The more I think about it, the more surprised I am that I haven’t seen more of the obvious right-populist-flavored arguments for full drug legalization.
Look, I don’t think it’s a good idea to poison yourself with cocaine, or heroin, or meth. But I also don’t think it’s my business. The nanny-state liberals seem pretty sure that it’s their business, though. Sure enough that they’ll get all up in your face. Sure enough that they’ll send their DEA narcs in the black helicopters around to go sniffing.
In fact, they seem so sure of it that they’re willing to single-handedly fund all the murderous criminal cartels in Central America, and South America, and the Middle East. Because that’s what they’re doing! All those gangs support themselves through drug sales, on which they have a monopoly, because our government was stupid enough to give them a monopoly! Strike the damn drug laws, and suddenly all the users aren’t going to be buying from criminal goons – they’ll be buying from Wal-Mart! If that money’s going to flow, let it flow into the pockets of hard-working American business owners and job creators!
Other than the last sentence this is literally what the libertarians I’ve been hanging out with since forever have always said.
Take a right-populist. Make the minimal changes to their brain such that they are capable of hearing and appreciating this argument. Congratulations, you now have a right-libertarian.
Point being, yes, I appreciate all the obvious ways in which this scans as a libertarian (or even leftist) argument – and have seen them dragged out oncce again in the comments to this post – but “we should take money away from Dangerous Hispanic Gangsters and instead funnel it to American Business” is a right-populist framing, it explicitly invokes both idolized local totems and hated outgroup totems, and it seems like you should be able to do something with that.