Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon probes the link between Democrats’ current policy proposals and the potential third-party presidential run from Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.
I’m not a Democrat—in case you haven’t noticed—but Howard Schultz is. And Schultz isn’t one of those Blue Dog, Southern or Midwestern, conservative Democrats either. He’s from Seattle, holds liberal positions on, as far as I can tell, every issue, and has donated gobs of money to the Democratic Party and to the last two Democratic presidents. But Schultz is also a democratic capitalist who attributes his phenomenal success—his fortune from Starbucks is around $3 billion—at least in part to America’s culture of entrepreneurial risk-taking, minimal government interference in commerce, individual responsibility, and rule of law. He worries that the Democratic Party, radicalized by the presidency of Donald Trump, is in the process of abandoning support for the very aspects of American life that made his life possible. “Both parties are consistently not doing what’s necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged, every single day, in revenge politics,” Schultz told 60 Minutes last Sunday. The Democrats then began proving his point for him. …
… The brightest star in the Democratic Party is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC. The other week, in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, AOC said, “I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.” Don’t worry, “It’s not to say someone like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are immoral people.” AOC’s complaint is with the “system” that “allows” Gates and Buffet—and Schultz and Bezos and George Lucas and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest—”to exist.” Presumably, then, Gates and Buffet are safe, existentially speaking. But the “system” of relatively free enterprise that allowed them to grow rich—and finance or innovate remarkable advances in technology and productivity that have benefited the world—should be altered drastically.