The Libertarian Civil War Nobody Wants to Talk About
Richard Hanania has produced one of those uncomfortable diagnoses that gets filed under "true but impolite" — a dissection of libertarianism's two incompatible souls, and why the movement keeps producing both Hayek scholars and conspiracy influencers under the same banner. The piece lands at a moment when the old coalition between classical liberals and right-wing populists is visibly fracturing, and the fault lines run straight through the philosophy's core.
Two Tribes, One Label
Hanania draws a sharp boundary between the libertarians who populate economics departments and think tanks, and those who command large online followings with culture-war content. The contrast he paints is stark. "Libertarianism attracts a lot of individuals inclined toward grifting, conspiratorial thinking, bigotry, and authoritarianism," he writes, pointing to the Mises Caucus — a faction with over 150,000 followers that routinely circulates election-fraud claims and culture-war grievances rather than arguments about price signals or regulatory capture.
On the other side sit the libertarians at the Cato Institute and academic economics programs — figures who tend to be more socially liberal, skeptical of foreign dictatorships, and opposed to conspiracy thinking. Hanania notes that elite libertarians resist what they see as statist projects wrapped in progressive language but are "less horrified by tolerance as a cultural phenomenon." The populist wing, by contrast, frequently ends up defending authoritarian measures that directly contradict any individualist philosophy.
Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in the Freedom Caucus, which campaigns on cutting spending while simultaneously demanding expanded funding for immigration enforcement and immunity from legal oversight for federal agents. Hanania argues that there is "no consistent through line that in ideological terms unites small government, anti-immigration, and lying about a stolen election." The members who refused to go along with efforts to overturn the 2020 election results became pariahs within their own ranks. Justin Amash, a founding member who resigned after concluding that the president had committed impeachable offenses, serves as what Hanania calls "a classic case of an exception proving the rule."
The Vice-Signalling Mechanism
Hanania's central explanatory claim is provocative and deserves scrutiny. Most people, he argues, do not understand economics. They hear that capitalism concentrates wealth and exploit the vulnerable, and they reject it. But a certain type of person — one who wants to project toughness, who wants to signal freedom from what he calls "pathological altruism" — hears the same criticism and thinks "that sounds great, sign me up."
The intellectual who is into libertarian ideas understands the arguments of Hayek and Friedman, and perhaps looks at empirical data showing that the US has been growing faster than Europe over the last several decades, which can in part be attributed to freer markets. The Tennessee congressman who riles up his high school educated constituents by talking about how we need to hang some pedophiles gets to many of the same positions because he sees small government as a way to express disdain for poor minorities.
The mechanism Hanania describes is not ideology but emotional identification. Two people arrive at the same policy positions for entirely different reasons — one through empirical reasoning, the other through a desire to appear hard-edged and unsentimental. And because the second group vastly outnumbers the first, any libertarian movement that fails to gatekeep will inevitably be captured by it.
Critics might note that Hanania's "vice signalling" framework is itself a form of intellectual condescension — it presumes to know the hidden motives of people he disagrees with while positioning his own camp as uniquely rational. There is also the question of whether the elite libertarians he champions have any actual political constituency at all, or whether they are simply describing their own irrelevance in flattering terms.
The Broken Bargain
For roughly three generations, Hanania argues, libertarians made a practical calculation: align with the conservative coalition, accept culture-war mobilization as the price of admission, and benefit from Republican governance that — despite the rhetoric — tended toward pro-market outcomes. "Running on chuddery but governing in a generally pro-market direction was a balance that the Republican Party was able to pull off" from the Reagan era through the early years of the current decade.
That equilibrium has collapsed. The current administration has little to offer classical liberals. Post-liberal intellectuals — who advocate statist positions on trade, immigration, and labor — now hold real influence. The old deal was always unstable: use populist anger to win power, then govern in ways that mostly ignore it. But technological disruption and the democratization of political discourse have blown the lid off that arrangement. The populist base now expects the governing coalition to deliver on its cultural grievances, not just its economic ones.
Hanania's verdict: "there's no turning back to the old bargain."
Where Libertarians Go From Here
The strategic conclusion Hanania reaches is one that will frustrate both sides. Libertarians, he argues, need to win over "intellectual elites and those who care about ideas." The problem is that "those people are now almost exclusively found on the left."
It is a remarkable concession from a writer operating in conservative-libertarian circles. Three generations of alliance-building, and the recommendation is essentially to start over on the other side of the political spectrum. Whether the left's intellectual elites — many of whom view free-market ideas as the root cause of structural inequality — are receptive to that overture is another question entirely.
Critics might also point out that Hanania's analysis treats libertarianism as a monolith in need of purification, when the tension between individualist principles and coalition politics is not a bug but a feature of any movement operating in a democracy. The question of whether a philosophy so skeptical of collective decision-making can ever build mass appeal without compromising itself is not one that Hanania resolves — and perhaps cannot be.
Bottom Line
Hanania's diagnosis is sharper than his prescription. He correctly identifies that the populist capture of libertarianism is not an accident but an almost mechanical outcome of how movements scale. But suggesting that libertarians should pivot toward left-wing intellectual elites assumes those elites want to be persuaded — and that a philosophy defined by its suspicion of collective power can survive the compromises required to build any coalition at all.