Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward has a wonderful piece in the New York Times, a core point being that Trump’s continuing abuse of executive power will be abused also by the Democrats when they return to power. Although Trump, of course, is not the first U.S. president to abuse executive power, he is unquestionably and inexcusably accelerating that abuse. The precedent is ominous.
As noted a couple of weeks ago by Daily Kos,
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to adopt the Republican interpretation of power. Apparently, she’s not the only one. It also appears Sen Elizabeth Warren wants to be a Republican as well or, perhaps more accurately, another Donald Trump. In a recent piece done by NOTUS , Sen Warren, Rep Ocasio-Cortez, and other leaders (and potential Presidential candidates) in the Democratic party “…expressed a willingness to use the new tools Trump has carved out, saying that if Republicans can do it, Democrats can too.”
Here are two slices from Mangu-Ward’s essay:
On immigration, speech and trade, Americans are living in a libertarian’s nightmare. Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement. Armed National Guardsmen walk the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order. Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on Gaza and Charlie Kirk. Tariffs on China have been set at 10, 20, 54, 145 and 30 percent in just the past few months. TikTok, Intel, U.S. Steel and their ownership have become matters in which the president has taken a personal interest — and threatened dire consequences if his wishes are not taken into account.
These stories are examples of a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long-held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism.
Libertarians have argued that the only way to prevent such abuses is to reduce the power of the federal government — abolish unaccountable federal agencies, scale back the administrative state, cut spending — and to restore the balance of powers by reining in the executive. This path has generally been treated as hopelessly naïve at best and morally suspect at worst.
The major parties have pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it. Libertarian voices have gradually gone quiet in the halls of the capital — bullied into silence, primaried out or resigning in despair.
Yet it has never been more obvious that the grab-and-grow approach to power is a destructive and self-defeating way to conduct politics.
…..
But the project of growing executive power has been bipartisan. On speech, officials in the Biden administration leaned on social media platforms to take down what they deemed Covid and election misinformation without explicit action from the F.C.C. The Supreme Court disposed of a case, Murthy v. Missouri, challenging this jawboning, as it is called, leaving the possibility of backdoor censorship wide open.
The executive’s discretionary economic powers — subsidies, stakes in corporations and tariffs — have proved irresistible, too. The administration has spent billions of dollars to take ownership stakes in private companies like Intel and U.S. Steel.
And Mr. Trump’s tariffs — leveled and removed at will and without the participation of Congress, where the Constitution places the primary power — have disrupted and destabilized the global economy and undermined America’s role in it.
While libertarians were hardly alone in championing free trade, what we have been hollering for years is that tariffs are and can only ever be taxes on Americans. To treat them as leverage, war by other means or simply a sign of the president’s displeasure is to fundamentally misuse and misunderstand the nature of a tariff.
Yes.
Trump & Co. are hostile to genuine liberalism – and, hence, hostile to the institutions and norms that promote social cooperation, peace, and prosperity. This reality is plain as day to all but the most MAGA-benighted. But also hostile to genuine liberalism and its fruits are people on the progressive left (whose policy preferences are not as different from those of the MAGA right as partisans in either camp suppose them to be).
It’s not uncommon nowadays to encounter people who criticize libertarians and classical liberals for reminding the world that many of the political enemies of Trump are also enemies of liberalism and the open society. But such reminders – as offered by Mangu-Ward – are necessary lest in our urgency to rid the body politic of one malignant tumor we replace that tumor with another malignant tumor.
Exposing the many misdeeds and dangers of Trump and MAGA is an important task. No less important is exposing the many misdeeds and dangers of the progressive left. Even if we could be certain that the latter is the lesser of these two terrible evils – a possibility to which I’m inclined but not at all sure of – it is a strategic and tactical mistake to suppose that the only task worthy of friends of liberalism today is to criticize Trump and MAGA while treating the progressive political enemies of our MAGA enemy as, if not our actual friends, our trustworthy allies. To criticize the progressive left is not to praise MAGA, to prop-up Trump, or to otherwise support the current administration.
Anyone who is so certain that the likes of Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris pose a significantly lesser danger over the long-run to liberalism than does MAGA as to justify muting criticisms of today’s Democrats and their media cheerleaders in order to focus criticism exclusively on MAGA is, I submit, naive.
