In 2000, Smith said he'd run for President if he got one million signatures. He could only muster 1,500, but still appeared on ballots as the Libertarian Party candidate in Arizona, even though Harry Browne was the party's national nominee.
L. Neil lives in fantasy world where the Whiskey Rebellion was a success and a libertarian utopia ensues:
In L. Neil Smith's alternate history novel The Probability Broach (1980), Albert Gallatin convinces the militia not to put down the rebellion, but instead to march on the nation's capital, execute George Washington for treason, and replace the Constitution with a revised Articles of Confederation. As a result, the United States becomes a libertarian utopia called the North American Confederacy.
In other words he's got his head so far up his own rear that he has to open his mouth to see where he's going.
Now you'd think a science-fiction writer might be intrigued about the possibility of slave-owning states successfully rebelling and establishing their own plantation state south of the Mason-Dixon line, but I guess how that would end up is just too obvious to be worth the trouble of writing.
No, it's not a recent thing.
ALL his life the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick yearned for what he called the mainstream. He wanted to be a serious literary writer, not a sci-fi hack whose audience consisted, he once said, of “trolls and wackos.” But Mr. Dick, who popped as many as 1,000 amphetamine pills a week, was also more than a little paranoid. In the early ’70s, when he had finally achieved some standing among academic critics and literary theorists — most notably the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem — he narced on them all, writing a letter to the F.B.I. in which he claimed they were K.G.B. agents trying to take over American science fiction. More...