Where are libertarians going? What is clear is where they are not going. The much-touted “libertarian moment,” as a New York Times Magazine article phrased it two years ago, never materialized. The story hailed the presidential aspirations of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) as the harbinger of a political sea change that would usher in a new era for the GOP and the country. It never happened. What happened instead was Donald Trump.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Senator Paul spent much of his energy backtracking and distancing himself from the strict libertarian positions of his father, former congressman Ron Paul, particularly on foreign policy. Team Rand thought they had only to trim their sails and he would enter the GOP mainstream: instead, the ship capsized and sank.
As the senator caviled and maneuvered in a bid to look respectable, Trump did precisely the opposite: defying the political class, he launched a frontal assault on the GOP establishment—and succeeded in overthrowing it, to the cheers of the Republican grassroots.
Paul reiterated his opposition to the Iraq War, but Trump went several steps beyond that, accusing the neoconservatives who surrounded George W. Bush of lying us into war: “They said there were weapons of mass destruction and they knew there were none,” he said at the South Carolina GOP presidential debate. “They lied.” As the lobbyists and party mandarins booed him, Trump revealed in their catcalls, serenely defiant in the knowledge that he had the country behind him.
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On domestic issues, too, Trump’s boldness overshadowed Paul’s caution. While the Kentucky senator introduced legislation that would make it difficult for visitors from countries rife with terrorism to enter the United States, Trump leapfrogged his Republican rivals by saying he would temporarily ban all Muslims from traveling to the United States. In a year in which half-measures and nuances weren’t selling, Trump understood the zeitgeist and went with it, while the rest of the Republican pack fell by the wayside—Paul being one of the earliest casualties.
The senator had started out by being dubbed “the most interesting man in Washington,” but by the end of his presidential campaign, he was sure among the least inspiring. His campaign was supposed to have been a less intransigent version of his father’s quixotic yet impressively enthusiastic White House bids in 2008 and 2012, mobilizing the young people drawn to the elder Paul’s angular libertarian message yet tempering its rough edges so as to neutralize neoconservative critics like Bill Kristol. What happened instead was that Paul’s cautious tightrope walk between these two poles wound up pleasing no one. Paul went from a high of 15 percent or so in the early polls down to 2 percent and fading fast. He dropped out after polling less than 5 percent in Iowa—not even a quarter of his father’s vote total four years before.
It looked like the libertarian moment would never arrive. But there was still a glimmer of hope embodied by that leftover remnant of the early days of the libertarian movement: the Libertarian Party.
After all, Trump’s economic program of tariffs and maintaining the basic infrastructure of the welfare state represents a reversal of long-standing GOP orthodoxy. Ever since 1964, when Barry Goldwater ousted the Rockefeller wing of the party, Republicans had limned libertarian rhetoric on economic issues—a trend that continued through the Reagan years and beyond—albeit without putting theory into practice. Trump has negated all of that, appealing to working-class voters with a pledge to preserve entitlements and sweep away the “free trade” agreements so dear to the hearts of libertarian economists. And while Trump is roundly condemned by the political class for his supposedly “isolationist” foreign policy—he questions the utility and cost of NATO, and wants to dump Japan and Korea from our Pacific defense perimeter—the real estate mogul always accompanies this kind of talk with almost comically bellicose rhetoric, declaring that we’re going to “wipe out” ISIS “fast,” denouncing the “bad deal” with Iran, and refusing to rule out the use of nuclear weapons.
With the Trumpification of the GOP all but an accomplished fact, would the Libertarian Party learn the lesson of the Rand Paul campaign—don’t trim your sails, unfurl them!—and nominate a candidate with the clarity and consistency that made Ron Paul into a political phenomenon? With a Clintonian corporatist on the left and a populist nationalist on the right, the Libertarians clearly had an unusual opportunity.
Yet they chose not to take it. Instead, they nominated Gary Johnson again, a former Republican governor of New Mexico and erstwhile marijuana entrepreneur. Johnson’s ideological compass is erratic, at best: he supports the “Fair Tax,” which is a consumption tax piled atop a monthly “stipend” from the federal government for all Americans. Asked about global warming, he put a “libertarian” spin on Hillary’s vow to drive the coal miners into the unemployment line by claiming coal is simply being run out of business by the free market. This will come as a surprise to those coal miners driven out of work by the Obama administration’s environmentalist edicts.
Johnson started his campaign for the LP nomination by announcing that Muslim women should be prohibited by law from wearing the burqa. He later backtracked, saying this flagrantly unconstitutional idea was “well-intentioned” and just a “knee-jerk response,” albeit “impossible to enforce.” Perhaps he realized out-Trumping Trump wasn’t going to get him the Libertarian nomination.
