🐍 🇺🇸 🛠 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?

Socialism is more fashionable today than at any time since the Soviet Union collapsed. It’s back, and its major rival isn’t an ideology of unfettered free markets but right-wing populism. Theodore Roosevelt is a greater inspiration than Ronald Reagan to today’s young Republicans. The man most likely to be the next GOP presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, is more enthusiastic about Huey Long than Milton Friedman. Even the alternative “NeverVance” candidate insiders in Washington prefer – Secretary of State Marco Rubio – has made a point of saying capitalism must be “common-good capitalism.”

Libertarians have disappeared, just as the national debt has blown past $40 trillion. Arguably the most libertarian member of the US House of Representatives, Thomas Massie, lost his primary in May after investing all his political capital in anti-Zionism and the Epstein files. The most libertarian senator, Rand Paul, has not succumbed to the same obsessions but finds himself marginalized in Donald Trump’s second term. He and Rubio were first elected to the Senate the same year; their divergent fortunes tell a tale.

Bold thinking rather than ballot-box popularity had always been libertarianism’s strength – but today the ideas seem exhausted, and there’s no libertarian who provokes or inspires to anything like the degree Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek or Murray Rothbard once did. Libertarian think tanks and magazines are running on fumes; they’re richly endowed but irrelevant.

One need not agree or even sympathize with libertarian philosophy to find all this surprising. Free markets had triumphed by the end of the 20th century, with even Democrats such as Bill Clinton and British Labour party leaders such as Tony Blair adopting pro-market attitudes, if not policies that satisfied libertarians. What had long been radical libertarian views on gay rights, recreational drug use, pornography and vices such as gambling have now become law throughout the western world. Free trade was a bipartisan orthodoxy for decades, and for more than 30 years Americans and Europeans got to reap the benefits – as libertarians believe them to be – of mass migration.

Strangest of all, even as the public’s faith in the institutions of government has plummeted this century, the popularity of anti-government ideology hasn’t risen. Instead, populists and socialists have reaped the harvest of discontent.

⬇️ Continued:

https://spectator.com/article/the-strange-death-of-libertarianism/

https://archive.ph/ahWH5