Former President Donald Trump’s sketch comedy portrayal of a would-be authoritarian, filtered through his antic norms-busting style, gives his fans an out: Libertarians nervous about Trump are just too uptight and antiquated to understand his appeal in this comedy podcast age, they might say. Being sincerely alarmed about Trump makes you the yokel—a deluded victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
But Trump, through the insult comedy and random ravings, is consistently a man of authoritarian temperament: He craves using government power to punish media that displeases him (including threatening broadcast licenses); desires legal immunity from accountability for himself and all government law enforcement; and most significantly, his prime campaign action point is launching an unprecedented in this century police/military action against millions of people living peacefully and productively in America.
His appeal to some who use the libertarian label is perplexing, then—except in that he’s not Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris is also someone no libertarian could affirmatively wish to be president—except that she’s not Trump.
Libertarians should have the courage of their claimed convictions to radically oppose the U.S. government status quo (which in the past eight years has been managed or represented by both Trump and Harris) and feel no obligation to positively affirm that either unlibertarian choice should reign. Not voting or promoting either is an appropriate option. Voting for or promoting Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver is an option as well.
Even on specific issues that seem to animate the more right-leaning corners of the libertarian world, Trump is either terrible or not clearly exceptional: He ruled as an inflationist and intends to continue to; he has no real concrete ideas for shrinking spending or government’s size and reach, and certainly didn’t do so in his first term, while vaguely and improbably promising Elon Musk will take care of it in a second; Trump can be expected to expand government spending and control in the name of allegedly pro-worker industrial policy that will likely have no better effect on America’s fortunes than past industrial policy efforts; while championing “free speech” for ideas and people he favors, he’s willing to punish peaceful expressive activities such as flag burning and peaceful economic activities such as drug sale with death (while improbably promising libertarians he’ll do something he could have done when he was previously president, freeing convicted Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht); he’s fanatically against free trade, a central tenet of free market economics, and his administration was responsible for what many libertarians never want us to forget was “COVID tyranny” and also for—even more destructive in many contrarians’ eyes—COVID vaccines. (One might, if one chooses, take seriously his various off-the-cuff plans to eliminate wide swaths of the current tax system and law in place of tariffs, but I don’t see much reason to.)
When it comes to foreign policy—which is generally the fallback for libertarians excusing their Trumpism—yes, he didn’t start new wars in new places. But he didn’t completely wind down or withdraw any sprawling existing U.S. commitments. He revved up the amount of bombing and civilian casualties at the start of his administration in Afghanistan and was slow to get out (an operation President Joe Biden concluded). He increased drone strikes in Pakistan and Somalia. He escalated our insanely destructive Saudi-aiding intervention in Yemen in violation of the War Powers Act. He claimed he was going to get U.S. troops out of Syria then changed his mind.
Even this week, he’s threatening to “blow to smithereens” Iran if he believes it harmed a domestic politician, and has long insisted that under no circumstances can Iran ever have a nuclear weapon. Trump the peacenik is largely an invention, or rationalization, of his antiwar fans who also like him for other reasons. In general, he kept both the expense and reach of the American empire’s military-industrial complex growing or at least the same. (It does seem likely that if he wins he won’t be as enthusiastic about funding and supplying the ongoing war started by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)
People perplexed by or ignorant of the libertarian world’s anarchist end are particularly puzzled that what many think marks Trump most clearly unfit for office—his role in instigating the January 6 protests/riots/assault on the Capitol and interfering in the “peaceful transfer of power” via election—some libertarians don’t care much about, and can find phrases such as “unfit for office” risible to begin with given government’s inherent evils.
After all, as some see it, only the Capitol and its inhabitants or defenders were harmed or even discomfited by the invaders, most of whom were not violent; it’s cool to scare government officials anyway; and if democracy is an inherently illegitimate cover for granting control of a machine of violence and oppression then protecting its outcome isn’t that vital, and who can prove the vote wasn’t rigged anyway?
Whether democracy is ethically justified or not in libertarian terms, it simply is better for libertarians and other living creatures given existing realities for that hoary old “peaceful transfer of power” to happen unimpeded. Civil war or even just mass unrest over who gets to be president is objectively very bad for peace, freedom, and market-oriented civilization. Those who participate in and support Trump’s “enemies within” schtick are objectively enemies of that civilization—especially given a reasonable perspective on what’s likely actually at stake in whether Trump or Harris wins.
An election that serious partisans try to frame as communists versus fascists should alarm anyone who remembers early 20th century European history. Does anyone really believe Harris will be nationalizing industries or fully confiscating all the wealth and property of Americans beyond tinkering at the margins of the taxation system that already exists? (The politics and jurisprudence of gun control this century I think also indicate she would never succeed in any gun confiscation scheme she might harbor in her heart.) Harris certainly has policy ideas that will be terrible for the American economy, such as stringent antitrust blows against tech companies and wealth taxes on unrealized gains. But Harris—especially given that she would almost certainly be constrained by Republicans in either or both the Senate and House—will more likely mostly continue governing as we’ve been governed for the past four years (and really the past 40). She’ll overtax and overregulate. Her bureaucracy will be overly concerned with enforcing racial or other identity concerns and quotas. She’ll continue our current military force structure, commitments, and expense.
Harris’ likely administration is nothing any libertarian, or any American, should want either, but no American—certainly no libertarian—is obligated to choose between these two evils. There is a reason libertarians tend to be amenable to the point that in a presidential election their individual vote is not going to make a winner a winner or a loser a loser. Thus a vote is useful only expressively. And what you are expressing by voting for Trump is approval of Trump’s policies, which as explained above for a libertarian seems indefensible. A libertarian in an un-libertarian country is much more effective as a true all-sides foe of overweening government. That Trump seems to think he ought to pander to libertarians on selected, disconnected issues is great; but that doesn’t mean any libertarian needs to actually support him, especially when his likely actions are considered in total, not just the libertarianish bits.
Fear about the wild evils the Other Side will commit if in power are a very strong motive power in American politics today. It’s rhetorically effective because you can’t win an argument about how some group in power will behave with reason or evidence; such claims can only be judged with common sense and ratified by time.
It makes pundits or voters who want to see themselves as reasonable people nervous—it’s made me nervous!—to be proven to be a panicked ninny, fearing or predicting bad outcomes that never come about. Free market libertarians should be used to this; we have feared or predicted many disastrous outcomes of government action in America that have not yet come about, from hyperinflationary collapse to World War III to a social credit system. Sometimes ginning up public fear can actually have salutary effects in making sure the fear doesn’t come true. But it’s not the worst sin to be overly careful when it comes to who controls the federal leviathan.
Certainly both candidates are dangerous to American liberty, and both will continue to run a government at least as huge and controlling in most respects as the one we have now. But only one has a short-term promise to assault and kidnap and ship out millions of residents who have harmed no one’s life or property, and in doing so destroy huge chunks of America’s productive economy, disrupting the lives of the other millions of legal citizens who hire them, work for them, depend on their services, or rent and sell to them. Only one has major supporters who cheer a masochistic vision of him as a “daddy” righteously punishing a misbehaving nation. That person is, at least as much as Harris, simply not someone who should run the federal government. And that should be especially clear to those who claim fealty to libertarian principles.
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