By Batya Ungar-Sargon, columnist with The Free Press and the author of Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.

The Washington Post op-ed page is going in a new direction, its billionaire owner, CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos, announced this week. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote in an email to the staff, which he then published on X. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Freedom “is ethical,” wrote Bezos. “I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.”

To paraphrase President Obama, the 1980s just called. They want their economic policy back.

Bezos’s announcement comes at a time when Americans on both sides of the political aisle have soured on the perfection of free markets. On the Left there is more support for higher taxes, unionization, and expanding the welfare state than ever before. And for some policies, like the Child Tax Credit, there is bipartisan support for expanding the government’s willingness to assist American families amid the precariousness of working-class life in the 21^st century.

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Indeed, in the age of Trump, the Right, too, has largely dispensed with the view that freedom is the highest ethical value. On the ascendent New Right in particular, it has been replaced with an emphasis on the common good. Senators like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton and now-Executive Branch officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance have all been willing at times to join with Democrats to support families and even back pro-union legislation. Trump’s pick for Secretary of Labor, former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, was endorsed by the Teamsters. The realignment within the party holding the White House and both branches of Congress isn’t lost on many, except perhaps the owner of the Post.

As the kids say, the Republicans know what time it is. They reflect the mood of their voters. Recent polling has found that Americans support mass deportations and other hawkish immigration measures, tariffs, and universal health care. And there’s evidence that Trump won by flipping precisely those Americans who support these two policies. As Ruy Teixeira put it in a piece exploring the polling, “the big shift toward Trump occurs precisely among those who both support an aggressive Medicare role in drug pricing and support using presidential powers to stop illegal border crossing.” Other polling suggests that the percent of Americans who are economically conservative and socially liberal—the dominant political thread in everyday life in the 1980s, and, revealingly, the way Bezos seems to understand Americans today—is vanishingly small.

This is also what I found while traveling the country interviewing working-class Americans from all political persuasions for my book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. There was enormous consensus, whether people voted for Democrats or for Republicans, about what they thought the priorities of government should be. And unlike the billionaire caste, free markets weren’t a priority. As for personal liberties, they were often too broke to worry about such things.

It’s clear that in Bezos’ mind, his declaration is a noble, brave stance against the radical leftism that’s taken hold of most of America’s mainstream media outlets. But in taking his “principled” stand, he ended up endorsing the most obvious, pro-billionaire, anti-worker agenda: the neoliberal upwards funnel of working-class wages into the pockets of the elites. This view is hardly rare in American media: it’s the Wall St. Journal’s narrative on what powers the economy (hint: the rich). But you can also find it popping up in any other “Resistance” media attempting to fight Donald Trump’s pro-worker, populist, protectionist agenda. You can see the same sentiment offered by both CNN talking heads and delivered from the pulpits of liberal churches, lamenting the loss of a underclass of indentured servants to pick the crops. Like Bezos, these rich Americans think they are noble for opposing the government’s removal of their servant caste.

It’s true that the Washington Post, along with most other mainstream American publications, has gone too far to the Left on social issues, representing only the narrowest of radical liberal perspectives. But that was a result of the Left’s endorsement of neoliberal markets and endless personal liberties, not a result of its abandonment of them. Had the paper paid better attention to where the electorate is actually at, it would have realized that the real debate is between working-class Americans who favor redistribution and more welfare and those who support President Trump’s efforts to tighten the labor market and enforce tariffs to benefit the American worker. Donald Trump’s resounding victory among working-class Americans makes clear which side appears to be winning

In other words, Bezos is “solving” a problem that doesn’t exist, and his “solution” is the very problem that gave us Trump’s 2024 electoral victory. The elites who dictate what our media focuses on have hidden the real debate to protect an anti-worker, neoliberal economic policy which made them rich. In doing so, the real issues that Americans care about won’t be highlighted, but buried.

All hail the brave Bezos who will give us to the exclusion of all views… save for an expansion of free markets and personal liberties!

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Democracy Dies in Delusion