This piece originally appeared in Commonplace.
With the election behind them, conservatives can release all the pent-up tension that comes from uniting around a common cause and go back to fighting amongst themselves. Within bounds, such fighting is all to the good. Nearly a decade in, the New Right still has serious internal divisions it must work out if it is to succeed over the next four years and beyond. Post-election, it still needs to confront these divisions head-on.
One such division was highlighted by Vivek Ramaswamy at this summer’s National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., in a speech titled: “National Libertarians and National Protectionists.” In the speech, he argues: “Both of [those groups] reject the historical neoliberal consensus on foreign policy, on trade, and on immigration, but for different reasons, and with very different implications for the future direction of America First policy.” National Libertarianism wants global trade, but with China cut out; National Protectionism wants to prioritize bringing jobs back home. National Libertarianism wants merit-based immigration; National Protectionism wants less immigration in toto. National Libertarianism wants to shrink the government; National Protectionism wants to put it to better use. Ramaswamy plants his flag solidly in the National Libertarian camp.
Now, those dubbed National Protectionists by Ramaswamy are hitting back. Oren Cass of American Compass recently rejected National Libertarianism as “warmed-over market fundamentalism with a dash of nationalism sprinkled on to mask that past-the-expiration-date funk.” “The project fails,” Cass argues, “because it was lab-designed to occupy a tactically useful political space, not built on an intellectually coherent foundation or formed from popular demands.” Another Compass staffer, policy advisor Mark DiPlacido, has similarly criticized Ramaswamy for “harken[ing] back to the failed, neoliberal, pre-Trump consensus.”
But as conservatives make their plans for the Trump administration and beyond, they should not dismiss National Libertarianism too quickly. The disagreements between the two camps are real and considerable, but there are also real and considerable affinities between the best forms of libertarianism and National Conservatism that distinguish both from the dying mainstream Right of recent decades. Seizing on these affinities and making common cause where possible, without ignoring divisions elsewhere, will be necessary if those who welcome the realignment are to make the most of it.
To begin, it’s not quite right to present National Libertarianism as spawning from some petri dish within a PR agency, without any history to speak of. National Libertarianism’s name might be new, but it is best understood as an attempted revival of the “Old Right,” the pre-World War II coalition of anti-interventionists and New Deal skeptics. While never quite a full-blown movement—with perhaps the exception of the America First Committee’s opposition to involvement in World War II—it captured a coherent-enough suspicion of FDR’s expansion of the federal government, and a sense that the old American ways were under threat from radical domestic reformers.
Though it faded away amid Eisenhower’s détente with the New Deal and the genesis of the Cold War, the Old Right, featuring such figures as Senator Robert Taft, Chicago Tribune publisher Colonel McCormick, and the writer H. L. Mencken, captured two fundamental American moods: the “don’t step on me” stance of libertarians and the unabashed “rally ‘round the flag” populism of nationalists. Behind these attitudes were some basic shared convictions: that the U.S. government needed to prioritize the American people over abstract global principles, and that it best performed its essential functions when it wasn’t sticking its hand into everything.
Is this so inconsistent? If it is, so much the worse for Trump’s aspirations for perfect philosophical purity; but many ordinary Americans have had just the same batch of inconsistencies, and still do today. The strange union of these two impulses—the small-government individualism of the libertarians, with the America First populism of the nationalists—is hardly a new phenomenon in American politics, or in American conservatism. No less an über-libertarian and Old Right advocate than Murray Rothbard, after all, supported the 1992 presidential bid of Patrick Buchanan, a New Right hero avant la lettre.
Rothbard’s praise of Buchanan, the “Trump before Trump,” is worth considering today: “[H]e stands for America First, and for an older and finer America, an America of liberty and individual responsibility, of a culture permeated by sound religious values. … He is the best hope for bringing back that kind of America.” Indeed, Rothbard, radical libertarian though he was, articulated a vision for the Right that wouldn’t be out of place in this magazine today:
The proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call ‘right-wing populism’: exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. … [W]e need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly.
Despite serious disagreements, there was a kinship here between nationalism and libertarianism, as well as a common foe in what had become the prevailing form of conservatism. That kinship still deserves a place on the Right today.
Consider some policy debates that the Right will face in 2025. Perhaps the most straightforward similarity between Old Right libertarians and New Right populists lies in foreign policy. Both reject the neoconservative goal of gallivanting around the world, changing a regime here, building a democracy there, and putting an “end to evil” everywhere. This is a source of agreement among virtually all New Right types. But the value of a National Libertarian voice in the New Right would also be strong on several matters of greater intra-conservative squabbling.
First, National Libertarianism and the New Right share an antipathy toward a bureaucracy that fails to deliver for the American people and that consistently avoids accountability for its abuses. Quick: is the call to drain the swamp libertarian or populist? Of course, it’s both. Libertarians have long opposed the surveillance state’s violation of civil liberties, from condemning the PATRIOT Act, while the GOP cheered it on, to advocating secure messaging apps today. More recently, the New Right has sounded the alarm at the weaponization of the federal government, the corrupt lawfare against Trump, and Big Tech’s collusion with the government in the censorship and deplatforming of conservatives. Here, a National Libertarian wing could help the New Right attempt a thorough cleaning house within the government to secure Americans’ civil liberties and protect the rule of law.
Economics also affords opportunities for an alliance. On monetary policy, the Federal Reserve has long been a bugbear for libertarians, but there has been little attention among the New Right on this topic, despite Americans’ recent inflation frustration. Writing for American Compass, Anthony Constantini recently called on the New Right to direct its economic populism toward the institution, arguing that the Trump administration should “at least lay the groundwork for serious future reforms,” which would “force the Fed to open its books to the American people.” Ron “End the Fed” Paul couldn’t have said it better himself.
On taxes and trade, Trump’s recent proposal to replace the income tax with tariffs captures some shared intuitions between Old Right libertarians and New Right populists as well—mathematical difficulties notwithstanding. After all, the absence of an income tax and the heavy reliance on tariff revenue represent the norm throughout American history. The libertarians of the Old Right never made too big a fuss about tariffs—a fact sheepishly acknowledged in Justin Raimondo’s adulatory history of the coalition (which, as it happens, enjoys a foreword by Patrick Buchanan). They recognized, sensibly enough, that one has to raise government funds somehow—a truth that the modern GOP’s perilous “cut taxes now and ask questions later” approach has ignored.
More generally, National Libertarianism could support the New Right’s desire for a government that is both competent and accountable. Today, we have the worst of both worlds: incomprehensibly complex bureaucratic procedures that involve the government in everything we do, without enabling it to perform those basic functions that Americans expect of it.
To address this fundamental problem of American governance, a populist-libertarian alliance could aim to cut off the dead weight slowing down the government—shrinking the state in some ways, yes, but for the sake, more importantly, of empowering it to do its job more effectively. A government run in the National Libertarian spirit would, to take inspiration from political scientist Steven Teles, be “bigger and more energetic where it clearly chose to act (and so received public sanction for doing so), but smaller and less intrusive outside of that sphere.”
Here, the tech-inflected quasi-libertarianism that has recently found itself on the Right could prove useful. The new Department of Government Efficiency could be just the thing to produce a more competent state, one that pursues discrete national priorities competently and otherwise stays well away. (At least, it could if its leaders, Elon Musk and the aforementioned Ramaswamy, themselves focused on discrete priorities related to public administration, rather than fighting over H-1Bs and sleepovers.) Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and other right-wing tech boosters like free markets; but even more, they like ambitious, well-run megaprojects, and they recognize that when it comes to initiating such projects, the government is the biggest game in town. A Musk-influenced government would hardly be one so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist wants. Rather, it would be one disciplined enough to leave many matters alone, but muscular enough to shock and awe all when it does act.
On all these fronts, the seemingly paradoxical mix of the big-government New Right and the small-government Old Right would be an improvement over the mainstream Republican Party of recent decades. That “conservatism,” besides endorsing the international adventuring rejected by both Old and New Right, has not succeeded in shrinking government, but only in making it more sclerotic, and in moving the country closer to bankruptcy. Nor has it succeeded in forestalling the progressive social-engineering project that the Old Right feared. National Libertarianism could help the Right chart a better path forward.
Consider how Old Right libertarians and New Right populists could make common cause in recognizing the stakes of our political moment. The Old Right had an invigorating streak of doomerism, which feared that America’s freedoms were under threat and needed aggressive action to be defended. Rightly or wrongly, its advocates had no qualms speaking of a looming totalitarian menace under FDR; in a similar vein, members of the New Right today have been uniquely willing among conservatives to insist on the dangers of totalitarianism and the need to radically change course.
In contrast, contemporary fusionists, perhaps spooked by this strong language or afraid to be lumped in with the kooky populists, have adopted a dull centrism, insisting that everything is fine—bad enough to complain about, yes, but not so bad that we need to panic. Whereas the Old Right journalist Garet Garrett warned of a “revolution within the form” transforming America into a tyranny, today’s fusionists glibly dismiss such fears as poppycock: “[D]o we have problems that have some superficial similarities with the Soviets? Sure. But … come on,” goes one recent such dismissal.
Such misguided moderation is coupled with a learned helplessness about the possibility of reform—a helplessness taught by many free-marketeers’ own arguments. I recently asked a prominent free-market wonk, who was invoking public choice theory to explain why government failure is inevitable, what the point of even talking about it—or of being a libertarian—was. By her own argument, wasn’t any attempt to get a more responsible, less corrupt government a fool’s errand? If resistance to lousy government is futile, shouldn’t we quit trying and instead pack up our bags and go home? Her response was to change the subject and lambast another regulation—a regulation that her own remarks would suggest we can do nothing about. Fusionism has preferred impotent grumbling about America’s problems; National Libertarianism could help galvanize the Right to actually do something about them.
None of this is to deny the serious disagreements within the Right on trade, immigration, unions, industrial policy, and more—or even to claim that National Libertarians have the better argument on these matters. But National Libertarianism nevertheless represents an approach to policy and governance that deserves a place in the next chapter of the conservative movement. Just don’t start calling it “NatLib,” please.
