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
It is odd to be lectured by Andy Craig about libertarianism, when he has never shown much interest in key tenets of libertarianism, such as fiscal conservativism or deregulation. There is no mention of fiscal conservatism anywhere in his essay, even though libertarians are supposed to be fiscally conservative, not merely socially liberal. Similarly, Craig's Bluesky and Twitter accounts consist heavily of woke grievance and peddling progressive talking points (although they also include interesting and knowledgeable takes on election law). Craig has exhibited much less interest in free markets than many more socially conservative figures, such as Ronald Reagan, the National Review, or the Wall Street Journal. They are not libertarians, either, but at least, they do not pretend to be. Many socially moderate Republicans are much closer to being libertarians than Craig is, such as New Hampshire's Chris Sununu and Vermont's Phil Scott. They have much more interest in free markets than Craig does, especially Sununu. If Milton Friedman -- who supported the death penalty, opposed affirmative action, and thought Africa benefited from colonization -- were still alive, Craig would probably call him a racist.
I too haven't seen much work on libertarian economics from Craig. Nor have I seen much on libertarian foreign policy, immigration, education, etc., from him.
Yet, respectfully, I'd say a more charitable take would be to grant that Craig focuses his energies on what he calls here "issue-based coalitions" in areas in which he is most knowledgeable -- especially electoral rules and politics. This is not to mention the positive nods he gives to "deregulation" and libertarian "tax policy" in this very piece. And even if Craig is not a "libertarian" in some significant sense, it's clear here that he is knowledgeable enough about the movement, its intellectual roots, and its history to offer a worthwhile opinion.
Libertarianism boils down to this: I don't need a driver's license, but THAT guy over there does! It has no place in reality and it's just a bunch of hot air. The first comment is such a good example of the self absorbed puffery. It's useless. Absolutely useless for real people other than the elbow-patch genteel haters who revel in their snobbery whilst SOLVING NO PROBLEMS IN REALITY. Nobody has time for navel gazing and reach-arounds.
All the folks in the real world that call themselves libertarians are now actually the far right wing of the republican party. The only real distinction is that they want their marijuana.
Yeah, but as Mr. Craig says, we can now re-claim the label "liberal" since the American Left has abandoned it in favor of "progressive". I find the Left's choice stunning considering the previous history of the term, but I guess most people just don't know history.
More-left "progressives" today often define themselves in contrast to mainstream Democratic "liberals," and vice-versa, so neither would agree that this is just a switching-out of terms.
I found it interesting that the Libertarian Party convention was pretty cool to vocally hostile to Trump's attempt to woo them to get his endorsement. His speech was booed by the majority although there were some MAGA fanboys trying to cheer him on. Above everything Trump displayed his two most obvious traits ignorance and arrogance. He only got cheers for promising to commute the sentence of the founder of Silk Road--- a conduit for the distribution of illicit drugs. Which is weird because he has also promised the death penalty for selling drugs.
He was also heckled for being a liar--- who knows where that idea came from--- and a war criminal.
He has as much kinship with libertarianism as he has with actual conservatism. None.
When the crowd gave him no love he took to his default position of mocking the audience.
Libertarian impulses run deep in America. The government needs to stay out of our bedrooms, our pharmacies, our uteri, marriage management, gender identity choices, markets, end of life decisions, etc. Wherever the individual can choose without harming another or others the local, state and federal government should not interfere.
There is a wall of separation between religion and state and there should be a wall of separation between business and state. The law of torts should become the main occupation of the courts instead of criminal law. Contract law should replace the nonsense of the social contract.
Now few would support all of these but among all of these almost all Americans from right to left on the philosophical spectrum would support some of these.
Many official libertarians want total freedom but without principle of equality or equal treatment. This leads to behaviours "I am a libertarian but the government can prevent Muslims from migrating and can punish woke left-wingers"
It has probably been on borrowed time since the fall of the Soviet Union. After that the choice was to play up the milquetoast liberalism of the Democrats as some sort of overbearing proto dictatorship (the maga path) or switch to being a gadfly in the broader left coalition as they had been on the right for so long. The intellectuals could handle the abstraction necessary for the latter, but the majority was always gonna end up in the former camp.
But why not learn the subject of politics, understand the ideas of thinkers such as Locke and America's Founders, learn fundamental concepts like individual rights and rights-protecting government and put forward a politically literate and coherent ideology of liberal governance and free market capitalism?
Libertarianism bugs the shit out of me and I was delighted to see the orange blob doing his word salad at their shindig since this sheds light on what I hate the most about libertarianism: the delusion!!!!! Short fingered vulgarian can take a crap on their sideshow and I'm here for it.
To be clear, I have no links with the Mises Institute or Caucus, do not support them in any way and am not even a US citizen.
So, without wishing to claim any right to speak for him, I suspect Dave Smith (curious that your article fails to mention at any point the single most important figure in the Mises Caucus takeover of the party; he is such an impressive figure that his opponents seem determined to pretend he doesn't exist) might say something along these lines:
- In roughly 50 years the LP has failed totally to retard in any meaningful manner the growth of big government and its bastard child, ever more insane money-printing;
- And then in 2020, when the most egregious attack on civil liberties of our lifetimes came along, the majority of the senior figures in the party tied themselves in knots, desperately trying to invent justifications in libertarian philosophy for allowing the government to continue doing exactly what it wanted to.
Some others in the movement preferred to pretend that the lockdowns and mandates weren't happening and kept on bleating on about civil asset forfeiture, agitating for changes in the age of consent laws (hey, that's a great way to get normies on board, tell them you want to make it legal to have sex with their 14-year old children!), siding with BLM or claiming that the greatest challenge facing modern day America was "transphobia" and other such irrelevant drivel.
Unsurprisingly, Dave Smith and his crew called out this BS, then got off their backsides and took over the party, although unfortunately not quickly enough to stop the LP fielding a terrible candidate in the 2020 election.
I came to libertarianism through the Cato Institute and it really does sadden me to see what it's become - as Tom Woods says, only interested in making sure that its opinions are acceptable to the NYT or WaPo and that the invitations to the DC cocktail circuit still keep on arriving.
BLM was right in the main line of libertarian thought. Extra judicial killing of unarmed citizens by militarized police is wrong. BLM was an expression of the principle that "All Lives Matter" within a specific context. No knock search warrants used to justify the killing of innocent citizens is wrong.
The rights of trans persons and their families are only an issue because some state governments have identified them as a vulnerable out group, easy to target, for state regulation of their bodies. If they had not been targeted and left to their own medical choices I don't think this would be an issue.
The nonsense about bathrooms and protecting girls sports is a bad response to bad law (Title IX) but that is not the fault of trans-persons.
The assault on the liberty of any citizen is an assault on the liberty of all citizens. That is why state regulation of transpersons (often just rationalized transphobia) are not just drivel to some libertarians.
Good column. In my view, here’s why libertarianism is neither Left nor Right but a consistent and principled advocacy of liberty: In terms of political philosophy and intellectual history, libertarianism, broadly defined, is the true resurgent liberalism of the 21st century.
Of course, different types of liberalism have arisen over the centuries, with legitimate differences to explore. Compare, say, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Herbert Spencer’s The Man Versus the State to George H. Smith’s The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism and transgender economist/historian Deirdre McCloskey’s Why Liberalism Works.
Yet, in tension with 20th century brands of interventionist, paternalistic or State-expansionist liberalism, the Latin root of the word ‘liberal’ most deeply relates to liberty.
True liberalism, rightly understood, champions Liberty by limiting Power, especially the brute force institutionalized by the State – as detailed in Roy Childs, Jr.’s essays in Liberty Against Power ..
Also worth reading: Szasz, Rand, Hayek, Rothbard, Tibor Machan, Robert Nozick, Henry Hazlitt, Rose Wilder Lane (The Discovery of Freedom), H.L. Mencken>
But definitions matter. Clarity in concept is the foundation of accuracy and insight.
For example: Government, most accurately defined by the great sociologist Max Weber, is the only human institution that claims a legitimized monopoly on the (final) use of force within a given geographical territory.
In short, behind the velvet gloves of even the more limited and democratic governments are always fists.
I agree definitions matter and that's the problem. Do you honestly think libertarians could even define the concept of liberty (it's rights-protecting government btw, not libertarian anarchy), let alone be consistent and principled advocates for it?
The American liberty movement is in a shambles because many alleged libertarians bought into the scamdemic narrative that was pr omoted by Donald Trump in early 2020. It was an obvious psy-op whose purpose was to get stupid and pathetic Americans to give up their liberty and destroy the social fabric that makes civilized society possible.
More and more libertarians view non-libertarians as hysterical, irrational, and dangerous. They are working on ways to separate themselves from the violent majority.
An interesting historical perspective on the roots and evolution of the Trumpian milieu, something not often done. Seems somewhat odd the emphasis on Rothbard, considering he died almost 30 years ago, and was more of a strategist and polemics than a strong theoretician. Also it might be noted another strategic alliance arose at least informally in the Trumpian world, that with the Russian far "right" such as with Sputnik et.al. and thinkers like Alexander Dugin.
Well, this article didn't age well. The actual outcome of the Libertarian convention - Trump is booed by the audience throughout his speech, and the whole thing ends with a mutual "fuck you". LP nominates cosmopolitan Chase Oliver as its candidate, and the Mises Caucus ends up losing big.
I think this gets the cause and effect backwards. Trump didn't kill anything. Libertarians, just like Conservatives, had this coming for a long time. They have no real grasp of political theory and no ideology. They were ripe for being overrun by populist lunacy sooner or later.
The saddest part of all is that no lesson has been learned at all. All the NeverTrumpers, et al, can see the dangers of where things are going but are still continuing with their hodgepodge of very superficial and contradictory political ideas without facing up to their own intellectual bankruptcy as being the cause of all this.
In the mid-Sixties my wife and I began a brief association with a group of libertarians. We soon found that the individuals had no understanding of what beset people without resources. My wife was poor and Black and one reason we were attracted to Libertarianism was what is called here their cosmopolitanism (not the drug issue - we never were interested though many friends liked legalization) and their rejection of religious doctrine as a basis for policy. Over the years the self-identified Libertarians I've encountered - and I've associated with quite a few here in Arizona - have veered more and more to crazy-villle a la Rand Paul. So thanks for clarifying their trajectory.
It is odd to be lectured by Andy Craig about libertarianism, when he has never shown much interest in key tenets of libertarianism, such as fiscal conservativism or deregulation. There is no mention of fiscal conservatism anywhere in his essay, even though libertarians are supposed to be fiscally conservative, not merely socially liberal. Similarly, Craig's Bluesky and Twitter accounts consist heavily of woke grievance and peddling progressive talking points (although they also include interesting and knowledgeable takes on election law). Craig has exhibited much less interest in free markets than many more socially conservative figures, such as Ronald Reagan, the National Review, or the Wall Street Journal. They are not libertarians, either, but at least, they do not pretend to be. Many socially moderate Republicans are much closer to being libertarians than Craig is, such as New Hampshire's Chris Sununu and Vermont's Phil Scott. They have much more interest in free markets than Craig does, especially Sununu. If Milton Friedman -- who supported the death penalty, opposed affirmative action, and thought Africa benefited from colonization -- were still alive, Craig would probably call him a racist.
I too haven't seen much work on libertarian economics from Craig. Nor have I seen much on libertarian foreign policy, immigration, education, etc., from him.
Yet, respectfully, I'd say a more charitable take would be to grant that Craig focuses his energies on what he calls here "issue-based coalitions" in areas in which he is most knowledgeable -- especially electoral rules and politics. This is not to mention the positive nods he gives to "deregulation" and libertarian "tax policy" in this very piece. And even if Craig is not a "libertarian" in some significant sense, it's clear here that he is knowledgeable enough about the movement, its intellectual roots, and its history to offer a worthwhile opinion.
Libertarianism boils down to this: I don't need a driver's license, but THAT guy over there does! It has no place in reality and it's just a bunch of hot air. The first comment is such a good example of the self absorbed puffery. It's useless. Absolutely useless for real people other than the elbow-patch genteel haters who revel in their snobbery whilst SOLVING NO PROBLEMS IN REALITY. Nobody has time for navel gazing and reach-arounds.
All the folks in the real world that call themselves libertarians are now actually the far right wing of the republican party. The only real distinction is that they want their marijuana.
"All the folks in the real world that call themselves libertarians are now actually the far right wing of the republican party."
Hey, we're standing right here.
https://c4ss.org/content/13979
Yeah, but as Mr. Craig says, we can now re-claim the label "liberal" since the American Left has abandoned it in favor of "progressive". I find the Left's choice stunning considering the previous history of the term, but I guess most people just don't know history.
More-left "progressives" today often define themselves in contrast to mainstream Democratic "liberals," and vice-versa, so neither would agree that this is just a switching-out of terms.
I found it interesting that the Libertarian Party convention was pretty cool to vocally hostile to Trump's attempt to woo them to get his endorsement. His speech was booed by the majority although there were some MAGA fanboys trying to cheer him on. Above everything Trump displayed his two most obvious traits ignorance and arrogance. He only got cheers for promising to commute the sentence of the founder of Silk Road--- a conduit for the distribution of illicit drugs. Which is weird because he has also promised the death penalty for selling drugs.
He was also heckled for being a liar--- who knows where that idea came from--- and a war criminal.
He has as much kinship with libertarianism as he has with actual conservatism. None.
When the crowd gave him no love he took to his default position of mocking the audience.
Libertarian impulses run deep in America. The government needs to stay out of our bedrooms, our pharmacies, our uteri, marriage management, gender identity choices, markets, end of life decisions, etc. Wherever the individual can choose without harming another or others the local, state and federal government should not interfere.
There is a wall of separation between religion and state and there should be a wall of separation between business and state. The law of torts should become the main occupation of the courts instead of criminal law. Contract law should replace the nonsense of the social contract.
Now few would support all of these but among all of these almost all Americans from right to left on the philosophical spectrum would support some of these.
In a sense we are all libertarians.
Many official libertarians want total freedom but without principle of equality or equal treatment. This leads to behaviours "I am a libertarian but the government can prevent Muslims from migrating and can punish woke left-wingers"
Being a Hans Herman-Hoppe libertarian means being a brutalist and anti-democracy.
It has probably been on borrowed time since the fall of the Soviet Union. After that the choice was to play up the milquetoast liberalism of the Democrats as some sort of overbearing proto dictatorship (the maga path) or switch to being a gadfly in the broader left coalition as they had been on the right for so long. The intellectuals could handle the abstraction necessary for the latter, but the majority was always gonna end up in the former camp.
But why not learn the subject of politics, understand the ideas of thinkers such as Locke and America's Founders, learn fundamental concepts like individual rights and rights-protecting government and put forward a politically literate and coherent ideology of liberal governance and free market capitalism?
Why wasn't that considered?
Libertarianism bugs the shit out of me and I was delighted to see the orange blob doing his word salad at their shindig since this sheds light on what I hate the most about libertarianism: the delusion!!!!! Short fingered vulgarian can take a crap on their sideshow and I'm here for it.
To be clear, I have no links with the Mises Institute or Caucus, do not support them in any way and am not even a US citizen.
So, without wishing to claim any right to speak for him, I suspect Dave Smith (curious that your article fails to mention at any point the single most important figure in the Mises Caucus takeover of the party; he is such an impressive figure that his opponents seem determined to pretend he doesn't exist) might say something along these lines:
- In roughly 50 years the LP has failed totally to retard in any meaningful manner the growth of big government and its bastard child, ever more insane money-printing;
- And then in 2020, when the most egregious attack on civil liberties of our lifetimes came along, the majority of the senior figures in the party tied themselves in knots, desperately trying to invent justifications in libertarian philosophy for allowing the government to continue doing exactly what it wanted to.
Some others in the movement preferred to pretend that the lockdowns and mandates weren't happening and kept on bleating on about civil asset forfeiture, agitating for changes in the age of consent laws (hey, that's a great way to get normies on board, tell them you want to make it legal to have sex with their 14-year old children!), siding with BLM or claiming that the greatest challenge facing modern day America was "transphobia" and other such irrelevant drivel.
Unsurprisingly, Dave Smith and his crew called out this BS, then got off their backsides and took over the party, although unfortunately not quickly enough to stop the LP fielding a terrible candidate in the 2020 election.
I came to libertarianism through the Cato Institute and it really does sadden me to see what it's become - as Tom Woods says, only interested in making sure that its opinions are acceptable to the NYT or WaPo and that the invitations to the DC cocktail circuit still keep on arriving.
BLM was right in the main line of libertarian thought. Extra judicial killing of unarmed citizens by militarized police is wrong. BLM was an expression of the principle that "All Lives Matter" within a specific context. No knock search warrants used to justify the killing of innocent citizens is wrong.
The rights of trans persons and their families are only an issue because some state governments have identified them as a vulnerable out group, easy to target, for state regulation of their bodies. If they had not been targeted and left to their own medical choices I don't think this would be an issue.
The nonsense about bathrooms and protecting girls sports is a bad response to bad law (Title IX) but that is not the fault of trans-persons.
The assault on the liberty of any citizen is an assault on the liberty of all citizens. That is why state regulation of transpersons (often just rationalized transphobia) are not just drivel to some libertarians.
No one took anything from libertarianism. The good things came from progressives.
Good column. In my view, here’s why libertarianism is neither Left nor Right but a consistent and principled advocacy of liberty: In terms of political philosophy and intellectual history, libertarianism, broadly defined, is the true resurgent liberalism of the 21st century.
Of course, different types of liberalism have arisen over the centuries, with legitimate differences to explore. Compare, say, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Herbert Spencer’s The Man Versus the State to George H. Smith’s The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism and transgender economist/historian Deirdre McCloskey’s Why Liberalism Works.
Yet, in tension with 20th century brands of interventionist, paternalistic or State-expansionist liberalism, the Latin root of the word ‘liberal’ most deeply relates to liberty.
True liberalism, rightly understood, champions Liberty by limiting Power, especially the brute force institutionalized by the State – as detailed in Roy Childs, Jr.’s essays in Liberty Against Power ..
Also worth reading: Szasz, Rand, Hayek, Rothbard, Tibor Machan, Robert Nozick, Henry Hazlitt, Rose Wilder Lane (The Discovery of Freedom), H.L. Mencken>
But definitions matter. Clarity in concept is the foundation of accuracy and insight.
For example: Government, most accurately defined by the great sociologist Max Weber, is the only human institution that claims a legitimized monopoly on the (final) use of force within a given geographical territory.
In short, behind the velvet gloves of even the more limited and democratic governments are always fists.
https://www.lfs.org/blog/interview-lfs-founder-michael-grossberg-on-how-he-became-a-writer-critic-sf-fan-helped-save-the-prometheus-awards/
I agree definitions matter and that's the problem. Do you honestly think libertarians could even define the concept of liberty (it's rights-protecting government btw, not libertarian anarchy), let alone be consistent and principled advocates for it?
The American liberty movement is in a shambles because many alleged libertarians bought into the scamdemic narrative that was pr omoted by Donald Trump in early 2020. It was an obvious psy-op whose purpose was to get stupid and pathetic Americans to give up their liberty and destroy the social fabric that makes civilized society possible.
More and more libertarians view non-libertarians as hysterical, irrational, and dangerous. They are working on ways to separate themselves from the violent majority.
An interesting historical perspective on the roots and evolution of the Trumpian milieu, something not often done. Seems somewhat odd the emphasis on Rothbard, considering he died almost 30 years ago, and was more of a strategist and polemics than a strong theoretician. Also it might be noted another strategic alliance arose at least informally in the Trumpian world, that with the Russian far "right" such as with Sputnik et.al. and thinkers like Alexander Dugin.
Well, this article didn't age well. The actual outcome of the Libertarian convention - Trump is booed by the audience throughout his speech, and the whole thing ends with a mutual "fuck you". LP nominates cosmopolitan Chase Oliver as its candidate, and the Mises Caucus ends up losing big.
I think this gets the cause and effect backwards. Trump didn't kill anything. Libertarians, just like Conservatives, had this coming for a long time. They have no real grasp of political theory and no ideology. They were ripe for being overrun by populist lunacy sooner or later.
The saddest part of all is that no lesson has been learned at all. All the NeverTrumpers, et al, can see the dangers of where things are going but are still continuing with their hodgepodge of very superficial and contradictory political ideas without facing up to their own intellectual bankruptcy as being the cause of all this.
In the mid-Sixties my wife and I began a brief association with a group of libertarians. We soon found that the individuals had no understanding of what beset people without resources. My wife was poor and Black and one reason we were attracted to Libertarianism was what is called here their cosmopolitanism (not the drug issue - we never were interested though many friends liked legalization) and their rejection of religious doctrine as a basis for policy. Over the years the self-identified Libertarians I've encountered - and I've associated with quite a few here in Arizona - have veered more and more to crazy-villle a la Rand Paul. So thanks for clarifying their trajectory.