The Coming Post-Trump Reality

The Dispatch Editors

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

History has a way of surprising you.

 

When this publication launched in October 2019, we announced our intention to set a journalistic course distinct from that of our competitors, both in the so-called mainstream media and in the partisan and ideological press, regarding the biggest story of the day. Our animating spirit was to be neither perfervidly pro-Trump nor neurotically anti-Trump but cheerfully and soberly post-Trump, ready to focus on the many important facets of this American life not dominated by the eccentric principal resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, whose retirement then seemed incipient.

 

We were premature.

 

The country, of course, endured the shameful events of January 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s risible attempts to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election, and, in 2024, his unlikely comeback from disgrace and exile—surely aided by both the excesses and incompetence of former President Joe Biden and his administration. But now, as we approach November’s midterm elections, we are cautiously hopeful that we are within spitting distance of the end of the Trump era.

 

If we are correct in that hope, the federal and state elections that take place eight weeks from today will signal the start of a transition to what could be a new era. Much can happen in two months of politics in this goldfish-memory era, and we have no illusions about the ugliness ahead. Partisan Republicans will spend their days insisting that the republic will end if the walking scandal that is Ken Paxton, a singular disgrace even among the rising class of profoundly dishonorable public servants, loses a GOP-held Senate seat in Texas and, with it, perhaps, the GOP majority in the upper chamber. Too many Democrats, meanwhile, will rally behind the radical anti-Americanism of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, shrugging off his persistent antisemitism and association with unapologetic terrorist sympathizers, just as they eagerly dismissed the Nazi tattoo and casual misogyny of Graham Platner in Maine until electoral, rather than moral, considerations ensured his defenestration.

 

At least from this temporal distance, it looks like much of the country seems prepared, finally, to reject the frivolity and depravity of Trumpism and its namesake. Democrats have opposed Trump from the beginning, of course. Many independents who once supported the president have turned on him. Most worrisome for the White House, and encouraging to us, are the Republicans who have had enough. To be sure, Trump still enjoys the backing of a substantial majority of his party and, as we’ve seen, his influence in GOP primaries remains. But his support among Republicans is slipping, in both breadth and intensity. Recent polling suggests that nearly half of the non-MAGA GOP, a substantial minority of the party, disapproves of his job performance. Even among Republicans who say they back the president, the number who strongly approve has been tanking. And yet Trump, obtuse and obstinate as ever, wants the midterms to be all about him.

 

Whatever the election brings, three things are true: Trump is broadly unpopular, he will soon be a lame duck, and, at some point, the Trump era will come to an end. So now is the time to contemplate in earnest what decisions Americans must face in that new era, and whose vision for confronting the existential problems these United States face will win out.

 

Consider: The federal government is headed for a fiscal crisis. Just last month the federal debt surpassed $40 trillion, and this year, interest payments on that debt will reach their highest shares of both GDP and federal tax revenue in the country’s history. Interest payments alone are a bigger expenditure than national defense. The debt has more than doubled since the end of the 2016 fiscal year, from $19 trillion. Out-of-control deficits and compounding entitlement liabilities drive that incomprehensible debt, and fixing this mess is not something the U.S. can simply “grow our way out of,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently claimed.  

 

Or consider how the U.S.’s position in the world is much diminished. This has come principally by Trump’s dishonorable attacks on NATO and other long-standing democratic allies, his aimless and dashed-off war in Iran, and by his destructive tariff war on low prices and flexible supply chains (attacks that have more than a little in common with the “economic patriotism” championed by Barack Obama and many contemporary progressives, whose ideas about national security and trade are nearly as wrongheaded as Trump’s).

 

Trump’s national security intellectuals—a term we use advisedly, given that some of his advisers are not intellectuals and some of his intellectuals seem shockingly unmotivated to bolster national security—insist that the administration is realistically adjusting to an era of great power, multipolar rivalries, and the need to maintain what some have called “spheres of influence.” This sophisticated theorizing has given us the “Donroe” Doctrine and “Lake America.” The truth is the theorizing is little more than gauzy window dressing on Trump’s impulses.

 

We would criticize the Democrats’ theories on national security too, but aside from reflexively opposing Trump and welcoming “anti-Zionists” into their tent, we have no idea what the Democratic understanding of foreign policy might be.

 

Regardless, for reasons partly attributable to Trump, but also for reasons long in the making, the world we face today is vastly more dangerous than the one America faced at the end of the Cold War. Ironically, that time of peace and prosperity, purchased with decades of perseverance and sacrifice, seems to arouse scorn from both left and right. It is apparently preferable to enjoy the luxury of denouncing an era of American “empire” in the rearview mirror than to ask how we might once again make the world safer for America, and more peaceful and prosperous in general, by providing global leadership.   

 

Addressing these crises—foreign and domestic—will require making difficult, unpopular decisions at a time when most politicians want easy sound bites instead. Some of those decisions, principally in foreign policy, will require more spending. Rearming our depleted armed forces and outfitting them to face the challenges presented by China, Russia, et al., is one such example. Other decisions, such as reforming the entitlements now bankrupting the country, demand real and painful fiscal discipline. Making these choices will require the kind of long-term, consensus-oriented program that Washington has shown no talent or appetite for in recent years, and any worthwhile program of reform will necessitate painful trade-offs that will leave precisely no one satisfied or unscathed.

 

But even less tractable than fiscal or foreign policy is the deeper cultural decay at the heart of our political dysfunction that has many Americans turning to a particularly ugly form of tribalistic politics as a kind of ersatz religion, a source of community and meaning. If we have a crisis of political leadership—and we do—we also have a terrifying crisis of American citizenship. Our decline is the product of countless choices at every level of society. Leaders of institutions surrender to the vibes and zeitgeist, dashing out of their lanes and roles to perform for their own aggrandizement or protect their own interests. Politicians, educators, public health officials, businessmen, clergy, philanthropists, and journalists certainly have particular responsibilities in all this, but so do we all. When the people do not demand better, they should not expect to get anything good.

 

These facts underscore the necessity of returning to a commitment to limiting the size and scope of the government’s influence in our daily lives. That principle is embedded in the gift the Founding Fathers left to us: a remarkably intelligent and adaptive constitutional architecture with which to organize our response to these challenges. That constitutional structure was designed to constrain power, to frustrate the ability of any one ideologue or iconoclast to wield the power and purse of the state like a foolish college student wields his father’s credit card and good name.

 

But there is no denying that the country no longer has a major political party devoted to limiting the size and scope of government. Broadly speaking, Republicans insist they care deeply about fiscal sanity and strong national defense. The message of the Democrats, meanwhile, is that budgetary discipline is unnecessary while national defense is a luxury we cannot afford. We are often chastised for our “both-sides-ism.” Well, we can at least say this much: The difference between these two messages is that the Republicans are right, but they are lying; the Democrats are at least honest, but they are wrong.

 

Democrats, of course, have long been the party of big government—from the New Deal through the Great Society—appealing to voters by promising government programs available to help at virtually every stage of our time on this earth. Remember, Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia?” Or Joe Biden’s shameless ploy to shift the burden of billions in student loans from those who took them out to American taxpayers? Now, while the Democratic Socialists of America and affiliated radicals enjoying a surging—but not unchallenged—ascendence in the Democratic Party, those same impulses live on in renewed pushes for Medicare for all, pledges to freeze rents, and promises of “free” universal childcare. Nothing new here.

 

For most of the past half-century, meanwhile, Republicans have promised voters they would be the party of limited government, through the Reagan presidency and the Gingrich and Tea Party congressional victories in 1994 and 2010, respectively. But in the decade since Trump was first elected, the country has seen an unmistakable trend toward expanding government.

 

Sure, there was DOGE, the ill-conceived and poorly executed Elon Musk effort to make the federal government more “efficient” at the beginning of Trump’s second term. But despite the administration’s absurd promises and Musk’s cringey showmanship, the actual savings of the effort were minimal. All the while, the president has declared that the entitlements driving our debt would largely be protected from cost-cutting reforms.

 

Instead, MAGA Republicans use government power to achieve their own preferred ends. While populist Republicans have warned of the creeping socialism among Democrats, they’ve cheered a president whose administration has taken stakes in 32 private companies, including a just-announced plan of dubious legality that would have taxpayers funding a Pentagon-led ownership of large swaths of the Venezuelan oil industry. Trump has also advocated public equity stakes in the technology companies driving American development of artificial intelligence—a proposal that in many respects mirrors one put forward by socialist Bernie Sanders.

 

Any talk among members of the Trump-era Republican Party of constraining government seems not to apply to the ones currently running the government.

 

All that is to say nothing of the rampant corruption within the Trump administration itself, which, on the matter of mere ordinary financial corruption alone, is without precedent in American history. Whether it’s the president cashing in on his cryptocurrency business to the tune of 11 figures, the way the aforementioned stakes in private companies benefit the president’s own family, or how the administration’s foreign policy seems to line the pockets of both Trump and his friends, this is an administration that manages to do three times a week something that would have resulted in an impeachment in more sober and self-respecting times.

 

So, in 20 years, will we look back on the Trump era as a parenthetical aberration or as the front-page headline announcing the arrival of something new, enduring, and ghastly—something alien to the best of our traditions and principles?

 

As our own Jonah Goldberg has observed, a two-party system cannot have a single sane political party: It will have two reasonably responsible and sober parties, or it will have two irresponsible and demagogic parties. At this moment, it may seem we are headed for the double-basketcase scenario rather than for a return to our senses.

 

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are sane and serious people in both parties. What the good people lack is either the incentives or the courage to take a stand. They tell themselves, not without reason, that it is better to work within the current dysfunction to make small improvements and prevent large disasters, biding their time like Christians in the catacombs of Rome for the opportunity to emerge and preach the secular gospel of political sanity.

 

Now is that time. The Trump era is ending, and that ending brings an appetite and a political opportunity.

 

We understand that even the best people find it difficult to work across the party line, to extend trust across that line, or even to see that authentic fellow Americans could even live on the other side of that line. But the contest now before us is not the extremists vs. the moderates so much as it is the grasping nihilists on either end of the political horseshoe against those exhausted and dispirited citizens in the horseshoe’s bend—those who still cling to decency, intelligence, prudence, good citizenship, neighborliness, and a rigorous commitment to dealing with the actual facts of the world, however inconvenient they may be.

 

As Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg made clear in this institution’s founding manifesto, The Dispatch has never attempted to force into existence a new great awakening of republican virtue. As journalists, our role in public life is simply to try to describe what is going on in the world and to host arguments about what to do about it. Nor do we pretend to a position of Olympian detachment and objectivity. We have seen some things, and we have reasoned judgments about what we have seen.

 

Nor is this a manifesto for some kind of No Labels-style centrism and bipartisanship. The times call for stronger stuff: If they mean only staying within the Venn overlap between MAGA and the DSA—and there is more overlap than you might think—then the cause will be lost even before the battle begins. What we need now are policies that call America back to fiscal discipline, advance faith in America’s ability to be a force for good around the globe, and that hold the rule of law and individual liberty as sacrosanct.

 

There are no ironclad laws of politics or history, but if there were one, it would be this: When responsible actors refuse to deal with legitimate issues responsibly, irresponsible actors will fill the vacuum and deal with them irresponsibly. Look to the last 10 years for proof of this. Why has the president felt so free to do the rampant self-dealing since returning to the White House last year? “Because I found out nobody cared,” he told New York Times reporters early this year.

 

So as reporters and commentators and publishers, as fathers and mothers, as voters and public officials, as members of religious congregations, as operators of businesses—as citizens participating in the glorious variety of American life—we have, to an extraordinary and often unappreciated degree, the power to make of our public life whatever we choose to make of it.

 

Whether we adorn our choices in blue or red, we can have more crises and convulsions, more rage and more monetization of rage, more ad-hocracy and mobbery and profligacy. Or we can have something better. We are not ready to entertain airy thoughts about national renewal or a renaissance of republican virtue, as happy as these things are to contemplate. We are talking about the grubby, difficult details of governance required of leaders in a republic: getting the deficit down to a manageable level, shoring up the rule of law against the forces of anarchy and predation, and talking to the American people like grown-ups rather than pandering to them like they’re angry, aggrieved teenagers.

 

That would be, at least, a start.

 

There is much that is good and admirable and inspiring and worth celebrating in America today. We have vast reserves of decency and ingenuity in this country that could be tapped if we could just clear the rust from the gears. We should be grateful for these resources and what they have accomplished, from the consistent improvements in material living conditions worldwide to wondrous technological and medical innovations led—for good reason—by American businesses, American workers, American scientists, American universities, American cities, and the capacious, audacious American spirit. We do not know what comes next, but we know that the power to decide what comes next is in the hands of the only people on this Earth who have ever raised their flag on the moon. In that, at least, we find reason for hope—sober hope—at the end of a long, vicious, squandered decade.

How Vasily Grossman Made Darkness Visible

By Gary Saul Morson

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

Vasily Grossman, the Russian-Jewish writer best known for the 1959 novel titled Life and Fate, has that book’s protagonist, Viktor Shtrum, express the view that the USSR is remarkably similar to its mortal enemy, Nazi Germany. Both are one-party states; both use unlimited violence against their own people; both suppress all disagreement; both rewrite the past whenever it suits them; and both maintain concentration camps on a vast scale. Still worse, they both regard some people as enemies not because of anything they had done, or even thought, but simply because of their ancestry.

 

In Germany, Jewishness earned a sentence to Auschwitz or Treblinka; in Stalinist Russia, the Gulag consumed those who belonged to the wrong social class. It makes no difference, Shtrum reflects, whether a person is good or bad, gifted or stupid, loyal or disloyal:

 

Hitler says none of that matters—all that matters is that they’re Jewish. And I protest with my whole being. But then we have the same principle: what matters is whether or not you’re the son of an aristocrat, the son of a merchant, the son of a kulak…. And we’re not talking about the merchants, priests, and aristocrats themselves—but about their children and grandchildren. Does noble blood run in one’s veins like Jewishness? Is one a priest or a merchant by heredity? Nonsense!

 

For Grossman, Marxism was racism by class. And it was also simple racism, which is to say discrimination by race, since Stalin purged whole nationalities by deporting them to uninhabitable wastelands. As a rule, half the transported perished, either during the journey or in the harsh conditions of their new home. Life and Fate is set in the period during which Stalin began to go after Jews specifically; it was only his death in 1953 that saved the Jews from mass deportation to Soviet Asia. Jews were condemned for “rootless cosmopolitanism,” and Jewishness became a badge of dishonor: In Grossman’s novel, Shtrum is informed that his discoveries in nuclear physics “stink of Judaism.”

 

Unsurprisingly, Grossman was not permitted to publish Life and Fate. He died in 1964; dissidents succeeded in smuggling the text out, and when it was published in English in 1980, it was immediately recognized as one of the greatest books of the century. But his career did not follow the path of dissident writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was never imprisoned for his writings and opinions. In fact, he had a successful career and was best known for his novels about World War II and his wartime journalism. As Robert and Elizabeth Chandler note in their splendid collection just published by New York Review Books, From the Front Line: Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin, 1941–1945, the Soviets spent enormous resources on journalism and fiction intended primarily for Red Army soldiers—a testament to Russia’s unrivaled emphasis on the importance of literature. More than 1,500 newspapers and periodicals, employing some 5,000 full-time journalists, were produced for the army, and soldiers read Grossman’s articles and his novel The People Immortal to shreds. (The Chandlers released a translation of that novel, also with New York Review Books, four years ago.)

 

Unlike other journalists, who played it safe, Grossman went to the most dangerous places to interview soldiers under fire. He produced 49 articles about the war, from its first days after the Nazis broke their peace pact with the Soviets and took city after city in an overwhelming onslaught, all the way to the fall of Berlin. Early in the war, his editor gave him two months off to write The People Immortal. Taken together, the novel and articles offer a remarkably powerful portrait of the war as Russians experienced it—and as Jews suffered it.

 

Grossman was the first person on this earth to report on the Holocaust, in part because the Soviet liberation of parts of Poland in 1944 led to Russia’s discovery of the death camps earlier than the other allied nations’. In two remarkable articles, “Ukraine Without Jews” and “The Hell of Treblinka,” he offered a harrowing picture along with disturbing reflections on what had happened. I thought I was well acquainted with the facts of the Holocaust, but Grossman’s detailed descriptions based on interviews of survivors and the Soviet troops who pushed the Germans out still shocked me.

 

Shortly after the German defeat at Stalingrad, Grossman observes, Heinrich Himmler visited Treblinka and ordered the construction of crematoria to destroy the evidence of mass murder. Experts supervised the excavation of a pit, about 250 to 300 meters long, 20 to 25 meters wide, and 6 meters deep, to house a giant grill for burning corpses; soon afterward, two more such grill pits were built. Each could incinerate about 4,000 corpses at a time. More than 800 prisoners—“more than the number of workers employed in the furnaces of even the hugest iron and steel plants”—were made to assist in the mass cremations. “This monstrous workshop operated day and night for eight months, without interruption,” Grossman explains, “yet it still could not cope with the millions of human bodies,” inasmuch as trains were still bringing more and more Jews.

 

But that was not the worst of it. The Germans “singled out for particular torment those who had participated in the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto.” These survivors of the great and tragic stand in 1943 were not gassed and then burned, like other Jews; they were instead taken straight to the grill pits and burned alive.

 

Mothers crazed with horror were forced to lead their children on to the red-hot grill where . . . corpses tossed and turned as if they had come back to life again, where the bellies of women who had been pregnant burst from the heat and babies killed before birth were burning in open wombs. Such a spectacle was enough to rob the most hardened man of his reason, but its effect—as the Germans well knew—was a hundred times greater on a mother struggling to keep her children from seeing it. The children clung to their mothers and shrieked, “Mama, what are they going to do to us? Are they going to burn us?” Not even Dante in his Hell saw scenes like this.

 

For the guards, it all made a diverting spectacle. “Sometimes the SS organized a kind of picnic by the grill pits; they would sit upwind from them, eat, drink wine, and watch the flames.” “Sit upwind”: This detail illustrates Grossman’s technique of first shocking readers with a description and then leading them to imagine still more. What was that smell like that the SS men were avoiding? Horror hinted at magnifies horror expressed.

 

All the same, Grossman seems to despair at the inadequacy of received forms of expression to what he witnessed. The destruction of Jews in countless destroyed Ukrainian villages forms the central theme of “Ukraine Without Jews.” What most shocks Grossman is what he does not see and the sounds he does not hear. No trace of recently abundant Jewish life remains: “The Jews of Ukraine are silent. There are no Jews in Ukraine. Not in a single city, nor even in one of Ukraine’s hundreds of shtetls or thousands of villages, will you see the dark little face of a hungry Jewish boy or the dark, tear-filled eyes of a small Jewish girl; nowhere will you hear the slow, sorrowful voice of an old Jewish woman. Stillness. Silence.”

 

Stalin is supposed to have observed that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic. The artistic problem facing Grossman was the same that confronted Solzhenitsyn in his descriptions of the Gulag: how to reveal the horror behind the numbers.

 

The Mishnah tells us that whoever destroys a single life destroys a world, and whoever saves a life saves a world. Grossman wants us to imagine whole worlds destroyed, one after another—each world distinct, each infinitely precious, each lost forever. To do so, he lists the many occupations of the murdered: “Tailors, hatmakers, cobblers, tinsmiths, jewelers, housepainters, furriers, and book binders—have been murdered; porters, mechanics, electricians . . . have been murdered; millers, bakers, cooks, and water-carriers have been murdered; doctors, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists and physiotherapists have been murdered.” The list goes on for a page. Occupations are just one way to imagine lost lives: “Grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake tasty bread, who could cook chicken soup and make apple strudel with walnuts, have been murdered; grandmothers unable to do anything except love their children and grandchildren have been murdered; women always faithful to their husbands have been murdered, and so have frivolous women; beautiful young women, jolly schoolgirls, and serious woman students have been murdered;… the blind and deaf-mute have been murdered;…. two-year-old and three-year-old children have been murdered; eighty-year-old men with eyes clouded with cataracts…newborn babies sucking at their mothers’ breast until their last moment have been murdered.” And that’s not the whole of it: It is not just individuals who have been murdered but a whole people, a faith, a tradition.

 

No list can do justice to so many worlds destroyed. As Grossman observes, we grow numb. “Man gets used to everything, the scoundrel!” declares the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The real story of “Ukraine Without Jews,” we come to realize, concerns the author’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring home to the reader what he has seen. He reflects on his struggle for adequate expression:

 

Human consciousness is constructed in such an unfortunate—or perhaps fortunate—manner that when someone reads or hears about the death of millions of people, they simply cannot grasp what has happened. They cannot imagine it; they cannot take in the depth of the tragedy. Someone who… chances to witness a truck crushing an eight-year-old child may feel shaken for the next few days…. But no one is endowed with the power and sensitivity of mind and soul to comprehend—from books and newspapers—the full horror of what is now taking place in the world.

 

As Grossman never forgot, something comparable had taken place in the USSR in the previous decade, when several million peasants, mostly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, were deliberately starved to death during the collectivization of agriculture. In his last novel, Forever Flowing—also unpublishable in his homeland—one character attempts to evoke what mass slow starvation means. Like the Jews murdered by the Nazis, these doomed peasants had done nothing whatever to merit their fate.

 

***

 

Throughout his writing career, Grossman struggled to put as much as he could into words, to stretch the boundaries of what was expressible. Of course, even under Khrushchev, the Soviets would never have allowed Stalin’s worst crimes to be mentioned. Grossman was also well aware that there was no point in trying to report the mass rapes and sadistic murders of civilians, not only in Berlin but even in Allied countries reached by the Red Army. No less obviously was it impossible to mention the “blocking detachments”: machine gunners placed behind advancing Soviet soldiers ready to mow them down should they try to retreat. Above all, he could not remind readers that during the first third of the war, the USSR was in effect an ally of Nazi Germany.

 

All this makes sense, but what reason could there be for the limits the censors placed on Grossman’s account of Nazi crimes? Why not use them all for propaganda? For one thing, honest reporting would have entailed describing the many Ukrainians who helped the Nazis murder Jews, a fact unacceptable not only because the regime wanted to describe all Soviet citizens as united in their hatred of fascism but also because of another truth that had to be obscured. Readers might wonder why so many Ukrainians volunteered to help the Germans destroy the USSR, and the regime could not allow them to know that this was so because of the mass-starvation campaign. It was also hard to report on the Nazi destruction of Jews because official policy demanded that one not “divide the dead” by mentioning that Jews were treated differently from anyone else. The regime preferred accusations of Nazi atrocities against undifferentiated “Soviet Citizens.”

 

In their versions of Grossman’s journalism and The People Immortal, the Chandlers, to reveal his difficulties in saying what he wished, include notes explaining what was omitted, either by editors or by the prudent Grossman himself. They did the same thing in their translation of Grossman’s novel Stalingrad, which went through several changes as the Party line altered. First Grossman had to please Stalin, and then Stalin’s detractor Khrushchev! The Chandlers’ edition allows one to see the text as a kind of palimpsest, with different versions showing through. I know of no other translation of Soviet literature that makes such a detailed reconstruction possible.

 

The omissions to which the Chandlers call attention are themselves instructive. Grossman ended an article on a soldier named Vlasov by saying that “such a figure, I believe, deserves to be called a great man.” This sentence was deleted, for there could be only one great man in Stalin’s USSR. Also censored was Grossman’s observation that “hatred of the Jews became a furnace: it brought the flames of the Fascist conflagration to their greatest intensity.” This judgment both contradicted Marxist theories of historical causation and placed too much emphasis on the Jews. By the same token, when Grossman observed that Soviet principles “entail respect for Polish property and the independence of the Polish nation,” he may have been trying to convince authorities to endorse such principles, but they already knew what they planned to do with Poland, so the sentence was dropped. Perhaps most interesting is that Grossman’s mention of the fall of Paris had to be excised because the event took place during the Hitler-Stalin pact and so might call attention to the deal Stalin wanted the Soviet populace to forget.

 

Grossman did his best to write truthfully. When he was criticized for not reporting on the heroic defense of the city of Oriol, he countered daringly that there was no such defense. The Chandlers’ notes explain that Grossman’s editors not only omitted mention of defeats that might dim morale, they also added approved clichés, like “the great [Soviet] army now driving away and annihilating hordes of invaders.” Most Americans are unaware of the difficulties that experts on Soviet literature often face when trying to read through additions and omissions, censorship and self-censorship, to determine the author’s real intention. Often enough, when self-censorship haunted creative work from beginning to end, the author himself did not know.

 

Grossman once remarked that his reporting and novel were so popular not because they were so good but because everything else on offer was so awful. In his notebooks he quotes the kind of bilge published in Soviet military newspapers: “The severely battered enemy continued his cowardly advance.” Soldiers detected such absurdities and, Grossman reports, circulated a parody: “Ivan Pupkin killed five Germans with a spoon.”

 

For Grossman, literature, like all forms of creative work, demands independent thinking. One cannot create anything of value to order and according to formula, as official socialist realism demanded. This year the Party needs novels about industrialization! In Life and Fate, Shtrum refuses to think along approved lines. He hits upon a great scientific discovery shortly after a daring conversation in which he and his interlocutor fearlessly explore forbidden ideas. When he returns to physics, still in a mood of free intellectual play, he is at last able to get beyond the puzzling experimental data to see something deeper.

 

The new theory was not derived [only] from experience. Viktor could see that quite clearly. It had arisen in absolute freedom; it had sprung from his own head…. The theory had sprung from the free play of thought…. The experiments had been merely a jolt that had forced him to start thinking.

 

“Free play of thought” is precisely what collectivist Stalinism was designed to abort. Socialist realist literature frequently told the story of how a dedicated but naive Communist learns to overcome his “spontaneity”—his individual ideas—and instead embraces “consciousness,” the infallible direction of the Party, which possesses the scientific laws of history. The young man must learn to submit to authority and not think for himself. Nothing could have been further from Grossman’s way of looking at things, and we can appreciate the central drama of his creative life as negotiating the conflict between official conformity and creative energy.

 

In a somewhat disguised form, that conflict informs a core story in The People Immortal. Bogariov, the novel’s hero, reeducates another officer, Mertsalov, who has all the right qualities except the ability to think for himself. Having earned the country’s highest honor, Hero of the Soviet Union, in the 1940 war with Finland, Mertsalov is surprised when Bogariov reproaches him for wanting to charge heroically at enemy lines when he should have been considering what action would be most effective. It comes as a shock to Mertsalov that he is to think on his own, all the more so because staying at his command post to plan flatly contradicts official Order 270.

 

“‘Dead husks and shells are the enemy of thought,’ [Bogariov] would sometimes say to himself, as he struggled to let go of some long-held view,” Grossman writes. In the novel’s pivotal scene, Mertsalov takes Bogariov’s lesson to heart and experiences a flash of inspiration:

 

And suddenly it was as if his heart and mind, everything inside him, were illuminated by a bright joyful light. An extraordinarily simple and mathematically irrefutable solution flashed into his mind.

 

This flash resembles the one Shtrum experiences in Life and Fate:

 

A mathematician or physicist is often overwhelmed in the first stage of his research by the complex and obstinate contradictions he has discovered in some apparently simple and ordinary phenomenon. He struggles to reconcile the various elements. . . . And then, as a reward for this arduous work of analysis, a clear and simple thought unexpectedly dawns on him, dispelling all confusion and complexity and yielding the only correct, astonishingly simple and irrefutable solution. This moment is what we call creative thinking.

 

Never had Mertsalov experienced such joy. When he outlines his plan, his subordinate warns him that it goes against official orders. “‘What of it?’ Mertsalov replied. ‘Remember Babadjanian’s words: the only norm I know is victory.’” Part of this scene was omitted from the published version.

 

Mertsalov’s plan contradicts Order 270 in more than one way. If the plan should fail, consequences would be dire, inasmuch as Order 270 promised punishment not only for the soldier who disobeyed but also for his whole family (a common Stalinist practice). But the plan succeeds.

 

In all of his published work, Grossman tested the boundaries of the permissible by using what the Russians have called “Aesopian” language. The term derives from the 19th-century satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s use of fables to express unorthodox ideas in a disguised form that the censor would not detect.

 

In The People Immortal, the common soldier Ignatiev, who remarks that he has experienced hunger, is described as an embodiment of the true Russian spirit. He begins the novel unenthusiastic about the war but at last learns to fight wholeheartedly. Reading Aesopically, a Russian might detect in hunger and lack of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union’s struggle for survival an allusion to the terror famine.

 

At times Grossman Aesopically denounces the Nazis for evils as common—or even more common—in the USSR. Talking to German POWs, Grossman is impressed that none of them expressed any regret for the murder of Jews and other atrocities: “Not once did I observe any sense of shame… with a strange naivete, they continued to believe that a crime against humanity was not a crime if it was carried out for the good of Germany.” Substitute “the Soviet Union” or “the Communist Party” for “Germany” and you have a statement of Leninist ethics, according to which it would be a crime not to commit mass murder, or anything else, if doing so would serve the interests of the Party. To think otherwise would be to embrace the bourgeois idea of universal “extra-class morality.” But “extra class morality” is precisely what Grossman appeals to here and explicitly defends in Life and Fate.

 

To be sure, Grossman remarks, some Germans objected to Nazi ethics, but the ones who “thought otherwise, who…retained a sense of universal human morality… these Germans had been exterminated or sent to concentration camps.” If they escaped that fate, they remained

 

silent, aware that the slightest act—the slightest hint of a word or act—will bring about their immediate destruction. In today’s Germany such Germans are not real; their thoughts and speech are paralyzed; every aspect of their lives is frozen. Today there is only one ideology in Germany.

 

This description applies at least as well to Grossman’s USSR. It was in the USSR, not Germany, that the criminal code defined mere “suspicion of espionage” as a crime in itself—espionage itself was covered under a different article—and so was “contacts leading to suspicion of espionage”! Of course, the USSR proudly proclaimed it was a land of one scientifically proven ideology. Life and Fate would describe in detail how the systematic imposition of “paralysis”—or “hypnotism”—precluded real thought.

 

In “Ukraine Without Jews,” Grossman declares that the Nazi leaders do not really believe their own propaganda because they “are guided only by the thought of what can be of use at a given moment,” a statement that contradicts an earlier one about the Nazis’ unflagging faith in their system of beliefs. I cannot help wondering whether Grossman meant to allude to Lenin’s insistence that “what can be of use at a given moment” should guide a truly Marxist party. To think otherwise, to cling pointlessly to ideology, was what Lenin famously called “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder.”

 

***

 

After describing the grill pits at Treblinka, Grossman imagines readers asking—as many did—“Why write about such things?… Why recall such things?” Grossman answers: “It is the writer’s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one’s eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who perished.” Those who want people to forget, Grossman continues, often cite a Russian proverb: “He who remembers the past loses one eye.” They forget how the proverb continues: “And he who forgets the past loses both eyes.”

 

In his writings, Solzhenitsyn also mentioned people quoting the first half of this proverb while forgetting the second. Both writers warned that such forgetting invites a repeat of the horrors. In his Nobel Prize speech, Solzhenitsyn foresaw that the ideology that enslaved his country was bound to appeal to others. “This torpid inability to understand someone else’s distant grief” is the rule, not the exception. The most rational and well-supported arguments will prove of little avail. Solzhenitsyn could think of only one thing that could “impress upon a sluggish and obstinate human being… an insight into the magnitudes of events and delusions he has never experienced”: Literature, and literature alone, can do that.

 

Like nothing else, literature has the power to “overcome man’s ruinous habit of learning only from his own experience, so that the experience of others passes by him without profit.” With that typically Russian faith in great writing, Solzhenitsyn affirms that only literature can convey “the experiences of other men, so we can assimilate it as our own” and not repeat earlier mistakes. Grossman, too, hoped that Life and Fate could do what no treatise, not even “The Hell of Treblinka,” could accomplish.

 

Reading Grossman and Solzhenitsyn, I cannot help asking: How can long novels help today when so many students now come to college, even to a great university, without having read a single book—let alone a long novel? How can reminders of events they have never heard of—like Soviet murders and even, more and more often, the Holocaust—make a difference?

 

Solzhenitsyn ends The Gulag Archipelago, published half a century ago, with a warning to Westerners:

 

All you freedom-loving “left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday—but only when you yourselves hear “hands behind your backs there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.

 

Russian experience shows that totalitarians will go as far as they can unless they are stopped, and so what really matters is whether the liberals and progressives who may not share their views are willing to oppose them. What really scares me is how rare such opposition still is.

The DSA’s Problem Isn’t ‘Media Training’

By Arash Azizi

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

American socialists are convinced that they have a media-training problem.

 

In the past year, members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest leftist organization, have won electoral victories in places such as New York City and Michigan, drawing a spotlight that the group has struggled to handle.

 

Last month, the DSA’s co-chairs, Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique, gave several high-profile interviews that even many of their most fervent supporters agree were disastrous. The two leaders struggled to give straight answers to simple questions, and they defended outlandish policies, such as abolishing prisons and police. They seemed to present socialists exactly the way their opponents caricature them: as extremist, unserious, and unprepared.

 

In damage-control mode, many of DSA’s defenders on social media are repeating the phrase media training as though it were a mantra. If only the group’s leaders had been better prepared to deal with media outlets, the thinking goes, they would have avoided this train wreck. The DSA’s communications director, Priscilla Yeverino, recently told Axios, “Our leaders aren’t politicians. They’re working-class people and new to doing media.”

 

The idea that the DSA’s troubles on prime-time television are a technical matter solvable by the right training is surely comforting, but it is also wrong. The group has a bigger problem: It is led by unpractical extremists whose views are a far cry from those that its electorally successful figures, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, espouse.

 

This disconnect is partly explained by a sharp division within the DSA. One wing engages in mass politics and includes AOC, Mamdani, and other socialists committed to democratic principles. The other wing is sectarian and extremist: It evinces little commitment to democracy and includes open admirers of Hamas, the Iranian regime, and historical dictators such as Mao Zedong. If the interviews with the DSA’s co-chairs were embarrassing, that’s a result not of a lackluster media performance but of the actual positions the group has embraced.

 

A closer look at the interviews confirms this. Romer, who belongs to the sectarian wing, evidently did not know what the 2000 Camp David Summit was and could not say what “taxing the hell out of millionaires,” as she demanded, would look like in practice. When asked about authoritarianism in Cuba, she praised the country’s constitution and suggested that Americans should learn from it.

 

Maybe media training could have taught Romer what happened at Camp David and what a tax policy might entail. It still wouldn’t have made the pro-authoritarian politics she shares with her faction of the DSA more palatable. In December, Romer’s Red Star caucus, a self-declared Marxist-Leninist faction of the DSA, posted quotes from a speech by Mao in “celebration” of the Chinese Communist leader’s 132nd birthday. Members of the faction study the works of Mao and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as part of their political education. Red Star has declared its unequivocal sympathy for Hamas and praised the “good judgement” of “our socialist siblings” in Palestine for working with the Islamist organization and “external groups like Iran, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah under a principle they call unity of the fields.” In other words, Red Star is an admirer of Iran’s notorious “Axis of Resistance.”

 

That Romer wouldn’t critique authoritarianism in Cuba is not a lapse but an expression of her faction’s politics. Red Star’s stated policy couldn’t be any clearer about this: “To publicly critique a government or movement that stands in opposition to the American government is to do the U.S. State Department’s work for them, from Iran to Palestine.”

 

In other words, any state or group that opposes the American government should be beyond criticism. Liberation, the DSA’s “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist caucus,” likewise declares the United States to be “not a nation” but a “prison-house of nations, with the Euro-Americans being the jailer.”

 

Unlike Romer, Siddique belongs to the mainstream wing of the DSA, but he is bound by the group’s statements and broader culture. The sectarian wing currently dominates the DSA: The group’s convention in Chicago last year rejected a resolution opposing “all governments that engage in the repression of democratic rights.” Thus, when asked repeatedly what he thought of Fidel Castro, whom the DSA had praised in an earlier statement, Siddique awkwardly referred to “inequality in the United States” and criticized U.S. policy—deflecting the question and offering sound bites instead of engagement, much as an establishment pol might do.

 

This pro-left-authoritarian orientation explains why DSA electoral observers shamefully reported no fraud when they were dispatched to monitor the electoral sham organized by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2024. Those results were so bogus that even the left-wing governments of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay couldn’t accept them. Yet at a DSA session on the subject, a pro-Maduro organization’s assessment that Venezuela’s electoral system was “one of the very best in the world” was presented as fact, as was the false claim that Venezuela’s main opposition candidates were “fascist.”

 

The two wings of the DSA are committed to wildly different methods. Mamdani governs New York City partly as a technocrat, and AOC has sought to influence the Democratic Party from within. One of the DSA’s sectarian factions, by contrast, recently suggested that socialist lawmakers “should do everything in their power to disrupt any Congressional business that does not benefit the working class or advance the socialist program.” They should, it went on, “creatively abuse their powers to make it difficult to conduct legislative business,” for instance by packing the galleries of Congress with hecklers. This faction seems to view elected lawmakers as “tribunes” for the socialist movement rather than as people who, you know, make laws.

 

The sectarian wing got the DSA to drop its endorsement of AOC and refuse to support Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Red Star argued against endorsing AOC unless she withdrew her support for Joe Biden (then the Democratic nominee), and it refused to fundraise for the Democratic leadership or central congressional campaign. But ultimately, the DSA dropped AOC on the grounds that she was not sufficiently anti-Israel—a singular obsession of the sectarian wing. (The foreign-policy section of the DSA’s political platform discusses the details of only one country’s politics, and that’s Israel and Palestine, in which it calls for the self-determination of Palestinians without making a similar provision for Israeli Jews.)

 

For all of the extremist wing’s influence, however, my years of research into the group suggest that the DSA’s members are mostly not members of any caucuses. The average DSA member probably has more in common with AOC than with Mao or Hamas, and the nonsectarians seem especially dominant in the group’s large urban chapters—such as in New York City, where the DSA has more than 15,000 of its approximately 120,000 members. More than 80 percent of DSA members in the Bronx and Queens voted in 2024 to endorse AOC. The sectarian wing came to control much of the organization’s leadership by manipulating internal processes, which is one reason it opposes organizational referenda and other one-member-one-vote procedures.

 

The DSA’s mainstream wing includes thinkers who are committed to democracy, critical of authoritarianism (including that of socialist regimes, past and present), and who reject some of the signature policies of the sectarian wing, such as police abolition. These figures have been vocal in response to last month’s media fiasco.

 

Eric Blanc, a labor historian at Rutgers, sharply criticized Romer for “falling into a trap being set by the establishment,” which seeks “to paint DSA as extreme.” Like others in his wing, Blanc advocates for adopting a Nordic-style social democracy as a step toward overcoming capitalism. This position is also shared by the Jacobin founder and former DSA Vice Chair Bhaskar Sunkara, whose 2019 Socialist Manifesto explores Swedish social democracy in envisioning a socialism for the 21st century.

 

Reacting to the DSA’s recent media debacles, Ben Burgis, a philosopher and Jacobin writer, opined: “We don’t do ourselves any favors by refusing to say anything too negative about left-wing dictatorships targeted by US foreign policy,” especially “if we’re trying to argue that the failures of authoritarian state socialism in the twentieth century shouldn’t mean that capitalism is the best humanity will ever be able to do.” The group has failed to reassure its critics of its commitment to multiparty democracy, Burgis added.

 

Thinkers in this wing of the DSA take seriously the imperative to reconcile socialist commitments to economic justice with democratic and liberal values. Burgis, Sunkara, and the economist Mike Beggs have co-authored a forthcoming book called The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, which attempts to offer a “realistic model” of a post-capitalist economic system. Drawing on the work of the liberal philosopher John Rawls, as well as detailed economic research, the book takes the Soviet Union to task for a “record of systematic economic failure, not just political repression” and suggests a model that mixes social ownership with a significant role for the market. It also engages the arguments of well-known critics of socialism, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. This work puts the flippancy of Romer’s “taxing the hell out of millionaires” comment to shame.

 

But if the likes of AOC, Sunkara, Burgis, and Blanc wish for the American public to give their notions of an economically rigorous and democratically committed socialism a chance, they need to break with the fans of Mao and Hamas. So long as they share an organization with the DSA’s sectarians, they can’t complain when the media associates the DSA—and American socialism—with the extreme positions that it formally adopts and that its leaders espouse. No amount of media training can solve that.

Calling a War a War

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

Epidemic math gets pretty complicated pretty fast if you’re really thinking through the issues, because you have to consider geometric growth, but if you happen to be both a mental defective incapable of complex thought and, simultaneously, a moral defective incapable of caring about anything beyond your own immediate comfort—and if you happen to be president of these United States when a disruptive epidemic emerges—then the math is pretty simple:

 

“Public Fear” + “Stock Market Contraction” = “I don’t get reelected.”

 

“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Donald Trump wrote in the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic. “We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” By all reports—including Trump’s own—he spent most of the early part of the COVID outbreak watching stock market news on television. COVID was, from his point of view, less of a public health issue than a political issue—a political issue relating to his own self-interest. The stock markets go up and down, but it is difficult to run for reelection during a sharp market downturn while claiming that the U.S. economy is performing better than it ever has thanks to the unique economic insights of Donald J. Trump, a half-literate gargoyle. Preposterous as the claim would be at the best of times, it would be preposterous enough to register in the minds of American voters—perhaps even Trump voters—during a crash.

 

Trump insisted on many, many occasions that the COVID epidemic would simply “go away”—it would go away in the spring with the warm weather, it would go away because the Chinese were so effective at dealing with that sort of thing, etc. At the end of March 2020, Trump said of the epidemic: “It’s going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month.” He said that while there were on average nearly 20,000 new infections daily. On April 3, he said: “It is going away” while there were nearly 27,000 new infections daily. By April 7 there were nearly 32,000 new infections daily, and Trump said: “It did go. It will go away.” Did, will, whatever.

 

With diesel just under $6 a gallon around the country, Vice President J.D. Vance has a message about the Iran war: It did go. It will go away.

 

“I wouldn’t call it a war right now,” insisted the dead-eyed Damien Thorn of American politics. There is, he claimed, “no active shooting”—words spoken in the very echo of Iranian attacks on U.S. assets through the region and a U.S. strike on what was, apparently, a wedding party. I suppose it is possible that there was no active shooting at the wedding until U.S. bombs started falling, but that would be an overly generous interpretation of the remarks of the sniveling and insipid little sycophant who currently serves as vice president of these United States. And Vance sounded precisely like COVID-era Trump when he insisted: “When will the Iranians shooting at ships stop having an effect on world energy markets? The answer is it has less effect day by day.”

 

Trump is moving rhetorically in the same direction: The Iran war, he now insists, is no big deal, “small potatoes.” Trump has declared victory over the Iranians a half a dozen times and has insisted that the Strait of Hormuz is open almost as many times as he has driven his businesses into bankruptcy, but happy talk don’t make it so. Trump’s base is not made up of very bright people, but even the most cretinous Trumpkins in the coalition know, as they drag their bloody knuckles across the asphalt to the fuel island at Buc-ee’s, that it now costs $270 to fill up an F-250. As a friend of mine says: Stupid should hurt. And it does hurt, though not apparently enough to have kept Americans from electing Donald Trump president, the second time after he had attempted to stage a coup d’état.

 

“A lot of people don’t call it a war,” the president said. “I call it a military conflict." Helpfully, Trump—whose poker face is so bad that he managed to bankrupt his own casinos in Atlantic City—has explained before why he does not call the Iran war a war. “I won’t use the word ‘war’ because they say, if you use the word war, that’s maybe not a good thing to do,” he said at a GOP fundraising event in March. “They don’t like the word ‘war,’ because you’re supposed to get approval, so I’ll use the word ‘military operation.’” I must admit that I am less scandalized by the fact that Trump is a moron than by how obviously—insultingly—transparent he is in his belief that he is supported by morons. The notion that a war isn’t a war if you don’t call it a war is on par with the notion that a Ford becomes a rutabaga if you pry the blue oval off the thing—without quite appreciating that it’ll still cost you the better part of $300 to fill ’er up.

 

Maybe Trump and Vance believe that horsepucky. Without question, they believe that they can convince you to believe that horsepucky.

 

In the Analects, Confucius speaks famously of the “rectification of names.”

 

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.

 

When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.

 

Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

 

And so:

 

If a superior man love propriety, the people will not dare be irreverent. If he love righteousness, the people will not dare not to defy his example. If he love good faith, the people will not dare to be insincere.

 

... Though a man may be able to recite the 300 odes, yet if, when entrusted with a governmental charge, he knows not how to act, or if, when sent to any quarter on a mission, he cannot give his replies unassisted, notwithstanding the extent of his learning, of what practical use is he?

 

J.D. Vance and Donald Trump both are expensively educated men, men of the Ivy League. Of what real use is either of them? Confucius himself might have a tough time answering that question.

 

It is important to call things what they are: What is happening in Iran is a war—an illegal war, imbecilically conceived and incompetently executed. Trump’s “bluster” and “salesmanship” and “passion” are none of those things—they are lies, and Trump is a habitual liar who has made his political career on the support of people, often dumb and mostly angry, who enjoy being lied to. J.D. Vance is a schmuck, a spineless yes-man without honor or integrity who will do and say whatever shameful and humiliating thing must be done or said in the moment as he inches, wormlike, toward what he imagines to be real power. Trump is surrounded by a team of cretins, incompetents, nepotism beneficiaries, drunks, degenerates, and sundry clueless clowns. Their political goal is tyranny and the displacement of the American constitutional order by a Trump-fronted mafia state.

 

It is not only the names that need rectifying, but speaking good plain English about this mess would be a good start.  

Look Back in Anger at 9/11

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

Nearly 25 years on from the attacks of September 11, 2001, my overwhelming sentiment remains what it was on that day: anger. Time often heals — or, at the very least, dulls — but, in this case, it has done no such thing. I remain livid with the perpetrators for what they did to the 2,977 people who were killed that morning, what they did to the thousands who were killed in the aftermath, what they did to the United States and the free world more broadly, and, on a significantly reduced scale, what they did to me, by abruptly ending my childhood. When bad things happen in the world, younger people look to adults for reassurance. September 11 was the first time in my life that that reassurance was not forthcoming. Even from the safety of England, my parents could not hide their shock or their horror, nor persuasively guarantee me that everything was going to be alright. To this day, much as is true for so many others, I consider September 11 to be the key dividing line in my life. I woke up as a child. I went to bed an adult. Beforehand, I knew little about the world, and I was content in my ignorance. Afterward, I knew all manner of things that I did not want to know. “May you live in interesting times,” insists the proverb. Screw that.

 

There is, sadly, nothing unusual about living through an atrocity. Had I been alive at the time of Pearl Harbor, I would undoubtedly have similar feelings about that. But I was not, and, besides, while Pearl Harbor was an abomination, it was an abomination inflicted by one army upon another, in the midst of an already-raging global conflict. At Pearl Harbor, military aircraft, piloted by military personnel, attacked military ships full of military sailors.

 

Not so on September 11.

 

Sneering types dislike the contention that the United States was attacked “for its freedom.” I do not. Irrespective, we can surely agree that the United States was attacked with its freedom. The assailants took advantage of a welcoming immigration system; turned quotidian commercial products into catastrophic weapons; and centered their attack around a pair of iconic private buildings in which civilians convened to trade with one another. They transmuted our media into a system for transmitting panic; used the selflessness of our first responders as a means by which to rack up kills; and turned the openness of our society into a liability. The architect of the attacks said, bluntly, that the difference between his band of thugs and the American people was that “these youths love death as you love life.” Indeed so. That most of those Americans assumed at first that what he had done to them had been an accident tells you everything you need to know.

 

Nothing good came of September 11. Pearl Harbor, like Operation Barbarossa, brought about the conditions that guaranteed the Allies would win the war. Antietam led to the Emancipation Proclamation and, eventually, to the defeat of the Confederacy. September 11 had no salutary consequence. We would, without doubt, be better off if it had never happened. A quarter of a century later, I still find myself fantasizing idly about going back in time to stop it. When I visit New York, I look at the skyline and wonder if, somehow, the Twin Towers will magically be there. Even now, when I see the footage, I hope, impotently, that, perhaps this time, the planes will miss. They never do. They never will. Each time I watch it, three of the four will ineluctably hit their targets, and I will sit in stunned disbelief as if I were seeing it for the very first time. I cannot make it go away. It is indelible.

 

It could have been worse. We now know what we did not at the time. We know that such attacks did not become commonplace. We know that the day’s events did not represent the opening salvo in a world war. We know that they did not permanently scar America’s sense of self — and, indeed, that, far from dwelling on it, Americans now have to be urged to “never forget.” I am at no risk of that.

Have We Turned the Corner on Higher Ed?

By Frederick M. Hess

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Conservatives’ trust in higher education has plummeted since 2015, and for good reason. A deluge of canceled speakers, tent encampments, DEI depravity, grade inflation, and out-of-control borrowing has marked the culmination of decades of institutional rot that has turned brand-name campuses into bastions of left-wing ideology.

 

This has made the right’s recent counteroffensive truly remarkable. This spring, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a profile of Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard University’s iconic conservative professor of government. It observed: “Mansfield spent six decades championing lost causes. At 94, he’s suddenly winning.”

 

Big, if true.

 

Have we turned the corner on higher ed? The signs are certainly auspicious.

 

Take grade inflation, a long-standing preoccupation of Mansfield’s. For the past decade, more than 80 percent of undergraduate grades at Harvard College have been A’s or A minuses. This May, Harvard’s faculty voted to impose a 20 percent cap on A’s awarded in each course. Dean Amanda Claybaugh predicted that the result would “strengthen the academic culture of Harvard” and might “encourage other institutions to confront” the problem of grade inflation with “rigor and courage.”

 

Universities have also started to reckon with the lack of intellectual diversity on campus. In June, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute issued a heartening faculty report, which conceded that “genuine problems exist related to open inquiry, diversity of perspectives, and free expression” and asserted that colleges need more ideas “associated with political conservatism.”

 

In April, Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education issued a bracing report calling out the academy’s failure to defend free inquiry, support heterodox debate, deliver value for students, and acknowledge the validity of its critics’ charges. The report’s many sensible suggestions included promoting ideological diversity, getting devices out of classrooms, streamlining bureaucracy, and making costs more transparent.

 

There’s been a sea change on DEI, with universities closing or revamping DEI offices in response to public and political pressure. In 2025, the University of Michigan shuttered its largest-in-the-nation DEI operation after a devastating New York Times exposé. Since 2023, more than 30 anti-DEI laws have been adopted by state legislatures. President Trump’s Day One executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” triggered aggressive federal investigations of campus conduct and froze hundreds of grants and contracts. As of June 2026, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Dismantling of DEI” tracker listed changes at 451 campuses.

 

More than 150 universities have adopted a formal policy of institutional neutrality on political matters — a stark reversal from the virtue-signaling wokeism of the early 2020s that produced campus pronouncements decrying everything from police brutality to fossil fuels. Meanwhile, since 2021, nearly two dozen new programs in Western civilization have emerged at universities across the country to champion republican virtue and teach the Great Books with academic rigor. One heartening consequence of all this activity is that, for the first time in decades, a vibrant job market is emerging for conservative historians, humanities scholars, and political scientists.

 

On university admissions, the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) — which ended race-based affirmative action — and its enforcement by the Trump administration have brought long-overdue change. Meanwhile, selective colleges have begun reinstating the standardized testing requirements that they dropped in the name of “equity” during the height of woke culture. The push to restore testing has drawn support from some surprising quarters. In May, nearly 1,000 University of California faculty members signed a letter arguing that “test-blind” admissions meant that too many new students were unprepared for college math and science.

 

Under threat of federal investigation, university leaders have rapidly restored order to their campuses. Not long ago, America’s most prestigious campuses were thick with pro-Hamas rallies and tent encampments and “anti-colonialist” building occupations. In an article earlier this year, The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch observed that “universities chose to let campus demonstrations get out of control.” Now, she notes, campus leaders “are choosing to suppress them.”

 

While the Trump administration hasn’t delivered many legislative wins, last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act featured several significant higher ed reforms. A new “do no harm” provision stipulates that, to qualify for federal student loans, college programs must demonstrate that their graduates earn more than similarly situated adults with a high school diploma. It’s a low bar, but a meaningful one: More than half a million students are estimated to be enrolled in programs that would fail the new test. The legislation also imposed much needed limits on graduate school lending. Combined with a bold push to overhaul accreditation — an effort that continues from Trump’s first term — the reforms suggest lasting changes in higher ed financing and accountability.

 

To see the Overton window shifting, one need only scan recent Chronicle of Higher Education headlines such as “We Need an Audit of the Political Enthusiasms of the Last Decade,” “How Humanists Helped Wreck the Humanities,” “The Left-Wing Case for Great Books,” and “Critics Are Doing Colleges a Favor.” For a publication that long dismissed higher ed’s critics as MAGA know-nothings, the tonal change is striking.

 

***

 

All in all, there’s much to suggest that we’ve turned a corner. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s not clear that the shifts on campus are as profound or durable as we might wish.

 

A telling illustration came in August, when Secretary of Education Linda McMahon issued a genial “Call to Action” to campus leaders, imploring them to explain themselves to the American people and clarify their commitment to teaching and research. While reasonable enough, the letter marked a head-spinning retreat from the ominous, threatening “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the administration issued a year ago. That statutorily unmoored exercise in overreach had gone nowhere, while making the administration look less like a bulwark of academic integrity and more like a playground bully. That cost the administration the high ground and helped its academic foils regain their footing.

 

While colleges have shuttered DEI offices and scrubbed their websites of DEI terminology, it’s unclear whether DEI is dead or merely in hibernation. Many institutions “abolished” DEI by folding it into another campus office. As the conservative outlet the College Fix reports, nearly 100 colleges simply renamed their DEI offices, turning to euphemisms such as “belonging,” “community,” and “inclusive excellence.” Even among colleges that pledged to abandon DEI, it’s unclear whether much has changed. Mark Perry, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan, found that 84 percent of the staff in its DEI office in 2024–25 remained in their jobs this April — a year after Michigan promised to eliminate much of its DEI apparatus. Meanwhile, there’s much to suggest that campus censoriousness is a consequence of Gen Z’s norms and social media habits, which means top-down reforms may go only so far in changing campus culture.

 

Or take grade inflation. Harvard’s move to put a cap on A’s is welcome, but the policy continues to permit unlimited A minuses, which makes the plan far less potent than many observers may realize. And there’s a cautionary Ivy League tale regarding grading reform: In 2014, a decade after similarly moving to limit A’s, Princeton abandoned the policy. Why? Although an advisory faculty committee found that the policy did not have “any measurable negative impact” on hiring prospects or graduate school admissions, it nonetheless fretted that the policy made students “feel as though they are competing for a limited resource of A grades.” In other words, Princeton abandoned the policy out of excessive concern for its students’ delicate sensibilities. Can we be confident that Harvard’s experiment won’t fizzle out in similar fashion?

 

More fundamentally, Harvard’s policy doesn’t address concerns about students’ minimal effort, lack of preparedness, or light workloads. There is widespread sentiment among professors, including at highly selective institutions, that students can’t (or won’t) read whole books. Students report spending just over six hours a week reading for their classes, and they say that their weekly academic workload doesn’t exceed 20 to 25 hours total. A modest attempt to limit the number of A’s is fine, but it doesn’t address the quiet collusion in which students pretend to learn, faculty pretend to teach, and no one feels hassled.

 

And then there are questions about the staying power of the White House’s higher ed campaign. While the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe tactics drove early wins, its clumsy rhetoric, procedural sloppiness, and disdain for due process have had consequences. Moreover, Trump’s maneuvers have an expiration date of January 2029; the executive orders, administrative actions, and high-pressure negotiations all rest on flimsy statutory footing, easily reversible by a Democratic administration. That reality, combined with Trump’s sinking poll numbers and the prospect of a tough November for the GOP, has led many in higher ed to quietly conclude that they can play possum and wait things out.

 

The Trump administration’s ruthless manipulation of federal grants, programs, and investigations has helped produce significant wins, but it has also set troubling precedents. (It was the Biden administration’s Title IX and civil rights lawlessness, after all, that helped enable Trump’s adventurism.) If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, it’s easy to imagine the Day One executive orders that will follow. Western civilization programs will be targeted for creating “hostile learning environments” for minority students. Admissions officials will be encouraged to employ criteria such as personal essays or community income levels as proxies for race to promote “nondiscrimination” in their decisions. Flagship red-state schools will be required to renounce their new curricular directives and anti-DEI policies lest they find their grants and payments held up. College leaders will be pressed on free speech grounds to accommodate protesters. Trump publicly threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status; under a Democratic president, something similar may well be in store for Hillsdale College.

 

A further problem is that many red-state attempts to counter DEI have been clumsy in design or execution. Partisans are eager to turn Western civilization programs into right-wing campus outposts that are narrowly committed to combating “leftist ideology.” A crackdown on “race and gender ideology” at Texas A&M University led administrators to forbid a philosophy professor from teaching Plato’s Symposium because the text “debates the existence of more than two genders and explores homosexuality.” Such incidents make talk of free inquiry ring hollow. Robert P. George, the founder of Princeton University’s conservative James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions — the model for today’s Western civilization programs — was recently moved to caution, “There’s enough indoctrination going on at universities already. We should eliminate it, not mimic it from the other side.”

 

***

 

So, are we winning? Yes — for the moment. But the wins are tenuous, and some may prove easily reversible. Still, we’re in a far better place than we were just three years ago.

 

The fuller answer, though, is more muddled because a series of sector-wide disruptions are poised to redraw some of the familiar divisions in higher ed. The emergence of AI, the demographic cliff, and populist suspicion of experts are creating critical new fault lines, which in turn are yielding some surprising alliances and requiring an entirely new scorecard for judging winners and losers.

 

First, AI is about to make conversations about grade inflation look quaint. Students have always taken shortcuts, but it’s never been this easy. AI tools will “watch” lectures for them, complete their take-home exams, and craft their essays. No learning required. In response, universities have abandoned century-old honor codes, and faculty have returned to handwritten essays, blue books, and oral exams. Meanwhile, an eager alliance of campus administrators and tech bros argues that AI means “mere” knowledge is obsolete. Alongside corporate lobbyists, they are promoting content-lite “21st-century skills” such as “collaboration” and “communication” rather than supposedly outmoded subjects such as history and literature. In this fight, conservative champions of liberal education and old-school progressive academics often sound alike as they confront a modish coalition of tech enthusiasts, Chamber of Commerce types, and trend-chasing college mandarins.

 

Second, the long-running decline in birth rates has led to falling enrollment, putting hundreds of campuses into dire financial straits. Scores of colleges have closed in the past decade, and hundreds more are likely to do so in the decade ahead. Competition from online alternatives and new limits on lending will only ratchet up that pressure. Small private colleges are especially at risk. Since many of them are faith-based or located in small towns and rural areas, potential closures could be hugely disruptive to their communities. That explains the oddly sympathetic relationship between the higher ed blob on the left and some rural populists and Christian colleges on the right. They are taking on a coalition of budget-conscious conservatives and wonkish Democrats. The financial squeeze could fundamentally reshape the debate over campus funding and accountability.

 

Third, rising skepticism toward science seems poised to fracture both the right and the left. The populist right has cheered Trump’s efforts to cancel billions of dollars in research grants, while the activist left has shown, on matters ranging from gender ideology to climate change, that its support for science is contingent on political utility. Populists are suspicious of research funding and eager to render it more responsive to the direction of politics. These efforts have given rise to a budding coalition of bipartisan policy wonks and researchers seeking to stabilize federal support, protect the grant-making process from ideological and political manipulation, and perhaps finally address long-standing concerns about curbing waste and ensuring rigor.

 

By all means, take heart in the right’s recent victories. They’ve been hard-earned. But they’re also precarious. And they’re about to be overtaken by events that may reshuffle who’s on which side in the battles defining the next era of higher ed.