Freedom Is Worth the Risk

By David Bahnsen

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

I am not just here today as a lover of freedom and markets, but I am here as a particular lover of National Review, of its history, its founder, its legacy, and its role in conserving the ideals that are worth conserving. But it is a very recent development that has me particularly animated and has reignited my love of National Review. Socialism existed in American faculty lounges in the 1990s. William F. Buckley attacked radicalism on college campuses as far back as 1955. We all know that the ethos of anti-Communism was central to the history of National Review.

 

But there is a massive uprising on the right involving those opposed to free markets, turning terms like “market fundamentalism” into pejoratives and making a case against free trade — people who believe that capital and labor are at diametrical odds with one another. The giants on whose shoulders we stand — Meyer and Buckley and Chambers, but also Hayek and Friedman and Smith — would expect us to fight this “new right” temper tantrum with every ounce of breath in our bodies.

 

The current debate over economic vision is not merely about policy preferences, tax rates, election cycles, or trade particulars. At the core of those who believe in free enterprise, who believe it is a core tenet of our nation’s founding, who believe that what is at stake is crucial if we are to preserve not only the American experiment but Western civilization, is this: a distinct view of the human person, of freedom, and of the kind of society that best allows people to flourish.

 

Do we still believe that free people, acting with virtue and responsibility, are capable of building a good society without coercion from above?

 

Because beneath the daily noise of politics, beneath the headlines and outrage and social media chaos, there is a much more fundamental struggle underway — a struggle over the dignity of the human person and the future of freedom itself.

 

Economic freedom is not merely an efficiency mechanism, and it never has been. It is not merely a system that produces more goods and services. It is not merely a way to maximize GDP. It is, surely, all of those things, by the way. It just is not only those things. Economic freedom is a moral necessity because the human person possesses dignity, agency, creativity, and responsibility. When a society forgets this, it does not merely become poorer. It becomes smaller, more cynical, more dependent. It possesses less character and less agency. And this is to say, it becomes less human.

 

The great crisis of our time is not merely inflation, debt, regulation, political polarization, and technological disruption. Those things matter. But beneath them lies something even more dangerous: a growing loss of confidence in the moral capacity of free people.

 

More and more, we are told that freedom is too risky. That ordinary people cannot be trusted. That experts must decide. That bureaucrats must manage. That central planners must be tasked with the role of allocating resources. These authorities, we are told, will save us from uncertainty, inequality, and instability — from the failures of a market system — you know, that incredibly free and open and low-tax and low-regulation market we have all been living in.

 

Yes, the Bernies and Warrens and AOCs and university professors who have never run a P&L tell us all these things, and most of these folks have said so for many years — whether they be extreme statists or overconfident technocrats. But the urgency of the message today is not about the message we are countering but the direction from which it is coming. The so-called new right economic manifesto has accepted all of the underlying tenets of central planning, and the road to which this goes is not ambiguous or unclear.

 

But history teaches us something profoundly different. The greatest achievements of civilization have not and cannot come from centralized power. Our duty as lovers of freedom and believers in the God-given dignity of the human person is to promote unleashed creativity. Risk-taking and entrepreneurialism are indispensable to this. So is the allocation of capital. The demonization of the investor class has become crass and cynical, and maybe effective, politics, but it is ideologically and practically insane. Those who claim to value family businesses and strong communities demonize capital formation and innovation to the peril of their own stated agenda.

 

The moral, communitarian, and interpersonal character we want in our vision for society as conservatives is not threatened by free enterprise, but it is threatened by central planning. It is threatened by confiscation. It is threatened by the dulling of our senses and agency that comes with an unending creep of state power. The result is the stagnation that comes from subpar allocation of resources, from the centralization of decision-making that inevitably leads to uninformed decisions and flawed incentive structures.

 

The right spent the second half of the 20th century claiming that bureaucrats create European stagnation, that committees cannot replicate what free people create voluntarily, that planners lack dispersed knowledge. We argued for entrepreneurial imagination and accurately said that the state cannot replace the moral energy that comes from human beings acting responsibly in freedom.

 

2008 was the seminal moment in which so many things changed. The right has still not wrestled with the implications of what took place in 2008. I am well aware that it was a pivotal moment in my own life and career, but I have become convinced over the years that it was a paradigmatic moment for our movement and our country, too, in which the right’s reliance on efficiency arguments for free enterprise would no longer be taken for granted, and when our inability to connect free enterprise to deeper transcendent truth would leave us on our back feet. Many people may not understand what actually created the 2008 financial crisis, but what I do understand is how the mood shifted in the aftermath. And it was a long time coming.

 

We now must restate pro-market arguments to some who were once our own people. We need to reframe markets as ecosystems of human action and demand that the discussion center around a coherent view of the human person — an anthropology worthy of the conservative worldview.

 

Every political philosophy contains an assumption about what human beings are. And the defenders of economic freedom must never concede this argument. We are not defending markets because we worship money. We are defending markets because we believe people matter. The central planner sees populations. We see human beings. The planner sees units. The free society sees souls. The planner sees problems to manage. We see human beings made for purpose, creativity, sacrifice, and contribution.

 

Free markets help to build wealth, they lift people from poverty, they extend life expectancy, reduce disease, expand opportunity, democratize consumption, and create prosperity on a scale previous generations could not imagine.

 

Those are all necessary but insufficient claims.

 

The new right and the old and new left suggest they can produce similar outcomes with more control, centrally manage efficiency, and use their preferences to create their vision of fairness. And if our only argument is material output, we will eventually lose to whoever promises enough comfort. But the deeper argument for freedom, including economic freedom, is moral.

 

Human beings are moral actors. And moral action requires choice. Responsibility requires freedom. Virtue requires agency. And this is why the defense of economic freedom must always be connected to the defense of civil society, family, faith, local institutions, and moral responsibility. Freedom detached from virtue collapses into decadence. Virtue detached from freedom collapses into coercion.

 

This is why the old fusionist project mattered so much. Fusionism understood something profoundly important: that economic liberty and moral order are not enemies. They are partners. Fusionism rejected two false choices. The first false choice was the idea that society must choose between moral order and economic freedom. The second false choice was the idea that markets alone are sufficient to sustain civilization. Both are wrong. A healthy society needs free institutions and virtuous people. It needs entrepreneurship and character. It needs prosperity and responsibility. It needs liberty ordered toward transcendent truth. The fusionist understanding recognized that the state cannot manufacture virtue. But it can certainly destroy the institutions that cultivate it. Families cultivate virtue. Churches cultivate virtue. Communities cultivate virtue.  Voluntary associations cultivate virtue. Work cultivates virtue. Responsibility cultivates virtue. The state does not — and cannot.

 

Markets do not replace morality. But they are the venues for morally formed human beings to create, grow, and innovate. Fusionism protects markets from unconstrained nature because it properly orders jurisdictions and disentangles confused roles — a paternalistic state, most importantly. The paternalistic state increasingly seeks to absorb the mediating institutions that stand between the individual and centralized power. The more dependent people become on centralized systems, the weaker families become. The weaker local communities become. The weaker religious institutions become. The weaker personal responsibility becomes. Dependency is not morally neutral. And neither is confiscatory statism.

 

A society that transfers responsibility upward inevitably drains initiative downward. And eventually people begin to lose confidence in themselves. One of the greatest tragedies of this modern political moment is that too many people have come to see themselves primarily as claimants rather than creators. Recipients rather than builders. Victims rather than agents.

 

National Review continues to stand athwart history saying that free enterprise is a system worth defending because it values the human person in the right way. Because capital markets are fundamentally about belief in the future. Think about what capital allocation actually is. An investor says:

 

“I believe this entrepreneur can build something valuable.”

“I believe this worker can create.”

“I believe this company can innovate.”

“I believe tomorrow can be better than today.”

 

Capital formation is an act of optimism. It is an act of trust. It is an act of confidence in human possibility. And this is why attacks on capital markets are so misguided.

 

Of course, markets are imperfect, because human beings are imperfect. There are bubbles, excesses, frauds, manias, greed, and speculation. There always have been. But the answer to fallen human nature is not concentrated power. Because concentrated power is exercised by fallen human beings too. The question is never whether flawed people will exist. We know too much about human nature to assume otherwise. The question is whether power will be decentralized or centralized. Whether failure will be distributed or consolidated. Whether correction mechanisms will exist. Whether people remain free to act, fail, learn, build, and try again.

 

The market economy works because it accounts for human imperfection better than centralized systems do. It disperses power. It allows adaptation. It creates feedback. It rewards value creation. Centralized systems entrench ruling classes. Markets disrupt them. That is why economic freedom matters. Not because every market outcome is morally ideal. But because freedom preserves the conditions under which human flourishing remains possible.

 

And we desperately need to recover the moral legitimacy of profit itself.  Profit is not theft. Profit is not exploitation. In a free exchange, profit is evidence that value was created for another person. When an entrepreneur risks capital, employs workers, serves customers, and allocates resources effectively, profit becomes a signal that scarce resources were directed toward productive ends.

 

Now, yes, cronyism exists — and never more so than in a system of imperialistic, discretionary tariffs. Corruption exists. Rent-seeking exists. Free enterprise is antithetical to an economy of political favoritism. We must fight against cronyism if we are to regain the hearts and minds of young people who are understandably jaded by what happens when the government picks winners and losers.

 

One of the most destructive lies in modern culture is the Keynesian notion that meaning is primarily found in consumption. It is not. Meaning is found in contribution, responsibility, and service. In creation. In work well done. The dignity of work transcends income and becomes about participation in creation itself. We were made to cultivate, build, organize, invent, and serve. And when societies suffocate enterprise under bureaucracy and dependency, they do not merely reduce growth rates. They diminish human purpose.

 

Now, let me say something especially important for this moment in history. Many people today feel anxious about technology, globalization, AI, financialization, and economic change. Some of those concerns are legitimate. Disruption is real. Communities can be destabilized. Transitions can be painful. But the answer cannot be a retreat into economic nationalism, centralized planning, or anti-market populism. History teaches us that prosperity does not come from insulating society from dynamism. It comes from channeling dynamism productively.

 

The answer to change is not paralysis. It is resilience. And resilience is built through strong families, strong communities, strong institutions, strong education, strong moral formation, and strong local cultures. Not through permanent dependence on centralized authority. We should absolutely seek policies that strengthen workers, families, savings, investment, ownership, entrepreneurship, and social mobility. But we must never forget that prosperity is created before it can be distributed.

 

And capital matters. Savings matter. Investment matters. Entrepreneurship matters. Productivity matters.

 

A culture that punishes capital formation eventually punishes workers, too. Because workers are more productive when equipped with better tools, better technology, better systems, and better enterprises. Capital and labor are not natural enemies. They are partners in production. The Marxian tragedy of progressive and new right economics is the attempt to pit them against one another as though prosperity were a fixed pie.

 

Human creativity expands possibilities. This is the miracle of free economies: They transform imagination into abundance. But none of this is inevitable. Freedom requires maintenance. Civilization requires stewardship. And economic liberty requires moral confidence. We must once again become willing to defend the free society not apologetically, but affirmatively.

 

And we should certainly not be embarrassed to defend the institutions of free enterprise that have done more to alleviate suffering and expand opportunity than any economic system in human history. But our defense must always remain rooted in a larger moral vision. Because a market is not the ultimate thing — the human person is. The economy exists for the person — not the person for the economy. And this is precisely why coercive statism ultimately fails. Because it reduces people into instruments of political administration. The free society recognizes something higher. That every individual possesses inherent dignity. That freedom is not merely procedural — it is deeply connected to what it means to be human. And so the challenge before us is not merely political. It is cultural. Spiritual. Civilizational.

 

Will we defend the mediating institutions that sustain liberty? Will we preserve the moral foundations necessary for economic freedom to endure? Or will we slowly trade freedom for dependency, dynamism for bureaucracy, responsibility for grievance, and aspiration for entitlement?

 

I remain hopeful because I still believe in people. And I still believe that when human dignity and economic liberty are joined together, extraordinary things happen.

 

The free society is worth defending because the human person is worth defending. And the task before us is to ensure that future generations inherit not merely wealth, but freedom itself.

 

My professional life has been and will continue to be in the capital markets, stewarding wealth, and utilizing the miracle of markets toward the achievement of financial aims. But accompanying the blessing that is my professional life is my moral duty to continue studying economic history and doing all I can to defend free enterprise for what it is: a moral architecture that promotes human dignity, constrains human nature, and feeds responsibility and flourishing of creatures made in the image of God.

Donald Trump’s Superficiality Is Bone-Deep

By Jonathan Chait

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

Donald Trump is reluctant to anoint J. D. Vance as his successor, and understandably so. But The New York Times recently discovered a peculiar basis for the president’s concern. “Mr. Trump, always keenly attuned to the optics of the presidency, has zeroed in on moments when Mr. Vance might not look the part,” the paper reported. “He has repeatedly brought up a moment from last spring, when Mr. Vance fumbled Ohio State’s national football championship trophy on the White House South Lawn.”

 

Of all the reasons for Trump to hesitate to crown Vance as the Republican presidential nominee in 2028, he has fixated not on Vance’s inflammatory comments about single women or on the difficulty vice presidents have detaching themselves from their administration’s unpopular record, but instead on the one time that Vance briefly mishandled a football trophy.

 

This is an extraordinarily shallow method for picking your party’s standard-bearer. It isn’t a surprise, however, because Trump is almost certainly the shallowest man ever to inhabit his office. Superficiality is a value system that has guided some of his administration’s most important decisions as it has drifted from menace into frivolity and decadence.

 

Trump has devoted his second term to the aspects of the presidency that would appeal to an apolitical tourist who visits Washington, D.C. He has poured himself into redecorations of the White House, interior and exterior, and has updated the city’s public spaces. This attention to renovation has yielded some undeniably lovely results, such as restored fountains and plazas. Other changes are more, well, taste-based, such as replacing the White House Rose Garden with a patio, and giving the Oval Office hotel-style signage and filling it with expensive knickknacks and gold leaf.

 

What’s striking about this campaign is not its aesthetic but its obsessive quality. Other presidents have engaged in monument-building and public-space remodeling, but Trump musters far more passion for these endeavors than any of his predecessors did. After a gunman invaded the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Trump tried to exploit the groundswell of sympathy, not to advance some high-value policy, or to seize more power, but to renew his push for Congress to fund his cherished ballroom project.

 

Trump has applied the same priorities to his personnel selections. His favorite way to compliment any official is to say that they come out of “central casting,” which is to say that he judges them by whether they look like they can do the job rather than whether they, you know, actually can.

 

He lingers on the appearance of men in his orbit—witness his recent wistful description of the New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart, a “beautiful guy” with “legs like tree trunks”—which my colleague Ashley Parker has shrewdly observed contributes to Trump’s curiously gay-adjacent sensibility. This behavior codes as gay mainly because it is unusual for straight men to spend so much time praising the beauty of other men. But it is also unusual for anyone, outside of beauty-related fields, to place as much emphasis on looks as Trump does.

 

Trump’s concern for appearance seeps into many policy domains. He has undertaken a whole-of-government assault on wind energy apparently because he hates the way wind turbines look. He has called wind farms “unsightly,” complained at length that they ruined the view of his golf course in Scotland, and said things such as “I don’t want windmills destroying our place. I don’t want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up a half a mountain that are ugly as hell.” He has accordingly shut down approved wind projects, forcing consumers to pay higher energy prices.

 

His hatred of immigration is likewise visceral. He associates immigrants from the global South with ugliness and mess (“filthy, dirty, disgusting”). This impulse is certainly tinged with racism, just as his disproportionate emphasis on female appearance (good looks being a bonus for male Trumpers and more of a requirement for female ones) has a sexist origin. Racism and sexism come in a variety of flavors, and Trump’s versions are inflected with an appearance bias.

 

His alliance with the “Make America Healthy Again” movement primarily reflects a rejection of science and expertise. But Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also share a skin-deep understanding of health, as do many of RFK Jr.’s allies. They seem to genuinely believe that allowing measles and other infectious diseases to spread while the shirt-optional secretary of health and human services engages in feats of strength on camera constitutes a net positive for public health.

 

No policy field has been affected more thoroughly by Trump’s superficiality than defense. He has placed in charge of the military Pete Hegseth, a figure he plucked from Fox News. Hegseth not only embodies Trump’s preference for “central casting”; he has turned it into a departmental ethos. The defense secretary has implemented new grooming standards and showed off his fitness with a series of televised workouts with the rank and file. Early in the Iran war, the president’s daily briefing featured curated videos of “stuff blowing up,” which fed his apparent belief that the campaign was a smashing success.

 

Trump has developed a fascination with building a new line of “Trump-class” battleships. Military experts have disparaged the functionality and cost of the expensive vessels. Mark Montgomery, a former rear admiral who works for the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, complained to The Wall Street Journal that the Navy is “focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”

 

Trump hardly disputes the accusation. It is more of a boast. “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a really aesthetic person,” he said once. “I put a little more spirit in the hull,” Trump told troops at another point. “I want that ship to look gorgeous, you know.” He has nostalgically invoked the old World War II documentary Victory at Sea.

 

This is happening at a moment when military tactics are transforming: The World War II–era crafts that hold nostalgic appeal for the Boomer president have diminishing value, and fleets of cheap drones have grown far more potent. As the military analyst Phillips O’Brien explained to my colleague David Frum, the most valuable warrior on the battlefield is usually a drone operator, who is essentially (and sometimes literally) a video-game player. That the U.S. military is losing the first war of the drone era while the television-trained defense secretary focuses on facial hair and push-ups is probably not a coincidence.

 

Future historians looking for a set piece to embody the Trump era might linger on the forthcoming UFC cage fight at the White House. The scene is intended to convey Trump’s sense of spectacle and violent domination, the link between power and literal muscle that fascinates him. The administration reportedly plans to fill the stands with soldiers—but not just any soldiers. CNN reports that attendees must meet fitness standards and generally “look good.” They are, after all, casting a show.

 

It is almost too on the nose for the aging president to stage gladiatorial bouts and commission victory arches as his armies overextend their power in a futile effort to subdue the Persians. The irony almost surely escapes him. His mind cannot process winning as anything deeper than looking good. The United States may be surrendering its technological advantages to China and allowing its scientific, medical, and bureaucratic skill to decay. But just as Trump slathers makeup on his skin and proclaims himself the healthiest president who ever lived, he measures the country’s success in gold leaf.

With Graham Platner, Democrats Are Playing with Fire

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, June 04, 2026

 

On a recent episode of Hot Ones, the internet show in which celebrities give interviews while eating spicy chicken wings, Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost decided to cool his mouth down not with milk or water but with a glass of hot sauce. In other words, he’d “fight fire with fire.” It didn’t turn out too well.

 

Democrats have adopted a similar strategy, but it’s threatening to burn the party down.

 

Over the past decade, Democrats have seen their chokehold on working-class men all but dissolve. As Donald Trump has saturated politics with unprecedented crassness, mini-Trumps have cropped up and won over hard-hat-and-lunch-bucket voters most commonly associated with union labor. It was no surprise that Teamsters President Sean O’Brien received a prime speaking spot at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

 

To counter the race for voters with dirty fingernails, Democrats have rolled out candidates cosplaying as working folks. Enter “oysterman” Graham Platner of Maine, who is running against Republican Senator Susan Collins. Republicans have their own gruff candidates, and Platner promised to be in the same mold, just on the left.

 

This weekend, reports surfaced that Platner had made a habit of sending sexual messages to six women who weren’t his wife. In fact, Platner’s actual wife, Amy Gertner, told her husband’s campaign about the texts back in 2025, warning them that his extramarital indiscretions could become a political liability.

 

But Platner’s candidacy has been nothing but a political liability all along. Virtually every bit of his résumé is mendacious self-mythologizing, from his working-class upbringing (he attended one of the nation’s most expensive prep schools) to his current wealth (his father, a Dartmouth-educated lawyer, floated Platner a $200,000 loan to buy a home in 2017).

 

He has had to answer for past statements in which he suggested that women who worry about being raped should “not get so f***ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.” He has made crude jokes about masturbation. And, of course, there is the small matter of the Nazi tattoo on his chest, which he proudly displayed for two decades. (He claims he didn’t know what it meant, but associates of his have said Platner knew exactly what it meant well before declaring his Senate candidacy.)

 

And now, we are forced to gaze upon the undressed torso of a Senate candidate, his lower half obscured only by a towel.

 

All of this could have been avoided by some rudimentary vetting, but Democrats’ thirst for a “genuine” candidate catapulted a genuine reprobate to the national stage. For a decade, the left has hammered away at Republicans for being interested only in gaining power, and now, because Platner is the Democrats’ best chance at retaking the Senate, they have to pretend that Platner is next in line for the papacy.

 

It is true that since Trump hit the scene, Republicans have been guilty of pushing candidates distinctly lacking in character or political skill. For a decade, conservatives have promoted freak shows like Herschel Walker (Georgia Senate) and Mark Robinson (North Carolina), or they’ve backed political incompetents like Dr. Oz (Pennsylvania Senate). The current secretary of health and human services is a lifelong Democrat with a long history of drug use and brain worms.

 

Right on cue, this year Republicans have nominated the unconscionably corrupt wretch Ken Paxton to be their Senate candidate in Texas. Now, otherwise sensible people have to pretend that Democratic weirdo James Talarico being overly entrenched with ephemeral wokeism is somehow worse than Paxton’s bribery charges and marital infidelities.

 

Every thinking person understands that if Graham Platner were a Republican, all the same people delighting that his embarrassing sexting shenanigans have come to light would be excusing that behavior. Instead, it’s liberals like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Chuck Schumer who have to choke on their Platner endorsements.

 

Elsewhere, Democrats have decided that performative masculinity is their way back to winning majorities. It’s why Pete Buttigieg now has a beard and why Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff has dedicated himself to a Captain America–style push-up regimen. (Seriously, Jon — drop the pec routine in the comments.)

 

But they have also emulated Republicans in gaslighting the public into thinking their worst candidates are viable public servants.

 

Documented sex pest Eric Swalwell was fully on his way to a California gubernatorial runoff election before a cadre of women came forward to expose his priapic exploits. His behavior was well-known before last month’s bombshell allegations, but other Democrats kept quiet. In the same primary, mean girl Katie Porter seemed to be starring in her own version of Wicked: For California. Democrats’ effort to cover up President Joe Biden’s obvious mental flaws during the 2024 election remains a national scandal.

 

And so, Democrats march on with Graham Platner, pretending there is nothing to see here. They will try to cast Susan Collins — one of the few Republican senators who voted to convict Trump — as a right-wing threat to the republic.

 

It may be entertaining to watch Democrats toss sticks on the bonfire of their own party’s immolation, but the Platner spectacle, like the Paxton variety, will leave our politics a charred husk.

Made Man

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, June 04, 2026

 

The essential thing to understand about the president’s decision to nominate Todd Blanche as attorney general is that it’s unnecessary.

 

In some cases, like Bill Pulte’s recent promotion to acting director of national intelligence, the law limits how long an acting leader can serve in a vacant position. Well, sort of: A White House that’s willing to game the rules (ahem) could legally keep Pulte in place for a loooooong time.

 

But if Donald Trump wants him in that role all the way to the end of his term—he says that he doesn’t, but you know him—he’ll need the Senate to give Pulte a thumbs-up at some point.

 

Not so with Blanche. Unlike Pulte, he’s already the duly confirmed deputy director of the department that he now leads in an acting capacity. As long as the position of attorney general remains vacant, he can continue to serve as acting AG indefinitely.

 

There’s recent precedent for it, in fact.

 

The Senate confirmed Julie Su as deputy secretary of the Labor Department in 2021. She became acting secretary two years later when the top job went vacant, at which point Joe Biden nominated her for the position. But Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema opposed her, denying her the votes she’d need for confirmation.

 

Biden and Chuck Schumer responded by doing … nothing. The then-president refused to yank the nomination, and the then-majority leader of the Senate declined to bring Su up for a vote, preserving the vacancy atop the department. Su ended up staying on as acting labor secretary for 22 months, until the day Biden left office.

 

In other words, the Democratic Senate forfeited its “advice and consent” power under Article II to please the White House. It used the fact that it had already exercised that power with respect to Su’s nomination for the deputy position as an excuse not to exercise it in more difficult political circumstances, when she was nominated for the big chair.

 

It was a profile in cowardice, a congressional specialty. Trump is now borrowing that playbook with respect to Blanche.

 

It’s possible that Senate Majority Leader John Thune will follow Schumer’s lead by not bringing up Blanche for a vote, ensuring that he continues to lead the Justice Department in an acting role. But I can imagine scenarios in which the nomination comes to the floor and is defeated, if not by the current Republican-controlled Senate, then certainly by a Democratic-controlled one next year.

 

And if that happens, unless I’m mistaken, Todd Blanche will continue to lead the Justice Department anyway. The fact that the Senate will have deemed him unfit to be attorney general won’t affect his ability to go on serving in the role in an acting capacity. All Trump would need to do to make Blanche untouchable is keep the AG job vacant.

 

The Senate’s power of “advice and consent” over the most important position in federal law enforcement would be functionally nullified.

 

All of which is to say that nominating Todd Blanche for attorney general seems oddly pointless. Trump doesn’t have to do it to keep him in the job indefinitely, and given his stated preference for having “acting” officials in key spots, it’s surprising that he would bother at all. Doing so achieves nothing except to make life harder for Senate Republicans.

 

And maybe that’s the point.

 

An unfit nominee.

 

I won’t waste (much) time explaining why the Senate should reject Blanche. A man who’s committed at least one and arguably two impeachable offenses in as many months on the job should not be confirmed for that job, let us hopefully agree.

 

We can argue over whether the preposterous “seashells” prosecution of James Comey is a high crime or misdemeanor. Incompetence isn’t impeachable, so the fact that the indictment in that matter is the flimsiest anyone has ever seen isn’t necessarily cause for removal.

 

What is impeachable is gross corruption, which is what Blanche demonstrated by pursuing charges against the former FBI director. He wanted to impress Trump by showing how willing he was to abuse state power to harass the president’s enemies, even—or especially—in a case like Comey’s that hasn’t a prayer of surviving under the First Amendment. It appears to have worked.

 

Impeachable or not, any senator would be justified in concluding that America can do better than let the DOJ be led by a guy capable of pinching off legal dookie like the Comey indictment.

 

The gravity of Blanche’s offense in midwifing the taxpayer slush fund for MAGA sociopaths is less debatable. It’s a straight-up heist from the U.S. Treasury carried out on the White House’s behalf by the head of federal law enforcement, reducing the role of attorney general to criminal “fixer.” The fact that Blanche used to be the president’s defense lawyer, and therefore has a conflict of interest with all things Trump that he continually ignores, is icing on the cake.

 

Even yesterday, after lawmakers browbeat him during testimony into saying that the slush fund won’t move forward, Blanche refused to put anything in writing that would formally rescind it. (I wonder why.) And he confirmed that the addendum to the fund plan that grants the president and his family absolution from any prior tax offenses they’ve committed will remain in place.

 

That giveaway is worth potentially $100 million to Trump. It “resembles a self-pardon, except that it extends even further, encompassing civil violations as well as criminal offenses,” Reason’s Jacob Sullum noted. If helping your crooked boss fleece the IRS to prove what an eager lackey you are isn’t impeachable, what is?

 

Todd Blanche is a Schmitt-ian nightmare, a conniving postliberal henchman who wields his power as chief prosecutor to help “us” and punish “them.” He’s a disgrace to his office and to his profession. And Senate Republicans know it: Remarkably, several are calling for legislative action to kill the slush fund despite Blanche’s assurances that it’s already dead. They don’t trust him to keep his promises to do the right thing unless he’s legally obliged, and why should they?

 

In short, if Republicans are looking for reasons to defeat his nomination, they don’t want for them. Are they looking to defeat it, though?

 

Could be!

 

Defiance.

 

It’s strange to think of Thune and his conference wanting to vote on this matter when they could just follow the Julie Su precedent and ignore it.

 

But there are a lot of Republicans in the chamber who are fed up with the president, Thune included, and who might enjoy an opportunity to stick it to him. The slush fund, the ballroom, the aimless Iran war and its impact on gas prices, and of course the presidential jihad against well-liked incumbents like Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn: Trump palpably could not give less of a rip how miserable his petty lusts and grudges are making life for Senate Republicans.

 

Now he’s saddled them with two indefensible promotions in the figures of Pulte and Blanche. (“We don’t need a weaponized DNI, we need professionals there,” Thune said tersely of the former’s appointment.) Perhaps the majority party in Congress is finally ready to make life—a little—miserable for Trump in return, especially as his job approval sinks beneath the waves.

 

It happened yesterday in the House, in fact, when four Republicans joined Democrats to pass a resolution that would block the president from ordering more strikes in Iran. It could happen again if the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up Blanche’s nomination. That committee happens to include Cornyn, who has an obvious axe to grind with Trump, and the retiring Thom Tillis, who’s bucked the president before on nominations and is no fan of Blanche’s. If they join Democrats in opposing the nominee, he would fail in committee.

 

And if they don’t, it’s conceivable that Cassidy, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins would cross the aisle to reject the nomination on the floor. Collins in particular might have reason to do so, as she’ll face her home state’s Democratic-leaning electorate at the polls in five months. Then again, she might not: Inflicting a humiliating defeat on the president and his nominee in the thick of the campaign could alienate Republicans in Maine.

 

It’s a no-win conundrum for the entire conference, really. If Blanche is confirmed, they’re on the hook for all of the corruption yet to come under his leadership, potentially a considerable electoral burden this fall. If they reject him or refuse to vote on him, they risk infuriating right-wing voters by demonstrating their “disloyalty” to the president. Why would Trump put them in that position?

 

To punish them, of course. He’s daring them to keep their recent mini-rebellion going by opposing Blanche, knowing that Blanche will remain on the job no matter what they do.

 

Any other president would spare his party a needless dilemma in an electoral climate as inhospitable as this one, but this president relishes “retribution” above all things—and doubling down on Blanche is retribution of a sort. The Senate blocked his ballroom money and then blocked his slush fund to prove that there’s a limit to how much corruption they’re willing to indulge. Answering that by nominating an unethical hack to be attorney general is his way of showing them that he’s unchastened by their resistance, still fully intent on using government to serve his personal interests.

 

The reason Schumer never put Julie Su up for a vote, I assume, is that he and Biden believed it would be untenable politically for her to remain as acting Labor secretary if her nomination were rejected. Lacking the Senate’s confidence, either she would feel obliged to resign or the White House would feel obliged to replace her. Trump and Blanche will feel no such dignified compunction.

 

If anything, the president might savor the prospect of keeping Blanche on after his nomination has been formally defeated. Doing so would extend an autocratic middle finger to Thune and the gang by demonstrating the futility of their “disloyalty.” What greater humiliation could there be for their “advice and consent” role than to have a rejected nominee continue serving in the job anyway?

 

Spite has always influenced Trump’s behavior as heavily as strategy has, but never more so than now that he’s reached his YOLO phase.

 

Incentives.

 

If you’re desperate for a strategic explanation for what’s happening, though, I’ll give you a few possibilities.

 

One is that the White House is trying to get Blanche confirmed before control of the Senate changes hands, in case a blue wave arrives in November. Having a Democratic Senate take up and defeat his nomination could trigger a legal battle over whether he’s lawfully permitted to remain as acting attorney general afterward. I think he is, but the opinion of The Dispatch’s worst lawyer doesn’t count for much.

 

In any case, better safe than sorry. Confirming Blanche now would remove any potential legal cloud over his eligibility. And if Republicans prove reluctant to do so, Trump could always motivate them by threatening to make Pulte acting AG if Blanche is defeated, as federal law entitles him to do.

 

Speaking of which, it’s possible that Trump nominated Pulte for the DNI position as a sort of sacrificial lamb, to soften up the Senate GOP with respect to confirming Blanche.

 

He did something similar by nominating Matt Gaetz to be attorney general shortly after the 2024 election, you may recall. Senate Republicans were so mortified by the pick that Trump’s many other execrable Cabinet selections seemed to become less mortifying by comparison. He eventually threw them a bone by withdrawing Gaetz—whereupon they turned around and rubber-stamped everyone from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Pete Hegseth to Kash Patel.

 

Maybe that’s the play with Pulte and Blanche too: “Confirm my embarrassingly unethical and unfit attorney general and I’ll throw you a bone by withdrawing my even more embarrassingly unethical and unfit national intelligence pick.” Another big “win” for Senate Republicans.

 

I do think there’s a strategic angle to Blanche’s nomination, but it’s much simpler than either of the convoluted theories above. It’s this: As usual, the president is seeking to incentivize corrupt behavior on his behalf by ostentatiously rewarding someone who’s already engaged in it.

 

That was also the point of pardoning the January 6 defendants and later creating a slush fund to enrich them. Postliberalism is a game of sticks and carrots, where you get the stick for posting a photo of seashells spelling out “86 47” and a carrot for trying to imprison the guy who posted it. The aim is the same in both cases: to communicate to the world at large that you’re far better off being a “friend” to the person who wields the carrots and sticks than an “enemy.”

 

Nominating Todd Blanche for a job he already has and will continue to have no matter how his nomination fares only makes sense when viewed as one of those carrots. By bestowing a showy honor on Blanche for committing impeachable offenses to serve him, Trump is signaling to other degenerates that they too will be honored and elevated if they choose him over the law.

 

If you know anything about the mafia, you’re familiar with the concept of a “made man.” The distinction is bestowed by the leadership on high-achieving thugs, granting them special privileges in the organization. In return for their absolute loyalty, they enjoy exalted rank and near-absolute immunity from being targeted for death by other mafiosos. Being “made” means you’ve earned the trust of the family by behaving ruthlessly on its behalf and are officially worthy of joining it.

 

That’s what Trump is doing with Blanche’s nomination. It won’t change a thing about how the DOJ operates, regardless of whether the Senate approves or rejects it. But that’s not the point. The point is to bestow an honor on a high-achieving thug, to incentivize other thugs—inside and outside the government—to emulate his ruthlessness in service to the family. As of yesterday, Blanche is a made man.

 

Elect a mafioso president, and your government will be run like the mafia. Congratulations to the nominee on an honor well-earned.

Remove Bill Pulte

National Review Online

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

Arguably, Bill Pulte isn’t well-suited to being director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, but at least he has ample experience in real estate.

 

Now, he’s become President Trump’s most egregious personnel decision since he briefly wanted to make Matt Gaetz attorney general of the United States.

 

In the wake of Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation last month, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he has appointed Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, a preposterous choice.

 

Pulte was qualified for his role at the housing agency, with decades of family experience in residential homebuilding and private equity. But he has become better-known in Washington as one of Trump’s most voluble internal partisan enforcers, using the access to private data his position gives him to dig up as much weaponizable information as possible about Trump’s political enemies: New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

 

Suddenly, all of them were guilty of “mortgage fraud.” Meanwhile — in terms of his actual policy role in the position as the self-appointed head of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — Pulte spearheaded the idea of a “50-year mortgage” for new homebuyers, a terrible idea that duly sank without a trace.

 

Now, without any prior experience or demonstrated interest whatsoever in the national security or intelligence sectors, he’s the head of DNI. It is difficult to avoid the obvious supposition that Trump selected him not for his expertise or any suitability for the role beyond his demonstrated enthusiasm for seeking any angle, legal or otherwise, to submarine the president’s enemies.

 

Now is not the time for a discussion about the superfluousness of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which should not exist. (It was created in 2004 after a panicked post-9/11 “do something” reorganization of the American national security sector, and inserts a needless layer of bureaucracy on top of an already inefficient and slow-moving intel community, rather than streamlining it.) But so long as it exists, the ODNI should adhere to the spirit of the statutory language that created it, and that language speaks with clarity on who should be appointed to oversee it: “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.” (This should go without saying, but the law actually says it.)

 

Obviously, a top national security position shouldn’t be treated like a political prize to be awarded to faithful myrmidons, or to be handed to mindless partisans. Even Roscoe Conkling might blush at the temerity of it. With Republicans lukewarm and Democrats threatening to derail a FISA deal over the selection, Pulte is clearly unconfirmable. Trump is now emphasizing that Pulte’s appointment is only temporary while he finds someone else to take the role permanently.

 

The more temporary, the better — this appointment never should have happened and should be revoked immediately.

Nobody’s Perfect

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, June 04, 2026

 

I get it—I do: I also have some tattoos I regret.

 

Nobody is perfect.

 

We all make mistakes. As a Christian, I believe that there is nothing—nothing—that is unforgivable. And at the more mundane level, I believe in second chances as someone who has needed a lot of those over the years. I myself am not very good at forgiving and forgetting, but that is a shortcoming in my character that says nothing about the virtues of forgiving and forgetting.

 

That stipulated, Graham Platner should not be in the Senate. It would be bad for the country and bad for him.

 

There are not many productive uses for negative polarization, but it sometimes is helpful to turn a question around. And so there is a question I sometimes ask my evangelical Christian friends who are committed Donald Trump supporters: “How many pornographic films would a man have to have appeared in before he lost your support as a political leader? Is there some number? Because three obviously ain’t it.” Donald Trump, in case you missed that detail among the many other colorful bits of his résumé, has appeared in cameo roles (as himself, of course) in at least three softcore porn films produced by Playboy Enterprises. Many of the same people professing to be Christians who scoff at James Talarico—because they object to his diet and his insistence, obviously true if expressed with modish imbecility, that the metaphysical essence of the Almighty transcends that which can be communicated in the gendered pronouns of the English language—somehow make their peace with Trump’s depicting himself as Jesus, with his plainly heretical religious views, and with his desultory, undistinguished career as a performer in pornographic films. It is almost as though these professing Christians do not believe the things they profess to believe. It is almost as though they cannot serve two masters.

 

How many porn films would be too many? One might as well ask these gentle Christians how many lies, how many adulterous affairs, how many probably illegal hush-money payments to porn stars diddled while the humiliated rent-a-wife was at home tending to the new baby ...

 

Well, they almost always say, Trump’s not perfect, but ….

 

And that is how you know they are stupid and dishonest.

 

Trump has made political life worse in obvious ways. But political life has made Trump worse, too, bringing out the worst in his already contemptible character, amplifying his vices, vanity, and venality to such a point that they have become strategically consequential geopolitical variables. It is as if Providence wanted us to have the most straightforward possible example of a man who gains the world but loses his soul. That’s the God of the Old Testament saying, as (cover thine ears, Mr. Talarico) He often does, whatever is Hebrew for, “Hey, stupid.”

 

Progressives rallying around the troubled candidacy of Graham Platner, the habitually dishonest skirt-chasing Totenkopf enthusiast challenging that nice Maine lady for a Senate seat, have learned precisely the wrong lessons from Republicans’ experience with Donald Trump, an experience that has left the GOP morally debased and ethically discredited and—perhaps Republicans will actually care about this part—unable to get much of what it wants politically. Legitimate issues, such as immigration control and abortion regulation, have been tainted by association with Trump and Trumpism, which means dishonesty and stupidity in the formulation of policy followed by incompetence and corruption in the execution of policy.

 

Progressives will get the same thing from such a figure as Platner. This is, evidently, a man who is a drama generator with a short attention span. And Democrats are telling themselves the same stupid lies Republicans offer when they want to feel better about their political situation. Again, look across the aisle and what you will see is a mirror.

 

Republicans looking for a reason to support Trump naturally found one, and, being Republicans—and therefore suffering a certain intellectual disability when it comes to imagination—they settled on the most decrepit, most obvious, most banal one: Our opponents are so wretched and so dangerous, and the emergency of this moment is so critical, that we must not only accept and ignore but explain away or positively embrace the thoroughly rotten character of the man we are putting forward as a candidate for high office.

 

But what about the character stuff? The Republican answer, in short: Hocus-pocus!

 

If I had a dollar for every useless goblin, prominent or obscure, who wrote or said the exact words “Trump isn’t perfect,” I would have ... many more dollars than I do right now. It is as though this were some kind of magical incantation, some handy formula of moral alchemy. Presto change-o!

 

And, now, inevitably, comes: “Graham Platner isn’t perfect, but ...”

 

To say that Platner “isn’t perfect” is to say nothing at all. None of us is perfect. To say that a man is not perfect is akin to saying he is not a giraffe or a Tiffany lampshade. Platner is a man with an SS tattoo and fidelity problems who cannot manage to give a forthright account of either these or many other legitimate concerns about his character and his candidacy. It is not that Graham Platner is not perfect—it is that he is positively bad, not in a merely private sense as some apologists would have it but in the sense of being a bad sort of person to endow with significant political power. Private morality and civic virtue are not the same thing (Cato the Younger was a drunk) but there is a great deal of overlap in that Venn diagram.

 

The standard for public men is not perfection. To write and speak and argue as though it were is simply a cheap and cowardly rhetorical dodge, one that should always and everywhere be treated with the contempt it deserves.

 

Should we love a man such as Platner—pray for him, forgive him, help him along, welcome him, encourage him? Yes, of course, all that. Should we endow him with a position of extraordinary public trust? Of course not. We should forgo that not only for our own sake—as a matter of prudence and political hygiene—but also for his sake. Putting a man with Platner’s weaknesses into such a position before he has reached a more mature and well-integrated state of life is like asking a newly reformed drunk to work as a bartender. A man with troubles of that sort should go where he will not be tempted.

 

If Graham Platner had an R next to his name, progressives would get it. If Donald Trump still had a D next to his name, conservatives would get it.

 

But, sure. Nobody is perfect. 

Calling a Nazi Tattoo a Nazi Tattoo

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

I can’t be alone in finding the Graham Platner conversation exhausting. Though I might be a little isolated for some of the reasons I find it exhausting. But let’s work through the obvious stuff first.

 

When the news broke that the married Platner was sexting with various women, feminist writer Jill Filipovic declared:

 

The Graham Platner story is landing because it confirms a bunch of his critics’ prior concerns: unvetted, history of poor decision-making, the kind of light misogyny that tends to go along with male bad decision-making. Those are all problems! But it’s worth asking if they’re problems that should be disqualifying for a senate seat and I think the answer to that is no.

 

Cenk Uygur said that the establishment backlash was a symptom of its contempt for “real people who aren’t corrupted by the system. They never go after insiders like this, because they’re already good boys and girls who do exactly as they’re told.”

 

Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project dismissed the whole thing, saying that “nothing that has come out about Graham Platner is scandalous.” The controversy was just “weirdo gaslighting from upper class ninnies.”

 

So, Platner’s “light misogyny” and “history of poor decision-making” have little bearing on his ability to do the job of being a senator. I don’t exactly know how to define the job of a senator, but I kind of feel like “decision-making” is part of it.

 

I think Uygur is a buffoon, but buffoons sometimes make plausible observations. I mean, even morons can be correct when they say, “Hey, that’s a duck!” when they see a duck.

 

But does anyone actually believe that “they” never go after “insiders” for their sexual indiscretions? Were Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bob Packwood, Matt Lauer, Bob Livingston, Andrew Cuomo, Dennis Hastert, Al Franken, Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Mark Foley, David Vitter, John Edwards, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Sanford, Anthony Weiner, David Petraeus, Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Les Moonves, and Harvey Weinstein, all populist anti-establishment outsiders?

 

Oh, and was the #MeToo thing just “weirdo gaslighting from upper class ninnies”?

 

Big, if true.

 

And then there’s the whole Nazi tattoo thing. Last Sunday on This Week, Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager, lamely tried to push back on the claim that Platner has a Totenkopf tattoo—used by the SS—saying it was just a “skull and crossbones” tattoo, “not a Nazi tattoo.” Never mind that Platner, a “big history buff,” apparently admitted more than once that he knew what it was.

 

Now, having written a whole book pushing back on argumento ad hitlerum, you’d think I’d want to go ballistic on this controversy. After all, from the 1930s to five minutes ago, there are innumerable examples of lefties—including FDR and Harry Truman—who’ve insisted that being a conventional conservative or a libertarian makes you a Nazi, a Nazi sympathizer, or a patsy for fascism. But voluntarily having the symbol of the SS drawn over your heart with indelible ink is essentially meaningless? And finding it worthy of criticism is essentially fascist gaslighting?

 

But let’s stipulate that Platner’s hypocritical defenders are hypocrites. He does have non-hypocritical defenders. Their position is that he’s a bad person who’s made bad decisions, but it’s worth supporting him to defeat Sen. Susan Collins and possibly win a Democratic Senate majority. I disagree with that take, but I don’t think it’s outrageous or indefensible.

 

And just to annoy everybody, I think a lot of Republicans are equally hypocritical. Trump’s history of sexual impropriety—even if you reject the worst allegations—is surely as bad as Platner’s, and a great many Republicans making hay about Platner don’t care. Similarly, our vice president has passionately argued for a “big tent” that makes room for fans of neo-Nazis and Nazi cosplayers. And he’s hardly alone.

 

If you widen out the context to the question of unacceptably flawed Senate candidates, the case against Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton is just as disqualifying as the one against Platner, if not more so. Platner is just a spoiled, louche loser propped up by his rich parents, pretending to be a regular Joe to win public office. Paxton has demonstrably abused his office as Texas Attorney General. Also, while Platner has only been accused—so far—of saying terrible things and sexting with women, Paxton actually cheated on his wife.

 

So spare me any of the selective moral outrage.

 

There are two arguments for supporting Platner, and Nick Catoggio lucidly combines them. What he calls the moral argument is that checking Trump by voting for a “chud” is worth it. “Six years of Graham Platner in the Senate would be mortifying,” he concedes, “but two more years of unified GOP control in Washington would be full-tilt banana republicanism for the United States. Not all chuds are created equal.”

 

I find this entirely defensible.

 

The reason I say there are two arguments is that Nick is not a partisan Democrat and his interest is not grounded in a desire to see the Democrats win, but in a reasonable desire to check Donald Trump. He calls this the “moral argument.”

 

Now I am sure that virtually every Democrat who supports Platner from afar or in the voting booth subscribes to this moral argument in whole or in part. But partisan Democrats and partisan DSA Democrats (not the same thing) don’t rely solely on this argument. First of all, many of them reject the idea that Platner’s any kind of chud at all. If they believed that, they would have rallied around Janet Mills, the normie Democratic governor of Maine with a better shot at defeating Susan Collins. Platner’s fans think he’s a heroic, “authentic,” man of the people with great ideas about economics and foreign policy while Mills is part of the Democratic establishment that must be toppled. So, for this crowd, the moral argument is just gravy.

 

These people care about power. I don’t necessarily mean that in some sinister way. Politics has to be about power to be politics. The people rallying around Ken Paxton have pretty much the exact same outlook. If they cared solely about denying Democrats a Texas senate seat, they would have supported incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.

 

Primaries color everything.

 

What annoys me is the way the populists demonize and denounce the “establishment” in the primaries and then, once they win the intra-party fight, they insist that the establishment must do everything it can to assure that their populist rabble-rouser wins the general election. Suddenly the establishment’s resources and expertise are good things, and the victorious rebels have an unlimited entitlement to them. Internal insurrection for me, establishmentarian party loyalty for thee. Donald Trump ran against the Republican Party, but once he won, he demanded absolute party loyalty from everyone else. Bernie Sanders has been a passionate enemy of the Democratic Party for his entire career, but if he’d won in 2016, you know all of the Bernie Bro Jacobins would demand strict partisan unity.

 

It’s like some Game of Thrones scenario. Launch a rebellion against the corrupt monarchy and once the rebel chieftain seizes the Iron Throne, start talking about the divine right of kings and the obligation to show fealty.

 

Now, you can argue that this is simply how party politics works in the era of primaries—and you’d be right! But I think that’s a very bad thing.

 

So yeah, it’s normal to have big fights in the primary and then to hear calls for party unity when “the people” have spoken. But that normal is fairly new, and it sucks.

 

I really don’t want to go on another tear about how terrible the primary system is for democracy. But the simple fact is that “the people” haven’t spoken, only a tiny sliver of the most rabid primary voters have spoken. These voters aren’t necessarily bad, or even wrong. But broadly speaking, they tend to have contempt for their own party, they just hate the other party more. They tend to vote with more passion than reason. And in the Trump era, many Republicans simply vote based upon whether the candidate is supported by Trump, and many Democrats simply vote for whoever hates Trump the most. That’s a really stupid way to run a country.

 

The result is that many Democrats and Republicans and most independents hate the choices they’re presented with in the general election. As a result, elections become a contest to determine which candidate represents the lesser evil.

 

Some will say, “It was ever thus.”

 

But it really wasn’t. Obviously, it’s true that prior to the adoption of primaries, people still argued about whether general election candidates were qualified for the job. But that argument tended to be comparative: Is candidate A more qualified than candidate B?

 

That’s because there was a backstop: Party leaders vetted and ultimately vouched for the candidates. The party establishment’s decision to nominate a candidate was on the ballot, too. After 1972, that decision-making process was outsourced to whoever showed up to vote in the primaries.

 

Democracy fetishists and populists (not the same thing) may think that’s exactly how it should work. But I am neither a democracy fetishist nor a populist. Democracy is what should happen between the parties, not within them. This is even more the case in an era where campaign finance reform and partisan media have basically made it impossible for grown-ups in the party to put their thumbs on the scale for the more responsible or electable candidate. Parties run by grown-ups would simply say, “Yeah, we’re not nominating the dude with the Nazi tattoo” or “Paxton is not fit for the nomination and, besides, we’re obliged to support the incumbent, who is more electable and upstanding anyway.”

 

No other significant institution in American life has been democratized the way the parties have (and no major democratic country does it the way we do). In fact, I struggle to think of any significant institution that has been internally democratized at all, certainly not the Catholic Church, the military, the police, etc. One could argue that much of the media has been democratized in the sense that so much of it organized around the imperative to tell audiences what they want to hear. Some also wrestle with a younger generation of staffers who think they should be able to rebel against management when “justice” demands it. How has that worked out for us?

 

There are two problems with supporting the lesser of two evils. The first is you’re still supporting evil. If the word “evil” triggers you, feel free to substitute “less bad.” You’re still voting for bad (or unqualified or dangerous or corrupt).

 

The second problem is that in an era where all notions of small-r republican virtue elicit contempt from anyone who finds virtue inconvenient to their pursuit of power, power becomes the measure of virtue. How many people who said Trump was the lesser evil a decade ago “evolved” to believe that Trump was the avatar of all that is good? His bad character was once a regrettable problem that was outweighed by the need to defeat Hillary Clinton. In short order, the definition of good character was rewritten to fit Trump. The same thing is happening before our eyes with Graham Platner, and I’m sure we’ll get there with Paxton.

 

I would like to live in a country where institutions, specifically political parties, do what institutions are supposed to do: take themselves and their responsibilities seriously. Serious parties screen, vet, and test candidates for office, just as serious news outlets vet their reporting and serious businesses vet their products.

 

When you hear someone say “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” you should ask them what they mean by that. Because republic is just a fancy word for “establishment”—a group of leaders who care about what the people think, but also care about what is right and proper.

 

Lacking responsible institutions that care about character and qualifications isn’t an excuse to abandon such concerns. It means that responsibility falls on voters (and journalists). It was good and valuable to have parties (and major media outlets) that took their responsibilities seriously. Just because they have abdicated their responsibilities doesn’t mean you’re liberated from yours. If a candidate is unqualified, it doesn’t matter if they have an R or D after their name. I’m not saying you have a moral requirement to make the perfect the enemy of the good, or that it is unacceptable to vote for the lesser evil. I am saying that you have a moral obligation not to lie about it, to yourself or anybody else. Because when you start saying the lesser evil is objectively good, you’re still calling evil “good.” And it never is.