Libertarians have generally been in a state of disarray since Ron Paul retired from Congress in January 2013. There have been considerable schisms within the libertarian movement in the intervening period as many have joined the Republican Party to support the rising Trump movement, while others have clung to their neoliberal roots by aligning themselves to globalist causes such as mass migration and multilateral trade.
The former understands where the political winds are blowing and the latter are teaming up with a political coalition that will end up stabbing them in the back. This is no hypothetical either. Former Obama administration CIA director John Brennan, like many of his colleagues on the liberal Left, went nuts after the January 6th storming of the Capitol.
In an interview on MSNBC in late January, Brennan stated that the Biden administration would take the following decisive steps to combat domestic extremism:
We are now looking forward that the members of the Biden team who have been nominated or have been appointed, are now moving in laser like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas, where they germinate in different parts of the country and they gain strength and it brings together an unholy alliance frequently of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, Nativists, even libertarians.
Indeed, libertarians are fair game under the anti-terrorism legislation that Brennan and his Democrat compatriots will likely be pushing in the next year. While there are possibly a few avenues of cooperation with certain factions of the Left, specifically progressives, there’s not much there when compared to the Right.
Let’s face it. Libertarians have a better chance of partnering with the Populist Right to expose corporate corruption, push sound money, clamp down on wasteful spending, and end fruitless conflicts abroad. Even if libertarians aren’t fully satisfied with the Republican Party, they should take advantage of the openings within it to build a faction inside the party and shape discourse on certain policies such as cryptocurrency promotion.
Such opportunities are simply not present in the contemporary Democratic Party.
