Postwar conservatism, under the intellectual leadership of Buckley, Frank Meyer, and their allies, was, famously, a "Fusion"-an alliance between social and religious traditionalists, anti-Communists and national-security hawks, and libertarians ranging from ideologues and idealists such as Henry Hazlitt and Ludwig von Mises to Chamber of Commerce types with their more prosaic concerns about taxes and regulation.
The libertarians have always been a junior partner in that alliance, but for many years they punched above their weight.
Libertarian attitudes enjoy some political support: Nick Gillespie, a true-believing libertarian, insists even in the teeth of the current authoritarian ascendancy that we still are experiencing a national-yes!-"Libertarian moment," based on Gallup polling data finding more support for broadly libertarian political sensibilities than for any other single group: conservative, liberal, or populist.
Hence the peculiar fact that 2016 polling of Republican primary voters found self-identified libertarians backing the authoritarian Trump in remarkable numbers-59 percent in South Carolina-over more libertarian-leaning candidates such as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.
Self-described libertarians were not less likely to line up behind the authoritarian demagogue, but half-again as likely to do so.
What are the libertarians getting? A man with Richard Nixon's character but not his patriotism, an advocate of Reagan's drug war and Mussolini's economics who dreams of using the FCC to shut down media critics-and possibly a global trade war to boot.
If the Democrats were more clever, they might offer the libertarians a better deal on trade, criminal justice, and civil liberties.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/defused/556934/
The libertarians have always been a junior partner in that alliance, but for many years they punched above their weight.
Libertarian attitudes enjoy some political support: Nick Gillespie, a true-believing libertarian, insists even in the teeth of the current authoritarian ascendancy that we still are experiencing a national-yes!-"Libertarian moment," based on Gallup polling data finding more support for broadly libertarian political sensibilities than for any other single group: conservative, liberal, or populist.
Hence the peculiar fact that 2016 polling of Republican primary voters found self-identified libertarians backing the authoritarian Trump in remarkable numbers-59 percent in South Carolina-over more libertarian-leaning candidates such as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.
Self-described libertarians were not less likely to line up behind the authoritarian demagogue, but half-again as likely to do so.
What are the libertarians getting? A man with Richard Nixon's character but not his patriotism, an advocate of Reagan's drug war and Mussolini's economics who dreams of using the FCC to shut down media critics-and possibly a global trade war to boot.
If the Democrats were more clever, they might offer the libertarians a better deal on trade, criminal justice, and civil liberties.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/defused/556934/
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