Will President Trump Revive Liberalism?

can he wrest control from unelected technocrats?

Daron Acemoglu writes,

they were typically in opposition. They were in a position of speaking truth to power in the 18th and 19th centuries. Liberalism was thus, in part, a philosophy of a criticism of how power was exercised by traditional economic and political elites. So my hypothesis is that liberalism failed because it came to power and it did not adjust to this new reality. It became too dominant and not sufficiently self-critical.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. My emphasis.

Nay, Mr. Nobel Laureate. The fault does not lie with liberalism. It lies with cadres who cling to power. The solution is to toss them out of power. You won’t like this, but President Trump could turn out to be the solution.

The phrase “liberalism failed because it came to power” is wrong, because it turns an ideology into a person. Here is a better statement: Liberalism is a philosophy that aligns with the view that as individuals our understanding is limited and our beliefs are biased; a process of competition and contention works better than absolute power.

Liberalism includes competitive markets, adversarial legal proceedings, and scientific dispute, as well as political competition. It means what North, Weingast, and Wallis call an open-access order, meaning that no one is excluded from creating a large enterprise or political organization.

The problem is that when you have political power, you are likely to lose the perspective that competition and contention are a good thing. You come up with all sorts of excuses to enforce a monoculture. Once in a position of power, an erstwhile liberal is tempted to become an epistemic autocrat.

The problem is not that liberalism fails. It is that the people who claim to be liberals, once in power, lose their taste for liberalism. The challenge is to set up systems that are robust to this tendency.

Democracy helps by facilitating frequent, peaceful changes of power. Frank Furedi argues that the incumbent technocrats are using lawfare to prevent this, in Romania and in France.

Lawfare is founded on the juridification of politics and the politicisation of the Courts. It subjects democratically arrived decisions to the verdict of unelected judges. In effect, political decisions are made by individuals wearing robes and experience shows that these individuals are bitterly hostile to the aspirations of populist movements, especially of those on the right.

In the United States, one can argue that important government agencies have become insulated from the process of changing power. One can read into the Trump Presidency an attempt to change that. His menagerie of anti-establishment appointments point in that direction. Chris Rufo’s “blueprint” describes the potential to dethrone the social justice activists in government, but it also shows that it will take a concentrated effort.

I see the war on bureaucrats as having two fronts. There is the DEI front, where it is relatively easy to come up with a list of enemies and a strategy for fighting them. However, as N.S. Lyons points out, most of these enemies are in the private sector, especially universities, and many are very well-funded by non-profit giants.¹

The other front is regulatory. Ambitious people, trying to execute projects, in either the public sector or the private sector, are like Gulliver, tied down by the Lilliputian agencies and their rules. You may hope for Elon to wave DOGE like a magic wand over this, but I would not count on it. The entire mindset in Washington, D.C., including Congress, is to govern by restriction. I call it the “culture of no.”²

I regard Trump 1.0 as having failed to change Washington. The swamp drained him.

Will Trump 2.0 drain the swamp? If so, will we be well governed?

If the answer to both questions turns out to be “yes,” then Mr. Trump might be remembered as the President who saved liberalism (!) But if things work out badly, then in 2028 the voters will probably meekly submit to a politician who would solidify the power of the Mandarin class.

I would wager against success. I am currently re-reading for the nth time David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. One of its lessons is how difficult it is to get a bureaucracy to change its behavior.

Someone who has never tried it might assume that managing down is easy—you just give the order and it gets done. But orders are processed unsatisfactorily. They are often misunderstood, misinterpreted, or subtly undermined. Overt defiance by underlings is rare, mostly because it is not necessary. A strategy of slow-walking is usually sufficient. The underlings can expect to outlast the Cabinet officials and their assistants.

I have my doubts that Mr. Trump is up for carrying out the crusade that Lyons and others are hoping for. I suspect that Mr. Trump sees government agencies primarily through the lens of his personal experience of them. He understands who are his friends and enemies as of now, but does he grasp the long-term problem of institutional decay? Does he embrace the larger mission of trying to wrest institutional control from the left? And even if Mr. Trump were disposed to take on that mission, what crises will arise that divert his attention away from such an effort?

substacks referenced above: @

The Counter-Revolution Begins

@

The Technical Managerial Elites Have Declared War On Democracy

@

Counterrevolution Blueprint

1. Lyons’ rhetoric is telling:

we also shouldn’t delude ourselves: not a single institutional power center of the left-managerial regime has yet been besieged, let alone taken and sacked; not a single yard of bureaucratic territory has yet been recaptured. And the enemy has had decades to entrench its positions. Yes, this electoral victory has been hugely important symbolically and offers an unprecedented opening to enact real change (an opportunity that, if missed, will not arrive again anytime soon). But this is hardly the time for complacency. Realistically, the fight is only just beginning and will be hard going; the enemy will inevitably regroup and counter-attack. To believe otherwise is pure naiveté.

2. I believe that the phrase “culture of no” was first applied to IBM, IIRC in the 1980s.