In a pair of essays on Reason's Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin and Matt Zwolinski agree on some fundamentals: democracy is generally superior to authoritarianism, libertarian critiques of democracy have real merit, and today the most serious threats to liberty in much of the world come from the nationalist right. But they differ sharply on what those agreements should mean for libertarian theory and strategy.
Somin argues that core libertarian critiques—tyranny of the majority, rational voter ignorance, and democratic paths for illiberal forces to seize power—are specific to democracy and cannot be folded into a general critique of big government. Zwolinski counters that most of what Somin calls a critique of democracy is actually a critique of state scope: limiting and decentralizing government says nothing about whether the government that remains should be democratically controlled. They also split on whether institutions like courts and central banks should be insulated from democratic control, with Somin saying yes and Zwolinski treating that as a dodge.
The deeper strategic disagreement is about comparative advantage. Zwolinski says libertarians should devote serious energy to defending democracy, especially because the turn against democracy has happened inside the liberty movement itself, as with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Curtis Yarvin, and Peter Thiel. Somin replies that such authoritarians are a tiny minority, and their real failure is insufficient respect for universal liberty, not excessive skepticism of democracy. For Somin, libertarians do better by warning non-libertarian audiences about democracy's dangerous flaws than by preaching democracy's virtues to people who are unlikely to listen.