Don Blankenship should have read more history while he was in prison. The Republican ex-con coal baron running for Senate in West Virginia can’t seem to stop praising Chinese central planning.
Blankenship compared the regimes of communist China and democratic India, observing during a Thursday radio interview with West Virginia Metro News that visiting China is “like going forward in time,” while visiting India “is like going back to the 1940s or 1950s.”
The aspiring senator was trying to clarify his earlier admiration for central planning. “Americans confuse the words communism and dictatorship,” he told the New York Times last week. “The Chinese are running a dictatorial capitalism and it’s very effective. That’s the way corporations are run. Corporations are not a democracy.”
The Times reported that Blankenship even mulled moving there to be “like George Washington, if I can get citizenship.” He doubled down on those remarks over the air Thursday.
“I witness when I go to these places, that democracy is obviously the right form of government, but for whatever reason [democracies] are, if you will, hamstrung by the need for permits and so forth, are basically failing their people,” Blankenship said.
His problem seems to be with decentralization generally and the democratic process. Pointing to India specifically, Blankenship said that when “you have democracy, you have all the issues that come with that: all the bureaucracy and people getting elected and people trying to get re-elected. A lot of times, things aren’t done that move the country forward.”
Blankenship is right, to an extent. Self-government is messy. But if the prison library had only contained a copy of the Federalist Papers, Blankenship would know that messiness exists by design.
The architects of our constitutional republic feared the authoritarianism that Blankenship admires. Their system decentralizes power and sets up intentional gridlock in order to preserve as much individual sovereignty as possible. The genius trick then is to make self-interested politicians act in favor of the general interest of the people. America has been pulling it off for more than two centuries.
Free markets are a natural corollary to democracy. People pursuing their own happiness end up improving conditions overall through innovation and entrepreneurship. That’s not so in China. Those people rely on the benevolence of the dictator to ensure the butcher, the brewer, and the baker can provide the groceries needed for dinner.
Blankenship tried to explain away his flirtations with that communist central planning Thursday.
“I’m not saying we should change to the Chinese system,” Blankenship told West Virginia Metro News. “I am just simply in observation of the fact that they are improving the quality of life for the majority of their people because they can move, they are not hamstrung, and they don’t have issues with being able to create jobs and so forth.”
If Blankenship wants to serve in Congress, if he wants to participate in this ongoing experiment in self-government, he should get on board with democracy.
