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Articles by Marcus Witcher
Huey Long’s Populism Is Back In Fashion
JD Vance made headlines a few weeks ago by invoking Huey Long while addressing a crowd in Middletown, Ohio. Long, a Depression-era Democratic senator and governor of Louisiana, was known for a folksy and fiery speaking style that combined traditionalism, populism, and socialism. He sought to mobilize the common man by promising massive economic redistribution and denouncing wealthy elites.
The Right’s Long March Toward Illiberalism
Several years ago, at a Philadelphia Society meeting, a friend approached me. He identified as a national conservative and believed that the Right needed to use the coercive power of the state to make the country more virtuous. He was mainly concerned about the supposed degradation of our culture and insisted that we needed a strong, authoritative leader to restore America to its former greatness.
Did New Deal Spending End the Great Depression?
John Maynard Keynes was not happy with US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1934, the famed economist criticized FDR for being “engaged on a double task, Recovery and Reform” when Keynes believed reform should wait until recovery was achieved. In fact, Keynes argued that Roosevelt needed to embark on much more deficit spending, and he lamented that the president was too wedded to his belief in balanced budgets.
The Dark Side of FDR
David Beito argues that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a self-serving politician who cared very little for the civil liberties of Americans. In FDR: A New Political Life, Beito challenges historians who explain away Roosevelt’s horrid record on civil rights as politically strategic (in the case of black Americans) or as an exception (in the case of Japanese internment). Instead, Beito contends that FDR’s glib view of civil liberties was core to his worldview.
No, Reagan Was Not Pro-Tariff
President Trump last week ended trade talks with Canada because of an advertisement sponsored by the Ontario government featuring snippets of a 1987 speech Ronald Reagan gave, explaining the dangers of protectionism. The point of the advert was clear: protectionism hurts everyone, including the country imposing the protectionist policies.
Looking at Reagan Through the Lens of Trump
Book Reviews Max Boot's biography of Ronald Reagan is deeply researched and informative, but it sometimes stumbles when it tries to use the past to make sense of the present.
Looking at Reagan Through the Lens of Trump (opinion)
October 10, 2024 at 3:00 PM Liveright Reagan: His Life and Legend, by Max Boot, Liveright, 836 pages, $45 Max Boot believes "the biographer's job is to find the compromises and expose the shibboleths and then to report on them dispassionately, not to cover them up or exaggerate their importance, so that readers can make up their own minds." In Reagan: His Life and Legend, the first comprehensive biography of President Ronald Reagan since Donald Trump entered the White House, the historian and...
The Libertarian Pioneer Who Wrote for America's Biggest Black Newspaper
September 21, 2024 at 5:00 AM Photo: Rose Wilder Lane, New York, c. 1928–1930; Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Rose Wilder Lane—novelist, journalist, founding mother of the modern libertarian movement, and very likely uncredited co-author of her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books—was also, less famously, a columnist in the early 1940s for the largest black newspaper in the United States.
Libertarian Rose Wilder Lane Wrote for America's Biggest Black Newspaper
History To Rose Wilder Lane, African Americans' achievements were all the more amazing given their disadvantaged starting point. | (Photo: Rose Wilder Lane, New York, c.
Classical Liberals on Race (August/September 2024)
Many classical liberals have been silent or passive when it comes to racism’s pernicious effects. Others have twisted or misunderstood classical liberalism to justify racist words and deeds. Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher are on a mission to raise up the thinkers within classical liberalism that are anti-racist and to show how the most important parts of classical liberalism are in opposition to discrimination against minorities.
History repeats itself with excessive transportation regulation Original
California’s battle between rideshare companies and unions has finally come to an end. The state’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled that these companies can continue to classify drivers as independent contractors instead of as employees.
Presidential candidates ignore child-care cost reform
Now that Vice President Kamala Harris is the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, perhaps the campaign can focus more on policy and issues that the American people care about. Following the first presidential debate, all the attention was on President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
Presidential Candidates Ignore Regulatory Reform to Cut Childcare Costs – DC Journal - InsideSources
Now that Vice President Kamala Harris is the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, perhaps the campaign can focus more on policy and issues that the American people care about. Following the first presidential debate, all the attention was on President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
Witcher: Childcare costs ignored in presidential debates
After the June presidential debate, all anyone could talk about was President Biden’s health. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about his mental acuity (for both political and governance reasons), but I was frustrated and concerned about something else — neither candidate seemed interested in addressing the problems that Americans face every day. The issues that Biden and former president Donald Trump sidestepped were vast, but one stuck out to me — the price of childcare.
The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied to About African Poverty — and What that Means for Human Flourishing by Marcus M. Witcher | Capitalism Magazine
In her new book The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied to About African Poverty — and What that Means for Human Flourishing, Magatte Wade argues that government corruption, overregulation, and Africa’s embrace of socialism have caused Africa’s poverty. She is pushing back against the standard narrative that slavery and colonization are the root cause of Africa’s misery.
Breaking the Shackles of Socialism in Africa
In her new book The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied to About African Poverty — and What that Means for Human Flourishing, Magatte Wadeargues that government corruption, overregulation, and Africa’s embrace of socialism have caused Africa’s poverty. She is pushing back against the standard narrative that slavery and colonization are the root cause of Africa’s misery.
License to Exclude: Black Barbers in Arkansas
Tanner Corley [1] ; Wendy Lucas [2] ; Marcus Witcher [3] [1] University of Alabama [2] University of Central Arkansas [3] Huntingdon College Localización: Essays in economic and business history: the journal of the economic and business historical society, ISSN 0896-226X, Vol. 41, Nº. 2, 2023, págs.
Permission to Speak – Helen Dale
We live in a world of mutually assured cancellation. Piled-on abuse and career destruction are now standard when dealing with political or intellectual opponents. I wrote about this on my personal Substack last month. There, I drew on the escalating—and global—war of words and deeds over Israel-Palestine. Finally, conservatives and dissenting liberals had found a way to wound the woke and radical left, and they were proceeding to dish it out in spades.
The Constitution of Eternal Time – - David P. Goldman
“In July 1997,” writes the distinguished Swiss Jesuit Christian Rutishauer, “I was attending an Ulpan [Hebrew-language immersion course] at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. During a break one day, I walked over to the Hecht Synagogue on the Mount Scopus campus. … By chance, I picked up a copy of Halakhic Man by the Rav [“the Rabbi,” as Soloveitchik is known to religious Jews]. … The name Soloveitchik did not ring a bell.
The Persistence of Market Fundamentalism – - Oren Cass
Perhaps because it is used almost always in criticism, the implication of the term “market fundamentalism” has become pejorative. Few people would say, for instance, that thanks to market fundamentalism we now benefit from … well, anything. But insults accomplish little. “Market obsession” or “market addiction,” for instance, might induce guffaws from the right audience, but all they convey is disdain. “Market fundamentalism,” by contrast, is at heart descriptive rather than a normative judgment.
Lenin’s Legacy - Roy Mathews
Sunday, January 21, 2024, was a day of celebration for the committed Left and within higher education. Many Communists across the world marched, gave speeches, and mourned the passing of the founder of one of the world’s most brutal regimes. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his revolutionary pseudonym V. I.
The Bifurcation of Constitutional Rights – Nikolai G. Wenzel
I confess I start every year with a song of hope—even for the three-ring circus in Washington, DC. And I end every year with a song of despair. For the most recent fiscal year, the federal government spent about a quarter of US GDP.American businesses spent almost $2 trillion (or roughly another 10% of GDP) complying with federal regulations. The national debt stands at almost 130% of GDP.
The Conservative Feminist Revolution – Brenda M. Hafera
Feminism is continually being redefined, and a group of conservative (and not so traditionally conservative) men and women are now piloting another new approach.
A Stoic American Founding? – - David Lewis Schaefer
In The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, Jeffrey Rosen undertakes to examine how leading American Founders learned from ancient writers on moral philosophy, especially the Stoics, to cultivate virtue as the means to attaining happiness.
Chile’s Constitutional Woes – Ojel L. Rodríguez Burgos
The call for new or improved constitutions has become a fashionable and enthusiastic rallying cry for politicians, ideologues, and intellectuals throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The emergence of new states, revolutions, political upheavals, aspirations for salvation, crises, or defeated states seeking a fresh start are among the reasons that our modern world is increasingly populated with modern constitutions.
Is Conservativism’s Future Strauss or Voegelin? – - Graham McAleer
Glenn Ellmers is the Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding at the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank in California. He believes that the United States is a post-constitutional nation and the cause of the loss of the people’s sovereignty is philosophical.
Third-Rate Governance for First-Rate Universities – John O. McGinnis
The resignation of Claudine Gay provides a window into many pathologies of elite universities—antisemitism on campus, the prioritization of DEI over merit, and plagiarism among academics. But it also reflects their poor governance. The Harvard Corporation made mistake after mistake—first, in deciding to hire Gay, then, in defending her after a disastrous performance before Congress and substantial allegations of plagiarism.
The New Deal's Dark Underbelly – - Marcus Witcher
When I arrived at the University of Alabama almost a decade ago to begin graduate school and met the historian David Beito (who would become the co-advisor on my dissertation), he was just beginning a project on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disregard for Americans’ civil liberties.
Teaching the Causes of Great Depression to College Students: Evidence from History, Economics, and Economic History Textbooks | Phillip W. Magness
PDF 36 pages, 655 KB Abstract We survey the treatment of the Depression in college-level textbooks for courses in US history and economics. History textbooks emphasis on inequality, the stock market crash, and underconsumption as the primary causes does not reflect the consensus of economic historians.
The Property Chronicle - Real estate, alternative real assets and other diversions
Since the 1619 Project’s release, proponents of free markets have rightly pushed back on the claim that American capitalism is irrevocably linked to racism and slavery. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Henderson and Phil Magness demonstrate that most of the injustice that was presented in episode three of the 1619 Project’s Hulu docuseries was perpetrated by governments, and was not the product of market capitalism.
Corporatism And Convict Leasing In The American South
Since the 1619 Project’s release, proponents of free markets have rightly pushed back on the claim that American capitalism is irrevocably linked to racism and slavery. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Henderson and Phil Magness demonstrate that most of the injustice that was presented in episode three of the 1619 Project’s Hulu docuseries was perpetrated by governments, and was not the product of market capitalism.
The Founding Mothers of Libertarianism
Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness , by Timothy Sandefur, Cato Institute, 500 pages, $19.95 With Freedom's Furies , Timothy Sandefur shows how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand defended individualism and free markets while America was in the grips of Depression and war.
The founding mothers of libertarianism
Libertarian History/Philosophy Freedom's Furies tells how three women offered their own unique defenses of individual liberty and how their disagreements anticipated the differences among libertarians and classical liberals today.
Matthew Continetti's 'The Right' Explores Populism in Conservatism
Conservatism On the American right, populism has always been lurking in the shadows. | The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti, Basic Books, 496 pages, $18.99 Unlike most accounts of the American conservative movement, Matthew Continetti's The Right begins in the 1920s, when two Republican presidents returned the country to normalcy after World War I.
Market Solutions to Ancient Sins – - Jason Jewell
It is a commonplace observation that public discussion about race relations has been framed and driven by political progressives for many years. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project is perhaps the most obvious example of this phenomenon in recent memory, along with the bestselling books How to Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi) and White Fragility (Robin DiAngelo).
On This Juneteenth, Let's Recognize that Formal Emancipation Did Not End Black Suffering
A group photograph of thirty-one people at a Juneteenth Celebration in Emancipation Park in Houston's Fourth Ward. Reverend Jack Yates, a freed man, minister and community leader, is pictured on the left. Wikipedia Commons. OTHER VOICES By Rachel S. Ferguson and Marcus M. Witcher To many Blacks—used to state-mandated segregation, discrimination, lynching, and other abuses—Oklahoma promised to be a fresh chance to start anew.
Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: A Snapshot
Print In Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America, we collect classical liberal insights on Black American history as well as recommendations to increase Black flourishing today. We felt deeply the misfortune that the political philosophy which has done the most to increase the material well-being of impoverished people across the globe is not associated in the minds of most Americans with liberation for marginalized groups.
Black Liberation Through the Marketplace
About The Book If we face America’s racial history squarely, will it mean that the American project is a failure? Conversely, if we think the American project is a worthy endeavor, do we have to lie, downplay, or equivocate about our past?
A New History of the Old Right
The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti, Basic Books, 480 pages, $32 Unlike most accounts of the American conservative movement, Matthew Continetti's The Right begins in the 1920s, when two Republican presidents returned the country to normalcy after World War I.
The Activism of Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington is an icon of the civil rights struggle in the United States. But he is often maligned by modern-day historians and activists who view him as an accommodationist to white racism.
Black Gun Rights Matter
Amir Locke should not have died for exercising the Second Amendment.
Taking the Long View of Black History
Thurgood Marshall, former chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, declared at the height of the civil rights movement (1958) “that without Masonic financial assistance, many of the NAACP’s victories before the Supreme Court would not have been possible.” As we conclude Black History Month, we should celebrate the Black organizations and businesses without whose success the civil rights movement would never have been possible.
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
August 9, 2021 By Marcus M. Witcher Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump By Daniel S. Lucks (Beacon Press, 2020) Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976–1980 By Rick Perlstein (Simon and Schuster, 2020) The election of Donald J. Trump to the White House unleashed a torrent of new histories of the conservative movement. Most such books explain Trump’s “conservatism” as a product of the same movement that produced Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan.
Opinion | A little empathy could go a long way to healing our nation
In his inaugural address, President Joe Biden made a powerful call for unity. Unity would require Americans to have empathy for their fellow citizens. Biden declared that “we must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal. We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts.” As historians, this was music to our ears.
Republicans must choose: Are they the party of Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump?
August 24, 2020 12:11 PM This week, Republicans will nominate Donald Trump for the second time for president. Trump has built a cult of personality. In the past month alone, he has tweeted about potentially postponing the election and asserted he had the right to limit mail ballot usage — neither of which he has any constitutional authority to do.
What We Don't Know About Socialism Can Hurt Us
While interest in socialism is on the rise among younger Americans, the history of global socialism should give pause. There is much confusion over what the term socialism means. To Americans who lived during the Cold War, socialism invokes images of the Gulag in Soviet Union, the mass starvation due to Mao’s policies in China, or the rampant poverty and political oppression of Eastern Europe.
Trump’s impeachment proceedings make Reagan and his legacy even more important for Republicans
With the impeachment proceedings of President Trump maturing and impeachment on the horizon, Ronald Reagan and his legacy are more important to the American Right now than they have been in a generation. As a Reagan scholar who has spent weeks at the Reagan Library and Museum, and written a book on the Reagan legacy, I was pleased that the complex survived the recent fires.
Perspective | Why it’s wrong to credit racist appeals for the rise of Ronald Reagan
We can’t discount the role economics and optimism played in the 1980 race. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush appear at a joint news conference on Nov. 5, 1980, in Los Angeles, the morning after their victory over President Jimmy Carter.
Why it's wrong to credit racist appeals for the rise of Ronald Reagan
Last week, a newly revealed tape of a 1971 conversation between California Gov. Ronald Reagan and President Richard Nixon made headlines. In it, Reagan, frustrated by the actions of African nations at the United Nations, used racial epithets to condemn them. He labeled the delegates "monkeys" and exclaimed "they're still uncomfortable wearing shoes," dismissing the leaders of the independent nations.
Everything Wrong with the Clinton Administration
Clinton was an internationalist and believed in an activist American presence abroad, but he was unable to create a comprehensive doctrine to guide the United States into the 21st century. “The era of big government is over,” President Bill Clinton declared during the 1996 State of the Union. Clinton’s pronouncement has been oft repeated, but the second half of his statement is often forgotten.
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