In one of the great scenes of one of the great gangster movies, Mike Newell’s “Donnie Brasco,” an aging Mafioso named Lefty Ruggiero paces a hospital corridor while his son fights for his life following a drug overdose.
“Twenty-eight years, you can read it on his birth certificate: Bellevue Hospital,” Lefty, played by Al Pacino, tells Donnie, played by Johnny Depp, about his comatose son. “Now he’s back, in there, and I’m out here, worried to my death. And he’s asleep in there, same as 28 years ago, with the same expression. He’s made no progress.”
It’s a line that could apply just as well to America’s policy debates.
Twenty-eight years ago — that was 1997, when “Donnie Brasco” came out — we thought we had made progress, at least when it came to answering some of the larger questions that had roiled 20th-century politics.
Trade protectionism? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s showed us the worldwide economic ruin to which that could lead. Government stakes in private enterprise, like the Trump administration’s recent equity stake in Intel? The record of state investment in, or control of, private enterprises, from Solyndra to Sematech (not to mention Alitalia or “Such a Bad Experience Never Again” Sabena), is mostly a story of financial disappointment, taxpayer bailouts, managerial incompetence, political interference and cronyism.
America first? The slogan of Charles Lindbergh and other pre-World War II isolationists should have been buried forever on Dec. 7, 1941. Instead, it emerged from its grave some 75 years later.
But it isn’t just the Trump administration that is reawakening the moral and intellectual zombies of the past. Everywhere one looks there are policy necromancers.
The platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America calls for a 32-hour workweek “with no reduction in pay or benefits”; “free public universal child care and pre-K”; “college for all”; the cancellation of “all student-loan debt”; “universal rent control”; “massive public investment to transition away from fossil fuels”; “guaranteed support for workers in the fossil fuel industry,” and “expansive paid family leave.” Not only would American workers stand to benefit, but so would everybody else, since the DSA wants to offer these benefits to anyone who wishes to come to United States through an open-borders policy.
How would the DSA pay for all this? By soaking the rich, along with “for-profit corporations, large inheritances, and private colleges and universities.” Why did nobody think of this before?
Oh, wait — many did. “Bolivarian socialism,” welcomed by the Jeremy Corbyns of the world, took Venezuela from being South America’s richest country to a humanitarian catastrophe. Sweden attempted a form of socialism in the 1970s and ’80s, only to reverse course after it experienced massive capital flight and a financial crisis during which interest rates hit 75%. France’s Socialist government imposed a 75% tax on earnings more than 1 million euros in 2012; it dropped the tax two years later as the wealthy packed their bags. Britain’s National Health Service, whose advocates chronically complain is “underfunded,” is in a state of perpetual crisis even as health care, according to the BBC, gobbles up roughly one-third of government spending.
“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” Margaret Thatcher once observed. To put it another way, you can’t abolish billionaires, as Zohran Mamdani, the DSA’s poster child, would like, and still expect them to keep footing your bills.
If socialism is foolish, there’s something worse: the “socialism of fools,” antisemitism, now rapidly ascendant on the MAGA right.
Consider last week’s interview of Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist, by Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned podcaster. Among Fuentes’ core beliefs: “I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler. I think there’s a Jewish conspiracy. I believe in race realism.”
As for Carlson, he lobbed softball questions at Fuentes, found much to agree on when it came to their shared hatred for Christian supporters of Israel, and then draped his arm around his guest for a cuddly photograph. And even that wasn’t quite as repulsive as the passionate defense of Carlson mounted by Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. As Roberts saw it, Carlson had done nothing wrong in making nice with Fuentes. Rather, it was “the globalist class” and their “mouthpieces in Washington” who were the real bad guys.
“Globalist class”? Whoever could Roberts have in mind?
Roberts later tried to distance himself from Fuentes without reference to Carlson’s role in boosting and promoting him — a case, as it were, of trying to have your Jew and eat him, too. But the deeper issue with the Heritage Foundation and its allies isn’t that they have an antisemitism problem. It’s that they have a surrender problem — surrender to any dreadful idea, so long as it has a critical mass of supporters on the ever-growing fringe.
As Al Pacino’s Lefty would say: “No progress.”
Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.
