Christian Heiens 🏛@ChristianHeiens
A lot of people are asking why the "Libertarian moment" failed to materialize. Here are my thoughts, as a former Libertarian myself.
About ten years ago, there was an expectation, certainly within libertarian circles but across the Right at large, that the future of "Conservatism" in the US would be Libertarianism. There was this belief that the GOP would become a vehicle for libertarian philosophy and that the Right as a whole would be moving in a far more libertarian direction.
The Tea Party movement, Ron Paul's presidential bids, the prospect of a future Rand Paul bid, and old Reagan quotes about how the essence of conservatism is libertarianism were all in vogue if you were involved in any sort of Right-wing politics in America.
There really was this feeling that the old Reaganite fusion was exhausted and the Iraq era had discredited Neoconservatism. Meanwhile, the 2008 crash, coupled with the managerialism of the Obama presidency, had radicalized a bunch of young men into rejecting what they saw as the establishment narratives of both parties.
For a 20-something-year-old guy, being able to proudly say that he hated both Bush and Obama felt incredibly liberating. Ron Paul's two presidential runs, and the prospect of a third and potentially more successful one from Rand, promised to herald in a new era for American politics.
Libertarianism also seemed like a great diffuser of the insidious social Progressivism that was beginning to creep into all mainstream institutions. The Great Awokening was just in its beginning stages, and at the time there seemed to be absolutely no response to the Progressive agitprop that was gaining traction on the Left. We understood that these "social movements" were all pulling in the same direction, but no one had any idea how to address them because they were about as intense as they were insane.
Libertarianism seemed to offer a great response. Do nothing.
I'm serious. There was this expectation that we could completely sidestep the Great Awokening and nip the entire thing in its bud by adopting a "You do you" approach. By pretending like social or cultural issues didn't matter, or in some cases, that Progressives were actually in the right on them, Libertarianism offered an avenue for the Right to seemingly take off the table an entire revolutionary movement that we all thought was driving young millennials (who were still in their teens and early 20s) into identifying as Democrats or Socialists or even Communists.
"I don't care about the culture war. I want gay married couples to be able to adopt and protect their marijuana operation that's going on in the basement of their private property with AR-15s, and I want to abolish the income taxes they make on it, too."
But when this tactic was put into practice, it never seemed to work.
I remember in my old libertarian days over a decade ago, having conversations with Leftists my age in high school and college, and it was always disappointing. It's like I kept trying to win them over and explain I was on their side and that they just needed to understand that wealth redistribution and socialism were bad policies, but that we were both "social liberals" who wanted the same thing. I just wanted them to be rich on top of it all.
And for some reason, it just never worked. At the time, I didn't understand why.
But I do now.
Libertarianism offered the possibility of escaping politics itself while still being political. You could tell someone that you didn't care about their lifestyle, worldview, theology, or culture, and still plausibly make the case for why they should vote for you and implement your policies, because your policies were all about transcending conflict rather than confronting it.
Libertarianism offered the illusion of a sophisticated ideology for adults who had outgrown the tribal passions of the past. But that's exactly why it failed. It was always operating like a parasite on an older order that it didn't create and couldn't defend, but few of us could see it at the time because of the nature of the world around us.
But that world, like the Bushite one before it, died.
Mass migration and open borders actually changed the visual landscape of America in a way that was far more abrupt than the gradual changes of decades earlier.
The Great Awokening, which Libertarianism offered to neutralize with its "live and let live" attitude, ended up devouring everything around it until people could no longer ignore it.
The economic situation, which Libertarianism had such elegant solutions for as the centerpiece of its entire worldview, actually ended up being far more complex than the activists ever expected.
America's massive twin fiscal and trade deficits, endless QE, zero interest rate environment, and the hollowing out of the Rust Belt all coincided with the rise of managerial credentialism, the professional laptop class, and the adoption of Progressivism as the civic religion of every institution and profession that seemed to be benefiting from these very policies. "Social Justice Warrior" and "Rich Liberal" became synonymous with all the institutions that had betrayed America.
This created a rebellion, as Libertarians expected, but the moment Trump arrived, he revealed that the overwhelming majority of those rebels were not interested in smaller government in the abstract. They were looking for a government that would fight for them.
They had felt betrayed, humiliated, forgotten, and denigrated. They believed, correctly, that they were losing their country. They had a deep resentment of our oikophobic ruling class and their wacky social views that seemed to always pop up whenever core elements of their way of life were about to be torn away from them.
And once those things came to the surface, the "Libertarian moment" was essentially dead because it had no satisfying answer to the actual question being asked, which wasn't "how to balance the budget?" or "what procedural railguards can we set up to protect Americans from warrantless wiretapping?"
It was “Who rules, in whose interest, and can we do anything to stop our dispossession at the hands of people who openly hate us?”
The Libertarian moment failed because it had no answer to this question, which has essentially been the foundation of all of American politics since Obama's second term.
It's a political ideology that wants to escape politics itself, and the moment politics became more than just a complicated math problem and instead was about which vision of civilization would prevail, the entire premise disintegrated.
