[yurishimo]

I'd consider myself pretty far left, especially by American standards, but Musk is in no way some sort of crypto (in the traditional sense) fascist. He's got some pretty libertarian views on free speech, a blind spot for PoC, and that's about it. I'd hardly categorize that as "alt right".

[brnt]

Actually, libertarianism is entirely constructed by what you can call alt-right circles. See Jane Mayer's Dark Money.

[mixedCase]

Libertarianism is literally just liberalism before modern day US liberals coopted the name, hence the alternative label "classical liberal". In the rest of the world being a "liberal" still means the same thing.

Feel free to summarize the point if there's any.

[dragonwriter]

> Libertarianism is literally just liberalism before modern day US liberals coopted the name

Once liberalism stopped being purely oppositional and established some power, there became a division between people for whom the progress achieved to date was the end goal and the people who saw it as partial.

In places where the success of liberalism also ushered in pluralism (not the US), the latter group got different names depending on exactly what they saw the end goal as...

In the US, once the early progress of liberalism was the right edge of the Overton Window, use of “liberal” and “conservative” as evolving relative-to-center terms for the directions on the primary axis of political dispute became fairly common, though even that fell apart as a consistent thing when part of the local “liberal” coalition turned sharply right with neoliberalism, resulting in an evolving use of differentiating language within the former “liberal” umbrella.