Libertarians are victims of their own success, and the rest of us are victims of the few remaining libertarians, who – like CrossFitters, militant atheists, and vegans – can’t seem to shut up about their obsession. The fact is that conservatism has absorbed most of libertarianism, at least the useful parts of it. I don’t have much use for a conservative who has no libertarian tendencies, but I’ve got no use at all for the self-identified libertarians we see all too often today. They are a bunch of rigid scolds with zero conception of how the world works but no hesitation to explain it to the rest of us.
The libertarian influence on modern American conservatism was a healthy and overdue development, and has opened conservatism to consideration by a much wider audience. Let’s look at old-school conservatism. The stereotype would be John Lithgow as the stick-up-his-Schumer minister in “Footloose,” obsessed with making sure that Kevin Bacon can’t bust a move. Repressed, boring, self-righteous – that’s the worst of the old-school conservative stereotype. But that’s not conservatism today. It’s not even close. And that has to do with the libertarian influence on our movement. The libertarian streak broadened not only the movement’s possibilities, but the potential for consideration by other folks who didn’t particularly want some dude monitoring their booty calls or regulating their haircuts.
Now, conservatives are not exactly libertines, and generally prize traditional values. As for abortion, there’s no libertarianism there. You just don’t get to kill babies. If live and let live means anything, it means both people involved live.
But libertarianism provided a healthy suspicion of authority and promoted the decentralization a power down to the individual rather than retaining it in social hierarchies, government, and local busybodies. And you see a lot of that libertarian streak in conservatives wanting to be left the hell alone with their guns, home schooling, and unregulated social media ranting.
But not everything libertarians have wrought was good. The joke until about 10 years ago was that libertarians were pretty much only interested in legalizing pot. Well, they got what they wanted. Dope is legal, and our cities smell like Snoop Dogg’s humidor. We’ve made it easier for people to sit around all day ripping bong hits and gobbling Doritos on their moms’ futons. Great, just what America needs, a drug that makes people lazier and less interesting.
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And now that they’ve managed to achieve their cannabis dreams, they don’t really seem to have much of an agenda other than pestering the rest of us. You would think with leftists wanting to impose their fascist vision on society, the libertarians would have their work cut out for themselves. But they don’t seem to want to bother with the leftists; they seem to want to bother with conservatives. Maybe it’s because the leftists don’t pay any attention to them and we do.
To the extent the modern libertarians get involved in the woke wars, it’s always to tell us conservatives fighting a rear guard action against it that we can’t use any kind of tactic or technique that might actually help us win. Hey Governor DeSantis, you can’t…withdraw a massive government subsidy for a Fortune 500 company. We see cancellation culture in effect, but we only hear from libertarians when we cons attempt to turn the wokes’ rules back against them. Libertarians seem baffled by the notion that sometimes you have to actually cause your opponent pain before he stops doing bad things. We have to be illiberal to force a return to classical liberalism. Do you know how we stopped Nazis from killing? We killed them. But libertarians are notoriously fussy about getting their soft hands dirty. Purity is everything in modern libertarianism, because it’s all a pose anyway. It’s not a functional ideology. It’s a hobby for political geeks to pursue for a while until they grow up and start being Republicans.
More troubling is that now we’re seeing their nonsense manifest in the form of foreign policy idiocy. For some reason, libertarians don’t particularly care about liberty, certainly not other people’s. But they don’t even care about their own, at least not enough to protect it. They seem to believe that liberty is a natural state of man that just sort of happens. Libertarianism has now become associated with the lamest kind of pacifism, in which fashionably cynical college students babble about “forever wars” and argue that the United States doesn’t have any legitimate interests past the surf line.
Libertarianism, or at least the rump ideology that remains after its absorption into conservatism, is now the domain of glorified sophomores running their mouths like American politics is some dorm room bull session at the University of College.
They deny the existence of any kind of actual enemy. Of course, to accept the existence of some kind of enemy would require they provide an explanation of what to do about said enemy. Now, adults understand that what you do about enemies is fight and defeat them. But if you take fighting and defeating off the table when you still have enemies, well, then you get what happened to the 1,400 Israelis when the Hamas savages poured out of Gaza the other week.
Some of the most shameful libertarian nonsense has swirled around Hamas’s declaration of war on Israel. Sometimes it’s hard to tell these people apart from Rashida Tlaib’s dormtrooper corps of murderous college students. The weird fixation of libertarians on pacifism requires that it deny the necessity to ever defend anything, and an easy way to do that is to look at the victim of an aggressor and decide he’s the bad guy for not sitting there and taking it.
As it is, modern libertarianism in America is an anemic, bespoke little ideology possible only in an environment where other people have agreed to do the hard work of building and defending the society and made a safe space for them. Do you think there are any libertarians in Gaza? How do you think they’d fare with Hamas? Or in Putin’s Russia, or in China or in Iran? Well, they would fare poorly, because they can only exist in a place that other people have built and defended using the very same tactics and techniques they ostentatiously reject.
I don’t hate libertarians. I just don’t think about them very much, because anything that was useful about them we’ve already co-opted into conservatism. They remain a tiresome little fringe group of self-righteous nerds who are eager to share their received wisdom with the rest of us. Oh well. I’m just going to keep exercising my liberty to ignore them.
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