Tag Archive for: conservative populists

Is a Conservative Libertarian Alliance Possible?

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In a recent column on American Greatness entitled “The Choice Facing Libertarians,” I argued that libertarians ought to stop supporting third-party candidates and join our side in an effort to stand up to the Left. In response, writing for Reason, this was the substance of libertarian author Steven Greenhut’s rebuttal. He claimed that while conservatives and libertarians have been allies on many issues in the past, “now we’re like residents of different planets.”

Maybe. A lot of the issues that joined conservatives and libertarians in the past have not gone away. As Greenhut acknowledged, during the Cold War, conservatives and libertarians agreed on the dangers of Soviet expansionism. They differed on how much that justified empowering the American security agencies. They agreed to fight progressive assaults on property rights, but disagreed on some major details, such as making asset forfeiture a tool in the war on drugs.

How much has changed? Where there was the Soviet Union, now there is China. Where there was cocaine and crack, how there’s methamphetamine and fentanyl. These problems, which Greenhut cites as examples, are bigger threats today than they were a generation ago.

It is impossible to explore the growing rift between populist conservatives and libertarians without discussing Trump’s role. Are libertarians, like Never Trumpers, putting Trump’s rhetoric and style in front of his policies? Have they examined Trump’s policies in their entirety, or selectively chosen what they see as his major transgressions because they don’t like him? To explore that question, it’s worth examining Trump’s record on the areas of traditional agreement between libertarians and conservatives. With respect to foreign policy, one of the authors Greenhut references is Libertarian National Committee Executive Director Wes Benedict, who in a 2018 position paper accuses Trump of “reckless military aggressiveness.”

But how did that pan out? Trump started no new wars. He withdrew troops from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Germany, and challenged other NATO nations to contribute more to their own defense. He deescalated tensions with North Korea. He avoided needless confrontations Xi Jinping at the same time as he strengthened alliances with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, and he directed the U.S. military to invest in strategic deterrence instead of maintaining expensive tactical deployments all over the world.

How is any of this reckless or unrealistic? Apart from some bellicose rhetoric and missteps that he corrected, such as hiring, then firing, David Bolton, what would a different president have done in order to be more palatable to libertarians?

With respect to the war on drugs, Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, did step up the war on drugs. But Sessions didn’t last very long, and by the second half of Trump’s presidency he accomplished something no president had ever done, he deescalated the war on drugs with the First Step Act. Why don’t libertarians give Trump credit for this? He overruled much of his party and offended much of his base to make this legislation happen, and it was the right thing to do.

It’s easy to get any productive dialog derailed on this issue, because libertarians get stereotyped by conservatives as pro-drug, anything goes libertines. But libertarians make a solid argument – the war on drugs has damaged civil liberties and helped create a monstrous security state – that requires a serious response. Conversely, however, when conservatives bring up the harm drugs inflict on individuals and on society, they are stereotyped by libertarians as authoritarian collectivists. What is required is finding the balance between repression and tolerance. Repression is terrible. Prisons are filled with nonviolent drug offenders and police are prioritizing drug crimes that you could argue aren’t crimes at all. But when taken to extremes, tolerance is also terrible.

There are nearly a half-million heroin and fentanyl addicts in the United States. After tripling in less than twenty years, for the last few years drug overdose deaths in the U.S., mostly from opiates, have leveled off at around 70,000 per year. This is an astonishing statistic. Every year, more opioid deaths than battlefield casualties during the entire Vietnam war. The toll on society is equally devastating.

In cities across America, especially in blue states, heroin and methamphetamine addicts have taken over entire neighborhoods. They are joined by drunks, the mentally ill, predators and thieves, the willful homeless, and – in far fewer percentages than is typically reported – sober, hardworking people who are genuinely down on their luck.

Libertarians claim that the “quality of life offenses” these homeless inflict on working people whose towns and cities have been overran are of “secondary” concern. The right to a safe, pleasant neighborhood is secondary to the fundamental human right to live a life of perpetual intoxication and pitch their tent on any public space.

To test their commitment to this legal theory, libertarians are invited to imagine themselves living in Venice Beach in Los Angeles, or the Tenderloin in San Francisco, or any number of places from Austin to Seattle, where drug addicts own the sidewalks and alleys. They are invited to step over the syringes and shit as they make their way to work in the morning, and navigate through an unavoidable gauntlet of stoned zombies on the way home. Libertarians are further encouraged to imagine this scenario includes their own hard won home equity being underwater thanks to the invasion, making it financially impossible for them to sell out and flee the chaos.

Live the nightmare, and then reconsider the question: Now how “secondary” is this right to do something, anything, to cope with “quality of life offenses?” Suddenly the “collectivist” compromises necessary to solve this problem become more palatable.

Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, possibly the only writer in America today who has been able to elicit any shred of empathy from progressives for poor white people, delivered a talk at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington in 2019 entitled “Beyond Libertarianism.” In his talk, Vance argued that social problems are often the result of political choices. His examples tap the same issues that Trump rode into the White House in 2016.

Vance describes the opioid epidemic as a political problem, saying “We allowed our regulatory state to approve these drugs and to do nothing when it was clear that these substances were starting to affect our communities.”

On the economy, Vance said, “We made the choice that we to be able to buy cheaper consumer goods at Walmart instead of have access to good jobs, and maybe that was a defensible choice—I don’t think it was—but it was a choice, and we have to stop pretending that it wasn’t.”

One of Vance’s main points was that the vast majority of conservatives, at least until Trump came along, had “outsourced” their economic thinking to libertarians. But he’s calling for balance, asking “the question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve? Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish those things?”

In a rebuttal to Vance’s 2019 talk, Steven Horwitz published an essay entitled “Why Libertarians Distrust Political Power.” Horwitz is a professor of economics at Ball State University in Indiana. He is also the director of the Koch funded Institute for the Study of Political Economy.

Horwitz labels Vance’s positions as “nationalist conservatism.” This is somewhat presumptuous, since the movement catalyzed by Trump is still very much in flux, but it beats “white nationalism,” and isn’t any less descriptive than “conservative populism,” so as a placeholder it will do.

The heart of Horwitz’s rebuttal appears to be that even though obvious social problems in need of remedies mean that we ought to do something, does not mean we can do anything. He cites historic political impotence in the face of Vance’s examples; drug addiction, suicide, pornography and the opioid epidemic, and claims that Vance “does not offer is any argument for bridging that gap between ought and can.”

There is a fundamental problem with Horwitz’s argument, however, which is that he is cherry picking. It is easy enough to cite examples, often of debatable merit, where government ineptitude caused problems, or took existing problems and made them worse. But where is Horwitz going with this argument? He ignores countless examples where government action did solve problems, and he doesn’t confront the consequences of his reasoning. What is government for? What is the purpose of a nation? Aren’t the realities of language and culture, the basics of what define a nation, ultimately social phenomenon?

Libertarians are right to promote limited government. As a guiding principle, it is one of the most important, along with the right to personal liberty and private property ownership. But libertarians, and conservatives, need to recognize that in our 21st century global economy, private corporate power can eclipse state power. Preserving the right of Americans to enjoy their personal liberty and independently build private wealth depends on preserving a balance of power between global corporate interests and the federal government.

The political threat that faces Americans today is a growing alliance between government and corporate power. Conservatives see this with increasing clarity, and are searching for political and philosophical answers that will build a movement to counter the relentless centralization of authority. It is a cause to which libertarians could make vital contributions, if they would recognize that inefficiency, corruption and centralization can come as quickly from corporate sources as it can from state sources.

It isn’t enough to sit back and take ideological pot shots at nationalist conservatives. Libertarians need to recognize the heretical fact that sometimes big government programs are in the national interest – the wildly successful Apollo Project with its myriad commercial spinoffs is as good an example as any. They need to reject their anarchist fringe, for which the logical endpoint of their philosophy is a nation fragmented into private fiefdoms protected by private warlords. They need to question ideology that doesn’t match reality. They need to engage in exploratory investigations instead of confirmation research, and question the paid for ideas coming out of their well funded think tanks.

With the challenges Americans face today, it isn’t enough for libertarians to say government cannot do anything as well as the private sector can, and let it go at that. They need to present a coherent policy agenda. America’s major cities are becoming ungovernable. What’s your solution? America needs infrastructure for the 21st century. What’s your solution?

Finally, libertarians ought to take a very hard look at the political advances progressives are making, with the full support of multinational corporations and the government bureaucracies. How is this less of a threat than conservatives? How will the progressive policy bludgeons of climate change mitigation and institutionalized anti-racism, both to be implemented as national emergencies, impact personal liberty and private wealth?

An alliance between conservatives and libertarians is possible. But conservative populism, both as an ideological movement and as a practical political agenda, will evolve with or without the libertarians.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Conservative Victory Requires Overcoming Popular Fantasies

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It will take more than a disastrous performance by Joe Biden for conservatives to win back control of the house and senate in 2022, and retake the presidency in 2024. For conservatives to get their country back, they will have to build a coalition that brings together Never Trumpers, libertarians, social conservatives, economic nationalists, and millions of independents and moderate democrats.

Defining an agenda that ought to appeal to all of these groups is actually the easier part. It just requires courage combined with tact. Reject, with Reaganesque grace rather than Trumpian bluster, all the nihilistic absurdities of leftist democrats. Reject them categorically. For example:

We will not enforce quotas based on race or gender. Anywhere. We will not tolerate curricula that teaches K-12 students that America is inherently oppressive. We will take back our city streets and, if necessary, conscript homeless, willfully unemployed, able-bodied substance abusers into a national service. We will control our borders and protect American jobs. We will have realistic energy policies that embrace an all-of-the-above strategy, recognizing that fossil fuel and nuclear power are essential to our economic health.

These pivotal issues involve the twin pillars of leftist thought: Fighting oppression and fighting climate change. They are both tools to cause further centralization of wealth and power, they are both massive exaggerations of facts, and both exploit primal emotions; envy, resentment, fear. The challenge for conservatives is to unite to expose identity politics and extreme environmentalism as frauds, and replace them with common sense.

This is a tough challenge. RINOs, opportunists, and well meaning but thoroughly indoctrinated people of all ideologies will have to be painstakingly convinced. But it isn’t the biggest challenge conservatives face. That would be the meaning of nationalism, and how nationalism translates into the size and role of the federal government.

Nationalism, like patriotism and even liberty, are words the Left has attempted, with some success, to taint as anachronistic if not downright evil. This is the first hurdle: Should nations exist in the 21st century? According to the corporate leftist establishment, the answer is no. Their goal is a global community, ran by a globalist oligarchy, with supra-national institutions managing and allocating resources. Responding effectively to the vision of corporate globalism is subtle. Corporate globalism, for all its pretensions of transnationalism, is actually just a variant of explicitly Western values and traditions, with roots that go back centuries.

The phenomenon of oligarchy and rule by elites is a defining feature of Western nations, including the United States, for most of its history. The conflict between individualism and collectivism, even as expressed in modern terms, goes back at least two hundred years. The clash of values between imperial ambition and a philanthropic sense of obligation was well established and ongoing throughout the Pax Britannica. Globalism today, functionally understood, is the American Empire. It is nationalism writ large.

Conservatives that want to attract a majority of the American electorate have to confront this reality. The American Left, to the chagrin of its more idealistic and savvy observers, has become the prime instrument of the Global American Empire. Their electoral majority, however dubious, is their claim to legitimacy. Their commitment to fighting race and gender oppression, paired with their commitment to eliminating use of fossil fuel, are, respectively, their international weapons of cultural and economic imperialism. So what alternatives can conservatives offer?

In answering this, another unavoidable reality must be faced: The rise of a rival superpower, China, ruled by a regime that is as implacably committed to world domination as it is prepared to take centuries if necessary to achieve that goal. There is a clash of civilizations in the world, and the prevailing antagonists are America vs China. This may seem counter-intuitive. If America and China are in conflict, why is America’s corporate leftist establishment selling their souls to China?

As Lee Smith eloquently and accurately observed in his recent essay “The Thirty Tyrants,” American globalists envy the Chinese model. The fascist ease with which China can manage its economy and its people appeals to the American ruling class. And getting access to the Chinese market while attracting Chinese investment in the United States is a lucrative game. But it won’t last. China and the United States are on a collision course.

Conservatives who think it will not matter if China gradually replaces the United States as the economic and military hegemon in the world have not thought it through. The idea that America would survive in a world where China controlled every supply chain ought to have been demolished when the COVID-19 pandemic exposed our dependence on Chinese pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. What about semiconductors and quantum computers? What about cobalt from West Africa, lithium from Bolivia, copper from Papua New Guinea, or dozens of other strategic minerals? America is a trading nation; a maritime power. Without access to foreign raw materials and manufactured goods, America cannot defend itself.

This goes to the heart of both the isolationist strain of America First ideology as well as to the nonaggression principle in libertarian ideology. Both are fatally flawed concepts in the real world. Once one accepts that the world is, and always has been, a Darwinian struggle between tribes, now evolved into nation states, there is an inescapable conclusion. America will either lead an economic and military alliance that will contain China, or America will not survive as a nation.

It shouldn’t be necessary to digress into a discussion of 21st century military technology to make this clear, but to be brief: The entire world is now a tactical battlespace. America is no longer protected by oceans. A single killer satellite, launched in a retrograde orbit, could sweep away every geosynchronous communications platform in about 12 hours. Weapons launched from land, air and space can destroy targets anywhere in the world in minutes. A few massive EMP pulses detonated over North America would fry every unshielded semiconductor. Cars wouldn’t run, power grids would fail, digital communications would be impossible. A genetically engineered, weaponized virus could target select cohorts of Americans, such as only those of European descent, and kill them all within days. And then there are nukes. None of this is fantasy.

During the cold war, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction deterred a total war of annihilation. But that doctrine was buttressed by tactical military supremacy that prevented nations being dominated one by one, and falling like dominoes. China is a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was, or ever will be. It is easy to scoff at all of this. But to scoff is to indulge in wishful thinking.

Conservatives have to convince their isolationist and libertarian factions that a strong federal government and a strong military are unfortunate necessities. That there is no way around it. In this day and age, an armed citizenry has zero chance of repelling invaders, once the federal military has been overwhelmed. They would be preemptively destroyed from orbit. You might as well have a pea shooter as an AR-15.

American nationalism in the 21st century, if it is to have any practical relevance, has to come to terms with the fact that the federal government is going to keep on doing things that violate their principles. In foreign policy, Trump coined the phrase “principled realism,” an intentionally ambiguous concept that in practice meant to balance idealistic goals with realistic restraints. Its oxymoronic essence is an authentic expression of reality, and underscores the utopian futility of trying to be perpetually consistent. We do the best we can with what we have.

Principled realism is a concept that can be applied to every federal role. On principle, perhaps the federal government should not impose tariffs on unfairly subsidized imports. But in reality, keeping critical manufacturing and resource extraction industries onshore is a strategic necessity. On principle, perhaps the federal government should not award contracts to companies to research quantum computing or breakthrough aerospace technologies. But in reality, America must be preeminent in these and other critical domains.

The most contentious issue of all, at least to some, is the federal spending deficit, and its consequent impact on the status of the U.S. dollar. A discussion of this requires much more than a paragraph, but here goes: The U.S. dollar will remain the reserve and transaction currency in the world as long as the following conditions exist: America remains the biggest, most diverse economy on Earth, and every competing economy with the requisite critical mass to launch a rival currency has a bigger debt overhang than America does. America maintains the most robust age demographics of any developed nation on Earth, the best technology on Earth, and the best military on Earth. That is the collateral that buttresses the American dollar. Metal backed currencies are an anachronism, as any cyber currency maven ought to know. As for the “finite” nature of cybercurrency? So what? To paraphrase Joseph Stalin, how many divisions does Bitcoin have? Look to India, where cybercurrencies may be outlawed later this year, at the same time as the Rupee is to be linked to a federally backed cybercurrency. There is a future for cybercurrencies, but the idea that their future isn’t going to eventually be coopted and orchestrated by central banks is yet another fantasy.

To build a winning coalition, American conservatives also have to recognize the essentially Western character of the corporate leftist narrative on identity and environment. They have twisted it well beyond healthy proportions, but that shouldn’t obscure its legitimate core ideals. Americans and people all over the world don’t want to live in a society that is oppressive. Fighting against oppression based on race and gender is inherently justifiable. The solution is not enforced “equity” of outcome, however, the solution can only be to offer equal opportunity. Similarly, nobody, anywhere, wants to live in a planet that is stripped of wilderness and wildlife. But the solution is not to declare a “climate emergency” and destroy entire industries and delegitimize private property. The solution is to find a moderate balance, and reject unfounded panic.

The good news for conservatives is that so far, Joe Biden is doing everything wrong. By the millions, Biden voters are experiencing buyers remorse. But the conservatives have a lot of work to do before they can be assured that what they offer will attract enough support to dethrone the progressives. Facing tough facts would be a good place to start.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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