Libertarianism

Katie Miller Thinks Classical Liberalism Is Woke Leftism. She's Wrong.

How are the Millers going to defend Western civilization if they don't know the name of its defining philosophy?

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Katie Miller | CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom
Katie Miller (CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom)

Katie Miller is a conservative podcaster and former spokesperson for the Trump administration. She was briefly involved with the Department of Government Efficiency, but left government employment to work for Elon Musk full time. In August 2025, she quit that job too, and launched her own podcast, The Katie Miller Podcast. She is married to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.

One would hope that an individual who has spent so much time in close proximity to high-ranking conservative political figures—and who is married to the avatar of a very particular brand of conservatism, New Right populism/nativism—might be able to properly define classical liberalism, an extremely well-known philosophy that undergirds the entire American project.

Alas, Katie Miller recently issued a warning on X that betrayed a fundamental ignorance about classical liberalism: She is conflating it with leftism, and for good measure, wokeness.

The post in question was an attack on Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, an AI company. Miller expressed concern about Olah's stated commitment to "the principles of classical liberal democracy."

"If this is what they say publicly, this is how their AI model is programmed," she wrote. "Woke and deeply leftist ideology is what they want you to rely upon."

She is clearly saying that "classical liberal democracy" and "woke and deeply leftist ideology" are one and the same. They are not.

Classical liberalism is the forerunner of modern libertarianism: It is a philosophy that emphasizes individual rights, including civil rights and property rights. Classically liberal thinkers such as John Locke helped establish the notion that government should be accountable to the people. Economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo used classical liberalism as a guiding principle when arguing in favor of free markets and free trade. In the realm of government, the political leaders associated with classical liberalism and laissez faire economic policies are people such as former President Calvin Coolidge, former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Argentinian President Javier Milei. Note that these figures are not exactly defined by their love of wokeness. To the extent that "wokeness" is even a coherent set of views, it emphasizes collective rights for various identity groups instead of the individual-rights framework of classical liberalism.

Leftists tend to agree with classical liberals and even most conservatives on some broad principles, like the notion that people should elect their leaders. But modern liberals, progressives, and leftists tend to disagree sharply with classical liberals and libertarians on economics: They want much more government regulation, taxation, and centralized government control of the economy. On these issues, leftism bears a closer resemblance to the version of conservatism advocated by Stephen Miller—who supports tariffs and extreme restrictions on immigrant labor—than it does to classical liberalism.

Katie Miller's former boss, Musk, seems to understand this much better than she does. In a reply on X on March 8, 2024, he wrote: "I believe in liberalism in the sense [of] supporting freedom of thought and action, but modern liberalism is the opposite of that." In other words, he was drawing a distinction between the classical liberalism of, say, America's Founding Fathers and the modern liberalism of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Stephen Miller frequently talks in apocalyptic terms about threats to Western civilization. Given this, one might hope that the Miller household could easily provide the name of Western civilization's defining political philosophy. Hint: It's classical liberal democracy.