Jimmy Carter is garnering more attention for becoming a centenarian on October 1 than he did when he was the first former president of the USA to celebrate a 96th birthday. Yet what thin hope I held in 2020 that the Democratic candidate might “follow Carter’s deregulatory path” seems even more distant from a party that will have further lost its way even if it defeats Donald Trump’s second bid at re-election. (A September Wall Street Journal opinion headline noted that “Biden and Buttigieg are Reregulating the Airlines.”)

Tom Tomorrow’s cover illustration for Eric Alterman’s Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America found room for philosophical intellectuals like John Stuart Mill and John Dewey to lend support behind Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi. 2024 Democrats are less likely to invoke either John than to ridicule opponents as spineless stooges for white supremacy and fascism (charges considered cheaply contemptible when hurled at the Michael Moore stand-in of An American Carol in 2008) or just plain “weird.” The New York Times can only make one of the most popular taunts against Trump’s running mate JD Vance fit to print by referring to it obliquely as “a vulgar, untrue joke.” President Joe Biden and NYC mayor Eric Adams have fallen out of favor for personal failings rather than stale ideas.

Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 laments the public’s shift away from New Hollywood “moral ambiguity, dark moods, [and] suffusing skepticism toward establishments of every description” to the “Old Hollywood pastiche” of the original Star Wars at the same time they abandoned the Carter who channeled Reinhold Niebuhr’s suspicion of “a too-simple division of the world into lightness and dark” in favor of the star of Knute Rockne All American. A future historian covering the quadrennial since Perlstein’s 2020 publication would find even less room for nuance. If anything, the lightness projected by a party purportedly devoted to “joy” is tempered by the bad vibes of anxiety threatening to overwhelm it (as literally happened onscreen in this summer’s Inside Out 2).

Yet Perlstein’s division of Hollywood into New and revanchist is itself oversimplified. The novelization of Star Wars portrays an emperor who fails to heed “the cries of the people for justice” not out of malice but due to being isolated from popular opinion by “assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office.” In the spinoff novels published during Carter’s term, Alan Dean Foster described a Luke Skywalker who “reflected grimly [that] if there was one thing he was sure of it was that the callow youth he had once been was dead and dry as dust,” while Brian Daley wrote of a young Han Solo whose seemingly “callous exterior” is realized to be a shield “from the derisions of fools and cowards” by an ally who warns that “in trying to preserve [one’s] ideals, one risks losing them.”

Let’s hope that this galaxy’s liberals learn a similar lesson before they divide the White House against liberalism in order to save it from conservatives.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism. He also enjoys the Lando Calrissian Adventures written for Lucasfilm in 1983 by libertarian author L. Neil Smith.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Michael Gallagher considers the relatively low inflation rates of the period “from Reagan’s second term through Trump’s” first to be “America’s amazing capitalism” (Queens Chronicle, September 5), sarcastically suggesting that “for 35 years … the robber barons of industry didn’t realize they could set their prices and gouge more money from the American people,” only getting the notion after the inauguration of noted anti-capitalist Joe Biden.

Gallagher makes no mention of Biden’s vice president, but the candidate Donald Trump dubs “Comrade Kamala Harris” will presumably carry forth such a break from said “amazing capitalism.” Meanwhile, a September 4 USA Today headline crows: “Goldman Sachs says Comrade Kamala is better for economy. She can’t even do communism right!”

By the standards of 2024 mud-slinging, the ranks of Reds could include even Ronald Reagan himself.  When not lauding workers’ “cooperative effort aimed at sharing in the ownership of the new wealth being produced” or being photographed under a towering statue of Vladimir Lenin at Moscow State University, the Gipper occasionally paraphrased a remark by socialist intellectual George Bernard Shaw. “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul” was Shaw’s way of explaining to readers of Everybody’s Political What’s What? how inflationary policies remained popular when inevitably “the return to normal prices rescues pensioners from destitution; but it ruins debtors, making the cure as calamitous as the disease, Paul being now robbed to pay Peter.”

That sounds more like something one might expect to hear from such a free-market advocate as Henry Hazlitt, whose The Conquest of Poverty echoes the Shaw he denounces as “shamelessly ignorant and silly” on economics in pointing out that “practically everybody concede[s] that the State does have a right to seize from Peter to pay Paul, when it levies necessary taxes, say, on Peter, a businessman, to pay Paul, a policeman” rather than asking “whether or not Paul is performing necessary and legitimate services in return for payment.”

One might expect Hazlitt to have reacted to Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons with Gallagher’s snideness, seeing them as unjustly unloved Ubermenschen who instead deserve to be lionized on Ayn Rand book covers.  Instead, Hazlitt’s assessment for The New York Times Book Review found that by reading such surveys “we would understand our country much better than we do” than from what he quotes Progressive historians Charles and Mary Beard as calling the “shadow picture” of conventional histories that offer more on “politicians of minor rank” than business leaders.  Even Rand’s tomes offer a more critical view between their covers of many malevolent magnates, whether archetypal fictional antagonists or all too real, who rely on “the power of forced, unearned, economically unjustified privileges.”

A history of actually existing capitalism that ignores the wide valleys between the highest peaks is as incomplete as an account of the Amazin’ Mets which only touches on their 1969 and 1984 World Series wins.  In contrast, an economy of free exchanges between Peter and Paul (or Paulette) is a win-win for everyone involved.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “America’s a maze in capitalism” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], September 10, 2024
2. “America is a maze in capitalism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, September 12, 2024

As Americans take August to process the presidential race upheavals of July, the most consequential may prove to be a union leader garnering wild cheers for declaring that “the biggest recipients of welfare in this country are corporations … we must put workers first!”

In the twentieth century, such campaign rhetoric was heard of only at the margins from the likes of Ralph Nader and Eugene Debs, not from any respectable Democrat, let alone a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention. Yet Teamsters president Sean O’Brien draws on enough mainstream discontent to position himself as a counter to “the extremes in both parties,” less than a year after conservatives united against actors’ and teachers’ union strikes.

They’re still a long way from warming to those professions. Another 2024 RNC big shot may have been dubbed “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan, but the lead of the Jordan Belfort-produced turkey Santa With Muscles lacks the star power of Batman and Robin‘s George Clooney.

Meanwhile, when Trump’s running mate JD Vance got the nod from O’Brien for having “the courage to sit down and consider points of view that aren’t funded by big money think tanks,” he wasn’t talking about what Vance learned at Yale. Republicans are as reluctant to laud their candidate’s choice to complete college as Democrats are to take Kamala Harris to task for not speaking out against early 2020s class closures after having been heavy-handed as a prosecutor on kids who skipped school.

An earlier Democratic nominee was distinctly less enthusiastic about imposing educational choices. In a 1988 introduction to John Holt’s How Children Fail, George McGovern noted that he had read the original edition during his 1972 bid and that “a visit to schools in any part of the nation will reveal the same uninspired children and lack of attention to what is being taught of which John Holt wrote.” Given such a status quo, “there is nothing lost and much to be gained in encouraging children to follow their own curiosity about life and to build on their own personal interests.”

The Cato Institute which exemplifies “big money think tanks” for liberals (while getting lip service from big-spending conservatives) reached leftward in 1977 with a denunciation of “schools that promise equal enlightenment [but] generate unequally degrading meritocracy and lifelong dependence on further tutorship” by Ivan Illich in the first issue of Inquiry magazine. They succeeded in getting Anthony Burgess and Noam Chomsky to write for later issues.

In The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, historian Rick Perlstein sees a Reagan “obsessed with preserving the factory system” as his own stardom faded, quipping that “the future champion of individualism and entrepreneurship despised the new, more individualistic, entrepreneurial Hollywood.” Such values, fully compatible with free association, can usher teachers’ unions into an educational environment as far from the longstanding model of a factory-like assembly line as today’s unionized filmmakers are from the dream factory studios of yore — with comparable paydays above scale for popular talent.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “COMMENTARY: When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Times-News [Twin Falls, Idaho], August 8, 2024
2. “When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], August 8, 2024
3. “What unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Elizabethton, Tennessee Star, August 9, 2024
4. “When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, September 4, 2024