A little over a week ago, in the brief historical entr’acte between the Brett Kavanaugh nomination and our president’s Helsinki rendezvous, I was in Las Vegas for the annual libertarian convention known as FreedomFest.

Like most interesting churches, libertarianism is a diverse and fractious faith, and FreedomFest brings together all its different sects: the think-tankers with their regulatory-reform blueprints, the muckraking journalists taking on government abuses, the charter city backers and Burning Man attendees, the Ayn Rand fans wearing dollar signs on their lapels, the eccentric-genius businessmen and pot legalizers — and the converts eager to tell you how everything changed when I got really into gold.

In principle I am not a libertarian: The teenage nerd enters conservatism through either Atlas Shrugged or Lord of the Rings, and between Tolkienists like myself and the Randians a great gulf is often fixed. But even if libertarianism seems an insufficient philosophy of human flourishing, its defense of individuals and markets can be a crucial practical corrective to all manner of liberal and conservative mistakes.

So it was interesting to be among the libertarians in a time when, like other right-of-center faiths, they have seen their political ideals swallowed up by the rule of Donald Trump (whose own FreedomFest appearance, back in 2015, featured a question for him about Russian sanctions from a certain red-haired Russian spy).