Rare News Desk
When Robert Draper’s piece on America’s “libertarian moment” ran in New York Times Magazine last week, many of us reacted by saying, “Well, of course.” Anyone who’s been paying attention for the past four years knows that libertarianism is ascendant, both nationally and in the Republican Party. Draper’s article was a rare effort by a mainstream newspaper to chronicle that shift, and cited everyone from Reason magazine to former MTV personality Kennedy.
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Out came the knives. Ramesh Ponnuru, interviewed by Draper, knocked the GOP’s recent flirtations with Rand Paul’s foreign policy because “at the end of the day, [Paul’s] a hard-core anti-interventionist, and Republican voters aren’t.” David Frum proclaimed, “Libertarians are like Marxists in that they have prophets like von Mises and Hayek, and they quote from their holy scripture, and they don’t have to engage.”
For too long this has been the tactic du jour for responding to libertarians. It’s the same strategy Ann Coulter employs to trash liberals: take the most extreme manifestation of an idea that you can find and assume that it characterizes an entire group. Thus a few libertarians never want to intervene anywhere, so neither does Rand Paul. A few libertarians love von Mises, so all libertarians must swallow him whole. A few liberals cavorted with America’s enemies fifty years ago, so all liberals must be guilty of treason.
The problem is that none of it’s true. Rand Paul isn’t rigidly opposed to every overseas intervention, as Ponnuru claims. He called for a tough response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea that included rebuilding defensive missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic, and hasn’t opposed airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq. He’s tried to leverage foreign aid to punish Egypt for its military coup, winning unlikely agreement from super-hawk John McCain.
During a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Paul sought to find “a middle path. A policy that is not rash or reckless. A foreign policy that is reluctant, restrained by constitutional checks and balances, but does not appease.” Trying to find a golden mean on foreign policy is very different from being a “hard-core anti-interventionist.”
Nor are all libertarians dogmatic apostles of von Mises and Hayek, as David Frum asserts. Some libertarians are absolutists, of course, but to dismiss them all as absolutists is in itself an absolutist argument. The average Millennial who leans libertarian hasn’t read Rothbard and doesn’t think the state should be abolished. But he probably thinks NSA surveillance needs to be restrained and that American drug policy doesn’t make much sense.
That’s the stubborn fact of the libertarian moment: it didn’t originate with spewing zealots on street corners or in musty political theory textbooks. It was borne from a series of very practical considerations. Americans are becoming increasingly alienated from their institutions, as Ben Domenech notes, making them more receptive to the ideas of individualism and libertarianism. And that atomization was caused in part by a decade of spectacular failures by their biggest institutions.
Big government brought us calamity in Iraq and oceans of red ink. Big business brought us unprecedented crony capitalism and chaos on Wall Street. By saying it’s time for a smaller state and a flatter economic playing field, the public is rationally responding to the events of the past decade.
So why do some conservatives insist on reducing libertarianism to a straw man? Because actually trying to understand the impetus behind the libertarian moment might lead them back to failed policies that they’ve supported. Libertarians have been right about a lot over the past decade—and their biggest vindication was over the Iraq war, which David Frum and Ramesh Ponnuru both vocally supported.
Frum was so agitated by Draper’s piece that he responded with a piece of his own. He noted that, while young voters agree with libertarians on certain issues, they also tend to support government interventions in the economy. But that’s exactly the point. You don’t need everyone to adopt the entire Libertarian Party platform to have a libertarian moment. Political positions are a la carte; people tend to pick and choose rather than accepting a party’s entire cafeteria tray. The public is trending libertarian, not becoming slavish Rothbardian fundamentalists.
Ah, but Frum is also worried about libertarians “pushing [Republicans] sideways to the extremist margins.” It’s true that extremism is a problem in politics. Here’s an example of extremist political rhetoric on the subject of homeland security:
The ranks of the faint hearts are growing, and their voices are echoing ever more loudly in our media and our politics. Yet tomorrow could be the day that an explosive packed with radioactive material detonates in Los Angeles or that nerve gas is unleashed inside a tunnel under the Hudson River or that a terrible new disease breaks out in the United Kingdom. …There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.
That’s from David Frum’s book An End to Evil, co-written with Richard Perle in 2004.
Is it any wonder that voters are leaning libertarian?
