Chasing Lost Edens

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Political types are often tempted to ascribe their opponents’ undesirable ideological positions to their being paid, evil, stupid, or in thrall in one way or another to a dastardly enemy lurking somewhere behind the scenes. This temptation is understandable but misguided. There are, indeed, a few among us whose commitments are the product of perfidy, ignorance, or greed, but mostly we remain infantry within what Thomas Sowell famously termed our “conflict of visions.” Why is it the case that, as Sowell put it, “the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again”? Because, he proposed, each side is animated by an opposite “sense of how the world works.” In consequence, Sowell concluded, the bulk of our contemporary political disagreements are the result not of varying exposure to the facts but of differing moral intuitions and value judgments.

 

Sowell was writing in the 1980s, and he focused on the divide between the left, which exhibits what he terms the “unconstrained vision,” and the right, which exhibits the “constrained vision.” To my mind, his work is as persuasive today as it was then, and it continues to explain many of the fault lines within our politics. Nevertheless, I might offer an addendum to his theory that I believe is of growing importance in our era: that, in addition to one’s view of human nature, the most potent predictor of one’s current political disposition is whether one is comfortable living in America as it actually exists in the year 2026 or one so resents the present for its many perceived failings that one wishes one had lived in an earlier time.

 

Consider how common it is at the moment to hear people on both the left and the right talk of a given period within the recent past as if it represented Eden before the Fall. On the left, the period in question might be the New Deal, or any time “before Reagan,” or perhaps any day up to and including the one before Donald Trump became president. On the right, the period might be the 1920s, or the 1950s, or the week before Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. Pick an epoch; the details don’t especially matter. What matters is that, for whatever reason — be it the latest cost of housing or health care or burritos; the existence of billionaires; a sense that there are insufficient opportunities for the young; the decline of religious belief — millions of people have decided that the past was preferable to the present, and those millions of people do not sort into neat left/right groups.

 

That alone sets this predictor apart from the others. One would expect self-described conservatives to be more prone to nostalgia, and yet polling shows that, in 2026, self-described Democrats are more likely to take a backward glance than self-described Republicans. Asked earlier this year by Pew whether America’s best days were “ahead of us” or “behind us,” only 34 percent of Democrats answered “ahead of us,” compared with 46 percent of Republicans. Historical polling suggests that this gap is a by-product of the incumbent president’s being a Republican and that it will be reversed when a Democrat is next voted into the White House. But this underscores rather than diminishes the point — which is that within both parties, a majority of voters are of the view that modern life is inferior to what preceded it.

 

This matters, for just as a man who has been given two weeks to live will make profoundly different choices from those of a man who expects to live for another 60 years, so an American who is comfortable with contemporary life — and who expects to remain so — will behave differently than one who is not. Among other things, those two individuals will adopt differing opinions about the integrity of their civic institutions, about the virtue of their regnant culture, about the wisdom of their fellow citizens, and more. One will become habitually pessimistic, the other habitually optimistic. One will be open to change; the other will feel perpetually in danger of losing his national inheritance. One will be more likely than the other to have children, build a business, and otherwise engage with what Edmund Burke described as the “little platoon we belong to in society.”

 

***

 

Once one acknowledges this divide, one sees it everywhere. Take, for example, the recent intramural fight over Christopher Nolan’s production of The Odyssey. Ostensibly, the fight was over a movie. In reality, though, it was a proxy argument about how comfortable right-wingers ought to be with modern American life. On one side of this argument were a bunch of people who are so appalled by the state of things that, having learned that the cast would include a black woman as Helen of Troy and a trans actor as Sinon, they considered even seeing the movie as an act of cultural treason. On the other side were a bunch of people who, while they may criticize the state of things, are fundamentally happy in the world. I am a conservative, and I suspected I might agree with some of the criticisms that the movie’s antagonists had offered up. But I went to see it anyway — and I enjoyed it anyway — because I regarded its flaws less as an indication of the ongoing collapse of Western civilization and more as nicks on the hull of a generally admirable and satisfying work. Which, of course, is pretty much how I see America in 2026. Yes, I have a series of strong political opinions, which I share enthusiastically — sometimes caustically — in this very magazine. But I would not want to live anywhere else. I would not want to live in another time. And, if I tally up the good and bad, I find myself filled with optimism, gratitude, and the conviction that the future is bright.

 

One might suppose this means that I do not take my strong political opinions seriously — or at least that I am willing to ignore them in favor of thinking happy thoughts. But that is untrue. I am, for example, sincerely pro-life, which in practice means that I consider the vast majority of American states to be sanctioning murder. I am a constitutional originalist, which in practice means that I consider an enormous amount of what the federal government does every day to be flatly illegal. I dislike the president, as I have disliked every president we have had since I moved to this country in 2011. I think that the media is a national disgrace, that academia has fatally beclowned itself, and that the entertainment industry has lost its way. If you were to invite me to gripe, you would, after the end of the second hour, wish to throw me out of an airplane.

 

It’s just that I also think that we live in the midst of an unparalleled miracle, and that, while every age features terrible problems, not every age has the upsides that ours enjoys. I could rehearse, as I often have, the intellectual case in defense of this view. But here’s the thing: While making that case is important, doing so will not be sufficient to overcome the great divide I am describing, because the great divide I am describing is not the result of disagreement about the facts. Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley Jr. had access to the same facts, and yet one of them experienced life as tragedy and was perpetually uncomfortable in the world, while the other offered his critiques with sprezzatura and remained at ease even among his adversaries. Could either man have argued the other into altering his disposition? I think not.

 

I do not mean to suggest that debate is futile, that political conversions are impossible, or that the attitudes displayed by our public figures are irrelevant to the fate of the nation. If I believed that the future of this country were foreordained, I would never write another word. I merely mean to propose that, as our politics becomes more muddled, it is worth looking outside of the traditional ideological axes to determine what is going on. If one does, one will find some strange bedfellows. In theory, the so-called post-liberal conservatives and the democratic socialists are sworn enemies, and yet if one listens to the descriptions of American life that both promulgate, one discovers that they actually have a great deal in common. Both groups believe that American life has been hollowed out by shadowy forces, both believe that this hollowing out was made inevitable by the design of the American system, and both believe that the solutions to America’s problems come from thinkers from other places and times. So similar are these two groups in disposition, in fact, that they routinely reserve their fiercest anger for those who are nominally on their side. The democratic socialists hate the moderate Democrats more than anyone else on earth, while the post-liberals are so incandescently angry with the Reaganites that they respond to any suggestion that life in the United States is tolerable by insisting triumphantly that such sentiments will turn people into socialists.

 

And perhaps they will. But by rights, they ought not to, because life in the United States is, indeed, tolerable — and usually a great deal better than that. Negativity may well be a character trait, but it is one that, like sloth or self-indulgence or impatience, ought to be treated as a flaw and worked on. Nostalgia may well be an inevitable hankering, but when it causes one to undervalue one’s actual life, it ought to be suppressed as an impediment to flourishing. (There is a good reason that nostalgia was originally classed as a disease.) A traditional conservative concern was that the arrival of mass affluence would lead people to forget by what mechanism they were liberated from want and thereby to kill the golden goose. To this, conservatives might want to add a related worry: that, having been freed from the need to fret about their subsistence, Americans would come to consider their own time frivolous and fall in love with the phantoms of a golden era that did not exist — and never will.

What Totalitarianism Could Not Destroy

By Anna Smith Lacey

Sunday, August 23, 2026

 

Every August 23, Black Ribbon Day commemorates the victims of Europe’s totalitarian regimes. The date marks the anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the 1939 agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that divided much of Central and Eastern Europe between them. For millions of Europeans, totalitarianism was not an abstraction debated in classrooms. It came to their villages, knocked on their doors, and called them by name.

 

My father was born in a picturesque small village among the vineyards of northeastern Hungary’s Tokaj wine region. It was founded in 1750 by German-speaking Catholic settlers from the Black Forest. They cleared the land, planted vineyards, built stone houses, and raised a church. Swabian by ancestry, Hungarian by homeland, and Christian by faith, they created an orderly and industrious community whose descendants still live there today.

 

The 20th century taught the people of Hercegkút how dangerous such an identity could become when the state claimed the power to assign guilt collectively.

 

Before the war, Hercegkút had a small Jewish community. Its first known Jewish resident arrived in 1808. At its height, in 1880, the community numbered 38 people. Its members included the Weinstock family, who operated the village general store and extended credit to local farmers until they could pay after the harvest.

 

After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, all Jewish villagers were taken first to the ghetto in the nearest town and then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. None of Hercegkút’s Jewish residents returned. A presence that had endured in the village for more than a century disappeared completely. Only some gravestones remain, alongside the intricate parts of the wrought iron gate of their old cemetery.

 

Then came another totalitarian power — with a different ideology but the same doctrine of collective guilt.

 

On January 2, 1945, Soviet troops ordered Hercegkút’s able-bodied men between the ages of 17 and 45 and women between 18 and 30 to report with three days’ food, two changes of clothing, bedding, and eating utensils. My great-grandfather was among them. My great-grandmother was spared only because she had a young child to care for — my grandmother.

 

They were told that the men and women were leaving for a few days of public work — malenkij robot, “a little work.” In reality, 135 villagers were loaded into railway cars and transported approximately 1,000 miles east to forced-labor camps in the Donbas, in today’s Ukraine. Their “crime” was their German ancestry.

 

Many of the men had only recently survived the destruction of the Hungarian Second Army on the Don River on the eastern front of the war. Some walked home from the war barefoot. They returned from one nightmare — only to be carried away into another.

 

The deportation hollowed out Hercegkút. The very generation that should have rebuilt the village after the war was instead sent into coal mines and labor camps hundreds of miles away. Fifteen of the 135 deportees never returned. The last 13 survivors did not arrive home until October 1949.

 

Those who came back were weakened to the extreme, traumatized, and frequently silent. They had been warned not to speak about what had happened. By then, Hungary’s Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship consolidated its control, and the victims understood that even memory could be politically dangerous.

 

In less than a year, Hercegkút — like the rest of Hungary — was struck by two totalitarian regimes. The Nazis eradicated the village’s Jewish community because of their ancestry; the Soviets deported much of its working-age population because of theirs. Different ideologies, same deadly principle: People were condemned not for what they had done, but for who the state decreed them to be.

 

It would be understandable if the story ended here. But, remarkably, it didn’t.

 

To understand how this village endured, one must only walk into its church and look up. The local church dedicated to the Our Lady of the Visitation was built in the late 18th century with the labor and contributions of the villagers. In September 1955, the parish council decided that its smoke-darkened interior urgently needed repainting. The scale of the project was extraordinary: Its estimated cost equaled roughly six years of the parish’s operating budget. The villagers planned to finance it partly through a collection of wine after the harvest, and parishioners built the scaffolding themselves.

 

Work began in the summer of 1956 — the same year in which Hungarians rose against Soviet domination and were crushed by Soviet tanks — and was completed in 1957.

 

The artists, the brothers Emánuel and Leó Petrasovszky, were men of profound Christian faith. On the walls and vaulted ceilings, they painted Hungarian saints and blesseds, the four Evangelists, scenes from the life of Christ, and the patron saints of the village’s traditional feast days.

 

Consider what that meant. Hungary’s church schools had been nationalized. Religious orders had been suppressed. Priests and believers were watched, harassed, and imprisoned. The regime’s officially atheist ideology sought to drive Christianity from public life and eventually wipe it out of human memory.

 

Yet in a little wine-growing village recently emptied by deportation, people sacrificed years’ worth of resources and their own labor to cover the ceiling with hope.

 

While the communist party promised a new world without God, the freshly painted church walls quietly disagreed.

 

It is difficult to imagine a more beautiful act of quiet, diligent, strong resistance. It was not a march or a manifesto. It was a community repairing what had been damaged and handing down what the state wanted forgotten. In a system built on fear and historical amnesia, the villagers chose hope and memory. Under a regime that claimed the future, they painted for generations they might never see.

 

Totalitarian regimes are obsessed with permanence. They erect colossal monuments, stage outsized military parades, rewrite textbooks and burn books that disagree with them, rename streets, and insist that history has culminated in their rule. They demand not only obedience but professed belief.

 

Then there’s a breaking point. Their monuments are pulled down. Their slogans become museum pieces. The officials who spoke in the name of history are themselves consigned to it.

 

But the parishioners keep praying. Children learn the names of those who were taken. Grief becomes memory, memory becomes duty, and duty makes renewal possible.

 

A state can confiscate property and abolish institutions. It can turn ancestry into a crime, put innocent people on trains, send soldiers from the Don to the mines of the Donbas, and frighten survivors into silence. It can even succeed in erasing an entire community from a village.

 

But it cannot finally possess the human soul. Faith, family, memory, love of home, and the quiet loyalty of one generation to another remain beyond its rightful reach. These are not sentimental refuges from politics. They are defenses against the state’s most radical ambition: to determine not merely how people live, but what they are permitted to remember, love, and worship.

 

Black Ribbon Day should recall more than what totalitarianism destroyed. It should also remind us of what it could not crush.

Blinded by AIPAC

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 21, 2026

 

The Washington Post eventually came to its senses, but not before all the wrong people saw how it characterized the race to replace former Representative Eric Swalwell in California: “AIPAC has a new target to exert influence over Democrats.”

 

A far more neutral headline subsequently took its place, but the original is instructive. The actual candidates in the race were, to the reporters and editors who crafted it, immaterial. They weren’t even rendered one-dimensional caricatures, players in the political press’s solipsistic morality play. They were erased. So, too, were the voters of California’s 14th district. In their place was a contest of power between one lobby — and a mob boss of a lobby, at that — and the Democratic Party, a unified entity beset by malign outside forces.

 

You could be forgiven for concluding that the victor in this race, Aisha Wahab, ran against a Republican in the contest to finish out Swalwell’s term. She did not. Her “moderate opponent,” Melissa Hernandez, a onetime transit official in San Francisco, seems to have earned the label only because she presented herself as tougher on crime than her opponent. But the Post’s coverage of this race (like many other outlets) reads like coverage of a far-off conflict in which the proxy forces doing the actual fighting are treated as mere pawns in a greater geostrategic game.

 

“Support from AIPAC has been used as a cudgel against Democratic candidates,” the Post wrote, once again, of a Democrat-on-Democrat race. Indeed, some outlets even seemed to regard the very concept of outside spending in this election as untoward.

 

The Wahab campaign “was on track for a double-digit win,” the San Francisco Chronicle observed. “Then came the AIPAC money.” As if the Americans who engaged in constitutionally protected political speech played a spoiler role by depriving Wahab of the ability to run up the score.

 

But the Chronicle’s piece does contain a useful admission from an unlikely source, the national political director for the far-left PAC Our Revolution, Robert Dempsey. “This is the establishment just trying to assert their control over this district and have another vote in Congress to vote against Medicare for All and to continue to pad their pockets,” he said of AIPAC’s spending on Hernandez’s behalf.

 

Which is to say that AIPAC is not and, really, never was a pro-GOP organization. “Since the 1990 election cycle — the earliest one recorded by the Center for Responsive Politics — contributions by pro-Israel interests have favored Democrats,” Open Secrets reported a decade ago. It was only after 2023 (did something happen?) that AIPAC’s PAC, which it only registered in December 2021, threw its weight behind more Republicans than Democrats. As late as the 2022 cycle, AIPAC backed both Democrats and Republicans evenly. Indeed, its primary project in that midterm year was to drive the Republicans who objected to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory out of office. For the Americans who contribute to AIPAC, things have changed a lot in the last few years.

 

If AIPAC’s spending in this race occupies a prohibitive amount of real estate in reporters’ heads, the outside spending that benefited Wahab does not. No one seems to care about the contributions to her campaign from controversial outfits like the Teamsters Union, the Service Employees International Union, or the Medicare for All PAC. To observe any consistency here would detract from the mania that media and Democrats are cultivating over AIPAC’s very existence.

 

Indeed, it doesn’t even really seem to be about AIPAC per se. As Dave Weigel helpfully flagged this week, one New Hampshire Democrat is attacking her opponent not for her affiliations with AIPAC but “AIPAC donors,” which is to say . . . well, you know what she’s trying to say. We all do.

Defending the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy

By Brian J. Paul

Sunday, August 23, 2026

 

In the last few months, we’ve watched as a U.S. senator has reintroduced a bill with ten cosponsors to restructure the Supreme Court, the House Minority Leader has called a Court majority “illegitimate,” and the president has attacked the very justices he appointed for ruling against him. Meanwhile, two justices appeared before the House to ask for millions in extra security funding; one of them told of how she has had to explain to her children what a bulletproof vest is and why she is forced to wear one. In view of these events, it’s worth taking a moment to remember why the Court still deserves our confidence — and our defense.

 

The Founders did not create the federal judiciary as an afterthought — they made it an independent branch precisely because they anticipated moments like this one, when politically unpopular rulings would tempt the other branches to retaliate. Alexander Hamilton, one of the principal advocates of the Constitution, understood that the judiciary “is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its co-ordinate branches.” Lifetime tenure and salary protection under Article III of the Constitution exist for this very reason: to allow judges to decide cases on the law, not on which political faction controls Congress or the White House. An independent judiciary was never designed to be popular in real time; it was designed to be a check that operates regardless of public sentiment. The current moment — a Court ruling against a sitting president’s signature tariff and birthright citizenship policies, with some of his own appointees joining the majority in those cases — is Article III working exactly as designed, not evidence that something is broken. The same can be said for what might be considered conservative-coded rulings: for example, the decision prohibiting racial gerrymandering from this past term and, even more controversially, the 2022 decision overruling Roe v. Wade.

 

More than two centuries ago, in the canonical decision of Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court established that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is” — a principle that has served as one of the pillars of American constitutional government ever since. Without judicial review, the courts have no meaningful way to check the other branches. Many of the Court’s most highly charged rulings are thus the direct descendants of Marbury. In the tariffs decision, the majority grounded its holding in the relevant statutory text and Article I’s assignment of the taxing power to Congress. In the recent ruling striking down limits on the president’s authority to remove officers of the Federal Trade Commission, the majority grounded its holding in Article II’s Vesting and Take Care clauses. Both are textbook exercises of the same power of judicial review that Hamilton first claimed in Federalist No. 78 and that Chief Justice John Marshall made law in Marbury; they tell a coordinate branch it exceeded a textual limit fixed by the Constitution. That a ruling happens to cut against either party is irrelevant to its legitimacy; the first part of Marbury itself involved a ruling against the incoming administration.

 

The Court’s legitimacy comes from how it decides, not what it decides. Reasoned opinions; adherence to text, structure, and history; transparent voting records; and public dissent are the procedural guarantees that make a ruling worthy of precedential force. If legitimacy depended on outcomes pleasing a particular faction, no independent judiciary could exist at all. The whole point of having an independent court is for it to sometimes rule against whoever happens to hold power in the moment without fear or favor. After all, for every winner in a Supreme Court case, there must be a loser.

 

President Trump’s response to the tariff ruling — calling the decision “deeply disappointing,” saying he was “ashamed” of the justices who ruled against him, and calling them “a disgrace to our nation” (even “disloyal to our Constitution”) while praising by name the justices who ruled his way — is a case study in treating judicial legitimacy as outcome-contingent. That kind of rhetoric, aimed at justices for ruling against the president who appointed three of them, sends a corrosive message: that judicial fidelity should run to the appointing president rather than to the law. This is the opposite of what the judicial oath requires: to “administer justice without respect to persons.”

 

On the legislative side, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) reintroduced a bill proposing 18-year terms and a new justice seated every two years, framed explicitly around restoring “trust” in a court he and his cosponsors describe as facing a “legitimacy crisis.” Whatever one thinks of term limits as policy, restructuring the Court’s composition in response to disfavored rulings normalizes the idea that judicial independence is negotiable whenever it becomes inconvenient.

 

Once the judiciary’s authority is treated as contingent on winning, no ruling — for anyone, on any side — can ever be regarded as truly legitimate. Congress does hold constitutional authority to set the size of the Court; it has changed the number of justices several times before, ultimately settling at nine in 1869. But the last time there was a concerted effort to alter the Court’s composition, now nearly 90 years ago, the Senate overwhelmingly rejected it. In a scathing report, the Senate Judiciary Committee recognized FDR’s court-packing proposal for what it was: a gambit designed “to make this Government one of men rather than one of law. . . .” So “utterly dangerous” was the bill, the committee openly wished “its parallel [would] never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” Alas.

 

Criticizing a specific ruling — arguing it was wrongly decided, or that the dissent had the better of the argument — is healthy, normal, and part of what we do every day as engaged citizens. Robust critique of judicial reasoning strengthens the system, which itself is adversarial by design. Delegitimizing the institution that issues the ruling — attacking justices personally, threatening to pack or restructure the Court because a preferred position lost, or declaring the Court’s authority illegitimate as a matter of principle — undermines the institutional trust necessary for any ruling to be enforceable. The current environment all but erases this line. A president calling justices a “disgrace” for ruling against him, and senators reviving a structural-reform bill explicitly timed to public approval polling, both move from “we disagree with this outcome” to “this institution’s authority itself is suspect.” As Hamilton wrote, the Court has “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” If even the authority to render a valid judgment is in question, the Court has nothing, and Americans will be the worse for it. Rights without a judiciary free to declare when they have been violated aren’t worth the parchment they’re printed on.

 

The Supreme Court does not need our political leaders to agree with every decision it hands down — it needs them to defend the process that makes those decisions binding at all. When a losing side is a president or a caucus of senators today, it will be a different president and a different Congress tomorrow. If we allow “I disagree with this ruling” to collapse into “this Court is illegitimate,” we are rhetorically dismantling the very forum in which those interests can be vindicated when those in power fail them.

 

Although attacks on the Court are nothing new, the nature of the attacks has become more radical. When several justices feel compelled to ask the solicitor general whether the president considers himself bound by Court rulings — as they did during an oral argument last year — something is terribly amiss. Fortunately, the solicitor general said yes, but today’s yes can easily become tomorrow’s no if all you really care about is whether the bottom line is, by your lights, “correct.” Hamilton was right in 1788 and he is right now: “All possible care” must be taken to enable the Court to defend itself against the attacks of the other branches. To Hamilton, that meant adopting a constitution that provides for an independent judiciary. To elected officeholders, it should mean even more: preserving, protecting, and defending the independent judiciary, in both word and deed. A bulletproof vest is a miserable substitute for responsible discourse.

How to Lose a Trade War

By David Frum

Saturday, August 22, 2026

 

U.S.-Canada trade talks collapsed last night. Punitive Trump tariffs will now go into effect. Canada will reciprocate with retaliatory tariffs of its own.

 

The story may not be over. Donald Trump is notorious for issuing threats, then reversing them. Wars are on, off, on again, off again, then on a third time—but only as a “little detour.” This is not an administration that thinks even one move ahead. But without a supersized Trump TACO, the U.S.-Canada impasse likely won’t resolve soon.

 

The Trump administration has one big idea about Canada: The U.S. is larger, stronger, and richer than Canada, so Canada must sooner or later surrender to Trump’s demands. That one big idea is wrong.

 

Yes, Trump can hurt Canada more than Canada can hurt Trump. That part of Trump’s thinking is true. But wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.

 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has much more political permission to accept pain from a U.S.-Canadian trade war than Trump does.

 

To read current Canadian polling is to see a country united under its political leadership—and energized by its dislike and distrust of Trump’s United States. A majority of Canadians view Trump’s America as a more immediate threat to their security than Russia or China. Two-thirds favor the government taking a hard line in trade talks; fewer than one-quarter regard the United States as trustworthy. Meanwhile, Carney is backed by the Canadian public, polling at about 60 percent approval, a remarkable figure in a multiparty political system.

 

The Canadian economy has definitely suffered because of Trump’s hostility. Exports were down last year, and growth slowed. But this year, Canada got an unexpected bailout: Trump’s Iran war and inflation have boosted prices for Canadian oil, gas, minerals, and food products. Canadian incomes are rising again. Meanwhile, Canada’s low levels of public debt have kept inflation low. Whereas the U.S. government must pay 5.3 percent to borrow money for 30 years, Canada pays 4.2 percent.

 

By contrast, Trump is facing an omnishamble. “Trump’s Economic Challenge: $40tn Debt, 6.7% Mortgages and $5 Diesel.” That’s a headline in today’s Financial Times. The paper could have added one more: 33 percent job approval, and falling fast.

 

Trump’s tariffs are costing the typical American household $1,100 a year in both direct collections and indirectly in higher prices, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Although teasing out Canada-specific costs is tricky, one indicator is the price of aluminum. In 2024, about one-fourth of the aluminum consumed by Americans came from Canada, the U.S.’s single largest source of imported aluminum. Result: Whereas European and Japanese consumers now pay about $3,000 a ton for aluminum, Americans pay almost $5,000, driving up the cost of everything from a can of beer to the construction of a new hospital.

 

Although Canada’s economy is much smaller than the U.S.’s, Canada’s government has a more rational and intelligent leadership—and can therefore target its retaliation in ways that better serve national ends. U.S. alcohol exports to Canada have collapsed by 80 percent as Canadian provincial liquor stores ban U.S. wine and spirits. Canada’s booze boycott hurts more than one might expect given the comparatively small size of the Canadian market. Alcohol exporters to Canada prepare special labels for their products to meet Canadian legal requirements. More than 1 million bottles of wine intended for Canadian markets now slumber in U.S. warehouses, unsellable anywhere else without costly repackaging.

 

More than 30 percent of Ohio’s exports go to Canada, and almost 40 percent of Michigan’s. Both states will this year elect a U.S. senator and fill open governor’s seats. Not only is Trump putting at risk his party’s position in purple Michigan, but suddenly the races in beet-red Ohio look in jeopardy too. These states may turn control of the Senate—and Trump’s chances of facing meaningful accountability next year for his law-breaking and corruption.

 

Trump’s theory of his trade war, like his theory of his Iran war, is that the bigger bully always wins. Size counts for a lot, but not for everything.

 

As Trump has declared over and over again, his ultimate goal in this trade war is to add Canada as a 51st state. Why? To make the United States look bigger on the map. For that goal, which excites ultra-MAGA crackpots, Trump is hazarding not only America’s most important trading relationships but very possibly every other political equity he holds, including avoiding investigations and accountability by a Democratic House and Senate after January 2027.

 

Against Canada, Trump is fighting a trade war that very few Americans support, under leadership that most Americans reject, to achieve results that virtually all Americans would dismiss as pointless if not crazy.

 

Against Trump, Canadians are fighting a trade war that the great majority support, under leadership that commands broad assent, to defend their independence and self-respect. That’s a war that even the weaker side can win, especially if it needs to hold on only a few months longer to survive.

The Cowardice of ‘Who Are We to Judge?’

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 21, 2026

 

Who are we to decide?

 

In politics (and a bunch of other fields), this is one of the oldest and most important questions there is. And pretty much whenever I hear it, I hate it.

 

Most rhetorical questions are pretty obviously rhetorical. “Is the Pope Catholic?” rarely elicits a serious reply. “Why yes, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV, aka the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God is commonly understood to be Catholic.”

 

But a great many of the people who ask “Who are we to decide?” seem to sincerely not understand they are asking a rhetorical question.

 

Back when rhetoric meant something, Cicero discusses this question but did it in the way we understand rhetoric today. When he was a young man, he wrote De Inventione, a handbook for orators. And the question “Who are we to decide?” was a literal one about procedure. Was the Senate or some other body the proper venue to settle a question or redress a problem?

 

All the legal mumbo jumbo about whether someone has “standing” to sue can be traced back to this question (though I think the idea is older than Cicero). If you leave an upper decker in my bathroom, I have a legitimate complaint, but I don’t bring it to the Interstate Commerce Commission. If your poorly trained monkey-butler bites off my thumb, I don’t go to the judges of America’s Got Talent to demand compensation.

 

My point is, I have no problem with the question when it’s not a rhetorical question.

 

But a lot of politicians and intellectuals don’t ask the question as a question. They are making a statement in the form of a question. When was the last time you heard someone ask, “Who are we to decide?” or even “Who are we to judge?” and then follow up with, “Now that I think about it, us! We do!”

 

Idiomatically, politically, and rhetorically, the question is almost always a prelude to abdication or denial of responsibility. And sometimes that’s absolutely correct. If a kid petitions the Supreme Court to make his parents stop serving broccoli, the justices’ answer to the question of “Who are we to decide?” is “not us.”

 

So, again, that’s fine. My gripe is with the folks who deploy this rhetorical question when the answer is “us!” Indeed, the tactical avoidance behind the rhetorical question permeates a lot of our society. It’s in the groundwater. Foundations, museums, media outlets, and universities have got the bug. The idea of taking responsibility is unsettling to a lot of people with responsibilities. Sometimes the cop-out comes in the form of lip service to “democracy.” Sometimes it takes the shape of faux humility: “Who am I to tell you what’s right or wrong?”

 

There’s a fad in education called “ungrading.” Professors reject the idea that it’s their place to assign grades. “Ungrading reduces the power imbalance between instructor and student,” Carnegie Mellon University explains. “Ungrading embraces subjectivity and puts students in charge of their own learning.”

 

Tuition and room and board at Carnegie Mellon is $93,614. Perhaps some parents think they’re paying more for the power imbalance between instructor and student, and less for the self-learning. In one article, a professor at the University of Richmond rejoices in being “[f]reed from the tyranny of determining a grade.”

 

There’s a movement among museum curators to reject the old-fashioned notion that the person or persons in charge of a museum should have a special expertise or authority over the question of what belongs in a museum. That’s at least the upshot of this aptly titled paper, “‘Who are we to decide?’ Internal challenges to cultural authority in the contestation over human remains in British museums.”

 

In 2019, the four finalists for the prestigious Turner Prize for visual art petitioned the judges not to pick an ultimate winner. Each of the finalists dealt with different themes: “migration, patriarchy, torture and civil rights.” They didn’t want the judges to pit these issues against each other. The “overwhelmingly excited” judges unanimously agreed to the request.

 

In 2002, a survey of art critics found that only 27 percent of them cared very much about offering objective judgments about the quality of the art they were criticizing. Indeed, the critics ranked judgment as the least important aspect of criticism. Description was much more important. But “educating” the rubes about art was vital.

 

In philanthropy, there’s been a push for “participatory grantmaking,” which embraces “people power” and “changing the role of foundations from arbiters of what gets done to facilitators of a process.” Foundations should consider letting go, and “cede control and power.”

 

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman identified this trend in his 1987 book Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals. His basic argument was that under modernity, intellectuals cast themselves as authorities or “legislators” concerned with absolute truth. Under postmodernism, the role of the intellectual was to “interpret” without offering concrete judgment on what the truth is, if it’s a thing at all.

 

But let’s leave the eggheadery and get to politics and journalism.

 

In Donald Trump’s second impeachment, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that the evidence was clear: “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.” He went on like that for a while, but then said, “The Constitution gives us a particular role. This body is not invited to act as the nation’s overarching moral tribunal.”

 

In one sense that’s true. The Senate is not invited to act as the nation’s overarching moral tribunal, which is why it takes no stand on, say, the adultery of a shoe salesman in Bayonne, New Jersey. But the Constitution does assign responsibility to the Senate—as a tribunal—during impeachment cases.

 

In 2024, when the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Minnesota Star Tribune suddenly decided not to endorse a presidential candidate, the “Who are we to decide?” vibe was very strong. The Star Tribune said its job is to provide a range of voices, “not simply one institutional voice above all others.” But it assured readers, “We will continue to use our opinion pages to shine a bright light on leadership and hold it accountable.”

 

The Post’s publisher at the time, Will Lewis, said, “We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as an abdication of responsibility. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for, a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”

 

The LA Times, where I’ve been a columnist for nearly 20 years, offered similar explanations.

 

Now, I think newspapers are free to endorse or not endorse candidates as they see fit. But when they break with established practice in the lead-up to an election, and justify it on the grounds that it’s not their job to tell their readers what the editorial board actually thinks, it screams “Who are we to decide?”

 

At the same time, I think it’s ironic that the complaints from the left about these decisions ran against the spirit of the anti-elite judgmentalism they embrace in so many other areas.

 

We don’t have the space to get deep into the tragic Jason Arday mess, but it’s amazing how many people seem to think it’s racist or otherwise outrageous that anyone would have offered criticisms of the man. Having an informed opinion about his scholarship—or lack thereof—is not illegitimate or sinful simply because it is “hurtful” or inconvenient.

 

But I should be clear. This isn’t a purely left-wing phenomenon. We live in a populist age. And much of the right is just as besotted with anti-elite, anti-republican rage.

 

Rather than drown you in Trumpian rhetoric and jabroni tweets, or opine on the sudden capitulation to data center moral panic, I’ll give you one example that still rankles. When National Review published its now unfairly infamous “Against Trump” issue, the pro-Trump populist right lost its collective mind. One Fox News personality after another was appalled or baffled by the effrontery of National Review, an opinion magazine, to render an opinion on Donald Trump’s fitness for office. “The National Review needs to get in line with the rest of the Republicans. How dare they trash the frontrunner Donald Trump!” shrieked Jeanine Pirro. Harris Faulkner was scandalized. “These words should disturb every American,” she said on air. She then quoted National Review’s editorial: “He [Trump] is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries.”

 

Then she asked, “Whose job is it to decide who gets to be where? It’s the voters who decide. It is not any particular party. That’s offensive on its face.”

 

Please. Put away the fainting couch.

 

I mean, are we to believe that no one at Fox ever renders judgments about who should or shouldn’t be in office? Who can forget all the times Faulkner, Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters, Laura Ingraham, et al. said it wasn’t for them to decide or offer an opinion on Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris?

 

In Federalist 10, James Madison lays out the arguments for both democracy and republicanism. The arguments for democracy aren’t worth rehearsing here because we live in an age of democratization of everything, from museums and classrooms to newspapers, parties, and even impeachments. What’s forgotten is the republican stuff.

 

Madison explains that the value of republican government is that it takes democratic sentiment and filters it “through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice, will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” Leaders in the new republic needed to be “proper guardians of the public weal.” Such proper guardians may be incorrect in their judgments and opinions—that’s unavoidable. But their guardianship is grounded in their judgment.

 

If their judgment is wrong, you can vote against them. If the critic’s judgment is wrong, don’t read him. If the museum’s choices are bad, don’t patronize the museum. As Yuval Levin has argued time and again, the first obligation of anyone in a position of responsibility is to ask “What is my role here?” The answer to that question is not “How can I avoid responsibility?” or “How can I avoid criticism?” or even “How can I keep my job?”

 

This was Edmund Burke’s whole point in his speech to the electors of Bristol. “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

 

All of the politicians and “intellectuals” who dodge offering an opinion on Trump, Ken Paxton, Graham Platner, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Hasan Piker, democratic socialists, etc., by offering platitudes about “letting the voters decide” (or yammering about how so-and-so has a “right to say” something even if they disagree with it), are betraying republican virtue by hiding behind the vices of democracy wrongly understood. The voters will still get to decide, regardless of your answer to the question. The poltroons and demagogues will have the right to say poltroonish and demagogic things too.

 

The ethos of “Who are we to decide?” I am describing isn’t primarily humble, humane, intellectual, or even democratic. It’s cowardly. It holds one’s convictions hostage to the opinions of the mob and the dictates of fashion. It sides with the “realism” of Callicles over the judgment of Socrates. After all, who was Socrates to offer his inconvenient judgment?

Adam Smith’s Warning for America’s New Socialists

By Mark Jamison

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

Socialism has acquired an appeal that few would have imagined a decade ago. Bernie Sanders’s near success as a presidential candidate seemed like a one-off. But now, self-declared socialists are winning elections.

 

The appeal isn’t surprising. Americans are experiencing anxieties about housing, health care, the economy, and technology. Some feel helpless. Socialists offer a deceptively simple explanation: Powerful corporations and wealthy Americans have rigged the system. And they offer equally simple solutions: Take power from the powerful, take their money, and use government to give people what they want. It’s a hero’s journey worthy of Hollywood.

 

But the interesting question isn’t why socialism has gained momentum, but what kind of world it assumes: Are prosperity and comfort things government can design from above? Or do they emerge only when people have the freedom to choose and pursue their own ambitions?

 

Adam Smith warned us about visions of top-down prosperity over 250 years ago. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith called the would-be planner a “man of system”: someone so confident in his own wisdom and design for society that he forgets that the people he proposes to direct have their own minds and purposes. They respond well to incentives, but not to dictates.

 

Sadly, today’s progressives fail to see themselves in Smith’s words. Consider Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who recently declared himself a capitalist and invoked Adam Smith to explain why. His Smith is chiefly an enemy of monopoly: Concentrated businesses exploit workers and consumers, requiring governments to restrain them.

 

El-Sayed isn’t wrong that Smith distrusted businesses that collude and secure government favors. But he misses Smith’s larger insight spelled out in The Wealth of Nations: Prosperity depends on liberty and on institutions that allow both ordinary and extraordinary people to pursue ideas and plans of their own making.

 

In his inquiry, Smith finds that economic freedom coordinates the actions of people who don’t share the same objectives. In Smith’s telling, the baker wants income. The customer wants bread. The employee wants wages. The entrepreneur wants to build something. The investor wants a return. There is no need for an overseer to direct them. Acting freely, their different purposes and personal energies create cooperation.

 

Smith’s insight was not about virtue. In a sense, it was almost the opposite: People with different purposes are incentivized to benefit each other when everyone is at liberty to choose.

 

Socialism does the opposite. Instead of allowing millions of people to direct their lives — and in doing so, coordinate their lives — political actors decide what is to be produced, who’s to produce it, and who’s allowed to buy it and at what cost. The mechanism is coercion, not cooperation.

 

Smith discovered that a successful commercial society requires three things: security, the rule of law, and economic liberty. People need to be secure in their person and their property, protected from criminals, from dishonest businessmen and customers that would break contracts, and from officials that take property. These basics depend on limited government and an independent and non-corrupt judiciary, following a system of laws designed to protect liberty, not favor one person or group over another.

 

Today’s socialist leaning political actors want to undermine these fundamentals. Their public statements spell it out, calling for large and essential businesses to be owned or controlled by the government or labor unions. The leaders fail to say what becomes of the life savings of people who have invested in or built the businesses that suddenly serve political and labor union interests.

 

Their political leaders also want to undercut the rule of law by politicizing courts. Most extreme is the DSA’s proposal to make courts “subordinate to Congress,” rather than being a third branch of government. Legal cases would be decided based on political connections, not laws, precedent, and specific facts. Contracts, whether for labor or business, would mean nothing. Proposals such as term limits, congressional oversight of ethics, and court packing are less extreme, but they are steps in the same direction.

 

This is Smith’s man of system at work. “Very wise in his own conceit . . . [the planner] seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard,” believing that people “have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them.” Housing costs too much? Just mandate lower rents. Health care costs too much? Make it a human right.

 

But ignoring economic realities doesn’t make them go away. Farmers choose what to grow based on what food processors want to buy. The processors make their choices based on what distributors and retailers seek. And these are ultimately competing for consumers. Every socialist experiment has shown that when government chokes these economic incentives, businesses and laborers work less and consumers do without. As Smith explained, the pieces on the economic chessboard move themselves.

 

The socialist error isn’t in wanting people to have good lives, but in believing too much in their man of system’s visions and abilities. The problem isn’t confined to the socialist left. Much of today’s populist right has accepted the same premise: When economic outcomes disappoint, politicians should rearrange them.

 

Americans aren’t chess pieces. We have ambitions and visions for our families’ and communities’ futures. Sometimes we choose wrongly. But it is only through protecting and exercising liberty that we find the right ways.