Liberals and national populists: a fragile alliance

Recent developments in the US administration that have led to the noisy Trump-Musk split highlight one fact: alliances between liberals/libertarians and national populists are inherently fragile. The main link between the two currents is of a negative nature: an alliance forged by a common rejection of the status quo. But this link alone will not be strong enough to withstand the various ideological incompatibilities in the medium to long term.

First, it is important to try to understand the reasons behind the growth of the national-populist or post-liberal right. This is not at all a simple task. Each country and each movement has its own particularities that deserve a detailed approach. But there is one issue that runs through all of them: the crisis of liberalism. In both Europe and the United States, we have witnessed, over the last few years, a perversion of the very concept of liberalism, which has gradually been captured by progressive agendas with hegemonic aspirations that reject and undermine the classical-liberal and liberal-conservative foundations. Liberalism, it should be understood, has always had more progressive dimensions and variants, but the process through which progressivism became the hegemonic liberal interpretation had very serious consequences for liberalism itself. Complacency, opportunism or simply intellectual and ideological errors were the driving forces behind the liberal bankruptcy that, naturally, paved the way for a national-populist reaction to a Global Leviathan.

This Leviathan has become increasingly powerful largely due to liberals and members of the centre-right (far beyond the parties that claim to be nominally “liberal”, even though these are generally also part of the problem), who have managed to discredit globalisation, a concept that is crucial for world development and prosperity, by making it synonymous with globalism. It is therefore important to emphasise that globalisation and globalism are not concepts that should be used interchangeably. An international order guided by the principles of classical liberalism and conservative liberalism rejects and transcends the globalism/nationalism dichotomy. This dichotomy is false, since it is possible, as history has already shown, to have a world with a plurality of sovereign and independent political entities that voluntarily relate to each other through the mechanism of free trade, rejecting a hypertrophied concept of supranationality. This deepens economic interdependence and creates conditions for global development and prosperity, a more effective containment of possible armed conflicts and uncontrolled migratory movements than any supranational bureaucratic organizations – the globalists' favorite solution.

This raises another inevitable question: immigration. Once again, liberal-conservatives reject the nationalism/globalism dichotomy. Immigration is generally beneficial and stimulates development and innovation, that is a fact, but with the imperative condition that it be controlled and regulated according to the social and cultural conditions of the host country. Otherwise, social cohesion is at risk and multiple tensions arise (cultural, security, fiscal, in public services) in States that already subject citizens to a suffocating tax system. It was also due to the failure to recognise this obvious problem that the door was wide open to nationalisms, which knew how to ride the wave of popular dissatisfaction.

The resistance led by national populists to a system dominated by the woke agenda, even if not necessarily coherent or well-directed, is healthy and desirable. And it is precisely this resistance that leads liberals (or at least liberals not captured by wokeism ) and national populists to an alliance. Liberal nature is contrary to this doctrinal omnipresence in fundamental sectors of society that, in its final stage, leads to censorship in universities and on social networks, to the control of the media and leads large companies to adopt LGBT, DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and ESG agendas uncritically, fearing some form of direct or indirect punishment in case of non-compliance. As Dalmacio Negro Pavón rightly pointed out in his work La Tradición de la Libertad , “the liberal reaction today must be, above all, against pseudo-statist liberalism, whose method is that of lies and propaganda” and against “neutrality” which is nothing more than “a clouding of consciousness for which “anything goes” because everything is the same”. It is precisely because of this sense of need and urgency to offer a united and firm response to this censorship drift that liberal-conservatives and national-populists are on the same side in this cultural war.

However, while this need certainly unites them, it is also true that other approaches and visions create incompatibilities that will sooner or later lead them to rupture. There are many points of tension, but one thing they all have in common: the State. More precisely, the role it should play in the political order. While for national populists the State represents an essential vehicle for implementing a political program focused on the national interest, and therefore needs to be strengthened to intervene in various sectors considered fundamental, for liberals the State is a mechanism that must exist fundamentally to ensure that individual freedom is not trampled upon. This does not mean that liberals do not value order and security. Quite the contrary. Without these two principles, a liberal political order cannot exist. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that for liberals, order and security are means to achieve a fundamental political end, i.e. freedom, while for nationalists they can be an end in themselves, to which freedom must be subordinated. This incompatibility was explained in a succinct but irreproachable manner by Juan Ramón Rallo: “For liberalism, the subject of sovereignty is the individual, so that it is individuals who have inalienable rights against any collective that seeks to trample on them, and it is individuals who, furthermore, constitute political communities through their voluntary association; for nationalism, in turn, the subject of sovereignty is the nation, so it is nations that have rights against any other entity that seeks to trample on them – including individuals.”

One of the vectors where this tension is particularly clear is in the economy. For example, JD Vance, the US vice-president and one of the leading faces of post-liberalism, has repeatedly demonstrated his support for state interventionism: from raising the minimum wage to protectionism, Vance’s economic agenda is closely aligned with that of many socialists (even if neither Vance nor the socialists would like to acknowledge it). This is economic nationalism, a doctrine with which, of course, no classical liberal/conservative can sympathise. In this respect, the fatal arrogance or hubris (to invoke Hayek) of progressive socialists is not fundamentally different from that of national-populists, even if their objectives may be nominally different. State-imposed manipulations of the economy undermine one of the fundamental principles of liberalism, the spontaneous order, which has consistently proven superior to a top-down planned order.

The issue of protectionism deserves special attention. Firstly, because it involves an approach to free trade that is diametrically opposed to that advocated by liberals. Secondly, because it was after “Liberation Day” – when Donald Trump launched an extensive package of trade barriers – that the distance between Musk and the President began to take shape. While Trump proclaimed that the country would once again become independent and that prosperity for the American people was now closer, Musk shared, on his X, an iconic video of Milton Friedman, in which he explains that the invisible hand and the free market are fundamental to the production of even a simple pencil.

Given the strength of national-populist movements and the growing popularity of post-liberal ideas, it is essential to understand them properly – without simplistic demonizations, but also without naïve support. And, in this context, today’s liberals face a double challenge: to recognize and confront head-on the crisis of liberalism that has allowed itself to be captured and instrumentalized by statist, progressive and woke currents, while at the same time being able to construct and articulate a constructive critique of the most dangerous aspects of post-liberalism, thus preventing it from triumphing among the liberal ruins. This is the great liberal mission of our times.

Editorial note: The views expressed by the authors of the articles published in this column may not be fully shared by all members of Oficina da Liberdade and do not necessarily reflect the position of Oficina da Liberdade on the topics discussed. Despite having a common view of the State, which they want to be small, and the world, which they want to be free, the members of Oficina da Liberdade and its guest authors do not always agree on the best way to get there.