The Rise of the Independents

Free Thoughts
E17 -

Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie join Trevor Burrus and Jason Kuznicki for a freewheeling discussion about the modern political scene in America.

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Hosts
Trevor Burrus
Research Fellow, Constitutional Studies
Aaron Ross Powell
Director and Editor
Guests
Nick Gillespie

Nick Gillespie is an editor at large at Reason, and host of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. Gillespie's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, Slate, Salon, Time.com, Marketplace, and is a frequent commentator on radio and television networks such as National Public Radio, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox Business, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and PBS.

Matt Welch

Matt Welch is the editor in chief of Reason magazine and co-​hosts “The Independents,” a new show that airs Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays on the Fox Business Network.

Jason Kuznicki

Jason Kuznicki was a senior fellow and the editor of Cato Books and of Cato Unbound, the Cato Institute’s online journal of debate. His first book, Technology and the End of Authority: What Is Government For? (Palgrave, 2017) surveys western political theory from a libertarian perspective. Kuznicki was an assistant editor of the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. He also contributed a chapter to libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty. He earned a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University in 2005, where his work was offered both a Fulbright Fellowship and a Chateaubriand Prize.

Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie have noted an emerging group of people who, having been accustomed to a panoply of choice in every other aspect of their lives, are abandoning America’s two-​party system in droves.

Is this growing movement of independents a cause for optimism among libertarians? Are we in for a better, more libertarian era than ever before? Or should we be skeptical of this kind of optimism, given the growth of the federal government in recent years?

Together Matt and Nick are the authors of the 2011 book, “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics can Fix What’s Wrong with America.”

Show Notes and Further Reading:

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics can Fix What’s Wrong with America

Gallup Poll: Americans Disapprove of Government Surveillance Programs