Strange Bedfellows

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, February 04, 2025

 

Ask a Trump guy where the Republicans went wrong, and he’ll tell you that the party was too long dominated by war-mongering neocons in foreign policy and by greed-mongering libertarians in everything else: too many foreign adventures, too enthusiastic about capitalism. One funny thing, beyond the fact that that analysis is utter baloney: The second Trump administration is now living out the political fantasy of one of the crankiest of all the 20^th-century libertarian ideologues—Murray Rothbard.

 

Rothbard was a brilliant weirdo who could have been a character in a Woody Allen movie—a neurotic Jewish intellectual in New York, his life was largely confined to the first four floors of Manhattan by his paralyzing terror of bridges, tunnels, and escalators. But he was like many dissidents on the right over the years in that he hated the Republican Party with the special hatred the true believers reserve for heretics (as opposed to the simple infidels on the left) and generally despised the Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan-era conservative movement as weak-kneed and compromising. Your normal cranky midcentury libertarian wanted to see the reinstatement of the gold standard; Rothbard demanded the reinstatement of the Articles of Confederation and bitterly denounced “Generalissimo” Washington for presiding over the conspiracy of usurpers who called themselves a constitutional convention in Philadelphia all those years ago. He was bananas, but also a serious economic and political thinker as well as a top-shelf writer. 

 

One of Rothbard’s big ideas—and let me emphasize here again that I am writing about a New Yorker who was the son of Jewish immigrants—was to reach out to the right-wing populist movement coalescing around Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in the 1980s and convince its adherents to link up with the remnants of the anti-Vietnam War movement to build a grand redneck-hippie alliance, uniting the political extremes against the center in a popular front that was anti-war, anti-welfare, and anti-state. It didn’t work. 

 

At the time.

 

But Anno Domini 2025 is a different story. In the Senate, Tom Cotton and John Cornyn are going to bat for Tulsi Gabbard, a former vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee with approximately Noam Chomsky’s views on the American intelligence community, which she has been nominated to oversee as director of national intelligence, presumably taking a sabbatical from her tireless efforts on behalf of Bashar al-Assad. Elsewhere in the Senate, Ted Cruz is pumped up about the prospects of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a left-wing trial lawyer, environmental activist, and “radical left lunatic” (in the words of … Donald Trump) who has advocated imprisoning people for expressing skeptical views of climate change. Kash Patel, who is to lead the FBI, sounds like a talking head in a Eugene Jarecki propaganda film. J.D. Vance increasingly talks like an antihero from 1970s conspiracy-thriller cinema, while Tucker Carlson is running out of red string with which to connect the dots on the murder wall in his basement. Poor Michael Brendan Dougherty over at National Review cannot decide if he is now a Code Pink lady or whether he is a beady-eyed defender of coalitional realpolitik.

 

This produces some very strange results. We heard a lot of skepticism of Big Business and Silicon Valley from the Trump movement, and now we have the world’s wealthiest man illegally shuttering federal agencies as an unelected—and entirely unaccountable—acting president. People who think of themselves as advocates of limited government are cheering. We heard a great deal about “warmongers” such as … Nikki Haley? … and now, it’s apparently time for Donald Trump to do to Greenland and Panama as Vladimir Putin is trying to do to Ukraine. More cheering.

 

I do wonder what Rothbard, the arch-libertarian—an “anarcho-capitalist,” in fact—would think of this. And I suspect he would approve—which does not add to my confidence in or enthusiasm for the Trumpist project.

 

Crackpots and fanatics have a hard time understanding the relative weights of process and outcome, and so they imagine that they are working toward a smaller government by trying to trip up foreign-aid spending (currently less than 1 percent of federal outlays) while creating a new procedural norm that amounts to—not to put too fine a point on it—tyranny. If the president or his donor-factotum can simply ignore the law—including the programs and spending Congress has approved—then we have literally swapped out the rule of law for something else: the rule of the last person to expertly blow smoke up the presidential bum. While we are debating whether Elon Musk is Donald Trump’s monkey-butler or it is the other way around (which is the way it is, if you’re wondering), we are very quickly losing sight of the fact that Donald Trump has no legal or constitutional power to do half the things he currently proposes to do. You may get some trivial satisfaction if a few GS-8 nobodies fall behind on their rent, but what’s being built is the infrastructure of dictatorship.

 

There are two ways for that to go: Either we end up with a variation of “the perfect dictatorship” Mario Vargas Llosa identified in Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or, at some point, the apparatus of dictatorship gets handed over to the other party. Everything Trump does via executive order is subject to being undone in the same way, in five minutes, by the first successor with different preferences. But do you think his successor, having a new appreciation for what is possible in our rickety system, is going to stop there? Will the left’s answer to Donald Trump—and there will be one—be so modest as that? 

 

Would you bet our liberty on that? Our prosperity? Our national self-respect, if we have any left?