Stuck Between Iraq and a Dumb Place

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president.

He was immediately mocked by Washington insiders. The mainstream media treated his campaign as a ridiculous human interest story, much like a frog wearing a straw hat or a chihuahua that dances to Lady Gaga songs. Of this late stage of the before-time, National Review editor Rich Lowry told Never Trump authors Saldin and Teles:

“I think we considered Trump a menace pretty early on, but underestimated the gravity of it because we thought it would fade. It was a strong version of a summer phenomenon that we’ve seen in Republican politics before.”

As Trump began to win primaries, those who saw his candidacy as a joke were suddenly not laughing. What was it about Trump that old guard conservatives, some moderates, and most liberals found so distasteful? Senator Ted Cruz summed up the attitude of many. Before finally bending the knee to Trump, Cruz attacked him as a “bully,” “a small and petty man,” “a pathological liar,” and “utterly amoral.” Others highlighted statements about rapist immigrants and, ironically enough, grabbing women in a very private place as particularly disqualifying. Many saw Trump as an existential threat to democracy.

There’s another take promoted by some right wing libertarians: that Trump is so hated because as an outsider to the Washington establishment, he poses a threat to the consensus of insiders and experts often referred to as “the deep state.”

And as conspiratorial as this take may sound, it’s not far from the truth. Saldin and Teles recounted Trump’s American foreign policy speech at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel in the spring of 2016; the one where he said:

“Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster. No vision. No purpose. No direction. No strategy… We have to look to new people because many of the old people frankly don’t know what they’re doing, even though they may look awfully good writing in The New York Times or being watched on television.”

In attacking the foreign policy establishment, Saldin and Teles argue that:

“Trump once again ignored the party’s unwritten rules of etiquette by gratuitously disparaging the Iraq War and its Republican architects. Much worse, he parroted a long-standing criticism, most popular in far-left and libertarian circles, that Washington’s foreign policy network in general, and its Republicans members in particular, are warmongers. Drawing a clear contrast between himself and the foreign policy establishment, he emphasized that ‘war and aggression will not be my first instinct.’”

And many did indeed see Trump’s proposed foreign policy as less aggressive than the Republican presidents who had come before him. In an op-ed that made him sound more like a Trump-ertarian than a leftwing elite, Paul Krugman–the bugaboo of many an economic libertarian–questioned whether Trump was “more fraudulent than the establishment trying to stop him.” Of Trump’s foreign policy heresies, Krugman opined “Mr. Trump is, if anything, more reasonable–or more accurately, less unreasonable–than his rivals,” in part due to his admission that “the Bush administration deliberately misled America into that disastrous war.”

But Trump was not just criticizing Republican wars. Eliot Cohen, a Bush 43 state department official and Never Trumper, told Saldin and Teles that Trump challenged a:

“two-generation-old American foreign policy consensus. Even in this era of partisanship, there has been a large measure of agreement between the two parties, cemented by officials, experts, and academics who shared a common outlook.”

Saldin and Teles noted that presidential candidates:

“ritualistically kiss the ring of the foreign policy establishment and receive the group’s blessing as a means of demonstrating their status as a serious person—and thus a legitimate candidate—who can be trusted in the high-stakes enterprise of national security.”

However, this was something that candidates Donald Trump and Rand Paul would not do in 2016. Paul opposed the foreign policy establishment for firm ideological reasons: he saw them as responsible for turning the United States into the busybody police of the world, with the result that we had recently initiated two destructive wars with no positive resolution in sight. In contrast, Trump’s unwillingness to kiss the ring may have been more strategic. He had:

“discovered that the foreign policy establishment—unlike, say, the top echelon of social conservatism—simply doesn’t command armies of voters and could be dismissed without electoral consequence” (Saldin & Teles).

Because of his personal character, his disregard for political norms, and also his comments celebrating dictators, praising the Tiananmen Square massacre, mocking POWs, and impugning free trade, “the Republican foreign policy establishment responded to Trump with open, furious, and mostly unified opposition” (Saldin & Teles). It was not necessarily specific positions of Trump that were being objected to. As former State Department aide Philip Zelikow argued, “You can’t have a policy disagreement with Donald Trump. . . . He doesn’t function at that level. He doesn’t know anything about policy. He is a culture warrior” (Saldin & Teles).

Trump also promised to “drain the swamp,” by which he meant, in essence, fire the deep state. In a fall 2016 speech, he swore to restore faith in:

“what he repeatedly called a rigged system that rewards the wealthy and well-connected at the expense of the common man. Speaking to a rowdy crowd estimated by police at 1,500, Trump said Hillary Clinton has benefited time and time again from system where lobbyists move between government, political campaigns and the private sector.”

To be specific, he advocated for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on congressmen, a ban on federal employees and congressmen lobbying the government for five years after leaving the public sector, and new campaign finance reforms.

However, John Stossel, writing for Reason earlier this year noted that the administrative state had actually grown under Trump.

Of course, these kinds of promises had been made by mainstream candidates before without raising too many hackles. Was the concerted effort which arose against Trump the result of the “deep state” trying to protect itself against a reformist outsider who heroically opposed them, or the result of a sincere belief that Trump was an infantile and unrespectable candidate who threatened our democracy?

While few in the “deep state” would see their commitment to the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy as an evil which Trump heroically opposed, there is some truth to the charge that they were as hostile to Trump as he appeared to be to them. Saldin and Teles summarize the attitudes of Trump and the foreign policy establishment to one another this way:

“Where foreign policy elites see themselves as honorable public servants, Trump denounced them as self-interested hacks. Whereas they see foreign policy as a noble and high-stakes arena for well-trained statesmen, Trump dismissed foreign policy as simply another realm for instinctive, transactional deal-making.”

Nevertheless, the notion that Trump poses a serious threat to foreign policy as usual is undermined by the fact that the policies Trump’s administration actually pursued hardly rolled back the warfare state. However, it did add a level of unpredictability to our foreign policy which experts feared would, at best, damage our relationships with other countries. As one open letter signed by a number of foreign policy experts argued, Trump’s “vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle. He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.”

So where does this leave libertarians? Apart from those who will reliably vote for the Libertarian Party candidate or just stay home, some will inevitably vote Harris or Trump in 2024–likely under duress.

The difference between a libertarian who would, if a gun was pressed to their temple, vote for Donald Trump and a libertarian who, in the same circumstances, would pull the lever for Kamala Harris, is basically this: the reluctant Trump voting libertarian thinks that the old order which dominated American politics was so horrible that any pushback against it–no matter how scattershot or incoherent–is a marked improvement. They reason, “Trump couldn’t make it any worse, could he?”

The reluctant Harris voting libertarian would respond, “oh, yes, he could.”

Each side has understandable reasons for thinking the other is naive, if not crazy.

Some right-leaning libertarians will, without much anxiety about it, make coalitions with people who traffic in borderline antisemitic conspiracy theories and tweet things like:

“[gangsta rap was] created by the Feds, who proferred deals to homosexual black men in prison and then turned them into artificial celebrities. The goal was to create false idols to destroy black American values.”

For their part, left-leaning libertarians will muse that maybe Dick Cheney, who recently endorsed Kamala Harris over his own party’s candidate, wasn’t so bad after all–at least he brought “decency” and “respectability” to the White House… oh, yeah, and two unaffordable wars that resulted in the loss of millions of lives and ultimately failed to accomplish their primary objectives.

In short, we’re stuck between Iraq and a dumb place. We can choose the old order that looks respectable but blunders into forever wars, secret coups that backfire, and the blowback of terrorism on our own shores. Or, in Trump, we can choose an unprincipled narcissist who barely improves our situation but at least gives the establishment elites hives.

Fortunately, there is more space between these two lamentable extremes than the culture war compromisers would lead you to believe.

Being a libertarian, like being Christian, means doing the right thing without worrying about whether or not it will “work,”–or rather, being willing to do the right thing even if you’re not sure you will “win” in the process. It means not having to compromise your values to be “pragmatic,” which in this case means that regardless of which major party candidate you support, you will be casting your vote for continuing to overextend our empire and welfare state until we collapse under the weight of our own spending.

Source: https://libertarianchristians.com/2024/10/24/stuck-between-iraq-and-a-dumb-place/