Libertarians have gradually been pushed to the margins of American politics. Whether that is a welcome development or a loss depends on one’s politics, but the movement appears to be fighting an increasingly uphill battle, despite its once-close relationship with conservatism, particularly during the Reagan era.
Its declining relevance has several causes. But as 2028 approaches, conservatives should not be too quick to write libertarians out of the coalition altogether. The movement’s best instincts, skepticism of concentrated power, support for free enterprise, fiscal restraint, and a preference for individual responsibility, have long strengthened the American right, particularly during the Reagan era.
A piece published yesterday in The Spectator argued that libertarians have become largely irrelevant in American politics despite their “richly endowed” network of think tanks and magazines. The explanation is not especially mysterious: As the right has embraced populism, traditional libertarian messages of limited government, free trade, and free markets have become more difficult to sell against promises of muscular executive authority and the aggressive use of public power.
Libertarians have disappeared from American politics. Their think tanks and magazines are richly endowed but irrelevant, their ideas exhausted. What happened to champions of free markets and free people?
— The Spectator 🇺🇸 (@TheSpectator) September 22, 2026
✍️ @ToryAnarchist
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I would add another explanation: American politics has not exactly been blessed with the strongest representatives of so-called libertarianism. Too many have allowed conspiracy theories, particularly the Epstein files, to become the lens through which they interpret nearly every political development. Others have elevated noninterventionism into isolationism, while still others advance a foreign-policy worldview so naïve that it makes it difficult to treat their arguments with much intellectual weight.
After all, “death is bad, therefore the United States should not bomb Iran” is not a serious foreign-policy argument. It is the kind of juvenile moral arithmetic that mistakes an aversion to difficult choices for strategic wisdom.
But compare today’s libertarians with those of the 20th century. Earlier generations helped lay the intellectual groundwork for modern conservatism, contributed to an era of growth and prosperity, and brought an intellectual seriousness that commanded attention, even from people who disagreed with them.
Milton Friedman helped shape the economic thinking that influenced the Reagan administration, making a powerful public case for lower taxes, market competition, and monetary restraint. Friedrich Hayek’s "The Road to Serfdom" warned that economic central planning could erode political liberty, helping turn broader audiences against socialism’s promises of benevolent control. Thomas Sowell, who studied under Friedman, chronicled his evolution from Marxism to free-market advocacy and spent decades explaining, with unusual clarity, the practical and moral failures of government-imposed equality.
These men remain icons among conservatives, and for good reason. In any meaningful sense, they were conservatives: thinkers committed to conserving America’s founding political tradition, defending the individual rights and liberties of its people, and preserving institutions capable of sustaining a free society.
They still have an indispensable place within modern conservatism. At their best, libertarians offer a defense of free enterprise as socialism again tries to pass itself off as compassion, warn against the ancient political temptation to concentrate power in the hands of those certain they will wield it wisely, and remind the right that America’s strength rests not merely on the state’s ability to act, but on the citizen’s freedom to live, build, work, speak, worship, and govern himself.
Conservatism has never been a project of motion for motion’s sake or an exercise in proving who can use government most aggressively. It is, at its core, an act of preservation: conserving the constitutional order, the liberties, the institutions, and the inherited moral confidence that made the American experiment exceptional.
That is the tradition today’s libertarians would do well to reclaim, and one conservatives should remain eager to practice.
