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David Boaz in his Cato Institute office in 2008. (Photo by Katherine Frey / Washington Post via Getty Images)

BACK WHEN I WAS STILL LIVING IN THE BAY, the Cato Institutes David Boaz sent me an email out of the blue asking if Id join him for lunch; he happened to be in town for a speech. We had been pen pals for years and seen each other at conferences but somehow never really met, so I was excited for the opportunity to kibitz with somebody whom I respected a great deal.

I was never a libertarian per se, despite having some impulses in that direction. But anytime I read or listened to David I thought that he was the kind of libertarian I would like to be.

He took the liberal part of the ideology seriously. Not prone to wild-eyed notions or conspiratorial thinking, he was not motivated by some Darwinian desire to let societys less fortunate fail. Just the oppositeto me it seemed as if all of his advocacy was motivated primarily by the desire for people to be able to live as they wished, free from discrimination or oppression, free from the unfeeling and capricious power of the state. This was no doubt informed in some ways by his experience as an openly gay man through the crackdowns of the 70s and 80s.

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He was principled but open-minded. Though he was as versed in libertarian philosophy as anyone on the planet, unlike many ideologues he was not blindly chained to dogma or determined to backfill a rationale for his preferred solution. He described himself as a reasonable radicalthe aptness of that label revealed his self-awareness. My husband once lobbied him on a food-labeling policy issue that he thought Cato should support. David instinctively rebuked his position, but listened, read, kicked the idea around, and eventually landed on the other side because he decided his first impulse was wrong. Refreshing!

But on the issues where he was right and righteous from the jump, he was unsparing and often ahead of his time. David wrote about ending the drug war for the New York Times in 1988 (1988!!!). The piece concluded:

We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this warbillions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedomis too high.

Show me the lie.

So when I finally got to spend time with him, naturally I was looking forward to the opportunity to engage on these big ideas. I imagined wed have a little debate with a few glasses of white wine and for dessert hed share some stories about 1980s gay San Francisco over Tadich Grills famed rice custard pudding.

But when I arrived for our lunch I was disappointed to find David a little melancholy. He was excited to chat, of course, and up for some old stories, but rather than wanting to mix it up with me, he wanted mostly to commiserate.

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Two years into the Trump term, many of his libertarian colleagues had followed the same path as my Republican ones. I would have thought the contrarian, powerless, strident, anarchic libertarians would have had more antibodies to resist the MAGA wiles. Its not as if people were angling for jobs or trying to prop up their careers as campaign ad men like my friends were.

But, unfortunately, the siren song of access, the hatred of the progressive left, and the appeal of an imaginary deep-state-destroying strong man was too much for that motley group of weirdos to resist.

David felt like he was on a bit of an island. He, like so many of us Never Trumpers, was devastated and gobsmacked that people he respected and believed in were succumbing to this buffoon. So we ate our comfort pudding and lamented our lost colleagues and friends. And walked out together into the crisp Bay air feeling a little better, having discovered there was another tribe on our isle with which we could break bread.

In the ensuing years David kept speaking out. He wasnt going to leave the movement that he had dedicated his life to. But he also wasnt going to follow them down the orange-bricked road to hell. So he became an outcast among the outcasts. Never wavering. Never backing down.

In what I believe was his last major public address, a speech he delivered in February, David sent a message to his fellow libertarians about resisting the allure of populism:

When you see self-proclaimed freedom advocates talking about blood and soil, or helping a would-be autocrat overturn an election, or talking about LGBT equality as degeneracy, or saying we shouldnt care about government racism against black people, or defending the Confederacy and the cause of the South, or joining right-wing culture wars in supporting politicians who want to use the state to fight their enemies, or posting Holocaust jokes and death threats on Twitter, recognize that for what it is. Speak up. Fight back. Tell people: Thats not America and it's certainly not libertarianism.

Amen to that.

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David Boaz, 19532024 - by Tim Miller - The Bulwark