“Will We Waste our Legacy or Magnify It?”: At Atlas Network Liberty Forum 2022, A Cold War Hero Gives Republicans a Unifying Line

An important speech got made last Thursday night, at the free-market Atlas Network’s two-day Liberty Forum in New York. Founded in the 1980s to bring free-market and anti-state activists around the world together in the dark days of the Cold War, the network has underwritten fights against collectivism and helped empower small businesspeople from Poland to Brazil, Sri Lanka to Burundi.

For an American conservative, the event happened in a broader context: six days after President Trump announced his intention to run for president again and two days before his reinstatement on Twitter, fights among Republicans were everywhere. Neoconservatives were claiming Ron DeSantis, MAGA was backing Trump. Chris Christie was criticizing Trump, Mitch McConnell was taking fire from on-the-ground activists. Everything was distracting from the bigger picture: a fight against arbitrary power held by the national government and the institutions it underwrites: too-big-to-fail corporations, media conglomerates, elite universities, multinational nonprofits and an infiltrating China beyond. The conservative base is itching for this fight, but the base doesn’t govern or set messaging in the day-to-day. There are three parts of the party at the top, in think tanks and advisory positions on campaigns, and these parts are extremely divided.

1.       The New Minority: They believe in anti-trust policies, reallocation of power to smaller banks, tariffs against China, the repatriation of some industries corporations have outsourced, and even support for private sector unions to check corporatists like Amazon. President Trump ran on most of these ideas, senators like Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton and newer House members are supportive of them, and so is the think tank American Compass. But they’re not dominant in the party, at least not yet.

2.       The Old Minority: The foreign-policy free-marketeers of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s were crucial to pushing against Soviet collectivism but have spent twenty years advancing policies their base doesn’t want like privatizing social security and prosecuting the “War on Terror,” while bloating the national debt. Prominent at the American Enterprise Institute, they’re also skeptical of Republican state legislatures pushing policies like parental rights: they see freedom through markets as more reliable than freedom through legislatures.

3.       The Persistent Revolutionaries: The drivers of the Reagan and Trump movements at the policy and think-tank level hold principles including respect for state powers, free markets, traditional family values and strong national defense. They’re skeptical of armed interventions abroad and of interfering with markets at home. Collected at The Heritage Foundation, “America’s outpost in Washington,” and developing legal theories through the Federalist Society, they’re committed to letting the fifty states chart their own courses, and their main enemy is the national administrative state.

These divides weren’t mentioned at Atlas’s two-day event devoted to the study of why free markets work. But the heroism of anti-statists was mentioned, from Hayek and Mises who insulated markets from communist interference to the Cold War activists who toppled Soviet-backed governments and reformed their economies. One of these activists received the keynote award of the event, named after its founder Antony Fisher. It’s her speech that hit on what might be a new Republican line.

Elena Leontjeva co-founded Lithuania’s first free market think tank, the Lithuanian Free Market Institute, as the Cold War ended and retired in 2001 to write novels and produce documentaries. She was a senior economic adviser to one president and a state counselor to six; among other achievements, she helped reform private pension insurance, set up a currency board and pushed deregulatory policies. At the start of 2020, she came back to head the organization as COVID-19 hit.

In her speech, which was short and friendly but also very deliberately delivered, she said that coming back to work at the think tank in 2020 had felt like “deja-vu.” Suddenly, in response to a pandemic, governments were taking on powers she hadn’t seen them assume since the Soviet era: mandates on peoples’ personal choices when it came to vaccines, massive pumping of state money into the economy with inflationary results.

Like in the Soviet era, putting the state in charge went “against nature”; it destroyed the ability of people to come together, “organically,” and improve their lives through free exchange of commerce, goods, ideas. Like in the Soviet era, whatever these governments were saying about what they were doing couldn’t mask what was actually happening: higher prices for goods, less efficiency, more “tyranny” in daily life. Like in the Soviet era, the people beginning to resist these moves could know that they were “with nature” against the unnatural interference of a powerful state.

In the face of these new old threats, “Will we waste our legacy or magnify it?” she asked an audience of fighters against statism ranging from Leszek Balcerowicz, responsible for deregulating Poland’s economy after 1991, to Jennifer Stefano, who helped found the Tea Party movement after the 2008-09 government bailouts which turned corporations too-big-to-fail. Listening to Leontjeva’s speech and watching the people she was addressing, a conservative line emerged that made the current Republican divides part of something bigger.

Here’s another way to chart the history Leontjeva describes:

In the 1980s, American conservatives united to beat back an expanding national government at home and allied with foreign activists to defeat a collectivist state abroad. Since then, the free market has grown, but in a lot of places, so has the state, in the name of public security and sometimes of market efficiency. In America alone, there’s been the War on Crime, the Department of Homeland Security, No Child Left Behind, the FISA Act, the Bank Bailouts, the Iraq War, ObamaCare, nationally-mandated kangaroo courts on college campuses, China investing in our national debt, Wall Street investors and government bureaucrats putting our money into Chinese markets, and climate treaties tying us closer to China and giving the national government more control. Abroad there’s been the European Union, which centralizes administrative control from places like Lithuania to Brussels in the name of free market growth, even as Europe’s “free-market” reliance on Russia’s natural gas has emboldened Vladimir Putin to run a rogue state. Now, after a virus from China spread around the world, there are mask mandates in the name of public health, massive inflationary spending and people subsisting off government checks. And, at least in America, government growth continues: executive actions on race, a climate boondoggle, unprecedented executive orders on student loans.

And so here we are: a new fight for a movement that’s existed in America since 1945. Back then, Midwestern transplants to the South and Southwest, afraid of collectivism at home and abroad, allied with Christians worried about infringements on their freedoms and businesspeople who saw regulations stifling growth. They produced first Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan. A later movement of many of the same people, now joined by working and non-college educated voters whom outsourcing to China and an uncontrolled border had left behind, came together to put Donald Trump into office.

Putting a line to today’s fight is more complicated, because the categories are murkier: it’s not just free markets vs. state-run economies. It’s a half-collectivist regime, China, versus a Republican Party that’s both free market and increasingly distrustful of the corporatism created by deregulation, outsourcing and government bailouts. And though the top of the party’s still free-market, Trump (and DeSantis) will be put into office by people who want tariffs and closed borders, and who see state legislatures as the grounds for their activism. These divides exist, and a medium has to be reached between tariffs and trade, anti-corporatism and pro-big business, and more. But the fundamental line Republicans should be unified around is bigger, and it’s Elena Leontjeva’s: against arbitrary state interference with natural commerce and communities. In the post-Trump awakening, with threats impinging everywhere, opponents of arbitrary power have more in common with each other than with our enemies.