The US today is the outcome of what is sometimes called “the greatest political experiment in the history of the world.” It’s a liberal republic, in the older sense of “liberalism,” a term that sometimes gets “classical” tacked on to it. It calls for a representative government, in which “the people” are conceived to be sovereign and the government observes the "rule of law." The classical liberal tradition has a complex history, but all you need is John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689), in which the state is supposed to be the outcome of a social contract among all the people (as in the American Constitution, which is explicitly framed as a Lockean contract), high officials are elected, and a number of steps are taken to limit the scope and power of the government, including dividing it into branches that serve to check one another.
It is, in some ways, among the most admirable and the most defensible political philosophies, or at least among the least repulsive, and we owe to it some fundamental insights and innovations, including the notions of universal human equality and of unalienable individual rights. And what’s most admirable: uniquely among political conceptions that countenance a government or state, it sees that the power of the state must be limited, or else the results are very likely to be annihilating. And though classical liberalism comes pretty directly from the 17th century, the true nightmare of unlimited and hence unhinged state power, the greatest fear of a John Adams or James Madison, was only realized in the genocides of the 20th century. The very worst crimes ever committed have been by governments.
Putting it mildly, classical liberals have a point. But one thing that current developments in the United States—such as the killing by ICE agents of Renée Nicole Good—should make you realize: liberalism just doesn’t solve the basic problem with the political state and contains the seeds of its own destruction. The Trump administration is shooting Americans, and claiming and deploying powers completely incompatible with classical liberalism or the US Constitution, including acts of war prosecuted all over the world with no Congressional approval, and pointed restrictions on the rights of free speech and assembly. All this emerges directly and sequentially from a liberal polity that has been subject, predictably, to continuous and expanding abuses of power. Trump wields the executive power of the presidency as expanded, among others, by FDR, Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama.
Message to statists: When you constitute a power sufficient to be effectively irresistible, it (not you) decides in the long run how big and powerful it ought to be, what powers it ought to have and what rights you ought to retain if any, and whether you yourself live or die.
The current expansion and abuse of state power could get much worse. On X, for example, you can witness Trump supporters releasing themselves into an advocacy of state murder. This administration possesses the surveillance state and "the greatest military the world has ever known," emerging directly from the liberal polity as constituted by the founders and interpreted by their successors, to enforce its destruction of "the rules-based liberal order."
Perhaps one shouldn't hold liberals responsible for Trump, who represents everything they repudiate. But the liberal American polity has slowly built the executive branch of the United States government into an effectively irresistible force. Once it starts to violate its own principles, turn against its own people—once it starts to censor, exploit, repress, or kill—there’s nothing anyone is going to be able to do about it.
That's not in keeping with liberal principles, but there’s no practical means in liberalism to resist or short-circuit it. The government that Trump now wields has its origin in liberalism and the Constitution. That government has, roughly, grown in every decade since 1790 (and perhaps it tripled in size during the New Deal), and is now exponentially larger than anything that could’ve been envisioned by the founders or by John Locke. Still, it was largely compatible with classical liberalism throughout (with disturbing exceptions, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Enemy Aliens Act during World War 1, and Lincoln's suspension of Habeas corpus), at least according to the classical liberals of each period.
Even in periods of nationalism, militarism, or reaction, there was some semblance of respect for individual rights and some common deference to the rule of law. But one thing we might realize now is that what kept all this in place was not any of the procedures specified in the Constitution, but a persistent ethos that was established at the founding. This ethos, shared by many citizens and many of the people those citizens elected to office, dissipated bit by bit in the 20th century, and now there isn't much of it remaining on the left or on the right.
It's that ethos that kept us fairly free. But the hedges against overweening government growth and intolerable government power—the separation into branches, for example, or the continuing practice of relatively fair elections—depend now, wholly, on the good will of whomever is operating the power. This is being demonstrated vividly, every single day, by the Trump administration.
The founding fathers created a government that could be shepherded toward continual growth and that is eventuating now in tyranny. It took longer than one might have expected, but on both practical and conceptual grounds, it was very likely to happen eventually.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell