Trump Killed Not Just the Libertarian Party But Maybe the Libertarian Movement Too

The principles will live on but his headlining the party convention has thrown into relief deep, longstanding philosophical rifts that can no longer be ignored

The UnPopulist illustration

Tomorrow, Donald Trump will headline the national convention of the Libertarian Party—which means that, this year, for the first time ever, a presidential candidate will address the convention of another party which is slated to nominate its own candidate to run against him. It’s a fitting culmination to the crack-up of both the L.P., which has fielded the (distant) third-place finisher in the past three presidential elections, and the broader libertarian movement in the age of Trump.

Though libertarianism as a political philosophy will continue, there is no longer anything resembling a coherent libertarian movement in American politics. That’s because the movement still bearing its name is no longer recognizably libertarian in any meaningful sense of the term. Nor can it still claim to be a political movement, which implies an association organized around not just a consistent set of ideas but a distinct political identity. For over a decade now, since Trump has dominated the national stage, longstanding disagreements have boiled over into a complete schism. There are those who have effectively become adjuncts of MAGA, and some who have gone firmly in the opposite direction, while others took a stance more akin to anti-anti-Trump voices who neither endorse nor firmly oppose the former president but train their ire toward those opposing Trump.

Movement libertarianism has always been a distinctly minority faction in American life, often on the fringes. But it has also had its moments of influence since it emerged as a distinct political affiliation in the post-World War II era. In the process, a constellation of loosely and mostly informally affiliated organizations—of which the Libertarian Party was one—formed what could be called a cohesive, if often fractious, political movement.

Understanding this turn of events, and what it means for the future, requires tracing internal libertarian disputes that began long before the rise of Trump. In some ways, they are a microcosm of similar developments in the American intellectual landscape writ large. Not just the implosion of a minor fringe party, the L.P.’s de facto endorsement of Trump shows important currents that will shape the ideological content of both the right and left for decades to come. The libertarian movement may be a thing of the past, but, like many movements before it that have come and gone, its influence—both for the better and for the worse—will not disappear.

From Fringe to … Somewhat Less Fringe

In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard. Though they exhibited substantial differences, each of these figures set out a general vision of what can be called libertarianism (though their attitudes toward that label varied). While other luminaries—such as Robert Nozick and Leonard Read—also made important contributions, most libertarians are primarily in the mold of one or more of Doherty’s essential five.

It’s not surprising that the influence of these foundational advocates has diverged and become more complicated, simply by the passage of time. The eldest of them, Mises, passed away in 1973. Only Friedman, who died in 2006, lived to see this century. Many of their differences turn on questions of economic methodology and abstract philosophy. But these are largely beside the point to the more concrete political valence each embodied. With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognition as demonstrated by their Nobel prizes.

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How the Libertarian Party Became the Reactionary Arm of Trump and Trumpism

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It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally. He was in many ways the most radical—an avowed anarchist—and the most marginal, never achieving mainstream prominence. But he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist.

Towards the latter part of his career until his death in 1995, Rothbard took a turn into the illiberal hard right. He branded this proposed strategy paleolibertarianism, a name which has stuck even as its advocates have variously embraced or dropped it. As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.

By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government—an early version of “drain the swamp,” as it were. This went so far as to lament the loss of David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial election. And it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues.

Over the latter half of the 20th century, some more right-leaning mainstream libertarians eschewed the more socially liberal side of the philosophy, particularly on issues of race and civil rights. Many were more amenable to the “fusionist” vision of libertarianism as part of the regular conservative coalition. Others embraced the leading edge of the gay rights movement, the fight to end the war on drugs, and other issues of individual freedom. But only in Rothbard’s vision, and those who followed it, did courting the authoritarian far-right become the centerpiece of the agenda.

The Proto-MAGA Intellectual Roots

Across the loose constellation of libertarian think tanks, advocacy organizations, and electoral efforts in both the L.P. and the GOP, the embrace or rejection of Rothbard’s “paleo” idea was a source of perennial tension. Rothbard himself was involved for a time in both the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, co-founding the latter before being acrimoniously ejected after a few years.

Later, he drifted into the orbit of a Texas congressman, Ron Paul. Together with Paul’s one-time chief of staff, Lew Rockwell, they founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute, even though Mises himself would have held a dim view of their right-wing culture war. The pair also ghost-wrote most of Paul’s infamous newsletters, dripping with overtly bigoted venom, that later returned to haunt his presidential campaigns.

In fits and starts, the other end of the movement came to embrace the view of libertarianism as fundamentally an extension of the larger liberal tradition, continuous with a classical liberal political philosophy rather than a socially conservative one. More in the vein of Friedman, Hayek, and Mises (the man, not the institute), this kind of libertarianism had a distinctly cosmopolitan tinge. Free markets and limited government were still a big part of the picture, but in service to a vision of a dynamic and pluralistic free society. These were not the sort of people likely to complain of “degeneracy" or fume about America’s progress on race relations. However, many of them were reluctant to openly condemn this sort of talk in the movement—in part, to avoid the perception of “infighting” and engaging in toxic, bitter feuds.

These two camps certainly influenced each other, circumscribing how much libertarians would allow themselves to ally with progressives. But they also traded barbs and were recognizably distinct factions within the movement. As much as each held a dim view of the other, both continued to work under the “libertarian” label.

The L.P. over the years oscillated between more radical and more pragmatic wings. The latter was typified by the party’s best-performing presidential nominee, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, whose 2016 candidacy yielded nearly 4.5 million votes (over 3% of the national total). By any measure of mainstream American politics, Johnson was a small government hardliner, but he balked at some more extreme stances, most notably refusing to endorse the repeal of anti-discrimination laws.

But it wasn’t Johnson’s 2016 presidential run or even the ire over his more centrist running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld that fractured the libertarian movement. That was the doing of his far more successful opponent in the 2016 election.

From the start, Trump’s brand of illiberal populism had more than a passing resemblance to Rothbard’s paleo strategy—minus, as many classical liberal critics had long predicted, any meaningful moves to actually shrink government. But it still embodied the burn-it-all-down reactionary ethos that saw tearing down established institutions as a necessary first step, even if that required an unrestrained autocrat.

From Tactical Bigotry to Actual Bigotry

It was in the fever swamps of the Trumpist neo-right that the Libertarian Party’s demise began. After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.

With this transformation has come an increasing unease with the word “libertarian” in some quarters, especially among those repulsed by the recent antics of the L.P. Though it was never the central pillar of the movement, the party retains the most prominent use of the term. It’s right there in the name, and on ballots across the country. For those who took a dim view of Trumpism, especially after Jan. 6, self-describing as libertarian came to have more baggage than it was worth. In their view, Trumpism was an authoritarian cult of personality, rank demagoguery, even something approaching fascism.

Increasingly, those in this group have returned to the use of the word “liberal.” (The UnPopulist is firmly within that camp.) Hayek himself had grumbled that he preferred this term, and that “libertarian” was an ugly neologism arising out of the confused American terminology that conflates “liberal” with the welfare-state left. But around the world, “liberal” retained its more classical connotation, which has started to seep back into American discourse. If everywhere else the term refers to the sensible, socially tolerant, pro-market bloc, why not in the United States?

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To Save the World, Fight for Liberalism

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At the same time, the Trump effect was working its larger realignment of American politics. A minority of traditional Republicans peeled off into the “Never Trump” camp. The libertarian movement was not immune to this realignment along pro-Trump and anti-Trump lines.

The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies. Some were caught in the middle, unwilling to prioritize the rise of Trump as a fundamental threat to liberal values above more traditional policy disagreements. But as the sorting dynamic continues, this number is dwindling, getting pulled into one or other camp.

Placed on the opposite sides of America’s defining political divide, there is really no longer anything that unites these disparate groups. It is no longer possible to ignore the conflict of visions about what kind of society freedom was supposed to yield. One in which private bigotry and established hierarchies were allowed free rein? Or an open and all-embracing one where different people and lifestyles disapproved by the traditional order could flourish?

The Future of the Libertarian Idea

Movements are not immortal. Modern libertarianism came together around writers active in the 1940s through the 1960s, and started to become explicitly organized in the early 1960s and throughout the 1970s, with the founding of the Libertarian Party, the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, and several other organizations. Depending on how you date it, that’s a run of somewhere between 50 to 80 years. By comparison, the Progressive Era and its associated movement is usually dated as lasting about 20 years, from the mid 1890s to World War I. Explicitly socialist parties in the United States had their heyday during the interwar era.

All political ideologies and their associated movements are products of their time and place. Though it never achieved anything like a governing majority, the libertarian movement had its impact on a wide range of issues, from deregulation to ending the draft to same-sex marriage. Today there are fewer general theorists of libertarianism as such, setting out an overarching worldview in the manner of Rand, Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, and Friedman. But there are many ideologically libertarian experts and advocates active on issues including immigration, criminal justice, election reform, tax policy, and just about everything else under the sun.

To speak of the libertarian movement in the past tense, as something that once existed but no longer does, is not necessarily to disparage it. After the better part of a century, evolution is inevitable. People influenced by libertarian ideas and libertarian organizations will continue to be active for many decades to come. The only way the libertarian movement’s demise could bring down libertarianism as a political-philosophical framework is if one expected the ideas themselves to disappear. Happily, a robust conviction of the centrality of individual liberty—or of the need to fight a tyrannical state—is in no danger of fully fading away.

This conviction may no longer be promoted as part of the Libertarian Party or a libertarian movement or anything still using the term. But it may well be advanced in solidarity with movements and parties that carve out space for those who appreciate America’s classical liberal roots, constitutionally limited government, and individual liberty.

The Libertarian Party cheering on its stage a would-be dictator is one of the most dramatic examples of the collapse of libertarianism as a distinct political movement. But many libertarian-minded figures have gone on to participate in the rise of new movements, such as the pro-housing YIMBYs. For some, the lesson learned is that a totalizing ideological label is less important and can even be counterproductive, and issue-based coalitions are a better route.

Ultimately, the word does not matter so much as the substance of the ideas. The principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets, and peace are not going anywhere. In another 50 years, there will still be recognizable influences traceable to the legacy of the libertarian movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In the organic ebb and flow, new organizations and new coalitions will come together, and at times fracture.

In the meantime, those who took from libertarianism its most fundamental liberal principles can move forward, free of any entanglement with their estranged cousins. It’s a long overdue development, and perhaps one we can thank Donald Trump’s Libertarian Party for bringing to such a definitive and undeniable culmination.

© The UnPopulist 2024

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