V. The Future The West Is a Portable Idea, Not Blood and Soil

Not everyone who goes around celebrating the achievements of The West and decrying its destruction is a true friend of freedom. We’ve known this since at least a century ago, when the acclaimed German historian Oswald Spengler wrote his magisterial tome The Decline of the West (1919).

The book goes on for 800 pages about the magnificence of Western arts, sciences, literature, and wealth, but that’s not its thesis. The purpose of the treatise was to issue a dark warning: the West must be tribalized under a new Caesarism and fast, before the other mighty tribes of the world win the struggle for control.

The ideologies of Liberalism and Socialism are dead, Spengler wrote, as is the money-based economy, which is too thin and weak to enter the struggle for control of history. A new form of dictatorship, backed by a conscious vision and will of political masters leading the people, was necessary to seize the day.

Spengler’s huge book was met with awesome public acclaim, but what did it presage? Look at interwar Europe and you see.

That Poland Speech

The book comes to mind because of Donald Trump’s Poland’s speech, which was sometimes beautiful and inspiring and others times strangely ominous. It took a few days, but it is gradually dawning on people that the speech scripted by policy adviser Stephen Miller was more than a recitation of the usual political bromides. It was a proposal to refocus the governing philosophy of the United States at a deep level, and instill an awareness of the unique identity and mission of what he repeatedly called “The West”—a term that hasn’t had political resonance in decades.

The West, in the way the speech rendered it, is not merely an idea, but a people, a nation unto itself, united by great achievements, including triumphs in great conflicts. For example, the speech recounted the remarkable heroism of those who resisted the Nazis in the Warsaw Uprising of 1943, and went further to celebrate the more recent resistance to Soviet occupation.

The way he recounted this history was just marvelous and inspired the crowd to nonstop standing and cheering.

It further sought to forge a solidarity—even an identity—between Poland and the United States as a distinct thing called the West, which Trump very beautifully described thusly:

There is nothing like our community of nations. The world has never known anything like our community of nations. We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers. We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression. We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.

I’ve written against so many of Trump’s policies and behaviors, but these words are stirring and true (as is much of Spengler’s book) and it is about time that someone said them in this generation. But note what is distinct about his formulation. He took pains to say that these traits belong to a certain “community of nations,” a particular people united behind a certain way of life.

Unlike his predecessors in office, he refused to describe these as hallmarks of the human ideal, a universal longing, but rather centered this outlook on a particular people—not the ideas that the people hold (ideas can be ported anywhere) but somehow embedded in a certain demographic.

Two Enemies

Trump further warned that the West was under profound threat from two enemies: the overweening bureaucratic state and invasion from foreign ideology (radical Islam). To fight against these two threats, Trump prescribed a new awareness of the uniqueness of the Western tradition.

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

This is a lot to unpack! Trump is positing an existential threat that can only be met by a conscious identity awareness. And what does this awareness lead to? A willingness to defend, a courage to fight, a desire to survive. And for what? For a way of life that resides within a narrow range of the human experience. It is not universal.

This isn’t just my interpretation. David French of National Review insightfully contrasts Trump’s speech with speeches by Bush and Obama, and observes: Trump “located the values that other presidents have deemed universal squarely within a Western context, and he specifically rejected a universalism and moral equivalence.”

French’s article seems to represent many opinions on the right side of the political spectrum, in which people are fed up with feeling as if they need to apologize for the achievements of the West and should rather take pride in them. As French says, Trump takes pain to locate these achievements in history with a certain specific experience of a particular people, attached to a particular Judeo-Christian outlook.

And yet, there really is a difference between celebrating freedom and engaging in crude cultural chauvinism. There is a world of difference between the claim that freedom grows out of certain institutions (“the primordial thing,” said Ludwig von Mises, is “the idea of freedom from the state”) and claiming that it is rooted in blood and soil.

Where Is Freedom?

The blood-and-soil view of what makes civilization great is contradicted by our own eyes. The world today shows the success of freedom and rights in many cultures and among many peoples the world over. Markets exist everywhere on the planet. So do human rights and the rule of law. So do symphonies, great architecture, innovation, free speech, and art. Wherever people are given freedom from the state, they thrive.

For proof, look no further than the Index of Economic Freedom. Champions including Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Mauritius, United Arab Emirates, and Chile are spread across the globe and span many races. What they have in common is not blood, religion, geography, or language but that primordial thing, liberty.

It’s one thing to observe that this thing we call The West was first to fully develop liberal ideas. This makes the idea of The West a matter of historical documentation and an indisputable fact. It’s another thing entirely to postulate that they belong to a certain people by virtue of… what? This was the unspoken aspect of Trump’s speech. What does he really mean? Is it religion, geography, great leaders, language, or… race perhaps?

Hearing Dog Whistles

The prospect that Trump’s speech was really a cover for a darker agenda prompted Peter Beinart to declare that Trump’s speech was nothing more than an exercise in political and racial paranoia. The West is clearly not a geographic designation as such, since “Poland is further east than Morocco. France is further east than Haiti. Australia is further east than Egypt. Yet Poland, France, and Australia are all considered part of The West. Morocco, Haiti, and Egypt are not.”

If not geographic, what is it?

Poland is largely ethnically homogeneous. So when a Polish president says that being Western is the essence of the nation’s identity, he’s mostly defining Poland in opposition to the nations to its east and south. America is racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He’s not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He’s speaking as the head of a tribe.

Before rejecting Beinart’s claims as the tirades of a left-wing race-baiter, consider that Trump’s formulation of The West as a people and experience rather than an idea represents a significant departure from old liberal ideals. In particular, the speech adds a special tweak to the enlightenment ideals we attached to thinkers like Hume, Locke, Smith, and Jefferson, funneling them through the lens of a tradition of thought that stands opposed to those ideals. What he is really proposing here is another form of identity politics that rejects universalism in fact and goal.

The Trouble with Universalism

To be sure, the cause of universal rights has been used as an excuse to violate those very rights. When Condoleezza Rice said that freedom and democracy belong to all, she was justifying the kind of nation building for which the Bush and Clinton administration were most known. What that policy leads to is not freedom in fact, much less democracy, but chaos of the sort we see in the war-torn nations of the Middle East. Universalism of that sort leads to imperialism.

That is the wrong kind of universalism. It imagines that since everyone has human rights, the most powerful nation should grant them good and hard, even if at the expense of the human rights of those chalked up as “collateral damage.” The critique of this view is also right. Freedom grows from a cultural firmament, gradually, as an extension of the hearts of the people. It can’t be imposed at the point of a gun, whether it is done by left-leaning neoliberals or right-leaning neoconservatives.

Many people who rally around Trump’s ideas today have identified this very problem with universalist politics. But are they choosing the right replacement? There has to be some alternative to “universalist” imperialism other than protectionism, isolation, cultural chauvinism, and religio-racial supremacy.

The Real Liberal Alternative

As it happens, there is an alternative. It was once called liberalism and today is called classical liberalism or libertarianism. With regard to this problem, the doctrine can be summarized as follows: universal rights, locally enforced. It observes that the longing for freedom is a universal ideal but it warns against any attempt by government to use power, at the expense of freedom, to impose it.

With Tocqueville, it defers to the cultural traditions and folkways of a people, recognizing that there are infinite ways in which universal rights come to be embodied in real human experience. It is tolerant and respectful of them all. In the writings of Ludwig von Mises, this liberalism sees its realization in limits on state power, the freedom of expression and movement for all individuals, free trade, and peace and harmony among peoples and nations.

Liberalism of this sort does not rest on some dark Hegelian view of history in the form expressed by Oswald Spengler a century ago. A new Caesarism will not save The West but rather take from it its most defining characteristic: freedom of the individual from the state.

The New Moderates

Where does that leave those of us who can’t rally around Trump’s vision or those who despise that vision? Maybe that leaves us in an enviable position.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia made a passing remark at FEEcon that stuck with me. He has long been a student of F.A. Hayek’s work and a solid libertarian. He says that these days, he feels less strident than ever before, for one simple reason. The right and left have become intensely partisan, unreasonable, internal, and vituperative in their tribal loyalties, and this is precisely what their leadership wants. They are two tribes fighting over the spoils of a corrupt and failing system. In this war, no one can win.

This has put Wales and many of us in the implausible position of feeling like moderates. We are able to talk sense with any reasonable person without changing our principles. A libertarian can be the most radically moderate person in the room.

The path forward is to drop the longing for a great and decisive tribal conflict and move toward a system of peace, prosperity, and social harmony for all. It’s not about blood and soil. It’s about the pursuit of happiness that is the right of all people.

The message that universal liberty needs no tribal strongman has never been more appealing, or more necessary.

Left-Wing Economics Is No Match for Alt-Right Resentment

The Democratic leadership, and its left-wing intellectual base, are feeling implausibly smug these days. They figure it this way: the Trump era is going to inspire a blowback. Trump will make a terrible mess, destabilize income security and health care access, and skew social power in favor of fat cats, and all of this will make people angry.

Then the Left will hold all the cards. They will say: told ya so. They will tap into populist impulses with their own plan for greatness, tacking further Left than Obama was willing to go. They offer up vast income guarantees, expanded economic regulation, a puffed-up welfare state, universal health care, a war on rich people like Trump, and then they rule, forever and ever, saecula saeculorum, amen.

They should rethink this. It’s probably not going to work.

It is precisely in reaction to such policies, and the complex demographics of class and race resentment they give rise to, that hard Right movements rose in the US and Europe. There will be no mass regret for turning away from social-democratic policies. On the contrary, sticking to big-government economics will perpetuate far-Right rule here and abroad. The Left has to rethink, and fast, and it means raising fundamental questions about their economic orthodoxies.

Internal Critique

Don’t take my word for it. This analysis actually comes from a solid article in the center-Left media site Vox, “Why Left-Wing Economics Is Not the Answer to Right-Wing Populism.” Keep in mind that this was written by friends of the Left, and they are sending a serious warning: there is no evidence that tacking Left has any chance of succeeding.

The problem is that a lot of data suggests that countries with more robust welfare states tend to have stronger far-right movements. Providing white voters with higher levels of economic security does not tamp down their anxieties about race and immigration—or, more precisely, it doesn’t do it powerfully enough. For some, it frees them to worry less about what is in their wallet and more about who may be moving into their neighborhoods or competing with them for jobs …

The uncomfortable truth is that America’s lack of a European-style welfare state hurts a lot of white Americans. But a large number of white voters believe that social spending programs mostly benefit nonwhites. As such, they oppose them with far more fervor than any similar voting bloc in Europe.

In this context, tacking to the Left on economics won’t give Democrats a silver bullet to use against the racial resentment powering Trump’s success. It could actually wind up giving Trump an even bigger gun. If Democrats really want to stop right-wing populists like Trump, they need a strategy that blunts the true drivers of their appeal—and that means focusing on more than economics.

I would correct the last sentence: it means that they must fix their problem with good economics or be doomed to continued marginalization. The Vox piece points out that since World War II, most European countries have adopted some model of social democracy: generous welfare states, regulated markets, high taxation, universal education, and socialized health care. The high-water mark of the political parties that embody that vision was in the 1970s.

They have all been losing support since that time. A Rightist revolt—not in a push against big-State policies but for a more nativist application of those same policies—began in France in the late 1970s and extended to Austria in the 1980s, and the movement has gained steam since the end of the Cold War through the new millennium. It is now rocking Europe from France to the Netherlands.

A study by Simon Hix and Giacomo Benedetto tracked the support for social democracy in 18 countries from 1945–2016. They find a long secular decline at the polls.

There is no reason to think this is going to reverse. The rise of the Right represents a repudiation of these policies, not in total, but in a particular form: the perception that the receivers represent a different tribe than the payers. Vox calls it “welfare chauvinism—an economic platform fairly similar to that of social democrats, but paired with an idea that immigrants should be excluded from receiving these benefits.”

Vox sums it up: “If social democrats see their future as a competition for votes with right-wing populists, then they have two choices: lose the election, or lose their progressive identity.”

The “Paradox of Social Democracy”

That’s tough advice. On a deeper level, it means coming to terms with the greatest secret in lefty circles, still spoken about in hushed terms among mostly academic types. This secret might need to come out in the open now. It is this: two high values of the Left, diversity and welfare statism, are an unstable and electorally incompatible mix.

The problem is that the willingness to cough up taxes for a government bureaucracy to support people with whom you sense some identity draws on a tribal instinct. You might not love it but you put up with it because you somehow identify with the people on the receiving end. There but for the grace of God go you. But the less you personally identify with those on the receiving end, the less sympathetic you are and the less willing you are to pay.

This is a fascinating observation because the ethic of the welfare state pretends to be benevolent toward marginalized groups. In practice, it only works by bolstering and feeding on identity politics. The larger the welfare state, the more the payers demand that it only benefit others like themselves.

The more diverse the society, the less likely you are to feel as if your tribe is winning in this redistribution game. You are now vulnerable to political manipulation. The first demagogue to come along and say “look at the creeps who are winning at your expense” wins the game. It’s an enormously powerful message. It taps into a deep sense of injustice that people have. Diversity becomes the proverbial straw that breaks the welfare camel’s back.

What does this breakage look like? It looks exactly like what we see around the developed world: the rise of nativism, police state authoritarianism, the boiling up of racialist feelings and movements, protectionist trade policies, centralization of power in the hands of people who have no sympathy at all toward non-majority religions, races, and language groups.

In practice, this political dynamic can get really wicked. Social welfare states, such have been built since World War II, are only politically stable in exactly the kinds of societies that are incompatible with the kind of world the Left wants and the kind of people the Left believes we should be. That’s a serious problem for them. It forces them to come to terms with a massive problem in their political worldview.

The Left Has No Answers

There seems to be no getting around this problem. Social democracy has created the very conditions that are leading to reactionary political movements that kick the left out of power. The left’s own institutions easily get captured by movements that reject egalitarian values, and use those institutions to punish the people who built them.

And as I type those words, I’m reminded that F.A. Hayek actually warned of this exact problem in his 1944 book Road to Serfdom. He predicted that social democratic policies, despite being based on a humanitarian outlook, would actually end in feeding authoritarian political movements. He warned the world back then, but only now are thinkers on the left realizing that this is true and that they have a serious problem.

And keep in mind that this is not only about the demographic paradox. The roots go much deeper to a problem that traces back at least a century: namely that left-wing movements have a huge blind spot regarding economics. Their suspicion of free-market systems runs so deep that they can’t come to terms with the obvious failure of the regulatory and welfare states they created. Or more precisely: despite all their failures, they cannot find their way toward a solution that would repudiate their foundational anti-capitalist impulses.

Just consider the obvious.

• They claim to love the poor and middle class. But when private enterprise comes along to bring food, clothing, and electronics to average people, via big-box stores, the left screams and denounces them. Instead of celebrating big box stores, fast food, and the mass availability of digital technology—which are actually achieving the old dream of universal access—they condemn them, regulate them, and even try to drive them out of existence.

• They claim to champion workers, but their taxes, mandates, wage floors, and restrictions have created a job marketplace that is hard to enter, restricted, leads to job locks, and pillages workers of their just compensation.

• They claim to champion the cause of democracy, but they create systems that prohibit average people from being the driving force for the society’s use of resources.

• They want universal schooling and healthcare but create systems that are wildly costly, deliver inferior results, and deny average people the right to choose.

• They try to foment class war against the rich without acknowledging that many average people actually admire the rich and aspire to be like them, and need a system filled with opportunity to help them achieve those dreams.

In short, their egalitarian and democratic ideals are at odds with their refusal to appreciate economics and the role of the market in achieving their own professed ideals.

In saying that, I’m not just trying to score ideological points. There really is a tragedy here. Since at least the 1930s, if not decades earlier, left progressives decided to abandon their 19th-century ideals to embrace a statist means of organizing society. Their hatred of capitalism trumped their love of rights and freedoms, and now they are stuck with the results: their own institutions are being captured by interests hostile to their ideals.

Keeping Progress on Track

And at this point, there is no going back. They can’t win. They are losing control. And there is no prospect that this is going to change unless there is some dramatic ideological shift. And this shift absolutely must take place, because the cause of liberty itself is in peril. It is being squeezed out of public life in a vice of right and left.

We need all hands on deck to keep human progress on track.

What form would this shift take? There are three paths, not necessarily mutually exclusive.

1. The social democrats need to lose their hostility to free enterprise, improve their economic understanding, and come out full force for deregulation, tax cuts, and privatization as the right means for realizing peace, prosperity, tolerance, and widespread access to material abundance.

2. The hard right needs to let go of its warm spot for the police state, migration restrictions, militarism, and middle-class welfare, and embrace a consistent view of human freedom that includes a tolerance for diversity and an acknowledgement that global trade is fully compatible with national pride.

3. We need a new and conscious movement that is devoted to a classical form of liberalism, applied in the 21st century. Such a movement should celebrate free enterprise, trade, and peace and recognize that the magic of freedom is revealed most profoundly in its capacity to create harmony out of diversity, strong cultural ties out of spontaneous association, and prosperity from the creative actions of individuals in an open-ended social order. Such a movement needs to detach itself from the war between right and left and instead embrace liberty as the third way and the light in an otherwise dark world.

As implausible as it sounds, the third path seems most viable to me. In many ways, it really is 1946 again, a time that cries out for the emboldening of a passionate, dedicated, morally strong movement to save freedom from its enemies. A genuine liberal movement must not only reverse the multifarious errors of left and right from the past but also point the way toward a peaceful and flourishing future.

Open Your Eyes: Social Democracy is Collapsing

A sign of strange times: 1984 by George Orwell has become a bestseller yet again. Here is a book distinguished for its dark view of the state, together with a genuine despair about what to do about it.

Strangely, this view is held today by the Right, the Left, and even people who don’t think of themselves as loyal to either way. The whole fiasco happening in D.C. seems insoluble, and the inevitable is already taking place today as it did under the presidents who preceded Trump: the realization that the new guy in town is not going to solve the problem.

Now arrives the genuine crisis of social democracy. True, it’s been building for decades but with the rise of extremist parties in Europe, and the first signs of entrenched and sometimes violent political confrontations in the United States, the reality is ever more part of our lives. The times cry out for some new chapter in public life, and a complete rethinking of the relationship between the individual and the state and between society and its governing institutions.

Origins of the Problem

At a speech for college students, I asked the question: who here knows the term social democracy? Two hands of more than one hundred went up. That’s sad. The short answer is that social democracy is what we have now and what everyone loves to hate. It’s not constitutionalism, not liberalism, not socialism in full, and not conservatism. It’s unlimited rule by self-proclaimed elites who think they know better than the rest of us how to manage our lives.

By way of background, at the end of the Second World War, the intellectual and political elites in the United States rallied around the idea that ideology was dead. The classic statement summing up this view in book form came in 1960: The End of Ideology by Daniel Bell. A self-described “socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture,” he said that all wild-eyed visions of politics had come to an end. They would all be replaced by a system of rule by experts that everyone will love forever.

To be sure, the ultimate end-of-ideology system is freedom itself. Genuine liberalism (which probably shouldn’t be classified as an ideology at all) doesn’t require universal agreement on some system of public administration. It tolerates vast differences of opinion on religion, culture, behavioral norms, traditions, and personal ethics. It permits every form of speech, writing, association, and movement. Commerce, producing and trading toward living better lives, becomes the lifeblood. It only asks that people—including the state—not violate basic human rights.

But that is not the end of ideology that Bell and his generation tried to manufacture. What they wanted was what is today called the managerial state. Objective and scientific experts would be given power and authority to build and oversee large-scale state projects. These projects would touch on every area of life. They would build a cradle-to-grave welfare state, a regulatory apparatus to make all products and services perfect, labor law to create the perfect balance of capital and labor, huge infrastructure programs to inspire the public (highways! space! dams!), fine-tune macroeconomic life with Keynesian witchdoctors in charge, a foreign-policy regime that knew no limits of its power, and a central bank as the lender of last resort.

What Bell and that generation proposed wasn’t really the end of ideology. It was a codification of an ideology called social democracy. It wasn’t socialism, communism, or fascism as such. It was a gigantically invasive state, administered by elite bureaucrats, blessed by intellectuals, and given the cover of agreement by the universal right of the vote. Surely nothing can truly be oppressive if it is takes place within the framework of democracy.

A Brief Peace

The whole thing turned out to be a pipe dream. Only a few years after the book appeared, ideology came roaring back with a vengeance, mostly in reaction to the ossification of public life, the draft for the Vietnam war, and the gradual diminution of economic prospects of the middle class. The student movement rose up, and gained momentum in response to the violent attempts to suppress it. Technology gave rise to new forms of freedom that were inconsistent with the static and officious structure of public administration. Political consensus fell apart, and the presidency itself—supposed to be sacrosanct in the post-war period—was dealt a mighty blow with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Government no longer held the high ground.

All that seemed to hold the old post-war social-democratic consensus together was the Cold War itself. Surely we should put aside our differences so long as our country faces an existential threat of Soviet communism. And that perception put off the unleashing of mass discontent until later. In a shocking and completely unexpected turn, the Cold War ended in 1989, and thus began a new attempt to impose a post-ideological age, if only to preserve what the elites had worked so hard to build.

This attempt also had its book-form definitive statement: The End of History by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama wrote, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

It was Bell 2.0 and it didn’t last long either. Over the last 25 years, every institution of social democracy has been discredited, on both the Right and the Left, even as the middle class began to face a grim economic reality: progress in one generation was no longer a reliable part of the American dream. The last time a government program really seemed to work well was the moon landing. After that, government just became a symbol of the worst unbearable and unworkable burden. Heavily ideological protest movements began to spring up in all corners of American public life: the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Bernie, Trump, and whatever comes next.

The Core Problem

Every public intellectual today frets about the fracturing of American civic life. They wring their hands and wonder what has gone wrong. Actually, the answer is more simple than it might first appear. Every institution within this framework—which grew more bloated and imperious over time—turned out to be untenable in one or another sense. The experts didn’t know what they were doing after all, and this realization is shared widely among the people who were supposed to be made so content by their creation.

Every program fell into one of three categories of failure.

1. Financially unsustainable. Many forms of welfare only worked because they leveraged the present against the future. The problem with that model is that the future eventually arrives. Think of Social Security. It worked so long as the few in older groups could pillage the numerous in younger groups. Eventually the demographics flipped so that the many were on the receiving end and the few were on the paying end. Now young people know that they will be paying their whole lives for what will amount to a terrible return on investment. It was the same with Medicare, Medicaid, and other forms of fake “insurance” instituted by government. The welfare state generally took a bad turn, becoming a way of life rather than a temporary help. Subsidy programs like housing and student loans create unsustainable bubbles that burst and cause fear and panic.

2. Terminally Inefficient. All forms of government intervention presume a frozen world without change, and work to glue down institutions in a certain mode of operation. Public schools today operate as they did in the 1950s, despite the spectacular appearance of a new global information system that has otherwise transformed how we seek and acquire information. Antitrust regulations deal with industrial organization from years ago even as the market is moving forward; by the time the government announces its opinion, it hardly matters anymore. And you can make the same criticism of a huge number of programs: labor law, communications regulations, drug approvals and medical regulations, and so on. The costs grow and grow, while the service and results are ever worse.

3. Morally unconscionable. The bailouts after the 2008 financial crisis were indefensible to average people of all parties. How can you justify using all the powers of the federal government to feed billions and trillions overall to well-connected elites who were the very perpetrators of the crisis? Capitalism is supposed to be about profits and losses, not private profits and socialized losses. The sheer injustice of it boggles the mind, but this only scratches the surface. How can you pillage average Americans of 40% of their income while blowing the money on programs that are either terminally inefficient, financially unsustainable, or just plain wrong? How can a government expect to administer a comprehensive spying program that violates any expectation of privacy on the part of citizens? Then there is the problem of wars lasting decades and leaving only destruction and terror guerilla armies in their wake.

All of this can remain true without creating a revolutionary situation. What actually creates the tipping point in which social democracy morphs into something else? What displaces one failed paradigm with another? The answer lies with an even a deeper problem with social democracy. You can discern it from this comment by F.A. Hayek in 1939. “Government by agreement is only possible provided that we do not require the government to act in fields other than those in which we can obtain true agreement.”

Agreement No More

Exactly. All public institutions that are politically stable—even if they are inefficient, offer low quality, or skirt the demands of basic morality—must at the minimum presume certain levels of homogeneity of opinion (at least) in the subject population; that is to say, they presume a certain minimum level of public agreement to elicit consent. You might be able to cobble this together in small countries with homogeneous populations, but it becomes far less viable in large countries with diverse populations.

Opinion diversity and big government create politically unstable institutions because majority populations begin to conflict with minority populations over the proper functions of government. Under this system, some group is always feeling used. Some group is always feeling put upon and exploited by the other. And this creates huge and growing tensions in the top two ideals of social democracy: government control and broadly available public services.

We created a vast machinery of public institutions that presumed the presence of agreement that the elites thought they could create in the 1950s but which has long since vanished. Now we live in a political environment divided between friends and foes, and these are increasingly defined along lines of class, race, religion, gender identity, and language. In other words, if the goal of social democracy was to bring about a state of public contentedness and confidence that the elites would take care of everything, the result has been the exact opposite. More people are discontented than ever.

F.A. Hayek warned us in 1944: when agreement breaks down in the face of unviable public services, strongmen come to the rescue. Indeed, I’ve previous argued that the smugness of today’s social democrats is entirely unwarranted. Trump won for a reason: the old order is not likely coming back. Now the social democrats face a choice: jettison their multicultural ideals and keep their beloved unitary state, or keep their liberal ideals and jettison their attachment to rule by an administrative elite.

Something has to give. And it is. Dark and dangerous political movements are festering all over the Western world, built from strange ideological impulses and aspiring to new forms of command and control. Whatever comes of them, it will have little to do with the once-vaunted post-war consensus, and even less to do with liberty.

Presidential adviser Steve Bannon is a dark figure—straight out of Orwell—but he is smart enough to see what the Left does not see. He claims to want to use the Trump years to “deconstruct the administrative state.” Notice that he doesn’t say dismantle much less abolish; he wants to use it for different purposes, to build a new national collective under a more powerful executive.

The institutions built by the paternalistic, urbane, and deeply smug social democrats are being captured by interests and values with which they profoundly disagree. They had better get used to it. This is just the beginning.

The partisans of the old order can fight a hopeless battle for restoration. Or they can join the classical liberals in rallying around the only real solution to the crisis of our time: freedom itself. These are the ideological battle lines of the future, not Left vs. Right but freedom vs. all forms of government control.

The GOP Implosion and the Rebirth of (Classical) Liberalism

I just returned from a historic event, the nominating convention of the Libertarian Party. (I spoke but was not a delegate and declared no support for any particular candidate.) It was a thrilling, raucous, contentious, fun, serious, and, ultimately, an ebullient event filled with high drama and intense argument.

I had keynoted the last convention in 2014, and the difference between that event and this one was palpable. What made this one historic where the other was not? The remarkable events of this year within the two major parties have created an unprecedented opportunity. The sense of this was easily discernable. This was not a civic club. This was not a social gathering. This was not a liberty-themed meetup.

This is a political party. And it matters. The Trump takeover of the GOP, and the entrenched power of the Clinton machine with the Democrats, mean that people who are looking for freedom from power have nowhere within the system to go. This opens the possibility that a new and clear voice can be heard within national politics that points the way not toward more government control but toward the cause of human liberty itself.

What struck me, however, is how the big-picture significance of all of this was largely lost on most commentators and delegates at the LP convention. Despite the ominous sense of responsibilities, they argued ad infinitum about ideology, theory, personality, and strategy. But I found few people who understood the full meaning of what is taking place.

What we have developing here is a new epoch in American politics: an authentically liberal (in the classical sense) political movement in the US is being born as an alternative to a deeply corrupt and ideologically dangerous mainstream dominated by two parties that have trended inexorably socialist and fascist.

In terms of mainstream politics, it’s the interwar period all over again: brown shirts versus reds. Except for this: there is a way out this time. This new movement has a message that is clean and clear: enough is enough, let us be free. Freedom works; government power does not. The emergence of a national political party that stands for liberty might be necessary but it is surely not sufficient. It is a sign of the rise of a broader and potentially transformative social, cultural, and intellectual movement that offers a third way beyond left and right.

Labor, Tory, and Liberal

Consider the way politics has fleshed itself out in most developed democracies over the last 150 years. There have been three broad camps (or parties), which we can call Labor, Tory, and Liberal. The names of the first two have changed (left, right, socialist, fascist, Democrat, Republican, conservative, fake “liberal”) but the themes have remained the same. The third force is known in most parts of the world as liberal except in the US where it is called libertarian today.

Labor was born in opposition to free markets, from the conviction that wealth was being wrongly distributed toward “capital” and at the expense of labor. This party has included labor unions, welfare statists, social democrats, socialists and even communists. It favors higher taxes, more regulatory control, and restrictions on commerce. Over time it came to represent the public sector bureaucracies and, finally, to embody every resentment against free enterprise you can dream up.

The Tories represent a different branch of the ruling class: the large banks, corporations, landed aristocracy, the dominant racial heritage, and the rich generally. They later came to include the interest groups that had a strong interest in an imperial foreign policy. This party had a different set of complaints against commercial freedom. It is too disruptive of tradition. It rewards the wrong people. It threatens business monopolies. The Tories long favored their own flavor of government control to restrain the “excesses” of freedom.

What the Tories and Labor have shared was a common desire to curb laissez faire based on conviction that society needs some plan emanating from the top, imposed by wise and public spirited people with the power to rule. In US history, these parties have had different names, but everyone knows them today as Democrats and Republicans. They have traded places many times but always moved toward the same general goal: an ever bigger state and ever less liberty.

The Liberal Party

And who are the Liberals? The liberal idea was born in the high middle ages and Renaissance, with the rise of commercial freedom and the prosperity that followed. It began with the realization that religious freedom is possible and need not send society reeling into chaos. The idea of freedom extended out during the Enlightenment to include speech, press, property rights, and foreign trade. By the 18th century, it came to include a love of peace and an aspiration for universal human rights.

Liberalism came of age in the 19th century, and its achievements were legion: social mobility for the whole population, new technologies of liberation, the end of slavery, the advance of women’s rights, the vast expansion of income and living standards, the explosion of population. Its economic form was capitalism, the greatest generator of wealth for the masses of people ever discovered. The message of Liberalism was clear and exhilarating: all humans have rights that cannot be violated by the state, and, so long as this is the case, society can manage itself without authoritarian control.

It was a beautiful period, filled with optimism. But Liberalism had its enemies on the left and on the right. The storm clouds gathered and disaster struck in the 20th century. Liberalism was dealt a terrible blow by World War I and the government controls that followed in its wake. In the course of one decade in most parts of the developed world, we saw vast and sweeping victories against liberty as wrought by both the Labor and Tory forces: labor controls, income taxes, central banking, product regulation, racial segregation, zoning, marriage controls, speech controls, prohibitions, and imperialism as a national habit.

Even before the Great Depression kicked off unprecedented experiments in central planning and economic control, Liberalism had nearly vanished from politics, academia, and popular culture.

Ludwig von Mises was writing in Vienna at the time and attempted one last explanation of the Liberal philosophy. His brilliant 1927 book on the topic remains a statement for the ages. He pointed out that at this stage of history, all existing political parties represented a lobbying force for some segment of the population. Only liberalism, which had no party, represents the common interest of everyone. But given the size and scope of government, even he doubted that liberalism would return in his lifetime, and sadly he was right.

The Liberal Diaspora

Given this situation, where did the liberals to go? They were homeless by the time World War II broke out. Following the war, they had been largely driven out of national politics. They were excluded from legislative priorities and media culture, not to mention academia. So the handful that existed turned to writing, publishing, independent educational ventures, civic organizations, and think tanks.

A beautiful example of this was the establishment of the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946 by Leonard E. Read. He saw a need for liberalism to have a voice and made FEE its home. He preferred the term liberalism but, sadly, the term had been taken over by Labor and the left.

Read was the first in the post-war period to suggest the substitute term “libertarian” and, later, came to reject all labels in favor of what he called the “freedom philosophy.”

By the early 1970s, the movement had grown to the point that it attempted its own political party. It was obvious that with Richard Nixon in control of the Republican Party, liberalism had no voice. The preferred name of Liberal was still taken, so a new party was named the Libertarian Party. Despite some small victories, it has never really taken hold as a viable competitor to the two major parties. (You can read a good timeline of the party here.)

The Union of Tory and Liberal

Still, the Liberal movement grew, under the influence of FEE and the Mont Pelerin Society, among many new upstarts. The names of their intellectual leaders are now household names among libertarians: Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Rand, Lane, among many others.

In the 1980s, in the United States and the UK, the Tories were led by two individuals who adopted liberal rhetoric: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In both their platforms, we saw a fusion of concerns for individual freedom (focused on economic freedom) together with traditional Tory concerns for national security and restrictions on civil liberties.

This alliance of interests produced some remarkable results such as deregulation, tax reductions, reduced use of money printing, and freer trade. The results were brilliant by comparison to the malaise of the previous decade. Economic growth boomed. Technological innovations grew at an unprecedented pace. Such were the achievements not of the Tory element of the administrations but of its liberal sectors, that which curbed the growth of government and backed private enterprise, thereby unleashing human creativity all over the developed world, and inspiring a global revival of Liberalism.

Within living memory, the party of Liberalism came to be stuck with this partnership. It has generally been beneficial, though muddy. The message of freedom became mixed up with other concerns central to Tory ideology: war, corporate monopoly, financial manipulation, prohibitionism, and social control. To this day, this is a serious problem for the Liberal party. We get stuck with the bad reputation of Tory policies, though we technically bear no responsibility for them.

The 21st Century Tory-Liberal Divorce

It was a long time coming but tensions finally boiled over in 2015 and finally with the apparent nomination of Trump in the spring 2016. Trump, representing an old Tory ideology devoid of the virtues of Liberalism, reasserted the raw statism of interwar politics. His central pillars are familiar to anyone of a certain generation: mercantilism, migration restriction, military belligerence, censorship, prohibition, even to the point of praising internments and recalling a pre-Enlightenment view of religion and society.

It was as decisive as it was ugly: the liberal spirit had finally been purged from the Republican party. There was no more room at the table (and anyone who claims otherwise is not looking at reality). It represents a repudiation of Reaganism, Thatcherism, and the coalition that drove the world to recovery. You only need to compare the speeches of the Reaganites on economics and immigration with those of Trump. They are worlds apart.

The shattering of this coalition is the single most significant political event of our times. It is done. It is a fact. It is decisive. And it will change everything for the foreseeable future.

Liberalism Defines Itself

Just when everything seems lost, you look around and see something beautiful. For 45 years, activists have been struggling to keep the awkwardly named party alive. And it does live! It is on the ballot in every state. It has a full and well-developed platform. It is ready for action.

In the last six months, some awesome people stepped up, ready for the nomination at the top of the ticket. The results were not to every taste but still extraordinary in broad terms. The party rejected the extremes at all ends and voted to nominate two former governors as standard bearers, two men who speak plainly and clearly about freedom in all its forms.

People can complain about this particular issue or that one. But no one can dispute that both Gary Johnson and William Weld represent the Liberal spirit that is now called libertarian. The difference with the Republicans and Democrats is unmistakable. The LP is neither left not right, neither Labor nor Tory, but a third choice: Liberalism as traditionally understood. That is the ethos of the party and the message of its candidates to the American people and the world at large. It is a breath of fresh air.

In other words, believers in liberty are exactly where we need to be. It’s a big tent, as it should be. It includes as many varieties of Liberalism as there are people who want to be free

And please remember: it’s not just about politics. In fact, politics is the least of it. The LP (and I wish it were called the Liberal Party) is finally positioned to be the political voice of a cultural, social, and entrepreneurial resistance movement to the left (Labor, Democrat) and right (Tory, Republican). The takeover of the GOP by illiberal nativists/protectionists/authoritarians is what finally pushed it over the edge.

No, history does not end with this election. One could say that it is just now beginning, now that we finally have a choice, for the first time in our lives.

People often say that America has a two-party system. People always believe that the status quo will last forever. The truth is that the status quo always lasts until, suddenly, it doesn’t.

Times are changing. Liberalism is back.

Take Back the Word “Liberal”

I would like to pick up an old campaign to take back the word “liberal” for the cause of human liberty. Or perhaps that’s too ambitious. Perhaps it is enough for each of us to do our part not to keep conceding the use of this glorious word to the enemies of liberty. It does not belong to them. It belongs to us.

This is not a tedious argument over definitions; this is about the proper identification of a magnificent intellectual tradition. Liberalism is about human liberty and its gradual progress over the last 500 years. It is not about state control. In the coming year, I’m determined to at least make my own language reflect this reality.

Yes, I know this is an old campaign. It was a cause pushed by F.A. Hayek, Leonard Read, Frank Chodorov, John T. Flynn, Milton Friedman, and countless others.

My favorite case is Ludwig von Mises. In 1927, he wrote a book called Liberalismus. It was an attempt to recast and update the intellectual foundations of the entire liberal movement. To his knowledge, this had not yet been done.

“The greatness of the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the first World War,” he wrote, “consisted precisely in the fact that the social ideal after the realization of which the most eminent men were striving was free trade in a peaceful world of free nations. It was an age of unprecedented improvement in the standard of living for a rapidly increasing population. It was the age of liberalism.”

But by the time the English edition of his book came out in 1962, he worried that the word liberal had been lost. The book appeared under the title The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth. Very soon after, he changed his mind again. He had decided not to give up the great word, not because he was spiteful or belligerent or did not understand that language evolves. He decided that the term could not be given up.

“This usage is imperative,” he wrote in 1966, “because there is simply no other term available to signify the great political and intellectual movement that substituted free enterprise and the market economy for the precapitalistic methods of production; constitutional representative government for the absolutism of kings or oligarchies; and freedom of all individuals from slavery, serfdom, and other forms of bondage.”

Doesn’t that just sum it up beautifully? The core conviction of liberalism was that society contained within itself the capacity for self-management. The social order was self-organized. We didn’t need masters and slaves. Society did not need to be hierarchically organized. Everyone could have equal freedom. This was a radical idea, and it did indeed build the best of modernity as we know it.

Liberalism secured private property. It ended slavery. It brought equal freedom to women. It stopped wars of conquest. It broke down the class and caste systems. It freed speech. It stopped religious persecution. It opened economic opportunities for everyone. It cast moral disapproval on despotisms of all sorts.

It put the consumer in charge of production. It brought education, culture, leisure, and even luxury to the mass of men and women. It lengthened lives, brought down infant mortality, raised incomes, ended plagues and starvation, and ignited the fire of invention that gave humanity the ability to travel, communicate, and cooperate as never before and as one human family. It brought peace.

This is what liberalism did! How can we give up this word? We cannot. We will not.

It is because of liberalism’s great achievements that the term itself became such a prize. We began to lose the word about 100 years ago, when the partisans of state power began to use the excuse of “liberalization” to push their agenda.

Gradually “liberalism” became about using public policy to create opportunities and improve the world, with the best of intentions. The statists’ goals were the same as those of liberalism but the means they used to achieve their goals were completely antithetical and even dangerous to liberal ideals.

Matters became especially intense after the economic crash of 1929. Suddenly the market economy itself was on the hot seat and self-described liberals were forced to choose. Mostly they chose wrongly, and mainstream liberalism hooked up with big government and corporate statism. By the end of the New Deal, it was all over. The word had been stolen and came to mean the opposite of the original idea.

In the post-war period, there was a new coinage to describe people who opposed the political agenda of these new fake liberals. That word was “conservative,” which was a highly unfortunate term that literally means nothing other than to preserve, an impulse that breeds reactionary impulses. Within this new thing called conservatism, genuine liberals were supposed to find a home alongside warmongers, prohibitionists, religious authoritarians, and cultural fascists.

It was a bad mix.

All these years later, this new form of liberalism remains intact. It combines cultural snobbery with love of statist means and a devotion to imposing the civic religion at all costs and by any means. And yes, it can be annoying as hell. This is how it came to be that the word liberalism is so often said with a sneer, which you know if you have ever turned on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. And quite often, the right-wing attacks on liberalism are well deserved. But what does the right offer as an alternative? Not liberation but a new type of party control.

Given all these confusions, why not make another attempt to take back the word liberalism? Again, this is not an argument over the definition of a word. It is an argument about the proper means to build a great society. Is the goal of political life to maximize the degree of freedom that lives in the world, or is it to further tighten the realm of control and centrally plan our economic and cultural lives? This is the critical question.

The other advantage to using the word liberalism properly is that it provides an opportunity to bring up names like Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, Frédéric Bastiat, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, plus the more modern tradition with Rand, Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek, plus the tens of thousands of people who long for liberty today in academia, business, punditry, and public life generally. Just using the old term in its proper way provides an opportunity for enlightenment.

It’s true that liberalism of the old school had its problems. I have my own issues with the positions of the old liberals, and they include a general naïveté over democracy, too great a tolerance for the mythical “night-watchman state,” and some latent affection for colonialism.

The more important point is that genuine liberalism has continued to learn and grow and now finds a more consistent embodiment in what is often but awkwardly called libertarianism or market anarchism, both of which are rightly considered an extension of the old liberal intellectual project.

Still, even libertarians and anarcho-capitalists need to reattach themselves to the old word, otherwise their self-identifications become deracinated neologisms with no historical or broader meaning. Any intellectual project that is detached from history is finally doomed to become an idiosyncratic sect.

Let’s just say what is true. Real liberalism lives. More than ever. It only needs to be named. It’s something we can all do.