It's Not Just Democrats Who Have Lost Faith in the Free Market
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
The headline framing here is a little too tidy for what's actually happening. It's not that conservatives woke up one morning and stopped believing in markets. It's that a lot of people watched their hometown factory close, watched the same corporations get bailed out twice, and watched their kids' prescription prices triple, and decided the theory wasn't matching the results they were living through.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
<![CDATA[Free markets have always been more than a policy preference for American conservatism. They were the pillar, a load-bearing idea that separated the American right from every other political tradition on earth, the belief that liberty and prosperity rise or fall together.
And yet that pillar is beginning to crumble, among Democrats, among Americans, and even among conservatives.]]>
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
The headline framing here is a little too tidy for what's actually happening. It's not that conservatives woke up one morning and stopped believing in markets. It's that a lot of people watched their hometown factory close, watched the same corporations get bailed out twice, and watched their kids' prescription prices triple, and decided the theory wasn't matching the results they were living through. That's not an ideological crisis. That's just people paying attention.
We'd push back on the idea that this is some new phenomenon splitting the right down the middle. Skepticism of unregulated globalism, of Wall Street getting rescued while Main Street eats the bill, of trade deals that hollowed out entire regions, has been building since at least 2008. What's changed is that more people are finally saying it out loud instead of pretending the spreadsheet numbers tell the whole story. A market that only works for people who already have capital isn't the free market anyone signed up defending.
None of that means the answer is European-style state control, and most of the voters losing patience with "the market will sort it out" aren't asking for that either. They want fair rules, enforced borders on capital and labor both, and an economy that treats American workers as something other than a line item to be optimized away. That's a correction, not a collapse.
If there's a real danger, it's treating this shift as heresy instead of feedback. The market didn't fail conservatism. Certain policies dressed up as free-market gospel did, and admitting that isn't losing faith. It's growing up.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.