Nevermind

But when Amash was originally elected to Congress in 2010, as a Republican, there was reason to think he might be part of a bigger trend. He might have been inspired in part by Ron Paul, but the Texas obstetrician-turned-small-‘l’-libertarian congressman (he got the Libertarian Party bug out of his system earlier, when a hard-fought battle to clinch the presidential nomination led to just 0.5% of the vote in the general election) was already well into his 70s at that time. Amash was only 30.

That’s not insignificant. Though part of the Tea Party wave that swept Republicans to power, Amash didn’t feel like the last gasp of the electoral coalition that supported Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He was revolting against another GOP president who was associated with “big government conservatism,” George W. Bush, but it was that Oval Office occupant who appeared to be the throwback. He represented a relatively moderate district, holding the House seat that once belonged to Gerald Ford. He won elections every two years, both to the state legislature and six terms in Congress, rather than simply mounting protest candidacies.

By 2014, pollster Emily Ekins had crunched numbers showing that the average millennial was further to the right on economic issues than on social ones. Republicans in this age group, especially, mixed fiscal conservatism with social liberalism. This to some extent expanded on work the Cato Institute’s David Boaz and David Kirby did on the “libertarian vote,” which they defined as “tending to agree with conservatives on economic issues and with liberals on personal freedom.” A 2015 Reuters survey found especially strong libertarian identification among voters aged 18 to 29. Paul had done best with younger voters in the 2008 and 2012 GOP primaries. His son Rand appeared poised to do the same in 2016.

Robert Draper, writing in the New York Times Magazine, memorably called it “the libertarian moment.” He opened with MTV VJ-turned-Fox Business personality Kennedy comparing the elder Paul to the 1990s grunge band Nirvana. “Like, the coolest, most amazing thing to come along in years, and the songs are nebulous but somehow meaningful, and the lead singer kills himself to preserve the band’s legacy,” she said. “Then Rand Paul — he’s Pearl Jam. Comes from the same place, the songs are really catchy, can really pack the stadiums, though it’s not quite Nirvana.” (She kept the analogy going — Ted Cruz was Stone Temple Pilots. Poor Mike Lee did not earn a comparison to Alice in Chains.)

Trump’s June 2015 ride down the escalator to declare his presidential candidacy was the day the music died. He revealed that Republican voters, even, perhaps especially, Tea Partiers, were looking for something else. Even Ron Paul’s inroads owed at least as much to older populists and paleoconservatives as young libertarians. Many of these voters pulled the lever not for Rand but for Cruz, who ran predominantly as a Christian Right candidate without the Trumpian hypocrisy, more Gatlin Brothers than Stone Temple Pilots, and also Trump.

By 2018, all the glossy magazines that had hyped the libertarian moment were burying it. Few eulogies were more skillful than Kevin Williamson’s in the Atlantic. Rand Paul might be more current than James Blaine, but he was a relic of a “postwar conservative era when Ronald Reagan could proclaim that ‘the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism,’ when National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. could publish a conspectus of his later work under the subtitle ‘Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist,’ and young blue-blazered Republicans of the Alex P. Keaton variety wore out their copies of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose.” (In fact, my government high school threatened to withhold my diploma if I did not return my copy of Free to Choose to the library before graduation.) “The GOP,” he concluded, “finds itself in the throes of a populist convulsion.”

Much of this rings true. Yet it still understates how difficult the Trump years have been for many of the young people, some now well over 30 but most still not as old as Amash, who were politically activated by the Ron Paul campaigns. They believed they had signed up for a revolution and that their peculiar combination of stringent constitutionalism and easygoing social tolerance was ascendant. In a few short years, something that in their minds represented the polar opposite of all this had triumphed, seemingly ratifying every stereotype of the Republican Party they had confidently assured their liberal friends was false, or at least outdated, with some of their old comrades in arms leading the charge. Like teenagers embarrassed by their parents’ politically incorrect jokes, they thought they had achieved independence, only to have to approach dad sheepishly for his credit card.

It’s almost as if another group of activist millennials went to bed after a long day of campaigning for Bernie Sanders and woke up the next morning to discover Jeff Bezos had purchased the Democratic Party in a hostile corporate takeover. In fact, the unbridled hostility many Sanders supporters felt toward McKinsey alumnus Pete Buttigieg and billionaire Michael Bloomberg stemmed from the fact that the Bernie Bros and their sisters understood that something in the ballpark of this counterrevolutionary outcome was a live possibility. Trump came out of nowhere, unless you count a listless CPAC speech here and a Mitt Romney endorsement there, and was the opposite of what the young liberty movement expected.

While there is no polling as of yet establishing that a large number of young Republicans even know what populism, national conservatism, or Catholic integralism is, much less identify with any of these labels or stand ready to usher in a Red Tory moment, there has been considerable pushback against libertarian ideas among prominent conservatives under 40 since Trump took office. “I believe that conservatives have outsourced our economic and domestic policy thinking to libertarians,” declared Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance, who later quipped on Twitter, “As everyone knows, the only way to beat China is a capital gains tax cut, a smaller deficit, and curbing eligibility for Medicare.” “Conservatism divorced from libertarianism should be ascendant in a moment like this, yet it isn’t,” complained pundit Saagar Enjeti, co-author with Krystal Ball of a book on populism in 2020, echoing a familiar complaint from conservatives that libertarianism has held outsize influence over Republican policymaking. “The age of libertarianism is over,” asserted commentator Ryan James Girdusky, co-author with Harlan Hill of another similar book. (A lot of libertarians would be pleased to learn they just had their own “age.”)

These conservative voices are following in the footsteps of Fox News host Tucker Carlson and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who have traveled from a more libertarian perspective a decade ago to something closer to populism and nationalism. Both delivered keynote speeches at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., last year. Neither are as simpatico with the Koch brothers as they once were, nor are they afraid to say so.

The caricature of libertarianism as simply a mix of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism probably hurt its appeal on the Right. Most of the liberty Republicans opposed abortion. Few of their elected officials were even particularly supportive of gay marriage. Amash was by most standards a social conservative. But he is out of step with new opinion leaders on the Right who speak of mandated family leave benefits and new bans on internet pornography.

In fact, Amash is the best known elected official aligned with those who find all of the above trends deeply disturbing. He is close to their ages and travels in their social circles. He has hired them as staffers and worked with them as campaign volunteers. Amash thinks the rise of nationalism moves American conservatism closer to the European variety, which he seldom hesitates to point out F. A. Hayek, of Road to Serfdom fame, decried in “Why I Am Not A Conservative.”

The now-40-year-old Republican-turned-independent-turned-Libertarian sees little positive about the Trump phenomenon, even if the president’s rhetoric on foreign policy or deregulation is occasionally useful. “Are we still droning people? Yeah,” Amash said in a 2018 interview with the Washington Post. “Are we still running covert operations that weren’t authorized by Congress? Yeah. Is the government still spying on Americans without warrants? Without due process? Yeah. When some libertarians talk about the great accomplishments we’re seeing on foreign policy, I don’t know what they’re talking about. Reaching out to these guys is one thing, but you have to move down the court. He actually made it harder for us to have a good relationship with Russia.”

To Amash’s allies, using Trumpian rhetoric about the deep state, “Obamagate,” or the non-football-related “Spygate” is duplicitous and vaguely dirty. Amash has promoted FISA reforms to rein in government surveillance of American citizens the whole time he has been in Congress, often painstakingly crafting bipartisan coalitions to do so and coming a few votes short of passage. He has hesitated to use Trump’s self-interested concerns about the flawed FISA warrants taken out on 2016 campaign aide Carter Page to promote these initiatives, noting the president has often sided with leaders in both parties in renewing the legislation responsible for such practices, though Trump is at this writing threatening to block reauthorization.

Amash supported Trump’s impeachment in response to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report. Some libertarian-leaning Trump allies thought this was counterproductive on the FISA front, given that inquiry’s reliance on what Attorney General William Barr has acknowledged can accurately be described as “spying.” House Democrats did not ultimately try to impeach Trump over Mueller’s findings, only acting after the whistleblower report concerning Ukraine.

Rand Paul’s tactics have been different. While Amash rejects tribalism, Paul thinks the best approach is to try to install the right leader of the tribe. Paul has cultivated a close relationship with Trump to counteract the influence of Lindsey Graham and other intraparty foes. But Paul represents Kentucky in the Senate, not Jerry Ford country. He has experience making these kinds of compromises. To win his Senate seat in 2010, the same year Amash was elected to the House, Paul had to persuade James Dobson, Sarah Palin, and Erick Erickson to endorse him. Amash’s short-lived Libertarian candidacy was based on the supposition that presidential politics is unlike the Hatfields and McCoys. He was seemingly surprised when his old friends in the Tea Party and his new ones in the resistance or Never Trump movements were fixated not on principles but on which major-party candidate he would end up inadvertently helping if he ran third party.

Paul remains in the Senate. His fellow traveler, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, appears to have survived a close call after crossing Trump on the initial coronavirus economic rescue package and seems likely to stay in the House. Amash is leaving, having already departed the GOP in 2019 to become an independent and then joined a small third party that wins few elections. “Amash supporters in his congressional district were basically Republicans, and few, if any, will actually follow him to another party,” said former Michigan Republican Party Saul Anuzis.

What emboldens Amash admirers and gives them confidence their course is the right one is the fact that Paul doesn’t yet have a major policy breakthrough to show for his Trump overtures, unless a FISA overhaul or Afghanistan withdrawal is in the works (near misses in Iran don’t seem to count). Trump’s party is not theirs. The revolutionaries have left the ideological battlefield for the homefront, at least until the next big-spending Democratic president beckons.

W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner’s politics editor.