Consider, conversely, the Left.
There has always been a coalition of various people - calm, rationed-looking college professors, union bosses (and you know of course early unions were often violent and linked to the mob), angry feminists, and of course, various hidden communists, and so on. Anarchists and communist radicals played a role in the formation of the union movement. Some of them were pretty crazy mofos.
But look today - say on live TV that the graduated income tax is a socialist measure, and you'll be derided as an utter madman. Nevermind that it IS a socialist measure.
And as for MLK, he had a variety of allies in the civil rights movement who were not quite as nice and civil as him. We just remember him as the 'face' of the movement, but it also had a lot of other body parts - which is not to draw from the general validity of the movement.
The statists have won, and they have won so much that it'll take decades upon decades of hard work until the Wilson-FDR-LBJ welfare state is undone, if we only restrain ourselves to wearing ties and being cute and reasonable. The damage that they've inflicted to every aspect of American culture in particular and Western culture in general is innumerable.
Assuming the libertarian movement has it right, and we should strive for a minarchist future (I know you think drug dealers need to be shot, but bear with me), making that happen by the comfortable tie-wearing ways will take at least as long as it took to build the modern welfare state - say, 70 years?
Now, I know that you think it's funny when people call what we have today opressive, and it's naturally not even close to being as evil as Stalin and Hitler and Mao. But, just for the purpose of this argument, imagine yourself in my shoes. I *do* think that it is opressive and evil, and I want to actually live in a society that is at least remotely like what I think is fair before I'm in a wheelchair and drooling on my shirt.
If the cost is endorsing a guy who looks slightly wacked-out to the average man in the street, so be it. I look slightly wacked-out to many people, too.