Year won?

The Left lost the elections. Now the Right must prevail on policy.

No, it was wasn’t a landslide.

In November, voters put Republicans in charge of Congress, the White House, and most state governments. But their margins of victory were relatively modest. The GOP will hold 53 of 100 seats in the U.S. Senate and actually lost ground in the U.S. House, securing one of the narrowest majorities in political history.

As for Donald Trump, some 77.3 million Americans picked him for president, surpassing Kamala Harris’s 75 million by 1.5 percentage points. His showing in the Electoral College was unremarkable among modern presidents — and nowhere near the margins won by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, or even Bill Clinton.

Still, the 2024 cycle must be counted as a successful one for the GOP. As we argued just after the election, the Democratic Party deserved to lose. Its candidates were weaker and often disconnected from reality, their policies failed and repudiated.

What Republicans have really won is a chance to prove themselves, to become America’s governing party for most than just a couple of years.

How? By delivering for the American people. By tackling such issues as education, health care, and federal deficits. By fostering economic mobility and family formation. By championing free speech, equal opportunity, and the rule of law. By advancing American interests and values in an increasingly perilous world.

Freedom Conservatives stand ready to help. Among our hundreds of signatories are experienced lawmakers and administrators, knowledgeable analysts, skilled litigators, effective communicators, talented educators, brilliant scholars, and compelling leaders. Just follow the above links to learn more about their views on these issues.

Now, just to be clear, FreeCons aren’t living in the past. We recognize that modern-day progressives and populists have raised some important questions. The answers they suggest are gravely mistaken, however.

Today we feature FreeCons with more constructive solutions to offer.

Healthy engagement

One issue attracting significant attention across the political spectrum is the transformational effect of social media, smart phones, and other digital technologies on modern life.

“Despite the sunny rhetoric of the early computer age,” wrote FreeCon signatory Joe Pitts in the American Institute for Economic Research’s journal FUSION, “digital interaction has not been an unalloyed boon for human wellbeing.

“It has wreaked havoc on teen mental health, with social media in particular contributing to a massive spike in mental health issues, especially among women and girls. These new forms of technology are replacing human experience, making us lonely, anxious, and lethargic.”

But is heavier government regulation the answer? Pitts, the CEO of Odyssey Consulting, argued that a wiser course is to build a “new temperance movement, focusing on reining in abuse while furthering healthy engagement.”

Another FreeCon, Rachel Lu, made a similar case in Civitas Outlook, the new journal of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas.

“It's fascinating how technology often enables people (myself among them) to live lives simultaneously very mediated and, in other respects, quite grounded,” wrote Lu, who contributors frequently to such publications as Law & Liberty and National Review.

“My own professional life involves very little face-to-face communication and no water-cooler conversations. I have many professional friends that I’ve never met in person. But where my father spent considerable time driving to and from an office each day, I consider it normal to click ‘send’ on a work-related document, open my office door, and sit down to dinner with my family fifteen seconds later.”

Such potential benefits don’t draw as much attention as negative stories but deserve consideration, Lu concluded.

“It’s often unclear whether technological advance makes life richer or more rewarding on balance,” she wrote. “But if it opens the way to real and important goods, people will use it. You don’t allow your child to die of a curable disease because you have diffuse concerns about the utilitarian ethos of modern medicine.

“Social media’s benefits are less dramatic, but they may still be real and important. If so, then it might not be enough to advise people to ‘be more Amish.’ Perhaps the real task at hand is learning to use technology well.”

Missed Boats

Another cause championed by both the progressive Left and the nationalist-populist Right is to roll back what they call the “financialization” of our economy — the extent to which, to their way of thinking, American policymakers addicted to “market worship” have favored Wall Street over Main Street.

In a recent white paper, FreeCon signatory David Bahnsen described the confused and shifting definitions of the term and how policymakers should respond to the critics’ arguments.

Some unproductive financialization “does, indeed, exist,” wrote Bahnsen, the founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Banhsen Group. “However, the culprits behind such are never the ones targeted by financialization’s loudest critics.”

The best approach “does not favor the financial sector over the ‘real economy,’ nor does it pit the financial sector against the real economy,” he concluded. “Rather, an optimal vision sees financial markets as capable instruments in advancing the economic good and public interest.

“A large public bureaucracy cannot improve the economic lot of workers, and diminished financial markets cannot optimally allocate resources to the real economy.”

Another FreeCon signatory, David McGarry of the Taxpayer Protection Alliance, explored similar themes in a recent book review for FUSION.

“The Federal Reserve, the SEC, and the CFPB, among others, deserve no deference,” McGarry wrote. “Intellectually, they sprung from the progressive fetish for ‘disinterested’ expert rule — as if any kind of governance exists that is not inherently subjective and political.

“Freeing financial institutions — or subjecting them to market forces, if you prefer — will allow Americans, rich and poor alike, to capitalize better on their advantages and talents. A freer flow of money will yield greater prosperity.”

In the mix

• In The Washington Post, longtime columnist and FreeCon signatory George Will casts a sardonic eye on the year that was. “Viewed in a bemused spirit,” he wrote, “2024 provided (in Mark Twain’s words) ‘not merely food for laughter,’ but ‘an entire banquet.’”

Among Will’s examples:

“According to Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, socialism is ‘neighborliness.’ Cuba, where neighborliness is strict, cut from 80 grams to 60 grams (2.1 ounces) its subsidized daily ration of bread. When German troops volunteered to help Poland recover from flooding, Poland’s prime minister told his nation, ‘If you see German soldiers, don’t panic.’ It was learned that in 2023, Amtrak lost $1.7 billion but scraped together ‘incentive’ bonuses of more than $200,000 each for 14 executives.”

• In the Toronto Globe and Mail, FreeCon signatory Jon Hartley reviewed some of the late President Carter’s better decisions, such as the nomination of Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve and deregulation efforts in transportation and energy.

“Deregulating many other industries would follow, even after the Carter administration,” wrote Hartley, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. “This practice has its critics who say it erodes the rights of workers, but it has unquestionably resulted in further reducing prices and thus improving consumer welfare, especially for those below the median income, as inflation is historically higher for the poor.

“While Mr. Reagan often gets the credit for deregulation and fighting inflation — he was in office during most of Mr. Volcker’s term at the Fed — some of the seeds of the Reagan Revolution were planted by a kind peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter.”