This was originally published as a section of my Substack newsletter on July 16, 2021. Since I’ve migrated off Substack and the topic of how libertarians should approach politics in the context of an increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic threat from the right is still (unfortunately) very relevant, I’m reposting it here.

Didn’t you used to be a libertarian?

I’ve gathered from conversations and online interactions that it’s worth addressing how my politics have (and haven’t) changed in recent years. Most of you know that I’ve been active in the libertarian movement for coming on two decades, starting with college summer seminars hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies and leading to an internship and full-time job in the media department at the Cato Institute, freelancing for Reason (which I still do), and other looser affiliations. Then two years ago I voted for a straight Democratic ticket for the first time, last year I marched in Black Lives Matter protests and endorsed Joe Biden, and currently I’m working to build up our local chapter of the Neoliberal Project. 

This might seem like a significant shift, especially if you’re used to thinking of libertarians as naturally allied with conservatives against the big government left. That brand of fusionism has been on the ropes for years and broke down further with Trump taking over the GOP. Personally speaking, this isn’t just or even primarily about specific policy positions, although Republican policies under Trump gave libertarians plenty to be upset about. My general views on policy haven’t actually changed that much; what has changed is my sense of what to emphasize and whom to ally with.

To think about this visually, let’s bring out our old friend the Nolan chart. [At top.] Libertarians correctly argue that their ideology doesn’t have a place on the typical left-right spectrum of politics. They’re too radical to be described as centrist, but they don’t fit typical conceptions of the left or right either. The Nolan chart plots ideologies along two dimensions instead of one, personal liberty (“socially liberal”) and economic liberty (“fiscally conservative”). This is far from perfect, but it’s popular as a rough approximation of what sets libertarians apart as a political faction while flatteringly putting them at the top of the chart.

A lot of people encounter a version of this chart on the “World’s Smallest Political Quiz” from the libertarian website Advocates for Self-Government. Just for fun, I retook it to see where I fall on it now. It still puts me in the libertarian box but tilted toward the left, with a 100% score on personal liberties and 60% on economic liberties.

I don’t quite agree with this but it’s not bad for a ten-question quiz. It understates my support for economic liberty by only asking questions that code as conservative (privatizing Social Security, replacing welfare with private charity, etc.). It doesn’t ask about the freedom to build multifamily housing, hire immigrants, or trade with foreigners, to name three highly relevant economic liberty issues on which the contemporary right has become increasingly hostile.

Quizzes like this one also oversimplify by not weighting the importance of the questions. Even if I were a more hardcore libertarian on issues related to the welfare state, I wouldn’t rate them as a higher priority than, for example, ending the drug war and its concomitant violent policing, arbitrary asset forfeiture, and excessive incarceration. The gradual legalization of cannabis is one of the most important liberty-enhancing political victories of the past two decades; another is the expansion of marriage rights to same-sex couples. There have been massive shifts on both issues and the left deserves more credit for leading the way. You can make a case that conservatives have defended freedom by opposing excesses of the left, but it’s hard to credit them with actively expanding liberty to any similar degree.

For all those reasons, the left-leaning libertarian corner of the Nolan chart makes sense as a description of where I’d put my political views: accepting of a basic social safety net but committed to free markets and personal liberties. And while my positions on some particular policies have changed over time, as a general description that’s also how I would have described my outlook for most of my adult life.

Something important has changed, however. It’s just not about specific policies or suites of policy preferences, so it doesn’t show up in charts or quizzes built around the things government should or shouldn’t do. It’s more about the need to support the basic political institutions that make democracy possible. This is basic stuff like voting rights, respecting the outcome of elections, preserving the rule of law, and the peaceful transition of power. We might imagine this as a third dimension on the chart mapping a democratic versus autocratic axis, though that gets hard to visualize. This is all tremendously important, but since we live in a mature democracy in which we’re all expected to agree on these things, it typically stays invisibly in the background of our political debates.

The rise of Trump, his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and his continued grip on the GOP highlight the peril of taking respect for democracy for granted. Trump is bad not just because his bad policies outnumbered his good ones. It’s a mistake to even think about politics in those terms right now. Doing so distracts from a much more fundamental problem: the intellectual and civic decline of the American political right and the Republican party.

When I urged libertarians to vote for Biden, part of the reasoning was that it was simply wrong to evaluate Trump as a normal politician:

In a contest between candidates like Bush and Gore or Romney and Obama, a libertarian could sensibly tally up their policy objectives, compare them to our own, and perhaps come to a weak preference for the lesser evil […] This is no way to approach the difference between Trump and Biden. To paraphrase some old campaign wisdom, “It’s not the policy, stupid.” Trump’s unique malignance endangers the country in ways that set him completely apart from any modern major party contender for the presidency.

I’ve never been enthusiastic about major party presidential candidates, but I also never had reason to doubt their commitment to preserving America as a democratic republic and to honoring the results of our elections. That’s not the case with Trump, who was signaling well before November 2020 that if the vote didn’t go his way, he would use every tool at his disposal to cast doubt on the result and possibly overturn it.

This isn’t a minor failing of a politician, like being caught in an affair or having the wrong position on steel tariffs, that you might sensibly forgive because he’s ultimately on your side. It’s an insidious rejection of hard-won American norms and institutions that shouldn’t be tolerated by any party or movement and it’s dangerous to let it go unchecked.

The crux of my case for Biden was to support him as the pro-institutional candidate and deliver a margin of victory decisive enough to prevent a potential legitimacy crisis. This worked out in the sense that our institutions ultimately held and the winner of the election was installed in the White House. But we fell short in other ways: the margin was narrower than expected, a violent mob assaulted the Capitol with the aim of preventing certification of Biden’s win, and the lie that the election was “stolen” metastasized throughout the Republican base.

I think it’s a mistake to dismiss this as sour grapes of no lasting consequence. The sheer size of the constituency buying into the stolen election narrative (or pretending to for personal gain) is too large to ignore and extends into Congress itself. Our institutions are only as strong as the people who operate within them to uphold free and fair elections and respect the rule of law. We avoided constitutional crisis largely thanks to officials and politicians who put devotion to principles over party, but if they are replaced with partisan hacks, the legitimacy of future elections could be even more tenuous.

There are a few nightmare scenarios for how that could conceivably play out in the 2024 presidential election, such as Republicans in Congress refusing to certify results from a narrowly Democratic swing state or state legislatures sending electors who contradict the will of their voters. I’m not saying this is likely; it probably won’t happen. The point is that even strong institutions are vulnerable if one side is truly committed to refusing to accept defeat and trashing our constitutional order.

You shouldn’t ignore catastrophic risks like that even if you think they’re improbable. And the way you insure against such improbable risks is by not tolerating aspiring autocrats even when they do nice things like deregulate the economy or cut your taxes.

Where does that leave libertarians? I wish I could say the answer is obvious and that we have been united in alarm against the autocratic turn of the American right from the beginning, but that hasn’t quite been the case. Some libertarians downplayed the danger, treated Trump as if he were within the normal bounds of American politics, or worse, enthusiastically welcomed him for shaking up the status quo and owning the libs. (I’ll cop to having been somewhat oblivious myself. I underestimated the possibility of Trump actually winning in 2016 and assumed the GOP would be forced to regroup after the embarrassing spectacle of running him as a candidate.)

Of course, other libertarians were right all along, including the late and greatly-missed Steve Horwitz. In a post from January 2017 that’s worth reading in full, he diagnosed a few reasons why some libertarians were getting Trump wrong. Two worth noting:

1. Too many libertarians are too focused on economics and are less concerned with other parts of the liberal order, especially the formal and informal political institutions that are equally necessary for a free society. […]

2. Too many libertarians hate the left more than they love liberty.

Steve was also clear about how libertarians should relate to the political left given the dangers emanating from the right:

Now, more than ever, libertarians need good-hearted, open-minded people on the left as allies in an attempt to preserve the things we agree on. We should never let our frustrations with the left become more important than preserving the liberal order.

So far, I’ve been intentionally avoiding the word “liberal” because Americans use it in such a peculiar way. In most of the world liberals are people who broadly support personal freedoms, open markets, and democratic institutions. In the United States the word came to be a synonym for “left,” with “more liberal” meaning “more left” no matter how illiberal the extreme left is in actuality. Because of that, we end up resorting to clunkier constructions for describing our political factions. A conservative like George Will is a “classical liberal;” a Democrat like Bill Clinton was a “neoliberal;” Justin Amash and Gary Johnson are “libertarian.” These groups certainly aren’t identical, but by abusing the word liberal we obscure their shared foundations.

Interestingly, “liberal” is becoming something of an epithet among the progressive, socialist, or far left too, as in this sign I came across recently in Portland:

If the word “liberal” is up for grabs, we might as well take it.

Personally, this isn’t a renunciation of the libertarian label so much as it is a change in emphasis. Emphasizing a libertarian identity as a contrast to mainstream Democrats and Republicans makes sense when the worst that can happen is ending up with someone like Barack Obama or Mitt Romney as president. Right now it feels more important to emphasize the longer, wider tradition of liberalism relative to the narrower libertarian movement, even though I situate my own views within both of them. For now, I’m putting liberalism first.

What does this mean in practice? For starters, it means voting for Democrats for the foreseeable future despite significant differences on policy. (Living in a very capital-D Democratic state that’s not well run, I’m not thrilled about this. But Oregon’s dysfunctional Republican party is hardly fertile soil for producing a reasonable alternative.) It means strengthening our election laws. It means working with groups like the Neoliberal Project and the Center for New Liberalism, which I think are better positioned than explicitly libertarian groups to advance pragmatic, liberty-enhancing policies in blue states and cities. And of course it still means working with smart, cosmopolitan libertarians, although that excludes much of the present Libertarian Party.

It also means working with honest people on the right. Nothing I’ve written is inherently anti-conservative or anti-Republican. There are current and former Republicans standing up for truth and liberal democracy, and we need them on our side, but the party is increasingly focused on punishing anyone who dissents from the authoritarian lie that the election was stolen: see Romney, Liz Cheney, or Adam Kinzinger. At the local level, it’s people like Upper Peninsula Michigan state senator Ed McBroom; if you haven’t read this Atlantic profile of him, it’s worth your time. Unfortunately, these are rare exceptions.

To my friends on the right who may be reading this, even if you can’t bring yourself to embrace the word liberal, I urge you to take seriously the threats to our democracy that are coming from your own side. Resist the kneejerk temptation of whataboutism that obsesses over real or imagined problems on the left while deflecting from the failure to get your own house in order. Be more like George Will; this profile is a good place to start. Be more like John McCain; go back and watch his 2008 concession speech to remind yourself how it’s supposed to be done in our country. Above all, break the illusion that America will die if Democrats win elections. You don’t have to like it when they do, and some of the policy results will suck, but this is nothing compared to what you risk by continuing down the path of burning it all down for an authoritarian loser.

Maybe this is alarmist. Maybe it’s cringe. Maybe the political winds will shift, the Trumpian fever will break, and we’ll look back on this period as a weird and very regrettable phase. But as a libertarian and a liberal, I’ve never been more worried about sustaining our most basic political institutions. With different people in our military, Department of Justice, courts, Congress, and state governments, or with an insurrection that managed to kill members of Congress or take them hostage, or with a president who combined Donald Trump’s lack of principle and lust for power with a more capable intelligence, the election and transition could have gone so much worse. Instead of recoiling in horror from that possibility, we have one party perpetuating the lie of a stolen election and making such an outcome more likely in the future.

This isn’t going to fix itself and we shouldn’t surrender our country to people who cosplay as defenders of freedom, liberty, and the Constitution while assaulting its democratic foundations. If we ever want to get back to a more normal politics, it’s up to the liberals of all parties to make sure they don’t succeed.