The Party of Principles, Until They're Not
How the GOP Abandoned Free Markets, Fiscal Responsibility, and the Meaning of Integrity
This is, after all, a philosophy blog.
Today's vote by House Republicans to protect Trump's tariffs has me thinking about cognitive dissonance. Specifically, the extraordinary mental contortions required to maintain the fiction that the GOP is still the party of free markets and limited government.
What more proof do we need that the “moderates” in the GOP are fucking cowards that we can't count on for anything? Every time there's a meaningful vote—one that might actually constrain Trump's most economically destructive impulses—they fall in line. Their spines dissolve. Their principles evaporate.
It's delightfully delicious to watch people continue to believe the GOP is the better party for economic policy, while the fucking Democrats try to protect free trade! Hilarious.
Delusional, really. The belief there's this raw free enterprise element at the bottom of the GOP, while they erect fucking oligarchy in front of our eyes!
It takes a certain kind of cognitive dissonance that I am incapable of.
“The GOP may be—almost uniformly—acting in ways that are anti-free market and oligarchical. But it's those communist democrats we have to worry about! Because Republicans tell me in private conversations that they disagree with all the actions they're taking on the floor of Congress!”
This is literally what some people think. Like the kinds of people who comprise the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. One would think that credibility maintenance would require just a little more ethical consistency than this. We are inundated with a commentariat of moral imposters.
For a moral philosopher like me, this is just too much to handle. It's the most indefensible ethical stance I can imagine holding, short of being pro-genocide.
Let's be absolutely clear about what's happening: A party that spent decades preaching the gospel of free markets, lambasting tariffs as job-killing taxes on consumers, warning about the dangers of executive overreach, and positioning itself as the guardian of fiscal responsibility has now embraced protectionist tariffs that economists across the political spectrum warn will raise consumer prices and destroy jobs. They've defended unprecedented executive power to impose those tariffs. They've supported policies that will explode the deficit. They've protected oligarchic interests at the expense of market competition.
This isn't a policy disagreement. This is a complete abandonment of core principles the moment those principles became inconvenient to maintaining power.
What fascinates me is the psychology behind those who continue to support the GOP on economic grounds. The mental gymnastics required would impress Olympic judges. They have to simultaneously acknowledge that current Republican policies contradict free-market principles, believe that Republicans secretly still hold those principles, trust that Republicans will eventually return to those principles once [insert condition that keeps moving], and dismiss Democrats' current defense of those same principles as insincere or accidental.
This isn't just inconsistency. It's willful self-deception. It's the deliberate suspension of critical thinking to avoid cognitive dissonance. It's the triumph of tribal identity over objective reality.
I've spent years studying ethical frameworks, moral reasoning, and the philosophy of epistemology. I cannot conceive of a defensible moral position that allows one to claim economic principle while supporting a party that has abandoned every economic principle it once claimed to hold sacred.
If principles matter only when they align with partisan advantage, they aren't principles at all—they're props. If fiscal responsibility matters only when the other party holds power, it's not a commitment to balanced budgets—it's a cynical political weapon. If free trade is essential until your party's leader decides it isn't, then your belief was never in markets—it was in authority.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And a party line vote to protect tariffs that every economic textbook would condemn as self-harming is not the action of a party committed to free markets or economic flourishing.
The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold. And holding it requires intellectual honesty about what we're actually witnessing, not what we wish we were seeing or what we're being told we should see.
If you find yourself justifying this kind of wholesale abandonment of principle, ask yourself: What remains of your political identity if you remove the principles you claimed defined it? If the answer is “loyalty to a leader” or “opposition to the other side,” then you're no longer engaged in principled politics at all—you're practicing something much older and much darker.
“Because power corrupts, society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.” — John Adams
First, I love that you authenticated my email. Consider sharing if this is easy to do with some app. But let me comment as a senior (82, Vietnam Vet, Citizen Diplomat to USSR post-Chernobyl, been to East Berlin before the wall came down, and physician/scientist) about what is missing in just about every media dialog involving Trump et al.
The hallmarks of Fascism involved 1. The Loss of Due Process (a pillar of justice) and the Loss of Free Speech. We are evidencing this in the first 100 days of Trump & acolytes. Grabbing people off the street and sending them to prison in El Salvador without due process, and handcuffing a Tufts foreign student who happens to wear a hijab and sending her to a holding cell in Louisiana because she is not a citizen but wrote or spoke anti-Trump statements is loss of free speech. The attack on the Associated Press (excluding them from the WH Press Pool and from Air Force One) is an early manifestation of the attack on the media, along with Trump's usual utterings of "witchhunt" and "fake news." This is all fascist narrative-- the same stuff of Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and of course, Trump's best friend Putin.
Change our current attempts to normalize or rationalize Trump's speech and actions and instead insert the premise that TRUMP IS A RUSSIAN ASSET. Then everything he has done and is doing and plans to do makes total sense. Throw Ukraine under the bus, disrupt NATO, alienate all allies, destroy American economy, divide the people, hire the most incompetent Cabinet and White House (WH) team in the history of America. Use that premise and ask people to show you where any of Trump's actions are inconsistent with this being the harshest of realities. Today, a friend said she can only hope for the 2028 elections. Such an election will be identical to that in Russia or Turkey. The Trump Dynasty is already in the works. Start to think that Trump is the Manchurian Candidate and he has won the election and now is doing what Putin would do: Destroy America. This is what is happening.
The core value of American society is wealth; it's why people from elsewhere have been coming here for centuries. Along the way, because we could afford to, we adopted some ideals never enacted before in the terms of the Declaration of Independence and solidified in the Constitution (as amended). We are the most fortunate people in human history - allowed, encouraged, to develop wealth as a consequence of our unprecedented freedom and opportunities, and to do so in the context of a society which until recently could derive satisfaction that we were at least trying to offer some safety net for those of us who could not get ahead and needed help. The government until now always understood that regardless of our political leanings we all wanted it to protect our money. If Congress has lost that understanding, I expect that by the midterms the people are going to re-teach them.