Judging Freedom - Can We See a Libertarian Moment Now

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Talking with Nick Gillespie, Host of The Reason Interview https://reason.com/podcasts/the-reaso...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, April 21st. It's about 2 or 5 in the afternoon. My guest is my longtime friend, intellectual, ideological colleague. He won't admit this, but he's also from New Jersey, Nick Gillespie. Nick has been a mainstay amongst libertarian thinkers for a very long time. He is currently editor-at-large of Reason magazine and the host of the Reason interview, a show on which I've been privileged to appear a number of times, and Nick joins me now. Nick, it's always a pleasure, my dear friend. Welcome back. I think you were here on the second, that was several hundred shows ago, of Judging Freedom. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm always happy. It's a good sign if I got invited back,

and I just want to correct you, Judge. I love talking about New Jersey, and I would talk about New Jersey for the rest of my life if it paid the bills, I'm happy to have been raised in Middletown, New Jersey. And you know, it, it, it, it stays with me.

Yeah. Like a welt across the back. Yes. Bloomfield, New Jersey stays with me. If you go to Bloomfield high school records and look up the name, Napolitano, you will see dozens of them going

back to my parents, aunts and uncles, my brothers, my cousins, and even a succeeding generation or two. So you and I have discussed this off air many times, and we both discussed it with our colleague Austin Peterson on his radio show out of Jefferson City, Missouri. And that is the poor state of the libertarian movement in the United States today. I can remember when Ron Paul was campaigning for the Republican nomination for president, the libertarian movement was about as energized as it has ever been. What happened? Yeah. In 2008 and again in 2012, I think Ron Paul brought a new vitality to the libertarian movement by articulating a very positive, upbeat message that was really about empathy and autonomy. He wanted the government or he wanted large organizations to get out of the way so that

we could build the communities that we wanted and help people the way that we wanted and also give us more freedom and liberty to decide how we live. His stump speech, which drew out thousands of people at colleges, you know, this was a guy who even then was an old man, but like Bernie Sanders on the left, he was filling, you know, college stadiums and auditoriums by saying, you know, I don't want to run your life because in a free society, you do that. I don't want to run the economy because in a free society, you don't do that. I don't want to, you know, we don't want the U.S. to run the world because like, you know, different countries will have different ways of doing things. And it was a positive vision along, you know, with tackling overreach by government, which was gigantic under George W. Bush. And then we knew with Obama, it was going

to increase. I think what has gone missing in a lot of ways is that first off, we are in a very pessimistic mood generally in the country. We go through these phases, everybody is downbeat, and it's partly because of the war on terror and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were disasters that everybody knew, but really only libertarians, especially at the beginning, were critiquing from the beginning, the financial crisis, and even more than the financial crisis, the response to it, where right and left came together to basically shore up and bail out the status quo in the big financial industries. I think somebody like Donald Trump, you know, offered a vision of, okay, we're going to burn down parts, or, you know, we're going to drain part of the swamp,

but he became completely overtaken by it. And I think COVID and the response to it, this has been a tough century in many ways, and people are in a depressed mode about that. Let me try and unpack some of what you just said. I think there is still very much an appetite out there for the happy, upbeat, I'm going to leave you alone, financially, economically, socially, culturally, and with respect to foreign policy argument that Ron Paul made. I think you probably agree with that. No, absolutely. What I think has happened in the libertarian movement more broadly, and this is similar to the country, the two major parties and the two major positions, conservative and liberal or progressive, have, you know, they're losing market share and mind share. People don't want to be a Democrat or a Republican anymore.

What does it mean to be a conservative Republican these days? Does it mean whatever Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump? Or Donald Trump? Yeah, no, it's a collective identity that, you know, that is so out of touch with everyday life, you know, and, but though that's where the money is. And I think what has happened to libertarians, particularly after Trump, because I would say between about 2008 and 2015, the libertarian movement was ascended. The New York Times magazine in, I think it was August of 2018, I know because I was quoted in the story, it had Rand Paul on the cover and it said, has the libertarian moment finally arrived? There was a long ascendancy. Matt Welch and I at Reason coined the term the libertarian moment,

which was kind of embrace of creative destruction in culture and commerce and politics. And the Libertarian Movement has become pessimistic. It's become kind of dark. In many ways, it's been Trumpified or it's been made kind of irrelevant. We're not articulating that positive vision of a future of do-it-yourself products, of projects, and of engagement with the world. A lot of people in the libertarian movement, I think, are hunkering down. And that's part of the problem. That's why we've lost some of our mojo. People are emailing me now saying, what about anarchy? I mean, obviously, the libertarian moment and the libertarian movement don't stand for anarchy. We are minarchists. We are minimal government. We are not. I agree with you. But I think this is also part of the confusion

is that a lot of people in the libertarian movement, and I'm not saying that these people shouldn't be in it or something, but I think a lot of people are kind of anarchists, but they call themselves libertarians. And that also means then that if you are against all government, the solution to every problem is like, well, there should be no government. It doesn't give you the grounds upon which to engage in public policy debates. All right. So you said Trumpified. You and I have a mutual friend who's an academic who's sort of the gold standard in libertarians, Walter Block. So when Walter Block, who's a professor of economics at Loyola University in New Orleans, correct,

asked me to sign, at the time I was teaching at Brooklyn Law School, a petition, academics for Trump. I called him up and said, Walter, are you crazy? Trump is not a libertarian and i'm saying this is somebody who's been his friend for 35 years he'd agree with what i'm now about to say he's an authoritarian he's the opposite walter said to me judge if you've been sentenced to 30 lashes would you rather have 30 or would you rather have one okay walter hillary is 30 and Donald is one. Yes.

So libertarians are going to support Trump. There's not a libertarian bone in Trump's body. There may have been in some of his words, like Ronald Reagan's words, but either the Democrats in Congress, his own ignorance of the way the government worked or the deep state stopped him at every turn. I don't think anybody can name anything that he did that was libertarian. I, you know, and also I think, you know, the calibration was, it wasn't the difference between 30 lashes and one, it was more like

25 and 30 maybe or something. So no, but you know, that's, that's important. And it is, again, I debated before the 2016 election at the Soho Forum debates, you know, monthly libertarian debate series hosted, you know, in New York. I debated Walter Block about that. And I was like, you know, he was like, libertarians should vote for Donald Trump. I said libertarians should vote for whoever they want to. But I said I was voting for the Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson, who most closely articulated my vision of government. We lose when we decide to become the 18th public special interest section of the Republican or Democratic Party. We need to flex and we need to be saying, you know what, a libertarian world

is one in which you are free in your personal life and you're free in your economic life. And the government exists to do a few things well, but mostly keeps people out. Should somebody like Thomas, I mean, Justin Amash gave up the ghost and Justin is as libertarian as you and I and people watching us now.

And Thomas Massey, Congressman Massey is really the Ron Paul of the House of Representatives today, minus a number of years and plus an incredible, incredible sense of humor and work ethic. Yeah, I do think I would rather have Ron Paul deliver my, you know, my the the babies of, you know, of anybody that I'm involved with rather than Tom Massey, but I think I would go to him for any kind of complex engineering problem. Okay. Should Thomas Massey and people like him, there's nobody else like him, Justin Amash is gone, Rand is Rand. Should somebody like Thomas Massey stay in the Republican Party? Let me an outcast and where his voting record, let me finish, Nick, where he's an outcast and where his voting record isn't consistent with any of them. Right. I, you know, I think that's a really fair question and it would be interesting to see

if Massey, you know, did that. Justin Amash obviously changed his affiliations to the LP before he left Congress. He is still, you know, he's still involved with the LP and he may well run for the 2024 nomination for the presidential candidacy. But I do think, you know, Amash is still making a positive argument for what a libertarian government would look like. And that we need more of. And we need to also, you know, be talking about, for me, I think, you know, among the most important things that libertarians have to offer is, you know, this belief in social autonomy, but also things like more immigration is better, more movement across border, arbitrary

borders is a good thing. More school choice, more ability to pick your intoxicant or not to get intoxicated at all, to call BS on a lot of these programs and to talk about free trade. We need free trade, neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party. And we need to show that this is actually going to help the most people. We're not doing that because people are like, oh, no, we have to be a barnacle on the hull of the Republican Party as it is kind of sinking in the harbor.

You and I agree on every one of the issues you just articulated. I'm on the board of the Mises Institute, but what I'm about to tell you, they already know. They're all for closed borders. I'm the only one for open borders. This is the gold standard in libertarian think tanks in the United States. My colleagues look at me like I have two heads when I say you have a natural right to travel and walk wherever you want.

My cousins from Florence want to live on my farm. It is none of the government's business, state, federal, or local. So there's not an agreement on all these issues. But there is an agreement on the overbearing role of the government in our lives. Is it not best to articulate that with a third party or to try and find more Thomas Massys in the Republican Party who are willing to have a miserable existence by being Republicans? I'll also, I'll throw in on the left, or not on the left, but in the Democratic Party, Jared Polis, who had been a colleague of Massy and Amash's in the House and is

now governor of Colorado and is actually as libertarian as any governor is, which is to say not- And he's a Democrat. Yeah. actually as libertarian as any governor is, which is to say not all that libertarian, but pretty libertarian. And I think it's great to see people in the two major parties, or maybe we should call them the two dying parties, but it's good to see people with libertarian influences in that. I think it's also important to have a robust third party, but as much as anything, libertarian, I think being a libertarian or having a libertarian sensibility is pre-political, it's pre-partisan.

And what we need to infuse people in America with is that sense of optimism. This is the one thing that ends up kind of persisting from Reagan. You know, Reagan took office in a terrible moment in American history in many, many ways, but his optimism and his belief that tomorrow would be better because America has, you know, good DNA. We need to be talking about that in a libertarian context, and we need to be excited about the culture. I mean, I think this is another big part of it, is that a lot of libertarians seem to be disgusted or have problems with, you know, amazing and growing amounts of choice, whether we're talking about what's on TV, what's on the internet, in your sexual life, you know, in your

personal life. We are people who define humans, going back to Ludwig von Mises, man is a choosing animal. We believe in praxeology. And we are in a world of increasing choices, and we should be talking about that and talking about why that is good. Do you and Matt Welsh and your Reason buddies, and I love them all and agree with them all, wish we could all be together again, like in my Freedom Watch days. See another libertarian moment. Obviously, it's going to be with Amash or somebody like that. It's not going to be with Ron because I don't think that's in the cards for him. He's in his mid-80s at this point. I think that there is a, when you look at the current moment, and we are living in a politics and a culture of exhaustion, everybody is too busy to sleep and too busy to reset and things like that. It reminds me very much of the early 70s when, in a political way, things were terrible.

There were wage and price controls. Inflation was out of control. Southeast Asia was a mess. The Soviets were kind of rolling in various places. And out of that came in the 70s, a wave of lifestyle liberation, as well as deregulation at the federal level, giving rise ultimately to the 80s, where there was a robust economy. We have a lot of obstacles to come over, including, you know, terrible treasury policy, terrible Fed policy, things like that. But we're also on the verge, I think, of a new era beginning. And we won't know exactly what it's like, but

people have more freedom and more ability and more permission to live however they want. Once they understand that and embrace it and enact it, I think we will see a libertarian moment and politics will reflect that. Politics are, you know, I guess Andrew Breitbart said politics are downstream from culture. I think that's true. They're a lagging indicator. And the problem is now we're just not, we're not, we're not, nobody is looking forward to the future. So our politics are about, you know, kind of parceling out the crumbs on the table rather than moving to a new place. One of my regular emailers during the show, Jen Liberty Lion. Now, I don't know Jen personally, but this person writes very provocative texts.

Why should we be forced to vote for the lesser of two evils? What is the real difference between the Republican candidate and the Democratic candidate other than personality and the people backing them? Those are two profound questions. There should be a libertarian or whatever you want to call it, small government, shrink the government alternative on the national level and on the national ballot. Agree or disagree? I totally agree. And all I'm saying is that I think that starts with a rebirth in our individual minds and in our communities where we say instead of we're worried, I mean, there's this insane battle going on about whether or not schools are grooming children, or is Walt Disney World

grooming children on the one hand, or is Facebook completely controlling all of our buying decisions and promoting hate speech on the other? This is a geriatric society that is afraid of the future. We need to shake that off and say, you know what, we have the ability to start our businesses. We have the ability to run our lives the way we want. You know, we have technology that enables that. We need to hold our politics accountable to get out of the way so that we can all run our different experiments and living and move into a future that, you know, is hopeful and is productive. That is such a beautiful summary of where we should be. I'm going to end with that, except for this one liner, Nick Gillespie for president. Well, now, Judge, I think you really, I'm going to have to, you know, call your psychiatrist on

that one, but I appreciate the gesture. I mean, the future, the future is better if we will, you know, if we will move towards it. The future belongs to optimists. The future does not belong to the government. All right. Nico, my dear friend, Nick Gillespie, always a pleasure. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.