Wednesday, May 07, 2025

'Any Guess Who the Serfs Are Going to Be?'

The Dispatch's Kevin Williamson deemed President Donald Trump a socialist in a scathing new column that asked its readers "who the serfs are going to be when we get to the end of this road?"

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"Republicans have a weird new proposition for the American voter: fewer choices, higher prices." Kevin Williamson: thedispatch.com/newsletter/w ...

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-- The Dispatch (@thedispatchmedia.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 1:35 PM

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More: "Donald Trump does not know the first thing about how a factory operates, of course, and neither do most of the private-equity dorks and middling media figures with which he has stocked his administration, a veritable museum of minor Fox News figures. But he has been inside Macy's, and even had a product-licensing deal with the department store once upon a time"ghastly shirts and ties with a predictable Gordon Gekko meets Liberace aesthetic.

And so Trump's version of quasi-monarchical Leninism is no surprise. It's not one big factory: It's one big Macy's, with him leading the parade."

"Donald Trump's vision of the economy is classic socialism," he continued. "Trump's view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about"though the old tyrants in Moscow at least had the humility to assume that a committee of experts would be necessary to manage the economy according to scientific' principles or at least the guile to pretend that they believed it, whereas Trump apparently has swallowed his own silly god-man horsepucky, being, as he is, an ass of exceptional asininity."

"He is economically more in Lenin's camp than in Adam Smith's and Milton Friedman's and Ronald Reagan's," concluded Williamson. "He already imagines himself as a kind of royal figure"any guess who the serfs are going to be when we get to the end of this road?"

Trump's tariff-heavy trade policy has drawn criticism from a wide variety of conservative voices.

In an editorial published on Tuesday, National Review torched the president over his "anti-abundance agenda," slamming him for "yammering about American children being spoiled" without ever having had "to make do with less."

#1 | Posted by qcp at 2025-05-07 11:09 AM

Thanks for posting this QCP:

Totalitarianism can be right or left, Hitler or Stalin.

www.britannica.com

Or Trump.

#2 | Posted by Corky at 2025-05-07 11:29 AM

What a great sales pitch for America.

Come to Trumplandia where we have fewer choices and higher prices!

Great job on the FAFO maga morons.

#3 | Posted by donnerboy at 2025-05-07 12:40 PM

The youth....
nymag.com

#4 | Posted by oneironaut at 2025-05-07 04:10 PM

Do you think there would be no "serfs" in socialism or communism?

I mean really, the motto for socialism is "No one should be rich if I cant be".

#5 | Posted by boaz at 2025-05-07 08:59 PM

Tell us that you didn't read the article without saying you didn't read the article.

#6 | Posted by qcp at 2025-05-07 09:28 PM

I appreciate the use of the term "serfs."

In American history, I was taught that in Europe, from whence most Americans came, they had "peasants."

The people who came to America for a better life were Peasants. But once they got to America, that changed.
They became Settlers, or Farmers, or Factory Workers, or railroad workers, or they were forced to join the Union Army, like the Irish who came over during the Civil War.
Something transformed them. They weren't Peasants any more.

You'll never see the word Peasant applied to an American Citizen. It's sort of an unwritten rule of American Exceptionalism.
In the historical telling of our past, peasants are what we once were, before we found this Promised Land.

#7 | Posted by snoofy at 2025-05-07 09:36 PM

(I'm guessing it hits a little bit different if you're black.)

#8 | Posted by snoofy at 2025-05-07 09:36 PM

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