Here. I certainly think he’s broadly right: the median libertarian is less absolutist than when Bryan and I argued about minarchy and anarchy back in the stone age of the early 90s, but at the same time anarchism has become a more popular view among young libertarians than it was then.

Part of the moderation, of course, involves shifts in a BHL direction, as former minarchists and otherwise-would-have-been minarchists shift toward endorsements of everything from redistribution for absolute poverty relief to a universal basic income. Here are a couple of reasons for that, besides those adduced by Bryan. These are philosophical, not sociological. That is, these are reasons why I think the minarchist position comes under justified pressure from our direction, not explanations of the trend Bryan observes. The truth of a view and its popularity are, to a first approximation, unrelated.

1) Minarchism demands an image of an impartial, law-abiding, and rights-protecting police and judicial system, and armed forces that are used justly and defensively. Some minarchists used to treat those institutions as a kind of default equilibrium: when you subtract everything away that the state shouldn’t be doing, they’re what’s left. And in the 1970s when modern libertarian minarchism came together as a position– post-Warren Court and post-Vietnam, pre-War on Drugs– I suppose that one could imagine that. But since then the monstrous growth in the carceral state and the constant increase in militarized and abusive policing have made that image of the rights-protecting law enforcement bodies more and more alien in the US. And, maybe, the post-9/11 turn to endless war and the growth of executive lawlessness even beyond Cold War heights make the requisite image of defense policy more alien as well.

The anarchist responds by, well, proposing the abolition of statist policing, judging, and armed force. The BHL might respond, at least on the domestic front, by looking at the social sources of the American carceral and police state, including not just bad laws such as drug prohibition but also including, e.g., the system of racial domination that has been a major source of American state power but is not only a statist phenomenon. The traditional minarchist view of Michael Brown might have been “well, he initiated force by stealing cigarillos, and it is the appropriate role of the police to protect property rights, so…” But for people who substantively care about human freedom, there’s obviously something pretty unsatisfying about that being all one has to say. In a society characterized by a history of pervasive, and impoverishing, racial domination, finding something else to say might well push in a BHL direction.

2) Minarchism also rests on a very particular view about legitimate redistribution. It is uniquely legitimate to force some to pay for the protection of others’ negative rights. Police protection (sticking with the image of police as “protecting”) is supposed to be provided to all, not on the basis of willingness or ability to pay; but no other good, benefit, or social service may be provided on the basis of coerced finance. Robert Nozick set his considerable intellectual powers to supporting something like that conclusion. I will here maintain agnosticism about whether the argument goes all the way through. I’ll just note that it is, at best, a very fine tightrope to walk, and that some fall off to one side and become anarchists opposed to the redistributive features of statist police protection, and others fall to the other and decide that there can’t be an absolute moral prohibition on other forms of coerced redistribution. (I provide more of an argument about this here.)

3) Of course, Nozick’s proposed solution rested at an important point on the absence of a history of rights-violations, and he acknowledged that in the presence of such a history, the claims of restitution and compensation might be so complicated that one might as well approximate them with systematic state action on behalf of the disadvantaged such as a redistributive welfare state or the difference principle. So even those who followed Nozick almost the whole way across the tightrope might find that, before quite reaching the other side, they had to jump one way or the other.