J.D. Tuccille: Americans have only bad choices in the midterms

COTTONWOOD, Arizona — The author and thinker Robert A. Heinlein once wrote, “the human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” With midterm elections approaching, the problem for Americans is that our ossified two-party system increasingly delivers us a choice between flavors of control freaks: Donald Trump’s Republicans and Democrats led by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. With few major-party candidates willing to consider leaving people alone, and alternative parties almost completely locked out of the political system, voters who want to run their own lives face almost entirely unpalatable choices.

Trump’s Republicans have drifted far from their nominally market-oriented roots towards greater government control of the economy. At the end of July, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced “the signing of 7 letters of intent to provide $874 million in federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act” in return for “a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each company as a condition for receiving the funds.” The announcement came on top of earlier government acquisitions of stakes in Intel, USA Rare Earth, and other companies in fields the administration considers critical.

“What is remarkable is that federal corporate ownership is becoming routine under a Republican administration,” the Cato Institute’s Tad DeHaven commented last month. “Republicans warning that communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.”

That taste for top-down direction of the economy — apparent in the president’s tariff fetish and mercantilism — is unlikely to disappear when the current White House resident departs. With a nod to the late, unlamented communist guerrilla Che Guevara, economic historian Phil Magness has taken to referring to the vice president and GOP heir-apparent as “Che D. Vance.” Magness focuses on Vance’s long history of hostility to individualism and attacks on free-market ideas.

In a 2019 article for First Things, Vance criticized libertarians for emphasizing “free choices” over coercion and for being “uncomfortable with political power” to accomplish what he considers to be “public goods” — and never mind that not everybody shares the same sense of what’s good.

If Republicans are discovering a taste for socialism and for state direction over individual liberty, Democrats are embracing full commitment to those ideas. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic member of Congress from New York, was only the first of a wave of open socialists to rise to prominence in that party (Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders is still technically independent). Preparatory to a run for president, she recently rejoined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the party within a party that organizes and coordinates the efforts of many radicals.

The DSA isn’t a caucus for government-run health care; it favours full state direction of the economy. The group’s program invites people to “imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism” in which “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation … are common goods and utilities.”

Housing, too. Cea Weaver, New York City’s director of the Office to Protect Tenants, claims that “private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, himself a socialist, clearly has no objection to such views in his administration. He vowed to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

Tellingly, President Trump and Mayor Mamdani, while representing opposing political parties, enjoy something of a mutual admiration society. In a demonstration of horseshoe theory, the two met last year at the White House and showed few signs of discord. “Trump and Mamdani answered questions from reporters, both striking a remarkably cordial tone, with the president indicating he agreed with many of the mayor-elect’s ideas,” The Hill reported. This week, the two met again at the mayor’s invitation and Trump voiced his hopes for Mamdani to be a “great one.”

Perhaps those most at risk of suffering the heavy hand of government under either of the major parties are Jews. Renewed hostility to the world’s most traditional group of scapegoats is well-entrenched in the Democratic Party with a rebranding as “anti-Zionism,” but it’s also creeping unrevised into the GOP.

“(T)oo many Democrats are noticeably and shamefully silent when antisemitism comes from the far left,” Josh Gottheimer, a member of Congress from New Jersey, warned in May.

“For many Jewish Democrats, the Democratic Party is just the latest institution that welcomed us and is turning hostile,” agreed Howard Wolfson, a prominent Democratic strategist, when asked about the problem by Axios.

With regard to the Republican Party, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz cautioned in March that “I have seen more antisemitism in the last 18 months on the right than at any point in my lifetime.” He added that the ancient hatred is “gaining real purchase, especially with young people.”

Bigotry, it should be noted, is a negation of the individualism at the core of the liberalism (in the old sense, not the current nanny-knows-best usage) on which modern western civilization is founded. To treat people as members of a group and to despise them for a collective identity is to reject the value of individuals on which our liberty and prosperity is built. Both major U.S. political parties, in favoring “public goods” over private choices and touting the “warmth of collectivism” leave the door open for the revival of prejudices we had hoped were dead and buried.

“A true liberal … believes that, as much as possible, no one should push people around, standing over them with a gun or a fist to force them to do his will,” the economist Deirdre McCloskey wrote in her 2019 book, Why Liberalism Works.

But the country’s main political parties both reject that concept and insist they do Americans a favour by advocating for an order where the dictates of the collective, as interpreted and enforced by the state, prevail over individual liberty. It’s true that the rot isn’t as deep in the U.S. as it is in many peer countries, where authoritarian parties of the right and left reject markets and individualism. But it’s bad enough.

As the midterms approach, those of us who refuse to be controlled have few good options.

National Post