Jerome Tuccille died in 2015. He was a writer, a novelist, a biographer, and for a brief, exhilarating moment in the early 1970s, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for Governor of New York. His 1971 memoir, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, remains one of the most entertaining accounts of what it felt like to be young, idealistic, and politically homeless in postwar America — too individualist for the left, too skeptical of authority for the right, and thoroughly convinced that both parties were selling the same comfortable illusions in different packaging.

Martin Morse Wooster captured it well when he noted that Tuccille understood political debates to be as much comic as serious — and had the stylistic gifts to prove it. The book holds up because Tuccille never mistook enthusiasm for argument, and never let ideology get in the way of honest observation.

Which makes his later epitaph for the movement all the more worth examining. Writing in National Review, Tuccille declared libertarianism “hopelessly utopian” — a worthy intellectual exercise, perhaps, but not a serious political alternative. He said it with the weariness of a man who had believed deeply and been disappointed thoroughly.

He wasn’t entirely wrong. The history of libertarian political organizing is largely a history of noble intentions colliding with the stubborn architecture of a two-party system, followed by internal squabbles that would have embarrassed a town selectmen’s race. The utopian strain — the conviction that the perfect framework, once articulated clearly enough, will carry the day — has cost the movement more ground than any opponent ever has.

But the conclusion doesn’t follow. The ideas themselves — individual liberty, voluntary association, skepticism of concentrated power, the belief that people are generally capable of running their own lives — have not been disproven. If anything, the decades since Tuccille wrote his epitaph have made them more relevant, not less. The institutions he might have trusted to govern wisely have not covered themselves in glory.

Utopianism is a trap. Pragmatism in service of principle is not. The goal was never a perfect libertarian society — it was a freer, more humane, more accountable one. That goal doesn’t expire. It just requires patience, persistence, and the willingness to work within imperfect systems toward better ones.

Goodbye, Jerry. You were right that the revolution wasn’t coming. You were wrong that it didn’t matter.