Benjamin Domenech is publisher of The Federalist.

Depending on which Republicans you listen to, the rise of libertarian views among millennial Americans is either nonexistent, a great threat to the country or both. Few recognize the truth: that it is a trend of the Republican Party’s own making. And it represents an opportunity for the GOP to decide, after almost a decade in the wilderness, what kind of party it wants to be – a party still clinging to the compassionate conservative lie, or one that believes in the primacy of liberty.

Most of today’s leading Republicans are even now making the wrong choice, it seems. Potential presidential candidates like Republican governors Chris Christie, John Kasich and Mike Pence have already given up the fight against President Obama’s health-care law and are creeping toward more compromise with the Democrats. More and more, when it comes to entitlement expansion, we are hearing religious-toned “my brother’s keeper” rhetoric from them. As Kasich put it bluntly: “When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”


A century ago, another presidential candidate made the case that Christian religious belief required a more active government to address social needs—including the prohibition of social ills, the expansion of entitlements and the centralization of power. “America was born a Christian nation,” this man said. “America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.” That candidate was Woodrow Wilson, and although he was a Democrat, his strain of religion-soaked, utopian progressivism is the historical antecedent to the compassionate conservatives of today, who still feel called to work diligently to make government do good, instead of rolling government out of arenas of life in which it has no business.

It was the Republican elite’s acceptance of the progressive approach to domestic and foreign policy that wrecked the party’s base and allowed for the rise of the Pauls—Ron and more recently his son Rand—and the tea-party movement. Now Republicans must choose between recognizing the accuracy of the libertarian critique of their agenda, rediscovering the promise of human liberty and putting their faith back into self-governance; or exacerbating what is now only a detente with progressivism and turning it into a permanent peace, aligning themselves with the false idea that that a government that is compassionate must of course do more, not less.

But if they choose wrong, they will risk losing the freshest base of the party: the millennial generation, which is entering its thirties as the largest and most diverse in American history. Millennials include a multitude of disparate views, which pollsters are struggling to turn into a coherent narrative. But there is no doubt that the energy on the young political right today is in its more libertarian cohort, more so than traditional conservative organizations.

The past six years have seen explosive growth of libertarian groups on campuses and in communities across the country. Students for Liberty has added more than 100,000 members and Young Americans for Liberty has formed more than 500 chapters. Multiple polls from Pew and Harvard University attest to young voters’ acceptance of non-interventionism, drug decriminalization, skepticism of government and other libertarian ideas. And surveys from Quinnipiac, Public Policy Polling and Reason-Rupe have found Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul receiving the most support of any Republican candidate among millennials.

These campus groups and a host of different state and national groups have helped educate and organize this movement, whether via top-down organizations that have built armies of volunteers to battle the overreach of the national security state, or bottom-up organic groups that have enabled thousands of young moms to stand against Common Core in their communities.

At the turn of the 21st century, the idea of an organized and activated libertarian movement would have struck most people as absurd, even for those in the halls of sympathetic think tanks. But it has arrived thanks to a number of factors, most of which, again, have to do with the decisions and mistakes of the Republican Party.

Republicans spent the first decade of this century largely squandering the gains they had made in the closing of the last one in the years of welfare reform and balanced budgets. Instead of a foreign policy of realpolitik marked by a reluctance to deploy the American military for exclusively humanitarian purposes, they embarked on exactly the type of ambitious nation-building attempts that George W. Bush had, as a candidate, decried. Instead of seeking to truly end the costly and damaging welfare state and devolve authority to the states, they confused the rhetoric of “compassionate conservatism” with an agenda of expanded entitlements and dramatically increased the power of Washington. And instead of demonstrating that for all their faults, they are the party you could trust to get things done, Republicans frittered away their reputation as the adults in the room by mismanaging the response to Katrina, starting an unnecessary war in Iraq, failing to kill Osama Bin Laden and throwing their hands in the air during the financial crisis.

The combination of Republican hypocrisy and irresponsibility led to a backlash – the rise of the tea-party movement in 2010. But as a broader trend it also led to an increase in the number of Americans open to the ideas of more libertarian candidates, such as the Pauls.

How did someone like Rand Paul go from being on the Republican fringe to, by some measures, being the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican nomination? The Pauls recognized the nature of the two-party system, and, instead of relying on the Libertarian Party, set about building their own groups and campus efforts to support their long-term goals. This effort to change the GOP was made possible in part because they present a form of libertarian thought that stresses the promise of increased freedom in terms that are not just welcoming to libertarians, but to many traditional conservatives who felt abandoned by their party in recent years.

It is no accident that unlike most Libertarian Party candidates, every libertarian-leaning Republican elected over the past several years—including Mike Lee in Utah, Justin Amash in Michigan and Thomas Massie in Kentucky—is strongly pro-life. Their brand of heartland libertarianism is not at odds with limited government conservatism or Christian belief; instead itaccepts the Lockean view of natural rights at the basis of the American founding. Ron Paul himself made this view explicit in a 2012 ad campaign, arguing that “unless… we understand that we must protect life, we can’t protect liberty.” This is a view of natural rights and the Declaration of Independence that eliminates a litmus-test issue that would bar many Christian conservatives from voting for a candidate like Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, the pro-choice former governor of New Mexico. It is an approach that expands the appeal of libertarianism, attracting supporters who in prior generations might have been lock-step Republicans and traditional churchgoing social conservatives, but have instead reconsidered whether compassionate conservatism and nation building was a good idea after all.

This is big-tent libertarianism. It is not just about a number of Republican politicians accepting traditional libertarian objections to the drug war or the overreach of the security state or the militarization of police forces. It is also about localism and federalism and self-government, welcoming home-schoolers and urban homesteaders and yes, even raw-milk aficionados – anyone who rejects the progressive-lite technocracy of compassionate conservatism in favor of the view that unadulterated liberty is more compassionate than the false promise of a new government program or a moderately reformed Great Society.

Of course, the voices within the Republican Party who stubbornly advocate for a progressive-lite strategy are still the ones constructing candidate platforms. So as the 2016 primary gets underway, you should absolutely expect to see Republican candidates with their heads in the sand, advocating for more aggressive foreign interventionism, for government agencies to subsidize wages of certain employees, for unending jobless benefits, for “conservative” proposals to achieve universal health-care coverage and perhaps even for Keynesian infrastructure packages as an economic boost.

Thankfully, because of the rise of libertarian views and the tea party’s rediscovery of constitutional conservatism, these will not be the only viewpoints on the stage. There will be those who argue for more dramatic change in limiting government power, dramatically reforming the security state and devolving authority back to the states and to the people. These candidates should expect to be derided as extremists, selfish and heartless throwbacks who don’t care about people. They should be prepared to argue the case for liberty against those who, like the Wilsonian progressives, consider these views selfish and dangerous.

GOP elites cling to their biases more strongly than to guns or religion, so it is likely they will consider the status quo of pro-business Republicanism the more moderate, familiar path - hence the recent calls for Mitt Romney to consider another run in 2016. It might seem safer to stick to someone who politely accepts the progressive victory, advocating for efficiency and a restored faith in the party’s long lost good governance attributes. In the short term, given the difficulty of navigating the culture war landscape, Republicans might be right to do so. But considering the outsized role millennial voters will play in the future, in the long term, they will be wrong.