Michael Lind is a contributing editor of Politico and a fellow at New America.

It was only a year ago that Rand Paul appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline, “The Most Interesting Man in Politics.” Time was hardly alone in this assessment. Paul was the subject of a lengthy front-page profile in the New York Times and came out No. 1 on Politico Magazine’s list of the 50 most influential people in politics. “Has the Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived?” Robert Draper asked in the New York Times Magazine.

Perhaps a better question is: Have the media ever been more wrong? Pundits speculated that the Kentucky senator would be a more plausible leader than his father, former Texas Representative Ron Paul, for a newly mainstreamed libertarian alliance that would bring together critics of U.S. foreign policy interventionism and government surveillance and advocates of drug decriminalization and criminal justice reform from across the political spectrum. Libertarian-leaning millennials, it was said, along with Tea Party opponents of big government, could bring about a realignment of American politics—helped along by all that money being funneled into the 2016 campaign by the libertarian Koch brothers. As Draper put it: “Libertarians, who long have relished their role as acerbic sideline critics of American political theater, now find themselves and their movement thrust into the middle of it. ”


But the libertarian moment was momentary indeed. The Republican presidential primary was upended not by Rand Paul but by Donald Trump, whose agenda is the exact opposite of libertarianism in almost every way. Libertarians want open borders; Trump promises to build a wall with Mexico and deport millions of illegal immigrants. Libertarians want to privatize Social Security; Trump has defended Social Security and Medicare. Libertarians want to cut defense spending; Trump wants a big military, though he promises not to use it unwisely. And, among Republicans, Trump is a relative dove. The others in the GOP field compete to be more bellicose than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Paul, meanwhile, has all but disappeared from view. Humiliated in the first Republican debate, when he challenged Trump to promise not to run an independent campaign, Paul alienated many of his noninterventionist fans and looked like just another politician instead of a principled libertarian when he came out against the Iran deal. His newfound hawkishness has not helped him. His poll numbers among Republican candidates have collapsed from 10 percent last April to between 2 percent and 3 percent now. It remains to be seen whether his polling numbers will be high enough to let him be onstage at the next Republican debate. On October 15, Paul’s campaign staff released a memo declaring that he is not dropping out of the race, never a good sign.

Whether Paul stays in the race or not, the libertarian moment he symbolized is over. To be more precise, it never existed.

Libertarians, like neoconservatives, are overrepresented among op-ed writers and TV talking heads and think-tank wonks on the right. But neither the Club for Growth wing nor what conservative writers Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat call the Sam’s Club wing of the GOP is libertarian, except when it suits them.

Unlike ideological libertarians who fantasize about the replacement of fiat money with gold or bitcoin, most Wall Street Republicans object to regulations they dislike, such as Dodd-Frank, while remaining content with a system that gives capital-gains income preferential tax treatment and socializes the cost of bank bailouts while privatizing the benefits.

For their part, white working-class conservatives—nativist, protectionist and often religious—are to libertarians what matter is to antimatter. Over the years, Rand Paul’s father, Ron Paul, managed to attract a variety of right-wing extremists who were not consistent libertarians, like gold bugs and racists. Since the Nixon era, the small number of actual Republican libertarians have been fleas hitching a ride on the dog of George Wallace-style populism—and in the Time of Trump, the fleas have fled the dog.

What holds together the donor class and populist wings of the GOP is not libertarian philosophy, but a policy: deficit spending. The Republican rich want lower taxes and lower spending. Many Republican populists want middle-class entitlements, if not spending on the poor, to be maintained. The only way to cut tax rates on rich Republicans while maintaining spending on the entitlements of middle-class Republicans is to run perpetual deficits. The fact that all of the economic plans of leading GOP presidential contenders, including Trump’s plan, would blow holes in the federal budget by slashing rates on the rich without cutting middle-class benefits is not a mistake; it’s a feature.

What about the general electorate? If there is a large pool of untapped libertarian voters, it is very well-hidden. In August 2014, Jocelyn Kiley of the Pew Research Center published a post titled “In Search of Libertarianism.” She concluded that only about one in 10 Americans who knows what the term means is a libertarian. Consistent libertarians were too small to make the cut as one of the seven groups Pew identified in its political typology (they are closest to “business conservatives”).

In a recent analysis of National Election Studies data for Vox, Lee Drutman showed that 40 percent of the public agrees with a combination of two issues associated with Trump—maintain or increase Social Security spending, while decreasing immigration. In contrast, the Americans who support both higher immigration and cuts to Social Security—the libertarian position—add up to no more than 1.4 percent of the population. That’s a 28-to-1 difference.

OK, so 2016 is not shaping up to be the year of the libertarian. Won’t libertarian-leaning millennials sweep libertarians to power, in the next generation, if not in the next election cycle? They might—if millennials were leaning libertarian.

It’s true that younger Americans tend to be more supportive of classic civil libertarian issues like drug legalization, police reform and reform of the federal surveillance state. Nick Gillespie at Reason cites trends like these in public opinion as evidence of a libertarian wave: “Gay marriage is not legal simply because of a Supreme Court decision but because of a shift to live-and-let-live principles regarding sexuality; a majority of Americans want to end the war on pot; the sharing economy's poster children, Uber and Airbnb, are wildly popular both for the specific services they deliver and the possibilities they represent; increasing numbers of people are OK with gun ownership and skeptical of unchecked police authority; and on and on.” But many of these are standard left-liberal ACLU issues that even the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders could support—including, in the case of Sanders, the rights of gun owners.

An April 2015 Yougov Poll shows that only 20 percent of Americans under 30 call themselves libertarian, compared with 15 percent of the population as a whole—a rounding error. Indeed, according to Pew, younger Americans are less likely than older Americans to support cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Two-thirds of millennials oppose raising the eligibility age for Social Security, and two out of three want to raise the Social Security payroll tax. Sixty percent of Americans younger than 65 oppose raising the age of eligibility for Medicare, compared with only half over the age of 65.

On the greatest social revolution of our time—rights for LGBT Americans—Rand Paul and other libertarians are at odds with millennials who support antidiscrimination laws and marriage equality. Paul has said that while he opposes racial discrimination, he opposes laws that ban racial discrimination by private businesses. Similarly, he is both for gay rights and against laws protecting gay rights. Paul defends the legal right of employers to fire people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity: “If you happen to be gay, there are plenty of places that will hire you.” But 65 percent of millennials support outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation or identity, compared with 15 percent who are neutral and only 21 percent who share Paul’s opposition to protective legislation.

Oh, and no less than 42 percent of millennials also think socialism is preferable to capitalism.

It’s enough to make the Kochs stop spending money or libertarians want to emigrate—and some libertarians have proposed doing just that. In a 2009 essay for Cato Unbound, Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri declared: “Libertarians are a minority, and we underperform in elections, so winning electoral victories is a hopeless endeavor.” Friedman founded the Seasteading Institute, with money from libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, in the hope of creating city-states at sea that could be colonized by libertarian refugees from progressive taxation, civil rights laws and minimum-wage laws.

Friedman’s seasteads are the latest version of the idea of “Liberland,” a libertarian utopia to be founded on the high seas or in some territory free from the jurisdiction of existing governments. Earlier experiments have not fared well. In 1962 a libertarian island in the Pacific named Minerva was claimed by the local superpower, the island of Tonga. Another would-be libertarian city-state off the Bahamas sank during a hurricane in 1968, living up to its name: Operation Atlantis.

There was never a libertarian moment in the United States. But there will always be Liberland.