Is libertarianism cracking up? Pick almost any contested political issue of the moment, and you’ll find prominent self-identified libertarians on opposite sides of it. On immigration, the Cato Institute’s Ilya Somin has spent the last several years arguing that libertarian principles require something close to open borders. Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute, has spent the same years arguing that they require the opposite. On Israel and Gaza, Walter Block has been an unabashed defender of Israel’s military operations on libertarian grounds; Dave Smith, working from what he takes to be the same principles, has been an equally vocal critic.
On the larger question of whether libertarianism should renew its old fusionist alliance with cultural conservatism, Reason‘s Stephanie Slade has made a careful and sympathetic case for fusionism — including in a forthcoming book of that name; her colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown has been a consistent voice for the more “libertine,” socially liberal version of the tradition. None of these disputes is between a “real” libertarian and an impostor. Each is between recognized, self-identified libertarians who reach opposite conclusions about what libertarian principles require. Are these still the same movement?
The instinctive answer, in each of these disputes, is to say no — that whichever side has reached the unfamiliar conclusion has stopped being libertarian in any meaningful sense. Each camp accuses the other of having abandoned the tradition’s true principles, each is sure it knows what those principles require, and each writes the other out of the family. I want to suggest a less satisfying but more honest answer: that the disputants on both sides of these arguments are continuous with the libertarian tradition, and the reason none of these disputes admit of clean resolution is that the tradition was never as philosophically coherent as libertarians have tended to assume.
Coalitions and Competing Creeds
The most useful lens I’ve found for thinking about this comes from a recent book by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis called The Myth of Left and Right. The Lewis brothers argue that “left” and “right” aren’t coherent ideologies. They’re tribes — coalitions whose positions shift across time and place because the tribes come first and the philosophies get reverse-engineered to fit. Conservatives went from being free traders to protectionists, hawks on Russia to doves, opponents of federal power to its champions, and the shifts only look puzzling if you assume there’s a fixed essence underneath the label. There isn’t. The Lewis brothers aren’t writing about libertarianism. But their framework predicts exactly the kind of fracturing libertarianism is now visibly going through.
As John Tomasi and I document in The Individualists, the history of the libertarian intellectual tradition bears this out. The term “libertarian” first emerged in the 1850s as a self-description for a French anarcho-communist who thought private property and the state were two sides of the same coin. By 1913, Charles Sprading was using it to describe a tent that included Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Single-Taxers, Anarchists, and Women’s Rights advocates. By the mid-twentieth century, under the influence of Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education, it had narrowed to mean support for free markets and limited government. By the 1970s, the Nozick-Rand-Rothbard synthesis had narrowed it further still — to a particular form of rationalist, rights-based, free-market absolutism. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, the label fragmented again. Bleeding-heart libertarians, left-libertarians, paleolibertarians, neoreactionaries — all under the same tent, none in agreement about what the tent contains. The current crackup isn’t an aberration. It’s what libertarianism has always done.
This wouldn’t be possible if libertarian principles really did the work of generating definite political conclusions. They don’t. Consider property rights, the closest thing libertarianism has to a settled core. Libertarians who all claim to be defending property rights have disagreed radically about what those rights require. Spencer and Spooner thought intellectual property was a straightforward extension of property rights; Benjamin Tucker thought it was an affront to them. Henry George thought land was categorically different from other property, justly owned by the community; Rothbard called that view “intellectually and morally beneath contempt.” Benjamin Tucker thought legitimate property in land required ongoing occupancy and use; Nozick thought original appropriation generated permanent rights. The principles do some real work — they rule out, for example, the more extreme forms of state socialism. But they aren’t powerful enough to settle the contested questions of our politics. A commitment to property rights doesn’t tell you what property is, how it gets acquired, whether it’s inheritable, or what to do when property-based claims conflict.
A Faustian Bargain?
This indeterminacy is on vivid display in the live debate now consuming much of the libertarian world: whether libertarians can legitimately make use of illiberal means to advance liberal ends. One wing of the movement has rallied behind the administration’s assault on the administrative state. Randy Barnett — the constitutional scholar who led the legal challenge to Obamacare — has urged libertarians to take the methods on display seriously rather than dismiss them. On a February 2025 Reason podcast that posed the question directly — should libertarians celebrate or be concerned about DOGE? — Barnett’s answer was substantially the former: that the regulatory state has grown so insulated from democratic accountability that breaking it open by executive action is constitutionally defensible and strategically welcome. In a New York Times op-ed with Ilan Wurman the same month, he argued that Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of unlawful immigrants has “the better of the constitutional argument.” Behind these specific positions lies what Barnett has elsewhere called the need for a libertarian “theory of the second best” — a libertarianism better fitted to a nonideal world of competing nations and entrenched institutions, willing to take the imperfect openings that real politics offers rather than insist on a first-best that isn’t on the menu.
The other wing has reached the opposite conclusion. In a February 2026 New York Times op-ed titled “Libertarians: We Told You So,” Reason editor Katherine Mangu-Ward argued that Trump-era governance has “vindicated libertarian warnings about executive power, civil liberties, and the risks of trading principle for partisan advantage.” The accusation cuts both ways: the wing that has cheered DOGE has, in her telling, sold the libertarian commitment to limited and accountable government for a temporary regulatory victory. Writing in The Bulwark, UnPopulist editor Shikha Dalmia put it more bluntly. Libertarians, she argued, “have abdicated just when they were most needed” — and the movement is “becoming a zombie ideology, unable to draw fresh moral sustenance even as it uses up its existing reserves.”
Similar fault lines have opened up over tariffs, deportation, and the administration’s treatment of universities and law firms. Reason senior editor Brian Doherty wrote that Trump’s first year had been “a libertarian nightmare.” Jack Hunter, writing in AIER’s own Fusion, called the same year “a libertarian triumph.” Both sides cite libertarian principles. Both believe themselves to be the legitimate heirs of the tradition. The dispute isn’t a disagreement about whether liberty matters; it’s a disagreement about institutional pathways, empirical bets, and which sociological anchors a libertarian’s instincts should track.
That’s the live form of the indeterminacy. It can’t be resolved by appealing to first principles, because the first principles are exactly what both sides claim to be defending. It can only be resolved — to the extent it can be resolved — by careful argument about particular questions: what executive power actually does to constitutional order over time, what immigration restrictions actually do to economic and political freedom, what alliances with the cultural right actually do to the prospects of liberty in the long run. Those are empirical and prudential questions. They aren’t axiomatic ones, and treating them as if they were is what gives the current crackup its bitter, unproductive character.
The Case for Intellectual Humility
What does all this mean for those of us who still call ourselves libertarians? Not, I think, that we should give up the label. The libertarian tradition contains real philosophical insights and remains a powerful corrective to the centralizing instincts of modern politics.
It does mean, however, that we should hold our libertarian views in a somewhat different spirit — less as conclusions deduced from a single axiom, more as provisional positions arrived at through careful thinking about particular issues, with libertarian principles as one important input among others. On some questions that thinking will yield confident conclusions. On many it will yield humility. That, I’ve come to believe, is the stance that actually follows from taking libertarian principles seriously, once you see that they were never powerful enough to do the work that ideological certainty requires of them.
