Faced With Trump, Libertarianism Shrugged
Faced With Trump, Libertarianism Shrugged
The libertarian movement should have been one of the first lines of defense against this aspiring autocrat. It folded instead.
DONALD TRUMP IS THE CLOSEST THING to an authoritarian that the United States has had in its highest office, and he has gone from bad to worse in the four years since his defeat in November 2020: attempting to steal that election, inciting an insurrection, then launching a presidential campaign built on lies and promises to use the immense power of the federal government against immigrants and his political foes. So why are so many libertarians—who prize protecting individuals from state tyranny—pulling their punches in strenuously resisting him?
The libertarian movement—which consists of a national political party, a small crop of elected officials, a host of D.C.- and state-based think tanks, public litigation nonprofits, activist outfits, student groups, some unknown number of millions of citizens, and flagship publication Reason magazine, where I worked for many years—has not managed to sustain a vocal, unapologetic institution whose brand is Never Trump. There are libertarian public intellectuals who are staunch Never Trumpers. But they have been sidelined within the movement and their organizations. The only exception is George F. Will, who, tellingly, is employed by a mainstream publication.
The Libertarian Party, after a hostile takeover by a Holocaust-denying, white nationalist-friendly, ultra-reactionary faction, has gone full MAGA, inviting Trump to speak at its national convention—with the party’s national chair even supporting Trump over her own party’s nominal candidate. The mainstream libertarian movement has taken great pains to separate itself from the yahoos now in control of the party. But it too has settled into a heterodox, right wing–inflected bothsidesism.
This is remarkable not only because Trump is an affront to every professed libertarian commitment—individual freedom, openness, cosmopolitanism, free enterprise, fiscal restraint, limited government, a tightly constrained executive—but also because libertarians have always seen themselves as the least partisan and most irreverent leg of Ronald Reagan’s fabled “three legged-stool” of the Republican coalition. Yet when the most authoritarian Republican in history came along, they became quiescent, lost their mojo. Libertarians haven’t donned MAGA hats—except at the Libertarian Party—but they have abdicated just when they were most needed.
How libertarians are conducting themselves in the age of Trump has implications for the movement going forward. Trump has spearheaded a new right that could prove to be the defining threat to Enlightenment liberalism for the next few generations, just as socialism was over the past few. This right’s populist, reactionary politics now pose the biggest threat to liberty. But, so far, libertarians, stuck in fighting the last war against the left, have not only failed to pivot but are simply not taking this threat seriously.
ONE OF THE MORE SHOCKING SPECTACLES in Trump’s first term was the conduct of the Federalist Society—the poster child for the Reaganite fusion between libertarians and conservatives—whose mission, among other things, is to defend the constitutional separation of powers doctrine. It invited Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, to deliver the prestigious Olson Lecture at its 2019 national convention; he used the occasion to advance a predictable and fanatical portrait of presidential power that served Trump. Some prominent libertarians of my acquaintance who are Federalist Society members privately protested and demanded a response to Barr. But far too many remained silent, and the Federalist Society did nothing.
Observing the behavior of his fellow libertarians, especially in the wake of the January 6th attack, David Boaz, longtime executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute and a stalwart of the movement who passed away this June, lamented on my colleague Aaron Ross Powell’s ReImagining Liberty podcast that most libertarians have simply failed to grasp that Trump was a “fundamentally different kind of politician” who represented an existential threat to the liberal order (or even a bigger one than Democrats). They minimized his threat by scoffing that “all politicians lie, all politicians violate the Constitution, presidents have done this before,” he noted.
Trump is manifestly worse now than when he was in office given his vastly more dehumanizing attacks against Haitian immigrants, ever more aggressive protectionism, escalating threats against his critics in the press and the “enemy within,” and his chilling calls for “one really violent day” when law enforcement is untethered from any constraints to go after criminals in a real-life enactment of the dystopian horror film The Purge. But prominent libertarians, deploying what the late libertarian economist Steve Horwitz derided six years ago as a ledger approach, are still concluding now, as they did then, that Trump is less injurious for liberty than the Democratic alternatives.
This approach puts Trump policies that libertarians agree with (tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments) on the plus side and Trump policies they disagree with (protectionism, nativism, and racism) on the negative side and then compares this ledger with a similar ledger of Democratic policies. Because they studiously avoid assigning any moral weights to any of the items, they conclude that Trump’s record of siccing the hard power of the state to deport vulnerable immigrants or his many violations of human rights are no more reprehensible than Democratic efforts to raise taxes on the upper crust.
In a veritable self-parody of this approach, libertarian George Mason University economist Daniel Klein co-authored a paper this summer that created precisely such a ledger rating which party was the lesser of the two evils and concluded that there was a “clear basis for favoring Republicans over Democrats, even though their policies and candidates are far from perfect.” Remarkably, after everything Trump has said and done, Klein scored Republicans as less dangerous when it comes to: “weaponization of govt institutions,” “election integrity,” “propaganda,” and “free speech”—an eloquent demonstration of the MAGA effect.
Likewise, the Hoover Institution’s libertarian economist David Henderson, editor of the wonderful Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, in a June blog post noted that though Donald Trump and Joe Biden, at that time the Democratic presidential nominee, were both “detestable as human beings,” Trump would be less dangerous than Biden because, despite his horrid immigration policies, Trump is more anti-war, a debatable proposition at best, and more pro-deregulation. As for his illiberal threats to punish his political enemies, Henderson dumbfoundingly concluded that Trump was more bark than bite given that he failed to lock up Hillary Clinton. Henderson totally left out of his equation Trump’s efforts to steal the election or his attempted coup.
Klein and Henderson are just the more open articulators of mainstream libertarians’ general tendency to minimize the threat of Trump and, conversely, maximize the threat of his Democratic opponents. There are exceptions, such as Mike Huemer, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. But by and large, the pattern holds. Indeed, even as Trump’s odiousness has grown, so has libertarian squishiness about him.
By and large, libertarians have shown little enthusiasm for holding Trump accountable for fomenting the election steal lie, or his role in instigating the January 6th attack, or his calls for violence. The House January 6th Committee hearings were treated as a big yawn by most libertarians, with a few notable exceptions.
Reason’s pre-election cover feature in 2020 paired “The Case Against Trump” with “The Case Against Biden,” implying that both men posed equal but different threats to its principles. In handling this year’s presidential matchup, the magazine didn’t reach the level of such an equivalency, it did more. It published two back-to-back editions with cover features on Trump and Harris, both by writers I admire. The Harris feature highlighted her admittedly draconian record on civil liberties when she was California’s attorney general, portraying her as a flip-flopper whose newfound pro-freedom persona is not to be trusted. But the real kicker was the cover art on the print edition, which consisted of a pair of flip flops with a Communist hammer and sickle emblazoned on one of them. The unsubtle message was that she is a secret commie.
The Trump feature argued that although the former president was doubling down on his authoritarianism, and that a cadre of right-wing figures and think tanks, including Project 2025, were working up plans to implement if he was elected, mainstream panic was overblown. Why? Because MAGA incompetence would undercut Trump’s designs. That is a novel if sanguine analysis. But in the interest of evenhandedness, shouldn’t the Trump cover have been illustrated with a swastika or some equivalent fascist symbol? Instead, it depicted tiny heads sporting MAGA hats lost in the thicket of Trump’s golden mop. All in all, Harris’s threat is played up and Trump’s played down.
John Stossel, the libertarian former host at Fox News who remains a respected figure in mainstream libertarian circles, has given up any pretense of nonpartisanship. He has in fact discovered his inner nativist and is peddling videos arguing that “millions of illegal immigrants poured into the U.S.” on Harris’s watch “partly because she’d promised them free stuff.”
With the exception of former Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, every member of the misnamed House Freedom Caucus, the closest thing there is to a libertarian group in Congress, including the card-carrying libertarian Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, have embraced Trump and MAGA.
A FULL ACCOUNTING OF HOW this came to pass would require a book, but one place to start would be the Cold War right-wing fusion in which libertarianism was a junior partner but one that punched way above its weight. The libertarian emphasis on limited government forced Republicans to take seriously concerns over taxes and spending (many of which have gone out the window since Trump) and the libertarian commitment to markets prodded conservatives to champion deregulation and embrace free trade. It is fair to say that without the libertarian influence, none of these issues would have been center-stage in American politics.
This fusion changed contemporary conservatism, but it changed contemporary libertarianism more. The lazy definition of libertarianism is that it is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. But the fact is that even though libertarians claim they are politically neutral and indignant when someone refers to them as conservative, the fusion with the right has imbued them with an abiding hostility to anything that smacks of leftism. They got caught up in the moral panic against communism during the Cold War just like the rest of the right and developed an exaggerated sense of the danger of the social justice left.
This muted the liberty movement’s concern during the previous century for the rights of blacks, which had been prominent during the abolition era. As libertarian philosophers Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi recount in their recent book The Individualists, libertarians’ sympathy for right-wing social causes has grown over the decades. Indeed, contemporary libertarians have far too often prioritized smaller violations of liberty and justice that affected whites over far bigger ones that affected oppressed minorities, a fundamental distortion of their philosophy.
Take the libertarian-conservative political godfather of the movement, Barry Goldwater. He was a member of the NAACP and an ardent opponent of Jim Crow. Yet he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act because its ban on discrimination by private businesses ran afoul of his free-market commitments. Goldwater wasn’t a racist. But his natural instinct was to prioritize white business interests rather than the plight of blacks suffering under the brutal boot of Southern apartheid. Even if one grants that the act wasn’t perfect, passing it represented a far bigger advance for liberty of the most subjugated people than not doing so. Holding it hostage to purist concerns showed just how little black concerns factored into the libertarian calculus at the time. Libertarian thinkers by and large simply did not believe that any efforts beyond an unfettered market were needed to accomplish black equality. They’ve never really developed a policy agenda for targeting racist state structures that kept—and still keep— blacks down.
More generally, libertarians have gone along with the right’s plans to hand tax cuts to businesses and welfare cuts to minorities, never mind that handouts to rich corporations are far more morally offensive than food stamps to the inner-city poor. Thanks to the conservative influence, even on social issues that have traditionally distinguished libertarians from the right, they have slipped. They are much more divided on reproductive rights than two decades ago. Likewise, far more libertarians, like Stossel, now oppose immigration from poor countries due to (unfounded) fears of the growth of the welfare state.
Although criminal justice reform has become a major libertarian priority over the last decade, the upshot of decades of fusionism with the right prior to that is that libertarianism has repelled minorities and attracted disaffected whites—particularly men. This created a feedback loop, pushing the movement in an ever-more rightward direction, as Aaron Ross Powell, who is a former director of Cato’s Libertarianism.org project, points out.
It is indisputable that libertarian organizations, even now, do far more outreach to conservative than progressive students. There is also a veritable revolving door among the policy staff of conservative and libertarian think tanks with nothing remotely equivalent on the progressive side. Also, the libertarian donor base is overwhelmingly right wing, and it was not at all shy about prodding the movement in a pro-Trump direction and depicting the left as far more dangerous—the biggest reason why the movement has failed to support Never Trump voices.
RON PAUL’S SURGE IN POPULARITY during the Republican primaries in 2008 and 2012—after having long been the most prominent libertarian politician at the national level, yet also having been seen by the mainstream as a highly idiosyncratic fringe character—only exacerbated libertarianism’s drift toward right-wing populism. Paul drew in folks with his conspiratorial mindset and his embrace of the notion of what is now called the “deep state,” his attacks on institutions like the Federal Reserve, and his ethnonationalism wrapped in high-minded anti-war packaging. All of this created a direct libertarian pipeline to the alt-right that now has been rechanneled into MAGA.
Indeed, the extreme preoccupation with the leftist enemy that consumes the right now afflicts the libertarian movement almost as much.
Feminism, multiculturalism, and critical race theory have their excesses. But these ideologies are also trying to ameliorate embedded injustices. Ron Paul paleolibertarians, however, have long derided these issues as “cultural Marxism” (Paul once went on an unhinged Twitter attack against them only to back off after an uproar).
Mainstream libertarians don’t go that far, but they also have a reflexive disdain for social justice causes. The historical problems with the New York Times’s 1619 Project received far more attention among libertarians than its basic objective—namely, that African Americans need the cultural space to interpret America’s founding through their own lens—received sympathy. No core libertarian principle would have been compromised had the balance been reversed.
Mainstream libertarian organs routinely platform anti-woke culture warriors such as YouTuber Dave Rubin and the conservative Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo—who’s on record saying he wants to make critical race theory “toxic” and then tie all left-wing causes to it. They lob friendly softball questions at them while frequenting right-wing platforms—even far-right ones—to fight cancel culture in the name of defending free speech. Sadly, there is not much functional difference between libertarians and the broader right on cancel culture hypocrisy now.
Libertarians like to boast that they were pro-gay marriage before the left. Yet now they are wondering if they should be “noncombatants in the Pride wars.” The leading libertarian proponent of school choice, Corey DeAngelis, has gone even further and actively allied with the explicitly anti-LGBT, anti-trans, conspiracist group Moms for Liberty to promote his cause.
Libertarians are in high dudgeon over the deplatforming of right-wing speakers on college campuses and other instances of cancel culture. But when it comes to the moral panic on the right over trans issues they aren’t vocally speaking up against red state governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis signing laws to remove minors from parents who provide gender-affirming care—and kids from transitioning parents. This is a clear slippage from the pre-MAGA days when they championed the transgender cause.
Libertarians’ hostility to leftism in general and wokeism in particular made them blasé about Trump’s authoritarianism. But even after he departs from the scene, either this year or four years hence (maybe), the GOP won’t return to the Reaganite status quo ante. The reactionary, populist neo-right Trump has inaugurated is here to stay, if his successors are any indication. The forces of liberalism and freedom will need to mount a vigorous response to defeat it.
What role will the libertarian movement, as it currently stands, play in this struggle?
TRUMP HAS RIPPED THE MASK OFF the libertarian conceit that it is a nonpartisan actor guided by its core commitments when opposing or allying with either side. As it turns out, the slam that libertarians are merely conservatives who smoke pot was—or has become—more true than false.
But Trump is a unique figure who despite—or perhaps because of—his nasty, no-holds-barred attacks on his opponents, especially progressives, has a strong hold on the right, especially the donor class. Although the policy staff and writers among libertarians are less susceptible, his pugnacious style still appeals to the many edgelords in the libertarian thinking class.
A less effective demagogue without Trump’s charisma, such as it is, may have a harder time maintaining a stronghold on the right, including on libertarians, and free them to be more critical. And libertarians are certainly concerned about the illiberalism of the national conservative movement.
But there are already signs that the phony ledgerism that libertarians have used to minimize Trump’s danger will also be deployed for his right-wing successors.
Consider DeSantis. During the Republican primary, the Florida governor positioned himself as a more aggressive culture warrior than Trump. He’s a proud anti-vaxxer who sued mRNA vaccination manufacturers on vague charges of withholding safety information. He boasts that Florida is the state where “woke goes to die,” although, in truth, it is where the “First Amendment goes to die.” DeSantis has declared an all-out war on the free speech rights of universities and Big Tech. He has also made efforts to weaken defamation laws to make it easier for aggrieved (right-wing) public figures to sue publishing platforms. And then of course there was his notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill that penalizes companies like Walt Disney that challenge his anti-gay and anti-trans agenda. He infamously used Florida taxpayers’ funds to charter a plane to dispatch asylum seekers on Texas’ border to Martha’s Vineyard to stick it to liberal elites, picking up Trump’s nativist mantle.
Despite all this, Reason magazine invited Rubin, the YouTuber popular with the right, to make the case for why libertarians should vote for DeSantis when he was challenging Trump. Rubin’s answer? Basically, for all his flaws, DeSantis is not as bad as the woke left.
Likewise, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican biotech tycoon who became a MAGA warrior after dropping his own presidential bid, receives a respectful audience in libertarian policy circles because of his opposition to the administrative state. His shameless cynicism in pushing conspiracy theories that January 6th might have been an “inside job” and his promises to pardon the Capitol rioters are evidently not disqualifying.
The one neo-right figure who is giving libertarians genuine pause right now is JD Vance. But that’s not because of his unhinged anti-wokeism but his overt rejection of markets, open embrace of industrial policy, and itch to use tax policy to advance his social-conservative agenda. More directly, he has also denounced libertarians by name, making his ideological hostility undeniable. His polices are certainly awful, but nothing compares to the massive and draconian abuses of the state that his boss is planning.
As Andy Craig wrote in The UnPopulist, the substack publication I edit, Trump has killed not just the Libertarian Party but the libertarian movement itself, in that it no longer exists as a coherent “movement” at all. In Trump’s wake, the movement splintered between the Never Trumpers, anti-anti-Trumpers, and MAGA-adjacents. Those in the first camp, the smallest of the three, have been pushed out or are quitting the movement and eschewing the libertarian label. That leaves the terrain to the other factions and the best that they can do is coalesce around small-bore policy reforms emptied of bigger moral concerns.
This is a genuine tragedy not only for the movement but the world because the libertarian philosophy—rooted in classical liberalism’s elevated and elevating commitment to a state limited to protecting the freedom and dignity of all, an open, cosmopolitan society that welcomes new ideas and cultures, and the dynamism of free enterprise—has much to offer to resist the biggest threat to liberalism of our times. These ideas will continue to influence the broader political conversation, but they will do so more effectively by detaching themselves from the movement and attaching themselves to other, healthier groups, causes, and ideologies.
Libertarianism unfortunately is becoming a zombie ideology, unable to draw fresh moral sustenance even as it uses up its existing reserves.
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