Citizenship, Justice, and the New Golden Age

Josiah Lippincott

Josiah Lippincott is a Ph.D. student at the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College, and a writer for American Greatness and The Federalist. His writing can be found on Substack under the name Regime Critic. This is the keynote speech of the annual dinner of The St. Croix Review held on October 17, 2025.

Derek Suszko and your editor invited me here to speak tonight on the theme of immigration. I am happy to oblige: The question of border security was paramount to Trump’s victory. Indeed, his greatest accomplishment thus far has been to dramatically reduce the number of illegals flowing into our country.

Yet to raise the issue of immigration means doing more than just addressing the problems of stemming illegal entrants or even the subject of deporting illegals already here. The question of legal migration is of even greater importance.

The question of who should become a citizen raises the question of what a citizen even is. What are the duties and rights of citizenship? What must one give up to become a citizen? What does one receive in return?

To raise these questions is to raise the question of what government is even for.

Here at last we come to the heart of the issue: We come to the question of justice itself. What is the best way of life? What authority is required to protect and secure this way of life?

The libertarians are fond of asking where we should “draw the line.” However, it is much more clarifying to ask who should draw the line: who should have the power, by right, to inflict harm on his fellow men?

By raising the question of violence, the real issues of immigration, citizenship, and justice appear in stark relief. Blood, torture, flogging, misery — WAR! — now we are talking! Death makes everything clear.

Politicians, journalists, and activists have every incentive to shroud this fundamental reality. They want to pretend that government is about health care, Social Security, roads, clean water, and education. Government is when we sing kumbaya and all work together to improve society.

The modern state, at its beating heart, is an apparatus of coercion. Simply raise the question of what happens if you do not obey, and then you will understand. What happens if I don’t submit to the lockdown? What happens if I refuse to wear the mask? What happens if I don’t pay my taxes?

Then the smiling façade of collective action for the “greater good” disappears. The open hand of common purpose transforms itself into a mailed fist ready to smash all skeptics and dissidents.

The government of the United States maintains a vast network of military bases, prisons, police departments, spy agencies, and nuclear weapons. Millions of regulators, bureaucrats, and administrators cover the surface of the nation snooping on everything from the words you say online to the amount of water in your toilet bowl.

From old age pensions, to student loans, to mortgages, to the market rate of interest, to banking — the long arm of The State finds its way into virtually every corner of our lives.

These vast instruments of power do not exist because your rulers trust you. Far from it. It is precisely because you are so bad, because you are so irresponsible with your freedom that your rulers have decided the only way you can have liberty is by ensuring you use it correctly, by which they mean using your rights in a way they find acceptable.

A citizen, therefore, in our present circumstance primarily means being a “human resource” that needs to be “managed” by the wise. In our case, the wise are the credentialled experts in Washington, D.C. The COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandate were a perfect example of the real meaning of citizenship in modern America.

In 2020, I was stationed in Pendleton, California, with the Marine Corps. I remember the insanity of those first few months. Police shut down the beaches and arrested anyone caught going out in the water. Skate parks were filled with sand or covered in steel cables to prevent teenagers from congregating. The parks had yellow tape around the play equipment. Local officials used drones to monitor my neighborhood to find anyone going where they were not allowed.

I distinctly remember the air of fear and paranoia that permeated every aspect of life then — dystopian.

I longed to rebel. One evening, I snuck out of my apartment down to the beach. I slipped past the barricades and patrolling officers till I came down to the waterfront. I was utterly alone save for one homeless schizophrenic in the distance screaming his ramblings at God and nature alike.

Storm clouds gathered in the distance, rolling in from the Pacific. I watched them for a long time. The gathering physical darkness reflected the nation’s dystopian spiritual condition. America has never been the same since.

The scars of lockdowns, mandates, and the despair of the Biden years have not gone away. We can paper over them, but we cannot, in the end, ignore what happened.

Things have improved, yes. The lockdowns ended. The mandate was unenforceable. The idiocy of the Biden years grew to such an extent that even “respectable” people had had enough. Trump’s sweeping victory in 2024 was a beacon of hope.

Trump, like a meteor blazing across a dark night, brought hope for a better day. Who could possibly forget the aftermath of the assassination attempt as Trump, covered in blood, pumped his fist in the air: FIGHT! Yes. We must fight. We have no choice. We must push back the darkness. We must.

Trump’s courage and charisma have propelled him to a comeback story for the ages. The man is a near unstoppable force. He is a man of destiny. His opponents, all lesser mortals, can do nothing but stare slack-jawed in his wake.

Trump represents a vision of the possible, of a better and more peaceful future. He speaks often of a new Golden Age. Trump is instinctually drawn to prosperity, greatness, and success. Trump is a winner. He is animated by the spirit of victory, by the fire of eternal youth.

Yet Trump cannot bring this golden future into being by himself. The problems are profound, deeper than even he knows. Trump, like Moses, points to a promised land that he will not enter. Trump is the Great Revealer and the Great Restrainer. Through his very being in the world, he reveals the true character of his enemies. When the masks went on, the mask came off.

Trump holds back greater evils. Yet in doing so, he preserves the current system. The great irony is that Trump is saving the liberals from themselves! Trump is not a radical. Far from it. He is a shrewd moderate, a businessman and ’90s Democrat who is more interested in making a deal than taking an ideological stand.

Trump isn’t here to blow up our institutions but to reform them. He doesn’t want to undo the post-1945 international order and American hegemony, he wants to make it work better. Trump’s primary complaint about the ruling class is not that they are evil but that they are stupid.

If the establishment were smart, they would try and work with Trump. They would accept his criticisms of their order and would respect his populist energy enough to blunt the more extreme aspects of their program.

If the Left was smart, they would have tried to keep the post-1994 political balance going for as long as possible: Republicans pushing for balanced budgets and low taxes on the one hand, but with no real desire to undo the Great Society or New Deal state. Crucially, the establishment should have avoided all further wars and economic dislocation. But the Left could not be satisfied. The uniparty needed new wars, new schemes of social transformation at gunpoint.

Trump is the response to leftist hubris. But even he is not willing to undo this system. Trump is still sending money and weapons to Ukraine and still hip deep in the Middle East. We are still in NATO, the administrative state still dominates our lives, Anthony Fauci is still a free man. Under Trump, current estimates put us on track to naturalize some new 600,000 to 800,000 immigrants. Those migrants continue to support the Democratic party by a ratio of about 3:2 in the best case.

Trump has not solved all of our problems. He has not answered the deepest political questions. This is not to attack him. Trump has done more than anyone else in my lifetime to stand against the Left. I merely wish to show the nature of the problem. Before we can find a solution, we must acknowledge what we are up against.

Taxes are still high, crime is still out of control (as the stabbing of Iryna Zarutska makes clear), and the Left has ramped up terrorism and violence. The failed assassinations of President Trump have been followed by the murder of Charlie Kirk. It is clear that the nation is still in a dark place.

We are running budget deficits of $2 trillion a year, half of which goes to paying interest to our current creditors! The national debt sits at $38 trillion, with no end in sight. Things cannot go on like this. We cannot borrow money forever. We cannot print money forever. Resources have to come from somewhere. There is no magic in this life.

The looming fiscal and monetary crisis is an enormous long-term problem, but in the short run, economic conditions remain bad for the young. Housing prices are sky high — the average new home costs $415,000. With 20 percent down, a 6.5 percent interest rate, and typical property taxes, the average first-time home buyer is looking at a monthly mortgage payment of $3,000 a month. The average salary is just $63,000 a year. You do the math.

There is a reason why young people are angry. The financial crisis of 2008, the lockdowns, and the subsequent inflation make it feel, for many, as if they will never get ahead. Boiling resentment, at the elderly in particular, is a normal feature of discourse among the young. “OK, Boomer” isn’t just a meme, it is a battle cry.

Zohran Mamdani in New York and Omar Fateh in Minneapolis show the future of leftist politics — explicit calls for more third-world migration, wage and price controls, and central planning in the name of racial justice.

What can the mainstream right offer in response? Older conservative Americans may be stunned by the rise in socialism among Zoomers and Millennials, but they have little ground to stand on. How can the eager recipients of Social Security and Medicare balk at an attitude of “entitlement” among the young?

Watching retirees with fat government pensions and monthly checks from the state, paid for with taxpayer dollars collected from young people who are still working, complain about the unwillingness of young people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps?

A dangerous realization is spreading among young people on both the left and the right: Why is it that money and resources should only flow one way? Why should Social Security and Medicare pay for the expenses of the old? Why not simply reverse the flow? Why shouldn’t rich boomers with paid for houses, 401(k)s, and rental properties be forced to pay their fair share by subsidizing the young instead of the other way around?

It does not help things that America’s elderly are predominantly white and the young are majority non-white. Identity politics pours fuel on the fire of intergenerational resentment. The 2020 BLM riots were simply a foretaste of things to come.

The trajectory is clear: Americans increasingly view their fellow citizens not as friends and allies but as potential pockets to be picked, as a source of resources and wealth. The old terms of the post-war social contract, in which young people were expected to pay into a social “safety net” that would be there for them in their old age, are laughable.

Cynicism and nihilism are the standard among the young today. No one believes government, media, or academic establishments. The truth is simple: I am simply a paypig. I am an ATM for government bureaucrats to draw down, a warm body to be sent into wars abroad, and a symbol of heteronormativity, patriarchy, and colonialism. In the eyes of those in power, I am at best a cog to be fit into place, at worst a problem to be solved.

Last year, I estimate that my wife and I paid, all told, some $25,000 in federal income taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, property taxes, import duties, and license and registration fees. God alone knows how much income I have foregone due to the hidden cost of administrative regulations.

We cannot go on this way. The current order is fragile. Trump may hold back the tide of resentment for a while, but eventually there will be a crisis and catastrophe that the ruling class cannot manage. What hope is there for the future? How can we rebuild our country?

And yet, there is hope. What was built by human hands can be unbuilt by human hands. We are not merely in the grip of blind fate. We can make choices. This does not mean we are guaranteed to succeed in attaining our ends but merely that things can be other than they are right now.

It is obvious that we need to start over. We have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten our heritage. We are increasingly a nation of strangers and enemies, but we can change that. We must go back to the heart of things and begin anew.

It is not my purpose tonight to spell out what a comprehensive transformation of American law and a restoration of American citizenship will require. Instead, I want to point the way toward what is possible. I want to provide a vision of hope, a vision of a new Golden Age.

I know my vision is radical. I know it will be difficult to make this vision a reality, but just because a thing is hard does not mean we shouldn’t attempt it. And just because a thing appears difficult to most people does not mean it is difficult for all. We should not, therefore, be afraid to strive for a bold future or to launch great endeavors.

Life is short and precious; why waste it on petty projects and nibbling around the edges of the real problems? As the kids say, go big or go home.

If our aim is peace and prosperity, what means will we require to get there? First, let us establish why wealth comes into being. The answer is simple: Because human beings seek happiness.

Every action we take in every moment of our waking lives aims at removing a source of misery or acquiring a piece of happiness. Human beings are finite, needy beings. We need food, water, air, clothing, and shelter just to live. More than that, we seek knowledge, friendship, entertainment, and love.

Deep down, the most powerful and common human desire is to have good things and to have them forever. We do not want to suffer, grow old, and die. We do not want to lose our friends and family. We want, rather, to have these good things indefinitely. We wish for a world in which every tear shall be wiped away, in which there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor weeping.

In this life, however, good things do not come about without effort. To this end, a human being has only three ways of solving his problems: He can solve the problem himself, he can hire someone else to solve it by offering that man something he wants, or he can seize the property of others.

A man may, in other words, produce, exchange, or steal. There are no other options available to him. Production and exchange are peaceful. Exchange, in particular, is potent. Because human desires vary not only from man to man but from moment to moment, it is possible to acquire the good things of life by offering up something we desire less than the thing we wish to acquire. Our trading partner experiences the same phenomenon in reverse.

Every single piece of human wealth that you see is the result of production and exchange. Every building, every road, every piece of technology came into being because its creator intended to profit (become happier) by producing it. Even those things which were either stolen or were the product of theft were, in the beginning, made for the benefit of the maker.

No one creates wealth so that it may be seized from him by force.

A world built on freedom and exchange, in which theft is outlawed and harshly punished, is a world of phenomenal wealth creation. It is simply in the nature of things that if men have peace and freedom then they will seek to solve their problems through individual creation and mutual trade.

It is also in the nature of things that if a man defers consumption today, he can save up for even greater production tomorrow. This is called investment. By nature, those who work hard and prepare for the future are wealthier than those who are profligate and shortsighted.

A free people is a virtuous and wealthy people.

Leave a free people alone in a wilderness and they will create a paradise. This is the story of America. In the 18th and 19th centuries, our intrepid forefathers gave birth to the freest, most powerful nation on earth. Their industry, frugality, and spirited defense of their property gave rise to phenomenal wealth.

During that time, government spending was just 2 percent of GDP. Today it is 25 percent. All told, federal, state, and local governments tax $7.5 trillion a year from their citizens. They issue another $3 trillion in debt.

This is $10 trillion a year in present and future tax obligations. Imagine, however, a world in which we went back to the principles of our forefathers, in which this tax burden fell by 90 percent.

Imagine if virtually all the money that currently flows, at the point of a gun, to bureaucrats, defense contractors, welfare recipients, Congresscritters, lobbyists, and grifters were instead left in the hands of the rational and industrious people who created that wealth in the first place.

Imagine if the average American watched his taxes fall by 90 percent, if $9 trillion more a year remained in private investment markets. There is your Golden Age. I’ve found it, right there!

Getting rid of the vast state agencies that parasitically suck down the wealth of the people would be a boon to the genuinely productive and decent people of this country. But who would build the roads, man the fire stations, and provide health care if the state no longer does so?

This is no objection to liberty. It is like asking who will provide the houses, food, and cellphones in a free society. Free men and women will provide them! If a service is valuable, then people will pay for it. Instead of nasty public fights over how best to spend extracted taxpayer dollars, free associations, charities, and businesses will provide these services.

In the beginning, the first fire companies were created by insurance providers in order to protect their assets. Moreover, there have always been private roads and bridges. Road owners have far more incentive to facilitate transportation at the most efficient price than government bureaucrats who will get paid no matter how badly or corruptly they manage these “public” services.

Americans, moreover, will be infinitely better off saving for their own retirement and health care. If Social Security and Medicare are so great, then why do Americans have to be coerced into paying into them? Are people so stupid that they do not recognize the great benefits of these public pension schemes? If they are so stupid, then why should these people be allowed to be free at all? They would be better off being completely enslaved to wise masters who are truly fit to manage their money.

I hold, by contrast, that the people in this country are not stupid. Take a simple example. In my 15 years of working, I have contributed $35,000 into Social Security and Medicare at an average rate of $209 a month. Right now, I am slated to receive $1,000 a month from Social Security starting at the age of 67.

If I lived for 20 more years beyond that point, I would receive $240,000 total from the SSA. However, if I invested that money in an S&P 500 index fund at the average market rate of interest over the last 30 years, I would have $1.8 million by age 67.

And remember, that money is mine; it can be left to my children, and I can spend it whenever I wished. In retirement, that money would continue to grow, too. Moreover, this assumes I don’t make additional investments over this time period.

A free man knows his own interest better than any socialist central planner. I know what makes me happy more than any meddling administrator in Washington, D.C. Moreover, why should we assume that everyone should save for retirement? There are no guarantees in this life. Some men may seek to enjoy the fruits of their labor now in the present rather than preparing for an uncertain future.

There is a cost to such a decision, of course, but that is no one’s business but their own. A free society is not a regime of busybodies.

In the world I am describing, virtually all of the services we associate with government have gone away. There is no more inflation because the Federal Reserve can no longer print fiat currency. The post office has been replaced by FedEx, Amazon, UPS, XPO logistics, and a hundred other delivery firms. Fire protection is covered by volunteer associations and insurance companies. Roads are managed by tollway operators.

Private property and personal freedom are the rule of the day. But what of the government? Who will protect this property and liberty? At last we return to the question of citizenship, what it is and who should have it.

In a free society, the role of government is the protection of person and property. It is a free association, created as our Founders so wisely proclaimed, by the “consent of the governed.”

Citizenship in a free society ought to be a choice. The duties imposed by citizenship — everything from the payment for protection to jury service to membership in the militia — are assumed by voluntary choice.

In return for these duties, the citizen of a free society receives protection from external dangers and the preservation of peace. A good governor is a defender of the peace. His most important domestic function is to ensure that disputes between citizens are arbitrated as honestly and peacefully as possible.

Since no man can be unbiased in his own case, a free society requires the creation of neutral courts of arbitration. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, these judges or deciders have been a jury of own’s peers. The citizen submits his case against his neighbor to his fellow members of society. While not perfect — no human system of judgment is — a system of true self-government in which criminal punishment and civil relief is meted out not by a bureaucratic process but by the earnest efforts of one’s fellow citizens is as close to an ideal as is known to us.

The true social compact is the creation of voluntary choice of its members. The word society comes from the Latin socius, meaning “ally.” The social compact is a military and juridical alliance for the sake of preserving peace from thieves, murderers, and invaders.

As a free association, its members have every right to accept or reject whomever they like as members. No foreigner has any right to become a citizen.

The territory controlled by the members of the social compact may have foreigners and non-citizens living on it. This is no issue. The peace of these aliens should not be disturbed unless they harm the person and property of a citizen. Yet, at the same time, they have no right to protection by jury. The will of the sovereign guardian toward these aliens can be appealed to no common judge. These aliens can be, if the sovereign determines it is necessary defense, be forced to find a new home upon the surface of the earth.

The citizen of a free society ought to take an oath of allegiance. There is no birthright citizenship and no claim by the son to the same protection that was given to the father. The right to a jury trial, to vote, and to police and military protection are the rights of citizenship. They are not for non-members.

Nor should the terms of the social compact change once it has been implemented. A contract where one side may unilaterally alter the terms at its own will is not just. It is merely a contract to sell oneself into slavery and is therefore incompatible with peace.

We have become used to an endless proliferation of laws and regulations. This is incompatible with a free society. City councils, county commissions, state legislators, and the federal Congress are all dens of thieves, fools, and tyrants. A true law is knowable even to children. It should never change save by the consent of every citizen.

Indeed, a free society needs only two laws: Thou shalt not harm thy neighbor and thou shalt not steal. All crimes violate one of these two commandments. Murder, theft, fraud, assault, arson, and rape are all covered under their aegis.

What possible law could be needed beyond these two? In our time, every expansion of the “law” is really an expansion of the commands of tyrants who seek to dominate their neighbors. Indeed, these are not laws at all but edicts! To call them laws is to lie, to bear false witness.

A free society does not know administrative orders, lockdowns, public health officials, or mandates. It knows only the law, which each and every one of its members has sworn to obey. A free society does not need regulatory agencies. It has juries! A free man does not submit to the long house of nanny state regulation.

True, in such a society, men would have to suffer the consequences of their own choices. There would be no bailout for stupidity and bad investments. Charity would be voluntary. Those who choose to prioritize present pleasures over future goods will pay the consequence. But that is life.

No man has any right to rule over his neighbors, nor can he justly steal their property even when he is in need. This is because every man is needy. All of us are mortal beings. We are all dying. We are all “disabled.” No man can rightly prioritize his own suffering over the happiness of his fellows without setting in motion the fatal cycle of tyranny that ends in civil war.

But, you may ask, this vision of the free society is compelling, it captures the spirit of our Founders, it appeals to the manly spirit of “Give Me Liberty or give me death” that freed us from the shackles of our imperial rulers, but how could this possibly work now? Wouldn’t such a society harm the poor, the elderly? Wouldn’t it lead to financial crisis and economic suffering?

I by no means accept this premise. A free society is a just society. It allows the industrious and rational to keep the rightful fruits of their hard work. It rewards industry, kindness, and frugality. These are good! We should not be afraid to end the parasitic nanny state in one fell swoop. True, this would be disruptive, but this current order is disruptive! It steals from good people! That is wrong. Theft and aggression make life worse for those who are subjected to it.

In a free society, yes, some of the poor and elderly might need to make friends or go to work. But this is by no means a bad thing! Our nation would be a better place if more Americans knew the dignity of productive labor, of knowing that in their own small way they were contributing to the betterment of their neighbors. We would be a better country if instead of being forced to subsidize the poor, we had genuine charity.

Indeed, in a free society even economic “crises” are good. It is simply a fact that sometimes investments do not work out. Men misread the nature of the times, unforeseen natural disasters strike. But this pain is good. It teaches us to be more cautious and thoughtful.

There is no magic in this life. The money that funds every bailout must come from somewhere; it must come from someone. It is not fair; it is not just that those who have been cautious with their resources should pay for the foolish risks taken by others.

Much more could be said on this matter. Bringing the free society and the attendant Golden Age into being will be hard. There are plenty of grifters, thieves, and wannabe tyrants who do not want it to exist. Cowards and despairing men alike will see every reason why they should not fight for a better future. We may pay them no mind.

The free man, the just man, does not bend the knee to danger. He is not cowed by difficulty. He maintains always a straight and narrow course toward what he knows to be right. Nothing good in this life may be obtained without hard work, daring, and foresight. We can live in a better country. We can have secure borders, thriving communities, and genuine civic friendship. We can have the Golden Age.

So what if it is hard to achieve? Did our forefathers give up on their cause because they suffered at Valley Forge? Were they so easily cowed? Of course not! They were real men. They fought and fought hard for what they knew was right. It is our duty now to do the same.

Like our Fathers, we must now take up the cause of liberty, mutually pledging to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Thank you.     *

Interview with Josiah Lippincott

Josiah Lippincott is a Ph.D. student at the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College, and a writer for American Greatness and The Federalist. His writing can be found on Substack under the name Regime Critic. This is the transcript of his interview with Rafael Pinto Borges, a writer on Substack. Lippincott will be featured as the keynote speaker at the annual dinner of The St. Croix Review on October 17, 2025.

It once seemed that American nationalism, and Trumpism in particular, was lagging behind established European right-wing forces like the Rassemblement National or Orbán’s Fidesz. Now, if anything, Trumpism seems to be well to their right. Why do you think that is?

The problem is that Europe is in an entirely different political situation. The continent is divided among numerous petty powers. Since 1945, Europe has been a minor player in world affairs. Occupied between the Soviets and the United States, European nations became satrapies. No great vision, either politically or artistically, is possible within this framework. A genuine right-wing movement cannot flourish in such conditions.

Nationalism, in the European situation, means petty nationalism. It means squabbling over identities that were desiccated (if not wholly destroyed) in the two brutal world wars, and then in the subsequent occupation by the Communists and liberals. Europe’s only meaningful future lies in true political unity, in self-overcoming.

America can be more right-wing than Europe because real choices are available to us that are not available to the Europeans in their current divided state. For instance, Germany has more in common with Texas as a political entity than it does with the United States. Berlin is about as meaningful to world affairs as Austin, Texas. Maybe less.

Europe, as a political entity, does not exist but should. The EU is a disgusting simulacrum of what is needed. The future of the world, unless we should be thrown back into barbarism, lies in continent-spanning superpowers like the U.S., Russia, and China. These powers exist on a different plane than that of small parochial entities. It is a joke to pretend that a “nation” like Estonia or Montenegro is a meaningful player in geopolitics.

One might as well assert that New Hampshire should make its own foreign policy and be treated as serious power.

A serious right-wing movement in Europe would seek continental unification for the sake of the preservation and defense of the European peoples. It will require a leader, a man of Trump’s ability and charisma, perhaps even greater. Until such a man and such a movement appears, European politics will remain secondary. The European states will be acted upon, not actors.

I do not wish this future for Europe. For my part, I would immediately end the American military occupation of the continent and remove ourselves from NATO. The dynamic of hegemon and satrapy is spiritually corrosive for Europe and America alike.

Why do you prioritize issues like immigration, trade, war, and crime over cultural battles for conservatives, and how can conservatives avoid divisive cultural debates?

There is no point in fighting a culture war if you don’t have a country. Without a country there is no culture. The first and most crucial question is the distinction between friend and enemy, citizen and foreigner, stranger and neighbor. Immigration, therefore, is crucial. Who are my fellow citizens? Why? What is our shared understanding of justice? What is our common good?

We cannot do anything else politically until these questions are answered. I do not advise avoiding divisive cultural debates but rather to order them properly, and to address them in the proper time and place. I, for instance, do not approve of abortion. I think it is destructive of the family, which is a core element of the free society. But I also know that Americans are deeply divided on this question.

As it stands, most Americans seem to favor a position somewhere between full legalization of abortion at every stage of pregnancy, and a total ban on abortion (with maybe a few exceptions). This may not be “logical” from the point of view of either extreme, but it is an honest accounting of where the nation is now. I see no good in fighting this battle at present when our government cannot even figure out who should be a citizen, or how to get mentally ill drug addicts off the streets.

In other words, there is much lower hanging fruit that a defender of the American way of life can and should address before even discussing abortion. Solve the easy questions first. Solve the 90-10 and 70-30 issues before going after the 50-50 ones.

In your Substack, Regime Critic, you mention “spiritual warfare against the swamp.” What are the greatest threats from the political establishment, and how can they be countered? Do you believe, crucially, that Trumpism 2.0 is better equipped to actually capture the levers of the state than Trumpism 1.0, which so patently failed at it?

Trump “losing” the stolen election in 2020 was, in hindsight, a blessing in disguise. It provided Trump and his allies four years to perfect their strategy, weed out dissenters, and assess the lessons learned from the first administration. This time around, Trump’s advisors are much better equipped to implement his agenda. That doesn’t mean there are no problems, but I have seen numerous signs that Trump 2.0 is light years ahead of the first term.

For one, on immigration, the administration concentrated on delivering funding to the immigration judges (administrative tribunals) at the Department of Justice. This shows that they are aware of the intricacies of deportation law and the bottlenecks in the current system. Sending ICE agents into drug dens, weed farms, and illegal labor operations is one thing.

Actually getting migrants out is another and it is obvious that Trump’s people have learned crucial lessons.

The GOP is still far from having been swallowed by the national-conservative wave. Despite figures like Trump and Vance, its leadership and elites (particularly in Congress) are still largely establishment holdouts. Does this bode ill for Trumpism as a long-term phenomenon? Or do you think Trumpism will succeed in shaping the GOP in its image in a more permanent way?

The American establishment is spiritually dead. It has nothing to offer the young and it refuses to address the problems it has itself created. For one, take the national debt. It is a product of the American global empire and its war machine on the one hand and the geriatric welfare state on the other.

It is obvious that we cannot keep spending profligate amounts of money indefinitely without raising taxes, devaluing the currency, or repudiating the debt. All three of these options will be very painful, if not outright catastrophic.

The only solution is to start again from first principles — to ask whether it is good for Americans that we have a network of bases all over the planet; is it good for the federal government to force Americans, at gunpoint, to transfer wealth from the young to the old? No one in power today, with the exception of Trump and those in his wake, shows any sign of even being willing to confront the reality of our disastrous foreign and domestic policy.

The Iraq War, COVID lockdowns, vaccine mandates, 2008 financial crisis, the post-2020 inflation wave, the demographic transformation of the country — all of these problems are a product of our sclerotic and corrupt establishment. The list of their sins could go on for a very long time. We need solutions. We need to think again from first principles. What are we doing and why? There is no way out of this question.

As a former Marine officer, how has your military experience shaped your views on U.S. foreign policy, especially regarding interventionism and global commitments? And how would you define a sensible, nationalistic, genuinely national interest-focused foreign policy for the U.S. at this time of history?

In 2019, while deployed to Okinawa, I had a Major tell me, with complete earnestness, that our presence in the Pacific was to serve as a “speed bump” for China when war broke out. I was shocked by the callousness and thoughtlessness of this “logic.”

I had been reduced to a cog in the machine. It was certainly not obvious to me that this was a wise use of the nation’s resources, both human and material for me and my men to occupy this station. Entirely lacking in any conversation on military strategy I ever had in the service was a clear and coherent articulation of America’s real foreign policy interests.

Why should we fight a war with China? Why should we fight wars at all? What is the point? I answer: To defend our life and liberty. America should only fight defensive wars when her territory and security is actually and literally being threatened by foreign invasion. Otherwise, we should seek peace and trade with all other powers.

We should have no preferences among foreigners during a time of peace. We should maintain no ongoing military alliances. The entire system of sanctions, embargoes, and military interventions in the name of “democracy” or “human rights” that have characterized American foreign policy since 1991 (and well before) should be done away with.

In order to preserve our sovereignty, we must limit foreign influence in our politics. This means we need to reduce the scope of our military action abroad and reduce the number of foreign migrants that we incorporate into our regime. The whole concept of foreign aid in peace time should be jettisoned. Wars should only be fought in emergency defense or as declared by Congress. The Constitution and its framework are superior to the moralizing crusading of the liberals.

America is currently involved in two major conflicts: one, in the Middle East, as it supports Israel against its enemies; the other, in Eastern Europe, with a nuclear-armed great power. How do you believe America ought to handle them?

We ought to disengage completely from the Middle East. By this I mean we should remove all of our troops from the region and relax all trade restrictions with the powers therein. I do not believe we gain any benefit from the sanctions on Iran, for instance. By preventing American firms from buying American oil, we hand a subsidy to China and India that they do not deserve.

It is of no concern to the American people whether the people in Iran live under a theocracy or a dictatorship. That is not our business. It is not our business whether Israel succeeds in her national defense or not. Before the Israelis occupied their current territory, the English did so, before them the Ottomans, before them the Mamluk Sultanate. When the Israelis are gone, another power will take their place. Such is human life. We should therefore mind our own interests only.

It is not our duty to make the Middle East safe for democracy but to protect our own rights and liberties. That is all we can reasonably do in this world of scarce resources. In Russia and Ukraine, a similar attitude should prevail. Russia is a dictatorship. So what? That has nothing to do with us.

The regional conflicts in eastern Europe are not our problem. No one during the Cold War thought it was a crisis that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. That was sober-minded. It would have been manifestly insane to try and split off territory from the Soviets by violence during that period.

It is stupid to do so now, but in the interim our leaders have become drunk on “end of history” nonsense and a belief in their own righteousness. They go crusading all over the world in the name of anti-racism, feminism, homosexuality, “democracy,” and human rights. Meanwhile, they strip us of our rights at home. This is a toxic situation and should not be allowed to continue. They think they can do anything they want with no consequences. Foolish!

Our most pressing need is for a new order of the earth to replace the moralistic globalism of the post-1945 era. From the Nuremberg trials onward, the sovereignty of states was denied by the liberals and the Communists as a matter of international law (rooted in arguments about the nature of the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war). The world was to be divvied up by the Communists and liberals as they saw fit.

Yet, in the Cold War this dynamic broke down. The two leftist factions that dominated the earth after 1945 could not get along. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the sole great power in the world. This post-1991 order has been characterized by liberal hubris and crusading. However, as China and Russia have recovered from their communism-induced material degradation they have re-asserted themselves on the world stage.

This is the core challenge of our time: How to integrate these two rising powers into a stable world order. The question of the new order of the earth is of paramount importance. Without an answer, we are left in the dark as to the meaning of sovereignty, citizenship, and even law itself.

The world is left in chaos and the prospects of new sources of conflict and war multiply daily. It is obvious that American “hegemony” is a false god. The United States could not win in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or now in Ukraine. Our aims have often been thwarted and at great cost to the American people.

For now, the citizenry has absorbed this drain on life and property as a necessary part of maintaining the “free world.” And yet this system is cracking. The global financial order that rests on American dollar hegemony maintained not by the free market but by American military power is vulnerable. Our debt burden is ever rising; domestic tensions resulting from the special privileges given to non-Whites over Whites, the elderly over the young, and the well-connected over the common man, are inflamed; radical ideologies proliferate in our public life.

None of this is good. A crisis is coming. In fact, it is already here. Those with the eyes to see must address it. The sooner the better.

How about China’s rise? Do you think war — either cold or hot — is inevitable? Or can the two superpowers somehow learn to coexist?

War is never inevitable. It is always a product of choices made by human beings. Those choices could be otherwise. China’s rise was the result of our involvement in WWII. We destroyed China’s nearest geopolitical competitor, the Empire of Japan, explicitly for the sake of preserving Chinese sovereignty. The United States had, from the Open Door Note onward, maintained a foreign policy of intervening in the Far East for the sake of protecting and promoting Chinese independence and sovereignty. The United States placed the de facto total embargo on Japanese oil and steel in 1941 in order to push Japan to cease her military invasion of China.

We are, without a doubt, the reason for China’s rise. Had we not intervened, China would have almost certainly splintered under Japanese pressure. Moreover, American support for Mao played a powerful role in his seizure of power — it was the manifest aim of American policy toward China after 1945 to integrate the Communists into the government of China. China’s rise is our fault and we should say as much.

But now that China has become once again a great power we must live in reality. We made this bed, time to lie in it. It is not in our interest to fight a war with China. Indeed, it isn’t even clear if war is possible. No two nuclear powers have ever fought a direct conflict.

But should such an exigency occur, the use of atomic weapons would almost certainly become inevitable if one side threatened to gain a decisive upper hand. In that moment, the resulting slaughter would make a mockery of the very concept of war as such. War, as opposed to mindless killing, is a structured activity that aims at procuring some good: National defense, peace, or conquest.

      Nuclear war, therefore, is a contradiction in terms unless it could somehow be limited in scope. I do not see how this is possible under current technical and political conditions. Therefore, peace with China is the obvious choice for our regime. Indeed, peace should always be the goal. We should only fight a war in defense of our common good, of our rights received from “Nature and Nature’s God.”

As I said above, I believe we must learn to co-exist with China. But it is obvious that the current arrangement is not working. The influx of Chinese students into American universities and Chinese immigrants into our polity has led to very real friction and problems. The Chinese way of life, with its rigidity and totalitarianism, is not aligned with the American way of life and our liberty.

We ought, therefore, to aim for minimal political interference with each other. Our relations should be economic only. American individuals purchasing from Chinese individuals is possible and would be good for us both. Trump wants tariffs. Fair enough. But these tariffs should be global and non-targeted. They should be the same on all foreign goods from everywhere.

I must re-iterate: It is simply out of the question that Chinese firms or individuals should ever lobby or seek political favor in the United States. This goes for all foreigners. They should never complain about American immigration policies, either. The composition of our political regime is our business, not theirs.

I have no desire to impose another century of humiliation on China, and they should not seek “revenge” for their grievances. What is needed now is a “forgetting” of the causes of discord and war. But this requires cooperation and peace. For instance, the chemical warfare waged by Chinese drug dealers against American citizens must end. This is a provocation, and it needs to stop.

However, China’s manifestly insane behavior during COVID should be set aside. If China is not trustworthy as a trading partner, then Americans should not invest there. That is their problem. To blame China for our own absurd response to the “pandemic” is to avoid much needed accountability. Xi Jinping did not force American governors to lockdown; he did not force Jerome Powell to print $3 trillion; he did not mandate that Americans get the vaccine.

China is welcome to be crazy on their own territory. That is part of what it means to be sovereign. The Chinese have no right to bring their crazy here or to participate in our domestic affairs.

As it stands, I believe we need a 90 percent plus reduction in Chinese naturalizations and in Chinese presence in American universities. Personally, I stand with Trump. I think we should consider shifting the tax burden away from the income tax to tariffs, including on tourism. I will feel better about foreigners being here as workers or visitors if I know that their presence means eliminating the intrusive IRS surveillance apparatus.

What practical steps can the right take to challenge the Left’s dominance in media and academia without mimicking their tactics? Or is mimicking their tactics exactly what we should be doing, in your view?

Severely reduce copyright protections. Hollywood dominates the media environment because of the government subsidy embodied in copyright. Protections for life of the author plus 70 years is insane. Leftists in Hollywood are dominant because they quite literally own the culture by government fiat. Take away the subsidy and the quality and ideological diversity of media entertainment would increase immediately. Copyright should only be for, at most 15-20 years. Enough time for authors to profit from their work but not so long that they can claim ownership of ideas in perpetuity which is manifestly ridiculous. Intellectual property as such is a strange and, frankly, quasi-unnatural category. Such protections should therefore be minimal.

In terms of academia, the same attack on government subsidies applies. Today student loan debt is in excess of $1.7 trillion. Of this, 92 percent is held by the federal government through Sallie Mae. One way to get leftists out of academia is to stop giving them taxpayer money! Stop subsidizing leftists. If people really wanted crazy Communists in charge of educating the young, then they would be happy to pay for it. Since the universities need government money to be crazy, then we must assume the genuine market for leftist craze is not large.

More broadly, the power of academia is enhanced by government regulations requiring college degrees and credentials for all manner of professions. Credentialism inherently strengthens the left because it makes financial success dependent on passing through leftist-controlled institutions. Get rid of the gates and you weaken the gate keepers. The Right should do this. It is foolish not to.

I will mention here one critical example: Doctors. In 2020, the medical profession covered itself in shame in its hyperventilating response to the scamdemic. Doctors covered for government tyranny and called for it. Those who knew better often said nothing. This is due to the massive debt loads on doctors that come from the credentialling process required by the state.

None of those regulations is necessary. Doctors should not be required to get licenses to practice medicine. That is absurd. The science of the body and knowledge of healing is available to all who know how to think. Bureaucrats know less than nothing of such things. Consumers of medical care should be able to choose for themselves based on their own appraisal of competency and quality.

Doctors should have to prove themselves like everyone else: By delivering results. Laws against fraud are more than enough to protect American consumers. The result of our current system is grifting, massive expense, and low-quality care. This is the inevitable result of meddling by those with the power of violence and coercion.

Take away government subsidies and you shatter the power of the left to dominate our lives. This must be done.

From a nationalist perspective, what should a reformed U.S. immigration policy look like to balance economic needs and cultural cohesion? What should the goals be? And how should it be implemented?

American post-war immigration policy has never been about the economy. If that were true, then why are liberals so insistent on making migrants citizens? There is no reason that foreign workers who voluntarily come here for pay should receive the rights and privileges of citizenship. This is ridiculous.

Americans, if they wished, could adopt some kind of foreign guest worker program like the old Bracero model or the Kafala system in the UAE. Run properly, it would allow foreigners to come here to work, would tax them at a high rate (using the proceeds to reduce taxes on citizens), and would require employers to bear the burdens of any criminal misbehavior.

A guestworker system could produce economic benefits. Labor is an input variable in production. The more production we have, the cheaper prices on goods will be, and the wealthier we will become. Americans like getting the goods of life at the lowest expense possible. This is simply human nature.

But there is no cheap good worth giving up our freedom. The free society is the basis of a free market. If we allow the invasion of America by Communist foreigners, like Zohran Mamdani and Omar Fateh, to continue then we will lose our liberty. This cannot be allowed to happen. Our recent migrants overwhelmingly favor the Democratic Party and leftism. It does not matter how hard they work or how much this allegedly benefits us. That is not a price worth paying. Ever.

We need to stop the invasion. We need mass deportations. We need to get rid of birthright citizenship. We also need to get rid of Hart-Celler, and we need to massively reduce new naturalizations in the United States. Our recent immigrants have not made for good Americans. This is not sustainable. My country feels like the international terminal at the airport.

I don’t care how expensive lettuce becomes; it is better to have a free country. I would rather be poor and free than rich in material goods and a slave. I would rather have liberty and work 80 hours a week in a factory than to be a commissar in a Communist order.

But that’s just the thing: Freedom is real wealth because freedom allows each man to pursue happiness as he sees fit, and happiness is genuine wealth. Therefore, measuring wealth in dollars or through averages like GDP is an absurdity. It is impossible to assign cardinal numbers to an individual’s scale of values; Ludwig von Mises demonstrated this point conclusively.

The pursuit of happiness is protected by the free society, by a regime dedicated to law and liberty. The American Founders gave us that free society. It is our birthright. We should defend it. This is our greatest source of wealth and prosperity. Give a free people a wilderness and they will make a paradise.

But to have this free society requires, in this world of wicked men and their schemes, borders and the relentless enforcement of our laws. Against criminals and Communists, against those who would rip apart our way of life, there is no “live and let live.” There is only the sword.

Those who would live in freedom must be prepared to fight to the death.

Alright, tricky question: Is the current architecture of the American state, in your view, compatible with the world as it is today? Is having the current people in charge sufficient for a project of national renewal or is it time for an institutional reset?

Our institutions are decaying. They are either zombified corpses or bloated monoliths to ineptitude and leftist hubris. The older institutional framework of the American Constitution is in every way superior.

Focus on institutional structures is of only secondary importance, however. What is needed now are men of action and conviction who will stand athwart the ossification of our time, who are willing to oppose gay race Communism in all its forms.

It is not offices which give honor to men but men who give honor to offices. National renewal is possible from all corners. It begins first at the individual and rises upwards. The new Golden Age starts with you! It starts in your own soul!

Despair has no place for us. We are already beings unto death. Mortality has always been our portion. For us then, the end is already set and known. What is left is to make the most of our time here, to carve out a good life for ourselves and our children, to plant trees in whose shade we shall not sit.

It is not our duty to bring about peace for all time or to remake the world. That is not within our grasp. But in political matters we can address many of the concrete problems of our own communities and nations here and now.

Even in the most labyrinth bureaucracy there is always a way to cut through red tape. It is incorrect to say that reform is not possible. No, it is very much possible. There is always a way to bring about political change. It may be difficult but that is not the same as saying it is impossible.

National renewal will inevitably require a change of leadership. It will require institutional reforms, as well. Our bloated bureaucracy in America must go. It is incompatible with republican government. To accomplish these tasks, we must convince the people of our rightness. We must show them how good things can be. We must be of hope and good cheer, laughing in the face of fear and crisis.

We civilized men, we men of the Right, should face the future with optimism and courage!     *

The Blessing of Neutrality

Josiah Lippincott

Josiah Lippincott is a PhD student at the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College and a writer for American Greatness. His writing can be found on Substack under the name Regime Critic.

The right to not care is one of the most important rights we have. The world is full of troubles, demands, and needs. Each day, a thousand voices call for our attention, our interest, our concern, and our care.

It is impossible for one man to comprehend the whole world, much less give it the attention it deserves. There are too many problems and not enough time. We are mortal. This is the tragedy of life — and of politics. No human work lasts forever.

Given this fundamental limitation, we can either give up in despair or take a more hard-headed and rational view. We cannot do everything, but that does not mean we can do nothing. We can make real choices. We can make things that last, maybe not forever, but for a long time.

We can plant trees whose shade will shelter our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. That is not nothing. Our work in this life matters. Therefore, it is in our interest to stay away from utopian scheming and paralyzing despair. We must distinguish between what we can do and what we cannot.

In the realm of politics and war, we must be tough-minded as to what is possible and what is not. This means that there are times when we must simply say no to those who ask for our help. We must say no to care, say no to involvement, and say no to war.

We must use our limited political resources wisely. We must focus only on solving obvious problems. We must start with the most pressing problems first. Hardest of all is recognizing that some problems are too complex to solve — and that our intervention would only make them worse.

A friend of mine works in the emergency room of a hospital. One of his duties is to inform families when further medical intervention is no longer useful or wise. CPR is violent even in the best of circumstances. Restarting the heart takes force and pressure. On an elderly person, attempting to bring them back with these measures is violent and painful. Even if they survive, they will need to be heavily sedated to overcome the pain of a cracked ribcage and internal bruising.

Sometimes there is nothing more that can be done and to intervene is to inflict pain without purpose. The same is true in political life.

The war in Ukraine is such a situation. For decades, American policy planners and foreign policy insiders have been trying to “defend democracy” in Ukraine. This has meant launching political influence operations, overturning election results we didn’t like, and, ultimately, pouring massive sums of money and weapons into a years-long war with a nuclear power.

None of this was wise. America should have stayed out of Eastern Europe. Both World War I and World War II began in this region. The ancient rivalries, ethnic tensions, and political feuding of the boundary between East and West promise us nothing but pain, bloodshed, and loss.

The first goal of our foreign policy should be to defend our rights, specifically our rights to life and liberty. The second aim should be to preserve our way of life. This means that we should not wage wars that will undo the fabric of our Republic. We ought not only to preserve our rights, but also to defend the consent of the governed.

Americans deserve a say in what their government does abroad. This means that Congress and the president should never commit weapons or materiel to a foreign conflict without a declaration of war. The only time we should fight a war without a declaration is in the immediate aftermath of a direct attack on our homeland. Even then, Congress should meet as soon as possible to put the nation on a true war footing and to announce to the world the nation’s military goals and intentions.

This procedure was not followed in the Russo-Ukrainian War. The State Department, USAID, and the Department of Defense, along with American NGOs, spent the two decades prior to the 2022 outbreak of the war staging influence operations in Ukraine and seeking to interfere in the region. Eventually, Russia countered with hard military power. This conflict has been a complete disaster for the West.

And it was all avoidable. America should have remained neutral. We should have stayed out of Eastern Europe. The right to not care should have been invoked. Of course, there are problems with Putin’s government. Of course, there is suffering, injustice, and bloodshed abroad. Of course!

But that does not mean the United States should set itself up as a global supreme judge over all mankind. We have no right to do so, and it is bad for us that we have done so. Ordinary Americans pay the price of these stupid interventions abroad. We pay for sanctions through higher prices, for military aid through our taxes — and, if this conflict spreads, we may pay in blood.

Neutrality is a beautiful word. It is a relief. We should focus on doing the best we can here at home. We should focus on protecting our way of life and doing justice right here in our own communities and homes. Every single one of our politicians would be better off focusing on how to be more honest businessmen, fathers, husbands, wives, mothers, and friends than trying to rule the world in the name of democracy and human rights.

If each human being on the planet spent their time minding their own business, the world would be a better place. If the nations of the earth treated one another as true sovereigns — and if foreign wars remained contained — we would, in the end, have more peace. It would not be a perfect world, but it would be a better one.     *

America Needs Tariffs

Josiah Lippincott

Josiah Lippincott is a Ph.D. student at the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College and a writer for American Greatness. His writing can be found on Substack under the name Regime Critic.

America’s national sovereignty depends on tariffs. Free trade advocates are wrong. Tariffs are a fundamental component of prosperity, not its enemy.

Tariffs are the necessary complement to a strong border. Tariffs control the flow of inanimate goods into our homeland. A strong border controls the flow of animate human beings into the same.

The inverse is also true. Free trade and open borders go together. Both are fundamentally globalist and anti-nationalist. Free trade is, quite literally, un-American. Free trade advocates, whether they admit it or not, want to unmake the traditional American political and economic character in order to replace it with something entirely different.

On the American Right, libertarians are the fiercest defenders of free trade. Indeed, before Trump, libertarian intellectual arguments for reducing tariffs had complete dominance over the post-war conservative movement.

The libertarian argument for free trade rests on the foundation of the alleged benefits of comparative advantage and a moral opposition to rent-seeking. Tariffs, libertarians insist, are a form of government overreach that harms the liberty of Americans to engage in private contractual relations for their own benefit. Tariffs, they insist, make us poorer by imposing inefficiencies into the market. Tariffs reduce competition in the marketplace, leading to less innovation and technological development.

These arguments are not without merit. Trade is obviously a good thing. Life in a world in which every man must make every single good from scratch by his own hands would be one of incredible drudgery and insecurity.

Specialization increases productivity. Doing one thing very well is more efficient than doing many things badly or in an average manner. If I am good at making nails and you are good at making t-shirts, then it makes sense for both of us to focus our efforts where we have the most talent and then trade for what we need.

This is the foundation of the principle of comparative advantage. Even if I am better at making t-shirts than you are, I should still focus on making nails because this is what I am really good at. This specialization makes both of us wealthier because it allows for maximal efficiency.

Libertarian free trade advocates extend this logic to the planet. At a national scale, America should focus its efforts on the most productive industries. Americans should design phones, airplanes, and computers — which is difficult and cognitively demanding — and leave the simpler but more grueling work of mining steel and assembling components to poorer countries like China. This system is more efficient — it produces greater wealth for everyone — because America focuses on what it is good at — designing things — and China focuses on what it is good at — building things. The stock market and GDP go up and hundreds of millions of third-worlders are lifted out of poverty. Everybody wins . . . in theory.

In practice, free trade advocates ignore political reality. They misunderstand human nature. True — in a perfectly rational world, free trade would be the norm. Everyone should do what he is good at, trading with others all over the world without interference and without fraud.

We do not, however, live in a perfectly rational world. Human beings are selfish, stupid, and wicked. These impulses are controlled only with great difficulty. Civilization is the exception, barbarism the rule. Moreover, there are enormous politically relevant differences between individuals and between nations. Human beings are not interchangeable widgets.

I witnessed a good example of the errors of free trade advocates at last fall’s meeting of the Philadelphia Society. Daniel Hannan, Baron of Kingsclere and a Conservative Party member of the House of Lords, gave the keynote address. Hannan, an ardent Zionist, opened his talk by mocking Hezbollah for falling prey to the Mossad pager attack, in which Israeli intelligence killed and seriously wounded hundreds of Hezbollah fighters by remotely detonating small explosive charges implanted in their communication devices.

Hannan then, without skipping a beat, launched into a full-throated defense of free trade. Hannan mocked nationalist and pro-Trump arguments for tariffs. He pointed to North Korea and Singapore as examples of the paths available. North Korea, his premier example of an autarchic economy and closed society, is significantly poorer than Singapore, an open society built on free trade. Case closed.

But not so fast. Hannan lacked the self-awareness to link the two parts of his speech together. The reason Israel was able to plant explosives in Hezbollah’s pager network is precisely because Hezbollah does not make its own communication architecture. They depended on foreign trade to acquire what they needed. Unfortunately for them, those supply lines were not secure.

Mossad was able to infiltrate the manufacturing process and implant tiny explosives in these devices, turning each pager into a mini IED. Because Hezbollah has no organic communications manufacturing prowess, it lacked the expertise to check the devices for penetration. Even if they had opened up the pagers, it isn’t clear their technical “experts” would have been able to identify the problem.

Free trade was Hezbollah’s undoing. Their faith in foreigners was rewarded with death and destruction. Their dependency on others was their weakness. Free trade is maximally efficient until your trading partner wants to kill you. Then it isn’t. You can only have free trade with someone you trust. Trust, it turns out, is hard to come by.

Hannan’s example comparing North Korea and Singapore is also suspect. True, North Korea is much poorer than Singapore, but North Korea also has nuclear weapons. The hermit kingdom might not have all the trappings of life in a liberal democracy, but it is undoubtedly true that the nation is sovereign on its own territory.

Singapore, by contrast, is much wealthier but far more vulnerable. Its geopolitical situation at the heart of the Straits of Malacca is enormously valuable for trade. But Singapore is only a small island nation. It cannot grow its own food. Nor does it possess the organic resources it needs for its self-defense. Virtually all necessities have to be imported to the island. Nor does it possess nuclear weapons.

This fundamental weakness and dependency were well known to Singapore’s wisest leaders. Lee Kwan Yew himself described Singapore as a mansion surrounded by beggars. Singapore, in other words, has a big target on its back. It needs powerful patrons, like the United States, in order to maintain itself. This fundamental geopolitical reality dominates Singapore’s ongoing existence.

Sovereignty is the power to make real choices. Money is a kind of sovereignty. If you walk into a store with a thousand dollars, you can make all kinds of choices with that money. It is a form of power. But if you walk through a dark alley and a thug puts a knife to your back and demands everything you have, that money is no longer an asset but a vulnerability. For protection, you would need a gun.

Weapons, like money, are another form of sovereignty. Weapons provide an individual and a nation with options in times of crisis. Libertarians and free trade advocates gloss over the reality of such exigencies.

In the talk I attended, Daniel Hannan, for instance, zeroed in on the value of free trade in creating wealth but entirely ignored the potential downsides that dependence on trade had for national security. Ideally, we would not need to spend money on defense and fraud protection — it is, in the libertarian framework, irrational to steal or to go to war. They are right that war is irrational. They are wrong to then suggest we can be rid of war.

Human beings have a powerful desire to have their cake and eat it too.

Trading goods freely sounds wonderful. You make t-shirts and I make nails, but what if I could get your t-shirts without making any nails at all? What if I just took them from you without working? The thug can, with a few knife strokes, make mincemeat of the earnest sucker who spent his days toiling away. The thief acquires with a little blood what the now-dead peasant spent much sweat to produce.

Free trade advocates treat their own moral impulses as the dominant mode of human life. They have a very hard time putting themselves in the shoes of a human being who wants to be a criminal or a tyrant.

“But engaging in mutually beneficial trade is good for the long-term betterment of mankind,” they say. But criminals don’t care. The temptation of living life without needing to work for one’s bread is very potent. The world is full of people who confuse short-term pleasure for long-term gain.

Selfishness, stupidity, and wickedness are endemic among human beings. There is no inexorable movement toward freedom or greater reasonability. At best, the human condition is one of cycles of rise and fall. Barbarism is the rule. Civilization is the exception.

Moreover, there is a universal disagreement between human beings about fundamental, existential matters. Human beings regularly kill each other over access to wealth, honor, and sex. They kill each other over religion, ideology, and tradition.

Many modern libertarians have never felt the deep attachments to a way of life that would drive them to war. They are irreligious and concerned with material goods. Spiritual values are of only secondary importance to this human type. They are living in John Lennon’s “Imagine” with nothing to “kill or die for.” Liberalism is triumphant and obviously correct. The only person who could possibly disagree is a fool or a fascist.

The arrogance and ignorance of this view create an enormous blind spot. In order to have a functioning economy, human beings need a functioning political regime to restrain the wicked. This political order needs weapons and men to wield them. It must have power — power to tax citizens, administer justice, and defend members from outsiders.

Such a regime requires that the members feel patriotic allegiance to their shared commonwealth and that they be prepared to sacrifice themselves in its defense. It is fundamentally unfair for some men to sacrifice their lives and treasure to protect others who do not fight or sacrifice. Therefore, the regime must distribute honors and power unevenly, giving a greater share to those who fight than to those who do not.

Fundamental human wickedness creates a demand that the righteous and industrious band together for self-defense. Free trade cannot exist where there is no trust. Trust is built on force because reason alone cannot govern human beings. That is why we have laws and nations.

Free trade requires certain preconditions in order to exist. It requires a society where men keep their word, where fraud is punished, and where men may labor in peace. These conditions can only exist within bounded political orders that sharply distinguish between friends and enemies, citizens and strangers.

Economics is subordinate to politics. Economics comes from the Greek words oikos, meaning “household,” and nomos, meaning “way” or “law.” Politics comes from the word polis, meaning “regime” or “city.” Cities are stronger than households. The gang is stronger than the individual.

For individuals and households to have freedom, they need allies. Our word society therefore comes from the Latin socii, meaning “allies.” The mutual alliance that preserves our liberty from foreign threats, natural disasters, and the winds of fortune requires certain duties between citizens.

My neighbor, for instance, builds automobiles. Let’s say I import a Chinese car for 75 percent of the price of his vehicle. That would make me wealthier, of course, but it would put my neighbor out of business. It would destroy his livelihood and threaten his family’s long-term security.

An open border might benefit me but it costs my neighbor a great deal. It has shattered the social contract between us. Replacing my neighbor’s business with the product of foreign labor might boost GDP in the short run but it now means my neighbor needs to uproot his whole life. The “creative destruction” from free trade has enormous costs for those getting destroyed. The type of man who makes for a good assembly line worker may not make a good computer programmer.

Before free trade and open borders, my neighbor and I both could live good middle-class lives. After my neighbor’s displacement by more “efficient” Chinese labor, I am slightly wealthier but my neighbor now has nothing. I have harmed my former friend and ally. Our alliance is broken because of my selfish desire for gain.

Free trade and mass migration operate on the same fundamental principle. Both destroy the social cohesion and political alliances that make genuine liberty possible.

This is not to say America should have no foreign trade. We should. But that trade should never come at the expense of the preservation of our national sovereignty. Tariffs ensure that does not happen; they prevent our enemies and competitors from flooding our markets with cheap goods to destroy our native industry. Tariff rates are a matter of prudence. At times it may be better to favor producers and, at others, consumers. Such decisions should be made as a matter of public policy and in accordance with the will of the people.

A strong political regime makes productive trade possible. Americans have free trade within their borders and rightly so. Businesses in Michigan can compete with businesses in Wisconsin and Texas because those competitors are our fellow citizens. This competition is bounded. In a nation with a tight labor market and high wages, losing your job to a domestic competitor isn’t that big of a deal — you can easily pick yourself back up.

Even when you don’t win, you know that your neighbor, who is bound to you by oaths of loyalty, has won. His private benefit accrues to you, too. It is better to be a poor man with rich friends than a rich man with no friends.

A strong political order is the foundation of real freedom. It makes genuine liberty and productive trade possible. Tariffs, like government itself, are a concession to man’s weakness, to the precarious position he finds himself in by nature. Tariffs secure our borders. They are protectionist. This is good! Protecting our fellow Americans is good.

Without a border, we do not have a country. Without a country, we are left naked and alone in a world full of strangers and enemies.

Liberty depends on sovereignty.     *