Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a name that lives in infamy within libertarian circles. With a Presidency spanning 3 terms, a World War and the record for the greatest number of Executive Orders ever issued, there is perhaps no other President that embodies such an antithesis to what we hold dear. Some go so far as to call him the President who brought us socialism, and you wouldn’t necessarily be mistaken. With his New Deal FDR instituted many socialist policies and greatly expanded the role of the State. However, if you ask a socialist about FDR, especially those around in the 30s and 40s they often spoke very ill of him. They argued that he cherry-picked the key positives in their plan in order to bolster his own new-liberal agenda (and yes, there is a difference between neo-liberal and socialism) without making the necessary systemic changes to actually “better” America. Or, in other words, he implemented surface level policies just enough to empower himself and his fellows, without actually changing how things really worked in America. From Social Security, the WPA and ending the Gold Standard FDR was able to secure the loyalty of disenfranchised Americans who were desperate for change and the wealthy financial elites who were looking for protection, all the while pulling the rug out from under American socialist efforts. Even today, our nation’s ideology and institutions seem almost stitched together with FRD’s New Deal, despite them being at odds and causing many issues, be they budgetary, ideologically or legally. Yet they remain in effect because they were reimagined as the “American Ideal”. En masse, most Americans experience no cognitive dissonance when they say “socialism is bad” while standing in line for a check from Uncle Sam.
At the writing of this we are two weeks past the inauguration of Trump 47. His return to Washington has been eventful. He’s broken the record for the single highest number of day one Executive orders and has already begun the process of significantly changing many of our allegiances, policies and standards. However, much to the glee of libertarians, some of them are positive. Ross Ulbricht is free, our policy of issuing foreign blank checks is frozen and crypto is being (at least for now) left alone. There is also talks of balancing the budget (emphasize ‘talks’) and even ending the income tax. Surely then Trump has come to usher in a libertarian America, right? No. He is a modern FDR. He is acting like an unchecked tyrant and is using these political performances to impress liberty-minded activists into fooling themselves into believing that the same President who loves tariffs, creating brand new Government Agencies and using violence to deport children is the good guy.
One may argue that “all’s well that ends well.” It doesn’t matter why Trump does X, so long as X gets done. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Firstly, he isn’t instituting real libertarianism because, even for his most noteworthy concessions, like FRD before him, he isn't changing America, or directing it towards a new way of thinking. He is stitching together disparate policies in order to make his own decrepit tapestry look more appealing. This confuses Americans into thinking that ending the Income Tax, or ending foreign handouts are intrinsically attached to tariffs and deporting children. They become synonymous, meaning hate for one attaches to the other. It means that when Trumps’ castle crumbles (and with the tariffs he’s suggesting, it won’t take too long) that these policies will look to be part of the problem. An example of this is the regular conflation in America with liberalism and the Democratic ‘Liberalism’, or how capitalism in the US is synonymous with what many of us call “crony capitalism”.
The other problem, and perhaps the more worrying one is it puts us in the same boat as the socialists were in with FDR. FRD stole their so-called positives. This meant that if you wanted your Social Security checks you didn’t support the socialists, but the Democrats. What did that leave the socialists? All the difficult stuff. Property reallocation. Ending land ownership. Elimination of individual rights. There is a reason why this isn’t part of their sales pitch. It sounds terrible (because it is). It took them decades to recover and it took the collapsing American healthcare system and our disintegrating institutions for them to capitalize on. What’s more is that he used those same policies, as did his successors to lure people into supporting things antithetical to socialism, such as the many proxy wars with the Soviets, Clinton’s Welfare Reform program, and Obama’s bank bailouts and migrant detention centers.
What then about us libertarians? What do we offer, in terms of a quick sales pitch? Trump is trying to take away ending the Income Tax, freeing crypto and ending foreign handouts. Ok. Surely we have other things like rights discussions to address, correct? Sure, but those aren’t simple things for people to understand. Tell a person we are going to restore individual rights, protect property and undo decades of economic mismanagement and many won’t know whether they want it or not. Tell them, instead, that you will let them keep their entire paycheck and they will throw you a parade. Hell, the Democrats already took from us drug and sex-work liberalization. We can’t even point to Javier Melei in Argentina, because that country has tried literally everything already to avoid complete collapse.
Hopefully most of us know that Trump is just as much of an enemy as Biden, Harris, or anyone else, but for those of you who are still on the fence just remember that while it is good to be happy about successes, we must also not ignore failures. We are now in a trade war with…everyone at this point. What did Canada do to deserve 25% tariffs exactly? ICE raids are happening across the country. US military personnel are mobilizing on our southern border and Trump (as of 2-3) has ordered the Treasury to purchase Tik Tok!?! Sadly, many of us are so thankful for freeing Ulbricht that we forgot Snowden is still hiding in Russia, that we have service people stationed all over the globe, that the police state is GROWING and that they are literally trying to change the Constitution to let Trump be the next FDR.