David French had a really good newsletter this week. I’m pretty sure it’s gated to subscribers, but it’s about Article II of the Constitution and the ambiguity of the opening sentence: “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” The problem is in the vagueness of the phrase “executive power”. It’s so open ended that we end up with a chief executive officer who can in a sense do whatever they want as long as they are executing some action, at least in theory. What David French, and others, have proposed is an amendment that rephrases that sentence to drastically limit executive authority. Instead of how it currently reads it would say “A president of the United States of America shall execute laws passed by Congress.” This makes it clear that the President is executing laws passed by Congress and all executive power (however the Supreme Court decides to interpret that) does not reside in them. This still leaves open the president as commander in chief of the armed forces and all other enumerated powers laid out in Article II. However, it restrains the President from the potentiality of doing whatever they want with laws that congress passes.

This week Trump implemented his tariffs universally at 10% and much higher tariffs than that on some countries in particular. Although a few Republicans protested, the vast majority have been deathly silent. The party that claimed to stand for economic freedom has been completely silenced as they have been bound to their leader. I take no delight in this as I wasa a Republican because I believed (and still do) in the freedom of the individual to pursue their lot in life as much as possible as they see fit in both the economic and civic spheres of life. It became apparent several years ago that the GOP had abandoned these commitments, and has wholly embraced power to implement reactionary policies and just plain old authoritarianism.

Free trade is a critical part of economic freedom. Not only does it tie the world together in largely peaceful ways, it is the freedom of people to purchase goods and services from wherever they wish to. It also allows different countries to more efficiently allocate resources to industries that it has a higher degree of ability to specialize in. To be a service based economy is not a bad thing, and America makes a lot of things, but it is mostly high-end things like jets, and other expensive goods. We should not wish to go back to making textiles and paper. We aren’t getting screwed over by other countries because of trade, but we are richer overall for the trade environment we have lived in for 80 years. As Tyler Cowen has noted, we will be poorer and have a future with few and more expensive choices. We did this to ourselves.

One of the things I want to use this blog for is documenting my thoughts and feelings over the next four years of the Trump presidency. Obviously there is much to be uncertain of as we ultimately don’t know what he is going to do. As Matt Yglesias has pointed out in his latest newsletter at Slow Boring Trump is a liar and his followers know he is a liar and that is part of the reason they like him. I think that a lot of his policies will be bad for the economy and our civic culture. But I’m also concerned as someone who serves in the military with his foreign policy and how that will impact my life and the life of my family.

Today he is expected to sign close to or more than 100 executive orders. Doing everything from declaring national emergencies at the border and energy to changing the names of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and Mt. Denali to Mt. McKinley. Makes me think of Governors of Maine LePage and Mills trading over what the sign at the border of Maine and New Hampshire on I-95 says. Thankfully he also clarified for everyone that there are only two genders, male and female (hopefully the sarcasm there can be detected). The big item that the news media seems to be taking is Trump saying that his inauguration brings to end a period of American decline.

I should say up front that my biggest concerns are less about Trump making himself into an authoriatrian dictator, and more that our political institutions will corrupt from within and the free culture that we have known that is based on our political system will slowly deteriorate. Granted that this has been happening off and on for a while, having a bunch of very rich dudes able to basically manipulate our system with money, while others exploit the people seems like a recipe for disaster. Oligarchy combined with kleptocracy is how many republics have met their fate. Hopefully by keeping our eyes open and thinking through what is happening we can arrest the rot that threatens to overwhelm the system.

That being said, I don’t think this has to mean the end of the American experiment in self-governance. This country has gone through many dark periods in the past and I see no reason why it could not emerge from this as well. I also don’t want to just offer up cynical takes either and disparage everything the new administration does. I want to tell the truth as I see it with full honesty. That is what any thinking person ought to offer at this time where there will be so much lying and deceit.

This is a short piece following on one that Nate Silver wrote in his substack on the growing split between liberals and leftists. His article is anchored to the Israeli-Hamas conflict that grew out of the attacks of October 7. He focuses on the leftists who support the Palestinians versus the liberals who largely support Israel. Nate uses the example to model the spectrum slightly differently as a triangle with MAGA conservatives in one corner, social justice leftists in the other corner, and liberals in the bottom corner. I think this is a fair model, but I would take it one step further, as his spectrum doesn’t include space for those who are conservatives, but not of the MAGA variety. Yes, we can get really nitpicky here, but I think there needs to be a recognized distinction between those conservatives who are all aboard the Trump train (or nationalist conservatives), as opposed to those who are anti-Trump, and embrace liberal values and principles.

My spectrum would thus resemble more of a trapezoid with the bottom corner broken into two corners, but closer together so that one is right-liberals and the other corner is left-liberals. Liberals after all share some core principles in common, but emphasize different elements. Right-liberals are more conservative socially, but still recognize that rights rest inherently in individuals, just as left-liberals do. Left-liberals are much more comfortable with market regulations and redistribution of wealth, but share with right-liberals a key commitment to free markets of varying degrees. The spectrum as it has been is growing rather long in the tooth, and if differences continue to keep emerging between left-liberals and leftists, and right-liberals and MAGA conservatives, I can see the possibility of new coalitions forming within the parties. I’m sure Nate Silver would not necessarily disagree with this model as his focus was more on the cleavages occurring within the left.