The Passing of the Libertarian Moment

Libertarian philosophies and economic theories have not had much influence in the United States for nearly a century. Only in opposition to Democrats and Progressives in general, have libertarians found a voice. It’s easier to oppose a party in power than to govern.

People claim to like libertarian ideas, until those ideas come close to being put into practice. People want their tax breaks. They want their special carve outs and expenditures. They want to tell other people how to live, too. Democrats and Republicans differ in which aspects of our private lives they wish to control, but they both want to control citizens in some way.

Actual libertarianism is unpopular once understood. 

That doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon my ideals or ignore the economic models that suggest free markets do, generally, function well. I will cling to Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill to the bitter end. I am an (almost) classical liberal, without a political home.

Unfortunately, no politician would be so dedicated — because voters claiming to be libertarian are not true libertarians.

The United States represented something of a pragmatic libertarian model from Reconstruction until Calvin Coolidge was succeeded by Herbert Hoover in 1929, with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson notably promoting more federal power. (Wilson was a horrible person and lousy president with authoritarian impulses, under the guide of scientific Taylorism.) After Hoover’s presidency, there was never again a true libertarian movement. For all the bluster, Ronald Reagan did not change the increasingly paternalistic nature of our federal government. The Reagan years were not libertarian, as government expanded dramatically.

Hoover’s reaction to the Great Depression earned him the designation of “socialist” from none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt during their presidential campaign. And with that campaign and the return of the Progressive movement — Hoover was a progressive Republican — the brief libertarian moment had its last gasp.

There never was a libertarian moment, despite the following headline and essay from The Atlantic:

The Passing of the Libertarian Moment
The end of the Cold War and the rise of Donald Trump have left classical liberals without a political home.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
APR 2, 2018

Philosophers and economists in the OECD nations, what we once called the “developed” economies, live comfortably and can test and promote market-based theories. The freedoms we enjoy in wealthy nations allow us to study what made us wealthy. We’re also able to critique our power, admitting that our nations exploited and oppressed other people. You do not have such self-examination in most self-avowed Communist nations.

And successful business leaders funded our universities and think tanks, further promoting market-based theories and market-friendly philosophies. Our schools of economics have their Marxists, yes, but you won’t find many economic liberals in Cuban schools. Our openness to debate is a form of market: the marketplace of ideas, as every schoolchild learns.

Even Democratic Socialists in OECD nations view markets and freedoms as essential.

The reason we had the promotion of libertarian and neoliberal thought was that it existed in opposition to the USSR and China. Opposition made libertarianism palatable for theorists, if not in practice. As Williamson notes:

But if libertarianism benefited from its rich friends, it surely benefited even more from its impoverished rivals: the Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, North Korea, Mao’s China, and other practitioners of robust étatism. Despite the best hopes of the postwar conservative fusionists, libertarianism has always been more effective in opposition than in government. President Reagan may have called himself a libertarian from time to time, but he also enacted protectionist tariffs, radically expanded the military and the federal police powers, and failed to exhibit a great deal of energy in resisting the deficit-swelling spending bills sent to his desk by Tip O’Neill. The libertarian tendency mainly provided a useful ideological foil, not only to the totalitarian socialist projects of the time but also to more liberal efforts to expand the welfare states in the Western democracies. If you are not moving in the direction of Milton Friedman, the argument went, then you are moving in the direction of Leonid Brezhnev—it’s Chairman Greenspan or Chairman Mao.

Neither Friedman nor Greenspan was a libertarian, but they were certainly neoliberal thinkers, shaped by Austrian economists. (Greenspan was problematically influenced by Ayn Rand, too.) Friedman unapologetically promoted open markets and minimal regulation. Greenspan also promoted minimal regulation of business and financial markets. I fear people use libertarian to mean Ayn Randian greed, when it means so much more.

When I hear someone claim to be libertarian, I wonder how well that person understands the coherent philosophies associated with left and right libertarianism. Instead, it seems that people claim to be libertarians when they don’t want to be Republicans and disagree with Democrats.

Libertarian attitudes enjoy some political support: Nick Gillespie, a true-believing libertarian, insists even in the teeth of the current authoritarian ascendancy that we still are experiencing a national—yes!—“libertarian moment,” based on Gallup polling data finding more support for broadly libertarian political sensibilities (27 percent) than for any other single group: conservative, liberal, or populist. But “libertarian” often means little more than “a person with right-leaning sensibilities who is embarrassed to be associated with the Republican Party.” (Hardly, these days, an indefensible position.) Libertarian sensibilities are popular because they enable the posture of above-it-all nonpartisanship, but libertarian policies, as Caplan and others have noted at length, are not very popular at all.

Under President Donald Trump, the Republican Party has shed any and all pretense of libertarianism. Trump is a reactionary. At best, he’s a conservative in the sense he clings to a mythical past that wasn’t as great as imagined. He’s not dedicated to personal freedom. He isn’t dedicated to anything that scholars of economics and philosophy would consider libertarian or classically liberal.

Trump’s election reveals that Republican voters and independent conservatives are not libertarians, either. They are also reactionaries, clinging to Trump’s mythology.

This leaves the true classical liberal without a political home. We have populism on the left, and populism on the right. Populists promise to use the power of government for the common good, giving voice to anxieties of the majority. The Tea Party wasn’t genuine, as we now see many of these same politicians and voters accepting Trump’s agency. Genuine Tea Party voters would be rising up against Trump, and that’s not happening.

Democrats are the only other choice, in our system. Could they reach out to libertarians? They won’t.

The Democrats are, incredibly enough, for a moment the relatively free-trade party and the party more closely aligned with the interests of the country’s most dynamic business concerns and cultural institutions. If the Democrats were more clever, they might offer the libertarians a better deal on trade, criminal justice, and civil liberties. Instead, they are dreaming up excuses to sue or jail people for their views on climate change, and the United States is for the moment left with two authoritarian populist parties and no political home for classical liberalism at all.

Classical liberalism exists on blogs such as this, at think tanks, and in some university departments. It does not and will not soon exist in political practice. I might find that disheartening, but that’s also realistic.

The great irony is that progressives now decry how Trump is abusing federal power via the executive branch. Isn’t that executive power what these same progressives argued President Obama should have used more often? But people don’t want to consider that their party won’t always be in power. Base voters, partisan ideologues, want their party to implement their agendas, no matter what.

The libertarian ideal would be government without a social agenda. Libertarians wish nobody had concentrated power, on the left or right.

Campaigning on “we won’t do a lot for you or to you” isn’t a winning message. It hasn’t been for a century.

There wasn’t a libertarian moment. Not in my lifetime.