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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1. “Red All Over? It’s Not So Black and White” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 5, 2026

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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1. “Politics is Just Another Word for No Freedom Left to Choose” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, July 9, 2026

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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