Hot take: Libertarians are the state’s most dedicated enemies and, in true Girardian fashion become its most faithful imitators.
Rene Girard observed that enemies often become mirror images of each other. The more fiercely they oppose, the more they mimic. The obsession breeds resemblance. This is the trap of mimetic rivalry: we become like the thing we hate.
Libertarians see the state as the ultimate enemy. But in their desire to escape or overthrow it, they begin to reflect its mindset. They study its structure, anticipate its moves, simulate its power in miniature. They build parallel institutions—private courts, private currencies, private defense—as if reconstructing the state from scratch, but with different branding.
Their deep paranoia, their obsession with sovereignty, even their fetish for rules (so long as they’re voluntary)—these are all echoes of the very system they claim to reject.
Like the revolutionary who dreams only of becoming the king he deposed, the libertarian is haunted by the shape of the state. He cannot stop thinking like it, preparing for it, becoming like it in opposition.
So yes—libertarians are closet statists. Not because they love the state, but because they hate it with such intensity that they’ve begun to mimic it.
The enemy has colonized their imagination.
