The Open Society and the Friends It Needs (Part 1)

This didn’t work. What will?

This is the first essay I’ve posted on this site since May 2024 — I’ve been away, turning the previous essays published here into a book. Now I’m back, and a thing or two has happened in my absence. Back then, Joe Biden was still the president and the presumptive Democratic nominee. Since then, his candidacy imploded, Kamala Harris took his place, and Donald Trump went on to win the popular vote and sweep every swing state. Now back in the White House, he is unleashing unmitigated chaos both at home and abroad.

Here I want to reflect a bit on how we ended up here — how, in particular, the large and energetic “resistance” movement that sprang up in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election failed so utterly to achieve its goals. Trump started his presidency isolated and all but friendless within his own adopted party, but by the end of his first term Republican opposition to Trump had been completely crushed. He did lose the 2020 election, thanks to the covid-19 pandemic and the economic disruption it produced, but still he got 11 million more votes than he did in 2016. I was shocked at the time, and it’s still shocking to me: how did going through four years of incessant lying, corruption, and malevolent incompetence end up significantly increasing the number of Trump supporters? The 2024 results, although not a surprise, were even more shocking: despite lying about his 2020 loss and leading a months-long conspiracy to steal the election (and racking up a second impeachment without conviction in the process), Trump was able to add another 3 million to his 2020 vote total and increase his share of the vote sufficiently to post a definitive win.

I had my own very small role to play in this vast failure. When I joined the Niskanen Center in July 2017, early in Trump’s first term, I came on as director of the center’s new Open Society Project, which had been launched in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election to defend the values, norms, and institutions of liberal democracy against the depredations of Trump and the MAGA movement. As the only D.C. think tank with any right-of-center connections to stake out an explicitly anti-Trump position, Niskanen quickly emerged as an organizing node for “Never Trump” sentiments and activities. In 2017 Niskanen started hosting biweekly, off-the-record “Meetings of the Concerned” to gather together former members of Congress and administration officials, campaign consultants and other political pros, think tank scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals — in short, everyone along the whole political waterfront who felt the Republican Party they had previously served or supported had been hijacked by a dangerous demagogue. I got involved in these meetings before joining Niskanen, and afterward I started organizing and directing them.

The most tangible, lasting impact of those get-togethers was that Bill Kristol and Sarah Longwell met and got to know each other — and out of that grew The Bulwark and much of the organized Republicans-against-Trump activity that has occurred since. That activity had its tactical successes, helping at the margins in midterm elections and in the 2020 presidential race. But the main goal of our group and the larger Never Trump movement was to resist and turn back Trump’s hold on the Republican Party and conservatism more generally, and on that score we failed comprehensively.

Niskanen chose the name of the Open Society Project with Karl Popper in mind, not George Soros, but also in a nod to the notion that the left-right political spectrum was giving way to “open” versus “closed.” The United Kingdom’s insular turn with Brexit, the rise of populist anti-immigration parties across Europe, and Trump, with his enthusiasm for both physical and tariff walls, were all manifestations of a new, “closed” political axis, anchored in what-used-to-be-working-class constituencies left behind by globalization and the information economy. Standing on the other side were the winners under the current system, concentrated in the highly educated professional and managerial classes, who stoutly defended openness to trade and immigration as well as the cosmopolitan values of tolerance and inclusiveness — and who saw themselves as the champions of ethnic and cultural minorities threatened by a rising tide of xenophobia and racism. In the United States in particular, opponents of Trump were quick to disparage his supporters as motivated by racial resentment and interpret his win as backlash against the nation’s first black president.

In light of the 2024 election, right-wing populists in the U.S. and around the world are exultant over what they perceive as victory over the false gods and woke decadence of the open society. The Substack writer N.S. Lyons, has written recently about the return of the “strong gods,” the binding ties of faith, family, and nation, and their emerging triumph over the open society’s “peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort.”

What are we to make of this characterization, offered up by both sides, of our recent politics as a struggle between the open society and its enemies? To be sure, Donald Trump’s worldview is a noxious stew of dark and illiberal impulses: his is a zero-sum world in which there are only hammers and nails — and being a hammer is all that matters. He does threaten our liberal democratic heritage, and in resisting his outrages and abuses we are, I continue to believe, keeping faith with the ideals of the open society. And during Trump’s first term, I sincerely hoped that the threat he posed could be countered by a left-right coalition that put smaller differences aside to unite in defense of a deeper consensus. As I put it repeatedly during those years, normal politics is like a football game in which we, as fans in the stands, may have different rooting interests — but now vandals are setting the stadium on fire, and so we have a shared interest in turning temporarily away from the action on the field to defend the integrity of the arena that makes the game possible.

Alas, the first four Trump years revealed that there was no deeper consensus left to defend. It turns out that principled support for liberal democracy — that is, support that is upstream from partisan and policy preferences — is vanishingly rare in America today, on both sides of the political spectrum. Most people like democracy just fine when they’re winning; ask them to pay too stiff a price in terms of electoral and policy losses, though, and commitment to democracy starts to unravel. The few Republican officeholders who did defy Trump invariably did so alone, rather than combining forces to make a stand that could make a difference. These brief, futile flickers of defiance generally ended quickly with the lone dissident’s announcement of his impending retirement. Republican voters, meanwhile, have shown repeatedly that they prefer Trump to the alternatives and are utterly unmoved by the overwhelming horror of elites.

Democrats were quick to depict themselves as defenders of liberal democracy and the rule of law in their hour of peril, but they were never even remotely serious about walking the walk. If they had actually believed their own rhetoric that democracy was on the line, they would have worked tirelessly to build the broadest possible coalition. To that end, elected officials would have told progressive activists to shelve their policy ambitions for the time being; what was paramount at present was assembling an electoral supermajority along the lines of 1932 or 1972 — one that would dispatch Trump and MAGA to the same oblivion that received Hoover and McGovern. Instead, of course, the whole progressive movement lurched wildly to the left during the first Trump administration, embracing inane fads like “abolish ICE,” “defund the police,” and an extreme transgender ideology that resists the oppression of basic biological reality.

During the 2020 primary season, the large gaggle of Democratic candidates practically tripped over each other in a race to embrace the toxic pet priorities of “the groups.” Only Joe Biden was sensible enough to veer the other way, or perhaps the dog was simply too old to learn any new tricks. In the event, Biden was the closest thing to a vote for normalcy on the 2020 ballot, and that sufficed to let him get the nomination and then squeak by Trump. Once in office, though, his administration prioritized intra-progressive comity over building a national unity coalition, allowing activists to infiltrate the executive branch and launch a series of politically tin-eared provocations. Consider just one example among many: Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world and owner of the Washington Post, defied Trump’s demonization of the press with the paper’s adoption of “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its official slogan shortly after Trump took office. So how did Biden treat such a powerful ally? He appointed Lina Khan as head of the Federal Trade Commission, a woman who had made her academic reputation advocating the breakup of Amazon.com — a genuinely dumb policy idea on top of everything. Through this and similar moves, Democrats succeeded in driving a critical mass of tech moguls into the arms of Trump, given him a powerful new base of support.

And of course, if Joe Biden and those in his inner circle were serious about the threat to liberal democracy, they would have prioritized dealing with that threat over stroking their own egos and padding their own nests. In other words, they would have recognized that an already over-the-hill Biden was in no shape at all to run for a second term. Instead, Biden stayed on and his aides did their best to conceal his condition from the public until the whole charade collapsed after the debate.

In the end, the effect of Democrats’ relentless attacks on Trump and the GOP as threats to democracy — and Never Trumpers’ efforts along the same lines — was to consolidate in the public’s mind the Democrats’ position as the party of the system and the institutional status quo. As Ezra Klein put it in a column just prior to the 2024 election:

To Democrats, the institutions that govern American life, though flawed and sometimes captured by moneyed interests, are fundamentally trustworthy. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise, staffed by people who do the best work they can, and they need to be protected and preserved.

The Trumpist coalition sees something quite different: an archipelago of interconnected strongholds of leftist power that stretch from the government to the universities to the media and, increasingly, big business and even the military…. Trump refers to part of it as the Deep State, … and JD Vance has described it as a grave threat to democracy.

Under the circumstances, this was precisely the wrong move. For although Donald Trump’s warped individual psyche makes him personally a grave threat to America’s constitutional order, the idea that the larger Trump coalition was a unified “closed” party in favor of using authoritarian means to maintain white supremacy, the patriarchy, etc. was never anything more than self-serving left-wing fantasy. (Trump won reelection in 2024 by picking up black and Hispanic votes and shedding white support.) As I have argued here on this site, the combination of repeated and high-profile failures by governing elites in the 21st century, a new media environment in which the shortcomings of those elites are greatly magnified, and a generally diminished capacity for trust across the electorate has led to a gathering crisis of legitimacy throughout the advanced democracies.

We can see this most clearly in the precipitous decline in trust of public officials since the mid-20th century. Back in my libertarian days, I took this as a good sign: people were too credulous in trusting government and imagining what it could do, but bitter experience was wising them up and would lead them to demand smaller, more tightly constrained government. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As I wrote in an earlier essay:

When people were telling pollsters that they no longer trusted government, what they had lost confidence in — what they were in the process of giving up on — were established institutions and governing elites. They hadn’t given up believing in power, and wielding it on their team’s behalf, and they hadn’t given up on following leaders. The erosion of trust wasn’t the path forward to Libertopia; it was the path backward to reliance on cruder, simpler forms of political authority. Rational-legal authority was gradually disintegrating, and people were reverting to charisma.

With the electorate’s growing conviction that established institutions are irreparably broken, the side committed to maintaining and improving those institutions rather than destroying them has only one move with any chance of success: endorse the public’s sense that the government is in disrepair, and then commit credibly to improving government’s performance in one specific domain after another. As my Niskanen colleagues and I wrote in a 2018 white paper:

There is only one sure way to quiet our populist distempers and restore faith in democratic institutions, and that is for those democratic institutions to deliver effective governance. The failures of governance are what got us into this mess; public confidence in government will return only when government demonstrates through successful problem-solving that such confidence is merited.

It's not an easy path, to be sure. Not only must necessary reforms overcome entrenched and formidable opposition from the beneficiaries of the status quo, but the reform effort must be waged in a political culture bristling with distrust and a media environment deeply hostile to good governance. But it’s the only option with any prayer of working.

Needless to say, Democrats did not follow this option. On the contrary, they wrapped themselves in symbols of the status quo while castigating the anti-system insurgency as racist, sexist, transphobic, fascistic, and so on. And as a result, they have wound up in the political wilderness. We can only hope that, chastened by the brutal results of 2024 and its aftermath, Democrats can summon the will to break sharply with progressive culture-war theatrics and develop a serious program for getting government to live up to its promises.

Looking back, I don’t regret hoping and working for Republican pushback against Trump; I don’t regret voting for Clinton, Biden, and Harris, despite all their political mistakes and governing failures. But I’ve learned through disillusioning experience that campaigning against right-wing populism as a threat to liberal democracy doesn’t work, even if the threat is genuine. At Niskanen, we adapted to this disappointing reality some time ago, pivoting back in 2021 toward a focus on improving American state capacity and unlocking abundance in housing, energy, health care, transportation, and elsewhere. Improving the quality of governance is needed to rise to the challenge of the pressing economic and social problems that confront us today; and beyond that, it is needed to break the vicious circle of government dysfunction and public mistrust that is undermining our commitment to constitutional self-government.

(I’m not ignoring the huge and daunting present task of opposing Trump’s abuses of power. But this will take place in the trenches of the courts, the Congress, and the executive branch — and if things get bad enough, it will spill over onto the streets. But in the larger battle for rallying public opinion and winning elections, Democrats must focus on highlighting Trump’s governing failures and their own superior alternatives.)

Trump’s return to power is certainly bad news for the constitutional separation of powers and the rule of law more generally – and thus must be seen as a setback, and possibly a grave one, for the political institutions of the open society. But is a broader turn against the open society under way as well? Are post-liberals like N.S. Lyons correct to see in Trump’s victory a repudiation of the open society’s failing shibboleths? And, beyond that, to see it as a vehicle for the revitalization of older, deeper, neglected loyalties?

I’ll turn to those questions in part two of this essay.