The blue party came close to nominating a socialist (and communist sympathizer) for president this year, averting that calamity only at the eleventh hour when the establishment, in a panic, settled for an unlikely savior in the person of Joe Biden.
But socialists such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remain stars, and the drift of the party is clearly ever leftward. Polls also show rising public support for socialism. A year ago, a Fox News poll found 31% of the public had a favorable view of socialism, up 6 points from nine months earlier. At the same time, Gallup found socialism’s support at 39%.
Free lunches are attractive but illusory. People look at socialism and see personal gain — “Hey, I’ll get free college” — with costs distributed far away from them throughout the population. But it doesn’t work like that. Twenty years ago, a corporate surgeon arrived at the place I then worked and, before applying the scalpel to costs, dryly told the staff, “You can have a lot of fun selling five-dollar bills for three bucks, but it doesn’t last forever.”
In other words, there’s no such thing as a free education (or free healthcare, or free anything), and raising taxes to pay the unavoidable bills crushes the economy. When that happens, those people who can leave for low-tax states do so. Hence the mass exodus from three of the worst-run blue states in the country, New York, California, and Illinois. Each will lose congressional seats after the next census because their inhabitants are fleeing to better-run red states in the South and West.
You’d think migration that boosts red states’ power on Capitol Hill would be good news for Republicans. But, oddly and dangerously, Californians, New Yorkers, and Illinoisans who vote with their feet for Republican policies nevertheless seem still to vote at the ballot box for the awful blue-state policies they just fled. Despite their first-hand experience of Democratic mismanagement, they’re turning states in the South purple or blue.
This is self-defeating because you only get the benefits of Republican government if you vote for Republicans. New Yorkers, Californians, and Illinoisans can drive 1,000 miles to a properly run state, and it will be for naught if they bring their political ideologies with them and vote for bigger government. Just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s no free state. You don’t get a better place to live if you turn it into a replica of the place you left behind.
This is the shifting political landscape on which the next elections will be fought, in 2022 for Congress, and in 2024 for the presidency. On this week’s cover, we feature Sen. Josh Hawley, whose brand of economic populism has made him a contender for the Republican nomination should he choose to run. Zaid Jilani argues that Hawley has some of the cross-party appeal of Teddy Roosevelt. Jay Cost looks at the incoming president’s hires and sees the West Wing, not the Senate-approved Cabinet secretaries, as the policymaking center. One man who might not be part of the new administration at all is Rahm Emanuel, whose precipitous fall Jeffrey Blehar examines in detail.
