John Tillman has made an advocacy career as a libertarian-conservative in one of the most socialist states in the union: Illinois. He brings the experiences of constant battle in that state to his new book, which is something of a memoir of his advocacy career (at least through about 2021) and a promotion for his current projects: The Political Vise: How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty.
The eponymous “vise” is Tillman’s model of how public policy is made and cultural change occurs. As the subtitle’s inconsistency with the present federal administration and the cultural changes it has carried out suggests, the model is missing something.
The political vises
Tillman proposes the existence of three forms of political pressure, which he analogizes to a carpenter’s vise. In the “traditional political vise,” which Tillman argues prevailed from the founding era until the 1980s, politicians who make decisions based on expediency, fear, and principle (in that order of precedence) are squeezed by the press and the people and driven to policy outputs that shape culture and norms by organized interest groups and other “influencers.” Tillman argues that since the 1980s, the dominant “vise” has been the progressive form, in which the public has been squeezed by the press and liberal politicians while influencers drive the public to conform to progressive norms or else.
Tillman also argues that a “liberty political vise” might also exist, with the media and influencers squeezing politicians who are driven by the people to make policies based on personal aspiration, opportunity, and fulfillment. One is allowed to have dreams, even after two decades in public policy work.
As a simple model of public policy development, the “traditional” vise reasonably explains (even today) why legislator X might be inclined to vote for policy Y, but it doesn’t explain the playing field on which liberals and conservatives contend. The “progressive” vise is a reasonable model of “cancel culture,” but here it runs into its own deficiency: Cancel culture doesn’t work like it used to, suggesting the vise can break down.
When the people aren’t for freedom
In the introduction to the book, Tillman asserts, “A people fully engaged will protect their freedom.” It’s a noble folk-libertarian sentiment.
But I fear this is wish-casting. As the Tommy Lee Jones character (Agent Kay) says in the film Men in Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” Tillman writes extensively on the early COVID lockdown period, characterizing it as a case of “manufactured consensus” and the Progressive Political Vise at work.
But was it? Sure, Deborah Birx, one of the first Trump administration’s COVID-lockdown advisers, essentially lied about “fifteen days to slow the spread,” admitting in her memoir that she effectively immediately went about getting the lockdowns extended. But in that she didn’t have to do much manipulation of anything other than the “traditional” political vise.
The people, being subject to Agent Kay’s Law, wanted to be protected by the state. The press amplified that desire, and influencers like Dr. Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci drove politicians—first and foremost President Donald Trump, as Tillman concedes—to act from expediency and fear to give the traditional political vise what it wanted.
When your people aren’t for freedom
I could not help ruefully laughing when Tillman wrote this, about red-state Democratic senators who voted to oppose Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court: “When the November 2018 midterms came, [Joe] Donnelly, [Heidi] Heitkamp, and [Claire] McCaskill were all ousted by Republican challengers […] GOP activists […] put three pro-liberty Republicans into office.”
The records of now-former Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) and Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) are debatable, but the third successor Tillman suggests was “pro-liberty,” statist Teamsters union stooge Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), most assuredly is not. This illustrates another problem with Tillman’s model.
Since President Trump’s second term began, the right — even the “MAGA” or populist right — has splintered, and along lines Tillman thought divided the right from the left. He contends that “victimhood versus fulfillment” is a key split, with the left playing on victimhood to convince the public to “give the government enough power [so] it will right the wrongs that have hurt you.”
But victimhood-dwelling is not a uniquely progressive-left fault. Right-wing victimhood culture likely underlies the curious rise of what some call the “woke right,” especially following the horrific assassination of Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk in September. This faction essentially flips the classical woke “pyramid of grievances”—under which “intersectional” identities prevail over the straight white Christian male—upside-down, seeking to privilege the group wokeism sought to overthrow.
To be clear, Tillman is not one of these people. He’s the exact opposite: A committed individualist and libertarian. (He asserts at multiple points that the income tax is theft if not tantamount to enslavement, which is about as libertarian as you can get without leaving this plane of existence.) But that makes it very tempting to believe that the wish that a “people fully engaged will protect their freedom” is a fact, or at least that everyone who asserts he is on one’s own side is aligned with the cause of liberty. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
What are the other guys actually selling?
What ultimately causes the “political vise” model to be incomplete is its failure to reckon with the sale the progressive-liberal movement has been making to American public opinion since Teddy Roosevelt ran under its banner. From its earliest days as an electoral movement, the progressive has offered the American voter a standard product: With the voter’s support, the progressive will deliver a stable, ever-improving, middle-class standard of living, and will raise the status of the voter’s relevant demographic “communities” (even if the supposed communities are actually heterogeneous and divided; see the division between New York City Puerto Rican and Miami Cuban “Hispanics” for a glaring example of such heterogeneity).
This is a fundamentally appealing offer, which explains why progressive-liberals win presidential general elections roughly half the time and control major states like Big Labor’s golden California, Zohran Mamdani’s New York, and Tillman’s Illinois. Conservatives and libertarians win when progressive-liberals fail to deliver the stable, ever-improving, middle-class standard of living. See the presidential elections of 1952, 1980, and 2024 for examples of this. They also win when the pace of social change to raise the status of certain demographic communities exceeds the public’s tolerance for change or the communities themselves fracture; this explains the elections of 1968 and 2016.
Using Tillman’s model, these dynamics contribute to the resolute strength of the traditional political vise and illustrate the fundamental weakness of the progressive vise, which has been effectively neutered by progressives’ loss of federal power since 2025. (It also illustrates how the liberty-movement vise is a pipe-dream.)
Politics is hard, and governing is harder, as Tillman knows and acknowledges in the memoir-ish portions of the story. Sometimes you win—Tillman rightly claims his share of credit for his organizations’ work supporting the Janus v. AFSCME challenge to mandatory union dues for government workers. Sometimes you lose—the left got much of what it wanted, at least for a time, out of the COVID-19 relief legislation. But both sides are ultimately playing the same game, and there’s no magic approach to ensure either wins forever.
