It's not difficult to think of left-wing public intellectuals: most people who speak or write in public are on the left. It's also not difficult to think of right-wing public intellectuals: major newspapers like the New York Times run columns by highbrow token conservatives like Ross Douthat, and magazines like Forbes publish the usual whingeing about high taxes. There's also a deep bench of nominally conservative publications like National Review, The Bulwark, and, more recently, niche venues for ideological entrepreneurship like Hungarian Conservative. But these journals are as likely to demand government intervention in people's private lives as they are to point out ways in which those interventions could go wrong.
This type of caution is typically the province of libertarians, who come in many shapes and sizes but who I might paint with a broad brush as being people who share some or most of the following characteristics:
A sense that state power causes problems as often as it solves them
A belief that economic freedom is the most reliable driver of human flourishing
A tendency to support solutions that favor local knowledge and decentralization instead of technocratic mandate and top-down decisionmaking.
A concern that the centralization of any sort of power generates new avenues for oppression
These ideas, on their own, are fairly common in political life. But they're inconsistently deployed. Leftists are wary of centralizing power in corporations, but sanguine about centralizing it in the state. Conservatives rage against the power wielded by bureaucrats, but view policemen and soldiers with affection. These are tensions that we're all familiar with.
What's unique about libertarians, as a class of thinkers, is that they package these ideas or some subset of them together. This package provides a powerful set of heuristics for thinking about how to organize society. When we make policy, the libertarians say, we should be mindful of history: unintended consequences are the rule, not the exception. We should question whether a dollar is better-off in the hands of a well-intentioned bureaucrat or in the taxpayer's pocket. We should look skeptically on any intrusion of government into the private sphere. We should view centralization as the introduction of a single point of failure, and the suffocation of experiment.
These are powerful critiques indeed, yet there are few well-known public intellectuals who make them regularly. Outside of the people confined to the pages of explicitly libertarian outlets like Reason or the halls of think tanks like Cato, libertarian public intellectuals in the mainstream media can be counted on one hand. Conor Friedersdorf is one, and so apparently is Jane Coaston. I'm pretty sure Timothy B. Lee still is. I have trouble thinking of others.
What gives? I think the answer here is actually pretty simple.
The place of the libertarian is, to paraphrase William F. Buckley, to stand athwart the machinery of government, shouting "STOP!" As it turns out, this does not make for a very interesting writing portfolio.
To make a name as a public intellectual, writers and speakers need to consistently having something interesting to say. In the realm of public policy, this usually means having a policy prescription of some kind. Unfortunately for libertarian thinkers, the most common policy prescription they have to offer is a blank scrip: do nothing, and call me in the morning.
Editors at mainstream publications are not likely to accept more than one such pitch from the same writer, and are unlikely to hire writers who make what is, essentially, the same argument over and over again. It is simply hard for anyone who takes a reliably libertarian perspective to get their foot in the door at such a publication, or a running gig at roundtable discussions on cable television. What do you think of this policy, Ms. Libertarian? "It's a bad idea — most policies are."
This is a shame, since many of the most exciting and novel ideas in contemporary political discourse would be, and probably have been, head-slappingly obvious to most libertarians. Environmentalists are waking up to the fact that federal environmental regulations strangle clean energy projects in the cradle. Restrictive building rules are increasingly recognized as the cause behind the twin crises of housing costs and homelessness. The Biden administration moved to dismantle stringent occupational licensing requirements that harm workers.
Libertarians are not anarchists. This is important. The force of the libertarian critique in a modern democratic society rests on the idea that a state, or at least something vaguely statelike, is fundamentally necessary. This means that the best libertarian work doesn't simply oppose government action. Instead, it attempts to move government action in a direction that takes note of the most trenchant critiques that the libertarian package has to offer. A good example of this type of proposal is the Manhattan Institute's work on hyperlocal zoning: instead of abjuring building restrictions altogether, this proposal proposes to renovate zoning with an awareness of local knowledge, local preferences, and the fallibility of government planners.
Yet proposals such as this one are often highly technical, unfamiliar to most readers, and firmly outside the Overton Window of policy discourse. The absence of mainstream voices arguing for more decentralized systems of social organization means that, when such ideas arise, they are instantly disqualified from consideration by their very weirdness. This, in turn, disqualifies their proponents. The absence of libertarian intellectuals from public life is therefore, unfortunately, self-reinforcing.
Thanks, as a filthy statist I enjoyed the alternate perspective! I particularly appreciated you advocating for small, metis-rich, local initiatives. I think one aspect that makes libertarian positive policy weird in the way you describe is that they engage on the level of big government but what they propose is a framework for devolution of power to small government – e.g. hyperlocal zoning. I think this is important and I'm not saying libertarians should do less of it. However, I think there's also value in providing a libertarian model _to_ people who want to spin up small local initiatives: from where I'm standing, hyperlocal healthcare, schooling, justice all seem implausible and (frankly) unattractive, but maybe that's because nobody's ever shown me a good template for how it can be done. If a hypothetical libertarian public intellectual were to lay out the framework for how such initiatives could work, and if enough people tried them and found them an attractive alternative to centralised planning, you would then have something positive to gesture at when advocating for deregulation.