If you listen to the "A Time for Choosing" speech by President Reagan from 1964, you will hear a strong advocacy of libertarian thought. In the White House, President Reagan advocated self-reliance and famously argued that "government is not the solution to our problems." Instead, government is the problem. The Republican Party took up the liberty mantle thirty years after that famous speech, and the 1994 Republican Revolution had strong libertarian themes. The Tea Party movement in 2010 had a lot of libertarian themes, supporting gun rights, devolving federal power to the states, and cutting both taxes and spending.
When Meg Basham argued on Twitter that "libertarians" fight for "weed and porn" but nothing that advances virtue, she provoked a lot of angry opposition. She doubled down, arguing that libertarianism is "immature."
And here is the fundamental disconnect: We should not confuse small-L libertarians with the capital-L Libertarian Party. A friend of mine has long maintained that there are more libertarians in the Republican Party than in the Libertarian Party, and has said that the Libertarian Party is "all about dope." When Ann Coulter wanted to run for Congress decades ago, the state Libertarian Party wanted to make legalization of marijuana her #1 issue. The Libertarian Party made a stink about Facebook rejecting an ad touting them as "the only political party advocating complete legalization of marijuana" back in 2010. The LP might support gun rights, free trade and federalism, but what motivates a lot of (capital-L) Libertarians to action is dope.
Some libertarians and Libertarians take utterly deranged "liberty" positions, including giving birth control to underage girls without parental consent, using the power of the state to subvert parental authority and cover up the crimes of sexual predators who prey on those underage girls. A significant percentage of teenage girls who get pregnant are impregnated by adult men.
This is why we have to draw a distinction between morally grounded libertarianism (especially the strong libertarian streak that still exists in the Republican Party) and immoral or deranged libertarianism. There is a difference between immoral libertarianism and the pro-liberty (even libertarian) positions that are grounded in limitations on government in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We should be careful to avoid conflating the clowns that are visible in the Libertarian Party with libertarianism. (And for the good of their party, sane Libertarians should take back their party from the clowns.)
So yes, we should advocate for libertarian policies like lower taxes, federalism, gun rights, lower spending, and devolving federal power to the states. We should continue the work of Ronald Reagan, the 1994 Republican Revolution, and the 2010 Tea Party movement. Small-L libertarianism is not about weed and porn. It is about getting government out of our lives at every level, and especially about resisting the effort to give ever-increasing authority to the leviathan federal government.
Is libertarianism only about weed and porn?
As President Reagan said, government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.
