Libertarianism vs Small-l Liberalism

[Vosem]

The divide here seems to be over how strictly defined something like 'purpose of government' is -- is it for things that can only be achieved with the presence of a state (like fighting off invasions or maintaining a court system), or might it be more loosely defined? You can be socially liberal and fiscally conservative, a la Bloomberg, and think the government has an important role to play in fighting the obesity crisis (an opinion which, in the US, I strongly associate with SLFC non-libertarians), or you can think that the government shouldn't have a role to play in fighting private vices.

I think that Gadsden-style libertarianism (for lack of a better term; the Gadsden Flag is a really common symbol of affiliation to this in the US) was vanishingly rare among the general public before something like 1990; when Bill Weld declared in his inauguration speech that he was a 'libertarian', nobody immediately understood this to mean something like 'ancap'. Today the association is much stronger, and a younger politician with the same politics of 1990 Bill Weld would be a moderate Democrat that would not dream of characterizing himself in such a way.

The point about monarchy is an interesting one. At least in the US and Canada, republicanism is so strongly associated with Gadsden-style libertarianism that monarchism comes off as something of a center-left position in response, which is not true anywhere else on Earth. There is certainly a substantial feeling that a government which is constitutionally proscribed from doing more might be better than a small-d 'democratic' government which feels free to be very activist; when I was younger I occasionally flirted with anti-federalist positions on the grounds that the worst tyrannies in First World countries usually seemed to be committed by municipal governments. (Think things like police shootings). I don't really think that anymore and I think that whole train of thought (which was only ever a thing among hyper-intellectuals) has become much less attractive/common post-COVID, but it does exist and I sort of understand where it comes from.