This Way to the Socialists’ Ball

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, January 29, 2026

 

‘In the course of the 1960s, the left adopted almost wholesale the arguments of the right,” said presidential policy adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the early 1970s. The future Democratic senator from New York noted that during the Vietnam era, students at elite Eastern colleges could be found arguing “that the growth of federal power was the greatest threat to democracy, that foreign entanglements were the work of demented plutocrats, that government snooping (by the Social Security Administration or the United States Continental Army Command) was destroying freedom,” and “that the largest number of functions should be entrusted to the smallest jurisdictions.”

 

Needless to say, the liberal capitulation to Republicans did not last. But while it took a war for progressives to warm to the right’s causes, half a century later, it took a lot less for Republicans to trade in their principles.

 

In order to improve the vast American economy, the party that once abhorred governmental interference in the free market has turned to a man who filed for bankruptcy six times and now, as president, wields unprecedented powers he has granted himself. (His vice president dubbed the economy “the Titanic,” evidently unaware of how the story ends.)

 

In just the past few months, President Donald Trump has proposed a slate of “fixes” that should excite progressives more than seeing Trump himself in an orange prison jumpsuit. He has suggested a 10 percent cap on credit card fees, which would drastically restrict access to credit for those most in need of it. He has proposed banning large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes, which could squeeze the housing supply. He has announced plans to use government funds to purchase a 10 percent stake in Intel, making the U.S. government the company’s largest shareholder.

 

Bernie Sanders is likely muttering to himself, “Seems like a bit much.”

 

While Trump labeled his 2024 opponent, Kamala Harris, a “communist,” he appears to believe there’s nothing the government — meaning Donald Trump — can’t fix. Trump and his acolytes have slobbered over the prospects of micromanaging private social media companies, forcing them to run content with which they disagree. He has suggested the proper number of dolls and No. 2 Ticonderogas each child should have. “They don’t need to have 250 pencils,” he said in an interview. “They can have five.”

 

And perhaps most importantly, the president has granted himself the sole ability to determine the rate at which tariffs — taxes paid for by the American people — should be levied. Of course, tariffs have long been a tool favored by the American left to protect union jobs, and not even the most liberal modern American presidents have considered the possibility that they had sole tariff authority. Yet now, the different tariffs go up and down depending on what mood Trump is in that day, or whether he wants to punish other countries for not backing his bid to take over Greenland.

 

Such power grabs would be anathema to any self-respecting philosophical conservative from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush. In the early 2000s, Republican politics was populated with hunters of RINOs (Republicans in name only) hell-bent on cleansing the party of anyone deemed insufficiently committed to cutting taxes and lifting the boot heel of government from their necks. That was until GOP voters fell in love with the heel.

 

That heel has come in the form of the Department of Justice, which the president has managed to turn from a nominally independent arm of government into the law firm of Trump, Bondi, and Miller. The president’s power grab at the DOJ has allowed him to prosecute political enemies while he pardons violent offenders who attacked U.S. Capitol police in the service of his stolen-election lie.

 

Trump has further used Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents as his own police force. The surge of federal law enforcement to Minneapolis most recently led to the shooting death of Alex Pretti, who at first was using his phone to film immigration officers, then attempted to help a woman whom officers had pushed to the ground. Pretti was taken to the ground; one of the agents involved in the scuffle found and removed Pretti’s firearm (legally owned and licensed), and another agent opened fire, shooting him dead.

 

Administration officials’ despicable lie that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who had attacked law enforcement officers was quickly spread by Trump’s most credulous and odious sycophants, many of whom are now trying to walk the claim back. Free people should object to being lied to, in brazen contradiction of facts, by their government as a justification for its actions. Truth is the antidote to brutality, not its companion. But amid the chaos, MAGA’s knee-jerk reaction was to question Pretti’s right to carry a firearm to an action involving ICE.

 

“With that being said, you can’t have guns,” Trump said to reporters on Tuesday. “You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t. . . . But it’s just a very unfortunate incident.”

 

So the president who made a hero of teenager Kyle Rittenhouse for hauling a rifle to a protest in Kenosha, Wis., then shooting two men dead, now doesn’t believe in the Second Amendment right to carry a firearm? When Trump finally leaves office after his tenth term, he already has a slot lined up as a columnist at Jacobin.

 

It doesn’t take more than five seconds to imagine what would have happened if President Barack Obama had deployed federal agents to America’s cities to harass people on the suspicion that they owned an illegal firearm. The outrage on the right would, justifiably, have been volcanic. Comparisons of Obama to a third world dictator would have led every Newsmax news segment.

 

Republicans can “but the Democrats” all they want, but it’s just a way of avoiding looking in the mirror. So-called conservatives are endorsing policies that would fit nicely in a Zohran Mamdani presidential platform.

 

The price of a ticket to the Trump show is pretending to see things your eyes don’t see and closing your eyes to your own principles. Hopefully, one day, enough Republicans will determine that the cost is not worth paying.