Against the Wall

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

A provocative take from economist Noah Smith: “The GOP had a golden opportunity to become a multiracial majority party and destroy the left for two generations, and instead they turned things over to the Claremont Nazis.”

 

I disagree. Mostly.

 

Faulting a party led by Donald Trump for “turning things over” to fascists would be like faulting a party led by Bernie Sanders for “turning things over” to socialists. There was no bait and switch; fascism was always the plan.

 

Postliberals care only about empowering postliberalism, and of course Trump cares only about empowering Trump. Neither gives a rip about empowering the party to which they belong simply because they belong to it. What would they gain by destroying the left for two generations if doing so required them to subordinate their own priorities?

 

Ask the “Claremonsters” privately whether they’d prefer to be governed by Democrats or by Republicans who have disowned postliberalism, and they’ll take the Democrats every time, I suspect. After all, the worse the centrist wing of the right fares at the polls, the more willing Republican voters should be to give right-wing authoritarians a fresh hearing.

 

That was the lesson of the 2016 presidential primary. And it’s been the point of the GOP “hostage crisis,” in which postliberals threaten to boycott their party if they don’t get to call the tune on policy, ever since.

 

Smith is wrong in a second way. For all their faults, and there are many, postliberals aren’t chiefly to blame for the GOP squandering its shot at a durable majority. The war in Iran and its ruinous effect on oil prices are the main culprits in the looming Republican wipeout, and it ain’t the Tucker Carlson wing of the right that egged that on.

 

In fact, at last check, Tucker was calling on the president’s Cabinet to seize power from him under the 25^th Amendment, alleging that Trump’s threats of a nuclear attack on Iran are evidence that he’s non compos mentis. Given how unpopular Trump and his war have become, I’d guess that a multiracial majority agrees with Carlson about that.

 

I do agree with Smith in a sense, though. There’s an important area of policy in which Republicans held an electoral advantage in 2024, could have maintained that advantage by simply sticking with their traditional position, and have now seen that advantage squandered by postliberal fanaticism.

 

It’s not trade. The president’s tariffs have assuredly cost the GOP votes, but Trump-style protectionism isn’t the traditional Republican position.

 

It’s not intervening militarily overseas. That is a traditional Republican position, but it sure isn’t advantageous at the polls in a post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan world. Plus, as I said, the only thing arguably fanatical about the postliberal position on war with Iran is the vehemence with which they oppose it.

 

It’s not fiscal responsibility either. That too is a traditional GOP position and Trump has done everything possible to destroy voters’ trust in Republicans over it, but it’s hard to pin his profligacy on postliberalism. Despite J.D. Vance’s best efforts to get people excited about paying moms not to work, the Trumpist base has always been animated by culture war issues, not right-wing socialism.

 

Besides, some of the president’s most notorious spending moves don’t jibe with the postliberal agenda. Cutting Medicaid from working-class whites under the One Big Beautiful Bill while demanding a mind-boggling $1.5 trillion budget for the Pentagon is not the stuff of which America First dreams are made.

 

The issue where postliberals have blown it for the GOP is immigration.

 

The albatross.

 

Paul LePage served two terms as governor of Maine and is running for a House seat in that state this year. Sometimes described as “Trump before Trump,” he proved that loose-cannon right-wing populism could win at the polls before you-know-who entered politics. Like any politician in that vein, he has made illegal immigration one of his favorite targets—although he could be slippery on the subject in the past as his electoral needs required.

 

This week he had a new complaint about immigrants. He thinks we’re deporting the wrong ones.

 

“My son’s wife’s dad is here legally,” he said during a press conference. “But he’s being deported because he came from a country that’s not liked by certain people in Washington. That’s not right.” Noting that his in-law has a work permit, LePage couldn’t understand why removing him is a higher priority than removing “people in the gangs and criminals.” Of all the cases of leopards eating people’s faces since January 2025, few faces have deserved to be eaten more than his.

 

Reading that, you might wonder whether LePage’s electoral needs are once again making him slippery on immigration. He’s a blue-state Republican running in a tough environment, so he’s moderating opportunistically on a key issue before an election, right? It’s not just LePage, though: Some red-state Republicans have also begun pivoting to the center on immigration.

 

The most buzzworthy example is Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar, who cut an ad last week in which she addressed Trump directly and said, “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. … The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.” Trump took 57 percent of the vote in her district two years ago.

 

He won the same share statewide in Kansas, yet both of that state’s Republican senators complained publicly a few days ago about ICE executing warrants in southwest Kansas without coordinating with local law enforcement. One of them, Jerry Moran, relayed reassurances from the Trump administration that only “individuals who have been charged with criminal activities” have been targeted.

 

Moran isn’t on the ballot in November, but his colleague, Roger Marshall, is. The latest major poll of the state has him trailing his Democratic opponent by 2 points. In Kansas.

 

God only knows what sort of internal polls he and Salazar are seeing that have moved them to distance themselves from ICE. But if the GOP drowns in a blue wave in November, particularly in normally red states with large Hispanic populations like Florida and Texas, a major subplot in the aftermath will be the political damage done by Trump’s “mass deportation” campaign. The script writes itself: Postliberals wanted nonwhite immigrants expelled indiscriminately, they sacrificed rudimentary professional standards to get their wish, and their reward was a Democratic wipeout.

 

The White House knows the issue has become a liability, too. Lately, ICE has largely—but by no means entirely—avoided the sort of goon-squad muscle-flexing that it demonstrated earlier this year in Minneapolis, when I warned that its tactics were going to discredit immigration enforcement. But it’s too late. Whereas 53 percent of Americans trusted Trump on immigration in November 2024 versus 46 percent who didn’t, by July that split had turned to 41-58. A Politico poll taken in August found nearly a quarter of Trump’s own voters believe the “mass deportation” effort has been too aggressive. Among those who described themselves as “non-MAGA,” 31 percent said so.

 

It’s true that Trump campaigned on “mass deportation,” not on deporting the criminals first. It’s also true that most Americans nonetheless support deporting the criminals first, or even deporting only the criminals, despite the president’s preferences. Immigration is like tariffs in that regard: Trump was candid with the electorate about his intentions, they voted for him anyway, and now they’ve discovered that his intentions are stupid or malicious. They’ll have a chance in six weeks to do something about it. They look poised to take it.

 

And so we might refine Noah Smith’s point this way: The GOP had a golden opportunity to establish itself as the “responsible” party on immigration for two generations, and instead it turned things over to Stephen Miller. The icing on the cake will come if and when Trump deputizes ICE to harass Hispanics at the polls in November. That ought to finish off whatever benefit of the doubt persuadable voters have been giving him and his party about the virtues of beefed-up border enforcement.

 

What now?

 

Compromise?

 

My editor reminded me this morning that we’ve seen this movie before. The GOP wins a momentous victory on a divisive issue, as Trump did by besting Democrats on immigration in 2024; Republicans blow their advantage by acting waaaaay too aggressively in the aftermath; and voters punish them for it by spanking them at the polls.

 

That’s the story of abortion, of course. Restricting abortion finally became legally feasible in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Despite strong public opposition to that decision, a number of red states turned around and passed strict bans instead of meeting the majority where it was with more modest regulations. Voters reacted by turning out in force to defeat state referendums aimed at limiting abortion, then squelched the expected Republican midterm wave by holding the GOP to a measly nine-seat pickup in the House and a one-seat loss in the Senate.

 

A funny thing has happened since then, though. The two parties have, sort of, compromised on the issue.

 

It’s the coldest of cold peaces, but the leadership on both sides appears sufficiently satisfied with the status quo on abortion that neither wants to disturb it. Trump was plainly spooked by the 2022 backlash and has steered away from any federal crackdown; not only has the FDA not moved to ban “abortion pills” like mifepristone from the market, it approved a generic version of the drug last year. The easy availability of the pills and the rise of “telemedicine” have made it simple for women to dodge state bans. The result, per best estimates, is that abortions in the U.S. have increased slightly since the end of Roe.

 

Republicans don’t want to poke the bear by revisiting the issue. And Democrats seemingly see little need to take it up, as issues like affordability and the war are more fruitful electoral targets. If women remain largely free to terminate their pregnancies at home and GOP lawmakers are comfortable with that, there’s little reason for their opponents to pick a fight.

 

Might we reach a similar compromise on immigration if the blue wave crashes down on the GOP this fall?

 

The political stars would seem to have aligned. Democrats lost the trust of voters in 2024 by being too soft on enforcement, and Republicans appear to have lost the trust of voters in 2026 by being too hard on it. The obvious consensus that would serve both parties is that aggressive efforts should be made to deport criminals; restricting illegal entries at the border should remain a high priority while removing noncriminal illegal immigrants should be a low one; and ICE should be radically reformed to reprofessionalize the force. In short, the left gives up on “open borders” and the right gives up on “mass deportation.”

 

If nothing else, the emergence of Hispanics as a crucial swing bloc in 2024 and 2026 might incentivize the two sides to move toward the middle. Democrats discovered to their dismay two years ago that a Republican could come within 5 points of winning that group despite running on the strictest anti-immigrant platform in modern American history. Republicans are about to discover to their own dismay that those gains can be incinerated in the span of one election cycle. One would think the sensible play, then, is for the parties to align their immigration platforms as much as possible with the preferences of Hispanics. Per one recent poll of that group, “76 percent preferred a candidate position calling for a bipartisan path to permanent legal status and immigration reform, compared with 24 percent who preferred a deportation-focused position.”

 

Easy peasy, no? Well….

 

Polarization.

 

One problem with my argument is that it’s perilous to assume that Hispanics weigh immigration more in deciding how to vote than other demographics do. (Although Trump’s version of ICE has certainly given them reason to do so.) When Mitt Romney was clobbered by Barack Obama among that demographic in 2012, one of the key “lessons” GOP party officials took from the drubbing was that Republicans would forever struggle with Latinos unless they moderated on immigration. Even Sean Hannity got the memo.

 

Four years later, Trump barged into politics vowing to build the wall and won his party’s nomination and the presidency. Eight years after that, campaigning on “mass deportation,” he nearly won Hispanics outright against Kamala Harris. Amnesty for illegal immigrants wasn’t the secret to winning Latino votes after all, it appeared. The apparent secret, very simply, is that Latinos are largely working-class and will be receptive to candidates who appeal to that constituency. In 2012 that was Obama, not the country-clubber Romney. In 2024 it was Trump, running against the high inflation of the Biden presidency. And in 2026 it’s Democrats, running against Trump’s failed promises on affordability.

 

Neither party needs to moderate on immigration to win Latino votes, in other words. (Although it might help!) Just convince them that you have better ideas for helping them stay ahead of the cost of living and you’re in the game.

 

The other problem with an immigration compromise is that partisan polarization will complicate the effort, as it always, always does. In many ways the two parties’ respective ideological vanguards have never been closer on the proverbial horseshoe than they are right now, but immigration is an exception. Abolishing ICE will be a priority for progressive Democrats for years to come, partly because they believe the agency has been deprofessionalized beyond repair and partly because its postliberal chud-ification is Trump’s most singular administrative legacy. The left wants to burn down the agency in the same way that it wants to burn down the White House ballroom.

 

And for the opposite reasons, the right will refuse. Rank-and-file Republicans will resist out of pure spite, to deny Democrats a key concession after their midterm victory and to protect the steep political costs Trump sunk into building the immigration force of his dreams. Committed postliberals will have a more ideological basis for resisting: Agreeing to abolish ICE and replace it with some kinder, gentler deportation squad would amount to capitulating on their most cherished priority, ejecting nonwhite undesirables from the United States.

 

Bad enough that their opponents would ask them to renounce “mass deportation” and admit that wielding state power ruthlessly against their cultural enemies was a mistake. But outright abolition of the goon squad is tantamount to asking them to repudiate postliberalism itself.

 

They won’t do it, and they won’t tolerate Republican lawmakers doing it. To repeat my point from earlier, postliberals don’t care a fig for their party’s fortunes relative to their own cultural priorities. They’ll happily punish GOP lawmakers for moving toward the middle on immigration by primarying them and/or boycotting general elections, even if that produces the sort of Democratic landslide that, ironically, would make liberal immigration policies more feasible. Radicals play the long game: If the only way to convince the wider electorate that they’re right is to let their enemy win and wait for a public backlash to that enemy’s policies, they’ll do that.

 

But this is all pie in the sky. Trump surely won’t be so chastened by a midterm drubbing that he’ll agree to compromise with Democrats on immigration, especially if doing so would require him to admit error on ICE. J.D. Vance, the party’s presumptive nominee, seems even less likely to support doing so given that he’s a postliberal ideologue himself and is palpably anxious about keeping that faction in his corner in the next primary. And if Vance did feel moved to compromise, that’s the sort of thing that might finally bring Tucker Carlson off the sidelines to provide a “real” America First option in the 2028 race.

 

In scolding Republicans for not maneuvering on policy to consolidate the coalition they built in 2024, Noah Smith is treating a kulturkampf as politics as usual. To the “Claremont Nazis,” there’s no point in having a democratic majority if holding it means having to give up on Nazism. On the contrary, as we saw on January 6 and are likely to see again before long, they’ll give up on democracy first.

Beware the Bursting Bubble

By Abe Greenwald

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Sometimes, you start to wonder if the current rise in anti-Semitism is a bubble that’s getting close to bursting. The events of this past week or so have me thinking about it. There was the Center of Attention media study revealing the world’s obsession with Israel, the canceling of Ed Sheeran for ditching Macklemore, the protests and walkouts over Benjamin Netanyahu’s presence at UNGA, the release of the anti-Israel propaganda film NAZA, a million new iterations of the genocide lie, and more hate-fueled assaults on Jews. Doesn’t such obvious overkill expose the whole campaign as preposterous? Isn’t it just too exhausting for its supporters to keep up with?

 

That’s the hope, but I’m reluctant to indulge it all that much.

 

We have to remember that to talk of anti-Semitism in terms of bubbles is to use a metaphor, and I’ve become increasingly convinced that thinking metaphorically about the topic may do more harm than good.

 

Anti-Semitism seems to resist metaphor altogether. It’s not, for instance, a disease or virus that one catches by chance. To describe it as such recasts the anti-Semite as a kind of victim.

 

The problem in trying to wrap your head around anti-Semitism is that it’s as singular a phenomenon as the Jews are a people. It’s so unlike any other form of bigotry that it constitutes a different category.
Anti-Semitism is a theory of how the world functions.

 

But, also unlike any other prejudice, it is spread most effectively by those who don’t necessarily believe its core theory or hate its targeted group. You don’t need to hate the Jews to believe the lie that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. In fact, to believe and transmit any slanderous lie about Israel, you need only have been told it under certain circumstances: You must sufficiently trust the source (such as the mainstream media); the claim of the lie must be couched in a moral concern (such as humanitarianism) that has no explicit connection to bigotry; and you must not know a whole lot about Israel, the Jews, and their enemies. The anti-Semites behind the original lie are obscured by multiple degrees of separation, allowing their claim to advance far beyond the bounds of the bubble itself.

 

Of course, it can be reassuring and therefore tempting to think of anti-Semitism as a bubble. But that’s only because we take the metaphor so superficially. We don’t consider what actually makes a physical bubble burst. Something like a soap bubble bursts, for example, because its wall becomes too thin and surface tension tears it apart. It’s an inevitable outcome of the bubble’s continued growth. Sadly, there’s no guarantee that political, cultural, or economic trends must comport with a comparable dynamic.

 

In the case of anti-Semitism, it’s as if the opposite applies. Left alone, it will grow and grow until someone takes action to stop it. If anything, the anti-Semitism inside the bubble is contained by a membrane of civil norms and social taboos, and once those wear thin and the bubble bursts, Jew-hatred is unleashed in all directions. I fear that might already have happened.

Red Harvest

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

Double, double toil and trouble — the electoral witching hour draws nigh for the GOP in 2026. We are well past Labor Day weekend — traditionally the last point at which a party on the electoral back foot is thought to have any chance of turning its fortunes around before the November midterm elections — and a roiling cauldron of voter discontent now seems set to bubble over volcanically onto the Republican Party.

 

According to all projections, the wages of Donald Trump’s second term are likely to cost the GOP its narrow House majority. But the question remains: Will the GOP’s 53–47 Senate majority also fall? A year ago, the notion would have seemed far-fetched. Now it seems more like a coin flip.

 

The reason for this primarily boils down to Trump’s staggering unpopularity across the country and across the board on every issue voters claim to care about. Some context: According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, as of mid-September, President Trump held a 40 percent job approval rating with a 56 percent disapproval rating, good for an overall minus 16 percent spread. And that appallingly low number begins to break down even more toxically once the president is assessed on the particulars. He sits at a minus 24.6 spread on the economy, the single most important issue voters will be expressing their opinion on in November. On inflation it’s a whopping minus 37.6 percent. On foreign policy (which might encompass anything from the war in Iran to the trade war on Canada)? A relatively mild minus 20.5 approval. Even on signature issues such as immigration and crime, Trump sports average approval ratings of minus 8 and minus 5.4 respectively.

 

Put bluntly, these are not numbers that suggest a good November. History is against the GOP anyway: Absent world-historical events (e.g., the Clinton impeachment in 1998 or the aftermath of 9/11 in 2002), voters always take their midterm frustrations out on the party in power. And yet one could argue hopefully that the Democratic Senate candidates will fall short in November for the same reasons that Republican Senate candidates fell short in 2022: In an age of increasing political disillusionment, voters angry with one president and party may nevertheless find the other party’s agenda to be a step too far.

 

Still, Republicans are desperately on defense right now: Democrats need to win at least four seats (without losing any they already hold) to win control of the upper chamber. They will have six realistic chances to win those four, and only one potential vulnerability among the seats they’re defending. These races tend to fall as dominoes — the mood of the nation often subsumes the mood of a particular state — so the individual odds are not independent of one another. Will the wave rise high enough to wash away the GOP Senate?

 

***

 

We begin our survey by noting the Republicans’ lack of serious pickup opportunities in 2026. This year the GOP is playing defense in so many states it has come to think of as home turf that it’s easy to forget how many opportunities for his party to make gains were squandered by Trump in pursuit of his private grudges and obsessions.

 

The GOP is virtually guaranteed to lose at least one Senate seat it currently holds: Facing threats from Trump that he would back a primary challenger, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis dropped his race for reelection, and his seat is now as good as gone to former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper. (Trump’s handpicked candidate to replace Tillis, former RNC Chairman Michael Whatley, currently trails Cooper by eight to ten points on average.) In a nominally red state — one that voted three times for Trump — Cooper has run an intelligently low-key race, leaning on his moderate credentials as governor and attorney general. North Carolina’s two-party vote tends toward partisan inelasticity — it would be surprising if Cooper exceeded 53 percent of the vote — but, by the same token, it would be even more surprising if Whatley reached 50.

 

In Georgia, insult has been added to injury as Democrat Jon Ossoff — improbably elected to the Senate in a 2021 runoff as a result of the temper tantrum Trump threw over losing the 2020 presidential vote in the state — is strolling through what should have been a tough reelection campaign. (His race has been made even easier owing to the overzealous MAGA comportment of Ossoff’s Trump-backed opponent, Representative Mike Collins.) Ossoff looks set to immediately pivot from reelection in November to exploring a presidential campaign — savor, then, the bitter irony that he exists solely because of Trump’s mindless vendetta against reality.

 

In two other Democratic races for open seats, the Republicans have gotten the best possible candidates they could have hoped for — but alas, the timing is off. Former New Hampshire Senator John E. Sununu might have had decent odds in a different year to reclaim the seat that retiring Senator Jeanne Shaheen bounced him from in 2008, but not in a Trump midterm, and not when matched up against acceptably colorless Democratic Representative Chris Pappas.

 

Meanwhile, the one potential pickup opportunity that exists for Republicans is in Michigan, where the egregious terror-apologist Abdul El-Sayed will likely be held to a close margin against former Republican Representative Mike Rogers. Several factors militate against optimism, however. The state’s DNA is fundamentally Democratic; it has not elected a Republican to the Senate since 1994, and since the days of Rick Snyder, only Donald Trump has ever managed to crack its statewide code. Trump has no magic touch with voters there now, though — he currently sports a measly 33 percent approval rating in the Wolverine State.

 

It will therefore be up to El-Sayed to disqualify himself with his own words — and given the antisemitic cast of earlier utterances, there is at least a chance that he might. Polling currently shows him with a surprisingly soft lead over Rogers, but a consistent one. This is a state, however, where the polling in the primary was off by twelve percentage points; one can envision a scenario in which voters reject El-Sayed even while disapproving strongly of Trump. (Some kinds of rhetorical thuggery truly distinguish themselves.) If one is looking for an upside surprise on Election Night, it could be here.

 

In remote Alaska, Democratic dirty tricks are threatening to derail the reelection of Republican incumbent Dan S. Sullivan in his race against former Representative Mary Peltola. Sullivan would normally be favored to win comfortable reelection in this state, where Trump won by a 13-point margin, but as a semi-anonymous functionary, Sullivan has numbers that have never been particularly strong, and he has to run for reelection with two wrinkles he did not face in 2020: the existence of ranked-choice voting, and a ballot that includes an identically named spoiler candidate. (Yes, Democrats got a 69-year-old retired teacher also named “Dan Sullivan” onto the ballot.) Polling in Alaska is essentially a black box, since so many of its decisive swing voters are both unreachable by pollsters and uninterested in responding to them. Even though Peltola is currently leading, that may be illusory.

 

In Maine, Susan Collins’s battle to retain her title as the Unvanquishable Senator has carried on with typical New England weirdness. She has faced a sequence of memorable challengers: first there was trust-fund kid and credibly accused rapist Graham Platner, now there is working man and confirmed cousin-lover Troy Jackson (who has two children with his second cousin). The polls have Jackson leading Collins by two or three points — which, on the evidence of elections past, is right where she wants him. Collins is a warrior — one of the last of those deceptively polite New England Republicans who can smile for the camera while swimming upstream with a knife clasped between her teeth — and while this race is a pure toss-up, I tend not to doubt her anymore.

 

What comes next is less pleasant to acknowledge: the GOP is at significant risk of losing Senate races in two states that are considered so much a part of Trump’s “core” heartland that their potential rebellion was on nobody’s radar back in January of 2025. In the (theoretically) strongly Republican redoubt of Ohio, appointed Senator Jon Husted is running to fill the remainder of Vice President JD Vance’s term, and he is beginning to look like an underdog.

 

It’s a perfect storm in Ohio, where Trump’s wildly unpopular economic policies (his approval rating in the state is an anemic 42 percent) have allowed the familiar populist Democratic face of former Senator Sherrod Brown to seize a significant lead over the largely unknown Husted. This is one of those races where analysts expect Ohio voters to eventually “come home” to the Republicans, but with Trump promising to keep his various trade wars going at all costs, many Ohioans are apparently beginning to feel that they haven’t much of a home to return to.

 

The situation is slightly better in Iowa, where Senator Joni Ernst is retiring, but not because Trump’s policies are any more popular in a state that has essentially become ground zero for the fallout from the president’s tariff regime. In the land of agribusiness, diesel now sits at $5.88 a gallon, steel and aluminum tariffs have raised the cost of doing business precipitously, and the state’s primary exports (farm products) are caught up in an unending series of trade wars with China and Canada. The GOP is lucky to be fielding its best candidate in Representative Ashley Hinson, but she has barely gotten her polling numbers above 50 percent and will be receiving no help from Republican Zach Lahn, who is currently on track to fumble away the governor’s race to the Democrats for the first time in 20 years.

 

Finally, no discussion of the jeopardy Republicans find themselves in is complete without mentioning the ongoing debacle in the Texas Senate race; I have a strong hunch that the most dispiriting news of the night will emerge from the Lone Star State. For far too long, Republicans have been far too complacent about the possibility that this most quintessential of “red” states would ever again vote Democratic on a statewide level. (How quickly they forget Ted Cruz’s shockingly narrow shave in 2018.)

 

But now the stars are aligning for potential doom. Texas GOP primary voters kicked popular incumbent John Cornyn to the curb in favor of intensely MAGA Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has long been deeply unpopular statewide for his corruption, track record of unapologetic sexual sleaze, and reputation for profound sloth. (He was impeached as attorney general by his own party and survived only by attaching himself to Trump like a barnacle on the tail fin of a baleen whale.)

 

It is the sloth that may prove to be his undoing, though, because beyond Paxton’s manifest moral deficiencies, he has also run a shockingly lazy, self-entitled campaign — almost as if he expects to be able to cruise to a November victory by sheer dint of being a Republican. Instead, the plentifully flawed Democrat James Talarico — who would be unelectable under any other circumstances — has outworked him, outraised him, and now leads him in every single poll in this highly suburbanized (and hence rapidly leftward-swinging) state. Will Texas’s typical Republican lean reassert itself? Talarico is counting on enough Texans overlooking his own ultraprogressive views to send a message to Paxton in much the same way Alabamans in 2017 voted less to elect Doug Jones than to reject Roy Moore. Don’t be surprised if they do.

 

***

 

With so many Senate races so close — and with so many X factors to consider — only a brave man or a fool would attempt to predict the final result come November 3. (Since your author attempts to be both, he predicts a 50–50 Senate with Vance as the tiebreaking vote.) But a red harvest is likely approaching, a bloody cull, and Trump now seems to be preparing for the worst. After the Republican “midterm convention,” where he publicly identified the GOP’s fortunes with his own — and offered to bribe every voter with $5,000 should they return the GOP to power — Laura Ingraham asked him whether he planned to campaign hard until Election Day.

 

“No,” Trump responded bluntly. “I’m a little bit tired of politics.” He then signaled his resignation to a loss, contenting himself with the thought of being a “blocker” for the last two years of his final term — as if he hadn’t already been playing that role against his own party for the first two.

The Underfunding Myth Is Exposed

By Inez Feltscher Stepman

Sunday, September 27, 2026

 

A rare column from New York Times staff writer and the 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones ignited a firestorm this past week around her decision to send her daughter to an academically stunted public school for social justice reasons. But in questioning how that decision affected her child (if not the rigid political beliefs that drove her to sacrifice her kid’s education), Hannah-Jones makes a tacit admission rarely encountered in legacy media: Money is not the problem at America’s many failing schools.

 

“I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but [my husband] Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget,” wrote Hannah-Jones, in setting up the story of how her checks and privileged advocacy failed to make a measurable difference in the low standards, disorder, and general dysfunction of her daughter’s school.

 

Even the writer does not seem to explicitly acknowledge that her cash infusions did little. Several paragraphs later, she’s back to beating the comforting drum of systemic underfunding. Progressives also might have a ready retort to any attempt to read deeply into her anecdote: Well, surely you can’t expect a single family to make up a school-sized shortfall with a PTA check, no matter how generous.

 

Hang on to your seat, dear reader, when I tell you that the New York City Department of Education says it spent, this year at that very school, P.S. 307 in Brooklyn, around $44,000 per student — and, when including other wraparound services, a whopping $58,000 per student.

 

Hannah-Jones is not alone in her assumptions about school spending. The average American wildly underestimates how much money is funneled into the public education system. High-poverty urban districts like the one in which P.S. 307 resides, contrary to another pervasive myth, usually boast annual revenues considerably higher than the typical middle-class or even upper-middle class district. The vast majority — nearly three-quarters — of voters underestimate per-pupil spending, sometimes dramatically. The most common guess for per-pupil funding is about $5,000 per kid, which is less than half the money spent in the lowest-spending state in the union. The real national average is triple that.

 

A lot of effort has gone into circulating this pervasive lie, which looms over practically all discussions and debates about public schools across the country. Teachers’ union representatives, as one would expect, never tire of repeating it. But dissemination of the myth that we just don’t spend enough on our public schools hasn’t been limited to adults whose salaries depend on it. News outlets continually repeat the claim, and even many state courts take it as an unexamined premise that underfunding is a major problem in public education, setting floors for legislative spending justified by a misguided notion of advancing equal opportunity.

 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the lie is reinforced by the real shortages in classrooms that parents encounter. Families reasonably assume that if their third grader’s teacher is begging for supplies at the beginning of the school year to avoid purchasing them out of her own salary, then there must not be enough in the kitty. In Hannah-Jones’s essay, for example, the tolerance for constant physical fights in the cafeteria is blamed on “understaffing” caused by a lack of funds.

 

Instead, the reality is that these shortages are produced by the education establishment’s spending decisions, which prioritize absurd bureaucratic bloat and pensions over basic classroom needs. Non-teaching positions have exploded by more than 700 percent since the 1950s, and just since the 1990s, money spent on administrative salaries has far outstripped that spent on teachers. In some states, the classroom basics-to-union-graft ratio can only be described as impressive; in Illinois, less than 10 percent of every new dollar spent on “education” goes to anything people would recognize as educational, namely school buildings, teacher salaries, and teaching materials. A popular documentary back in 2009, The Cartel, tried to chase down some of these dollars that were earmarked for a New Jersey classroom, and even found plenty of old-school corruption, like huge construction contracts going to family members of school employees.

 

Nor is the link between spending more money and school performance well supported by the data. The late Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute famously circulated a gut-punch chart plotting federal spending increases against National Assessment of Educational Progress score changes; the former skyrockets up from the 1970s onward, while the latter is flat enough to be a Kansas skyline.

 

But the lie, unfortunately, works. Seventy-five to 80 percent of education bonds placed before voters pass; Americans are usually more willing to open their pocketbooks for schools than for other tax increases. And finding out that their estimates on school spending are wildly off has a huge impact on voter opinions, with the percentage of voters saying education spending is “too low” plummeting from above 70 percent to an underwater 40 merely by encountering the numerical fact as reported by a reputable media outlet. By remaining silent about the numbers while propagating misleading insinuations about underfunding, legacy media outlets are getting the outcome the left wants from purposely uninformed voters.

 

The worst thing about the big underfunding lie, though, isn’t the taxpayer dollars stolen from the pockets of an already-struggling American middle class, exploiting Americans’ goodwill toward “the children” with a false impression of educational impoverishment. No, it’s that “we don’t spend enough” has been a shield against reform and against outrage toward the absolutely criminal performance of the public school system across the board. It’s a shield that is finally — at long last — showing some cracks, and the post-Covid school choice explosion in many states will hopefully bear fruit for hundreds of thousands of American students.

 

But now, even the New York Times has unwittingly admitted that the crisis in American education isn’t about the money.

Against Great Books Fetishism

By Surya Gowda

Saturday, September 26, 2026

 

A wise man once said, “Whatever passes for conservative thought in the American academy usually passes through the influence of Leo Strauss.” This was no less true in the 1980s, when Strauss’ student Allan Bloom published his smash hit The Closing of the American Mind, than it is today, when Costin Alamariu—known to his vast online following as Bronze Age Pervert—promotes Nietzschean philosophy through homoerotic physique-posting. (Alamariu, for those who are unaware, was a doctoral student of the Yale Straussian Steven Smith and wrote a dissertation that engages deeply with Strauss’ work.)

 

Who exactly was this Strauss fellow, you ask? In short, he was a political philosopher who lived and worked during the 20^th century and wrote major works on ancient and medieval philosophy and natural right, among other topics. A Jew who fled Germany shortly before Hitler came to power, Strauss wound up teaching in several American universities—most prominently, the University of Chicago—and influencing a few generations of students, known as Straussians, who more or less adopted his theoretical presuppositions and pedagogy. Strauss was a critic of both historicism, a method of understanding philosophies by examining the historical conditions in which they arose, and the modern social sciences, which analyze social phenomena through empirical research methods. In his view, both failed to fully grapple with fundamental questions about the nature of goodness, justice, and human excellence. Thus, Straussians’ preferred research method involves close-reading canonical texts in pursuit of timeless, esoteric truths.

 

I fell in with the Straussians when I arrived at UChicago nearly five decades after Strauss’ death. At the suggestion of a professor and dear friend, I entered into a Great Books major called Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, where most courses focused on a single author or major work in the Western canon. I took classes on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and Adam Smith’s social and political thought and wrote essays on Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt. The closest thing I took to a gender studies course was one where we read Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen, a comedy in which the women of Athens enact a sexual equality law that forces men to sleep with old and unattractive women before they can access young, beautiful ones.

 

Many conservatives today, whether they’re of the Straussian variety or not, champion the Great Books curriculum and would like to see it replace most of what passes for humanities and social science education in English, sociology, and various “studies” departments across the country. A rigorous classical education in the liberal arts can certainly seem like the antidote to the left-wing ideological excess that plagues many college campuses. But now, a little more than two years out from graduation, I feel I can say with some confidence that while a Great Books education provides innumerable benefits, it is not without shortcomings.

 

Reading the Great Books can be utterly enthralling, and studying historical works forces us to exercise our humility, as it reveals how few of our ideas, or even those of present-day “thought leaders,” are truly original. What are Peter Thiel’s ideas on creative monopolies being the drivers of capitalist progress, for example, if not a reformulation of Joseph Schumpeter’s arguments in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy? Informing ourselves of the historical antecedents of contemporary ideas not only impels us to notice certain enduring facets of human nature and social relations, but also allows us to spot these ideas’ strengths and weaknesses before we’re condemned to live out their consequences once more.

 

The problem with the Great Books approach, however, is that it risks treating the texts themselves, rather than the ideas they contain or phenomena they describe, as the sole objects of importance. I noticed that far too many individuals in Straussian academic circles were content churning out papers presenting ever so slightly different interpretations of Hobbes or Rousseau while disregarding or even disdaining historical work or empirical findings from economics, psychology, or political science that might’ve proved relevant to the topics at hand. In opening their minds to the insights of great thinkers from the past, they shut them to the treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom that can only be gained in the present. Moreover, the Straussians deemed a relatively small number of texts worth studying and didn’t stray far from Strauss himself in terms of the questions they asked about them and answers they entertained. Academic Straussians seemed to fetishize the Great Books rather than build on the big ideas they contained.

 

We should certainly attempt careful study of canonical texts—it’s worthwhile, for example, to decipher what Machiavelli really thought of Christianity and Roman paganism by drawing out subtleties in his works. But doing so should impel us to ask further questions: What does the historical record reveal about religion’s ability to produce civil obedience? And do contemporary findings show that the latter can persist without the former? We may then set out on the bolder quest of proposing our own explanations of the role religion plays within the polity.

 

The Great Books invite us to join a millennia-spanning conversation about foundational questions of social and political life, but they are not that conversation in and of themselves. The books do not call on us to be lovers of them; they call on us to be lovers of wisdom … that is, philosophers.

The Red’s Carpet

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, September 24, 2026

 

The more a man revels in his own dominance, the more eagerly he’ll shine the shoes of some more domineering man.

 

We might call that “Hegseth’s paradox” in honor of our defense secretary, who’s forever complaining about the low-T softness of those who serve under him when he’s not tongue-bathing the Florsheims of the man under whom he serves. But it feels unfair. Why single out “No Tab Pete” for a universally familiar phenomenon, the domineering bully who abases himself before his male superior?

 

Every authoritarian political movement, past and present, has been built on that dynamic. Partly it’s a matter of self-interest: By demonstrating obedient servility toward those who outrank him, the mediocre bully normalizes an ethic of servility from which he benefits among those he outranks. But at the heart of it is old-fashioned lizard-brained power worship. The reason red-pilled bros who preen about being “alpha males” invariably fangirl over Donald Trump is because they envy his accrual of power and admire the ruthlessness with which he wields it over weaklings.

 

And so, Hegseth’s paradox (sorry, Pete): The more boorishly a man postures as Achilles, the more likely he is to be some more powerful man’s political concubine. Under postliberalism, someone’s boots are always being licked.

 

We got a superb illustration of the “obsequious bully” dichotomy this week from the president, who used his address to the United Nations on Wednesday to revel in his own dominance. “To the victor belongs the spoils,” Trump said at one point of Venezuela, celebrating a deal he negotiated at gunpoint with that regime to plunder the country’s oil wealth. I doubt we’ll ever come closer to a formal statement that banditry is now a core priority of U.S. foreign policy.

 

Later he raised the possibility of escalation in Iran and sounded whimsical about the destruction he might cause. “I have a big decision to make,” he told his audience. “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”

 

To annihilate or not to annihilate? He’s keen for you to know that he’s the one who gets to decide.

 

That was the bullying side of the president. A day later we got to see the other side, when a more domineering man touched down at Joint Base Andrews and the military troops Trump commands got on their knees—literally—to tidy up the red carpet that was rolled out to welcome the visitor.

 

The dictator of China had arrived, and the president himself was there to receive him. “U.S. leaders by custom do not greet arriving heads of state at the airport, holding back at the White House to offer a reception on their own turf,” the Washington Post noted. “And Xi [Jinping] did not greet Trump at the Beijing airport when the U.S. president flew there in May.”

 

Modern presidents have reserved the honor of an airport reception for visiting popes, not foreign leaders—and certainly not leaders of enemy nations. In fact, when Barack Obama supplied a little pomp and circumstance for a visit to the Pentagon by then-Vice President Xi in 2012, he was criticized for it by … well, guess.

 

Why was China’s tyrant received so warmly? Why is he even here?

 

What’s the transaction?

 

Trump is often described as transactional by nature, which is true but not as true as people say.

 

For instance, he could “purchase” some goodwill and improve his party’s chances in this fall’s election right now by announcing that he’s ending the global trade war he started last year. But he won’t. The tariff power allows him to menace other nations on a whim; it’s too precious to him to be transacted away for votes.

 

Still, “Trump is transactional” is broadly true insofar as it’s polite shorthand for “Trump has no moral conscience that might deter him from partnering with villains if he sees some advantage in doing so.” Foreign policy minus morality is realpolitik. That must be what the president is up to in welcoming Xi to the White House.

 

So, I’ll bite: What sort of transaction is he pursuing with China that’s so important that it requires a state visit from that country’s president to hash it out? What’s the goal of this summit?

 

Put that question to a sample of Americans and the consensus response, I’m sure, would be “artificial intelligence,” which is a sensible guess. The AI-pocalypse is a hot topic in the United States, and it’s widely understood that the race with China is impelling U.S. firms onward to develop the technology at a reckless pace. When Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, called for global cooperation on a slowdown a few weeks ago, he explicitly encouraged the U.S. government to “coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.”

 

That must be what the summit is about, one might assume. Trump and Xi are going to hash out some sort of digital arms deal to ensure that neither side unwittingly builds Skynet. But one would be wrong. “Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is,” Trump wrote this morning. “That is China’s position also.”

 

The one politician in Washington who’s remained glibly dismissive of the risk from AI amid surging doomerism happens to be the person Americans placed in charge of U.S. diplomacy. Sources told The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire that, at best, some sort of toothless “broad-strokes agreement” about managing the threat might emerge from Xi’s visit. AI isn’t why this summit is being held.

 

Maybe it’s about trade? You may recall that the U.S. and China reached a deal last October to de-escalate after Beijing sharply expanded export controls on rare-earth minerals and Trump threatened 100 percent tariffs in response. That spooked the White House, which agreed to lower tariffs in return for lifting those export controls. The deal that was struck was set to expire in November, forcing the two sides to huddle recently about an extension. Perhaps that’s why Xi is here.

 

But no, that’s not it either. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced yesterday, around the time Xi was landing in the U.S., that a two-month extension has been agreed to. With that box now checked, it’s unlikely that the two presidents will spend meaningfully more time on it. Besides, a modest deal continuing the status quo isn’t the sort of thing that would normally require the dictator’s physical presence in negotiations.

 

Are they going to talk about Taiwan? Surely it’ll come up. But even if Trump wanted to threaten Xi on that subject, and there’s little reason to think he does, America is in no position militarily right now for him to do so. Between the president’s fecklessness toward allies and the Pentagon’s inability to protect its assets from a comparatively minor power like Iran, a preemptive Taiwanese surrender to China over the next decade seems more probable than America joining the island’s defense in war.

 

If nothing else, you might think, Trump will use his face time with Xi to call him onto the carpet for various forms of treachery practiced by China at America’s expense. There’s the small matter of that primetime televised speech he gave two months ago in which he accused the Chinese of having at one point plotted to manufacture ballots for Joe Biden in 2020. It was a momentous allegation! Here, at last, is his chance to interrogate the prime suspect. Do you suppose he’ll take it?

 

There’s also a report today about China quietly supplying Iran with the parts needed for the drones it’s using in combat with the United States. In fact, between its sanction-dodging consumption of Iranian oil and its military support for Tehran, possibly no country has done more to enable Iran’s war effort than China has. “Satellite imagery procured from Chinese entities has been linked by U.S. officials to an Iranian strike that killed three American troops,” the Wall Street Journal noted in its scoop this morning. “Chinese companies have also helped provide chemical precursors used to manufacture the types of ballistic missiles used in the attack.”

 

Do we think the president will be more Achilles or more concubine in how he broaches that subject with Xi? A clue: When he was reminded a few days ago that China represses its media, he reflexively rushed to China’s defense. “I think we’re repressive also,” he replied, a predictable reverse tu quoque for him—but also, at this particular moment, more than a little true.

 

Trump isn’t going to “get tough” with Xi. And there’s no major deal in the offing that requires the two men’s direct participation. So why did he want to meet him?

 

Prestige.

 

For prestige, of course. We’ve reached the point in history where the president of the United States believes he gains more prestige by appearing with the leader of China than vice versa.

 

That’s why the reception for Xi yesterday irritated so many observers. It didn’t just offend their sense of morals to see the world’s most powerful totalitarian received in the land of the free with the sort of enthusiasm normally reserved for, of all people, the pope. It offended their pride in American power.

 

You would think our nationalist, image-obsessed blowhard of a president would be similarly sensitive to looking like the supplicant in his relationship with a foreign leader, especially this foreign leader given the postliberals’ empty posturing about containing China. And if he insisted on being a supplicant, granting Xi the courtesy of an airport greeting that wasn’t granted to him when he visited Beijing, one might assume that he at least wouldn’t go over the top by rolling out a literal red carpet.

 

His behavior yesterday suggests that Trump now sees China not merely as a “peer” nation but as primus inter pares internationally. I’m open to the argument—the president’s second term has been a sustained exercise in shrinking America’s influence in the world while expanding China’s—but no patriot could watch it without cringing.

 

The spectacle would have been more tolerable if Trump were a more genteel character. “The politesse was excessive and unfortunate but well-meaning,” observers might have said. Instead it was an unusually stark example of Hegseth’s paradox: The great American bully, always so imperious toward those weaker than him, polished the visiting emperor’s shoes to a high shine.

 

Prestige largely answers the question of why he was eager for Xi to visit, I think. “Beyond the awkward imagery are deeper questions about the strategy,” CNN’s Jim Sciutto said of their summit. “President Trump has rolled out the red carpet for Xi, [Vladimir] Putin and Kim [Jong Un] multiple times with few concessions to show for it. Summits and state visits have historically been contingent upon deliverables. Now, the meetings themselves have become the deliverable.”

 

That’s correct. The point of the meeting is the meeting. Trump palpably envies the autocratic power those three men have accrued and admires the ruthlessness with which they wield it. The thrill of prestige he gets from meeting them isn’t unlike the feeling, I’d imagine, that one of those random red-pilled chuds I mentioned earlier might get upon meeting Trump himself. Here, right before me, is the apotheosis of the type of man I’d like to be.

 

The reason Xi and Putin are welcomed with red carpets and Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t is because Trump derives no similar sense of vicarious prestige from Zelensky. It does nothing for him to meet the leader of a smaller power without imperial pretensions, however heroic and impressive its war effort has been. The president only lights up when he gets to meet a would-be emperor. Because when would-be emperors come to him, it reassures him that his stature is imperial too.

 

One can even draw a straight line, I think, from Trump’s odd preoccupation with White House renovations to his red-carpet reception for Xi. Both are answers to the question, “How should a king behave?” A king should have his own palace ballroom. And a king should receive a visiting king with royal fanfare.

 

It’s tempting to wave all of that away and say no, no, no, this is about postliberal foreign policy, not about imperial LARPing. That is, the reason Trump greets Xi and Putin with special deference isn’t because he gets a dictatorial contact high from being around them. It’s because he shares their vision of a world divvied up into “spheres of influence” in which great powers exploit their neighbors without restraint by international norms. There’s even been chatter about the three holding a trilateral summit in November, although whether that’s serious or just the Kremlin pandering to the president’s thirst for prestige is unclear.

 

My problem with that argument is that, to Trump, postliberal foreign policy is imperial LARPing. If China and Russia offer him some sort of 21^st-century hemispheric Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he’ll listen intently (remember, he’s “transactional”!) but not because he has some Kissingerian view of how “spheres of influence” might benefit America on balance. His interest in Greenland, his designs on making Canada the 51^st state, his rapaciousness toward Venezuela, all of it is about gratifying the sense of prestige he derives from growing the population of people who have to answer to him.

 

To the victor belong the spoils: All emperors yearn for the personal glory that comes with expanding the boundaries of their empire. Postliberalism, preliberalism—it’s all the same crap.

 

If there’s any coherent “policy” reason for his lavish greeting of Xi and invitation to Putin to attend the upcoming G20, it’s that Trump wishes to emphasize to the rest of the world that the United States no longer regards illiberal regimes as less worthy of friendship. It’s not that he respects China more than he does, say, Britain. (Although he does. C’mon.) It’s that he wants the rest of the Western order to stop treating authoritarianism as inferior to liberalism. In welcoming China’s dictator more exuberantly than the prime minister of the U.K., he’s leading by example in normalizing dictatorship as an acceptable model for Europe and beyond.

 

The shameful red-carpet treatment for fascist and communist degenerates was one of the more predictable consequences of the choice Americans made in 2024. If you’re looking for a silver lining in all this, that’s it: The humiliation to which we’re being subjected is what the people wanted, and therefore what they deserve.

The Last Ditch for Mask Hysteria

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Maybe it says something about my excessively bourgeois, disproportionately right-of-center, gay-friendly but mostly not gay social and professional circles, but I haven’t met anybody who didn’t love the Boston Globe piece on the Last Ditch Bar. I’ve barely even seen any criticism of it, and the criticism I have seen has been more like a continuation of the joke. The most forceful condemnation of the Globe piece that I’ve come across was issued by the Western Massachusetts Communist Party USA.

 

Let’s stop right here. I love that there’s a Western Massachusetts Communist Party. It implies the existence of an Eastern Massachusetts Communist Party, and from there the People’s Front of Judea vs. Judean People’s Front jokes just start tumbling out like patrons leaving the Last Ditch on ladies night. I mean, we all know that those Eastern Massachusetts faux communists lack the revolutionary zeal of the true believers of the Berkshires and Pioneer Valley. When the revolution comes, the Kulaks of Boston and Salem will be the first to be reeducated or liquidated.

 

Fun fact: When I googled “Western Massachusetts,” I got results describing the region. But when you google “Eastern Massachusetts,” the results are just for the whole state of Massachusetts, which any Western Massachusetts Stalinist will tell you is evidence of how the Easterners are in bed with the corporate hegemons, colonizing the whole state with their settler ideology. This will no doubt be part of the indictment when the trials come.

 

The Western Mass Communists objected to the story because it invited “heightened national scrutiny” at a time when the Trump administration and Republican governors are carrying out a “genocide of LGBTQIA+ people.”

 

“The Western Massachusetts CPUSA rejects the use of conflicts among LGBTQIA+ people and organizations as a tool of division by the extreme right,” the statement said. “We reaffirm our solidarity with all those struggling against the genocide of transgender people.”

 

Okay, like whatever. But here’s the thing. Or a thing. Or something. The people profiled in the story aren’t mobilizing and protesting against Donald Trump or Republican governors. They’re tearing down a lesbian bar opened to be a safe haven for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends.” It even welcomes the “poor and unhoused” and serves them for free when necessary. The only condition: You had to wear a KN-95—or higher filtration—mask.

 

Because the bar was struggling financially—who could’ve guessed that serving people for free was not a great business model?—its operators announced, very politely, that they were going to go mask-optional on Saturday nights. A fierce backlash ensued. One patron replied, “I hope you get firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists[sic].”

 

Now, call me a cis-heteronormative, sellout-to-neoliberalism-and-patriarchal-values square, but I kinda think this is overkill.

 

One of the central themes of communist history, and radicalism generally, is the tendency to tear down the groups, institutions, tribes, whatever, closest to you. Who were the first victims of the Jacobin Reign of Terror? Their fellow revolutionaries, the Girondins. Long before the Nazis turned on the Jews, they first turned on the leadership of the SA, aka the Brownshirts. Stalin’s Terror mostly liquidated fellow Communists. In the 1960s, the new left disliked conservatives and Republicans, but they hated liberals and moderate Democrats. The radical jabronis of the new right hate the Reaganites and Bushies, maybe not more than they hate the left, but they dedicate a lot more time and energy to them.

 

I think there’s a lot of this kind of dynamic in the riot of dysfunction chronicled by the Globe. But the more interesting thing to me is how the ideological rhetoric the angry patrons of the Last Ditch deployed is really a mask for something else. For instance, Soe Noire, the stage name of a leading critic of the bar and the head of another “Queer COVID-conscious collective in Western Massachusetts,” hurls all sorts of ideological buzz phrases at the bar’s proprietor during a struggle session. Noire accuses the owner of shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” and accuses the Last Ditch of not being “a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary praxis.”

 

If your irreducible requirement for a good bar is that it be dedicated to “revolutionary praxis,” you might end up drinking alone more than you want. That’s late capitalism for you.

 

What I mean by a mask for something else is that the Marxist and Marxish vocabulary is the language the critics have available. I don’t know if this has happened to you, but sometimes when I am in a non-English-speaking country, I will lapse into using whatever tidbits and snippets of any foreign language I do know. I’ve spoken bits of Czech to Germans, slivers of German to Czechs, and chunks of Spanish to French people. Your brain grabs what it can from the lost-and-found box of foreign languages.

 

The language these people have greater fluency in is obviously the subdialect of gender theory. But between the Marxist jargon and the trans terminology, there lies another vocabulary of neuroses, or psychobabble, or hygienic paranoia. It’s a weird dialect or “fusional language” that blends terms like “revolutionary praxis” with racialist identity politics, even a bit of anti-Zionism, and medicalized phobias about contagion. It’s a kind of Yiddish for the immunocompromised, real and, I firmly believe, alleged alike.

 

The COVID-19 epidemic ended years ago. There are vaccines and many treatments for it, but like the famous Japanese soldiers keeping World War II alive in their hearts long after the paperwork was signed on the USS Missouri, the ranks of the traumatized and COVID-neurotic live on, hiding in plain sight from an ended epidemic. The Last Ditch is a kind of Brigadoon for these people.

 

And I have to say, while I think a lot of it is funny, pathetic, and weird, I also find some of it kind of touching. I don’t think these people are living happy and healthy lives. But the Last Ditch was a place for unhappy and unhealthy people to enjoy each other’s company.

 

But I also think there’s something else going on. The tendency of radicals to attack those closest to them gets at it a little. But I think that’s too political. I mean, I doubt many of these self-styled Marxist types could speak for three minutes on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.

 

I’ve long argued that American or even Western culture is suffering from a kind of autoimmune disease. It’s a cultural and political version of the hygiene hypothesis. Why do so many kids get asthma? One reason is that the environments they grow up in are too clean. Not having enough real allergens to fight, our immune systems become hypersensitive. You know how you can prevent kids from getting peanut allergies? Give them peanut butter when they’re young. Wait too long, and the body overreacts to peanuts. Kids who grow up on farms are much less likely to get asthma, because their bodies learned to deal with dirt and dander from day one. (Alliteration for the win!).

 

America has gotten steadily less racist over the last 70 years. But large chunks of our society, the lymphatic system of the body politic, are more attuned to spotting and combating racism in the nooks and crannies than ever before (this tendency, I believe, has invited an ugly right-wing racist reaction. But that’s a topic for another day). Noire, a lesbian who uses masculine pronouns, is so hypersensitive to racism, he is sure that it’s not only the explanation for the mask-optional policy, but also explains why the apology for the policy was insufficient. “I’m not going to give grace,” he explains, when someone is “spreading rhetoric that will get people hurt.” The evidence of this dangerous rhetoric spreading? The bar’s Instagram account “liked” some of the responses that supported the initial policy announcement. That’s not exactly Bull Connor with a megaphone.

 

This is the problem with our cultural autoimmune disorder. It has a kind of China Syndrome logic to it. People who suffer from it cannot turn it off; they cannot take the win. The meltdown is inexorable, burning through every barrier, every obstacle. Noire’s emotional meltdown acts the same way. He cannot offer “grace” to someone who is losing money on a bar that caters to people like him, because such thinking has no ends—it’s means all the way down. Acid doesn’t say, “I’ve dissolved enough material.” Fire doesn’t declare, “I’ve burned enough of the house.” Water doesn’t decide, “This is a nice spot, I’ll seek my level tomorrow.”

 

We get the term “last ditch” from the military. It appears to have come from William of Orange, the idea being that it’s the last line of defense. To die in the last ditch is to fall in battle because there’s nowhere else to fall back to. To fight to the last ditch, or make a last-ditch effort, is to stand your ground because there’s no other option, save dishonorable surrender. Noire and friends are fine with seeing the Last Ditch go under, even if it might be the last ditch for people like them in Western Massachusetts. Because for them, revolutionary praxis means tearing down anything that is good—on their terms—in the name of the perfect, and the impossible.