Carte Blanch: Did “America First” Kill Libertarianism In The Republican Party?
RobinOlimb
Over the past five years or so, the Republican party has abandoned libertarian thought at rapid pace. Small government and individual rights have been overshadowed by nationalism, populism, and the acceptance of central planning rationalized with tribalist language like “beating China”. While libertarianism made a brief resurgence within the GOP during the Obama years, that quickly faded when Donald Trump entered the picture. He scoffed at the idea of relinquishing control of the country’s direction and punished those who disagreed. The party, for the most part, jumped on board with his new “America First” plan of action. The end result was that the Democrats seized full control of the federal government in 2020 and jumped on the opportunity to make the government bigger than it has ever been in America.
It is hard to tell if the Republicans have learned their lesson. They are currently powerless and the only thing they can really do is sit back and critique the left’s current power trip. With the exception of a few that dared to question Trump’s disregard for small government policies, Republicans in Congress can’t complain about reckless spending when they were complicit in Trump’s use of borrowed money like his personal line-of-credit. This abandonment of fiscal responsibility has created the new normal of spending bills in the trillions and debt obligations that surpass GDP, and most Republicans now banking on Keynesian economic theory. The few that still express concerns over spending are chastised by the two largest groups - America First Republicans and neoconservatives. And while some neoconservatives like Mitch McConnell still maintain leadership positions, Trump still controls the GOP, and his allies are continuing to advance his idea of conservatism - America First - within the party.
Last Friday, Trump’s loudest supporter in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, announced that she was starting the America First Caucus. By Saturday, those plans were scrapped after their apparent platform was leaked by Punchbowl News and received major backlash for the inclusion of nativist language such as, “America is a nation… strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.”
After the leak, the platform received praise from several Trump devotees like Louie Gohmert and Matt Gaetz. Neo-conservative Republicans like Kevin McCarthy, Liz Cheney, and even George W. Bush have strongly condemned the hostile language, specifically regarding immigration policy. In a Today Show interview this week, Bush bluntly described the modern-day Republican party as, “isolationist, protectionist, and to a certain extent, nativist.” This was particularly telling given that Bush is notoriously careful to never criticize his successors. He’s clearly disturbed by the direction he sees the party going in - similar to how libertarians felt when his brand of neoconservatism caught fire. But libertarians in the party should be even more concerned about Trump’s America First brand.
America First, Freedom Last
The America First Caucus platform itself mirrors many of the touted policies of the Trump Administration, and even specifies, “a certain intellectual boldness is needed amongst members… to follow in President Trump’s footsteps.” Greene visited Mar-A-Lago a few weeks before the announcement, so it is likely Trump at least had some input. While the language is noticeably more aggressive and unapologetic about its nationalist intentions and aversion to foreigners, the overall strategy appears to be the endurance of Trump’s idea of governing.
The seven-page document is a mix of dubious theories (election fraud, the need to “beat” China), socialist policies veiled as “requirements” to protect Americans (Big Tech censorship, immigration), and policies that have already been tried and backfired (economic protectionism). It is full of contradictory messages that may sound good on the surface, but fall apart in practice. It also includes promises Trump made during his 2016 campaign, yet didn’t even try to fulfill (reducing debt, ending foreign wars). This is particularly apparent to anyone who calls themselves a libertarian.
Trump enjoyed paying lip service to libertarians, but his America First movement revolved around a collective identity that rewarded loyalty with a seat at the decision table. While libertarianism requires the de-escalation of state power in the interest of the individual, Trump’s brand of nationalism demands that individuals lend him their trust for the supposed good of the country, even if that was at odds with what’s best for the individual. And despite his promises to “drain the swamp” in D.C., he did the opposite – filling his cabinet with CEOs, investment bankers, and industry investors, while helping his corporate buddies by way of tariffs and subsidies. Of course, Trump is a master salesman, and populism tends to flourish when the politician is able to sell flawed ideas to gullible masses who don’t have time to delve into political theory. The America First platform even tries to sell a few libertarian ideas, but we tend to not fall for cheap talk.
Trump’s most egregious violation of libertarian principles came in the form of economic war with China. Despite warnings from economists and pleads from U.S. industry leaders, Trump decided to disregard basic economics and go through with his decades-long desire for a trade war. By all measures, it was a disaster. He said we must reverse trade deficits, a metric that economists stress to ignore regarding trade policy, yet these deficits actually increased. The trade deficit was about $49 billion during March 2019, the month the trade war started. In January 2021, the month Trump left office, the deficit was $69 billion.
His top economic adviser Peter Navarro (who became the country’s top trade official by luck when Jared Kushner found his anti-China book on Google) foolishly claimed that no country would retaliate with their own tariffs. That assertion turned out to be wrong, of course, as China (and other countries) retaliated in a big way, setting off the biggest trade war in history. According to the Tax Foundation, the trade war is estimated to reduce long-run GDP by 0.51%, lower wages by 0.35%, and eliminate approximately 394,300 jobs. The farming industry was especially decimated, forcing Trump to prop it up with $37 billion in bailouts in 2020, about four times what it was before the trade war. Additionally, the cost to consumers of the trade war is estimated at $57 billion annually. But Trump’s tweeted about the flourishing steel industry (due to higher prices) as a measure of success, despite only a handful of steel firms benefitting at the cost of everyone else.
While I didn’t expect Marjorie Taylor Greene to be a scholar of Milton Friedman or F.A. Hayek, her platform’s lack of awareness of Trump’s failed trade war, or just basic economics, is appalling. It is by far the largest section of the platform, and launches a myriad of ludicrous attacks on free trade. It suggests that free trade results in, “transforming countries into essentially industrial plantations run by semi-slaves.” America First all of the sudden became humanitarian, apparently. It also blabbers about protectionism being vital to national security. Trade has nothing to do with national security. By this platform’s rational, you would think free trade is as much of a threat to America as Kim Jong-un.
There are many other policies in this platform that defy libertarianism. The obsession with eliminating Section 230 is a catastrophic threat to online free speech. Shutting down immigration to protect “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” grossly misrepresents the fact that America is a country formed by immigrants, and stands in opposition to the right to self-determination for every individual. And, “the federal government should exercise its constitutional authority,” to build “infrastructure… that befits the progeny of European architecture” is not only an outright socialist viewpoint, but even suggests that we be more like Europe. Even so, none of these are as blasphemous to libertarians than the vilification of free trade.
Conclusion
After the January 6th insurrection on the Capitol and subsequent Twitter ban for Trump, there was a sense of relative peace through Biden’s Inauguration. But once the Biden Administration started getting to work, the “America First” brand of the Republican party resurged in a big way, most notably through Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s been in Congress less than four months, and has already been barred from committee assignments due to her extensive promotion of QAnon theories and other conspiracy theories purporting that the Sandy Hook shootings, Charlottesville white supremacist rally, and the Pentagon attack on 9/11 were inside jobs.
The problem is that barring her from committees doesn’t matter in the least bit because nothing gets done in Congress. In today’s hyper-partisan and media-driven tribal climate, it is more important to be loud and controversial than to try to actually legislate. It is even more important when you’re a populist with such a flawed ideological framework as proposed in the America First platform. Greene has been extremely successful because there is a major population of Americans who are furious that Trump lost (or believe he didn’t lose). And, to a certain extent, they have a right to be angry when Democrats and the media vilify them for their views, and try to silence their right to express those views. This anger has led to an outpouring of support for Greene in the tune of $3.2 million in campaign contributions in the first quarter of 2021. This was only second to Nancy Pelosi, and more than her nemesis Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
So, is libertarianism dead in the Republican Party? As explained above, it certainly has no place in the America First faction of the party, nor should it. It also doesn’t fit into the mold of the neoconservatives like McCarthy, Cheney, and Mitch McConnell, who arguably still control the establishment of the party. The handful of “small l” libertarians – Peter Meijer, Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, and a few possible others – certainly seem out of place and the ideology is losing influence by the day. Meijer recently was asked on CNN about the QAnon influence in the party and asserted,
"The fact that a significant plurality, if not potentially a majority, of our voters have been deceived into this creation of an alternate reality could very well be an existential threat to the party."
Meijer seems to understand the gravity of the threat that “America First” poses, but he seems helpless. Libertarianism doesn’t appear to have a future in the Republican party, and libertarians like Meijer should follow in his predecessor Justin Amash’s footsteps, and join the Libertarian Party.
