Reason senior editor Brian Doherty has a piece in the Times criticizing Senator Rand Paul for not being a good-enough libertarian. Doherty raises fair points, and he won’t get any debate from me that Paul is far from an ideal libertarian candidate.

But I think he’s missing the bigger point about Senator Paul’s campaign: the fact that he is is a national figure and that we’re discussing on a daily basis a growing libertarian branch of the GOP is a much more important story than whatever deviations he makes from libertarian orthodoxy.

For at least the past 20 years in the United States, attitudes toward government have become clearly more libertarian. Don’t get me wrong: Americans aren’t full-blown libertarians and they certainly don’t call themselves that. But a growing number of Americans hold libertarian views. Cato’s David Boaz, for instance, shares some poll data that confirms this point:

In studies that David Kirby and I have published at the Cato Institute on “the libertarian vote,” we have found that only 2 to 4 percent of Americans say that they’re libertarian when asked. But 15 to 20 percent — 30 to 40 million Americans — hold libertarian views on a range of questions. The latest Gallup Governance Survey finds 24 percent of respondents falling into the libertarian quadrant, matching the number of conservatives and liberals and up from 17 percent in 2004 and 23 percent in 2008. And when asked in a Zogby poll if they would define themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian,” fully 44 percent of respondents — 100 million Americans — accept the label.

And Nick Gillespie at Reason reports on other poll data:

Since the early 1990s, CNN has looked at the responses to two questions on two different polls to crudely gauge libertarian sentiments. One was about the role of government in running things and one about the role of government in morality. The first question asked whether you thought government was trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. If you agreed, that was the libertarianish answer. Another question asked whether you think government should promote traditional values or favor no particular set of values. If you preferred the second answer, that counted as libertarian. You add up the libertarian response to both questions and you get a composite score.
The latest CNN survey asking these questions is from December 2014 (see questions 11 and 12) and the trends are clearly moving in a libertarian direction. Back in 1992, only about 50 percent agreed that “government was doing too much.” In 2014, that figure was at 58 percent (down slightly from a 2011 peak of 63 percent). In 1993 (the first year the question was asked), only 42 percent said that government should not favor one set of values. In 2014, that figure was 55 percent, an all-time high.

In fact, based this data and his own work, 538’s Nate Silver recently wrote a piece entitled “There Are Few Libertarians. But Americans Have Libertarians Views.”(He also had a 2011 piece in the Times on the same CNN polling.)

Whether the data is a reflection of “a libertarian moment,” as the folks at Reason like to call it, is up for debate. But the trend is unmistakable, and it demands more attention from conservatives than it does from any disgruntled Rand Paul fan.

Charlie Cooke’s excellent new book is an attempt to grapple with this new reality and what it may mean for the GOP, but I don’t see many GOP contenders acknowledging this new reality in the 2016 campaign or taking on Cooke’s challenge.

By the way, not all libertarians feel the way Doherty does about Rand Paul – Matt Welch at Reason makes a much more enthusiastic case for Rand Paul’s libertarianism.

In conclusion, I will reiterate what I once wrote to Kevin Williamson when he was so down about Rand Paul’s chance of winning on the grounds that, as he put it, “Americans ultimately value short-term government handouts over long-term fiscal health.” I wrote:

Kevin shouldn’t dismiss the idea that the electoral success and subsequent popularity of lawmakers like Senators Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz, or like Representatives Matt Salmon, Justin Amash, and Thomas Massie, is a harbinger of a major change in what people expect from their politicians.
Americans have lost their taste for the slop that the Republican party has been serving for years. Milquetoast promises about smaller government inevitably precede GOP votes for ever bigger government – in the bedroom and in the boardroom. …
The plucky senator from Kentucky makes waves because he is not your typical Republican: Where others cower from political controversy, in rhetoric and in practice, Paul can be counted on to deliver on the many issues that people care about.

And I added:

In fact, my interest in Paul does not stem from a broad agreement with him on each policy issue — there’s a lot I disagree with him on. Rather, his appeal stems from the impact his bold, new ideas may have on the Republican status quo — and ultimately on America. Sure, he gives a voice to many of the issues that I (and more Americans than many appreciate) like, but more important, he is forcing a conversation that wouldn’t happen without him. At the same time, he and guys like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Justin Amash are holding other Republicans’ feet to the fire, making it harder for legislators to say one thing and do another without us noticing.
Senator Paul and his fellow band of renegades are undeniably creating conflict in the short term, but it’s for the long-term benefit of the Republican party. Far from a menace to Republicans, these guys’ brash challenges may be the only way to save the ailing elephants.

In other words, Paul’s presence in this race is a real benefit to libertarianism in the longer run, whether he gets elected or not.