Unlike the entirely emotive slur Fascist, there are still a minority of people who identify with the concept of Liberal, even as it has become more common for younger leftists to decry this concept along with its nebulous offspring "neoliberalism." The modern liberal is someone who believes in social engineered multiculturalism with a large and robust government able to tackle social ailments. The liberal fears nascent Nazism and Communism, a threat to the democratic process that allows all citizens (regardless of gender, sexuality, class, creed, or color) to vote for their representatives. The liberal believes in maternal capitalism that permits free-enterprise until the Fat Cats start mucking it up. Welfare, public-private partnership, and higher taxes on the productive to support these measures. There’s an emphasis on both hard-hitting logic, but also decency and compassion. It has become the center-left that has increasingly (outside of the Aaron Sorkin demographic) embarassed and lacks self-confidence. Liberal is more often a slur than a proud badge of identification. Both self-professed leftists and rights mock the pretensions of “liberals” who are enabling, respectively to each wing, Fascism or Communism. It is a faltering, but still hegemonic, middle ground that has fewer and fewer believers.
When one turns back the clock to examine the origin of the concept “Liberal,” it is hard to believe how such a grandiose transformation took place. Classical Liberalism exalted the individual, the mostly unrestrained free market, and decried most attempts at carving out privilege, whether for the nobility and the church in the past or for racial and gendered minorities in the present. As president Javier Milei of Argentina sometimes forgets when he tells Anglophone audiences that he is a Liberal, the term Libertarian has often absorbed these older classical notions of a highly limited nightwatchman state. Government has a right to protect private property in the courts and defend national borders, but that was it. Economic management created poverty and artificial wealth, while the “invisible hand” of the market would allow a natural (and just) allocation of goods.
How could the intrepid entrepreneurial individual who limited the state to a guard in the tower ever transform into the compassionate welfare state, with a vast bureaucracy to handle the increasing proliferation of disadvantaged classes?
Most analysis of this genealogical question is short-sighted. Somehow John Locke created an ideal that swept the world (perhaps through Masonic Lodges and Jews), slipping down the slope from proscribing atheists from government to constitutionally permitting drag shows for children in public schools. The emphasis on the individual’s right free speech in a free press morphed effortlessly into criminalizing hate speech. Something, it would seems, has taken place in the interval! This kind of historiographical analysis is mainly worthless, used by the semi-educated to spin just-so fables. A more solid conceptual analysis is necessary.
One option is to simply ignore any real connection. Liberalism was the skin-suit of socialists and paternal conservatives to justify the battery of their new legislation. Thus the modern Liberal had no ideological connection to classical Liberalism, he simply cynically adopted these labels to hide the purpose of his own legislative agenda. But this claim does not stand up to much scrutiny. Many modern Liberals (beginning in the late nineteenth century) had sincerely believed in or advanced classical ideas. The policy makers of modern Liberalism were not interlopers that used the moral associations to advance their own ends, they were often fierce advocates of the many classical ideas of freedom and limited government. In contrast, it appears that the advent of modern Liberalism from classical Liberalism was, in some sense, an attempt to save the Liberal project from implosion. I do not deny that concepts are adopted polemically and, through use, transform over time. But it was not a callous disregard for Liberal notions, but an attempt to see them through to the end, that saw this radical transformation in and through rapidly centralizing and industrial societies.
Liberalism, as any idea, is not a solid-state thing, a Platonic form that instantiates into the here and now. Rather, ideas are like constellations: they form a single identifiable image, but upon closer inspection derive from a series of interconnected nodes. This essay will argue that the constellation of Liberal had internal tensions that, in different social conditions, exploded into two rival traditions. These tensions are manifest in one of the arch-theorists of Liberalism, Adam Smith.
Often treated as the ur-theorist of “Capitalism” and the Free Market, Smith had a more particular focus. Smith was concerned with “Mercantilism,” an invented concept to identify and attack the series of policies that regulated trade and placed its control in the hands of an imperial Parliament. Rather than prospering the nation, Smith argued these Mercantilist policies (the most famous of them being the Navigation Acts) hamstrung economic growth and enriched an elite government class at the expense of many entrepreneurial commoners. Instead of a paternal state, the self-interest of all market actors would guarantee an enlightened state of benevolence. Mutual good was not predicated on mutual intended good. The self-oriented objectives of the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker would all contribute to public weal. High taxes, tariffs, subsidies, and chartered monopolies hindered the full expansion of a nation’s economic potential. Free, not regulated, trade was the only way to wash out all artifice and allow natural excellence to flourish:
"Were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free importation, the different states into which a great continent was divided, would so far resemble the different provinces of a great empire. As among the different provinces of a great empire, the freedom of the inland trade appears, both from reason and experience, not only the best palliative of a dearth, but the most effectual preventive of a famine; so would the freedom of the exportation and importation trade be among the different states into which a great continent was divided." (Wealth of Nations, IV.5)
Thus, not only will free trade bring prosperity, even mutual prosperity, but form the conditions of European (if not global) peace. Free trade would put an end to the common diseases of mankind. There is a utopic expectation of returning to nature away from corrupt mechanical additions. In order to secure nature’s order, governments exist with limited duties, but these contain internal contradictions:
"All systems, either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which, no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interests of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works, and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual, or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society." (IV.9)
In other words, the government's sole objective is 1) defend from invasion; 2) prevent internal oppression (theft, murder, etc); 3) public works that would best facilitate the entire public in their pursuit of their own ends (e.g. roads, harbors, etc.). Government must both defend private property, as well as rectify certain inequalities (i.e. access to public works for trade) that would allow individuals to equally compete. There is nothing inherently contradiction of wanting government out of regulation and in road construction. There is nothing about rectifying natural inequalities (only artificial ones):
"Wherever there is a great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate, that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate, continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary." (V.2)
Government therefore is necessary to preserve property rights and to balance the hostility between the haves and have-nots. To further bolster this civic regime, Smith advocated for a standing army (in contrast to voluntary militias) to most adequately deal with foreign threats. Unlike classical whig-republican theory, that deplored standing armies as tyrannical, Smith accepted the necessity of professional fighting forces. Smith stands athwart traditional categories between Whig and Tory, and would later influence more full-throated defenders of Liberalism like the Frenchman Benjamin Constant, who distinguished between the ancient liberty of republics from the modern liberty of commonwealths. A professional army put away the compulsory nature of military service, allowing a de-politicization that allowed most men to conduct their business in peace.
But besides maintenance of property and a solid defense, Smith also argued for public education. If pure economy was permitted, the citizenry would decay on its own without proper counterbalance. Therefore, the civil realm must provide learning for all:
"In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations; frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard, with abhorrence, the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment, than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."
In other words, if the wage labor system is allowed to expand (and it should, the division of labor and technological advance is a boon) then schooling must be used to offset the deleterious effects on the mind. Smith operated within a world of political economists that attempted to abstract general laws and rules of how states and societies functioned and act accordingly. In contrast to Smith, later economists adopted a historicist approach that refused abstraction in the name of empirical and strictly organic realities. While Smith hoped for European peace, economists like Alexander Hamilton or Frederich List believed in the necessity for a conscientious mercantilism. For the American and German, in contrast to the British Smith, new republics could not simply take a chance with the free market. The question was not free enterprise, but acknowledgement of trade war. While Smith believed tariffs led to the breakdown of international relations, the historicists believed tariffs were the only way to counterbalance the power differences between nations. What was to stop British manufacturers dumping in rival nations to breakdown rival industry? But before returning, Smith believed all these challenges would wash out in the end. Trade benefited industry and industry specialized labor, allowing plunging prices and improved goods:
It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. (I.1)
Of course, in the history of England and Europe, the wage-earning classes did not always taste the fruits of this economy. In England, conservatives and chartists often fused to contend against the liberal Whigs (who eventually coalesced into their own eponymous party). The United States never had an Ancien Regime or a concomitant conservative movement, but the Democratic party often housed many little guys and agrarians who feared the rise of the capitalists (usually associated with silk-stockings and Whigs). But even where conservatism had taken root, 1848 saw an explosion of liberal movements in defense of not only national independence, but free speech, free trade, and dissolution of privileges awarded to the nobility and the church. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat, as equally apart of the Thrid Estate, coalesced to introduce legal equality and the removal of regulatory restrictions. The unification of Italy and Germany not only brought about a new national government, but often dissolved old feudal bonds. Though some 1848 revolutions failed, policies or greater enfranchisement were offered as a sop. While Liberal Britain flourished across her wide empire, most developing powers adopted historicist economy, with protective tariffs and privileges to industry to jumpstart them into competition with Britain.
But even in Britain, classical Liberalism began to falter in the latter nineteenth century. Free trade appeared to have failed. English industrialists, the great barons of Manchester who had buried Toryism with the repeal of the Corn Laws, were in shock to see their profits decline. British textiles, the pride of the Empire, were slipping before American and German exports. Even worse, the industrial wage-earners seemed disinterested in the liberal ideas. Unions, paternal government, and socialism appealed to them much more strongly. Complaints of terrible working conditions and frail children crawling about machines often saw a resurgence of traditional conservative politics. Socialism did not mean radicalism or Marxism, but the need of patricians to care for the lesser classes through the machinery of the state. It was not Liberals that opened the franchise to all men, regardless of property, but the Tory Disraeli, who correctly bet universals suffrage would benefit his party. Jingoism also offered a means for the commonman to rally, focused on the preservation of the Empire against newcomers and internal revolt. The insurgent campaign of Joseph Chamberlain drew from this popular discontent and industrial decay. These same forces, combined not with nobility and Church but Methodism and unions, produced the Labour party that would eventually replace the Liberals as the primary opposition to revived Toryism.
Elsewhere, the United States and Germany were undergoing their own shocks. After the Civil War, the Republican Party (which ran on Hamiltonian policies) became the party of industry, passing tariffs and stable currency (following the international gold-standard that Britain had normalized). Democrats became an odd combination of frustrated liberals, disgrungled unionizing proletariats, and agrarians disgusted with industrial domination of federal politics. But even in both parties the sense that the policies of the self-made man and western expansion were running dry. The Lincolnian idea of Free Labor had started to see defectors. The Democratic party that had recaptured the presidency in Grover Cleveland, the most Liberal president that America has had, was immediately overtaken with the unrest of populism. The president who had defended free trade and the gold-standard was now replaced with nominees that wanted federal intervention in railroads, currency, industrial cartels, and with much higher taxes to boot. The GOP also gained a master who believed in the paternal statism of Disraeli, offering a Square Deal to clean up the crooks.
Germany, under the iron hand of Chancellor Bismarck, offered a ameliorated process of socialization. Concessions as much as undermining radicals, Bismarck implemented national insurance programs, safety-nets, and wider enfranchisement across the Second Reich. Germany’s main problem was to absorb, and undermine, old prerogatives. Thus, non-Prussian nobility must be absorbed or undone. Kulturkampf was a war against the Roman Church that sought its unique prerogatives and privileges that gave it life outside of the state. German cartelization and finance became a larger rival to Britain, all the while staving off the growing demands of socialist transformation. Marxism had been contained through the innovations of Social Democracy, which believed in progressive parliamentary procedure to effect socialism. It was this competitive bent, with Britain’s own flagging fortunes, that formed the context for the First World War. Like England, it was not capitalists in top hats and junkers gripping steel that most fervently celebrated war, it was also the trade unions and socialists who dominated the Reichstag.
What had happened? Did statesmen and legislator wake up one day and simply repudiate Smithian political economy? Was Liberalism (as Henry Clay claimed) simply the British System? Did Britain give up on its own system because it no longer worked? If so, why did anyone continue to adhere to name “Liberal” in pursuit of their policies? If Anglophilia was disdained in early eighteenth century America, it was Anglophobia that had fallen on hard times among American elites. At the turn of the century, John Hobson (whose theories on imperialism inspired Lenin) had identified himself with a New Liberalism, who found himself among other socialist-tinged members of the Fabian Society. These correspondences crisscrossed the Atlantic, with arch-Anglophiles like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson claiming the Liberal mantle for themselves (with Wilson as disciple and admirer of Prime Minister Gladstone). Why maintain these terms if their fortunes seemed to be running dry? Why claim to be a Liberal when free trade, the gold standard, limited government, and low regulation were increasingly in disrepute?
It’s upon this moment, as a rock, that the constellated idea of Liberalism foundered. It was not a question of abandonment or cynically recycling old labels. Rather, certain values within Liberalism had to be discarded to preserve the other (more noble) values. If the advance of Socialism was to be checked, it was not simply attacking outside schemers and professional revolutionaries. There were structural problems that produced the revolt of the working class. What if government had to intervene to prevent massive price fluctuations? What if industries could successfully conspire to create a cartel that kept out new entrepreneurs? What if inviolable property rights slowed down the process of labor specialization? Should not patricians and professionals, those with the mandate to govern, take the helm? Thus, while Fabians in England and Bismarckians in Germany openly professed the Old Ways as they introduced new scientific methods of governance, the old families of American claimed Science and Expertise as they regained a paternal grip on the levers of power. Noblesse oblige now came not in the form of feudal bonds, but in and through the central state.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the core myth and transformative moment of making America into a modern Liberal state, was entirely a patrician comeuppance. Greedy Capitalists were not blue bloods, but upstarts who seemed to smash and grab the market for their wealth which they then used to burst into polite society. But, at the same time, some old lefties, rock ribbed Liberals, found themselves among conservatives and the rightwing. Such was the birth of Libertarianism before the term, where Liberals now themselves fighting tooth and nail against implementing the welfare state, with Al Smith and H.L. Mencken in the Liberty League locked in arms with the party of Warren Harding.
The shattering put an end to classical Liberalism, but what had divided? How did some Liberals in Britain become Tories and other Labour? How did the party of Jefferson become the party of Roosevelt? Why did aged revolutionaries of 1848 either move towards Socialism or in defense of the aristocracy or church? As one extreme example: why would the father of Austrian economics, Ludwig von Mises, side with the Fascist party in Austria (holding his nose) against the rising tide of socialism? What forged this new realignment?
The following is my [[provisional]] schematism for how Liberalism broke into Libertarianism and modern Liberalism:
-Sound money (gold standard) has gone hand-in-hand with free trade. Yet what if control over precious specie had broken down and the money markets were out of control? What if speculation in debt had made free trade more dangerous (and thus more tempting to reimplement tariffs)? Often neglected in FDR’s Atlantic Charter was the goal of establishing free trade (anti-colonialism was often justified on almost Smithian terms of blocking the exchange of goods). If free trade was to exist, then global agencies to preserve it were necessary. While a modern Libertarian like Ron Paul will valorize free trade, he does not mean to defend extra-national trade organizations like NAFTA or the WTO. But these institutions came into existence to facilitate the free exchange of goods. The age of British free trade coincided with the omnipresence of the British navy. What security can be offered today if not the global system of American bases? Additionally the gold standard was predicated upon British domination.
If currency exchanges cannot be stabilized — what is more important free trade or sound money? If gold could no longer be regulated and maintained in the same way the fiat dollar could, then could it truly service the seemless exchange upon the market? Fiat money is faith in faith, it is signifier without sign, it is the ultimate form of trust in the system. Rather than seeing the fiat dollar and the Federal Reserve as damaging American free trade, it is part of permanently shoring it up. Systems like SWIFT and the process of dollarization were part of fully enacting this state of affairs. Gold had originally pegged the dollar through Bretton-Woods (which guaranteed a deflated strong American currency to allow Europe to recover) was now a threat. What if, as president deGaulle attempted for France, Europe wanted to dedollarize, cash out, and rely upon a gold-standard Franc, Pound, or Deutsche Mark? Worse, what if this bankrupted American gold reserves and destroyed the dollar? President Nixon’s decision to detach the dollar from gold was ultimately a bid to save America’s economy from total collapse (a temporary measure that has never ended), but it also signified a shift to reliance upon the market. Sound money was set aside for stable money. Gold was now a threat to free trade, and had to be ejected.
-Limited government and public works could easily go hand-in-hand in the heydays of liberalism. In the US, the fight between Whigs/Republicans and Democrats was primarily whether the Federal government had a right to build infrastructure, but it had nothing to do with state governments doing the same. Public works was accepted by all at some level. Similarly, public schools were accepted as the growing norm (at the state level). The American System’s mercantilism was a question of national development for infrastucture, it did not have statism dimensions. Advocates of this system in noway sought to replace the voluntary societies that provided relief, insurance, and welfare for the down and out. However, as more complex forms of social organization (as well as the explosion of urban immigrants in urban centers) brought new problems to the fore. The sprawling industrial centers of Britain, America, and Germany were (or threatened to become) dirty, uncontrollable, riddled with crime and vice that often bred radical politics of relief. In the bid to keep the wage-earners from becoming the ape like beasts that Smith feared, more than schools were needed. Should government regulate working hours? Offer insurance or healthcare? Should the government regulate the operations of city life to keep streets clean and home life decent? If so, then more taxes (especially on the wealthiest) were necessary to provide for the lowest of citizens. Such was especially the case in Europe, where the appeal of Socialism was to offer the kind of paternal release that the throne, the church, and the nobility seemed unable or unwilling to provide. If the Ancien Regime would not check the Capitalists, then trade unions and radical party cadre would have to do so through the machinery of the state. Limited government now became a liability for these new Liberals who feared the dissolution of their system. A welfare state (with paternal or, later, maternal characteristics) was necessary to preserve the public amenities that allowed equal growth for the citizenry. The reactionary who preferred limited government had to then go to war against the battery of these new bureaucracies which threatened to strangle the Liberal idea with the rope of natural equality.
-The division between property rights and division of labor reflect the growing demands of the economy. When Locke defended the role of government as defending the right of property, it was not in terms of a naked and inviolable right. The Englishman who mixed labor with the undeveloped soil had a right to that property that superceded any Indian tribe that claimed collective ownership from time-out-of-mind. The classical Liberal required government to defend property because economic activity would be paralyzed if every property owner feared theft at every turn. But were these rights absolute if they too interfered with the dynamism of economic progress? The courts (with their muscle, the police) were to regulate and maintain property, an extension of Smith’s advocacy for a professional army to keep foreign forces from plundering. But what if the division of labor required more and more plastic forms of property ownership. Notions like Eminent Domain allowed the government to seize and recompense property in the pursuit of roads. But what if development required less and less ownership? Per Lockean theory, wage-earners (or farmhands) could make a minor claim on ownership of the means of production. Did these workers have a right to complain if capital flight threatened their ability to live? Or more still, did owners have a right to deal locally through firing and wage adjustments? If the government could jawbone (or worse) companies to freezing wages and prices, or backed union rights to squeeze deals for their workers, then what good was ownership? These policies were often pursued not from naked socialism, but concern over production stagnation. But who really owned these means of production? If then owners decided to move overseas, what was the point of this property?
Smith had believed the subrational prejudices men had for their homeland and countrymen would circumvent the desire for greater profits. But what if owners do not care if they pull their factory from Michigan and transplant it to Mexico or Burma? What if limits on freedom of movement (such as immigration) were an impediment to development? What if this cheap labor damaged the value of property (e.g. foreign workers mass-move into a neighborhood causing real estate to plummet)? Which takes priority? For advocates of open borders and free trade, the former, but for those who more highly esteem the grounded realities of ownership (of land, of homes, and of buisnesses), then no amount of development or specialization could justify these policy turns.
Such is my provision crack-up. It is for this reason that both sides of the political divide can justly accuse the other of “liberalism” or the betrayal of old ideas. The Birchers were not so wrong to accuse both parties of effectively embracing socialism; such was necessary, according to politicians and wire-pullers, to prevent something worse. We can question their reasoning and whether they were right, but not their commitment to Liberalism. More often than not, such was what was believed necessary to save the old ideas from ruin. Similarly, when self-professed “progressives” or “socialists” cry about the domination of “neoliberalism,” they are aware of continued dominance of the old tradition. The desire to save Liberalism was what led Roosevelt-Kennedy Liberals to ram through an elaborate welfare state. It was the same Liberals, when this institution started to falter, that often abandoned paternalist welfare for hardnosed workfare. Ronald Reagan was a Roosevelt Democrat long before he became Republican governor. The continuity between Reagan and Clinton show more than not that there was a bigger realignment. The old moniker of “Liberal” may be in decay, but the center itself continues to adapt. If Socialism (or Socialism-lite) has indeed succeeded, it is off the back that Marxism is defunct. The proletariat is politically insignificant, financialization has made more of the economy virtual, and imperialism gave way to something else without a global revolt.
When the World Economic Forum meets, it does not discuss Socialism but Capitalism. It is not simply Capitalism either, but Ethical Capitalism or Stakeholders Capitalism. Liberalism has continued to adopt to maintain the center. Centered in an Anglo-Euro-American Empire (that includes Asia in Japan and S. Korea), the center continues to hold. Those who cannot keep up with or commit heresy against it depart into new movements. So-called “populists” like Trump do not depart from the consensus as question certain aspects, such as questions over tariffs and immigration (an issue that has gripped most of Europe). Perhaps such has begun another crack up. Similarly BRICS (which is China+ in effect) offers not to destroy the Liberal system, but to change its management (the dollar being put on par with the Yuan) into a multipolar balance-of-powers. That too could exacerbate the tensions of those who, like Premier Xi, believe in globalism (but with Chinese characteristics), which is no less national than the insistence that America comes First. Additionally, with the pressure for greater recognition of minority rights (an infinitely expanding palette of identities), can the old center keep up with these changes or collapse under impossible demands? Can minoritarian cliques (such as Jews around Israel) maintain unwavering commitment to Middle East involvement if it puts international relations increasingly at stake?
To conclude, in 2024, President Milei gave a speech (that upset not a few in the World Economic Forum) that declared that the old days are over:
This is how we come to the point where, by using different names or guises, a good deal of the generally accepted ideologies in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be openly communist, fascist, socialist, social democrats, national socialists, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or globalists.
Ultimately, there are no major differences. They all say that the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals. They all defend a model contrary to the one that led humanity to the most spectacular progress in its history.
We have come here today to invite the Western world to get back on the path to prosperity. Economic freedom, limited government and unlimited respect for private property are essential elements for economic growth.
Liberalism gave us the center of the current globalized world, but even its modernized variant is fading as passe. What will come next, or whether the center will find a new way to maintain its hold, is something yet to come.
How would you assess Alexander Hamilton’s protectionism, the American System, and tariffs? I know a lot of libertarians don’t think his system quite fits in with a free-market purist view