The far left and the MAGA right find a common enemy -- "oligarchs."

The concept of individual responsibility gets lost in the demagoguery.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been on a “fighting oligarchy tour.” In their telling, oligarchs control America and exercise their control to oppress workers and hollow out the middle class.

In other words, they’re saying just what you would expect contemporary American socialists to say.

To a significant degree, though, they are also saying what MAGA politicians and intellectuals say. Steve Bannon, for example, routinely denounces “oligarchs” and the “American carnage” they have inflicted.

That’s why I have argued that, with Trump’s movement ascendant in the GOP, both of our major political parties are now radical.

In a war between Trump’s movement and the far left over who’s controlled by oligarchs, I give the advantage to the far left. Sure, it’s tough to be the anti-oligarch party when Silicon Valley has helped subsidize you. But it’s even tougher when, to Bannon’s consternation, Elon Musk is the leading force behind your domestic policy. And besides, Silicon Valley seems to be switching sides.

The larger question is whether the critique of our economic system by Sanders-AOC and Bannon has merit. In my opinion, it doesn’t have much.

As Roger Clegg has said: “The world order that the West has championed since World War II has left the United States by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet.” It is this world order that the MAGA-right and the socialist left characterize as misrule by a global oligarchy.

The numbers refute claims that our economic order has hollowed out the middle class. Stephen Moore provides them here (via Richard Vigilante), complete with Census Bureau charts which I have omitted:

The period 1980 to 2021 saw the largest gain in real median family income in recorded history. Factory jobs have been lost to higher paying jobs - just as 100 years ago farm jobs were replaced by tractors.

These gains in living standards began with the Reagan era of free trade, lower tax rates, a strong king dollar, and a technology explosion continued under Clinton and Trump.

Real median family income in 1982 was $67,000 and it is now $100,800 - an astonishing 50% gain.

These stats, as measured by the Census Bureau, include some government cash benefits like Social Security and unemployment benefits, but do NOT include food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, or the earned income tax credit. They understate the gains that families have made because they don't include private health benefits, 401k contributions, or capital gains on stock and property.

I doubt that Trump himself believes the American carnage narrative. He has claimed that under his first administration, we experienced an unbelievably good economy. The oligarchs must have been on vacation.

He also says, of course, that the Biden economy was unbelievably bad, and indeed it was plagued by high inflation. Yet, during the last two years of Biden’s presidency, wages were rising faster than prices.

Clearly, a great many families struggled under Biden, but there was no “American carnage.”

The numbers I have cited are aggregations. They don’t account for what has happened in certain rust belt communities, JD Vance’s Middletown, Ohio for example.

But a close reading of Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, shows that it wasn’t just the vice president who overcame hard times in Middletown. If I recall correctly, most of his family members who made good choices — i.e., didn’t become addicted to drugs —also prospered to some extent.

Conservatives have always emphasized the importance individual responsibility and the choices people make. Radicals have always downplayed individual responsibility and blamed the system — capitalism, oligarchy, or whatever — for individual hardship.

In some contexts, the radicals may have been mostly right. In contemporary America, I think they are mostly wrong.