It's fair to say most RP supporters are under 40 but the most active RP supporters in my local community are 50 and 60 somethings. Heck, the man himself is a stuffy old doctor.
(musing on)
Really I don't understand where this idea that anarchist = libertarian comes from, those two ideas are quite different. Anarchism is more or less we assume everyone is good and kind and wonderful so we'll all just cooperate and no state is necessary. Libertarianism is the idea that a government is necessary but the government is inherently problematic, so it must be contained to the smallest scope possible.
This idea has always been built into American government and we just have let it be corrupted away from us. From the Alien and Sedition act, to Lincoln suspending the writ of habeus corpus shutting down newspapers critical of his actions in the Civil War to FDR managing to persuade America that the socialist programs he dubbed the New Deal bolstered the post WW2 American economy, we've slowly lost our way right from the get go.
Look at Article I Section 8. Those powers are clearly enumerated for a reason. It takes a politician to convince you that anywhere in there is Congress granted the authority to do two thirds of what it currently does.
Jefferson ran the country with five scribes. Our forefathers would wonder why on earth Congress was in session for more than a few weeks per calendar year.
Is it really so wacky to want the government to stop its neurotic, self destructive behavior and try limited government, an idea of which we have
ample reason to suspect actually works?
Is it my goal to achieve some perfect libertarian state? Of course it is. Do I expect that to happen? Of course not. People aren't that inherently good to not find new ways to abuse the government for their own benefit. It will always be a problem. But in seeking the ideal, we become something greater than our current selves, and perhaps even ultimately arrive at something greater than that to which we aspired in the process.
So what do you do? You try to understand libertarian ideas. Then you look at the way things are and build a bridge from one to the other. I for example oppose the legislation making machine guns so hard to acquire. Ideally, we would simply repeal this legislation. That would be correct, you now have a solution and a goal all in one. But it's not going to happen in the real world that we just suddenly achieve it.
So what do you do? First you work on securing your existing access to the arms you are still allowed to have. Then you start chipping away at the key components, 922(o) for instance. You challenge the very existence of the bureaus which enforce those laws so that they have no teeth. You fight back with the same creeping incrementalism which got you here in the first place. You fight like a wolverine, make no compromises, and attack the thing you hate on all fronts.
If you can gradually shift the momentum in the direction towards freedom, it's like packing snowflakes together one at a time to make a snowball. Eventually the snowball gets big enough and begins to roll, packing on more snow, and then suddenly it goes over the edge of the cliff and disturbs a snowbank, and the snowbank falls, starting an avalanche. But the initial phases are hard, time consuming, and difficult, and there's little support. Most of the snowflakes you try to gather will simply melt in your hand as people who support these new ideas will be called fools, maniacs, and other insults while they yet live, and will be derided and opposed. Just look at what they did to Galileo.
It matters not to me however. Anything ever accomplished that has brought new light into the human experience was pioneered by a handful of determined individuals. And in seeking the ideal do we secure our only hope for individual accomplishment, an act in such scarce supply, yet it is the very thing which advances our own existence and the existence of those to come.