Photo of the cavalcade available to shoppers half a century ago by Gay Hoover’s father; released by Hoover under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker proclaims that “America Is the Land of Endless Choice, Except in Politics” (June 30).  Yet he wants Lady Liberty to be pregnant with just a little bit more of it.

Baker doesn’t have to work up a sweat to find more economic options in the US than the EU.  His attempt to ask for a steak to be cooked medium rare over there being seen as outlandish as a request to “bring me the cow” may not be the most universally representative of anecdotes.  For many Americans, such fine dining may be as fantastically out of reach as Charlie Chaplin’s dream in Modern Times of being able to get fresh milk immediately from a bovine conveniently passing by his front door.  And a perusal beyond the superhero stacks at his local comic shop might turn up second varieties imported from Europe, such as an Italian retelling of Dante’s Inferno starring Mickey Mouse and Goofy.

Yet Baker finds the most extra, if not the best, menu among the little Caesars of Euro-politicians, one in which “you can have your politics served Communist, nationalist, Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, Green, Socialist, conservative, liberal and anything in between.”  Across the pond, he hopes instead merely to be able to have just enough extra options to be able to “choose a government that is sane, honest, patriotic, responsible and worthy.”

Baker may see opening the door too wide as unleashing such socialist sects violently from Pandora’s box, but they have already left the stable.  As New York Times reviewer Walter Goodman noted of the various membership cards Ronald Radosh carried across most of the twentieth century as recounted in his memoir COMMIES: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left: “It takes some dedication to sort out one group from another, since they all seemed to be using ‘socialist’ in their titles.”

Baker frets that the Democrats may become “a party of graduate student activists” beholden to “ideas about economics that were discredited half a century ago.”  Radosh was among the graduate student activists who learned from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s William Appleman Williams to discredit the entire framework of viewing modern liberalism as “a popular movement, opposed by business … to challenge the one-sided power of large corporate business” rather than “the ideology of dominant business groups” which “have in reality favored state intervention to supervise corporate activity” (as Radosh described in Debs, an account of a socialist leader who “did not favor any form of regulatory activity”).

Big business versus big government is the ultimate false dichotomy of our time.  Championing the former won’t break the cycle that allows both to marginalize the scope of (and solutions emerging from) voluntary cooperation, decentralized association, and individual freedom.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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It may be 64 years after the New York Mets losing 120 baseball matches in their debut season led manager Casey Stengel to plead “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Yet The Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston notes that the same question could still apply to another “two monumentally inept teams.”

He doesn’t have in mind the Chicago White Sox, whose 121-loss season in 2024 led first-year Met Ed Kranepool to confess to the Journal that  “I feel sorry for them,” or the Colorado Rockies beating the equally longstanding Mets record for rock-bottom run differential last year.  Instead, Galston has in mind the Democrats and Republicans, “Capitol Hill’s Unlovable Losers” (May 27).

Less than two full years after the 2024 presidential election, Galston has merely to nod at the former party’s abject failure to learn from their loss, and the latter’s squandering of what little momentum remains from their win. UCLA School of Law professor Stephen Bainbridge adds: “at least we’re better off than the UK, which has about half-a-dozen incompetent teams.”

The iconic cinematic line from WarGames about it being “a strange game” if logic dictates that “the only winning move is not to play” applies not only to nuclear war, but the nuclear-option scorched-earth tactics that increasingly dominate electoral and cultural wars. While the suggested alternative of “a nice game of chess” offers at least a level playing field and an even chance to win — and even the most underdog of sports teams at least have some real if slim possibility of an upset — all-encompassing politicization fares even worse than such comparison implies.

After all, the psychological investment into two-sided competitive games isn’t quite as zero-sum as the scoring suggests. John Astin’s Dr. Gangreen in the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes animated episode “The Great Tomato Wars” finds “the agony of defeat” to be as appealing as “the thrill of victory” — as he also puts it: “I hate ties! I like winners and losers” — and one need not go that far to appreciate a well-played contest. Affairs of state divert resources from win-win voluntary deals to sports arenas whose business doesn’t need them to earn consumer dollars, and other battlegrounds where the vintage 2004 Alien vs. Predator tagline “whoever wins … we lose.” perpetually applies to a closer-to-home species of space invaders.

For a less unlovable political loser, Galston could have turned to Jimmy Breslin, the author of a book about the 1962 Mets named after Stengel’s remark. While Kranepool helped take his team from last place to triumph in the 1969 World Series, Breslin finished in penultimate place as Norman Mailer’s running mate for NYC mayor.

Observing that “the last thing that New York can afford at this time is a politician thinking in normal politicians’ terms,” Breslin offered not just a long-shot chance of change at the top (Mailer optimistically estimated a chance of winning the race around 5%) but the promise of moving much of daily life to local community decision-making by neighbors — and so out of the control of elected, and unelected, officials entirely.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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In the months leading up to the USA’s 250th birthday party, some debris from its 200th is making headlines.

The New York Times‘s Jennifer Schuessler finds conspicuously “much less investment and enthusiasm overall” for this year’s semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence than the 1976 bicentennial, itself diminished by jaded jeers charging that “‘Buy-centennial’ huckersterism had sold out the true radical spirit of ’76” (“How a Historian Saved the Schlock of ’76,” May 5).

Schuessler chronicles plenty of “hats, mugs, playing cards and pickleball paddles” currently being hawked under the aegis of Donald Trump, but compared to such bicentennial-branded excrescences of “unapologetic 1976-style schlock” as toilet paper, diapers and condoms, even the output of a coauthor of Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life can be described on the pages of the Gray Lady as “tasteful.”

Yale University’s library includes a permanent panorama of such effluent ephemera thanks to State University of New York academic Jesse Lemisch, who preserved what he predicted would become “a deeply embarrassing heritage for 2076.”  Schuessler explains how Lemisch drew a stark contrast between the actually existing capitalism of ’76 and “the ‘arrogant nationalism and elitism’ of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.”

Lemisch confronted “the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power” as early as a 1967 analysis of the American Revolution, “a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.”  That viewpoint was “particularly recommended” in the newsletter The Libertarian, whose “Washington Editor,” Karl Hess, was on the path that led to his interview in the July 1976 issue of Playboy (which highlighted his observation that “The Declaration of Independence is so lucid we’re afraid of it today … because it tells us there comes a time when we must stop taking orders”).

Yet even back then, Lemisch suspected that efforts at “replacing elite history with a history of ‘average people'” had, in shifting emphasis from the halls of power to the market square, “merely traded in the heroes of politics for the heroes of business.” So it was not completely out of character for him to see the spirit of 1976 as one that “floated down from above, and responded to no popular longing to celebrate the Bicentennial,” despite Schuessler noting that voting with dollars for “Patriotic Dixie cups and cereal boxes might seem to epitomize the kind of populist ‘history from below’ that Lemisch championed” (less than a month after Mekado Murphy has written in the Times that relics of Rocky‘s bicentennial bout “are as essential to Philadelphia tourism as the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall”).

One replica of the Declaration from the Me Decade, a freebie for Fourth of July grocery shopper Michael Hart, might have made the perfect bit of decorative detritus for Lemisch — if Hart hadn’t instead typed up the text, immortalizing it as the first entry of his Project Gutenberg collection (he would oversee it growing into an online library tens of thousands strong).  In 1971, one of the few files starting to spread as widely on nascent computer networks was a popular Star Trek game by Mike Mayfield.

The utopian universe whose tricky traders rarely “wear red, white and blue, or look anything like Uncle Sam” (as surmised in the 1987 episode “The Last Outpost”) ironically also provided inspiration to the patriotic Objectivist Hart. Times obituary author William Grimes described Hart’s eBook giveaways as aiming to prefigure a Trek-like “age of universal abundance,” one which would upend “all established power structures” and  “challenge the entire social and economic system of the United States.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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