Guest Columnist Idaho Senator Brian Lenney: The Difference Between Us?

Liberty is the road we travel. Not the destination.

That’s why I vote conservative instead of libertarian even though I agree with libertarians probably 60% (ish) of the time and genuinely like a lot of them personally, especially here in Idaho.

But here’s where I get off the highway.

The Big L Libertarian position on drugs is that legalization is the only logically consistent liberty position. And look, I understand the argument. But we don’t live in a philosophy seminar. We live in a community where meth destroyed entire family lines, where fentanyl is killing kids who thought they were taking a Xanax, and where the social wreckage of that stuff lands on neighbors, churches, grandparents raising grandchildren because their own kids are gone.

“Personal choice” sounds clean until you’re watching what’s left of a family at a funeral for a 24 year old. Liberty without cultural guardrails doesn’t set you free. It just moves the chaos somewhere else, usually onto the people least able to handle it, while the guy tweeting about the non-aggression principle never has to clean it up.

Same with hookers. Consenting adults, victimless (they say). Except it’s not victimless. The communities where that gets normalized don’t get more free, they get coarser, more predatory, and harder on women and kids downstream. I’m not interested in optimizing for theoretical adult autonomy at the expense of what that does to the culture my kids grow up in.

Open borders is where they completely lose me and frankly, most Americans. Open borders is the logical endpoint of pure liberty philosophy. “Labor should flow freely like capital.” Except I’m not trying to optimize a global labor market. I live in a country with a particular history and particular people already in it who I actually owe something to. You can’t conserve anything with open borders. You just get demographic replacement and call it freedom.

And that word, conserve, that’s the whole point.

I’m a conservative. The job is to conserve things worth keeping. The family. The kids. The place you actually live. Liberty is a powerful tool for doing that. Limited government, free markets, personal responsibility.

But all of it only matters if there’s something worth protecting on the other end.

And when ‘muh liberty’ is the answer to everything, including whether your community gets any say in what takes root inside it? Brother, you left conservatism about three exits back.

A lot of my libertarian-leaning friends here in Idaho get this instinctively even if they don’t frame it this way. They want liberty because they want to be left alone to raise their families, run their farms, live by their values. The liberty is in service of something. They’re not philosophically committed to a world where anything goes as long as nobody technically coerces anybody.

That’s the small L libertarian I can work with.

The Big L who follows the philosophy all the way to its logical endpoint, wherever that leads, open borders, legal everything, zero community standards because standards are coercion? That person is consistent. I’ll give them that. They’re just following the road all the way to the end.

I got off twenty miles back because there was actually somewhere I was trying to go.