With a few exceptions — energy, education, judicial appointments, and border controls — President Trump and his administration have become a threat to this nation’s republican government – a threat to the Constitution, the US and world economy, and US national defense. If traditional Republican candidates don’t make headway in recapturing the party from Trump’s MAGA sycophants by the 2026 primaries, the US will need a new third party. Its purpose will be to provide an alternative to the protectionist, large government, debt-addicted Republicans and Democrats.
John Tenniel illustation of Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum from Alice and Wonderland
Almost two and a half centuries ago the United States became the world’s first classical-liberal republic. Both major US parties have since abandoned that heritage for the corrupt, statist, authoritarian government models that the US broke from during the American Revolution and Constitutional Convention. If the Republican Party proves itself incapable of returning to that heritage by continuing to tie itself to Trump and his MAGA sycophants, the formation of a new classical liberal party, however challenging, will become a “must do.”
We can and should discuss what the bedrock principles of such a recaptured Republican Party or new third party would be but at the same time move ahead with organizing around those principles we can agree on. Here are the ones that I’d suggest as essential:
- Foreign policy and defense. Restore US deterrence with a crash program to rebuild US national defense. Coordinate with allies having shared interests.[i]
- Immigration and border. Expand productive legal immigration while continuing to block illegal immigration.
- Government size. Reduce government debt, spending, and taxation. Abolish unconstitutional federal departments and federal agencies, especially those that combine executive, legislative, and judicial functions (the so-called “fourth branch”). Keep budgets at present size or smaller — the defense sector excepted for now. Where possible, let the natural growth of the economy reduce and eliminate the remaining debt.
- Trade and innovation. Expand free trade except for carefully vetted national security products and services.Negotiate free-trade treaties with allies and potential allies. Negotiate the return of the US to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which the US never should have bowed out of.[ii]
- Energy. Continue market-driven “all azimuths” energy production. Terminate all “green” subsidies.[iii]
- Money. End the Federal Reserve System’s fiat-money money monopoly. Allow gold-backed and digital currencies to compete as legal currencies, TheFed has been a long-running policy disaster, leaving a legacy of inflation, depressions, recessions, investment uncertainty, and low to mediocre growth in its wake. [iv] Trump’s attempt to control the central bank will only make matters worse.
- Taxation. Move to a flat tax system for growth, simplicity, and elimination of corruption through special-interest rent-seeking.[v]
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Footnotes
[i] Canada, Denmark, and Greenland are allies, not hostile takeover targets. The US must not disgrace itself with capricious, unstable, and contradictory policies or red lines and sanctions that are continually deferred, as with Russia and Venezuela. Punitive tariffs must not be imposed on allies like India (e.g., for buying Russian oil) while a free pass is given to a hostile power like Communist China that is an even more consequential purchaser of Russian oil.
[ii] On the known folly of tariffs and President Trump’s profound ignorance of basic economics, see among many other articles to the same effect, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/you-cant-break-the-laws-of-economics-supply-and-demand-a6786d1d.
[iii] See https://www.energy.gov/topics/climate for the executive summary and full report of the science behind this policy.
[iv] See Lawrence H. White, Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin (Cambridge University Press, 2023) for the details.
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