“Why Reconcile when the Enemy Can be Crushed?”

Last Considerations Before the American Elections

Introductory Note: This is my last publication before the American presidential elections next week. As it happens, I travel to the U.S. tomorrow and stay till Sunday, in the very city where Donald Trump gave a big meeting yesterday. I’m curious to feel the pre-elections atmosphere there, if there is any. Anyway, today’s post is a bit of a patchwork as I would like to briefly comment on two recent articles that respectively discuss libertarians’ endorsement of Trump and the myth of populism.

Dalmia on Libertarianism

Last week, Shikha Dalmia published a very interesting article about an apparent paradox, namely the endorsement by many libertarians of Donald Trump. Over the last months, several prominent libertarians have publicly stated their support for Trump over Kamala Harris. This is a continuation of the institutional evolution of the Libertarian Party which, following its takeover by the Mises Caucus some years ago, has taken a complete Trumpist turn. According to Dalmia, this is not something that we should have expected:

“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.”  

Dalmia notes that this support results from an unwillingness from libertarians to weigh the positive and negative aspects of Trump’s and Harris’s programs in terms of moral importance:

“This approach puts Trump policies that libertarians agree with (tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments) on the plus side and Trump policies they disagree with (protectionism, nativism, and racism) on the negative side and then compares this ledger with a similar ledger of Democratic policies. Because they studiously avoid assigning any moral weights to any of the items, they conclude that Trump’s record of siccing the hard power of the state to deport vulnerable immigrants or his many violations of human rights are no more reprehensible than Democratic efforts to raise taxes on the upper crust.”

The rest of Dalmia’s article analyzes the roots of the “fusion” between libertarianism and conservatism. Quoting Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi’s recent intellectual history of the libertarian movement,[1] she points out its reactionary sympathies are not new. Zwolinski and Tomasi indeed do a tremendous job showing the original radicality of the movement has progressively been tainted with conservative and reactionary nuances from the second half of the 20^th century onward. What were nuances during the Cold War became dominant traits at least within some subgroups of the Libertarian movement with the emergence of so-called “paleo-Libertarianism” in the 1900s. Any doubt about the reactionary implications of this form of libertarianism is easily dispelled by looking at the few social experiments explicitly building on this ideology, as recounted by the intellectual historian Quinn Slobodian in his recent book Crack-Up Capitalism.[2]

Whatever the outcome of these elections, the fact is that there is no longer a coherent movement combining progressive social views and free-market radicalism in the U.S., beyond a bunch of isolated individuals, most of them academic scholars. Maybe that was meant to be like this. From the outset, the post-WWII libertarian movement has been plagued by two constitutive problems. First, a strategic problem that is related to the difficulty of finding a political space in the U.S. two-party system. In such a political context, the alternative is between retaining the movement’s independence while giving up any hope of having any real political influence, or somehow infiltrating one of the dominant parties to grow the influence from within. The latter is partially what happened during the Reagan era. Maybe some libertarians see their endorsement of Trump as a new version of this strategy, but this is clearly a mirage. There is nothing liberal (in the classical sense) in Trump’s ideology and political ethos. Endorsing him is to concede on all the values and ideals that form the bedrock of the large and diverse liberal family.

However, this only reminds us of libertarianism’s second, ideological problem. As I have claimed several times (see especially here), what sets libertarianism apart from other forms of liberalism is its attitude toward politics and the political. In a nutshell, libertarianism is broadly based on the belief that a society can do without politics, understood as the realm of coercive relations outside contractual (market-based) agreements. I argue that this is an impossibility but ignoring it explains why libertarians can reach the kind of moral judgments that Dalmia rightly denounces. From a libertarian perspective, diminishing taxes and the economic size of the state may be seen as a step in the right direction toward the libertarian ideal society. If you think that you can substitute market contracts for political authority, then a smaller state is a good thing. Add to this the anti-progressive social bias that many libertarians de fact have, and you understand why they can support Trump. Their mistake is to not understand, or to pretend to not see, that political authority will not disappear with Trump, quite the contrary. There is no need to debate whether Trump is a fascist to understand that with him in office, the very liberal idea that political power should be harnessed by a finely designed constitutional mechanism supplemented by a political ethos of respect and tolerance is dead. The libertarian endorsement of Trump is proof that libertarianism, for the most part, is liberalism minus this political understanding.    

Bartels on Populism

In the last issue of Foreign Affairs, the political scientist Larry Bartels provides an original perspective on current political affairs regarding “populism.” Indirectly, Bartels’s article strengthens the point I’ve just made about the role of politics.[3] On the common analogy between democracy and markets, we’re used to assuming that citizens’ political preferences are given (or can only be changed at the margin) and that the main problem of political “suppliers” is to find the platform that maximizes their chances of winning given these preferences. The theoretical importance of the “median voter theorem” (MVT) is a good illustration of the centrality of this assumption in the way political economists and political scientists analyze politics. I’ve already argued here that the MVT is probably less relevant to studying politics in the context of a “transitory democratic regime” where the distribution of political preferences is not settled.

Bartels more radically rejects the relevance of the very concept of populism when it is understood as a broad exogenous shift in citizens’ political preferences on economic and especially cultural issues. Bartels’s thesis is that if the political landscape has changed in many regions of the world, with many populist leaders rising to power, the primary cause is not a citizens’ change of attitudes. It is rather the result of the conjunction of two phenomena. First, the general and long-standing political passivity of citizens:

“It might be tempting to interpret public indifference to violations of democratic norms as itself a product of the “populist wave.” In fact, it is a long-standing feature of democratic politics and not only in the cases of breakdown studied by Bermeo. Six decades ago, the political scientist Herbert McClosky’s classic study of “consensus and ideology in American politics” documented the shallow allegiance of many ordinary Americans to the “rules of the game.” McClosky concluded that members of “the active political minority” were “the major repositories of the public conscience” and “the carriers of the [democratic] Creed.””

Bartels points out a feature of democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated a long time ago in the second volume of Democracy in America, namely that the equalization of conditions is likely to make individuals less and less interested in political matters.[4] Another way to put the matter is that citizens’ commitment to the foundational principles of liberal democracy has never been so strong as to trigger a collective response in case these principles are threatened. The defense of these principles and the maintenance of the institutions that guarantee their respect by harnessing political power essentially comes from the elites, especially the political elites.

The second phenomenon that Bartles points out is that citizens’ political preferences, in part because of citizens’ political passivity, are largely malleable. That means that the decreasing support for democratic principles and institutions is largely pulled by the attitudes of the political elites and, in the case at stake, the Republicans:

“Trump’s movement to “Make America Great Again” appeals to a deep fear of diversity and social change. That sort of fear is commonplace in all societies, and it has often roiled democratic politics. Yet the threat Trump poses to American democracy has little to do with “populism.” It doesn’t come from ordinary citizens immersed in “culture wars”—even from those who stormed the Capitol on January 6. They were and are a sideshow. The real threat is from the Republican officeholders who, hours later, supported Trump’s effort to decertify the election outcome. It was not some rush of antidemocratic feeling that threatened American democracy in those months; it was the machinations of political elites determined to entrench themselves in power.”

Ultimately, Bartels argues that most of the contemporary analyses of populism are based on a mistaken conception of democracy and its nature:

“At its heart, widespread misunderstanding of the contemporary populist threat rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of democracy itself. An idealized “folk theory of democracy,” as the political scientist Christopher Achen and I have called it, encourages journalists, scholars, and ordinary citizens to imagine that the moving force behind major shifts in party systems and governing coalitions must be correspondingly major shifts in public opinion. If populist parties are gaining strength in parliaments, it must be because people are turning against immigration, European integration, and established political institutions. (They are not.) If democratic norms and institutions are eroding, it must be because public support for democracy as a system of government has weakened. (It hasn’t.)”

Bartels, with his colleague Christopher Achen, have defended in place of the “folk theory of democracy” a “realist conception” that builds on a more empirically grounded account of political actors’ behavior, especially voters.[5] This realist conception suggests that what happens in a democracy is largely the result of the beliefs and choices of the elite minority who, because of voters’ political passivity and malleability, have a large de facto power that goes well beyond what democratic institutions accord them on paper. The bottom line is that if there is any culprit for the current political situation, the responsibility largely falls on the political establishment that has been failing to live by liberal democratic principles. This analysis surely applies to the U.S., but it would not be difficult to extend it to other countries – including France.

Conclusion

I wanted to discuss Dalmia’s and Bartels’s articles in the same essay because, though they are on different topics, they ultimately point toward the same lesson: there is no reconciliation outside politics (contra libertarians) and a lot of this reconciliation stems from the political attitude of the minority that, as a matter of fact, controls the institutions and largely influence the majority’s beliefs and preferences.

In his very last article, the political philosopher Gerald Gaus reflected on the conditions required for moral reconciliation to proceed in a society where people disagree about many things, including their fundamental views about what is just and good:[6]

“The core idea is ‘convergent normativity’: while we disagree on many of the grand issues of morality we can, in the interests of achieving a cooperative order based on relations of mutual moral accountability, reconcile on common rules that each of us, for her own reasons, endorses… But [this approach’s] lesson, that each can simultaneously affirm her own moral perspective while reconciling with others on common rules, abstracts from numerous issues. It assumes, first and foremost, that most people do not simply dismiss the normative perspectives of others as befuddled crooked thinking, but acknowledge them as intelligible ways to understand social morality. In the current environment, many people apparently prefer the joys of anger and aggressive self-righteousness to reconciliation with others. Why reconcile when the enemy can be crushed?”

Gaus’s use of the word “enemy” to characterize the attitude of those who refuse reconciliation of course echoes Trump’s recent rhetoric. It’s too late now in the U.S. to remedy the situation. If Trump wins, there is a lot to worry for all of us. Fascist or not, his political attitude is the negation of the very idea of reconciliation. His program betrays the view that society is a zero-sum game where what some win, others should lose it. Endorsing him for any reason is showing the middle finger to a two-century-old intellectual and political tradition. The political elite that allowed Trump’s rise has a huge responsibility. The non-political elites who are desperately trying to find good reasons to justify their support, too.    

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[1] Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism (Princeton University Press, 2023).

[2] Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2023).

[3] Larry M. Bartels, “The Populist Phantom,” Foreign Affairs, October 22, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/populist-phantom-threat-democracy-bartels.

[4] See my recent essay on “normalization.”

[5] Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

[6] Quoted in Kevin Vallier, “The Social Philosophy of Gerald Gaus: Moral Relations Amid Control, Contestation, and Complexity,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9, no. 3 (September 2023): 510–32, p. 532.