Why Warren Buffett’s A Democrat January 7, 2026January 9, 2026 Georgia’s lifelong Republican former Lieutenant Governor, Goeff Duncan, explains why he’s now a Democrat (38 seconds). (Top line: “I’m guided by our family motto — that doing the right thing will never be the wrong thing — and this is the right thing to do.”) Releasing the Epstein files is also the right thing to do — and it’s the law, passed by Congress and signed by Trump. So where are they? Another right thing to do would be to enact tax reforms of the kind described Tuesday that would touch only the top 1%, in whose favor — much as we love and admire them — the current system is too heavily skewed. Carl sees it differently. He sent me a photo of me flanked by Zohran Mamdani and Karl Marx, writing: Andy, there are no billionaires in Cuba. Take Mamdani, Bernie and move there? “And yet,” I replied, “there are billionaires in Europe. Sweden alone has 45 – more per capita than here. Do you consider Europe a shithole of oppressed unhappy people?” The truth is, I’ve shaken hands with Mayor Elect and have high hopes for him. (Not least, that he will modify his views on successful charter schools and gifted-learning programs.) The one time I shook hands with Bernie, years before he became so famous, he struck me as grumpy — but for good reason. (I was home sick the day Karl Marx came to my high school.) On the spectrum from pure from-each-according-to-his-ability-to-each-according-to-his-needs communism, at the extreme left . . . to pure survival-of-the-fittest libertarianism, at the extreme right — both utopian extremes are disasters. The former, because humans are not wired to be selfless; poverty, corruption, and tyranny inevitably follow. The latter, because it’s wildly unfair, cruel, hard-hearted — “unChristian,” if you will — and leads to revolution.) Most First World democracies, like the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Europe, Japan, Australia, and Israel, among others, fall pretty comfortably in the middle. If public education, public health programs, social safety nets, and progressive tax rates make them “Democratic socialist,” they should wear the label proudly. In a world where artificial intelligence and robots will handle most of the routine jobs that humans now do, we’re going to have to get used to the idea of “spreading the wealth” and accepting the leisure that centuries of scientific striving and technological progress are rapidly making possible. Should the fruits of a thousand generations’ hard work creativity be concentrated in the hands of a few trillionaires while the rest scrape to get by? Or should we continue to modify the “Democratic socialist” construct that leaves plenty of room for wealth and incentive . . . but that affords most people life, liberty, and the likelihood of basic creature comforts and dignity in their pursuit of happiness? You may recall that I once asked Warren Buffett why he’s a Democrat. He didn’t come to it without some thought, after all — his dad was a deeply conservative Republican Congressman. But if you read John Rawls, Warren told me, how can you be anything else? There’s much to be said for traditional Republicans — Romney was certainly right about Russia! Nixon signed into law both the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Environmental Protection Agency, Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system and warned against the military industrial complex, George W. Bush launched the PEPFAR program that has saved an estimated 25 million lives. But Trump’s Republican party has veered wildly off course. Appending the term “socialist” to the term Democrat is not a slur. If anything, it helps to define Democrats as the party of Jesus Christ and anyone else — Gandhi? Maimonides? Muhammed? you? — who cared, or cares, about the welfare of all mankind, not just their own. In case you’re in a position to help fund the opposition, please click here.