What The Election Means For Libertarians

By Jeff Deist

This recent election isn't really about Trump, and what he's going to do, or who he's going to appoint. I think it's more about the voters themselves. The fact that so many millions of Americans went off the reservation, went off the script, voted for a guy they're not supposed to vote for, and challenged the whole idea of Hillary's inevitability, progressive inevitability and globalist inevitability. It's a great thing for libertarians, and we ought to view it as that.

People are clearly looking for something different. Trump represents a protest vote. Libertarians represent a protest movement, an anti-state movement, and we should embrace Trump voters rather than pushing them away. The silver lining here is that millions of disaffected voters want something different.

​Clearly the importance of the mainstream media is waning. The digital revolution has been a huge leveler. It used to be that bricks and mortar publishers like the New York Times had the final say. But now we have websites where everyone can be a publisher and have their own platform. In effect, everyone is their own media today. Everyone has a camera, and everyone has a phone, and many have a Twitter feed where they're out their reporting the news.

I'm noticing that news events appear faster in my Twitter feed than they do on The Drudge Report. And as we know, Drudge's stories appear faster than they do on CNN, ABC, CBS, etc.

The mainstream media is being left behind, and they should be left behind. They've been adverse to our interests for decades. They have their own agenda and they've been promoting a very anti-libertarian society.

We know from both theory and history that liberty works. It works better than any other system ever devised. In fact, it's not a system. It's the absence of a system. So what we desire is the de-politicizing of society. We desire a world where the great economic, social and cultural questions of the day are less decided by a central government. These issues are instead decided by individuals and markets in civil society. 

Libertarianism is an ideology for everyone, regardless of one's religion. It's for soccer moms, churches, neighborhoods and schools. It's not something where you have to agree with other people's lifestyle. Disagreements are just solved peacefully and voluntarily, rather than by the violence of politics.

I think we have to stay strong and we have to know that in the long run, however imperceptibly, things are moving our way because I think liberty is the natural state for humans.