Political libertarians are democratic hackers. They take democracies and insert destructive anti-social code…

Political libertarians are democratic hackers. They take democracies and insert destructive anti-social code into the operating system, ideas and beliefs about individual freedoms that are fundamentally opposed to the whole idea of democracy. /1

They get away with it because elections gave them a way in. What we call democracy is really the complex public institutions that organise and run public life. Libertarians have convinced people democracy is elections. Elections were always only one (very recent) way to.../2

...elect leaders. A tool, not democracy itself, which pre-exists elections by thousands of years. Libertarians gamed this tool easily, it's just popularity - marketing. Once done, they then claim the 'will of the people' for their democracy hacking. /3

Only about 20 democracies even require people to vote, and of those only about half even bother to enforce it. So the 'will of the people' or a 'mandate' is a pretty tenuous construction. Most of what a government actually does is never even discussed at an election. /4

Once the anti-social hack is inserted into the democratic system, it infects widely, such as with privatisations, and now with public health. Libertarian politicians hacked the public health response for Covid, turning it into a classic libertarian 'freedom' campaign. /5

This isn't an analogy, this is the deliberate hacking of a system of governance. The vast network of think tanks and media interests the libertarians created and acquired do this as their core work. Weaponising issues every day of every year, you can see how during Covid.../6

...every advance by public health is immediately met by a new libertarian variant, hastily strategised and circulated. Slogans, strategies, 'living with the virus', 'just like the flu', immunity debt', etc. This is what hackers do, re-jig their code to maintain control. /end