James E. Miller, writing for Taki’s Magazine, certainly thinks so. While he has some interesting and some worthwhile things to say, it’s interesting to note that he also clearly has no idea what he’s talking about — he doesn’t exhibit any knowledge of what libertarianism is, where it comes from, or what its aims are, nor does he appear to care very much. His article is very much an alt-right victory lap, heavy on the fist-pumping and potty mouth, and rather light on the actual research. Still and all, he’s not entirely wrong, as we see when he opens his piece with:
There is no libertarian moment.
Miller is entirely correct; the libertarian moment does not exist. It never did. What exists in America is perhaps best described as an anti-establishment moment; the great mass of the American people is becoming increasingly dissatisfied with "business as usual" in Washington, and wants a change it can believe in — hence the rise of Obama in 2008, and the popularity of perceived "outsider" candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, not one of whom has the tiniest shred of libertarian leaning. Ron Paul also received the benefit of this "moment," and that misled a lot of people into believing that America was now ripe for a libertarian revolution, in spite of the fact that a greater-than-ever (and still rising) percentage of Americans is presently dependent on government largesse in one form or another. However attractive the idea of liberty may be, most people will take the money instead.
Contrary to popular opinion, the self-styled "liberty movement" is not ushering in a new era of freedom. Friedrich Hayek’s books aren’t flying off the shelf. Rand Paul’s sclerotic presidential campaign isn’t months away from downing Hillary Clinton. Libertarianism as a philosophy is still relegated to all-male conferences and basement-dweller Facebook pages.
Basement-dweller Facebook pages and sites that get tens of thousands of unique impressions every day, sure. This is where the author’s lack of familiarity with his subject matter begins to show through, and it’s very early yet: Friedrich Hayek was a fine economist but, as a philosopher of liberty, he was very deeply flawed, as serious libertarians are quite well aware. As Dr. North puts it:
Hayek, at a fundamental level, did not have a general principle of economic or political interpretation which enabled him to classify something as comprehensive and as crucial to the modern welfare state ideology as old age retirement and medical programs funded by the state. If a man cannot not identify these programs as inherently in conflict with the system of ordered liberty, then he lacks a fundamental understanding of how to link his general principles and specific cases.
Perhaps if one is wholly unfamiliar with this, one is unqualified to be writing articles about libertarianism. As though to illustrate the point, set it in a profound yet elegant typeface, bind it in genuine lambskin, and tastefully gild the edges, Miller proceeds in his very next sentence to identify the Huffington Post as a "libertarian publication." The Huffington Post! It is difficult for me to apprehend sufficiently the confusion of ideas that would lead one to write such a thing. Or this thing, for that matter:
The buzz around the "libertarian moment" emanates from an August 2014 New York Times Magazine article.
What? No, that’s several varieties of way wrong. The "buzz" undeniably began on 15 May 2007, when Ron Paul annihilated Rudy Giuliani on the subject of foreign interventionism:
The buzz grew much louder in the following years, and reached its peak throughout the 2012 primary season, when Ron Paul’s campaign speeches drew absurd, stadium-filling, Trumpian crowds. This was the golden age of libertarian buzz, when students were holding "End the Fed" rallies, Judge Napolitano (no Hayekian milquetoast he) had his own TV show devoted entirely to libertarian issues, and Americans from all regions and social strata were united in opposition to bailout-mania. At that time, it seemed like libertarianism really might ride the anti-establishment wave all the way into the mainstream of political discussion.
By 2014, of course, the bloom was off the rose. The Tea Party had, as expected, betrayed its libertarian supporters as soon as it took power, and the new "face of libertarianism," Rand Paul, proved too prickly and uncharismatic to command the following his father had. The disaffected went elsewhere for their hope and change.
Social conservatism was on the wane, with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision less than a year away.
Here’s the smoking gun, if you will: James E. Miller is so clueless on the subject of libertarianism that he apparently believes it’s somehow at odds with social conservatism. No doubt he’s picked up on the absurd "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" definition that unprincipled yahoos like to peddle, but that actually has nothing at all to do with libertarianism, which is a philosophy entirely about when it is and is not appropriate to engage in violence. To disprove this notion that libertarians must be social liberals would take literally minutes of research, though perhaps but one second of rational thought: no less significant a personage than Ron Paul himself could never be confused with a social liberal!
In fact, not only are there significant libertarian thinkers who also happen to be socially conservative; as near as I’ve been able to determine, there are far more social conservatives than social liberals. Lew Rockwell, Walter Block, David Gordon, Tom Woods, Robert Murphy, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Laurence Vance, Tom DiLorenzo, Walter Williams, Gary North — all socially conservative. Where is the corresponding volume of scholarly thought from the social liberals? I’ll give you Sheldon Richman and Roderick Long, but other than that, I’m at a loss to identify any. Not that I consider myself part of the same intellectual level as the aforementioned (lord knows), but I’m a social conservative myself, and I defy anybody to impugn my libertarian credentials.
Why the big misjudgment on the political landscape? Libertarians missed the emergence of the "national question" because they don’t think in terms of nations. For them, borders are a government construct, and because the state enforces them, they are illegitimate.
They don’t realize that while national governments establish borders, they serve a real and meaningful purpose.
Even amidst the other errors in this article, this is stunningly uninformed. Libertarians absolutely do not — emphatically do not — reject the idea of borders. The whole fundamental underpinning of libertarian thought is based on borders! Libertarian thought builds from the idea that it is wrong to aggress against other people, which is the same as saying that it’s wrong to violate other people’s property rights. Obviously, what is my property must be separated from what is not, and those separations are borders. This is quite clear with real property; if our yards abut one another, there will be a specific, defined line on one side of which is my yard, and on the other side of which is yours, and this is unmistakably a border. The concept is less clear but still intact in other cases; as the old saw goes, my property rights extend to the end of my fist, and yours to the tip of your nose. As long as they don’t befoul one another, my fist and your nose can coexist peacefully.
Libertarians also have no problem with nations, any more than we have a problem with towns, neighborhoods, clubs, or families. It makes sense for people of a similar heritage who speak a similar language to consider themselves a nation, and, historically, this has been the case; even the warring city-states of ancient Greece considered each other to be part of the broadly-defined Greek nation, and identified Persians, Gauls, Arabs, and whatnot as outsiders. No, the one and only problem libertarians have with national borders is that the central state claims exclusive control of them; as such, it enforces a universal one-size-fits-all policy as regards immigration and emigration, and disallows people to enforce private borders within the national borders.
It’s also the case that libertarians do not have a universal opinion as regards what should be done with those borders in the immediate short term. Long-term, pretty much all libertarians agree that the correct position is to privatize the borders; no government should interfere to keep people out, nor should any government interfere to accept people in. Travel across any and all borders is to occur when and only when both the traveler and the owner of the border consent. This is precisely the same principle that people intuitively accept in nearly every human interaction; if it’s yours, I can use it only if you let me. There is, however, substantial disagreement among libertarians about the appropriate short-term resolution to the issue of borders, because it turns out that implementing just a tiny piece of the libertarian program without all the supporting pieces in place can lead to some pretty awful, unworkable results, like what would happen if the USPS were disbanded, but the ban on private carriers of first-class mail were retained. That would be a tough thing to support, even though, on a very narrow reading, ending socialist mail is a libertarian position.
As we can see if we look at the current situation in Germany, if "open borders" means that, suddenly, the taxpayers are on the hook to help resettle tons of immigrants, existing property rights are abrogated to make room for the influx of population, the social welfare system balloons to accommodate them, and then brand new laws are passed criminalizing even speaking unfavorably about the immigrants, much less attempting to enforce private borders against them, that’s hardly what anybody would consider a libertarian success story.
With their individual fetishism, libertarians have a difficult time accepting the idea of collective action.
Which is, of course, why no libertarian political parties, educational institutions, or cruises exist anywhere at all. Libertarians have no fundamental "individual fetishism" particularly! What libertarians have is a rather well-founded understanding of the fact that collective action, whatever its merits and demerits, is nothing more or less than the actions of a group of individuals. Can it be a useful thing? Absolutely. Is it somehow magically different from a bunch of independent actors doing the same thing? Absolutely not.
It’s great being an empowered individual, but autonomy must be tempered with a devotion to a larger body, whether it be family, town, or country. Libertarianism is predicated upon the idea that everyone can exist within their [sic] own sphere. It doesn’t acknowledge the bonds we have that turn life into more than just a dog-eat-dog struggle.
Utter hogwash. The idea that libertarians deny the value of the family is so absurd it takes my breath away. Libertarianism is predicated on no such idea. It is predicated on the idea that everyone may exist within his own sphere ("everyone" is singular, James) if he so chooses, but makes absolutely no assertion that that’s somehow superior to any other method of social organization. In the ideal libertarian social order, absolutely nothing would prevent people from organizing into tiny little autarkic Marxist communes if they so chose; to suggest that such a flexible model would somehow struggle to accommodate the family is painfully ignorant.
Libertarians lack the imagination needed to combat the feeling of alienation within one’s own country. Rugged individualism is not a solution to blue-collar Joe losing his job to a Hispanic illegal earning a quarter of his wage.
Nor, of course, is it the solution libertarians would offer. I’m not sure that even qualifies as a straw man — it doesn’t even make sense. It’s just a sound bite mismatched with a made-up scenario. He could just as easily criticize libertarians by saying "eliminating the Department of Education would not have been a solution to 9/11," which, while technically true, is pretty meaningless.
Until libertarians accept that 90% of the country live on a different intellectual plane than them [sic], the philosophy will remain only of interest to polyamorous nitwits arguing on Reddit. And given the trend of libertarians teaming up with the culturally Marxist left, we’re probably better off if it stays that way.
Call me a nitwit if you like, but "polyamorous?" What a bizarre insult. What could that possibly have to do with anything? It describes me (and most, if not all, of the libertarians I know) with a very high degree of inaccuracy. I rather suspect that James E. Miller does not actually know what "polyamorous" means. This would fit right in with his level of knowledge about what "libertarian" means; the two examples he cites of libertarians "teaming up with the culturally Marxist left" are (I kid you not) both articles in, of all things, the left-progressive Daily Beast, by utter nonentities Cathy Young and Jack Hunter. These are not serious libertarians! They are followers of political trends who played at libertarianism when it was fashionable, and are currently playing at social justice war because that’s the new flavor of the month.
James E. Miller, as it turns out, is correct about his major premise: there is no libertarian moment, and there never really was. This is not news to libertarians, mind you, who are still engaged in playing the long game: the slow grind toward spreading the ideas of freedom. I might suggest, however, that before Mr. Miller writes his next sneering, potty-mouthed screed decrying an entire philosophical system, he could at least take the time to learn anything at all about it. Otherwise, he’ll end up looking like a fool. Again, I mean.