Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler details how the New Right looks left. Two slices:
I like J.D. Vance’s background. Humble beginning, Marine, Big Ten and Ivy League graduate, author, venture capitalist. He even headbanged to Kid Rock in Milwaukee. As politics work, he’s the heir apparent to conservatism and the Republican Party. But in his bid for populism’s golden scepter, he’s abandoned any free-market bona fides he ever had. The vice-presidential candidate is considered part of the “postliberal” new right. I suppose that’s close to being a conservative, but as is often attributed to the baseball great Frank Robinson, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”
Politics isn’t a straight line. At the extremes, the far left and far right often bend around and almost touch, it’s been said, like a horseshoe. We’re seeing this play out in real time. Check out this rhetoric: “Organize the dispossessed in community movements for economic gains.” “Movements of welfare mothers, the unemployed, tenants, and others have been organized around their particular grievances.” Compare that with: “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man.” “We will protect the wages of American workers.”
The first quote is from the 1962 Port Huron Statement written by liberal activist Tom Hayden and the Students for a Democratic Society. The second is from Mr. Vance’s nomination speech. Similar, no? Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades. Politics these days isn’t at the center. It’s at the extremes, with socialism and populism almost linked. Dogs and cats living together. That doesn’t seem stable to me.
Both sides are protectionist: President Biden never rescinded Donald Trump’s foolish tariffs. Now Mr. Trump wants 10% tariffs on all imports and at least 60% on Chinese goods. This is bad industrial policy and a growth-killing closet tax hike on the rich and poor. Mr. Vance told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “We need to protect American industries from all of the competition.” Reed Smoot, is that you? Also watch for a weak dollar to “stimulate” exports. Dangerous moves.
Both are anti-free-market: Think of the Biden administration’s green subsidies and heavy regulatory hand. Now we’re hearing calls for big-government intervention from Republicans, including deficits all the way down. Mr. Vance proposed $7,500 tax credits for U.S.-made gasoline-powered vehicles after years of $7,500 electric-vehicle credits. Like Oprah: Everybody gets a car subsidy! A better plan is to let markets price vehicles, and may the best car win.
Both are pro-union: “Great to visit the auto workers striking in Toledo this morning.” Mr. Biden? No, that was Mr. Vance in October 2023 as he visited a United Auto Workers picket line. Kamala Harris joined UAW picketers in Reno, Nev., in 2019. Horseshoe vote pandering. Unions love tariffs. It’s easier to skim dues from higher worker pay than it is to deliver better worker productivity. No wonder job-replacing automation is rampant.
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I get it, populism is about getting votes and winning elections. But it’s no way to govern. This is as big a transition for the GOP as the 1960s Southern strategy, turning Southern states reliably red, pandering to white grievances. It is equally distasteful. This new-right populism could be called interventionist conservatism, abandoning free markets. It’s good for votes but bad for progress. That’s no way to make anything great again. I’d rather see a leader fight for an educated workforce and great jobs for our economy—not give speeches on tariffs, protecting wages and browbeating Wall Street.
Putting aside the pros and cons of noncompetes, the central question for the rule of law is how three unelected FTC commissioners, without clear direction from Congress, can effectively legislate labor law for the entire U.S., affecting tens of millions of people and almost $500 billion in commerce while undoing the laws of dozens of states in the process. This question is not limited to labor issues. Having claimed such broad powers, what other national mandates might three people impose on their fellow citizens, based on vague language or congressional silence? What other state laws might they choose to sweep away? And how would this comport with our representative democracy, where, as repeatedly recognized by the Supreme Court, such major decisions are supposed to be the responsibility of those chosen by the people?
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Determined to get around precedent constraining its stated desire to bring sweeping change to antitrust law, the current FTC majority has argued that it has expansive authority to define unfair methods of competition, unbounded by prior antitrust case law. Tellingly, this push to expand the FTC’s unfair methods of competition authority comes after Congress declined to adopt proposed dramatic changes to antitrust law in 2021 and 2022. Among various proposals, these changes would have given the FTC the authority to prohibit outright certain common business practices and outlaw mergers undertaken by large companies, all without showing they were likely to harm competition. As a companion to this effort to interpret into existence what Congress failed to grant explicitly, the FTC leadership also claims the ability to issue legislative-like rules implementing this broad interpretation of its competition authority, relying on a novel interpretation of a small provision of Section 6 of the FTC Act.
This new approach poses serious problems from a rule-of-law perspective.
[DBx: Don’t forget that this FTC, under the lawless direction of Lina Khan, is an object of express admiration from J.D. Vance.]
Todd Zywicki, a GMU colleague over at the Scalia School of Law, tells “how law schools got woke.” Two slices:
The nostrums of woke law reject the rule of law precisely because it attempts to apply fair, neutral principles to everyone (even if it does so imperfectly in practice). The traditional focus on fair processes and procedures should now be subordinated, the thinking goes, to equity inresults. Under this worldview, the gauge of an institution’s fairness or justice is not rigorous adherence to formal rules but certain outcomes, such as elimination of racial disparities. Equal formal treatment of all individuals through consistent application of principles of procedural justice violates the concept of equity. The ongoing attack on the criminal-justice system as “systemically racist” and illegitimate illustrates this mind-set. The system is no longer judged according to the traditional notion of a fair trial, which relies on unbiased jurors’ applying the law neutrally to the facts of the case. What matters instead is that the system deliver specific results thought to correct historical injustices. The ideal of impartiality is thus replaced with transparent activism.
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As for [UC-Berkeley] Dean [Erwin] Chemerinsky? Well, despite his admission that he had been violating state law for years, he remains at Berkeley (a state school), earning more than half a million dollars per year. But this spring, he reaped what he had sown when a group of student activists — one of whom was the president of Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine — disrupted a small dinner he was hosting in his backyard. A protester seized a microphone and began lecturing the guests about Ramadan and “the blood of Palestinians.” Chemerinsky, who is Jewish, asked the group to leave, explaining that they were violating property rights and had no First Amendment privilege to disrupt the private dinner party. Unsurprisingly, the admonition fell on deaf ears, and the students refused to disperse peacefully. They had learned their lessons too well.
Roger Pielke Jr. explains “why climate misinformation persists.” Two slices:
In 2001, I participated in a roundtable discussion hosted at the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) with a group of U.S. Senators, the Secretary of Treasury, and about a half-dozen other researchers. The event was organized by Idaho Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) following the release of a short NAS report on climate to help the then-new administration of George W. Bush get up to speed on climate change.
At the time I was a 32 year-old fresh-faced researcher about to leave the National Center for Atmospheric Research for a faculty position across town at the University of Colorado. I had never testified before Congress or really had any high-level policy engagement.
When the roundtable was announced, I experienced something completely new in my professional career — several of my much more senior colleagues contacted me to lobby me to downplay or even to misrepresent my research on the roles of climate and society in the economic impacts of extreme weather. I had become fairly well known in the atmospheric sciences research community back then for our work showing that increasing U.S. hurricane damage could be explained entirely by more people and more wealth.
One colleague explained to me that my research, even though scientifically accurate, might distract from efforts to advocate for emissions reductions.
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The most important explanation is that many in the climate community — like my senior colleague back in 2001 — appear to believe that achieving emissions reductions is so very important that its attainment trumps scientific integrity. The ends justify the means. They also believe that by hyping extreme weather, they will make emissions reductions more likely (I disagree, but that is a subject for another post).
Samuel Gregg reviews Susan Gaunt Stearns’s Empire of Commerce. Two slices:
The story of how America eventually acquired these territories [west of the original thirteen states], and the economic, political, and constitutional questions that required navigation before this massive expansion of the American republic could occur, are addressed comprehensively in a new book by the historian Susan Gaunt Stearns. In Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade, Stearns places commercial expansion to the West at the heart of the political and constitutional debates that preoccupied Americans from 1776 until Napoleon sold France’s reacquired Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803. Stearns’s book is an impressive work, not least because it shows how the forces unleashed by commerce helped give America its current political and geographical form. “At the heart of nascent ideas of American empire,” Stearns argues, “was trade.”
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High ideals have always gone together with economic self-interest in the history of the United States. Stearns’s achievement is to show just how much commercial dynamics drove the growth and unification of postrevolutionary America. Not for the first time, American politics and statesmanship turned out to be largely the handmaidens of trade and economic ambition.
Here’s part 3 of Chelsea Follett’s series on global equality.
