The thing about a philosophy as amorphous as populism, MAGA, 21st-century liberalism, or for that matter anarchism-without-adjectives is that it isn’t really much use for predicting what its adherents will do or what policies they’ll condone.
Several years of touting Trump’s “antiwar” credentials hasn’t stopped most of his followers from turning around and cheering his attack on Iran, for example, even though they must recall America’s track record of prolonged, expensive fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But then, they’ll cheer almost anything Trump does. Can you blame leftists like Kyle Kulinski for sounding so angry about it?
When people have no clear principles to follow, they follow leaders or mobs, neither a good strategy and both likely to result in a lot of posturing and random fighting. I recommend treating property rights, including each person’s ownership of her own body, as inviolable—an admittedly simple formula that would make virtually all government, all political schemes, all violent crime, and all war impossible (war tending to destroy people and property).
Here we are instead with a president who one day happily calls his predecessors idiots for engaging in regime-change wars and the next targets foreign leaders in a notoriously volatile region for bombing. But he didn’t start down this road just a few days ago, and it’s not just this region. Recall Venezuela, if your memory goes that far back. Or should I just say: “VenezLOLa! He showed them!”?
The question shouldn’t be merely whether the attack on Venezuela “went smoothly” but whether any moral or political guidelines can be discerned in Trump’s actions that even enable us to predict what he’ll do next. We will all be along for the ride, after all.
Trump sometimes sounded interested in peace and possibly even pot legalization in days past, as befits a sybaritic Boomer, but now it turns out he’s such a drug-warrior fanatic he’s willing to bomb suspected drug boats without a trial, turning the metaphorical (and futile) “war on drugs” into an actual war. I suppose that’s nothing new in Latin America, where U.S. helicopters spend so much time attacking drug cartels, you’d think it was, well, Vietnam.
Trump’s troglodytic New Right followers seem to have convinced themselves that every culture conflict is war and thus that drug traffickers can logically be shot with missiles. Will they balk at aiming the missiles at mere drug users if the opportunity arises? Trump surely has friends in the weaponized drone industry who’d be happy to help.
But are drugs even his motive? In some moods, he’ll admit he just wants Venezuela’s oil, much the way he wants Greenland, seeing no reason anything should get in the way of his desires. It’s enough to make one suspect his interest in Iran isn’t driven by a passion for democracy alone. So, expect any regime change there to be at least as hands-on (and profitable for Trump) as the mopping-up in Venezuela.
While the U.S. grows increasingly willing under Trump to say, in effect, “Spare me the details, kill everybody” when faced with intractable problems, there are some figures in Latin America who sound more libertarian than Trump and recognize the immense advantages of solving problems through free trade and individual rights.
Argentine president Javier Milei has done more to cut government there than Trump has here, and Peru almost appointed free-market economist Hernando de Soto prime minister recently. I would not only respect their right to visit the U.S. without being hassled at the southern border, I’d be delighted to see them governing the U.S.—and so would many of the MAGA faithful if they looked thoughtfully at principles and policies instead of just dismissively checking which region people hail from, concluding anyplace that isn’t here must in all ways be worse, which historically has had a tendency to make wars against those other places more thinkable.
Back in mid-December, it looked as if Trump might well expand his barbaric, roving boat attacks to other drug-exporting countries down south. You may think any country involved in drug trafficking deserves whatever it gets, but God help us if he finds out what country’s buying most of those drugs.
Trump’s foes, back when he was running in 2016, said an arrogant, combative personality like his leads to conflict, potentially to full-blown war. Those critics might well have been hypocrites, favoring elective and international-establishment-pleasing wars the world over, but were they wrong about Trump?
More damningly, they said conservative overconfidence and hyper-patriotism in general leads to war. Were they wrong?
They said an overly sloppy, ethics-free, grasping, cheating version of capitalism leads to war in oil-rich regions. Were they wrong?
They said the U.S. is too quick to fight Israel’s enemies instead of just our own. Were they wrong?
A few of Trump’s more discerning critics said recent converts from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, of which Trump inspired many, are often the most vicious and immoderate political activists, leading to even more ham-fisted policies and rhetoric. Were they wrong?
None of the above should be taken to be a defense of the left itself. Anyone who’s read my past work knows I oppose the left. After Trump, we might well find ourselves with President AOC and be subjected to more spectacles like her recent stunned confusion when she was asked whether she thinks the U.S. should defend Taiwan from China, a simple question causing a fit of stammering that she followed up much later with a whispered bedside video arguing that people should focus on how dumb Trump is instead of criticizing her—a video made even less serious by the sound of her boyfriend loudly snoring in the background.
Like many on the left, she’s ridiculous, even dangerous. You might have difficulty imagining anyone more ill-suited to high office. And yet she’s not the one who just started a war with Iran.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey