J.D. Tuccille: Americans have only bad choices in the midterms - National Post
Voters check in on the second day of early voting ahead of the midterm elections, at a polling place at DuPage Event Center and Fairgrounds in Wheaton, Illinois, on September 25, 2026. Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI /AFP via Getty ImagesArticle contentCOTTONWOOD, Arizona — The author and thinker Robert A. Heinlein once wrote, “the human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” With midterm elections approaching, the problem for Americans is that our ossified two-party system increasingly delivers us a choice between flavors of control freaks: Donald Trump’s Republicans and Democrats led by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. With few major-party candidates willing to consider leaving people alone, and alternative parties almost completely locked out of the political system, voters who want to run their own lives face almost entirely unpalatable choices.
Trump’s Republicans have drifted far from their nominally market-oriented roots towards greater government control of the economy. At the end of July, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced “the signing of 7 letters of intent to provide $874 million in federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act” in return for “a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each company as a condition for receiving the funds.” The announcement came on top of earlier government acquisitions of stakes in Intel, USA Rare Earth, and other companies in fields the administration considers critical.
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“What is remarkable is that federal corporate ownership is becoming routine under a Republican administration,” the Cato Institute’s Tad DeHaven commented last month. “Republicans warning that communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.”
That taste for top-down direction of the economy — apparent in the president’s tariff fetish and mercantilism — is unlikely to disappear when the current White House resident departs. With a nod to the late, unlamented communist guerrilla Che Guevara, economic historian Phil Magness has taken to referring to the vice president and GOP heir-apparent as “Che D. Vance.” Magness focuses on Vance’s long history of hostility to individualism and attacks on free-market ideas.
In a 2019 article for First Things, Vance criticized libertarians for emphasizing “free choices” over coercion and for being “uncomfortable with political power” to accomplish what he considers to be “public goods” — and never mind that not everybody shares the same sense of what’s good.
If Republicans are discovering a taste for socialism and for state direction over individual liberty, Democrats are embracing full commitment to those ideas. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic member of Congress from New York, was only the first of a wave of open socialists to rise to prominence in that party (Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders is still technically independent). Preparatory to a run for president, she recently rejoined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the party within a party that organizes and coordinates the efforts of many radicals.
The DSA isn’t a caucus for government-run health care; it favours full state direction of the economy. The group’s program invites people to “imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism” in which “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation … are common goods and utilities.”
