One reason I think the world seems more libertarian than it did in the past was that a number of issues which previously divided libertarians from conservatives have been / are currently being publicly resolved in the direction of libertarians. The obvious big one is plant legalization. To a lesser extent, some subgroups of libertarians did not support institutionalized governmental discrimination against gay people. On these issues the world in 5 years from now will look a lot more like the libertarian view than it will look like the status quo of 15 years ago.
Will this trend continue on other issues and does it tell us anything about libertarianism? I think the answer to both is probably “not really but, eh maybe?”. A first point that’s relevant is that although plant legalization was considered a ‘libertarian’ issue, it has probably long been the case that the absolute number of democrats in favor and the absolute number of republicans in favor were both far higher (probably by orders of magnitude) than the absolute number of libertarians in favor. The distinction is that libertarian party leadership was for it, and that a higher percentage of libertarians were for it. How you explain those facts is going to impact your view on what the trend on this issue means.
One key characteristic of the issue is that it’s a really easy question. Some policy questions are hard and complicated and involve contentious value judgments and difficult tradeoffs. Some are layups. The two main causal reasons someone could oppose plant legalization are ignorance on the subject or financial conflict (e.g. they are an alcohol company, or take advertising money from one, or are receiving payments in the form of donations or consulting fees from one). Everyone (by everyone I mean most people) who makes an effort to be informed and acts in good faith gets the same answer and this has been true since at least the 70s.
As for the large numbers of democrats and republicans not financially conflicted but opposed, most were probably not that knowledgeable on the question. Very few people randomly go out of their way to research some question of policy unless its made salient by some leader or public debate. So to see if its really a ‘libertarian’ issue, you would want to see how does P(pro plant | libertarian & well informed & not financially conflicted) compare to P(pro plant | democrat & well informed & not financially conflicted) and P(pro plant | republican & well informed & not financially conflicted) and how do all three compare to the base rate of P(pro plant | well informed & not financially conflicted). I don’t have the data on this*, but I would bet they are all close enough and that the differences between parties on this issue probably stem mainly from the percentage of party members that are well informed. Libertarian party members were probably strongly selected for being knowledgeable about plants. Likewise leadership of parties that actually win elections is probably strongly selected for being finically conflicted.
If you buy into this model, than seeing a big social swing on these issues could just as easily be caused by an increase in well informed people or a decrease in financial conflict without any change in ‘libertarianism’. So, what’s the answer? I don’t know, I suspect an increase in ‘well informed’nes but its hard to say for sure. Usage trends point that way. The medical trend probably produced and distributed a lot of educational materials. And possibly the rise of the internet should make us think people should on balance be better informed than the past..?
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