The Pragmatists Are Bad for Liberty

The perennial feud between Donald Trump and Rep. Thomas Massie has flared up again, with the President taking to Truth Social to colorfully lambast the Kentucky congressman, along with Senator Rand Paul. The two Kentuckians ended up on the receiving end of Trump’s ire for failing to fall in line with the rest of the Republican Party to pass a bloated, sloppy, and irresponsible continuing resolution to reopen the government rather than do the actual work of passing separate appropriations bills as they are supposed to do.

There’s something ridiculous about a sitting president, who campaigned on a slogan of putting America first, taking to social media to hurl childish insults at two of the most patriotic Members of Congress, while giving a pass to opportunistic career politicians without a principled bone in their body. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

But that’s who Trump is. It’s who he’s always been. No surprises there. What’s more troubling has been the response from those who should be the first to defend Massie and Paul against accusations of being third-rate grandstanders, Democrat shills, or “nasty liddle guys.” Siding with Massie and Paul on this should be a no brainer for anyone who cares about liberty, but instead we’re seeing a wave of skepticism, and even open hostility, against the only men in Washington brave enough to vote their consciences rather than fall in line behind special interests and naked partisanship. It’s a sad reflection of the direction the liberty movement has taken over the last few years.

There was a time when the liberty movement was divided broadly into two camps. On one side, anarchists and agorists, influenced by 19th century individualists like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, argued that the pursuit of political power was inherently corrupting and could therefore never be an effective method for advancing freedom. Against them was the more pragmatic wing of paleo-conservatives and paleo-libertarians led by Murray Rothbard, who thought it was important to recognize the reality of political institutions and hoped to change them from within. Today, in the era of Donald Trump, the pragmatists have pretty definitively taken over the liberty movement, having achieved what they perceive to be a political win and developed a taste for it. As much as I love Murray Rothbard and respect his contributions to human freedom, I think he got this one wrong, and we’re currently reaping the poisonous fruits of the pragmatist strategy.

Libertarians had a lot of hope for Donald Trump, and it’s not hard to see why. He courted the Libertarian Party at their convention with the promise of freeing the unjustly imprisoned folk hero Ross Ulbricht, ending foreign wars, and dramatically downsizing the federal government with the help of Elon Musk. He called out the neocons and warmongers, he pledged to return education to the states, and most importantly (for some), he drove progressive socialists into apoplectic conniption fits that were admittedly amusing.

Some libertarians—like me—were wary of supporting a Republican who spent the vast majority of his adult life as a New York Democrat, and who seemed to have no real ideology apart from whatever personally benefits him in the moment. For raising these concerns, we were decried as useless and utopian dreamers too obsessed with philosophical purity to ever achieve even incremental wins. The pragmatists sneered at our naivety, claimed we didn’t understand politics, and accused us of standing in the way of real progress. At the time, I was willing to consider that maybe they had a point. Well, now we’ve had some time to see how their “mature and realistic” political strategy is working out, and I can confidently say that the results are nothing to brag about.

After campaigning on free speech, Trump quickly reversed himself and threatened to throw protesters in prison for burning the American flag, an activity protected by the First Amendment. With no regard for due process, Trump is blowing up ships that are allegedly bringing drugs into the United States. These are the kinds of extra-judicial killings that libertarians savaged Barack Obama for engaging in during his tenure as president. Economically, Trump is waging a mercantilist trade war against the whole world at once, increasing taxes on Americans in the form of tariffs and higher prices for foreign goods and services. Meanwhile, inflation continues to raise domestic prices, with Trump making no effort to rein in the out of control Federal Reserve. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was a bust. All the savings they found were either not reflected in the GOP’s budget, or else redirected into increased military spending. The war in Ukraine continues to rage (supported by American tax dollars) and the peace process in Gaza (where more American dollars are funneled into weapons) is steadily and predictably falling apart, and the supposedly peaceful president has already dropped bombs on Iran and Yemen after less than a year in office. To Trump’s credit, he did follow through on his promise to free Ross Ulbricht, and I want to be clear that I couldn’t be happier for Ross and his family. But at the same time, Trump’s immigration policies have thrown who knows how many peaceful people into El Salvadoran prisons where they will rot with no champions to argue for their release.

In the past, it would fall to libertarians to push back against an imperial president who so blatantly disrespected the Constitution, who was so committed to increasing the national debt, and who seemed determined to wreck the economy. In today’s environment, however, the expected outcry is strangely muted. The reason for this is the pragmatists.

The fundamental claim made by the pragmatists is that political power is necessary to create change. If you believe this, it follows that one’s personal values and principles should be subordinate to whatever it takes to win elections. Without the power to act on them, the pragmatists argue, principles amount to nothing more than empty naval gazing. To actually advance liberty, we have to be willing to compromise, to play the game, in order to get into a position to enact a liberty agenda.

But the logic of pragmatism doesn’t end there. Even if a libertarian succeeds in getting elected, he is still only one person. Politics is a team sport, and cooperation is necessary to get anything done in Washington. The lone libertarian must, therefore, set aside his personal principles and go along with party leadership, to keep playing the game. To do otherwise is to risk being labeled, at best, a useless obstructionist or, at worst, a traitor. This is why you will see Republicans accusing Massie of being secretly loyal to the Democrats (a ludicrous assertion if you know anything about his voting record). The pragmatists smugly scoff at these men of principle as being naive and not understanding how to get things done in Washington.

Anyone entering Congress with this mindset will cherish a faint hope of a distant future—a future that will never arrive—in which they can stop bending the knee and actually stand up for what they believe in. This hope allows them to rationalize every concession, every bad vote, and every broken campaign promise as in service of a noble goal. Meanwhile, the state grows ever larger and more powerful, while the movement best poised to vocally resist tyranny has been convinced that discretion is the better part of valor. They are content to keep their powder dry, staying silent or cheering on authoritarians all while patting themselves on the back for practicing a smart and savvy political strategy.

Libertarianism need not be an all-or-nothing proposition; there’s nothing wrong with incrementalism as long as that incremental progress is moving in the right direction.

But the pragmatists fail to draw a distinction between making things marginally better and making things worse at a slightly slower rate than the status quo. Increasing government spending by $1 trillion instead of $2 trillion is not a win for liberty, and the idea that libertarians should accept, or even support, such a disastrous proposal is contrary to everything we claim to believe in.

I understand that many people in the movement are desperate for a win; libertarians have been losing for a long time and losing is no fun. But if the cost of “winning” is to betray everything we believe in, that is no victory at all. Trump and his allies say they want Massie and Paul to act more like Lindsey Graham, but in no world does a Congress full of Lindsey Grahams result in a society that is more prosperous or more free. Some of the pragmatists, embittered casualties of the culture war, have become so obsessed with “owning the libs” that they are willing to abandon even the pretense of freedom if it means hurting their enemies.

A liberty movement that will turn its back on Thomas Massie and Rand Paul in the hopes of being thrown a few scraps from Donald Trump’s table is not worth the name. The best and brightest warriors for human freedom—the Ron Pauls, Margaret Thatchers, and Javier Mileis of the world—were bold, radical, and principled. They succeeded by repudiating political pragmatism, not by succumbing to it. If we want liberty to win in the future, we have to follow their examples, not that of Lindsey Graham.