Trump’s Dramatic Crossroads Between Protectionism and Dynamism
A popular meme depicts a road diverging. In one direction is a many-towered palace glistening in the sunshine. In the other is a crumbling castle beset by storm clouds and eerie purple lightning. The point of the image, known as “Dramatic Crossroads,” is not hard to apprehend: A single starting point can lead to very different outcomes depending on the path one chooses.
At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, two unusually distinct possibilities await, and skirmishing has already begun between proponents of the two visions. Trump seems to find each appealing in its own way, so it’s hard to guess which path the new administration is more likely to take.
In a surprisingly thoughtful keynote speech at last summer’s National Conservatism Conference, Vivek Ramaswamy took a stab at clarifying the situation. The entrepreneur and onetime presidential candidate drew a distinction between the “national protectionist” and “national libertarian” wings of the ascendant American right. According to Ramaswamy, both options are nationalist in that they try to put America’s national interests ahead of other considerations. (This he contrasted with the “neoliberal” consensus of the 1990s and early 2000s, which supposedly prioritized economic growth at the expense of national security and national unity.) “I think it’s been decided, as obviously as it possibly can be, that America First is the future direction of the Republican Party,” he told me the day after his speech. “From where I sit, the most important debate for the country to have is the intra–Republican Party and even intra–America First debate” about how best to advance the American cause.
That’s as useful a way as any to conceptualize the crossroads facing the GOP and the country. The (national) protectionist path sees free trade and immigration as threats to Americans’ well-being, and it sees the federal administrative state as a weapon conservatives can and should use to reward their friends and punish their enemies. The (national) libertarian alternative sees trade as positive except where national security is narrowly at issue, welcomes foreigners as long as they’re willing to work hard and embrace America’s civic ideals, and wants to shrink the administrative state so that conservatives’ enemies can no longer wield it against their friends or anyone else.
The two visions imply meaningfully different approaches to public policy. Take trade. A national protectionist aims to stop cheap foreign goods from undercutting domestic producers; he wants Americans to buy American, even if it costs more, because those purchases will support jobs on the homefront. That would make all imports troubling—T-shirts as well as technology, from Canada as well as from China. A national libertarian, in contrast, cares about eliminating dependence on China only in what Ramaswamy called “critical sectors for U.S. security”: military equipment and pharmaceuticals. Moreover, he recognizes that “if we’re really serious about decoupling from China in those critical sectors, that actually means more, not less, trade with allies like Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam.” Stopping Americans from buying fruit from Peru or cars from Germany makes consumers worse off, and it doesn’t do anything to address concerns that our top geopolitical adversary could control our access to lifesaving drugs. (How serious a concern that ought to be is a separate question.)
Until recently, Trump has been treated as a dyed-in-the-wool protectionist. But at the tail end of the 2024 campaign, he and those around him began to make recognizably libertarian noises. Now, as he begins the difficult task of assembling a governing agenda, two paths lie before him. One leads toward dynamism, the other toward stagnation. The future of American prosperity depends in no small part upon the choices he and his party will make.
DOGE Days
You may be wondering how different these options really are. While neither will align perfectly with a typical Reason subscriber’s preferences, even a MAGA-inflected libertarian agenda could represent a major improvement over the left’s militant progressivism or the “muscular” conservatism advocated in recent years by the so-called New Right. As evidence, witness the leading protectionists’ indignant reactions to some of these recent developments.
Oren Cass is often considered the top policy wonk pushing right-wing economic nationalism. A former adviser to presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, Cass in 2020 launched American Compass, a think tank “dedicated to helping American conservatism recover from its chronic case of market fundamentalism.” Since then, he and other nationalist conservatives have endorsed a host of government interventions historically associated with the Democratic rather than the Republican Party, from industrial policy to labor regulations to family subsidies to tariffs. The Cass agenda is explicitly protectionist, seeking to shield American workers from foreign competition and to p
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