Libertarians and Trump

Defending liberty means rejecting authoritarianism

In a scathing essay at The Bulwark, Shikha Dalmia takes the libertarian movement to task for its ambivalent stance toward Trump:

This is remarkable not only because Trump is an affront to every professed libertarian commitment—individual freedom, openness, cosmopolitanism, free enterprise, fiscal restraint, limited government, a tightly constrained executive—but also because libertarians have always seen themselves as the least partisan and most irreverent leg of Ronald Reagan’s fabled “three legged-stool” of the Republican coalition. Yet when the most authoritarian Republican in history came along, they became quiescent, lost their mojo. Libertarians haven’t donned MAGA hats—except at the Libertarian Party—but they have abdicated just when they were most needed.

In some cases, libertarians have gone beyond mere silence and positively advocated for another Trump presidency. Daniel Klein, a libertarian economist at George Mason University, is one of the individuals behind the “Professors’ Statement” endorsing “the Republican candidate for the Presidency in 2024” on the ground that Republicans are the lesser of two evils. Todd Zywicki, a libertarian law professor at GMU, agrees. So do Walter Block, and David Henderson.

I count all of these people as friends. And I admire their scholarly work tremendously. But on this issue, I think they are deeply mistaken. From the perspective of someone who cares deeply about individual freedom, a second Trump presidency would be a disaster.

Lower Taxes vs. the Rule of Law, courtesy of Dall-E

The libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer sets out clearly what seems to me to be the major issue:

There’s really only one thing that I care about. The U.S. President, for the first time in the history of the country, made a concerted and credible, illegal attempt to not leave office after he was voted out…
The first thing that every American should know about their society is that it is vastly better than the overwhelming majority of societies that have existed in human history or that exist today. Nearly everyone throughout human history lived in conditions of horrifyingly severe poverty, oppression, and misery.
Any normal policy issue that we debate within our political system is trivial by comparison. The difference between (the U.S. with good policies) and (the U.S. with poor policies) is negligible in comparison with the difference between (the U.S.) and (a typical society in human history).

But if you’re still on the fence about Trump, and you’re only going to read one piece on the subject, I implore you to read Ilya Somin’s essay at Reason, which makes a careful and detailed libertarian case against Trump (and for Harris).

One of Somin’s key arguments is that from a libertarian perspective, Trump is worse on many issues than Harris. And the issues where Harris is worse are likely to matter less in terms of the kind of policy outcomes we actually get.

Trump's record of trying to overthrow constitutional democracy after he lost the 2020 election creates a strong presumption against him. In addition, he is worse on key policy issues, most notably, trade, immigration, federal spending, and maintaining the Western alliance in the face of threats from authoritarian powers.

This outweighs Kamala Harris's significant weaknesses on some other issues, especially because Trump is more likely to be able to implement his worst policies through unilateral executive action, while Harris's worst ideas require hard-to-secure new legislation.

In normal times, elections are hard for libertarians. There are some things we like about Democrats, and a lot of things we dislike about them. Ditto for Republicans. But these are not normal times, and Trump is not a normal candidate. Trump is a danger to the institutional structures on which our individual freedoms depend. For a libertarian, everything else should pale in comparison.