Tag Archives: maga

What Would Truly Make America Great Again?

Donald Trump ran three presidential campaigns under the banner Make America Great Again (MAGA). He also promised to put “America First,” a reference to the 20^th century interwar movement that opposed further involvement in foreign wars. Instead, its adherents then and a large portion of Trump’s supporters now believe the wars America has fought have not served the interests of Americans and that the federal government should address those instead of “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

But therein lies the rub. Whether or not MAGA and America First are compatible largely depends upon how one defines “great.” And based upon the president’s actions thus far during his second term, his definition does not jibe with that of his America First supporters nor their 20^th century predecessors.

Trump’s supporters are sometimes criticized for romanticizing the 1950s, a period of relative peace and domestic prosperity. From the early 50s through the mid-1960s, life most approached what they consider the American ideal. Jobs were plentiful, including high paying manufacturing jobs, and most American households could live comfortably on one income.

They believe economic “globalization” ruined this idyllic lifestyle. Specifically, “free” trade agreements like NAFTA and allowing China to enter the WTO resulted in U.S. manufacturing being outsourced to cheaper labor markets abroad. This, they contend, has resulted in a dearth of high-paying jobs and the necessity for at least two people in the average household to work just to scrape by.

Thus, Trump’s first inaugural promised to reverse this “American carnage,” bring high paying manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., and restore the idyllic lifestyle Americans once enjoyed as their birthright.

It’s a compelling story and has certainly created a vast political movement. It’s also demonstrably false on every point.

First, American manufacturing has not been “hollowed out.” Manufacturing output is currently at an all-time high and any honest analysis of its virtually uninterrupted ascent over the past 100 years would conclude that the only interruptions to this success story have been the two financial crises – and accompanying monetary inflation – in 2008 and 2020. More on that later.

It is true that manufacturing jobs have declined precipitously, but that just means that the U.S. manufacturing sector is becoming more efficient, able to produce more output with fewer workers. The same thing has happened in farming over the past 100 years. In any case, the trend has nothing to do with NAFTA or China entering the WTO, as this chart clearly demonstrates:

If one were to take away the years at the bottom of that chart, no one claiming NAFTA or China entering the WTO were the driving factors in the decline of manufacturing jobs would be able to find those trade agreements on the chart. In fact, if one were to pull the timeframe out to include pre-WWII periods, it would show that WWII and the years immediately afterward were the highwater mark in terms of manufacturing jobs as a percentage of all jobs.

In other words, for most of American history, including most of the 1950s, 70% or more of American workers had non-manufacturing jobs. And somehow they were able to live middle class lifestyles.

It isn’t even true that increasing the number of manufacturing jobs would make the average American wealthier today. The median annual wage or salary for all full-time jobs in the U.S. economy is about $62,400. The median for full-time manufacturing jobs is about $45,960. Americans leaving the average job for a manufacturing job would not live a higher lifestyle. Quite the contrary.

Nevertheless, there does seem to be an “affordability” problem for average Americans. And the U.S. has been running large net trade deficits for decades, with no foreseeable end in sight. If Trump’s story doesn’t explain these problems, what does?

That brings us back to the definition of “greatness.”

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Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and host of the Tom Mullen Talks Freedom podcast.

Venezuela could be the necons’ ticket back to power

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Their demise has been greatly exaggerated

MAGA is riding high these days, convinced they’ve finally exorcised the neoconservatives who controlled the Republican Party for decades. Supposedly gone are the days of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the trillion-dollar boondoggles sold as “spreading democracy.” Trump promised to drain that swamp, and his base believes he’s done it—putting America First and mocking the old guard like John McCain and Liz Cheney.

I hate to burst that bubble, but the neocons are far from dead. At best they’re playing possum. And President Trump’s looming military action against Venezuela could be their golden ticket back to power, co-opting the very movement that thought it had buried them.

Let’s start with the obvious: the demise of the neocons has been greatly exaggerated. Sure, their poster boys like Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney couldn’t win a presidential primary at the moment. But look who has staffed both Trump’s administrations. Mike Pompeo, the quintessential neocon hawk, served as Secretary of State the last time, pushing regime change agendas from Iran to North Korea.

Now we’ve got Marco Rubio in the same spot, a guy who’s never met a foreign entanglement he didn’t like. Rubio’s been a darling of the interventionist crowd since his Senate days, advocating for arming Syrian rebels and toppling dictators throughout the Middle East. Trump himself has been more restrained—no full-scale invasions on his watch yet—but that’s a far cry from the drastic change some in MAGA envisioned.

Trump hasn’t decreased overseas troop deployment on net whatsoever and the Pentagon budget has risen significantly in both of his administrations. As for Rubio, he’s trying to sound as America First as he can while serving the current boss but make no mistake: the push for action in Venezuela reeks of his influence, along with other holdovers like Elliott Abrams, who’s been knee-deep in Latin American meddling since the Reagan era. Throw in unconditional support for Israel’s wars, and you’ve got essentially a new Bush administration disguised as America First.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Trump and MAGA predictably dump their few libertarian positions

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Well, that didn’t take long.

The Trump administration, which won the 2024 election promising libertarians smaller government and an end to endless wars, has summarily dumped its libertarian promises. Elon Musk has split from the administration after spending several months identifying myriad opportunities to cut federal spending under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The “Big, Beautiful Bill” has replaced those cuts with spending increases that will outpace those under the previous Democratic administration, as every Republican administration of my lifetime has done. Funding the Ukraine War is also back online.

History isn’t just rhyming here; it’s repeating. It is the mirror image of the post-Revolutionary War split between Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian libertarians after their common enemy, the British, was defeated. Today, the MAGA Republicans embody classic Hobbesian/Burkean conservatism, while modern libertarians carry the torch of Jeffersonian principles rooted in John Locke’s property based inalienable rights. The defeat of the modern “British”—the progressive left—has exposed this divide, revealing that the MAGA movement’s heart beats closer to Hobbesian control than Lockean liberty.

Many conservatives may object to my identification together of Hobbes and Burke, given the quite different visions they had for the form of government. But they both agreed on the purpose of government: to hold back man’s savage instincts at any cost, including liberty.

In my book, Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From?, I argue that conservatives, at their core, believe that the “inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection,” as Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Men are entitled only to what liberty the government allows after fulfilling this primary purpose. Burke agreed with Hobbes on this essential point, quoting Hobbes directly in explaining the problem with natural rights: that they give men “a right to everything.”

Burke’s only departure from Hobbes was the means for this thwarting. Hobbes argued that only a unitary, all powerful central government could achieve it. Burke argued that what he called “prescription” – the power of long-established traditions to restrain the savage impulses – could also play a part.

MAGA Republicans are a striking combination of both visions. Their rhetoric often champions “law and order,” a Hobbesian call to maintain societal stability against perceived threats. They have no problem with a massive military establishment, although they reject wars of choice for the purposes of benefiting the peoples of foreign nations rather than purely for domestic security.

The culture wars, on the other hand, are rooted in Burkean prescription. The overturning of long-established norms and traditions – standard ops for the revolutionary left – are a direct threat to civilization that must be reversed. Here there is some overlap with libertarianism. If those traditions are the non-involvement of government in certain areas of human activity, libertarians are all for it. But even if the particular tradition is inconsistent with libertarian principles, those traditions must be maintained, similar to the conservative insistence on maintaining primogeniture in Jefferson’s day.

The natural economic system of conservativism is mercantilism. Since the natural state of man is a state of war, economic activity must have winners and losers. Recall Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. His constant complaint was “we don’t win anymore” when speaking of international trade. He promised instead that Americans would “get tired of winning.” Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists saw the economy precisely the same way and made the same promises.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Democracy IS the problem

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A Wisconsin judge has been arrested for allegedly helping an illegal alien evade immigration authorities. The case has added gasoline to the fire blazing in the wake of several recent court rulings against the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport illegal aliens more expeditiously than customary due process procedures would allow.

The administration argues the judiciary is deliberately obstructing its attempt to execute the clear will of the people, expressed in the last election, to reverse the trend of mass illegal immigration into the United States. Its opponents argue the administration is violating established law and basic constitutional protections of individual rights, especially the Fifth Amendment guarantee that no one shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

Both sides accuse the other of being “a threat to our democracy.” This has been a mantra repeated about political opponents for many years now, by everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Tucker Carlson. Carlson railed against suppression of free speech as incompatible with “a democracy.” Democrats wailed that we must “save our democracy” from their Hitler-cartoon version of President Trump, even after he’d left office.

But to paraphrase a popular 20^th century president, democracy is not the solution to our problems. Democracy is the problem.

If Americans should have learned one thing, it is to be suspicious of anything the media repeat over and over, through every medium. And what they’ve heard night and day for the past decade, from conservative and liberal media alike, is some form of the message “democracy is in danger.” They’ve heard it so much that they’ve forgotten what it is they should be desperate to protect. And it isn’t democracy.

Before the progressive era, the American political system was generally referred to as “republican” rather than “democratic.” This may seem purely semantic and to some extent it would be if the Constitution merely described a simple republic. In that case, representatives would be elected by popular vote and would generally be expected to do what those who elected them want them to do.

But the Constitution isn’t even that democratic. Once elected, the representatives are not permitted to do anything the people who elected them want. They are limited to a short list of powers they are authorized to exercise, regardless of the supposed “will of the people.”

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Will MAGA remain antiwar post-Trump?

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While much of American politics in the 21^st century has been dominated by foreign policy, the past two and a half years have not. The hysterical government response to Covid-19 forced Americans to shift their focus back home and grapple with basic questions of liberty in the face of an increasingly totalitarian state.

Former President Trump has a checkered record at best on Covid. While he maintains to this day locking down American “saved millions of lives,” he did ultimately leave that decision to the states, administratively, if not financially.

Unfortunately, while Republican governors were generally less severe in imposing lockdown policies and tended to begin easing them more quickly than Democratic governors, very few took a principled stand. Exceptions that rule were Governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Noem deserves top honors on principle for never locking down her state a single day. She also took the most libertarian approach to Covid vaccines, neither mandating them nor prohibiting businesses or other private organizations from mandating them on their own property.

DeSantis was the first governor to drop all statewide Covid restrictions and was more willing to use government power against the private sector in both prohibiting vaccine mandates and in combatting “woke” cultural issues according to the preferences of his supporters.

Both Noem and DeSantis were rewarded with landslides in 2022 after having won much narrower victories in 2018. Both correctly cited their stands for individual liberty during the pandemic as political risks that paid off in their acceptance speeches.

While Noem’s policies were much purer on these grounds, DeSantis is the governor of a much more populous and politically important state. Unsurprisingly, he has emerged as a credible challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination for president.

Having listened to DeSantis’ stirring victory speech on November 9, I couldn’t help wondering what a DeSantis presidency might look like. While DeSantis is certainly a more polished politician and more disciplined person than Trump, and while I would have rather lived in Florida in January 2021 than California, I couldn’t help being concerned about DeSantis’ foreign policy instincts.

Like Governor Noem, DeSantis has had few opportunities to opine on foreign policy. Also, like Noem, DeSantis has on those occasions spouted generic, establishment rhetoric about the threat China represents.

More telling is DeSantis’ record in Congress, to which he was elected as a veteran and supporter of the Iraq War. DeSantis opposed Obama’s war ambitions in Syria, as did a lot of Republicans just because it was Obama. Otherwise, he sounded much more like a neocon.

He supported President Trump’s decision not to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2017 making all the arguments one might expect from any establishment Republican. DeSantis certainly isn’t Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, but he’s no Rand Paul, either.

Neither is Donald Trump, one would correctly argue, but here is the rub. Trump seems to have a genuine aversion to war that not only exceeds that of most of the politicians in his party, but even that of most of his supporters.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?