Maybe take libertarians more seriously
A reminder from my friend Bonnie Kristian.
I’ve long had a soft spot for libertarians. I don’t really share the ideology, but their location outside the usual Republican-Democrat conservative-liberal binary has (I’ve thought) made them pretty good at seeing stuff about our politics and governance that the rest of us maybe can’t glimpse so clearly.
There was a brief period, during the George W. Bush administration, when it seemed like “liberaltarians” might become a thing. But then Barack Obama became president and suddenly a lot of Democrats — including Obama — forgot that they wanted to restrain the executive branch so much.
Go figure.
Anyway, you may have heard a bit about how Donald Trump has empowered Elon Musk to basically rip apart American government from the inside, the expressed wishes of Congress be damned. And if the courts try to put a stop to it — they may not, admittedly — there’s a good chance Trump and Musk will ignore them too. Checks and balances are disappearing. It looks like we have a king.
My libertarian friend Bonnie Kristian is very libertarian in her latest newsletter, and in her “I told you so” of it all, she has a point:
President Trump is back in office, so naturally cries of How can he do this? How can this happen? are resounding anew.
I would humbly suggest that, functionally, he can do it and, so far, it can happen because nobody was willing to lock things down when they had a chance. Nobody was willing to pass some honest-to-goodness laws that would also limit what their guy could do. Nobody wanted to fix the procedure.1
And, well, she’s right.
But fixing this means doing away with some liberal dreams, admittedly. “Realistically,” Bonnie writes, “much of what ought to be done would require not only a reduction of the power of this particular office but of the state itself.”
A few months ago, I would have found that discomfiting. But Trump and Elon are already dismantling what I consider the good parts of the state, like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Saving ourselves from Trump — and locking down the possibilities of a future Trump — may mean we have to embrace aspects of libertarianism a little more than we’d like. The question now is if we’ll ever get a chance.
Emphasis added.
Libertarianism, as a doctrine, is something I deeply dislike and find profoundly wrong both philosophically and religiously. But libertarianism as a set of practices, particularly when expressed via pleas for decentralism, federalism, legislative oversight, electoral responsiveness, and anti-statism in general? There I see a lot that's of value, and a lot that we could have used more of (in particular, perhaps, from self-identifying libertarian organizations--like the Libertarian Party itself--and individuals--like Senator Rand Paul--who have gone full MAGA) in the past couple of decades, as the Republicans collapsed into a personality cult and the Democrats divided and sub-divided themselves to the point of being mostly ineffectual in responding to the looming crisis.
"...the expressed wishes of Congress be damned..." What wishes are those, exactly? Their standard operating procedure over the course of decades has been to defer to the agencies in lieu of actually legislating — abdicating their constitutional obligations and prerogatives along the way. And so you get Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which ended the Chevron doctrine but didn't end the mischief. Perhaps now they'll learn? We'll see.
"But Trump and Elon are already dismantling what I consider the good parts of the state, like USAID..." Time was liberals older and wiser understood that USAID was a cutout for the CIA and, quite apart from acting as an instrument of beneficent "soft power," buttressed the much-reviled military-industrial complex. I suppose that was another, more benighted time. It might end up being the case that we want to continue funding PEPFAR — that seems to make a lot of sense and do a lot of good. But maybe it's not in the national interest to pay for a lot — most? — of the other stuff.
"Checks and balances are disappearing. It looks like we have a king." _Are_ disappearing? You learned very little from our partnership, I'm afraid. With the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge, every president since Woodrow Wilson — Republican and Democrat — has pushed the constitutional envelope as far as possible, distorting the republic beyond recognition. Trump is a culmination — not even THE culmination — of that process.
Read more Jeffers. https://allpoetry.com/Shine,-Perishing-Republic