David Boaz: A Tribute to His Life and Legacy
David Boaz: A Tribute to His Life and Legacy
The UnPopulist's contributors reminisce about the mark that this libertarian stalwart has left on them and the world
Jonathan Rauch
“I believe I’ll be the judge of that.”
The context was a conversation in which someone had opined on whether some position on some issue should be considered libertarian; the speaker was David Boaz. He was kidding, of course—and yet not. There are many branches of the tradition Americans call libertarian (or classical liberalism), ranging from gentle Jeffersonians to hardcore anarcho-capitalists and esoteric objectivists. At the intersection of those streams was David. Despite never holding political office or heading an institution, he was among the most important American libertarians of the postwar era: writer, editor, policy wonk, theorist, think-tank executive, human encyclopedia, and, perhaps most important, teacher and mentor of thousands, including me.
We met in 1987 at a pizza reception on Capitol Hill, when I was in my 20s and he in his early 30s. He was executive vice president of the Cato Institute, then still a small and little-known think-tank in a townhouse on the Hill. We were, in so many ways, opposites: I, the congenital moderate, always suspicious of ideology; he, the purist, the ideologue par excellence, the believer that taxation is theft and all politicians are crooks. Yet we saw something in each other. Even in a brief conversation over pepperoni slices, I recognized his blade-like intelligence, his idealism, and his commitment to human freedom and flourishing in all their dimensions.
It helped that we were both then single and gay (though never romantic), at a time when LGBT people were unwelcome in the conservative world and mostly closeted even among libertarians. After growing up in Mayfield, Kentucky (said to be a model for Mayberry R.F.D.), attending college at Vanderbilt (where he established a Young Americans for Freedom chapter), and working on Ed Clark’s Libertarian Party presidential campaign, Ed Crane hired him for the then-fledgling Cato Institute. Though second fiddle, he was the inside guy par excellence, personally editing or approving nearly every Cato policy paper or report, vetting panels and events, and hiring talent. While he joyfully (and mercilessly) poked fun at the foibles of government in his “To Be Governed” feature of Cato’s newsletter, his purpose was serious: to bring libertarian ideas into the mainstream of American intellectual life. By recruiting top scholars, holding them to the highest standards of rigor and polish, and making Cato a factory of policy ideas, he succeeded.
He succeeded, too, in mainstreaming the causes he most cared about. The war on drugs began when he was in high school and outraged him with its excesses and abuses. Today, more than half of Americans live in states where recreational marijuana use is legal, and restitution for victims of the drug war is openly discussed; psychedelics are on the cusp of medical and legal breakthroughs. School choice was a fringe idea when he began his advocacy; today, 29 states allow parents and students to take their tax dollars to private schools. Homosexuality was a crime in every state when he was in grade school, and same-sex marriage was unthinkable; today homosexuality is legal nationwide and David died in the loving care of his partner, Steve.
Still, he was far from content. Frequently, including in his last speeches, he chided libertarians for having been missing in action for the great civil rights struggle of the 20th century, the fight against segregation and racism. (He defined conservatives as people who were always against every civil rights advance until they were always for it.) In the rise of the big-government, authoritarian populism of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, he saw a generational challenge to limited government and the rule of law, and he went to his grave saying so. (His last published article: “What’s Donald Trump Doing at the Libertarian Party Convention?”)
However cloudy the future, David ended life hopeful. He was modest about his own role and accomplishments, and realistic about the challenges ahead. Yet he never took his eye off the North Star, the principle of liberty; and he never lost heart, succumbed to the temptations of power, or submitted to the pressures of groupthink. If there was ever a more principled American, I never met him. I’m sure I never will.
Shikha Dalmia
I met David in late 1994 or early 1995 when, after some telephone calls and letters, I showed up at his Cato office on Massachusetts Avenue for a scheduled appointment. I was working on my (still unfinished) PhD at Michigan State University, and was giddy from intellectual discovery after reading F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Robert Nozick and other thinkers in the libertarian tradition.
I was excited about meeting David, whose brilliance and role in co-founding the prestigious libertarian think tank were already legendary in young libertarian circles. I assumed that as fellow libertarians, we’d have a friendly conversation about the ideas that inspired us both.
But that was not David. He enjoyed sparring, challenging, playing the devil’s advocate, taking your measure as a thinker, not as a libertarian. The whole time I felt his mustache frown at me.
A few weeks later, however, I received a letter inviting me to spend the summer in-residence as a research fellow. In exchange for a modest stipend, I’d be required to produce several columns and write a research paper on a topic of my choosing that would be presented at a Cato luncheon (to which David invited Tom Palmer and Tyler Cowen, the first time I’d meet both).
Ironically, the topic of my paper was the conundrum of liberal toleration that is now haunting liberal democracies confronting a surge of hate and bigotry: Does the liberal commitment to tolerance require it to tolerate the intolerant even if that puts its own survival at risk? David and I stayed in touch over the next few decades, exchanging emails and having the occasional lunch when I would visit DC. But we truly bonded over the last eight years after Donald Trump arrived on the scene. Trump’s polarizing persona sundered many friendships—but also deepened some.
David had Trump’s number right from the start. In his essay in National Review’s famous January 2016 “Never Trump” edition, about six months before Trump sewed up the Republican nomination, David wrote:
Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign. Trump launched his campaign talking about Mexican rapists and has gone on to rant about mass deportation, bans on Muslim immigration, shutting down mosques, and building a wall around America. America is an exceptional nation in large part because we’ve aspired to rise above such prejudices and guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone.
Equally troubling is his idea of the presidency—his promise that he’s the guy, the man on a white horse, who can ride into Washington, fire the stupid people, hire the best people, and fix everything. He doesn’t talk about policy or working with Congress. He’s effectively vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat. It’s a vision to make the last 16 years of executive abuse of power seem modest.
The magazine and many of the other contributors to that issue have since changed their mind—deciding that the left poses a bigger danger to the republic than the man who tried to pull off an insurrection. But not David. He was hardly oblivious to the excesses of the left but he refused to get sucked into the right’s culture wars. He remained steadfastly opposed to the 45th president and was deeply disappointed by those on his side who minimized Trump’s—and MAGA’s—danger.
In his last speech in February at the Students for Liberty convention, a libertarian group aimed at college students, Boaz reminded the audience that libertarians are in fact liberals. And liberalism is a universal creed that endows all—not just some—with inalienable rights. “That idea is incompatible with political ideas based on ‘blood and soil’ or treating people differently because of race or religion,” he pointed out, a subtle rebuke to those libertarians who believe that left-wing cancel culture is a bigger threat to liberty than right-wing nativism and contempt for liberal institutions and values.
Many have pointed out that David was a moral lodestar of the libertarian movement but, for me, he was also a rock. He didn’t believe in sugarcoating criticism. He gave it to you straight—and he did to me on more than one occasion. But when I wrote something that he liked but knew would be regarded as controversial in our circles, he’d also drop me a note of encouragement and support. After he heard that I was receiving pushback for my column, "Conservatives and Cancel Culture Glass Houses," calling out the right’s cancel culture, he sent me a Facebook message noting, “This is what libertarians should be saying about cancel culture.”
I no longer consider myself a libertarian because its fusion with the right, I have come to believe, has made it too preoccupied with the leftist enemy and fundamentally distorted its moral and political priorities. But David never gave up on it. In his final week, his hearing and speech were almost gone, and he knew he was in a race against time. In his sporadic moments of alertness, he’d reach out for two things: the hand of his devoted partner, Steve Miller, and his computer to send off material to his assistant helping him update The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom.
We can just hope that the movement he did so much to create can stay worthy of him.
Rest in peace, dear friend. You’ll be missed but your mark will remain on those of us who knew you—and many, many more who didn’t.
Aaron Ross Powell
David Boaz was more conservative, temperamentally, than I am, and we spent years in friendly arguments around that difference. But he was no less liberal. David built the Cato Institute because he knew that even if Washington would never get on board with radical liberty, it was critical for the future of the country that a principled presentation of that fundamental and moral idea was part of the DC conversation. And that meant not just holding firm to the underlying philosophy of libertarianism, but also presenting it in a thoughtful, scholarly, and respectable way. The idea was to assemble policy analysts who were so good at their jobs that lawmakers, regulators, and journalists wouldn’t be able to ignore their “reasonable radicalism,” as David often described his stance.
In that, he succeeded. With David’s guidance, Cato made the world better, even if the ideal government remained always on the horizon. But David’s legacy is bigger than the organization he shaped and led. For over 40 years, David was arguably the most important American voice for political and economic freedom. His book, Libertarianism: A Primer, came out the year I graduated high school, and it shaped not just my outlook, but my career. It convinced me of the necessity of liberty, and how its opposite, even when well-intentioned, never achieves worthy goals. And it convinced me to dedicate my own life to advancing that cause, eventually working for David himself at Cato, where he became my mentor and close friend.
I was not alone in taking such inspiration from David. Last week, when I wrote a tribute to him while he was still alive, my inbox filled with messages from others who encountered David’s work when they were young too, and who told me how he shaped their political and intellectual perspective. A generation of principled advocates for genuine liberalism exists because of David Boaz, and more are discovering his writing every day. (Libertarianism: A Primer was updated as The Libertarian Mind in 2015, and the third edition will be coming out next year. It remains the best introduction to libertarian ideas.)
That is David’s legacy. It is the countless people committed to making the world better by making it freer, and who came to that commitment, or renewed it, because of David Boaz. This is why I have hope, even though so many in the liberty movement betrayed their stated values—and betrayed David’s values—with the rise of Trump, the reemergence of the American hard right, and the miasma of anti-liberal culture warring. David mourned this shift, because he knew that the path to liberty is only darkened by strongmen preaching reaction, racism, nationalism, and the corrosion of liberal norms and institutions. And he loudly spoke out against it, even as so many around him refused to do so. But while there’s much work to do, and liberalism is under greater threat than any time in recent memory, David remains the light guiding the way forward. It is fitting that his final post on X is a reminder that we mustn’t pay respect to the authoritarians who would overthrow the liberal society David spent his life defending.
Andy Craig
I first got to know David through Facebook. Like so many millennials, I was a bit too eager to voice my many opinions by yelling at the internet. Every once a while, he liked one and would share it. As a young libertarian, I was aware of David, and had read several of his books, and considered myself a fan. I thought it was cool he liked what I was saying, but I didn’t think much more of it than that.
In 2018, David emailed me with an unexpected invitation. The staff writer job at Cato was opening up, and he wanted to know if I’d be interested. I felt woefully unqualified and had little idea what being a staff writer entailed. But I was being invited to move across the country to work at an esteemed institution, by one of my intellectual heroes … on a provisional, three-month trial basis. In the end, I stayed for four years.
It wasn’t a typical hiring process. Instead of the usual pleasantries about work ethic and collegiality, David interrogated me on every issue under the sun, unfailingly friendly but highly persistent. He was not doing it as an ideological litmus test or to weed out heretics—far from it. He was judging, with intense perceptiveness, your ability to think and converse about ideas. If you simply agreed with everything he said, he’d quickly grow suspicious and then bored. Luckily, I didn’t have the good sense to refrain from debating politics in a job interview.
Staff writer, as it turns out, was something like being David’s apprentice. I reported directly to him, my office right across the hall on the seventh floor of Cato’s glass-encased headquarters in downtown Washington, DC. I remember first walking into the building with its cavernous atrium and sweeping spiral staircase, feeling a bit overwhelmed and wondering what I had gotten myself into.
We spent endless hours discussing the news, history, theory, and everything else. His knowledge was encyclopedic across a dizzying array of topics. Not all of them were ones where I shared his interest, such as when he would eagerly recount the Golden Age of Hollywood films he loved to watch, only to be met with a blank stare when I recognized none of the famous actors. But I could almost keep up with him on the most arcane trivia of American political history, so that was often where the conversation went.
While drafting book summaries and editing speech transcriptions, I was encouraged by David to continue my own writing. I also began to hone in on a policy focus: election law and electoral reform. After the events of January 6, these topics suddenly had a new urgency. For David, there was no question about it: democracy and representative government were fundamental. He had no patience for those who would equivocate or minimize the threat of Donald Trump’s illiberal populist authoritarianism. For him, the only place for libertarians to be was in manning the bulwarks against a would-be tyrant.
One day, I was asked to speak at Cato’s monthly staff meeting, which David usually chaired, about our participation in the reform of the Electoral Count Act, for which I had written a Cato Policy Analysis. He was beaming like it was a graduation ceremony. He snapped pictures of me at the podium and then emailed them to me. That same afternoon, by pure coincidence, was when I told him that I had accepted a job working on election issues.
It was a bittersweet moment. He was very happy for me, but also sorry to see me go. Of course we continued to stay in touch, and met regularly to chat. I had no idea at the time that the next two years would be his last.
Many can tell similar stories about how David changed their lives. I was incredibly lucky to be one of them. After just a few years of working with David, I was being quoted by national news outlets and in Congress. Language I helped craft was being signed into law by the president of the United States. All because David had seen something he liked, and wanted to cultivate, in my youthful opinionated ramblings to a small handful of friends on Facebook.
David’s own books, speeches, and essays are an awe-inspiring accomplishment. But his influence extends far beyond that. Thousands of people came through Cato’s doors in his time there as employees, as interns, and as friends David helped connect to other opportunities. Their efforts have produced real victories, in ways big and small too numerous to count. They will continue to do so for many years to come.
None of it would have been possible without his passion and his genius. But most importantly, David saw the core of his life’s project as lifting up others to go make a difference in the world. Those of us who had the immense privilege of knowing him will never be the same.
Tom G. Palmer
A bright light of liberty has gone out. David Boaz illumined for us the path to dignity, progress, peace, and liberty. He also gave us a warning beacon to guide us away from the looming horrors of populist authoritarianism. David loved liberty like he loved life— and accordingly feared angry populism and the threat it poses to our few centuries of experiments in limited government and individual liberty.
In 2016, David wrote about the dangers of Trumpissmo: “He’s effectively vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat.” It was not that he was blinded to the dangers from the other side of the aisle, but that the populist hatred of the “enemies of the people” had been ratcheted up to such a degree:
Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign. Trump launched his campaign talking about Mexican rapists and has gone on to rant about mass deportation, bans on Muslim immigration, shutting down mosques, and building a wall around America.
We were warned. David Boaz’s clear voice still echoes in my mind as we prepare to face yet more onslaughts of populist hatred.
After the death in 1887 of one of David’s heroes, the tireless abolitionist activist, Lysander Spooner, Liberty magazine described Spooner in terms that apply well to David: “as a man of heart he was a good hater and a good lover—hating suffering, woe, want, injustice, cruelty, oppression, slavery, hypocrisy, and falsehood, and loving happiness, joy, prosperity, justice, kindness, equality, liberty, sincerity, and truth.” David loved the liberty of others as most politicians love the exercise of arbitrary power over them. And to the best of my knowledge, he never hated anyone, even those who had sorely wronged him.
How to sum up a life? Here are some applicable terms: generosity of spirit; principle that never bended to expediency or partial interests; public spiritedness; clarity of expression; humility; decency; courage of his convictions; professionalism; determination. Above all, steadfastness. He never gave up. In his last days he continued to work on the revised edition of his clear, elegant, and profound statement of liberal principles, The Libertarian Mind. It will come out in paperback next year, David’s last gift to us.
My heart is broken. Not only because I can no longer call on him for advice, kibitzing and catching up, but because his beautiful soul and his adventure have been brought to a close. He still speaks to us, though, through memory, through his example, and through his writings.
It is one of the signal honors of my life that David Boaz was my friend. He led an exemplary life. His example, his sage advice, and his fundamental decency will always be there to inspire me and everyone whose life ever intersected with his, including his millions of readers. Let us try to be more like David Boaz. Let us be lights in the darkness and warning beacons against hatred, rage, resentment, and the populist authoritarianism they feed.
Radley Balko
When I applied for a marketing manager job at Cato in my mid-20s, I wasn’t all that qualified for it—but I could write, and I was excited about libertarian ideas. My first job had been at a far-right nonprofit, and, well … I found them terrifying. By contrast, Cato’s commitments—skepticism of political power, free exchange, civil liberties—made sense to me. I was warned that my final hurdle would be an interview with this really intimidating guy named David Boaz who could see right through any bullshit. I was nervous.
About halfway through the interview, David asked me why I was a libertarian. I answered that I was a libertarian because I thought libertarianism worked. I then ran down various ways I thought the libertarian approach was the best way to solve various problems, touching on foreign policy, regulation, civil liberties, trade, the drug war.
I was really impressed with my answer. And then David said—and I can still hear that throaty, Kentucky-twanged timbre as I write this—“So what you’re saying is that libertarianism is just utilitarian for you, and you really have no underlying principles at all?"
I was shattered.
And yet I was hired.
That interview was humbling, but it sparked in me a thirst to better understand those underlying principles. So I read David’s Libertarianism: A Primer, and it lit a fire in me. David’s book made sense of the things I had long been thinking, but couldn’t quite articulate. It made the ideas bouncing around in my head fit together.
I would have a lot of interactions with David during my first few years at Cato. David could be prickly, exacting, demanding. He’d push back on just about everything. I swear there were times when I’d find myself arguing with him about some idea about the website, and we’d each be arguing the opposite positions a few days later. I sometimes contemplated casually walking up to him at a Cato happy hour and saying, ”You know, we don’t really need a fourth branch of government”—just to see if he’d take the other side.
But it was always clear to me why David was so demanding and why he loved to argue—why even after I left Cato he’d occasionally email me to point out a typo in something I had written. Ideas mattered to David. It was always critical to him that the people who work for Cato know the ideas and know how to express them clearly and persuasively.
Since I was a kid, I always knew I wanted to write for a living. While I was editing the Cato website, I started blogging. This was in the early 2000s, when blogging was taking off. I had also started doing some freelance writing. I’d often come in a couple hours early in those days to write before work. But I was also blogging and freelancing while I was on the clock, and this soon became apparent to the powers that be at Cato.
This eventually led to a bit of a showdown with my boss, who wanted to fire me. I probably did deserve to be fired, but David didn’t allow it. I had built up a fairly decent readership, and because David guarded the ideas coming out of Cato so closely, he had been reading what I was writing. I had somehow managed to convince him that I was a pretty good ambassador for civil libertarianism.
So instead of getting fired, I was moved to a policy position—a position covering civil liberties that ended up launching my career. I had been rewarded when I should have been fired. He’d later give the green light to “Overkill,” my white paper on police militarization that I would later expand into my first book. When I broke the story of Cory Maye on my blog—about a black man in Mississippi who was on death row for mistakenly killing a white police officer during a botched drug raid—David told me to go to Mississippi on Cato’s dime to attend an important court hearing, even though that wasn’t really the sort of thing Cato normally did. Ultimately, for David, the ideas came first. They were far more important to him than petty grievances and office politics.
After leaving Cato, I watched David continue to fight for these ideas—ideas like individualism, pluralism, voluntary exchange, the corruptive power of state coercion, that each of us is born with inherent dignity and basic rights, that we should be left to make our own decisions about our lives, bodies, and livelihoods, and that everyone deserves the freedom to flourish. David never abandoned his principles, even when it wasn’t particularly convenient for him to hold on to them.
David was always an eloquent champion of liberty. His lifetime of scholarship and that folksy influence of his Kentucky upbringing gave him a unique knack for articulating complicated ideas in ways that were accessible and appealing. He understood the importance of breaking out of the bubble, and of presenting both sides of libertarianism—the perils of central planning, public choice, and aggressive regulation, sure, but also the benefits and morality of a generous immigration policy, the dignity of bodily autonomy, and that allowing people the freedom to pursue their own happiness and potential ultimately benefits all of us.
To close, I’ll just reiterate something that Andy Craig pointed out on social media: David often lamented that there wasn’t a great, unifying libertarian thinker of our age—no Hayek or Nozick or Friedman for our time.
There was one, though. David just didn’t notice because it was him.
Veronique De Rugy
David Boaz is gone. It is a tragedy, as there was no one like him, and I fear there never will be. While much has been said about his incredible influence on the libertarian movement—his fingerprints are everywhere—as well as some of his idiosyncratic personality traits, I believe these two things are connected. You don’t play such a key role in building a movement that goes against the mainstream by having a milquetoast personality and staying in the middle of the road. It takes someone unique. You don't fight for marriage equality when being gay was considered a terrible sin without having a fire in you that burns more intensely than in other people. You don’t fight against the war on drugs when most Americans hadn’t even begun thinking of the status quo without being a missionary for the cause of liberty. You don’t spend thousands and thousands of words, writing in sickness and in health, to educate people about the libertarian mind without being exceptional and quirky.
Much has also been said about his ability to detect a typo from a mile away and his insistence on good spelling and precise grammar. It made him a feared editor. When I started working at Cato, most of what I wrote went through him. It made sense. Unlike other prospective Cato employees, he hadn’t taken me apart during my job interview to test my knowledge of the liberty movement and see if I could think on my feet, likely as a favor to his dear friend Tom Palmer. Additionally, my writing was less than polished (more French than English, you may even say). As a result, drafts I sent him would come back covered in red. Often, no words of mine remained. If he ever thought I was a useless cause, he never said it and kept helping—with my writing and often with my career. That’s because behind the stern editor was a remarkably generous person, always looking to make all of us better thinkers and better messengers for the fight for freedom.
To say that he will be missed is an understatement. I worry where future generations of young libertarians will look for guidance and direction without him. But then I remember that he has trained and influenced so many people who are now walking in David's footsteps—none more than his beloved staff writers, some of them right here on this screen—that I am hopeful together we can continue what he started.
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Thanks for the different memories of Mr. Boaz's friends and colleagues.
Those of us who know public figures from a distance rarely get to see the person behind the public face.
It was lovely to get to know him in a different way.
Thanks for the memories.
“he chided libertarians for having been missing in action for the great civil rights struggle of the 20th century, the fight against segregation and racism”
With all due respect to David & his legacy, doesn’t the Civil Rights Act contain several unconstitutional & un-libertarian provisions (hence Barry Goldwater’s opposition to it despite his support for state, local & private desegregation)?