Where Have All the Libertarians Gone?

Then-presidential candidate Ron Paul, addressing the Congressional Health Care Caucus (via CNN)

Let's take a journey back to the distant year of 2007. The campaign to decide who will replace the unpopular incumbent, George W. Bush, is well underway. One the Republican side options are plentiful, but one particular candidate boasts a unique status; that man's name is Ron Paul. He's managed to attract support on college campuses, bring in impressive fundraising hauls, and achieve a loyal following on the web. While he's a long-shot for the nomination, the ideology he represents—libertarianism—looks as if it may become a force to be reckoned with. Four years later, Paul runs for president again, and while he's a long-shot this time as well, he attracts impressive support from young voters in states like New Hampshire. It looks as if libertarianism may really be gaining traction.

So why is it that now it seems the libertarian movement (as it were) has all but totally dissolved? Well, some of the young voters who were taken with Ron Paul in his 2008 and 2012 runs have surely gone on to become Bernie supporters in 2016; other former libertarians have gone on to join the alt-right and/or support Donald Trump. Ron Paul's own son, Rand, ran in the 2016 Republican contest and failed to even achieve his father's cult following. Why was the seemingly widespread, if underground, support for libertarianism so fragile? 

To answer this question, we have to look at a few intertwining factors, as I will do here. Admittedly, a lot of what I'm about to write is conjecture, so take it with a grain of salt; but keep in mind, I am basing this off of what I've seen, even if it's not strictly scientific. The factors behind libertarianism's decline, in my estimation, are as follows: that two very different groups of people tend to be initially attracted to libertarianism; that many people in each group, for specific reasons which I'll explain, also have a tendency to end up drifting away from libertarianism after a while; and that libertarianism is an ideology that is ultimately really attractive in its own right to only a small number of people, again for reasons I'll lay out.

Let's start with an exploration of the two groups of people I mentioned. The first group is people who are more or less leftist in their sympathies, which is to say they have a genuine concern with systemic injustice and the rights of oppressed people around the world. These people are attracted to libertarianism because it opposes imperialism and needless wars, mass incarceration, the War on Drugs and other policies that negatively impact vulnerable people around the world. Many of the college students who were supportive of Ron Paul's candidacy in 2008 and 2012 surely fall into this group. It wasn't his free market economic policies that appealed to them; it wast that he wanted to end the War on Terror, legalize drugs, and end intrusive provisions of the PATRIOT Act.

So where does the problem arise? Well, the people in this group—whom we might refer to as "confused leftists"—are fundamentally collectivist in their outlook, in some sense. They think that we should care about more than just ourselves and our friends and the people in our particular in-groups; rather, we should care about the welfare of people around the world. This fundamentally collectivist impulse is, on its face, in contradiction with libertarianism's hyper-individualistic economic ideology: that the economy should be based on private property rights and each individual's pursuit of their own gain, and that we should privatize what common property presently exists. The only way to reconcile this collectivist, humanitarian impulse that we should care about the welfare of everyone with this atomistic free market ideology is to claim that a free market really will allow for the greatest possible freedom and well-being for everyone.

The thing is, this is a pretty difficult view to maintain. It's hard to see how abolishing all aid programs could possibly be to the benefit single parents, the physically and mentally handicapped, and other people who are at a disadvantage when it comes to competing in a market economy. It requires a great amount of faith to think that private charity would simply swoop in and save these people from destitution. And, furthermore, just about every proposal for helping poor and working-class people—Medicare for All, free college, etc.—is coming from the left, and demands that we expand, rather than reduce, the government's role in some respects. For many of these "confused leftists," economics may not have had much to do at all with what attracted them to libertarianism to begin with, and they may have never bought into the whole let's-deregulate-everything approach even as they appreciated Ron Paul's tirades against imperialism and the War on Drugs. So it's easy for many to drift away from libertarianism and towards, well, actual leftism, especially when a figure like Bernie Sanders comes along. Sanders, after all, has a good bit in common with Ron Paul—he, too, is a critic of the drug war, of the War on Terror, of NSA spying and the like—and his views on economics intuitively make a lot more sense, if you want to help the disadvantaged, than, say, converting Medicaid into a block-grant program.

The second group of people who are initially attracted to libertarianism is radically different from the first. These are people for whom the hyper-individualist, "survival of the fittest" nature of an unbridled free market is very appealing, and is, in fact, what attracts them to libertarianism. They have a burning hatred of socialism and collectivism in any form (and they define the terms very, very loosely), and the idea of an economy where the successful are free to hoard their money and spend it as they see fit is a very attractive one to them. For these people, the libertarian's worst enemy is not the neocon or the establishment politician (though they certainly dislike both), but the socialist. Sure, they have some views in common with leftists (at least until they abandon libertarianism altogether)—anti-imperialism, pro-legalization views on drugs—but the reason this sort of libertarian opposes mass incarceration or wars in the Middle East has little to do with a concern for the well-being of others. It's because unjust wars and restrictive laws violate property rights, and for this brand of libertarian—whom we might call a "nascent reactionary"—property rights are supreme because they justify selfishness. It's worth noting that a good number of these libertarians are anti-immigrant (unlike most of their "confused leftist" counterparts, I would venture to say), ostensibly on the grounds that immigrants are taking advantage of the welfare state and that immigration under a non-libertarian system amounts to "forced integration."

It's not hard to see why many of these nascent reactionaries either don't last as libertarians or continue to claim that they're libertarians while embracing right-wing "populists" like Donald Trump. When someone like Trump comes along, presenting himself as a bulwark against both the neoconservative Republican establishment and leftist "political correctness" (which the nascent reactionary opposes because it demands they make some sacrifice on behalf of the marginalized), they quickly overcome any concerns—real or pretended—about his authoritarian tendencies. Plus, their general selfishness slides easily into tribalism—an embrace not of their individuality, but of their "cultural identity," and accordingly a desire to protect "western culture" from all threats, inside and out. Right-wing authoritarians only propose to trample on the "property rights" of the Other: Muslims, immigrants, leftists, women (it's a safe bet that nascent reactionary libertarians are overwhelmingly male), LBGTQ+ people, etc. With manufactured panics about Political Correctness running amok on college campuses and Islam threatening western civilization, it's easy for the nascent reactionary to convince themselves that it's "us or them" and to stop caring at all about the rights of the Other. At that point they become full-blown reactionaries, no longer nascent.

I am not proposing that every libertarian falls into one of these two categories—and even those who do may very well continue to be (more than nominal) libertarians until the day they die, by successfully walking the tightrope and maintaining the challenging view that's essential to their libertarianism (for the "confused leftist," that a free market really will create a better world for all; for the "nascent reactionary," that one must truly respect the rights even of Muslims, feminists and communists). But the fact that so many people who are initially attracted to libertarianism end up treating it as simply a gateway drug to either leftism or reactionaryism highlights an interesting point.

I have certainly seen libertarians argue that their ideology is more consistent that liberalism or conservatism, and in a sense, they are correct; both liberals and conservatives do, in some cases, support government restrictions on "property rights" in the libertarian sense of the phrase, and in other cases, oppose such restrictions (conservatives seek to preserve the property rights of the rich by lowering their tax rate but support laws against drugs and abortions; liberals support greater personal freedom than conservatives but also support higher taxes on the rich and more regulations on big business). Libertarianism, on the other hand, consistently upholds property rights, whether it be your right to have an abortion or smoke marijuana or a CEO's right to pay their employees starvation wages. So on a theoretical plane, looking at everything through the lens of property rights, libertarianism is more consistent than its main competitors.

But most people don't really operate in the realm of abstract concepts like property rights, and it's difficult for them to truly attach much emotional significance to a notion that academic and legalistic. And, on this more common, human level, libertarianism is actually a radically inconsistent ideology, because it asks us to care deeply about the property rights of everyone around the world but to care little about their actual well-being. It's very difficult for most people to, at the same time, fervently support someone's right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion while simply shrugging it off as a necessary evil if they die of exposure because they were too poor to afford a place to live. For better or worse, the ideologies that have gained the most widespread support throughout history tend to lay their emphasis on people, in one way or another—either on the working people, or the "master race," or the citizens of Our Nation (whichever one it may be), or the adherents or Our Religion, or simply on all people, everywhere. Libertarianism, at least in its doctrinaire form (which is the form represented by figures like Ron Paul and, before him, Murray Rothbard) does not lay its emphasis on people; rather, it lays its emphasis on the notion of property and the right thereto. As different as they are, the confused leftist and nascent reactionary have in common that they see libertarianism as the path to the well-being of some group of people—for the leftist, humanity in general, and in particular the oppressed and marginalized; for the reactionary, themselves, and the people most like them. And both grow disenchanted when they begin to feel this isn't the case.

That is why, as a mass movement, libertarianism is almost certainly doomed to failure. Its concept of freedom is far too divorced from the actual well-being of any group that offers some strong sense of identity for a large number of people. One can feel a kinship with people around the world on the basis that we are all human beings, or one can feel a tribalistic kinship with the members of one's own race, religion, national group, etc.; but libertarianism would primarily benefit those who are able to do well in a free market economy, and even predicting with any certainty how one would fare in such a setup takes a reasonable amount of guesswork, meaning it's simply not a group that offers any strong sense of fellowship. The fact is that relatively few people feel personally aggrieved that the government involves itself in the economy to some extent, so it's rather more difficult to create widespread pro-free market solidarity than it is to create unity among the working class, or among marginalized groups in society—or, for that matter, to stir up animosity toward ethnic minorities and immigrants by appealing to notions of a shared culture or religion. In this respect, libertarianism's hyper-individualism is its downfall; for, whatever one thinks of individualism, it can hardly serve as a doctrine that unites the masses of humanity for the purpose of collective action.