A Political Movement Defined by What it Hates will Eventually Love Power

by Rod Williams, Feb. 21, 2026- As I have watched the Republican Party and major elements of the conservative movement abandon every principle that once expoused, I have been dismayed and disappointed and often felt betrayed. I have pondered how it could have happened. In the editorial below, I think Diogo Costa provides the answer.

Diogo Costa

by Diogo Costa, President, Foundation for Economic Education, Feb. 21, 2026 - A political movement defined by what it hates will eventually love power, because power is the easiest way to punish what it hates.

The Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s sweeping tariffs last week, ruling 6–3 that he had exceeded his authority. The principle at stake, that government power must be constrained by law, that no president is above the constitutional structure, was for decades a constitutive commitment of American conservatism. From Goldwater to Reagan to the Tea Party, there was an entire intellectual project built on it. And for decades the antagonistic energy pointed the same way, as conservatives defended separation of powers against Obama’s executive orders, against every expansion of presidential authority that served progressive ends.

Then the executive power became theirs. Now, the president calls the justices who went against his tariffs “fools and lap dogs,” “unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” But “disloyal to our Constitution” no longer meant what it once meant. It meant disloyal to the president. The Constitution was no longer invoked as a principle, but as a loyalty test. Many of those now denouncing the ruling once championed free trade and warned against executive overreach as foundational conservative commitments. The principle did not change. The power did. And those for whom the principle had never been anchored in anything deeper than opposition followed the power.

Every political movement contains two orientations. One is constitutive: it knows what it stands for. For classical liberals, this means individual freedom, voluntary exchange, human dignity, institutional pluralism, the dispersed knowledge no central authority can replicate. The other orientation is antagonistic: it knows what it stands against. The enemy might be as real as socialism, identitarianism, progressive overreach, bureaucratic capture… but opposition becomes the organizing center of the project. This is not to say that antagonism is a corruption of politics. Every political movement pushes against something: from abolitionism to economic liberal reforms. The question is which orientation is load-bearing: the constitutive or the antagonistic. When the two point in the same direction, they feel like a single commitment. But when they pull apart, each person follows whichever thread runs deeper.

Free speech shows this kind of drift. The ACLU progressive in the 1990s defends the rights of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, because the principle protects everyone or it protects no one. But she is also energized by what free speech does for her people: it shields civil rights organizers, anti-war protesters, marginalized voices. Then the voices demanding protection become conservative speakers and heterodox academics. She does not announce that she has abandoned free speech. She redefines it. Speech becomes harm, silence becomes safety. Now take the anti-woke conservative in 2018, rallying to free speech against deplatforming and campus speech codes. He may even understand the constitutive case. But he is also energized by what the fight does for his side. Then his side gained access to institutional power, and censorship became available as a tool rather than endured as a grievance. All of a sudden, he becomes in favor of the restrictions to speech he once denounced. He does not announce that he has abandoned free speech, either. He redefines it. Neither experienced the drift as betrayal. It felt like fulfillment.

Richard Hanania recently argued that American libertarianism has fractured into two camps: an elite wing of economists and policy scholars, and a populist wing of conspiratorial influencers and authoritarian fellow-travelers. There’s something to this distinction. But Hanania treats it as a sorting into fixed categories. On the one hand, the serious people who were always classical liberals, on the other, the contrarian vice-signalers who never were. I think this misses an important part of the story. Or, it misses the story. The fracture is not a revelation of who people always were. It is the result of a drift, a story told by its mechanism.

Plenty of well-educated people made the drift. They didn’t become stupid. But antagonism has its own logic, and that logic eventually overrides whatever ideology it inhabits. The process is not a simple switch from principled to unprincipled. It is a drift. Most people hold both constitutive and antagonistic commitments simultaneously, in varying degrees of alignment. In certain moments, the two converge almost perfectly. But contexts change. Enemies shift. The political field rearranges itself. And the constitutive and antagonistic begin to pull apart. When these no longer align, they must choose which to follow. The choice is made incrementally, through a thousand small decisions about which audience to address, which outrage to amplify, which coalition to prioritize. To invoke Kubrick, they have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

The case for liberty does not merely announce itself. The principles of a free society must be taught in a way that forms constitutive commitment, not merely reactive opposition. This is what the best educational institutions in the classical liberal tradition have always understood. The goal is not to produce people who are against the state or the left or any particular enemy. The goal is to produce people who understand what freedom generates, people who grasp the discovery processes that emerge when individuals and institutions are free to experiment, fail, learn, and cooperate.

Community matters, but not merely as a coalition, which is the trap Hanania falls into when he suggests that libertarians court intellectual elites on the left. If the problem is that alliance politics subordinates principle to tribal loyalty, the answer cannot be a different tribe. Community matters as a condition of formation: relationships of intellectual trust where someone further along can hold your attention on what is actually happening before you reach for a theory about it. This kind of community does not require partisan affiliation. It requires a shared commitment to seeing clearly.

A political movement defined by what it hates will eventually love power, because power is the easiest way to punish what it hates. Antagonism will always give you a rush and a reason to forgive your own side’s coercion as soon as it becomes available. Alliances can flip. Principles can be redefined. The only durable antidote is formation: communities of intellectual trust that train attention, that teach people to recognize the quiet miracles of liberty, and that make the constraints of law feel like guardians rather than obstacles. This is not a political project. It is an educational one.