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In 2016 the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, received more votes than any of the partys other candidates in history and the most of any third-party candidate since Ross Perot and arguably, the Libertarian Party has never recovered.

Much like the conservative movement, the libertarian movement has been divided between more normie libertarians who have embraced criminal justice reform and social freedoms (like immigration and the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people) and the harder-line libertarians who tend to lean more to the right on cultural issues.

In 2022 the hard-line Mises Caucus took control of the Libertarian Party, promising to gain more votes from disaffected Republicans and conservatives (and annoy a lot of people on the internet, including me). And in 2024 the Libertarian Party Convention featured appearances from people like Donald Trump.

But in a major surprise, the winner of the partys presidential nominating process was not the Mises Caucuss favorite but Chase Oliver, a 38-year-old gay antiwar activist who had left the Democratic Party. I spoke with Mr. Oliver about what libertarianism means to him today, how he plans to fight for independent votes this year and why the Libertarian Party failed 2020s libertarian moment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity and is part of an Opinion Q. and A. series exploring modern conservatism today, its influence in society and politics and how and why it differs (and doesnt) from the conservative movement that most Americans thought they knew.

Jane Coaston: What does libertarianism mean to you now?

Chase Oliver: Libertarianism to me has always meant the freedom for peaceful people to make their own decisions about their own lives without government interference. Ive always said that if youre living your life and not using force, fraud, coercion, theft or violence, your lifes your life, your bodys your body, your business is your business, and your property is your property; its not mine, and its not the governments.

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Opinion | What Chase Oliver, the 2024 Libertarian Candidate, Believes - The New York Times

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pages, $30

When the Clock Broke, by the progressive essayist John Ganz, is a solidly educational and entertaining work of political history. While Ganz winningly doesn't bash you over the head page by page with the larger point he's trying to make, the stories he chooses to tell about the early 1990s are meant to hit home how elements of American political, cultural, economic, and ideological life back then laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) movement today.

His title derives from an obscure 1992 speech by a figure most progressive readers have likely never heard of: the libertarian-movement founding father and gadfly Murray Rothbard, an economist who also explored political philosophy and history as he built a case for a totally stateless society.

Most libertarians' amour-propre might be wounded seeing their movement fingered as having meaningfully paved the way for Trumpism. But in May, the management of the Libertarian Party, dominated by a caucus that sees itself in the Rothbardian tradition, invited former President Donald Trump to speak at their presidential nominating convention, where he tried to make the case that their votes rightfully belonged to him. Whether or not it makes philosophical sense, there is something to Ganz's attempts to link anarcho-capitalist Rothbard with big-state caudillo Trump.

MAGA does at times seem to wear the mantle of smash-the-state anarchism in its rage against the modern progressive state, though Trump's regime managed a state pretty much as big and intrusive as its predecessors' (except for some tax and regulation reductions that were GOP orthodoxy long before Trump). And the Rothbardians' state-hatred can make any punctiliousness about the institutions of democracy and peaceful change of power that Trump threatened seem besides the point: If the state is pure rapine and murder, who can get too upset about whether or not power is exchanged politely?

Since most of this book about the tumult of the early 1990s has nothing to do with Rothbard or libertarianism, readers may wonder why they are hearing quite so much about things like what that eccentric economist in Las Vegas thought about Woody Allen's love life, or why his statement underlies the book's title. Ganz's choice here seems to imply that the clock-breaking Rothbard advocated actually happened.

What Rothbard called forin a talk to the John Randolph Club, a mixed gathering of libertarians and reactionarieswas to "break the clock" of "social democracyGreat Societywelfare stateand New Deal." That clock-breaking obviously did not happen. The best one can say for such a thesis is that Rothbard in the last few years of his lifeafter his "paleo" turn led him to reject most of the libertarian movement and ally himself instead with Pat Buchananstyle conservativesbegan dreaming of a Trumpian-styled right-populist champion on the horizon, one who would aggressively and with no politesse punch left-liberalism in the metaphorical nose. But When Obscure Agitators Who Wanted To Break the Clock Sounded Political Notes That Trump Later Magnified and Succeeded With isn't as catchy a title.

Rothbard and the paleos did accurately foresee something looming in American political culture that the libertarian comrades he left behind did not: that political success could be had by linking rhetorical anti-statism (about some things at least) with a gleefully rude appeal to white resentment.

More Trumpy than Rothbard were the other major characters in Ganz's narrative. Certainly, Buchanan's 1992 presidential campaign, detailed here at length, was a dry run for Trump, as were Buchanan's later books obsessed with defending the white European character of America by putting the brakes on immigrationthough Buchanan was more conventionally educated in politics and economics than Trump is.

Another obscure writer whose story Ganz tells, Samuel Francis, presaged Trump in an almost eerily on-the-nose manner. Francis' columns in The Washington Times and Chronicles advocated an American right that was more open to bully-boy violence and even terror, more obsessed with closed borders, more furious at cultural elites, and more willing to use the government as a nationalist tool to prop up a white working-class constituency, reverse progressive cultural change, and tame "woke" corporations (long before that term was in use, of course).

Underlying Ganz's story is a narrative also believed by his ideological enemies on the nationalist right: that Reagan-era deregulation, deindustrialization, tax cuts, loosening of trade restrictions, and union-busting annihilated any chance for America's former middle classes to thrive, drove them insane, and led them to Trump.

But most evidence indicates that Trump voters are driven more by cultural insecurities and resentments than by economic ones. Besides, Ganz's story of American economic life in its focus only on decline is misleading and overly pessimistic. His book gives the impression that from the early 1990s to Trump's rise, an unrelenting economic disaster settled over the American working man. In fact, from 1992 to 2016 per capita gross domestic product more than doubled, as did median personal income; the median hourly wage nearly doubled; and while the homeownership rate declined, it did so by less than 1 percent (and was by 2023 nearly 2 percent above the 1992 rate). In that quarter century, more of the middle class disappeared into upper classes than tumbled into eternal penury, with the percentage of Americans in the lower middle class or poor shrinking by around 8 percent and the percentage in the upper middle class or rich going up by around 10 percent.

This is not to deny that there were individual voters who fell on the bad end of economic change or had other reasons to feel aggrieved. But it does blunt the idea that economic devastation explains Trump.

The bulk of Ganz's book tells the early-1990s stories of Jesse Jackson, Rush Limbaugh, Ross Perot, Bill Clinton, Daryl Gates, Randy Weaver, and John Gotti, drawing more or less convincing or interesting parallels between their activities then and Trumpian modernity. The Jackson chapter, with its focus on Bill Clinton's "Sister Souljah" moment, reminds us that in a pre-woke age even a liberal Democrat could sound tough on racial politics in a way that reads as MAGA now. The Limbaugh chapter highlights one clear aspect of Trump's appeal, as the paladin defending middle Americans who feel disrespected and mocked by those who control their culture and government. (Trump, Ganz demonstrates, is a walking embodiment of early-'90s right-wing talk radio.) The Gates chapter reminds us that in an era of far more prevalent crime than the one Trump portrayed as "American carnage," worries about street crime didn't necessarily have a racial valence, as even many black citizens and leaders wanted tougher policing. (Not that this was the point Ganz was trying to make.)

The Perot chapter shows that many Americans (though not nearly an electoral majority) were already in the early 1990s hungry for a non-status-quo strongman and didn't care exactly how that would play out in policy terms. And the Gotti chapter, at the book's end, is intended to make the reader think of Trump as more organized crime figure than politician, wrapping up the narrative with a small frisson of fear about what might await America next year.

The 1990s are a fresh area for Ganz to make his writerly mark. But if you read Rick Perlstein's work on the American right in the 1970s (an obvious influence on Ganz in both style and intent, though Ganz can't quite pull off Perlstein's effortlessly delightful readability), you'll see there was nothing uniquely germinal in the '90s for the Trump movement. It was a longer time coming.

Racial and ethnic resentment, revolutionary activity on the part of a tiny margin (with a larger audience of fascinated admirers), a conservative America that feels mocked and disrespected by an elite class, fear of clandestine government agencies, worries about the working class losing economic ground: They were not new in the Trump era, nor did they begin in the '90s. They are persistent parts of the modern American experience.

While Ganz wants to blame free markets for destroying widespread American prosperity, as always, the path to consistently creating wealth (and eventually spreading it more evenly) lies in halting government practices that have slowed down wage growth and productivity, particularly barriers to practicing professions and creating businesses and building living spaces. As always, the most state-encrusted parts of the economy, such as health care and higher education, are the most sclerotic and expensive.

As Ganz makes clear, the fascist-adjacent philosophers that his villain Francis doted on, the likes of Georges Sorel and Vilfredo Pareto, tended to analyze all social issues and crises in terms of who has power and who they wield it against. This is the mindset that leads tribalists such as Francis to try to make the American right a more explicitly race-based operation, as well as one eager to use state power to crush its cultural enemies. In a multiracial, multiethnic republicsomething that America will continue to be no matter how many immigration restrictions the right tries to imposethat's bad for peace and prosperity.

Ganz launches his book with the political saga of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who became a Louisiana state legislator from 1989 to 1992, a story that hits home how much the author centers racial conflict in the modern American story. Trump is certainly more circumspect on race issues than Duke. But to the extent that he and his epigones make politics more race-conscious, the worse things will get for America. The same goes for race-conscious Democrats.

Despite Rothbard's embrace of right-wing populism in his declining years, the libertarian project he did so much to further for most of his careerthe project of limiting and decentralizing power rather than frantically striving to use it against your perceived enemiesis all the more vital for civic peace and prosperity in the Trump and post-Trump eras.

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It Didn't Start With Trump...or Libertarians - Reason

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In practical policy terms, that means small government, low taxes, free enterprise and school choice, among other positions associated with the political right. It also means robust civil liberties, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the repeal of bans on drugs and prostitution, and the rejection of censorship, among stances traditionally taken by the left.

There are only a few rules: You cant hit other people and you cant take their stuff, Mr. Boaz once quipped to The Washington Post. After that, you have to make the important decisions for yourself.

Mr. Boaz said he was drawn to libertarianism during his adolescence in western Kentucky, where he acquired a twang that never fully left him. His mother had studied economics and kept on her bookshelf a copy of Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, a best-selling 1946 volume that articulated in laymans terms the case for an unfettered free market.

The young Mr. Boaz also consumed works such as the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, a cult classic among libertarians, and The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) by US Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican who lost the 1964 presidential election in a landslide but invigorated the conservative movement.

(In his office at the Cato Institute, Mr. Boaz kept a Goldwater poster and two busts of Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher associated with laissez-faire capitalism.)

By the end of his life, Mr. Boaz was one of the writers to whom people of his persuasion turned for their political moorings. He was the author of books including The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom (2015) and The Politics of Freedom (2008) and edited the volume The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-tzu to Milton Friedman (1997).

Mr. Boaz helped shape the course of libertarian thought from his longtime intellectual home at the Cato Institute, which he joined in 1981.

He quickly scaled the leadership ranks and was widely described as one of the key leaders who helped grow Cato from a scrappy operation into a significant presence in the Washington policy world.

Mr. Boaz contributed prolifically to newspapers including the Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He drew wide notice with a 1988 commentary published in the Times in which he argued against the criminal laws, immigration regulations, and other policies enforced under the umbrella of what was often described as the war on drugs.

An antiwar song that helped get the Smothers Brothers thrown off network television in the 60s went this way: Were waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on, Mr. Boaz wrote in the op-ed. Today were waist-deep in another unwinnable war, and many political leaders want to push on. This time its a war on drugs.

In his personal life, said Tom G. Palmer, a longtime friend and colleague at Cato, Mr. Boaz was a teetotaler. He drank no alcohol, smoked no cigarettes, used no pot. His only vice, Palmer said, was Coca-Cola, which he preferred so strongly that he avoided restaurants that offered Pepsi products.

But Mr. Boaz saw anti-drug laws as a violation of civil liberties and the right to privacy. He compared them to Prohibition, which officially banned but failed to actually stop the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933. He argued that alcohol and tobacco both legal accounted for many more deaths per year than illegal drugs did.

For libertarians, the growing contemporary movement toward the legalization of marijuana represented a significant victory; the drug is now legal for medicinal purposes in 38 states and the District and for recreational purposes in 24 states and the District.

Mr. Boaz counted another victory in the expansion of rights for same-sex couples most notably the US Supreme Court decision in 2015 finding a constitutional right for gay couples to marry, a cause that he had worked toward for decades.

But mainstream American politics, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, remained, in his view, woefully distant from foundational notions of liberty.

He criticized Democrats for seeking to raise taxes and Republicans for attempting to censor books and television. Liberals who oppose school vouchers, as he interpreted their position, would deny parents the right to send their children to the schools of their choice, while conservatives opposed to gay rights would constrain an individuals right to marry and build a family.

He conceded that the Libertarian Party was not a very successful political party but posited that most Americans support at least some libertarian ideals.

Millions and millions of Americans, if you ask them, What do you think about drug laws; what do you think about Social Security; what do you think about taxes? theyre going to come out in a libertarian direction, he said. But theyre not going to call themselves libertarians, because libertarianism really is the basic theme of America.

David Douglas Boaz was born in Mayfield, Ky., near the Mississippi River, on Aug. 29, 1953. His mother was a homemaker. Mr. Boaz described his father, a circuit court judge, to the Washington Examiner as a Jeffersonian conservative Democrat. Reflecting on his own political evolution, Mr. Boaz said that he was a conservative before he was a libertarian.

Mr. Boaz enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he received a bachelors degree in history in 1975. He landed one of his first jobs with the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth organization, before working as a campaign staffer for Ed Clark, a libertarian who unsuccessfully ran for California governor in 1978 and for US president in 1980.

Besides Miller, of Arlington, Mr. Boazs survivors include a brother and a sister.

Mr. Boaz did not join the Libertarian Party, telling NPR in 2002 that he preferred to think of himself as an independent.

He found stark flaws in the Democratic Party platform and during the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Democrat Hillary Clinton lost to Republican Donald Trump, remarked that among libertarians, the view was that if someone puts a gun to your head and says you have to choose between Clinton and Trump, the correct answer is, take the bullet.

But in that election, Mr. Boaz also condemned Trump for making racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign and for vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat.

Mr. Boaz expressed deep distress about Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election, in which he lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden, and opposed the appearance of Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, at the Libertarian Partys 2024 national convention in May.

I have friends who say Biden is the biggest spender ever and hes regulating and hes woke and how can anyone consider voting for him over Trump? Mr. Boaz told CNN in April.

And Ill say that one reason is that Biden has not tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Thats a very fundamental issue. You can add up all these [other] issues and weigh them. But the big freedom issue that Biden has over Trump, he continued, is that Trump tried to steal an election.

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David Boaz, leading voice of libertarianism, dies at 70 - The Boston Globe

David Boaz, an apostle of reasonable, radical libertarianism who argued that Americans are entitled to pursue life, liberty and happiness without government meddling in their bedrooms or boardrooms or with their cannabis, died on Friday at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 70.

The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, his longtime partner, Steve Miller, said.

Mr. Boaz encapsulated libertarianism, the philosophy that prioritizes individual freedom over government overreach, with characteristic perspicuity:

You learn the essence of libertarianism in kindergarten, he wrote in Libertarianism: A Primer, a 1997 book that was updated and rereleased in 2015 as The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom. Dont hit other people, dont take their stuff, and keep your promises.

As executive vice president of the Cato Institute, the Washington-based libertarian think tank, since 1989, Mr. Boaz was a frequent contributor to the libertarian magazine, Reason. He also wrote opinion essays for The New York Times and other publications, advancing a philosophy that had been embraced for centuries by thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, but whose practical application posed challenges to some potential disciples.

Summing up his holistic view of individual liberty, Mr. Boaz told The Times in 1984, I dont think its any of the governments business to protect people from themselves, whether its seatbelts, cyclamates or marijuana.

Nor, he argued, did it make any sense to deny gay people legal equality. Government benefits, for example, should not be withheld from same-sex partners in stable relationships, he said, when children of single-parent families or of unmarried heterosexual partners were receiving that support. Mr. Boaz was openly gay and a founding member of the Independent Gay Forum, a website that aggregated articles by gay conservative economists in the mid-1990s.

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David Boaz, a Leading Voice of Libertarianism, Dies at 70 - The New York Times

Attendees of the Libertarian Party National Convention at the end of May selected Georgia resident Chase Oliver to be the partys 2024 presidential nominee. Oliver, 38, was the last nominee standing at a hectic (and at times turbulent) Libertarian National Convention held over the weekend of May 24-26. His win at the convention was anything but expected.

Oliver was born in Nashville, Tennessee and now lives just outside of Atlanta, in Snellville, Georgia. The nominee for President recently spoke with Connect Savannah about his campaign, his background, his answer to a popular sentiment of third-party voting being a waste, and what Georgia voters have at stake come Election Day on November 5.

A third-party candidates chances are never great in the current two-party system, but irritated voters searching for options other than the polarizing frontrunnersformer President Donald Trump (Republican) and incumbent President Joe Biden (Democrat)should turn to Oliver, he says.

I don't believe we're taking votes away from anyone. Nobodys vote is owned by anyone except for the individual voter. They should pick for themselves, but it's up to them to make that determination. Itll be up to the voters; who do they believe best aligns with their individual values? There is a route for voters in November to turn the tables on the two-party system.

The countrys third largest political party gets its nominee through a series of voting rounds for delegates at the national convention. After each round, candidates are eliminated from the bottom of the ballot. Oliver was never a frontrunner; he was not the leading vote-getter following any of the first five voting rounds. Following the sixth round of voting, Oliver (49.5 percent) took a lead over Michael Rectenwald (44.8 percent) with five percent of the delegates casting votes for NOTA (None of the Above). Mike Ter Maat is his running mate as Vice President.

[CHASE OLIVER FOR PRESIDENT]

We have to hit a certain threshold for this race, because if we do not, we lose our statewide ballot access as a party, he said. So I urge every libertarian, even if you disagree with me on an issue or two, this is the time for us to unite together to preserve the ballot in Georgia. It's vitally important that you have your voice and your vote heard. And it is dependent upon you to make that happen this November.

[JOE DEHN]

Oliver with media at the Libertarian National Convention

The weekend received national attention, thanks in part to speeches made by Trump and Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The latter seems to be Olivers biggest challenger for voters looking to stay away from either major party candidate. Oliver was asked about the difference between a vote cast for RFK Jr. and a vote cast for him.

Unlike with RFK Jr., who is a one time candidate, when you vote still within a party structure, it creates a foundation for growth and building that spreads over the years, but it also spreads down in government, Oliver says. So for elections that are not a presidential (race) in Georgia, or any other state, you would see growth there too.

There are many different metrics for victory. The greatest one, of course, being winning the election. But if we were to have a major breakout in votes of, say, 5 percent or 10 percent, we would naturally and foremost be taken a lot more seriously a lot sooner. We would see the levels of fundraising and activism go up almost instantly with a result such as (5 percent to 10 percent in 2024).

He began his political activism opposing the War in Iraq while former President George W. Bush was in office, but Olivers first time having a political impact on the national stage came in Georgias 2022 Senate race featuring Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker. Oliver was a third option that November, and he received more than 80,000 votes (a little over 2 percent) by the time it was over.

Its an example, Oliver says, of people making an impact with their vote. He says a stigma exists around third-party voting, with many people feeling pressured to pick a side. Oliver adamantly disputes the wasted vote argument for third party candidates. If Oliver receives say 5 to 10 percent of the vote this November, it will impact the presidential elections four and eight years from now. He refers back to the 2016 election when Gary Johnson was the Libertarian candidate.

He also cites his being left off the stage for the upcoming Trump versus Biden debate on June 27. Its being hosted by CNN in Atlanta, Olivers de facto hometown. Still, Oliver was not invited, and that might be due to results of the past.

Let's say Gary Johnson got 10 percent of the vote in 2016, he said. I have no doubt that at this point we would already be automatically invited to the 2024 debate. I think if we had already had that breakout eight years ago, then of course we would be in a much greater place than we are now. That's why I'm wanting to build that breakout now. So in eight years, we have a real possibility of having gold congresspeople and senators and governors and state legislators that have large libertarian contingents already residing within them.

During the 2020 election featuring Trump and Biden, Oliver was asked who he would support, gun to his head. He responded that the gun would go off.

The platform reflects his partys stances, for the most part.

He is emphasizing immigration and criminal justice reforms as a self-described pro-gun, pro-police reform, pro-choice Libertarian who is armed and gay. A gun owner who is openly homosexual, Oliver doesnt shy away from being a gun advocate. But he is also passionate in his unwavering anti-war stance. There are aspects which could alienate certain segments of voters. Its something he acknowledges when pushed.

That is probably a conversation that's happening in living rooms, barrooms, or on Facebook and Twitter and really, its all across America right now. When someone thinks about stepping outside of the box, a certain segment of the population feels the need to nudge them back, you know, its better to step back inside that box because you're stupid otherwise. I think that's really wrong, even morally wrong, to a degree.

Its a campaign that will be run on an uneven playing field, at least in terms of funding. It wont be a new concept for Oliver, however. He refers back to the Walker versus Warnock race and the numbers from that election cycle. Specifically, Oliver cited a cost-per-vote metric which uses the amount of money raised by a candidate to compare it to the number of votes received.

Herschel and Senator Warnock were spending about $20 to $25 per vote in that election. They will happily pay you that for a vote, because of how they earn. It cost their campaigns and related organizations to get those votes and they are glad to pay for them, said Oliver. I earned 81,000 votes and spent $20,000 ... It was less than 25 cents per vote. Look, we were massively outspent, but when you look at what we did dollar-for-dollar, we got our voters out and at a much lower cost per vote.

We recognize we're going to be out funded again by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. We have a fundraising goal that is somewhere between that $5 million to $9 million and they're going to probably spend $1 billion. So there's still a huge disparity there. We're going to have to be lean and mean in the way that we get our messaging out. We will continue punching above our weight.

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INTERVIEW: 1-on-1 with Chase Oliver, 2024 Libertarian presidential nominee and a Georgia resident - Connect Savannah.com