I have read the Economist for 40 years. It is perhaps the best international news magazine that actually understands economics, even if we might have different views. It was founded in 1843 by James Wilson, not surprisingly an economist. It is rare that a publication can stay in business that long.  That longevity says things about their quality.

Articles often range widely in subject matter and I concede that if you read just this one magazine, you would be reasonably informed about the world on a variety of subjects. Its companion publication the Financial Times also ranks pretty high in today’s world of diminished journalism.

It was with great disappointment a few years ago I got the weekly magazine with a cover of Donald Trump shouting through a megaphone, that if you looked carefully was a Klan hood. I thought this was so over the top I wrote the editor, telling him I would no longer be a subscriber. One can have disagreements with Trump and know he is not a bigot. Prior to running, he received many awards from civil rights organizations and much of his extended family is Jewish. So, the implication of the cover and much of their coverage, was biased, uninformed about America, and just plain stupid.

Just because one does not agree with open borders, in the age of the welfare state and international terrorism, does not make one a Klansman. The Economist should have known better than to get down in the gutter with the rest of the press. If you do not agree with Trump on the border, make your case for open borders and defend it. Don’t dodge the argument by associating someone with a horrible organization, organized by the way, by Democrats.

I often read views that don’t agree with my own. That is unavoidable with today’s biased journalism. As Dennis Prager has pointed out, Conservatives often read Progressives, but Progressives don’t read Conservatives. They do what the Economist did, fling snarky insults instead of confronting an opposing view.

Conservatives have to swim in the water that flows from the universities, big business, the arts, Hollywood, book publishers, magazines, and the social media giants.  We can’t help but get soaked with their ideas. Progressives however, do not face the same environment as they are now “the establishment.”

Like many publication, The Economist had uncharateristically succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome, a very serious mental illness. It was very disappointing. In many important respects, they still don’t understand the MAGA revolt in America as a revolt against Leftist domination of our institutions.

As we have pointed out in the past, even the term “populist” is not very descriptive of MAGA which blends elements of nationalism, Judeo-Christian principles, political conservatism, and libertarianism. Unlike legacy conservatism, MAGA supporters are tired of losing and appreciated Trump’s fighting spirit. They have heard conservative shibboleths since Goldwater, and except for occasional political victories (Reagan), legacy conservatism has presided over the loss of one institution after another to the Left. And unlike traditional liberals, MAGA has been fully aware of the totalitarian instinct in today’s “Progressives.”

Hoping that since Trump was gone, they might regain some of the intellectual composure, I ventured another subscription.

Like many who hated Trump, and thus supported Democrats,  largely because of his often off tone remarks and tweets, there is a degree of buyer’s remorse setting in. There is a difference between rhetoric and actual governing. Trump sometimes said things in a way that made you wince, but other than frequent turnover in cabinet positions, he governed pretty well, considering he was under unrelenting attack.

Polls show the Bidenism is a loser. His failure on the border, the economy, with Covid, in foreign policy, in inflation, race relations, and crime, his deliberate dividing even further the electorate, are starting to hit home for many. Upwards of 20% of Democrats now say they wish they had voted differently. In the all important independent voter sector, which often determines elections when the two major parties are running neck and neck, Biden’s popularity is also falling.

Those individuals associated with Biden are beginning to feel they hitched their wagon to a fading star, and one that is suffering from a touch of dementia as well. But the folks at the Economist are not running for office, so their alarm is coming from another place.

There seems to be a shift in the Economist, even though they are not seeking office. It appears they have discovered (surprise, surprise, surprise), that today’s Progressive is an undemocratic bigot. The Democrat Party has been captured by the gender and race hustlers ensconced in your local university. But the crazy stuff does not stay on campus, it has spread faster than Covid.

I would take this shift at the Economist as important, but not like there is a major quake in the intellectual tectonic plates of the global marketplace of ideas. They still take their swipes at what they call “populist.” But this week’s issue should rattle some windows. In the most recent print issue, there is an important essay which seems to support the idea that they are getting it. What  I mean is the recognition is dawning that the modern Democrat Party is anything but democratic and that so called liberals today, are no longer liberals. They have become Leftists, and nasty ones at that.

Leftists are bullies and historically trended to violence and dictatorship. That is why naive Leftists keep arguing that their “pure” ideas has never been tried, it is always corrupted. They never ask why it is their ideas are always corrupted and end up as Pol Pot or Castro.

How many times does it have to happen before they begin to understand the totalitarian rot comes from within the movement itself?

At any rate, there is a shift in the Economist and it could well mean others are getting the message as well.

Below is a quote from their recent essay:

The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left. We describe this week how a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.

Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.

However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more over how to bring these things about. For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom up—and it depends on the separation of powers, so that nobody nor any group is able to exert lasting control. By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.

This difference in method has profound implications. Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competition—by, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers. Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “equity”—the outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.

Mr Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But his blunderbuss approach risks denying some disadvantaged children the help they need and others the chance to realise their talents. Individuals, not just groups, must be treated fairly for society to flourish. Besides, society has many goals. People worry about economic growth, welfare, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they advance a particular group. Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course. The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.

Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary. That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice. It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.

Milton Friedman once said that the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither”. He was right. Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individuals—and, in that, it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.

Let’s hope this is the beginning of a broader understanding of what unhinged Progressives mean to society. That no matter what differences one may have had with Mr. Trump, his opponents are fundamentally more dangerous to liberty. Note we included their gratuitous swipe at the “populist right”, that they still don’t understand. But at least they are getting the message on the Progressives.

The irony here is that it was Trump who truly understood the culture war, and would use his bully pulpit to inveigh against critical race theory, gender bending, and the attacks on free speech by publishers, the government, the press, and social media monopolies. And it is his followers who are standing up at school board meetings and city council meetings and fighting censorship and cancelling social media and big business. It is the Trump followers and a small band of Libertarians that are fighting the totalitarian Progressives. This is now what the Economist is doing.  I wonder if they realize the irony in that.

Even if they don’t, welcome aboard the liberty ship.  We can use more hands, especially as articulate as those at the Economist. Go forth and fight the Progressives. These Marxists are enemies of both old fashioned Liberals and Conservatives.