There are still libertarians?
Herding the cats from 1995-2025.
James Taylor Foreman posted this question on Substack Notes, and as someone who is a small-l libertarian, I had this answer:
They did a kind of schism. Some of them went the way of Crypto Conservatives. Others are now Abundance Libs. Like how New Atheism Tumblr split into Woke and Rationalist.
A few people on Substack and X seemed to like this idea so I wanted to sketch out this bit of internet history, because it shows how ideas rise in the zeitgeist and end up splitting over time. It’s an illustration that “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.”
For those who don’t know, as the name implies, libertarianism says: Liberty is the primary cultural virtue. “Life free or die”, yo!
In practical terms, this amounts to supporting free markets, personal privacy, civil liberties, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. Most would agree that the government should be limited. In Europe, they are more left-wing, associated with the Austrian school of anarchic anti-authoritarianism. In the US, they have traditionally been more right-wing, the sovereign Cowboys of the West.
However, in the U.S. over the last 30 years, as the Democratic and Republican parties have polarized, libertarian ideas briefly enjoyed bipartisan appeal. Eventually, this gave way to a right-wing repudiation, where Trump essentially said “F-those-guys,” pushing libertarianism off the national stage and into local politics — where it’s now resurfacing as a push for abundance.
But to understand that process, you have to understand how the libertarians grew up with the internet.
The Rise of the Internet Libertarians and the Glory Days of Blogging 1995-2008
It was the best of times, because the dot com boom was subsidizing the web hosting. It was the worst of times because you typed out HTML by hand, in Notepad, like some pecked-fingered psychopath to get published. What the internet lacked in credentialed gatekeepers, it made up for in technical spadework.
It was only 6 months after Kevin Kelly launched WIRED’s Hotwired.com website in 1994 that Virginia Postrel launched Reason.com, the home of “Free Markets and Free Minds”, the following year. That made Reason a home to lots of early internet adopters, who already had a pirate, open-source, DIY, free minds Liberal ethos which naturally fit Reason’s other damn-the-man positions on things like Gay Marriage, Debt and Spending, (In)Efficiency, Free Trade, and “Open Internet Good”.
This early move online also meant that Reason — and libertarian-adjacent thinkers — were uniquely positioned when 9/11 changed the publishing environment from weekly to daily to immediate. Cable news led this cocaine pace, but it hit the internet like crack. Weekly was too slow. Reason’s Hit & Run blog launched in August 2002 just as the Iraq War debate began. On the left, you had Code Pink, soon to be pussy hat, protesters organizing on DailyKos. On the right, there was Nick Gillespie and his crew of libertarian punks at Reason: Matt Welch, Megan McArdle, David Weigel, and Radley Balko.
Being anti-Iraq War put libertarians at odds with their traditional conservative allies but aligned them with the war-weary and segments of the left. Compounding the rift, gay marriage became the topic du jour during the ‘04 elections. Once again, libertarians broke ranks with the right and sided with the pro-gay marriage left and Classical Liberal Andrew Sullivan.
This realignment came as the broader right and left were polarizing. For many centrists, “I’m a fiscal conservative but a social liberal” became the libertarian equivalent of saying, “I went to school in Boston.” No longer the third leg of conservatism, libertarians were now spanning a political chasm.
At the height of the blogosphere, libertarians like Reason and Sullivan, along with Tyler Cowen, Glenn Greenwald, and the broader economics crowd, became rare common nodes. They had ties to both Hugh Hewitt and Ezra Klein, DailyKos and Daily Wire, FOX and MSNBC. This Swiss-like neutrality reached its peak during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the rise of Ron Paul and Barack Obama.
The Crest and the Crash: Obama vs Ron Paul vs Trump 2009-2016
On the one side of the spectrum was Ron Paul, a throwback-style libertarian; he was anti-war, and didn’t care about who you married, but what he really cared about was monetary policy. If Lehman Brothers had collapsed 8 months earlier, Paul, who came in second to McCain, might have gotten the GOP nomination. As it happened, Paul was the candidate who raised all of the traditional right libertarian issues around debt and the role of the central bank in absorbing that risk, and lost to a war hero who had no idea how to deal with economic issues when they arose later in the campaign.
On the other side, Obama took the same anti-war position as the Libertarians did, and got the same credibility boost for doing so. Obama was also widely suspected of being in support of Gay Marriage, to the point that Andrew Sullivan, the vanguard of the Gay Marriage movement, endorsed him. Which is to say that Obama had adopted the two key social libertarian positions and had won the nomination.
In 2008, more than half the Reason writers, and likely more than half the Reason readers, voted for a man many called a Socialist. Sure, he flirted with nationalizing healthcare and possibly the banks. But Obama was anti-war, pro-gay, pro-internet, and pro-weed. During his presidency, libertarians won on gay marriage, marijuana, and free trade. In practice, Obama governed as a pro-business conservative who passed a conservative governor’s health care model.
Which gave rise to the Tea Party. All across the country in Republican districts, you would hear Ron Paul’s talking points in colonial wigs. At the time, it seemed like libertarianism might also be ascendant on the right and the left, a total victory. In retrospect, the right-libertarian push back was them trying to regain ground that they lost to Obama. So much so that by 2012, Obama and Romney both had (different left-right) appeals to libertarians; Obama socially and Romney fiscally. No matter who won, libertarians would win; they were the most contested voting bloc in that election. But it turned out that Romney-Ryan was the last gasp of libertarianism on the right.
When 2016 rolled around, Hillary and Trump were both loathed by libertarians. Clinton for her command and control approach to governing, and Trump for Tariffs. In response, Gary Johnson got 4.5M votes, the most ever for a Libertarian candidate, and more votes than the popular vote split between Trump and Clinton. But Trump’s 2016 election was the end of a 56-year run of libertarian ideas on the right.
Mistakenly, many have said, “The Tea Party flipped their wigs for MAGA hats.” I don’t think they changed their minds. I think Obama, and then Trump, drew a new line — and people had to choose. A shift best exemplified by Chris Arnade and Ferdinand Lejune in this exchange:
As a cartoon illustration of the point, take a political compass and shift the left-right axis to the left by 45 degrees. Obama starts the shift towards pro-business state capacity libertarianism, and it's why the Tea Party are the ones who push back first, they see and feel the encroachment. In response, you get Occupy Wall Street, who start to correctly intuit that Barack “Some of my best friends are Billionaires” Obama was not on their side. This was the Bernie-Bro pushback from the left, to the Tea Party pushback from the right. It’s also how to get Tim Pool, starting with Occupy Wall Street, voting for Trump in 2016. All while gathering up union members first, then their bosses, and eventually the Young Turks by 2024. When people talk about Red Maoism, this is the shift they are pointing towards: socially conservative, fiscally (corporately?) liberal.
On the other side of the spectrum, it was the Free Traders, liberty and democracy promoters on the right, who formed the core Never Trumpers. These were the unelected elites, think tanks, academics, media personalities, campaign operatives, those front-row types; they left early. For the people with actual positions of power, it was more complicated.
Not all of the Right Libertarians were out, nor did they all leave at the same time. Ryan, the hero of 2012, was out of the party before the end of Trump’s first term, and Romney would be out before Trump's second term. But some people learned a different lesson. The best example is Thomas Massie who ran on a Tea Party platform in 2010, but joined the Trump Train, later saying in a March 15, 2017 interview with the Washington Examiner:
“All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul-searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son-of-a-bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best-in-class, as we had up until he came along.”
Which is to say that people didn’t really change their minds so much as make a choice about which issues they really did or really did not care about. Prioritization. The NeoCons were wrong about Iraq. Right or wrong, they really did and do believe in liberty and democracy. Once Ryan got his longed-for Tax Cuts enacted, he had no reason to stay. Massie made the opposite choice. But no one changed their mind so much as they decided which side of the Obama-Trump line they were going to stand on.
Woke and COVID 2017-2024
Woke put libertarians in yet another uncomfortable position. On the one hand, censorious cancel culture went against their free speech ideals. On the other hand, libertarians have been critical of the police state for decades. Unlike the Iraq War or Gay Marriage, this position won them zero friends and made them enemies of the left, especially the right-leaning, Classical Liberal libertarians. This mostly showed up in the mediasphere with several cancellations by major media companies, including Glen Greenwald, Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, James Bennett, and Will Wilkinson, just to name a few. Between Trump and Woke, the libertarian appeal plummeted, shoving it off the national stage and hitting an all-time nadir with COVID.
There are no libertarians in a pandemic.
Public Health is a public good, and a highly communicable disease has to be dealt with at the community level. Every public health measure is a form of coercion and a violation of the absolutist non-aggression principle that strong libertarians hold dear. Mask mandates, vaccine requirements, closing public spaces, helicopter shimmies, and scientific censorship are all things that might have been necessary for the community, but it divided them internally into knots and effectively ethered libertarianism nationally.
This is why Taylor asked his question, and Chris and Ferdianian are correct in their exchange.
But this shift did not make the cats disappear, so where are they now?
BTC and YIMBY Abundance 2017-2024
The True Heir to Ron Paul’s moment was not Rand Paul, it was BTC.
Planted in 2008, as the GFC began, BTC inherited Ron Paul’s true believers. Libertarian blogs like Reason helped onboard many early investors — who promptly lost money at Mt. Gox, making the worst-best decisions of their lives. Crypto offered Paul’s promise without the peril of an 81-year-old candidate. Digital gold. Fort Knox made of ether. Where do I sign my hash?
In the wake of the Ron-Romney-Ryan losses, the economic libertarians went underground. Without the GFC and the ZIRP that followed, BTC dies in it’s crib. And it just was as the Trump /Ryan massive budget explosion was passed into law that BTC had it’s first breakout, hitting the first of many highs. COVID accelerated everything. Like ZRIP on steroids, alot of stimmy inflation went into BTC prices rather than good prices, and maybe we should be happy about that. But for the BTC Libertarians, it was vindication – they had been right all along! When the Canadian Truckers had their bank accounts seized, and the Russian Central Banks got their assets confiscated, it wasn’t just the Americans who got crypto religion; a lot of people all over the world packed hard wallets with crypto, JIC.
Crypto is a natural fit for those who have long been skeptical of the government, but within Crypto, BTC vs MEME is the new libertarian scissor. Many of the BTC (Maxxie) True Believers view BTC as an exit option against Trump himself, as much as a hedge against socialized debt, like Alexander Good. The Meme crowd formed the tech right that would emerge to sign a bargain with Trump 2.0, which he would use to launch $TRUMP.
For today’s right-libertarians, your BTC-vs-MEME allocation says a lot about your politics.
For the left libertarians, their attention turned to local concerns, namely housing and the right to build, what we call the YIMBYs or Yes In My BackYard. While the YIMBY name had been around, it got a big push in early-2010’s from the non-crypto tech world, as San Francisco became ground zero for the explosion of housing prices that would rip across the fastest-growing metro areas. For the libertarians who learned how to use the internet to organize and lobby for state-level ballot initiatives around gay rights or marijuana legalization, this was a natural fit for an issue. It also cut across the left-right parties axis in that it was liberal-libertarians in California asking to be more like conservative-libertarians in Texas. The argument being “I have personal property rights.” A quintessential libertarian talking point.
Which way, Western man?
The libertarian reorientation leftward wasn’t just political. It was intellectual.
This is best seen in the move from Milton Friedman to Tyler Cowen as the main characters of libertarianism. Friedman mostly focused on ‘freedom from’ the state/socialism/communism in a Cold War setting, which gave him a clear enemy and a clean line to draw.
Cowen was handed the mantel of libertarianism in 2020 during the pandemic with his essay State Capacity Liberalism. Cowen attempted the much more difficult task of defining a liberalism of ‘freedom to’ enforce laws, make decisions, and improve the general welfare. One of the key points that Cowen makes is that the state itself is overregulated, limiting the government’s ability to deliver on progressive goals. It’s the same point that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make in their book Abundance, because it’s part of the same continuing rotation of libertarianism to the left. It is also why the strongest push back to Abundance has come from the more communitarian anti-trust anti-corporate side of the party, because they correctly intuit that the philosophical shift comes at their expense.
This gives me no joy at all. Yes, i’m happy that the Libs are getting more Libertarian. But the idea of getting the opposite of everything I want every 4- 8 years is not a great place to be politically. If I could change it, getting half of what I want all the time was a much better deal.
But if this is what happened, the next post asks the question, why - what did libertarians get wrong?