Donald Trump is profoundly, or perhaps I should instead say very superficially, wrong on trade. He plainly believes that every dime you pay to a seller, even of your own free will, is a loss and thus that all trade, especially with foreigners, is harmful. Perhaps his own wares have tended to be shoddy and so he assumes everyone else is a rip-off artist as well. It’s not just Trump, unfortunately: Nearly every American political faction big enough to have a name is awful on the topic of trade and therefore frequently becomes a threat to it.
Sorting through the dozen political factions I list in this column and next week’s (six right, then six left) looking for common sense on commerce is as frustrating as trying to find a combination on the Lament Configuration device from the Hellraiser movies that doesn’t unleash demons, or trying to perform “intersectional analysis” of endless ethnic and gender subgroups in an academic setting without concluding that someone’s oppressed and you personally should atone for it. It’s a losing game, in other words—unlike free, consensual, mutually beneficial trade. The biggest losers, though, are the billions of people here and around the world made poorer by these factions’ economic ignorance. Avoid optimism as you read, even if you agree with one or two of these factions on a few things.
At the farthest-right of the dozen factions is the Trump-Led Republican Party. I certainly wouldn’t have put the Republican Party in this slot in decades past. It usually hovered frustratingly somewhere near the political center and merely made gestures in the direction of the free market or religiosity without delivering much beyond centrist corporatism—but if left-leaning people could defend welfare-statism in lieu of the socialism they craved, Republicans could be forgiven (sometimes) for defending corporatism in lieu of fully freed markets (which would feature no subsidies, no property rights violations). Now, the Republicans barely defend capitalism. Last week, among the Republicans in a Senate ostensibly controlled by that party, only libertarian Rand Paul and two liberals could be troubled to vote for a measure blocking Trump’s tariffs. All the other Republicans were willing to let culture war—or nationalism or Trump’s egomania or some fighting-schoolkid’s notion of “fairness” or whatever we’re calling the impulse now—override sound economics.
Populism tends to override any finer philosophical notions with which it’s blended until Locke, Burke, Smith, Russell Kirk, Buckley, and the like fade from memory and one is left only with the atavistic animal parts of the brain, which intuit dumb things such as that it is good to hurt anyone you can from Country B if someone else from Country B did a thing you dislike, including sell more widgets than you. Apply that kind of tribal thinking all the way down to the city level and soon enough we’ll be replacing civilization with house-to-house combat—and extreme poverty.
Speaking of house-to-house combat, and thus feuding hillbillies, the so-called paleoconservatives, more or less pro-rural communitarians like Vice President Vance, are the second faction that I nowadays have to reposition on my (inevitably crude) right-left model, since they used to pride themselves on being farther right than the bulk of the Republican Party but look almost pastoral and pleasant now that so much of the party has rushed rightward toward fascism and left the paleos in the (country road) dust. Vance looks smarter (and more Wall Street-savvy) than Trump at the moment but might merely prove more adept at promoting some of the same terrible measures, such as tariffs—better at soft-pedaling cruel ideas like raising prices on imported toys (not to mention possibly First Amendment-violating ideas like raising prices on foreign movies and other media imports, to the sorrow of domestic viewers and readers).
Some of the writers at Breitbart seem to buy into these ideas. Vance is well-positioned, as the former “hillbilly” author, to augment Trump’s crass comments about kids not needing so many dolls with some rustic prairiecore b.s. of his own about cheap homemade dolls being the best and most wholesome kind. (I’m reminded that one of the first things to make me dislike politicians when I was a kid was the awareness that they were trying to regulate the toys and TV shows I liked. Back off.)
Just a smidgen closer to the political center and still destructive are the deceptively soft-spoken, often Catholic-inflected, wonky faux-moderates such as Oren Cass who—a bit like Ross Douthat, or like the Bushes when they talked about being “kinder and gentler” or “compassionate”—think they need to reimagine capitalism as a mushier, vaguer, more welfare-statist thing to rescue us all from a dynamic but cruel economy. (Do they realize all money collected from tariffs goes straight to that wasteful leviathan called government and not to their God?) Cass’ underlings at the group American Compass are prone to claim in broad, economic-analysis-eschewing ways that Trump has turned the “spigot” of the economy so that it no longer sprays upward at the elite but instead downward at Main Street. (Huzzah!)
Another American Compass writer eyerolls that free-market arguments are so commonplace as to be “boring,” though it certainly doesn’t seem many people have absorbed those arguments yet, nor even read them. I used to say the left is as bad at econ as the right is at scientific reasoning, but increasingly the whole political spectrum is bad at both kinds of reasoning, so I can’t even use that contrast anymore. (At least Cass is non-religious, so in some sense we’re moving farther from the right on this intellectual journey.) I’ve been too often burned by people who sounded interested in radically decentralizing government but were mainly just echoing Catholic “distributist” thinking about making subsidiarity in society resemble the subsidiarity of the Church.
Our fourth faction, paleolibertarians, combine admirable free-market principles (as paleolibertarian political commentator Robert Novak, who headed a writers’ grant program from which I benefited, wisely put it decades ago: “The trade deficit is meaningless”) with cultural impulses right-leaning enough to risk undermining those market principles. Witness the Libertarian Party, which while remaining the only morally acceptable political party in the U.S. and more classical-liberal (in the 19-century sense) than conservative, has lately taken a turn for the Trump-ophilic and anti-immigration in its leadership and some of its advisor-associates. I hope their populist aversion to expertise will not lead inexorably to an indifference to economists’ insights as well. (The outgoing chairwoman half-jokingly posted that she’ll listen to moon landing deniers but must draw the line at Flat Earthers.)
Trump has a way, after all, of making people abandon their principles, even a seemingly radical antiwar stance. Leftist Kyle Kulinski does a decent job of listing Trump’s militarist behaviors starting three minutes in through eight minutes into this video, yet the desire to avoid war seems to be half the LP leadership’s reason for tolerating Trump (the other half may have been his promise, since broken, to appoint a libertarian to his Cabinet; RFK doesn’t count). And restricting workers who want to travel is restricting trade as surely as tariffs are, so Trump either loses points on that one or at best breaks even, and the LP with him if it persists in being cozy with him.
Normal, non-party, small-l libertarians are really the sweet spot in American politics and consistently supportive of free trade, but, contrary to their radical reputation, libertarians are also mostly cowardly and/or complacent by activist standards. I’ve long wished they had the fire of some of the LP crazies without, well, the craziness. Strictly speaking, normal libertarians are neither right-wing nor left-wing, but being solidly capitalist distances one from the left these days even if it no longer guarantees one inclusion on the right. Mainstream libertarians are about the best the political spectrum has to offer on trade, though on this, as on many other issues, I wish they were more inclined to say loudly, “Free people should travel where they please and trade with whomever they please, for whatever they please, all over the world!” In practice, they’re more prone to say, like suburban moderate Republicans, “Ouch. That new tax might pinch the local car dealership a bit. Hope they fix that someday.” It’s a start, I guess.
The neoconservatives, some nowadays dubbed NeverTrumpers for their objections to his takeover of the Republican Party they once called home, are nominally pro-trade but have a long history of being “mugged,” that is, surprised, by reality. Wars keep lasting longer and killing more people than they expected. Government keeps getting bigger than they promised. And trade agreements involve far more lawyers, regulations, and subclauses than neoconservative court economists said they’d prefer. One half of the cozy neo/neo center of American politics (with the neoliberals, who we’ll get to next week, being the other half), they often say the right things—they should, given how many establishment speechwriters they employ—but out of laziness or venality, they tolerate and even venerate the vast bureaucracy that is D.C. (and all the statehouses that mimic it, lest we let them all off the hook), with its endless impediments to doing business, here and overseas, not least its tendency to drop bombs on people, the one form of profiteering the neoconservatives seem to find heroic. It’s not on balance profitable for most of us, though, no matter what they try to tell you about peacetime uses for Kevlar or Humvees.
I was once fairly at home among the neoconservatives, mainly because I took people at their word when they explained their philosophies and political goals. Now, when I hear someone like conservative economist Art Laffer assure a roomful of people that Trump’s just using tariffs as a short-term strategy to get other countries to abandon tariffs, I think wistfully about how libertarians are more conscious of the tendency for each new tariff (or regulation of any kind, whatever its original intention) to produce a constituency, often a very powerful business, that benefits from the stifling effect that policy has on its rivals—and thus will never want to see the policy go away, leaving us stuck with its costs long after Trump has retired from politics. Don’t dare call me a RINO for my lack of trust: I ditched any thoughts of voting for Mitt Romney when his support for minimum wage laws revealed his lack of basic economic understanding, and I will not cut Trump any greater slack than that.
But next week: Six left-leaning factions are also wrong.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey