David Boaz, 1953–2024
R.I.P. to a true friend of liberty.
BACK WHEN I WAS STILL LIVING IN THE BAY, the Cato Institute’s David Boaz sent me an email out of the blue asking if I’d join him for lunch; he happened to be in town for a speech. We had been pen pals for years and seen each other at conferences but somehow never really “met,” so I was excited for the opportunity to kibitz with somebody whom I respected a great deal.
I was never a libertarian per se, despite having some impulses in that direction. But anytime I read or listened to David I thought that he was the kind of libertarian I would like to be.
He took the “liberal” part of the ideology seriously. Not prone to wild-eyed notions or conspiratorial thinking, he was not motivated by some Darwinian desire to let society’s less fortunate fail. Just the opposite—to me it seemed as if all of his advocacy was motivated primarily by the desire for people to be able to live as they wished, free from discrimination or oppression, free from the unfeeling and capricious power of the state. This was no doubt informed in some ways by his experience as an openly gay man through the crackdowns of the ’70s and ’80s.
He was principled but open-minded. Though he was as versed in libertarian philosophy as anyone on the planet, unlike many ideologues he was not blindly chained to dogma or determined to backfill a rationale for his preferred solution. He described himself as a “reasonable radical”—the aptness of that label revealed his self-awareness. My husband once lobbied him on a food-labeling policy issue that he thought Cato should support. David instinctively rebuked his position, but listened, read, kicked the idea around, and eventually landed on the other side because he decided his first impulse was wrong. Refreshing!
But on the issues where he was right and righteous from the jump, he was unsparing and often ahead of his time. David wrote about ending the drug war for the New York Times in 1988 (1988!!!). The piece concluded:
We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this war—billions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedom—is too high.
Show me the lie.
So when I finally got to spend time with him, naturally I was looking forward to the opportunity to engage on these big ideas. I imagined we’d have a little debate with a few glasses of white wine and for dessert he’d share some stories about 1980s gay San Francisco over Tadich Grill’s famed rice custard pudding.
But when I arrived for our lunch I was disappointed to find David a little melancholy. He was excited to chat, of course, and up for some old stories, but rather than wanting to mix it up with me, he wanted mostly to commiserate.
Two years into the Trump term, many of his libertarian colleagues had followed the same path as my Republican ones. I would have thought the contrarian, powerless, strident, anarchic libertarians would have had more antibodies to resist the MAGA wiles. It’s not as if people were angling for jobs or trying to prop up their careers as campaign ad men like my friends were.
But, unfortunately, the siren song of access, the hatred of the progressive left, and the appeal of an imaginary deep-state-destroying strong man was too much for that motley group of weirdos to resist.
David felt like he was on a bit of an island. He, like so many of us Never Trumpers, was devastated and gobsmacked that people he respected and believed in were succumbing to this buffoon. So we ate our comfort pudding and lamented our lost colleagues and friends. And walked out together into the crisp Bay air feeling a little better, having discovered there was another tribe on our isle with which we could break bread.
In the ensuing years David kept speaking out. He wasn’t going to leave the movement that he had dedicated his life to. But he also wasn’t going to follow them down the orange-bricked road to hell. So he became an outcast among the outcasts. Never wavering. Never backing down.
In what I believe was his last major public address, a speech he delivered in February, David sent a message to his fellow libertarians about resisting the allure of populism:
When you see self-proclaimed ‘freedom advocates’ talking about blood and soil, or helping a would-be autocrat overturn an election, or talking about LGBT equality as ‘degeneracy,’ or saying we shouldn’t care about government racism against black people, or defending the Confederacy and the cause of the South, or joining right-wing culture wars in supporting politicians who want to use the state to fight their enemies, or posting Holocaust jokes and death threats on Twitter, recognize that for what it is. Speak up. Fight back. Tell people: That’s not America and it's certainly not libertarianism.
Amen to that.