Dave Weigel has an appreciation of the late David Nolan:
The 66-year-old libertarian activist David Nolan died on Saturday; he had a stroke while driving, then crashed his car.
Some of the vital history of anti-statist politics dies with him. In the 1960s, Nolan was a YAF and Students for Goldwater activist. 1971, Nolan was watching Richard Nixon on TV with some like-minded friends when the president announced that he’d be introducing wage controls and price controls. The Libertarian Party was born in his living room; its first national convention was held months later, in Nolan’s Denver. He built it, according to Brian Doherty’s essential history Radicals for Capitalism, by tapping a list of disgruntled libertarian-minded YAFers for funds, and then relentlessly promoting the party with cast-aside libertarians around the country.
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It’s unusually difficult to say what Nolan’s legacy will be. He leaves behind a small “l” libertarian movement that is more powerful, with greater control over the levers of the GOP and more footing in popular culture, than at any time in living memory. (Witness the current, libertarian-driven backlash against the TSA if you want proof.) He also leaves behind a Libertarian Party that, like almost every third party in American history, struggles for relevance and has its best ideas co-opted by major party politicians who go on to disappoint their supporters. But if the measure of an activist’s success is bringing attention to his ideas, and bringing them from the fringe of respectability to the center, David Nolan was a success. After all, in 1971, the “crazy” guy was the one who thought price controls were a bad idea.
