Third, on Culture Clash: This is the most significant problem and the likeliest one to derail this organic movement before it takes hold. The anti-government populists of the Tea Party are largely pro-life and pro-family, regular churchgoers with a healthy respect for faith and traditional marriage (even if they do not prioritize this issue above others). Their close-knit communities of home schoolers and co-op moms are intelligent and engaged, but they are also devout. This causes problems for the more atheist and agnostic strands of libertarianism, particularly the urban variety. Consider prominent libertarians like Cato’s Dave Boaz, who sneered openly at the rise of the Tea Party and recoiled at the number of Christians within it. Libertarian exclusivity here could prove a difficult barrier for this movement to overcome if their leaders do not see the common ground they have with the populists – a fact which smart libertarians increasingly recognize.

And then there is the issue of terminology. I’d like to quote from a reaction to this by one of the key figures writing along these lines, Robert Tracinski (if you view Thomas Sowell as the id of libertarian populism, Tracinski is the superego). “I agree that asking, “So what is your plan to run this giant, bloated big government apparatus?” misses the point. It reminds me of an odd challenge from Michael Lind at Salon, who argues that libertarianism is not a credible political philosophy because we can’t name any countries that have adopted it. It is a challenge that is not quite honest (Lind rejects on ad hoc grounds a number of examples of countries with much smaller governments) and also astonishingly ignorant of history. The libertarian utopia, or the closest we’ve come to it, is America itself, up to about 100 years ago. It was a country with no income tax and no central bank. (It was on the gold standard, for crying out loud. You can’t get more libertarian than that.) It had few economic regulations and was still in the Lochner era, when such regulations were routinely struck down by the Supreme Court. There was no federal welfare state, no Social Security, no Medicare.”