Donald Trump’s attempts at “fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past” have a chance to succeed — by spurring the very sort of “revisionist movement” he denounces in his March 27 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Not that Trump’s “solemn and uplifting public monuments” will engender much high-mindedness among the American public, even though they will surely avoid quoting from Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School. And Trump’s trumpeting of America’s “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing” is at odds with his 2017 inaugural address describing a country in which heretofore “there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land,” since “for too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”

But the administration’s very heavy-handedness might make Americans think twice about what they think they know about their history.  On April 2, New York Times contributor David W. Blight insisted that what Trump dubs a “revisionist” approach is necessary to “maintain relevance,” and that “many Americans … actually prefer complexity to patriotic straitjackets.”

The newspaper wasn’t always so charitable to the revisionists.  In 2007, Howard Zinn responded to Walter Kirn calling his A Young People’s History of the United States less devoted to “telling the truth” than “editing and motivating” in The New York Times Book Review with a letter to the editor insisting that “there is no such thing as a single ‘objective’ truth” independent of “the viewpoint of the historian.”  This year, a contribution by Jeet Heer discerned “a proto-Trumpian politics” in Murray Rothbard viewing America’s rules as “a sham that ripped off ordinary citizens” (“Why We Got Kash Patel and a ‘Gangster Government’,” January 30).

Yet the Rothbard who Heer sees as yearning for rule by real-life equivalents of “the mobster antiheroes of the ‘Godfather’ movies” had no use for the not-so-little “Caesar in the White House” who imposed wage and price controls in his 1971 Times op-ed “The President’s Economic Betrayal,” or Nixonian Republicans who “have forgotten their free enterprise rhetoric and are willing to join in the patriotic hoopla.”

In contrast, the February 1976 issue of Rothbard’s The Libertarian Forum lauded “the Revisionist, even if he is not a libertarian personally” since “to penetrate the fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals” is “a vitally important libertarian service.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Trump Makes History Again? Great…” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, April 4, 2025

“What noted conservative advocates jailing people to prevent the spread of their ideas?” If David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom was written nowadays, he could challenge readers to think of one who doesn’t.

Friedman observed that National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.’s then-recent 1965 call for “quarantining all [narcotics] addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague” was “inconsistent with [Buckley’s] belief in a free society.”  The pugnaciously partisan pundit of conservatism wouldn’t take the implications of his own analogy far enough to “favor jailing Galbraith, Bundy, and several Rockefellers as carriers of liberalism.”

By 1996, Thomas Szasz could be confident that “Buckley has since moderated his views” on the issue (even if he hadn’t “abandoned defining the ‘drug problem’ as a medical matter”).

Yet in February 2025, former Reagan staffer Glenn Loury still considered applying a Just Say No approach to other vices, deeming “online gambling and pornography … detrimental … to marriage,” enough so to possibly justify efforts to “prosecute producers of … the most obscene videos.” Friedman had quipped that the decisions made by what Buckley called the “psychologically weak or misinformed” might include “getting married or subscribing to National Review.”

Loury’s “obscene videos” may not include Academy Award champion Anora, but on May 3, Lauren Smith vouched that its filmmakers’ acceptance speeches would “legitimise the act of sexually exploiting women for money” (“The ‘vibe shift’ hasn’t reached the Oscars,” spiked). That same day, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called anti-Semitism “comparable to history’s most deadly plagues” not just in its harmful effects but its catchiness, with top universities serving as “greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence” — while decrying in the same breath “censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture.” JFK’s nephew ignores such ills among his new bedfellows in the Trump administration as intently as the new PBS American Masters documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse covers them as if they are only found there.

Friedman pointed out that “a university may proclaim its neutrality, but neutrality, as the left quite properly argues, is also a position” — one particularly hard to maintain “if one believes that the election of Ronald Reagan or Teddy Kennedy would be a national tragedy.” Long after their time, the solution remains not “a university run from the outside, by a state government” but developing “noncoercive cooperation.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Freedom: Not Another Word for Things Left to Lose” by Joel Schlosberg, The Newton Kansan, March 10, 2025

With the end of January consigning Christmas decorations to cheerful memory, even if northern blizzards and hot-button issues stoked by the incoming Trump administration are less conducive to jollity, is it “time to cut the green tape”?  Lauren Smith thinks that such eco-bureaucracy is “Why Britain can’t build anything” (spiked, January 29).

Solar power is not in fact as much of a real-world threat to England as it was in the hands of Christopher Lee’s fanciful Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga.  Across the Atlantic, red-staters are the ones eager to snip red tape, even if the bounteously bearded fellow in a red hat gracing the Wall Street Journal editorial page was not Kris Kringle but Karl of Das Kapital, illustrating Jacob Berger’s case for why conservatives have more in common than they assume with the original Red (“Why MAGA Folks Should Read Marx,” January 23).

The prospect of a so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” may provoke Green New Dealers, but the original New Deal’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman had been promptly inducted into the “Society of Red Tape Cutters” created by Dr. Seuss for the staunchly leftist newspaper PM to laud “Boldness and Directness of purpose” in overcoming “petty bureaucratic detail.”

Even after Seuss became more associated with the amusements of what Dissent‘s Michael Kazin called “lovely nonsense with no discernible moral point” than pointed propagandizing, the lines were not so clearly drawn. In 1982, conservative columnist George Will gushed that “the space program is the greatest conceivable adventure; yet the government scants it.” Will leaves unnamed any particular “Philistine utilitarians” he has in mind who need to be swayed by “such marvels as nonstick frying pans” but must have had in mind the likes of Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who had infamously insisted that NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence “should be postponed for a few million light-years” (or at least “until right after the federal budget is balanced”).

In 1999, Garry Wills couldn’t understand why Americans would “want inefficient politicians to govern us” when “we do not want inefficient doctors to treat us, inefficient lawyers to represent us,” a year after Barry Goldwater’s New York Times obituary reminded readers that his “philosophy was never more simply put” than when he had declared that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient… for I propose to extend freedom.”

The “new, smaller government” promised in Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address was compromised by micromanagement as well as malpractice — as when proposing deeper involvement “in the workplace, in religious, charitable, and civic associations” or “to cut bureaucratic red tape so that schools and teachers have more flexibility for grassroots reform, and to hold them accountable for results” in ways that were inevitably top-down — and laid the ground for the seemingly endless conflicts and post-dotcom-boom busts of the twenty-first century. Disentangling voluntary cooperation from such astroturfing is necessary to break free from red (and green) tape.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “One Dog, Too DOGE, Red Tape, Green Tape” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, February 3, 2025