Ranking U.S. Presidents by Classical Liberalism: Jefferson, Cleveland, and the Governance Test

Most rankings of American presidents center on "greatness" — a composite of leadership, crisis management, and historical reputation that tends to reward presidents who did more. This is not that ranking. What follows is an attempt at something more specific and arguably more honest: rating our presidents against a coherent philosophy of governance, namely classical liberalism, and placing each on a spectrum from exemplar to adversary.

The framework matters, so let's establish it clearly before we touch a single president's record.

The Framework: Governance First, Economics Second

Classical liberalism, in its original and most rigorous sense, is a political philosophy organized around a few durable commitments: individual liberty as the primary political good; limited government operating under constitutional constraints; equal treatment under the law; skepticism of concentrated power (whether in executive, legislative, or corporate hands); and voluntary exchange over coercion in both economics and civic life.

For this ranking, governance is the primary axis. That means:

• Individual liberty and equal rights under law — the foundational measure. This explicitly includes not enslaving people. Slavery is not a footnote to classical liberalism; it is its categorical negation. A president who defended or extended human bondage cannot rank well on classical-liberal grounds regardless of anything else on his ledger. Liberty for some is not liberty.
• Constitutional fidelity and rule of law — acting within enumerated powers, respecting the structure the Constitution created rather than working around it.
• Executive restraint and separation of powers — not accumulating power in the presidency, respecting Congress and the judiciary, restraining war powers and civil-liberties abuses.
• Federalism and decentralization — keeping decisions at the lowest practical level of government.

Economics is a real but secondary axis. Sound money, spending restraint, free markets, and opposition to cronyism matter. But a president who governs with small-government economics while simultaneously violating civil liberties, suspending constitutional rights, or expanding executive power at the expense of the other branches does not rank as a classical-liberal exemplar. The governance record controls.

This is a defensible framework, not gospel. Historians will weigh factors differently. Apply your own weights and you'll move presidents around. But the framework is internally consistent, applied as evenly as possible, and more honest than the usual hero-worship or partisan score-keeping.

Jefferson — The Ideal in Theory

Thomas Jefferson wrote the most consequential classical-liberal document in American history. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In those words, Jefferson articulated the philosophical foundation of classical liberalism with more clarity and force than any governing document before or since. The entire American project, at its best, is an attempt to make those words real.

As a political thinker, Jefferson was relentless in his hostility to concentrated power. He feared standing armies and permanent debt. He argued for a ward system of decentralized republican self-governance that anticipates what we now call subsidiarity. He believed the natural progress of things was for liberty to yield and government to gain. He was the intellectual architect of the view that the federal government possessed only those powers explicitly granted it.

Which is why his presidency is, at times, an uncomfortable read.

Jefferson the president stretched the Constitution he had championed as its strictest constructionist. The Louisiana Purchase — perhaps the single greatest land acquisition in American history — was executed without the constitutional amendment Jefferson privately believed the act required. He rationalized it on executive necessity and moved on. The Embargo Act of 1807, his response to British and French interference with American shipping, was something worse: a coercive, sweeping restriction on American commerce enforced by executive action that made something of a mockery of his free-trade principles and imposed genuine economic hardship on American merchants and workers. It was a failure on both practical and philosophical grounds, and Jefferson knew it.

And then there is the permanent, unanswerable fact: Jefferson enslaved more than six hundred people over the course of his life. He wrote that all men are created equal while holding human beings as property and profiting from their labor. He knew this was a contradiction — his writings acknowledge it in ways that range from tortured to cynical — and he did not resolve it. He was not alone among the Founders in this, but the gap between his stated philosophy and his lived practice is uniquely stark. The man who wrote most eloquently about liberty did not extend it to the people in his own household.

So when we call Jefferson the most ideal classical liberal, we mean something specific and limited: his philosophy, his articulation of first principles, his intellectual framework for thinking about government and rights, stands at the apex of classical-liberal thought in American history. As a governing president, the picture is more complicated. He is the canonical text, not the flawless practitioner.

Cleveland — The Best Practitioner

Grover Cleveland, the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms (22nd and 24th), is the closest thing American history offers to classical liberalism translated into actual governance. He is not a household name in the way Lincoln or Washington or FDR are. He should be better known.

Cleveland's governing philosophy was simple and he applied it consistently: the federal government had defined, limited powers; those powers were to be used honestly and sparingly; the treasury was not a mechanism for rewarding political allies or constituent groups; and the law meant what it said regardless of who it inconvenienced. He meant all of it.

He vetoed more bills in his first term than all previous presidents combined — more than 400 vetoes. Many of these were private pension bills, individual acts of Congress granting federal benefits to specific Civil War veterans on claims that were fraudulent, unverified, or simply the product of political patronage rather than legitimate need. Cleveland read them himself and rejected them case by case. His veto messages were terse, factual, and principled. One of his most famous lines, written in response to a request for disaster relief funds: "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit." And then, in a line that clarifies the thought: "The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This need not concern us here. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood."

He was not, in other words, arguing against charity. He was arguing against the substitution of federal coercion for voluntary civil society — a distinction that matters enormously and that most politicians in his era, as in ours, were not inclined to draw.

Cleveland supported sound money and the gold standard, resisting inflationary pressure from the silver movement. He opposed tariff protection as a form of cronyism that benefited entrenched interests at consumers' expense. He ran a government that spent carefully and governed honestly in an era of notorious corruption.

There is one significant mark against the Cleveland governance record: his response to the Pullman Strike of 1894. When railroad workers struck against George Pullman's wage cuts, Cleveland sent in federal troops over the objections of the Governor of Illinois to break the strike and restore mail service — invoking federal authority in a labor dispute in a way that was legally questionable and practically served the interests of railroad capital over labor. Eugene Debs was imprisoned. The intervention was not Cleveland's finest moment, and it sits uneasily with his general commitment to the proposition that government should not be an instrument of private advantage.

But the weight of his record is clear. Cleveland governed, with discipline and genuine conviction, closer to classical-liberal principles than any other occupant of the White House. He is the best practitioner — not because he was flawless, but because his flaws were exceptions to a consistent governing philosophy rather than expressions of it.

The Rankings: A Governance-Weighted Tier List

What follows covers the major and most consequential presidents. Not every occupant of the office gets equal treatment — some are more historically significant, some more philosophically interesting. The tiers are ordered from most to least classical-liberal by the governance framework established above.

Tier I — Classical-Liberal Standard-Bearers

Grover Cleveland (22nd/24th) — The best practitioner, as argued above. Disciplined vetoes, sound money, anti-cronyism, genuine constitutional fidelity. The Pullman Strike intervention is a real deduction but does not displace him from the top tier. No other president governed so consistently from classical-liberal first principles for so sustained a period.

George Washington (1st) — Set the precedents that defined constitutional self-restraint. Voluntarily relinquished power — twice — when he could have held it indefinitely. Resisted the temptation to become a monarch in republican clothing. The Farewell Address warned against permanent alliances, political factions, and the public debt with clarity that still reads as genuinely classical-liberal. The Whiskey Rebellion suppression was an assertion of federal authority, but one with a legitimate constitutional basis; it was not an expansion of executive power beyond what the Constitution contemplated. Washington's governing instinct was conservative in the best sense: protect the constitutional order and then step aside.

James Madison (4th) — The intellectual architect of constitutional limits on government. His presidency was imperfect — the War of 1812 was ill-managed and the burning of Washington was an embarrassment — but his governing philosophy and his record of constitutional fidelity rank high. Madison opposed the first Bank of the United States on constitutional grounds (before eventually relenting) and was genuinely skeptical of federal overreach throughout his career.

Martin Van Buren (8th) — Often overlooked, but deserves credit. He resisted pressure to expand the federal role during a severe economic depression (the Panic of 1837), arguing that the federal government should not be in the business of bailing out private losses. He established the Independent Treasury to remove federal funds from private banks — a structural reform aimed at limiting cronyism. His record on slavery is poor (he was a political accommodationist), but as a matter of fiscal and executive governance, he practiced restraint at a moment when the political temptation to do otherwise was strong.

Calvin Coolidge (30th) — The last president to preside over a genuine reduction in the federal government's size and scope. Cut federal spending, cut taxes, paid down the national debt, and largely stayed out of the economy. His famous silence was not laziness but a deliberate governing philosophy: the executive should do less. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was a naive piece of symbolism, but Coolidge's domestic governance was as close to laissez-faire classical liberalism as the 20th century produced. He had genuine civil-liberties blind spots — his immigration restrictions and the continued federal enforcement of Prohibition on his watch are real deductions — but the fiscal and executive-restraint record is strong.

Tier II — Mixed Record / Constrained Classical Liberals

James Monroe (5th) — Governed in the "Era of Good Feelings" with relative executive restraint and sound finance. His opposition to the Missouri Compromise's congressional overreach and his famous Doctrine (limiting European re-colonization of the Americas) were defensible applications of republican principle. Not a consequential enough presidency to rank higher, not a problematic one either.

James K. Polk (11th) — A disciplined executive who accomplished his stated goals, kept his pledge to serve one term, and ran a financially honest administration that reduced tariffs and established the Independent Treasury. But the Mexican-American War was a war of executive aggression and expansion that Lincoln (then a congressman) rightly criticized. The expansion of American territory came at a significant governance cost in terms of war powers and the subsequent question of slavery in the territories. Mixed.

Warren G. Harding (29th) — Harding's economic record is underrated: he managed the deflationary recession of 1920-21 without federal intervention, allowing the market to clear in a contraction that was sharper but shorter than the Great Depression would be. He also championed Black civil rights more openly than most of his contemporaries and commuted Eugene Debs's prison sentence (which Wilson had let stand for political opponents of WWI). But the Teapot Dome scandal and the pervasive corruption of his administration are real governance failures. He gets credit for the instinct, deduction for the execution.

William McKinley (25th) — Economically protectionist, which is a deduction on the classical-liberal ledger, but a generally restrained executive who did not dramatically expand the presidency. The Spanish-American War and the subsequent Philippine-American War mark the beginning of American imperialism as governing policy, which is a significant classical-liberal deduction — the projection of state power beyond the republic's borders at considerable human cost. Mixed.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th) — Balanced the federal budget, wound down Korea, resisted the national security establishment's pressure for adventurism (most notably declining to intervene militarily in Vietnam after Dien Bien Phu, over the Joint Chiefs' objections), and issued his famous warning about the military-industrial complex. On the other hand, presided over a large and growing federal government without fundamentally questioning it. His civil rights record was tepid — he desegregated the military (Truman's action) and enforced Brown v. Board at Little Rock, but without particular conviction. A restrained, pragmatic presidency that held the line more than it advanced classical-liberal principles.

Gerald Ford (38th) — Governed briefly and without a mandate, but with genuine respect for constitutional process after Nixon's abuses. Vetoed significant spending. The Nixon pardon was controversial but arguably a constitutional act of executive discretion rather than an abuse of power. A transitional presidency that stabilized constitutional norms rather than violated them.

John F. Kennedy (35th) — The Cuban Missile Crisis resolution was genuinely prudent executive statecraft — managing an existential standoff without military escalation. Kennedy's tax cuts were classically liberal in design. But the Bay of Pigs was an executive overreach and disaster, Vietnam escalation began on his watch, and his civil rights record was cautious to the point of moral evasion until the events of 1963 forced his hand. A complicated figure placed here more for what he refrained from than for what he did.

Ronald Reagan (40th) — The 20th-century president most explicitly associated with classical-liberal rhetoric, and his record partially justifies that reputation. He cut marginal tax rates significantly, challenged the regulatory state's expansion, and his Cold War posture helped bring the Soviet empire down without direct military confrontation. But federal spending rose on his watch, deficits exploded (reducing future fiscal flexibility), and federal drug enforcement and the "War on Drugs" expanded civil-liberties abuses substantially. The rhetoric often ran ahead of the governing record. He belongs in the mixed tier, not the top — a classical liberal in instinct who governed in a political environment that constrained the practice.

Bill Clinton (42nd) — Welfare reform (1996) was a genuine devolution of federal authority to the states — the most significant contraction of a major federal entitlement program since Cleveland. The budget surpluses of the late 1990s were real. NAFTA was a classically liberal trade policy. But the 1994 crime bill expanded federal criminalization substantially, telecommunications and financial deregulation in the 1990s had mixed long-term effects, and the military interventions in Yugoslavia and Somalia were imperfect applications of executive war powers. A mixed classical-liberal record with some genuine wins.

George H.W. Bush (41st) — Managed the end of the Cold War and the Gulf War with genuine multilateral restraint — building a coalition, obtaining congressional authorization, achieving the stated objective, and stopping. The elder Bush is a case study in executive restraint in the use of military force. But his domestic governance was largely status quo federal management, and the "no new taxes" reversal (however fiscally defensible) reflected a pattern of executive drift. A better foreign-policy classical liberal than a domestic one.

Tier III — Governance Statists / Progressive Expansionists

Abraham Lincoln (16th) — Lincoln requires the most careful treatment in this framework, and he deserves it.

The governance metrics against him are real and not trivial: the suspension of habeas corpus without congressional authorization, the Emancipation Proclamation issued as a war measure under executive power rather than through legislative process, the suppression of dissenting newspapers, the use of military tribunals for civilians. By a narrow reading of constitutional fidelity and executive restraint, Lincoln scores poorly.

But the framework cannot stop there, because classical liberalism is, at its root, about individual liberty — and Lincoln's presidency ended the institution that was the most massive and systematic violation of individual liberty in American history. The emancipation of four million enslaved people is not a footnote. It is the most consequential expansion of human liberty in the republic's history. A framework that ranks Confederate-sympathizing governors of "limited government" above Lincoln because they didn't suspend habeas corpus would be using the machinery of classical liberalism to reach a conclusion that classical liberalism fundamentally rejects.

The honest assessment: Lincoln expanded executive power in ways that set troubling precedents, and those precedents matter. But he did so in service of the foundational classical-liberal end — the recognition of the equal humanity and equal rights of all persons. Credit the end, note the means, and place him here: above the straightforward statist expansionists who expanded power without liberty-advancing purpose, below the exemplars who achieved principled governance without the constitutional stretches.

James Monroe / Andrew Jackson (7th) — Jackson presents a textbook case of the limits of applying "small government" labels without examining who the government was small toward. He warred against the Second Bank of the United States on classical-liberal anti-cronyism grounds that were entirely coherent. But he also signed the Indian Removal Act and presided over the forced displacement of the Five Civilized Tribes — an act of catastrophic state violence against people whose property rights and treaty rights the federal government had previously recognized. Jackson's "limited government" was selective. It shrank federal authority when it served his political base and deployed massive coercive state power when it dispossessed Native Americans. That is not classical liberalism. It is populism wearing classical-liberal clothing.

James Buchanan (15th) — Paralyzed as the republic came apart, but his paralysis had a governing-philosophy flavor: he argued the federal government had no constitutional authority to prevent secession, even while simultaneously arguing states had no right to secede. The result was an incoherent, disastrous non-governance that helped precipitate the bloodiest war in American history. Failing to use government's legitimate authority to protect constitutional order is not classical liberalism.

Theodore Roosevelt (26th) — Statist-Progressive tier. Rated in full in the grace note below, as our firm's namesake requires — but the placement is unambiguous: by the governance measure, TR expanded federal and executive power deliberately and proudly.

Herbert Hoover (31st) — Often misread as a laissez-faire classical liberal because the Great Depression happened on his watch and FDR was his successor. In fact, Hoover intervened aggressively: the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (signed over the objections of virtually every economist in the country) choked international trade; the Reconstruction Finance Corporation began federal bailout of large financial institutions; he signed the Revenue Act of 1932 with one of the largest peacetime tax increases in American history, contractionary at exactly the wrong moment. He was neither a rigorous classical liberal nor a rigorous anything else. He was an engineer who believed he could manage the economy if given sufficient authority. The results were catastrophic.

Harry Truman (33rd) — The Marshall Plan was a genuine act of classical-liberal statesmanship in foreign policy — rebuilding market economies in Western Europe to check Soviet expansion. The desegregation of the military was a significant civil-rights advance. But Truman expanded the national security and intelligence apparatus substantially (the CIA, NSC structure, permanent military establishment), pursued an undeclared war in Korea through executive authority alone, and attempted to seize the steel industry by executive order in 1952 — an act the Supreme Court flatly rejected as unconstitutional. The national security state that would grow for the next 75 years has significant Truman-era roots.

Richard Nixon (37th) — The most comprehensive governance failure in this ranking below the collectivist tier. Wage and price controls imposed by executive order in 1971 were a frontal assault on the market economy. The closing of the gold window ended the Bretton Woods monetary system unilaterally. The EPA, OSHA, and a significant expansion of the administrative state all occurred on Nixon's watch — more new regulatory agencies than under any president since FDR. And Watergate: the systematic abuse of executive power, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement for political persecution. Nixon was not a classical liberal by any measure that matters.

Jimmy Carter (39th) — Deregulated airlines, trucking, and railroads — a genuine classical-liberal achievement that reduced costs and expanded consumer choice. But stagflation, the energy crisis, and his response (gas rationing, windfall profits taxes, the synthetic fuels corporation) reflected a pattern of administrative-state thinking over market mechanisms. The Iran hostage crisis exposed an executive branch unable to act decisively even when executive action was clearly called for. An honest mixed record that earns him this tier rather than the next, but without the governing confidence to push classical-liberal reforms through consistently.

George W. Bush (43rd) — The post-9/11 expansion of executive surveillance power (PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, the "unitary executive" theory), the indefinite detention framework at Guantanamo, and the extraordinary rendition program are among the most significant domestic governance failures on civil-liberties grounds of any modern presidency. The Iraq War was sold on intelligence that proved false, authorized through a broadly worded use of force resolution that Congress has never truly reclaimed, and executed with catastrophic miscalculation about post-invasion stability. Federal spending increased substantially. The prescription drug benefit (Medicare Part D) was the largest expansion of a domestic entitlement since LBJ. This is a poor classical-liberal record by the governance measure.

Barack Obama (44th) — Expanded the surveillance state he inherited rather than curtailing it. The drone program established a precedent for executive targeting of individuals (including American citizens) without judicial review. Executive overreach on immigration (DACA, DAPA) bypassed legislative process. The Affordable Care Act, whatever its policy merits, mandated individual participation in a private market through federal authority. Federal spending and debt increased substantially. Obama governed as a liberal technocrat, not a classical liberal.

Donald Trump (45th/47th) — Deregulation and the three Tax Cuts and Jobs Act rate reductions have genuine classical-liberal elements on the economic axis. But the governance ledger is more complicated. The executive-order approach to immigration, the trade war tariffs imposed by executive authority (bypassing Congress), the erosion of institutional norms around law enforcement independence, and the post-2020 challenge to peaceful transfer of power are significant governance deductions. Classical liberalism depends on constitutional process as the guarantor of liberty; a president who treats those processes as obstacles rather than constraints is not a classical-liberal practitioner, whatever his economic preferences.

Joe Biden (46th) — Federal spending at historically high peacetime levels (the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act), significant regulatory expansion across energy, labor, and financial markets, and a pattern of executive orders that pushed against the constitutional limits the Supreme Court ultimately enforced in West Virginia v. EPA and related cases. The student loan cancellation attempts — repeatedly struck down by the courts as beyond executive authority — are a clear example of the governance pattern. Not a classical-liberal presidency.

Tier IV — High Collectivism / Statist High-Water Marks

Woodrow Wilson (28th) — Wilson is, by the governance framework, the most troubling American president for classical liberals, and the reasons run deeper than the standard policy critique. Wilson was intellectually hostile to the Founders' constitutional framework. He believed the separation of powers was an inefficient anachronism and that scientific administration by expert bureaucracies should replace democratic self-governance for complex technical questions. He was not just expanding government — he was theorizing its expansion as a superior form of political organization. The administrative state that classical liberals have fought against since the New Deal has its deepest intellectual roots in Wilson's political science, not FDR's. And Wilson's civil liberties record is catastrophic: the Espionage Act and Sedition Act prosecuted dissent and criticism of the war with prison sentences; Eugene Debs received a ten-year sentence for a speech. Jim Crow was re-implemented in federal workplaces under Wilson's direct order. He resegregated an executive branch that had been more integrated under his Republican predecessors. By the governance framework — individual liberty, constitutional fidelity, executive restraint — Wilson is uniquely disqualifying.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (32nd) — The New Deal transformed the relationship between the federal government and the American economy in ways that have not been reversed and were not intended to be. The executive branch grew in scope and ambition; the administrative state that Wilson theorized, FDR built. The Supreme Court-packing scheme — blocked by the Senate but nakedly aimed at removing a constitutional check on executive power — is one of the most serious attacks on separation of powers by any American president. The Japanese-American internment (Executive Order 9066) was a civil-liberties atrocity without redemptive purpose: the forced relocation and imprisonment of 120,000 people based solely on ethnicity, and it was upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu in one of the worst decisions in that court's history. Roosevelt's wartime economic controls extended federal direction of the economy to an unprecedented degree. The New Deal coalition produced genuine popular support for expanded government that lasted fifty years, but the classical-liberal critique is clear: this was the most consequential transformation of the American state toward administrative collectivism in the republic's history, and FDR was its architect.

Lyndon B. Johnson (36th) — The Great Society added layers to the administrative state that the New Deal had built: Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, the expansion of the federal role in education, housing, and urban development. These programs reflected a governing philosophy of Washington-based technocratic solutions to social problems that classical liberals fundamentally dispute — not because poverty doesn't matter, but because concentrated federal authority to address it trades one problem for another. LBJ's civil rights legislation — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 — are real classical-liberal achievements: the extension of equal rights under law to Americans who had been denied them by state-level apartheid. Credit where due. But on executive power, Vietnam is disqualifying. LBJ escalated a war on the basis of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — passed on the strength of an incident that was, at minimum, deliberately misrepresented to Congress — without a declaration of war, resulting in 58,000 American deaths and a catastrophic failure of the constitutional war-powers framework. The combination of Great Society statism and Vietnam executive overreach places LBJ firmly in this tier.

A Grace Note on Theodore Roosevelt and the Name We Carry

This firm is named for the Bull Moose — Theodore Roosevelt's third-party run in 1912, the most successful independent presidential campaign in American history. We owe the name an honest accounting.

By the governance framework applied above, TR does not rank as a classical liberal. He was explicitly, self-consciously a progressive — the word was his and he meant it. The expansion of the federal regulatory state (the FDA, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Hepburn Act extending ICC authority over railroads, the Bureau of Corporations), the use of executive power as a "bully pulpit" for national purpose, and the "New Nationalism" of his later career that contemplated a positive federal role in equalizing economic conditions — these are not classical-liberal governing positions. TR believed government should actively shape economic outcomes, not merely protect market processes. He would have acknowledged the description cheerfully.

So, rated on the scale: TR lands in the Statist-Progressive tier — the same tier as Woodrow Wilson, for different reasons. Wilson supplied the intellectual architecture of the administrative state; Roosevelt supplied the political will and built the regulatory machinery (the Bureau of Corporations, the Hepburn Act, Pure Food and Drug). What keeps him out of the highest-collectivism tier — Wilson at his civil-liberties worst, FDR, LBJ — is that his expansions were aimed at policing market power and corruption rather than directing the economy wholesale or suspending civil liberties: trust-busting and railroad regulation, not internment or court-packing. He is the upper edge of the statist tier, not the bottom. Economics secondary, governance primary: TR fails the governance test he would not have cared to pass — a deliberate and consequential expander of the American state.

So why the name?

Because what we honor in the Bull Moose run is not TR's economic statism. It is the impulse that drove him out of the Republican Party when he believed it had been captured by machine interests and corrupted by party over principle. The 1912 campaign was a candidate-over-party, conscience-over-machine act. Roosevelt ran because he believed Taft and the Republican establishment had sold out to the same corporate interests the progressive movement existed to check — and he was willing to lose, and he did lose, rather than accept the machine's verdict in silence.

That spirit — the candidate who stands on principle against the party apparatus, who serves the people rather than the machine, who treats party loyalty as contingent on the party deserving it — is the spirit we try to bring to how we work with candidates. We don't think parties are the point. We think governance is the point. TR got that right even when his vision of governance differed from ours.

The irony is self-aware. We carry the name of a president who did not govern as a classical liberal, because he embodied something classical liberalism depends on: the willingness to challenge concentrated power, even when that power wears your own party's colors.

A Note on the Far End of the Spectrum: Communism and Socialism

The spectrum on which we've placed American presidents runs from classical-liberal to statist. But the spectrum itself has a far end that no American president has approached — and that far end deserves brief attention because it defines what classical liberalism is most fundamentally against.

Classical liberalism holds that voluntary exchange between individuals — in markets, in civil society, in all arenas of human cooperation — produces better outcomes and preserves human dignity better than coercive substitutes. The natural adversary of this view, in its most complete form, is communism: the abolition of private property, the collective ownership of the means of production, and the direction of economic activity by the state rather than voluntary exchange.

The classical-liberal critique of communism is not simply that it doesn't work, although the 20th century record is damning on that count. It is that it cannot work without coercion, because private property and voluntary exchange are the only mechanisms that efficiently aggregate the dispersed, particular knowledge that individuals have about their own circumstances, needs, and preferences. Friedrich Hayek named this the "knowledge problem": no central planner, no matter how intelligent or well-intentioned, can replicate the information generated by millions of individual transactions, because that information does not exist in any form that can be centrally accessed. It exists only in practice, in the choices actual people make about actual resources. You cannot plan what you cannot know.

The 20th-century experiments confirm the theory. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge — each attempted, in varying degrees, to organize economic life through central command. Each produced material poverty and political terror. The poverty was not a design flaw; it was an output of the design. The terror was not incidental; it was the enforcement mechanism that coercive economic organization requires when voluntary compliance fails, as it inevitably does.

Socialism in its strict sense — state ownership or direction of the means of production — shares this problem in proportion to the degree of central direction. A market economy with a robust safety net is not socialism; it is a market economy with redistribution, and classical liberals can and do disagree about how much redistribution is appropriate and through what mechanisms. But a genuine socialist economy — one in which the state directs production, sets prices, and controls capital allocation — replicates the knowledge problem at every level and produces the same predictable failures at smaller scale.

The historical record is available to anyone who looks at it honestly. Every society that has pursued comprehensive economic collectivism has produced coercion, shortage, and ultimately repression. Not because socialist or communist leaders were uniquely evil people, though some were, but because the system requires the suppression of the price signals, voluntary transactions, and individual choices that are the only mechanism for social coordination that actually works. When you eliminate those mechanisms, you substitute political command — and political command, in practice, means force.

Classical liberalism's answer is not that markets are perfect or that inequality is irrelevant. It is that voluntary cooperation, protected rights, and limited government produce better outcomes for more people — including the poor — than the alternatives. The evidence for that proposition, measured across the 20th century and into the 21st, is not ambiguous.

Why This Matters at the Local Level

We spend most of our time helping candidates at the county commissioner, city council, school board, and state legislative level. It might seem like a philosophical essay on presidential governance is a long way from a county commission race in a midwestern swing district.

It isn't.

The principles that make classical liberalism worth defending at the national level are the same principles that show up in local governance every day — usually less dramatically, but no less consequentially for the people who live under them. The county commissioner who understands that the government budget is the public's money, not the government's, and who treats it accordingly. The school board member who believes parents have a legitimate claim on what their children are taught. The township trustee who knows the difference between a government that serves the community and one that substitutes its judgment for the community's.

Those instincts — grounded in the same philosophy that Jefferson articulated and Cleveland practiced — matter more in most people's daily lives than the federal government's posture on most issues. What happens in your school district, your county budget, your local zoning board shapes your life in ways that most federal policy does not.

We work with candidates who take that seriously. We don't require philosophical conformity. We do believe that candidates who understand what government is for — and what it is not for — govern better, serve their constituents better, and earn the trust that makes political careers worth having.

The spectrum from classical liberalism to statism isn't just a historical ranking exercise. It's a description of two fundamentally different relationships between the governed and those who govern them. The candidates we work with are trying to get that relationship right. So are we.