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Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.
We have entered another Trump term, and the political landscape has shifted in ways that challenge the very foundations of our liberal democracy. With unprecedented executive power and a growing ecosystem of loyalists surrounding the president, we must ask: What happens when political institutions are no longer able to constrain a populist authoritarian president’s ambitions? And how do institutions, the media, and civil society respond?
Today, The UnPopulist’s editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia is joined by senior editor Berny Belvedere and contributor Andy Craig. They explore the risks of an unchecked executive, the breakdown of institutional safeguards, the chilling effect on dissent in both politics and culture—and whether libertarians, who put checking abusive state authority at the heart of their political project, will stand up to Trump in his second term, which is already shaping up to be far worse than his first.
We hope you find the discussion interesting, if depressing.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Shikha Dalmia: Hi, Andy and Berny. This is our first editorial podcast of 2025. It’s going to be an awesome four years, I am sure. And I’m counting on you to try and keep me sane.
We are taping this three days before the inauguration. And just observing the macro circumstances in which Trump is coming into office: he is going to assume the most powerful office on the planet, with the most unchecked powers we’ve ever seen. He has unified control of the government: He is the president, the Senate and the House are Republican. The Republican Party has completely collapsed. The Paul Ryans of the world are in complete disrepute. Democrats themselves are in disarray. They don’t know how to position themselves. And the confirmation hearings of his cabinet picks so far have been a clown show. They don’t know what they are doing. They don’t know how to be an opposition party.
At the same time, you’re going to see unprecedented control of executive agencies. Project 2025 is set to unify executive control under the presidency. It’s the kind of thing that libertarians and classical liberals used to really worry about—this concentration of executive power. They have a full-scale plan to stack executive agencies with Trump loyalists who will advance his agenda. The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling has given literally carte blanche powers to the presidency. There is nothing within the scope of a president’s official duties, however they are construed, that a president can’t do. His pardon powers are immense.
At the same time, you see a whole bunch of private companies who are completely within the MAGA camp. The oligarchs, who control information flows and the content that people get ... they are either completely within the MAGA camp or they are very rapidly bending the knee. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, all of them—they’re all going to be at the inauguration. They are giving millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration.
And Trump is coming in with a massive persecution complex. He’s convinced that the government was weaponized against him with all the lawsuits that he faced. He does not see it as being held to the rule of law. He sees this as all partisan politics and he has a retribution agenda. And of course he has no internal norms that would restrain him in making responsible use of executive power. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, given these confluence of events, what do you think is going to happen in the second Trump term?
And let me just add: In every other country where you haven’t had this convergence of factors, countries that are experiencing democratic backsliding, the second term of the proto-authoritarian, the wannabe authoritarian, has been much worse than the first one. That’s true in Viktor Orbán’s case in Hungary; that’s true in Narendra Modi’s case in India.
So, what are you guys fearing? And if you’re not fearing anything, I’d love to hear that too.
Berny Belvedere: Those ingredients that you laid out will be a recipe for disaster for the country. I echo all of the things that you pointed out about the damage Trump 2.0 can inflict. I think, for me, the greatest concern is that his most destructive ideas and impulses ... they’re far less likely to be thwarted since many of the constraints that were in place the first time around aren’t there anymore.
One of the tragic ironies of his first term is that the resistance to him that was coming from inside his administration kind of indirectly paved the way for his eventual reelection. So, this past November, we know from the exit polls and just from the data that’s come out—this is of course four years removed from when he was last in office—people remembered his first tenure in far fonder terms than they should have. A lot of people looked back on his first tenure and concluded that the warnings about how bad the next Trump presidency will be didn’t quite match how they remembered his first term. But here’s where the tragic irony comes in: The reason Trump’s first term wasn’t as cataclysmically awful as it could have been was because there was a contingent inside his administration that wasn’t fully MAGAfied.
Two years into his tenure, The New York Times publishes a guest essay from someone inside his administration, but they publish it anonymously. The title is: “I Am Part of The Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” And the subtitle is: “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” The author eventually outed himself, as we all know—it was Miles Taylor, chief of staff at Homeland Security. And you can read it ... the argument isn’t, “We are part of the hashtag resistance movement.” Actually, he explicitly disavows that in the piece and instead explicitly invokes the idea of the need for “adults in the room” who have a duty to uphold the Constitution.
So, why will it be worse now than it was then? I think it’s obvious that his first victory caught him and really everyone else by surprise. When he won in 2016, he quickly realized he was out of his depth. There wasn’t a governing-ready MAGA apparatus in place that could transform his instincts into policy. He went along with what the party establishment wanted because the GOP hadn’t yet fully reorganized itself around his personality and preferences. You heard this all the time from his camp when he was out of power: they didn’t have their people running the show. That was the great tragedy from their perspective about his first term; that’s what they diagnosed as the major problem that they won’t make again.
Think about this: In year four of his presidency, he was still deferring and delegating to people like Anthony Fauci. There’s no world in which Trump’s incoming administration would even entertain something like that. The closest we’re going to get to Trump having a normal-ish type of figure who has his ear, in a key position, is Marco Rubio at state. But even Rubio has proven far more pliable than initially thought. This is a guy who was once on the vanguard of passing the kind of immigration reform that Trump would never stand for today.
But make no bones about it, Trump will have a formidable MAGA brain trust in place now that wasn’t in place last time. The problem isn’t just Yes Men. He’s also surrounded himself with MAGA true believers who are far more competent than he is. So he’s got this perfect brew—really tragic for the country, but for him, a perfect brew—of undying allegiance among foot soldier types, and then an ideologically-aligned suite of policymakers and operatives far more cognitively capable than he is to implement his agenda.
That’s what worries me the most—that there’s no longer going to be a sufficient number of executive staffers who are loyal to the Constitution first and foremost. There will no longer be key personnel at the highest positions circumnavigating Trump’s worst instincts or thwarting them. On the contrary, they’ll be taking his worst urges and harnessing them into workable policy initiatives. And that scares me quite a bit.
Dalmia: When you mentioned Marco Rubio, I remember after he dropped out of the primary the first time around, after being roundly humiliated by Trump, he did a really good press conference where he actually warned the country: You got to figure out what kind of a country you’re going to be. And he laid out very explicitly the kinds of dangers that Trump poses to the public. And here he is, quite willing to do business with Trump.
“Just observing the macro circumstances in which Trump is coming into office: he is going to assume the most powerful office on the planet, with the most unchecked powers we’ve ever seen. He has unified control of the government: He is the president, the Senate and the House are Republican. The Republican Party has completely collapsed. The Paul Ryans of the world are in complete disrepute. Democrats themselves are in disarray. They don’t know how to position themselves.” — Shikha Dalmia
In Trump’s first term, Bill Barr was the attorney general, and Barr had an expansive understanding of executive authority. I mean, he gave a speech to the Federalist Society where he said that this idea of checks and balances to executive power is sort of like a civic book understanding of the Constitution, and that it’s not true. But when Trump wanted to overturn the election, Bill Barr still stood up to him. This man who had this expansive understanding of executive power still had some lines he was going to draw. Now you have Pam Bondi, who is auditioning for the role of attorney general in front of Congress, and she refuses to say that the election was not stolen, that Biden is a legitimate president.
Belvedere: This is the horror of what we’re seeing. Pam Bondi, as bad as she is, is actually a level up from what we could have had: Matt Gaetz, someone without qualifications, but someone Trump knows would go after his political enemies like a bulldog. That telegraphs the kind of administration he wants to run: a muscularly MAGAfied administration, and there won’t be those internal checks that we saw the first time around.
Dalmia: So, Andy, how worried are you?
Andy Craig: It’s not good. There’s no doubt about that. I agree with a lot of these points about why our expectations should reasonably be that we will be getting a second term that is a lot worse than the first term. For starters, Trump himself is radicalized in a way that he wasn’t in his first term. I mean, he’s already openly musing about, “Maybe I’ll run for a third term” and “who cares that the Constitution says I can’t do that.” We’re a little lucky that he’s as old as he is and the man’s not immortal.
One of the things that’s happened just in the last few days that I think is a really worrying red flag, and goes to how the institutional checks and balances have been just eviscerated, is Trump effectively fired, by way of Mike Johnson serving as his compliant messenger boy, Mike Turner as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. lot of people might shrug that off and say, “Well, we don’t like Turner” or “congressional committees aren’t serious” or whatever. But the intelligence committees are legitimately important. And these are institutions that Congress does take seriously. These are the people who get to see what the president can do in absolute secrecy—where if you reveal it, you go to prison—using America’s bloodiest wrenches in the toolkit: the CIA, the NSA. So it’s immensely worrying that not even a couple of weeks before taking office, he’s demanding, and the Speaker of the House is going along with this demand, that we have a completely pliant stooge in that role.
I think the Supreme Court is worse than it was. In the first term, we didn’t have the immunity rulings, the 14th Amendment rulings that disallow states to disbar insurrectionists from running for president. In the New York hush-money case, there were four justices who wanted to stop the pro forma sentencing to no punishment for Trump, even though it absolutely doesn’t matter. That’s very concerning.
In terms of what he’s going to try to do, one of the big red flags I’m watching, and I think that people don’t quite understand how this is going to work, is free speech and going after opposition. It’s not going to be this cartoon version people have in mind—the Gestapo is not going to be hauling people off for tweets saying, “The orange man is bad.” But what we see from the modern authoritarian playbook is you don’t have to do that. It’s about retaliation and intimidation. It’s about the chilling effect. It’s about leveraging the risk aversion of institutions. And we’ve already seen that just with him coming in. It doesn’t even necessarily take explicit actions—only the knowledge that he’s the kind of person and he’s staffing the administration with the kind of people who would do that. That’s a lot of what’s going on with Jeff Bezos and the moves at The Washington Post; it’s a large part of what’s going on with Zuckerberg. He threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison for the rest of his life. And now, he’s buddy-buddy and he’s on board. And of course there’s Musk with his infinite pile of money. He was literally out there buying votes in Pennsylvania, giving people million dollar checks which, you do that with $20 and you’ll go to prison, but do it with a million dollars and apparently that’s not an issue.
That kind of corrosive miasma permeating civil society and private sector institutions has a dramatic effect on how effective opposition can be. It’s kind of an unseen thing. It’s hard to point to one specific thing. Look, they’re trying to prosecute Liz Cheney, which I honestly don’t think is terribly likely to actually happen. They might launch an investigation, which is its own kind of intimidation and retaliation and very serious. But in general, it’s just going to be that they’ll make a few examples. They’ll let the threat stand and that will have a much broader effect on legacy media institutions.
Just today, 10 Senate Democrats joined the Republicans to pass this terrible immigration bill, the Laken Riley Act, that really opens things up for a lot of worse unilateral executive actions. Ken Paxton, the worst state attorney general, had new powers and legal standings under this. And that was Democrats rolling over. I do think we need to confront the fact that, for all the rightful fears we have and viewing him as the major threat, the Democratic Party is deeply unfit for its purpose in this moment. Both wings of the Democratic Party are wrong. We have this kind of centrist technocrat inclination to roll over and compromise, and then we have the leftist wing that wants to revive half-baked Marxist ideas from last century that are unpopular and wrong on the merits. What we need is a kind of radical liberalism—but there’s not a whole lot of that on offer among Democratic electeds today. I think it was a deep shame and a very bad sign that Senate Democrats reelected Chuck Schumer unopposed to be their Senate leader. I have my complaints about Nancy Pelosi, but if there’s anybody who has really in big ways failed in the Trump era to take this seriously and to do the kind of actions that needed to be done, it’s Chuck Schumer.
So, yeah, across the board, there are a lot of dangerous threats, and a lot of the checks on what he can do and what opposition levers are available are in pretty grim shape.
Dalmia: I’m actually more depressed after listening to you, Andy, if that was possible. More terrified.
But a lot of what’s going to happen is the unseen stuff, right? Like, instead of seeing the kind of resistance we saw the first time, whatever resistance is there is just holding back because within the executive branch people are afraid. Where I think the opportunities are going to be is when Trump overreaches. He has a performer’s mindset. He’s a performative president. Every cabinet member, or many cabinet members, that he’s picked are TV-ready people. These are TV personalities. So he will want to showcase certain things. I don’t think Liz Cheney is going to be put before a martial court and executed. He may say that he’s not going to do that, but he will want to showcase some kind of retribution to her. So that will open up new avenues for resistance.
What would an actual retribution agenda against these people look like that we can start telling the public about so that when these things happen, when the overt things happen, people can start connecting the dots?
Craig: I think there’s a few things to watch for. When you’re talking about Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, people like that who were at the forefront of Trump opposition over the last eight years—in Cheney’s case, only for the last four years—that’s probably going to take the form of either threatening or actually opening investigations. And they’re going to be shams. But being the subject of a federal investigation, either by a U.S. attorney or appointing a special counsel, is an immense, expensive, scary thing to go through. And having that example made will very much send a message.
“The entirety of the right-wing universe believes Trump has been the victim of partisan lawfare and rhetorical attacks that have culminated in assassination attempts and threats of imprisonment. And they feel like he’s entitled to do the same against his foes. Of course, what this rationalization gets so wrong is that Trump is far more corrupt, far more ethically compromised, far more inclined to illegal actions, than any of his presidential rivals have been. In the end, this rationalization is just a pretext. It’s something Trump uses to go after his rivals. The whole edifice of you came after me with lawfare, so I can now use the same system against you has a rot at the core of it, which is that he actually does the stuff that the law should hold accountable.” — Berny Belvedere
We don’t know yet how far it will go. Will they actually try to bring bogus charges? How will the courts handle this? But one of the things about it is the courts have very little leeway over the executive branch merely conducting investigations and doing subpoenas and all those preparatory things to actually filing criminal charges against somebody.
Dalmia: Or you have congressional committees. Like Jim Jordan. You don’t even have to go to a judge. They are in control of all the congressional committees and they can subpoena anybody and haul in people before them.
Craig: Yeah, Jim Jordan is already very good at this. And this is a problematic thing that Congress has done for a while—you know, “We’re going to have the committee hearings on C-SPAN,” which is not as big of a threat, but it’s it’s certainly not a pleasant thing to go through.
Dalmia: The hearings are under oath, which means that whoever they hold before them has to be very careful what they say or it’s a perjury trap. So there are all kinds of ways they can exercise their power. The problem with some of these showcase hearings is that the public doesn’t care. Jim Jordan has been out of control for a while with his congressional hearings. One reason Mark Zuckerberg bent the knee was that he was hauled before the committee and basically asked to admit that Joe Biden censored him.
Craig: I do think the more insidious, harder to see, and more damaging thing is going to be actual and threatened retaliation against businesses, against non-profit orgs. Ken Paxton in Texas, who set the tone for a lot of what we can look forward to on this, now from the federal level opened an actual criminal investigation of Media Matters for publishing an article about how ads on Twitter were running next to neo-Nazi stuff. We’re gonna see more of that.
But when you’re talking about Zuckerberg and Bezos and people like that ... I mean, even the CEO of Coca-Cola put out a statement like everybody else on Jan. 6 about this is horrifying and we hate it, and now the CEO is going to present Trump at a photo op with a customized bottle of Diet Coke. But that’s the kind of thing that very much would not be happening under a normal president because under a normal president, Coca-Cola doesn’t have much of a reason to worry that they’re going to come after them with all kinds of regulatory levers and the whole apparatus that can go after a large company like that. And similarly for media organizations and advocacy groups.
So I think those are the two avenues to really keep an eye on. One is the quieter institutional intimidation of key parts of our society outside of the government. And the other is the making an example of specific individuals. They’re not trying to intimidate Liz Cheney into changing her mind—they’re trying to make an example of her. Or Jack Smith ... the people on Jack Smith’s team are trying to prepare for what they expect to come down on them. And I think the message is going to be heard loud and clear.
That’s the thing to understand about what a constitutional crisis is. It’s not just a political crisis. A constitutional crisis is when the system is thrown into contradictions where something has to break—like maybe the military defying orders if he tries to send them into the streets. Something is seriously breaking about how our Constitution works either way these things go. So that’s what we have to look forward to.
Belvedere: And to the point about how maybe there will be a natural restraining mechanism in place because Trump is beholden to how he comes across, and because he is a TV personality and he won’t want to do drastic things ... another dimension to that that spells more danger is he has an entire information ecosystem where it seems like with every passing day more and more extreme proposals are expected of the people that the right elects. TV personalities know their audience, and Trump’s audience, the right-wing base, expects them to go hard against the people who they think have been so nasty toward them.
It’s worth spelling out how we got here. The entirety of the right-wing universe believes Trump has been the victim of partisan lawfare and rhetorical attacks that have culminated in assassination attempts and threats of imprisonment. And they feel like he’s entitled to do the same against his foes. Of course, what this rationalization gets so wrong is that Trump is far more corrupt, far more ethically compromised, far more inclined to illegal actions, than any of his presidential rivals have been.
I agree, Andy, with your critique of the Democratic Party and how they are not meeting the moment. But have they done plainly illegal things? No. Well, Trump has. And so Trump was held accountable by the law because he was, first of all, reasonably believed to be in violation of it. I mean, Hillary misused an email server. Joe Biden, they can’t get him, but here’s his son who has done a bunch of stuff. In the end, this rationalization is just a pretext. It’s something Trump uses to go after his rivals. Trump retaliating against his political opponents is just completely unjustified for the simple reason that he actually does illegal stuff and they don’t.
So the whole edifice of you came after me with lawfare, so I can now use the same system against you has a rot at the core of it, which is that he actually does the stuff that the law should hold accountable.
“In terms of what Trump is going to try to do, one of the big red flags I’m watching, and I think that people don’t quite understand how this is going to work, is free speech and going after opposition. It’s not going to be this cartoon version people have in mind—the Gestapo is not going to be hauling people off for tweets saying, “The orange man is bad.” But what we see from the modern authoritarian playbook is you don’t have to do that. It’s about retaliation and intimidation. It’s about the chilling effect. It’s about leveraging the risk aversion of institutions. And we’ve already seen that just with him coming in.” — Andy Craig
Dalmia: In India, when Modi wanted to intimidate his opponents or crackdown on dissent, he would actually send an income tax raid. You literally have a SWAT team that descends upon all the properties that you own—your business properties, your homes—they seal your safety deposit boxes in your banks, and a whole suite of federal agents swoop upon you. And this is terrifying for the people who have to endure it. Sometimes it’s justified. Modi did it not just against actual tax scofflaws—he used this to go after civil society groups and dissidents. So, NGOs who he thought were on the take from Soros had these income tax raids.
Is Trump going to do something like that? Unleash audits on various philanthropies whom he hates because they were funding his opponents? Is that something that you think will move the needle and get the public to see how draconian he is? Nobody is watching C-SPAN and Jim Jordan’s congressional committee, which is essentially accomplishing the same function—intimidating his opponents. Nobody cares about that. But a whole pattern of abusive audits—does that move the needle a little bit?
Craig: Well, one of the things that’s so insidiously effective about that method, and you see it across the board from figures like Modi and Orbán, is that it taps into a national mood of hating the elites and they’re all corrupt—and in some cases it’s true; these are billionaires who are probably cheating on their taxes or engaged in financial shenanigans. And it’s very easy for people to look at that and say, “Yeah, this is actually a good and righteous crackdown on elite corruption.”
But it’s the selectiveness of it. And just bad faith pretexts in some cases where there’s not actually any underlying misconduct to legitimately go after. I think there’s going to be a lot of cheering for it. Some of the foreign policy stuff is potentially a flash point where this insanity about Canada and Greenland—I mean, the Canadian government is making a big show of, we have this retaliation planned if he does these insane tariffs that he slaps on us. And that’s going to be stuff like cutting off energy exports. The United States gets like 60% of its oil and a ton of its electricity from Canada. So, you do that kind of thing and, even though we’re probably not literally invading Canada or Greenland, there will be a massive trade war that will hit people in a way that maybe is dramatic and painful enough that people’s groceries shoot through the roof. One of the main things people were mad at Biden about is inflation, their grocery prices went up. If he follows through on even a fraction of what they’re talking about with tariffs, the economic consequences will be devastating and rapid.
Dalmia: So the question is whether we can gin up public concern over executive abuses for his own personal agenda and retribution purposes. (There’s going to be a whole lot of self-dealing and corruption in this organization, but let’s table that for a second.) Or whether we just have to wait for his massively bad policies to actually affect ordinary voters and Americans before they stand up against him. We are in the middle of a woke scare right now, but when we were in the middle of a red scare, McCarthy’s hearings, they went so overboard that eventually the tide turned against McCarthy. People just could see how draconian this was, even people who didn’t like Hollywood. But the kinds of tactics that McCarthy deployed finally did wake people up. They could see the rise of draconian, tyrannical, federal overreaching.
So I keep waiting for that moment to happen in our era, but I really don’t think it can because of the confluence of a whole lot of social factors and the radicalization of the right. We live in a very different media ecosystem where you can’t really build a common narrative across the aisle—with Musk in control of Twitter and radicalizing his foot soldiers and what have you.
Craig: One of the difficulties of resisting authoritarianism in any era—I mean, this goes back to fascism and Nazism—is that the people thought they were free. The illusion of normalcy is very deep. I mean, life goes on. People take their kids to birthday parties and take vacations. And we have this cultural image of what authoritarian rule looks like, which is like The Empire from Star Wars. And there’s guys in uniforms, goose stepping about and that kind of thing. And that’s just not the day-to-day reality of what living under this kind of regime looks like.
“This is the thing to understand about what a constitutional crisis is. It’s not just a political crisis. A constitutional crisis is when the system is thrown into contradictions where something has to break—like maybe the military defying orders if he tries to send them into the streets. Something is seriously breaking about how our Constitution works either way these things go. That’s what we have to look forward to.” — Andy Craig
Most people most of the time will go on as if life is normal and the cumulative effects of what’s going on are very diffuse but that doesn’t mean there aren’t real, dramatic ways in which people are getting hurt.
Dalmia: Even in Russia, a completely authoritarian country, the vast majority of people still go on with something resembling normal life. They may stay out of politics. They may choose not to get engaged. But so long as they can go about with their basic day-to-day functioning, they don’t really feel the effect of authoritarianism. I’ve lived through pretty tumultuous times in India. Indira Gandhi declared a national emergency, suspended the constitution and jailed all her political opponents, which was a pretty dramatic moment in the country’s political history. But I was going to school. My dad was a doctor—he was going to his clinic. Everything was kind of normal for most people. It’s only in national emergencies, like wars or what have you, where the normal day-to-day life of people is impacted. So the question becomes: When do the people rise and take the authoritarian threat seriously?
One faction we would expect would help us stand up to this rising authoritarianism and tyranny that we are about to experience is libertarians. Andy, you and I both come from a libertarian background. Neither one of us is a self-identifying libertarian at this stage. The UnPopulist is not a libertarian publication. It has a lot of sympathy for some libertarian ideas like free market and small, limited government. But we are not a libertarian publication. And we cover libertarianism like we cover any faction of the right. We’ve covered the evangelical movement, the paleo movement, the neoconservative movement—we cover all the various factions of the right to see how they have comported themselves in this age of Trump and this true authoritarian age that we are about to enter. Andy, you have covered the libertarian party for The UnPopulist, how it has become completely MAGAfied. It’s completely in the thrall of a reactionary faction at this stage. But we haven’t really talked about the libertarian movement itself and how it has conducted itself.
I was reminded of this when, three weeks ago, Reason magazine, where I worked for 15 years, conducted a debate with The Bulwark, the Never Trump publication populated by former Republicans. And the motion of the debate was: You don’t have to pick a side. And it was interesting to have my former colleagues, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, debate Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller on this motion. And I have to admit that it was sort of depressing to watch this debate because Reason and the Cato Institute, with which you have been affiliated, are the better players within the libertarian movement. I think we can legitimately look at them to see the outer limits of how well libertarians are going to conduct themselves in the age of Trump. If they don’t hold the fort, I don’t think we should expect any other libertarian group, whether it’s at the state level or local level or other libertarian think tanks, to hold the fort against Trump.
To put my cards on the table just before Trump got elected, I wrote a piece for The Bulwark, which was titled “Faced With Trump, Libertarianism Shrugged.” The libertarian movement should have been one of the first lines of defense against this aspiring autocrat. It folded instead. And that was from just watching how libertarians had conducted themselves from the inside in the first Trump term. I left Reason in 2020 just as Trump left office and Biden came in. And I was hoping that the second term of Trump would be different for libertarians. But it doesn’t seem like it. And the motion of the debate itself, you don’t have to pick a side, to me was really cringe-worthy because when you’re saying you don’t have to pick a side when you have an authoritarian coming into the White House, you’re basically saying he’s not so bad, that he’s not really an authoritarian. This to me goes even further than libertarians have previously gone.
I mentioned in the Bulwark piece that the way libertarians had conducted themselves in the first Trump term was that they took this ledger-like approach: Let’s see the good he did, put it in one column; let’s see the bad he did, put it in one column—and then let the chips fall where they may. So they wouldn’t connect the dots. Trump was terrible on immigration. He was terrible on trade. He was abusing executive power. But they would not connect the dots and say that he was an authoritarian. Their idea was we are going to be neutral arbiters and just call the shots as we see them and let people connect the dots. But when you say you are not going to pick a side and you have an actual authoritarian, you’re essentially saying that he’s not really an authoritarian or he is no more authoritarian than the alternatives. And so, therefore, we don’t have to choose a side. Now they are in the mode of actively, not just passively, downplaying the second Trump term and the authoritarian threat that he poses. Am I wrong, Andy?
Craig: No. There’s a lot to unpack there about the different strains of the libertarian movement and its history. Like you, Shikha, this is kind of the world I came up in. I’m friends with a lot of people at Reason and organizations like that. But the question for the debate was very frustrating and they were very much talking past each other.
Do you have to take a side in politics? I mean, if you’re not taking a side on something then what you’re doing is not politics. Politics is trying to build a coalition to get the things you want, and libertarians and folks at Reason and elsewhere very much do that. And instead they kind of treated it as, Should you be a blind partisan hack? I have a ton of criticisms of Democrats. I’m not a Democrat. The folks they were debating are ex-Republicans who left their party. These are people who did put principle over party and the red team/blue team affiliation.
But I do think there’s this history when you talk about the Libertarian Party and the Mises Institute type people. Those are folks who are just full blown, proud, right-wing authoritarians. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the Libertarian Party is a hate group now and they explicitly rant about the Jews and that kind of thing. But the more mainstream, serious kind of libertarianism has this history, which has merit to it of, we’re gonna stand above both sides and criticize both when they get it wrong. And that on its face is correct—it’s what you should do. But it leads to this kind of both sides are equally bad mentality, and we have to be balanced in exactly how bad we’re saying Republicans and Democrats are. The truth is that, if you are a libertarian, somebody who subscribes to classical liberal values broadly speaking, this is not a both sides are equally bad moment.
When you’re doing that it leads you to this kind of detached, cynical, above-it-all ... it’s almost like none of this really matters; a kind of, we’ll take our shots at Trump, but in the end, whoever wins the election, there’s bad things that happen either way.
Dalmia: And Reason had a whole issue on all the bad things that Biden did. I don’t remember them having a similar issue on Trump.
Craig: Yeah, and I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush because there are people who are in these sorts of places, people who consider themselves libertarians, who have been better on this kind of thing. But if you’re not willing to prioritize the higher order, constitutional, fundamental liberal principles stuff as being on a different level than are we gonna tweak income tax rates up or down? or is this or that regulation going to be repealed? I mean, we can have those arguments and those things matter—they’re not unimportant—but they don’t matter if you lose the system itself of free and fair elections, of civil liberties, of constitutional government under the rule of law. And Trump is an avowed enemy of all of that.
Dalmia: Right, but let me just ask you one thing, though, Andy. You seem to think that, among libertarians, there is actual neutrality between the two sides. I actually don’t see the neutrality. Libertarianism arose in the heyday of the Cold War in a fusion with the right. So it has always been more right-wing inflected. Many libertarians are quite active foot soldiers in the culture wars. Ron Paul’s whole persona was against what he called the cultural left. So they were in some ways primed to carry this MAGA mantle against the left. There is a catastrophization of the left among libertarians. In my view, they were never really positioned to be neutral arbiters—between the two sides, they exaggerate the threat of the left and they downplay the threat of the right. If they were really, truly equally both-sideists, the neutral application of their principles would lead them at this moment—when one side is actually much worse—to take a side against Trump and against authoritarianism. But it is not doing that.
It is not only in the way that libertarians are going to deal with just Trump or even the Republicans in Congress. The way they are going to deal with the entire MAGA ecosystem is going to be not very libertarian. To give you an example, look at that coverage about the way libertarians are talking about Bezos and Zuckerberg bending the knee. They think that Mark Zuckerberg’s suspension of his content moderation policies means that he has grown a spine suddenly against the state. They don’t see it as a capitulation to an actual threat of imprisonment by the incoming president. They see it as: Something good is happening. Something good is going to come out of the Trump administration because Musk is going to be heading DOGE and he’s going to cut government waste and abuse. And you’re going to get free speech eventually because the orthodoxy of cancel culture is going to suddenly be exploded. So there is this right-wing codedness to libertarianism that I think prevents them even from being actually honest bothsideists.
Berny, you’re not a libertarian. What did you think of the debate?
Belvedere: I agree with you about the way that the debate went. I thought the Bulwark team routed the Reason folks.
Dalmia: And the audience agreed, by the way.
Belvedere: The audience agreed. And I think it was pretty obvious because Reason kept trying to turn this into a debate about whether you have to make a once-for-all decision about putting on a team jersey and inflexibly committing yourself to a party and then never criticizing your own side, always just parroting whatever the party wants you to. That was never what was being debated. As you guys pointed out, they were literally debating people who left their party.
But I also thought there was a deeper problem with the framing of the debate, with the idea of picking a side. So, there are moments in American history when picking a side or backing one particular option within an electoral contest is an imperative. But then there are also times in history when it’s just not. There are moments when the salient consideration isn’t, I have to pick a side, but rather, I should make an informed choice of who I want to be president from a list of broadly similar choices. I mean, don’t get me wrong: obviously who a person picks to be president should be weighed very heavily; who a nation picks to be president is always a consequential decision. But there are times when the language of you have to pick a side just doesn’t fit the moment as well as just pick which of these more or less broadly acceptable or broadly unacceptable choices you want to be president. We’re not living in a moment where this is the case.
“When Trump won the 2016 election, there wasn’t a governing-ready MAGA apparatus in place that could transform his instincts into policy. He went along with what the party establishment wanted because the GOP hadn’t yet fully reorganized itself around his personality and preferences. … Trump will have a formidable MAGA brain trust in place now that wasn’t in place last time. The problem isn’t just Yes Men. He’s also surrounded himself with MAGA true believers who are far more competent than he is. So he’s got this perfect brew—really tragic for the country, but for him, a perfect brew—of undying allegiance among foot soldier types, and then an ideologically-aligned suite of policymakers and operatives far more cognitively capable than he is to implement his agenda.” — Berny Belvedere
But I think the Reason versus Bulwark event was operating at a conceptual level above where the debate actually is for these two camps. I think there’s a deeper difference between the two that wasn’t being talked about. Here’s what I mean by that. I think, to use the language of the internet, with one neat trick, I’m fairly certain I could have convinced the Reason folks to answer affirmatively that it is important to pick a side. Because, of course, the Reason folks have already professed to pick a side: they pick the side of liberty.
And you can break down and analyze into constituent parts what that means, what that involves: individual liberty, statist non-interference, constitutional constraints, the rule of law, and on and on. On each of these, they would affirm, “Yup, that’s the side we’re on.” But then here’s the really interesting thing that shows that they were really discussing something else all along. You could then ask them, “Okay, so, since you’re on the side of liberty and constitutional constraints and not using the powers of the state to retaliate against political opponents and all that, given that that’s the side you’re on, you’ll join us in opposing Trump much more vigorously, criticizing Trump much more frequently, than you will his Democratic opponents, right?” And then that’s when they’ll say, “Nope, sorry, can’t do that.”
Here’s the reason why: because they just don’t see him as being worse than his opponents. They roughly see him as being, at best, equivalently bad, but oftentimes they view his opponents as worse. So the problem isn’t picking a side. They’ve picked a side. They profess to pick the side of all of those constituent parts that go into the libertarian ethos. But then when, the embodiment of the repudiation of all of that comes along, from our perspective it’s like, “Look, here’s the guy that you want to oppose.” But they don’t because they actually don’t see him that way.
I think this is an egregious mistake on their part. If you teleported into the early ’90s and insisted that I simply have to pick a side between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, I would think you’re overdoing it because there isn’t that kind of moral imperative between those two presidential options. But they’re saying that about a contest in which Donald Trump is one of the two candidates. That’s the crazy thing.
Craig: In talking about the libertarian movement and broader center-right anti-Trump camp, I do think it’s important to acknowledge that there have been a lot of people who have come to the right conclusions, and whether they still identify with the word “libertarian” or not, that’s where they’re coming from. Shikha and me both came from that camp. But there is a broader coalescing around something that has aptly increasingly referred to itself as liberal.
You know, there’s my day job at the Institute for Humane Studies, which is very much in that camp of wanting to embrace what we would for clarity call classical liberal values more broadly and the big tent of the liberal tradition in the West, which is much older and broader than post-World War II American movement libertarianism. When we talk about the libertarian movement, I think it’s something that only makes sense to speak of it in the past tense. It’s a historical phenomenon. For these decades, there was this broad constellation of factions and they argued amongst themselves, but broadly shared a political identity. There’s no meaningfully shared libertarian political identity that unites people like us with people like the Libertarian Party, with its view that the Jews are bringing too many immigrants in. There’s no coherent unity or movement or identity to that. But there are parts of that that have gone in the right direction and have joined forces with other disaffected groups.
“There is a catastrophization of the left among libertarians. In my view, they were never really positioned to be neutral arbiters—between the two sides, they exaggerate the threat of the left and they downplay the threat of the right. If they were really, truly equally both-sideists, the neutral application of their principles would lead them at this moment—when one side is actually much worse—to take a side against Trump and against authoritarianism.” — Shikha Dalmia
Most of the Never Trumpers come from what we once would have called a neoconservative or at least hawkish conservatism. A lot of them are Bush administration alumni. And if you told me 20 years ago that I would have considered Bill Kristol a friend and ally, I would have thought you were crazy or that something terrible had happened to me. But, you know, we’re in different times and there are different issues and new coalitions form. And Bill has been excellent on Trump and the dangers of this era. So that’s kind of my silver lining optimist point: these things come and go there’s creative destruction of political identities and movements. There are positive and negative legacies of a libertarian movement that no longer really exists in a way that it makes sense to speak of.
Dalmia: Right, the libertarian movement as a coherent intellectual movement I think is gone. But I think it exists in a whole lot of institutions and outfits that still self-identify as libertarian in some way, shape, or form. I mean, they think of themselves as libertarian, and so they’ve got some issues and some principles that they are fighting for. I’ve ceased to be a libertarian because, to me, what I liked about libertarianism was—having grown up in socialistic India, it was democratic, but it was socialistic—the emphasis on markets as liberating forces. And I like this idea about standing athwart history and yelling “stop” to authoritarianism and tyranny. That was at the heart of their political project. Classical liberalism is a much broader concept. And there are many people who call themselves classical liberals who may or may not be in favor of markets in the way we are—or a whole bunch of other issues, but they do have a foundational commitment to a certain idea of toleration, pluralism, checking executive authority, an open society.
So, at this stage, that one particular instantiation of libertarianism, which was all about state power but, then did not stand up to state power when it was most needed, caused me not to be a libertarian anymore. I consider myself a classical liberal who’s fighting for these much bigger, broader values that are under threat and are being assaulted by the rising forces of illiberal extremism in the United States. But if libertarians had actually stayed true to themselves, this could have been the libertarian moment. They could have shown leadership in standing up to Trump and authoritarianism. They could have carried the baton forward.
They would have said, “hell, no, not on our watch” and should have been leading the Never Trump coalition. But they make fun of Never Trumpers. They think, as this debate motion suggested, you don’t have to pick a side. Basically, you are saying that you don’t have to pick a side against Trump. That’s essentially what it boils down to. Otherwise, it doesn’t make any sense as a motion.
I still have a lot of sadness for how things have shaken up. And I say I’m a short-term pessimist, but I’m a medium and long-term optimist. We are in this moment of political and ideological flux. And the libertarian movement as it existed no longer does. There are going to be all these breakaway factions like us—we are going to attach ourselves to different groups and different movements that are responding to the current moment in a different way than libertarians. I’m hoping eventually we’ll be able to build back better and come up with something healthier and stronger in terms of a true liberal movement. I hope we can save the term liberal from a certain kind of progressive statism and give this movement that name, the liberal movement.
So it’s going to be an interesting four years. We’ve got our work cut out for us, Berny and Andy. And whether the libertarian movement stands up to Trump’s authoritarianism or not, we are going to do it. That’s what we are here for. That’s our mission.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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