The Great Relearning Begins Anew

By Marian L. Tupy

Sunday, June 28, 2026

 

The novelist Tom Wolfe gave us the phrase in a 1987 essay about the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, who decided that hygiene, monogamy, and other rules of polite society were bourgeois inventions. They threw them out, moved into communes, and were visited by afflictions that modern medicine had not seen in generations. Doctors at the free clinics started teaching sanitation lessons that Victorian housewives once took for granted. Wolfe called that the Great Relearning: Civilization that discards its hard-won knowledge does not leap ahead to utopia but is dragged back to the starting line.

 

We are living through a Great Relearning of our own.

 

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a set of propositions seemed settled beyond dispute. Central planning had impoverished half of Europe while markets enriched the other half. Prices were not arbitrary impositions but signals carrying more information than any ministry could gather. The right to own a business, to keep the fruits of one’s labor, and to trade freely across borders had lifted more human beings out of poverty than every charity in history combined. They were the conclusions of an experiment run across a continent, with a control group on either side of a barbed wire line.

 

A generation later, those conclusions have been forgotten. Voters in wealthy democracies, and the young above all, are electing self-described democratic socialists who promise to repeal economics by decree. In New York, a democratic socialist won the mayoralty in November on a platform of frozen rents, city-owned grocery stores, and an expropriation of someone else’s wealth. The voters in Washington, D.C., are all but certain to elect a similar candidate. The 20th-century socialists buried hecatombs of corpses. Yet it is the intellectual corpse of socialism that is being revived.

 

What are the lessons that the voters have forgotten? Free trade is desirable because it lets Vietnamese seamstresses and Iowa farmers prosper by doing what they do best, while protection taxes a nation’s own citizens for the privilege of buying less. Rent control is ruinous because a price pinned below the market ensures that fewer apartments are built and maintained. Public ownership of factories fails, because the managers risk no money of their own and answer to no customer free to walk away. A municipal grocery cannot serve you, because a shop that is forbidden to fail has no reason to stock what you want. Confiscatory taxes defeat themselves, because capital, unlike the wage earner, has feet. Chronic deficits and the inflation they summon are cruelest of all, for they levy a tax that no legislature ever votes on and that the poor can least afford to dodge.

 

None of that should surprise us. We are not blank slates onto which empirical argument permanently writes. We are the descendants of small bands of chimpanzees who survived by raiding neighbors and dividing a fixed supply of meat. The zero-sum intuition that one man’s gain must be another’s loss is older than agriculture and far older than Adam Smith. Markets are recent and counterintuitive. Human nature does not change, and so the case for liberty must be made afresh in every classroom of every generation.

 

Which is precisely where the chain has broken. When you stop teaching a lesson, you guarantee its repetition. In 2024, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that on college faculties, the far left outnumbers the far right by 16 to 1. Self-described Marxists and socialists now outnumber self-described conservatives on the American faculty. In fields like history and sociology, a conservative voice has become a near-mythical creature. A student may pass four years hearing the case for markets only as a caricature to be refuted. The post–Cold War cohort was never taught why the Wall fell and is now relearning it the slow way.

 

The dearth of academics and public intellectuals willing or able to defend sound economics is also wreaking havoc on the right, aggravated by a president whose populist “solutions,” including tariffs and nationalization of shares in publicly traded companies, permit no commitment to principles or long-term thinking. Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump’s opposite, thought differently. Freedom, he warned in 1961, is never more than one generation from extinction. It must be fought for to be passed on.

 

My hope is modest: that the young will relearn the affordable lessons before they reach the final, expensive one. Friedrich Hayek explained it in 1944: Socialism, whether implemented by the left or the right, is unstable, because when its promises collide with arithmetic, a government must choose between abandoning the program and abandoning the voters who object. The choice may not be as obvious to those in power as it should be.