May 9, 2024 - 8:00pm
In 2016, a number of prominent US conservatives gathered to formally debate whether the much-vaunted “libertarian moment” was merely a mirage. Nearly a decade later, the American Right’s libertarian contingent has seemingly been dealt its final blow.
FreedomWorks, the once-influential libertarian-leaning conservative organisation, shut down operations on Wednesday following a precipitous decline in revenue and years of internal strife over Donald Trump. The small-government ethos that defined FreedomWorks — and much of the GOP establishment — fell out of fashion as Trump and Republican voters embraced economic protectionism and more restrictive immigration policies.
The group’s president told Politico that a “huge gap” had grown between the organisation’s leadership and its members — a conflict emblematic of the conservative establishment’s struggle with the GOP’s populist drift since 2015.
Libertarian ideology at one point had strong institutional power and financial backing on the Right, with corporations having an obvious financial interest in promoting deregulation, free-market economics and low taxes.
The Tea Party movement, which grew to prominence under the Barack Obama administration, emphasised fiscal conservatism and limited government. The grassroots movement featured protests against government mismanagement attracting large crowds of ordinary voters, but it also enjoyed backing from libertarian-leaning think tanks and activist groups funded by corporate interests.
The ties between the economic libertarians of the Right and the corporate world didn’t end with the collapse of the Tea Party. Both Facebook and Google made sizeable contributions to conservative bulwarks such as the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and State Policy Network in the late 2010s.
The Heritage Foundation, in particular, was an odd partner for these corporations, given its public feuds with Big Tech. The group acknowledged as much in 2019, when it rejected gifts from Google and Facebook in the first sign of a major shift that would unfold over the coming years. Since 2021, Heritage has taken on a new president and adopted a strain of conservatism that’s more open to the use of government power to advance its goals. And as FreedomWorks declined in recent years, populist conservative organisations such as American Moment and the Conservative Partnership Institute have grown more influential.
Americans tend to become more libertarian under Democratic presidents, according to Gallup’s annual polling. The belief that the government does too much peaked at 61% late in the late Obama years, and declined throughout Trump’s term, reaching an all-time low of 41% in the summer of 2020. At 54%, libertarian sentiment is now back in a normal range, and Republicans remain substantially more likely than Democrats to believe the federal government has too much power.
But this polling doesn’t capture the Right’s changing attitudes on individual policy issues. The Right has reversed course on the issues on which it was increasingly libertarian in the mid 2010s —most notably, immigration and economics. Republican support for free trade, for instance, fell from a strong historical majority which at times approached 80% to an all-time low of 44% in 2021.
The Republicans and the average GOP voter have both undergone a transformation over the past decade as working-class Americans, who have been most affected by the downstream effects of free trade and immigration, increasingly flock to the party. With the collapse of FreedomWorks, it appears that beltway institutions are finally catching up to these trends.
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