually stillborn. The battle for libertarians is against the neurotic conceit that individuals or collectives can model and control the market, which is formed from the diffuse desires of all people.
The thing is that libertarians fail, in a way Reactionaries do not, to generalize spontaneous order as widely as it should be. Sure the economy is spontaneously ordered, but more than that, all of human society is as well. Libertarians will often shutter at the thought of collective and purposeful economic engineering and change, but suddenly soften their hearts for purposeful social engineering.
In the same way that economic institutions such as private property, banking and loans, credit, currency arise gradually as norms to solve underlying economic problems, social mores and institutions, be they gender roles, xenophobia, dieting prohibitions, aesthetic tastes, environmental practices, etc. evolve as ways of variously dealing with inherent social problems (how to maintain pair-bonding,
The whole point of spontaneous order is that no one sat down one day to decide what kind of gender roles a society should have, in the same way that a banking system or conventions for property rights are never decided in some historical meeting. A gradual inter-play of needs and solutions combine to address the problem. Gradually, an efficient solution emerges, but no individual person needs to understand why or how it works.
In fact, most of the history of economic thought was an issue of gradually coming to grips with the fact that seemingly "irrational" or exploitative practices like, say, taking interest on loans were in fact, not just efficient in some narrow economic sense, but socially beneficent. If social engineers came in power and couldn't see a justification for any interest and therefore prohibited it outright, the social repercussions would've been disastrous.
The logic is the same in the social domain. If we honestly forfeit all our critical faculties and social mores to an opinion-molding class that insists on gender roles are "irrational" and must be stomped out, the diffuse ways that gender roles bring together the disjoint interests of males and females are lost. Rational precaution dictates that we shouldn't steamroll everything we might not understand.
Even at that, a lot of what sociobiologists, anthopologists, Game Theorists and others have done within the past century amounts to an account of human social mores similar in style to the French classical liberal analysis of economics. Instead of looking at complex systems in the human domain with a naive eye to engineer, serious attempts at understand how and why human societies arrange themselves as they do have been undertaken with fairly fruitful results. Even without them, it would be no more rational to trash social conventions because they are unsavory to us on individual aesthetic grounds.
There is a wooly-headedness in some libertarians (usually the Koch-kosher ones) that somehow social mores are "obsolete" because of some hand-waved social change. It's hard to enunciate how naive this is. If a Progressive gets up and says "income inequality" or employment or scarcity itself is no long a problem we have to deal with if we didn't just have some progressive panacea (college education, more progressive taxation, environmental regulation), a libertarian would wince, but some might turn around as say something as equally stupid like that xenophobia is no longer necessary because we now live in a "globalized economy." Xenophobia and nepotism solve for inevitable information asymmetries and tail risks; they're never going to be obsolete or "irrational."
Libertarians see the emergent nature of one aspect of human society: the economy, but often don't generalize the intuition where it's totally due. Reactionaries do. Granted, social mores can constrain individual action, so if he were to notice this, a libertarian would cease being a libertarian in some sense. Still the principles behind the Reaction and libertarianism are quite the same. Of course, there are other minor sociological reasons for the libertarian refuge in Reaction. There is the betrayal of Ron Paul by the RNC in 2012, which forced many libertarians out of "reforming the system." And now the perennial attempt to find middle ground with Progressives on things like gay marriage, sex and abortion is considerably compromised due to the unrelenting acceleration of unmitigated insanity of social engineering Left.
What we're left with the same old assembly line. Every libertarian has the same choice: sell-out and try to make it at George Mason or see how deep the rabbit hole goes.