Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim’s “A Suggestion for Young Radicals” to embrace moderation (October 1) might seem to bring the second least appealing news hook for a commentator whose outlet is named after the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who famously asserted that he would rather “tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm” than “use moderation in a cause like the present … I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

At least Swaim’s contribution keeps the Journal‘s op-ed page going when even the New York Times has moved on to so-called “guest essays.”  P.J. O’Rourke, in contrast, opened A Cry From the Far Middle with a proposal for “an opinion-free news media source” called “Happy Medium” — and while Swaim commends Aurelian Craiutu’s Why Not Moderation? for how it “distinguishes moderation from ‘lukewarm wishy-washiness,'” O’Rourke would happily “bring the Wishy and the Washy back together … The extreme moderates’ non-negotiable demand? Negotiation.”

While O’Rourke made his lack of regret for moving from his hippie Maoist youth to middle-aged rock-ribbed-yet-still-hip conservatism clear with titles like Republican Party Reptile or Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut, his idea of mellowing in old age was writing a follow-up to a humor piece whose title infamously began “How to Drive Fast on Drugs” with one on “How to Drive Fast When the Drugs Are Mostly Lipitor …” (both reprinted in a 2009 book whose subtitle boasts that his ideal post-recession economy would be one “With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn”).

In contrast, Swaim seeks refuge in “institutions that require political actors to reason, argue and compromise with one another.” The Freeman founder Leonard Read anticipated Swaim’s invocation of Aristotelian moderation as an inherent good, writing in a 1956 article for that magazine that “the golden-mean theory cannot properly be applied indiscriminately … it is patently unsound when deciding between stealing nothing or stealing $1,000.”

Swaim paints a picture of a “hard left, from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union” which always “tried to explain life’s complexities in terms of class warfare” (which makes it almost redundant for him to note that he “regard[s] socialism as itself a form of extremism”).

In the wake of that collapse, The Freeman ran an account about how “it is good to remember that from the beginning—not just among conservatives but among democratic socialists—there were many who saw clearly that Marxism was a weird mystique set forth by an egotistical crank” by democratic socialist Martin Gardner, who related how “[H.G.] Wells tried to convince Russian leaders that in England there were at least 200 different classes.”

Gardner could then point to Bertrand Russell’s The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism as a book-length exposé of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the perspective of a less doctrinaire socialist “widely known” enough compared to Wells’s Russia in the Shadows to not need popularization (a category for which he could have also mentioned John Spargo’s Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy).

As for actually existing capitalism, it includes not only such deviations from clichéd socialist theory as individuals like Wells’s “works foreman who is being taken in a train by an engine-driver to see how the house he is having built for him by a building society is getting on.” The editors of In These Times, which to Swaim exemplifies far-left “periodicals that might fairly be termed immoderate,” observed in 1980 that “federal regulation of the economy has been welcomed or sought by American business leaders” while being sold as a populist imposition on them — and thus socialism would involve “dismantling the highly centralized agencies created to insulate corporate power from popular control.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Andrew Langer’s “What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Hamilton” (The Wall Street Journal, August 28) could as aptly have been titled “What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Milton Friedman.”

Langer notes that Hamiltonian trade barriers were “generally moderate” in comparison with “President Trump’s sweeping protectionism,” but is just as concerned that “Mr. Vance also caricatures Friedman’s legacy by implying that laissez-faire elevates economic development above human dignity” — a distortion needed to justify the shift of American economic conservatism’s lodestar from one to the other as “obviously a good thing.”

Not heeding that, as put in John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding Science Fiction, “the really appropriate epitaph for many and many a man is ‘Why, it’s obvious …’,” Vance’s supposedly self-evident case for reburying the man of monetarism in order to resurrect the man on the money is even more of a departure than the Broadway version’s hip-hop beats.

After all, many of the right and many more of the left have attributed virtually every American ill since the Reagan administration to free trade and deregulation.  Yet Vance argues for Friedman’s obsolescence by contending that his ideas succeeded back then — but only due to “a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity” that has become impoverished enough to require a ten-dollar substitute for its devaluated coinage.

The usual demonization of Friedman posits Margaret Thatcher as a Wicked Witch East of the Atlantic to his Elphaba, ignoring his influence on Estonia and New Zealand. Vance would need to make a stretch to find the “powerful institutional Christianity” responsible for the embrace of international markets in Israel, Singapore or even the India of Usha Vance’s ancestors.  At least it doesn’t seem like Vance is tracing his wife’s success at Yale Law School back to the influence on Gandhi of Leo Tolstoy’s “A Letter to a Hindu.”

Vance could buttress his argument by noting that American deregulation was more thorough, and brought more economic benefits, under faithful Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter than the divorced Hollywood union boss who followed him.  Yet that would be as awkward for partisan platitudes as recalling that the previous Second Lady who had issued a 1987 jeremiad against a “bizarre occult subculture” which “rejects Judeo-Christian religion, turns good and evil upside down, and rebels against life itself” was not Barbara Bush but Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society author Tipper Gore.

Vance is also unlikely to compare his own adeptness at shedding convictions to what Friedman biographer Alan Ebenstein calls his subject’s “excessively religious phase as a young boy” — “noteworthy because it reflects the natural character of his mind … he tends to got he whole way intellectually or not at all, and seeks order and harmony in the universe. When he was unable to achieve this intellectual state through the logical observation of every detail of Orthodox Judaism in its dietary and other strictures, he dropped religion completely.”

In asserting that Hamilton’s heavy hand rather than a Jeffersonian lighter touch (let alone Adam Smith’s invisible mitt) “will dominate American conservative economic thinking for the future,” Vance isn’t just rebuking Jefferson’s anti-Hamiltonian’s view: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  Vance may, to misquote the famous line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, have a first-rate ability to function while holding ten opposed ideas in mind. But all bring a risk of injury to your pocketbook and mobility.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Red All Over? It’s Not So Black and White” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 5, 2026
2. “Red all over? It’s not so black and white” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, Arizona News, August 8, 2026