What’s the matter with libertarianism?

When I first came to Washington to work for the Heritage Foundation, there were a few think tanks that made the nerd in me stand a little bit in awe. First, of course, was Heritage, but the second was the Cato Institute.

Heritage was conservative and Cato libertarian, but both seem roughly on the same side. They differed as to how far things should go, but they were both always in opposition to the left. Conservatives wanted constitutionally limited government; libertarians wanted as close to no government as possible.

That’s an overly simplistic way of putting it, but it illustrates what libertarians used to be.

And then, somewhere along the line, they morphed from libertarians to liberal-tarians. It’s amazing what money can do.

I remember vividly attending an election night party in 2008 with my good friend Mike Flynn, who was then the editor-in-chief of Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website, a couple of years before they relaunched as Breitbart News. It was a libertarian organization’s party — no one had high hopes for that night. What stuck with Mike and me was that, when each state was called for Obama, the crowd cheered.

Mike, who has since passed away, was livid. He has worked in libertarian think tanks and organizations, knowing all of the people there, and he could not believe what we were witnessing.

Republican nominee John McCain wasn’t inspiring to anyone. That he lost was no surprise. But that didn’t make the Democratic Party’s agenda any less damaging to the country. Just because you know something bad is going to happen doesn’t mean you celebrate it when it does. Yet that what we were witnessing.

We were also witnessing the end of the pure libertarian movement.

Cato, possibly in an attempt to become more relevant, embraced the left on many issues – open borders, gay marriage, and transgenderism, for example. When I say they’ve since embraced the left, I don’t mean they pay lip service to the issues; they full-throatedly advocate for them.

Reason, another libertarian think tank (the Reason Foundation) and magazine, is now an outpost dedicated in large part to advocating for prostitution. Don’t take my word for it, take a look for yourself.

The Libertarian Party hasn’t been relevant since the 1980 election, when John Anderson pulled the all-time high of 6.6 percent of the vote. Since then, Libertarians have nominated a series of former politicians and clowns, culminating in Chase Oliver, a left-wing open borders advocate whose only political experience was being a rounding error in a Georgia House race in 2020 and Senate race in 2022.

Oliver, who is gay, supports the right of biological males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports, wants your children exposed to drag queens at local libraries, and enthusiastically supports ranked-choice voting in elections. That’s a long way from the priorities of the old Libertarian Party, which focused mostly on economic theory, limiting government, and staying out of war.

Today, libertarians are those people I saw cheering Obama’s win.

After Oliver’s nomination, the Cato Institute’s homepage asked, “What’s Donald Trump Doing at the Libertarian Party Convention?” The sub-headline on their homepage read, “The Libertarian Party has always stood for personal liberty, economic liberty, and constitutional rights, but the most prominent speaker at its convention opposes all those things. Why are they doing it?”

On what planet is Donald Trump “opposed” to personal or economic liberty and constitutional rights?

The libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party are irrelevant not because they nominate weirdly woke candidates or because their institutions’ priorities only play well at the Bunny Ranch. They’re irrelevant because there are no standards for what it means to be a libertarian.

Anyone can call himself a libertarian because it means nothing. Bill Maher used to call himself one while supporting socialized medicine, heavy government regulations and tax hikes. That led my former boss Grover Norquist to joke to Maher, “So you’re from the pro-high tax wing of the Libertarian movement?”

Maher didn’t even get the joke. Now, the whole movement is the butt of it.

I would, on occasion, refer to myself as a conservative with libertarian leanings. I can’t do that anymore. That doesn’t mean what it used to, it means simply being a contrarian for its own sake.

I get that the party was never going to get behind Trump, but credit him for showing up to ask. They also passed on Robert Kennedy Jr., which would have been smarter for them. RFK is not a traditional libertarian, but those don’t exist anymore anyway. At least they’d have a candidate with name recognition who agrees with them on a lot of issues — an embrace of the idea that their 80 percent friend is not their 20 percent enemy.

They decided to go in a different direction. They always choose to go in a different direction. They’ll call it “being principled,” but it’s really just being irrelevant. It’s easier to sit on the sidelines and complain about how screwed up things are than it is to get in the fight. That’s not what libertarians do anymore, which, in the sea of issues they have, is their biggest problem.

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).