Dave Smith believed (back in 2021, at least) that libertarianism should be populist. (Even though populism is not an ideology.) That we classical liberals should ride the wave of public uproar against the political mainstream. Direct the vitriolic hate for the “cathedral” at all incarnations of the state and surf the MAGA wave into the White House.

He was not alone in this opinion. A growing portion of libertarians believe that all free-market advocates should pick the conservative side in the culture war. The Libertarian Party, controlled by a pro-Trump faction, embraced those tactics and slowly imploded as an effect. Still, the proposal of fusion with the populists is echoed now by the failed 2024 Republican presidential nomination contender Vivek Ramaswamy, who came out in support of a libertarian-nationalist alliance.

Libertarianism does not sell

There is a fundamental problem with this strategy. Libertarianism principally does not sell to the masses! The average voter does not long for us to tell him that government should exist only to protect individual rights; what he wants to hear is: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Related: What is Classical Liberalism?

Large swaths of the population simply do not have the intellectual capacity or willingness to embrace fiscal responsibility, retirement cuts, free trade, private healthcare, even housing deregulation. As Prof. Bryan Caplan points out: “The median American is no Nazi, but he is a moderate national socialist – statist to the core on both economic and social policy.” 

The only saving grace of the current political system is that voters rarely get what they want. The average voter has a chronic case of what Caplan calls political ADHD. Populism is intrinsically paired with a mental sloth that manifests in thorough impatience. Voters never bother to demand real results from their chosen demagogues.

The most surprising conclusion he and I have reached is that we live in a much more libertarian world than measuring public opinion would predict. And the very reason for that is that elites are more libertarian than the masses. Caplan is not alone in this observation.

“Given that we live in a democracy, and how unpopular libertarian ideas are, the fact that libertarians have any influence at all in Washington is quite remarkable,” points out Richard Hanania in his landmark piece Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV.

The Intellectual Degeneracy of the Right

Libertarians never really fit the categorization as right-wing, but today, they seem more distant from it than ever.

The main difference between the left and the right lies in how the two groups consume information. Liberals tend toward the written word, and conservatives gravitate to entertainment-style news. Conservatism’s current state, dominated by infotainment and tribalism, discourages deeper intellectual reflection. As a result, many conservatives are more focused on “owning the libs” rather than advancing a coherent set of principles or long-term goals. Simply put, liberals read, conservatives watch TV.

See also: Why Should Conservatives Like Libertarian Ideas?

And that fundamentally puts libertarians at odds with the conservatives, as libertarian elites are intrinsically more intellectual than the right-wing ones. They are avid readers and not brainless TV watchers. “Libertarianism is an ideas-based movement on the right,” as Hanania puts it.  

We are just fundamentally not a populist faction. Hanania also points out the successful strategy libertarians have used for years to push their agenda. “Libertarians are the leftists of the right. Even when they appear to lose political battles, they still mostly win, because their philosophy inspires a small number of idealistic people who care about ideas, no matter how broadly unpopular they are, and they keep working after others have stopped paying attention.”

Elites are the target

The strategy at hand is not easy or certain to succeed, but it is much better than the alternative. The intellectual elites are the group most important to convince, and they are the only group that will listen. They will, however, be completely lost if freedom is integrated with incompatible populism. If libertarianism embraces the right-wing side of the culture war, it will lose its unique identity and become an embarrassment.

In his other article, Elite Human Capital Is Always Liberal, Hanania provides a stellar analysis of the distribution of what he calls elite human capital across the political spectrum: “The negative relationship between social conservatism and IQ appears to be practically universal. Whenever you measure people’s intelligence, or a proxy for it, and ask about their views on anything related to race, gays, foreigners, or religion, respondents who hold liberal attitudes are smarter.”

However, outside of the U.S., economic and social conservatism are weakly correlated. In other regions of the world, free markets are not paired with the toxic longing to turn the clock back on social issues to the 1950s. As Ayn Rand pointed out: “The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories — with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe — but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.” This reality is uniquely American and reversible. 

Trump’s economic illiteracy may very well be the best chance to that end. It may seem appealing to coddle up with the right-wing side of the political spectrum, but it requires selling your soul and your most valuable asset. Populist or nationalist libertarians must sacrifice the inherent-to-libertarianism social liberalism at every turn to cater to the anti-freedom conservative masses. As a result, the receptive Elite Human Capital is forsaken.

“When Republicans were seen as normal people in business suits, smarter Americans were more receptive to their arguments about small government. As the party has started doing things like featuring Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan at its national convention, Elite Human Capital is now more attracted to the messaging of its opponents,” writes Hanania. Embracing populism is the perfect way for libertarianism to lose its only stronghold. It is also morally vile and revolting.

The libertarians, even forgetting the ethical quandaries, have little chance of becoming a dominant ideology of the populist movement. Hanania rightly points out that “Low human capital cultures are the world of transparent scams: anti-vaxx, Stop the Steal, the corrupt televangelist, gold and silver bars sold at exorbitant prices, fake news content mills. Yes, conservatives disproportionately create and fall for such scams. But they proliferate because even among smart people on the right who should know better, there is no culture of shaming or stigmatizing members of the tribe for even the most egregious types of behaviour. (…) It’s a tribal morality, which appeals to people who are stupider and less idealistic.“

Libertarians will never be such a tribe. As Dr. Tom G. Palmer put it, “Liberalism, it isn’t as stirring in the blood as massacring your neighbours. Not many things, especially for young men, are as exciting as going and killing your neighbours.” 

Libertarianism is not, and cannot be, built around a cult following (no gods or kings, only man is the central point, after all), hate for foreigners, or disdain for the elites. Libertarian ideas are too complex, and those libertarian intellectuals who give in to populism quickly become subject to audience capture, which turns them unrecognizable from what they were before.

They become the Dave Rubins of the world: capable of believing every hoax but removed from any power to steer the movement in their way. Today, one can hardly believe that a few years back, Rubin had Caplan and Deirdre McCloskey on his podcast. This is the future the libertarian movement needs to be saved from. There is no hijacking populism for free markets. When nationalism is blended with libertarianism, it is nationalism that will prevail, while liberty will be reduced to a marketing prop.

Libertarians have an actual opportunity to influence the world through politics. Many countries with a high degree of polarization and two major parties could find themselves struggling to form a government once a libertarian-leaning third party is in play. Even a couple of MPs in a scenario with a tight majority could give huge negotiating power to a well-running libertarian party. However, if libertarians cozy up to right-wing parties, the libertarian identity won’t be distinct enough to build a party upon it of a size that could become kingmaker. Admirers of Orban, Trump, or Bolsanaro do not need a papier-mache replica of their cult leader. 

And we not need to fall into the trap of trying to figure out how to blabber about the superiority of Austrian Economics to the masses. The key to liberty is not delivering a 1,506-page-long MAGA edition of Man, Economy, and State to every single home in the country.

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