Libertarians

Political years are the opposite of dog years: they pass by in a blaze, with entire epochs elapsing in the course of a few news cycles. Ideas, even movements, fade abruptly, recalled only years later when you clean out your garage and stumble on that old tricorn hat from your Tea Party days. If you want to know how jarring political change can be, consider that at this time in the 2016 election cycle — around the late spring of 2015 — the predicted frontrunner for the GOP nomination was Rand Paul. This was no coincidence. In those days, we were said to be in the middle of something called a libertarian moment. Voters were leery of Barack Obama’s deficit spending, Washington’s endless wars, the NSA surveillance that had been unveiled by Edward Snowden.

In many countries, tricking stupid people out of money is a crime. In the United States, it’s the basis of a whole economy. Cryptocurrency is the crowning glory of this broken system. You give me a bunch of your real money, and I’ll give you some of my fake money. Fantastic! It’s like tulip mania, only instead of flowers, you get… nothing. The collapse of FTX — the second largest crypto exchange in the world — will cost millions of customers billions of dollars. Some expect it to significantly worsen the recession, though I’m not so sure. If those folks hadn’t wasted their savings on Bitcoin, they probably would have wasted it on some other scam. (Is William Duvane still selling gold?) In theory, this is bad news for the Democrats.

Sohrab Ahmari Modern American conservatism is composed of three distinct traditions: libertarian economics, foreign-policy hawkism and social traditionalism. This “fusion” was born of a contingent historical moment, the Cold War, when the Soviet threat forced different social classes and their ideological spokesmen to band together in common cause. There was no eternal principle demanding that these groups tie their destinies together — a fact that became apparent with Donald Trump’s rise, which divided the three camps along various axes of alliance and enmity. Fusionism is dead. Well and truly dead.