Once and future President Donald Trump addressed the Libertarian Party convention on May 25. He was reaching out to unify all who oppose a second term for Democrat president Joe Biden. It was not a success, as he was jeered and heckled. Disagreements among the delegates regarding Trump spawned fistfights the day before. Exasperated, Trump told the crowd “Maybe you don’t want to win. Keep getting your three to four percent every year.” Yet that is exactly what the Libertarians are happy with, wedded to an ideology that rejects being practical in a world they reject.
Trump’s visit demonstrated the fundamental divide between “classical liberals” and conservatives which should inform the latter going forward as to what must be done to Make America Great Again. It is not to make common cause with those for whom America has no meaning as a national society based on tested principles that produce prosperity and security. I have spent half a century as a conservative activist in academe, think tanks, and government, working within the Republican Party. I backed Trump as soon as he came down the escalator because he was poised to finally shift the basis of the movement from capitalism to nationalism, broadening the movement both in its reach and moral basis. Not that the hyper-successful billionaire was going to abandon capitalism, which is clearly the strongest horse in the economic race. But he was going to put it in its proper place as a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end being the continual development of the United States as a place worth living in.
Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy confirmed we had returned to a world of competing nation-states after the bubble of supposed “globalization” which followed the U.S. victory in the Cold War. The delusional “end of history” mantra gave the classical liberals hope that their day had finally come after centuries of disappointment. They had long believed that national passions and other “irrational” attachments to parochial identities and values (especially those stemming from religion) would fade. They adopted a one-dimensional concept of human nature, the “individual” who had no concerns beyond being a consumer in a capitalist marketplace. Transnational private associations of business and counterculturalists would undermine national loyalties to create “global citizens” whose “rights” would free them from all social restraints and civic duties imposed by church and state. A creed not for heroes but for anti-heroes.
Across the spectrum, everyone claims they are for “freedom,” even socialists. Workers can only be free if they own the means of production so they don’t have to take orders and can pay themselves whatever they want. Yet, when everyone uses “freedom,” it has no meaning. Anyone who proclaims it as their platform must answer the question, “freedom to do what?” Libertarians will say “anything goes.” Conservatives cannot accept that because as students of history rather than ideology (reality versus fantasy), they know only some answers work to build and maintain a viable society. And the errant children of the classical liberals cannot be allowed to run with scissors.
The three main issues the libertarian delegates had with Trump were his policies against “free trade” (mainly restrictions on China, but including sanctions against any foreign power), open borders, and abortion. These are the amazing results of an ideology that clings to self-pleasing notions in the face of abject failure.
globalization sophistry of the 1990s did what classical liberalism wanted, it allowed (encouraged) economic interdependence between nations. These were seen as ties between individuals for mutual benefit at the private level. What actually transpired was economic subversion by hostile governments to cripple the ability of the U.S. and its allies to respond to aggression. It was the loss of national independence, the loss of the ability to act on our own. I worked for decades on a bipartisan basis to stop this, with the country club GOP the main obstacle. Speaker Newt Gingrich was then a cheerleader for Big Business, but in his 2019 book Trump Vs China. Facing America’s Greatest Threat, he confesses his error, “Let me admit that I was one of those who thought admitting China to the WTO would be a big step forward. Naively… Boy, were we wrong.” He goes on, “perhaps we let self-interest get in the way of objectivity.” That self-interest being in the form of corporate lobbyists pushing classical liberal theory while waving fat checkbooks.
It may seem ironic that business mogul Trump would turn this thinking around to favor the rebuilding of national capabilities, but who else could better understand the threat than someone who had seen it from the inside? Someone whose wealth gave him the “freedom” to look at the larger issues. He not only knew what China in manufacturing (and Russia in energy) had done to the American economy, but what these rivals were using their economic gains to do: acquire the power to challenge American security and a world order in which Americans could be safe as well as wealthy. Decoupling from China was a top priority, one Biden has (reluctantly) continued and which Trump has promised to accelerate when he resumes office. And energy independence is a Trump objective neither Biden nor the libertarians support.
What more needs to be said about the damage inflicted across the country by Biden’s open border policy? Economic dislocation and rising crime have made this second only to inflation as the top issue on the minds of voters. As I started my graduate program in economics, I dabbled in libertarian thought but was turned off when I read Ludwig von Mises claim in Omnipotent Government. The Rise of the Total State and Total War that he didn’t care about borders because “under free trade and free migration, no individual is concerned about the territorial size of his country.” Those of us who live in the real world do have to worry about such things if we want to preserve a society we can live in.
On abortion, the libertarians share the “our bodies, ourselves” view that no higher standards of morality exist beyond personal indulgence. The ties between anarchy and nihilism are very close. The Cambridge Dictionary defines nihilism as “a belief that all political and religious organizations are bad, or a system of thought that says that there are no principles or beliefs that have any meaning or can be true” and thus cannot justify any authority over the actions of individuals who are free to make decisions on whatever basis they desire. A contributor to the Anarchist Library writes “Nihilist anarchism isn’t concerned with a social revolution that adds a new chapter to an old history but the ending of history altogether.” Convincing mothers to kill their babies truly is the end of everything. Countering this profanation, Russell Kirk in his foundational classic The Conservative Mind argues, “Leadership can be restored only by the slow and painful process of developing moral gravity and intellectual seriousness turning back to the strength of traditional doctrines.”
Kirk added in his magisterial Ten Conservative Principles, “When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. Anarchy never lasts long, being intolerable for everyone… To anarchy there succeeds tyranny or oligarchy, in which power is monopolized by a very few. The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise.” We thus see the Marxist Left endorse anarchy with a dishonest short-term embrace of libertarian rhetoric. They hope that by destroying conventional society, the libertarians will have opened the door for them to rescue desperate people by ending the chaos in brutal fashion. It is up to conservatives, who sit in the center between anarchy and tyranny, to maintain what economist Joseph Schumpeter called the “steel frame” or “protective strata” of traditional society without which not only capitalism but civilization itself cannot endure. Americans are turning toward Trump in the hope he is the kind of strong leader who understands this mission, and that he will not pander to the libertarians again after having exposed them as a threat to MAGA.
William R. Hawkins is a former economics professor who has worked for conservative think tanks and on the professional staff of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. He has written widely on international economics and national security issues for both professional and popular publications.
Comments are closed.