Yuck.
Staring at the political menu these days is enough to make a man lose his appetite. All I see on offer is left-wing socialist authoritarianism (plus war!) or right-wing socialist authoritarianism (plus war!).
That’s it. That’s the entire menu. Those are the specials of the day, every day, year after year, with no realistic small-government option on the board*. There’s no real choice for anyone who thinks the state (if tolerated at all) should mostly leave people the hell alone.
Both sides talk a big game about “freedom,” of course. They always do. But in the mouths of a politician, the word has no real meaning. Just look at the actual policies, the spending, the regulations, the mandates — and the bodies they leave in their wake — and the differences start looking cosmetic.
It’s always the same overgrown, coercive machine with different branding and slightly different preferred victims and scapegoats.
Just look at the money — that neither party cares about. The national debt is careening past the point where anyone serious still pretends the numbers are sustainable. Trillions upon trillions in deficit spending, year after year, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
Entitlements and military budgets expand, industrial policy and subsidies get handed out like candy to favored industries, and the Federal Reserve keeps the whole crooked carnival running with money printing that quietly steals from everybody.
Both teams cheer when it’s “their” priorities getting funded. Neither team ever seriously proposes cutting the state back in any meaningful way.
Both “teams” love regulations and mandates. Occupational licensing that protects incumbents. Environmental rules that act as barriers to entry while doing little for the actual environment — and often harm it! Speech codes enforced through bureaucratic pressure and “disinformation” partnerships. Zoning that prices young people out of housing. Agricultural and energy policies that pick winners and losers. Surveillance that expands under every administration that claims to hate it when the other guy is in charge.
The administrative state just keeps growing, and the politicians of both major parties treat it as the natural order of things.
And the wars, of course. Always the wars. Endless foreign interventions, bases everywhere, blank checks for allies and proxies, the perpetual emergency footing that justifies domestic expansions of power. to support empire abroad.
Left and right have their preferred theaters and preferred narratives, but the result is the same: American blood and treasure spent in places most voters couldn’t find on a map, while the national-security apparatus grows more powerful at home.
Peace is never the default. Restraint is never the default. “Just one more intervention” is the bipartisan consensus.
COVID was the perfect stress test of what I’m talking about, and both Trump and Biden failed it from a libertarian perspective — spectacularly.
Trump’s Operation Warp Speed was a massive exercise in industrial policy and liability shielding for pharmaceutical companies, coupled with lockdowns, travel bans, and emergency powers that set terrible precedents. The same man who correctly noted that the virus was overhyped in some ways still green-lit the machinery of centralized control.
Biden then took that machinery and ran with it: vaccine mandates that made a mockery of “my body my choice” rhetoric, continued emergency declarations, censorship pressure on social media platforms, and a general contempt for anyone who questioned the official line.
And under both presidents, the grinning, demonic jackal named Fauci was there throughout, lying through his filthy teeth about the entire thing every step of the way.
Back-to-back, we suffered two presidents, two parties, both with the same underlying assumption: in a crisis (real or manufactured), the state gets to decide how you live, work, travel, and what goes into your body. Both political parties treated the dissenters as the problem while they embraced the overreach.
It’s exhausting. The Overton window has shifted so far toward permanent big government that arguing for the opposite feels like speaking a dead language.
The “right” increasingly wants industrial policy, protectionism, culture-war state power, and its own version of social engineering. The “left” wants the full suite of redistribution, equity mandates, speech controls, and global governance ambitions.
Both despise free markets. Both are comfortable with surveillance, debt, and the forever war posture. Both worship the Federal Reserve. Both treat the Constitution as a joke, only mentioning the document when they are out of power.
So where could a small-government future possibly come from?
I don’t have a tidy answer, and anyone selling one is probably lying. Politics as currently structured is a machine for expanding power. The incentives point only one way.
On the other hand, human nature hasn’t changed. People still prefer prosperity to poverty, autonomy to micromanagement, and voluntary cooperation to coercion — at least when they are on the receiving end of that coercion.
Will people learn to give up the ring of power and throw it in the volcano if they end up on the receiving end of it enough times?
Parallel institutions, free cities experiments, technological exit options (encryption, decentralized finance, remote work that makes location less relevant), cultural shifts that make dependency uncool again, and relentless education about how markets and civil society actually work — these are slow, unsexy paths, but sometimes that’s the only path available.
Then again, secessionist energy, whether formal or de facto, keeps bubbling up because the one-size-fits-all superstate is increasingly unworkable for 330+ million people who don’t share the same values.
Maybe the most realistic hope is that the system eventually overreaches so badly that large numbers of people simply stop granting it legitimacy in their daily lives. I don’t have any faith in some glorious revolution, but how about just a quiet, widespread opting-out?
History shows that empires and overgrown states don’t last forever. They have a tendency to collapse under their own bloat. And ours looks mighty bloated, doesn’t it?.
But for right now, the political landscape remains bleak for anyone who still believes the state should quit being a nanny, a planner, a moralist, and a perpetual warrior — or better yet, stop… being.
We keep getting offered the same two brands of authoritarianism. The only sane response is to keep pointing out that both are poison, keep building alternatives, and refuse to pretend this is the best we can do.
Naturally,
Adam
*Yes, I know the Libertarian Party exists. (sigh) We all know the Libertarian Party exists.
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