Libertarianism

The 'Strange Death' of Libertarianism Is Greatly Exaggerated

On some of the key policy questions of the second Trump administration, libertarians are clearly punching above their weight.

Robby Soave | 9.22.2026 5:00 PM

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Libertarianism (ToryAnarchist/X/Wiki Commons/Fatima Ruiz.)

Is libertarianism effectively dead? Daniel McCarthy, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former editor of The American Conservative, certainly thinks so.

"Libertarians have disappeared, just as the national debt has blown past $40 trillion," he writes in an incendiary column for The Spectator that is part lamentation and part triumphalist sneer. "Today the ideas seem exhausted, and there's no libertarian who provokes or inspires to anything like the degree Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek or Murray Rothbard once did. Libertarian think tanks and magazines are running on fumes; they're richly endowed but irrelevant."

As a writer for a libertarian magazine, I obviously disagree! Libertarianism is clearly alive and well, and is impacting economists, policymakers, and tech CEOs at high levels of influence, which is why Americans arguably enjoy more freedom now than at any other point in human history. In his column, McCarthy does not even particularly disagree that this is the case, conceding over and over again that on everything from the rise of the internet to the spread of gambling to the legalization of gay marriage, the U.S. has become freer; his actual contention is merely that this is bad, rather than good. Indeed, the column is mostly just a screed against libertarianism—which McCarthy views as insufficient........

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