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In game theory, there's a difference between cooperative strategies and non-cooperative strategies. In non-cooperative strategies, you act alone, generally with no connection to others or any knowledge about how they'll act. In cooperative behavior, you can form blocs and groups with others.

The economy is generally thought of as non-cooperative, though some issues e.g. Affirmative Action and nepotism challenge this. This means that everyone is supposed to look out for themselves, and not care about the actions of everyone else. It's the classical profit-maximizing libertarian dream which should, at least in theory, lead to the best possible outcome for all people involved.

The problem with this is that cooperative strategies absolutely shit on non-cooperative ones. After all, in a non-cooperative strategy one cannot under any circumstances be expected to sacrifice themselves. Taking on a bit of hardship for the good of the group makes zero sense when you deny that there's a group. For a concrete example, think of strikes. If the manager offers extra pay to break the strike, there's no non-cooperative reason for you not to break it. They rely entirely on cooperative strategies to be effective.

This relative strength means that cooperative strategies are much more prevalent in modern politics and society. Nations themselves are a cooperation of different individuals with only arbitrary similarities between them, as are the political parties and factions within them. In US politics in particular, it's been found that political identity is more predictive of how people vote than actual political beliefs. That is, working-class democrats will vote for the yuppie socialist democrat before a working-class republican, even if the latter reflects their beliefs much more accurately.

This is why libertarianism is largely a meme ideology. It simply isn't a part of the real world's "meta". Rugged individualism will always be destroyed by non-egalitarian groupthink. And this is also why US politics nowadays is so retarded and divisive, because people will care more about their own group and alignment than actual benefits to themselves or others. Even the pundits who point this out, and say that the elites are dividing us, only ever do so as a way to shoehorn in their own cultural beliefs. Like the lefties on reddit who use inclusivity as a weapon to exclude "transphobes", despite the latter being a much larger portion of the population (particularly working class population) than trannies.

The only way around this is absolute nationalism. You need a homogenous nation, to minimize internal divisions, while also focusing heavily on foreign groups to spur cooperation against this perceived threat. The US has operated on this principle since its founding, from the indian wars, to the Mexican-American War, to the World Wars and so on.