Damon Root: 'How FDR Contributed to the Libertarian Movement'

Source:Wikipedia- with a look at President Franklin D. Roosevelt's (Democrat, New York) New Deal agenda.

"The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs and agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). They provided support for farmers, the unemployed, youth and the elderly. The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The programs focused on what historians refer to as the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.[1] The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority (as well as the party that held the White House for seven out of the nine presidential terms from 1933 to 1969) with its base in liberal ideas, the South, big city machines and the newly empowered labor unions, and various ethnic groups. The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as hostile to business and economic growth and liberals in support. The realignment crystallized into the New Deal coalition that dominated presidential elections into the 1960s while the opposing conservative coalition largely controlled Congress in domestic affairs from 1937 to 1964." 

From Wikipedia

"Root tells the tale of several noted leftists of the ’20s who found themselves marked right-wing reactionaries in the wake of FDR’s New Deal. 

Toward the end of a mostly sympathetic profile of the great journalist and critic H. L. Mencken, Christopher Hitchens once claimed that Mencken’s only “brilliance and verve” occurred during “the period between 1910 and the end of Prohibition.” Which is to say, before Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal came along. It’s an all too common refrain. Biographer Terry Teachout characterized Mencken as “blinded partly by his hatred of Roosevelt.” 

Mencken scholar Charles A. Fecher—whom you’d expect to know better—declared Mencken’s opinion of Roosevelt to be “maniacal—there is no other word to use.” Although it’s true that Mencken ended the 1930s as an enemy of what he called FDR’s “More Abundant Life,” he hardly started out the decade that way. 

A self-​described “lifelong Democrat,” Mencken voted for Roosevelt in 1932 and voiced cautious support for the New Deal’s first stirrings, writing in March 1933, “I have the utmost confidence in his good intentions, and I believe further that he has carried on his dictatorship so far with courage, sense and due restraint.” 

It wasn’t until Mencken realized the vast size and intrusive scope of that “dictatorship” that he went on the attack, lambasting the New Deal as a “puerile amalgam of exploded imbecilities, many of them in flat contradiction of the rest.” Indeed, in a passage that could be recycled and reused in our own troubled times, Mencken denounced Roosevelt for proposing “to lift the burden of debt by encouraging fools to incur more debt, and to husband the depleted capital of the nation by outlawing what is left of it... 

You can read the rest of this piece at Libertarianism.Org.  

To put it simply: the reason why we have a smaller Libertarian Party that's part of a broader Libertarian movement in America, is because of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Thanks Democrats and Republicans for giving us a party, for people who believe in both personal, as well as economic freedom, and limited government, as well as federalism, and the U.S. Constitution. 

Of course there was a Progressive movement in the 1910s and even 1900s, but there wasn't any Federal safety net for America until the 1930s with the New Deal with President Franklin Roosevelt. And then President Harry Truman unsuccessfully tried to expand the New Deal in the 1940s with his Fair Deal agenda. 

We get the Federal, public infrastructure system in the 1950s with President Dwight Eisenhower, who was Center-Right, Progressive Republican. And of course the Great Society in the 1960s with President Lyndon Johnson. 

So the main reason why Libertarians aren't Democrats or Republicans, because both parties have long histories of expanding the Federal state in America. Progressives were a major part of the Republican coalition up until the 1990s or so. And then you have the Christian-Right take over the Republican Party in the 1990s. 

So there hasn't been any real home for Libertarians as far as a political party, at least since the 1920s. Which is why the Libertarian Party was created in the early 1970s.