I wonder if authoritarian vs libertarian is on a pendulum as well. Smarter people with smarter choices leading to more libertarians.
Libertardians are dumb people who think they're smart because it's nothing but a theoretical construct that doesn't exist in reality. It's a fraction of a second power vacuum that's replaced by a strongman. If you waved a magic wand to force the US to be "libertarian", then all it means is that someone like George Soros is your new ruler (not that he isn't already). Libertardians are essentially just useful idiots lowering the drawbridge to be conquered by an external force, similar to how "anarchists" were used to try a create a political vacuum to be conquered in Russia and bring in Jewish communism.
"6. Political freedom is an idea but not a fact. This idea one must know how to apply whenever it appears necessary with this bait of an idea to attract the masses of the people to one's party for the purpose of crushing another who is in authority. This task is rendered easier if the opponent has himself been infected with the idea of freedom, SO-CALLED LIBERALISM, and, for the sake of an idea, is willing to yield some of his power. It is precisely here that the triumph of our theory appears; the slackened reins of government are immediately, by the law of life, caught up and gathered together by a new hand, because the blind might of the nation cannot for one single day exist without guidance, and the new authority merely fits into the place of the old already weakened by liberalism."
"14. In any State in which there is a bad organization of authority, an impersonality of laws and of the rulers who have lost their personality amid the flood of rights ever multiplying out of liberalism, I find a new right - to attack by the right of the strong, and to scatter to the winds all existing forces of order and regulation, to reconstruct all institutions and to become the sovereign lord of those who have left to us the rights of their power by laying them down voluntarily in their liberalism."