Tailor Your Ideology Into Relevance

August 3, 2017 Robert Higgs

PROPOSITION: Until libertarians tailor their ideology and their actions to accommodate the common people’s nativism, nationalism, ethnic bigotry, and support for U.S. imperialism abroad and police brutality at home, they can never gain enough adherents to become a serious factor in American political life.
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REPLY: If that is the price of libertarianism’s political success, the price is too high, and libertarians ought to give up their efforts to influence politics directly. Libertarians have nothing of value to gain by transforming their ideology into fascism lite.

Written by Robert Higgs

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.