HOW’S THAT LIBERTARIAN MOMENT WORKING OUT FOR YOU?, asks Kevin D. Williamson:

In the event, the two presidential candidates Americans got most excited about were Donald Trump, a nationalist, and Bernie Sanders, a socialist. Between the two of them, they make a pretty good national socialist. Trump won his party’s nomination and Sanders ceded his to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is (arguably) a little bit more of a nationalist and (arguably) a little bit less of a socialist but in many ways a much better distillation of the partnership between big government and big business that characterizes our current political moment.How’s that libertarian moment working out for you?

I am writing from FreedomFest, the annual Las Vegas gathering of libertarians ranging from those we’d recognize as ordinary conservatives to the Libertarian-party types, goldbugs, marijuana obsessives, and the rest of the merry liberty-movement pranksters. The discussions have ranged from libertarianism in the Islamic world to Black Lives Matters to New Hampshire secession, a subject that may be of some interest to my fellow Texans.

The conversations here are familiar: The proponents of free people and free markets have a “branding problem,” and, if we could only figure out the right words to say in the right order, then people would flock to our banner. At the Planet Hollywood hotel and casino, a famous libertarian activist sweeps his hand over the adult video games, the burlesque dancers at the Heart Bar, the people wandering around with foot-high daiquiri glasses and says: “Hopefully, the whole world will soon look like this.”

And we libertarians wonder why we’re losing.

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