Photo by Hanna Zhyhar
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.
