By Tom Mullen
July 14, 2025
The Trump administration, which won the 2024 election promising libertarian smaller government and an end to endless wars, has summarily dumped its libertarian promises. Elon Musk has split from the administration after spending several months identifying myriad opportunities to cut federal spending under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The "Big, Beautiful Bill" has replaced those cuts with spending increases that will outpace those under the previous Democratic administration, as every Republican administration of my lifetime has done. Funding the Ukraine War is also back online.
History isn't just rhyming here; it's repeating. It is the mirror image of the post-Revolutionary War split between Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian libertarians after their common enemy, the British, was defeated. Today, the MAGA Republicans embody classic Hobbesian/Burkean conservatism, while modern libertarians carry the torch of Jeffersonian principles rooted in John Locke's property based inalienable rights. The defeat of the modern "British"-the progressive left-has exposed this divide, revealing that the MAGA movement's heart beats closer to Hobbesian control than Lockean liberty.
Many conservatives may object to my identification together of Hobbes and Burke, given the quite different visions they had for the form of government. But they both agreed on the purpose of government: to hold back man's savage instincts at any cost, including liberty.
In my book, Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From?, I argue that conservatives, at their core, believe that the "inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection," as Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Men are entitled only what liberty the government allows after fulfilling this primary purpose. Burke agreed with Hobbes on this essential point, quoting Hobbes directly in explaining the problem with natural rights: that they give men "a right to everything."
Burke's only departure from Hobbes was the means for this thwarting. Hobbes argued that only a unitary, all powerful central government could achieve it. Burke argued that what he called "prescription" - the power of long-established traditions to restrain the savage impulses - could also play a part.
MAGA Republicans are a striking combination of both visions. Their rhetoric often champions "law and order," a Hobbesian call to maintain societal stability against perceived threats. They have no problem with a massive military establishment, although they reject wars of choice for the purposes of benefiting the peoples of foreign nations rather than purely for domestic security.
The culture wars, on the other hand, are rooted in Burkean prescription. The overturning of long-established norms and traditions - standard ops for the revolutionary left - are a direct threat to civilization that must be reversed. Here there is some overlap with libertarianism. If those traditions are the non-involvement of government in certain areas of human activity, libertarians are all for it. But even if the particular tradition is inconsistent with libertarian principles, those traditions must be maintained, similar to the conservative insistence on maintaining primogeniture in Jefferson's day.
Since for conservatives the natural state of man is a state of war, the natural economic system of conservativism is mercantilism, which views economic activity as having winners and losers. Recall Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. His constant complaint was "we don't win anymore" when speaking of international trade. He promised instead that Americans would "get tired of winning." Alexander Hamilton's Federalists saw the economy precisely the same and made the same promises.
None of this is at all compatible with the libertarian worldview, where life, liberty, and entitlement to the fruits of one's labor are property rights the government is tasked to defend. This "American Creed," crystallized in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, was endorsed by the revolutionary Congress in 1776 but quickly rejected by the conservative Federalists once the Revolutionary War was won. Jeffersonians were just as startled by the abrupt shift away from those principles once the Federalists took power as modern libertarians are by Trump and MAGA's whiplash turn today.
Progressives represented a threat to both conservative order and libertarian freedom, uniting these groups in a temporary alliance. Yet, just as the Federalists and Jeffersonians diverged after defeating the British, the MAGA Republicans and libertarians are splitting post-progressive defeat.
But between the reign of the Federalists and ultimate conservative victory under the Republicans, something happened. Jefferson called it "the revolution of 1800," considering his and his party's election as a return to the original revolution's libertarian roots. What followed was a half century of libertarian dominance in American electoral politics, where even the suggestion the government should be involved in building roads could lose one an election.
Yes, this period was marred by the institution of slavery, a norm of human civilization for all of recorded history, but this was not at all an essential or necessary part of the libertarian system. On the contrary, Locke rejected slavery as merely the state of war in another form. Jefferson himself and his compatriots were constantly seeking a way out of the institution. All the arguments for continuing the institution - even when made by Jeffersonians in times of weakness - were rooted in conservative thinking, not libertarian principles.
The American Revolution itself was rooted in libertarianism, with Locke's ideas flowing through the writings of British Whigs John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon and American revolutionaries like Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. Thus, when the Federalists assumed power and began governing as conservatives, there was a backlash that led to decades of libertarian electoral victories.
Can another revolution of 1800 occur in America today? The prospects seem grim. Lockean property rights are no longer even a memory for most modern Americans. A century and a half of progressive (originally "Republican Party") education has purged those ideas from the American psyche. When considering a political issue, absolutely no one poses the question, "Who has a property right here?" - the only question that should be posed in any political argument.
Still, the original libertarian movement during the Enlightenment came from somewhere. The history of mankind is decidedly unlibertarian until this relatively brief, shining moment that just happened to be responsible for everything good about modern civilization - including but by no mean limited to the abolition of slavery. The inalienable rights of the individual, including the right to compete in a free market, to be left alone by the government unless convicted of a crime by his peers (not the government), the freedom to say or think anything one believes without fear of violent repression - these are all libertarian ideas.
The vestiges of these ideas are still alive - barely - in the modern American psyche, despite more than a century's attacks from the left and right. Perhaps only another Enlightenment can reawaken them. Libertarians can only hope.