I wrote a piece for Guernica on the regular reappearance of libertarianism in America. Here’s the key idea I wanted to get across:

These tensions [between majoritarian politics and unassailable individual freedoms] are largely inherent to our political system, and as long as we have a liberal democracy, they cannot be finally resolved. Libertarian arguments will keep coming back, because majoritarian politics will always be unsatisfying or objectionable to some subset of the population. Transforming a policy dispute into constitutional or higher order debate about individual rights provides a mechanism for resisting majoritarian abuse, but it can also undermine the potential power of a political majority and make a country ungovernable. And as we are now seeing, this ability to reframe politics as a battle between the individual and the state also contains the explosive potential to escalate simple politics into a constitutional crisis. Billionaire funders and government ineptness aside, libertarianism is in the air because the line between private power and public accountability is being redrawn.