Steven Greenhut: Left’s teachable moment about perils of unlimited government

SACRAMENTO — The freer the nation, the less the public needs to care about anything that its leader might say or do. In freer nations, the leader’s powers are strictly limited and the citizens’ rights are protected. Yet in America today, we are dependent on every whim, utterance and narcissistic rage post from our president, as he pursues policies that could disrupt our lives. In that way, we’re more like North Korea than our founders’ America.

This has always been true to a degree, but since Donald Trump took office last year, Americans have been experiencing a severe form of political whiplash. Firmly in control of the nation’s massive federal apparatus, MAGA and its Republican lickspittles in Congress have thrived on chaos. Every day, the president issues some new threat. He imposes new tariffs on countries that don’t kiss the ring, then backs off, then imposes even harsher ones.

After getting his feelings hurt for not receiving a peace prize that he believes he deserves, Trump threatened to invade a territory controlled by an ally. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize… I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” he wrote in a letter to the prime minister of Norway (who neither controls the Nobel committee, nor Greenland, which is a Danish territory). Meanwhile, ICE agents are treating Minneapolis as if they are Marines trying to subdue Fallujah.

Trump often backs down, so the nation breathed a sigh of relief after he declared he wouldn’t use military force to grab it. But who knows who he will bully today? Social media is abuzz with photos of bruises on his hand, sparking widespread chatter about his health. Our lives really shouldn’t revolve around the condition of our leader. Some conservatives have started referring to Trump as “Daddy,” which suggests that many Americans probably prefer a king.

I’ve often criticized Trump-era Republicans for tossing aside their freedom birthright in favor of the stale porridge of authoritarianism. My vain hope today is to convince my newfound anti-Trump allies (who have disliked my years of writing against progressive policies) to view the current national nightmare as a teachable moment.

Both political sides assume they will always control the levers of power. But they forget this important axiom: Don’t ever support a new power that you wouldn’t want in the hands of your worst enemy. Maybe it’s time for Trump’s foes to recognize the importance of limiting executive power, so that no one can abuse it this way in the future.

It’s an admittedly difficult change of mindset, especially given all the hypocrisy on the right. Conservatives have spent my adult life touting limited government. Those ideas are correct, but it’s hard to stomach their lectures now that they’ve embraced Trump’s vision for unlimited government.

Still, progressivism’s historic task has been to reduce the sphere of the private sector and increase the realm of public officials, shifting decision-making from free individuals (bound by some easily defined limits) to the administrative state. Their goals are high-minded (protecting the environment, improving workplace conditions, breaking up powerful interests, helping the poor), but their tools always involve taxation, regulation and government power.

Now that our federal government is controlled by a man they fear and despise, can modern progressives at least finally understand libertarian motives? Aren’t we better off in a world that enforces firm limits on what politicians can do rather than whatever we live under now?

President Woodrow Wilson, an early progressive, made a case for the “New Liberty” that replaced the founding’s focus on negative rights (the right to be left alone) with a system of positive rights (you have the right to a host of benefits that government will provide to you). “Without the watchful interference, the resolute interference, of the government, there can be no fair play between individuals and such powerful institutions as the trusts. Freedom today is something more than being let alone. The program of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative merely,” he wrote.

Since that speech in 1912, the nation has built a Byzantine system of bureaucracies and regulations, which has led to a federal government that runs a $38.4-trillion debt and micromanages many aspects of our lives. Modern progressives are even more aggressive in their desire to expand the tax/benefit/regulation smorgasbord.

The latest Democratic rock star, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for instance, promised during his inauguration speech to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Anyone who has lived through any of the modern world’s collectivist societies could explain there’s nothing warm about it.

Such rhetoric leads to a society where everyone fights for the ability to try to remake the nation in their own image. And that leads to our current moment, where there aren’t sufficient guardrails to control the impulses of a mad king.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute and a member of the Southern California News Group editorial board. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.