A major danger will continue to threaten the future of liberty in 2025. It is not a new threat but one that has become more pressing since the rise of populism in the world over the past three decades, including with the election of Donald Trump. (On the rise of populism, see Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebescb, “Populist Leaders and the Economy,” American Economic Review, 2023.)
Populism of the right, which is more prevalent in Europe, is no less dangerous than populism of the left, which has been the main variety in Latin America. But the threat I want to emphasize is not populism as such, which I have treated elsewhere (see notably my Independent Review article “The Impossibility of Populism”), but its frequent identification with what journalists often label “the libertarian right.” It seems to me that Donald Trump himself has been mentioning the word “freedom” (but significantly not the more demanding “liberty”) more often recently—for example:
“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Ignore the funny anthropomorphism in the quoted statement. Consider instead how the likely problems caused by populism will be identified by the enemies of liberty as failures of libertarianism and classical liberalism. This could set liberty back several decades—and that’s if we are lucky.
One set of catastrophes will likely be economic. For example, if Trump were to follow up only on his tariff promises, we can expect a recession to follow the supply shock. If the federal government reacts by increasing its expenditures and the Fed partly finances them by creating money, inflation will compound the problem. It is easy to forecast that a populist government will worsen the problem with price controls.
Another sort of catastrophe would be war. For many Trump supporters, whether among the enthusiasts or among those who believe that his collectivism is less dangerous than that of “the left,” this cannot happen because he said he opposed forever wars. Among the least damageable foreign adventures, the Panama Canal may not be handed to the US government without a fight. Sending missiles against Mexican drug gangs would also be a casus belli—which is apparently a current fear among the least sycophantic in Mr. Trump’s entourage. According to the Washington Post (“Trump Team Says Canada, Greenland, Panama Comments Are Part of a Broader Plan,” December 28, 2024),
Some in [Mr. Trump’s] orbit have real concerns about whether he will cross the line from harsh rhetoric and economic warfare to military intervention. Trump has threatened a 25 percent tariff on Mexican imports to stop the flow of illegal drugs, and privately discussed the idea of firing missiles into Mexico to try to take out cartels.
Even if none of these catastrophes come to pass, any suggestion that such games or clowneries have something to do with the ideal of individual liberty can only compromise its future. John Maynard Keynes was right that in the long run, ideas matter.
Consider the case of Xavier Milei, the president of Argentina who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist or, more recently, a minarchist. He seems cut from a different cloth than the sort of illiberal populists I have been alluding to. (Among the recent press reports, see “An Interview With Javier Milei, Argentina’s President”; Javier Milei, “My Contempt for the State Is Infinite“; and “Javier Milei, Free-Market Revolutionary“— all in The Economist dated November 28, 2024.) Milei obviously has some economic understanding and competence: during his first year in power, he has already significantly reduced inflation, balanced the budget, and seems for the moment to have stopped the long decline of his country—decline that was mainly due to previous populist rulers. (See Ciara Nugent and Michael Scott, “Argentina: Has Milei Proved His Critics Wrong?” Financial Times, December 10, 2024; and Mary Anastasia O’Grady, “Measuring Milei’s Argentine Progress,” Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2024.)
But Milei has also fallen in with bad company. He expressed his support for many far-right and illiberal populist politicians in Europe and the Americas. Whether or not he succeeds in his important Argentinian enterprise, he will have further contributed to identifying libertarians with illiberal wackos.
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For somebody who can draw, it should not be rocket science to create, for this post, an image illustrating a dangerous pass in the Alps under the inspiration of a passage in a short story by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1993), L’Auberge (The Inn):
Le ciel pâlissait sur sa tête ; et soudain une lueur bizarre, née on ne sait d’où, éclaira brusquement l’immense océan des cimes pâles qui s’étendaient à cent lieues autour de lui. On eût dit que cette clarté vague sortait de la neige elle-même pour se répandre dans l’espace. Peu à peu les sommets lointains les plus hauts devinrent tous d’un rose tendre comme de la chair, et le soleil rouge apparut derrière les lourds géants des Alpes bernoises.
[Translation:] The sky was growing pale overhead, and suddenly a strange light, springing, nobody could tell whence, suddenly illuminated the immense ocean of pale mountain peaks, which stretched for many leagues around him. It seemed as if this vague brightness arose from the snow itself, in order to spread itself into space. By degrees the highest and most distant summits assumed a delicate, fleshlike rose color, and the red sun appeared behind the ponderous giants of the Bernese Alps.
Below is the best I could get from DALL-E after I provided “him” with the passage and at least an hour of explanation effort on my part. Many times, I repeated the bot that the valley must be dark and forbidding, and that only the summits can be pink. Its drawing remained very far from Maupassant’s picture in words:
A dangerous pass in the Alps, by DALL-E (trying to imitate the style of Maupassant in The Inn)
