From an NR piece titled “What Happened to the ‘Libertarian Moment’?”:
Even free trade and a welcoming attitude toward immigration, longtime liberty-conservative staples, are under assault in today’s GOP. The Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins recently published a paper, “The Five Types of Trump Voters,” describing the groups that coalesced behind the president in the general election. Only 25 percent were what she labeled “free marketeers” — people opposed to higher taxes and bigger government but supportive of free trade and immigration. A larger number were “staunch conservatives,” and this group opposed illegal immigration overwhelmingly, loved the president’s proposed Muslim ban, and had grown much less supportive of free trade since 2012. A third group, “American preservationists,” nearly a fifth of Trump voters, were even more intensely opposed to immigration and free trade. Steve Bannon is attempting to unite these latter groups against the free marketeers in party primaries…
After the Goldwater debacle, longtime National Review editor Frank Meyer argued that traditionalists, anti-Communists, and liberty conservatives should unite, forming a “fusion” of their movements and ideas. That is what happened, but the past 20 years show that the liberty wing is much weaker than it imagined itself to be. It can reinvigorate itself only if it finds a way to make itself relevant to a new conservative fusion.
