In 2001, the libertarian anti-tax activist Grover Norquist gave a memorable interview on NPR about his intentions. He said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Everything about the line was designed to provoke: the selection of a bookish and easily horrified audience, the unapologetic violence of “drag” and “drown,” the porcelain specificity of “bathtub.”
As propaganda, it worked magnificently. When I arrived in Washington, two years later, as a novice political reporter, the image still reverberated; to many it seemed a helpfully blunt depiction of what conservatives in power must really want. Republicans were preparing to privatize Social Security and Medicare, the President had campaigned on expanding school choice, and, everywhere you looked, public services were being reimagined as for-profit ones. Norquist himself—an intense, gleeful, ideological figure with the requisite libertarian beard—had managed to get more than two hundred members of Congress to sign a pledge never to raise taxes, for any reason at all. The Republicans of the George W. Bush era were generally smooth operators, having moved from a boom-time economy to the seat of an empire, confident, at every step, that they had the support of a popular majority. Their broader vision could be a little tricky for reporters to decode. Maybe Norquist was the one guy among them too weird to keep the plans for the revolution a secret.
But, as the Bush Administration unfolded, it became harder to see the Republicans as true believers. Government just didn’t seem to be shrinking. On the contrary, all around us in Washington—in the majestic agency buildings along the Mall and in the rooftop bars crowded with management consultants flown in to aid in outsourcing, and especially in the vast, mirrored, gated complexes along the highway to Dulles, from which the war on terror was being coördinated and supplied—the government was very obviously growing.
However much the Republicans had wanted to downsize government, they turned out to want other things more—like operating an overseas empire and maintaining a winning political coalition. Bush’s proposal for privatizing Medicare was watered down until, in 2003, it became an expensive drug benefit for seniors, evidently meant to help him win reëlection. After beating John Kerry, in 2004, Bush announced that Social Security reform would be one of his Administration’s top priorities (“I’ve earned capital in this election, and I’m going to spend it”), but within just a few months that plan had run aground, too. House Republicans saw how terribly the policy was polling and lost their nerve. Meanwhile, more drones and private military contractors and Meals Ready-to-Eat flowed to Iraq and Afghanistan and points beyond. New programs offset cuts to old ones. Norquist was going to need a bigger bathtub.
Self-identified libertarians have always been tiny in number—a handful of economists, political activists, technologists, and true believers. But, in the decades after Ronald Reagan was elected President, they came to exert enormous political influence, in part because their prescription of prosperity through deregulation appeared to be working, and in part because they provided conservatism with a long-term agenda and a vision of a better future. To the usual right-wing mixture of social traditionalism and hierarchical nationalism, the libertarians had added an especially American sort of optimism: if the government would only step back and allow the market to organize society, we would truly flourish. When Bill Clinton pronounced the era of big government over, in his 1996 State of the Union address, it operated as an ideological concession: Democrats would not aggressively defend the welfare state; they would accept that an era of small government had already begun. It almost seemed—as in the famous bathtub drowning scene in the movie “Les Diaboliques”—as if the Democrats and the Republicans had joined together in an effort to dispatch a shared problem.
Had you written a history of the libertarian movement fifteen years ago, it would have been a tale of improbable success. A small cadre of intellectually intense oddballs who inhabited a Manhattanish atmosphere of late-night living-room debates and barbed book reviews had somehow managed to impose their beliefs on a political party, then the country. A sympathetic historian might have emphasized the mass appeal of the ideals of free minds and free markets (as the libertarian writer Brian Doherty did in his comprehensive, still definitive work “Radicals for Capitalism,” published in 2007), and a skeptical one might have focussed on the convenient way that the ideology advanced the business interests of billionaire backers such as the Koch brothers. But the story would have concerned a thriving idea.
The situation is no longer so simple. At first, the Republican backlash against Bush’s heresies (the expensive prescription-drug benefit, the lack of progress against the national debt) cohered into the Tea Party and—once the G.O.P. establishment made its peace with the movement—into Paul Ryan’s stint as Speaker, with its scolding fixation on debt reduction. But that period scarcely outlasted Ryan’s Speakership. It was brought to an end by Barack Obama’s crafty (and somewhat under-celebrated) reëlection campaign, in 2012, in which he effectively cast Romney-Ryan libertarianism as a stalking horse for plutocracy, rather than a leg up for small business, as Republicans claimed.
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.
All this genealogy can seem a little notional, but certain suggestive rhythms recur: Zwolinski and Tomasi show how many thinkers return to personal liberty and the right to private property as bedrocks. That isn’t only an American grammar—it comes from Locke and Mill, and, as “The Individualists” stresses, from some French sources, too—but it’s the one in which the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are written. Why do so many Americans own guns? Probably in part because gun ownership is protected in the Constitution. Such choices by the Founders don’t make America a libertarian country, but they do insure that libertarians will be around for as long as the Constitution is.
Zwolinski and Tomasi emphasize the contingencies in libertarianism’s history, but the most consequential contingency was the Cold War, which closely followed the publication, in 1944, of a core libertarian text, Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” An austere Austrian economist who taught at the London School of Economics, Hayek had become alarmed that so many left-of-center English thinkers were convinced that economic central planning ought to outlast the Second World War, becoming a permanent feature of government. Back in Vienna, Hayek and his mentors had studied central planning, and he believed that the English were being hopelessly naïve. His economic insight was that, when it came to information, no government planner, no matter how many studies he commissioned, could hope to match the market’s efficiency in determining what people wanted. How much bread was needed, how many tires? Best to let the market work it out. The price system, Hayek wrote, “enables entrepreneurs, by watching the movement of comparatively few prices, as an engineer watches the hands of a few dials, to adjust their activities to those of their fellows.” He coupled this insight with a warning: “Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”
“The Road to Serfdom,” a text that relied on Austro-Hungarian historical experience to make a point about wartime English policy, was initially rejected by American publishers. But once it saw print, and won a rave in the Times, Hayek became a phenomenon. Anxious and unprepared, he was pushed by his publisher onto the stage at Town Hall, in New York City, to address an eager audience of American industrialists who were sick to death of Roosevelt. An abridged version was published by the Reader’s Digest in the spring of 1945, and was then made available as a five-cent reprint through the Book-of-the-Month Club, which distributed more than half a million copies.
Hayek’s work more or less invented libertarianism in twentieth-century America. As the Cold War wore on, his warnings about the perils of central planning gained urgency. Small libertarian think tanks, newspapers, and philanthropies appeared across the country through the nineteen-fifties.
Hayek’s mentor, Ludwig von Mises, arrived in America and began teaching a seminar in Austrian economics, at N.Y.U., underwritten by a businessman’s fund. The movement was insular, fractious, New Yorkish. On West Eighty-eighth Street, a late-night salon convened in the apartment of Murray Rothbard, a student of von Mises’s who had become the chief propagandist of libertarianism’s extreme wing. (Robert Nozick, who became libertarianism’s most important philosopher, dropped by.) In Murray Hill, Ayn Rand held post-midnight sessions with her own circle, which, at different times, included Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson, who would become a leading domestic-policy adviser to Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Even to ideological allies, the Rand circle—in which everyone seemed to be in psychotherapy with the novelist’s lover, Nathaniel Branden—appeared to be a cult. “What if, as so often happens, one didn’t like, even couldn’t stand, these people?” Rothbard asked.
Libertarian thinkers, on the page, tend to be prickly, disputatious, and drawn to absolutes, which is why they make for good copy. Those traits were deepened by an isolation from real power; they lorded over some small-circulation journals and a couple of budding think tanks, but that was basically it. Von Mises, among the crankiest of the originals, was once summoned to a small conference in Switzerland with a handful of libertarian grandees—the few other people on earth who actually agreed with him—and stormed out because they didn’t agree with him enough. “You’re all a bunch of socialists,” he said. When Milton Friedman, the most urbane of the libertarian greats, published a pamphlet, in 1946, denouncing rent control, Rand fumed that he didn’t go far enough: “Not one word about the inalienable right of landlords and property owners.”