A Decade of Liberty or Whatever
Intellectuals, being a bunch of unforgiveable b.s. artists, love to claim that their rivals’ predictions all turned out wrong and that their own worldviews are vindicated. I mainly avoid that battle by not making predictions. Still, occasionally I explain my hopes, always expecting that humanity will find new ways to dash them, especially in politics.
Thus, my book Libertarianism for Beginners, released 10 years ago this month, was almost entirely descriptive of the long past of that movement, with only one chapter—the chapter on the species of libertarianism called anarcho-capitalism—reserved for (implicitly) explaining how I think things should work out in the end, which is to say: with no government at all, only a residual respect for private efforts to defend individuals’ property rights and bodily integrity (security guards, arbitration firms, etc.). As fully expected, things haven’t worked out that way quite yet.
If humility is a virtue (sometimes yes, sometimes no), at least give me credit for starting the pessimistic reassessment early, since I recognized at the time my book came out that populist, trade-bashing Trump almost simultaneously winning the 2016 Republican Party presidential nomination wasn’t a good sign by my standards, certainly not a clear and unambiguous good sign.
The left and right each love to pretend they can’t tell the difference between a rival faction and [anything bad they wish were logically yoked to that unfortunate faction], but actual libertarians knew that we were in for a rough ride if the right was veering in the direction of stymieing international trade and travel while the left was showing a renewed love of censorship and socialism—much as each of those two large factions might enjoy blaming (tiny, largely inconsequential) libertarianism for what its main opposite faction or even its own side was up to.
Ten years on, I’ll add two more layers of pessimism to that grim picture by, first, acknowledging that many of the past decade’s populist warnings about the philosophically corrosive nature of nominally free-market institutions such the academy and media are true and, second, acknowledging that some of the most proudly market-oriented institutions, such as tech companies, have proven so eager to aid government in controlling the populace, as with surveillance and warfare technology (not to mention aspects of medicine), that one has to suspect those institutions would continue down that authoritarian pathway even in a world where they were no longer subsidized by the taxpayer.
Furthermore, the past decade has made it apparent that as the libertarian movement grows (ever so slightly), it doesn’t just adopt some mushy-moderate, mainstream political positions to hasten its acceptance (as David D. Friedman reasonably predicted a half-century ago) but begins importing many of the same stupid factional battles that plague the non-libertarian portions of the political spectrum—feuding internally over immigration, lifestyle choices, religion, Israel, and more.
You might think I sound radical today, but I swear I was long the sort of bourgeois “big tent” guy who thought that libertarians should mostly stick to talking about the issues on which all libertarians agree (property rights, legal individualism, the need to shrink government) and bracket or footnote the stuff that was divisive within the movement for later discussion (especially those issues that were both divisive within the movement and alienating to those outside of it).
I still think there are ways to get a substantial portion of the population onboard with the libertarian project, but it’ll require for starters once more valuing attracting people to philosophical positions rather than, as seems to have become a popular sport across the political spectrum, finding new and ostensibly hilarious ways to vex and repel them. You’re still sane enough to see that, right? I’m not the only one?
But for now, our whole political culture seems content to see the worst in others while also summoning the worst in oneself, a bad downward spiral if ever there was one. Take the issue of secession.
There are countless examples of geographically-themed movements with humane motives for wanting more political autonomy, not just the desire to engage in slavery without reprisals from the central government, but some latter-day secessionists are happy to muddy the waters by tossing in veiled or “joking” defenses of slavery while they’re at it. Unsurprisingly, propagandistic establishment venues such as Wired magazine are only too happy to pretend this reveals the ugly truth about secessionists in general.
Furthermore, the Wired piece argues that even well-meaning secessionists bear the moral blame for those violent reprisals from the central government, which is a bit like blaming peaceful protestors if the cops use tear gas on the entire surrounding neighborhood. By this reasoning, the only moral course of action when faced with authoritarianism is to comply, which seems to be how many non-intellectuals think about law and politics, like children telling other children they must always obey parents and teachers.
A good six years before my book came out, I was already warning that the impulse to take perverse, sadistic, punitive, needlessly combative positions in politics was then fast overtaking the impulse to persuade people, in part by warning that there is a “darkness on the right,” as I put it on CSPAN. But the right’s problems aren’t the only problems on display since then: I’ve warned as well that many prominent libertarians would rather defend the liberal establishment than defend liberty itself.
Alas, I’ve been thoroughly vindicated on that point too. I’ve lost a few friends in making each of those points, but better to lose friends than to lose principles.
The last thing a political pessimist should do is suggest putting our hopes in any flesh-and-blood human being as a way to fix things, certainly not some egomaniacal personality-cult-builder akin to a Donald Trump. I will say, though, that I’m ever so slightly pleased to hear that Sen. Rand Paul may be entering the 2028 Republican Party presidential primary, this time probably without having to worry about being blown out of the water in the debates by Donald Trump insulting his height.
Among his several virtues, Paul offers a way to yoke the populism of our era to the more highbrow, Constitution-quoting, market-analyzing ideas of libertarianism. He sounds like a Trump-allied southerner even as calls for legalizing all drugs, demilitarizing the police, ending wars, and respecting longstanding constitutional limits on government action. Squaring the populist/libertarian circle might be the best way to get American politics back on a sane course, and not a moment too soon. It’s a task at least 10 years overdue.
Lest we fall prey, by contrast, to the optimistic and amnesiac idea that the Democrats will fix things if we just let the Republicans (and the libertarians to boot) self-destruct, remember that the biggest debates within the Democratic Party, wishful thinking aside, tend to be over whether to become slightly more socialist or drastically more socialist.
This very month, the smart, respectable, thinktank-adjacent Democrats are condemning a few of their more popular political candidates for suggesting that tax cuts might have some place in the arsenal of acceptable Democratic policy positions. Republicans are often wrong lately, but the Democrats have pushed bigger government—higher taxes, more regulation—since at least as far back as Woodrow Wilson in the World War I era and, as the current thinktank backlash shows, aren’t likely to change for a long time to come. In short, one of the two major parties may yet be of service to the public when its current cynical leader is gone, but the other has been at war with the public for over a century now.
Liberty, though, will require more people being comfortable and even casual about condemning both right and left as utter monstrosities.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.