Politics is Full of Bad People Who Do Good Things

Are MAGAs the New Protestants?

I’ve been trying to reconcile two things I believe very strongly:

1. Conservative economic policies of the kind supported by the Republican Party are the best way to move humanity forward.

2. Prominent conservatives and their base, at least since the movement has been taken over by MAGA, are intellectually and morally inferior to their adversaries and it’s not even close.

These two ideas are in obvious tension. Their combination tends to confuse people. A prominent leftist emailed me not that long ago saying I was obviously just saying stuff to get traction with Elon and the new Twitter, while rightoids accuse me of kissing up to the left by harping on what makes MAGA so terrible. This is a kind of horseshoe thing, where both the right and left are unable to decouple and are unsettled by those of us who can.

Yet, it doesn’t do to simply say “I’m just a high decoupler” and be done with it. Bad people tend to do bad things. It can’t be irrelevant for governance that conservatives are more indulgent of corruption and less connected to reality.

A good decoupler understands that there’s not always a perfect correlation between how good people are and how beneficial their preferred policies are for society. But my worldview goes so far in the opposite direction that it strains credulity. Can there really be that negative of a correlation? The MAGA movement and the man it has formed a cult of personality around are such bad faith actors that to even hear them being compared to their opponents compels me to jump up and defend people who politically stand for everything I’m against.

I think we can reconcile all of this by thinking about the history of how governments have come to respect individual rights. From this perspective, we find that the successes of bad people resulting in good outcomes is not all that unusual. Cremieux argues that Protestantism led to modernity not because followers of Martin Luther were necessarily stronger believers in individual rights. Rather, they were less competent than the Catholic Church was at rooting out free thinkers and heretics. Thus, in areas where Protestants had power, we ultimately saw more scientific innovation and economic growth. There’s an entire school of historical thought that holds that the advance of liberty has been a byproduct of clashes between different centers of power as much as it has been a story of freedom directly winning in the marketplace of ideas. Think of the Magna Carta or the Treaty of Westphalia.

In modern times, people who are illiberal supporting liberal causes is far from rare. The school choice movement has made rapid gains in the last few years, and it’s largely been due to religious fundamentalists whose problem with the public schools is that they teach a secular worldview. At The Unpopulist, Landry Ayers complains that libertarians have been going about fighting for school choice in the wrong way by leaning into the culture war and aligning with the Christian Right. He points out that school choice advocates used to produce content like the documentaryWaiting for Superman, which focused on the needs of disadvantaged children and appealed to conservatives and liberals alike. But then individuals like Corey DeAngelis gave up on that path and instead started focusing on a Red State strategy that ran with things conservatives were angry about and presented educational freedom as the answer.

The problem with this argument is that bipartisan efforts failed, while the appeal to conservatives has worked. I would personally love a movement of secular non-homophobic parents who believed that it was important to give family rather than government control of the education of children. But secular Americans have proved not to be interested in that cause, or at least not interested enough to do the hard work of challenging the teachers unions that are part of their political coalition. Your average school choice advocate may not believe in Darwinian evolution and have unpalatable views on the necessity of protecting zygotes, but the education policies they support end up granting more freedom to everyone.

Conservatives on this issue may not be primarily motivated by an abstract concern with liberty. There’s every reason to believe that if the Christian right had power, it would use it to force its preferred educational practices and curriculums on the rest of society. But since the educational establishment and public schools are controlled by secularists, the best they can do is demand that government leave them alone. This can even lead to a principled stand in favor of freedom. I’m sure if religious fundamentalists ran the public schools liberals would be more in favor of school choice than they are, but that’s not the world we live in.

The education issue provides lessons that are more generalizable. One of the biggest problems that developed societies have is that they give government too much power to tax, spend, and regulate. People who dislike elites for whatever reasons in effect often end up standing against expansions of government power, which we saw in an extreme form during covid. Very few people identify with the right for the same reasons that I do, namely a commitment to individual liberty, a belief in the power of economic incentives to influence behavior, and an understanding that prices are the only way to rationally aggregate information on a mass scale. Many more people oppose left-wing statism because they’re religious fundamentalists, bigots, conspiracy theorists, or resentful chuds who hate anyone who seems smart and educated. Such is the way of the world. There are a lot more listeners to Tucker and Alex Jones than there are readers of Marginal Revolution or Reason Magazine. You either make alliances of convenience with the nuts, or you end up like Europe, where they have much fewer crazy rightoids but then there’s no one left to resist the expansion of suffocating state power.

It’s often been remarked that liberals used to be the ones in favor of free speech, but now that they have power they have become the censors. Those on the left will sometimes say how weird it is for people who claim to prioritize free speech to support someone like Donald Trump, who goes around openly talking about locking up his opponents. The logical response to this is that of course Donald Trump doesn’t believe in free speech and wishes he could be an absolute dictator. All we can say in his defense is that he’s much less likely than leftists are to ever be able to exercise censorship on a mass scale. I have absolutely zero tolerance for anyone who maintains any delusions about the man’s virtues.

Libertarians should proceed along two parallel tracks. First, of course you make the arguments for individual rights and hopefully bring people over to your cause. But in the meantime, one must face politics pragmatically, and there’s never a guarantee of winning over hearts and minds, given how historically rare it has been for principled arguments in favor of liberty to succeed. As they make their case, libertarians should seek political victories by finding leverage wherever they can, which often means throwing their support behind the weaker party in a dispute. Be on the side of Christian fundamentalists against the leftist educational establishment, blue haired leftists in states with abortion bans, immigrants against xenophobes and government agents seeking to deport them, conservative professors against the educational bureaucracy. This isn’t the most aesthetically appealing way to do politics, as we naturally like to think that there is a great deal of coherence between how sympathetic people’s motivations are and the desirability of the policies they support. In the real world, principled defenders of liberty are rare, and they need to realize that having unpopular political opinions means that you must sometimes ally with those you find distasteful.