The Democrat-dominated establishment amounts to a coalition of insufferable narcissists with authoritarian instincts. More often than not, those instincts overlap and lead them all in the same general direction.
Occasionally, however, the establishment authoritarians begin to turn on each other. When that happens, anti-establishment outsiders may applaud particular criticisms while remaining alert to a larger and more sinister agenda.
On Thursday, for instance, in an admirable piece titled “When your opponent calls you a ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls,” Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell delivered a scathing critique of Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s idiotic and authoritarian proposal for a “federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries.”
The summary headline put it bluntly: “It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is.”
Harris, who has spent nearly a month hiding from the media while at the same time benefiting from a propaganda blitz unlike anything in recent memory, was scheduled to announce the proposed ban at a Friday afternoon event in Raleigh, North Carolina, according to ABC.
The event is scheduled to begin at 2:45 p.m. Eastern Time, according to Yahoo Finance.
Or will she? Might adverse reactions from the likes of Rampell convince the Harris campaign to make a last-minute change? After all, the vice president has built her inauthentic campaign on optics while working feverishly to reinvent herself. So one cannot rule out the possibility of a toned-down proposal.
In any event, Rampell based her criticism on a Wednesday news release from the Harris campaign.
The details of that news release inspired one of the most cogent critiques one will ever read from an establishment source.
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“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food,” Rampell wrote.
“Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.”
Besides wholeheartedly endorsing the substance of it, what should we make of Rampell’s brutal criticism?
First, we must understand that in this case the Harris campaign and the Post writer serve two different authoritarian masters.
Not long ago, any American with an eighth-grade education would have recognized Harris’s price controls as a staple of totalitarian communist regimes.
In fact, historian Kristy Ironside has described price controls as a kind of civil religion in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
“Price reductions were presented as an expression of Stalin’s care for workers’ economic interests during the process of recovery and as a blow at those who had unfairly profited during the war,” Ironside wrote in 2016.
“By the early 1950s, annual price reductions had become an explicit economic doctrine and a new Stalinist ritual and celebration, despite the persistence of serious shortages, especially of food, and growing evidence of the policy’s shortcomings,” she added.
Rampell predicted something similar.
“At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat,” the Post columnist wrote of Harris’s proposal.
In other words, the intelligent segment of the establishment wants nothing to do with Stalinist economics. As she has proven on many occasions, Harris represents the establishment’s instinctively socialist and cognitively challenged wing. Therein lies the root of Rampell’s criticism.
Keep in mind, however, that Rampell serves the establishment’s cold and calculating managerial class. Thus, she represents a different kind of authoritarian.
For instance, this week alone on the social media platform X, she has defended illegal immigration.
On Wednesday, she mocked Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, former President Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate, for urging voters to support Trump if they want to reduce inflation.
“How? By deporting the immigrants who pick produce and build homes? By devaluing the dollar? By jacking up tariffs on all imported goods, including vegetables and housing materials?” Rampell tweeted.
How?
By deporting the immigrants who pick produce and build homes?
By devaluing the dollar?
By jacking up tariffs on all imported goods, including vegetables and housing materials? https://t.co/i2t75lW8tu— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) August 14, 2024
The conflation of illegal immigration with legal immigration is deliberate. As is the scare mongering. One could scarcely imagine a more globalist, anti-American, anti-worker endorsement of the status quo.
Likewise, on Tuesday Rampell blasted Trump’s “no tax on tips” proposal, which Harris copied.
Making tips tax-free was a bad idea when Trump proposed it a couple of months ago (as many progressive pundits pointed out at the time).
It remains a bad idea when Harris belatedly endorses it, too.https://t.co/RY17WJdX7n— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) August 13, 2024
In other words, if you happen to work in the tips-heavy service industry, you must know your role. The establishment does not need your money as much as it needs your compliance with the entire federal taxation regime.
George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984” offers perhaps the best illustration of the kind of authoritarian Rampell represents.
As author Lionel Trilling wrote in a review of “1984” in the New Yorker in June 1949, shortly after the book’s publication, Orwell described his imagined totalitarian regime as driven not by the sort of nitwits who tout Stalinist price controls but by “the new aristocracy . . . of bureaucrats, scientists, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.”
That, in effect, characterizes the modern establishment. They want lockdowns and mandates. They loathe the United States and its history of constitutional limits on government power. And they like their Marxism with a heavy dash of wokeness.
But, unlike Harris and her advisers, Rampell’s establishment authoritarians have too much basic intelligence to give their outright support to Stalinist price controls that would destroy the source of their wealth and erode their donors’ profits.
In short, sometimes it is best to allow the authoritarians to devour one another.
