The end of FreedomWorks comes a few months after Americans for Prosperity — the other libertarian group created by the 2004 split — abandoned its effort to beat Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primary. Neither organization was part of the Republican Party per se. But their retreats confirmed one of the biggest Trump-led changes in the party: The victory of right-wing populism over big-tent libertarianism.
FreedomWorks veterans told me today that the 2023 reboot, backed by polling and demographic research, was doomed by the group’s longtime identification with the conservative movement.
It was stymied when it actually reached out to independents and Democrats, who looked up what the group stood for, and saw stories about its work to elect Republicans (true) and its association with the most-demonized conservative donors in America (false, It was famously born from a 2004 split in the Koch donor network, which backed AFP). The group got too close to Trump and “MAGA-world,” I was told; after the Trump presidency and the 2020 election, that baggage was simply too much for non-Republicans, who’d found plenty of other ways to advocate for “individual liberty.”
Meanwhile, campaigners for “small government” and entitlement reform were losing market share inside the GOP. Libertarians hoped that the Tea Party movement would create a political constituency for across-the-board spending cuts and the dismantling of the administrative state. The Trump administration made big strides on that second priority, rolling back consumer and environmental rules and appointing judges poised to take power away from federal regulations.
But House and Senate Republicans failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Trump ruled out any changes to Social Security and Medicare; he won the nomination this year while accusing the AFP-backed Nikki Haley of wanting to rip benefits away from seniors.
Anti-immigration politics, which libertarians won at, were far more powerful. One of the stars of the 12/9/2009 FreedomWorks rally in Washington was Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. On Wednesday, as FreedomWorks closed down, Martin joined House Speaker Mike Johnson at a press conference https://twitter.com/scottwongDC/status/1788224474178801929 that would bar non-citizens from voting – already illegal in federal elections, but a more powerful issue for Republicans than entitlement reform.
