The fight between government intervention and free markets continues to rage within the Republican Party, particularly with the rise of right-wing populism. On today’s episode of The Editors, Rich highlights the debate and poses the question to Noah, “The populist right is winning the economic debate currently within the right: Yes or no?”
“Sadly I think it is,” Noah responds, “but it’s winning by adopting the left’s conceits.”
“‘The private sector is driven by greed,’ they maintain, ‘that its uncompetitive practices are native to the marketplace, not an outgrowth of government influence.'”
“It’s seductive,” Noah says of populism. “It appeals to an evolutionary trait in the human brain, and we’ve been combating it for a generation or more. They’re winning, but they’re winning by sacrificing the hard-won intellectual gains of a generation that . . . contributed to popularizing the primacy of the individual and the theory of market economics.”
“So the answer is yes,” says Noah. “But I’m hardly thrilled about it.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.