On the menu today: As libertarian-minded activists gather in Memphis, Tenn., for FreedomFest conference, it’s a good time to ask if the country is becoming more free or less free. The glass is half full, with plenty of signs for optimism and plenty of signs for pessimism — in particular, the sense that today’s Republican Party is much less interested in reducing the size of government and expanding freedom, and much more interested in using big government as a cudgel against its enemies in the culture war. Perhaps the biggest problem for libertarians is that our political debates are increasingly dominated by larger-than-life personalities, and not what government ought to do, and what areas of American life it should stay out of completely.
Is Libertarianism Merely Resting, or Is It Pining for the Fjords?
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — I’m here in Bluff City for FreedomFest, a libertarian-minded conference that describes itself as focusing upon “all the ways we experience liberty in our lives — political, financial, social, creative, professional, physical, intellectual liberty, and more.” All the freest of the free thinkers are here — from the high-minded, white-collar Steve Forbes to the blue-collar Mike Rowe to new National Review columnist and economic historian Amity Shlaes, and at least three presidential candidates in Larry Elder, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
If you’re an optimistic libertarian, you can point to signs that the country is moving in your preferred direction:
- School choice is on the march in more states, even though Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, chickened out of embracing it at the last minute. So far this year, lawmakers in 14 states have passed bills establishing school-choice programs or expanding existing ones, and six states now or soon will allow nearly all students to use public money to attend private schools. Some form of school choice exists in almost all states and the District of Columbia, even if those forms aren’t as widespread or expansive as school-choice advocates would prefer.
- Even with near-constant demagoguery that demonizes law-abiding gun owners, Americans’ Second Amendment rights are as secure as they’ve been in several generations.
- Marijuana has never been more legal or more easily accessed, and you can smell the consequences in the downtowns of many American cities.
- Americans are much more aware of the abuses of law-enforcement officials, much less likely to give government authorities the benefit of the doubt in public controversies, and more likely to believe that policing procedures require either minor or major changes.
- By historical standards, federal income-tax rates are low. Even some Democratic governors are signing income-tax cuts into law.
- Gay marriage is, legally, a settled issue.
- The death penalty is growing rarer over time.
- “Stand your ground” and other laws ensuring a right to armed self-defense are growing more common. “Laws in at least 28 states and Puerto Rico declare there is no duty to retreat [sic] an attacker in any place in which one is lawfully present.”
- The makeup of the Supreme Court ensures, at least for now, that six justices are likely to be skeptical about extensive interpretations of federal or state government power. Yes, justices can surprise you and sometimes disappoint you, but the government faces a more skeptical Supreme Court now than it did in 2013 or 2003 or 1993.
Sure, the Libertarian Party itself is marginalized and uncompetitive, beset by infighting, petty rivalries, and a tendency of the party’s weirder advocates to freak out the normies, but that’s pretty much par for the course for the past few decades. America has a lot more libertarian-leaning voters or small-“l” libertarians than capital-“L” registered Libertarians. Go figure, it turns out that a movement full of people who like being left alone and detest being told what to do is difficult to unite into a cohesive national political force. Libertarians face the biggest mobilization challenge since the Introvert Activism March.
But if you’re a pessimistic libertarian, you can find plenty of signs of the political and cultural tides moving against you:
- Americans have rarely seemed more eager to stick their noses in one another’s business. The Covid pandemic temporarily enabled sweeping restrictions on Americans’ freedom of movement and association, and brought out many people’s inner nannies, wagging their fingers at those who didn’t wear their masks. Beyond government surveillance (more on this below), we live in a surveillance state of our fellow citizens, who are eager to whip out their cell-phone cameras and make any social interaction with strangers go viral.
- Vocal corners of the Republican Party have abandoned their stated beliefs in limited government and now eagerly embrace a big and powerful federal government as a tool to punish their enemies in the culture war. The man who currently appears most likely to be the next Republican nominee declared to his supporters, “I am your retribution.”
- Republicans have fallen short of expectations in the past few election cycles, and where Democrats have replaced Republicans, they’re undoing the pro-freedom moves of their predecessors. Michigan Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer and Democrats in the state legislature repealed the state’s right-to-work laws.
- Many Democrats adamantly believe that free-market economics have proven an immiserating failure, and the only way to keep the American economy strong is through ever-bigger spending initiatives, higher taxes, and more regulation.
- The Biden administration and its allies are hell-bent upon monitoring, restricting, and punishing anything they choose to define as dangerous “misinformation,” an approach to restricting private speech that is utterly incompatible with the First Amendment. There’s even some evidence that the FBI is “forwarding thousands of content moderation ‘requests’ to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube on behalf of the SBU, Ukraine’s Security Agency.”
- Regarding government surveillance, Biden’s nominee to lead the National Security Agency says he will “champion the mass surveillance power that has been used to collect data from foreigners and Americans alike and which has come under renewed scrutiny from lawmakers.”
- And there are some signs that figures and factions who were once thought of as libertarian voices in our culture are proving that their commitment to those principles was a mile wide and an inch deep. The Silicon Valley tech bros who once boasted of their independence from Washington and the irrelevance of the federal government were among the first to scream for a federal bailout of Silicon Valley Bank.
Back in 2019, Salon magazine shrieked in fear, “Welcome to ‘Kochland’: We all live in the brothers’ libertarian utopia.” You are forgiven if you failed to notice the libertarian utopia all around you.
Earlier this year, Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in The New Yorker that libertarianism is past its glory days and slowly inching toward the ideological retirement home:
Doctrinal libertarianism hasn’t disappeared from the political scene: it’s easy enough to find right-of-center politicians insisting that government is too big. But, between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, libertarianism has given way to culture war as the right’s dominant mode. To some libertarians — and liberals friendly to the cause — this is a development to lament, because it has stripped the American right of much of its idealism. Documenting the history of the libertarian movement now requires writing in the shadow of Trump, as two new books do. Together, they suggest that, since the end of the Cold War, libertarianism has remade American politics twice — first through its success and then through its failure.
Again, from the list of changes at the top of this newsletter, the libertarian pro-freedom agenda is racking up some significant wins. But it’s easy to miss those, because the terms of the loudest public debates are shifting away from what government should and shouldn’t do and matters of policy. Instead, our political debates are increasingly dominated by personalities: what crazy thing Trump said this week; the latest signs of age catching up to Biden; Kamala Harris’s latest bizarre soliloquy; and what people think of figures such as Ron DeSantis, AOC, Elon Musk, etc.
Fairly or not, in certain conservative circles, “libertarianism” is almost a synonym for “libertinism.” On paper, libertarians match social liberalism with economic conservatism — free minds and free markets, as the crowd at Reason magazine puts it. (Keep in mind, there are some flaws in that chart arguing that most Americans are economically liberal and socially conservative and that libertarian views are exceedingly rare in the electorate.)
For a while, libertarians could argue that public policy was moving in their direction by pointing to legalization of marijuana and gay marriage, and public support for abortion, while hand-waving away an ever-expanding Federal Register full of regulations, higher taxes, and growing government spending. In other words, the “socially liberal” part of the libertarian agenda was thriving while the “economically conservative” part stagnated or shrank. With several states, such as Iowa, changing their abortion laws, and certain Republicans, such as Ohio senator J. D. Vance, teaming up with Elizabeth Warren on regulation of banks, perhaps the momentum is with the more socially conservative and economically liberal.
You can fairly ask Americans why they keep voting for even bigger government if they’re so disappointed with the big government they’ve gotten so far.
Even with all of its flaws and challenges, the Libertarian Party remains the third-largest party in the United States. Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgenson earned 1.86 million votes in the last presidential election — a significant drop from Gary Johnson’s 4.4 million votes in 2016, but still the highest vote total of any third-party candidate. If 2024 brings a much-dreaded Trump vs. Biden rematch, perhaps many Americans will be looking for other options and take a long look at the libertarian alternative.
ADDENDUM: Frank Mongillo, an internal-medicine physician with a private practice in New Haven, Conn., writes on NRO today about a nutty proposal to require physicians to wear body cameras to ensure they aren’t denying patients quality care based upon race:
Doctors wearing body cameras would have a chilling effect on the doctor-patient relationship. Privacy is at the center of every encounter. If everything is being filmed, patients will be much less likely to discuss sensitive health concerns. Most patients would also rather not have their more intimate exams filmed. A camera would have a chilling effect on some of the most important conversations that any of us may ever have. The privacy concerns and the legal issues of filming every patient encounter make this suggestion absurd.
The heart of a lot of problems in our society is that some of us do not trust other Americans to do their jobs with professionalism, care, and good judgment, and yearn for some sort of all-knowing wise government authority to watch over everyone at all times to make sure they’re performing their duties the way they should.