A lot of people have claimed we’re in a libertarian moment, but very few have offered a meaningful definition of what a libertarian moment really entails.

Some have said we’re in a libertarian moment because of the sometimes-favorable press coverage libertarian ideas have received lately. Others have pointed to the rise of quasi-libertarian politicians in national politics. There are a handful of polls that claim some sizable portion of the United States electorate has libertarian leanings, and two national libertarian organizations for young people have formed over the last few years.

While these developments are welcome, I don’t think they make a libertarian moment. Specifically, it seems unlikely that these events, on their own, will lead to the adoption of libertarian public policies in the United States by greatly increasing the number of libertarians in the general population.

Libertarian ideas have been in the press lately. There’s the New York Times magazine cover feature and the subsequent discussion that followed. During its long slide into a clickbait ad revenue generator, Salon has made libertarian fearmongering a daily feature. National news organizations are commonly mentioning libertarian perspectives in their coverage, and Radley Balko’s coverage of police militarization has hit the mainstream.

However, there isn’t strong evidence that suggests simple news coverage will translate into large increases in the number of Americans supporting libertarian public policies. For many people—even the most engaged in politics and public policy—a news story will simply be checked to see whether or not it agrees with the reader’s political predisposition and rejected if it does not. For those with lower levels of political engagement, news stories will simply be ignored when many readers cannot quickly determine which side of the red/blue divide it falls under.

While there are good reasons for libertarians to pursue media coverage and offer their own contributions, creating a “libertarian moment” that leads to libertarian public policies may not be one of them.

Nominally libertarian politicians don’t offer us much hope in the near-term either. In the House, Representatives Amash and Massie are promising advocates for liberty. Both provide libertarian-leaning soundbites and are amongst the least likely in the House to vote with their party, but two representatives out of several hundred won’t have much influence over the body as a whole unless they’re able to convince their colleagues to follow their libertarian lead. Ron Paul’s long but ineffective tenure in the House is a shining example.

Rand Paul has significantly more influence over policy outcomes than Massie and Amash, largely because the Senate’s rules allow a minority to derail bills with greater ease. However, the incentives he faces to go along with his colleagues have prevented him from making any substantial libertarian achievements. While he has often been one of the sole voices to oppose the PATRIOT Act and other bad bills, he has either been unwilling or incapable of stopping them.

As his aspirations for the presidency have become more concrete, Paul has moved toward a more mainstream, conservative position on a number of issues. As we near the 2016 elections we should expect a further softening of his libertarian positions.

New polling data shows some promise for a libertarian moment, but there are caveats here as well.

One review of polling data by David Boaz and David Kirby found that 14% of the American electorate is libertarian. A recent Reason-Rupe poll conducted by Emily Ekins found that 7% of Millennials identify as libertarian, compared to 4% of people over the age of 30. She also found that 53% of Millennials would vote for a “socially liberal, fiscally conservative candidate.” Another poll from Pew released this summer found that 11% of Americans are libertarian. Boaz, Kirby, and Ekins were very careful in how they designed their studies and how they selected questions that accurately capture the distinction between libertarians and non-libertarians. Pew’s questions aren’t nearly as good, but their survey has an important test that’s potentially useful for determining whether or not we’re living in the libertarian moment.

Pew used a two step process to identify libertarians:

Respondents were asked whether the term “libertarian” describes them well and — in a separate multiple-choice question — asked for the definition of “someone whose political views emphasize individual freedom by limiting the role of government”; 57% correctly answered the multiple-choice question, choosing “libertarian” from a list that included “progressive,” “authoritarian,” “Unitarian” and “communist.” On the self-description question 14% said they were libertarian. For the purpose of this analysis we focus on the 11% who both say they are libertarian and know the definition of the term.

Amazingly, more than 21% of self identified libertarians in Pew’s survey were unable to define what that means.

Even after trying to control for people who call themselves libertarian but may be mistaken, things don’t look much better when respondents were asked about public policy. Self-identified libertarians who could also define the term didn’t substantially differ from the rest of respondents on questions of marijuana legalization, police power, economic regulation, and foreign policy.

It’s nice that people are adopting the term libertarian to describe their political beliefs, but they are unreliable political allies if they don’t actually support libertarian policy goals.

It may be the case that libertarians in the broader electorate aren’t like professional libertarians who work in think tanks and other related organizations. Like their Republican and Democratic peers, “libertarian” survey respondents probably don’t follow policy issues very closely, and their survey answers don’t reflect an actual, internally-consistent political ideology. That is, when answering survey questions on the phone it may be the first time the “libertarian” respondent has ever given much thought to the issue at hand, and he or she may simply be relying on whatever considerations come to mind at the time.

If that’s the case, then there are probably very few libertarians in the United States, even if some have adopted superficial allegiance to libertarian ideas.

Most people have things in their lives — family, friends, careers, hobbies — that they value more than public policy, which makes it rational for them to devote time to those issues rather than keeping abreast of public policy proposals and political developments. This means there are very few people in the country who have both the interest and understanding to receive libertarian messages.

I think that the developments I mentioned above—a handful of libertarian politicians, two new libertarian student organizations, substantial press coverage, and a greater percentage of the population that self-identifies as libertarian—is due largely to the high-quality work done by libertarian organizations over the last 40 or so years. In addition, the Heller case orchestrated by Bob Levy and Clark Neily, which relied on decades of libertarian legal research, resulted in several important public policy victories. These are all substantial achievements.

But it doesn’t mean that these victories will deliver major libertarian public policies any time soon. The libertarian moment hasn’t yet happened. Rather, libertarian developments in public policy will probably proceed as they have in the past: piecemeal, unpredictably, and led by non-libertarians. Consider the draft, deregulation of the 1980's, increased freedom to trade, marijuana liberalization, and better protection of individual rights for racial minorities, women, and homosexuals.

Libertarians have an important role to play in improving public policy, but it won’t be because of a wave of political libertarianism sweeps the electorate.