Libertarians, too, are at sea, swept away by Trump wave
A few weeks ago, in the brief historical entr’acte between the Brett Kavanaugh nomination and our president’s Helsinki rendezvous, I was in Las Vegas for the annual libertarian convention known as FreedomFest.
Like most interesting churches, libertarianism is a diverse and fractious faith, and FreedomFest brings together all its different sects: The think-tankers with their regulatory-reform blueprints, the muckraking journalists taking on government abuses, the charter city backers and Burning Man attendees, the Ayn Rand fans wearing dollar signs on their lapels, the eccentric-genius businessmen and pot legalizers.
In principle I am not a libertarian: The teenage nerd enters conservatism through either Atlas
Shrugged or Lord of the Rings, and between Tolkienists like myself and the Randians a great gulf is often fixed.
So it was interesting to be among the libertarians in a time when, like other right-of-center faiths, they have seen their political ideals swallowed up by the rule of Donald Trump.
Just a little while ago journalists were talking about a “libertarian moment” in American politics, with Rand Paul as its avatar — an entitlement-cutting, prison-reforming, drug-legalizing, intervention-opposing, drone-strike-filibustering politics that was supposed to build bridges between Republicans and millennials. But then Paul, like other Republicans, was steamrolled by Trumpism in 2016. So what exactly happened to his moment?
One answer is that the libertarian spirit was overextended and vulnerable to a backlash. Confident free-traders underestimated how much outsourcing had cost the Western working class. Entitlement reformers overestimated the political practicality of their proposals. Cultural laissez-faire weakened social solidarity, with opioid-driven disintegration the starkest symptom of decay. And the rise of the Islamic State group transmuted the postIraq anti-interventionist impulse into a “raise the drawbridge” style of politics, with the libertarian aspect drained away.
In this account Trumpism, with its tariffs and walls and family-separating cruelties, is simply a rejection of the politics of liberty, an anti-libertarian moment. But there’s also a different story, in which Trump didn’t as much defeat Rand Paul’s worldview as co-opt its more effective messages, while exploiting libertarianism’s tendency to devolve into interest-based appeals.
On foreign policy, for instance, Trump ran as hard against the Iraq War and neoconservatism as the Kentucky senator or his father. Trump’s skepticism about international institutions and U.S. intelligence agencies is also in tune with common libertarian assumptions (and paranoias).
Meanwhile, on economic policy, you could argue that Trump has debased libertarianism rather than disavowing it, following many prior Republicans in using the rhetoric of capitalism to champion businessmen rather than markets.
His ascent has a lot to teach ideological purists about the political limits of their theories, the need to temper dogma with more contingent wisdom. But learning those lessons without surrendering to Trumpian whims requires a discipline that even Ayn Rand’s supermen might struggle to maintain. And libertarians, alas, are as fallen as the rest of us.