Doctrinal libertarianism hasn’t disappeared from the political scene: it’s easy enough to find right-of-center politicians insisting that government is too big. But, between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, libertarianism has given way to culture war as the right’s dominant mode. To some libertarians—and liberals friendly to the cause—this is a development to lament, because it has stripped the American right of much of its idealism. Documenting the history of the libertarian movement now requires writing in the shadow of Trump, as two new books do. Together, they suggest that, since the end of the Cold War, libertarianism has remade American politics twice—first through its success and then through its failure.
In “The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism” (Princeton), Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi argue that things didn’t have to turn out this way. Zwolinski, a philosopher at the University of San Diego, and Tomasi, a political theorist at Brown, are both committed libertarians who are appalled at the movement’s turn toward a harder-edged conservatism. (They are prominent figures in a faction called “bleeding-heart libertarianism.”) Their book is a deep plunge into the archives, in search of a “primordial libertarianism” that preceded the Cold War. They contend that the profound skepticism toward government and the political absolutism that characterize libertarians have animated movements across the political spectrum, and have, in the past, sometimes led adherents in progressive directions rather than conservative ones. (In the call to defund the police, for instance, the authors identify a healthy skepticism of too much centralized government.) As they see it, libertarianism once had a left-of-center valence—and could still reclaim it.
If this sounds a little optimistic, it does make for an interesting historical account. The first thinker to self-identify as libertarian, the authors point out, was the French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque, who argued that “private property and the state were simply two different ways in which social relationships could become infused with hierarchy and repression.” Better to abolish both. The social Darwinist Herbert Spencer denounced imperialism’s “deeds of blood and rapine”; the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lysander Spooner condemned slavery as an instance of the government’s usurping natural rights. In the history of resistance to the modern state, Zwolinski and Tomasi see libertarians everywhere. This approach can sometimes come off as a land grab; my eyebrows went up when they claimed the abolitionist John Brown as a libertarian hero. Then again, Brown was a fiercely anti-government radical who sought to seize a federal armory to provision slaves for an uprising, so maybe it’s not much of a stretch.