RIP: Libertarianism?

In a long Politico piece, Tim Alberta asks if Trump’s election, and the relative decline in political stature of Rand Paul and other Congressional libertarians, represents “The End of the Libertarian Dream?

Meanwhile, in “Ayn Rand is dead. Liberals are going to miss her”, Jennifer Burns, a Professor of History at Stanford University, argues that the forces of The Dark Enlightenment have dethroned Ayn Rand (Hat tip: Hunter Wallace).

First, Burns discusses how Trumpian economic nationalism is supplanting libertarian, laissez-faire economics:

Ayn Rand is dead. It’s been 35 years since hundreds of mourners filed by her coffin (fittingly accompanied by a dollar-sign-shaped flower arrangement), but it has been only four months since she truly died as a force in American politics…

In electing Trump, the Republican base rejected laissez-faire economics in favor of economic nationalism…

Yet none of this could match Trump’s full-throated roar to build a wall or his protectionist plans for American trade. In the general election, Trump sought out new voters and independents using arguments traditionally associated with Democrats: deploying the power of the state to protect workers and guarantee their livelihoods, even at the cost of trade agreements and long-standing international alliances. Trump’s economic promises electrified rural working-class voters the same way Bernie Sanders excited urban socialists. Where Rand’s influence has stood for years on the right for a hands-off approach to the economy, Trump’s “America first” platform contradicts this premise by assuming that government policies can and should deliberately shape economic growth, up to and including punishing specific corporations. Likewise, his promise to craft trade policy in support of the American worker is the exact opposite of Rand’s proclamation that “the essence of capitalism’s foreign policy is free trade.”

Then, onto the ‘darker’ stuff:

What is rising on the right is not Randian fear of government but something far darker…

Instead, young insurgent conservatives talk about “race realism,” argue that manipulated crime statistics mask growing social disorder and cast feminism as a plot against men. Instead of reading Rand, they take the “red pill”, indulging in an emergent internet counter-culture that reveals the principles of liberalism — rights, equality, tolerance — to be dangerous myths. Beyond Breitbart.com, ideological energy on the right now courses through tiny blogs and websites of the Dark Enlightenment, the latter-day equivalent of Rand’s Objectivist Newsletter and the many libertarian ’zines she inspired…

Indeed, the new ideas on the right have moved away from classical liberalism altogether. American conservatives have always had a mixed reaction to the Western philosophical tradition that emphasizes the sanctity of the individual. Religious conservatives, in particular, often struggle with Rand because her extreme embrace of individualism leaves little room for God, country, duty or faith. But Trump represents a victory for a form of conservatism that is openly illiberal and willing to junk entirely the traditional rhetoric of individualism and free markets for nationalism inflected with racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

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