Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel

By Sam Harris

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. The Making Sense Community seems to have inherited this infatuation, leading to some heated exchanges in recent days. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.

 

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

 

Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

 

However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.

 

The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.

 

I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.

 

What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

 

When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:

 

If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.

 

The truth is, I have never known how Israel should have responded to the events of October 7th. I only know that they, along with every other free society, must ultimately defeat militant Islam. How we should do this is genuinely debatable. But that’s not the point of contention among Israel’s critics, especially on the left. To them, worrying about militant Islam—even in Israel, even in the aftermath of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—is just more “Islamophobia.” It’s just more “colonialism” and “racism” (as though that last charge made any sense in the Middle East).

 

If you want to understand my view of this conflict, simply ask the one question that clarifies everything in the present:

 

What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?

 

Though many pretend otherwise, everyone knows the answer to this question to a moral certainty.

 

If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7th. And while it is true that Jew-hatred throughout the Muslim world has been made immensely worse by a century-long fascination with Nazi propaganda and conspiracy theories, this animus isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. For instance, there is a famous hadith which predicts that the End Times will not come until the very stones and trees cry out “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come kill him.” Unsurprisingly, Hamas cited this hadith in its founding charter.

 

Most Palestinians know this, and yet Hamas remains popular. For over a decade, Hamas diverted foreign aid that was meant to improve life in Gaza and used it to build the largest bomb shelter our species has ever constructed—hundreds of miles of tunnels—and yet no Palestinian civilians were allowed to shelter there during the war. Why not? Because Hamas was using these men, women, and children as human shields. And when Israel made phone calls and sent millions of text messages urging civilians to evacuate, the loudspeakers in the nearest mosques warned them to stay in place. And Hamas snipers murdered many who tried to move to safety. The Palestinians know all this, and yet Hamas remains popular. Even after all the devastation that Hamas has brought down on its own people, it remains the most popular Palestinian faction, well ahead of its rival, Fatah. This is why there is no peace in the Middle East.

 

The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t thinking about—is just as real. You should ask yourself why you don’t care more about it. This difference, emotionally and politically, is what it looks like to lose an information war.

 

We haven’t seen all the dead children in Yemen, Syria, or Sudan, where the numbers are far worse than in Gaza, but everyone has witnessed the pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by supporters of Hamas. You might think that your special concern over Israel is due to the fact that we (Americans) supply many of the weapons the IDF uses to kill Palestinians. But we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000 people. Where were those protests? Where was the celebrity sanctimony over Yemeni dead? Why didn’t Zohran Mamdani trumpet his opposition to this evil while campaigning to become Mayor of New York? Yemen was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for years, with American weaponry and logistical support fully implicated, and yet it never became the organizing moral obsession of universities, media institutions, activist networks, or leftwing politics the way Gaza has.

 

To point this out isn’t to commit the rhetorical sin of “whataboutism.” Rather, it exposes a glaring moral disparity: The world simply does not care when Muslims kill other Muslims—amazingly, it doesn’t much care when they kill Christians either—but it does care, enormously, when Jews do it. The General Assembly of the UN and its Human Rights Council have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. A few of these countries have committed actual genocides. None of this makes sense. But this is the world we are living in.

 

Of the world’s 193 nations, two-thirds were created by map makers who merely imagined their frontiers into being, without much regard for the tribal interests of the people living within them. In fact, more than half were created since 1948, the year that Israel was founded. And yet there is only one whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies.

 

This obsession with Israel, and the double standards to which its people are held, now forms the center of mass of that shapeshifting moral affliction widely known as “antisemitism.”

 

I’ve lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind us, at least in the West. Unfortunately, the response to October 7th has put that assumption very much in doubt. The atrocities committed by Hamas revealed a level of Jew hatred, globally, that shocked even those of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives. Crucially, this hatred showed itself before Israel invaded Gaza. When the corpses of the young people mutilated and murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had students at Harvard and professors at Columbia—and demonstrators in New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto—celebrating their killers.

 

Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that makes free societies possible.

 

Let me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and arguments. This, after all, is what a real intellectual and moral community is for.

Bernie Sanders’s ‘Wealth Fund’ Scheme Has Already Been Tried

By John Gustavsson

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

Bernie Sanders announced last week that he will be introducing legislation aimed at creating an artificial intelligence sovereign wealth fund. Sanders proposes confiscating 50 percent of AI equity and putting it into a public fund, having the government act as an active shareholder. Sanders falsely implies that this is a mainstream practice around the world. It is quite telling that Sanders does not understand how Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, built from oil revenue and currently buying small stakes in a number of AI firms at the market price, differs from his own proposed state confiscation. In fact, only Sweden provides a real historical precedent — and that experiment ended in a disaster that forever changed the country’s political environment.

 

In 1976, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation proposed the creation of löntagarfonder, or employee funds. The issue had been debated since 1971, when the Confederation funded a study to lay out how such funds might work. This study was released to a warm reception in 1975 and officially was endorsed by the government the following year. Under the original plan, any corporation with more than about 50 employees would be required each year to issue new shares equivalent to 20 percent of its profits. Control of these shares would go to the individual unions that made up the Confederation. Gradually, these unions would gain a majority stake, effectively socializing the economy.

 

This was a radical deviation from traditional Swedish social democracy. The Social Democrats party, while proudly left-wing, had prided itself on its rejection of Bolshevism, even going so far as to round up communists into concentration camps during World War II. The party’s long streak in government was the result not just of good outcomes, but of pragmatism: The monarchy was left in place, and while tax levels rose, these taxes — beyond a mostly symbolic wealth tax — did not chiefly target the aristocracy.

 

In the late 1960s, this began change, as radical left-wing trends sweeping the world reached Sweden. Taxes began to rise sharply. The 1938 agreement between unions and the employers’ confederation that guaranteed no government interference in the labor market — the reason Sweden to this day does not have a legal minimum wage — was violated by the government for the first time in 1974, in the unions’ favor.

 

Soon after, the Confederation, flush with confidence, proposed the employee funds. The Social Democrats, a party that had once founded the Confederation and was bankrolled largely by union contributions, found themselves unable to disown the idea.

 

The timing could not have been worse. After enjoying a post-war boom even stronger than the United States’, the Swedish economy had already stalled under the weight of high oil prices and increased international competition. The mere prospect of the employee funds greatly contributed to families behind iconic Swedish firms like IKEA and Tetra Pak leaving the country.

 

In 1976, after an election campaign dominated by the employee-funds issue and Sweden’s infamous above-100 percent marginal tax rates, the Social Democrats were defeated, ending a 44-year streak in power. Despite this, the party, still in the unions’ headlock, officially endorsed and ran on establishing employee funds ahead of the next election in 1979. They were again defeated.

 

Finally, after returning to power in 1982, the employee funds became a reality, albeit in a watered-down form. The minister of finance at the time, Kjell-Olof Feldt, was caught on camera furiously writing a poem in the plenary on the very day the funds legislation was passed. In the poem, he cursed the funds that he — despite publicly endorsing them — knew would hurt Sweden’s economy and cursed the union bosses who forced him, an old-school social democrat, to implement them. Outside the Riksdag, over 75,000 people gathered to protest the funds, in what was (and continues to be) the largest right-wing demonstration in Sweden’s history.

 

Almost one-sixth of Sweden’s business dynasties had left the country by 1988. This number conceals a far greater capital flight: 67 percent of the wealth held by the 50 wealthiest Swedes was by the early 1990s held by those living abroad.

 

After the victory of the right in the 1991 election, abolishing the funds became the very first act of the new coalition government. To discourage the unions from ever trying again, the center-right government refused to let the unions keep the money already in the funds, instead using it to fund a number of research foundations and two venture capital firms.

 

The government spent its one term in office cleaning up the fallout from both from the capital flight and a collapsed real-estate bubble, which had been caused by a credit boom stemming from the Social Democrats’ decision to abolish liquidity ratios. That boom had also drastically increased money supply, but as the Social Democrats had refused adjust the krona’s fixed exchange rate, this left the currency overvalued and vulnerable to speculators.

 

This problem, too, was left to the center-right government, which reluctantly agreed to abolish the fixed exchange rate regime altogether after a massive speculative attack by none other than George Soros, with the aid of current U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

 

Subsequent changes to the Social Democrats’ statutes drastically reduced the unions’ influence, as the party chose to rededicate itself to pragmatism and its two core ideological principles: to take power, and to keep it. Feeling secure enough that the era of socialization was over, some — but not all — of the entrepreneurs who had left Sweden went on to return beginning in the 1990s. Today, not even the Swedish Left Party, which during the Cold War was bankrolled by the Soviet Union, seeks the reestablishment of the employee funds.

 

Yet the mark it left on Swedish politics remains. After trusting and accommodating the Social Democrats for over 40 years, Swedish businesses began to organize politically, funding not just political campaigns but also still-active think tanks to fight back against the left-wing consensus and educate the next generation of right-wing leaders (including current Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson).

 

Rest assured that even in Europe, Sanders’s unique blend of Luddite Bolshevism is a no-sell, and the mere prospect of such an idea being implemented would surely cause capital flight from the U.S., just as happened in Sweden. Those short-lived employee funds live on today only as a cautionary tale against socialization. If America goes down Sanders’s path, it will no doubt find itself writing the next chapter of that tale.

The Mendacity of Graham Platner

National Review Online

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

It’s hard to know what’s worse — Graham Platner’s pattern of deception, or the willful credulity of his supporters.

 

In a friendly interview with progressive host Chris Hayes meant to do damage control on the latest scandal involving abusive behavior toward ex-girlfriends, the socialist Senate candidate insisted, “I have been very open with the people of Maine.”

 

Like so many other things he says, this isn’t remotely true. The candidate claims to be a straight shooter who served his country honorably as a Marine, went through a rough period when he got back, put the past behind him, and emerged from it a better man. Yet there has been a steady stream of revelations that show his appalling behavior has continued more recently and that have consistently undermined his self-justifying explanations of his life story.

 

Platner has portrayed himself as just a regular “working class” oyster farmer and has relied on lies or omissions to obscure the fact that, in reality, he had a wealthy upbringing. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, he did not purchase his current house with “the support of the VA,” as he has claimed, but with a $200,000 loan from his dad, while the primary customer for his oysters is his mom’s restaurant. He claimed that he attended Hotchkiss, the elite private school in Connecticut, because his local school lacked accreditation. But when the Maine Monitor, a local publication, found that it was accredited well before he was of school age, the campaign claimed Platner “misspoke.”

 

Late last month, the New York Times reported that early in their marriage, Platner’s wife had caught him in sexting relationships with as many as a dozen women (his campaign put the number at “up to six.”) This happened in 2023 and 2024, months into his marriage. Asked by Hayes when it stopped, Platner responded with an answer that was as clear as lobster bisque: “It stopped when it was happening.” Huh? Even the most charitable interpretation of this conduct would place his reckless behavior in the year prior to launching his Senate campaign.

 

As of last week, Platner had an active account on Kik, an anonymous chat app whose loose standards have given it a reputation as a “predator’s paradise” that allows for the sexual exploitation of young girls. The Senate candidate’s profile picture was himself wearing just a towel.

 

It was in the wake of these controversies that the New York Times reported on Platner’s history of toxic behavior based on accounts from his ex-girlfriends. One of the women, Lyndsey Fifield, corroborated Platner’s abusive behavior by providing, among other things, diary entries, text messages, and Facebook messages.

 

Fifield stated that during one argument, Platner “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’”

 

In perhaps the most damning piece of information, Fifield said Platner regularly spoke about the Nazi tattoo on his chest, a skull-and-crossbones image that was adopted by the branch of the Nazi SS that served as concentration camp guards. Fifield, whom Platner supporters are trying to dismiss because she is a Republican, provided a screenshot of a private chat last summer where she described the Nazi tattoo to friends. Platner has implausibly insisted that despite having gotten the tattoo in 2007, he didn’t know what it was until last October, when the image became a subject of controversy after he announced his candidacy.

 

Asked how Fifield could have texted her friends about the Nazi tattoo months before he claims to have learned about it, Platner said, “Well, she certainly didn’t send a text to me. Whoever she sent it to and was talking to, I can’t say why. But I will say that I certainly didn’t know. And the text messages she is sending to friends who may have recognized it, they didn’t tell me that.”

 

The idea that Platner would have needed to rely on Fifield and her friends to let him know the origins of a symbol he had emblazoned on his chest for nearly two decades is preposterous (of course, she says she learned about it from him). And the transparent dishonesty makes his denials of abusive behavior harder to believe.

 

Platner lamented to Hayes that he’s been open about making mistakes earlier in life, dismissing the focus on “things that happened before I became a public figure.” But the deceptions are happening right now, when he has all but locked up the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Maine.

 

He’s given Democrats assurances that there will be no more embarrassing revelations — which is probably as credible as everything else he’s been saying about his background.

In Negotiations With Iran, Trump Risks Repeating the Mistakes of Afghanistan

By Mike Nelson

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. President Donald Trump is growing increasingly frustrated by a conflict with no clear end in sight. Despite initial overwhelming success and ongoing tactical victories against an enemy outmatched in skill and technological prowess, the war’s continuation has not brought the U.S. any closer to victory. His heart really isn’t in it, and he sees it as a distraction from the things he’d rather be focusing on.

 

Growing concerned about the costs of the conflict, Trump seeks a negotiated settlement to bring the fighting to a close. While this does seem like the most likely resolution to the war, our adversary proves to be a difficult and duplicitous negotiating counterpart. We find ourselves constantly offering concessions to our enemy—not as part of the final settlement, but just to convince its leaders to continue talks that they seem more than willing to walk away from. Our desperation to continue discussions is in part because, since the start of the negotiations, the enemy has avoided targeting American troops directly, instead continuing attacks on partners, allies, and their civilian infrastructure.

 

This constant pattern of concessions pulls America further and further from what we actually hoped to achieve in a settlement, and the act of negotiating becomes the goal in itself in hopes of getting a deal—any deal—that allows us to walk away from the war. Our nominal friends, Qatar and Pakistan, are offering questionable advice while pretending to act as honest brokers between the warring parties.

 

The situation above encapsulates the president’s current predicament as he seeks to end the war with Iran. But it is also a description of the first Trump administration’s approach to the Doha negotiations with the Taliban—a disastrous agreement that, while not the final conclusion to our longest war, almost guaranteed our embarrassing defeat.

 

First, let me concede there are obvious distinctions between the two conflicts. The duration and human toll of the war in Afghanistan both significantly outpace those of the war with Iran. Trump initiated the Iran war and will (hopefully) be the president who is ultimately responsible for its conclusion, whereas in Afghanistan, Trump inherited the ongoing conflict from two previous administrations, and he was not the commander in chief who oversaw the catastrophic end. His government, however, signed the agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that began the NATO withdrawal later that year and promised its completion by 2021. This timeline neither attributes sole responsibility to nor absolves Trump or Joe Biden of the disaster that followed with the 2021 fall of Kabul; as fellow Dispatch contributor Paul Miller has pointed out in his excellent book, there is plenty of shared blame among the four administrations that conducted the war.

 

But while there are distinctions between the two conflicts, there are also similarities specific to the Trump administration’s negotiating philosophy.

 

In 2017, President Trump announced his South Asia strategy—a plan for dealing with the war that had dragged on too long, with various shifting goals, nebulous end states, distracting mission creep, and too little focus on creating conditions for lasting stability in Afghanistan. Among other things, the strategy confronted a truth that many U.S. officials had been unwilling to face: We had not succeeded in ending the Taliban’s operations through military force, and were not likely to do so in the future. Therefore, there needed to be some plan for their reintegration into a post-conflict Afghanistan. The strategy envisioned reconciliation and the eventual political integration of the Taliban into the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

 

Yet to achieve this goal, American negotiators agreed to Taliban demands that planted the seeds of future disaster. The Taliban refused to allow the Afghan government to participate in the talks and made promises (that were never honored) to later negotiate directly with then-President Ashraf Ghani’s government only after a deal with Washington had been reached. In 2020, the U.S. agreed to the release of Taliban fighters in Afghan government custody—something Afghan officials were neither aware of prior to the deal nor supportive of, only doing so eventually, and begrudgingly, following U.S. arm-twisting. Their concerns proved legitimate: A large number of the thousands of fighters released then returned to the battlefield and participated in the final assault on Kabul in August 2021.

 

Today, the president seems to be walking down that same path, one where his need and desperation to keep negotiations going could lead him to agree to otherwise unacceptable terms—not even as part of a final settlement, but just for the potential for the other side to show up to the table.

 

Last week, the Iranians announced they were walking away from negotiations because of continued Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in response to rocket and drone attacks from the latter. Rather than take issue with this Iranian recalcitrance, Trump once again threw his ally under the bus. During an adversarial phone call with Benjamin Netanyahu, the president reportedly called the Israeli prime minister “crazy” for jeopardizing negotiations with Tehran. He then publicly claimed that he had gotten Israel to agree to the Iranian demands to halt hostilities in Lebanon, despite the fact that Hezbollah had given no such assurances.

 

If one of the White House’s stated goals for the war with Iran was severing the links between the Islamic Republic and its regional proxies, Tehran’s ability to demand protection for these militias, and the administration jumping to comply, do exactly the opposite—it codifies that connection.

 

Any extended protection over Hezbollah or other proxies in the final settlement would be unacceptable, as would any other conditions that run contrary to our stated goals. But rather than haggle over them in the process of diplomatic horse-trading, Iran is all but guaranteeing these conditions will be included by baking them in before the real negotiations happen. By making such demands preconditions for even talking, Iran preemptively weights the outcome, having notched a series of wins before we establish what is on the table regarding starting positions. It’s galling that a man who sold himself as a master dealmaker does not see or does not care how much he is willing to give away in advance.

 

The president is apparently spooked—both by the whispers that a settlement would be viewed as too sweet a deal for Iran and by the prospects of continued human costs, economic disruption, and depletion of critical military weapons if he were to reinitiate hostilities. So he commits to neither—doing anything to continue negotiations or maintain the appearance of negotiations and making repeated and increasingly far-fetched claims of a forthcoming deal. Perhaps he views this as Schrödinger’s negotiation, where all potential outcomes are possible and exist within the theoretical box as long as he never commits to one, keeping alive the hope of a glorious and undisputed victory.

 

But today, thanks to Trump’s missteps during the war, there are only outcomes with significant downsides within the box—and the drawbacks grow in number and severity the longer he dithers. In addition to waning public support for a military campaign that never enjoyed popular backing (primarily because the president never attempted to rally it), the president now faces growing congressional pushback, most recently in the form of a House measure to restrain the executive branch’s war powers. While the vote will prove largely symbolic, the fact that four Republicans joined Democrats is a sign of brewing bipartisan resistance to the president. 

 

As the president faces the headwinds of domestic opposition, he further narrows his range of options through public statements meant to calm markets spooked by the prospect of full-scale renewed hostilities. Not only is he conceding Iranian demands for extended protections for Hezbollah, but he is also casting off much of America’s leverage by implying he would not reinitiate offensive operations unless Iran kills more U.S. service members and signaling possible accommodations in nuclear negotiations. While there may be wiggle room to reach an agreement on these and other issues in a final deal, conceding them in advance removes them as levers to gain Iranian concessions.

 

Rather than continue his desperate overtures for diplomacy, Trump should take an approach similar to the one currently working in Iran’s favor and back away from talks until such a time as the Islamic Republic is willing to comply by engaging in good-faith negotiations and refraining from attacks on international shipping or civilian infrastructure. 

 

As Nick Catoggio notes, many observers continue to encourage the president to “finish the job,” including some who think regime change is still within the U.S. grasp. But ultimately, the burden, effort, and cost of overthrowing the Islamic Republic are well beyond the already demonstrated fleeting level of presidential interest. Insofar as Trump put any thought into the war’s outcome, the only real effort was his wishful and unrealistic plan that initial decapitation strikes in the first 24 to 48 hours would solve everything.

 

There are others, including me, who encouraged the president earlier in the conflict to at least achieve some quantifiable goal based on any of the objectives he enumerated at the start of the fighting. But since I made that case, America’s position has grown weaker through a combination of concessions, desperation, disinterest, naïveté, and neophyte bumbling from a president who never learned why the conflict with Iran has simmered for 47 years. So now, “finishing the job” may mean avoiding a truly disastrous deal and instead working to bring about a merely bad one. In his desire to avoid any blame or criticism for a negative outcome, Trump makes one in which there are conditions worthy of blame more likely—and fails to recognize the hard reality that the possibility of dodging well-deserved blame stopped existing long ago.

 

Ultimately, this war is going to end in a settlement, and sadly, because of the president’s decisions, it is likely to be a settlement that’s favorable to Iran. At a minimum, the outcome of the conflict will come with tacit recognition that the Iranians are the masters of a maritime chokepoint, with the ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz at any time they choose, and that they got away with murdering tens of thousands of their own citizens—a grim signal to the Iranian people the next time they get notions about liberty, democracy, and human rights.

 

There will always be war between nations, and military force is a necessary tool in any president’s toolkit. Sometimes wars result in failure, despite the best planning and intentions of the governments that start them, or the incredible valor and skill of the soldiers who fight them. In this case, we have an abundance of the latter and a dearth of the former. For there are few things less forgivable than deciding to go to war without any willingness to invest the personal effort or political capital to win it.

 

In the end, whatever the specifics of the deal, this conflict will not prove to be the conclusion of a 47-year conflict, as the White House claimed in its ham-fisted communications at the war’s start. Rather, it will be just one chapter in the enduring clash between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic—one which makes the coming chapters more difficult than they needed to be.

Do Conservatives Care to Have a Conscience?

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.”

 

If you’ve ever seen the clearest and bluest of the Atlantic in the Caribbean, you have a sense of what the weather has been like in Washington, D.C., in recent days. I haven’t been here in a while, but it sure welcomed me back well. I had the opportunity to see the town from a Virginia balcony with a comprehensive view. And for a bit, all I could look at was the Jefferson Memorial.

 

Almost obsessively.

 

Later on, I opened up Mike Pence’s new book, What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience, launched Tuesday. Right away, I realized why I couldn’t take my eyes off Jefferson’s spot on the Tidal Basin. It’s the inscription, which Pence remembers taking note of when he and his family first moved to the nation’s capital and took the whole walking tour of the monuments and museums.

 

“Etched on an inside wall of the open-air structure, it faces the statue of the primary author of the Declaration of Independence: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”

 

He notes the trembling more than once in his book. It’s at the core of who we are — as people and as a country.

 

He writes: “Etched on an inside wall of the open-air structure, it faces the statue of the primary author of the Declaration of Independence: ‘God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?’”

 

Jefferson, of course, was writing about slavery, “which haunted the man from Monticello to the end of his days.” They immediately haunted Pence, as “applied to the plight of the unborn.”

 

“That’s the thing about timeless values,” the former vice president writes: “They possess the power to instruct and inspire in different times and circumstances.”

 

We will be judged by how we treat our most vulnerable. That’s a paraphrase of what he writes. It’s my conviction. No may about it. No question about it. Not that I think Pence has any doubt. He goes on to define the most vulnerable as: “the aged, infirm, disabled, and the unborn.” He writes: “No class of Americans is more vulnerable or marginalized than unborn children. They are truly the least among us, utterly dependent on others for everything.” He insists: “The starting point for protecting them is the recognition that everyone born and unborn enjoys a God-given right to life, from conception to natural death and at all points in between.” Most babyboomer Democrats whose names you would know once basically held that view — it was mainstream. Now abortion is being delivered by your mailman and assisted-suicide can come by doctor prescription — and for situations that are far from terminal.

 

That’s not mercy; that’s murder.

 

When I was looking for Pence’s book in a sea of Jill Biden’s East Wing memoir in a new Barnes & Noble (a new bookstore! Bookworms swoon! Civilization may survive yet!) in the old Woodward & Lothrop building near Ford’s Theatre, I saw a book by Walter Isaacson on the Declaration of Independence, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. Now, needless to say, the president of the Aspen Institute isn’t going to be writing like Mike Pence, but his chapter on life was disappointing. It’s positively Lockean. Property is supreme. The challenge to humanity to steward life is missing. It is what it is, but it misses the life — and love — of the sentence.

 

Pence, not far from Isaacson, did make up for it, though, writing that he “saw Roe v. Wade as a rejection of the opening line of the Declaration of Independence.” The Indiana native says: “The right to life is our first freedom, and our unalienable right as Americans. It is the foundation upon which every other right rests. None of them matters without this one. As the great congressman Henry Hyde once told me: “Democracy is meaningless without respect for the sanctity of human life.”

 

Isaacson did nothing wrong. But you shouldn’t have to write a manifesto for conservative renewal to get that. It should be the stuff of America’s 250th anniversary coffee-table books. It should be part of the air we breathe — to give thanks for life and to cherish and protect it. Men died to give us the freedom to live. They died so we could live the lives we do.

 

“Courage inspires imitation,” Pence writes in the book. “So does weakness.” And he quotes Proverbs 24: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay everyone according to what they have done?”

 

Coraggio. That’s what the late Great John Paul II rallied us to. “And let us all join in that one prayer,” is how Mother Teresa ended her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance remarks. “God give us courage to protect the unborn child, for the child is the greatest gift of God to a family, to a nation and to the whole world. God bless you!”

 

That’s the thing: God has blessed us. What are we going to do in return? “Silence is not an option,” is Pence’s takeaway from Scripture on these points. “Dobbs,” he writes, “was a great victory and a crucial turning point. Yet it was not the end of the fight for life but merely the end of the beginning.” There are “new battlefields” now, he says, and this is an opportunity for the U.S. for new life — “a chance for renewal, restoration, and redemption.”

 

“Conservatives,” Pence writes, “must seize the opportunity to pursue a future in which Americans celebrate the gift of life, honor the promise of the Declaration, come alongside women in need, stand up for the weak, and declare without apology that every life matters and every child deserves a chance.”

 

This is not just a cause for conservatives. But if the word means anything, conservatives better be for these. Consider this year’s Independence Day fireworks your starting command to renew the face of the earth with the Spirit of God flowing through our authentic desire to conserve the good and consider it our duty to pass on this country and its commitment to life even better than it was, with a declaration to live by.

What’s the Difference Between a Platner Senate and a Collins Senate?

By John McCormack

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

Evidence continues to pour in that Graham Platner, the likely Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, is a man of deplorable character.

 

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner had an active account—with a shirtless profile photo—on the private messaging app Kik and that he was sending sexually explicit texts to at least six women after he married his wife three short years ago.

 

Then on Thursday, the New York Times published an article in which Lyndsey Fifield, an ex-girlfriend of Platner’s, said that he had been physically abusive: He grabbed her by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks, yanked her out of a taxi by her wrist, and once twisted her arm behind her back and shoved her in a room and kept her trapped inside.

 

Fifield also told the Times that Platner had always known his Nazi tattoo was in fact a Nazi tattoo, not something he discovered after 18 years of sporting it, as he has claimed. He had long referred to the S.S. skull-and-crossbones tattoo as “my totenkopf,” she told the Times. Platner denied the allegations: “Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of somebody politically motivated.” While Fifield is a conservative, another Platner ex-girlfriend, Maine Democrat Jennifer Racicot, told the Times she found Platner’s behavior to be “reckless” and “unsettling.”

 

Meanwhile, many progressives and Democrats have been busy trying to convince themselves and others that Maine voters must vote for Platner because the consequences of which party controls the Senate are simply too great.

 

Living as we do in a country where voters backed Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, it’s a little hard to blame them: It’s clear that most voters in both parties are simply consequentialists when it comes to voting. They are willing to overlook enormous character defects in order to vote for the candidate more likely to implement their preferred policy preferences.

 

But character still counts for a significant slice of voters who think there is at least some point at which their preferred candidate’s character could be so bad that they’d either cast a third-party protest vote or vote for the opposing party. In 2017, Republicans lost a deep-red Alabama Senate seat after GOP nominee Roy Moore was credibly accused by Leigh Corfman of abusing her when she was 14 and Moore was in his 30s (dueling defamation suits were later dismissed). In that race, 1.7 percent of voters cast write-in votes; Moore lost by 1.5 points.

 

For those voters who care about candidate character and the political consequences of elections, these questions exist on a sliding scale. They weigh just how bad a candidate’s character defects are against just how bad the political consequences would be of his defeat.

 

While the drip, drip, drip of news continues to inform us of how bad Platner’s character is, it’s worth taking a moment to think concretely about what the real-world consequences would be if control of the Senate comes down to Maine.

 

What exactly would be the difference between a 51-49 Democratic Senate with Graham Platner in it versus a 50-50 Republican Senate with Susan Collins in it? In the latter scenario, Republicans would have already lost three seats elsewhere—probably North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas. A world in which Republicans have lost two seats in states that Trump carried by double digits is a world in which Democrats have taken control of the House. “There is no universe where Democrats are winning Senate seats in Iowa, Ohio, but losing the House,” Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, told The Dispatch. With control of the House, Democrats would have the power to check Trump with investigations and impeachment. They would also have put an end to any GOP-only legislation passed by the reconciliation process.

 

What difference does it make if Democrats gain a Senate majority in addition to the House? The two obvious gains are the power to block judicial nominees and the power to block Cabinet nominees. “Who gets confirmed for lifetime judicial seats? Who gets confirmed to lead federal agencies and be our ambassadors overseas? And what do we spend in support of our core national mission?” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware told The Dispatch in the Capitol when asked about the stakes of Senate control. Pressed specifically on the difference between a Senate in which Platner or Collins is the deciding voting, Coons said: “I've worked on a number of things with Sen. Murkowski, Sen. Collins … over the years, but when you have a president who is this far out of his appropriate role in the mainstream, I think the best check is a Democratic majority.”

 

When it comes to judicial nominees, some of Collins’ critics (including my Dispatch colleague Nick Catoggio) point to her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as evidence that she would vote to confirm a lackey as Supreme Court justice. But Kavanaugh was eminently qualified, and Collins, like then-Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, carefully weighed the thin case against him and voted to confirm. There is strong evidence that Collins would not vote to confirm an unqualified nominee—her vote against Trump’s appellate court nominee Emil Bove. If Trump is going to try to put a thuggish lackey on the court, Bove would probably be at the top of his list, having already been confirmed 50-49 to the appeals court.

 

But Bove was confirmed without the votes of Collins and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. In a 50-50 Senate, Republicans would need both of them to confirm any new Supreme Court justice. (Murkowski voted against Kavanaugh, while Collins voted against Amy Coney Barrett.) More to the point: Replacing Justice Thomas or Justice Alito with a Kavanaugh protégé is not going to tip the balance on the Supreme Court, which has already held Trump in check in some respects by overturning his unconstitutional tariffs and halting his deportations to a brutal Salvadoran prison without any due process.

 

When it comes to Cabinet nominees, Collins has a mixed record on Trump’s most controversial picks. She voted against Pete Hegseth to serve as Pentagon chief but voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr as health secretary and Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence. It’s possible Collins could take a stronger line against lame-duck Trump than she did at the start of his second term, but it’s also true that there’s little the Senate can do if Trump is content to rely on “acting” secretaries for his worst picks from here on out. The reason he named Bill Pulte acting director of national intelligence is because he knows the current GOP-controlled Senate would not confirm him.

 

So, if one’s top priority in the midterms is to implement a check on Donald Trump, are those consequences on judicial and executive branch appointments worth the cost of backing a candidate with as low of a character as Platner?

 

After news about Platner’s extramarital sexting came out but before allegations of physical abuse, I asked Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who backs Platner, if Democrats overlooking Platner’s character defects were doing the same thing as Republicans overlooking the character defects of Texas GOP senate candidate Ken Paxton, who cheated on his wife and was impeached by the Texas House for corruption.

 

“I think that people back home who know these folks are the ones who can best judge them,” Warren replied, declining to address whether she saw a difference between the character of Paxton and Platner.

 

In 2025, Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine grilled Pete Hegseth during his confirmation hearings on Hegseth’s long, sordid history of marital infidelity. Last week in the Capitol—after the Platner sexting scandal emerged but before the allegations of physical abuse—I asked Kaine if Maine Democrats should overlook Platner’s infidelity. “I’m not giving Maine Democrats advice. I generally don’t like national Democrats going into primaries and telling their voters here's what you should do,” Kaine replied. Maine’s Democratic Gov. Janet Mills is still on the ballot in Tuesday’s election despite suspending her primary campaign against Platner in April, but Kaine insisted, “I don’t get involved in primaries outside of my own state.”

 

“You saw in my questioning of Hegseth the values that I bring to the table and the concerns that I have,” Kaine added. “Whether those are the concerns of Maine voters or not, I don’t know.”

 

Democratic primary voters are still perfectly free to reject Platner on Tuesday in favor of their own Democratic governor. If they don’t, those tempted by consequentialist arguments to vote for a creep in November should first weigh the actual consequences—for Congress, as well as their own credibility and conscience.

The Resistance’s Newest Retiree

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, June 04, 2026

 

I oppose the firing of Scott Pelley from CBS News. But only because I have little doubt that he wanted very badly to be canned, and it would have been delicious were he denied this wish.

 

At a staff meeting on Monday, Pelley told 60 Minutes’ new executive producer, Nick Bilton, that CBS News’ new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, is “murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

 

He didn’t stop there. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you [Bilton] have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the Evening News have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?” At some point, Pelley asked his executive producer why he accepted the job “knowing that you will never be welcome here.”

 

When Bilton said, “I care so deeply about this institution,” Pelley said, “Oh, please.”

 

Pelley’s words don’t strike me as those of a man looking to keep his position. It seems, rather, that he was going for a take-this-job-and-shove-it speech absent the necessary courage to say, “I quit.” I don’t know the details of Pelley’s contract with the network, but quitting can be more costly than getting terminated. You might think of this as career-suicide-by-cop.

 

Only it’s not really career suicide for a well-known and wealthy television host to quit in a blaze of self-righteous glory. Like getting arrested these days, it opens doors. Bari, oddly, has become a stand-in for Donald Trump. That now makes Pelley the latest resistance hero, which is a more sought-after commodity than a generic anchor on a dying network show. He hasn’t gotten this much attention in his entire career. 

 

Which is why I wish Bilton and Bari had dashed his hopes by shrinking his professional role and keeping him on staff as a diminished malcontent.

 

Of course, that’s not the way to run a successful operation. And the whole point of bringing Bari onboard was to make CBS News successful. When someone speaks to his higher-up the way Pelley spoke to Bilton and insults his boss the way he insulted Bari, he has to be fired. Pelley put the network on notice, announcing that he’d be an uncooperative employee going forward. So Bari had no choice but to grant him his wish.

 

In truth, Pelley’s post-network career might not be as exciting as he may hope. As far as resistance figures go, he’s not poised to be in anyone’s starting lineup. Despite his fiery morning-meeting rant, Pelley is stiff and bland and fluent in the kind of liberal boilerplate commentary that’s all but lost its relevance today. He’s also almost 70. Come to think of it, maybe he wanted out not to leverage his hero status but because he recognized that the world had passed him by. Which puts him on the same page as the CBS News brass, after all.

Cut Platner Loose

By David Frum

Saturday, June 06, 2026

 

The Maine Senate race is far from the first time that an American political party has had to choose between character and power.

 

In 2017, Alabama Republicans nominated a state supreme court judge named Roy Moore for U.S. Senate. A month before election day, The Washington Post published a report that when Moore was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, he initiated sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl. Three other women alleged that Moore had also pursued them when they, too, were underage. Asked on Sean Hannity’s radio show whether he had ever dated underage girls, Moore replied, “Not generally, no.” Then a fifth woman stepped forward to accuse Moore of sexually assaulting her in her teens. Four days after the Post story broke, local Alabama media reported that it was common knowledge in the area that Moore stalked teenage girls—so flagrantly that a local mall banned him from setting foot on their property. By Moore’s own account, he had become interested in the woman he subsequently married when she was in her mid-teens and he was in his early 30s.

 

The allegations created a quandary for Republicans. They had emerged from the 2016 elections with a slim majority in the Senate, just 52 seats. If they lost in Alabama, they would be reduced to 51—meaning that Republican Senate leadership would be utterly dependent on the shifting moods of the Senate mavericks John McCain, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins.

 

On the other hand, Moore’s reported sexual misconduct not only embarrassed his party colleagues but also threatened to discredit them. The Jeffrey Epstein story was not yet the firestorm it would later become. But newly elected President Trump had already been scorched by allegations of unseemly interest in underage girls. In October 2016, five women told BuzzFeed News that Trump walked unannounced into their changing room during the Miss Teen USA pageant. Trump had told a variant of that story to Howard Stern in 2005. (In Trump’s version, he entered an adult changing room.) Moore’s elevation to the Senate could intensify the association between the GOP and men who once preyed on teenagers.

 

The first leading Republican to break ranks was McCain. After the Post published its story, McCain described the allegations as “deeply disturbing and disqualifying” and said that Moore “should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of.” Two dozen other Republican senators accepted the allegations as credible and urged Moore to step aside if the claims proved true. When the second round of reports appeared on November 13, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said he believed Moore’s accusers and demanded Moore end his run.

 

Moore refused to withdraw. His party then took an even more radical step: Two weeks before the December 12 special election, Moore’s prospective Alabama Senate colleague, Richard Shelby, told reporters that he had cast an advance ballot against Moore. “No, no, no, I voted absentee. I didn’t vote for him. I voted for a distinguished Republican write-in.” On December 12, Moore lost the Alabama Senate seat to Democrat Doug Jones by 22,000 votes.

 

Senate Republicans still played the political game hard and tough. McConnell delayed seating Jones until January 2018, an interval long enough for the Senate to pass the 2017 tax cut with the vote of Alabama’s appointed interim senator, Luther Strange. Everyone understood that Jones’s tenure would be brief: Jones lost his seat in the regular election in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville. Even after Jones was seated, Republicans still succeeded in passing some major legislation, including a partial rollback of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulations, signed by Trump in May 2018. Senate Republicans retained enough votes to confirm Trump executive-branch and judicial appointees, including Supreme Court nominees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

 

Not as paragons of moral virtue but as pragmatic politicians, the Senate Republicans of 2017 made and executed a calculation: We are better off sacrificing the Alabama Senate seat for three years than enduring Roy Moore as a Senate colleague for who knows how long. If Moore had won in 2017, then gained reelection in 2020, he’d have been serving that first full term during the congressional Epstein hearings of 2025. How would that have looked for the GOP?

 

In 2026, it’s the Democrats’ turn for strategic choice. The allegations against Graham Platner differ from those against Moore. As of June 6, Platner stands accused of laying hands on one named woman, and of intimidating behavior against two other women who thus far have not been named. (Platner told The New York Times that he “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations.) All three accusers were and are adults. No Platner supporter, however, can feel certain that the shocks have ceased. Platner’s own reassurances by now lack credibility, and fellow Democrats express deep unease about his chances in November.

 

The stakes are high this year. Maine was the Democrats’ brightest hope for a net gain in the Senate. Drawing a route to a Democratic Senate majority that bypasses Maine is difficult, if not impossible.

 

But sticking by Platner has costs too.

 

Excluding Maine, the year’s most high-profile Senate races might be Texas, where a Republican impeached by his own party for corruption faces a former candidate for the ministry; North Carolina, where a business-friendly two-term former governor faces a Trump ultra-loyalist who has never won an election to any office at any level of government; and Georgia, where one of the Democratic Party’s most adept communicators faces a bitterly divided Republican Party that has still not united on a nominee.

 

With Platner, the Maine election will offer voters a contest between a moderate Republican woman who voted to convict Trump at his 2021 impeachment trial and a man who can be plausibly depicted as a violent misogynist whose working-class image is built on fictions and fakes. How much will Roy Cooper, Jon Ossoff, and James Talarico love seeing Platner’s photograph alongside theirs in TV graphics about the 2026 election? Not much, one should think.

 

To defend Platner, Democrats will have to choose between two strategies: denouncing as liars a possibly growing number of women—or else accepting the stories, but then arguing that twisting a woman’s arm and locking her in a room is not quite the same as beating her. Do they want to haggle over just how inappropriate these romantic relationships were, even as they argue that wearing an SS tattoo throughout most of one’s adult life does not prove that one is a literal Nazi? These are not conversations that Democrats should wish to prolong in a year that might otherwise deal with Trump’s abuses of power, corruption, and economic mismanagement.

 

A majority of the American electorate is female. Nearly half of American women have suffered some form of intimate-partner violence. Platner’s most fervent supporters seem to be gambling that Democrats can win more votes from men who are sick and tired of women’s bellyaching than they stand to lose from women who might associate Platner with the abusers in their own lives. That seems a long-odds bet. A politician as unsentimental as Mitch McConnell could recognize when it was time to cut loose a moral and political liability. Can the Democrats of 2026 muster equal shrewdness and toughness?

The Downfall of the Postliberals

By Josh Appel

Sunday, June 07, 2026

 

In April 2026, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party was voted out of power in Hungary, losing its parliamentary majority for the first time in over a decade. A sober assessment of Orbán’s Hungary, alongside other postliberal regimes, should finally put to rest the imagined utopia of postliberalism. We can now say plainly that real postliberalism has been tried, and the results were far from perfect.

 

I am here evoking the longstanding notion in Marxist circles that regimes aligned with Communist ideals have fallen short only because “real socialism hasn’t been tried yet.” The endurance of that idea has been vital for those who still believe in the overall Marxist ethos. In this view, socialism’s dark history is due only to the corruption and wickedness of people like Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, not to socialism or Communism itself. But 109 years after the formation of the Soviet Union and 36 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is nearly impossible to argue with any honesty that the failures of socialism were not aberrations but features. Food shortages, economic stagnation, corruption, and repression are inherent to collective ownership and centralized social planning. The failure to grasp such basic cause and effect is due to the romanticization of Communist utopia and the demonization of democratic capitalism. In this imagined world of perfection where socialism can work, everything good from our current order can remain the same while we simply fix the inequality of capitalism by superimposing socialism on top of it.

 

The “hasn’t been tried yet” fantasy is an attempt to have your cake and eat it too, to avoid the atrocities of socialism by keeping the parts of society that are good while doing away with the unfairnesses. What socialists refuse to grasp is that oftentimes those very good things they value are by-products of the system they so loathe.

 

A similar problem plagues those who self-identify as postliberal and/or integralist. Postliberals, such as the political philosophy professor Patrick Deneen, and integralists, such as the law professor Adrian Vermeule, successfully identify genuine cultural problems—and then issue sweeping and sensationalist solutions. Seeing a world bereft of order and virtue—as evidenced by alternative forms of marriage, the collapse of the nuclear family, the abandonment of the factory-working everyman, the proliferation of drugs and pornography combined with weak communal and religious institutions—postliberals then turn and blame the problem on liberalism itself.

 

For Deneen, liberalism’s emphasis on autonomy and rights has deemphasized the necessities of obligation, tradition, and community. But instead of noting the difference and calling for a revival of the mediating structures that try to set individualism within the framework of communitarianism, Deneen and others throw out the baby with the bathwater. The only way to rectify such issues, they argue, is through “regime change,” which happens to be the title of Deneen’s second book on the topic. Deneen concludes it with a call to action: “It is time to abandon the ruins we have made, seek shelter, and then build anew.” But what postliberals get wrong is that they believe they can maintain the “good” parts of liberalism while abolishing the parts they contemn.

 

Just like the Marxists, the postliberals refuse to make a cost-benefit analysis that ignores perfection as a possible end; instead, they rely on a utopian conception of the way things ought to be, and from which we are currently separated, to make value judgements on the way things currently are. This failure to appreciate the successes of liberalism in the first place is why they fall into a fatal trap—the belief that historical novelties such as the rule of law and economic prosperity are simply inevitable. In other words, for the post-liberals, all that we prize in society can exist absent liberalism; while at the same time, liberalism is holding us back from the way in which things can be even better.

 

This is where the postliberals have their own form of the “hasn’t truly been tried” myth. Instead of admitting that centralized, religious autocracy inevitably leads to all sorts of intended and unintended consequences—of which there is adequate proof—postliberals seem to believe that real religious autocracy, or real postliberalism/integralism, hasn’t been tried yet. But the truth is it has been tried and the results left much to be desired.

 

Three contemporary examples show us how postliberalism greatly weakens economic stability, hollows out authentic religious adherence, and does little to help the family grow.

 

***

 

The first is António de Oliveira Salazar’s regime between 1932 and 1968 in Portugal. In the aftermath of the First Republic of Portugal, Salazar created the Estado Novo, the New State, which combined Catholic social doctrine, nationalism, and economic corporatism. Salazar’s Estado Novo has in recent years received praise in the pages of the American Conservative and First Things.

 

That praise was unearned. Salazar’s corporatist system produced stagnation and peasantry. In 1962, the New York Times referred to Portugal as an “impoverished, backward, feudal country… the poorest and worst administered nation of non-Communist Europe.” The report continued, “Dr. Salazar has managed to keep law and order, the two primary aims of all dictators. Little else can be said for the regime.” By rejecting both free market dynamism and genuine competition, the Estado Novo further entrenched a poor, agrarian working class that was kept deliberately isolated to preserve control. Industries were organized into state-supervised guilds that suppressed innovation and protected incumbent owners. Almost half of the population worked the fields in abject poverty. Despite moderate GDP growth, Portugal remained one of the poorest countries in Western Europe. The economic gains that did materialize, often cited by postliberals, were a product of capitulating to “globalization”: the benefits of the Marshall Plan, extractions from African colonies, joining the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and European Free Trade Association in 1960, and a trade agreement with the European Economic Community in 1972. While other European nations further industrialized rapidly after World War II, Portugal lagged.

 

The regime also failed in its professed commitment to the family. While Salazar championed traditional family structures, his economic policies made it difficult for families to thrive materially. Although Salazar rapidly expanded the number of schools, illiteracy rates remained among the highest in Europe. The combination of low wages and limited opportunity led to significant emigration to France. By 1969, more than 100,000 Portuguese citizens had fled there.

 

In addition to the economic consequences of corporatism, Salazar—as all authoritarians must in order to uphold control and “order”—relied on harsh censorship and domination. The PIDE, Portugal’s secret police, often engaged in extrajudicial torture and execution. The suppression of dissent created a culture of fear, not virtue.

 

Ultimately, Salazar was plagued by the same malady that tends to destroy all repressive uniparty regimes: Life is unpredictable, and no central authority—no matter how disciplined or well-intentioned—can anticipate every social, economic, or political contingency. When pressures arose in Portugal over its imperialist policies in Africa, the regime could not adapt without undermining its own foundations. Salazar was forced to respond by intensifying control, expanding the mandatory military draft, and diverting scarce resources to preserve order. The result was a precarious cycle in which each effort to suppress instability only deepened it, leaving Portugal poorer, more isolated, more unstable, and less capable of genuine renewal. The Estado Novo was upended by the Carnation Revolution in 1974 without a single shot being fired.

 

If Salazar’s Portugal was marked by economic stagnation and widespread peasantry, Francisco Franco’s Spain was far worse. Yet, American Reformer writer Josh Abbotoy once quipped that “basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco”—later qualifying, but not fully retracting, the remark in First Things.

 

Franco came to power at the end of a bloody civil war and ruled from 1939 to 1975 over a regime that was both more authoritarian and more explicitly religious than Salazar’s. Franco’s autocracy was not subtle, and neither were its consequences. He vowed to root out what he called “Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik” influence, and he styled himself El Caudillo por la gracia de Dios, leader by the grace of God. His Falange movement had been backed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini during the civil war, and absent Spain’s internal devastation, he may well have joined them in World War II. The civil war itself was catastrophic: More than 500,000 died, with roughly 200,000 victims of mob violence and torture. During the war, the Nationalists imprisoned hundreds of thousands in concentration camps. Upon taking control, Franco abolished all political opposition, centralized legislative power in his own hands, and executed more than 20,000 political enemies, ensuring that dissent would not reemerge.

 

Economically, Franco initially pursued autarky—an attempt at total economic self-sufficiency—and it proved disastrous. Famine spread, and civilians collapsed in the streets. Beggars reportedly lined the roads as Franco’s motorcade passed, hoping for scraps of bread. By some estimates, as many as 200,000 people died from starvation in the postwar years…in Spain. Like Salazar, Franco ultimately had to abandon his ideological commitments to preserve his regime. By 1950, Spain was taking loans from the United States, and the 1959 Plan de Estabilización opened the country to international capital, IMF assistance, and American military bases. Tourism surged, forcing the regime to tolerate cultural changes—including bikini-clad tourists on Mediterranean beaches—that sat uneasily with its professed Catholic moral order. By the 1960s, Spain had joined institutions like the OECD and integrated into global trade, effectively abandoning autarky. Yet even with foreign investment, Spain was the poor relation of its Western European neighbors. A regime that had promised economic independence and moral virtue ended up compromising both.

 

Beyond economics, Franco’s fusion of church and state did not strengthen Catholicism; it weakened the faith’s potency. By presenting himself as a divinely sanctioned ruler and suppressing any religious pluralism, the regime bound the fate of the church to its own repression. The association between church and state, combined with harsh repression, made way for an even stronger anti-Catholic backlash in the inevitable collapse of the Franco regime. Today, Spain is more secular than half of the countries in the European Union, ranking 16th out of 34 in religiosity, according to Pew Research. Only around 20 percent of Spaniards identify religion as “very important in their lives” and say they attend services at least monthly. Supposedly secular strongholds such as Poland, Ukraine, and Greece all rank higher than Spain.

 

This is no surprise. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed as early as 1835, the separation of church and state is not a boon for secularization but for religious authenticity and piety:

 

When a religion founds its empire upon the desire of immortality which lives in every human heart, it may aspire to universal dominion; but when it connects itself with a government, it must necessarily adopt maxims which are only applicable to certain nations. Thus, in forming an alliance with a political power, religion augments its authority over a few, and forfeits the hope of reigning over all.… The Church cannot share the temporal power of the State without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites.

 

According to Tocqueville, anticipating our current debate, by standing apart from the ephemeral and political state, the church strengthens true faith and virtue.

 

The same phenomenon is evident in Orbán’s Hungary. While touting itself as a postliberal Christian country, Hungary ranks even lower (20th) in religiosity than Spain. In the latest Hungarian census, 57 percent of Hungarians declined affiliation to any faith. Membership in the Catholic Church dropped by 30 percent—an estimated 1.1 million people—since 2011. Hungary’s Catholic demographic shrunk from 50 percent in 2001 to a lowly 28 percent today. This, despite the fact that large swaths of state funds have been poured into churches.

 

In addition to falling religious association, Hungary’s pro-natalist policies have done little to curb declining birth rates across Europe. Hungary’s birthrate (1.41) trails both France’s (1.61) and England’s (1.55).

 

***

 

And, just as Salazar and Franco were undone by economic trouble, the same is true of Orbán. Despite adopting free market policies between 1998 and 2002 during his second tenure as prime minister, Orbán later took a more corporatist stance, or what he deemed an “unorthodox economic policy.” He levied heavy taxes on banks, energy, and telecommunications, in addition to nationalizing private pensions. The Fidesz party took control of hundreds of corporations and businesses and invested greatly in Chinese lithium-ion batteries and electric-car plants. The investment did not pay off and left the economy in free fall. Orbán raised the minimum wage and put price caps on a number of products including gasoline, making the economic problem even worse. In 2025, Hungary’s growth in GDP was 0.4 percent, third to last among EU countries. As was the case with his postliberal predecessors, Orbán was forced to give in to his chief populist foe, the European Union. According to Johan Norberg, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, EU funds to Hungary “totaled up to 4%… similar to what East Germany received from West Germany after reunification.” An economic plight of Orbán’s own making, combined with pervasive corruption—rivaling that of countries like China and Cuba—helped sow the seeds of the regime’s demise.

 

What these case studies show us is that removing the pillars of the liberal democratic order doesn’t fix systemic inequality or stem the proliferation of pornography. It has a much more wide-ranging impact. Were we to follow these examples, as the benighted postliberal philosophical apologists for Orbán would have us do, we would risk upending the foundations of a prosperous society that allow us to have basic needs met in the first place. Autocratic regimes aren’t repressive because they have a depraved leader—although they oftentimes do—but because autocracy doesn’t govern by popular or republican consensus. Widespread poverty and a poor working class aren’t a coincidence but a consequence of corporatism, protectionism, and anti–free market policies. And the idea that they foment virtue is a proven absurdity. When you fuse church and state, you get a less authentic, more alienating religious order.

 

Instead of seeking utopia, postliberals, just like socialists, would be better served spending their time thinking about how liberalism has made our lives comparatively better than those of our predecessors while working on ways to fix whatever drawbacks come along with it. Winston Churchill said as much when he quipped, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Maybe that’s why postliberals hate him so much.