Some Supplemental Reason Reading (and Viewing) on ‘The Libertarian Moment’

As
mentioned earlier, the New York Times
Magazine has just published a long and entertaining feature
titled “Has
the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?” Reason and
its staffers have been chewing on that subject for several years
now. A partial reading list:

* In November 2007, as the Ron Paul
rEVOLution was first catching fire, Nick Gillespie and Matt
Welch were asked by the
Washington Post (and
after, its readers) to explain what this whole libertarian
business was all about. Excerpt from that:

When a fierce Republican foe of the wars on drugs and terrorism
is able, without really trying, to pull in a record haul of
campaign cash on a day dedicated to an attempted regicide, it’s
clear that a new and potentially transformative force is growing in
American politics.

That force is less about Paul than about the movement that has
erupted around him — and the much larger subset of Americans who
are increasingly disillusioned with the two major political
parties’ soft consensus on making government ever more intrusive at
all levels, whether it’s listening to phone calls without a
warrant, imposing fines of half a million dollars for broadcast
“obscenities” or jailing grandmothers for buying prescribed
marijuana from legal dispensaries.

*
In December 2008, as the world was descending into a financial hell
replete with statist over-reaction, Gillespie/Welch doubled down
with “The
Libertarian Moment: Despite all leading indicators to the
contrary, America is poised to enter a new age of freedom.”
Contentious claim:

As in 1971, there is no shortage of reasons to grumble about the
state of American liberty at the end of 2008. As this issue went to
press, Congress had passed the economic equivalent of the PATRIOT
Act, a nearly trillion-dollar bailout of the financial industry,
involving whole-scale nationalization of the mortgage lending
business [….] Despite (or perhaps because of) eight years of a
president who has increased regulatory spending by more than 61
percent in real terms, “deregulation” has become a concept even
more panic-inducing than Janet Jackson’s nipple. Whether in
international security, the financial world, or the cultural arena,
the answer to everything seems to be a new clampdown. It is nearly
impossible to cross a North American border without showing a
passport, revealing biomedical information, and being entered into
a database for decades. Every day across this great country some
city council is finding a new private activity to ban, whether it’s
selling food cooked with trans fats, using a cell phone behind the
wheel, or smoking a cigarette outdoors. And the two major-party
candidates for president are trying to out-populist one another
with Oliver Stone–level attacks on Wall Street “greed,” while
advancing economic plans filled with centralized industrial policy
and extravagant promises that would undoubtedly burst the federal
government’s already near-broken budget.

Yet if 1971 contained a few flickers of light in the
authoritarian darkness, 2008 is chock full of halogen-bright
beacons shouting “This way!” Turn away from the overhyped prize of
the Oval Office and all the dreary, government expanding policies
and politics that go with it, and the picture is not merely one of
plausible happy endings to our current sob stories of
mortgage-finance meltdowns and ever-lengthening war, but something
far more radical, more game-changing, than all that we’ve grown to
expect.

* From that essay (which you can
watch Gillespie talk about at a February 2009 International
Students for Liberty conference) sprang a 2011 book, called

The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can
Fix What’s Wrong With America (Public Affairs). Some
contentious claims from that, culled from an
August 2011 Reason excerpt:

Where will the next political smart mob, the next online swarm,
come from? Look wherever there is too broad a gap between the two
major political parties and their bases. One good short-term bet is
the issue of rolling back the drug war, which professional
Democrats from the president on down openly mock while a growing
number of Republicans (such as presidential candidates Ron Paul and
Gary Johnson) gain surprising support by uttering the unspeakable.
Other swarms will likely be much more hostile to libertarian policy
aims…but each new wave will succeed at doing to two-party
politics what technology has done to the rest of the economy:
undermine the gatekeepers who want to control your life.

Political independence has individual virtues as well. Thinking
for yourself requires much more work than setting your compass by
the direction of the tribe, but, oh, the liberation. Suddenly the
political bully boys look a good deal more ridiculous, tawdry, and
intellectually beatable. There are other hyphenated weirdos, just
over there, who have genuinely interesting things to say. Voters
free from the affiliation of party membership are more inclined to
view political claims with the skepticism they richly deserve, to
hear the atavistic dog whistle of partisan politics as a deliberate
attack on the senses rather than a rousing call to productive
action. By refusing to confer legitimacy on the two accepted forms
of political organization and discourse, independents (especially
of the libertarian flavor) hint strongly that another
form—something unpredictable, fantastical, liberating—is gathering
to take their place.

(Speaking
of Lou Reed, you can read another Declaration of
Independents chapter, on the globally liberating effects of
rock music,
here.) More bibliography, after the jump.

* In June 2012, a year after their Dec’l o’
Indies-inspired “Ask a
Libertarian” YouTube marathon, the Glimmer Glower Twins were

made to answer the question, so where’s that damned
libertarian moment you promised us?

* Various Reason TV interview subjects have also chewed on the
libertarian moment, from Glenn
Reynolds to
Peter Thiel to Matt Kibbe to

Norm Singleton to
David Boaz to
Rand Paul.

* By August 2013,
Gillespie was ready to raise the bar: “Can
We Start Talking About the Libertarian *Era* Already?“

* In May of this year, Gillespie updated the manifesto with
“Libertarianism
3.0: The Koch Brothers, the GOP, and What Comes Next.”

* And in June, Senior Editor Brian Doherty, in the wake of David
Brat’s upset primary victory over then-House Majority Leader Eric
Cantor (R-Virginia), explored the question, “Can
a ‘Libertarian Moment’ in Politics Be Very
Libertarian?“

Speaking of Doherty, there is simply no understanding of
present, future, or past libertarianism without his foundational
2007 book,
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern
American Libertarian Movement. And coming full circle to Ron
Paul, Doherty was also author of the 2012 book, Ron
Paul’s rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He
Inspired.