This essay was originally published at The Bleeding Heart Libertarian.
With the nomination of J.D. Vance, the Republican Party has officially abandoned whatever remained of its Reaganite commitment to free markets, limited government, and global engagement. Vance, an ardent supporter of National Conservatism, has made clear his support for higher tariffs and restricted immigration, and his leadership seems virtually certain to push the United States in a direction that further alienates it from potential allies and trading partners elsewhere in the world.
Of course, the Republican Party was never really as committed to limited government as popular mythology held it to be. Whatever their commitment to individual freedom in the marketplace (and even that was more rhetoric than reality), Republicans were quite willing to deploy the power of the state in defense of “Family Values” and a broadly traditionalist conception of social morality. And, on the other side, the Democratic Party always contained a technocratic element that could embrace market-oriented reforms if and when they could be shown to be an efficient means for realizing progressive ends – an element exemplified most clearly in the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.
It is true that for most of the twentieth century, American conservatives portrayed themselves as defenders of the free market. Driven by the threat of militarist socialism abroad, and worries about creeping socialism under the guise of the New Deal at home, conservatives formed an uneasy alliance with libertarians in defense of the free market. The marriage was never an entirely happy one. As John Tomasi and I chronicle in The Individualists, libertarians’ commitment to the free market was based upon a radical commitment to individual rights – one which, if it had been consistently applied, would have called not for a defense of the status quo but for a wholesale revolution in the political and economic institutions of society.
Still, even if the simple story was not entirely accurate, most people saw it as at least a good enough approximation to make it stick. That is, up until 2015. In that year, the campaign and subsequent presidency of Donald Trump appeared to change everything about conservative politics in America. Gone were the Republican commitments to international free trade, replaced by a nationalist, protectionist economic policy. Gone, too, was the conservative deference to long-standing public institutions, torn down by an angry populism with little but disdain for the elite establishment.
Responses to this development have ranged from befuddlement to outrage, as book after book has appeared attempting to explain, diagnose, or contextualize the current state of conservatism in America. Occasionally, as with the response to Sohrab Ahmari’s recent book, Tyranny, Inc., the response even veers into a kind of surprised delight, with progressive commentators celebrating conservatives’ apparent newfound appreciation for the shortcomings of the market, and the possibility of an alliance that would mean the salvation of social democracy.
So far, most commentators have treated Ahmari’s social democratic flirtations as something distinct from the populist nationalism of contemporary American conservatism. This, despite the fact that Ahmari has been one of the leading proponents of both developments. But in fact, the connection runs much deeper than any single individual. Socialist interventions in the economy have long been a mainstay of populist movements of the left. And there is a much greater overlap between left-wing and right-wing populism than most people appreciate. It is therefore worthwhile to try to understand what both varieties of populism have in common on a philosophical level, and how these philosophical commitments have led to the kinds of economic and social policies that have defined populism both historically and in the present day.
First, and perhaps most significantly, both left-wing and right-wing varieties of populism share a fundamental commitment to nationalism, understood here as the idea that the interests of the nation are superior in some sense to the interests of individuals and groups outside the nation. To illustrate, consider two seemingly disparate ideas: “America First” and “Social Justice.” Most people associate the first of these ideas with right-wing politics, and the latter with the political left. But in fact the ideas are complementary, both philosophically and politically. Social justice – a term popularized, let us remember, by the populist Catholic priest Charles Coughlin in the 1930s – has always referred to standards of fairness and distribution within a well-defined society. Social justice is justice for members of a particular group. The commitment to social justice is thus distinct from and in tension with the cosmopolitan idea that the interests of all people are worthy of equal consideration, regardless of which tribe or nation they happen to have been born into. As we will see below, this has important implications for debates about free trade and immigration policy.
Second, populists of all ideological stripes tend to have a similar suspicion of open-ended, decentralized social change, and a similar longing for stability and control. To borrow a distinction from Virginia Postrel’s 1998 book, The Future and its Enemies, populists tend to be stasists, rather than dynamists. On the right, this tendency will often manifest itself in a reactionary desire to stop change – to restrict migration, to limit the development of new technologies, to preserve traditional ways of life against waves of social transformation. On the left, the more common manifestation is a technocratic impulse to control change through regulation and bureaucratic oversight. But neither group is willing to countenance the idea of social change as an organic, evolutionary process – one that emerges from the choices of various individuals without management and direction from a higher authority.
There is, of course, more to populism than just these two philosophical commitments. Even by themselves, however, nationalism and stasism go a long way toward explaining the positions that populists take on a range of social issues. For instance, while we are accustomed to seeing criticisms of capitalism from the left, it should not be at all surprising to see similar criticisms coming from right-wing populists like Sohrab Ahmari or Patrick Deneen. The latter’s 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, is filled with a mix of paeans to localism, traditionalism, and even environmentalism that many found puzzling. But why should it be? Whatever else might be said for or against it, capitalism as an economic system is a dynamic, internationalist force which tends – as even Marx recognized with a kind of grudging admiration – to tear down both national borders and traditionalist ways of life. The constant, churning creative destruction of markets has never been a comfortable fit with the conservative emphasis on traditionalism and localism. We’re already used to seeing right-wing opposition to free trade in the United States. Deneen’s insight that the right also shares common ground with anti-growth environmentalists may well prove to be a harbinger of political alliances still yet to come.
Stasism and nationalism also explain populist hostility toward immigration. We are accustomed to thinking of immigration as a right-wing issue, with charges that immigrants are undermining American culture or stealing American jobs. And both of these arguments are, of course, prominent among right-wing populists today. But in fact there is a long history of anti-immigration sentiment from the left as well, from the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, to the Sierra Club in the 1990s, to Bernie Sanders declaring open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal” in the 2010s. Sometimes, these left-wing arguments draw upon the same (dubious) claims from the right that immigration will lower wages for domestic workers. But progressive critics of immigration have also long made a distinctive argument that high levels of immigration are at odds with their commitment to social justice. After all, high levels of redistribution within a group can only be maintained if not just anyone can become a member of that group. Thus while Milton Friedman took the incompatibility of open borders and the welfare state to be an argument against the welfare state (and, most people have failed to realize, in favor of illegal immigration), progressives have often taken it to be an argument against immigration.
In both its right-wing and its left-wing forms, populism stands opposed to the kind of classical liberalism championed by figures like Adam Smith, Karl Popper, and Friedrich Hayek. A liberal society is, in Popper’s famous phrase, an “open society” – one that welcomes the influx of new ideas, new technologies, and new people. It is a society committed to the belief that economic and social order must evolve from the bottom up, rather than be imposed from the top down. It is a liberal society insofar as it prioritizes individual freedom, either as an end in itself or as an important means to the achievement of larger social goals.
Importantly, liberalism in this sense is not in any way opposed to the kind of conservatism associated with Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott or, despite his protestations to the contrary, Hayek. It is entirely possible to put one’s confidence in individual liberty and spontaneous order while still maintaining the importance of tradition and custom – both of which are often themselves examples of decentralized, evolved social norms. It is possible to be a liberal and nevertheless reject what Hayek called the “crude rationalism” of the Enlightenment, which seeks to tear down all that it cannot penetrate, without recognizing the immense limitations to which its own understanding are subject.
Indeed, for this reason, both liberals and conservatives alike will have reason to oppose the extreme anti-institutionalism of populism. Populist distrust of “elite” institutions – from the Supreme Court, to traditional political parties, to large corporations, to the “mainstream media,” is often based on a dislike of the outcomes those institutions happen to be producing at any given moment. But this stasist focus on outcomes tends to ignore the underlying dynamic processes that give rise to those outcomes, and the ability of those processes to evolve and adapt over time in response to feedback and changing circumstances.
The fact that left-wing and right-wing populists overlap to such a significant degree is bad news for champions of the open society. It means that our enemies are not split, but united against us. But the fact that there is greater overlap than we have appreciated between conservatives and liberals in opposing this populism should give us cheer. We have already seen this overlap at work in major public intellectuals like George Will, whose magnum opus The Conservative Sensibility contains little that a classical liberal could not embrace, and who has spoken out strongly against populist trends on the right. New times and new challenges to liberty call for new ways of thinking about political ideologies and alignments. If the left/right spectrum is no longer as meaningful as it once seemed to be, this is because the main threats facing a liberal political order have changed. We cannot necessarily look for the friends of liberty in the same places we used to at the height of the Cold War. But if we look carefully, perhaps we will find new friends, and new opportunities, in different and unexpected locales.