The Erick Erickson Show

S15 EP134: Hour 2 - Beat the Socialists With a Good Economy

July 23, 2026·36 min
Episode Description from the Publisher

Erick builds a full monologue on Nate Silver's Cooperative Election Study data showing the Democratic Socialists of America are not the poor but downwardly mobile rich kids with prestige degrees, invoking Peter Turchin's elite overproduction, Joseph Schumpeter's creative destruction, Graham Platner's fake oyster fisherman act, and Dan McLaughlin's Karl Marx versus Frederick Douglass contrast. His free market fix for Republicans is blunt: scrap the Trump and Peter Navarro tariffs, stop the government from taking ownership stakes in companies, expand school choice to gut the "progressive madrasas," and defund victimization degrees. He then pivots to the Colorado River crisis at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, arguing for water pipelines and desalination the way America builds oil and gas pipelines, before mocking the left's new conspiracy theory that Mitch McConnell is secretly dead. Nate Silver, the Cooperative Election Study, and the DSA as highly educated, downwardly mobile "rich kids": 80 percent with bachelor's degrees, 45 percent under 60,000 dollars, 85 percent white, clustered in teaching, nonprofits, and public sector work Peter Turchin's elite overproduction, Joseph Schumpeter's creative destruction, Graham Platner's oyster fisherman pose, and Dan McLaughlin's Karl Marx versus Frederick Douglass framing The free market prescription: kill the Trump and Peter Navarro tariffs, end government ownership stakes in tech companies, expand school choice in Georgia and beyond, and defund gender studies and queer theory degrees Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and the Colorado River crisis: build water pipelines and desalination plants, harness the Permian Basin's billion gallons of daily produced water, and stop the "de-growth" left from blocking energy and water infrastructure (Energy Transfer, Western Midstream, Enterprise Products) The Mitch McConnell "death hoax": why the left now attacks Kentucky Governor Andy Beshir over a conspiracy theory, and Erick's warning that the internet is rotting brains on both sides

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