Can libertarian ideas break through in an era dominated by fear-based politics and bipartisan protectionism?
Brian Doherty, senior editor of Reason Magazine and author of books including “Radicals for Capitalism” and “This Is Burning Man,” joins The Overton Window Podcast to discuss one of the movement’s central challenges: shifting the Overton Window toward liberty in a political landscape increasingly hostile to free-market principles. Doherty’s latest book, “Dirty Pictures,” traces major post-1960s shifts in the business and aesthetics of comic books through the history of underground comix artists.
At the heart of Doherty’s analysis is the concept of sentiment — something that exists between an idea and a feeling.
“The sentiment that Trump has played on, which is — to my peaceful libertarian mind — a scary one, is this sentiment of anger and fear of the other,” Doherty says.
Meanwhile, “both parties, dwell on anti-trade and anti-market bias,” creating a political environment where pro-market arguments struggle to gain traction.
Part of the problem is perception. “A lot of libertarianism feels like political science fiction,” Doherty says. “When government has run public schools for generations, people genuinely can’t imagine alternatives. They think, ‘The government has been running public schools as long as I’ve been alive; I don’t understand how education would work without them.’” Doherty suggests that many Americans would say the same about grocery stores if they’d only known them to be operated by the government.
The contradiction reveals the challenge: Americans understand markets work when they can see them in action. The solution isn’t purely ideological — it’s practical. “We have to create a critical mass of people in this country who think like libertarians and expect to see a libertarian country. I think the size of that critical mass might be a little larger than you think.”
How does Reason Magazine tackle this challenge?
“One of the reasons why Reason Magazine exists is to get people exposed and to show them interesting things that libertarians might care about,” Doherty says. It’s better to tell stories about “not just government doing bad things — which is actually kind of my favorite because it gets your blood boiling — but stories about how markets, even highly constricted markets, create immense prosperity.”
When it comes down to it, “you don’t necessarily have to convince every politician to accept the whole libertarian message. You just have to let more things be done by the private sector,” Doherty explains. “And then people say, ‘Oh, this works. It actually works.’”
The way he sees it, “If you look at the world with open eyes, I don’t see how you can hate capitalism the way that certain people claim they hate capitalism.” Often, what people actually hate are “certain results of the existing constricted capitalism that America has” — not free markets themselves.
By combining engaging storytelling, concrete examples of market success, and incremental policy victories that demonstrate what works, advocates can chip away at the edifice of statism. The challenge is finding the right sentiments to make Americans feel the need for market reform.
Listen to the full conversation on The Overton Window Podcast.
