Ransom Note

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, August 07, 2026

 

Of the many terrible consequences of the Iran war, an underrated one is the traction it’s created for a “real postliberalism has never been tried” movement to get rolling on the right.

 

It isn’t all bad. In the short term, a splinter faction of disgruntled Lindberghians is actually useful to the anti-Trump cause. To take one obvious example, the president will find it harder to convince Republicans that this fall’s election was rigged than he did in 2020–21 because the discontented far right has a motive this time to vouch for the legitimacy of a Democratic victory.

 

The left didn’t cheat; it won because American voters don’t want to fight Israel’s battles, they’ll insist. Trump conquered the right in 2016 by making it safe for Republican voters to believe that Bushism failed. Now the Lindberghians need to do the same to him, and they’re going to try.

 

Also, there was surely going to be some sort of “real postliberalism has never been tried” wing of the post-Trump right even in a timeline where the war never happened. It’s in the nature of revolutionary populism to fracture into more and less austere strains once the galvanizing messianic leader passes from the scene. With or without the Iran conflict, the Lindberghians were going to stake a claim in 2028.

 

But they’re more viable now, mid-war, than they otherwise would have been. If you’re the sort of chud whose big problem with the last 18 months of kakistocracy is that we’re too close with Israel and not nearly close enough with Russia, good news: Your time is coming.

 

The grand poobah of “real postliberalism has never been tried” in modern right-wing politics is Tucker Carlson, who conferred last week with disgruntled populists like Rep. Thomas Massie, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent on a way forward for the Tuckerite right. They don’t agree on everything—Greene is a nationalist, Massie a staunch libertarian—but all seem to believe that putting “America First” starts with reducing Israeli influence.

 

On Wednesday Carlson revealed the fruits of that conference in a podcast modestly titled “Rebuilding America After the Great Betrayal.” I lack the grace to sit through a 94-minute monologue by a guy whose devotion to Putinism once led him to marvel at the sophistication of Moscow shopping carts, but I trust that Axios’ summary of the 10-point manifesto that Tucker revealed fairly states his agenda.

 

Those 10 points were framed, apparently, as the foundation for “whatever comes next.”

 

Oh? What comes next?

 

Ransom note.

 

Coverage this week of Carlson’s gambit has reliably pivoted to speculation about him running for president in 2028, either as a third-party candidate or as a dark-horse entrant into the Republican primary. The manifesto is his campaign platform!

 

I don’t think that’s primarily what this is about.

 

Until there’s evidence of a falling out between him and his acolyte J.D. Vance, I default to believing that Tucker will stand aside. He’s unlikely to defeat Vance, for one thing, especially if Trump is in the vice president’s corner: Carlson’s net approval among Republicans fell from +54 two years ago to +7 earlier this year after he began attacking the president over Iran, such is the GOP base’s loyalty to its leader.

 

Running and losing would be bad. Running, losing, and weakening Vance with the right such that Democrats win narrowly in 2028 would reduce Carlson to Nader-esque infamy among the Republican base, damaging postliberalism long-term.

 

He might be willing to take that risk if he felt obliged to punish Vance over the war, but he went out of his way to absolve him for it during an interview in June. The vice president is “in a horrible situation” with respect to Iran, forced to defend a conflict he didn’t support, Carlson observed. “And every day I feel sorry for J.D. Vance. Every day I say a prayer for him. Always consider him a friend.” He pronounced the VP “really smart” and “obviously” preferable to Marco Rubio as a Republican nominee in 2028.

 

That doesn’t sound to me like a man who’s expecting to run for president. That sounds to me like a man who’s expecting J.D. Vance to run and who intends to use his influence on the right to make sure that the GOP establishment—and Vance himself—remains tethered to postliberalism after Trump retires.

 

The manifesto is a ransom note. As long as the party doesn’t drift too far from Carlson’s principles, whether due to a conservative resurgence or some felt need to moderate for the sake of “electability,” there will be no Tucker candidacy. That’s a powerful incentive for Vance’s skeptics in the GOP’s ruling class to put aside their qualms about him and their infatuation with Rubio. They can get behind our postliberal vice president and have an uneventful, unifying presidential primary, or they can back a traditional Republican and take their chances against a charismatic challenger in Carlson whose warmth toward Russia makes Trump look like Ronald Reagan.

 

“I do want to be involved in offering an option of some kind,” Tucker said in that June interview about the coming presidential cycle. Pay the ransom by doubling down on postliberalism or try to beat me in ’28: That’s the option he’s offering to the GOP.

 

The manifesto is also a sort of “break glass in case of emergency” option for postliberals. Conceivably, Vance could falter politically, losing popularity on the right because of his role in brokering June’s pitiful peace deal with Iran or to other failures yet to come. Trump, being Trump, could also decide that he simply likes Rubio better, shunting Vance aside and effectively killing his chances at the nomination. Postliberals can’t control whether the VP runs—but they can control whether Republicans will field a candidate to fill the vacuum left by his absence. Carlson’s 10-point vision is his way of volunteering to be the Troy Jackson to Vance’s Graham Platner, I suspect.

 

The manifesto does one more thing for him. It sets him up to be the guru of postliberalism in a Trumpless American right.

 

That role currently belongs to the president, who boasted earlier this year that “America First” means whatever he says it means. It isn’t always, or even often, the case that the leader of a revolutionary movement is also its definitive ideological authority among followers; those roles could diverge once Trump is gone, even if Vance wins the presidency. I imagine that Carlson believes they will, and that he’s well positioned as a talented demagogue to define the parameters of the nationalist vision for grassroots Republicans while his friend J.D. goes about executing the program.

 

Putin has Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian nationalist philosopher sometimes described as his “Rasputin.” President Vance will need a Dugin too. The manifesto is Tucker’s job application to right-wing voters, offering himself as someone who’ll keep the next Republican president honest about continuing to follow “America First” principles while in office.

 

And should that president spring a new “great betrayal,” 2032 is only a few years away.

 

What is the “nationalist vision” according to Carlson, though?

 

Virtue, postliberal style.

 

Per Axios, the 10 points are organized thematically according to virtues that he believes should define America. Fairness. Sovereignty. Industry. Beauty. Health. Honesty. Optimism. Wisdom. Decency. Unity.

 

It’s an irritating rhetorical conceit, for more than one reason. “Like many lists created by Carlson’s erstwhile opponents on the socialist left, these are slogans that are meant to be unopposable,” Douglas Murray noted in a piece for The Free Press. “Or to put it another way, as a logician taught me many years ago, there is no point in uttering a phrase the opposite of which would be uttered only by a madman.”

 

Who could oppose “fairness” and “wisdom”? Who, for that matter, could be against “social justice” and “diversity”?

 

It’s irritating too because, as with their cherished concept of “the common good,” it’s another case of postliberals babbling about virtue while conveniently reserving to themselves the right to say which beliefs and policies do—and don’t—define those virtues. I invite you to judge for yourself how sincerely an apologist for Russian fascism, who very clearly wants to expand the right’s “big tent” to include white nationalists and Holocaust revisionists, cares about “decency” or “wisdom” in the abstract.

 

An honest manifesto of postliberalism would state forthrightly that it rejects traditional Christian notions of right and wrong because those values undermine the ruthlessness required to dominate one’s political opponents. That’s how you know Carlson’s claptrap is foremost a political document, not an ideological one: It’s sugar-coated to make it easier for gullible Americans to swallow.

 

Speaking of which.

 

Read through Axios’ summary and you’ll run across some of the usual nationalist hobby horses. “Unity” means fewer immigrants; “wisdom” means ditching progressive dogma about gender fluidity; “optimism” means natalism; “beauty” grouses about America’s brutalist architecture, an evergreen preoccupation of “RETVRN” bros on social media. None of these ideas are galvanizing to the left. But there are some in there—lots, actually—that do have crossover appeal.

 

“Fairness” and “honesty” refer to anti-corruption measures like holding government officers to the same rules as the average joe and punishing officials who lie to citizens, an obvious shot at Trump. “Sovereignty” and “decency” are anti-war planks about not letting allies—including one very specific ally—lead us into foolish wars or spend U.S. tax dollars on genocide. “Health” borrows Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda of better eating and less reliance on pharmaceuticals. And “honesty” nods at conspiracy theorists by calling for full disclosure on everything from Jeffrey Epstein to the Kennedy assassination to 9/11.

 

Republicans are reportedly planning to turn next month’s pre-midterm national convention into a two-day horror movie about democratic socialists taking over the country. Carlson’s manifesto is a sort of “prebuttal” of that, eschewing pure left-bashing for a more traditional populist attack on The People’s enemies on all sides, including the Trumpist establishment. That’s just the sort of pitch you’d make if you were looking to attract some of the many left-wing postliberals who are disillusioned with the Democratic Party and might be open to radical new political coalitions, especially one that encourages scapegoating Israel.

 

Still, to any traditional conservative, what pops about Carlson’s 10 points is what’s absent. There seems to be nothing much in there about individual freedom or smaller government, cornerstones of postwar right-wing thought—as Tucker, a former loud-and-proud libertarian, surely intended.

 

Identity, not freedom.

 

That’s why they call it “postliberalism,” you might reply, and you’d be right. By definition, the term describes a politics that deprioritizes personal liberty relative to other values. I’m not surprised that Carlson’s vision reflects that; I’m surprised that he was honest about it, declining to pay lip service to freedom to make his agenda more palatable to voters the way he sugar-coated his dishonesty about virtue.

 

But I shouldn’t be. The point of the manifesto, after all, is to replace freedom with identity as the value around which American politics should be organized.

 

Carlson wasn’t subtle about that, ending his podcast with these words: “If you’re going to fix it and rebuild this country and turn it into a place that the grandchildren you hopefully will have can inherit and thrive, you’re going to need to do something about the pressing question of American identity. ‘What does it mean to be an American?’ But it’s fixable, you just have to try, and we will be trying. And we’ll tell you, as we continue to do that."

 

Traditionally the question “What does it mean to be an American?” has been answered with some variation of “It means you’re free.” To be an American during the Cold War was to stand for liberty against communist tyranny; to be an American at the Founding was to stand for liberty against imperial tyranny. A civil war was fought, and a civil-rights movement later mobilized, over whether blacks were “American enough” to deserve the same freedom of self-determination that whites enjoyed.

 

Because postliberalism cares a lot about identity but very little about liberty, its recurring interest in the question of what it means to be an American inescapably feels ominous. If the answer isn’t some version of “freedom” or allegiance to constitutional values, then that answer must be more tribal and exclusionary. In postliberal hands, “the pressing question of American identity” is necessarily obsessed with determining who shouldn’t be able to claim that identity, not who should.

 

And so a classical liberal who shares some of Carlson’s goals would nonetheless need to suffer some sort of brain injury to trust him and his ilk to craft policy to advance them. A chronically low birth rate is a major national problem, but no rational person wants belligerent nationalists with low regard for personal liberty writing laws on it. Americans probably do rely too much on medication to treat health issues, but the sort of conspiratorial crank who thinks an mRNA flu vaccine will kill more people than it helps should have no say over how it’s regulated.

 

It’s not “the common good” per se that’s the problem, in other words, it’s that illiberals who think about the pursuit of happiness in collectivist terms have been willing to go to remarkable lengths historically to subordinate individual freedom to achieve it. American conservatives spent most of the 20^th century warning naifs about that. I guess we’ll have to do it again.

 

I will give Carlson his demagogic due, though: I can imagine his program proving seductive to many Americans, and not just the usual suspects on the chud right. There are intimations in his manifesto of a vision of human betterment that both of our major parties conspicuously lack. Bigger families, beautiful cities, an economy that values building things over securitizing them—nationalists have always been better than liberals at offering a sense of purpose, which liberalism leaves to the individual to decide for him or herself.

 

It isn’t hard to believe that a country suffering a crisis of meaning, in which artificial intelligence makes American labor increasingly expendable and American life increasingly comfortable, might drive demand for political movements selling purpose above all. We’re already well down the path of seeking religious meaning in politics, as the cultishness of the right over the past 10 years demonstrates. If the culture changes in ways that boost that demand, as it seems poised to, I expect the Carlsonian version of “identity politics” will benefit.

 

A country capable of electing Donald Trump twice is capable of electing anyone. That’s good news for postliberals—on both sides.

J.D. Vance’s Burrito Offensive

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 07, 2026

 

Sometimes a burrito isn’t just a burrito.

 

Let me be honest with you: I’m on a mini-vacation and I’m looking for an easy topic. I thought about tackling Tucker Carlson’s 10-point plan for pretending to be a serious person, but I just can’t do it. Besides, Douglas Murray beat me to the punch in pointing out that this agenda demonstrates the degree to which Tucker’s head is Israeli-occupied territory. Forget Judea and Samaria, the really settler-colonial drama is in Tucker’s cranium.

 

I do respect how he’s bringing back some of the greatest hits—including attacking the sin of usury and the slavery of debt. The “slavery” of debt is No. 2 on his 10-point platform. Meanwhile, “breaking the slavery of interest” was a mere No. 11 on the National Socialist German Workers’ Party’s list.

 

There will be plenty of time to deal with all of this nonsense later.

 

I want to tackle a different nonsense. A headline from the Telegraph:

 

How burritos are tearing apart the Republican Party

 

Rising food costs – and conservatives’ eating habits – at heart of social media row

 

And Fox News:

 

Burrito debate rips open GOP civil war on affordability: ‘We will lose, and deserve it’

 

A viral complaint over the price of a burrito has exposed a widening conservative divide over affordability

 

“This is nothing short of a battle for the future of the Republican Party,” Politico’s White House reporter, Megan Masserly, declared on the Playbook podcast this week, according to the Telegraph. That’s right. Sorta. But this fight isn’t really about burritos or even “affordability.”

 

You can read the Telegraph piece or Jim Geraghty’s analysis if you want to dive into the details of this social media firestorm. But the short version is: Someone from Turning Point USA, the campus right-wing network, quoted a student summarizing his concerns with affordability as “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.”

 

Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, a friend and colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, indirectly defended the current administration with some conventional Twitter mockery. “Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.”

 

Then the vice president made fun of Thiessen by calling him fat (which he isn’t), tweeting, “I’m surprised to hear Mark [sic] say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”

 

And with that, everyone was off to the races. I agree with the folks—Eric Erickson, Ben Shapiro, Geraghty, et al.—who pushed back on the claim that $20 burritos are really a thing. I mean, sure, they exist. But generally speaking, if you’re dropping Hamiltons like Aaron Burr on burritos, you’re either ordering some very rarefied burritos or you’re having $10 burritos delivered by DoorDash or Uber Eats.

 

Some have noted the awkwardness of the sitting vice president lending aid and comfort to the kids whining about “affordability,” given that “affordability” is a word, and concern, that Vance’s boss believes is a Democratic hoax. Weirder still: Trump’s policies are one of the major contributors to higher prices. You can support his anti-immigration efforts, in whole or in part, while still acknowledging that driving out cheap labor—the kind of labor that goes into making a lot of America’s burritos—isn’t helping affordability. Likewise, you can love his tariffs all you want, but I would love to see a serious argument for how they’ve made things like burritos cheaper. Ditto rising fuel costs. Oh, and then there’s the monetary theory. One funny irony: Generally speaking the same folks who ridiculed opponents of Trump’s Liberation Day fiasco—mocking people for thinking cheap stuff from China mattered—are now bitching about affordability. Remember it was Vance who said, “We believe that a million cheap knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.”

 

It’s absolutely true that the Biden era (and Trump’s first term before that) contributed to inflation significantly. I’m always surprised when people seem to think bringing the rate of inflation down means lowering the price of things. It doesn’t. A lower inflation rate is a decline in the rate of increase. Deflating prices—something we are not seeing, at least in the burrito sector—would mean lower prices. Barring deflation, what makes things more affordable is rising real wages. Things have been fairly meager on that front since Trump took office.

 

Now, if you’ve been following the burrito wars, you’ve heard all of this already. And if you haven’t, you don’t really need to hear any more, because this “civil war” isn’t about burritos or even affordability. It’s all about J.D. Vance.

 

You may have noticed in recent weeks that Vance and his surrogates have been jumping ugly on his critics lately. Indeed, Vance’s cheap insult of Thiessen was a counterpunch in response to a very tough column Thiessen wrote about Vance titled, “Trump’s Iran strategy is working. His vice president’s isn’t.”

 

Now, I didn’t love the column. I don’t think Trump’s Iran strategy is working. But I agree that Vance’s Iran strategy is worse and that Vance’s internal White House strategy is to undermine his boss. But my main objection to the column is that it falls perilously close to a mode of analysis I am very weary of: Donald Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed. We see a lot of this from some Republican senators who put the blame for Trump policies on unnamed subordinates giving the president “bad advice.” It’s a Trumpified version of the old “good czar, bad boyars” canard.

 

But none of that is particularly relevant. Marc was just the latest victim of the Vance team’s effort to silence any internal opposition to his capturing the 2028 nomination. Dan McLaughlin had an excellent piece on this at the end of last month, when Vance loyalists were flaying Rod Dreher for turning on Vance.

 

Vance wants a coronation, not a contest. Moreover, as Dan noted, for a certain segment of the right, there is no substitute for Vance. If you want someone—someone who can actually win the nomination at least—who champions postliberal, Orbánophilic, cultural and economic nationalism and statism, he’s your only choice. Tucker is not going to be your guy. Indeed, it wouldn’t shock me at all if Tucker’s thinking is to build up a base of ultra-MAGA supporters and then endorse or team up with Vance at some crucial moment. That might seem outlandish now, but the longer the Vance people go without training their vitriol on Tucker, the more plausible that scenario will seem.

 

Axios had a write-up of Vance’s war with his detractors. The piece wasn’t terrible, but the headline could have been written by Vance’s press team: “Pre-Trump GOP is coming for Vance.” Vance wants—needs—people to believe that the “MAGA revolution” is permanent, because if it is then he is the rightful heir to it. The first problem with the headline, and some of the analysis, is that it is Vance who turned on the pre-Trump GOP. He was one of them, felt the wind on his wet finger, and changed course. The second problem is that the author—and Vance’s surrogates—believe that MAGA is what they say it is. Marc Thiessen, Ben Shapiro, Rod Dreher, the late Lindsey Graham, et al. have not been “Never Trumpers” by any stretch for a very long time. Some have been pro-Trump longer than Vance himself. What makes them Vance’s enemies is that they don’t agree with him on various policies or accede to Vance’s sense of entitlement.

 

Vance’s theory of politics is that he needs to be the avatar of the Very Online populist right. His “big tent” is explicitly aimed at attracting the Nick Fuentes and Tucker crowd, while nightsticking the “neocons” out of the tent. Groups like TPUSA are his base, which is why he thought it wise to do his “hey fatso” schtick with Thiessen. And it’s why his surrogates piled on. From the New York Times:

 

An ally of the vice president said the columnist had it coming. “It’s neither appropriate nor constructive for self-described ‘Republican’ commentators like Marc Thiessen, who earns an absurd living promoting war after war on television, to use their platforms to dismiss the economic anxieties of young Americans,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a former Trump campaign aide.

 

He added: “I support elected officials who speak the truth. The vice president was right: Marc Thiessen appears to be severely obese. He should lay off the burritos.”

 

The idea that Bruesewitz is a champion of “truth-telling” politicians is transparent nonsense. Indeed, if he thinks it’s outrageous for Republicans to mock concerns about affordability, he’d be attacking Donald Trump, the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.

 

It’s also nonsense that Vance is a serious champion of affordability. His economic ideas are closer to Elizabeth Warren’s than they are to those of traditional conservatives, which is why he says so many silly things about GDP, Milton Friedman, etc. But that’s not why he ran to the defense of a kid whining about $20 burritos. He ran to his defense to bully a critic and to further secure the support of the whiners.

The Unwelcome Return of Sentimental Socialism

By Christine Rosen

Saturday, August 08, 2026

 

There are many ways of looking at the recent political successes of the Democratic Socialists of America. Thoughtful analysts have compared the DSA to the earlier Tea Party movement and the later rise of President Trump’s MAGA movement — groups that moved the GOP more firmly to the right, as the DSA is moving the Democratic Party to the left. Others have viewed young Americans’ positive views of socialism as a legitimate expression of concern about economic opportunity and social mobility that DSA candidates have cannily capitalized upon. Still others have noted the DSA’s skill in turning itself into a political movement with a very broad tent, where haters of Israel and haters of landlords can all peacefully coexist at the same hip pool parties and where embittered graduate students can mingle with content creators and children of wealth and privilege such as far-left streamer Hasan Piker, all while discussing the evils of late-stage capitalism.

 

But one aspect of the DSA’s appeal has been too often overlooked, particularly by conservative critics: its appeal as a form of instant community for a generation that often lacks one. DSA supporters are a highly homogenous group: 85 percent of DSA members are white, and 80 percent of them have college degrees. But it turns out that one of the things this knowledge-class proletariat is seeking (besides the abolition of prisons and the end of landlords) is . . . friends?

 

Reporting from the recent DSA summit, the New York Times noted that “for many of its members, the DSA is both a political and a social home.” One DSA leader told the paper that “the DSA fills the same social function for him that the Catholic Church played for his parents when they were in their 30s.” Another young DSA leader echoed the sentiment: “Our generation is so alienated — when you go to a canvas [canvassing for a political campaign], it’s a huge social affair.”

 

The Times found similar positive social impacts during Zohran Mamdani’s run for New York City mayor last year, describing Mamdani campaign events (which included organized scavenger hunts, board game nights, singles meetups, and crafting sessions where devotees made beaded bracelets spelling out “Zohran for NYC”) as “a salve” for young people suffering from anxiety. “It’s honestly what I would prescribe for the loneliness epidemic,” one Mamdani supporter said.

 

Socialism as a cure for loneliness might seem farcical (the jokes write themselves: You’re never alone in a bread line! etc., etc.). But paired with the DSA’s youthful and ironically hip aesthetic, it’s no wonder it’s proved to be an intoxicating brew for a population of young people grown weary of both established political parties. During the DSA summit, at a nearby dive bar, DSA acolytes “punched their fists in the air” and “formed a sea of sweatshirts that read ‘Red Hot Socialist Summer’” while a nearby socialist merch table hawked copies of The Communist Manifesto (which sold out).

 

Self-aware DSA types in the media often downplay the fact that DSA members are a rather privileged group. A recent piece in the New Yorker acknowledged that “they are indeed ‘privileged’ in the boring sense of that word,” as if being college-educated, living in gentrified neighborhoods in blue cities, and being economically not “particularly worse off than their boomer parents were at the same point in their lives” were irrelevant facts; Marx and Engels came from great wealth and privilege, after all. And so we are meant also to sympathize with the revolutionary tendencies of what the New Yorker describes as “a college-educated voter in her early thirties who isn’t making as much as she thought she would.” Why? Because “what matters isn’t so much the specific policies but rather the promise of upheaval.”

 

This would not be the first generation of youth to revel in such abstractions. The current iteration of socialism resembles an earlier movement: sentimental socialism. Described by British socialist Ernest Belfort Bax in 1884 as adherents of a type of “unscientific” socialism, 19th-century sentimental socialists share some similarities with their modern counterparts. Bax described them as “the young people of the well-to-do middle class” who “think human nature susceptible of higher aims than the current ones, and meet in drawing rooms for the apparent purpose of passing resolutions to that effect.” He found that “the sentimental Socialist desires above all things to be broad and comprehensive.”

 

Like today’s DSA supporters, sentimental socialists were motivated not by concerns for the working class, but by their own ennui: “The young men and women of our blasé middle-class civilization require a stimulus; this stimulus may be aesthetic, philanthropic, or social,” Bax noted. “It may consist in languishing vapouring on art, on improved dwellings, on social reconstruction.” Bax was a bit impatient with their navel-gazing complaints: “The whole movement is born of the morbid self-consciousness of our Christian and Bourgeois civilisation run to seed.”

 

Like sentimental socialists of old, the current crop of socialist youth, surrounded by others exactly like themselves and marinating in resentment about their circumstances, risks falling prey to what William James called the “sentimentalist fallacy,” or the tendency to “shed tears over abstract justice and generosity, beauty, etc. and never to know these qualities when you meet them in the street.” His example was “the weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside.” Today’s equivalent might be the Sey Coffee barista with a Ph.D. in post-colonial studies who is invested in seeing herself as downtrodden (while ignoring the genuinely struggling working-class people who surround her).

 

Writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, former Democratic congressman Daniel Lipinski tried to calm fears of a radical takeover of the Democratic Party by the DSA. He claimed “it is best to understand what is happening inside the Democratic Party today not as a widespread endorsement of the DSA platform, but more broadly as a protest by those fearful about the future and feeling betrayed by the perceived fecklessness of party leaders. Such emotions make fertile ground for demagogues.”

 

Today’s DSA demagogues-in-training already know this; the question is when their young followers, busy with their communal political gatherings and reveling in sentimental abstractions, will see how deeply cynical — and harmful to a free society — the political program they are supporting really is.

Is Anyone in Iran Willing to Accept Trump’s Surrender?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 07, 2026

 

Some have speculated that, when dealing with state terror sponsors with nuclear ambitions, Trump’s conduct of the war against Iran risks discrediting the military option. Well, at least in Trump’s case, it should.

 

Those doing the speculating would be hard-pressed to find an advocate for a muscular, extroverted American presence on the world stage who would endorse the president’s bipolar war-fighting strategy.

 

As any reasonable observer should be expected to concede (as evidence of his reasonableness, if nothing else), Operation Epic Fury was a tremendous tactical success. Even America’s failures — such as the shooting down of an F-15 Eagle — were a success, lest you believe that America’s adversaries take no notice of our ability to establish a forward-operating airbase deep inside Iran that successfully exfiltrated our airmen. Even if America’s adversaries are emboldened by the war’s strategic failures, no one can afford to ignore America’s unparalleled ability to project sustained and efficacious force anywhere on earth.

 

But if the war was a triumph, the cease-fire and all that it entailed was disastrous.

 

The cease-fire to which Trump agreed in early April should have lasted no more than a week. That was how long it took to conclude that the Iranians were not abiding by its terms. Moreover, the conditions that supposedly justify Trump’s hesitation are unpersuasive.

 

If the depth of America’s defensive ordnance magazines was a problem then, as it is now, they can be supplemented by offensive capabilities. After all, American offensive strikes had held Iranian missiles in check during high-tempo combat operations. If the Strait of Hormuz was going to be closed, as just about every war-game scenario projected (indeed, the U.S. opened the strait by force in the late 1980s), then Trump should have implemented his blockade of Iranian ports at the outset of hostilities.

 

But after the bombs stopped falling in April, the president swiftly revealed that the reason he wound down the campaign was not that the primary target list was exhausted and dual-use civilian infrastructure was about to be hit next. Rather, he’d simply had enough.

 

The so-called memorandum of understanding was designed to codify Washington’s quiescence — ceding much to the Iranians in return for parchment promises on which the Iranians themselves never delivered. But the remnants of the Islamic Republic were not content to allow the president to slink away. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ periodic strikes on shipping in the strait and civilian targets in the Gulf ultimately forced Trump to start shooting once again.

 

And yet, at no point did Trump resort to truly coercive measures. Instead, he opted to attrit Iranian capabilities, signaling both his indecision and his own reluctance to invite another encounter with his pain-tolerance threshold (Brent Crude at about $110 per barrel).

 

No one with an ounce of strategic sense would fight a war this way. And if Trump’s example discredits his on-again, off-again war fought with the smallest possible force posture — a conflict he sought without consulting the public, their representatives, or America’s treaty-bound allies — we should be grateful.

 

“Far from discovering a new way of war, Trump has merely discovered new ways to lose,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Kori Schake wrote for Foreign Affairs. Had the president observed the Powell Doctrine, she observed — e.g., deploying all state resources, including overwhelming and disproportionate force, in pursuit of clearly delineated objectives — Trump would have more options at his disposal and the IRGC would have fewer.

 

A “cataclysmic defeat” in Iran “is not yet inevitable,” Schake contended. But only an adversarial Congress can dissuade Trump now from sacrificing America’s vital strategic interests to extricate himself from the conflict he started. If the legislature has any intention of saving Trump and the country from the president’s cravenness, they had better act fast.

 

Officially, the Trump administration’s position is that it will oppose a deal that includes Iranian impediments to maritime traffic in the strait — “meaning no approvals or permissions and no tolls or charges,” as one U.S. official put it. But that is what the terms of an Iran-Oman deal would reportedly allow. The U.S. side of this equation hasn’t voiced any objections to that deal — not yet, at least. Even as Iran continues to fire on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and as Iran’s terrorist proxy in Yemen, the Houthi militia, menaces traffic entering the Red Sea — menacing Saudi and Western European assets alike — the president continues to broadcast nigh delusional optimism.

 

Perhaps the administration doesn’t want to get ahead of the negotiations, which might be wise. But the president and his allies are signaling their satisfaction with what are, as publicly reported, unacceptable conditions. Trump is telegraphing his desire to withdraw from the fight, even if that sacrifices America’s role as guarantor of free maritime navigation rights and sets the stage for future challenges to U.S. naval dominance by aggressors far more dangerous than the Islamic Republic.

 

The only ray of light piercing these dusky geopolitical clouds is the degree to which the Iranians, emboldened as they are, don’t seem willing to take yes for an answer.

 

The IRGC overplayed its hand in July, compelling Trump to withdraw the waivers that allowed Iran to sell its oil openly for U.S. dollars. That’s not an outcome the regime wanted, and the intra-regime tensions it caused quickly spilled out into the international press. Iranian negotiators are now reportedly pushing for a deal that would allow them to extort funds not just from incoming ships but also to impose that deal on Washington without Trump’s input. Flush with confidence, the IRGC will not allow Trump to save face.

 

The Iranians may have miscalculated just how much leverage they have over Trump. They’ve certainly misjudged his willingness to admit error, which is what Tehran seems to want. With luck, the Iranians’ obduracy will persuade the president not to give away America’s generational geostrategic heritage — if only because doing so would be too humiliating to bear.

 

As causes for optimism go, that’s not much. But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the president you’ve got.

In the Battleground States, Voters Like Their Economy More Than ‘the Economy’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 06, 2026

 

Navigator Research has released a new poll. It features answers from 1,500 likely 2026 voters, across 67 competitive congressional districts. Among its findings is this:

 

A majority (65%) rate the national economy negatively, including more than four-in-five independents.

 

That’s pretty disastrous stuff! It also found this:

 

High costs are having a direct and personal impact. More than a third (36%) say their personal financial situation is bad.

 

Hang on a moment. That’s a bit odd, no? Here are the full results:

 

 So 63 percent of respondents said that their “personal financial situation” is either “excellent” (11 percent) or “good” (51 percent) — up from 55 percent in May of this year; 64 percent of respondents said that their “personal financial situation” is “better” (15 percent) or “about the same” (49 percent) as it was “a few months ago”; and yet just 34 percent of respondents said that the economy is either “excellent” (5 percent) or “good” (29 percent).

 

I will confess to finding this confusing. One of the criticisms that I often leveled against Joe Biden — and have also leveled against Donald Trump — was that it is impossible to tell people that their financial situation is good when they do not think that it is. It simply does not work. People can see their receipts, their paychecks, their bank accounts, and so forth. They can see their bills. They know how much pizza cost last year relative to this year, or whether they feel secure in their obligations, or whether they are progressing toward their goals. Try as one might, one cannot fake consumer sentiment with happy talk or tell people that they are confident when they are not. If people say that their personal financial situation is a mess, it is fruitless to talk to them about “the economy” as an abstraction.

 

But what happens when those same people say that their personal financial situation is good, and yet remain convinced that, as a general matter, “the economy” is bad? In the Navigator Poll, 63 percent of those asked said that their finances were either “good” or “excellent,” but only 34 percent of those asked said that the economy was “good” or “excellent.” Surely, if one is to remain consistent, then one ought to consider the first answer much more important than the second? It is true, of course, that people’s perception of “the economy” is more than just their own finances. But it shouldn’t be so much more that we see a gap of that size.

 

Ultimately, the economy is the people. If 63 percent of Americans said that their personal financial situation was “not so good” or “poor” but only 34 percent said “the economy” was bad, we’d be shocked, right? We’d say that the economy “wasn’t working for real people”? We’d say that the statistics were useless or fake. Well, shouldn’t we be shocked here, too? And shouldn’t we perhaps reconsider whether the economy is good or bad? Ronald Reagan famously asked, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” He didn’t ask, “is your vague conception of ‘the economy’ more positive than it was four years ago?”

 

Within a democratic system such as ours, it presents something of a problem when nearly two-thirds of the public says that their situation is good or excellent, but just one-third of the public says that the economy is good or excellent. It’s almost as if they’re answering a different question . . .

A Foreseeable and Dire Munitions Crisis

By Rich Lowry

Saturday, August 08, 2026

 

During the 1979–1980 hostage crisis, a defiant Iran starkly demonstrated the limits of American power.

 

Forty-five years later, it is doing the same thing, although in vastly different circumstances.

 

Back then, when the post-Vietnam military was at a low ebb, we didn’t strike Iran, and a long-shot rescue operation ended in abject failure.

 

Now, with the U.S. military at its most proficient and professional in history, we have inflicted punishing blows against the regime but still haven’t been able to impose our will, in part because we are running low on the munitions necessary to prosecute the war.

 

Not only is this embarrassing, it is dangerous.

 

If Operation Midnight Hammer — last year’s lightning strike against Iranian nuclear facilities — demonstrated the prowess of the U.S. military and sent a useful deterrent message to our enemies, the Iran war is now doing the opposite.

 

We’re running low on missiles and interceptors in a monthslong conflict with a beleaguered second-rate power. What would happen in drawn-out war with a major adversary?

 

President Trump has posted a thunderous denunciation of leaks to the media about our depleted weapons stocks, and they are indeed irresponsible. But this problem is a matter of public record and has been tracked by outside organizations.

 

At the end of July, the think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated that out of an arsenal of 2,330 Patriot interceptors before the Iran war, we had roughly 800 remaining. We were down to roughly 250 THAAD interceptors from 450 of the ballistic-missile interceptors at the start of the war.

 

On top of this, news organizations are reporting that we are almost out of ATACMS — a ground-launched precision-strike missile — and Precision Strike Missiles, the newer, longer-range successor to ATACMS.

 

This isn’t comforting at a time when a war with China could be in the offing. Even before Operation Epic Fury, a war game involving a conflict in the Taiwan Strait conducted by CSIS had the U.S. running out of key munitions in days or weeks.

 

What happened? This is a crisis a long time in the making. As defense analyst Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute has warned for years, skimping on the acquisition of munitions was an easy way to meet constrained Pentagon budgets, and we relied on optimistic scenarios about potential wars to justify chronically insufficient production.

 

For some understandable reasons, we also emphasized sophisticated missiles and interceptors over “good enough” systems. This led to Iran, for instance, forcing us to use highly expensive, difficult-to-replace interceptors against cheap, bulk threats from drones.

 

All this means that we’ve expended ordnance that will take us years to build again. According to media reports, we’ve used about half our supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles, when we’ve been manufacturing fewer than 100 a year.

 

We need to put missile production on a wartime footing and leverage hungry new defense firms to produce cheaper precision missiles and interceptors at scale.

 

In World War II terms, it’s the difference between the easy-to-maintain and mass-produce Sherman tank and the exquisite and powerful, but ultimately impractical, Tiger. Whatever advantages the Tiger had in armor and punch, you’d still rather be the U.S. with 50,000 Shermans than the Germans with 1,500 Tigers.

 

The Trump administration has been talking the right game, and there have been encouraging moves. It has signed agreements to acquire 10,000 cruise missiles over three years at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars each, far less than a Tomahawk at more than $2 million.

 

Wars always bring surprises. It should have been a shock to no one, though, that contemporary military conflict is largely missile warfare, or that we’d have trouble sustaining prolonged hostilities given that we started out with inadequate stocks.

 

The American way of warfare is often to mess it up before adjusting and getting it right. The course correction here should be considered the most urgent priority of U.S. national security.

When Does the Democratic Establishment Just Throw Up Its Hands?

By Judson Berger

Friday, August 07, 2026

 

Dark days have fallen on the Democratic establishment.

 

At official headquarters, DNC Chairman Ken Martin is in “survival mode,” the AP reports, avoiding media appearances amid fundraising woes and calls for his ouster. The organization’s troubles keep getting featured in the New York Times (with details Jeff Blehar says point to a party in crisis). Socialists are winning primaries and flexing muscle, amid lingering consternation over the DNC’s misbegotten 2024 “autopsy.”

 

It is perhaps an added cruelty, then, that the Midwest, the region Martin calls home, is the site of the party’s latest trials and humiliations. In Michigan this week, the radical Abdul El-Sayed narrowly pulled off a victory over establishment choice Haley Stevens in the hard-fought primary race for Senate. From National Review’s editorial:

 

His win is an ill omen for the current direction of the Democratic Party — and a terrible development for Michiganders and Americans alike — but an enormous and deeply symbolic victory for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

 

As Jeff wrote ahead of the result (which ended up being closer than expected), the coming general election battle will be competitive, despite President Trump’s unpopularity, “because Detroit cares a lot more about the fate of the auto industry than it does the fate of Gaza.” Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, is by no means a lock but says he is confident he can break Democrats’ 25-year hold on Senate seats in the state.

 

“The crazy train has arrived in Michigan, and AOC is the engineer, and Bernie Sanders throws coal in the fire, and my opponents, with all of their endorsements are riding that train. It’s just not who we are here,” the candidate said in an interview with NR’s Kamden Mulder.

 

Then again, as the editorial cautions, “the problem with a major political party losing its mind is that a goodly number of the candidates it nominates will, if the circumstances are right, make it into office.” Either way, Michigan is now critical for the GOP’s hopes of holding onto the chamber.

 

While El-Sayed has denied he’s a socialist, Kamden notes he’s been outspoken about far-left beliefs:

 

He supports abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, expresses anti-Israeli sentiments, and wants to end the Senate filibuster. He also supports Medicare for All, which is one of his most talked-about issues — aside from Israel — with supporters on the campaign trail.

 

El-Sayed’s rhetoric is out of step with the more moderate stances of his [now-defeated primary] opponent, and many establishment Democrats in the state.

 

That’s just Michigan. Wisconsin is up next, with a gubernatorial primary next week that, in the words of NR’s editorial, could mark the return of so-called sewer socialism, but worse. Again, the establishment is in danger of being steamrolled:

 

Marquette’s latest polling for the state’s gubernatorial race, published on July 29, has Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong at 38 percent, 22 points in front of second-place Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor who lost a Senate race against Ron Johnson and just dropped out. Wisconsin’s Democratic leadership prefers the third-place David Crowley (7 percent), the current Milwaukee County executive. Governor Tony Evers endorsed Crowley after his lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, also withdrew from the race because of gross financial mismanagement. The single primary debate saw Hong go unchallenged while Barnes and Crowley did yeoman’s work convincing viewers that neither of them is up to the job.

 

In short, the field is a mess in Wisconsin’s Democratic race, with voters now “seriously considering a journalism dropout” and holiday-hating weirdo in Francesca Hong, despite the party’s historical success with more boring candidates, as was the case in Michigan for years.

 

Primary voters are making ever-riskier bets, and by all indications, party leaders cannot do a thing about it.