Embracing Libertarianism Will Not Save the GOP

There are some in today's Republican Party who claim that Libertarianism offers the best new hope for the GOP.  While there may be libertarians in the GOP, the bulk of the GOP base is the antithesis of the libertarian agenda of maximum personal freedoms with minimal government intervention.  It is no coincidence that the anti-gay agenda of the GOP base (and the political whores in elected GOP positions) flies directly against the arguments made by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, in amicus briefs which have sought to see state bans on same sex marriage invalidated.  The GOP base wants to regulate and control everything except for businesses/corporations.  True libertarians take a a 180% opposite position.  David Frum argues that the GOP is insane if it believes that embracing libertarian themes will save it from being anathema to most voters under 30.  Here are highlights:

Has the libertarian moment finally arrived? Robert Draper asks that question in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. His answer: Yes! Young voters are leaning libertarian, he says, and a Rand Paul presidential candidacy could energize those voters for the GOP.

Spoiler alert: Draper’s wrong, emphatically wrong. Young voters are not libertarian, nor even trending libertarian. Neither, for that matter, are older voters. The "libertarian moment" is not an event in American culture. It's a phase in internal Republican Party factionalism. Libertarianism is not pushing Republicans forward to a more electable future. It's pushing them sideways to the extremist margins.

Every serious study of the political attitudes of voters under 30 has discovered them to be the most pro-government age group since the cohort that directly experienced the Great Depression. Young voters are more likely than their elders to believe that government should intervene in the economy to create jobs. They support government aid to education and healthcare more than any other age group. Their voting behavior tracks their values: Under-30s massively voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

The claim that young voters are trending libertarian rests on three principal data points:

1. Young voters are more permissive on issues like same-sex marriage and drug legalization than their elders.
2. Young voters are marginally less supportive of Medicare and Social Security in their present form than are older voters.
3. Young voters are more alienated from institutions than their elders, including the two existing political parties.

But these points don’t add up to libertarianism. They don’t even present an opening to libertarianism. They reveal (modest) generational self-interest, social liberalism, and political demobilization.

Libertarianism is not rising in the country, but since 2009 it has exercised increasing influence inside the Republican party.  One measure of the libertarian rise is the waxing fortunes of the Paul dynasty

Despite the self-flattering claims of libertarians, the Republicans' post-2009 libertarian turn is not a response to voter demand. The areas where the voting public has moved furthest and fastest in a libertarian direction—gay rights, for example—have been the areas where Republicans have moved slowest and most reluctantly. The areas where the voting public most resists libertarian ideas—such as social benefits—are precisely the areas where the GOP has swung furthest and fastest in a libertarian direction.

Nor is it the strength and truth of libertarian ideas that explains their current vogue within the Republican Party. Libertarians have been most influential inside the GOP precisely where they have been—and continue to be—most blatantly wrong, such as when they predicted that the cheap money policies of the Federal Reserve would incite hyperinflation or that the United States teetered on the precipice of a debt crisis.

Libertarianism diverges from ordinary conservatism in many ways, but perhaps most fundamentally in this: Whereas ordinary conservatism emphasizes the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of government action, libertarianism presents government as alien and malign. 


Like all political movements, libertarianism binds together many divergent strands. It synthesizes the classical liberalism of the 1860s with the human-potential movement of the 1960s. It joins elegant economic theory to the primitive insistence that only metal can be money. It mingles nostalgia for the vanished American frontier with fantasies drawn from science fiction. It offers three cheers both for thrift, sobriety, and bourgeois self-control and three more for sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.  It invokes the highest ideals of American constitutionalism—and is itself invoked by the most radical critics of the American state and nation, from neo-Confederates to 9/11 Truthers.

The libertarians interviewed by Robert Draper talk about their movement’s exciting, bold ideological vision. Yet the true secret to its post-2008 appeal is just the opposite. Those conservatives who succumb to libertarianism do so in despair, not hope. Instead of competing to govern the state, many now feel that their only hope is defend themselves—with arms if necessary—against an inherently and inevitably hostile and predatory state.

Conservatives who still want to compete, win, and govern must trust that this despair will pass. The “libertarian moment” will last as long as, and no longer than, it takes conservatives to win a presidential election again. Unfortunately, the libertarian moment is itself the most immediate and the most difficult impediment to the political success that will be libertarianism’s cure.