American Libertarianism is Teetering on Extinction
- Fred
- Jul 1
- 5 min read
My blood right now is at a boil. For the last 7 days, Libertarians that I follow have posted some variation of this message: "I will never forgive the government for what they did during Covid."
Umm, okay. What was that exactly?
"They made us wear masks for no reason!!!"
And that's where we begin.
My day job is in the local school district. As I tried desperately to make Beacon of Speech work in the year 2020, I followed news reports from China reporting that a new virus had a 4-6% death rate, was overwhelming Chinese hospitals, and was putting the fear of God into the Chinese mainland.
China's Solution? Draconian lockdowns. People were starving to death in their apartments. Parts of Wuhan became as deserted as a zombie movie. When the rest of the world asked for help, China said, on the record: What Virus? And then arrested anyone in their country who mentioned it.
As the United States struggled to cope in real time, I was focused on our district. In 24 months since it washed ashore in America in 2020, Covid killed 1,000,000 people by the end of 2022. That is not a made up stat, that is not me speculating, that is a fact. You lived through Covid, I'm not telling you anything you don't know.
But let me give you some stats from my little corner of the world. Our school district has just under 5,000 kids. NOT ONE KID DIED OF COVID. The population of the district is about 25,000. About 100 people died of Covid, matching the national death rate of .4%. About 8 parents of school aged kids died, and I feel like I knew every kid that had a grandparent or great-grandparent die. 100 senior citizens was about the number of deaths in the community, many of them in the nursing home at the edge of town.
Libertarians were consistently beating the drum during the pandemic that the government had no special powers to restrict citizens' rights. There were no sickness exceptions in the Constitution. They were technically right, but their philosophy of letting Covid burn through the population and let it kill who it was going to kill had a coldness to it that many couldn't embrace.
But instead of filling the courts, Libertarians whined that Covid wasn't that bad. None of their friends died, and the death numbers were inflated. If you go by the excess death rates, though, Covid deaths were actually UNDERREPORTED.
Every libertarian I knew had the same argument: Those old people were going to die anyway.
You don't know that.
During the 2 worst waves of Covid in our state, the local hospital, where my wife works as a nurse, had to rent out refrigerator trucks to store excess bodies. There is a natural ebb and flow of life and death at a hospital, and Covid pushed the health care system to the brink.
You say no it didn't? Listen, hospitals basically shut down, that's why they had cycles where they were empty. If no surgeries were happening, or no patients were on the floor, those nurses were used for Covid. A lot of nurses, and other health care personnel, didn't like that and simply quit. All of a sudden, you have staffing shortages and not enough staff to handle both Covid and the regular business of the hospital.
My wife wife cried every single day she was a Covid nurse. She worked her mandatory hours, put on her space suit, and then went home. Every 8 hours she got called at home as they asked her to work more. How much more? Basically every single shift, every day of the week. She refused. She was trying to exit the health care field herself when a different job in the hospital opened up. Every nurse she talked to said what was happening at the hospital was an unnatural surge of death and no one cared. Everyone just wanted to use numbers for their own political purposes.
A generation of nurses were gutted from the profession.
My argument, from the beginning, is you can't unkill millions of people. Under no metric is a million dead Americans considered "no reason."
Those dead people were real people.
Which circles us back to the Libertarians. With Donald Trump and Joe Biden, both, having historically low popularity numbers, Libertarians should be making herculean strides.
Republicans and Democrats both want bigger government, just different winners and losers.
Libertarians want smaller government.
Republicans and Democrats want power in their hands.
Libertarians want the power to be in the hands of the people.
Republicans and Democrats both warn of wasted votes if you don't vote for them. Yet almost every Western Democracy has more than 2 parties.
Covid was an emergency. You need to stop being babies and crying about it. Complaining about Covid now doesn't help Libertarianism in the future. You say I would have had a different opinion if Covid ruined my life? It did ruin my life, I'm f@cking deaf.
Your angle is that the government was wrong? Yeah, the government is wrong about a lot of stuff. How do you fix it moving forward, or do you watch your party disintegrate at the hands of Donald Trump?
What do I mean?
You say it wasn't fair you were made to wear a mask? I am telling you right now, with AI on the rise, you will be fighting for the right to wear a mask within a generation.
Donald Trump won the popular by about 2.3 million votes. In 2016, Libertarian Gary Johnson garnered about 4.5 million votes for the Libertarians. Someone smart on Donald Trump's election team figured out that if Donald Trump could capture those Libertarian Votes, he would win easily.
And he did.
Since then, Rand Paul, who uses Libertarianism when its convenient, has been under attack from the Right. Thomas Massie is under full-fledge attack from the Right. Tulsi Gabbard has been cut out of the loop in policy decisions.
The Right used Libertarians to win the presidency, and are now flushing them back out of the party. If true Libertarians were smart, they would leave. When Donald Trump's term is over, and it's over in 2028, Trump's brand of populism will be rudderless.
In the 2024 election, Trump siphoned off so many Libertarian votes, the party came in 5th in the election. Listen, there is a very clear delineation between Libertarians and Republicans. Leaders of the movement need to start laying the foundations for 2028 now and stop trying to change Republicans from the inside. Libertarianism doesn't win inside the Republican Party, it wins on the outside.
Covid policy is not going to move the needle a fraction of an inch in the 2028 election. If that's your go-to issue in the next election cycle, your party will cease to exist.
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