Can we just put away any talk of a “Libertarian Future” for a while?

If there was ever a year when the Libertarian Party should have done well, this was the year as explained below in this communication from National Review.  Despite getting off to a rough start when the Libertarian chairman did a striptease dance down to his underwear at the convention, I thought the Libertarian candidates would do better.  In Johnson and Weld they had two experienced candidates who had been popular Republican governors.  If there is a receptive audience for a fiscally conservative, small government, socially liberal, isolationist message, then this is the year that message should have resulted in votes.  I for one do not think the libertarian movement will ever become a political force.  I don't know what the future hold for the Republican Party, but whatever it is, I do not see it benefiting the Libertarian party or the libertarian movement.

Can we just put away any talk of a “Libertarian Future” for a while? I’d love to live in it, but there’s no sign it’s coming, in either a capital-L Libertarian Party way or a small-L philosophical way. This was the year that the Democrats nominated a corrupt, longtime-insider, big-government, scandal-ridden statist, and the Republicans nominated a guy who wants government to get bigger – more infrastructure spending, mandated maternity leave, opposes entitlement reform, cheers eminent domain, and a new 35 percent tax on companies that fire workers. Trump’s focus was never freedom or liberty. It was about empowering government, run by him, to address grievances of working-class whites and return America to a golden past, un-doing decades of changes to the country and the world.

This year was the golden opportunity libertarians – capital L and little L – had dreamed of for decades… and they fumbled it away.

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