Blink and You’ll Miss This Libertarian Moment
30th May 2023
Political years are the opposite of dog years: they pass by in a blaze, with entire epochs elapsing in the course of a few news cycles. Ideas, even movements, fade abruptly, recalled only years later when you clean out your garage and stumble on that old tricorn hat from your Tea Party days.
If you want to know how jarring political change can be, consider that at this time in the 2016 election cycle — around the late spring of 2015 — the predicted frontrunner for the GOP nomination was Rand Paul. This was no coincidence. In those days, we were said to be in the middle of something called a libertarian moment. Voters were leery of Barack Obama’s deficit spending, Washington’s endless wars, the NSA surveillance that had been unveiled by Edward Snowden. And only Paul, a self-described “libertarian-ish” senator from Kentucky, had given eloquent voice to this skepticism of the state.
If you want to know how jarring political change can be, consider what happened next. Paul came under fierce fire during the GOP primary debates from a guy called Donald Trump, who took many of Paul’s libertarian issues — antiwar, anti-security state — and rolled them into a more visceral and smash-mouth populism. This populism was simultaneously comfortable with strong government on issues like entitlements and immigration. It was this formula, which we’d now call MAGA, that tapped the mood of the Republican base. Paul dropped out after the Iowa caucuses.