Huey And The Lapdog

    As a governor and senator, Huey “Kingfish” Long is best remembered for his radical proposals to redistribute wealth by force and for criticizing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” as not expansive or progressive enough. So, it is worth remembering when Vice President Lap Dog says out loud, that he finds Long “great” and “interesting.” For me, Long will more importantly be remembered as a demagogue and a Fascist. But I will do my best to put that aside…today.

    While speaking in Ohio a couple of weeks ago, the vice-president invoked Long’s famous “Every Man A King” slogan and hailed Long as a “great Southern populist” who was “an interesting guy; kind of a crazy guy.” Really, now. “But no man is a king if their castle is under siege by criminals,” The Lapdog continued. “No man is a king if they can’t take their family out to dinner without being mugged or having their car jacked.”

    The moment is illustrative both because of The Lapdog’s choice to invoke Long by name—this was a deliberate choice made in a prewritten speech, as opposed to some half-asked, off-the-cuff remark—and for how the vice-president seems to have misunderstood the speech he was referencing. Indeed, Long’s “every man a king” platform had nothing to do with locking up criminals or more restrictive immigration enforcement, as Lapdog suggested in his speech. It was, instead, a direct call for a more powerful federal government to seize and redistribute wealth. “You must keep the wealth of the country scattered, and you must limit the amount that any one man can own,” Long said. To accomplish that goal, Long advocated for limiting individuals to owning no more than $50 million—though he admitted that “it may be necessary that we limit it to less.”

    Now, the above dollar amount is equivalent to about $1.2 billion today. Effectively, Long was calling for a populist uprising against the billionaires of his time. He was quite literal about it. “Our taxation is going to take the billion-dollar fortunes and strip them down to frying size,” he promised. And that’s not all. The rest of the “every man a king” program called for loan forgiveness and a limit on the number of hours people worked. It is a speech and a political platform that, aside from a few bits of outdated language here and there, sounds like what you would expect from the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or the Democratic Socialists of America. What is it, one might wonder, that Lapdog finds so interesting about Long?

    In fairness, the vice-president did add that Long was “kind of a crazy guy.” And the vice-president was not saying that Republicans ought to embrace Long’s economic views or copy his policy platform. The Lapdog’s point seems to be that abstract ideas like freedom and rights can be undermined by material insecurity—and even though the context is quite different, that was certainly a fundamental premise of Long’s call for redistribution of wealth. But this is also a telling wink.

    Long may have wanted the federal government to decide how much wealth Americans could hold, but he had less strict views about the accumulation of political power. He understood, as Lapdog seemingly does as well, that populism is a means to an end, and the end is usually a more muscular, and dare I say, annoying government. Lawrence Dennis, an outright American fascist, said that Long was “the nearest approach to a national fascist leader” that the United States had ever seen.

    The Lapdog has had no trouble cozying up to authoritarians, or espousing illiberal views about political power. Lately, he has been making his progressive and authoritarian economic views increasingly clear. In a recent interview with Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire, Lapdog defended President Trump’s idea of seizing AI companies’ profits, then proceeded to outline a vision for the future in which the Republican Party shuns the economic ideas of Milton Friedman. Really?! Moron. 

    “Vance understands better than Trump that such a proposal contradicts long-held GOP economic dogma, and that is precisely what he likes about it. He likes that it’s kind of socialist,” wrote Reason’s Robby Soave at the time. It was perhaps inevitable that Lapdog’s mixture of illiberal political views and populist economics would land him in the vicinity of the “Kingfish.” By invoking Huey Long, The Lapdog has offered a clarifying moment. Huey Long’s career and philosophy represents almost everything the American right once warned against in the name of limited government and constitutional liberty.

    The fact that The Lapdog can’t stand Friedman but finds Huey Long, of all people, to be an “interesting” figure speaks volumes—and should be a major red flag for his future political aspirations.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com