The Libertarian movement, which could be accurately described as the prevailing right wing of the civil liberties movement in the United States, has historically been grounded more in free-market economics than progressive social policy. It's cold, in both the positive and negative senses of the word—emotionally detached on empathy- and religion-related matters (there is no such thing as "bleeding-heart Libertarianism"), but relentlessly calm and rational in its implicit government framework. It also has, perhaps, the strongest claim to preserving the intellectual tradition of the Founding Fathers.
1689
John Locke publishes his Two Treatises on Government, which imply that good government serves as an agreement among the people and has no intrinsic purpose beyond that. This idea is fairly radical by 17th-century standards.
1857
The left-wing French communist Joseph Déjacque coins the political term "Libertarianism" to refer to the belief system of the radical anarchist left. Slowly, over the following century, its political orientation would change—but its anti-authoritarian tone would not.
1920
American socialist Roger Nash Baldwin and his allies on the progressive left create the American Civil Liberties Union, which uses litigation to fight Woodrow Wilson's attempts to suppress wartime dissent.
1943
Rose Wilder Lane publishes The Discovery of Freedom, and Isabel Paterson publishes The God of the Machine. Both are right-wing Libertarian manifestoes, both protest FDR's New Deal and other legislation that the authors view as socialist encroachments on American capitalism, and both define American Libertarianism as a movement that centers on free-market economics. In the same year, Ayn Rand—sometimes identified as the third "Founding Mother" of American Libertarianism—publishes her landmark novel The Fountainhead, a capitalist parable.
1966
Robert Heinlein publishes The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a science-fiction novel about libertarianism on a lunar colony. The book is notable for coining the acronym TANSTAAFL ("There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch"), which was incorporated into the original Libertarian Party logo and has been central to the movement ever since.
1968
Reason, a Libertarian publication grounded in the slogan "free minds and free markets," begins circulation. Reason quickly becomes the magazine of record for the American Libertarian movement.
1971
President Richard Nixon severs all remaining ties with the gold standard, contributing to a rift between Republicans and Libertarians and helping to inspire members of the latter group to create the Libertarian Party in the same year. Over time, the LP would grow to become the nation's third-largest national political party.
1977
A group of Libertarian scholars create the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think-tank that conducts detailed policy analysis from a free-market, pro-civil liberties point of view.
1980
Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark performs better than any LP presidential candidate before or since, attracting nearly a million votes nationally and contributing to the Libertarian Party's profile as a viable third party.
1988
The Libertarian Party experiences division over social issues, as the anti-abortion, socially conservative Ron Paul runs against and ultimately defeats civil libertarian Russell Means in the presidential primary. Later, Ron Paul would join the Republican Party—but his impact on the Libertarian Party's identity, and especially on its willingness to take nontraditional socially conservative positions on hot-button issues, has endured.
1992
Although Ross Perot was not technically a member of the Libertarian Party, his independent presidential candidacy—which would ultimately attract 19% of the national vote, the highest of any third-party candidate since 1912—was grounded in traditional Libertarian free-market principles, and helped to center the national policy debate on those principles for years to come.
2008
Former Republican representative Bob Barr, who was generally regarded during his service as one of the most socially conservative members of Congress, captures the national Libertarian Party presidential nomination. Although he claimed to have moderated his views on social issues and ran primarily against post-9/11 civil liberties violations, his nomination suggested that the party's rightward shift, which had most clearly begun with Ron Paul's nomination in 1988, had not ended. The future of the Libertarian Party with respect to its position on civil liberties issues remains unclear.
