In May, a piece I’ve been eager to see published came out at Liberal Currents. In it, I argue that classical liberals (small government liberals and libertarians committed to liberalism) fit better with our fellow liberals than with erstwhile allies on the political right. I talk about a few reasons why this reunion didn’t happen already, and why those reasons shouldn’t stand in the way anymore.

Liberalism Reunited

Classical liberals must rejoin left liberals in fighting for emancipatory politics and against the illiberal right.

Liberal Currents

Writing this piece was, in a way, the culmination of almost a decade (especially the last half decade) of me working through how I ended up standing politically next to people who are indifferent or hostile to the values and policies that I think matter most while the liberal consensus and the “libertarian moment” collapsed. My hope is that this piece extends a hand to people who came through that moment feeling the way I did to help them see a path through.

The most common criticism or concern I’ve seen expressed about this piece is from people wondering how coalitions can be formed by people who have such different policy prescriptions. I have something in the pipeline about this topic that I hope to share next time.

I regret to inform you that as a result of this piece, I made my debut on TikTok.

@liberal.currents

LC contributor Janet Bufton discusses her newest essay, which you can find out now at liberalcurrents.com, entitled "Liberalism Reunited."... See more

The video promo was well-received, and working a pitch for the piece down to three minutes or less was a useful exercise. So (sigh) I will be making some more and (sigh) getting myself a space on TikTok, YouTube, and an author page on Instagram. I’ll send that info out when I have it set up. Blame/credit to Adam and Samantha at Liberal Currents.

This piece is also part of my ongoing argument that market liberals and liberal libertarians should stop seeing themselves as above the fray of politics or too skeptical of democracy to participate so that they (we) can more thoughtfully join the fray. See also here and the pieces collected here.

Recs

A few pieces went up in the past month at Liberalism.org (where I’m also a contributor) in which I see shared themes with my Liberal Currents piece. First, Jacob Levy comes out swinging against claims that liberal neutrality, or individual commitment to it, takes the fight out of liberalism or excuses liberals' staying on the sidelines.

Liberal Neutrality and How to Fight For It

Defending liberal political norms doesn’t mean always reaching across the aisle. Sometimes, liberal neutrality means playing hardball.

Liberalism.org • Jacob T. Levy

And Sarah Skwire writes about when coalitions can be (or become) dangerous, especially once they’re accepted as inevitable. Also, dragons.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is a Really Big Dragon

When political theory meets horror, do not call up that which you cannot put down. Sarah Skwire discusses Joe Hill's novel King Sorrow, "a deliciously gory and smart bit of horror" that also brings lessons about the enemy of your enemy.

Liberalism.org • Sarah Skwire

If you wish for more reading recommendations from me, you can always follow me on Seabird Reader.

Happy Monday, and happy June.

Featured image is by Nk Ni on Unsplash.

A new online magazine, Liberalism.org, launched in March. I’m a founding contributor along with a very flattering (to me) group.

My first piece for the outlet was published this week. I take a deep dive into a well-known passage by Adam Smith (the “Man of System” passage) to argue that liberal principles don’t need to be protected from political action. In fact, liberals need both an idea of how things ought to work and a commitment to persuasive democratic politics.

The Liberal Spirit of System

The “man of system” is a famous figure in the work of Adam Smith, and not in a good way. And yet we all think in systems. They can be both beautiful and helpful. What gives?

Liberalism.org • Janet Bufton

I’ve got more in the works, but since the magazine is new I’ll draw attention to a few pieces that strike me as interestingly in conversation with mine—by Mike Munger, Sarah Skwire, and Kevin Elliott.

Yours, Mine, or Ours? Liberals Need a Theory of the State

Economist Michael Munger outlines how public goods may be provided with little or no state involvement. Private road associations are viable, and better tolling technology lessens the need for state action. That's true of many other technologies, making efficient government a moving target.

Liberalism.org • Michael C. Munger

Mini Tacos, Murder, and the Problem of Getting Exactly What We Want

When personalization is king and optimization is everywhere, fiction has lessons about where to stop.

Liberalism.org • Sarah Skwire

If Liberals Get Tougher, What Will They Become?

If American liberals deploy aggressive tactics against the right, will they lose what makes them good?

Liberalism.org • Kevin Elliott

(Sarah Skwire has also done a podcast interview about her article.)

There is more than I can politely share in an update on my own writing, but I hope you’ll subscribe to the site.

In his book, How to be a Liberal,¹ Ian Dunt introduces the story of Benjamin Constant at the tail end of recounting of the Terror during the French Revolution.

After the execution of Robespierre came the quest to understand what had gone so wrong in France. One such famous postmortem was Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke thought that the importance of ancient institutions could protect against chaos, while individuals could only be swept up in it. The political supremacy of institutions, to Burke, was so great that individuals could not constitute whole political units. Dunt illustrates with a famous quote from a speech by Burke to Parliament, “Individuals pass like shadows; but the commonwealth is fixed and stable.” (Burke, 49)

Dunt says, “The phrase 'individualism’ emerged, for the first time. But it was not celebratory. It was an expression of disgust at what had triggered the Terror.” (104) He also mentions Louis Veuillot, referred to everywhere I can find him as a “militant Catholic”, who says, “All for each, and each for all, that is society; each for himself, and thus each against all, that is individualism.” (quoted in Lukes, 50)

Against these conservatives, I dissent.

My cold shoulder for collectivism

I am also among those left cold by Zohran Mamdani’s appeal to “the warmth of collectivism.” But I simply cannot bring myself to care as much as some do. Zohran Mamdani did not shoot anyone in the face for dissenting yesterday.

Mamdani is misdiagnosing what ails us. It is not individualism, rugged or otherwise.

Writing after the Revolution, Benjamin Constant,³ the first modern liberal, “recognised that the Terror was not the result of too much individualism, but too little.” (Dunt, 105) So too with authoritarian populism.

In the United States, legislators and much of the establishment media and punditry seem to have concluded that a presidential administration that won the popular vote cannot be stopped if it orders that children be dragged from their beds and zip-tied, or mothers and babies be abused. Worse than a touchy-feely approach to collectivism is if the supporters of right-wing illiberalism have been allowed to claim “individualism”. The term must not belong to those who insist that to be an individual can only mean to stand alone.

Right-wing populists claim that they are against identity politics,² and when appealing to liberals and conservatives, will often say that individualism is being undermined by concern for minorities. It is maddening that people fall for this, but it’s not new. In his Principles of Politics, Constant wrote that, “Most political writers, above all those who wrote according to the most popular principles, fell into a bizarre error when they spoke about majority rights. They represented the majority as a real person whose existence is protracted and which always comprises the same parts.” (Book 2, Chapter 2)

Immigrants are a minority, and opposition to accommodating them and respecting their rights has made for an effective political dividing line the world over, with the right wing ginning up and weaponizing opposition to free movement. Liberal individualism demands that they be defended, regardless of their nationality, birthplace, or minority status. If they are not protected as minorities, they are not protected at all. Constant again: “To defend the rights of minorities is therefore to defend the rights of all. Everyone in turn finds himself in the minority. The whole society is divided into a host of minorities which are oppressed in succession.”

“To grant the majority unlimited power is to offer to the people en masse the slaughter of the people piecemeal. Injustice and misfortune make their way round the whole society, becoming ever more oppressive of individuals in isolation in the name of all. At the end of this dreadful rotation, all people find they have lost more, irretrievably, as individuals, than they had transiently gained as members of society.” It is when we are conceived of and defended politically as individuals, not as constituent parts of a collective, that liberalism shines. “The individual was like a light. Constant could shine it anywhere and the true moral form of what he was looking at would reveal itself”, says Dunt. (124)

Liberalism doesn’t make individuals into islands. It doesn’t leave us alone. Liberalism recognizes that individuals are social. Its whole point is to find a way for us to live together without being made into something we’re not. Individuals can choose to stand together. We choose to do it all the time. We can benefit from the warmth of those who stand with us without forgetting that each and every one of them matters.

Must reads

If you haven’t read the following, go do so:

We Need to Get Off the Defensive About Immigration

Free movement is a fantastic thing, and we should say it.

www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-get-off-the-defensive-about-immigration

They Were All Our Ancestors

Nationalism chooses sides in the most awful family drama of all time. It sides with the evildoers, and never with their victims, and teaches you to do the same.

www.liberalcurrents.com/they-were-all-our-ancestors

The Americans Who Saw All This Coming—but Were Ignored and Maligned

Call them the Cassandras: the people—mostly not white and male—who smelled the fascism all over Trump from jump street. Why were they “alarmists,” and how did “anti-alarmism” become cool?

newrepublic.com/article/204254/survey-2024-election-cassandras-trump-2025

No Sweetheart, Favoritism Isn't Driving ‘The Great Feminization’, Modernity Is

And it’s a good thing for women and the world, contrary to claims of the neo-right’s new darling

open.substack.com/pub/theunpopulist/p/no-sweetheart-favoritism-isnt-driving

Notes

1. I reviewed How to be a Liberal with Paul Crider and Alan Elrod at Liberal Currents.

2. HA.

3. Liberal Currents has been on a Constant kick. See here and here.

Photo (cropped) by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

At The Reading Room, I apply Adam Smith’s warning about the “man of system” and public choice’s assumption of behavioural symmetry to Isabel Paterson’s famous essay, The Humanitarian With the Guillotine. Then, I hold it up against the actual dismantling of government humanitarian aid.

The Libertarian With the Guillotine | Online Library of Liberty

Isabel Paterson's argument against government charity hasn't held up, but it still offers important lessons about liberal, and libertarian, politics.

oll.libertyfund.org/posts/2025-07-09-the-libertarian-with-the-guillotine

I conclude that while there is a core insight in the essay (I don’t say this, but you could get that insight from many other places), Paterson isn’t where libertarians should go for arguments about government humanitarian aid. Instead, Paterson should be treated as a cautionary tale about the temptation to indulge utopian thinking, even (especially?) among those who think of themselves as immune to it.

Utopian-driven catastrophe is something liberal democracy can guard against (Adam Smith backs me up there), and libertarians’ skepticism of democracy makes them more, not less, prone to this kind of utopianism.

The costs of ending USAID humanitarian assistance are ongoing and not inevitable. The U.S. government will be burning enough high-energy emergency food to feed 1.5 million children for a week, after children who could have received it have already starved to death. The situation is grotesque. No defence of the really-existing U.S. cuts to aid spending should be allowed to pass without a challenge. I think there were defensible theoretical ways to cut or restructure USAID funding, but they did not happen.

What we can imagine is no defence of what was done.

Recs

I was very pleased to see Emily Chamlee-Wright’s defence of Harvard University in its fight against the Trump administration follow my piece arguing that liberalism needs liberals to defend it at Liberal Currents. I skeeted:

What kinds of values should liberals hold? What kind of fights should liberals fight?

Here's one: Fighting against arbitrary power on principle, not only out of self-interest—making an act of self-preservation into one also of defiance and persuasion.

— Janet Bufton 🍁🌻 (@janetbufton.ca)
10:27 AM • Jul 8, 2025

✨The Discourse✨ this past week reminded me of this piece (brought to my attention by Cathy Reisenwitz) about the already-existing affirmative action for male university students at private universities in the U.S.

Speaking of The Discourse, here’s a great kids’ podcast on the origin story of Superman as a creation of immigrant kids who wanted to talk about the immigrant experience. If you favour eyes over ears, Jacob Grier wrote about this at The UnPopulist, too.

Depressing and important from Justin Ling: Welcome to Post-Extremism, and this look at how comedy can be (and has been) used to undermine the politicalness of our humanity, The Deportation Comedy Hour.

More of this kind of reporting on how the reforms by the Trump administration are actually working seems like it would be good.

Finally: I am trying (medium success) to use Seabird Reader (Play / Apple) more often. If you’re on there, look for me! I’m @Janet.

Featured image from Oscar Omondi on Unsplash.

Liberalism Needs Liberals

It is precisely because liberalism cannot take sides that liberals must.

www.liberalcurrents.com/liberalism-needs-liberals

Fusionism is a trap. Judith Shklar can tell us why, as I outline in a new piece at Liberal Currents.

Fusionism is the argument that liberal neutrality means that liberalism needs another, non-liberal political philosophy to fill in its gaps. It insists that because liberal institutions can’t take sides, liberal people have to be rudderless, with no useful conception of a life worth living or the type of person we should want to be, unless we also wed ourselves to another philosophy.

This was the basis for insisting that libertarians must ally themselves with conservatives: conservatives provide the values and morality, and libertarianism provides the institutions. That libertarians fell for it is maddening. It concedes that morality has to come from politics. That gives away the game. It is just what liberalism rejects.

Liberals’ morality does not and cannot come from our political philosophy. But that’s only a problem for non-liberals. Liberals can recognize which type of morality support liberalism, though and, if they want to fight for liberalism (they should), pursue those morals in the private sphere.

It might sound like a quibble, but there is all the difference in the world between the two. The latter insists on a sharp line between public and private that the former insists is fuzzy or impossible to maintain. That’s just the mistake Shklar identifies in those who tie morality so closely to politics as to risk making the former dependent on the latter:

It matters a lot that so many liberals got this wrong. Some are trying to hold the pieces of fusionism together and hope the glue dries. Others tried to port in a sort of pragmatic centrism that insists there are good ideas on the left and the right. (Libertarians should have an argument against a basis in such centrism ready: it’s the same argument Hayek made against conservatism.) No matter how they reacted, it’s obvious that when fusionism fell apart, too many liberals really were left feeling rudderless.

We never should have allowed this to happen. We should never let it happen again.

Recs

It’s been a minute since life let me get my fingers on a keyboard. Here’s some good stuff.

Liberty Fund hosted a really wonderful symposium in remembrance of David Boaz.
Jonathan Blanks and Aaron Ross Powell talked about the importance of equality to liberty.
Matt Zwolinski wrote about the importance of focusing on an end goal of liberty and not simply opposing the government—even if you think the government is the biggest threat to liberty.
I enjoyed this episode of The Curious Task podcast about the left-wing history of free trade.

Coming soon: an airing of grievances at Isabel Paterson, lots more about Judith Shklar, and a review of Quinn Slobodian.

I’m at Econlog this afternoon airing a grievance about one way markets are defended.

More Fronts in the War on Prices - Econlib

Sometimes, people who argue that there are negative unintended consequences don’t seem to understand why. In particular, when those who are against price controls also support policies that intervene in price signals less directly.

www.econlib.org/more-fronts-in-the-war-on-prices

The policy that drew my ire is the promise from Canadian political parties (including the current government) to use tighter limits on immigration to as part of their plan to address the housing crisis.

A friend once used a funny story to describe how he thinks about market interference. He said that when looking at a market that’s dysfunctional under heavy intervention, deciding to intervene further is like taking a bite of a burger topped with hot relish, cotton candy, olives, jam, pickles, and cottage cheese and saying, “That tastes terrible! We’d better add some malt vinegar.”

The housing market is in shambles. That’s terrible! Let’s mess with the labour market.

More seriously, both direct price controls (price caps, anti-gouging, rent control) and indirect price controls (through trying to control demand or inputs) are going to mess with our ability to economize on resources and boost productivity. A shallow understanding that lets someone understand that rent control is a problem because it interferes with prices, but not that the same problems apply to restrictive zoning and immigration caps, leaves us poorly positioned to assess policy and government performance.

Some good stuff

In case you don’t know, Jonathan Blanks’ work is self-recommending. Here he is at The Bulwark: Popular Resistance to Trump is Working.

A throwback (from 2011) from my late friend Steve, on my mind a lot lately: The Other Principle of Classical Liberalism.

Berny Belvedere and Alan Hayman at The UnPopulist dismantle some of the arguments that I see credulous advocates of smaller government repeat about DOGE and USAID, USIP, and the Social Security Administration: DOGE’s Cruelty—and Lies—Will Taint the Cause of Downsizing Government.

Finally, I am thinking a lot about The Present Crisis and the End of the Long ‘90s by Samantha Hancox-Li at Liberal Currents. I’m thinking about it so much that we should probably devote more brains to thinking about it. Give it a read.

——
Featured photo by Shubham Sharan on Unsplash.

I’m at EconLog today, with a “hear, hear” to an observation made by Scott Sumner last week: The most important effects of tariffs don’t look like an immediate recession or inflation, but a reduction in long-term growth. I illustrate with some observations on Brexit.

Tariffs, Growth, and Brexit - Econlib

Scott Sumner’s post Tariffs and the Economy observes that the most important effects of tariffs are not big, dramatic, or immediate ones. They’re the hits to long-term growth as arrangements gradually become less efficient and lower growth rates compound.  The lack of an immediate, catastrophic outcome could be used as an excuse to dismiss tariffs […]

www.econlib.org/tariffs-growth-and-brexit

This week, I also hosted The Curious Task Podcast. I interviewed Alan Elrod of the Pulaski Institution about how liberals should think about children.

How should liberals think about children? | The Curious Task

Janet speaks with Alan Elrod to explore how classical liberalism understands the role of children in a free society.

www.podbean.com/pu/pbblog-t5nu9-538037

Libertarians are famously terrible at thinking about children. Rothbard treated them (philosophically) almost like property. But liberals can do better. More urgently, liberals must recognize what illiberal thinking about children looks like, especially when it’s cloaked in pro-family rhetoric.

Other good stuff:

A recent episode of Reimagining Liberty with guest Alysia Ames discusses gender and the economy. She raises tough challenges for liberalism when it comes to kids and the family, covering some stuff that made me wish I had more time to chat with Alan. I’m still thinking about:

• What would it mean to assign societal/market value to the positive externalities of having children?

• Does the “traditional family” make fathers fungible by reducing them to earners? If so, how has this affected how “traditional family” advocates value fatherhood?

It took me over a month to watch it, but the newest Contrapoints on Conspiracy is very good. Break it into seven or eight “chapter” installments, and the length becomes less daunting. In a similar vein, I’m listening to (and enjoying) the audiobook of Ghosts of Iron Mountain by Phil Tinline.

Finally, I had reason to revisit Tom Palmer’s piece, Radical Illiberalism on the Right. It remains important, especially if we’re interested in getting to a world where it seems less important again.

—
Featured photo by Nik on Unsplash

My new piece at The UnPopulist takes a deep dive into why celebrations and relief about Poilievre’s defeat in Monday’s election need to be tempered. tl;dr: He lost, but he was very, very popular! We’re not out of the woods yet—the main thing we’ve bought ourselves is time.

A Liberal Victory Does Not Mean Populist Furies Are Dead in Canada

For that, the party will have to correct its abysmal governing failure and deliver economic results

www.theunpopulist.net/p/a-liberal-victory-does-not-mean-populist

Some thoughts on the Canadian Conservatives that go beyond the scope of the piece:

A combination of horror at what’s coming out of the U.S. and desperation for a win vs. illiberalism has imbued Canadian politics with meaning it hasn’t earned. The biggest mistake* is to confuse illiberal populism in Canada with MAGA. Trump is defying the U.S. constitutional order, sending people without due process to foreign gulags, turning the power of the most powerful state in the world against perceived thought crimes, and has binned the integrated global economy. When we say MAGA, this is what we’re talking about.

One can dislike the Canadian Conservative Party an awful lot and realize it’s not that.

Most illiberal populism has not been as destructive as MAGA. That doesn’t mean that most illiberalism isn’t worth worrying about. To accomplish illiberal goals, governance from the new right has to chip away at liberal norms and institutions. Those norms and institutions are what defend people against a government seized by a demagogue like Trump. The whole point of what Anne Applebaum calls Autocracy, Inc. (a great little book) is to dismantle or defang the barriers to illiberalism. We should worry very much about the advance of illiberal populism. We have to recognize it and fight it.

My biggest concern about Poilievre is that he appeared unable to understand Trump or the type of threat he represents. I suspect the culprit is that he blinded himself with anti-leftism. He is not on the far right, and he is not Canadian Trump. He has a history of brash, negative politics that didn’t need to be borrowed from MAGA. His sometimes libertarian-coded conservatism made it possible that he could have sincerely been after market-forward reforms to a dysfunctional and often counterproductive government. (As I make clear in the piece, people unhappy with the status quo in Canada are right to be.) But that’s not the version of his party that he put on the ballot.

At the end of the day, Poilievre has illiberal conservative impulses, he hates (some of) the government more than he is committed to individual freedom and markets, and he is someone who could stand to read an FAQ on the Far Right rather than assuming everyone criticizing the right is shrill and hysterical.

But anyway, Poilievre was also extremely popular! I suspect he’ll be back in the House soon, and it’s not at all a foregone conclusion that the party will dump him (or that if they did, they’d choose someone better).

Folks in the Conservative Party who are under the impression that liberalism is baked into their party need to put their foot down and insist on it. Poilievre just demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be. This might mean letting Bernier have his nuts—chasing those votes didn’t moderate those voters. It helped mainstream their grievances.

Carney’s Liberals need to be serious about understanding and addressing the concerns of those who didn’t vote for them—maybe especially in the ridings most affected by trade that did not send a Liberal MP to Ottawa.

And those of us who have been sounding the alarm about the danger of the illiberal new right have to keep at it. We don’t have to insist we’re right (how could we know? I always hope that I am not!), but we should be taken seriously—more seriously than those who were surprised and appalled by Trump’s first 100 days.

Alan Elrod at Liberal Currents has a piece with a similar motivation to mine, aiming at those reacting with excitement to the unpopularity of Trump’s policy. The unpopularity is good and we have to reckon with the people for whom it is popular. I think it makes a good companion piece.

Inherent Vice: Can America Come Back From Who We’ve Become?

At the richest moment in world history, in an unparalleled time of comforts and luxuries, we have elected self-harm and self-pity.

www.liberalcurrents.com/inherent-vice-can-america-come-back-from-who-weve-become

——
*The second biggest is to mistake Doug Ford for a #Resistance hero.

I’m at AdamSmithWorks this week with a piece commenting on a (well, on two) episode(s) of The Great Antidote podcast, with the economic historian Sandra Peart.

The Great Antidote: Extra—Smith's egalitarianism and what follows | Adam Smith Works

A Great Antidote Extra for Sandra Peart on Ethical Quandries and Politics Without Romance

www.adamsmithworks.org/podcasts/the-great-antidote-extra-smith-s-egalitarianism-and-what-follows

I was struck by an offhand remark in the podcast that since Adam Smith thought the division of labour was such a positive influence, he had no worries about it. But Smith offers a famously brief list of proper roles for the government, and among them are measures to counter the downsides of the finer and finer division of labour that Smith believed would follow from economic progress, and I bring to light evidence that he was actually quite worried about some effects of the division of labour!

I think it’s unlikely that Peart and I disagree. I just use the comment as a point from which to jump into questions about how Smith thought about the costs of the most important benefit in economics. I also refer to another episode of The Great Antidote with Jacob Levy, in which they explore how the division of labour can lead to spontaneous orders that are dangerous to liberalism.

I also have a little piece at The Online Library of Liberty’s Reading Room about the passionate defence of free trade offered by ‘Manchester Liberals’ like Richard Cobden.

Cobden's Age of Improvement | Online Library of Liberty

Richard Cobden reminds us that the cause of free trade is not one of bloodless economics, but of improvement, prosperity, and peace. 

oll.libertyfund.org/publications/reading-room/2025-04-16-cobden-s-age-of-improvement

I read things:

Jason Kuznicki has moved his blogletter, Pacification, to beehiiv. He was also at Liberal Currents last week talking about a foreign policy that takes liberal individualism seriously. Huzzah!

Pat Lynch wrote a nice remembrance of Paul Lewis, who passed suddenly in March. Paul was a kind guy and an interesting thinker. It was always a treat to work or chat with him. I will miss him.

I liked and endorse this op-ed by Benjamin Perrin about Poilievre’s promise to use the Notwithstanding Clause (spoiler: we’re against it).

This recent piece by Alan Elrod, Children Are The Future: Authoritarianism, Culture War, and Making Model Citizens is worth more time than I can give it here. There would be something to tying it in with this post by Andrew Jason Cohen on the “telos” of universities and rejecting Jon Haidt’s false dichotomy.

Featured image from Arno Senoner at Unsplash.

Today’s post at EconLog addresses a claim about Adam Smith’s exceptions to his opposition to tariffs that both misunderstands and over-applies Smith’s exceptions to automatically condemning tariffs.

Adam Smith Would not Approve - Econlib

Someone asked recently what would change as a result of the world being plunged into a trade war by the Rose Garden tariffs. I quipped that either Adam Smith would be proved wrong or we’d all get poorer. (This is also true of the scaled-back tariffs, which still leave American tariffs higher than they’ve been […]

www.econlib.org/adam-smith-would-not-approve

It starts with a claim that Smith argued that retaliatory tariffs work and are good. This understanding was so widespread that it appeared in the biography of Adam Smith in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (with a correction in 2014—I agree with David’s correction).

In the 2010s, mentions of this claim started to pick up in conservative circles, and so it was on hand to defend the Trump 1 tariffs. Along the way, the argument bled toward a claim that Smith believed that some tariffs were better for wealth creation than free trade. But that’s wrong. Smith argued that the benefit of national defence was worth the economic cost of managing trade. He argued that a short-term cost, which is still a cost, might be worth paying for the benefit of freer trade.

Let those claims cook for a decade on the internet, and today you might hear that we don’t know what the effect of many tariffs on many countries, and that Smith’s defence of tariffs gives us reason to doubt that we could know. But we do know. We know because the cost of tariffs is determined by Smith’s most foundational observation: that the division of labour allows us to create more wealth.

Read more:

EconLog has had lots of good trade war content.

I liked Dave Hebert’s article in The American Spectator about what I agree is the most damaging aspect of Trump II’s tariffs: the uncertainty. I don’t think the genie’s going back in the bottle.

Justin Ling’s piece on McKinley and Navarro remains relevant.

Featured image is a portrait of Adam Smith embellished by Jacob T. Levy.  

I’ve got two new pieces up at Econlib sites.

The first uses a famous Supreme Court of Canada case about interprovincial trade, colloquially known as the “free the beer” case, to talk about the unavoidable and more political barriers to getting to free trade that aren’t tariffs.

Free the Beer, Free the Trade - Econlib

CBC Radio has a great report on what we can learn from the Supreme Court of Canada case R. v. Comeau, popularly known up here as the “Free the Beer” case.  In 2012, Gerard Comeau loaded his car with beer (and whiskey and liquor) in Quebec and headed […]

www.econlib.org/free-the-beer-free-the-trade

Tariffs are (uncharacteristically!) the most significant issue facing Canadian trade today. But the United States seems committed to tariffs for their own sake and standard arguments for free trade seem unlikely to move them. Non-tariff barriers are likely to be the most relevant sticking point for diversifying Canadian trade to mitigate the damage from a hostile U.S. and to put ourselves in a better long-term position.

Meanwhile, at AdamSmithWorks, I write a bit about two Great Antidote Podcast episodes:

Podcast Extra: Erik Matson on Adam Smith, David Hume, and the New Paternalists

Complex preferences, the difficulty of understanding tacit knowledge (even with clear prices!), and Enlightenment lessons come together in Janet Bufton's Extra on Juliette Sellgren and Erik Matson's Great Antidote podcast. 

www.adamsmithworks.org/podcasts/great-antidote-podcast-matson-smith-hume-paternalists-may-2024-extra

They’ve gotta pick one episode for the title, but this is about two episodes that you can listen to together. The first is a conversation about “new paternalism” and libertarian paternalism. The second is about price controls.

Listening to them together, I was struck with how slippery our ideas of preferences are and how thinking about prices (and a restricted concern about prices that focuses on price controls) can muddy the water.

I came back from March break pretty sick—that nasty non-Covid cough that’s going around—but immune system willing I’m hoping to keep up the regular content.

Moar:

Justin Ling has had some great content inspired by Trump’s trade war. First, Beggar Thy Neighbor, Beggar Thyself tackles a misunderstood McKinley, Mercantilism, and Peter Navarro. Next, There Is No Land Uninhabitable, Nor Sea Innavigable how the Empire Marketing Board responded to the trade war in the 1920s less with marketing and more with research about technical trade barriers, and how that last global trade war might help us think about this one.

Liberal Currents also had a great week last week following my defence of Canadian sovereignty, No is Enough. Check them out tout de suite—though there’s always more good stuff coming.

In the beloved cult Canadiana TV show Letterkenny, a crude comedy set in small-town Ontario with an unexpected moral core, is a running joke. There’s a rumour that some guys in town, Boots and The Ginger, fucked an ostrich.

The rumour inspires horrified fascination every time Boots and The Ginger come up—We don’t KNOW they did it. How could they even do it? We’re hearing it was a sick ostrich. Allegedly. You’d need two guys. Etc.

Recall Ken White’s The Rule of Goats:

The Rule of Goats is this:

If you fuck a goat, you’re a goatfucker.  It doesn’t matter that you were fucking the goat ironically, or to troll people.  You fucked a goat.

— Domestic Enemy Hat (@kenwhite.bsky.social)
1:02 AM • Jul 28, 2023

“Boots, The Ginger, and forgiveness” draws on a the same joke that inspired The Rule of Goats: A guy with a long list of accomplishments fucks a goat. From that day on, no matter what else he did or does, people remember him as the goat fucker.

Boots and The Ginger teach us that if you fucked an ostrich, the normal reaction you should expect people to have is to think about that ostrich when they think about you.

People who make a mistake have to deal with the doubt that their mistake inspires in others. Especially if they made a mistake that calls their character, allegiance, and/or motives into question. It’s reasonable to think of this as an ongoing demand and not a one-time thing. You can't just apologize and move on if you want to be part of the gang.

Someone who made a mistake is at least partly responsible for overcoming the fact that people hear their name and think of their metaphorical ostrich. It is not reasonable—and it’s not realistic—to demand that people just forget the ostrich and let the past be the past.

This is, crucially, not the same as saying someone can’t be forgiven.

Redemption is really important. It takes work and that work is worth it. Not everyone can or will do that work. Most people don’t have the time or inclination for deep dives into bad behaviour. They need signals from those of us who do.

We also need to remember that redemption is something that smart, sophisticated bad actors will take advantage of. Very often, they will not tell you who they are. We should expect them to exploit undemanding forgiveness.

Hanania’s ostrich

Richard Hanania, in case you’ve missed this, is a political commentator (I guess). His pseudonymous work as Richard Hoste for Richard Spencer’s “AlternativeRight” website in the early 2010s was the subject of an exposé in August 2023. I wrote for Liberal Currents about Hanania shortly afterwards, contrasting his story with Adrianne Black (born Derek Black), a prominent former white nationalist.

Black famously broke from her former life and her family, including her father, Donald Black (who started the white nationalist website Stormfront) and godfather, David Duke.

After she renounced white nationalism, Black not only told her story but gave interviews and lectures. She worked to build understanding and awareness of white nationalism as something understandable and organized for which there is sympathy. She demanded we reckon with it as something to which smart people are emotionally attached and intellectually committed. This meant taking ownership of and explaining her former beliefs and how she justified them. It meant explaining that we can't assume that good wins. The purpose of this work was to help people understand white nationalism and how to fight it. She said:

I also mention in Deradicalizing the Center the story of Katie McHugh, an ex-alt-righter whose life had been blown up by her time in the alt-right. She, too, was speaking up to raise awareness of how ordinary people could get pulled into the movement, how dangerous she believed it was, how to spot and counter it. She made an appeal to those who were still in to get out. It wasn’t in vain! As I mention in Liberal Currents, several libertarian organizations took stock and made admirable changes based on her story, which touched the libertarian world.

Wait. Is it libertarian story time?
OK.

Contrast Black and McHugh with Jeffrey Tucker.

Back in 2014, Jeff Tucker made a splash with his article Against Libertarian Brutalism.

It was splashy because Tucker had earlier been involved in the Mises Institute and worked with Lew Rockwell during the days of the Ron Paul and Rothbard-Rockwell Report newsletters. He had been associated with the neoconfederate League of the South (he denied membership). After “Against Libertarian Brutalism”, he was writing for, working, and travelling in more respectable libertarian circles (Reagan fusionist, not Pat Buchanan fusionist, to borrow a distinction from Cory Massimino).

I am sure I’m not the only one who wanted Tucker to do what Black and McHugh did. After Charlottesville, I asked people who had known him for a long time—will he talk to us about that world? Will he tell us how they work, what they’re thinking? Why does anyone who likes Hans Hermann Hoppe or Jared Taylor think they believe what we say we believe? What can we say to turn people away from the far right? To turn the far right away from us?

Again and again, I got the same answer: That brutalism piece shows he’s changed. We have to be willing to give people another chance. We have to let the past be the past. But we didn’t just accept Tucker. We lifted him up.

And we got played. By 2022, Tucker was (among other things) on Fox News pretending to be a random visitor to Monticello to complain that it’s woke for tour guides to talk about slavery on tours of Thomas Jefferson’s slave plantation. He’d rebranded “libertarian brutalism” as libertarianism that recognized that Covid-19 is a dangerous disease that required us to act on behalf of one another. Now he bashes immigration and fawns over MAGA. He’s returned to form.

When I watched Richard Hanania’s unmasking, I saw Jeff Tucker, not Adrianne Black. I didn’t see someone using their experience to make the far right understandable, to protect those who might fall for the same thing, to fight those looking to radicalize others. Hanania wrote his white nationalist chapter off as a stupid mistake of his youth (he was 24 and at Chicago Law but whatever). He wanted to let the past be the past.

Forgiveness is worth the effort

The thing is that redemption is important. Letting people join our side is important. We need a way to approach forgiveness in a world with bad actors.

We need to remember (waves small Canadian flag) Boots and The Ginger.

If we think of forgiveness as a two-way street, then we can expect people who have given us reasons not to trust them to work to earn our trust. The rest of us assess those efforts while remembering the importance of genuine redemption as motivation. This can even be (guardedly) collaborative. It is worth working at and it is something worth taking risks for. It is something we need as part of building a coalition to defend liberalism.

It has not even been two years since Hanania was tweeting about needing more brutal policing for Black people and being exposed for supporting eugenics and opposing race-mixing. Yet Hanania is being hosted by Vox and welcoming Atlantic writers to his podcast. Hanania not dealing with his ostrich problem, but others are avoiding it, too.

A common rejoinder if you bring up Hanania’s past is that he is anti-Trump now. And he seems to be! But so is Richard Spencer.* Hanania is also pro-trans (trans people, he says, are high-IQ and so good and deserving)—and hey, I’m on the record saying that gender is a political sorting issue. I can buy that if he’s committed to supporting trans people, even for weird reasons, he can end up on the right side of a big tent.

This defence of trans people is otherwise not reassuring. IQ was also at the root of Richard Hoste’s arguments for racism and eugenics. Adrianne Black tried to tell us years ago that ”race science” tries to tie IQ differences to racial ancestry to cloak and legitimize racial discrimination. Besides, whether racial or otherwise, ”group” IQ science is junk science. It’s no more meaningful for LGBTQ+ folks than it is when applied to races. People deserve protection not because of their IQ, but because of their humanity.

Hanania is also the guy still being profiled because of his work to make DEI a bad word through his book(!) advocating for victory over wokeness by overturning Civil Rights policies and legislation. Hanania, a one-time acolyte of 2017’s most famous Nazi-saluter, is also back in 2025 to explain the logic behind…Nazi saluters*.

Most recently, he argued for what he sees as social catharsis from the death penalty as a method to keep society from becoming “too gay” (h/t Mike Brock). Once again, he is carving up humanity, presenting a world where some are deserving some should be (in this case, literally!) sacrificed for the good of society. He’s only haggling over who gets what treatment.

It’s not like Hanania is completely unrepentant. But the haste to get back to the way things were feels too much like unwillingness to hold up his side of the redemption bargain. I’m glad to have him defect from the opposition, but if his pitch is, “Trust me, I’m not like that anymore”, I do not trust him. I don’t know why anyone would.

He isn't helping us fight the world he fell into. He’s showing us why he was vulnerable to it. He's saying, “I'm still like that, and trust me.” There’s no reason to elevate this guy.

In the end, Boots and The Ginger don’t do the work to be brought back into polite company. Wayne and the crew will occasionally call on Boots and The Ginger in case of emergency—they need muscle in a brawl and there aren’t good alternatives. Boots and The Ginger are sometimes useful. But they’re still gross, and everyone still knows it.

Richard Hanania might be benign going forward. That would be great. But (hopefully) he doesn’t matter that much. It’s the inability or unwillingness to deal with Hanania’s history that should worry us.

——

*Obviously, I do not trust Richard Spencer. He is, first of all, still horrific, and there are reasons that someone still on the far right would say they supported Kamala Harris—accelerationism, trolling, whatever. But Hanania worked for this guy!

*I am not a Free Press subscriber, so I can’t see what’s below the paywall. Maybe under there, it says that there is no excuse for normalizing the most far-right gestures while far-right figures command the most powerful government in the world. That would be great. Hiding it way down behind the paywall would also be a terrible way to show people like me that we can trust Richard Hanania to be on our side if they’re put to the test.

Over the weekend, I had a new piece at Liberal Currents:

No Is Enough

Canada does not need your permission or your approval to exist.

www.liberalcurrents.com/no-is-enough

I have tried to emphasize to my American friends that, as much as some (fewer as time goes on) want to be able to make light of annexation/51st state talk, Canadians really are taking it seriously. Even if we could set aside all the assurances that trade war talk was just bluster or that the guardrails would hold when neither has been the case, the Trump administration keeps saying it.

Canada does not want to be part of the United States. We have never wanted to be part of the United States. That’s all that matters when it comes to whether or not Canada is really a sovereign country.

I link to an Evan Dyer piece above (click “taking”) about parallels between how the United States talks about Canada and how Russia talked about Ukraine before its invasion. My friend and co-author Tom Palmer pointed out to me yesterday that the invasion of Poland was also preceded by accusations that drugs were being manufactured in and exported from Poland.

I want people to take the defence of Canada’s sovereignty seriously. I also want to raise the alarm: What is under attack is the liberal international concept of respect for self-determination and sovereignty. Trump also has eyes for Greenland, Panama, and Gaza. Putin is already in a hot war for territorial expansion. China keeps its eyes on Taiwan. Simple sovereignty that doesn’t need justification or permission is also beleaguered by those uncomfortable with what they see as a flimsy national identity grounded in mere pluralism—those who wish for a defined national vision or explicit collective aspiration. I’ve argued against that idea before in a different context, and I hint at my disagreement in this new piece.

I also agree with Judith Shklar that, far from being a flimsy basis for national identity, committed liberal pluralism is a demanding commitment. It’s something liberals should take pride in cultivating and maintaining. But that’s an argument for another day.

Featured image is Child wearing Canada flag by Ksenia Makagonova

—

btw, mine is not the first Liberal Currents piece defending Canada’s sovereignty. Read Katherine Alejandra Cross, too. And consider giving the outlet a follow, if you don’t already, or becoming a supporter.

O Canada

For all the well-meaning stereotypes about Canadian Nice, the truth of the country is one of a flawed, disputatious pluralistic work-in-progress that can emerge as a beacon for the democratic world.

www.liberalcurrents.com/o-canada

The UnPopulist hosts an FAQ on the far right by me and my co-author Tom G. Palmer. The questions can be found together below. It is published in two parts, Part 1: What is the Far Right? and Part 2: What Does the Far Right Want and How Will it Try to Achieve It? For convenience, I list hyperlinked sections of the FAQ:

I wrote up these FAQs when they were released:

FAQ on the Far Right (Part 1 of 2)

Laying the groundwork to fight back

www.janetbufton.ca/p/faq-on-the-far-right-part-1-of-2

FAQ on the Far Right: Part 2

Spotting and fighting far-right influence

www.janetbufton.ca/p/faq-on-the-far-right-part-2

I have also written about this topic elsewhere:

Deradicalizing the Center

In 2016, the Washington Post ran a remarkable piece of journalism. Derek Black, a pedigreed, up-and-coming white nationalist leader had experienced an ideological transformation while a student at the New College of Florida.  After he was outed by another student as a white nationalist, the school reviewed Black’s academic

www.liberalcurrents.com/deradicalizing-the-center

Fighting hate. Even when it’s hard.

I spent a long time deciding whether or not to post this. I don’t expect it will make my friends on the right or the left happy.

Freedom Today Network

All FAQ images are original illustrations by The UnPopulist.

(Only interested in the full list of FAQ questions? Jump here.)

Your Comprehensive Guide to the Far Right: Part II

How a movement that poses the single biggest threat to open, liberal societies took control of the discourse and politics in America and abroad

TheUnPopulist.net

The UnPopulist published part two of the FAQ on the Far Right. (When Part 1 was released I wrote about the origin story of this FAQ, which you can find here.)

Part 2 provides a starting point for spotting and combatting far-right influence. This is especially important if you work or spend time in a space vulnerable to hijacking by the far right—organizations that care about free speech, freedom from government, and free markets—or if you comment on policy and politics today.

In a world where men close to the president of the United States are throwing Nazi salutes like it’s going out of style, spotting and understanding far-right influence can help make sense of the actions of organizations, governments, and individuals that have fallen under their sway. It can also help us avoid making things worse. Commenting on the far-right riots in the UK during summer 2024, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt of the Origin Story podcast outlined how ignorance of the far right led to irresponsible reporting and confused narratives around the riots. Ignorance of the far right elevated far-right concerns, advanced far-right policy goals, mainstreamed far-right talking points, and added to a climate of fear, confusion, and unpredictability.

In fact, there was an explanation: a long search for an excuse for violence against refugees had found a target: weaponizing the murder of three little girls. What happened next was understandable. And, understanding it meant also understanding that the number of truly scary people was small and easily overwhelmed by counter-protests.

If we had to stay on top of every new dog whistle and talking point, spotting far-right influence would be hopeless. But there are patterns and shared ideas that, if you become familiar with them, can help you develop a sort of spidey sense that can act as a prompt to take a closer look. Part 2 of the FAQ aims to help you get started on that spidey sense.

You can also keep an eye on folks who watch these movements for a living. I follow this Bluesky feed and many folks from this starter pack of extremism researchers, but they might not be for you, or that might be too much. (This stuff can be a lot.) One good beat reporter can keep you pretty on top of things without overwhelming you with horrible stuff.

The full FAQ on the far right has sixteen questions, linked individually below and followed by links to each of the two parts. If you find it helpful, please share it widely.

Overview of the FAQ on the Far Right

Your Comprehensive Guide to the Far Right: Part I

Understanding this rising threat to liberalism across the world is the first step to defeating it

TheUnPopulist.net

Your Comprehensive Guide to the Far Right: Part II

How a movement that poses the single biggest threat to open, liberal societies took control of the discourse and politics in America and abroad

TheUnPopulist.net

FAQ image is an original illustration by The UnPopulist.

I am a free trader. Adam Smith understood before there were even economists that wider market access and more freedom for producers and consumers make us richer, and being richer increases the effective freedom of ordinary people—freedom from want, freedom from illness, freedom to experiment and be the people we want to be. This is the reason that almost all economists believe in free trade, and their belief is supported by a century of evidence.

Canada responded to the announcement that the United States will impose across the board tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China with promised retaliatory tariffs. I don’t think that anyone knows what, if anything, will motivate Donald Trump to call this insanity off. But I wish they hadn’t started our response with tariffs.

There are other responses available. Trade agreements aren’t only about tariffs. They are about harmonizing legal and regulatory regimes to allow trade to take place. (This is why the UK couldn’t just leave the EU and continue trading with them freely, even if they unilaterally ended all tariffs.)

Most of these harmonizations are fairly benign. But one is pernicious, in my opinion: demands by the United States to bend the world to adopt its restrictive approach to intellectual property. To the extent that these protections are respected in Canada because of trade agreements with the United States, this is a better area than tariffs to abandon our side of the agreement. Abandoning these commitments would free Canadians up rather than costing us more.

In that spirit (and thanks to the legwork of a friend who knows the relevant policy well), I sent the following email to my federal and provincial representatives this morning. I suggest that other Canadians do the same on this or other issues that are important to them. (I’ve seen medical patents suggested. If you do the legwork on another issue, let me know.)

There are a lot of reasons to leave Meta.

I started trying to get friends to leave Messenger for end-to-end encrypted chats in 2022 after a Messenger chat between a mom and daughter about the daughter’s abortion allowed Nebraska to send them to jail. Beyond that, I’ve been reluctant to use Meta apps for sharing life updates, especially about the kids, since the apps started prompting me to make private photos from Messenger chat histories and photos not even on Meta but in my phone’s storage—photos I had specifically decided not to share more widely—into its “stories”. I don’t want apps that allow me to essentially pocket-dial my way to unthoughtful photo sharing.

Plus, you know, all of this stuff.

But there are reasons to stay on Meta.* There are family and friend connections that will not be replaced if we leave. The alternative often isn’t better connections, but no connection. And autonostalgia features anywhere, including the Meta apps, really are nice.

There is another reason it’s hard to leave that I haven’t seen talked about: Facebook’s ghosts.

If you’re old enough, you’re probably included when I say we were all on Facebook. We were all on Facebook because we were all on Facebook, and because we were all there we didn’t just poast through things, I don’t think. We shared our lives in a less cynical and less guarded way. We didn’t realize how optimistic we were.

Now not everyone is on Facebook and a lot of people are leaving. The thing is, we’re not all here anymore, and some of the people who aren’t here didn’t leave Facebook while they were. Whatever the rest of us do, they’re still there and they can’t move with us. Their chat logs, photos, post and comment thread memories are like ghosts.

If you were on Facebook in its heyday, you almost definitely have a few Facebook ghosts.

We used to live without these kinds of memories, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worthwhile. For many of us, it’s nice (even if sometimes overwhelming) to see a post come up in our newsfeed with a face we’ll never see again. Like Wash looking over his shoulder at the Serenity Memorial.

One of the ghosts that live on Facebook is our unthinking optimism about social media. The unguarded sharing of even intimate memories, left where someone else owns them. That could have been OK. I am not reflexively against important things being for sale. I’m sure some people still don’t mind. And that’s fine.

But I think I’d like to move more things to where my data is mine, and more of the scraps of me that people look back at belong more to the people who want to look back at me. YMMV.

*FWIW, I think you can reduce the cost of staying on Meta by a lot if you take a few steps to make sure they’re used more mindfully. Most importantly, turn off notifications, turn off recommendations on Instagram whenever they’re offered, and browse Facebook through the chronological “feeds” feed. You can also delete the apps, or at least strip their permissions. All of these things reduce the chance the platforms can do stuff you don’t want them to, including keeping you thoughtlessly engaged with outrage fuel.

Elizabeth Picciuto asked on Bluesky,

What do you fine people think that Trumpists consider virtues? Set aside whether they practice them. Set aside also that your answers will not be true virtues. What do *they* think the good/admirable person ought to be like and do?

— Elizabeth Picciuto (@epicciuto.bsky.social)
12:09 PM • Jan 31, 2025

This is something I had occasion to think about when writing an FAQ on the Far Right (You can find part one of two here, part two should be coming soon.) I agree with (and have learned a ton from) my FAQ co-author Tom Palmer: understanding Conservative Revolutionary thought is important for understanding a lot of what is going on with the illiberal “New Right”.

But this question prompted me to frame it differently. The result seems useful.

What virtues inspire the New Right?

I’m using “New Right” to encompass NatCons, MAGA, the far-right, and the international illiberal political Right in places like Germany (AfD), France (RN), Russia (Z/Putin), and Hungary (Orban). In case it’s not clear, this excludes groups like right-libertarians and anti-”woke” conservatives that are in the coalition for different reasons.

I think that there are three primary “virtues” of the political New Right. Each comes with corresponding “vices”. Understanding these helps me make sense of why certain policies are (or are not) priorities for the New Right.

1. Strength is virtuous for the New Right. To be strong is to be ostentatiously strong: strength is demonstrated through action. Strength establishes and maintains the hierarchies that the New Right believes should be in place. Strength is also commanding, not compromising.
   
   The corresponding vice is weakness. It’s embodied by “inaction”—things like deliberation (postpones action) or leaving something to institutions (shirks responsibility). It can even apply to compromise and agreement, which imply that both sides have given something—the strong side should simply dictate the outcome.
   

2. Supporting hierarchies is virtuous for the New Right. They try to brand their preferred hierarchies as “natural” no matter how much force is required to bring them about. This “natural” hierarchy is replicated at different levels of society: namely the government and in the home (see Jason Kuznicki’s essential piece on The Domus Mindset). This support should be thorough: publicly declared and privately performed.
   
   The corresponding vice of egalitarianism is embodied by equality that they believe can only come about if enforced, impersonalism (trusting in procedures and rules vs. commands from above), and refusal to support assigned places in the hierarchy (feminism, racial justice).

3. Loyalty to family and nation is virtuous for the New Right. Membership in both is tied to blood. Membership in the nation is established through a prolonged and inherited relationship with the physical land of the nation, to which its people adapt and become distinct. This means that national membership is not readily accessible to outsiders. Loyalty to family and nation means not only preferential treatment for people in those groups, but also their elevation and perpetuation, both of which come from having children.
   
   The corresponding vice of disloyalty comprises both the belief in the equality of outsiders (immigrants) who if not barred outright from membership should at least be disfavoured and the refusal or failure to perform assigned roles in perpetuating and protecting the family and nation (LGBTQ+ people, feminists).

I don’t think that there is consensus within the new right about how these virtues (and vices) work—for example, I do not believe J.D. Vance believes his family brings his loyalty to his nation into question, but some Trump supporters certainly do. But I do think some version of these virtues is espoused across the most influential groups forming the political coalition of the New Right.

Further, these three blend and are mutually reinforcing. To be “strong” is to be masculine men, to enforce hierarchy, and to defend family and nation. To be weak is to be feminine women, subservient, and protected.

“Personalism” triggers every “virtue” when it is paired with nationalism because the it embodies strength in individuals who make commands and codes those commands with support of nation.

Trans people trigger every “vice” because they do not assume their ascribed role in either the hierarchy or in perpetuating the nation/family, they undermine the idea that roles and strength are fixed, and they require social cooperation of others, which is interpreted as undermining and weakening those who should instead put them in their right place.

I encourage everyone to click through to the skeet and see other answers because mine aren’t the only ones. It also seems like she may be writing a thing. I’ll share if she does.

Urban regulation and the extent of the market

At AdamSmithWorks, I wrote about the similarities between certain types of urban regulations, especially land-use regulations, and how they are similar to limiting the “extent of the market” that Adam Smith said limits our ability to become richer. I’m using a podcast episode with the urbanist Alain Bertaud as a springboard. I hope you’ll take a look (and listen!)

The Great Antidote: Extra: Alain Bertaud on Urban Planning and Cities | Adam Smith Works

Diversity in cities creates challenges but the largeness of cities make them great places to address those challenges.

www.adamsmithworks.org/podcasts/great-antidote-podcast-bertaud-cities-february-2024-extra

More mindful social media

After the insanity of last weekend’s news, I mused about how to think about social media consumption and participation. I think we should think about it like everything else.

Social media isn't special

Mindfulness, not abstinence

www.janetbufton.ca/p/social-media-isn-t-special

Recs

Jonathan Blanks is just terrific in this piece on practical responses to the chaos and pessimism of the moment.

This by Noah Millman is sobering but important: the failed opposition to the far right in Europe under proportional systems makes explicit what is more obscure in first-past-the-post coalitions: old political coalitions are cracking because they differ not only in strategy but in aims. So far all but the far right are failing to deal with this reality.

New today at The UnPopulist, Alan Elrod argues for excluding trans elimination from the boundaries of liberal debate. Debates about trans rights and legal accommodations are a normal part of democratic politics. But, argues Elrod, that’s not what the Trump administration is doing, and what they’re doing should be firmly rejected by liberals.

It’s been eight years since my late friend Steve wrote this important piece about free marketers’ responses to the first Trump administration. Steve argued against simply tallying up good-sounding things against the bad. Instead, he insisted we weigh the importance of the human cost and the likely outcomes of policies. It’s a lodestone. (This piece for small government advocates is a good companion.)

—
Featured image is cropped from this one by Gina Canavan on Unsplash.

Me, looking around at the Internet right now: “I’ve got to start playing more games.”

I think the internet is great. I think social media can be great. My friends and family are geographically dispersed and I am so grateful to be able to stay on top of not only big life changes but little delights that used only to be accessible to friends who stayed nearby.

I bristle at the claim that everyone’s life would be better if we all unplugged completely. Condemning outright something that can facilitate low-cost human connection is a bad idea. And besides, you don’t have to use social media. Or have a smartphone, or a TV, or any other piece of modern tech. It’s fine. If it works for you, don’t use it. This is a completely morally neutral decision.

The more we treat social media like absolutely everything else, the more useful our response to it will be.

The predominant reaction to the should-not-be-surprising revelation that anything people do as often as they use social media leads to a dopamine reward sometimes feels like panic (or at least an affectation of panic) because dopamine supposedly implies “addictive”. But everything fun triggers a dopamine response (that whole thread is great).

Social media is(?) just something fun. We should enjoy fun and be mindful of how we get it.

Going cold turkey on social media seems silly (but again, if it’s for you, that’s fine. totally morally neutral). But thinking about why you’re using it, whether it’s fulfilling those needs, and how it’s affecting you seems as sensible with social media as it is with everything else.

For what do I use social media?

1. Keep in touch with friends and family

2. Promote my work

3. Follow the news

4. Follow commentary I enjoy

5. Pass the time in a fun way

   1. esp: Follow the Detroit Lions

   2. but also: Work through things I’m thinking about

These things don’t have to go together, however common it is for them to be bundled right now. These things are not equally rewarding or stressful. They can all be done in more than one way, and not every way of filling all of these needs is equally stressful or rewarding. You can schedule lunch, coffee, or a phone call with a friend. You can start a newsletter (hello!) to promote your work. You can read news sites (plug for the most local sources plus the most boring national/international news source you can find). You can read commentary (do not confuse this with news) where it’s published.

And there are lots of ways to have fun that don’t come with all the baggage that sometimes sneaks onto social media with its other functions.

It’s useful to be aware of how you react to the things you do—whether they drain your resources or help fill you up—and why you do those things. And it’s useful to think about whether or not you can meet those needs in a way that, if it can’t fill you up, at least does not drain you so much.

So, like I said. I’ve got to start playing more games.

Featured photo is by Robin Worrall on UnSplash

One of the most fun things I get to do for work is online reading groups. It’s something I started doing a bit in 2019 and then hoo boy, did demand take off in 2020. But they’re still fun now! I love working through a book, the best way to do it is in conversation with other people, and the best way to find enough people who want to read the same book is on the Internet.

These days, the reading groups I get to host are hosted by Liberty Fund.

One of the books we read late last year was Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. I put together some of my thoughts from the reading group discussion and they’re up today at The Reading Room at the Online Library of Liberty.

Hoffer makes what I think is a pretty common mistake about liberalism for conservatives to make, with parallels to the conservatives that try to claim Hayek. I hope you’ll take a look.

Liberalism in The True Believer | Online Library of Liberty

In November, Liberty Fund hosted a virtual reading group on Eric Hoffer's short book, The True Believer.  One topic of discussion was Hoffer's conservatism, which is implicit to his theories of mass movements. One place it’s implied is in his mistreatment of liberalism. In section 52, under “Deprecation of the Present”, Hoffer sums up his views of conservatives, skeptics, liberals, radicals, and reactionaries.

oll.libertyfund.org/publications/reading-room/2025-01-22-liberalism-in-the-true-believer

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I wrote about a common mistake that liberals make when talking politics: we assume that the liberal assumptions that were safe a couple of decades ago are still safe now. They often aren’t.

For example, we can’t only argue that we shouldn’t intervene in others’ lives for their own good anymore. We have to argue for a broad concept of a private sphere in which individuals should be allowed to make their own choices, rather than acting as part of a social collective. I illustrate starting from a post about the nature of gender by Andrew Jason Cohen at ProSocial Libertarians.

Liberal assumptions

If we don't assume liberal premises hold, our arguments have to get deeper

www.janetbufton.ca/p/liberal-assumptions

I also expand on my belief that the political Right has made gender, like immigration, a newly salient political sorting issue, whether moderates, centrists, and the centre-left like it or not. The argument is very similar to the one I made in Liberal Currents back in the fall about the Right’s pursuit of closed borders as a useful political signal.

Gender and political sorting

The Right draws another line in the sand

www.janetbufton.ca/p/gender-and-political-sorting

Recs

Two great pieces by Andy Craig came out today, one at Liberal Currents about fruitful paths for constitutional reform in the United States, and another at The UnPopulist about the type of liberalism we need now.

Zack Beauchamp’s article at Vox discussing the type of politics that frames attacks on liberal democratic norms as defence of liberal democratic norms is a valuable read.

This new piece at Liberal Currents by Toby Buckle about our meta-narratives on gender was really helpful, it’s worth your time.