Trump and the libertarians - interview with Marlene Laruelle

Marlene Laruelle of George Washington University’s Illiberalism Studies Program recently sat down with our own Shikha Dalmia for a wide-ranging conversation on her break from libertarianism, the relationship between libertarianism and liberalism, and what it would take to build a durable pro-liberal political coalition in America today. What follows is a transcript of the convo, lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Illiberalism Studies Program: Shikha, thank you for joining us for this Agora interview. I wanted to open with a personal question about your own ideological journey: Why did you leave libertarianism? How do you dissociate libertarianism from liberalism and which elements do you still believe are important?

Shikha Dalmia: My break with libertarianism happened when Trump arrived on the scene. I was working at Reason magazine at that time and, the minute Trump came down the golden escalator, it was clear to me that he was a different kind of politician: he was a demagogue and an authoritarian, he didn’t really understand liberalism, and he didn’t understand America’s core commitments. He was closer to demagogues that I had seen in India, like Narendra Modi, who preceded Trump by a few years. Given this, I was a little bit more sensitized to demagogues in general and Trump in particular, so it was pretty clear to me that the libertarians around me were just not seeing him as the same kind of threat as I was.

In fact, there was general chuckling at the way he was sticking his finger in the eye of the left and going after liberals. It is not that libertarians were completely unconcerned about Trump; it’s that they were just not taking the threat seriously. They were treating him as a normal politician, just bad in a different kind of way and, at best, maybe a corrective to the excesses of the left. This chasm between me and libertarian circles just kept growing, and it was getting hard to get my point of view taken seriously.

This was particularly perplexing given that libertarians are born to fight authoritarianism! They put the danger of state tyranny at the heart of their political project. Every school of political thought has different end goals. Integralists, for example, believe in a Catholic state built around Catholic idea of virtue; virtue politics is important to them. For communitarians, some kind of thick-knit community is important. And for libertarians, it is state tyranny that is important. So, when you see the closest thing to an authoritarian come along, you would expect libertarians to be up in arms!

Before Trump, libertarians would start warning of slippery slopes at a president’s use of the state for any goal. I, personally, wrote a gazillion pieces about Obama and Obamacare and how it represented a “road to serfdom,” in Hayek’s famous phrase, because it involved forcing people to buy healthcare. I wrote a piece encouraging a civil disobedience movement against Obamacare’s mandate. The thought was if a president can force you to do this, what else would be required?

But Trump was infinitely worse than any of them—in a league of his own—and I just didn’t see the alarm. He didn’t even bother to couch his agenda in some high-minded language. He divided the population into “us versus them” and promised to use the draconian powers of the state to help “us” and hurt “them”—a complete violation of the fundamental neutrality of the state, which is a basic commitment of liberal governance—and libertarians merely shrugged.

That got me thinking: Why is this? The reasons are partly political, partly sociological, and partly theoretical. Politically, since libertarianism arose in the heyday of the Cold War and made an alliance with socially conservative traditionalists and neo-conservative foreign policy hawks, it got inflected with a certain right-wing flavor. Libertarians became so attuned to fighting the leftist threat abroad that, once Communism fell, like the rest of the right, they had to find a new leftist threat at home, which primed them to be receptive to Trump’s message and his preoccupation with the leftist enemy.

It was partly sociological because, in this Cold War context, all of libertarianism’s social networks were on the right: whether it was their audience, their donors, or the policy issues they were discussing, all of it was inflected to the right.

The theoretical reason is something I’m still grappling with. Did libertarian theory just take a wrong turn or is there something fundamentally wrong about it? I am certain that it took a wrong turn, partly because of its fusion with the right. Libertarianism is a deductive school of thought that tries to derive all its commitments from a defense of individual rights, specifically property rights. Ownership of your own self and your own labor without fearing external aggression is central to that. But, if you’re trying to derive everything from this one axiomatic commitment, it actually becomes easy to end up defending completely opposite views. You can take the same principle of absolute ownership of your labor and property and use it to defend the little guy or the big guy. I think they went in the direction of defending the powerful because they were mixed up with conservatives.

So, they clearly took a wrong turn—but whether it was necessary for them to do so remains an open question for me. My guess right now is that it is—because, at some point, when you start developing an entire political philosophy based on one axiom, you get cut off from the core human commitments that are needed to keep balancing what you really stand for. At some point, they lost sight of what their normative goals were—namely, to defend the equal dignity of all human beings and create a pluralistic, open, and tolerant society.

They lost sight of the fact that they were liberals in a broader sense of the term and not just libertarians based on some dogmas and the policy commitments that followed from them. In other words, instead of beginning with a normative framework and then trying to figure out the right principles to advance it, they started with a narrow set of principles without answering broader questions about what values these principles were in the service of.

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