The 2024 Democratic National Convention has come to an end. During her speech last night, VP Kamala Harris repeated a theme of her campaign: Democrats are the party of freedom and opportunity.
Whether one believes that’s the case or not (on economic grounds, I don’t), or whether we simply have a different understanding of what freedom and opportunity means (I am very sure we do), that strategy is good politics.
The irony, of course, is that not so long ago, opportunity and freedom used to be a conservative strategy and message. With the advent of the New Right conservatives, not so much. In fact, a central tenet of their message is precisely that freedom and economic growth as the best path to opportunity should be called into question.
We are told that we should instead focus on gauzy abstractions such as “common-good outcomes,” and we should stop believing that keeping America affordable is a good thing. Many on the New Right are demanding that we ignore how much markets have done for us. They want us to ignore the damage inflicted by our inefficient tax code, our punishing regulatory environment, distortive spending, $1.9 trillion deficits, and the 4,392 pages of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (per Dominic Pino) so they can claim that the market fundamentalists have been in charge for 40 years.
What’s more, to the extent that these New Right conservatives talk about opportunities, they, like Democrats, mean big-government policies, redistribution, even unions, and subsidies to preferred industries and protection of national champions. Their vision is dark, and their policies, of the past. And it remains to be seen if that it’s good politics.
Please, don’t mistake this post for an endorsement of the VP. It’s not. In fact, to the extent that I can decipher the policies she may want to implement, I can’t stand them.
Dominic Pino and Americans for Prosperity’s Akash Chougule just talked about this on the latest episode of Qualified Opinions here.