[<\/span>My writing here sort of fell off a cliff after coming back from sabbatical last Fall. But look for more content soon. In the meantime you should also check out The Institute for Humane Studies\u2019 fantastic new project, Liberalism.org. I\u2019ll be doing a good deal of writing there this year. My first essay, \u201c<\/span>The Enemy is Power, Wherever You Find It<\/a>,\u201d is up, along with a companion <\/span>podcast interview<\/a> with Aaron Ross Powell.<\/span><\/em>]<\/span><\/p>\n If you had asked me in 2015 to describe the core commitments of American libertarianism, I could have done it in about a minute. Free markets, limited government, individual rights, skepticism of state power, free trade, open or liberal immigration, some version of non-interventionism abroad, a strong preference for constitutional constraints on executive authority. There would have been edge cases and internal disputes, sure, but the center of gravity was clear enough that you could gesture at it.<\/p>\n Try to do the same today, ten years later, and you run into trouble almost immediately. In the public-facing, movement-adjacent side of libertarianism \u2014 the one that reaches audiences through podcasts, YouTube, X, and the tech-intellectual networks of the last few years \u2014 the center of gravity has shifted in ways that would have seemed inconceivable a decade ago. <\/span>Peter Thiel<\/a>, perhaps the most influential libertarian-adjacent figure in American finance, funded J.D. Vance\u2019s Senate campaign and helped bring him into the Trump orbit, where Vance now openly describes himself as <\/span>post-liberal<\/a>. Dave Smith and Tom Woods, two of the most-listened-to libertarian podcasters in America, have made common cause with Trumpism on immigration. A significant fraction of their audiences has gone along for the ride.<\/span><\/p>\n The picture is different in the academic wing of the movement, which is where many of the readers of this Substack will have encountered libertarianism. Classical liberals and libertarians in universities, at <\/span>Reason<\/a><\/em>, and at institutions like <\/span>Cato<\/a>and the <\/span>Institute for Humane Studies<\/a> have largely stayed where they were \u2014 defending open immigration, free trade, limited executive power, and constitutional constraints, and most of them have been among the administration\u2019s sharper critics. <\/span>Ilya Somin<\/a> has spent the last year writing essentially without pause about the administration\u2019s assaults on constitutional limits. <\/span>Justin Amash<\/a>, still the most prominent libertarian politician in recent memory, has been unsparing. These sticky ideologues now find themselves watching former fellow travelers in the popular movement make arguments that would have gotten them laughed out of libertarian circles in 2015, and some of them feel like strangers in a movement they thought they belonged to.<\/span><\/p>\n What\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n * * *<\/p>\n One answer \u2014 the one most libertarians instinctively reach for \u2014 is that whichever side has drifted isn\u2019t really libertarian anymore. Depending on who\u2019s telling the story, either the Thiel-Vance wing has abandoned libertarianism for reactionary nationalism, or the <\/span>Reason<\/em> wing has sold out to the very liberalism it was supposed to oppose. Each camp accuses the other of being fake libertarians who\u2019ve misplaced the true principles of the movement.<\/span><\/p>\n I want to suggest a different diagnosis: that both camps are real libertarians, and that the reason libertarianism can\u2019t settle the question of who counts is that libertarianism was never as philosophically coherent as libertarians have tended to assume. The current fracture isn\u2019t an aberration. It\u2019s what libertarianism has always looked like. We just didn\u2019t notice, because for a brief window in the late twentieth century the sociology of the movement happened to produce the appearance of a consensus.<\/p>\n The most useful framework I\u2019ve found for describing this phenomenon comes from a recent book by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis called <\/span>The Myth of Left and Right<\/a><\/em>. The Lewis brothers\u2019 central claim is that \u201cleft\u201d and \u201cright\u201d are not coherent ideologies. They\u2019re tribes. The political positions associated with left and right don\u2019t hang together because of any underlying philosophical essence. They hang together because they happen to be the positions currently held by the left-wing and right-wing tribes. Conservatives went from being free traders to being protectionists, from being hawks on Russia to being doves, from championing federal power to hating it, and the shifts aren\u2019t puzzling once you see that the tribes came first and the ideologies came second. People anchor into a tribe, usually for sociological reasons \u2014 family, friends, a formative book, a single resonant issue \u2014 and then pick up the tribe\u2019s positions as a matter of social conformity. The positions change as the tribe changes. The \u201cessence\u201d that\u2019s supposed to link them all is a story told after the fact.<\/span><\/p>\n The Lewis brothers aren\u2019t writing about libertarianism \u2014 their target is the essentialist reading of the political spectrum as a whole. But their framework gave me a vocabulary for something I had already come to suspect, both from years inside the libertarian movement and from tracing its intellectual history. Libertarianism isn\u2019t an exception to the Lewis thesis. It\u2019s a smaller version of the same phenomenon, and if anything its philosophical pretensions make the tribal dynamics easier to see once you know to look.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Let me start with a brief version of the history (the longer version of which is laid out in <\/span>The Individualists<\/a><\/em>). The term \u201clibertarian\u201d began in the 1850s as a self-description for a French anarcho-communist named Joseph D\u00e9jacque, who believed that private property and the state were two sides of the same coin and that a real commitment to liberty required the abolition of both. Through most of the nineteenth century, \u201clibertarian\u201d was used by anarchists of various stripes \u2014 some who favored private property, some who rejected it \u2014 to distinguish themselves from authoritarian socialists. The term was consciously positioned on what we\u2019d now call the left.<\/span><\/p>\n By the early twentieth century, the label had broadened into something close to a generic anti-authoritarianism. Charles Sprading\u2019s <\/span>Liberty and the Great Libertarians<\/a><\/em> (1913) used \u201clibertarian\u201d to cover \u201cRepublicans, Democrats, Socialists, Single-Taxers, Anarchists, and Women\u2019s Rights advocates\u201d \u2014 a genuinely big tent united only by the commitment not to impose one\u2019s views on others by force. A few decades later, under the influence of figures like Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education, \u201clibertarian\u201d had been narrowed to mean support for free markets and limited government. By the 1970s, the Nozick-Rand-Rothbard synthesis had narrowed it further, to the point where many libertarians treated the label as synonymous with a particular form of rationalist, rights-based free-market absolutism.<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s not where things stayed. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the label fragmented again. <\/span>Bleeding-heart libertarians<\/a>started talking about social justice. <\/span>Left-libertarians<\/a> drew on Tucker and Proudhon to critique actually-existing capitalism. <\/span>Paleolibertarians<\/a> went in the opposite direction, making alliances with the cultural right. And now, in the 2020s, the rise of the tech-right, the neo-reactionary movement, and the Thiel-Musk orbit has produced another set of self-identified libertarians whose views on immigration, trade, executive power, and free speech would have been nearly unrecognizable to the libertarians of twenty years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n The Lewis framework predicts this kind of drift. An essentialist framework doesn\u2019t. If libertarianism were really defined by a fixed philosophical essence, you wouldn\u2019t see these kinds of swings. You\u2019d see the label getting more precise over time, not less. You\u2019d see cumulative convergence on what libertarian principles actually require, not recurring bouts of fragmentation and re-fragmentation. The pattern we actually see \u2014 a label whose meaning shifts as the sociological composition of the movement shifts \u2014 is exactly the pattern the Lewis brothers describe for left and right.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n The second piece of evidence is theoretical, and for me it\u2019s the more decisive one. It\u2019s that libertarianism\u2019s foundational principles can\u2019t actually do the work libertarians sometimes claim they do. They\u2019re too open-ended to yield determinate answers to concrete political questions.<\/p>\n Take property, which is the closest thing libertarianism has to a settled core. Libertarians who all claim to be defending property rights disagree radically about what those rights require. Herbert Spencer and Lysander Spooner thought intellectual property was a straightforward extension of property rights; Murray Rothbard thought it was an affront to them. Henry George thought land was categorically different from other property, justly owned by the community; Rothbard called that view \u201cintellectually and morally beneath contempt.\u201d Benjamin Tucker thought legitimate property in land required ongoing occupancy and use; Robert Nozick thought the original appropriation of unowned land, once performed, generated permanent rights. These are libertarians all claiming to defend the same foundational commitment while disagreeing about what that commitment actually is.<\/p>\n The same story plays out for every other core libertarian principle. Does the non-aggression principle permit pollution? <\/span>That depends<\/a> on how you define \u201caggression\u201d and whose property rights you recognize, and libertarians disagree sharply about both. Does individualism require <\/span>open borders<\/a> or permit the kind of restrictive \u201ccovenant communities\u201d that <\/span>Hans-Hermann Hoppe<\/a> defends? Libertarians who share the same foundational premises reach opposite conclusions. Does skepticism of authority lead to anarchism or just to minimal government? Libertarians have been arguing about that <\/span>since the 1970s<\/a> and will still be arguing about it in 2075.<\/span><\/p>\n The deeper point isn\u2019t that libertarians happen to disagree about these questions. It\u2019s that the foundational principles <\/span>underdetermine<\/em> the conclusions. A commitment to property rights doesn\u2019t tell you what property is, how it gets acquired, whether it\u2019s inheritable across generations, whether it applies to ideas, whether land is a special case, or what happens when property-based claims conflict. A commitment to non-aggression doesn\u2019t tell you what counts as aggression, what counts as a defense against aggression, or how to weigh the competing claims of parties who each believe themselves aggrieved. A commitment to individualism doesn\u2019t tell you how to think about collective action problems, inherited obligations, or any of the other ways individual lives turn out to be embedded in structures.<\/span><\/p>\n The principles do some work. They rule out, for example, the more extreme forms of state socialism or totalitarianism. But they can\u2019t do anything close to the work of generating determinate libertarian positions on the contested questions of our politics. Which means that when libertarians arrive at positions on those contested questions, the real work is being done somewhere else \u2014 by a particular <\/span>interpretation<\/em> of the principles, combined with a particular reading of history, a particular set of empirical assumptions, and a particular constellation of intuitions about which tradeoffs matter. And those interpretations, readings, assumptions, and intuitions are, for most of us, not the product of independent philosophical reasoning. They come from the particular sociological path we took into libertarianism \u2014 the books we read, the teachers we had, the institutions that trained us, the peers we argued with at a formative moment.<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n This is why the current fracture in libertarianism is so illuminating. The tech-right wing and the academic classical-liberal wing aren\u2019t disagreeing about libertarian principles. Both sides are drawing on the same vocabulary of property, liberty, individual rights, and skepticism of power. The disagreement is about how to interpret that vocabulary and apply it to the contested questions of the current moment \u2014 and the interpretations track the sociology of the sub-tribes, not the logic of libertarian philosophy. The tech-right lineage came into libertarianism through a particular set of institutions (Founders Fund, certain podcasts, a distinctive set of internet intellectuals), and it\u2019s going in one direction. The classical-liberal academic lineage came in through a different set of institutions (IHS, Cato, the Liberty Fund seminar circuit, Mont Pelerin), and it\u2019s going in another. Both sides are doing what libertarians have always done, which is to reason from shared premises to conclusions consonant with the sensibilities of their particular intellectual community.<\/p>\n The essentialist view can\u2019t account for this without calling one side fake. The sociological view doesn\u2019t have to. It just says that libertarianism, like every other ideological identity, is held together primarily by a set of sociological anchors \u2014 institutions, readings, friendships, conventions \u2014 and that when those anchors shift or diversify, the views do too. When one of my friends finds himself newly sympathetic to Trump-style immigration restriction while still describing himself as a libertarian, he isn\u2019t being incoherent. He\u2019s responding to a shift in the sociological composition of the tribe he\u2019s part of, and reverse-engineering a philosophy to fit. So, for that matter, are the rest of us \u2014 the ones who feel we\u2019ve stayed put. Our \u201cstaying put\u201d is itself the product of a different but equally sociological anchoring. None of us is reasoning from pure libertarian axioms to specific political positions. The axioms aren\u2019t powerful enough to do that kind of work, and we aren\u2019t disembodied philosophical agents to begin with.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n There is a version of this argument that ends in nihilism \u2014 if libertarianism is mostly sociology, why bother? That isn\u2019t the conclusion I draw, and it isn\u2019t the one the Lewis brothers draw either. Their own recommendation, at the end of <\/span>The Myth of Left and Right<\/em>, is a kind of particularism. If the political spectrum isn\u2019t tracking any real essence, we shouldn\u2019t try to think our way through politics by locating positions on a single axis. We should disaggregate \u2014 take issues one at a time, think them through on their own terms, and let our conclusions go where the specific case takes us, even when the resulting pattern doesn\u2019t fit any existing ideological mold.<\/span><\/p>\n I find that broadly congenial, and not only because it\u2019s where the present argument pushes. It aligns with a pluralistic, non-ideological sensibility about moral and political philosophy that I\u2019d want to defend on other grounds anyway. <\/span>Isaiah Berlin<\/a>\u2018s value pluralism, <\/span>Bernard Williams<\/a>\u2018s skepticism of systematic ethical theory, the long tradition that insists there are many goods, that they don\u2019t reduce to one another, and that practical wisdom about particular cases can\u2019t be replaced by the application of a master principle \u2014 all of that sits much more comfortably with me than the monism of an Ayn Rand or a Murray Rothbard, for whom political philosophy is the deductive application of a single axiom to every case that comes along.<\/span><\/p>\n So the right response to seeing libertarianism as partly sociological isn\u2019t to stop holding libertarian views. It\u2019s to hold them in a different spirit \u2014 less as conclusions derived from an axiom, more as provisional positions arrived at by thinking as carefully as I can about particular issues, with libertarian principles as one important input rather than the only one. On some questions \u2014 mass incarceration, occupational licensing cartels, the drug war, closed borders \u2014 I\u2019m confident. On others \u2014 climate policy, labor organizing, antitrust, the regulation of AI \u2014 I\u2019m much less so, because the tradition I\u2019ve inherited offers multiple defensible answers and I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve landed on the right one. That kind of issue-by-issue tentativeness can feel like weakness next to the certainty of the ideologue. I\u2019ve come to think it\u2019s the stance that actually follows from taking libertarian principles seriously, once you see they were never powerful enough to do the work that ideological certainty requires of them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [My writing here sort of fell off a cliff after coming back from sabbatical last Fall. But look for more content soon. In the meantime you should also check out The Institute for Humane Studies\u2019 fantastic new project, Liberalism.org. I\u2019ll be doing a good deal of writing there this year. My first essay, \u201cThe Enemy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7046201,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[208672,407,18562,114697],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7046200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-libertarianism","tag-matt","tag-myth","tag-zwolinski"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!FyVk!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3035eaff-eb2a-4bb3-8dd6-1c4b010a310e_1600x900.heic)
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