The Roots of Authoritarian Libertarianism

The Libertarian Faustian Bargain

Preliminary Note: This essay is the written and more elaborated version of a popular talk I will be giving next week on authoritarian libertarianism. It uses material already published in this newsletter and is conceived to stand by itself – no need to read the other essays I’ve written on similar topics, though I’ll link to them at the end of this piece below.

As I’m writing these lines, Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration is about to start. Trump’s return to the White House has been backed by the emergence of a three-faction coalition reuniting mainstream conservatives, MAGA Trumpist partisans, and tech entrepreneurs. These factions share some political and economic-policy views about the need to reduce the number of regulations, to severely cut the size of the administration, to strictly control immigration, and to implement a tougher foreign policy. Even before it officially takes office, some hints at future disagreement among this coalition have already appeared, regarding in particular the necessity to maintain borders opened to highly skilled immigrants. This last view is more particularly taken by the third group of the coalition, the tech entrepreneurs, which is also incidentally the most significant addition compared to Trump’s first reign. These entrepreneurs, the most prominent names are Elon Must, Peter Thiel, and Mark Andreessen, tend to also self-identify – and be identified – as libertarians.

Besides the fact that their wealth indirectly contributes to giving the 47^th American President unprecedented political and economic power, the support and participation of libertarian tech entrepreneurs for Trump’s administration marks a novelty compared to 2016. In 2024, many libertarians are not shy of explicitly endorsing and supporting Trump, although he in many ways impersonates a kind of political leadership and authority that is antithetical to liberal politics, while at the same time endorsing protectionist economic policies in unambiguous contradiction with free-market views. Elsewhere in the world, political leaders, often with no significant political track record, have skyrocketed to power partly thanks to the support of voters espousing libertarian views. The most significant example is Argentine’s Javier Milei. Compared to Trump, Milei defends and, since his election, has mostly implemented policies that fit within a classical liberal/libertarian agenda. Nevertheless, Milei’s political rhetoric and style also display the verbal excesses, aggressiveness, and disrespectful stance that go against all shared liberal political values. Even if Milei has until now not trespassed any constitutional rules or infringed on the rule of law, he nonetheless, like Trump, betrays the characteristics of a political leader that contradict the tamed, moderate, rule-based approach to politics traditionally associated with liberalism.

The libertarians’ support for leaders like Trump and Milei raises an enigma. Their anti-progressive views about social and cultural issues combined with their illiberal, if not authoritarian political style, directly conflict with the radicality and anti-authoritarian stance that have historically been constitutive of libertarianism in Europe and the U.S.[1] In Trump’s case, the enigma is even more pronounced as aggressive protectionism, where tariffs are used as a weapon to put foreign countries (including close allies) under pressure, is completely anathema to classical liberal and libertarian principles. What follows is an attempt to solve this enigma. In substance, I argue that in their quest for ideological purity, libertarians reject not only the state but more fundamentally politics[2] as a domain of social life. This is impossible, however. Libertarians’ support for authoritarian political leaders and regimes is the outcome of forcing into this impossibility. The rejection of politics, including liberal politics, gives place to a kind of bellicose and personalistic politics described (and endorsed) notably by the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt.

A Libertarian-Populist Vote

It may be convenient to address the aforementioned enigma by treating separately the popular libertarian votes and the support of economic and intellectual elites (e.g., tech entrepreneurs but also academics) for authoritarian political leaders. Both share some roots but also probably reflect different social and intellectual dynamics. I shall start with the former and I’ll be brief, as I think we lack empirical evidence to be assertive.

The “libertarian-populist” vote is a subcategory of the broader populist vote that has gained strength across the world since the previous decade. Explanations for the populist vote are many and partially overlapping. Among the populist voters, a more or less significant minority seem to be individuals with at least partially libertarian views on the economy, society, and politics. A recent book by two German sociologists, Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey, provides theoretical and empirical elements helping to identify the profile of such voters casting their ballot for the party Alternative for Germany (AfD).[3] Though different sub-profiles emerge from their study, they appear to all share an absolutist conception of individual freedom as non-interference:[4]

“The adherent of such an understanding of freedom perceive wearing a mask to cover their mouth and nose, or indeed gender-sensitive language conventions as obstacles that are holding them back. They regard any new or altered social conventions as externally imposed restrictions that illegitimately limit their scope for self-realization. Some go even further and turn against the very preconditions of freedom: they do not want to pay taxes (or only very low taxes) but do not hesitate to use roads that are paid with tax money. They ignore the fact that cutting-edge medical research would be inconceivable without public funding and that a publicly provided school education is the very basis of individual self-development.”

Libertarian-populist voters (who Amlinger and Nachtwey call “libertarian authoritarians”) entertain a conception of autonomy as self-development with some Millian aspects. They tend to consider their beliefs as “authentic,” meaning that they don’t regard them as being determined by the dominant opinion. That makes them prone to reject mainstream views provided by experts who are, in one way or another, tied to the illegitimate ruling political authority. This ideal of autonomy remains unreachable and creates frustration, a “sense of powerlessness” that drives a strong resentment against all those bodies or groups of society, often minorities, that are deemed responsible for undermining people’s autonomy.

This description may apply to populist voters in general, not only to libertarian-populists. What seems to make the latter specific is their anarchistic rejection of political and social authority. They are not necessarily “supporters” of the populist parties and leaders they are voting for. They are not politicized and quite the contrary display a broader anti-politics attitude reflecting a disinterest in public matters. Libertarian-populists are “individualists” in the sense discussed by Alexis de Tocqueville; they only care for their private life and don’t want to be dependent on anyone else or be told by anyone what to do.[5] Even more to the point, they illustrate the risk that Benjamin Constant identified in his discussion of the liberty of the moderns.[6] Exclusively valuing their individual freedom of not being interfered with their choices (of the kind of speech they want to hear or make, of wearing a mask or not, of driving big cars, of following or not traditions), libertarian-populists see no problem granting political power to leaders as long as they are convinced that this is the best way to achieve their autonomy. Unbounded economic freedom comes at the expense of non-valued political liberty.

Libertarianism and the Avoidance of Politics

A similar explanation may probably account partially for the support of libertarian economic and intellectual elites to populist leaders. There are also other factors at play. There is hardly any doubt that endorsement of Trump during the last U.S. Presidential elections by tech entrepreneurs like Musk, Thiel, or Andreessen was largely motivated by self-interest considerations in light of Trump’s economic program. That doesn’t explain however the support that Trump’s candidacy received from some libertarian intellectual circles. Below the surface of opportunistic and pragmatic reasons that account for the libertarian endorsement of populist and illiberal leaders, lies a deeper explanation. This explanation, I contend, has to do with the libertarians’ complex relationship with politics.

Because he has been prone to candidly express his views on this subject, PayPal co-founder and Palantir CEO Peter Thiel’s writings and oral communications provide a good place to start. Thiel has idiosyncratic views that single him out in the libertarian community. He is, to my knowledge, the only libertarian to explicitly appeal to intellectuals like Carl Schmitt and René Girard. Contrary to most libertarian elites, his endorsement of Trump is not recent and dates back to 2016. Thiel cannot therefore be taken as representative of all libertarians. Nonetheless, I tend to consider his thinking as the most accomplished, at least as far as the relationship between libertarianism and politics is concerned.

In his widely commented 2009 essay “The Education of a Libertarian,” Thiel states that “[he] no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible.” If it had been written by a classical liberal thinker 150 years ago, that would have been quite mainstream. Liberalism is indeed the product of a complex understanding of the relation between freedom and democracy, animated by the fear that democracy turns into a despotic rule of the majority over minorities. From today’s eyes, it is a contentious claim that rests on the ambiguity of the term “freedom.” Whatever we may think of it, Thiel is anyway far from being alone among the libertarian elites in holding this view.[7] Speaking for “classical liberals” in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Thiel observes that the prospects for libertarian ideas to come to actual political life are uncertain:

“As one fast-forwards to 2009, the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed. Exhibit A is a financial crisis caused by too much debt and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of moral hazards — and we know that the response to this crisis involves way more debt and leverage, and way more government. Those who have argued for free markets have been screaming into a hurricane. The events of recent months shatter any remaining hopes of politically minded libertarians. For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand.”

In light of this, the question, Thiels tells his readers, is “of how to escape not via politics but beyond it.” This could not be more explicit: the libertarian intellectual and political project is to find a means to escape from politics. In what he describes as a “race between politics and technology,” Thiel contends that the latter will offer opportunities to build a society free from political authority and coercion on which democratic societies are built:

“The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

The idea that technology can be a way to escape politics and build an authentically free society is not Thiel’s. Back in the 1970s, David Friedman was already alluding in his book The Machinery of Freedom to how technological developments would help to implement libertarian solutions for the provision of public goods, for instance charging fees for the use of private roads.[8] What was mostly science fiction at the time has since then become reality. Cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, or blockchains are technological devices that, at least in theory, could permit the enforcement of voluntary contracts without the discretionary intervention of the state through the intermediation of politicians and bureaucrats. The libertarian ideal of a free stateless society of a size large enough to enjoy the economic benefits of specialization and economies of scale seems to become more tangible. Instead of libertarian politics, techno-libertarianism is the road to realizing it.

We understand that Thiel’s opposition of technology to politics entirely rests on the same conception of freedom as an absolute individual right not to be interfered with that motivates libertarian-populist voters. A free society is one without coercion and coercion, by assumption, always has political roots. In a society without politics, there is no coercion because all social interactions take the form of explicit or implicit voluntary consented contracts. If one is forced to do something, it is only to the extent that she has previously agreed to commit to doing it in the appropriate circumstances. Interference with one’s choices is legitimate insofar as it is the only way to force one to act as she has previously committed to. This is still coercion, but “contractual” rather than political coercion. There is nothing more in being free than being submitted only to contractual but spared from political coercion.

Libertarianism and Schmittian Politics

Even if we accept the libertarian conception of freedom as absolute protection against state coercion and any other kind of non-contractual interference, we may ask how a total escape from politics is possible. There is first the practical issue that if we start from a society that is “political” so to speak, it seems that any retreat from politics must involve political, and thus coercive, action. Second, even if technological evolution provides new means to solve classical collective action problems related to the provision of public goods, regulation of externalities, and enforcement of rules, technological devices are themselves not fully autonomous.

These two points suggest that the libertarian ideal of dispensing with coercive political power may be impossible to achieve. This is the most obvious regarding the former. As a matter of fact, repealing or changing a law involves a political action. It might be argued that substituting contractual coercion for political coercion entails a net improvement in freedom because the latter but not the former counts as proper interference. Moreover, we imagine that a libertarian society can be created ex nihilo on a free land or even on the sea. Since nobody is forced to join, no illegitimate coercion is involved.

Many libertarians still entertain this – I’ve no better word to qualify it – fantasy. The problem is that the world doesn’t function like that. For many reasons, few individuals are willing to join a stateless society – in part, this is because very few individuals actually grant absolute priority to freedom from interference. Technological developments have also not changed the fact that a stateless society would be vulnerable to external threats.[9] Finally, there is the fact that in a libertarian society, some individuals and organizations would have tremendous power over others. This power may eventually not be authentically political (i.e., based on political coercion) but power is power, that is, a way to have others act as you see fit. Politics is undoubtedly a source of power, but in some circumstances, it also provides a shield against other sources of power that, at least in some respects, may be completely arbitrary.

In light of this, lucid or “realistic” libertarians understand that if a stateless society may still be the ideal to aim at, that cannot come with the abolition of politics. Despite his explicit claim for the contrary, I think that Thiel (as well as Musk for that matter) is among those realistic libertarians who have perfectly acknowledged that politics, and not any kind of it, and libertarianism go hand in hand. Though Thiel’s early writings already make reference to figures like Girard and Schmitt, he has recently expanded on his conception of politics in talks and interviews.[10] If it was not already obvious, Thiel’s endorsement of the Schmittian conception of politics is now explicit – so explicit that even the libertarian magazine Reason worries about it. There are at least two characteristics of Schmitt’s conception of politics that are relevant in this context. First, Schmitt famously argued that politics is constituted by the division between enemies and friends. Not aligning with a political coalition makes one by definition the enemy of this coalition.[11] Second, Schmitt ties political sovereignty with the effective capacity to determine when an “exception” prevails such that the sovereign has the legitimacy to act outside the bounds defined by constitutional rules. On Schmitt’s conception, political authority is “decisionistic.” Genuine political authority only transpires in exceptional circumstances, circumstances that only the sovereign can characterize.[12]

In interviews, Thiel hints at the fact that the “neoliberal” coalition of the Reagan era that led to policies with a libertarian tilt is no longer effective. This heterogeneous coalition, made of free-market libertarians, social conservatives, and defense hawks, was tied to its opposition to communism. The fall of communism meant the disintegration of the coalition. The moving political landscape where libertarians are making an alliance with MAGA Trumpists and mainstream Republicans can be interpreted, from Schmittian lens, as a new coalition holding thanks to its opposition to the “progressist” and “woke” enemies. It is a matter of debate whether this is the correct reading of current American politics but, in any case, it is plausible that a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy is at play here. Thiel is just explicitly articulating a belief that many libertarians have, i.e., to win you have to make a common front against your enemies, whatever the costs.

This is more than an alliance of circumstances, however. This is not only the political landscape that has shifted, but more globally the social morality of liberal democracies throughout the world. The broadly liberal political public culture that was prevailing has been progressively displaced by a more conflictual, polarized one. Societies are more and more diverse, creating tensions between ways of life. This creates a context where compromising with what would have been before ideological foes becomes justified to fight the biggest evils. The Reason article I mentioned before quotes Patri Friedman explaining Thiel’s political evolution:

“In a well functioning ‘liberal’ (enlightenment values, not libertarian) society, as we had in the ‘80s & ‘90s, pushing for more freedom makes sense. But when there are paramilitary extremist groups fighting in the streets, that lack of basic civil harmony seems like a bigger problem than government spending.”

In an unexpected and ironic turn of events, you have libertarians ending up justifying the means by the ends, exactly as communist supporters of the Soviet Union were doing in the 20^th century.

Schmittians or not, libertarian realists are now convinced that to achieve their ideal, or at least to move toward it, they must submit to the personalized and decisionistic politics that contradicts all the fundamentals of liberalism. If something looks like a Faustian bargain in this world, it must only be this.

Liberty Pluralism

If this analysis has any validity, then the illiberal turn of libertarianism finds its roots in the monist, unidimensional conception of freedom that libertarians entertain. In a society that becomes less and less friendly to liberal ideas broadly speaking, including libertarian ones, those who give absolute value to freedom from interference cannot see any other solution than an absolute retreat in their sphere of private sovereignty. The world being as it is, this retreat cannot be accomplished individually, all alone. In normal liberal times, the natural authoritarian tendencies of an obsession with freedom from interference are counterbalanced by mechanisms such as healthy rule-based politics of moderation and respectful competition, or an active associative and civil life. As these mechanisms are increasingly undermined, libertarians are not willing any concessions. The ultimate irony is that they believe that they have no other choice than to turn their back on the very principles that ground their convictions and embrace the kind of politics that liberalism has always fought. More than ever, we need to emphasize the plurality of freedoms that are constitutive of liberalism and liberal societies. Once libertarians have realized that ignoring this undermines the very liberty they cherish, they will change their minds. But it could be too late.

Other relevant essays on this and similar topics

“Techno-libertarianism and the Paradox of Politics”

“Liberalism is More than Libertarianism with Exception”

“Is Populism Necessarily Bad?”

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[1] For a history of libertarianism that emphasizes these features, see Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism (Princeton University Press, 2023).

[2] A more precise wording would be to say that libertarians reject the political as a domain of social life. I’ll not distinguish between politics (as a practice) and the political (as a domain social life) below and use “politics” for both as, ultimately rejecting one entails rejecting the other.

[3] Carolin Amlinger, Oliver Nachtwey. Offended Freedom: The Rise of Libertarian Authoritarianism (Polity Press, 2024). I should mention that there are aspects in this study that should be taken with care. The authors do a tremendous job identifying several profiles of libertarian-populist voters but seem to overstate their case by implying that all voters of AfD – and the far-right populist vote fall into these profiles. In France, for instance, it is highly doubtful that the majority of voters of the Rassemblement national hold the libertarian conception of freedom that Amlinger and Nachtwey characterize. Libertarian-populist voters may however well be predominantly found among those supporting Eric Zemmour’s party. This is purely speculative however, as there is not enough empirical evidence to support this assumption.

[4] Ibid., p. 5.

[5] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, ed. Isaac Kramnick, trans. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin Classics, 2003).

[6] Benjamin Constant, De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes (Paris: Fayard/Mille et une nuits, 2010).

[7] See Zwolinski and Tomasi, The Individualists. Many libertarian or “quasi-libertarian” projects of free economic zones that have been implemented in the recent past also display the same relative endorsement of democratic values and principles. See Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2023).

[8] David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, 3rd edition (New York, NY: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 1973 [2015]), p. 71.

[9] This is the only place where Friedman expresses skepticism regarding the feasibility of an authentic libertarian society. See Ibid.

[10] See for instance this conversation with Tyler Cowen.

[11] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, trans. George Schwab, Enlarged edition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1932 [2007]).

[12] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, 1st edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922 [2006]).