Agree, agree. However, what is going on I think is simpler than a horseshoe and it's happened before. This is a fight about a word -- liberal -- and it mirrors the fight about another word -- the Left, which was ignited by Joe Stalin and his Third International, who called everyone to his right "right deviationists". [That included a bona fide communist like Bucharin, who was executed after a show trial in 1938.] The Social Democrats became social fascists and the National Socialists were deemed right wingers, even though they were both clearly left wingers. We owe our dictionary to Joe Stalin!
You rightly point out that Sunstein et al are calling themselves liberal on account of Trump being President. However, what happened is that Sunstein's liberals have moved so far left that Trump is closer to a classical liberal position than the liberals are, probably ever were. [I know that Trump is not a classical liberal, but neither are Sunstein et al.]
Just as the progressives stole our word "liberal" in the '20s and '30's this latest play with words is theft. It's all quite deliberate -- change the dictionary and raise our consciousness!
ETA: Here is a lovely cartoon that depicts what happened. The cartoonist even uses the word "liberal".
Cass would have called himself a liberal long before Trump — but not a classical liberal. Your cartoon illustrates part of what happened, but the right shifted as well, putting both ends of the spectrum farther from both me and Cass.
I have occasionally asked a few of my more rabid TDS friends (I have an odd assortment of friends) to please show me one place, policy, etc where Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1995 would differ with Trump in 2025. That leaves them sputtering.
I'm sure there are some, but you would have to dig hard to find them.
I don't think "the rise of Donald Trump" would have existed if not the rise of illiberal left and its ideological takeover of the Democratic party. If you look at many Trump positions, he is not so far from where Democrats were 20 or 30 years ago on a vast array of issues. However, since then things changed, a lot, and traditional Republicans could not provide any comprehensible answer to the challenge that the excesses of illiberal progressivism provided. Neither Libertarians or classical liberals could provide any solution, at least any practical solution - they could talk about how everything would be better if only we returned to classical liberal ideals (and they might be entirely correct, in theory), but they had zero practical recipes about how to make it so, and about 1% of the vote.
Thus, the rise of Donald Trump. Anybody who didn't like what was happening in the last 20 years in the country, had very little practical choice. Democrats are not willing to change, and old Republicans can't force them to change by threatening to take power from them otherwise - because they couldn't take any power anymore. Why is that is another question, but for now I think it's enough that Trump - with his right-illiberal MAGA coalition - could fight left-illiberals, and nobody else could. I don't know if it were possible, theoretically, to have some other movement arise, not right-illiberals, to serve the same goal - but in reality, there was none on offer. And it is not entirely obvious to me if it's actually possible - in practice - to construct a political movement that could successfully take on illiberal progressivism - without incorporating at least some illiberal elements. If the illiberal progressivism is willing to wield the immense power of bureaucratic state, combined with immense power of enforced cultural alignment - what the liberal alternative would be wielding to defend itself from being reduced to 1% of the vote?
I didn't vote for Trump in 2016. I knew he had always been a Democrat -- he attended the Clintons' wedding, or was it vice versa? -- and I truly feared he was a stalking horse, intending to reveal his true colors if elected, or possibly to pull a Biden (though I wouldn't have called it that then) and cede the race to Hillary at the last minute.
Since then it has become clear to me that Trump, with his finger firmly on America's pulse, saw what I did not see in 2016, that the Democrats were going batshit insane and the way to capitalize on that was to run as a Republican. And sure enough I voted for him in 2020 and 2024, despite him being neither a conservative nor a libertarian, which identities I subscribe to on alternate weeks.
I have a suspicion that the populist right is anti-liberal/free markets/freedom less because they are against those things themselves, but rather because they accepted the left's definition in use of those terms, and dislike the outcomes. When I see people say "If free markets are so good, why is the medical market and the housing market so broken? Free markets are bad!" I have to wonder what gave them the idea those were free markets. The other day I was arguing with someone on Substack who claimed the UK was an example of what happens when individual liberty and freedom get taken too far, never mind that people get jailed for complaining on Twitter in the UK.
I always feel the need to scream at these people "Why do you rail against leftists then swallow whole their definitions of things?" It seems crazy to accept the word of people you feel actively hate you, but that seems to be the pattern. All labels without reference to underlying reality.
I read the Magness quote and the linked article. I think all this is over-complicating matters.
I first came across the term "populism" in a systematic way around 1990. It is a term used by the Left to bash the Right. The way the Left uses it I infer they are referring to people who they think should be for the Left, but are not. In other words, populists are suffering from false consciousness.
So, "post-liberal" is a new word replacing "populist". These are word games.
BTW: It's not that some on the Left and Right don't understand any economics -- they actively reject it! After all, there are these things called budget constraints. Nobody likes them!
It always puzzles me when I hear "populism" bashed. I can't find any definition of it that I can distinguish from "democracy", but very few of the bashers are willing to bash them both equally.
I have similar problems with bashing "partisan politics".
I first heard the term populism when I learned about Shirley Chisholm, who (if I remember correctly--it was a long time ago) referred to herself as a populist.
Then I didn't hear the term used for a long time until 2015 when Trump ran for president and I heard him described as a "populist conservative", which surprised me because he never struck me as being either of those things.
Speaking of these iconic dudes, I’m currently listening to Lex Fridman’s interview with Jennifer Burns, who wrote biographies of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. David, I’m curious if you’re aware of her work, this interview, and if yes to either of these, what you thought of it.
I think Magness's sweeping generalizations about the post-liberal movement are overly broad and overstate the differences from fusionist conservatives. The term "post-liberal" is itself misleading because post-liberals are really just communitarians, a political philosophy tradition that predates liberalism by several thousand years, dating back to Aristotle. In reality, post-liberals are also pre-liberals. However, I think the ideological differences in that movement are greater than within libertarianism. The differences between ancaps and minarchists, or deontological libertarians and consequentialist libertarians, don't produce radically different policy preferences. However, the differences between Vermeule, Oren Cass, and Deneen, for example, are quite significant even though they all fall under the post-liberal umbrella. Deneen and Cass still broadly argue for forms of federalism and localism and are on the more state-skeptical side of that spectrum. COVID is also a strange example for Magness to use, because post-liberals were still very much part of the anti-lockdown and anti-mandate coalition, even if they blamed supply-chain vulnerabilities on markets rather than on regulatory failures.
When you look at the communitarian populist-right in Europe in particular, there is also a more anti-statist strain of thought within that movement because the burdens of both the supranational and domestic European administrative states are felt much more acutely than in the United States. That is one area of common ground shared by the populist right in Europe and right-libertarians. On the other hand, mass migration in Europe is an issue where American libertarian-conservatives and post-liberals tend to view it within the frame of Kling's civilization-versus-barbarism axis. In contrast, libertarians view it within their own axis, which puts them on the same side as European center-right liberals and progressives. That gap reveals where conservatives, in general, part ways with libertarians, even if they agree economically, because conservatives take a cultural and social stance on that issue, while libertarians do not.
Is it meaningful to confound these two? Libertarianism, if it means anything at all, denies legitimacy of political authority fundamentally. Classical liberalism does not and it is a pretty fundamental distinction.
"libertarian" can describe a range of positions. I think of it most broadly as the modern equivalent of "classical liberal," usually implying a position towards the extreme of the latter and usually not including the liberal support for expanding the franchise.
I think whether one is a libertarian depends on what policies, legal rules, etc. one supports, not on why. I discuss some of this in:
Libertarianism is a dogmatic system with flawed premises. It is based upon non-definition of property. Hence it generates paradoxes
Contrariwise, classical liberalism is a big and happy tent. It has Adam Smith, Burke, Macaulay , all good writers. Even Russell Kirk would sympathize with it. And he called libertarians "metaphysically mad".
I read libertarian debates. They are uncomfortable that property is based upon theft in remote past. Because their ancestors drove away other people. But ask them if people own the national territory and they all deny.
These two propositions conflict. If people do not own national territories then no theft was committed if one people drive another people.
You read some debates by some people and now you know everything about all libertarians and all libertarianism.
I think not.
You don’t even understand the difference between individual and collective property ownership. It’s as if you found that 2+2=4 and 2×2=4, then claim libertarians believe that 3+3=3×3.
Agree, agree. However, what is going on I think is simpler than a horseshoe and it's happened before. This is a fight about a word -- liberal -- and it mirrors the fight about another word -- the Left, which was ignited by Joe Stalin and his Third International, who called everyone to his right "right deviationists". [That included a bona fide communist like Bucharin, who was executed after a show trial in 1938.] The Social Democrats became social fascists and the National Socialists were deemed right wingers, even though they were both clearly left wingers. We owe our dictionary to Joe Stalin!
You rightly point out that Sunstein et al are calling themselves liberal on account of Trump being President. However, what happened is that Sunstein's liberals have moved so far left that Trump is closer to a classical liberal position than the liberals are, probably ever were. [I know that Trump is not a classical liberal, but neither are Sunstein et al.]
Just as the progressives stole our word "liberal" in the '20s and '30's this latest play with words is theft. It's all quite deliberate -- change the dictionary and raise our consciousness!
ETA: Here is a lovely cartoon that depicts what happened. The cartoonist even uses the word "liberal".
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/my-political-journey
The "me" in the cartoon could almost be me.
Cass would have called himself a liberal long before Trump — but not a classical liberal. Your cartoon illustrates part of what happened, but the right shifted as well, putting both ends of the spectrum farther from both me and Cass.
I have occasionally asked a few of my more rabid TDS friends (I have an odd assortment of friends) to please show me one place, policy, etc where Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1995 would differ with Trump in 2025. That leaves them sputtering.
I'm sure there are some, but you would have to dig hard to find them.
I have read somewhere Trump being described as a 1980's New York City democrat! In other words, a left winger.
I'd say closer to 1990 or so, but he was never a conservative.
I don't think "the rise of Donald Trump" would have existed if not the rise of illiberal left and its ideological takeover of the Democratic party. If you look at many Trump positions, he is not so far from where Democrats were 20 or 30 years ago on a vast array of issues. However, since then things changed, a lot, and traditional Republicans could not provide any comprehensible answer to the challenge that the excesses of illiberal progressivism provided. Neither Libertarians or classical liberals could provide any solution, at least any practical solution - they could talk about how everything would be better if only we returned to classical liberal ideals (and they might be entirely correct, in theory), but they had zero practical recipes about how to make it so, and about 1% of the vote.
Thus, the rise of Donald Trump. Anybody who didn't like what was happening in the last 20 years in the country, had very little practical choice. Democrats are not willing to change, and old Republicans can't force them to change by threatening to take power from them otherwise - because they couldn't take any power anymore. Why is that is another question, but for now I think it's enough that Trump - with his right-illiberal MAGA coalition - could fight left-illiberals, and nobody else could. I don't know if it were possible, theoretically, to have some other movement arise, not right-illiberals, to serve the same goal - but in reality, there was none on offer. And it is not entirely obvious to me if it's actually possible - in practice - to construct a political movement that could successfully take on illiberal progressivism - without incorporating at least some illiberal elements. If the illiberal progressivism is willing to wield the immense power of bureaucratic state, combined with immense power of enforced cultural alignment - what the liberal alternative would be wielding to defend itself from being reduced to 1% of the vote?
I didn't vote for Trump in 2016. I knew he had always been a Democrat -- he attended the Clintons' wedding, or was it vice versa? -- and I truly feared he was a stalking horse, intending to reveal his true colors if elected, or possibly to pull a Biden (though I wouldn't have called it that then) and cede the race to Hillary at the last minute.
Since then it has become clear to me that Trump, with his finger firmly on America's pulse, saw what I did not see in 2016, that the Democrats were going batshit insane and the way to capitalize on that was to run as a Republican. And sure enough I voted for him in 2020 and 2024, despite him being neither a conservative nor a libertarian, which identities I subscribe to on alternate weeks.
I have a suspicion that the populist right is anti-liberal/free markets/freedom less because they are against those things themselves, but rather because they accepted the left's definition in use of those terms, and dislike the outcomes. When I see people say "If free markets are so good, why is the medical market and the housing market so broken? Free markets are bad!" I have to wonder what gave them the idea those were free markets. The other day I was arguing with someone on Substack who claimed the UK was an example of what happens when individual liberty and freedom get taken too far, never mind that people get jailed for complaining on Twitter in the UK.
I always feel the need to scream at these people "Why do you rail against leftists then swallow whole their definitions of things?" It seems crazy to accept the word of people you feel actively hate you, but that seems to be the pattern. All labels without reference to underlying reality.
I read the Magness quote and the linked article. I think all this is over-complicating matters.
I first came across the term "populism" in a systematic way around 1990. It is a term used by the Left to bash the Right. The way the Left uses it I infer they are referring to people who they think should be for the Left, but are not. In other words, populists are suffering from false consciousness.
So, "post-liberal" is a new word replacing "populist". These are word games.
BTW: It's not that some on the Left and Right don't understand any economics -- they actively reject it! After all, there are these things called budget constraints. Nobody likes them!
Postliberal is a term used by people on the right to describe themselves — Vance for example.
It always puzzles me when I hear "populism" bashed. I can't find any definition of it that I can distinguish from "democracy", but very few of the bashers are willing to bash them both equally.
I have similar problems with bashing "partisan politics".
I first heard the term populism when I learned about Shirley Chisholm, who (if I remember correctly--it was a long time ago) referred to herself as a populist.
Then I didn't hear the term used for a long time until 2015 when Trump ran for president and I heard him described as a "populist conservative", which surprised me because he never struck me as being either of those things.
Excellent post, especially on explaining Sunstein.
Speaking of these iconic dudes, I’m currently listening to Lex Fridman’s interview with Jennifer Burns, who wrote biographies of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. David, I’m curious if you’re aware of her work, this interview, and if yes to either of these, what you thought of it.
I am aware of her biography of my father, have heard her speak on it, have not read it, perhaps should.
I'm enjoying the interview, at least. In case you're curious: https://lexfridman.com/jennifer-burns
I think Magness's sweeping generalizations about the post-liberal movement are overly broad and overstate the differences from fusionist conservatives. The term "post-liberal" is itself misleading because post-liberals are really just communitarians, a political philosophy tradition that predates liberalism by several thousand years, dating back to Aristotle. In reality, post-liberals are also pre-liberals. However, I think the ideological differences in that movement are greater than within libertarianism. The differences between ancaps and minarchists, or deontological libertarians and consequentialist libertarians, don't produce radically different policy preferences. However, the differences between Vermeule, Oren Cass, and Deneen, for example, are quite significant even though they all fall under the post-liberal umbrella. Deneen and Cass still broadly argue for forms of federalism and localism and are on the more state-skeptical side of that spectrum. COVID is also a strange example for Magness to use, because post-liberals were still very much part of the anti-lockdown and anti-mandate coalition, even if they blamed supply-chain vulnerabilities on markets rather than on regulatory failures.
When you look at the communitarian populist-right in Europe in particular, there is also a more anti-statist strain of thought within that movement because the burdens of both the supranational and domestic European administrative states are felt much more acutely than in the United States. That is one area of common ground shared by the populist right in Europe and right-libertarians. On the other hand, mass migration in Europe is an issue where American libertarian-conservatives and post-liberals tend to view it within the frame of Kling's civilization-versus-barbarism axis. In contrast, libertarians view it within their own axis, which puts them on the same side as European center-right liberals and progressives. That gap reveals where conservatives, in general, part ways with libertarians, even if they agree economically, because conservatives take a cultural and social stance on that issue, while libertarians do not.
You’ve spent too much time in Illinois to not know there’s only one Horseshoe that counts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_sandwich
Chicago, not Springfield. This is the first I heard of it.
Ah but do you like your hot dogs with poppyseeds on the bun?
(It’s not the best thing I’ve ever eaten.)
"classical liberal/libertarian"
Is it meaningful to confound these two? Libertarianism, if it means anything at all, denies legitimacy of political authority fundamentally. Classical liberalism does not and it is a pretty fundamental distinction.
"libertarian" can describe a range of positions. I think of it most broadly as the modern equivalent of "classical liberal," usually implying a position towards the extreme of the latter and usually not including the liberal support for expanding the franchise.
I think whether one is a libertarian depends on what policies, legal rules, etc. one supports, not on why. I discuss some of this in:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/the-meaning-of-libertarian
Libertarianism is a dogmatic system with flawed premises. It is based upon non-definition of property. Hence it generates paradoxes
Contrariwise, classical liberalism is a big and happy tent. It has Adam Smith, Burke, Macaulay , all good writers. Even Russell Kirk would sympathize with it. And he called libertarians "metaphysically mad".
Lots of nothing there.
Why is libertarianism worthy of "dogmatic" with the implication that other ideologies are not?
Where do you get that idea about no definition of "property"?
What paradoxes?
What does your opinion of someone else's opinion of libertarianism have to do with actual arguments against libertarianism?
I read libertarian debates. They are uncomfortable that property is based upon theft in remote past. Because their ancestors drove away other people. But ask them if people own the national territory and they all deny.
These two propositions conflict. If people do not own national territories then no theft was committed if one people drive another people.
You read some debates by some people and now you know everything about all libertarians and all libertarianism.
I think not.
You don’t even understand the difference between individual and collective property ownership. It’s as if you found that 2+2=4 and 2×2=4, then claim libertarians believe that 3+3=3×3.
Yes we shouldn't generalize about libertarians but all others, conservatives, governments, are free game.
The concept of collective property is specifically denied by Friedman himself. From the post linked above:
" just that the country doesn't belong to some imaginary person called "the people" who gets to decide for me who goes on my land."