Radio Free America: Leftists are losing the war of ideas

Welcome to Radio Free America, Aaron Kleinman’s newsletter on stories that matter in state politics but aren’t getting enough attention. Want this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? Sign up!

Image by: Nikos Michals

Axios, the newsletter from journalists that pretend to write for an audience that pretends to read, thinks that the Democratic establishment is losing the war of ideas. They note that its vision seems to be a collection of half-measures — raise taxes, but not by too much. Rein in capitalism without upending it. But what they miss is that the leftist and socialist candidates who’ve been winning Democratic primaries sure seem like they’ll govern like pragmatists. If anyone’s winning the war of ideas, it’s the establishment, which appears to not understand that contained in its own vision is actually a powerful idea.

Take Abdul El-Sayed, for example. Medicare for All was integral to his platform in the primary, so much so that it took up 27% of his slogan. Of course, single-payer health care would entail significant disruptions to coverage (ask Obama staffers how that impacts your next election), and handing the government a monopoly on health insurance is politically fraught. On top of that, you’d probably have to change the composition of the current Supreme Court in order for such a law to take effect. Good slogan, but not something you can deliver.

El-Sayed has since clarified that he backs a more pragmatic version of Medicare for All that would let people keep their private insurance. This would minimize the disruptions and, if it worked well enough, would limit private health insurance to being a niche product for the wealthiest Americans, similar to the German system. Instead of statism, he’d use the power of state capacity in the market to improve health insurance for everyone.

And it’s not just in Michigan — left-wing and socialist politicians frequently find themselves acting pragmatically once in office. For example, Zohran Mamdani isn’t governing like a far-left ideologue. He seeks to govern within the existing order, not overthrow it. That means instead of seizing the bourgeoisie’s property, he’s sending them notices that they may be subject to an additional tax if it’s not their primary residence and valued at more than $5M. He may be standing up publicly owned grocery stores, but that doesn’t mean he’s trying to shut down Trader Joe’s.

What this all represents is the intellectual victory of another revolutionary ideology that’s proven far more durable than Marxism: Enlightenment liberalism. After all, enshrined in our very own Declaration of Independence is a radical idea — that governments’ right to govern is secured by consent of the governed. That representative democracy, effective government, personal freedom and fair markets are the four-legged stool on which our prosperity rests. Even with Donald Trump putting it on the ropes, liberalism still seems to be pretty durable. 

Marxism, on the other hand, is looking a little long in the tooth these days. Turns out that a revolution of the proletariat is difficult to achieve when scientific advances make it so the standard of living for even the poorest county in West Virginia is superior to that of the mid-19th Century Rhineland. So when confronted with this once winning an election, left-wing candidates tend to govern as liberals. Especially because, as so often gets elided, the vast majority of elected Democrats are moderates and liberals.

The right, on the other hand, has turned its back on Enlightenment liberalism. Instead, it embraced the ideas of Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt. Any Republicans who still believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence are very much the junior partners in that relationship, as the Indiana state Senate primaries showed earlier this year. Meanwhile, Trump’s siccing the secret police on his political opponents, and we’re waiting on foreign food deliveries like we’re the Soviets.

Which makes it frustrating when Mark Cuban says that he could only win as a Republican because Democratic primaries are dominated by ideologues. Cuban isn’t uniquely misinformed; this is a Democratic communications failure. Democrats get so lost in optimizing messaging to be inoffensive that they make it impossible for any animating philosophy to break through their typical dull cant of lowering costs for working families. We’re stuck with a somnambulant liberalism that is doing oppo research on the DSA instead of claiming victory after left-wing candidates acquiesce to their views.

Robert Frost once quipped that “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” And this has been the actual failure of liberalism over the course of my adult life — a lack of will to take its own side. Running from the crimes from George W. Bush’s administration to the Great Recession to Donald Trump, well-meaning liberals too often refused to actually stand up for liberalism (or reform our judiciary so that it can). A good first step toward reclaiming the initiative would be talking about how, at least within the coalition, they’ve already won.

---

AROUND AMERICA

• Sen. Darline Graham narrowly fended off Rep. Ralph Norman in the South Carolina Senate runoff on Tuesday. I used to think that Norman would be a weaker candidate because he’s the type of guy to brandish a gun while meeting his constituents. But after seeing the above, maybe Graham gives Democrats a better chance. I mean, have some self-respect!dominating the news cycle, I wanted to feature a few races you might have missed.

• Also on Tuesday, Trump-endorsed state Sen. Mike Mazzei narrowly won the Oklahoma gubernatorial nomination. During the primary, Mazzei’s strange behavior and history of unexplained absences in the legislature led to questions of the veracity of a drug test that he submitted. He’ll still be the heavy favorite in the fall, but his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Cyndi Munson, has routinely outperformed the top of the ticket. At the very least, she should do a lot better than Kamala Harris.

• How far is the far right willing to go to achieve dominance within the Republican Party? The attorney general of Montana tried to singlehandedly change term limits laws to keep two Republicans who actually want to govern instead of sow havoc off the ballot. Thankfully, the state Supreme Court unanimously told him to pound sand.

• Florida Republican gubernatorial nominee is trying to get the women’s vote by telling them that fixing the roads will make it easier to get to the salon.

• Jason Kelce wants to cool data centers with urine. Amanda Silberberg of TechCrunch talked to some experts and found that was a bad idea. I guess unless, like most Americans, you hate data centers. Also, it seems like they’re just poorly constructed in general, so maybe even pH 7.0 water would be enough to turn them into heavily leveraged laser tag arenas.

---

INTERNET STUFF I LIKED THIS WEEK

Allow me to be another voice paying tribute to the Southern music icon we lost this week: ZZ Top’s Frank Beard. Like any good millennial, I learned about the band through their synth-heavy ‘80s stuff. But their earlier albums are the ones that I still listen to. I still can’t hear “Dallas, Texas” without muttering “Hollywoooooooooood” to myself afterward. But my favorite song of theirs is still “Just Got Paid,” which sounds so much like Texas that they had to set the playoff scene in “Friday Night Lights” to it, available in the blurry video above. What a band, what a loss.

---

BOOK CLUB

Image courtesy of Macmillan Publishing

What if you liked Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet but wanted it to pick up the pace a bit? And for it to have a bit of a darker edge? In that case, check out Yiyun Li’s “The Book of Goose,” which is about a friendship between two girls in dreary postwar Europe — but in this case, their plan to escape their stultifying town ends up being a cautionary tale. It’s a cutting look at what it means to make art, and it’s one of the best novels I read all year.

---

HELP US OUT

Thank you all for your suggestions on what to do with way too much olive oil. Come October, it appears I will be entering the confit zone.

As for this week, Maximum Pat McAfee shows how ESPN has pivoted away from making entertainment (which requires taste) to content (which doesn’t). In case you missed it, that means they stopped making “This Is Sportscenter” commercials. A huge loss for the culture. Obviously the Y2K one above is the GOAT, but which one is the second best? Email me and tell me what you think!

Want this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? Sign up!