Folk libertarianism is not an ideological affair. Neither is it a policy agenda. It’s an anti-authority impulse that wants authority for itself, seeks personal license while denouncing libertinism, carries a ”thin blue line” flag while fighting the Capitol Police, and boasts of being a “live and let live” alternative to left-wing pieties while whipping up panic about how other people behave. The notion was popularized by The New York Times’ Ross Douthat in a 2020 column, but the term is at least four years older than that, and the phenomenon it describes is much older still. It’s an attitude or posture, a way of engaging in politics that is both profoundly American and, though there are some commonalities, substantively different from the philosophy from which it borrows half its name…

DeSantis and his take on vaccine mandates are a useful case in point. Most libertarians, even if adamantly pro-vaccine, opposed generalized state mandates for COVID-19 shots on grounds of bodily autonomy. So far, libertarians and folk libertarians agree. But suppose a private company wanted to mandate vaccines for its employees or refuse to do business with unvaccinated customers. Though they might be personally critical of this call, libertarians would look to freedom of association and private property rights to defend that choice. DeSantis and his fellow folk libertarians would ban it on pain of $10,000-$50,000 fines.

And that’s not hypocrisy for them. In fact, this is one of two crucial things to understand about folk libertarians: There’s no “gotcha” in demonstrating they made the government bigger. Often limiting the state makes sense for them, but often it doesn’t. In some irony, folk libertarians are often most comfortable with growing the enforcement arms of the state: police forces, border patrol, and the military. The animating concern is not the size, scope, or form of government but rather “the things that they want to preserve in the American way of life,” especially in their own lives. This is self-protection, not philosophy, and we’re mistaken to expect DeSantis and his ilk to behave like the ideological libertarians they are not.

The second crucial thing, as The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher has argued, is that folk libertarianism may well be “the purest expression of contemporary popular American conservatism.”