It was only a little more than a decade ago that Mark Zuckerberg had few qualms about airing his politics.
Earnest and optimistic — perhaps naïvely so — he rushed onto the national stage to discuss issues he cared about: immigration, social justice, inequality, democracy in action. He penned columns in national newspapers espousing his views, spun up foundations and philanthropic efforts and hired hundreds of people to put his vast riches to work on his political goals.
That was Mark Zuckerberg in his 20s. Mark Zuckerberg in his 40s is a very different Mark Zuckerberg.
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As recently as June at the Allen and Company conference — the “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho — Mr. Zuckerberg complained to multiple people about the blowback to Meta that came from the more politically touchy aspects of his philanthropic efforts. And he regretted hiring employees at his philanthropy who tried to push him further to the left on some causes.
In short — he was over it.
His preference, according to more than a dozen friends, advisers and executives familiar with his thinking, has been to wash his hands of it all.
In public, that means Mr. Zuckerberg is declining to engage with Washington except when necessary. In private, he has stopped supporting programs at his philanthropy that could be perceived as partisan, and he has tamped down employee activism at Meta, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so or did not want to jeopardize their relationships with Mr. Zuckerberg.
He has also spoken to former President Donald J. Trump in one-on-one telephone calls twice over the summer, these people said, a move that some have characterized as an attempt to repair a long-strained relationship between the two men.
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Privately, Mr. Zuckerberg now considers his personal politics to be more like libertarianism or “classical liberalism,” according to people who have spoken to him recently. That includes a hostility to regulation that restricts business, an embrace of free markets and globalism and an openness to social-justice reforms — but only if it stops short of what he considers far-left progressivism.
Across the tech sphere, self-described libertarians are abetting Trump’s rise to power. Elon Musk praised the victory of Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, saying “prosperity is ahead for Argentina”. He now promises to do the same for the United States, and has been selected as a co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, or “D.O.G.E.” for short. Marc Andreessen, a prominent Silicon Valley investor and Trump backer, authored a 5000 word manifesto in which he “denounc[ed] progress-impeding forces like “social responsibility” and “tech ethics.” Jeff Bezos, long described as a libertarian, quashed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris after leaders at his space company, Blue Origin, met with Donald Trump shortly before the election. And Peter Thiel, arguably the father of tech libertarianism, now has a former employee and close ally, J.D. Vance, as the future Vice President. Musk’s rise to Trump’s right hand man promises to bring yet more tech libertarians into his administration, including David Sacks and other hangers-on.
It isn’t just traditional tech. Cryptocurrency libertarians (including Andreessen, a large investor in crypto startups) strongly backed Trump over Harris. One crypto mining company, Marathon Digital, met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, “to discuss lower taxes and even whether the US government should start buying bitcoin”. Trump’s positions on bitcoin have flipped diametrically from just a few years ago, when he claimed that bitcoin “just seems like a scam”.
Trump, unlike Harris, spoke at the Libertarian National Convention, where he was greeted with a mix of boos and cheers. One of the loudest was for his pledge to free Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road, a dark web drug marketplace. (Ulbricht was arrested in 2013 for facilitating trafficking of illegal drugs and sentenced to life without parole.) After the election, Ulbricht tweeted, “Immense gratitude to everyone who voted for President Trump on my behalf. I trust him to honor his pledge and give me a second chance. After 11+ years in darkness, I can finally see the light of freedom at the end of the tunnel. Thank you so much, @realDonaldTrump”. Other applause-worthy moments included his promise to install a libertarian in a cabinet position (does Elon count?) and “rail[ing] against government bureaucracy and regulation”.
Although much was made of the boos, the cheers were arguably more significant. The convention was deeply divided. Many Trump supporters showed up, sporting MAGA hats. Even some of the libertarians viewed Trump as an ally. The party chair, Angela McArdle, explained
“I haven't endorsed Donald Trump, but he has endorsed us,” McArdle said in a video posted shortly after the convention. “Donald Trump said he's going to put a libertarian in a cabinet position. He came out and spoke to us. He said he's a libertarian. He has basically endorsed us, and so in return, I endorse Chase Oliver [the Libertarian Party candidate] as the best way to beat Joe Biden. Get in loser, we are stopping Biden.”
Since then, McArdle and other Libertarians have been more explicit about their once-tacit hope for a second Trump term. In an episode of the Decentralized Revolution podcast published in late October, she celebrated Oliver for siphoning votes from Democrats specifically.
“I think he's done a fantastic job of helping Donald Trump get elected, it couldn’t have been better.” she said.
During the same podcast, she said she was in talks with Trump and his team before, during and after the convention, and gave him notes on how to appeal to the libertarian electorate.
And the New Hampshire Libertarian Party, self-described as “the most libertarian party in the most libertarian state”, also backed Trump, believing him to be the best chance to secure “a Free New Hampshire”. (Although it’s perhaps worth noting that this same party is truly insane: “In 2024, LPNH wrote on X that "Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero." LPNH later deleted its tweet as it violated X's rules, while complaining about restricted speech: "Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority.")
When Trump was booed at the Libertarian convention, he shot back, “Only do that if you want to win. If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your three percent every four years.”
In fact, the Libertarian Party’s performance reverted to its historical level of ~0.5% (not 3%) this cycle, after recent upticks in 2012 (1%), 2016 (3.3%) and 2020 (1.2%). It finished with a paltry 0.4% of the vote, finishing 5th behind the Green Party (Jill Stein) and RFK Jr. Whether this is a sign of strength — that the Republican Party has adopted libertarian principles, rendering the party itself superfluous — or a sign of weakness — that the Republican Party has won without compromising much to the libertarians — is the focus of this essay.
One sign that the libertarian moment is not as libertarian as it seems is that the “principled” libertarians — writers, journalists, think tankers, academics, and so on — largely viewed Trump’s candidacy with horror (although usually not horrifying enough to support his Democratic opponent).
For example, Reason Magazine asked its staffers to submit their presidential vote, a tradition they started in 2004. This year, they reported that
This survey yields a high percentage of Libertarian Party (L.P.) voters and nonvoters, and that remains true in 2024. This year we have 12 Chase Oliver voters (many of whom have horribly mean things to say about the L.P.), six nonvoters, three Kamala Harris voters (many of whom have horribly mean things to say about Harris), one Nikki Haley write-in, one Kennedy write-in (the Fox News host, not RFK Jr.), and two undecideds (one 50/50 Trump/Oliver and one 50/50 Trump/nobody). In general, the tone of the forum is bleak and discouraged, in keeping with the mood of the American public.
And the president of the Cato Institute, the most prominent libertarian think tank in the U.S., complained in a Washington Post Op-Ed that "Trump is hardly libertarian. But neither is today’s Libertarian Party.” He argued that Trump’s opposition to a “peaceful transfer of power and constitutional order” make him the ultimate example of an authoritarian, not a classical liberal.
So what should we make of this alliance between libertarianism and Republicanism, one that seems to have benefitted one party disproportionately?
Much of this is obvious, but it’s worth saying anyway. Donald Trump is about as far away from libertarianism as a Republican can be. He believes in tariffs, not free trade. (The putative justification for these tariffs is to tamp down on fentanyl, the same sort of drug trade Ross Ulbricht was imprisoned for facilitating.) His 2024 campaign was virulently anti-trans, and his Supreme Court picks are responsible for destroying the right to abortion. He wants to build out a federal mass deportation force, and use the military on American soil. In his first term, he sought he to fire missiles at Mexico, and in his second, he is sure to widen our wars overseas. He doesn’t believe in the Constitution, and views himself as a king. He supports government intervention in the market when it works in his favor politically (such as his promise to use taxpayer money to fund a Bitcoin national reserve). His policies will explode the national debt. He’s never met a contract he didn’t intend to break, if convenient to him. And he’s promised to crack down on ideological enemies and shutter newspapers that oppose him.
The Republican Party once embraced at least some of the opposite principles, particularly on free trade. Ronald Bailey, a Reason staffer mentioned in the piece I quoted above, lamented his 2012 vote for Gary Johnson, saying “Our country would have been in a much better place socially and economically had Mitt Romney won in 2012”. One could plausibly say Mitt Romney had some libertarian tendencies. I’m not sure what Donald Trump’s are, besides wanting to dismantle the welfare and regulatory state.
Why has the Republican Party become less libertarian but acquired more of their vote? (Actually, one could ask this about many such voting blocs: why has the Republican Party become more racist but also more multi-ethnic? Or more anti-working class but also now the party of the working class?) There are a few answers.
The first is that libertarian billionaire is somewhat of a contradiction in terms, and these oligarchs are not truly libertarian at all. I’m not even sure they are able to process politics outside of their own parochial interests. Marc Andreessen reportedly turned on Biden when he floated a billionaire’s tax. Elon Musk defected from “half-Democrat, half-Republican” politics after the Covid lockdowns harmed his business. (It’s also tough to reconcile his libertarianism with the fact that one of his most valuable companies, SpaceX, receives much of its revenue from the U.S. government.) Bezos, Andreessen, Musk, and others all have business interests that would benefit from more government funding, or at least not enforcing securities, safety, health, environmental, antitrust, and other laws. Matt Levine of Bloomberg called Elon Musk “the great legal realist of our time, a guy who is unusually strong-willed and clever about seeing rules he doesn’t like and saying “well what can they really do about it?”” (In that way, he’s much like Trump). But what exactly does libertarianism mean without respect for rules or contracts? It is simply brute power and corruption — and, trust me, there will be plenty of that over the next 4 years.
At the other end, it is not surprising why many non-millionaire libertarians are abandoning libertarianism for Trump. The Libertarian Party’s appeal is that it is an alternative to two staid boring establishment alternatives. But now we have a Republican Party that appears to no longer be staid or establishment.
Libertarianism simply isn’t that exciting. There are no villains and heroes, no love and hate, no will to power, just the dull and monotonous enforcement of rules and contracts. Hardly anyone is thrilled by the invisible hand of the market, or cares to stand up for the right to abortion in the abstract. Politics requires some level of emotion and narrative and meaning, and Trump promises to imbue it with that. There is a striking set of quotes about Chase Oliver in the article I previously quoted about libertarians abandoning their own party for Trump:
“Oliver has consistent libertarian beliefs, but significant portions of the party have taken a rightward shift on some issues.
For example, Oliver supports allowing minors, their parents and their doctors to make medical decisions about non-surgical gender-transition treatments such as using puberty blockers and hormone therapy.”
“Much of the general opposition to Oliver is more based on personality and identity than policy, Doherty said. Oliver doesn’t have the offensive, edgy disposition that many in the party have come to embrace.”
““If you scour around the X site, you'll definitely find a lot of people who just seem to be mad at him because he’s gay,”
For the young men that form the core of the libertarian party’s base, libertarianism is no longer edgy enough. They want to call gay people slurs. They want to attack trans people. They want to tell women “your body, my choice”. They want to be offensive and transgressive. They want to own libs. Who better than Trump to make that happen?
