> Infantilism is a big component in far anything communities, but the internet has made it way worse in some cases

I definitely agree with this. I've seen it in my own ideological development.

I'm about 40 years old now. I've labelled myself lots of things over the years: Republican, conservative, libertarian, Objectivist, Anarcho-Capitalist, and more. I still identify in some way with all of those, which makes sense because while my ideas and beliefs have been refined over the years, much of the foundation and all of the personal experiences that informed them haven't.

I stopped calling myself a Republican when I saw that most Republicans had strong beliefs that ran counter to mine. I've never cared who someone loves or how they live. I'm happy to live peacefully and respectfully with whomever is around me as long as they're happy to do the same. I've always been opposed to the unbound growth of government and particularly opposed to government violating its own rules in pursuit of a goal that happens to be "an exception". The people I knew who called themselves Republicans increasingly differed from me, in these areas and others, so I looked for a new (or perhaps "more specific") community.

Libertarians seemed to fit that mold for me, and that worked for a long time. That term became associated with the Libertarian Party for me. For a while the LP seemed to be making some progress. I was an ardent supporter of Ron Paul and would have loved to see him take the Presidency. He didn't, so I started to care more about building a solid foundation so the "next Ron Paul" could be better supported. That looked like it might work for a while, but ultimately the LP fell apart and was taken over by people who weren't there for the same reasons that I was.

Objectivism was a more well-defined label, and at first I agreed with almost all of it. I loved that it was so consistent! But over time I found more and more edge cases where it wasn't consistent at all, and I realized that the people I interacted with were more interested in what Ayn Rand said than they were about thinking critically about things. I came to see Objectivists as "Randists", and abandoned the label.

Anarcho-Capitalism was similar. It's consistent, I agree with the foundations... but the people who apply it to themselves began to feel more and more "shallow" to me. Most of them were self-described Ancaps because they saw it as edgy; most those that earnestly believed it have such a shallow understanding of the way social systems work that they expected to be able to throw out all government tomorrow morning and everything would work out great. I (think!) I know better - while I believe government in its current form is immoral and should ultimately be abolished, trying to do it in one fell swoop is a sure recipe for social and economic disaster. Historically that's always followed by a period of violence and the rise of authoritarianism. No thanks.

These days my views are pretty much just my own, and I don't strongly identify with any label that I know of. My username is sorta tongue in cheek, even - I've seen it used as a slur for ancaps in the past, and it was mildly amusing to me, so I adopted it.

TL;DR: I think I've grown as a person to the point that I know my beliefs change over time, allow for the idea that I could be totally wrong, and am really just looking for a way to leave in peace and harmony with those around me. If I can find common ground with them and work together to move toward our shared goals - awesome. If not, that's OK too. I'm happy continuing to ignore the things I can't change.