This article walks through the tension that libertarians have with the Republican Party.
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For Senator Rand Paul, winning the Republican presidential nomination will involve a delicate balancing act of keeping faith with his libertarian roots while also appealing to the broader conservative base of the party. On issues like the war on drugs and government surveillance, Paul has articulated strongly anti-statist positions that are rarely heard from either party. Yet to be a plausible Republican presidential candidate, Paul, to the disappointment of many of his more orthodox libertarian followers, is increasingly sounding like a typical conservative, especially on foreign policy.
Paul’s conundrum shouldn’t surprise us: Libertarians have always been an uneasy fit within the broader Republican coalition. Libertarians claim to have roots in classical liberalism of the early modern era, but only emerged as a salient and self-conscious political movement in the 1930s, as a reaction to the expansion of the welfare state initiated by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. That didn’t make libertarians comfortable Republicans, though. As purist counter-revolutionaries who wanted to roll back FDR’s achievements, libertarians all too often found Republicans to be cowardly and unreliable allies.
