On Wednesday, I did a special Reason Interview livestream with leaders from the two biggest libertarian student groups: Dr. Wolf von Laer of Students for Liberty (SFL) and Sean Themea of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL). I was especially interested in hearing what they had to say about their organizations’ efforts on college campuses in the wake of the assassination of Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk in September.
I was an undergraduate at Rutgers University from 1981 through 1985 and attended and covered countless protests, rallies, and events for the school newspaper, The Daily Targum. This was the heyday of the movement for colleges to divest from stocks and companies having anything to do with the apartheid regime in South Africa. There were also tons of events criticizing and defending Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, especially in Central America. And demonstrations both for and against abortion rights. It seemed like every day you could have your pick of a different cause to protest or champion, or at least learn about. Yet the idea that somebody would get shot and killed, or even roughed up physically, never crossed my mind (even though students had been killed a decade earlier at Kent State and Jackson State—that seemed like it happened on a different planet*).
Both Wolf and Sean are thoughtful, perceptive, and principled, as are the organizations they represent. Apart from what it’s like to be on campus in the wake of a brutal, ideologically motivated killing, we also discussed what’s been happening to the broad libertarian movement over the past decade or so, especially with the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA conservatism on the one hand and woke progressivism on the other. And we talk about how COVID lockdowns radically altered student life—and continue to influence campus socializing and organizing.
As Wolf and Sean note, SFL and YAL have worked together in various ways but they have distinct profiles and agendas. SFL, which does a lot of work overseas as well as in North America, has found success partly by talking more about the intellectual roots of classical liberalism in academic settings and training students for leadership roles. YAL explicitly pursues a model of ‘confrontational politics’ both on campus and off and blends a grounding in libertarian ideas with electoral activism. Together, they offer related but distinct approaches toward advancing libertarian ideas and policies in a world that seems both increasingly desperate for new ideas and tied to the dead ideologies (and parties) of the past.
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*: As Maggie Helveston astutely points out in the comments, Kent State (and Jackson State too) had occurred only a decade or so before the protests I was attending. It’s partly due to the ignorance of youth and partly due to the radically changed atmosphere in the country that nobody (certainly not me) had such events in mind at all during the 1980s. The early ‘70s was a very violent time in America, especially for political violence, but that really faded into the background by the time I was in college.
