Imagine if Hillary Clinton – Democratic nominee for president of the United States – responded to the latest Texas Textboook kerfuffle (KHOU [1]), by lamenting the near-monopoly of government schools in K-12 education and calling for an expansion of school choice and charter schools.
Imagine her announcing from a Food Lion in Fairfax County that, should she be elected, she would take apart the myriad of agricultural mandates and subsidies [2] designed to prop up inefficient farmers [3] at the expense of taxpayers across the country.
Imagine her blasting Donald Trump for opposing TPP, NAFTA, and free trade in general while she stands up for consumers, lower prices, and jobs better able to weather foreign competition.
Imagine her attempt at health care reform including a breaking of the CMS-AMA link [4] and encouraging states to loosen COPN requirements [5] so Americans can have more choices in health care and lower prices (either directly or indirectly via insurance).
Finally, imagine the Democratic nominee responding to the latest “hottest Insert-month-here-ever” scare not with standard left-wing drivel but a supply-side tax reform [6] coupling a carbon tax with an equivalent reduction in income taxes.
It may sound far fetched, and given what has already happened in this campaign, it is far fetched. But it didn’t have to be.
One of the painful realities of this election cycle is the end of the Republican Party as the party of free markets – or, if you prefer, the end of the illusion that the GOP is the party of free markets. However one wishes to label the event, it essentially turned economic conservatives like myself into political orphans [7]. In effect, our options are a party that considers free markets to be bad for everyone (the Democrats), a party that considers free markets to be bad because they hurt white people (the Republicans), a party that considers free markets to be bad because they hurt the environment (the Greens), and a party that like free markets in general but doesn’t much about them in practice (the Libertarians, to which I have drifted as the best of a bad lot).
Did it have to be this way? Honestly, no. In fact, I would argue that Hillary Clinton – of all people – was the best chance the Democrats have had to reach out to pro-free-market voters in generations. Her husband was arguably the most-market friendly Democrat to occupy the White House since 1963 (or even, depending upon one’s viewpoint, 1896). The political coalition she leads is the least dependent on rural voters in American history (meaning she’d have the least to lose by taking apart Pitchfork Corporatism). Her predecessor has largely tried (and partially succeeded) keeping health insurers onside with “Obamacare” (which was corporatized health insurance disguised as socialized medicine), giving her incentive to push ahead with genuine market reforms in health care that reduces prices (and thus costs to insurers). Finally, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decade-long walk back the Democrats brings a strong voice for educational choice into the party’s ranks.
Given all of the above, it was certainly possible for Clinton to recognize that pro-market Americans were now swing voters, and reach out accordingly.
Of course, a certain Senator from Vermont put paid to all that by dragging the party back to the 1970s while exploiting Clinton’s personal weaknesses, giving us the campaign we have now: where every candidate is engaged in kulturkampf and tribal signaling while moving leftward as fast as they can.
That said, these policies (and the voters who can be won over by them) are still out there: for Democrats looking to build a firm majority by including pro-market voters, for Republicans who truly wish to prove folks like me wrong and show that they are serious about expunging the Trumpenproletariat, for Greens looking to show they are something other than a lefty fringe party, and especially for Libertarians eager to flesh out their skeletal body politic with real, pro-free-market policies.
As it is, they lay unnoticed, rejected by the Trumpsters and by the Greens, and opportunities for a Libertarian Party to grow (if that’s what they want), or for a decivise Clinton majority that (for now) she refuses to build.