10 Ways Libertarians Can Save Western Civilization (Using This One Weird Trick)

10 Ways Libertarians Can Save Western Civilization (Using This One Weird Trick)

Adapted from a speech delivered to the Libertarian Party of Colorado Convention by Austin Petersen

The Struggle for Civilization

Western civilization isn’t guaranteed to survive. It never was.

Every generation must relearn what makes freedom work—or lose it. The liberal values that created the modern West—reason, property, speech, and individual dignity—are now attacked from both directions. The progressive Left seeks control through bureaucracy and guilt. The populist Right seeks control through power and rage. Between them stands a shrinking middle that still remembers what “liberty” means.

Libertarians, for all our eccentricities, remain that middle. We are the heirs of Jefferson and Mill, the students of Bastiat and Hayek. But we have one fatal flaw: we confuse purity with strength. We believe that touching power corrupts, so we leave it to people who despise us.

The “one weird trick” to saving civilization isn’t another manifesto or meme. It’s the courage to use power—principled power—to defend liberty itself.

1️⃣ Stop Pretending You’re Above Power

In every libertarian room there’s a quiet superstition: “Power is evil. Wanting it makes you one of them.” That mindset has kept us pure—and powerless.

Cicero made the same mistake. Rome’s greatest orator believed reason alone could save the Republic. He trusted virtue to defeat ambition. It didn’t. Octavian understood that ideas move the world only when someone wields power in their name. Cicero died with his head nailed to the Senate door. Octavian became Augustus.

Virtue without strategy lost the Republic.

Two thousand years later, our movement repeated the error. Ron Paul ignited a revolution of ideas. Yet when victory required organization and discipline, we said, “We’re not here to win—we’re here to educate.” Tell that to the IRS while they’re holding your paycheck.

Power is not violence. Power is the capacity to turn ideas into reality. If we refuse it, others will use it to chain us. The Left understood this long ago. The populist Right is rediscovering it now. We are the last faction still afraid of the sword that defends us.

Western civilization will not be saved by people too noble to lead. It will be saved by men and women strong enough to hold power—and decent enough to give it back.

2️⃣ Escape the Purity Spiral

Libertarians possess many gifts: logic, wit, and an almost supernatural ability to spot a Fed at fifty paces. Our curse is cannibalism.

No one eats their own like we do. We can turn a city-council campaign into a doctrinal trial over commas in the bylaws. I once watched a candidate for local office get denounced as a “statist pig” because he supported a sales-tax reform bill—in 2013.

This is how freedom dies: not under tyranny, but under snarky Facebook threads.

History warned us. During the French Revolution, the Jacobins executed the Girondins for insufficient zeal. Then Robespierre lost his head to the same purity test. “Revolutions devour their own children,” wrote Mallet du Pan—and every generation proves him right.

Today our factions multiply like mushrooms after rain: Hoppeans, Agorists, Minarchists, AnCaps, Crypto-Paleo-Post-Whatever. Everyone has a podcast, few have a plan. “Welcome to The Anarcho-Nudist Gardening Hour, sponsored by Monero.”

Meanwhile, the Left builds institutions. They take messy wins and move forward. We take symbolic losses and start new group chats.

Unity doesn’t require uniformity. You don’t have to agree on everything to fight for liberty together. The Founders certainly didn’t. Adams loathed Jefferson, yet they signed the same Declaration because freedom mattered more than ego.

If we can’t sit at the same table with someone who likes pineapple on pizza—or voted for Donald Trump—then we deserve extinction. The state doesn’t care which sub-sect you’re in. It only cares that you’re divided.

Stop sharpening guillotines for your friends. Start building bridges for your allies.

3️⃣ Take the Institutions—or They’ll Take You

The people who rule you aren’t smarter; they just showed up.

While libertarians were arguing over the Non-Aggression Principle, the Left was marching through academia, newsrooms, Hollywood, HR departments, and even the military. They understood the insight of Antonio Gramsci: “The revolution is not in the streets—it’s in the schools, the churches, the culture. Win those, and you win the world.”

We laughed, called it “statist nonsense,” and went back to posting memes. They went on to run every accreditation board and social-media trust council in the Western world.

Now those cathedrals of progressivism dictate what can be taught, published, or said. The irony? They were built by our ancestors—the classical liberals, scientists, and merchants who founded the modern West. We erected the temples. They seized the pulpits.

Elon Musk offered a rare reversal. Instead of building a “FreeSpeech.io,” he bought Twitter and tore down the altar. “The bird is freed,” he declared—and for one brief moment, liberty owned an institution again.

Imagine if libertarians did that everywhere. Run the school board instead of ranting about it. Chair the chamber of commerce. Become the county sheriff who refuses to enforce bad laws. Build new think tanks, media studios, and charities that prove freedom works.

You don’t have to storm Washington. Start in the Shire. Take Rohan before Mordor. Every small victory becomes a fortress.

If we don’t take the institutions, they will keep taking us—until freedom survives only as a nostalgic meme.

4️⃣ Build Power Locally

If you want to change America, start where the empire isn’t looking.

The Left obsesses over Washington. The populist Right dreams of the presidency. Libertarians should look down — at the map beneath their feet. The most revolutionary acts in American history began not in Congress but in taverns, lodges, and living rooms.

Before there was a Continental Army, there were Committees of Correspondence — small networks of ordinary citizens who met in secret to share letters, news, and plans for resistance. One tavern at a time, they turned towns into colonies and colonies into a country.

“It does not take a majority to prevail,” said Samuel Adams, “but rather an irate, tireless minority keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

That principle still works.

Moms for Liberty flipped school boards across the country by showing up where no one else bothered to run. They didn’t need Congress. They didn’t need CNN. They just needed a quorum and a spine. While Washington debated pronouns, parents took back classrooms.

Look at the Free State Project in New Hampshire: libertarians who moved, organized, and now control real levers of power. They passed constitutional carry, expanded school choice, nullified federal gun laws, and slashed taxes — all without ever holding a federal seat.

You don’t need to conquer the empire. You just need to own your ZIP code.

Who decides what your children learn? Who controls your property taxes? Who enforces red flag laws? Not the President — your sheriff, your school board, your county commission.

Those are the last fortresses of self-government left in America. That’s where revolutions still start. The state wants you distracted — podcasting about the Fed while they seize your school district. Stop posting. Start showing up.

Because all tyranny is local, and all liberty begins there too.

Take your town. Then take the next one. When the empire comes knocking, hand them a map full of free cities and tell them there’s nowhere left to land.

5️⃣ Stop Being Allergic to Charisma

A few years ago, after giving a speech, a woman told me, “You remind me of a young Bill Clinton.” She didn’t mean it as a compliment. In libertarian circles, charisma is treated like witchcraft. Smile too much and you’re a grifter. Dress too well and you’re a Fed. If people actually like you, you must be selling out.

This allergy to charm is killing us.

You can have the best ideas in the world, but if you deliver them like an actuary reading tax code in a bunker, no one will follow you.

History belongs to the magnetic. Alexander the Great led from the front, inspired devotion, and built an empire not just through strategy, but through fire. Javier Milei, the chainsaw-wielding libertarian of Argentina, didn’t whisper his way to the presidency. He turned liberty into theater — dancing, shouting, preaching against socialism with messianic energy — and his people felt alive again.

“There is nothing impossible to him who will try,” said Alexander.

Charisma isn’t tyranny. It’s persuasion. It’s the art of making people care about truth.

Even the greatest minds of liberty — Jefferson, Rand, Friedman — knew how to inspire, not just instruct. They didn’t apologize for style. They used it.

You cannot bore a nation into freedom. You have to make freedom beautiful, dangerous, thrilling again.

The world doesn’t need another monotone economist with a YouTube channel. It needs orators, artists, and entrepreneurs who can make liberty feel like destiny.

Maybe what this movement needs isn’t less flash — it’s more confidence. Less suspicion — more seduction.

6️⃣ Mock the Regime — But Learn Its Rules

Libertarians are master satirists. We were mocking Fauci when everyone else was still clapping for him. We’ve been joking about the ATF’s “pet control” division since Waco. But here’s the problem: mockery without mastery is masturbation.

It feels good, looks righteous, changes nothing.

Tyrants aren’t afraid of your memes. They’re afraid of your competence.

Consider Lysander of Sparta. In the fifth century B.C., Athens ruled the seas, confident in its wealth and democracy. Sparta couldn’t win by force alone. So Lysander studied his enemy — their trade routes, supply chains, and weaknesses — and used diplomacy to turn Persia into an unwitting ally. When Athens’ ships stopped eating, its empire starved.

He didn’t storm the walls. He owned the grain.

Fast forward two thousand years: James O’Keefe does something similar. Instead of ranting online, he infiltrated bureaucracies, read HR manuals, mastered whistleblower law, and let the system destroy itself on camera. The regime hated him because he played its game better than its own architects.

You want to dismantle tyranny? Learn how it works.

Understand budgets. Read the fine print. File the FOIA. Show up to the meeting no one else attends. Tyranny thrives in the shadows of our ignorance.

Mock the regime, yes — ridicule exposes its weakness. But ridicule alone isn’t resistance.

Behind every joke, have a plan. Behind every meme, a motion. Behind every punchline, a proposal.

“Ridicule is the most potent weapon,” wrote Saul Alinsky. True — unless the guy being ridiculed just took your job.

Learn the rules. Then break them better.

7️⃣ You Don’t Need a Majority — You Need Footholds

One of the biggest lies in politics is that you need 51 percent to win. You don’t.

History is written by minorities — the small, stubborn ones who act before anyone else believes they can.

In 1776, the American Revolution was not a national consensus. Historian Robert Calhoon estimates that only about 15 to 20 percent of colonists supported independence. Another 20 percent were loyalists. The rest waited to see which way the cannon smoke would drift.

Freedom didn’t come from mass approval. It came from the few who showed up.

One of them was my ancestor Isaac Wade, a soldier in the 14th Virginia Regiment. He didn’t wait for permission; he picked up a musket. He didn’t poll the neighbors; he marched.

That pattern echoes through time.

The early Christians met in catacombs under threat of death. They had no empire, no army, no algorithm. But through conviction and discipline, they built the longest-lasting institution in Western history.

A thousand years later, on an island called Okinawa, martial artists like Anko Itosu and Gichin Funakoshi taught karate in secret after the practice was banned. They trained in graveyards at night, passing on the techniques that would one day circle the globe.

Freedom survives the same way. Quiet rooms. Hidden hands. Tireless hearts.

You don’t need a nation. You need a foothold — a sheriff’s office, a podcast, a dojo, a city council seat, a family business that refuses to bow. Revolutions begin when a few people decide they will no longer live as subjects.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,” said Margaret Mead. “Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

8️⃣ Cultivate Excellence, Not Just Rebellion

Libertarians are famous for being right — but not always for being reliable.

We’re brilliant at spotting tyranny, brilliant at mocking it, and sometimes less brilliant at replacing it with something better.

If we want to save the West, we can’t just oppose the regime; we have to outperform it.

Consider Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the farmer whom Rome made dictator during a crisis in 458 BC. He led the army, defeated the invaders, and twelve days later walked back into the Senate, surrendered absolute power, and returned to his plow.

“They found him plowing his own field,” wrote Livy.

That’s not rebellion; that’s competence wrapped in humility.

Excellence is what makes liberty trustworthy. It’s what separates the citizen from the crank, the reformer from the rebel.

The American Revolution didn’t end with the Declaration; it continued through Madison’s meticulous spreadsheets that became the Constitution. Jefferson wrote poetry; Madison built plumbing. Civilization needs both.

Be the person who shows up early, reads the budget, writes the policy, and delivers results. Be so competent that the bureaucrats can’t keep up.

“Let them call you rebels,” Jefferson might say today. “The day will come when they’ll call you leaders.”

The Discipline of Joy

Excellence wins trust, but joy wins souls.

Authoritarians thrive on misery. A population that laughs is ungovernable.

In 1989, Czechoslovakia groaned under Soviet rule. No free press, no free elections — a gray empire of slogans and fear. Then came a playwright named Václav Havel. He mocked the censors, wrote absurdist comedies that made tyranny look ridiculous, and filled his underground theater with laughter.

“The real power of the powerless,” Havel said, “is to live in truth.”

Within six weeks, that laughter toppled a regime. The Velvet Revolution was the gentlest overthrow in history — powered by songs, jokes, and courage. Havel became president, not by force but by reminding people what freedom felt like.

That’s the lesson. Liberty should feel good.

Be the family that laughs louder. The small business that treats customers like friends. The church that sings louder than the bureaucrats drone. The podcast that makes people smile instead of seethe.

Because joy is disobedience with a smile. And joyful people don’t kneel.

9️⃣ Build Parallel Systems

When the empire rots, the builders of the next one are already at work.

After Rome collapsed, monks in cold stone monasteries preserved the manuscripts that would relight Europe. They didn’t ask permission; they copied by candlelight while barbarians burned libraries.

We stand in a similar moment. Our institutions are decomposing — banks inflated into fragility, universities converted into indoctrination camps, the media addicted to outrage. Don’t waste breath begging them to reform. Build new ones.

Bitcoin began as a white paper. Now it’s an alternate monetary realm. Homeschool networks, independent medical cooperatives, encrypted journalism, parallel supply chains — these are the monasteries of the modern age.

Elon Musk’s Starlink kept Ukrainians online when governments tried to flip the switch. That wasn’t politics; that was infrastructure for liberty.

Start small. Form a neighborhood defense co-op. Launch a credit union that won’t cancel customers. Grow food that no bureaucrat can ration. Create media no censor can silence.

When the empire demands obedience, let it find an empty chair.

Because civilization isn’t preserved by complaints — it’s preserved by creators.

🔟 Re-Enchant the West

We’ve fixed our arguments. We’ve lost our awe.

You cannot defend a civilization if no one believes it’s beautiful.

The West wasn’t built on spreadsheets alone. It was built on cathedrals and symphonies, on Aristotle’s logic and Michelangelo’s hands. When we reduced freedom only to a cost-benefit chart, we forgot why people once died for it.

Freedom without meaning becomes mindless consumerism. Meaning without freedom becomes tyranny. The West at its best marries both — reason and reverence, science and soul.

We must make liberty sacred again. That means culture: art that glorifies courage, architecture that honors order and grace, stories that make self-ownership feel heroic.

Look at Javier Milei in Argentina — economist by trade, rock star by instinct. He quotes Hayek between guitar riffs, swings a chainsaw at socialism, and makes liberty exciting again. If the Left can make tyranny glamorous, we can make freedom gorgeous.

Commission painters. Fund filmmakers. Support musicians and game designers who tell the truth about the human spirit. We are not just defenders of the old world. We are architects of the next.

Light torches, not merely policies.

🧭 The Call to the Libertarian Nationalist Movement

All of this leads to one mission: to rebuild a civilization worthy of liberty.

That mission is Libertarian Nationalism — not a party, not a purity test, but a call to principled power. It means combining liberty with loyalty, rights with responsibility, reason with beauty.

I’ve written The Libertarian Nationalist Manifesto as a compass for that task. It’s not about control; it’s about coordination — a blueprint for builders, not beggars. 

Read it. Argue with it. Steal from it. Use it to start your own projects — your own towns, shows, campaigns, co-ops. Make liberty look like victory again. Read my manifesto as a blog here on this site.

Because freedom will not defend itself. It demands courage, discipline, and joy. The West will not be saved by the indifferent. It will be saved by those who take power, use it wisely, and make it beautiful.

We’re not relics of a fading order. We’re the first architects of a new one.

Take power. Build something that lasts. And light the way home.