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America Needs a Liberal Party
America needs a new political party, one opposed to isolationism, protectionism, nativism, authoritarianism, and ecologism, and which supports free enterprise, Constitutional government, human equality, liberty, and dignity, and the defensive alliance of all nations committed to such ideals.
Some might call such a party “conservative,” and indeed, many of those who call themselves conservatives today would find themselves in agreement with its tenets. But these are the ideas of classical liberalism; they are the ideas that made the free world free, in as much as it is free. They have been misbranded by their “progressive” opponents as “conservative,” — a word associated with “servility” and the service of privilege — in order to make them seem reactionary. It’s time for the true defenders of real liberalism to take their proud title back.
America needs a new Liberal Party because both major parties have abandoned liberalism. Neither adequately supports international free trade or the defense of the West — the two pillars of the liberal world order since 1945. Both lack commitment to constitutionally limited government, separation of powers, free enterprise, and human equality and liberty under law. Each supports its own Malthusian antihuman collectivist ideology: for Democrats, it is ecologism, for Republicans, it is nativism.
Ecologism — the advocacy of state-administered collective sacrifice for the putative benefit of nature — is so obviously antiliberal, reactionary, and indeed, antihuman, that I will leave it to the would-be liberals of the left to figure out how they ever got roped into adopting it as part of their core ideology. As a result, the party that once proudly proclaimed itself the defender of the poor now centers its program on ultra-regressive sales taxes of fuel and electricity, while boasting of its ability to throw entire industries and their workers on the scrap heap. Furthermore ecologism serves as a justification for the expansion of the powers of the state to intrude into every aspect of public, commercial, and private life, reinforcing monopolies, impairing initiative, and destroying opportunities at every turn.
Nativism, on the other hand, is the ideology that brought the Trumpist Trojan horse into the conservative citadel. A mirror image of the Democrats environmental Malthusianism, it asserts that rather than natural resources, it is human opportunities that are in limited supply. It is not a conservative ideology, because it is anti free enterprise and anti Judeo-Christian. Our nation’s founding creed is that of inalienable rights granted to men created equal by God. How can a movement which explicitly denies that faith be considered conservative, or even traditionally American? In fact it isn’t conservative at all. It is Alt-Right. But what is the Alt-Right really?
In his classic 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, then living in exile in England, shocked readers with his diagnosis of Nazism. National socialism, he argued, was not the opposite of social democracy — many of whose adherents could be found fighting in the ranks of the Allies — but its evolutionary extension. All Hitler had done, said Hayek, was to grasp that racism is required for socialism, because to mobilize the passion necessary to achieve the full collectivist agenda, it is necessary to invoke the tribal instinct. Thus, contrary to Marx, the ultimate development of socialism is not stateless international brotherhood, but various forms of rabid tribal nationalism. Similarly, tribalism leads to socialism.
Not to put too fine a point on the matter, tribalism, or “identarianism” if you will, is not a conservative ideology; it is collectivist ideology. It is the oldest, most powerful, lethal, and most degrading collectivist ideology, because it is based on primeval animal instinct. By using xenophobic agitation to mobilize mob support for a program of socialistic policy, unlimited government, and strongman rule, the international Alt-Right has embraced a political methodology clearly identified seven decades ago in The Road to Serfdom.
Running up taxes on fuel, electricity, and fuel for the putative purpose of stopping climate change is an alternative version of human sacrifice for weather control. Excluding immigrants for the putative purpose of making jobs available is merely an alternative version of the counterfactual case for population control — to wit that we supposedly would all be better off if there were fewer people. (In fact, we weren’t.) Neither is a liberal, moral, rational, or practical position. On the contrary, increasing human numbers, freedoms, and living standards accelerates the rate of invention, and thus humanity’s ability to deal with any problem. That’s the liberal, moral, rational, and practical program for advancing the human condition. It’s also the winning political answer to both the brown and green antihumanists. Immigrants and free enterprise, together, are what made America great — and they both need each other.
To see clearly what the Liberal Party needs to oppose, it is useful to examine what freedom’s most dedicated enemies are for. Aleksandr Dugin is one of the principle philosophical theoreticians of totalitarianism internationally, and his publications are regularly featured in such American identarian outlets as Radix (Dugin’s English language translator is the wife of American Alt-Right leader and Radix publisher Richard Spencer). While he greatly admires Nazism, Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory” seeks to transcend traditional Nordic racism’s self-limited market appeal by proposing multi-centered tribal fascism, and allying it with other antiliberal ideologies including communism, and ecologism in a new synthesis to counter to the liberal ideas of individualism, intrinsic rights, and universal human dignity. It is the raising of “blood and soil” over “all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;” of animal instinct over human reason; of the id over the superego; of greed and lust over justice and love. This is the metaphysics of tyranny.
Madison said “If men were angels, government would be unnecessary.” The corollary to this is that if men were beasts, freedom would be unacceptable. Dugin understands this. So like Circe, he seeks to use the sorceries of tribal and ecologic antihumanism not merely to weaken and break up the Western alliance, but to turn men into unreasoning beasts, the better to end the specter of liberty everywhere.
This is the enemy we now face. Encouraged, supported, and in some cases directed by the Kremlin, the green, red, and brown rainbow alliance of tyranny is on the march across much of the globe. In Europe, the socialists and environmentalists mismanaging the European Union are discrediting the dream of a united Europe, providing the opening for Moscow-backed tribalist parties to break up and take over the continent. This effort is being further helped by a concerted campaign of economic sabotage by the green and red parties whose antifracking initiatives are making sure that Europe remains dangerously dependent on Russian natural gas, and by the armed forces of Russia and its Iranian and Syrian allies, whose ethnic cleansing campaigns are stampeding millions of refugees into Europe to rapidly accelerate the rise to power of the Kremlin’s brown fifth column.
America should be opposing this offensive against the free world with might and main, but under the misleadership of the partisan careerists who dominate both major parties, it is not doing so. On the contrary, with the near unanimous support of the Democrats in Congress, the Obama administration helped to fund Iran’s brutal offensive in Syria to the tune of a hundred billion dollars released in accord with the terms of its nuclear deal, and failed to effectively assist Syrian rebel forces fighting the Iran-Assad-Russia alliance on the ground. Not only that, the Obama administration opened the door to overt aggression by failing to honor America’s treaty commitment to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine, and by reducing US Army troop strength in Europe to 30,000 men, an amount less than one-tenth that of its late Cold War strength and smaller than the NY City Police Department.
Until recently the Republicans chose to criticize the Democrats for their foreign policy weakness, but the new Trump administration promises to be even worse. While the Obama administration offered only feeble help for the Syrian rebels, Trump has said he supports the Assad-Iran-Russia war effort. While Obama limited the US response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to ineffective economic sanctions, Trump has offered justification for Putin’s attack. Furthermore, notwithstanding his UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s Samantha Power-like grand verbal denunciations of Putin’s aggression, Trump has dismissed criticisms of the Russian strongman’s murderous regime across the board. While Obama cut American military power in Europe to mere tripwire levels, Trump has offered to render even that symbolic level of support to Europe’s defense moot by stating that he sees no reason to be bound by the NATO treaty’s requirement to come to member state’s aid should it come under attack.
Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the Kremlin chose to interfere in the American election with both covert and overt actions to assist the rise of Donald Trump. What is disheartening, however, is the degree to which the Republican Party has rallied to deny or dismiss this intervention in America’s internal affairs, an outrage which verges on an act of war against the United States homeland itself. And while the Democrats are currently making much of Trump’s Putinophilia, an honest recollection of their own behavior prior to the Trump candidacy makes it difficult to take their newfound ardor in the defense of the West seriously. That said, we now have a President whose self-interest apparently requires him to suppress or silence the nation’s intelligence agencies which have brought to light the enemy conspiracy on his behalf, and a majority party – in as much as it remains a party-bound to support him in this endeavor.
This is a five-alarm fire. America needs a new party, one that will, in the present emergency, bravely rise to the defense the republic and the grand alliance of free nations which it leads. It needs a party of economic sanity, which will not destroy the basis of our livelihood through either a combination of trade war and immigration restriction or top-down suppression of business. It needs a party of humanity, which rejects tribalism, not only for the harm it inflicts upon its targets but for the moral and intellectual degradation it infests within the minds and hearts of its converts. It needs a party of liberty, one which will defend not only the borders of freedom, but the ideas and institutions that make freedom possible.
In short, America needs a Liberal Party. Scattered, the forces of liberalism are weak. Together, we may yet prevail.
Published in Politics
Editor Note:
Play the ball, not the man.It is apparent that [some] are in the same boat as the progressives who never think that the Law of Diminishing Returns also applies to “the two pillars of the liberal world order since 1945.”
Ahem…
Don’t ask Trump’s mouth to write a check our [expletives] can’t cash right now. We need time.
[Emphasis added.]
Trump is talking significant money for defense. Mattis’ first priority seems to be the Army. Until then, “defense of the West?” Are the Baltics important enough to bet the farm on?
As for the Navy:
The Navy:
I don’t think it can get elected into power.
Who is the voter base of this liberal party? How do you overcome the disgust associated with term Liberal, which now means statist birkenstocks stomping on your face? How will this party avoid handing victory to the statists in a two party system?
Because such folks are not about power or controlling others, right?
Because the American people don’t appear to want that.
Much like various ethnic groups have taken back negative words I think it’s high time those of us dedicated to free minds and free markets take back the word Liberal. It’s an accident of Wilsonian history that lead to its corruption.
We won’t know until we offer it to them.
They don’t vote Libertarian now. Granted, the Libertarian part clearly is not into NATO, so you could argue their message is not exactly this. However, while I would vote for the party described, I don’t think most Americans will. They like their stuff. After the economic collpase it will take off.
America needs to realize their problems will never be fixed by Politicians as they have a vested interest in things remaining broken.
I’m intrigued by the possibility…I think “Liberal Party” is probably too tainted a name to be used, and all I can otherwise think of is the-even-worse “Classical Liberals”, or CMP.
(I do really like the porcupine logo, though!)
That’s the logo for the Libetarian Party. I posted it as a joke.
I edited my comment: I left out “Not”before about.
Dealing with confrontation with more confrontation is Chinese fingercuffs. The sad truth is just because you are in the moral right doesn’t mean you will prevail (often it means you will fail).
As much as I appreciate the sentiment, the Libertarian party’s logo may as well be Blinky the Clown given that they nominated Gary Johnson.
The Republican party can get Morton the Talking Sock as their new logo for nominating Trump. But, hey… He won.
56% of the Republican voters. Trump never won the majority. Just the plurality.
I feel like a guy in search of a party for some of the reasons Zubrin cites. But I also think it’s too early to say. Trump has exposed this rift in the Republican party, but has he permanently torn it apart, or will the two sides reconcile? We’re three weeks in. I don’t think you can make a case for a multiparty replacement until at the soonest 2018. Can Trump send legislation/budgets to congress and get bills back to sign? Does he have coattails? Will the Republican majorities hold through 2018? Are there going to be Trumpists who mount primary challenges to GOPe Congressmen? And win?
“Liberal” would certainly be an improvement on “Libertarian” – a word I have always disliked on purely aesthetic terms.
I’ve got your candidate and your slogan:
Jeb Bush 2020: Please Clap.
That may happen even if a new party is not started. Trump will probably be primaried.
BUSH? 2020: The Sound of No Hands Clapping
I’m sorry to mock Mr. Zubrin. The fact is his ideas of Conservatism almost exactly mirror my own. However, my disdain for elitist intellectualism (not saying that’s him) immediately makes me join whatever peanut gallery that’s within throwing distance.
We American Studies and Poly Sci people often like to steeple our fingers and posit “Populism is a cancer” — without acknowledging the remaining biology of the metaphor. That cell growth and division is the engine of life. Just as we are mystified at what triggers the spontaneous abnormalities in cancer development, we are gobsmacked when a Populist movement defies all practical logic and puts a wheel of cheese in the White House
However, we do have predictive lifestyle clues. Such as sedentary economic growth, sustained foreign wars (I mean, even I knew something crazy was going to happen after a dozen years of across the globe occupation), and ever encroaching governmental overreach. I sure as hell ain’t saying I’m happy with this outcome — but saying that whipping up another stew of praxis will fix things ain’t right either.
America had a liberal party. It started with Ronald Reagan and the GOP in 1980, then took over the Democrats under Bill Clinton in 1992. The Democrat side died in 2010, while the GOP side died last year.
Good riddance. The global neoliberal elite has proven itself unworthy of power. Half of them are stuck in the dark ages of fixed exchange rates, while the other (American) half spent the last five years speaking in terms that, were we to see in a third-world country, we’d call precursors to ethnic cleansing.
Huh?
Oops! My bad…guess that rules THAT right out!
While “libertarian” tends to make us pedants think of “libertine” I think that the other direction on the Road to Serfdom is the Road to Liberty, not the Road to Liberality.