In the month celebrating 250 years of red, white and blue, Americans were seeing plenty of red — and not just as part of commemorative trifectas or midterm forecast maps.
Red-baiters based in red states (or the financial districts of blue ones) have a wave of actual reds in power to push against. Once, the best opposition they could hope for were such fellow travelers as Reds director Warren Beatty, who as biographer Peter Biskind notes “was no Communist but empathized with the idealism of the American left” (and whose production “reflects his ambivalence”).
In 2026 they are able to point to candidates who can win elections (if only within the bluest of blue electorates) affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America collective, which dropped a manifesto in mid-July proclaiming a need for “aggressive wealth taxes” to bring about the day when the whole sectors of “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses.”
On August 3 alone, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page offered “A Brief History of Wealth Creation” from John Steele Gordon, chiding “many on the left, unable to distinguish between wealth aggregation and wealth creation,” immediately above Allysia Finley judging “the socialist agenda” to be “a sham” (and not just because it attracts “relatively affluent people” who “dress like hobos”).
In July’s Journal, Karl Rove called for not falling for “a seductive tale” reducing life’s woes to the machinations of “nasty villains with evil plans” who “can be beaten” by ballots for ruthless representatives (like the narrative he helped provide for George W. Bush?), while Obama staffer Rahm Emanuel deemed efforts by “socialists who led the charge to defund the police, open the borders, abolish prisons, release violent criminals onto the streets and degrade the flag” to be just as counterproductive as their efforts “to turn safe Democratic states and districts a darker shade of blue” at the expense of winning purple areas. (In fairness, the socialists might spare the Stars and Stripes.)
Even former card-carriers Joshua Muravchik and Ronald Radosh took their ex-comrades to task in 2025. Those who “would transform the economy from private enterprise to public ownership, but — unlike communists — only through persuasion and legislation, not violence and coercion,” a viewpoint for which they take pains to note they had both been true believers, “must choose between democracy and socialism” when the former cannot yield enough consensus for the latter. Thus, “the two of us made peace with democratic capitalism” while “the DSA has clearly made the reverse choice.”
There’s something to be said for socialists being forthright about their most radical ideas. In contrast, as Roderick Long observes, free-market libertarians have perennially treated theirs as “esoteric doctrine … confined to scholarly studies and movement periodicals.” In a previous era, the sort of rhetoric in the DSA program would have only been shown to the general public accompanied by a South Park-style disclaimer on how “this is what socialists actually believe.”
Yet the DSA’s vision of how “the political and economic system under which we live is built on private ownership and profit at all costs” leaves out many of the same complications absent from Gordon’s “brief history.” Half a century before Radosh made that “peace with democratic capitalism,” he filled a book with the help of a very different coauthor, “firm believer in laissez-faire capitalism” Murray Rothbard. In A New History of Leviathan, Radosh and Rothbard’s joint introduction explained how they and a contributing roster of leftist and libertarian historians traced how the “economy dominated by giant multinational corporations” in the years leading up to the bicentennial had followed, not from “fierce winds of competition,” but from efforts in which “sophisticated reformers sought to stifle” just such remnants of “a freely competitive economy” — preferring instead to “mold the government into a mighty instrument of monopolization and cartelization.”
Getting the dust off the shelf of books by A New History of Leviathan‘s generation of New Left historians, and carrying their analysis forward, will show how much both economic innovation and well-being for the masses are being held back by the assumption that current concentrations of wealth are the result of an inherent conflict between the two, and not by a distorted conception of both.
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
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