You’re Probably Not Actually a Libertarian

Most college students claiming to be libertarians are actually just traditional conservatives misidentifying themselves. It’s because universities still take libertarian arguments seriously.

It is becoming all but conventional wisdom that libertarianism is the philosophy in vogue for many college-aged students and young professionals. Labeling oneself as libertarian has become almost as prevalent for this demographic as calling oneself “spiritual but not religious.” One 2015 survey concluded that 1 in 5 “millennials” would describe themselves as libertarian. Time will tell whether these young people shed this identity and become less individualistic as they grow older. However, in the meantime, one wonders if this trend is more the consequence of libertarianism’s style of argument fitting in the current academic climate rather than a product of genuine belief in the ideology’s tenets and conclusions.

Libertarianism certainly makes valid points. There is something to be said for an inviolable respect for individual rights from property to privacy. Perhaps more fundamentally, though, libertarianism recognizes that government often struggles to restrain itself, and well-intentioned, small-scale government programs can balloon to the point of becoming intrusive into the private lives of citizens.

On the other hand, libertarianism’s adulation of the individual often fails to situate a human being in the context of relationships to others, from family-life to civic organizations. It can ignore the importance of churches and the boy scouts. Sometimes libertarianism, implicitly or otherwise, fails to affirm that social relationships are essential for human flourishing.

The concern here, however, is not the advantages and drawbacks of the libertarian school of thought. Rather the suggestion is that many young people self-identifying as “libertarian” do not actually subscribe to many of the assumptions that, in fact, underpin libertarianism. Although they call themselves libertarian, many of these young adults are actually traditional conservatives. However, since the types of arguments that conservatives often use have fallen out of fashion in the current academic climate, these young people are forced to use libertarian arguments to get to conservative conclusions. In doing so, they may misrecognize themselves as libertarians. This is the unfortunate result of a university environment that only admits a certain type of argument as valid. Libertarianism, despite leading to different conclusions than those held by most academics, at least fits the framework of thinking preferred by those who create the modern intellectual space.