Is the American Experiment Legitimate?

By Yuval Levin

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

Is our government legitimate?

 

Although we rarely ask that question quite so bluntly, it actually lies at the bottom of many of our deepest disputes. Those disagreements that really cut to the core of our politics tend to be less about the direction of public policy in one arena or another than about who should have power in our government, by what right, in what way, through what means, and to what ends.

 

These questions were at the very heart of the American Revolution, which took itself to be responding to an abdication of governmental legitimacy. And they were then crucial to the effort to frame a legitimate constitutional system in the revolution’s wake.

 

Some of the most fundamental political debates we have today are about whether that effort succeeded. There have long been critics of the U.S. Constitution who argue that the system lacks legitimacy. Some of them now teach in America’s leading law schools and occasionally populate the upper reaches of government. But even at their most intellectually serious, such critics too rarely engage with what our Constitution is really trying to achieve when it comes to legitimacy, and why.

 

So in this 250^th year of our republic, as we reflect on our history and also look forward, it is worth asking some basic questions: What did the American founders think a legitimate form of government needed to look like? Does their test of legitimacy still make sense? And does the form of government we inherited from them pass that test?

 

***

 

We might as well start with the Declaration of Independence, which is after all what we are celebrating when we treat this year as the 250^th anniversary of the American founding.

 

The Declaration clearly addressed itself to a legitimacy crisis. And at first glance, it seems to offer a straightforward answer to the question of what form a legitimate government would need to take. Governments properly formed to secure the rights of the people, it tells us, “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Consent requires accountability, and presumably that means it requires some set of democratic (or, in the parlance of the founders, republican) institutions, and especially elective offices.

 

But the Declaration doesn’t actually make that plausible leap from the necessity of consent to the necessity of democratic forms. In fact, it declares itself to be indifferent to specific forms of government. And it does so in the same sentence in which it insists that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

 

Here is the great and famous second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, which amounts to a set of criteria for governmental legitimacy:

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

 

On its face, what we see here is a functional rather than a formal definition of political legitimacy. Human beings are all equal, and so endowed with equal rights; governments exist to secure these rights; and when our government fails to secure them, we may overturn that government and replace it with another of whatever form we judge best suited to secure them and to make us safe and happy. 

 

To us today, the notion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed suggests that governments have to be elected, or that there can’t really be a legitimate monarchy. There were certainly people in the late 18^th century who thought that too. Thomas Paine made that argument in Common Sense, for instance. But the Declaration of Independence did not. It did not suggest that there can’t be a legitimate monarchy. It did not argue that the King of England couldn’t rightfully rule in England. It didn’t even argue that he couldn’t rightfully rule in America.

 

In fact, if you follow the logic of the grievances laid out later in the Declaration, you’d have to conclude that the Americans did live under a legitimate monarchy that did secure their rights until not all that long before the Declaration was written. That government rendered itself illegitimate not because it wasn’t elected by the people but because it stopped securing their rights and started undermining and threatening those rights. Not its form but its function was the problem.

 

So at least at first glance, the Declaration seems to say that legitimacy is not a consequence of form but of function. When we find ourselves needing to arrange a government, we can do so in any form that seems likely to serve the proper function of government—that is, the protection of our rights.

 

But who is this “we”? Who makes this decision, and how? That, after all, is what the question of forms of government is really about: who makes decisions, and how. Is the Declaration of Independence really indifferent to the answers to those questions?

 

As a practical matter, and even as a logical matter, it couldn’t be indifferent to them. Those are questions that have to be answered somehow, and the answer would have to be rooted in the premises laid out in that very same second paragraph of the Declaration quoted above. That answer, moreover, would have to matter not only when we form a new government but also in its continuing work.

 

If we are all equal, and have equal rights, and government requires our consent, there can’t be an infinite number of ways to obtain that consent, or to achieve legitimacy. Abraham Lincoln, for example, thought there could really be only one. Gesturing toward that same paragraph in the Declaration, Lincoln argued that it must point to majority rule. In his First Inaugural Address, he said:

 

Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

 

If we believe the Declaration’s self-evident truths are true, and we want to avoid anarchy or despotism, then majority rule would seem to be the only possible route to legitimacy in government. And majority rule obviously has some implications for the forms that a government can take.

 

Once we see this point, the Declaration’s ambivalence about forms of government quickly comes to seem less like genuine agnosticism and more like a carefully couched case for popular sovereignty.

 

Consider again, for example, the grievances that make up most of the document. They do suggest that a king can be a legitimate sovereign but that the particular British monarch of that moment had acted in ways that nullified his legitimacy. But just what were those ways?

 

Here are the first five grievances listed in the Declaration:

 

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

 

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

 

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

 

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

 

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

 

All of these are in fact complaints about the king’s obstruction of the operation of representative legislatures, which work by some form of majority rule to make laws for the community.

 

The other two dozen or so grievances in the document can then be readily divided into two other categories: complaints about the king’s obstruction of the operation of the judiciary, and complaints about abuses of the king’s own powers as an executive. George III is accused of things like making “judges dependent on his Will alone,” corrupting the administration of justice, and intentionally failing to protect the people from external threats. 

 

So while the Declaration says it is indifferent to forms of government, its complaints about the failure of the British government to secure the rights of the people are in fact complaints about its failure to function as a government that governs through representative legislative assemblies, a responsible executive, and an independent judiciary.

 

And the core principled complaint offered up by the colonists both before and after the Declaration focused on the necessity of representation as a precondition for legitimacy—or in other words, on majority rule. “No taxation without representation” is not a line of argument that is agnostic about forms of government.

 

And yet, the Declaration’s emphasis on function over form still matters enormously. It suggests criteria of legitimacy for government that go well beyond majority rule, and in fact it points in the direction of an enormous challenge to the legitimacy of majority rule.

 

The logic of the Declaration implies that the people’s rights cannot be effectively secured in the long run without some form of majority rule. But that does not mean that any form of it will do, or that the more thoroughly democratic a regime becomes, the more protective it is of the rights of the people.

 

That, in fact, is plainly not the case, and for a simple reason. A majority is composed of a part of society, not the whole. Ideally, the majority will have the interest of the whole of society at heart. But realistically, majorities will often pursue the interests that their members share in common, and they always run the risk of doing so at the expense of the rights of minorities, or of individuals who aren’t part of the majority.

 

This tension is pretty much the oldest and most familiar problem with democracy. Majorities can tyrannize minorities. You can’t look for very long at the history of democracy—or at the history of the United States—without seeing just how horrendously oppressive majorities can sometimes be.

 

So majority rule is an essential principle of legitimacy, but it can also become a principle of despotism. There is no alternative to it if you want a legitimate government, but there are huge risks to it as the organizing principle of a legitimate government.

 

The Declaration of Independence doesn’t tell us how to form a government that accounts for this problem. But it does put forward a demanding set of criteria for whatever forms might be proposed.

 

In other words, the Declaration tells us that majority rule is an essential means of legitimacy, but that the end—the very definition of what legitimacy really is in government—is securing the rights of the people in light of the equality, and therefore the universality, of their rights. A government that doesn’t secure the rights of all is not a legitimate government, even if it is accountable to the majority. Majority rule is a starting point for deciding on forms of government, but it is not all that matters.

 

This is a very demanding test of legitimacy, and a very grave challenge to any prospective American law-giver. And it is exactly the challenge that the United States Constitution eventually rose to meet. The Declaration of Independence outlined the criteria that an American regime would need to satisfy, and the Constitution set about satisfying them.

 

***

 

But the Constitution spoke to the challenge of legitimate majority rule not only because the Declaration had laid out that challenge. It did so above all because of the circumstances of the intervening years.

 

The Constitution, like the Declaration, came together in the summer, in Philadelphia, in what we now call Independence Hall. The two documents were debated and approved in the same room, but 11 years apart. And the experience of those 11 years confirmed the difficulty of the challenge that the Declaration had sketched out.

 

They were seven years of war and four years of peace. The war was fought for self-government, and against abuses of power by a government that was not sufficiently accountable to the people it governed. The revolution came to be understood, at least by the end of the war, as what we might call a struggle for democracy. And the forms of government established in the states during and after the war tended to be radically democratic: Strong legislatures kept close to the people, in several cases through annual elections, and a kind of thoroughgoing majority rule.

 

There was general agreement in America that these republican forms were necessary, and in some respects that they were key to what the war was about. But by the end of the war, and especially in those first years of peace, it also became increasingly clear that these modes of government were not working well. They didn’t govern effectively, nor did they protect the rights of the people effectively. The populist governance of those years regularly devolved into mob rule, which led to widespread instability, governmental dysfunction, and in some cases, outright political violence.

 

Both of these worries, about the ineffectiveness and the injustice of how America was governing itself, led to the pursuit of a new Constitution. And both worries were very much on the minds of the people who drafted and negotiated that Constitution.

 

They were above all on the mind of James Madison. In Federalist 10, when Madison described what had made a new Constitution necessary, he focused on precisely the dangers of reckless majority power. He described that problem this way:

 

Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.

 

This danger of majority power is of course a particular risk for governments rooted in majority rule, and Madison took it to be the source of the deepest problems such governments had always faced throughout history. As he put it: “The instability, injustice, and confusion, introduced into the public councils have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have every where perished.”

 

And yet, Madison was absolutely committed to the principle of majority rule. And the Constitution, unlike the Declaration of Independence, did not pretend to be ambivalent about forms of government. It was, after all, itself a proposed form of government, and so couldn’t feign agnosticism. The republican principle, the principle of majority rule through representation, was the implicit and often also explicit premise of every discussion held at the Constitutional Convention, and every argument made in favor of the Constitution. The government the founders were designing was going to be a republic.

 

But it was also designed with a keen awareness that forms of government were means and not ends, and that the end to be pursued, in the Constitution just as in the Declaration, was a government geared to securing the rights of the people. How the two could be balanced—how majority rule and minority rights might be secured simultaneously—was the great question for Madison, and he took it to be the great challenge to republican government everywhere and always.

 

This is the very subject of Federalist 10, Madison’s most profound contribution to the tradition of political thought. We tend to describe that essay as being about the problem of faction. And we have a good excuse for describing it that way: That is what Madison says it is about. But if you actually read it, you find that Madison is not primarily focused on factionalism in the sense of fragmentation or the proliferation of interests and views in society. He’s focused on the risks of majority rule. Here is the paragraph that lays out the core problem Madison thinks the Constitution needed to address:

 

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.

 

This is the core challenge for Madison. The Constitution has to secure the public good and private rights—first and foremost. But at the same time it has to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government.

 

Those two goals, in that order, are how the Declaration of Independence saw things too. But while the Declaration limited itself to laying out these goals and showing that they had not been met in Britain’s treatment of America, Madison and his fellow framers of the Constitution had to actually figure out how to achieve these two frequently contradictory goals simultaneously.

 

And they did.

 

***

 

The tension between majority rule and minority rights is behind a lot of what is most peculiar and frustrating about the American Constitution. Above all, it is behind the system’s insistence on impeding narrow majorities and forcing them to grow before they can wield real power.

 

By separating the branches of government and setting them in each other’s way, by dividing Congress into two houses chosen by different electorates and formulas of representation, by empowering sovereign states and the national government simultaneously, and more generally by sustaining multiple competing centers of power, the Constitution compels narrow majorities to expand themselves and build broader coalitions before they can act. All of these mechanisms are means of requiring and facilitating negotiation. And the politics envisioned by the Constitution is from every angle a politics of negotiation.

 

The Constitution embraces the essential justice, indeed the inescapable necessity, of majority rule. But it also works to create the conditions for negotiated accommodations, so that majority rule might on the whole be protective of minorities too, and might produce stable, durable, effective government. Small, ephemeral majorities are restrained and frustrated in the service of empowering a more considered and therefore effective majority rule.

 

The aim is precisely to meet the two often conflicting goals set out in the Declaration of Independence. The great political philosopher Harry Jaffa once described the matter this way, in the Declaration’s own terms: 

 

Because men are by nature equal; because, that is, no man is by nature the ruler of another, government derives its just powers from consent—that is, from the opinion of the governed. But government based upon the consent of all must operate upon the only practicable approach to unanimity, namely, the rule of the majority however defined; and majorities can take shape or form only in and through the process of discussion. It is for this reason that discussion is indispensable to the democratic process; but the principle of discussion can never be separated from the principle of majority rule; nor can the principle of majority rule be separated from the principle of the natural equality of political rights of all men.

 

This kind of restrained majority rule means that majorities are constantly shifting and transforming themselves, making it more likely that every American will sometimes be in the majority and sometimes in the minority.

 

This was Lincoln’s view of how majority rule could be legitimate, too. In the very same paragraph of his First Inaugural cited above, where he insisted there could be no alternative to majority rule, Lincoln also noted that such rule cannot be pure if it is to be legitimate, arguing that “a majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”

 

This impurity of our system’s majoritarianism is now often held up by critics as proof of its illegitimacy. That the Constitution doesn’t simply empower one majority to govern unimpeded, however narrow or ephemeral it might be, and that it instead forms governing majorities in different institutions by different modes of representation and sets them against each other, is said to be evidence of its undemocratic character. But this critique mistakes means for ends, and so would purify democracy at the expense of legitimacy and not in its service. What it treats as the problem is actually the solution. In effect, the imperative for “discussion,” in Jaffa’s terms, operates as a constitutional restraint that better enables majority rule to coexist with minority rights.

 

Such discussion, and the negotiated politics it makes possible, must happen in Congress above all. And the Constitution clearly envisions the Congress—its first and foremost branch of government—as an arena for bargaining and accommodation. The institution is built to be representative of key constituencies in American society but also to refine and elevate the wishes of those constituencies through negotiations among representatives. A functional Congress is essential to a functioning American constitutionalism, and congressional dysfunction is at the heart of our system’s broader problems now.

 

But the other branches play key parts in balancing the competing goods of majority rule and the securing of everyone’s rights. The president has some independence from Congress but ultimately has to act within the legal frameworks negotiated by and with Congress, and so can exercise some judgment that stands apart from the will of momentary majorities but is nonetheless subject and accountable to voters. And the courts are granted extraordinary independence from both the public and the other branches—judges serve for life, their pay can’t be cut, and they never have to face voters—so that they can protect the rights of all even as they secure the application of the laws enacted by majorities.

 

All of this makes for a system that plainly prioritizes legitimacy, even above efficiency. This is a common frustration with the American system of government, especially in comparison with some other forms of democracy. Our system is slow and cumbersome. It’s hard to make policy, and the process required to do so often deforms clean and technically appealing schemes into messy, clumsy muddles. And all of this happens through adversarial bargaining. It always feels like conflict, and pretty much no one ever gets quite what they want.

 

All of those critiques are true. But they describe a price we pay for a system of government that has managed for nearly two and a half centuries now to allow our society to navigate extremely treacherous waters while generally, and increasingly, meeting the very challenging criteria of legitimacy set out in the Declaration of Independence—balancing majority rule and minority rights.

 

***

 

We often take that achievement for granted. But this year, as we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the American founding, is a time to appreciate it—and to reflect on what has made it possible.

 

It was not by any means obvious that our system could last this long. On August 8, 1787, the Constitutional Convention took up the question of the formula for representation in the House of Representatives. In his notes from that day, James Madison recorded that, while he himself was making a mundane point about how one proposed approach might play out over many decades, Massachusetts delegate Nathaniel Gorham rose to object that thinking so far ahead was a waste of time.

 

“It is not to be supposed that the government will last so long as to produce this effect,” Gorham said. “Can it be supposed that this vast country, including the Western territory, will 150 years hence remain one nation?”

 

It was a reasonable question. And Madison makes no mention in his notes of offering any answer to Gorham. But the Constitution that the convention ended up producing was itself an affirmative answer. The system of government it created could last, and it has lasted, with amendments and adaptations, far longer than even a century and a half. 

 

There are people in our society who take that to be a bad thing, and consider our Constitution an embarrassingly ancient relic. But the durability of our politics is not a mark against it. Our politics is durable because it is adaptable. It is adaptable because it was built to sustain a dynamic balance. And it was built to sustain a dynamic balance because it was constructed with a keen awareness of the permanent tension between the two essential preconditions for the legitimacy of a government in a free society: majority rule and equal rights.

 

Our Constitution demonstrates how both can be secured at once. And in that respect, it is an answer to a question posed by the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago this year. A politics built to never stop asking that question is a politics that can endure, regardless of how much the world might change.

 

When we take our system of government for granted, we tend to see only what it prevents us from doing and to ignore what it enables us to do. We see the bad but not the good. And that is precisely because of how extraordinarily effective our system has been at securing the good. Its success has led us to forget why it is necessary.

 

But if our form of government is going to last another 250 years, we will have to grasp just how successful it has been and therefore also just how necessary it remains. The greatest challenge we will face is the challenge we have faced from the start: the challenge of legitimacy. The political inheritance that we are privileged to enjoy as Americans offers us the resources to meet that challenge. But we can only do that if we are prepared to understand and use them.

 

So the question we confront in this anniversary year is not whether the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are up to meeting the challenges of the next 250 years, but whether we are up to meeting those challenges—and whether we can prepare those who will follow us to meet them too.

A Moral Case for Jeff Bezos’s Wealth

By Marian L. Tupy

Saturday, June 06, 2026

 

There’s no doubt that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos earned his fortune, and it’s easy to see how the value his work has created has benefited modern society. Amazon has saved people many hours and many dollars. Basic arithmetic shows that his fortune represents only a fraction of the value created for others.

 

But that is not the only defense of his wealth. There is also a moral defense rooted in economic justice. It rests on ownership, discovery, choice, and responsibility.

 

When I recently wrote about Bezos’s value creation in the Wall Street Journal, some readers objected that Bezos did not build Amazon by himself. Amazon used the internet. The government helped create the internet. Therefore, his wealth is partly a product of government action. Therefore, the state has a moral claim on much of his fortune.

 

That is Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” argument. True, no one builds anything in isolation, and entrepreneurs use laws, courts, roads, schools, electricity, language, science, and prior inventions.

 

But the redistributionist conclusion does not follow.

 

Public inputs are not gifts from the state. They are funded by taxpayers. If government taxes citizens to build roads, courts, or networks, it cannot later treat those services as favors that create a second claim on private achievement. Citizens paid for the input. They do not owe the state their output.

 

Access is not authorship. The internet made online commerce possible. It did not make Amazon inevitable. The same public inputs were available to millions of people. Every major retailer, investor, and bookstore owner had access to the network. They did not change how we shop. Bezos did.

 

The logic applies universally. The lawyer did not invent the courts. The doctor did not invent medicine. The writer did not invent language. If public input is dispositive, then private property becomes meaningless.

 

The argument becomes circular when government monopolizes an input. The state taxes citizens to fund infrastructure, restricts or crowds out private alternatives, and then says citizens’ use of state infrastructure proves their dependence on government. That is not moral reasoning. It is a closed loop.

 

True public goods may justify taxation under clearly defined rules. They do not justify an ownership claim over every enterprise that uses them.

 

The public inputs argument takes success for granted but never explains why Bezos succeeded while most did not even try. The economist Israel Kirzner provides the answer: entrepreneurial alertness. A successful entrepreneur notices what others miss, acts before others act, and is rewarded if consumers value the result.

 

What about the efforts of Bezos’s employees? Workers are part of Amazon’s success, but their work took place inside an enterprise Bezos created. Wages compensate labor. Equity rewards ownership and risk. Those are different claims.

 

That leads to a second, deeper objection to entrepreneurial wealth from their creations. Bezos may possess unusual alertness, intelligence, drive, or temperament. But he did not earn those traits. He was born with them. Why should he own the returns from gifts he did not earn?

 

The objection confuses two questions. One is whether a person earned his original endowments. He did not. No one does. The other is whether the absence of self-creation gives someone else a better claim to those endowments. It does not.

 

“Unearned” does not mean “ownerless.” Still less does it mean “state-owned.” A person does not earn his memory, courage, intelligence, looks, or energy. Yet those traits are not public property. Think the opposite, and every wage, prize, patent, book, performance, and promotion becomes suspect.

 

Personal attributes are inseparable from the person who possesses them. To let the state claim their products because a person did not earn them is to give the state a prior claim to the person himself.

 

Who, then, has the best claim to his talents and to the fruits of their use? His parents? Parents do not own adult children. The state? The state provided general conditions funded by taxpayers, but it did not raise him, take his risks, delay his gratification, or make his decisions.

 

That leaves Bezos. He may not have earned his native abilities, but he is the person who must exercise them or waste them. Bezos put his endowments into productive action.

 

This, then, is the morally principled case for Bezos’s wealth. A person has the first claim to his mind, body, time, and choices. If he uses them peacefully, and if others deal with him voluntarily, the resulting gains are his.

 

Unequal ability does not transfer ownership of the able to politicians. To let politicians claim ownership over productive talent is a moral inversion.

 

Everyone stands on the shoulders of others. Only a few see farther and build from what they see. We should welcome unequal talent when it is used peacefully and productively. It is a force that moves civilization forward.

Fetish Object

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

The latest New York Times scoop about Graham Platner is the news equivalent of a hand grenade. It’s powerful enough to damage its target but short of the nuclear detonation many were expecting.

 

No wonder partisans from both sides hate it.

 

One can’t read the Times story without sensing that it was inspired by more damning allegations that, for whatever reason, didn’t make the final cut. Last week the Wall Street Journal revealed that Maine’s presumptive Democratic Senate nominee has (or had) a voracious appetite for “sexting” women who aren’t his wife, and that he maintains an account on Kik—a messaging app popular with teenagers—to this day. Which prompted the question: What was he doing on a platform like that?

 

Another rumor circulating was that Platner had behaved badly with some of the women he’d dated, a not-unheard-of development among boorish chuds with Nazi tattoos. Adultery is one thing, sexual assault would be quite another. Is that what the Times was about to drop?

 

On Thursday the paper showed its cards. No underaged sexting, no sexual assault. But.

 

What was in the story was bad enough. According to Lyndsey Fifield, whom Platner dated years ago, he never hit or punched her. But he “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders, sometimes hard enough to leave marks,” once pulled her out of a cab by her wrist forcefully enough to cause pain, and on another occasion “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’”

 

He’s also been lying through his teeth about not knowing the provenance of his tattoo, Fifield alleged. She claims he described it to her as “my Totenkopf” more than a decade ago, and she described it that way herself in a chat group with friends last year—before Platner said he discovered what it was. (That isn’t the only evidence that he’s lying about his ignorance.) How could she have identified it before he supposedly did? When pressed about it last night during an unpersuasive damage-control appearance on MS Now, he had no answer.

 

He denied in the same interview ever getting rough with Fifield or with any other woman, but it’s unclear why anyone should rely on the memory of a brazen liar who admits to having spent much of his adulthood in a drunken stupor.

 

The Times scoop was disappointing to right-wingers—including Fifield, a longtime conservative activist. The Daily Caller claims that the reporters on the piece had spoken to two women “who had credibly accused Platner of sexual assault,” and Fifield herself claimed in a Twitter post that she was moved to speak to the Times only because she believed her story would support those more serious allegations. When the story was published without them, she felt hung out to dry. No wonder something seemed to be missing from the piece.

 

Reaction among progressives was more interesting.

 

They, too, were disappointed by the scoop, but not because of Platner’s behavior toward Fifield. Many seemed annoyed that the Times chose to publish it at all, never mind that Maine’s Democratic primary is days away and the race is a must-win if the party wants to retake the Senate in November. The paper did the left a favor by giving primary voters further reason not to saddle themselves with an unelectable scandal machine in the general election.

 

Why are so many progressives mad about it?

 

A blue-collar ‘fetish.’

 

To believe that Fifield invented all of this to help Susan Collins beat Platner, one needs to ignore the contemporaneous evidence of his misbehavior like her 2016 diary entry (viewed by the Times) describing him as “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.”

 

But some erstwhile believe-all-women types are willing to go that extra mile. “NYT published uncorroborated accusations against [Platner] of ‘unsettling’ and ‘toxic’ behavior that came from a Heritage staffer who previously worked for a conservative org that backs Collins,” Krystal Ball complained. Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse was also unimpressed. “Seems like a lot of nothing,” he said of the story. “I mean, the only one who had anything to say that seemed ‘unsettling’ was a woman who works for right-wing political operations.”

 

This is the same Sheldon Whitehouse who wrote during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing, “Today I stand with women who are brave enough to come forward with their stories of abuse and mistreatment. They deserve to be heard and credible allegations must be investigated. We must believe survivors, not bully them.” Golly, we’re a long way from #MeToo.

 

The easy explanation for progressive denial about Platner’s flaws is that they’re simply protecting their investment. They spent a lot of political—and emotional—capital on cheering him on in Maine as a left-wing insurgent taking on the state’s aged establishmentarian governor, Janet Mills. Those costs are sunk. Now here he is, blowing up on the launch pad on the eve of the general election campaign and at risk of costing Democrats a Senate majority in a national environment in which winning Maine should be a gimme.

 

His boosters would rather save face by downplaying his liabilities than admit their own foolishness, even if that means forging on to November with a badly injured candidate.

 

Certain progressives, like their postliberal Jacobin counterparts on the right, might actually prefer to lose with a nominee who’s to their liking than win with a moderate who isn’t. As with MAGA, their first and most urgent ideological task is to gain control of their party and normalize radicalism as its default mode. If crowding out neoliberalism by elevating socialist candidates requires fumbling away a few winnable races, they’ll pay that price.

 

I think there’s more to left-wing Platnermania than face-saving, though. And I’m not alone.

 

Last week Jill Filipovic, a liberal, accused leftists of overrating Platner “because people fetishize the white working-class man no matter his actual capabilities or biography.” Josh Barro, another Democrat, used the same piquant term in comparing Platner to John Fetterman. Both men are “low-conscientiousness losers,” he argued, in that they grew up privileged and were forced to rely on their parents’ support well into middle age due to their incompetence at handling basic adult responsibilities. “Leftists have fetishized the style of the low-conscientiousness man,” he concluded.

 

Others made similar points without using the F-word. “There's a performative aspect to it I just can't shake, or put my finger on,” Matt Glassman wrote of the left’s Platner infatuation. “Like, he's not even [a] genuine populist loser. He's a D.C. insider’s vision of a loser from their high school playing the part.” Natalie Wynn put it this way: “I feel like this whole Platner situation could’ve been avoided if a bunch of upper-middle-class leftists hadn’t seen the most obvious red flags imaginable and thought, ‘that’s just what rough, salty, Ohio Waffle-House-type working-class people are like.’”

 

They’re all describing a sense, which I share, that progressive apologias for Platner have a dimension beyond policy or partisanship.

 

Any candidate beset by scandal would get an initial benefit of the doubt from members of his own tribe, but the dogged dismissiveness toward evidence of this one’s full-spectrum scumbaggery seems partly due to his persona. No one in left-wing politics (since Fetterman’s apostasy, anyway) looks the part of a relatable blue-collar joe like the white, bearded, burly Marine-turned-oysterman from Maine. Progressives are clearly grading him on a curve because of it. A steep one.

 

“Graham Platner represents a rejection of Dem HR lady politics,” leftist Matt Stoller crowed this morning. Trump fans have been rationalizing the president’s degeneracy in similar terms for 10 years. Progressive journalist Ken Klippenstein’s populist defense of Platner could be reprinted verbatim on any MAGA blog: “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high-school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”

 

“Smoothgroins,” huh? Three days after Klippenstein posted that, New York magazine quoted a Democratic strategist as wondering, “Are we going to see pictures of Graham Platner’s penis before this is all over? I think we almost certainly will.” I doubt there’s another candidate in all the land whom the left might defend for sending naked photos of himself on grounds that at least he has a d–k.

 

The nature of a fetish.

 

The vibe I get from many progressives about Platner reminds me of the vibe from right-wingers whenever a celebrity comes out as Republican. They yearn to be loved by that person’s cultural stratum so desperately that having the affection reciprocated validates them in a way that renders that person’s flaws and foibles irrelevant.

 

And by right-wing celebrities, I’m not just thinking of seedy has-beens like Kid Rock. There are worse ways to understand the cultish devotion to the president than as ecstatic gratitude at having a bona fide celebrity take up the crusade against the left.

 

Progressives have no trouble attracting celebrities to their cause. Their trouble is with the working class, an agonizing deficiency for a movement that purports to defend that class against its bourgeois exploiters. In theory, white working-class men should be lining up to support a faction that promises to redistribute wealth to them to improve their lives. In practice, the left is getting the pants beat off of it in that battle for hearts and minds by a freakishly corrupt billionaire game-show host.

 

Even in eras when they were cleaning up with those voters at the polls, many of the Democrats’ greatest political icons were conspicuously and uncomfortably not blue-collar. Franklin Roosevelt was a wealthy aristocrat; the Kennedys were mega-rich playboys; Barack Obama was a cerebral ivory-tower egghead. Even Nancy Pelosi, the party’s most effective legislator in modern times, came from a political dynasty and is a millionaire many times over.

 

The so-called party of the working class would really like to improve its credibility among that class, and not just as a matter of emotional and ideological validation. Shedding blue-collar whites, particularly men, to the GOP has created momentous electoral problems for Democrats. There is no Trump era without hardhats and lunchpail workers choosing to prioritize their cultural differences with the left over their agreements on economic matters.

 

Amid that angst appeared the figure of Graham Platner, a kind of political “celebrity” in how freakishly accurately he resembled the sort of voter whom Democrats covet. Is it really so surprising that progressives would go irrationally wild for him?

 

Platner is a bona fide blue-collar white guy—kind of, in the same way that any screw-up who was born rich and couldn’t get it together in adulthood might end up living paycheck to paycheck. He looks blue-collar. He sounds blue-collar. And he’s ostentatiously masculine for good and for ill, as yesterday’s Times story demonstrates. Lyndsey Fifield claims that Platner was known to say that if anyone broke into his apartment, he would would rape them—but not in “a sexual way, not in a gay way. He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant.”

 

He’s an almost cartoonishly stereotypical version of a white working-class guy, a culturally alien species to the modern left, and yet he loves leftism. What more validation could progressives want?

 

I suspect they also view Platner as a living, breathing advertisement to other white working-class men that wanting to be an alpha dude who rapes intruders in your home isn’t incompatible with preferring progressive policies. In a party where the most influential progressives are either young nonwhite women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or very old white men like Bernie Sanders, they think they’ve finally found a butch young bro who might plausibly seem relatable to a key demographic that’s gotten away from them.

 

His impressive polling in Maine (well, until this week) also probably convinced them of something that ideologues of every stripe long to believe: There’s nothing wrong with our policies. All we need to win is to find the right “messenger.” That’s another potent form of validation.

 

What makes the left’s attraction to Platner “fetishistic” is that the disgusting elements of his personality seem to enhance his appeal rather than detract from it.

 

His tattoo, his many years of churlish online comments, his (virtual) infidelity, and now his brutishness toward Fifield: Progressives like Stoller and Klippenstein who aren’t willing to stoop to outright denial about his vices seem to regard these things as populist proof of authenticity. This is how “real people” behave! They’re rough around the edges. Platner’s vices may be repellent, but that’s also the thing that makes them relatably politically “sexy.”

 

It’s precisely that attitude that seems to offend Glassman and Wynn. When leftist intellectuals and Democratic “insiders” treat Platner’s proclivity to behave like a chud as evidence of his blue-collar cred, they’re not paying blue-collar people a compliment. You need to hate the working class on some level, or at the very least to look down on it, to think a dissolute, underachieving, compulsive liar is a classic specimen of the form—a weird thing for alleged champions of that class to do.

 

How many working-class people do Platner apologists actually know? What leads them to believe that this shady, below-average wastrel who’s decided he wants to be a senator has an unimpeachable claim to that title?

 

Progressives like Krystal Ball who instead choose to turn a blind eye to his vices are also behaving fetishistically, although in a different way. Their denialism wouldn’t be as determined, I think, if he were a rich progressive in the Tom Steyer mold, even if he favored all of the same policies. Platner’s blue-collar credential creates a talismanic presumption of decency: Because he’s not a professional politician or tainted by the original sin of wealth, it’s harder for some leftists to believe he might be a bad guy. Particularly when he hates all the same people they do.

 

And so, for different reasons, the party is likely to end up stuck with him when Maine goes to vote next Tuesday. Yearning to be validated by the working-class cohort Graham Platner claims to represent, Democratic primary voters will decide that he can’t possibly be a degenerate and/or that he is a degenerate and that’s good. Fetishes are perverse, and political fetishes are no different.

Less ‘Keeping It Real,’ Please

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

Spoiler alert: At the end of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star.

 

He does this by following Obi-Wan Kenobi’s advice and training. He uses the Force. When he uses the targeting system of his X-wing starfighter, his proton torpedoes miss their target. The disembodied Kenobi tells him, “Use the Force, Luke,” so he puts away the targeting system, closes his eyes, and searches his feelings. That does the trick, because as Darth Vader says of Skywalker, “the Force is strong” with him. Oh, another spoiler alert: Darth Vader is Luke’s father.

 

Star Wars is widely described as science fiction, but it’s really not. As George Lucas explained many times, it’s really more of an exploration of myth, a space opera without the singing.

 

The idea that one can merely consult one’s feelings to find a deeper truth or superior skill is a mainstay of Western culture.

 

I’ll give you some examples off the top of my head:

 

Maverick in Top Gun explains, “You don’t have time to think up there. If you think, you’re dead.” In The Matrix, Neo masters his powers simply by believing. Accept that there is no spoon and you can dodge bullets. The rules are not rules. In Bull Durham, Crash Davis explains to the mule-headed Nuke, “Don’t think; it can only hurt the ball club.” In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee tells us, “Don’t think. Feel.” Tom Cruise gets basically the same advice in The Last Samurai.

 

We teach children this stuff from a very early age. It’s the soul of The Catcher in the Rye. Schools emphasize self-esteem over self-discipline. In the early 1970s, with the help of government funding, starting with Captain Kangaroo, TV stations across America ran a series dedicated to the idea that “You’re the most important person.” I must have heard this song a thousand times when I was a kid: “The most important person in the whole wide world is you—and you hardly even know you!”

 

Hollywood still teaches this stuff, even without government funding. In Frozen, Elsa realizes her powers when she decides to ignore her hangups, and “Just Let It Go.” Harry Potter doesn’t win his battles because he’s the best student or the best-trained wizard, he wins them because he cares more. In Kung Fu Panda, Po discovers that mastery of kung fu comes not from some secret ingredient or training, but from self-acceptance and belief.

 

This isn’t just the stuff of pop culture and education-major pabulum, these are the themes of Romanticism, transcendentalism, and, to some extent, Protestantism. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” he tells us that the highest duty, and the path to wisdom, can be found in the exhortation to “trust thyself.”

 

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

 

Obi-Wan couldn’t say it better.

 

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Still, I should be clear: This stuff isn’t necessarily bad. Indeed, I think some of it is inseparable from art and literature, not to mention rock ’n’ roll and jazz. It’s also as American as any idea can be, though America hardly has a monopoly on it, given that its literary high-water mark can be found in English literature. It’s a human thing. It’s also very much a Western thing, with the West’s disproportionate emphasis on the individual.

 

Indeed, there’s a reason why this stuff appeals so much to young people. When we’re young, we struggle to navigate the rules of society, and we’re full of hormones and the feelings they fuel. Our passions and egos convince us that the world outside us is populated by people who don’t really “get” us. Even hyper-rationalists can fall prey to this kind of thinking. In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s heroes are the independent creators and producers; her villains are the mass of “second-handers,” “looters,” “moochers,” and “parasites”—people who either cannot create, will not think, or seek moral and political power over those who do. No one who loves Atlas Shrugged—and there are millions who do—ever thinks they’re one of the moochers or second-handers, just as no one who falls in love with Nietzsche believes they are one of the Last Men.

 

Living downstream.

 

My late friend Andrew Breitbart popularized the phrase “politics is downstream of culture.”

 

But the idea was hardly original to him. It stretches from Plato and Aristotle to Burke, Montesquieu, and de Tocqueville. But let’s stay on Burke. “Every age has its own manners, and its politicks dependent upon them,” Burke observed in his “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.” Elsewhere, he writes:

 

Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law can touch us here and there. Now and then, we are liable, for a little excess, to a severe discussion. But manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like the air we breathe.

 

The key to understanding Burke is to understand that he considered principles very important, but he didn’t think they were everything. Every good principle, taken to an extreme, can become a bad principle. Reason is important, but it’s not everything. Monarchy is good, but an absolute monarchy that becomes tyrannical is bad. Tradition, history, and free commerce were his lodestars, but he believed you could follow any one lodestar into a dead end. Judgment, “prescription,” “prejudice” (though not in the modern sense), recognition of trade-offs—these were the guardrails of his mind.

 

Often, the people who use Breitbart’s “politics is downstream of culture” pronouncement use it shallowly. They tend to see culture purely as a political issue that divides partisans. Obviously, there are many such issues. My problem with this tendency is that it’s like standing by the stream precisely where it splits into two tributaries. It fails to appreciate that our politics are colored by our culture much further upstream.

 

For instance, we’re used to thinking that “libertarianism” is a thing that libertarians believe. Some see libertarianism as part of the right, and one branch, or really several branches, of libertarianism are. But there are countless libertarian ideas held by conservatives who don’t consider themselves libertarians. And yet, they are nonetheless passionate believers in “libertarian” ideas, from free speech to property rights to the Second Amendment to religious liberty. I think most people can see this quite easily. What many struggle with is the idea that the left has a libertarian streak, too. Many on the left are also passionate about free speech and even property rights and religious liberty—when it’s their property or their religion, at least. Defunding the police and abolishing the “carceral state” are profoundly stupid ideas, in my opinion. But they are also deeply libertarian. Drug legalization is a libertarian idea that crosses the ideological divide. The point is that what we call the “libertarian” perspective is in many respects an American perspective because Americans have an extremely individualistic, philosophically liberal culture.

 

The people who say “politics is downstream of culture” see these issues from the vantage point of where the stream divides, rather than illustrations of the much broader current. Abortion is perhaps the ur-culture war issue. But without launching a huge debate, it is a contest between two fundamentally libertarian-ish worldviews about autonomy, agency, and individual rights. Pro-lifers see the fetus as a human with the first of all individual rights—the right to life. Abortion rights supporters see a woman with sovereign rights that the fetus does not have. To be sure, the argument from both sides rests on a disagreement about certain fact claims—how to think about the unborn—but philosophically it’s a conflict between two different rights claims and how the state should intercede to protect the rights, real or alleged, of the parties involved.

 

In short, all of American politics, not just the emergent issues that get our attention, are downstream of culture. But here’s the thing: The culture is not really a stream at all. It’s an ocean. Creatures that live in the ocean don’t know they’re wet.

 

When the levees break.

 

I am perilously close to horribly mangling metaphors, so having fired my salvo, let me switch metaphors by pulling up like Luke Skywalker after successfully using the Force to destroy the Death Star. 

 

I have a Burkean outlook when it comes to our culture’s love affair with the Romantic hero. It’s great where it’s great, in art and literature and movies; it’s complicated in other realms. In business, it can be useful when we empower the entrepreneur, the inventor, even the salesman, to reject conventional wisdom to innovate and create wealth. But the employee who thinks that he has to “keep it real” and rob the company in a misplaced rage at having to submit his TPS reports is a criminal. The teacher who inspires his students to think imaginatively is great. The one who takes the “Captain, my Captain” schtick so far that his student kills himself out of despair at going to medical school might want to tone it down. The journalist who blazes a trail to make a name for herself is great. The one who plagiarizes or makes up quotes to gain fame has missed the point.

 

These are extreme examples—life is full of harder judgment calls. Finding the line is less a science than an art. It’s a bit like telling provocative jokes. When it works, we laugh. When it doesn’t, we wince. One of my problems with today’s culture is that too many people go for the wince on the false assumption that makes them braver or more “authentic.”

 

I’m more than 1,600 words in, so I need to wrap this up. But I started out wanting to talk about our culture’s obsession with authenticity. When it’s Thoreau writing about fleeing conformity to embrace authenticity, there’s much to admire or contemplate. When it’s jackasses on social media being obnoxious or cruel for the “lulz,” it’s a sign of a disordered culture.

 

We’ve horribly confused ourselves. We think authenticity is the fullest expression of individuality, and we’ve lost the ability to identify what actually constitutes authenticity. Some people are authentic fools, or bullies, or narcissists. Telling them to “search your feelings” is like telling an alcoholic to do another shot. Moreover, defying conventions for attention is not authenticity, it’s performance and play-acting, which is definitionally a form of fakery. Negative attention is not proof that you’re “keeping it real” when that negative attention takes the form of telling someone they’re being an ass. Indeed, contrarianism purely for the sake of contrarianism isn’t heroism, it’s a form of asininity.

 

I thought I was going to ground these points in the effort to market Graham Platner as “authentic,” but I don’t think I need to bother. Josh Barro does an excellent job of poking holes in all that. Platner is a kind of unreliable loser that our culture wants to celebrate as a kind of authentic rebuke of “the system.”

 

Popular culture is the lingua franca of our lives these days. I am the first to acknowledge that I enjoy speaking that language as much as anybody. But the rules of popular culture, of entertainment, aren’t the rules of real life. In American Beauty, an execrable and wildly overpraised film, the protagonist has an epiphany that the dull, bourgeois, suburban life he’s been living is inauthentic. He has to be true to himself and keep it real. “I feel like I’ve been in a coma for the past 20 years. And I’m just now waking up,” declares Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey). He commits himself to a new, authentic path of getting high, seeking sexual conquest, and sticking it to the man. “Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go f—k himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost $60,000. Pass the asparagus,” Lester tells his daughter at the dinner table.

 

Now, however interesting you might think Lester Burnham is as a character, in real life a Lester Burnham is a piece of garbage. In real life, we sacrifice the alleged ecstasy of authentic self-indulgence to be responsible spouses, parents, and citizens. In movies, anti-heroes can break the rules to fulfill their desires. But we’re supposed to expect something more, something better, from our political leaders (starting with, you know, the president).

 

When politics becomes another form of popular entertainment, the rules of entertainment become the standards for politics. The older concepts of civic virtue emphasized self-mastery, conquering your impulses to serve a higher cause. Today’s politics treats self-mastery as suspect, a form of fakery or selling out, while asinine self-exposure is proof of depth and authenticity. The older republican tradition asked whether a man could govern himself before entrusting him with power. The new authenticity politics asks whether he seems sufficiently ungoverned to be trusted. 

 

“Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law” is the line from “America the Beautiful.” That idea is a joke in American Beauty and, increasingly, in Washington.

Russia Is Losing Its War, and Congress Should Help Finish the Job

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 05, 2025

 

George Barros, one of the Institute for the Study of War’s leading analysts of Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine, believes that the long-running conflict in Europe has reached a tipping point.

 

Moscow’s advances, most of which have been limited by Ukrainian drone warfare to platoon-level incursions, have “steadily decreased since January” of this year, he said recently. “Ukraine’s lines are holding and will likely continue to hold,” Barros continued. The “fortress belt” in the Donbas continues to repel Russian forces. “Ukraine has spent the last 11 years pouring time, money, effort, and resources into reinforcing the Belt, establishing significant defensive infrastructure in and around” the cities in the free areas of Donetsk Oblast.

 

This explains why the Kremlin has leaned so hard on the Trump administration to force Kyiv to surrender that region to Moscow “without a fight.”

 

But since mid-May, Barros, his colleague Kateryna Stepanenko, and the rest of the team at ISW have seen evidence that Russia is experiencing battlefield setbacks unlike any it has endured since the earliest days of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist war. “ISW is no longer prepared to forecast whether Russia is even capable of seizing the territory at all,” Barros warned.

 

He directed his audience to a May 13 ISW analysis, which concludes that Moscow’s “exaggerated territorial ambitions and aggressive territorial demands run completely counter to battlefield reality.”

 

Ukrainian forces are “stabilizing the line” and innovating new methods of “mechanized maneuver warfare” even under the drone-glutted skies of Eastern Ukraine. “And we anticipate that Ukrainian performance will likely to continue to stabilize throughout the rest of 2026,” Barros observed.

 

If the ISW is right, the West has a limited window of opportunity available to it to attempt to persuade the Kremlin that victory in Ukraine, as Vladimir Putin defines it, is unattainable. At least 18 House Republicans have heeded the call. This week, they joined House Democrats in voting to provide Ukraine with $8 billion in loans and another $1.8 billion in military aid.

 

The legislation faces a steep climb in the Senate, though. “And even if it were to clear both chambers, it would likely be vetoed by the president,” the New York Times asserted.

 

Perhaps. But the president may be persuadable. Given the intractability of his war against Russia’s allies in the Islamic Republic and the extent to which Moscow has provided vital assistance to Iran throughout the conflict, it’s possible that Trump could be convinced that his war and Ukraine’s are extensions of the same war against the emerging anti-American axis (because it is).

 

Congress’s intervention here is timely. The president’s allies in the Senate should support the House’s initiative, whether Trump backs it or not.

The Graham Platner Candidacy Keeps Getting Worse

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

The U.S. has sent Candace Owens and Andrew Tate to Russia; as a staunch opponent of Moscow’s aggression who wants the Russian regime to suffer, I think sending the pair seems like an effective first strike.

 

We’ve known that long-forgotten has-been action movie star Steven Seagal has cheerfully embraced his role as a mascot for Vladimir Putin’s regime; what you may not have known is that there’s an excellent chance you’re now in better shape than Seagal is. Apparently, the only thing that’s under siege these days is a buffet table.

 

Also enjoying the fireworks at this week’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — and when I say “fireworks,” I mean the nearest oil terminal getting blown up by Ukrainian drones — is one U.S. government official, U.S. Commission of Fine Arts Chairman Rodney Mims Cook Jr. Apparently, Cook is Schroedinger’s delegation, both an official U.S. government representative and not an official U.S. government representative at the same time.

 

Cook, appointed to the government commission by President Donald Trump, is the first US official to attend the forum since 2017. His presence has been much touted by the Kremlin, which described him as the leader of the first official U.S. delegation at SPIEF for many years.

 

Cook told Russian state media on Wednesday he had permission from Trump and the State Department to visit Russia. However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday that he was “not aware” of an official delegation attending, despite Moscow’s suggestions otherwise.

 

The U.S. should not be sending any government official to an event hosted by a government that is committing war crimes with metronomic regularity.

 

In the war, Ukraine is slowly but discernibly improving its leverage, albeit at considerable cost and with its cities still bombarded, night after night.

 

Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, wrote Wednesday:

 

Russia’s inability to break through the stalemate in Ukraine is becoming so evident that significant voices in the Russian establishment have publicly started to call for an end to the conflict.

 

…

 

The calls don’t just come from the business elites and more liberal parts of the Russian establishment. Some of Russia’s best-known hawks have also become much more open in expressing a belief that Moscow simply doesn’t have the capacity to achieve an outright victory against Ukraine.

 

In his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said of Russia, “the invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic disaster for them. They are not going to achieve the objectives they set out on day one, for certain, and they may not even be able to militarily ever achieve the objectives they’re demanding now in negotiations.”

 

And before the House Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio said:

 

We are not impartial mediators in that war. We don’t provide weapons to Russia. We only provided weapons to Ukraine. We don’t impose sanctions on Ukraine. We only impose sanctions on Russia. So, we have clearly taken a side. We continue to sell weapons to Ukraine, by the way, through the PURL program, unimpeded by what’s happened in the Middle East or anywhere else. And look, we’d love to see that come to a negotiated settlement. As of right now, the prospects don’t look great that either side is prepared to make the concessions necessary in order to reach an agreement, but we stand ready and we’ve engaged and invested a tremendous amount of high level time on that conflict over the last year…Hopefully this year will bring better news. I don’t have any news for you on that front today, but we are ready.

 

President Trump’s favorite foreign negotiator, Steve Witkoff, and Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, have not met since March 11 in Florida — although Witkoff is reportedly going to visit Kyiv and Moscow at some point in the near future. (Witkoff has never visited Kyiv.) Witkoff and his primary partner, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, have had their hands full with negotiations with Iran in recent months.

 

Earlier this week, I met with an ambassador from a NATO member country who believes that the Trump administration has decided to more or less just not say anything about Russia and the invasion of Ukraine.

 

Saying nothing is better than berating Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and bellowing — glaringly inaccurately, both at the time and even more so in retrospect — that Ukraine doesn’t have “any cards.” Still, not saying much about the invasion of Ukraine isn’t going to make the problems associated with it go away.

 

I’d really like to tell you that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is approaching its end. At the end of May, Anne Keast-Butler, director of GCHQ, the British electronic surveillance agency, said new intelligence showed that nearly a half-million Russian soldiers had been killed in the Ukraine war. If accurate, that would be about 100,000 more killed in action than the U.S. suffered in the entirety of World War II. In fact, that figure would be about 38 percent of all U.S. killed in action in all wars . . . ever, going back to the state of the Revolutionary War.

 

Unfortunately, as discussed in previous editions of this newsletter, over the past four years (more, really) Russia has reorganized its economy to be a war economy. Half of all government spending is on the military or internal security. Livelihoods, companies, profits, and industries now depend upon the war continuing. Plus, there’s the sunk costs; if Putin were to admit he’s traded a half million lives for 44,600 square miles of Ukrainian territory — a bit more than 11 soldiers for each square mile — he would effectively concede that he killed off a chunk of Russia’s next generation for some thoroughly destroyed no-man’s-land and a permanently hostile Ukrainian state next door.

 

The Worst Man to Run for Senate Ever?

 

The claim from Graham Platner on MS NOW last night was that his girlfriend from 2013 to 2015, conservative activist Lyndsey Fifield, knew that the tattoo on his chest was a Nazi SS Totenkopf, and she told her friends that he had a Nazi tattoo, but she never told him that she recognized it as a Nazi tattoo, never discussed it with him, and that she is lying when she says he referred to it as “my Totenkopf.”

 

“I feel like, you know, we’re kind of rehashing the thing we’ve been through. I’ve had that tattoo for 17 years,” Platner whined last night.

 

Well, when the tattoo on your chest is the insignia on the hats of the guards in the concentration camps of the Holocaust, people are going to have a lot of questions, and they’re going to have a very hard time believing that a “military history buff” who chatted about World War II on Reddit threads never recognized it over an 18-year period.

 

Platner also says that in those years he was “self-medicating with alcohol” but can also say with absolute certainty that Fifield’s description of physical abuse that she shared with the New York Times never happened:

 

Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he “never hit me, he never punched me.”

 

But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.

 

During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.

 

“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”

 

Mr. Platner “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations, his campaign said. The Times could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account of the altercations.

 

Those who are habitually abusing alcohol do not always have the most reliable memories of what they did and didn’t do while they were drunk, do they?

 

Remember that detail in the Wall Street Journal’s account of Platner’s meeting with Senate Democrats in Washington on Tuesday?

 

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also attended the meeting, followed up and said there is a big difference between marital issues and allegations of sexual assault, the people said. Platner agreed and denied any credible allegations of assault were forthcoming.

 

Boy, that sure makes it sound like Warren had some idea that allegations of sexual assault are lurking out there.

 

Also, here is Platner’s vague answer on when he stopped sexting with other women behind his wife’s back.

 

MSNOW’s Chris Hayes: If there was stuff that you’re not proud of, that you worked out with your wife, and you don’t want to talk about the details, when did it stop?

 

Platner: Well, it stopped when it was happening. I mean, like, it was — Amy and I, Amy and I…  it happened soon after we got married. And we dealt with it very, it was very, very early in our relationship and so that’s, that’s when it stopped.

 

Once again, Platner gets asked whether there are other problems in his life that he’d like to be forthcoming about with the voters.

 

Hayes: Maybe you’ll be the nominee, probably be the nominee for the Maine Senate on Tuesday. And then it’s October 10th. And here’s a text or picture of Graham Platner that is not the kind of thing that you want to see. Like, are you worried about that? Are there texts like that?

 

Platner: I’m not worried about it. I mean, one, I went, as I’ve talked to him, I went through my life through a number of years struggling and not exactly acting under — with the best behavior. I’ve been very, very open about that.

 

Except, he hasn’t been “very, very open about that.” As mentioned yesterday, Platner has been asked directly — several times — whether he had any other issues, scandals, or concerns the voters deserved to know about, and each time he’s said “no.” And then we keep learning about new ones.

 

Platner insisted, “These are things that happened before I became a public figure, before I got into politics.” I mean, he announced his Senate campaign August 19, 2025. We’re talking about less than a year ago. Since then, he’s been running on a campaign claiming that his GOP rival, Susan Collins, is “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly.”

 

You see, he can’t be a secret Nazi, because he’s arguing that the Jews control American society openly.

 

Early this morning on X, Fifield laid out how the New York Times article did not include other supporting evidence of her account that she provided the reporters.