A lot of people, in recent memory, came to libertarianism for freedom from what they (correctly) perceived to be a quickly metastasizing State and rapidly growing tyranny.
Many came because they newly understood free-market "libertarian" or "Austrian" economic analyses and resultant policies to be easily better for their wallets, and for sound money and a sane economy, than any other alternative on the Liberal-Marxist spectrum.
Many came because they appreciated alternative and independent journalistic voices, that were not a part of the Matrix created by the State-Corporate Complex.
Yet others came because they experienced decades of slow Big Agro and Big Pharma poisoning, and recently saw the light regarding natural health, food and medicine.
Many conservative families valued educational and homeschooling freedom (for its own sake) as well as to serve as a bastion against the encroachment of the Left and saw liberty as a means to get there.
Many came since they valued atomistic individual freedom ("live and let live") from traditional or societal norms, bonds and expectations -- whether of the rugged "American" individualism variety we see on the right, or of the libertinism and degeneracy we see on the Left.
The natural bed fellowship of the State and the Left meant that many traditional-valued (anti-leftist) folks came to see libertarian anti-Statism as an escape from the onslaught of the Left across all societal institutions. This attracted even more from the "right-wing" tribe -- "liberty" had become the new "based".
I will not go so far as to say that ALL these are bad reasons per se -- in many contexts, many of these can potentially be very good reasons to desire liberty. However, if these are all there ever was, even the possibly good reasons become bad reasons -- since they miss the main reason that man MUST desire to do good, which is that goodness is inherently worthy of doing.
the main reason that man MUST desire to do good...is that goodness is inherently worthy of doing.
Liberty is not about...
Liberty will most likely lead to maximum practical freedom, but it is not about freedom.
Liberty will most likely allow for the maximum proclamation of the truth, about food, health, parenting, family, education and even global affairs, as well as metaphysical and spiritual matters, and will most likely suppress lies and special-interest manufactured narratives.
But, liberty is not even essentially about all that, however good and beautiful all that truly may be.
Not only is liberty only tangentially related to these other goods listed above, it is even further far removed from inherent evils like libertinism and Leftism. Liberty is not about "live and let live". The only requirement is that criminal aggression is not justifiable -- there are a plethora of non-criminal ways in which one can choose to not "let live" and instead interfere (non-violently, yet effectively) in the lives of others, with one's own unsolicited moral expectations and demands.
Then, why liberty?
Liberty is MOST fundamentally about law, about ethics, about lawfulness. More specifically, it specifies the only morally correct answer to the question of the use of violent force among men -- which is that it may ONLY be used to restitute/redress prior committed crime, or in self-defense.
Therefore, being thus morally correct, this truth or goodness is inherently worthy of embrace.
The above insight provides the only rock-solid reason for embracing liberty -- "it is good to do the right thing because it is the right thing" and NOT "it is the good to do the right thing because it usually leads to other good things for me".
Leaving liberty?
People who do not embrace liberty for the right reason (and instead come for some of the other otherwise good reasons mentioned above) do not have a natural and strong ground for staying. In addition, they will observe those (few as they might be) that have come for inherently bad reasons, and will react strongly, which ever more quickly weakens their already weak foundations.
The moral imaginations of these people have not yet grasped many core ideas
-- that while liberty is a non-negotiable part of virtue, it is not the whole of virtue or morality, which may and must also be pursued,
-- that the State (being itself a criminal organization with a large religious cult following) cannot provide law and justice (as well as other things), even if some in it sometimes wanted to, and
-- that the illegitimacy of unprovoked violence does not mean that one is also disallowed from using non-violent means of persuasion and application of societal norms and expectations of virtue (alienation, excommunication, ostracization, shaming, etc.)
This poverty of moral imagination combined with an already weak grounding explains why many, in recent memory, not only appeared to have had quickly embraced liberty but also seemed to have had, almost as quickly, left it.
Related Reading
[1] @paulvp/conservatism-vs-libertarianism
[2] @paulvp/are-libertarians-or-conservatives-liberal-is-the-west-christian-or-judeo-christian-and-greco-roman-classical
(*For the purposes of this post, the words "libertarianism", "anarchism" and "voluntaryism" are to be considered synonymous. See here for a more nuanced explanation of these terms.)