Just as a side note, is that "Lean: Libertarian" a sarcastic joke? Because you sound an aweful lot like a communitarian conservative.
Libertarian does not mean libertine nor just the American libertarian party. I am a Communitarian-individualist because that is the only way to understand man, society and freedom. I'm a committed decentralist and in some sense libertarian though.
I mean I combine a communitarian, conservative streak with radical decentralism, a sort of libertarian socialist/distributist economic outlook with a thorough libertarianism that is however interpreted through my communitarian-individualist view of society.
So how exactly should I say I lean? There is no decentralist lean, I'm little like the average liberal and although I have a conservative streak I'm really not that conservative I only look that way to the very liberal or social democrat. Few conservatives would claim me as one when they knew my actual thoughts on most issues.
But on topic. I would like to see some evidence and explanation of this grand social decline you are talking about. As a society that values liberty we generally let the individual be responsible for their happiness and even their downfalls. If you're suggesting dictatorship in some venerable context against, well, libertarianism quite frankly, then that's a whole seperate topic and debate.
I'm talking about the breakdown of intermediate associations like family and local community which go a significant way to determine the personality, order, meaning and freedom of individuals. Man is a social anima, not a floating, autonomous atom.
If you want evidence well I'd start with Durkheim's
On Suicide or anythng by Robert Nisbet. Or just witness the great increases in state power, the decline of traditional associations, the rise in mental health issues and suicide the later being as Durkheim saw the ultimate evidence of alienation from society, the rise in alcoholism, the rise of crime and other such problems over the last few centuries or so. The list goes on.
We did well in loosening the grip of the oppression of some of traditional society but we went too far into individualism and atomism. We did not replace the necessary bonds and associations that help shape and constitute men and we left him helpless. He naturally looked to such comforts as oftened by substances, consumerism, evangelical religion and mostly obviously the overbearing state. This is part of the ancient conservative realisation that the statism and corrosive individualism go together naturally.
I did post this from Robert Nisbet but you ignored it.
Conservatives, from Burke on, have tended to see the population much in the manner medieval legists and philosophical realists (in contrast to nominalists) saw it: as composed of, not individuals directly, but the natural groups within which individuals invariably live: family, locality, church, region, social class, nation, and so on. Individuals exist, of course, but they cannot be seen or comprehended save in terms of social identities which are inseparable from groups and associations. If modern conservatism came into existence essentially through such a work as Burke's attack on the French Revolution, it is because the Revolution, so often in the name of the individual and his natural rights, destroyed or diminished the traditional groups - guild, aristocracy, patriarchal family, church, school, province, etc. - which Burke declared to be the irreducible and constitutive molecules of society. Such early conservatives as Burke, Bonald, Haller, and Hegel (of The Philosophy of Right) and such conservative liberals as the mature Lamennais and of course Tocqueville, saw individualism - that is, the absolute doctrine of individualism - as being as much of a menace to social order and true freedom as the absolute doctrine of nationalism. Indeed, they argued, it is the pulverizing of society into a sandheap of individual particles, each claiming natural rights, that makes the arrival of collectivist nationalism inevitable.
De Maistre summed it up when he said he'd seen Frenchman, Italians, Englishmen, Germans and so on, he'd even heard of Persians but he'd never seen a man. Men do not exist outside the social associations they reside in and these are necessary to give him a fulfilling existence.
So, I don't get it. I guess some people do, people do some crazy ****. I just don't see what it "validates" about someone.