This has not been my experience. Most of the (modern American) libertarian intellectual patron saints, like Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard, were quite open racists and sexists. And even the ones who aren't nationalists tend to believe in human inequality, demarcated by something like IQ rather than race or culture. After all, the successful among us are simply our betters, and attempts to enforce any kind of social equality are tyrannical because try as we might we just can't make everyone the same. Almost without exception, right-libertarians I've interacted with have had right-wing views about social issues.
Meh. More issues than you might think are relevant to "protecting property." Libertarians have traditionally opposed the civil rights movement, for example, on the basis of protecting the prerogatives of private property owners. They oppose feminism on similar grounds- contracts are sacrosanct, and the state enforcing all this "equal treatment and equal pay" nonsense is a form of tyranny.
This is really the only "new" thing about the modern American libertarian movement. It's perfectly in keeping with the long right-wing political tradition stretching back the French Revolution - what it adds is the insistence that there is something insurgent, something rebellious, about what is essentially a defense of power and privilege.
I agree overall - I'm just trying to explain what goes on in the confused mind of a true-believer libertarian. I find it a pretty terrible ideology too for much the same reason. Embarrassingly, I went through a phase of about a year and a half in college of being a libertarian, so I'm describing the way I and my libertarian friends thought at that time.
The ones I've met were all liberal on issues related to civil liberties, although of course civil liberties don't include the liberty of not starving or being homeless, and depriving people of necessities doesn't fit in their narrow definition of violence. I've encountered mostly open-border types as well, although I don't know if they're the majority. Obviously they favor removing prohibitions and restrictions on everything, economic or social.
Most that I've met have thought that racism/sexism/etc. were bad, but that the free market will take care of any economic effects over time because it is economically irrational to discriminate based on something other than their qualities as an employee, and some believe that changing social norms are sufficient to avoid racism elsewhere (as well as in the economy). They oppose anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, and the like because of property fundamentalism, but the free market argument is how they hand-wave issues of discrimination away. They tend to personally disagree with the racism and sexism of Rand, Rothbard, et al. but think it just had to do with the times.
They tend to believe in some sort of "meritocracy" where "merit" is measured by how valuable you are to the market. Of course many if not most factors in "merit" are not controllable by the person being valued - IQ being a classic example, as is the social class you're born in, any discrimination you've faced, illnesses (mental or physical), etc. Unsurprisingly they are mostly white males with high IQs and middle-to-upper class backgrounds, who have no idea what it's like to be considered economically useless.
Increasingly, I am seeing the two-spectrum model for politics as actually worse than a single-spectrum model. Economic and social issues can't be so readily separated. And frequently economic issues are simply a proxy or cipher for how someone believes society should work. As an example, the early classical liberals were 'left-wing' in the sense that they wanted free markets because they believed free markets would lead to social equality. Modern free-marketers tend to be right-wing because they believe free markets give proper scope to what they see as natural inequalities between people, whereas "government tyranny" always results from attempts to make equal what can never truly be equal. Free-market politics are as often about reinforcing social inequalities of various kinds as they are about free markets for their own sake.
It's certainly true that economic and social issues are two aspects of hierarchy in society, and they can't be separated entirely. But I do think the differences between, say, Chavez and Corbyn are important, as are those between Gary Johnson and Richard Spencer. My view is that there are a number of different political spectra in addition to the two on the Political Compass, e.g. militarist vs pacifist, or elitist vs populist. All political spectra are interrelated, but that doesn't mean it's useless to think of multiple ones.
Still though, I certainly agree that they do want a hierarchy (one they would do well in, moreover) and this puts them on the right in any 1D model.
There are some who want to see social inequalities widened, but there are a lot of others who believe that systems (almost) always just work better if privately run, and that a reasonably just society can be created if the government stepped out of the way and let private enterprise handle everything. It's a really comforting delusion because it says that humans are fundamentally so good that, left to their own devices without attempting to control very much, they will naturally help each other out including through private philanthropy and mutual aid, building a desirable and mostly just society. Of course it's not true, and it's mostly possible to hold such beliefs only if you're very sheltered from the world. But there are true believers who think that - I was one.
The other thing that's seductive about it is that the conclusions (mostly) follow logically from the premises - it's a self-contained and seems internally consistent when you're inside it. There's a lot of Homo economicus thinking, where you believe humans are at worst boundedly rational actors. It seems to be popular among STEM majors because they mistake logical elegance for a good model of reality. Uncommonly for libertarians but commonly for STEM libertarians, I always threw in a couple of taxes to deal with problems like pollution/global warming, but other than a couple of kludges like that, there didn't seem to be much within the ideology that didn't have a ready answer.
The other, less-than-reasonable things that got me to fall for it are that I have a strong contrarian streak (triggered in a college environment, de-triggered once I left) and I tended to believe that people who get emotional when they argue aren't arguing rationally. The libertarians I talked with were all rational-sounding, and of course they were disproportionately STEM while the leftists were disproportionately majoring in humanities and social sciences. Also, I simply found left-wing activists annoying. A pretty large chunk of libertarians - especially the Reason magazine set - seem to have "converted" for many of the same reasons.
