Two weeks have passed since Donald Trump’s second election victory, and the future president is rapidly choosing political appointees for his second administration. One of the two most notable choices? The richest man in the world and a presidential hopeful for the Republican Party in 2024.
Early last week, Trump asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). What form DOGE will ultimately take is anyone’s guess, though there’s certainly something ironic about creating an entity to reduce redundancy and then giving it two heads. But we do know that the new department is being portrayed as an attempt to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. From this perspective, the choice of Musk and Ramaswamy – two fervent free marketers – makes perfect sense.
But looked at another way, Ramaswamy’s choice is particularly remarkable. Why? Because the former biotech entrepreneur has rebranded himself as one of the key explainers of Trump’s America First agenda – with a twist.
At this year’s National Conservatism Conference, Ramaswamy labeled his view as “national libertarianism.” He later described this view to the New York TimesAs part of America First, Ezra Klein focused on “dismantling the existence of that nanny state in all its forms: the rule of law, the regulatory state, and the foreign nanny state.” However, if you listen to him a little more closely, Ramaswamy’s vision begins to look more like an ambitious attempt to wrap libertarianism in nationalist garb.
Ramaswamy, for example, is focused on dismantling what he calls the “unconstitutional fourth branch of government,” by which he means the federal bureaucracy, and wants to cut employment by 75 percent. “Reconstitutionalizing” the administrative state is one thing; Dumping most of the largely harmless bureaucrats who make a country of 350 million people function is pure nihilism. And it’s not clear that most post-liberal MAGAophiles want this.
After all, Trump is an ideological figure. His cryptic politics have spawned a cottage industry dedicated to building theoretical scaffolding for his movement, working overtime to fill his agenda with intellectual heft. Unfortunately for Ramaswamy, the people doing this Sisyphean work are not his like-minded fellow travelers; it’s a whole different set of ideologues who openly reject him. Although Ramaswamy is aware of this incongruity, he believes his policy blueprint will prevail. He may be a little too sure of himself.
The MAGA intelligentsia that Ramaswamy wants to join – a strange mix of Catholic critics of the Enlightenment and outright “blood and soil” nationalists – has come to completely ignore the wisdom of free trade, bourgeois nationalism and ethnic nationalism. reject. immigration of any kind. For them, libertarianism has not only failed; it is the source of “rot in the existing order” that they seek to revise.
These reactionaries no longer view libertarianism as relevant, let alone redeemable. They have become suspicious of the idea that markets can solve all social problems or that a globalized world can coexist with a coherent American identity. Their leading voices are already celebrating Trump’s re-election as the dawn of a new post-liberal era. New Right theorists, such as Gladden Pappin, president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, no longer wonder whether they can fully seize the reins of state power. Others openly wonder whether the state can be used to reward friends and punish enemies. They now want to explore what to do with this power, regardless of those pesky liberal restrictions and norms.
It is difficult to imagine that Ramaswamy’s views will not appear too generous towards right-libertarian principles. He may sometimes venture into the fever swamp, but he still clings to a vision that is fundamentally at odds with his New Right counterparts. His cabal – backed by Silicon Valley barons like Musk and Peter Thiel – represents a kind of Randian techno-libertarianism that sees Trump purely as a vehicle for their anti-state goals. They chose MAGA not out of conviction, but out of calculation, in recognition of the fact that it is the only game in town in today’s GOP. These tech titans, who place their faith in technological innovation and the liberating potential of free enterprise, share very little with the post-liberal worldview.
What unites these futurists with their neofeudal allies, however, is their disillusionment with democracy. As disciples of blogger Curtis Yarvin, the high priest of the “Dark Enlightenment,” Ramaswamy, Musk, Thiel, et al. It appears that democratic inertia is responsible for Silicon Valley’s inability to deliver on its utopian promises. The potential erosion of liberal-democratic norms does not worry them, because they believe the engines of American productivity and innovation are being held hostage by lower-case Democrat “statists.” While MAGA intellectuals envision a theocracy anchored in Catholic social teaching, the Silicon Valley contingent dreams of a Singaporean-style technocracy that would unleash their own creative potential.
One thing Ramaswamy gets right is that the Republican base is closer to him than to people like Pappin. Contrary to what some may tell you, Beltway conservatives aren’t the only ones who haven’t “moved beyond the 1980s.” Most rank-and-file Republicans have never experienced a kind of Damascene conversion away from free-market orthodoxy. Republican voters love Trump simply because he is the id of the American right: bombastic, boxy, politically incorrect and, above all, anti-left. These people are still skeptical of anything that even resembles “socialism” and still recite what some in the MAGA intelligentsia would call “Zombie Reagan” mantras.
However, mass sentiment matters much less than elite ideology in shaping political outcomes. The intellectual center of gravity in Trumpworld is firmly with the post-liberal nationalists, not the techno-libertarians. Post-liberal Adrian Vermeule is right: mass deportations and the abolition of the administrative state are mutually exclusive goals – only one view can prevail. This divide will have enormous implications for a second Trump term as two camps vie for influence. But from now on, it’s clear who wears the pants in this marriage of convenience.
Read more at De Uitzending
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