What’s sad about this is that Amash has proved a certain kind of libertarian is too naive to achieve anything for the cause of liberty. Amash has many principles in which he professes to believe, including the unborn’s right-to-life. Trump and the populist Republican party are clearly better than the Democrats, or any non-existent third force, where some of those principles are concerned. With respect to others, such as reducing government spending and power, both major parties do nothing for libertarians like Amash. But having presence in the GOP can pay dividends even there when the occasion arises — when it means that there are more small-government Republicans willing to hash out a compromise like the ‘sequester’ that limited both domestic and military spending, for example, one of the rare success stories for smaller government in living memory. Real-world politics is messy and compromised, and so anyone who takes part in it must prioritize. Was calling for impeachment really the right priority for Amash, even by his own lights? Was it more important to make a futile attack on Trump than to do whatever he could for the pro-life and limited-government causes? Amash believes he has taken a stand for the rule of law, but the Mueller report — which, notably, does not call for impeachment, unlike the Starr Report of 20 years ago — is a sorry hill to die upon. There is nothing here of the nobility of a last-ditch stand against an unjust war, for example.

What Ron Paul did was to counteract neoconservatism in the Republican party with libertarianism and populism. Populism proved to be more potent, but libertarianism itself contributed important elements to populism, including an articulate anti-interventionist foreign policy and a sense of class warfare as about power, not just wealth. Amash was never comfortable with populism, but libertarianism without it has no market at all. The Washington Post and the NeverTrump neocons share Amash’s animosity toward Trump and the populist right, but they share even fewer of his professed principles than Trump does.