Every political ideology tells itself flattering stories. Progressives imagine they are the only moral compass left in a cynical world. Conservatives imagine they are the last guardians of common sense. Libertarians, particularly in the United States and across Europe, imagine themselves as the final rationalists, the people who follow arguments to their endpoints without succumbing to tribal emotion. It is a beautiful idea. It is also wrong. Political psychology research across decades shows that ideological consistency is rarely a product of logic. It is a product of identity maintenance. I write this not as an outsider throwing stones. I write this as a libertarian who has spent years inside the movement, watching smart people collapse into intellectual rigidity the moment their ideological purity feels threatened. Libertarians talk endlessly about the dangers of state power but seem unable to recognise the far more immediate danger to their own intellectual freedom: the terror of being seen as inconsistent.
The research is brutal. Studies on cognitive dissonance, coherence seeking, and motivated reasoning from scholars like Pennycook, Rand, Festinger, Kunda, Shalvi, and Van Bavel all show the same pattern. Once a person adopts a political identity, the brain begins to reorganise beliefs to protect the label. Contradictions are softened. Doubts are buried. Exceptions are reframed as misunderstandings. People do not defend ideas. They defend a self-image. Libertarians are not immune to this dynamic. They are often its most committed believers. Because the ideology is built on elegant theoretical premises, the psychological cost of admitting contradiction feels twice as high. When your worldview is constructed like an equation, every inconsistency feels like a personal flaw.
This obsessive need for purity explains why so many libertarians in the United States and Europe reacted to the COVID vaccine like it was a referendum on the entire philosophy of liberty rather than a public health question. In principle, libertarians should have been the first to say: “Your body, your choice. Take it or don’t. The state should not coerce.” Instead, a large faction of the movement transformed scepticism into doctrine. It stopped being a debate about safety, data, or public health infrastructure. It became a test of identity. To accept the vaccine was to risk being called a coward or, worse, a statist. Research on identity threat predicts exactly this behaviour. Once a health decision is coded as an ideological signal, the mind treats it as a loyalty ritual, not as medical information. That’s how you get libertarians who distrust immunology but trust Telegram groups because the latter feels more aligned with the identity.
European libertarians, especially in Poland, Ireland, France, and parts of Western Europe, fell into the same trap but with a unique twist. Their scepticism fused with older cultural wounds about state authority. What could have been a rational conversation about civil liberties and medical policy instead became a theatre of ideological purity. People stopped asking “Is this treatment effective?” and started asking “What does my stance say about who I am?” This is textbook motivated reasoning. It is also the point where libertarianism stops behaving like a philosophy and starts behaving like a performance.
The same rigidity appears whenever libertarians try to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Across the American and European libertarian ecosystems, there is a recurring failure to understand that this is not a simple narrative of state versus individual, power versus liberty, or aggression versus non-aggression principle. It is a conflict rooted in history, geography, religion, demographics, and national identity. Yet many libertarians insist on mapping it onto a clean moral equation that bears no resemblance to reality. This is what happens when ideological consistency becomes a fetish. The complexity of geopolitics makes purity impossible, so the purity narrative rejects the complexity. Instead of engaging with the conflict as it is, many libertarians in Washington, Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Barcelona prefer to force it into a cartoon. One side is rebranded as “the state aggressor”. The other is rebranded as “the oppressed people.” It is a template, not an analysis.
You can see it in how American libertarians on social media discuss the issue. They reduce a century of geopolitical fragmentation to a single axiom: the smaller entity is always morally right. This is not libertarianism. This is a medieval fairy tale applied to modern warfare. European libertarians are often even more rigid, using the language of colonialism and decolonisation as if the Middle East were a campus debate rather than a region drenched in competing sovereignties and existential threats. They cling to abstractions because the real world would force them to confront contradiction, and contradiction feels like ideological death. Researchers in political cognition warn about this exact phenomenon. When an identity is threatened by complexity, people retreat into simplicity and call it consistency. They stop trying to understand and start trying to protect their internal narrative.
The irony is that libertarianism, when practised with intellectual honesty, should be the ideology best equipped to handle nuance. It is built on scepticism toward power. It is built on moral humility. It is built on an understanding that centralised solutions often fail because the world is too complex for one authority to manage. Yet the culture surrounding libertarianism in the United States and Europe has drifted far from that humility. The obsession with ideological symmetry has turned many libertarians into guardians of doctrine rather than explorers of reality. The focus becomes maintaining the performance of purity rather than evaluating policies on merit.
Look at how libertarians respond to immigration debates in the US and Europe. In theory, libertarianism supports free movement. In practice, many libertarians abandon their own principles the moment migration threatens their cultural comfort. Others perform the opposite contortion: they defend open borders not from moral conviction but from fear that any nuance will brand them as authoritarian. Both reactions are symptoms of the same problem: ideological panic. The need to appear consistent overrides the need to think clearly.
The same rigidity appears in debates over digital privacy, crypto regulation, trade agreements, military aid, and the role of supranational institutions like the EU. Instead of examining each issue on its own terms, libertarians retreat to purity scripts. The EU is always bad because it is a “superstate”. Crypto is always good because it is “decentralised”. Military alliances are always coercive. All foreign aid is always theft. These claims are not arguments. They are identity movements. They give people the comfort of symmetry, not the clarity of truth.
The tragedy is that conforming to purity does not make the movement stronger. It makes it irrelevant. Political psychology shows that the groups most capable of shaping policy are the ones that tolerate internal disagreement. Flexibility allows adaptation. Rigid identity maintenance produces echo chambers and exile rituals. Libertarians often pride themselves on being the ideological minority that sees what others cannot. Yet internal purity culture blinds them to the world as it actually is. Instead of developing libertarian solutions to modern problems, many libertarians spend their time accusing each other of treason.
I say all this as someone who still believes in the spirit of philosophy. I believe in human freedom, voluntary cooperation, entrepreneurial dynamism, and the sacredness of individual dignity. I do not believe that these values require absolutism. I do not believe that purity is a virtue. I do not believe that one contradiction invalidates an entire worldview. I believe that libertarianism can survive only if it becomes more psychologically mature. It needs people who can withstand the discomfort of complexity without collapsing into reflexive defensiveness.
The real threat to libertarianism in the United States and Europe is not the state. It is not regulation. It is not socialism. It is the internal belief that the only legitimate libertarian is one who never admits context. This belief is anti-intellectual and anti-human. It suffocates the very freedom the ideology claims to champion.
Libertarianism will have a future only if its members rediscover humility. Not the humility of submission but the humility of honest thinking, the ability to sit with contradiction, the courage to remain free even from their own ideological fear. Only then can the movement step out of its own shadow and become what it claims to be: a philosophy of real human liberty, not a museum of perfect symmetry guarded by anxious curators.
–
Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957.
Kunda, Ziva. “The Case for Motivated Reasoning.” Psychological Bulletin 108, no. 3 (1990): 480–498.
Jost, John T., Christopher M. Federico, and Jaime L. Napier. “Political Ideology: Its Structure, Functions, and Elective Affinities.” Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 307–337.
Pennycook, Gordon, and David G. Rand. “Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News Is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning Than by Motivated Reasoning.” Cognition 188 (2019): 39–50.
Rand, David G., Gordon Pennycook, and Adam Berinsky. “Motivated Reasoning and the Origins of Partisan Perception.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 25, no. 8 (2021): 676–693.
Van Bavel, Jay J., and Andrea Pereira. “The Partisan Brain: An Identity-Based Model of Political Belief.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 22, no. 3 (2018): 213–224.
Taber, Charles S., and Milton Lodge. “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs.” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 3 (2006): 755–769.
Bolsen, Toby, James N. Druckman, and Fay Lomax Cook. “The Influence of Partisan Motivated Reasoning on Public Opinion.” Political Behavior 36 (2014): 235–262.
Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Lodge, Milton, and Charles S. Taber. The Rationalizing Voter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Bardi, Anat, and Shalom H. Schwartz. “Values and Behavior: Strength and Structure of Relations.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29, no. 10 (2003): 1207–1220.
Shalvi, Shaul, Ori Weisel, and Yoella Bereby-Meyer. “Morality in Groups: The Better-Than-Individually Effect.” Current Opinion in Psychology 6 (2015): 143–147.
Tetlock, Philip E. “A Social-Psychological Perspective on Political Ideology.” In Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske and Daniel T. Gilbert, 886–918. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998.
