Liars and Loons

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

You know populism is having a good week when the White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t the most self-discrediting elitist spectacle of the past seven days.

 

That came on Wednesday, when COVID pope Anthony Fauci was hauled before a Senate committee to explain why some of his public statements during the pandemic didn’t jibe with the thoughts he recorded in the private diary he was keeping at the time. Modern congressional hearings unfailingly generate far more heat than light, and this was no exception. But the heat was enough to melt a meaningful chunk of what’s left of Fauci’s reputation.

 

On the advice of counsel, to avoid the risk of perjury charges that might arise from his testimony, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions no fewer than 111 times. A man who spent seemingly every waking moment of 2020 and 2021 chattering into microphones suddenly had nothing to say.

 

It’s true, of course, that pleading the Fifth isn’t proof of wrongdoing, no matter what Josh Hawley might tell you. But it’s also true that it’s a tactic that the public associates with criminal lowlifes like gangsters, or the president. Fauci will never fully recover.

 

Just as embarrassing was the habit revealed by his diary of the doctor squeeing like a teenage TikTok influencer about how famous he was becoming during the pandemic, replete with name-checking the celebrities who had reached out to him. The eternal populist critique of the ruling class is that its highest priority is enhancing its own prestige, and now here was apparent confirmation in Fauci’s own words.

 

“Reading this, I truly worried about someone who would take a call from Dionne Warwick to talk about vaccines in a moment when the country really needed him to be a bit more focused,” The Atlantic’s Gal Beckerman sniffed of the diary entries.

 

And then, to round matters off, there was the matter of the blanket pardon Fauci received from Joe Biden during the final hours of the former president’s term. Biden would say that he did that to shield the doctor, a longtime MAGA hate object, from being unfairly harassed by a renegade Trump Justice Department. (A reasonable concern, to be sure.) But it had the effect of immunizing Fauci from any crimes he really did commit between 2014 and 2025—like, say, perjury in the testimony he gave to Congress during the pandemic.

 

So Fauci is untouchable legally—living proof that Trump and the right haven’t quite cornered the market on granting clemency to ideologically aligned cronies and shielding them from public accountability. Fauci will never need to explain whether he deliberately undersold the possibility that COVID leaked from a Chinese lab when, it turns out, he was privately agnostic about its genesis early on. Or whether his public skepticism of the lab-leak theory had to do with the fact that his own agency helped fund the Wuhan lab that was carrying out the sort of research that might plausibly have produced a Frankenvirus.

 

The political script here writes itself. You can’t trust the experts. They’re drunk on their own power and will lie to protect it. They care more about their own press than they do about your life. As I say, a good week for populism.

 

But not as good as it might have been.

 

No reckoning.

 

“It’s a real shame that the country cannot have an honest conversation, with the benefit of hindsight, about the many mistakes that were made six years ago,” the Washington Post wrote in an editorial about yesterday’s dismal Fauci hearing. “America has never fully grappled with the causes and consequences of COVID.”

 

My editor made a similar point this morning. In the past, he noted, major national failures typically generated serious inquiries into finding out what went wrong. Sometimes, as with segregation, those inquiries were informal matters of cultural reflection and debate. But with acute episodic crises—the Kennedy assassination, September 11, Nixon-era abuses by federal intelligence agencies—Congress opened bipartisan fact-finding investigations that ended with recommendations for reform.

 

Not the pandemic, though. Even if Fauci had agreed to answer the committee’s questions, it’s hard to imagine yesterday’s hearing producing anything more illuminating than Republican members telling him that he belongs in prison and Democratic members asking him how it feels to be a hero. Why is that? Why can’t America do a fruitful, thoughtful examination of what everyone agrees was a mismanaged once-in-a-lifetime calamity?

 

The easy answer is that the same bitter hyperpartisanship that’s made presidential landslides a thing of the past has made earnest nonpartisan problem-solving a thing of the past too, at least in matters as intensely politicized as COVID. Consider this: Unlike with most major national failures, the two sides can’t even agree on what the failure during the pandemic was.

 

The Warren Commission probed the government’s failure to detect an assassin and to protect the president from him. The 9/11 Commission probed the government’s failure to sniff out and foil a terrorist plot. The Church Committee probed the government’s failure to keep intelligence bureaus from being turned against the public those bureaus were supposed to protect.

 

Which failure would a “COVID Commission” probe? The failure to limit transmission of a virus that ended up killing more than a million Americans? Or the failure involved in locking down schools and businesses and imposing mandates for masks and vaccines?

 

The divide over how America failed during COVID is less an ideological “disagreement” than it is a divorce. It’s why, to borrow a term my editor used, Fauci has become a “totem” of sorts for both sides. In a country where each party increasingly regards the other’s continued viability as a threat to the American experiment, politics is less a shared struggle toward national improvement than a battle for dominance to crush an incompatible worldview. Each worldview reflexively polarizes around sources of authority, and so Fauci became an angel to the left and a devil to the right.

 

That also explains why idiot socialists are still masking in 2026. It’s not because they’re terrified of COVID. It’s because they’re keen to signal their allegiance to a worldview in which the state is empowered to take draconian measures in the name of “safety”—as leftists define it, at least. Masks are totems too.

 

In my darker moments (which are most moments, admittedly), I’d go further and hypothesize that Americans aren’t clamoring for a “COVID Commission” because they simply no longer expect national problems to be addressed seriously, let alone solved. In May, Pew Research Center published a poll in which it asked respondents whether they thought the country’s best days are behind it or ahead of it. Across all parties and all races, majorities answered “behind.” An America that continually stumbles into wars it can’t win, that remorselessly amasses a national debt it knows it can’t sustain, and that twice elected a character like Donald Trump is plainly incapable of dealing conscientiously with challenges.

 

We’re in our “managed decline” phase as a nation, and most of us know it. So why go through the motions of pretending that a “COVID Commission” might be productive?

 

There’s another reason that a thoughtful bipartisan investigation into the pandemic is impossible, though. One of our two major parties is beholden to populists, and “populism” and “thoughtfulness” are basically a contradiction in terms.

 

The lesser evil.

 

The two lessons I gleaned from yesterday’s hearing and the right-wing commentary around it are (1) Fauci isn’t very trustworthy, and (2) if you’re forced to choose between letting him set your scientific policy and letting Republicans do it, take Fauci every time.

 

That’s what I meant when I said above that the hearing was a missed opportunity for populism. Having effectively discredited the expert di tutti experts, the GOP should have been teed up to assert itself as the superior choice for Americans on public health. It … did not do that.

 

When I say that Wednesday’s “right-wing commentary” about COVID wasn’t reassuring, I’m not talking about crank randos on social media. I’m talking about Republican lawmakers. Sen. Ron Johnson babbled at the hearing about an alleged epidemic of suicides among people who’ve been “injured” by the COVID vaccine. Rep. John McGuire complained to Newsmax that Americans had been urged to take a vaccine that includes “human fetus baby parts” when they could have simply used ivermectin instead. Then Sen. Tommy Tuberville topped both of them by accusing Fauci of having been responsible for no fewer than 9 million deaths.

 

Granted, not every Republican in Congress is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics, which is how we ended up with Bill Cassidy, M.D., feeling obliged to support the most infamous anti-vaccine advocate in the country to be head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In a declining America, you can have Fauci spearheading pandemic policy in between signing autographs—or you can have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presiding over an unfolding disaster in American vaccine uptake with potentially dire long-term consequences. Take Fauci.

 

QAnon chronicler Mike Rothschild captured the absurdity of populist strains of thought about COVID with what’s at best a half-joke: “The overwhelming right-wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it’s Joe Biden’s fault.” Another Twitter user flagged a dispute between two populists, one insisting that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab and the other insisting that the virus never existed, with the caption “the diversity of right-wing thought on display.” Those are the impulses that congressional Republicans somehow have to navigate.

 

How could they possibly conduct a serious pandemic investigation under the circumstances?

 

What about Ron DeSantis? you might say at this point. The governor of Florida is very much a populist, and he had a thoughtful COVID policy in the early days of the pandemic, back when Democrat Andrew Cuomo was seeding contagion in nursing homes across New York. DeSantis is the exception that proves the rule, though: Having boldly defied the left-wing lockdown consensus and followed the facts initially, he began meekly pandering to right-wing anti-vax paranoia as he prepared to run for president in 2024. At last check he was busy pushing his state legislature to repeal certain vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.

 

Not every Republican politician is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics.

 

The supreme tragicomic example is Trump, of course, who’s never been free to celebrate his momentous achievement in helping to bring the COVID mRNA vaccine to market during his first term. He spent months after leaving office in 2021 urging supporters to take the vaccine, only to discover that this is one matter in which their loyalty to him isn’t absolute. By 2024 he had stopped mentioning it altogether; “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” he said, not a little resentfully, “because I’m a Republican.”

 

Two years on, though, he seems to have finally caught up with his own base. Reportedly, Trump approached Kennedy recently to ask why he wasn’t moving faster to reduce the number of childhood vaccinations recommended by the federal government. The president is now more eager than his fanatically anti-vax deputy to scale back immunizations. Once again, for emphasis: Take Fauci.

 

Brain worms.

 

Even thoughtful right-wing commentators, when writing about left-wing pandemic failures, rarely reckon seriously with the fact that they’re allied with a faction of witch-doctor lunatics who’d rather spend money studying whether ivermectin cures cancer than encouraging mRNA research.

 

In noting that, I don’t mean to imply that, because the right is crazy, it’s acceptable for Fauci to lie or for Democratic policymakers to take dictation from the teachers unions on opening schools. But if we’re going to critique the expert class usefully, with an eye to convincing readers to trust it less blindly, we should probably be more forthright about pointing out that the main alternative to Faucism in modern America has brain worms. Literally.

 

Nor should we excuse populist derangement over the pandemic as an understandable or even defensible reaction to the expert class’ deceptions. It’s doubtless true that Fauci’s deceit about masking and revisionism about herd immunity piqued skeptics’ mistrust in the science bureaucracy, but right-wing mania over COVID was already raging long before Fauci became an Enemy of the People. As early as April 2020, just a month after the virus began spreading aggressively, the FDA had to debunk the populist craze over hydroxychloroquine as a pseudo-folk remedy against it.

 

You can have Fauci telling “noble lies” about masks to try to protect the supply available to hospital workers, or you can have the president musing about bleach injections and his fans praising the magical healing powers of a deworming medication. Only a doomed, decadent country would put itself in a position of having to choose between the two, but if we do have to choose—and most right-wing critiques of Fauci implicitly invite us to do so—the choice is clear. “The experts are untrustworthy” does not rationalize brain-worms populism.

 

And that’s the only kind of populism there is in practice, I suspect. Even when it has valid grievances, even when it’s led by obviously intelligent figures like DeSantis, the intense pressure populism is under to affirm and ventilate the suspicions of its supporters—whether those suspicions are reasonable or not—will lead it inevitably toward crankery. To its own detriment.

 

It’s why DOGE, led by the richest man in history and driven by an obviously legitimate belief that government is too wasteful, ended up cutting federal programs so vindictively and indiscriminately that Elon Musk himself recently admitted that he’d gotten carried away. It’s why Trumpists, despite enjoying strong popular support for measures like mandatory voter ID, can’t resist framing calls for better election security in terms of ludicrously paranoid conspiracies to rig elections. Populism could and should win on those issues, just as it should win its case against Fauci.

 

But the brain worms always find their way in.

 

Maybe we’ll eventually see a form of it that’s better suited to governing responsibly. (Leftists might point to the New Deal or the Great Society as examples, although you can imagine what an anti-statist conservative like me thinks about that.) “Populism, but smart” is the implied warranty of J.D. Vance 2028; a brilliant Ivy-trained mind like his can deliver the sober, reality-based people power that skeptics are waiting to see, his fanboys would insist. Could be—but remember that the vice president has also “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” according to the White House chief of staff. Even in a brain as formidable as his, the worms are stirring.

 

I’ll believe “populism, but smart” when I see it. In its current incarnation the movement is a purely adversarial force, unequal to the challenge of governing effectively and not even very interested in doing so. It won’t pursue an inquiry like “What went wrong with COVID?” because it won’t risk having to reach conclusions that challenge the inviolable suspicions of its supporters. If populists were more intellectually honest and civically virtuous, Wednesday’s Fauci disaster would have been the first chapter in an earnest effort to improve America’s scientific bureaucracy. As it is, the book is closed.

 

 

Abdul El-Sayed Fuses Together Two Toxic Ideologies

By Jonathan Chait

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

Abdul El-Sayed is running for Senate as a Democrat in Michigan, where he is waging a close and bitter contest against Representative Haley Stevens in a primary that will be held on Tuesday. Were he to win, and then go on to defeat Mike Rogers, the presumed Republican candidate, El-Sayed would become the most fervently anti-Zionist senator. “If you want your politics dictated to you by AIPAC or Chuck Schumer, then I’m not your guy,” he said during a debate with Stevens.

 

El-Sayed depicts Israel and its American supporters as the primary authors of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. He also blames Israel and AIPAC for a wide array of domestic social problems. “We should be using our tax dollars here to invest in health care here and education here, rather than sending it over there to buy bombs and tanks that get used to drive apartheid and genocide there,” he said to WDET, Detroit’s public-radio station. El-Sayed has barely acknowledged the possibility that Stevens is a sentient being with individual agency, describing her as “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.”

 

Asked recently on CNN if he thought there were any reasons other than money that someone might have a different view on Israel, he said, “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights.” Asked if a progressive could also be a Zionist, he replied, “Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.”

 

The magnitude of the shift in Democratic politics that El-Sayed’s election would create has not quite registered with the party’s voters. In part this is because New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also a fervent anti-Zionist, attracted so much attention and controversy in his campaign last year that El-Sayed’s run feels like a tamer sequel. In reality, however, not only was Mamdani running in a far different locale (an overwhelmingly Democratic city rather than a purple state), but he also, with rare exceptions, focused on affordability, not on Israel. It was his opponents who sounded obsessed with Israel.

 

El-Sayed’s campaign is currently the left’s preeminent cause, held up as key proof that an obsessively anti-Zionist left-wing politics can win outside of blue enclaves. Michigan voted twice for Donald Trump. Should El-Sayed prevail, he would immediately open the door for a new wave of like-minded candidates to follow behind him. “You put one ogre on a pike,” El-Sayed told donors in a Zoom call, according to Politico, apparently referring to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, “and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different.”

 

But if El-Sayed’s anti-Zionism is obsessive, it is not a singular obsession. He talks about the Israel lobby the way he talks on the stump about nearly any other political issue. The El-Sayed formula is to describe just about any policy as a conspiracy by a corporate entity or wealthy cabal to enrich itself at the expense of the people. The villains in his stories are motivated by pure greed, and trade-offs do not exist.

 

This is a rhetorical style that has long existed on the populist left. The trouble is that, when you apply it to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and especially to the question of why some Americans do not share El-Sayed’s position on it, his approach grows paranoid and menacing.

 

Populists believe, almost as an article of faith, that Democrats can win working-class voters by moving left on economic policy. El-Sayed has aligned himself with the Democratic Party’s Bernie Sanders–and–Elizabeth Warren wing, endorsing Medicare for All, promising to end Citizens United, supporting targeted tariffs, emphasizing the evils of corporate monopolies, and generally making the answer to every political question a blunt attack on billionaire greed. When applied to ordinary problems, this rhetorical mode yields oversimplistic but crowd-pleasing answers. “Why don’t our schools get the funding that they deserve? Well, because there’s not a lobby for schools. Kids don’t have a corporate PAC,” El-Sayed says, in a typical piece of campaign rhetoric. In truth, there is a powerful lobby for school funding: teachers’ unions. The main barrier to more spending on schools is not the absence of lobbying; it’s that people don’t like paying taxes.

 

After Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s popular Democratic governor, endorsed Stevens last week, El-Sayed explained the choice as the inevitable product of the two women’s benefactors. “Those who have taken corporate money for most of their careers tend to stick together,” he said.

 

When this populist analysis is extended to Israel, it takes on an even more conspiratorial edge. El-Sayed’s efforts to weave a seamless narrative connecting AIPAC to his struggle against wealthy interests has built the Israel lobby into an almost-supernatural force controlling American politics behind the scenes.

 

Graham Platner—who was running competitively in polls against Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, before scandals overtook him—preceded El-Sayed as the movement’s cause célèbre. He similarly depicted himself as the tribune of the people fighting a twilight struggle against oligarchs. When reporters began to unearth evidence of questionable behavior, his supporters quickly concluded that his twin struggles against oligarchy and Zionism—perhaps it was a single struggle—had made him a target.

 

“The thing about this smear campaign is that it’s obvious,” wrote the American Economic Liberties Project researcher Matt Stoller on X. “Graham Platner wants to eliminate the power of billionaires, and wants to end our alliance with Israel. That’s all these slurs are about, not what he did or who he is.” The podcaster Krystal Ball posited a “clear double standard at play with Platner reporting because he is anti-zionist and anti-oligarch.” Sam Haselby, a historian and an author, wrote on X, “Let’s be serious. They don’t like Platner because he’s an economic populist. They have no trouble with vastly worse sexual ethics as long as one is pro-billionaire and pro Israel.”

 

The basis for these charges is a bit cracked. But it follows logically from the populist analysis of the situation. If all resistance that left-wing candidates face is the work of a shadowy moneyed interest, and fighting Israel is the left’s most deeply felt cause, then it stands to reason that Israel, or its lobbyists, are behind every setback the movement encounters. Earlier this month, El-Sayed casually dismissed a poll showing Stevens leading him by a point by telling MS NOW, “That poll seems to be funded by AIPAC,” which is not true.

 

Pro-Israel lobbying does play an important role in domestic politics, and it does often include spurious charges of anti-Semitism to discredit legitimate critiques of Israel. Aid to Israel is not, however, a meaningful constraint on American domestic spending, given that aid to Israel accounts for less than one tenth of 1 percent of the federal budget. The populists are not imagining that they are fighting a well-funded lobby. What they are imagining is that this lobby is the hidden force behind all of the opposition they face.

 

I received a small taste of this political style earlier this spring, when I wrote an article criticizing El-Sayed’s claim that he can adopt unpopular left-wing positions without jeopardizing his ability to win a general election. The small left-wing magazine Current Affairs asked him to respond the next month, and he said, “I really appreciate the question, because I really want us to step back and ask a couple of very basic points about how politics actually work, not from the Atlantic desk where you have a vested interest in sustaining a system that whitewashes neoliberal ideas and continues to tell us the best use of our money is to subsidize big corporations or a foreign government.”

 

The “foreign government” he refers to is presumably Israel. El-Sayed was not merely disputing the merits of my beliefs (which he mischaracterized—I have argued against aid to Israel, and I have no idea which big corporations he thinks I wish to subsidize). He accused me of representing a “vested interest” in these policies. His campaign declined to respond to multiple emails requesting clarification as to the nature of this alleged vested interest.

 

The combination of populism and anti-Zionism has introduced a strain of political rhetoric that heretofore has had little place within the Democratic Party. Anybody who has observed the Republican Party in the Trump era, however, would recognize the combination of populist demagoguery and edgelord bullying. Informing your supporters that their problems are the result of a shadowy cabal of billionaire conspirators tends to unleash passions that can be difficult to control. El-Sayed and Trump share a gleeful lack of concern for the consequences.

 

Although the comparison may sound like an insult, it’s one El-Sayed has invited himself. Earlier this year, he held a campaign event with Hasan Piker, a popular streamer and enthusiast for left-wing authoritarian regimes. When reporters questioned his choice of allies, El-Sayed replied, “If perfectly inoffensive won elections, then Donald Trump would never have been President.” Democrats now have to decide whether they think they can win elections this way, and whether they want to.

The Gentlemen of Antwerp

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, July 31, 2026

 

Donald Trump is cheap in every sense of the word: cheap in that he is an infamous deadbeat who cheated his creditors; cheap in the sense of tacky; cheap in that he is the sort of man whose virtue, such as it is, can be overcome at no great expense—a cheap date.

 

Trump is a $40 fake Rolex made copious flesh.

 

Trump is so cheaply bribed that the bribes almost do not look like bribes, and they aren’t bribes in the conventional sense, notwithstanding only the fact that no court of law has found them to be such. They are moral bribes—trinkets—rather than economic bribes.

 

And you do not have to spend very much on that sort of thing. One need not be overboard. The pimped-out airplane from the Arab despot was a bit much, maybe. But the CEO of Rolex, Jean-Frédéric Dufour, bought the whole Swiss watch industry a better deal on tariffs with a desk clock that was not even solid gold but merely gold plated, along with a 1-kg bar of gold engraved with the word “PRESIDENT”—in case Trump, who seems to believe that there is something called the Islamic Republic of Japan and who conflates Vladimir Putin with Volodymyr Zelensky, finally forgets which office it is he holds.

 

The gemstone cartel known as the Antwerp World Diamond Center got its diamonds an exemption from Trump’s tariffs after offering up the merest of baubles, a hideously tacky ring with diamonds arranged in two big capital Ts and the numbers 45 and 47, references to Trump’s two terms as president. Trump in the pocket of a bunch of European diamond merchants: The antisemitic stereotypes thereby invoked must have been almost too much to bear for the Jew-hating cretins in Trump’s coalition, who surely would be muttering about some yarmulke-wearing malefactor

 

spawned in some estaminet of

 

Blistered in Palm Beach

 

Patched and peeled in Washington

 

if any of them had ever read a book that did not have pictures in it.

 

It is, to be sure, a real ring of power, but the power it expresses is not that of the president of the United States—it is the power of the Antwerp diamond cartel, which knows exactly how to tickle the ol’ hypothalamus when it comes to such a piteous figure as Trump.

 

Trump is hardly alone in being cheaply had. Sen. Bob Menendez gave it up for a little bit of gold and the down payment on a Mercedes C-Class—the starter Benz!—for his lady friend. He also hinted that he’d like an expensive watch. Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, whose conviction on corruption charges was overturned, accepted a Rolex from a favor-seeker. The traitor Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who spied for the Russians, sold himself for a couple of Rolexes and similar loot.

 

Rolexes are a thing when it comes to corrupt officials, but cash is still king, even if the amounts are relatively small: A Washington city councilman is on trial for corruption charges after being accused of accepting a mere $156,000 to redirect some $5.2 million in city contracts—a nice ROI for the bribe-payers, if the facts of the case are as prosecutors present them. Thrifty gentlemen in the District of Columbia managed to get out of $3 million in taxes for a mere $75,000 or so in emoluments. Federal prosecutors estimate that a corrupt USAID contracting officer received something in the neighborhood of $1 million in bribes in return for running a scheme that redirected some $550 million worth of contracts.

 

I’m a journalist, and $1 million is a lot of money to me, but the organized-crime standard for kickbacks is about 10 percent—and the USAID guy got less than two-tenths of 1 percent: chump change. Hell, those 70 corrupt housing authority guys in New York commanded kickbacks amounting to as much as 20 percent of the contract value in their 2025 bribery case.

 

No one really knows how wealthy Donald Trump and his family were before he was elected president—he lied pretty consistently about his wealth and has been known to say that his net worth varied with his mood. (“The heart is fickle above all things, and desperately wicked.”) Perennially over-leveraged, Trump spent much of his professional (“professional”) life walking a financial tightrope, but there is no doubting the vastness of his family’s wealth today, thanks in no small part to some pretty shady crypto stuff and unapologetic profiteering from his office.

 

Trump represents the ultimate vindication of “fake it ’til you make it.”

 

And so, of course, Trump does not need the gentlemen in Antwerp to buy him a diamond ring valued at a mere $35,000. He does not really need a corrupt petro-potentate to buy him an airplane, either, and he can afford all the fancy watches he likes. (Once a hawker of gawdy knockoff watches, Trump himself now favors timepieces from Vacheron Constantin, apparently the result of his wife’s uncharacteristically tasteful influence.) The point of the baubles is not their market value but their psychic value. What the Swiss et al. have discovered is that it is more efficient to spend a few dollars servicing Trump’s vanity than to spend a larger sum of money to get at him through purely economic means.

 

What that says about Trump is nothing good.

 

What it says about the Americans who twice elected him president is worse: They are not ambitious enough to be cheap, and they are not even free—they are marks who can be made to pay for the privilege of being fleeced and condescended to by a grifter who might have been lifted from the pages of a Sinclair Lewis novel.

We Discard the Lessons of WWII at Our Peril

By Joshua S. Treviño

Friday, July 31, 2026

 

There has arisen of late a cottage industry encouraging the thinker and the policymaker to set aside the Second World War. On the elevated end of things are works like Alec Ryrie’s 2025 book, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It, which argued that the postwar liberal order was a function of (post facto) opposition to Hitler. (Modern asylum law, for example, is not meant to contend with small boats bearing Pakistani men: It was written for Anne Frank.) Also on the high end is R. R. Reno at First Things, who argues in “Putting World War II Behind Us” that “World War II encourages a Manichean mindset, one that rushes to describe conflicts as world-historical clashes between unmitigated evil and unimpeachable good.” This is, he argues, deranging to modern statecraft and discourse both. At the low and base end is Tucker Carlson promoting internet historian Darryl Cooper’s revisionism, leaning heavily into apologetics for the Third Reich and hatred for its enemies, notably Winston Churchill and the Jews. This last is a narrative as old as Nazism itself, being of the same source. The former, however, is morally and intellectually legitimate and deserves a response.

 

Ryrie and Reno are surely correct in their descriptive analysis. The world after 1945 is indeed ordered, in the grand-strategic sense, in response to the Second World War. The major institutions — the United Nations, NATO — emerged from it, and the assumptions dictating behavior are to a meaningful extent rooted in it. Metaphors are often enough derived from it, especially when describing evils and antagonists. Reno specifically argues that the war, having been a civilizational disaster of the first order, is in the end no template. “To its orgy of violence . . . we owe the soul-eating nihilism that today threatens the future of the West,” although this is properly more the First World War than the Second. For the Western Allies, at least, the Second World War was a struggle against a species of “soul-eating nihilism” against which — see Carlson and Cooper — we still contend today.

 

Yet the question raised by those begging off the Second World War is whether the problem — in skewed perceptions, in unrealistic policy, in unachievably maximalist demands — is the war or the modern statesmen who keep it in mind. Reno correctly notes that “World War II participates in the inevitable moral ambiguity of the human condition,” which must place the onus upon the latter. The war itself is one of the most stupendously complex events of all human history and contains within itself a variety of moral and pragmatic questions so profound, and surrounded by events so dense, as to command several lifetimes of study and interpretation. In the American context, it stands next to the Civil War as a touchstone of identity and example; in the British, next to the First World War and Napoleonic Wars. The first thing to grasp is that it deserves its place.

 

The present tense must be used: The Second World War deserves its place, by its nature, and we err if we cast it aside or, worse, adopt the interpretive frames of our antagonists. However, it is entirely just to demand that those who would invoke it fully understand it. Not every villain is Hitler and not every stand against one is Churchillian. Unconditional surrender is a dramatic aspiration outside the norm of nearly every war ever fought. Not every aggression leads to another. All this is true and it is worth remembering: Pragmatism and prudence should inform statecraft, not pushing sentiment aside but tempering and informing it.

 

Yet set against this must be an understanding that the Second World War provides an array, unique in modernity, of useful heuristics that tend toward good policy and good outcomes. It actually is good to oppose territorial aggression early. It actually is good to prefer democracies to autocracies. It actually is good to prefer worst-case assumptions in assessments of events. It actually is good to maintain a military alliance in being, and a political superstructure over Europe specifically, versus the alternatives. It actually is good to be constantly conscious of the standing risk of a civilization-destroying world war — and to orient policy and action against it.

 

Because all history is contingent, there are ample counterexamples. Perhaps Kuwait in 1991 was not the Sudetenland in 1938. Perhaps Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler. Perhaps the American-led multinational force in South Vietnam was not the Allies of 1945. Perhaps policy is led astray because officeholders cannot discern the difference between Syrian migrants of 2015 and fleeing Jews of 1937, or the difference between Serbian militias and the Wehrmacht, or the difference between a managed threat and an existential one. But the discrete exceptions do not outweigh the aggregate — and it isn’t close. The distinguishing characteristic of both the structures and the mindset of the post-Second World War order are their overwhelming success. It is 81 years since the guns went silent in May and September 1945, and we ought to be more astonished than we are at what has happened since. There have indeed been wars and atrocities, but for the most part the borders are the same; for the most part the peace is kept.

 

Our forefathers who survived the great and bloody strait of the war did not expect it. The general assumption was that the fighting would somehow resume, in a decade, perhaps, or two — repeating the passage from the First War to the Second. As the Cold War arose, the prospect of general nuclear annihilation was added to the forecast of doom. But none of it came to pass. Even when the Soviet empire collapsed and the continent of Europe convulsed under an unexpected reordering, it did not come to pass. We should not deny the working of Providence, but the consciousness of the Second World War was also at work.

 

Now those achievements are everywhere fraying, and there is war, and the rumor of war, from the European steppe to Iran to the South China Sea and beyond. Eerily echoing the 1930s, the wars slowly coalesce: North Korean infantry moves upon Ukrainian battlefields, Russia provides targeting for Iran against American bases, Yemeni fanatics launch missiles against Saudi Arabia on Iran’s behalf, China slowly encircles Taiwan with territorial grabs from its neighbors, and Ukrainian forces target Iranian vessels in the Caspian Sea. This is only the surface of events, but even the surface is amply combustible.

 

It is no accident that events become fraught precisely as the Second World War loses its purchase on popular consciousness, not least as the Second World War generation passes into history. The veterans of that war are now exceptionally elderly and few in number. Perhaps 40,000 remain in the United States, maybe 0.25 percent of all who served; and perhaps 8,000 in Britain, around 0.23 percent of all who served. The political leadership in both countries largely slipped away from the Second World War generation, and into Boomer hands, in the 1990s. A thumbnail of the misapplication of the Second World War might be found in this, as the inheritors of a system failed to grasp it as well as did its creators. The “Freedom Agenda” that confidently sought to re-create postwar Europe in the Middle East, which visibly failed in its first three years but took 20 years to unwind, is the signal caution of that failure. Most apt as a metaphor is the removal of Churchill’s bust, midway through that generational span, from the Oval Office. Those demanding that we move on from the Second World War are really demanding that we move on from this, and they are right.

 

From the war as such, though, we ourselves will never escape, because we live in its shadow and always will. Perhaps someday an intervening catastrophe will assert itself to define our times, but thanks to the actual lessons of the war it has yet to come. History’s reach is long. My grandmother, a grand lady of east Texas, is 97 and will on occasion vote Republican, which runs contrary to her political socialization generations past — an era that included the war. Yet she does it in part because her beloved grandfather voted Republican: one of only two Republicans in tiny Grand Saline, Texas, nearly a century past. He was a Republican because when he was two years old, Confederate bushwhackers murdered his father, a Unionist militiaman, in St. Clair County, Mo. To borrow from Faulkner, it is “not even past.”

 

If the echoes of the American Civil War are with us in 2026, the Second World War will be with us longer still.

 

This returns us to our current crises, which as they metastasize properly demand not yet further departures from the lessons of the war, but a rediscovery of them. It is no original observation to note that events have a pre-war quality to them, “made more sinister . . . by the lights of perverted science.” The craft and statesmanship that preserved civilization in the war are even more necessary now, from the urgency of industrial capacity, to the necessity of innovation, to the stewardship of alliances, to the discovery and communication of purpose. Our survival depends upon all of it.

 

In that light, the question is not whether the war is remembered but who owns the memory. If we choose to discard it, it does not go away, but it is ceded to the likes of Carlson and Cooper, for whom the difference between good and evil is curiously obscure, and those who would fight for the former are disarmed. The war is over — defending the world it won remains.

The DSA Envisions a ‘World Without Prisons,’ but Not One Without Camps

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

The list of things the Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish is long: federal immigration enforcement agencies and the borders they police, the Pentagon, the Senate, the Electoral College, the two-party system, and the Constitution’s separation of powers among them. But it’s the existence of America’s prisons, and the justice system that consigns convicts to incarceration, that seems to irritate the DSA’s vanguard most.

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for “prison abolition” designed to “abolish our carceral system.” The Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th district, Darializa Avila Chevalier, couldn’t agree more. “I am an abolitionist and oppose reform that entrenches the expansion of the carceral state,” she wrote. CNN described Zohran Mamdani as “evasive” when the New York City mayor was asked whether he sought the end of incarceration as we know it. “There are prisons,” he replied with remarkable obtuseness when asked if there “should be” prisons. Mamdani skeptics were probably not persuaded that he had abandoned his longtime confusion over the “purpose” of prisons.

 

Of course, defunding the police is part and parcel of this campaign. “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” the Democratic Party’s likely nominee for Wisconsin governor, Francesca Hong, once insisted. Such reforms are a sine qua non if we are to realize her “perfect world,” which “would be a world without prisons.”

 

The press rather gently describes these views as “ambitious” or even “aspirational,” but the DSA’s most notable agitators are not dealing in metaphors. It would be foolish, however, to expect DSA candidates to “explain the nuances of prison abolition in a hostile media environment,” the Maoist influencer Hasan Piker brooded. “We need far more political education, power [and] credibility before we get there.”

 

Some of the DSA’s candidates appear to struggle with the concept of criminality itself. For her part, Chevalier agonized over the impossible moral conundrum presented by murder, and whether punishing the murderer renders us complicit in some cosmic injustice. And yet, for all the DSA’s hostility toward the conventional methods for punishing criminals, most of them can still summon passion for prosecuting crime as they define it.

 

Among the far-left activist class, for example, there is all but universal agreement that the Israeli government should be in prison. Some, like Mamdani, contend that American law enforcement should facilitate their arrest in deference to the concept of “international law” — a conceptual framework that should trump the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. But the representative government freely chosen by the Israeli people isn’t the only object of DSA hatred. So, too, are the American officials who have enabled them.

 

Trump, too, is a war criminal. Trump’s impertinent tweets aren’t merely unstatesmanlike — they are “a war crime,” according to AOC. Representative Rashida Tlaib agrees. His airstrikes on Iranian entities, even those in command of U.S.-designated terrorist outfits, in nations covered by congressional authorizations for the use of force are “lawless.” Trump should probably, therefore, feel the full brunt of “international law.” But so, too, should Joe Biden. He’s another “war criminal,” in Chevalier’s estimation, as well as a “rapist.”

 

The U.S. criminal code’s circumspection often vexes the Democratic Socialists. They’d seek to expand it to include what they view as violations of the social compact.

 

Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, co-sponsored legislation that would “amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to provide for increased criminal and civil penalties for wage theft,” including imprisonment. The DSA’s advocacy, however, blurs the discrepancy between clear and intentional fraud and run-of-the-mill workplace disputes. During her bid for district attorney, socialist NYC councilwoman Tiffany Cabán advocated “wage theft” enforcement priorities that thrilled her socialist boosters. They went “beyond a narrow view of law enforcement” and would, in practice, “free the poor and jail the rich.” Lawmakers should pursue new anti-wage theft laws, the DSA’s Los Angeles chapter averred, as well as “criminal penalties against non-compliant employers.”

 

If the DSA had its way, polluters and other environmental miscreants would likewise find themselves in the dock. In New York City, DSA-endorsed figures like Kristen Gonzalez and Emily Gallagher, as well as the self-described Democratic Socialist Jessica González-Rojas, pushed prosecutors to “press criminal charges against big oil for its role in fueling hurricanes and other climate disasters.”

 

The Mamdani administration’s plan to seize properties from “negligent owners and property managers” will run into constitutional obstacles, as the Cato Institute’s Ilya Somin explained. “The mayor’s proposal doesn’t just violate the federal and state constitutions,” he wrote. “It would also make the city’s shortages worse” as owners sit on vacant properties rather than expose them to expropriation. Mamdani has a plan for that: criminal penalties.

 

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced in May that it will “pursue criminal charges and engage with lenders to force compliance or immediately begin foreclosure proceedings when landlords refuse to comply” with Mamdani’s anti-owner “Fix the City” initiative. It’s a small step toward remediating the damage done by private property ownership, which the mayor’s tenant organizer, Cea Weaver, called “a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”

 

In the future our would-be socialist overlords imagine for us, there might be no jails, but there would still be criminals. Whereas the DSA’s more whimsical figures struggle with how to deal with murderers, arsonists, and rioters, the radicals among them are not so conflicted when it comes to America’s political officials, employers, industrialists, and property owners. The unconstitutionality of their policy preferences doesn’t seem to bother them much. And why should it? That’s what the revolution is for.

What Happened to the Democratic Establishment?

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

The Michigan Senate primary is August 4. The three most recent surveys have Abdul El-Sayed up by a wide margin over Haley Stevens. Our old friend Henry Olsen crunches all the numbers and concludes El-Sayed is favored to win.

 

The Wisconsin gubernatorial primary is August 11. A new survey shows Francesca Hong remains well ahead, with 38 percent, with her closest competitor former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes at 16 percent. Remember, there is no runoff; Hong just needs the most votes on primary election night.

 

It’s not that every self-identified socialist candidate or those affiliated with the DSA won or is winning Democratic primaries this year. But many did, in ways that warrant attention. Melat Kiros beat 15-term incumbent Representative Diana DeGette in Colorado’s first district. Darializa Avila Chevalier beat incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th district. Brad Lander beat incumbent Dan Goldman in New York’s tenth district. You could throw in Graham Platner beating Governor Janet Mills in Maine.

 

I don’t often read Vox, but Astead Herndon reframed the phenomenon going on in the Democratic Party in a potentially useful way: What if what we’re witnessing within the Democrats is less the rise of the party’s left wing, and more the collapse of the party’s center or establishment?

 

Even when they aren’t facing a DSA or socialist challenger, being perceived as part of the “establishment” has suddenly become a severe liability for Democratic politicians. Michael Bennet, the three-term senator who looks exactly like the guy you would cast in a movie or TV show to play a senator from Colorado, lost his state’s gubernatorial primary to State Attorney General Phil Weiser.

 

What happened to the Democratic establishment? In theory, they’ve still got the money and the power. Incumbency is usually a huge advantage in elections, and the mainstream media usually adores candidates who are on the left — but not too far on the left.

 

I think what we’re seeing in this year’s primaries reflects a long-building crisis of confidence in the Democratic Party, where the party’s grassroots have gradually concluded that their party’s leaders don’t know what they’re doing.

 

Put yourself in the shoes of a typical loyal Democratic voter and think about what you’ve seen in the past decade or so.

 

·         Hillary Clinton and her campaign wanted to face Donald Trump in the general election, because they were convinced Trump would be the easiest to beat.

 

·         Four years later, the elderly Joe Biden won. As 2024 approached, Democrats were repeatedly assured by Biden and his team that the president was good to go for another four years — despite polling indicating that 86 percent of Americans believed Biden was too old to serve another term. Then Biden turned in his catastrophic debate performance.

 

·         Then the Democratic grassroots were assured by just about every high-level party leader that Kamala Harris was the right choice to be the party’s nominee, and that there was no need, or time, for a primary. For several months, the message from her campaign, the party’s leaders, and a largely aligned media, was that Harris was “brat” and “joy.”

 

·         When Harris selected Tim Walz, the party’s establishment almost universally hailed the choice as inspired. Then Walz proved to be a flop on the debate stage, the highest-profile moment for a vice-presidential candidate.

 

·         While some Democratic Party leaders had private doubts about Harris’s ability to beat Trump, they kept them to themselves. Some analysts confidently predicted that Harris would win. Ann Selzer, the celebrated Iowa election pollster, missed the outcome in her state by 16 points.

 

·         After the 2024 election, grassroots Democrats suddenly heard a dramatically different story, that the Harris campaign always thought they were heavy underdogs. Harris senior adviser David Plouffe said, “Even post-debate, we had ourselves down in the battleground states. . . . I think it surprised people, because there were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.” (This would later be contradicted by Harris, who claimed her campaigns’ “internal analytics” had her “ahead in all the battleground states as of the previous Friday.”)

 

·         After the election, everyone started noticing that Harris, along with the Biden campaign, had raised more than $2 billion, double what the Biden campaign had raised four years earlier, and way more than the victorious Trump campaign. So where did all the money go, and why didn’t it lead to any swing state wins? Subsequent reporting suggested the Harris campaign was wildly overpaying for basic services because of time constraints.

 

If you’re a rank-and-file Democrat, you probably feel like you’ve been jerked around for years by party leaders who keep telling you everything is going to be all right and to trust them, but who then fumble at the worst times.

 

But you know who didn’t have any significant role in any of the messes laid out above?

 

Bernie Sanders.

 

Sanders has offered a consistent message since he became a household name running against Hillary Clinton — everything in American life that you don’t like is the fault of “the millyun-aihs and the billyun-aihs and the big banks.” He furiously denounces America’s wealthy and corporations as greedy, immoral, and grotesque. He isn’t complicated, he never has his finger to the wind, and looking and sounding like Howard Beale in Network, he’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. He’s not even going to pay a lot for this muffler.

 

He’s Luigi Mangione without a firearm.

 

And the socialists and DSA candidates get to be the candidates who stand for change, compared to their intraparty rivals. To a certain degree, a party’s establishment always represents the status quo, or at most, gradual and incremental change. And lots of Americans have been dissatisfied with the direction of the country for a long, long while.

 

I also think there are two other factors driving the crisis of confidence among Democrats.

 

First, if the Democrats’ blue state model is so self-evidently superior . . . why does it take forever to get anything built in a blue state, and why are school performances so subpar? Why has California spent about $14 billion on its high-speed rail project over a decade with no track laid yet? Why does California have the highest cost of living in the country? Why is there a consistent trend of people moving from blue states to red states in recent years?

 

One of the supposed advantages of the Democratic establishment was that it was supposed to be the pragmatic, realistic wing of the party that knew how to govern and get results, not a bunch of idealistic crazy dreamers.

 

Second, it would help if the men representing “the establishment” stopped being such heinous creeps — Andrew Cuomo and Eric Swalwell, most notably, but we can throw in Tim Walz arguing that the deportation of a convicted child rapist “doesn’t make us safer” and “we can’t all be judged by our worst day.”

 

(Yes, Graham Platner evened the score somewhat.) The average Democrat believes Donald Trump is the epitome of evil and the world’s sleaziest sexual predator; it’s not surprising that there’s talk of a second wave of “Me Too” gaining momentum. Whether or not Democrats actually stand for a higher standard in consequences for sexual predation and misbehavior, Democrats very much want to believe that they stand for a higher standard in consequences for sexual predation and misbehavior.

 

Max Miller, the Ohio Republican No One Wants to Talk About

 

Speaking of heinous creeps . . . are Republicans sure they want second-term Ohio Representative Max Miller to run for another term? The allegations against him by his ex-wife make him sound like an absolute monster:

 

Representative Max Miller, a second-term Republican representing northeast Ohio whose political rise was fueled by his close relationship to President Trump, has been accused by his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, of domestic abuse against her and their 2-year-old daughter.

 

Ms. Moreno, the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno, also an Ohio Republican, has said that Mr. Miller scalded her chest and stomach by throwing hot water from a skillet at her body; held a gun to her head; pushed her against a wall and hit her head; and fractured their daughter’s collarbone and bruised her shoulder.

 

According to court documents, their daughter at one point told Ms. Moreno, “Daddy kill you.”

 

Mr. Miller has not only denied it all, he has gone on offense against Ms. Moreno, making damaging accusations of his own in a series of media interviews, court filings and countersuits that have kept the family’s personal trauma in the headlines. He has called his ex-wife mentally ill, a liar, a stalker and a dangerous individual who has made him and their daughter unsafe.

 

I notice Ohio GOP Governor Mike DeWine isn’t exactly running to the ramparts to defend Miller’s reputation:

 

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is concerned by the domestic abuse allegations against Republican Congressman Max Miller, but said it should be up to voters if he remains a U.S. representative. Now, a Democratic member of the Ohio delegation is calling for Miller’s resignation.

 

Across party lines, politicians are concerned about multiple women’s claims of domestic violence by Miller. The congressman has denied every allegation.

 

“The accusations are certainly very serious and certainly troubling,” DeWine said.

 

Ohio held its primary May 5; Miller ran unopposed. Under Ohio law, if Miller were to withdraw, the state GOP would select his replacement.

 

Rahm-Page

 

In a normal time, someone like Rahm Emanuel would get at least somewhat serious consideration for the Democratic presidential nomination. You’re not going to find many candidates with a more varied resume — representative, White House chief of staff, mayor of Chicago, U.S. ambassador to Japan. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that Emanuel is way to your left in terms of ideology. But he’s always been a hard-charging guy who recognized the importance of results. Compare his legacy as mayor of Chicago to Lori Lightfoot’s, or the results so far under Brandon Johnson.

 

But so far, Emanuel is an asterisk in national polling, and he’s going to have a steep uphill climb.

 

Emanuel’s been writing occasional columns for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page — on how the “Bernie Bros” could harm the Democrats’ chances in the midterms, on how Democrats can learn from Texas on how to adopt and promote wind and solar energy, and how the U.S. alliances with Israel and with NATO need to be retooled. (His one on parenthood is particularly good.)

 

But notice Emanuel’s choice of venue for his pre-campaign messages. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page is considered right-of-center, but it’s a particular niche of right of center: pro-business, hawkish foreign policy, serious, intellectual, usually anti-populist. This is Emanuel’s “lane” in the Democratic Party — one that is not particularly big, but which he may well have all to himself.

 

ADDENDUM: I suspect many fans of Dr. Anthony Fauci believed at the start of yesterday that Senate Republicans were on an unhinged witch hunt, and that there were perfectly reasonable explanations for everything Fauci did. And taking the Fifth was just a reasonable move to avoid any entrapment or future prosecution.

 

And then Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri asked a couple of basic questions:

 

Hawley: Let’s try something. What day of the week is it today?

 

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

 

Hawley: What color tie are you wearing?

 

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

 

Hawley: What color is the carpet in front of you?

 

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

 

Really? Fauci thinks he might incriminate himself by saying what day of the week it is, or what color his tie is, or what color the carpet is?

 

Does Fauci come across as reasonable to you in that exchange?

The Democracy They Warned Us About

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

But, if you ask me, terror is terror.