Spot on! I debated many times with Dave Nalle, the one-time president of the libertarian Republican Liberty Caucus, and there was one thing he said that I think he didn’t mean to let slip: “Libertarianism demands an underclass.”

I think that’s the quiet part said out loud. Randian libertarianism glorifies the “self-made man,” and strongly implies that such are the exception rather than the rule, thereby consigning the remainder of the population to the misery it deserves for each individual’s failure to bootstrap themselves to success. They become the ‘underclass’ to which Nalle referred.

Moreover, due to America’s less-than-stellar history concerning race relations, this outlook allows the self-made libertarian to look down upon less-successful groups and consider them as unworthy as a whole. This would explain why, using the metaphorical example of a Venn diagram, libertarians share much of the same space on the far political Right with white supremacists. Note that their self-perception of superiority is (mostly) not a result of malice, but of the condescension of “I’d like to see the other races do better, but they can’t help it - they are who they are, and the best help I can give them is to do nothing at all for them, so they’ll learn to bootstrap themselves.”

It is as Solzhenitsyn said: “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”