Someone asks:
“Hi. So you are more active in libertarian circles then I am. I am trying to better understand the process by which libertarian spaces have been captured by authoritarian populists. You probably saw this more in real time. Can you describe the process there? I’m interested in how this has developed.”
Like all political movements, the libertarian movement has several factions: minarchists, anarchocapitalists, paleolibertarians, Objectivists, monetarists, etc.
Historically, cosmopolitan libertarians were the dominant faction. The cosmopolitan libertarians tend to be urban, college educated, atheistic, and socially liberal. For example, due to their influence, ending immigration suppression laws has been one of the planks of the Libertarian Party platform since 1976.
However, paleolibertarians have been a significant faction of the movement as well. The paleolibertarians tend to be blue collar, Christian, rural, and socially conservative.
The paleolibertarians typically support most libertarian positions on guns, taxes, and economic regulations.
But paleolibertarians often support authoritarian policies that they believe are necessary to limit the growth of non-libertarian populations or populations who impose excessive negative externalities: Muslims, progressives/Democrats, welfare seekers, degenerates, and criminals.
For example, paleolibertarians are generally strongly opposed to relaxing immigration suppression laws, because they think doing so will result in a large influx of poor, left-wing immigrants who will vote for increases in the welfare state and cause excessive crime.
Paleolibertarians often support zoning regulations. That’s because they fear that poor people, immigrants, and black people will move into their communities, and subsequently commit crimes at much higher rates. But they can’t exclude them directly due to Title II and Title VII provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
However, if they can reduce the kind of housing that appeals to poor people (apartments, multi-family homes, SRO’s) via zoning regulations, they can achieve the same result.
Paleolibertarians also often strongly disapprove of recreational drug use, homosexuality, and sex work. Paleolibertarians see these behaviors as degenerate behaviors which lead to the destruction of the family, spread disease, and cause excessive strain on the welfare system.
Beginning in 2008, large numbers of new paleolibertarians joined the LP after being inspired by the Ron Paul presidential campaigns. Frustrated by the long time failure of the LP to achieve any political success, and repulsed by what they see as the limpwristed degeneracy of the old guard libertarians, they formed the Mises Caucus in 2017. The Mises Caucus won control of the party at the Libertarian Party national convention in 2022.
Mises Caucus leadership believes that by promoting socially conservative messaging, they could draw much larger numbers of people to the party.
So the Mises Caucus began to loudly proclaim their opposition to immigration, trans/gay people, sex work, Black Lives Matter, etc.
Like the party nationally, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire (LPNH) was also taken over by the Mises Caucus. According to the Freedom in the 50 states survey published by the libertarian Cato Institue, New Hampshire is the most free state in the US.
As the LPNH represents the LP in the most the libertarian state in the US, the LPNH has a large influence on the perception of libertarians. Their twitter feed has more than 96 K followers vs 391 K followers of the LP National twitter feed.
The politics of New Hamsphire also has outsized importance to libertarians due to the Free State Project, the most successful libertarian political strategy to date. The FSP was founded in 2001 by Jason Sorens, then a graduate student at Yale. Sorens noted that the Libertarian Party had achieved almost zero success, despite 30 years of effort. He reasoned that the primary cause was the fact that libertarians make up a small percentage (~5%) of the population, roughly equally dispersed across the US. In the popularity contests that are elections, libertarians always lose.
But what if the libertarians were concentrated in a single state? If enough libertarians moved to a single state, they would have sufficient numbers to win office and pass pro-liberty legislation: low taxes, low regulations, gun rights, etc.
Thus, Sorens created the Free State Project to try to recruit libertarian activists to move to New Hampshire.
The FSP board hired a paleolibertarian named Jeremy Kauffman to be executive director of the Free State Project in 2018. At the time, the rift between the paleolibertarians and cosmopolitian libertarians was not so great, and Kauffman’s initial messaging was generally inline with libertarian messaging more broadly.
However, Kauffman’s messaging became increasingly inflammatory over time.
Kauffman believes that the libertarian movement in New Hampshire could easily be overwhelmed by an influx of non-libertarians from nearby states.
Since New Hampshire libertarians can’t deport non-libertarians from New Hampshire, nor prevent them from moving there in the first place, Kauffman thinks that one of the few ways libertarians can stop their influx and encourage their departure is to behave so repulsive to them that they avoid the state voluntarily.
The FSP board came to believe that Kauffman’s obnoxious messaging did the Free State movement more harm than good—Kauffman was fired in 2023. He subsequently became communications leader for the LPNH, where he has continued his “repulsion” strategy to this date. He is the principal author of most of the LPNH’s most notorious tweets.
To date, the Mises Caucus strategy has failed utterly.
At the LP presidential convention in 2024, the Mises Caucus candidate lost the LP presidential nomination to a gay cosmopolitan libertarian, Chase Oliver.
Unfortunately, not only did the national liberty party (still under the control of the Mises Caucus) not support the Oliver campaign, they badmouthed him and tried to sabotage his campaign at every turn. Instead, LP national, LPNH, and other affiliates) began fundraising for and endorsing Donald Trump instead.
As a result, at the national level, LP memberships, donations, and volunteers have all declined precipitously, as many of the cosmopolitan libertarians quit the LP in disgust. The departing cosmotarians were not replaced by new paleolibertarians, probably because Republican policies aren’t that far off from the paleolibertarians. Why join the Republican Mini-Me party, when they could just join the Republicans?
However, despite backstabbing their own party’s candidate, and their dismal failure to grow the party, the Mises Caucus still controls the LPNH and the national LP. That’s because many of the people who would oppose them have quit the party.
Note that the LPNH only has about 200 members. (Most libertarians who actually want to win run as Republicans). So, despite the fact that they are loud on Twitter, the LPNH only represent a small fraction of libertarians in New Hampshire, let alone the libertarian movement more broadly.
Even so, I’m not sure that it’s worthwhile for the cosmopolitan libertarians to try to retake the party, as the LP has proven a wholly ineffective mechanism to advance libertarian political goals.
But the Libertararian Party is what many non-libertarians believe best represents libertarian beliefs. So, until they’re booted out, the paleolibetarians will be able to promote authoritarian policies that don’t represent the movement more broadly.