The Democracy They Warned Us About

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

The Democratic Socialists of America, an insurgency within the Democratic Party, is having a moment, and it is showing us something worth noticing: This is the democracy John Adams warned us about.

 

Given the record of socialism in power, critics of the DSA and what it stands for are justified in suspecting that these radicals are not actually all that serious about the democratic part of democratic socialism, that the word “Democratic” in the faction’s name is no more meaningful than in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. But the thing to be feared here is the opposite: They are extremely serious about the democratic part and will strip Americans of their rights, liberty, and property in the name of—and with the aid of—democracy.

 

Democracy is the oxygen of the American political atmosphere, and as in the physical atmosphere, you only want a little bit of that oxygen—too much oxygen in the mix and the political metaphors start to write themselves: People develop tunnel vision, the central nervous system breaks down, tiny sparks turn into explosions and conflagrations, and the thing we cannot do without becomes the thing that kills us. Sola dosis facit venenum, advises the old physician Paracelsus: It is the dose that makes the poison.

 

What distinguishes the American constitutional order is not its democratic components—which it has in common with any number of daft utopian schemes and failed revolutionary projects—but its antidemocratic components: the Bill of Rights, which places Americans’ civil rights and civil liberties beyond the reach of mere majorities, the division of national powers among the branches and subdivision within the legislative branch, the further division of political power between the national government and the states, etc. On top of these is the broader American order that counterbalances political power per se with private power, including civic institutions explicitly protected by the Constitution (the press, religious bodies, private associations) as well as that greatest of all guarantors of liberty: property.

 

The DSA, in the name of democracy, proposes to remove all buffers between the individual and centralized national political power wielded on a purely majoritarian basis. The DSA would, according to its own platform, abolish the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, and replace the latter two with House committees controlled by the majority party. The DSA would eliminate Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to criticize elected officials (by, among other things, nullifying the Citizens United decision) or to petition them for redress of grievances (by abolishing lobbying), and put elections under the control of the majority party in Congress by mandating state to control of the financing of political campaigns. It would override property rights by imposing state ownership on U.S. businesses.

 

This is a formula for mob rule, of course, and the DSA would expand the size of the mob by extending voting rights to noncitizens and incarcerated felons. It is strange—and ahistorical—for the DSA to assume that it and its allies will always have the biggest mob, as though Donald Trump had not received millions more votes than Kamala Harris in 2024. Nationalists, socialists, and national socialists are always confident that they have the People on their side, and all of them are right—at times.

 

It is not only the radical left that wishes to eliminate our constitutional safeguards and competing centers of power. The so-called new right (the fourth or fifth “new right” in our political history) sneers at “procedural liberalism” and insists that the “common good” provides the caudillos of their dreams with a moral mandate to restrict economic liberties and ordinary daily liberties (see, e.g., Sohrab Ahmari’s entirely insipid odes to the so-called blue laws), to wield the force of the state to put American businesses (especially technology companies) under political discipline, etc. The most contemptible of them reject such foundational American commitments as religious liberty and advocate, as in the case of Curtis Yarvin, a return to monarchy. They speak more often in terms of old-fashioned European étatisme and that slippery “common good,” but the closer they approach to electoral politics the quicker they are to invoke “the People” on whose behalf they, like their leftist variants, purport to be acting. The division of power and structural limitations on political ambition are no less inconvenient to the utopians of the right than to the utopians of the left.

 

“Absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, and democrats,” as John Adams observed. Adams was at times terrifyingly prescient:

 

Obsta principiis, nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.

 

(The war against foppery is, alas, evidently lost.)

 

Adams was famously acerbic on the subject of democracy—which, being an intelligent and educated man, he understood to be something distinct from what the United States has long enjoyed, i.e., a republican form of government with its motions controlled by certain limited democratic processes:

 

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.

 

What the DSA has in mind is the democracy that Adams warned us about: one in which power, once blessed by a temporary majority, is arbitrary, undivided, and irresistible. The DSA promises that it will use this only to do good for the People, which is, of course, the same promise various peoples heard from the Jacobins before their Reign of Terror, from Lenin and Stalin before their terror, from Mao before his terror, from Hitler before his terror—and from Donald Trump, who murders and oppresses and steals and terrorizes while promising that his only ambition is to “Make America Great Again.” I do not mind if the ladies and gentlemen of the DSA wish to call that “democracy,” which is what John Adams called it.

 

But, if you ask me, terror is terror.

Lessons From a Socialism 101 Class

By Grace Salvatore

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

We cut through Seward Park in the dying March light, then down East Broadway in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Lauren, my cousin visiting from Nebraska, was always game for something weird and niche and classically New York. On past trips, that had meant mostly underground musicals. This time, it was a Socialism 101 course with the NYC Democratic Socialists of America.

 

We rounded the corner onto Jefferson Street. A group of joggers stood sipping water from paper cups in front of a graffiti-laden storefront. Posters littered the windows: “OUR TIME for an Affordable NYC,” “Zohran, for a New York You Can Afford,” and “Solidarity Forever!” Alongside them hung the mayor’s campaign promises: freeze rent, build 200,000 affordable homes, provide universal no-cost childcare, make buses fast and free, and guarantee cheaper groceries through city-owned grocery stores.

 

Inside was a humble box: cement floors and a black-and-white mural on a red wall. “Hi folks, welcome!” an instructor said, waving us over. Lauren and I took seats house left beneath a poster I recognized from my friend’s college dorm room: “Tax the Rich.”

 

The room quickly filled with a dozen chatty, enthusiastic people: Behind us sat a mother with her two teenage children in tow. Her son chatted with the male instructor, who said he was excited to convince him of the merits of socialism. “I don’t think you’ll have to do much convincing!” her son said with a smile. The woman next to me wore heeled black boots and the Sézane Clyde coat, the same $355 piece I’d begged my husband for for my 30^th birthday.

 

Everyone here seemed disarmingly warm, though I knew how cold collectivism could be. I’d spent the last nearly four years working at a nonprofit with young people who’d suffered immensely under socialist and communist regimes in places like Venezuela, North Korea, China, Cuba, and Eritrea. All had risked their lives to come to the United States for a better life. I’d read all the literature, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

 

I was interested in how the DSA representatives would answer my questions. How did they reconcile these histories with the movement they were building? How had an ideology that had left such a devastating mark on the 20^th century energized some of the brightest young people in Manhattan?

 

“Welcome to Socialism 101,” said the curly-haired male instructor. “My name’s Ray, my pronouns are he/him, I’m based up in the Bronx.” Raised in Connecticut, Ray joined the Peace Corps after college and spent time in Guinea. “I pretty much saw that our job was just like propaganda, essentially,” he said, describing what he saw as the consequences of “us extracting from the populations.”

 

After reading Algerian philosopher Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Ray said he “worked backwards into Marxism.” He later arrived at Columbia University, where involvement in campus organizing, including the 2024 anti-Israel encampments (he proudly mentioned that he helped plan these), connected him with Young Democratic Socialists of America. From there, he joined what he called the “grown-up version” of that movement, or the DSA.

 

Founded in 1982, the Democratic Socialists of America spent decades as a small intellectual movement on the fringes of American politics. That changed after Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, when democratic socialism found a new generation of adherents disillusioned by rising costs, institutional distrust, and a sense that the American promise had failed them. DSA membership surged from roughly 6,000 members before Sanders’s campaign to more than 90,000, transforming the organization from a niche activist group into a formidable political force. Though membership declined to 50,000 in late 2024, there are now 120,000 members as of 2026.

 

In the wake of Mamdani’s rise, a broader network of aligned candidates—like Brad Lander in New York and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan—has brought the movement’s language of solidarity into mainstream discourse. As Lander put it after the election night where he won the Democratic primary in New York’s 10^th Congressional District, “The spirit that’s moving in this city … offers a path forward to a future so much better than the grim, selfish, zero-sum world that Trump and AI oligarchs are offering.”

 

Both Ray and his comrade, clad in a cardigan and dark, uneven mullet, felt the same. “My name’s Laura, pronouns are she/her,” she said, stepping in. Laura was radicalized, she said, while living in Seattle during the Black Lives Matter rallies. Inspired by CHOP (the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, a six-block, police-free autonomous zone), she started a mutual aid network focused on placing free fridges and food pantries across the city. She soon tired of the “anarchic small group,” and joined the DSA when she got to Columbia University for her philosophy studies. “I study Marx and all the, all the big, the big guys, the dead white people,” she said.

 

Laura and Ray laid out the evening’s agenda: explain the basic mechanics of capitalism, connect the theory to everyday life, introduce socialist alternatives to our current capitalist system, and discuss how society might transition from capitalism to socialism.

 

“Turn to whoever’s around you, and say your name and your pronouns,” Ray directed. I instinctively turned straight to Lauren, but saw him approach us out of the corner of my eye. He sank into the folding chair in front of us.

 

“So,” he asked, “what has y’all interested in socialism?”

 

“Hi. Daley,” I said, using my middle name and choking out my pronouns. “I think the Zohran campaign was really energizing for a lot of young people. I’d like to see what that’s all about.” It was true. For years, the Democratic Socialists of America had been quietly building a home for young New Yorkers who feel priced out of the city, alienated from traditional politics, or simply convinced that capitalism had failed them, and Mamdani’s movement has given them a charismatic standard-bearer. As his campaign gained steam, NYC-DSA’s dues-paying membership more than doubled (from roughly 6,000 members when he launched his campaign to more than 13,000 by the end of 2025). Nearly three-quarters of New York voters under 30 would eventually vote for him, and youth turnout reached levels the city hadn’t seen in decades for a mayoral race.

 

After a brief break, it was time to start the lecture in earnest. Ray began where any conversation about socialism had to begin, he said: capitalism. The explanation hinged on dividing society into two classes. First were the capitalists, who “own the things that make other things,” or the “means of production,” like factories, machinery, or businesses. Then came the workers, “the ones who actually do things,” transforming raw materials into products or providing services.

 

Ray boiled it down to a simple formula: “Capitalists own. Workers do.” The capitalist hires workers, pays them wages, and keeps the difference between what their labor produces and what they’re paid. That difference, he explained, is Marx’s concept of “surplus value,” or profit. From a socialist perspective, he said, profit exists because “the worker produces more value than he actually gets for himself.”

 

Laura jumped in. The DSA’s view, she explained, was fundamentally different from the modern Democratic establishment: Inequality, exploitation, and the concentration of wealth were “baked in” to capitalism’s design and cannot be separated from the system.

 

Ray turned back to us for questions, and the mom behind us raised her hand. “So, business ownership has certain risks involved in it, too,” she said, almost apologetically. “Under socialism, are the benefits and risks spread out equally among everybody? How does that work?”

 

“Great question. … I have been a business owner. I used to own a coffee shop,” said Laura. “I definitely am sympathetic, but I am, at the end of the day, a socialist.”

 

“I did try to cooperatize my coffee shop,” she added, “but trying to transition to one place within a larger system—we didn’t own the building. We had a landlord. We had to pay rent … if you sell less and you’re splitting less, you don’t have that guaranteed pay that you would in a capitalist system,” she said. Socialism really had failed everywhere it had been tried, I thought—including Laura’s coffee shop.

 

“The worker has a huge degree of risk that they take on,” Laura continued. “Even the fact that they are not guaranteed employment tomorrow.” She mentioned those who relocate for jobs, uprooting their families and lives, and those who work in dangerous industries. “And to say that Bezos incurs more risk and that’s why he deserves to rule over us like a king is just kind of disproportionate,” she said.

 

I looked behind me to see if the mom was buying her argument. She nodded, but furrowed her brow and sat back in her chair. “If we had someone in office who actually cared about this, there are ways to mitigate these things,” Laura said. “Part of this is just, like, opening our mind to the actual breadth and depth of the human imagination.”

 

Sézane coat girl raised her hand. “In defense of capitalism, I feel like I hear a lot of the same things,” she said. “One being the social mobility aspect. Opportunities that, say, feudalism didn’t afford people—the opportunity to move from the poverty level to, you know, the American success story, the American Dream, whatever that is.”

 

“I’ll take that,” said Laura. Capitalism was an improvement from feudalism, she said, because it allowed social mobility. You weren’t tied to something that was inevitable, she explained. “But poverty is still inevitable,” she said. “If you have wealth, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will probably also have it. There is a certain degree of inevitability to the class system and the reproducibility of the class system.”

 

“There was a philosopher named John Rawls,” she said. “He thinks of even something like intelligence and hard work as being contingent or accidental. How is it that you get to be somebody who has the discipline to look at flashcards for an hour and a half? How is it that you acquire the skill of reading?” she asked us. “These things are not things that people are born with. It often involved having a parent that was attentive, a teacher that was attentive.”

 

“You didn’t choose where you were born,” she continued. “If you were born in Nepal and you were a woman, you probably had to walk eight miles a day to get water for your family. You don’t get to go to school. I didn’t choose to be born in the United States. These are all accidental features that produced me.”

 

She looked around the room at us. “So … how much are you really responsible for who you are?”

 

There it was, I thought: the crux of the great works by Hayek, von Mises, and later Thomas Sowell. The fundamental ideological divide wasn’t merely economic, but philosophical: a heart-posture toward human agency, responsibility, and the nature of man. Do we see people as capable actors in their own lives, able to make choices, create, build, and rise, or as products of their circumstances, waiting to be shaped by others? The American experiment was built on the radical hope that ordinary people, given freedom and responsibility, could do extraordinary things.

 

The socialists, at least on that March day, seemed aware of this fact—and poised to deconstruct it. “Part of the idea here is to develop a different sense of values, a different way of orienting yourself towards your fellow person,” Laura said. “We’ll just change your entire psyche. Just flip the whole thing around.”

 

The room was buzzing by the end of class. The mom and her kids caught Ray to sign up for local volunteer initiatives. Sézane coat girl and her friend walked over to me to give me a list of podcast recommendations. “Are you on Twitch?” she asked. “Start with Hasan Piker.” Others milled about, pulling board games and books from the shelves.

 

Lauren and I shimmied our coats on and scraped the door open, stepping back into the cold. After over two hours, I couldn’t tell you what socialism was, or capitalism, for that matter. But that didn’t seem to matter. In fact, that seemed to be the draw: Socialism was whatever you wanted it to be.

We’re Not One Election Away From Ruin

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

 

“History is made by intense, compact minorities,” George Will is fond of observing.

 

As with a great many things, Will is both correct and wise (not all correct statements are wise, but I think all wise statements must be correct. Please let me know if you can think of a counterargument to that).

 

The Christians were a tiny cult, and they conquered the Roman Empire and moved the river of history in a new direction. The Bolsheviks were a fringe that captured Russia. Ditto the Maoists and Khmer Rouge. Even democratic societies are shaped—or, in our case, founded!—by small groups of ideologically committed activists and intellectuals. Abolitionism was started by a tiny sect of 12 British zealots (nine Quakers and three Anglicans) who through the force of their moral clarity eventually triumphed. The conservative legal movement, born in the wake of Roe v. Wade, was easily dismissed for years as little more than crackpottery; it now has six adherents (of various levels of intensity) on the Supreme Court. The Fabian Society, the Seneca Falls 100, the Mont Pelerin Society, Supply Siders: The list is almost endless.

 

The problem with this observation, which I think about a great deal, is that it doesn’t provide much guidance on how seriously to take each intense, compact minority you encounter. Because for every sect, cabal, faction, club, cell, and party that succeeds, there are dozens, maybe thousands, that flail, fail, and drown in the currents of history. The ancient world was full of false messiahs who only a few scholars can even name. History counts far more failed revolutionary movements than successful ones.

 

The champions of Esperanto were compact and ideologically committed. The only people today who can speak Esperanto are constantly surprised by how few people want to talk to them at all—even in English. No one spends a lot of time worrying about the Fourierists of Brook Farm. The Oneida Community was created to end monogamy. They failed but they do live on as a thriving cutlery business.

 

A fraction of them get an asterisk in the history books as being prematurely right. Jan Hus was a premature Protestant. Had his movement succeeded, we might be talking about Hus the way we do Martin Luther. Many socialists see the Diggers as the first socialists, so they have a certain immortality as precursors of the “successes” that followed.

 

But, again, for every such moral victory there are countless more Shakers, Hale-Boppers, Southscottian Panacea Societies, Fruitlanders, Fifth Monarchists, and Muggletonians (the last one died in 1979. We shall not see his like again).

 

I bring this up because I’ve gotten an interesting reaction to my LA Times column on the alleged threat of a socialist takeover of America. A good number of people tell me that I am being too dismissive. The  Democratic Socialists of America is taking over the Democratic Party, and the radical movement would do enormous damage or even destroy America if it got into power.

 

Now, I agree entirely that it would do enormous damage if it got into power. I’m even willing to concede that the chances of it destroying America are greater than zero if it managed to seize the reins of both the Democratic Party and subsequently the country.

 

(I’ll even add to the threat matrix. I don’t want to say the DSA is explicitly antisemitic—not because I don’t think the case can be made, albeit contestably. An easier claim to defend is that it has a high degree of tolerance for antisemitism and that is dangerous enough. Small, committed minorities of Jew-haters have made their share of history, too.)

 

But that doesn’t mean I think the DSA will be successful in turning the country socialist. I explained some of my thinking in the column. Socialism tends to become more popular—in polls—when people are dissatisfied with the economic status quo and their personal plight. But that has more to do with the fact that they think capitalism is the label for the status quo. And since the opposite of capitalism in their minds is socialism, by the transitive property, they say they want socialism because that’s the antonym for the status quo/capitalism. This is a longstanding trend in public opinion.

 

But I’ll broaden out. Americans don’t like socialism because distaste for socialism is a component part of American exceptionalism. Sure, being human beings, Americans like subsidies and free stuff far more than they should. But they also hate long lines, bureaucracy, shortages, inefficiency, freeloaders, economic stagnation, and being bossed around. Socialism may suck at delivering knee surgeries in a timely manner, but it’s great at delivering that stuff.

 

Indeed, the term—not the idea or the phenomenon—“American exceptionalism” was coined by Joseph Stalin when Jay Lovestone told him that the American capitalist running dogs just didn’t want to eat the Marxist dogfood. Stalin refused to believe the American proletariat was unconvertible to the cause  and called American exceptionalism a “heresy.” And Stalinists—and all manner of communists and socialists—continue to agree with him.

 

I think I’ve earned my anti-communist and anti-socialist credentials. I am happy, to the point of crackpot exuberance, to denounce socialism and communism and defend capitalism (though not the status quo) all day long. I think the DSA is shot through with bad ideas and infested with bad people. I’ve written quite a lot about that already.

 

What seems to annoy some people is not my opinion about the DSA’s craptacular ideas, but my analysis about their likelihood of success. I don’t want to get deep into the punditry, but I am hardly alone in thinking it’s fairly obvious that the DSA agenda is not merely stupid on the merits, but politically idiotic. Many of the same people who nod along at—correct!—claims that Kamala Harris lost in 2024 because she was too left-wing want to believe that a faction even further to her left is on the cusp of total victory.

 

The reason why establishment Democrats are finally starting to fight back against the radicalism in their ranks has less to do with their adamantine opposition to abolishing the police or ending border enforcement—after all, many of them embraced or quasi embraced such ideas just a few years ago when they thought, wrongly, that such ideas were popular (ironically, the liberal media screwed the Democrats by helping them think that). No, they’re fighting back because they understand this stuff repels far more voters than it attracts in general elections. (By the way, the idea that socialists and communists are opposed to the police or border enforcement is one of the strangest ahistorical pieces of claptrap imaginable. The Berlin Wall was not some socialist installation art piece at the unpoliced open border between the Germanies.)

 

Are they fighting back effectively? Alas, no.

 

I get it coming and going. Because other people give me grief for writing as much as I do about the DSA. Some want me to concentrate my ire at President Donald Trump and Republican perfidy. Others insist that the DSA is a fringe group with a small following only in very blue districts and regions. The two groups overlap in the complaints I get about lending aid and comfort to Trump by either letting myself be distracted (from my Trump criticism) by the DSA or by bolstering his hysterical Red Menace rhetoric.

 

What unites all of these complaints—of “you overestimate the DSA’s significance” and “you underestimate it”—is the confusion of electoral analysis with substantive analysis.

 

Ironically, this is precisely the same dynamic I’ve been struggling with for 10 years now when it comes to the new right, my preferred catchall for the various nationalists, postliberals, common good constitutionalists, neo-reactionaries, and the like. These are also small, ideologically committed minorities, and I’ve struggled with how seriously I should take them. I’ve decided to take them very seriously, not because I think their arguments are good and their ideas are sound, but because Trump succeeded in becoming president and has seeded them throughout the government and the right-wing media and institutional ecosystem. Trump himself is not one of them. He has no fixed ideological commitments. But the new right figured out that in exchange for lip service (to his posterior) they can get power unearned by serious arguments.

 

I think many of the ideas associated with this crowd are also stupid and dangerous. I also think they’re politically unwise in a post-Trump environment. If J.D. Vance gets the nomination in 2028 (a much bigger “if” than some of my friends believe) and runs as an out-and-out postliberal, I think he’d lose in a landslide against any remotely normal Democrat. But he might win against a committed DSA-style Democrat. The converse is also true. If a Mamdani doppelganger gets the nomination and runs against a relatively normal Republican, I think the Democrat would lose.

 

I’ve spent so much time and energy arguing against the illiberal ideas capturing the hearts and minds of young right-wingers—including a similar DSA-esque tolerance for antisemitism—for several reasons. For starters, as noted above, they are actually wielding real political power and influence, thanks to Trump. Also, as a lifelong defender of traditional conservatism, I think that’s not just my obligation, but my beat. More importantly, I think this country desperately needs a healthy conservatism that seeks to conserve the classically liberal propositions at the heart of the founding and the American creed. My argument has never been that if the corporatists, nationalists, and theocrats get power, they will destroy America overnight. They’d do damage. They’d weaken the country. But they would not actually “succeed” because their ideas are bad, often un-American in a literal and descriptive sense, and won’t work. And therefore their ideas would prove to be unpopular.

 

I’d rather not go through all the drama of being proven right, though. Which brings me back to my main motivation. As I’ve said countless times, this stuff can break conservatism as a viable philosophical movement. Redefining conservatism as state capitalism or corporatism in the service of some kind of white or Christian identity politics would be a disaster over the long term.

 

Likewise redefining the “liberalism” of the Democratic Party into DSA-style socialism, left-wing identity politics, and a kind of secular, environmentally inflected theocracy would be a disaster over the long term as well. We need two healthy, serious parties. The longer we go without them, the more damage they will do.

 

That damage will have electoral consequences that can be remedied in whole or in part with another election. Or the one after that. Or the one … you get the point.

 

The question of how to deal with bad ideas is very easy. Reject them. Argue against them. Prove them wrong, as best you can. But the question of how seriously one should take small, committed minorities pushing bad ideas is a prudential question.

 

My problem is with people who think if those minorities win one election, that minority will win perpetually. The idea that we’re one election away from destruction is a destructive idea, because it gives parties and voters permission to make allowances for lesser evils until all we have are choices between competing evils. In such an environment, opponents of what they deem to be the greater evil get very angry at criticism of the lesser evil because they think it’s tacit support for the greater one. Such thinking just perpetuates the cycle, inflicts more damage, and delays the day when Americans figure out how to get us out of the mess. The people making allowances for the DSA do so because they think anything that “stops Trump” is worth it. The people making allowances for Trump do so because they think anything that “stops socialism” or “stops communism” is worth it. This is how electoral calculations predicated on the false assumption that we’re one election from Armageddon corrupt intellectual calculations. America has not been destroyed by Trump, and it won’t be destroyed if the DSA gets a larger foothold in the Democratic Party.

 

These small, committed minorities should be opposed because they’re wrong and bad for the country. But winning one election isn’t all it takes for them to destroy America. Think about it this way. Obviously, FDR had a lot of political success with the New Deal (I think his policy successes were far more mixed than the conventional wisdom holds). But in 1944 he wanted America to adopt a second Bill of Rights that could be part of the DSA platform today—guaranteed jobs, healthcare, housing, etc.— and Americans said, “No thanks.” If Americans didn’t want quasi-socialism then, I don’t see why we should believe they’ll want it in 2026 or 2028. But even if they do want it, that doesn’t mean they’ll want to keep it once it proves not to work.

 

Once enough people—both voters and politicians—accept there are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats, that we have the agency to remedy mistakes, the sooner we’ll get to a constructive political order again.

 

I’m long-term bullish on America because I think our constitutional structure combined with our vast, diverse, continental nation will allow the innate reasonableness and decency of the American people and our exceptional culture to win out. I’d just rather see it happen in my lifetime.

Mamdani’s Not So Super Markets

By John Gustavsson

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

At a July 27 press conference, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani finally unveiled additional details of his city-owned grocery stores scheme. Prices on all meat, seafood, fresh produce, and 20 other “essential items” such as bread and cheese will be set 30 percent lower than private competitors’, with prices updated monthly. With grocery prices having soared since the pandemic, enthusiasm is understandable — though ultimately misguided.

 

Neither the press conference nor the “vision plan” provided by the city contained any measures to prevent hoarding and reselling, including commercial reselling. Food banks usually deal with this by limiting who can purchase food and the amount each client can purchase. At the five ZohranMarts, however, everyone will be free to enter and shop to their hearts’ delight.

 

And it really means everyone, including non–New Yorkers, presumably because requiring strong proofs of identity or residency (beyond something like a library card, the only measure that’s been discussed) is anathema to Mamdani’s ideology. After all, if such documents were required to enter a grocery store, they may soon — God forbid! — be required to vote.

 

Although New Yorkers pay more for their groceries than the residents of almost any other city in America, the difference is not as big as one may think, and prices are even higher in several other major cities in coastal states, including San Francisco and Portland on the West Coast, and Charleston on the East. At a 30 percent discount, a shopping trip becomes a profitable endeavor not just for people living in nearby Yonkers, but also those living out of state in major cities like Newark and Philadelphia.

 

With unauthorized reselling already a problem for food banks and SNAP benefits, there is no reason to think it won’t be even more of a problem in grocery stores that are open to everyone.

 

The same, of course, goes for shoplifting. While the stores will be publicly funded, they will be managed by private operators whose losses will be reimbursed by taxpayers in the form of “targeted investment.” Even though these operators will be responsible for “managing crime and loss prevention,” it is hard to see any seller taking serious measures to combat it when ultimately, the city will be on the hook for losses, and that’s on top of the already strong litigation threat all stores face when cracking down on shoplifting. If the city attempts to push back, the operator can always threaten to shut the place or leave the ZohranMart shelves empty — which would be devastating to Mamdani’s reputation and political prospects.

 

Any store that becomes a free-for-all for shoplifting will also attract a criminal clientele that could very well make the areas surrounding the stores less safe.

 

Though private operators won’t have an incentive to stop shoplifting, they will have an incentive to upsell customers on the non-subsidized items they will also be carrying. While stores will be forbidden from carrying alcohol, tobacco, lottery tickets, and hot prepared food, nothing prevents them from carrying “regular” snacks, soft drinks, household items, and similar things. We should expect these items to be aggressively marketed, with many customers ending up spending their “savings” on nonsubsidized products. Some customers may be deceived by the general perception of the stores into buying these products, wrongly thinking that they, too, are a bargain.

 

Which brings us to the most fundamental error behind not just city-owned grocery stores, but all left-wing policies aimed at combating “food deserts,” of which New York City has none, and poor nutrition: The problem has never been the supply, but the demand.

 

In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), George Orwell summed up the reason why individuals with low incomes tend to have terrible diets:

 

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread . . . ? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots.

 

And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. . . . When you are unemployed . . . you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.

 

A stated goal of the city-owned grocery stores is to combat food deserts and improve nutrition. But, as Orwell notes, the problem is not that poor people don’t have access to or are priced out of nutritious food — like brown bread and raw carrots — but rather that they don’t want much of that food (not that they are necessarily alone in that). If anything, giving them “regular” grocery items at a lower cost frees up more money to be used for indulgences, whether it be cookies and chips bought at the ZohranMart, or cigarettes and liquor bought next door.

 

Worse, even if Mamdani could somehow force New Yorkers to stop eating their feelings, behavioral research on “addiction transfer” suggests that those who eat to cheer themselves up would simply find another, often worse, coping outlet. Or they will just become more dissatisfied with life in general, which is never good when you’re the incumbent. There is a reason why the Soviet Union kept the vodka flowing even as other goods were missing from the shelves, and why Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign caused him so much grief.

 

Far from a public service, the city-owned grocery stores are perfectly designed to transfer wealth from the public into private pockets: more specifically, into those of resellers, shoplifters, and opportunistic operators, and, of course, the bureaucrats paid to supervise this project. While Mamdani will pay anything to keep shelves stocked, New Yorkers will soon find themselves paying what they save — and more — on groceries through their tax bills. As the old economics saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The UN Would Rather Historical Sites Be Destroyed Than Be in Jewish Hands

By Seth Mandel

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon is an unforgettable landmark to Israelis and to the general public. For the latter, a reasonably well-preserved Crusader fortress is a rare and memorable sight. For Israelis, however, Beaufort’s other uniqueness comes into play: It remains, 900 years after its construction, a strategically useful fort.

 

Built in the 12th century above the Litani River, the fort spent its early decades changing hands between the Franks and Muslim forces. In the modern era, Israel, Lebanon, Palestinian terrorists, and the Iranian occupation forces of Hezbollah have taken turns.

 

When Israel fought the Palestine Liberation Organization in South Lebanon in 1982, taking the castle was the source of some controversy. Its necessity was in question and its cost in casualties was higher than expected. Each time Israel withdrew from Lebanon, which it did again in 2000 under Ehud Barak, Beaufort was among the last places evacuated.

 

For decades, then, Beaufort Castle was a place from which terrorists attacked Lebanon’s sovereign next-door neighbor, Israel. Doing so was an act of recklessness, though neither the Palestinians nor the Iranians have ever shown hesitation in putting historical sites at risk. And yet it was only last week that UNESCO, the United Nations cultural arm, moved to put Beaufort on its historic register.

 

The reason? To undermine the Israel-Lebanon peace process.

 

In taking this step, the UN made the destruction of historic sites (one in Lebanon and one in Judea and Samaria) far more likely. It’s clear now that, somehow, the world is going to need to protect historic sites from the United Nations.

 

Beaufort’s addition to this list is among the most hypocritical acts the UN has ever taken—and the UN engages in a lifetime’s worth of hypocrisy every year.

 

In fact, it’s much worse even than it looks. On the surface, those who launch rockets from the Beaufort area and who draw war to its doorstep are obviously the ones putting the fortress in danger. But Hezbollah does so much more than that.

 

Just two weeks ago, Israel showed journalists what lies beneath Beaufort thanks to the Iranians and their allies. Hezbollah built a sprawling tunnel system in the ground under and around the fortress, which lies on a ridge two-thousand feet above sea level.

 

The IDF took journalists into one of the tunnels, which has an exit facing the northern Israeli town of Metula, making clear that Hezbollah’s presence in the ridge has one purpose: war.

 

With the cease-fire, however, Israel is held back from fully chasing Hezbollah terrorists out of ridge tunnels. The pause has enabled the Iranian proxy to fortify other positions, move weapons and personnel around, and create the conditions for more all-out war from the castle and the other tunnel systems it has built in the South.

 

The UN has thus moved to preserve, rather than remove, the biggest threat to Beaufort Castle.

 

In Samaria, meanwhile, Palestinians rejoiced at the inclusion of Sebastia on the heritage list. Sebastia is an ancient Jewish historical site next to an Arab village, and the Palestinians have looted and destroyed parts of the site while preventing additional archaeological excavations.

 

Israel has moved to expropriate a piece land next to the site, located within Area C, which is under Israeli control. It would do much to prevent the further intentional destruction of Jewish (and Roman) history. What hasn’t been looted has been appropriated: The Palestinians submitted the site to the UN heritage list while omitting any Jewish connection to it. (I think some used to call that “cultural genocide.”)

 

Thus the approval of the application is itself a formal erasure of history designed to prevent its protection from further destruction. The UN is doing this solely because it shares the Palestinian application’s hatred of Jews and dedication to the political looting of other people’s history.

 

The UN has turned UNESCO into an agency of destruction. It should be kept far from anything the world wants preserved.

America’s Progress Paradox

By Marian L. Tupy

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

A recent column by Allison Schrager that appeared in Bloomberg poses a puzzle: Americans have never been richer, and they have rarely been angrier. Indeed, by nearly every objective measure of material flourishing, such as life expectancy, real income, hours worked to buy food and shelter, access to technology that did not exist a generation ago, the average American lives better than his grandparents did. The mood does not match the record. The explanation lies partly in the happiness data themselves and partly in how people evaluate their country compared with their own lives.

 

Schrager invokes the Easterlin Paradox. In 1974, Richard Easterlin observed two findings that appeared to contradict each other. Within any country at a given moment, richer people report higher well-being than poorer ones. If income raises well-being for the individual, one would expect it to do so for the nation. But as a country grows richer across decades, average reported happiness appears to remain flat.

 

That conclusion rested on thin evidence, however — mostly American data over a few postwar decades. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers reexamined it in 2008 using global surveys covering far more countries over a much longer period. They found that rich countries report higher well-being than poor ones and that growth raises reported well-being over time. The relationship is logarithmic: Each doubling of income adds roughly the same increment of satisfaction. A rise from $2,000 to $4,000 a year does about as much as a rise from $40,000 to $80,000. That accounts for much of the apparent paradox. In a wealthy country, a 3 percent raise is a small proportional gain, so the measured return looks negligible even though the relationship between income and well-being remains intact.

 

The same correction has been applied to the best-known finding in the field. In 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton reported that day-to-day emotional well-being stopped improving above roughly $75,000 in annual income. In 2021, Matthew Killingsworth, sampling moods in real time through a smartphone application rather than asking people to recall the previous day, found no such ceiling.

 

The two camps then conducted an adversarial collaboration and reanalyzed the data jointly. Their 2023 result: For the least happy fifth of people, well-being does flatten above a threshold, because, the authors suggest, heartbreak, bereavement, and clinical depression are not problems that income solves. For the remaining four-fifths, well-being continues to rise with income and rises fastest among the happiest. Kahneman accepted the revision of his own finding.

 

Easterlin has not conceded. His 2022 work with Kelsey O’Connor maintains that the long-run correlation between growth and happiness disappears over horizons of 20 years or more. The dispute is now largely technical, and it is not settled.

 

Two cautions are warranted on the skeptics’ side. Happiness scales are bounded from 0 to 10: Someone who rated his life a 7 in 1975 cannot report a 14 today, however much better his circumstances have become, so the instrument understates real gains. And income was never the dominant variable. Health, marriage, friendship, employment, and a sense of purpose account for more of the variation between individuals than earnings do, which is what one should expect if markets are a means rather than an end.

 

The sharper explanation for American discontent has little to do with Easterlin. When Americans are asked about their own lives — their health, families, safety, and standards of living — roughly four in five report satisfaction. When the same population is asked about the direction of the country, satisfaction falls to a quarter or less. The pessimism is aimed at the nation, not at the respondent’s own circumstances.

 

Three mechanisms produce that gap. The availability heuristic, identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1973, leads people to judge how common an event is by how readily an instance comes to mind. Negativity bias, summarized by Roy Baumeister and co-authors in 2001, means adverse information registers more forcefully than favorable information of equal magnitude. And the economics of media reward salience: Incremental improvement is not reportable, while price spikes, scandals, and disasters are. Personal experience is drawn from direct observation. National judgment is drawn almost entirely from mediated information selected for alarm.

 

The consequence is not merely a sour mood. Voters who conclude that democratic capitalism has failed them will accept price controls that suppress supply, tariffs that reduce trade, and immigration restrictions that cut off the inflow of talent that generates new ideas. Dismantling the institutions that produced current abundance on the strength of a misperception would convert a false belief into a true one.

 

Progress does not promise total contentment. It is a method for solving problems. Housing costs, childcare costs, and failing schools are real and specific, and they yield to reform, competition, and technical ingenuity, as thousands of comparable problems have. The mood, then, is not a verdict on the record. The mood is a verdict on the story Americans have been told about the record. They have never been richer, and they have rarely been angrier — but the anger is best aimed at the specific problems that remain, not at the machinery that solved all the others.

The Left Has No Use for Anthony Fauci Anymore

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

 

It’s been a long fall for Dr. Anthony Fauci. Four years ago, he was hailed as real-life Atlas — the avatar for an army of selfless physicians and medical professionals and proof that bureaucracy and competence were not incompatible concepts. Today, Fauci is invoking his right against self-incrimination in what may be a fruitless effort to avoid accountability for what Republicans allege was a pattern of misconduct. And for all his troubles, Fauci’s performance before a congressional committee on Wednesday may yet result in a criminal referral. After all, what else would you call that spectacle but “contempt?”

 

A few dead-enders still enamored with the fictionalized account of Dr. Fauci that ensorcelled so many liberals in the depths of the pandemic mounted a half-hearted attempt to defend his honor. But they seemed more outraged by the GOP’s behavior than aggrieved on Fauci’s behalf.

 

The left’s indifference is understandable. Why bother? As an instrument of political utility, Fauci is a spent force.

 

There’s a reason why, more than any other public health official under Trump at the outset of the pandemic, Fauci so quickly became a dashboard saint to the American left. No other figure in public life had the demonstrable power to convince the public to subordinate their financial self-interest to the state, severing the bonds of community and family that mediate the personal and the political.

 

Even as public officials with more propriety assured Americans throughout the Covid years that a return to “normalcy” was the goal — “or as normalized as you can be, post-Covid,” in former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s formulation — a segment of the American left convinced itself that returning to normal would be worse than the perpetuation of the pandemic.

 

Vox’s Sigal Samuel called it the kind of anxiety that “might be worth cultivating.” Theirs was a fear of returning to a world in which mental health was incompatible with “the rigidity of the modern workday,” a world of wealth disparities and racial inequity, a world defined by “harmful systems” and no collective will to alter them. “We shouldn’t go back to ‘normal,’” he admitted. “Normal wasn’t good enough.” That outlook was hardly exclusive to the far-left fringe. “There is no getting ‘back to normal,’ experts say,” CNN’s headline read. “The sooner we accept that, the better.”

 

This outlook was overrepresented in the Biden administration. His White House fast lost sight of its initial modest objective — putting “the nation back on a path to get closer to normal.” By the fall of 2021, Fauci told reporters in the first weeks of Biden’s presidency, he hoped only that America would “start approaching some degree of normality.” After all, “our lives are not going to be the same,” Barack Obama’s CDC director, Thomas Frieden, contended. If these were only prudent expressions of uncertainty, they wouldn’t have erred only in one direction — and there would not have been consequences for administration figures who diverged from that depressing pattern. And as 2021 drew to a close, Fauci abandoned normalcy as a goal in favor of advocating the pandemic’s anti-social practices indefinitely.

 

Fauci was never an honest broker. When it came to the “herd immunity” threshold, the doctor “acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts” in an interview with the New York Times. He convinced Biden not to relax the federal government’s recommended vaccination schedule because that would be “a logistical and messaging nightmare” — as if pandemic-era guidelines were ever static, and best practices should be subordinate to the ease with which they’re communicated. Fauci has defensively insisted that he never insisted on the closure of schools, in accordance with the demands of core Democratic constituencies like the teachers’ unions, although his diary tells a different tale. But we don’t need the diary to indict Fauci’s mendacity. As he boasted to reporters in October 2020, “I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.” Quote, unquote.

 

None of this diminished his standing in progressive eyes. Rather, it seemed to intensify the affection for him. Whether he was a man of the left himself was immaterial. He was a man of the state.

 

At the height of his power, Fauci had his hands in nearly every aspect of American statecraft — from its foreign policy to the preservation of Americans’ constitutional rights — and he would often contradict Democrats who displayed any sensitivity to the public’s demand for normalcy, the president included. It was power he managed to amass, in some reasonably significant measure, due to the cultural phenomenon around him. In his private musings, Fauci indulged his own celebrity. He never seemed to recognize it for the contrivance that it was.

 

Fauci was the perfect technocrat; impassive, disdainful of public opinion, and single-minded in his assumption and application of state power. That’s what they loved about him. But just as Andrew Cuomo discovered that the cult around him — what with the prayer candles, ornamental “love gov” socks, and celebrities confessing their “Cuomosexual” tendencies — wasn’t sincere, Fauci has learned the hard way that he was only ever useful. Now, he’s not.

 

It was the doctor’s own hubris that brought him low, but, of the many miscalculations he made, believing himself to be anything other than a tool in his political allies’ hands was his gravest.