Is classical liberalism for losers?

That is the topic of my latest column for The Free Press.  Excerpt, starting with the point that the New Right has an obsession with seizing political power:

There are two essential problems with yelling “Rule!”

The first is that your side will not win every election. It’s a reliable assumption that, on average, “the other side,” whoever that may be, is going to win half of the time.

If you build up executive power, or state power more generally, in the service of your ends, the chances are pretty high that those same powers someday will be used against you. Democrats are enraged at Trump’s use of executive orders and executive power more broadly, but that did not begin with Trump. Consider how Barack Obama seized the power to provide legal status to illegal immigrants, or how Joe Biden sought to extinguish all those student loans, without buy-in from Congress. The point is that Trump stepped into a system that had already been transformed, and he is now using it to his own ends.

Or to take another example: Many Democrats hate DOGE, but in fact it is a repurposed version of a 2014 President Obama creation, namely the United States Digital Service, which initially was designed to improve the IT capabilities of the federal government. Ask yourself which Trump initiatives someday will be repurposed in an analogous fashion.

If your fundamental beliefs are in individual liberty, responsibility, and toleration, the escalation of state power, across competing administrations, is unlikely to prove your friend over time.

The second problem is that rule by the political right is not necessarily better than rule by the political left, even if you have basic right-leaning sympathies, as I do on a large number of issues, especially in the economic realm. But even on economics, the Trump administration is bringing depredations, such as the very high proposed tariff rates, that we would not have seen under a typical Democratic administration. Circa May 2025, I feel less economically free than I did under the Biden administration.

Such problems are all the more true when a given side wins a series of successive political victories.

Power corrupts; the right is not immune to that truism. For instance, the Republican Party typically has been a vehicle for fiscal conservatives, at least on paper and in rhetoric. Yet under the Republican trifectas of both George W. Bush and the first Trump administration, both spending and debt rose dramatically. When you get to be the one spending the money, it is hard to exercise restraint.

I go on to argue that classical liberalism in fact does win a series of periodic transformative victories, even though at many historical moments it is relatively dormant in influence.  It is the way to be a real winner.

Definitely recommended, of real importance.