THE UNLIKELY ALLIES REPORT When the Far Left and Far Right Agree | In an era of unprecedented political polarization, specific issues consistently unite libertarian conservatives and progressive activists against the bipartisan establishment.

In an era of unprecedented political polarization, specific issues consistently unite libertarian conservatives and progressive activists against the bipartisan establishment.

This report maps four areas of convergence –surveillance opposition, anti-interventionism, corporate monopolies, criminal justice reform– using only public records and verified reporting. The pattern reveals a deeper fault line: concentrated power versus distributed accountability.

I. THE SURVEILLANCE STATE

When Spies and Activists Found Common Ground

Amash-Conyers Amendment (2013): The Vote That Scrambled Everything

Edward Snowden’s revelations hit Washington like a Russian tsunami. The NSA wasn’t just monitoring foreign targets –it was vacuuming up metadata on every American phone call– building a map of the nation’s communications without warrants, without oversight, without Constitutional authority.

The response should have been predictable: progressives cry foul, conservatives defend security, nothing changes. Instead, something unicorny happened. Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), a libertarian firebrand, and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), a civil-rights veteran, co-sponsored an amendment to kill the program.

On July 24, 2013, the House voted. The amendment lost 205-217 but the breakdown revealed the real story:

111 Democrats and 94 Republicans voted YES to end bulk collection. 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats voted NO to preserve it. Leadership from both parties scrambled to keep the surveillance machine running. But more Republicans defied their own party than Democrats did; a rare fracture that exposed something the establishment wanted hidden: when you ask citizens directly about unaccountable power, partisan tribalism dissolves.

The ACLU and EFF stood with Cato and Tea Party groups. Tea Party and progressives on the same side. Not because they agreed on anything else, they despised each other on nearly everything, but because they shared a conviction: government agencies should not collect data on Americans without warrants.

Rand Paul Filibuster (2013): A Conservative Defends Habeas Corpus (and Liberals Notice)

March 6, 2013. Sen. Rand Paul took the Senate floor to filibuster the CIA nomination of John Brennan. He spoke for nearly 13 hours straight.

His target: drone strikes. Specifically, whether the President could order a drone strike on an American citizen, on American soil, without trial.

The reaction split along invisible lines. Traditional hawks—John McCain, Lindsey Graham—attacked Paul. But something else happened. Progressives praised him. The Guardian’s Amy Goodman called it a moment of national shame that only a libertarian Republican was asking the question. Civil liberties groups across the spectrum rallied.

ABC News ran the headline: “Rand Paul Wins Applause From GOP and Liberals.” It wasn’t a typo. It was the actual fracture.

Paul lost the nomination fight and Brennan was confirmed. But he exposed something: when a conservative stood on principle against executive overreach, progressives recognized the principle. When a libertarian defended Constitutional limits on state power, civil libertarians admitted it. The culture war noise evaporated, replaced by actual debate on actual stakes.

NDAA Section 1021 (2012): The Law That Could Imprison Americans Forever

In December 2012, Congress buried a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that alarmed both left and right: Section 1021 granted the President authority to detain American citizens indefinitely, without trial, based on suspicion of support for terrorism.

No charges. No court. No end date.

The constitutional objection was immediate and cross-ideological. Ron Paul called it unconstitutional. Bernie Sanders introduced amendment language to strip it. The ACLU issued warnings. Conservative legal scholars joined progressives in opposition.

The Senate almost listened. A Feinstein-Paul amendment passed 67-29 to prohibit citizen detention. But the conference committee, where bills go to die quietly, stripped the language. The final law kept the power intact.

Once again, the pattern: concentrated executive authority without accountability. Once again, unlikely allies recognized the threat. Once again, the establishment center preserved the power anyway.

II. ANTI-INTERVENTIONIST FOREIGN POLICY

Against Endless Wars

Iraq AUMF (2002): The Vote That Revealed the Real Divide

On October 11, 2002, the House voted to authorize military force against Iraq. The result looked partisan on its surface: 296 yes, 133 no. But the breakdown exposed something deeper.

Republicans marched lockstep: 215 of 223 voted yes (96%). Democrats fractured: only 81 of 208 supported it (39%). The 156 who said no included some of the sharpest ideological adversaries in Congress –progressive firebrand Barbara Lee, socialist Bernie Sanders, and libertarian Ron Paul– united by a single principle: the President cannot wage war without genuine Congressional deliberation.

What made their opposition radical wasn’t the conclusion. It was the reasoning. Progressives warned of imperial overreach and humanitarian catastrophe. Libertarians warned of unconstitutional executive power and contractor profiteering. Different languages, identical alarm: Congress had abdicated its war powers to the executive, and America would pay for it in blood, treasure, and the erosion of constitutional constraint.

Twenty years later, they were proven right on the facts. The coalition’s shared objections –that wars born from military-industrial profits, unchecked executive authority, and nation-building fantasy cost far more than officially admitted– became historical consensus.

III. CORPORATE POWER & BIG TECH

Populist Antitrust

Hawley-Warren: When Populists Weaponize Antitrust

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) occupy opposite poles of American politics. One is a populist conservative; the other, a progressive firebrand. Yet in 2024, they found themselves co-authoring legislation to dismantle Big Tech monopolies; a convergence that terrified Silicon Valley and bewildered party establishments alike.

Hawley’s Bust Up Big Tech Act targeted Amazon’s ability to operate as both marketplace and competitor, selling its own products on its platform while having access to rival merchants’ data. Warren’s Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act went broader: forcing divestiture of conflicted business lines, protecting privacy, and rewriting Section 230 –the law that shields platforms from liability for user content.

Their stated motives diverged. Hawley framed it as protecting small business and free markets from monopolistic capture. Warren framed it as protecting workers, consumers, and democracy from corporate feudalism. But their actual target was identical: concentrated corporate power operating without meaningful accountability or democratic constraint.

This wasn’t accidental alignment. Both recognized that Amazon, Google, and Meta had evolved into something beyond traditional corporations—they were infrastructure, gatekeepers, surveillance engines dressed in Silicon Valley rhetoric. And neither party’s establishment wanted to touch them, given the donations flowing in.

Audit the Fed: Following the Money Behind Closed Doors

A similar coalition formed around the Federal Reserve. Rep. Ron Paul spent years pushing the Federal Reserve Transparency Act; demanding that the Government Accountability Office audit the Fed’s monetary policy decisions, not just its bookkeeping.

For years, the bill went nowhere. Then Sen. Bernie Sanders, hardly a libertarian ally, joined the push. In 2010, as the financial crisis aftermath still smoldered, Sanders negotiated a compromise: a limited audit of Fed emergency lending, passed as part of the Dodd-Frank reform package.

Again, the reasoning differed: Paul opposed the Fed on free-market constitutional grounds; Sanders opposed it for enabling Wall Street excess. But both recognized the same threat: a secretive institution making trillion-dollar decisions behind closed doors, answerable to bankers rather than citizens.

The Fed’s defenders deployed the bipartisan establishment reflex: both parties’ leadership opposed meaningful audits, citing “independence” and “market stability.” Translation: don’t let daylight in on how power actually works.

IV. CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM

When Unlikely Allies Rewrote the Rules of Incarceration

First Step Act (2018): The Coalition That Broke the Tough-on-Crime Consensus

For decades, criminal justice reform was a third rail. Democrats feared being labeled soft on crime. Republicans owned the law-and-order lane. Prisons filled. Sentences exploded. Nobody touched it.

Then something shifted.

In 2018, an unlikely coalition formed: the ACLU and progressive activists sat alongside the Koch brothers’ libertarian network, evangelical Christians, and, most improbably, the Trump administration.

Their target: the machinery of mass incarceration. Not to empty prisons, but to acknowledge a brute fact: America’s sentencing system had become grotesquely disproportionate. A person convicted of drug possession could face decades. Mandatory minimums removed judicial discretion. Rehabilitation was an afterthought. The system warehoused bodies, particularly Black and brown bodies, with the efficiency of a production line.

The First Step Act didn’t solve incarceration. But it cracked the consensus. It reduced sentences for certain non-violent offenses. It expanded rehabilitation programs. It allowed judges discretion on mandatory minimums. It created “second chance” provisions.

More importantly: it passed. House 358-36. That’s not a squeak, that’s a landslide.

How did this happen? Because when you strip away partisan theater and ask “Who benefits from unaccountable government power to lock people away indefinitely?” the answer unites people who disagree on everything else. Libertarians oppose it on Constitutional grounds. Progressives oppose it on justice grounds. Evangelicals oppose it on redemption grounds. But they all oppose it.

Jared Kushner, of all people, became the unlikely broker, lobbying Trump to back reform despite the instinct to play tough-on-crime for the base. The machinery of the carceral state had become so obviously unjust that even its natural defenders had to admit: this needs to change.

The bill wasn’t perfect. Advocates wanted more. Opponents wanted less. But the passage itself was the signal: when concentrated government power becomes so nakedly unaccountable that it unites the far left, the far right, and the center, it’s vulnerable.

The Vertical Axis: Power, Not Politics

Four issues unite the far left and far right: all target concentrated, unaccountable power.

On surveillance: both left and right oppose warrantless data collection by intelligence agencies answerable to no one. On war: both oppose executive power to wage indefinite conflict without Congressional approval, enriching defense contractors. On monopolies: both oppose tech giants and financial institutions wielding control over speech and economy without meaningful oversight. On prisons: both oppose government power to cage citizens for decades without proportional accountability.

The establishment center, corporate Democrats and establishment Republicans, opposes all four reforms. Why? Because both parties have benefited from post-9/11 security expansion, defense contractor donations, Big Tech and Wall Street funding, and tough-on-crime politics.

This reveals the true divide in American politics: It’s not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom: those defending concentrated, centralized, unaccountable authority versus those fighting for distributed, transparent, accountable power.

Libertarian conservatives and progressive activists disagree sharply on economics, culture, and vision. But they converge at the bottom of the power axis – both rejecting the maleficent marriage of government and corporate authority that keeps citizens surveilled, divided, conscripted into endless wars, trapped in monopolies, and incarcerated en masse.