Libertarians for Trump?

Photo by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

A few years ago, our own Kristin wrote a great piece on the tension between online libertarian snarking and actually advancing libertarian goals. After describing her involvement with the Libertarian Party, she contrasts that against actually getting involved in politics on the local level, changing the system from within:

How does one get more liberty in a world full of statist a-holes, pray tell?? Well, I don’t know either, but what I do know is you won’t get it by being a small, obnoxious group of slavering jerkwagons who demand a fully libertarian society IMMEDIATELY regardless of how many people it hurts in the process. Who in their right mind would sign up for a political party that is calling for dramatic, drastic, draconian changes in public policy that will cause people pain and suffering in the immediate future? Even if it would be better in the long term, even if future generations would live like royals in a libertarian utopia (course, just like all utopias, libertarian utopia does not actually exist) as Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’ good buddy Milton Keynes once said, in the long run, we are all dead.

…

After my husband and our dear friend lost their Congressional races as they knew they surely would because libertarians can’t actually win, both of them did something that might’ve surprised some of our libertarian cohorts who exist in that magical realm known as Extremely Online – they went into government. That’s right; they became part of the problem. These valiant men, both of them libertarians of exceptional purity, compromised their precious, precious ideals to govern within a system that didn’t always mesh perfectly with the fantasy world they would have created if only this was a game of the Sims. And because they did that, they were actually able to affect the outcome of public policy debates in ways that helped government to run more efficiently, with less corruption, and in some ways – small, perhaps, but real – did their part to actually shrink government and render it more accountable.

I’m not as libertarian as Kristin. But … well, here’s my voting history for major party candidates for President of the United States since I registered to vote in 1990.

1992: George H. W. Bush
1996: Bob Dole
2000: George W. Bush
2016: Hillary Clinton
2020: Joe Biden

So what happened between 2000 and 2016? In those years, I voted for the Libertarian Party. My vote was based on a mix of principles, protest and pragmatism. In principle, they were probably the closest to my actual beliefs. As a protest, I was casting a vote against both major parties — I was never a Democrat and the GOP had left me on important issues like fiscal responsibility. As a pragmatic manner, I was living in Maryland in 2004 and Texas in 2008. In neither election would my vote have mattered, so casting it for the LP was a way to boost their fortunes. In 2012, I was living in Pennsylvania, but the state was not terrifically close and, honestly, I would have been fine with either Obama or Romney winning. Both were decent men who were actually fairly close on policy and about equidistant from me. In 2016, I intended to vote Libertarian. But on the morning of the election, I checked the polls and realized that, 98% Clinton victory projections notwithstanding, the polls were too close to risk not voting against Trump.¹

While 2016 did result in Trump’s election, there was a silver lining; it seemed the long-awaited “libertarian moment” had finally arrived. In a field that included two of the most unlikable people to ever run for President, the Libertarian Party put forward a comparatively mainstream duo in former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson and former Massachusetts governor William Weld. They racked up an impressive 3.3% in the popular vote, the best Libertarian showing ever and one of the better third party results in recent memory. In 2020, the LP was not quite as successful, but still got 1.2% running Jo Jorgensen, a relatively normal college professor. Her votes were more than Trump’s margin of defeat in key swing states. There was, in libertarian circles, the hope that the dysfunction of both parties might be an opening for libertarians. Not necessarily to win high office, but to have a significant influence on policy. If the libertarian vote were enough to swing an election, it would behoove politicians to move slightly in their direction.

Unfortunately, in the four years since Kristin wrote the above, the Libertarian Party, instead of getting better has gotten worse. Instead of capitalizing on that moment to have an actual influence, they’ve decided to become even more online jerkwagons. Even worse, the Libertarian Party has been drifting toward a position I would call “MAGA, but more so”. That thread recounts the rise of the Mises Caucus within the party. The caucus was founded partially in response to the LP’s condemnation of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which did not sit well with some libertarians. It has been fed by MAGA operatives and took full control of the party in 2022. I hesitate to describe anyone as bigoted but unlike the previous heads of the LP, the Caucus doesn’t seem to have a problem with bigotry. They have abandoned much of the LP’s focus on social issues for a hard push on economic freedom and have also pushed forward a bunch of aggressive edgelords that seem more interested in stirring controversy than advancing ideas.²

After Russia invaded Ukraine, their first campaign was to host an "anti-war" rally on the steps of the US Capitol that featured Russian propagandists like genocide celebrator and communist Jackson Hinkle, Russian propagandist and convicted pedophile Scott Ritter, and many more. pic.twitter.com/uypWPESI6f

— Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 (@JoshEakle) May 1, 2024

The culmination of this hit last week. The LP invited both Presidential candidates to attend their convention. Biden refused because that’s what a normal politician would do when invited to address a rival. Trump accepted because he knows he’ll get a friendly reception. The LP immediately started crowing about it and was even selling merchandise with images of Trump’s hair and Trump quotes on them. Yes, really. I guess I can see the excitement. Now that the party has been taken over by a bunch of MAGA-adjacent twerps, this is like having the high school quarterback attend your birthday party.

I’ll be frank: I can understand a libertarian holding their nose and voting for Trump. I’ve held my nose in every election except three. I held my nose so hard in 2016, I still have bruises and cinnamon smells funny to me. I would understand this embrace if the LP were getting cuddlesome with one of the major parties in order to influence policy. But it’s clear, from their rhetoric, that the opposite is happening, the LP is changing their policies to be more cuddlesome with the GOP. How else do you justify enthusiasm for a man who:

• Refused to put a stop to warrantless surveillance and has called for cops to be immune from lawsuits or prosecution for breaking the law. This is on top of his current legal strategy of claiming the President is above the law.
• Boasts about killing Roe v. Wade, has appointed justices who will ban abortion pills for the entire nation and has said he will not oppose monitoring pregnant women to make sure they don’t have abortions or forbidding women from crossing state lines to get abortions.
• Engaged in the most protectionist, mercantilist set of trade policies since the Great Depression and has proposed a universal tariff on imported goods.
• Increased federal spending faster than Barack Obama and Bill Clinton combined, even before the orgy of COVID spending. Has refused to consider entitlement reform. When confronted with the dire budget projections of his policies, said, “Well, I won’t be here.”
• And if COVID is your concern, this a President who presided over and supported, at least initially, all the COVID restrictions libertarians hated.³ This was the guy who literally appointed Anthony Fauci to head our COVID response.
• Plans, as his top stated policy for a second term, to replace thousands of federal employees with political hacks, loyal to him, not to the Constitution or the nation.
• Continued the policy of aggressive drone strikes (something Biden has cut down to nearly zero).
• Has proposed the most restrictive immigration policy in a century, including the forced deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants or people who might be illegal immigrants.
• Has surrounded himself with a bunch of Heritage Foundation Project 2025 theocons who envision things like establishing the President as having absolute power, banning pornography nationwide, using the military for law enforcement, prosecuting political enemies with the Insurrection Act and legalizing LGBT discrimination.

You may think the above is some kind of left wing hysterical nincompoopery. But this is all stuff that he has either done or is in his stated agenda for a second term. These are not the hysterical claims of his opponents; they are the boasts of him and his supporters.

This is not to say that Biden is some libertarian savant. Many of his policies are very anti-liberty. But on many key policies — fiscal responsibility, spending, immigration, trade, abortion, law enforcement, executive power — he is well to the libertarian side of Donald Trump. At the very least, the prospect of a second Trump term should give Libertarians some pause, not having them wetting their pants with joy.

In truth, I think the main reason the current LP is so enthusiastic for him has little to do with policy and everything to do with his personal awfulness. How else do you explain the LP chairwoman, in an interview, saying that Trump is “a better person” than Biden (and then accusing Matt Welch of making up the quote)? Even if you like Trump, how is he a better person? Is it the two divorces? Is it the cutting off healthcare to a relative over a family spat? Is it the massive corruption? The extramarital affairs? The sexual assaults? The law-breaking?

Again … that’s not to say Biden is an exemplar of morality. At best, he looked the other way while his son was trying to peddle his name into undeserved fortune. And he has a tendency to make things up or exaggerate, like claiming his family members were killed by a drunk driver.⁴ And if you hate his policies, fine. But, Good Lord. There is no definition of “better person” that suits this man.

That is … unless, like the current LP, you like the edgelording. You like the outrages over his statements. You especially like the unhappiness that his wild statements create in a certain part of the commentariat. You think that his best personal quality is making liberals cry.

The libertarian movement has always had a tension between two factors, probably best represented by the advice, “Don’t read the comments at Reason.com”. Reason is the flagship publication of the libertarian movement and while I don’t always agree with it, it features some very smart and thoughtful writers like Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Nick Gillespie. It has featured guest contributions from Radley Balko and Ken White and Maggie McNeil and Lenore Skenazy, people whose work I respect a great deal. It has devoted entire issues to attacking the prison-industrial complex, had nuanced discussions of wars and even featured at least two pro-life libertarians.

But the comments section tends to be a cesspool of misanthropic troglodytes who get upset whenever the publication takes on racism or police brutality. Folks who regard any kind of regulation or restriction on their personal freedom as tyranny. Folks who cite things like “market forces” as a mantra.⁵ And, of late, folks who often recite Trump talking points in response to Reasons’s reasonable discussions of his various legal entanglements.

Together, the two embody the libertarian movement: a superego interested in expanding freedom to as many people as possible and an id mired in selfish cantankerousness, content as long as they have what they want and can be aggressively obnoxious. The struggle for the soul of the party has been to advance the former and control the latter. The LP’s id has now taken over the party, pushing it toward the worst form of libertarianism, one focused a little bit on economic freedom — defined as low taxes and being able to pollute at will — with no regard for freedom-crushing ills like institutionalized bigotry. But one that is far more focused on snark than policy.

I’m reminded of something Will said a few years ago, when Trump told the members of the Squad to “go back where they came from”:

We spend a lot of time here discussing whether supporters of Trump are inherently racist, mostly racist, or not racist unless proven by a jury of our peers or trial through combat or something. Some clearly are and it’s equally clear that Donald Trump spends a significant amount of time cultivating their support and loyalty. There are others (including some non-reluctant ones) that I simply cannot conclude are (in any binary sense, or rating high on my ten-scale) based on everything I’ve known about them over the years. There are a lot of others in between. As far as I am concerned, while they do all have in common either a willingness to accept this odiousness or what can only be described as willful blindness towards it, the lines are often blurred and it is and ever will be complicated because people are complicated.

Trump himself is less complicated. He spends a lot of time cultivating the support and loyalty of the first group. He brings out racism in otherwise non-racist people. He picks at the scabs. He empowers the bad and often corrupts the rest. He brings out the worst in his supporters and his opponents alike. That he is personally racist makes him more effective at it than the pretenders.

This isn’t something that just happens. It isn’t something the liberals caused. It is his political business model. Those running interference for him and making excuses for it are active participants.

The ascendancy of MAGA-adjacent edgelords within the LP has, like the ascendance of MAGA within the GOP or the opposition to MAGA within the Democrats, brought out the worst elements of the movement. And the speaking gig is just the exclamation point on that.

Early on in Trump’s presidency, Nick Catoggio, formerly known as Allahpundit, tweeted out an image that encapsulated much of what MAGA thinks. I can’t find the exact quote but it was something like, “Conservatism consists of whatever makes liberals cry. The more it makes them cry, the more conservatismer it is.” A Libertarian Party that thinks their agenda is to make liberals cry is not a party I care to be a part of. A Libertarian Party has seen itself as a refuge for people too embarrassing for the GOP is not a party I care to be a part of. If I wanted to be MAGA that desperately, I’d just be a Republican again.

1. One of the many things I will never forgive Trump or the GOP for is making me vote for Hillary Fricking Clinton.
2. That incident is far from isolated. Eakle’s thread has numerous examples of LP talking heads doing things like saying women should lose the right to vote, defending J6 rioters and attacking LGBT folk.
3. I hated them too, but thought they were necessary.
4. Although, as I keep noting, Corn Pop was real.
5. I once got into an argument with one of these people over vaccinations and they said vaccinations shouldn’t be mandated but determined by market forces. I didn’t realize there was a market in polio.