In Search of Liberalism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

I spent part of the week at Liberalism for the 21^st Century—LibCon 2026—an annual conference put on by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, a relatively new organization headed by my friend Shika Dalmia, long associated with Reason magazine and now publisher of the UnPopulist. I am interested in opportunities for right-left collaboration on issues such as the rule of law, free speech, free trade, and similar things that traditionally fall under the heading “liberalism,” and so I try to go to things like this when I can. They are, as we say around here, worth our time.

 

The lineup presented some opportunities for political intermixing: There were familiar libertarian types such as Dalmia and Walter Olson of the Cato Institute, left-liberal types such as Ezra Klein and Danielle Allen, idiosyncratic liberals such as Francis Fukuyama and Yascha Mounk, and a fair number of regular ol’ conservatives, including me, David French, and Bill Kristol. I can hear the keys clicking as emails are written denouncing the last of these, or, at the very least, tartly informing me that he is no longer a conservative; about that I will write only that while he and I may have some wide and deep disagreements about the best way to approach the current political moment in these United States, in conversation Bill Kristol strikes me as being, if anything, more conservative in the genuine sense of that word than he was 20 years ago—more skeptical, less ideological, free from party feeling, more interested in preservation and continuity, etc.

 

It is a good mix, but an uneasy one.

 

***

 

I try to put on a friendly face when I encounter some of the lefty types here, many of whom I have exchanged some pretty harsh words with in the past. There is nothing in particular that I wish to retract, but this is a conciliatory occasion. My efforts meet with decidedly mixed results. I do not blame my interlocutors for this: My attempts to be friendly must seem as disturbing and unnatural to them as it does to me.

 

***

 

I have been going to political conferences like this for a long time—more than 30 years now—and have been to conservative conferences, libertarian conferences, progressive conferences, Texas separatist conferences, flat-earther conferences, etc. Sometimes one hears some interesting things, has a useful conversation, meets a new interesting person, and that, of course, is really what these things are for: The panels and the formal program serve a convening function, but most of the real value is created on the sidelines, over by the coffee urns.

 

The programming varies, but there are two things you can always count on hearing: 1) a lament about the movement’s frustrating inability to get young people involved in whatever it is the conference is about; 2) several instances of people insisting that the challenge is finding new and better ways to talk about the agenda, whatever it is, the need to tell emotionally compelling stories about the program under discussion. Conservatives, in particular, have a thing about the need to recruit more young people—if you ever want to see Jonah Goldberg try not to wince, just watch him at one of these conferences when the youth-outreach stuff comes up. One of the things that conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, etc., never seem to quite understand is that whipping crowds of young people into a state of emotional excitement not only is unnecessary to their program but is, in fact, antithetical to it. No good comes of it.

 

There’s an old joke that libertarianism is “a shadowy conspiracy to leave you alone,” and while conservatism and liberalism (I mean what we call “classical liberalism,” though I do not much care for that phrasing and do not want to repeat it every time) are distinct from libertarianism, they have a certain libertarian character and share a certain libertarian disability: The practical pursuit of political power is always in tension with philosophies based on restraining political power. Populism is exciting and enjoys a certain built-in political advantage because it is based on an underlying premise of action rather than on an underlying premise of restraint: A populist demagogue, of the right or of the left, can promise a crowd just about anything—there is no limiting principle. Ezra Klein, speaking at the conference, praises the “unbounded” vision of New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Liberalism is not an unbounded vision of the scope of state action.

 

The hard part of selling liberalism or American conservatism (which seeks to conserve the liberal principles of the American founding) is not how we talk about the philosophy—the trouble is with the philosophy itself. Restraint is (barring some kink) unsexy. There is nothing thrilling about acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs, the role of prudence applied ad hoc to individual cases, or that the best-case scenario we are offering is a series of good-enough second-best settlements and accommodations.

 

I recently reviewed Luigi: The Musical, which closes with the titular antihero (Luigi Mangione is being tried for the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson) singing a song in which he proposes to keep murdering people until there is peace and justice upon the land while the chorus behind him sings about policy trade-offs, the complexity of health care as a social issue, and the necessities of compromise and negotiation. Of course, Luigi drowns out the chorus. That is how it goes.

 

***

 

Liberalism, like conservatism, is less of a policy agenda or a coherent political movement than it is a sensibility and a set of attitudes. It is not a platform or a party. The foundation liberalism provides is by no means prior to politics, but it is, in a sense, prior to the familiar divides and controversies in American politics in the current era. I disagree with your typical left-leaning New York Times columnist (Jamelle Bouie is in attendance) on a great many things, but, if we agree on some fundamental things—the rule of law, freedom of speech, due process, the dangers of official corruption, etc.—then there is room to cooperate, and a need to cooperate, on those things when our shared bedrock values are threatened, as they are now.

 

I have in the past joked that you will know conservatives have won the day when I decide that the fact that Ramesh Ponnuru is wrong about child tax credits is now at the top of my list of things to care about and the time has come for us to get down to having a real fight about it. I would rather be in a position in which my top political priority is fighting with my progressive friends about their various batty and impractical ideas rather than looking for ways to work with them to preserve the fundamental things that create the conditions under which such a fight can be had at all. But that is not where we are.

 

We are not preparing ourselves for some hypothetical future crisis: The crisis is upon us, though there are different views about how best to approach that—differences in views about that (and judgments about what practical responses are necessary) are really the basis of the differences in sensibilities between organizations such as The Bulwark and National Review and our style here at The Dispatch, though none of these is homogeneous. I do not take precisely a Bulwark view of the current crisis, but the argument that the most meaningful practical thing we can do at the moment is to reduce the political power of Donald Trump and the Republican Party by electing Democrats, including loopy socialists, is not obviously bananas. I think it probably is wrong, in the way simplifications always are wrong, but I don’t think it is insane.

 

There are many people at this conference who believe that the project of liberalism in our time is electing Democrats. The people who believe this do not want to hear about the illiberalism of the Democratic Party or the illiberalism of the left. There are many self-described liberals in attendance, including Danielle Allen, a Harvard political scientist whose top priorities include overriding the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and thereby empowering the government to engage in political censorship under the guise of regulating campaign finance, a body of regulation that is mainly about preventing bribery in one form or another. I do not think that is a liberal position, though she no doubt makes a good case that it must be.

 

Allen and Ezra Klein, in their discussion, agree that it is necessary to do such things to counteract “concentrations of capital and power,” as Klein puts it. Klein is associated with the New York Times Company, arguably the most influential corporation of its kind in the world, one with a revenue stream measured in billions of dollars and that is, and has been over the years, controlled by people who might be described in the pages of the New York Times as oligarchs if they had different kinds of last names or different political associations. Allen is associated with Harvard, arguably the most powerful institution of its kind on Earth, one backed by a $57 billion endowment among its other considerable financial resources. Concentrations of capital and power, to be sure. I am reminded of a South by Southwest conference I once attended, where I heard very comfortable people, some of them rich and famous, lamenting their situation as members of “marginalized” groups at a forum sponsored by Google, PepsiCo, AT&T, NBCUniversal, Facebook, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, and Deloitte. “We should all be so marginalized,” I wrote at the time.

 

But fish don’t know they’re wet.

 

***

 

Are simplifications always wrong? If I have a single political idea that is always at the back of my mind, it is Paul Valéry’s maxim: “Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.”

 

***

 

The conference is at the Watergate Hotel, which leans into its association with the scandal that ruined Richard Nixon’s presidency. (The scandal by means of which Richard Nixon ruined his own presidency, I mean, J.D. Vance’s recent judgment notwithstanding.) A sign offers office space at the “infamous address,” and there is a hospitality room called the Vault, which one approaches through a hallway bedecked with scandal memorabilia and images of Nixon. For a slightly disreputable right-winger with a shaved head and a considerable firearms collection, skulking around the Watergate is a bittersweet thing. I am no G. Gordon Liddy, but I feel like I should be wearing a trenchcoat.

 

What I am wearing when I enter the hotel is a very good suit. It is a cotton suit, not a silk suit—it is very, very hot in Washington this week—but I have silk suits on my mind. More precisely, what I have going through my head is a bit of dialogue spoken by John Goodman in the film Born Yesterday, in which he plays a wealthy businessman, a rich but vulgar self-made kingpin who feels condescended to by a slick journalist who is profiling him, a role played by Don Johnson. The journalist, indicating the magnificent hotel suite in which his subject is being pampered by a barber and manicurist, asks, “Are you afraid of losing all this?” The businessman says he does not worry about that, because he believes in himself.

 

I started with a wagon, selling somebody’s junk. And I got here, in a silk suit, talking to a college know-it-all like you. If I lose it, I’ll meet you right back here in this room, in a new silk suit.

 

The first time I heard that line, I heard only the well-earned confidence of the self-made man. Now, I hear both that confidence and the resentment behind it, the chip on the shoulder. I have my own little history with the Watergate, where the Atlantic had its offices during my infamously brief period of employment there. I meet the Dispatch’s production guru, Victoria Holmes, for lunch at the lobby restaurant and pick up another Dispatch-associated guest, David French, along the way, running into him in the lobby. The last time I was in that restaurant was when I learned, over breakfast, that I was going to be fired. I got fired over breakfast from another job a long time ago, too—the most important meal of the day, to be sure, but, for me, a fraught one! I like to think that I do not have a very large chip on my shoulder, but I do hear that bit of dialogue from Born Yesterday in the back of my head. And I do make a point of putting on a very good suit.

 

***

 

One of the conference speakers is Bob Rae, who served as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations. As he tells it, the wake-up call that something had really changed in the United States beyond Donald Trump’s idiotic talk about making Canada a state was something he experienced at the United Nations. Canada and its European allies, among many other nations, were putting forward a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the United States, at the last minute, introduced a much softer resolution, one calling for an end to the war but omitting any reference to the cause of the war—Russian aggression. That measure carried the day, with the United States voting in a bloc with the world’s autocracies over the objections of the world’s despairing liberal democracies. When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney talks about “the rupture,” Rae said, that is what he is talking about. Under the Trump administration, the United States has become less like Canada or the United Kingdom and more like Russia or China, and the consequences are profound for the American people and for the world.

 

Rae’s remarks raise a question about how enduring we should expect the stamp of Trump and Trumpism on American politics to be. The optimists believe that we will look back on this period, after a few years, as a mere aberration; the pessimists believe that we will look at it as the beginning of something, a new ugly era of caudillo-ism and corruption. At the conference, I heard good arguments for both sides, and I still am not entirely sure what to think.

 

***

 

Reporting from some of the first Tea Party rallies lo these many years ago, I wrote:

 

There was an interesting coalition assembled for the Tea Party, and my unscientific sampling suggests it was about two-thirds regular Joes and about one-third people who are involved, in some way, with heterogeneous political enterprises, whether Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, Libertarian- or Republican-party factions, anti-tax and anti-Fed groups, and the like. The regular Joes with whom I spoke were almost to a man talk-radio listeners, and their cheery ferocity makes me suspect that even conservatives have failed to truly appreciate the reach and power of that medium. There were some single-issue fanatics, inevitably, including one colorful clown who kept shouting “Abolish the Fed!” with the occasional improvised expletive. Another fellow was explaining, with great animation, that Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada was a converted Jew (this would have come as a surprise to his uncle, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada) and that various Jewish and Islamic tendencies, including the concept of machismo, had been imported into the New World by the conquistadors, most of whom were conversos as well, and that this apparently has something or other to do with something or other. One meets these sorts of characters in political crowds, and one learns to dread obsessions with matters Semitic, or mentions of the Knights Templar.

 

There is an inverse relationship between the specificity of political ideas and the sanity of political ideas. There are sensible people who are generally liberal and sensible people who are generally conservative, and then there are passionately deontological libertarians slugging it out with angrily consequentialist libertarians, or Objectivists affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute vs. Objectivists loyal to the Atlas Society, because A is A, damn all heretics. I met a fellow at the Tea Party who described himself as an anarchist, and it seemed natural to us both that I asked him: “More of a Rothbard guy, or more of a Proudhon guy?” One wouldn’t want to associate with the wrong sort! The scattered nuts in the tea-party mix showed great specificity: abolish the Fed, or adopt a new tax code, or abolish the Fed, or legalize homosexual marriage, or abolish the Fed, or whatever.

 

...

 

I wonder if the people at the Tea Party want the same things, or want enough of the same things to cohere, and to cohere in a movement that is recognizably conservative. And if they do want enough of the same things, I wonder what those things are — because I was there, and I am not sure.

 

Looking backward, one can see a line, not quite straight and not quite unbroken, from those rallies to the present moment—a political current, right-wing but revolutionary rather than conservative, getting near to bursting its banks. And now the flood is upon us. It seems almost inevitable that Tea Party figures such as Sen. Ted Cruz were so easily swept away by the sewage flood of Trumpism. But if you were to ask me today whether the Republican Party still had a core around which it might once again be able “to cohere in a movement that is recognizably conservative,” I have a more definite answer, and it is “no.”

 

And so here I am—and here we are—looking for alternatives and allies. And this, I am more confident, is the beginning of something rather than the end of something.

‘Excesses’

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

Hasan Piker, the leftist influencer, has millions of followers across Twitch, YouTube, and other platforms. And so it is not without interest that he has described Mao as “one of the great leaders of this world” and that, when challenged about this, he conceded that “there was a lot of f***ing excesses, let’s be real, but. . . .”

 

Ah yes, there is always a “but.”

 

The “but” in this case was that “the People’s Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong.”

 

True enough. Then again there were tens of millions of Chinese who would have existed for quite a bit longer were it not for Mao or his republic. And many of those did not meet their deaths because of yet another catastrophic communist “reform,” but because they were, in one way or another, murdered.

 

The easy response to Piker’s comments is to write him off as a provocateur or a nut. But the wiser course is to take him seriously, to believe that he either believes what he says or, at least, that he wants his followers to believe what he says. If that’s so, he will want them to agree with his comment about the greatness of Mao, and to join with him in dismissing those millions of dead as “excesses,” a blot on a glorious record. It’s an old argument. To borrow from a notorious phrase, those millions were the eggs broken to make an omelet.

 

And once people come to accept that way of thinking, there will, sooner or later, be other omelets — and other eggs.

In Trump’s Campaign Against ‘Third Worldism,’ Cuba Is at the Center

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

In its 100-page report on the threat Havana represents to U.S. interests and the safety of its people, the State Department deemed Cuba the “capital of 21st-century communism.” The agency might as well have labeled communist Cuba the epicenter of “third worldism.” That is, after all, what the report alleges. And the modern manifestations of that ideology are as menacing for the United States as Marxism-Leninism ever was.

 

Cuban communism, the report contends with all requisite evidence, long ago departed from the Soviet model. The “revolutionary leftism” Havana promotes is less focused on fomenting “economic class conflict” and more committed to exacerbating “racial, social, and even civilizational grievances.” It seeks to mobilize not the disaffected international proletariat but “the colonized nations and peoples of the Global South.” The report quotes the far-left magazine Jacobin’s approving summary of communist Cuba’s mission statement: Havana presents itself to the “Third World as the ideal site for radically rethinking anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and decolonization.”

 

The document takes readers on a jaunty excursion through the history of the late 20th century and Cuba’s many contributions to revolutionary violence that typified it. Cuban guerrillas terrorized Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, exported insurrectionary tactics and the tools of revolutionary violence to every corner of the world, and provided material as well as spiritual support for a variety of militant outfits — even inside the United States. All the while, Havana articulated a dogma of “third worldism” that “would go on to instantiate itself as the dominant genre of left-wing radicalism around the globe.”

 

One 1966 conference outlined the otherwise disparate and incompatible elements that Cuba cobbled together into an anti-Western alliance. Attendees included the “Palestine Liberation Organization, the Viet Cong, Puerto Rico’s leftist Pro-Independence Movement, South Africa’s African National Congress, and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union.”

 

Another conference the following year, “Black Power and the Third World,” sought to operationalize this anti-Western doctrine and use it to exacerbate “the racial problem in the United States,” as one CIA operative testified. The report describes how Cuba undermined the civil rights movement’s commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience in favor of “armed self-defense and revolutionary confrontation.” In addition, it outlined the methods Cuba used to establish contacts between America’s would-be militants and their comrades in places like Angola, Mozambique, and, in particular, Algeria, from which many of the Black Liberation Army’s militancy was directed.

 

Indeed, so many violent movements that upended the late 20th century — from the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to the Palestine Liberation Organization — were tethered together by Cuban initiatives. So, too, were terrorist organizations like the Puerto Rican independence gang FALN, which was one of the deadliest Marxist guerrilla groups of the 1970s and, according to one FBI account, was “supported and directed by the Cubans ‘at a firsthand level.’”

 

The FALN was just one Cuban-aligned terror group that tormented Americans in the 1970s. The Weather Underground was another. “Weathermen communicated through operatives working out of Cuban embassies in the United States and Canada in an effort ‘to blunt official surveillance,’” the report states, “utilizing the ‘Cuban diplomatic channels as a private communications network’ to stay in touch with other cells.”

 

It would be a mistake to conclude that Cuba’s crippling poverty has rendered it benign, the State Department document warns. Cuba’s assets and its agents of influence are “true believers,” it continued. They constitute a spy network that punches above Cuba’s financial weight, and elements within it are “likely directly responsible for the deaths of several American soldiers, agents, and citizens.”

 

The document is not a nostalgic romp through the Cold War–era archives. It is a warning about the threat that Cuba poses today as both a conduit for “adversarial states such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea” and a font from which chaos agents, spies, and militant insurgents alike spring.

 

The tools that Cuba uses to undermine American security from within vary, according to the report. There’s the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), an instrument of Cuban intelligence that oversees the influence campaigns conducted by the people-to-people outfit Venceremos Brigade.

 

The National Network on Cuba (NNOC) is another. Earlier this year, NNOC disturbed a “national rapid response plan” that the State Department alleges sought to “coordinate nationwide actions” against federal law enforcement in the event of hostilities between Cuba and the U.S. The plan was both a targeting document and a work of propaganda — “a practical application of the Third Worldist doctrine that U.S. government repression of ‘black and brown communities’ in the United States is part of the same phenomenon as U.S. imperialist oppression abroad,” the report reads.

 

The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) embodies the third-worldist philosophy in practice. In one illustrative anecdote, the report tracks the finances provided by Cuba to Hamas via the notorious pro-Iranian British  political figure George Galloway — a gift that the late Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh warmly received.

 

The National Lawyers Guild — a onetime Soviet cutout that has frustrated U.S. efforts to counter communist influence for nearly a century — is cited as an organization that financed the activities of the Marxist guerrillas of the 1970s with Cuba’s backing. “Today’s NLG is also notorious for working in coordination with Antifa networks,” the report adds. “Guild members have openly admitted to directly coordinating with self-described Antifa groups, meeting before street confrontations to preemptively ‘discuss tactics.’”

 

The People’s Forum, a group led by Neville Roy Singham, the Shanghai-based “former Marxist militant organizer with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers,” was singled out for his work on behalf of communist Cuba’s efforts to cultivate new agents of influence. And, of course, the Democratic Socialists of America are singled out for special condemnation in the report, but not because that organization or its members are on Cuba’s payroll. Rather, the DSA is “the ideological inheritor of the Cuban-influenced radicalism of the post-1960s left,” the State Department contends, and “it freely embraced the policy agenda and worldview of its own accord.” Nevertheless, DSA members have had extensive contact with Cuban intelligence assets.

 

There is a geostrategic dimension to Cuba’s third worldism, too. Cuba provides America’s enemies with a vector to infiltrate and influence the United States. It is a listening post for China, a proving ground for Russian technology and an outpost for its military assets, and a foothold in the West for the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the decades in which Cuba ran Venezuela as a colonial outpost, “analysts estimated that thousands of suspected Hezbollah, Hamas and other Iranian-backed militants had traveled to Venezuela and to other parts of Latin America, including Bolivia and Nicaragua.”

 

The relationship between Cuban communists and Islamists isn’t so new, as the report contends. Cuba elevated Palestinian militants as proximate expressions of their own “antiimperialist and anti-Western creed” — sending soldiers and intelligence assets to remote Middle Eastern training camps and propping up “Marxist-Leninist groups” like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

 

“Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history — from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses — can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” the report concludes. The practical utility of this report amid the Trump administration’s emerging conflict with the tenets of third worldism should not be understated.

 

With the report’s release, Undersecretary of State for Public Policy Sarah Rogers read the subtext aloud: “There’s been a lot of talk lately about a vicious, lowest-common-denominator leftism that imports anticolonial resentments to the metropole,” she wrote. Cuba, she contended, is “a culpable node” for the promotion of this emergent anti-Western intellectual fad. “Most people fail to appreciate the extent to which this ideology was — and still is — incubated and institutionalized right here in our hemisphere,” Rogers concluded.

 

Indeed, the Cuban threat is not a quaint artifact of a bygone era. It is a real and present danger. No one who reads the State Department’s dispatch could conclude anything less.

The Futile Fight for Commonsense Liberalism

By Lauren Veldhuizen

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

The Democratic Party has long thrown common sense out the window to appease progressive ideology. In the process, the party poisoned the morale of much of its voter base, leaving them isolated, disillusioned, and ripe for Republican capture.

 

To fix this, traditional Democrats are suggesting that the party go back to common sense with suggestions that sound almost — dare I say — conservative. Such an antidote is doomed to fail.

 

An essay titled “If the Democrats Actually Want to Win, This is What They Have to Do” was published in the New York Times last week by longtime liberal journalist Thomas Edsall. He is what you might call an “establishment Democrat.” He champions issues of a more traditional Democratic nature, such as economic and racial inequality, and identifies less with the progressive identity politics that much of the left now espouses.

 

In the essay, Edsall diagnoses the ills of the Democratic Party using what I call “commonsense liberalism,” citing immigration, urban disorder, and transgenderism as the three main issues that “serve to reinforce the perception that Democrats are willing to sacrifice the interests of the working and middle classes in favor of special interest constituencies.” He refers to these ills as the party’s “liabilities.” Edsall argues that these liabilities are the reason that once reliably Democrat working-class votes are now swing votes.

 

To cure these ills, Edsall offers commonsense concessions such as Democrats actually enforcing immigration law, aggressively prosecuting violent crime, and recognizing that there are, in fact, two biological sexes: men and women. Other “planks” of the new-and-improved platform include a commitment to free speech and a free market and a rejection of cancel culture and socialism.

 

As much sense as these concessions make, they are futile because the identity of the party has become synonymous with progressive politics. For this new platform to gain any traction, the ideological entrenchment of the progressive left would need to be entirely divorced from the traditional Democratic Party; Edsall refers to this as a necessary “ideological exorcism.” While such an exorcism might rid the party of its radical leanings, it would also leave it limp and lifeless without a united voting base.

 

Even if some Democrats wanted to pivot toward the center, the party’s internal makeup, mechanisms, and incentives make detaching liberalism from progressivism extremely difficult, if not impossible. A recent poll on  political typology conducted by Pew Research Center found that “Leftward Progressives,” a group within the Democratic Party that holds the most progressive views across most issue areas, are deeply dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, highly politically engaged, and much farther left than other Democratic factions on issues such as transgenderism and democratic socialism. Progressive Democrats are also highly organized, well-funded, and have dominated in recent primaries and local party politics, giving them a large amount of influence despite making up such a small percentage of the Democratic Party,

 

Thus, the progressive ideological capture of the Democratic Party overrides any reasonable appeals from within the party to limit such extremism. The progressive party members who determine nominations, organize volunteers, provide endorsements, create grassroots campaigns, and perform well in Democratic primaries are not necessarily representative of the party’s broader and more moderate electorate, leaving the party open to political extremism.

 

Because of this, seemingly “moderate” Democrats who come to power often end up being progressive in policy. History has shown that moderate positions, while they poll better nationally, are politically risky inside of a Democratic primary. This means that extreme, progressive candidates are often elected into positions of power during primaries. However, to win against Republicans and gain swing votes in general elections, those extreme positions must be masked as “moderate.” Take Texas state representative and Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, for example. In theory, he presents himself as a moderate to appeal to more center-left and moderate voters in a traditionally red state. But in practice, Talarico is anything but.

 

Ultimately, it is a lose-lose situation for Democrats: Either run on a platform of commonsense liberalism and win back swing and “left-out” Democratic votes while isolating more extreme progressives, or appease the ideologues at the risk of moderate Democrat swing votes going in favor of Republicans. Traditional Democrats made their bed with progressive bedfellows; now they must lie in it.

 

This might, however, present an opportunity for conservatives to reposition themselves in the public mind and gain center-left voters who are simply seeking a logical approach to politics. A post-MAGA Republican Party could make major inroads with some swing voters once divorced from Trump’s divisive personality and married to practical policies. As the Trump administration enters its final two years, Republicans should consider if and how they are going to sell their platforms to disillusioned liberals; it seems like a bit of common sense is all it would take.

The Qatar Force One Fiasco

National Review Online

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

Not many Americans thought it was a good idea for President Trump to accept a Boeing 747 from the Qatari royal family to become a short-lived Air Force One. When Yahoo  News/YouGov surveyed U.S. adults in late May, only 32 percent approved of the decision to accept and use the jet, and 51 percent disapproved; just 25 percent said they did not think the jet was a bribe, while 54 percent said they thought the government of Qatar was trying to bribe the president.

 

Trump’s first-term vice president, Mike Pence, called it a “bad idea.” Not even Laura Loomer, about as loyal a Trump supporter as you can find, thought it was a good idea; she called the decision to accept it a “stain” on the administration. Senate Republicans expressed misgivings, but hung together to block an effort by Senate Democrats to prevent funding for converting the jet to Air Force One specifications.

 

But President Trump wanted it and charged ahead, despite the terrible optics and real concerns about whether a donated jet — from a less than savory regime, no less — could be quickly and safely upgraded to the considerable security needs of a traveling American president.

 

The president and U.S. Air Force assured the public, emphatically, that the Qatari plane would be completely safe.

 

“The safety and security of the commander in chief is our highest priority,” Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said in a statement June 19. “From the beginning, we meticulously evaluated every requirement to accelerate delivery while maintaining the high standards expected of the presidential mission. This effort proves that the U.S. Air Force can move fast without sacrificing quality, security, or reliability.”

 

But a little further down in that statement, the Air Force added, “No risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications, but the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver to support the next 40 years.”

 

Now we have some sense of those “trades.” Earlier this month, Trump traveled to Ankara, Turkey, for the NATO summit on the new Air Force One but switched back to one of the two old planes for the return trip. The move was a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran. The New York Times reported that the new plane “lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities, according to multiple officials who have been briefed on how the jet was retrofitted.” The administration then proceeded to subpoena the reporters on that story. A Justice Department spokeswoman said that “reporters are not the targets, those leaking classified information are.”

 

On Sunday, Trump was asked why he was flying in the Qatari jet again. He responded, “It has a lot of capability, but as I understand it, in about a month or so, they’re gonna send it to have it be, uh, maxed out. So, they’re gonna be sending it, and they’ll have it be maxed out. It’ll take about a month.”

 

So, the president accepted a $400 million jet from a foreign government, to be used for just a few years before being retired to Trump’s presidential library, and rushed it into service without the advanced antimissile capabilities. This has been a fiasco from the very beginning, and an entirely predictable one.

The New Red Scare

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

Let’s test your political acumen. Imagine that the president’s job approval is below 40 percent; that he’s stuck in an unpopular war he can’t get out of; that gas prices are much higher now than they were when he took office; that public pessimism about the economy is at its worst point since 2023; and, as a cherry on top, that some garish new report of his lascivious corruption arrives every day.

 

Under those circumstances, would you expect his party to be gaining on the generic congressional ballot or falling further behind?

 

The answer is “gaining,” of course.

 

On May 31 the RealClearPolitics tracker had Democrats ahead of Republicans by 7.6 points, teeing up the sort of midterm drubbing for incumbent presidents to which Americans have grown accustomed over the last 40 years. But a funny thing happened on the way to the blue wave: That lead has now shrunk to 4.7 points and the GOP is now polling at its highest level (43.9 percent) this year.

 

Nate Silver’s generic ballot tracker has seen less of a shift, but there’s movement there too. On May 31, Democrats led by 7.1 points; today they lead by 5.9. That’s meaningfully less than the 7.6-point advantage they held at this point in 2018, when they went on to sweep House races.

 

Not only that, the latest evidence suggests the trend toward Republicans is accelerating. On Sunday the Washington Post released a new survey that had Democrats ahead 48-45, one in a series of recent national polls that have put their generic-ballot lead in the range of 2-4 points. If the margin is that narrow on Election Day, the GOP could plausibly retain its House majority with an assist from mid-decade partisan gerrymandering.

 

Americans are disappointed, angry, and … seriously considering voting for the status quo in November anyway. How come?

 

I say this in my best “Church Lady” voice: Could it be socialism?

 

Liberal strategist Jeb Fain fears so. “I don’t think it’s coincidental that we’re seeing evidence of a tightening generic ballot as DSAers have gained traction in primaries and outsized media attention,” he tweeted on Saturday, referring to far-left candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America. “We can allow deranged extremists to take over the Democratic Party, or we can defeat Trump. There’s no doing both.”

 

GOP strategists share his suspicions. “It’s going to be a hate election,” a Republican who works for Trump’s political operation tells Axios. “Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.” A Republican pollster put it this way to the outlet: “Swing voters have a persistent fear the Democrats will just go too far left. So we can make the case that yeah, we suck. But they’re worse.”

 

If you’ve wondered why the president is babbling so much about communism lately, that’s why. Until recently, his autocratic project was an electoral prisoner of its own success: Having faced almost no meaningful resistance during his first 18 months back in office, he lacked a villain to rally Republican voters against. That’s a momentous problem for a figure like Donald Trump, a quintessential “lesser of two evils” politician whom no one in their right mind would support—unless they’re convinced that the alternative is worse.

 

He and his movement desperately need a foil. And now, thanks to the DSA, they have one.

 

I’m not sold on the theory that the new red scare explains the tightening generic ballot, though. At least, not all of it.

 

Questioning the timing.

 

There’s a timing problem here.

 

The first big primary victory for socialists this year came on June 9, when disgraced oysterman Graham Platner trounced his opponent to win the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine. Two weeks later, three hard-left House candidates endorsed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their primaries. A week after that, on June 30, DSA upstart Melat Kiros unseated longtime Democratic House incumbent Diana DeGette in Colorado.

 

If Democrats’ shrinking generic-ballot lead is due to a popular backlash against socialist victories, we’d expect the trend toward the GOP to have begun after all of those primaries, in July. But that’s not what the polling shows.

 

To begin with, the gaudy lead of 7-plus points that Democrats enjoyed on May 31 was an outlier. For most of this year, the party’s margin over Republicans has floated in the 4.7 to 5.9-point range, a solid but modest lead likely attributable to the left’s lingering “brand problem.” They’re back in that range today in both the RCP and Silver trackers. If June’s socialist triumphs supposedly triggered a groundswell of public opposition, shouldn’t Democrats’ lead now be meaningfully smaller than it’s been for most of 2026?

 

The reason their advantage grew in May is because the bottom briefly fell out for the GOP, with Republicans losing more than 3 points of national support between May 7 and May 31 per RealClearPolitics. That boosted Democrats’ advantage temporarily to “blue wave” proportions, but the trend began to reverse around June 1. By June 17—before all but one of the socialist victories I described above—Republicans had regained nearly all the ground they’d lost and were back to within 4.8 points of Democrats overall.

 

Then, after June’s socialist wins, the GOP suffered another mini-slide when it lost more than a point between June 27 and July 9. Weird, no? Shouldn’t commie-hating voters have begun trending solidly toward Republicans at that point?

 

Weirder still: If the stench from the DSA is causing Americans to recoil from Democrats, why hasn’t support for the party declined at all in generic-ballot surveys over the last month?

 

On June 17, Silver’s tracker had Democrats polling at 48 percent. Today, more than a month later, with the new red scare in full swing, they’re at … 48 percent. At RealClearPolitics, the party has actually gained over the last month. Democrats stood at 47.9 percent on June 17 and are at 48.6 percent today, not far from their best polling of the cycle to date.

 

Even if we concede that socialism is an albatross for the party, it’s likely less of one than Trump is for Republicans. A new CNBC poll asked Americans whether finding out that a candidate belongs to a particular political movement would make them more or less likely to vote for him or her. Discovering that someone is a democratic socialist led to a 32-50 split; discovering that someone is MAGA triggered a 27-57 divide by comparison.

 

There’s an obvious alternate explanation for why the generic ballot is tightening. We can dispense with most of this ideological argle-bargle and look at a simple metric.

 

The cost of gasoline began rising after the U.S. attacked Iran on February 28 and continued to climb until around April 7, when the two sides agreed to a ceasefire. Prices then began to inch downward on hopes that pre-war levels of oil-tanker traffic might resume in the Strait of Hormuz—only to climb higher again in May, to a peak of more than $4.50 per gallon, when Iran refused to relinquish control of the strait.

 

Coincidentally, May was also when Republicans’ generic-ballot polling cratered.

 

As the standoff with Iran dragged on, America and other nations scrambled to bring down prices, tapping oil reserves to fill the gap in supply. China scaled its consumption way back, driving the cost of gasoline down further. And in mid-June the U.S. reached, or seemed to reach, a peace agreement with Tehran that would reopen Hormuz fully, without fees, for at least 60 days. By mid-June, gas prices were below $4 again.

 

Coincidentally, this was the period when Republicans’ generic-ballot polling recovered.

 

It’s not the red scare that’s causing the GOP’s prospects in congressional races to fluctuate, we might conclude. It’s thermostatic public reaction to fuel costs. When gas trends more expensive, a certain number of angry Republican-leaning voters withhold their support. When it trends cheaper, they’re back on the team again. There’s nothing more to it than that.

 

Except that hypothesis isn’t quite airtight either.

 

Soft Republicans.

 

If the generic ballot is simply measuring how optimistic or pessimistic Americans are feeling about gas prices, we’d expect the GOP to be in another nosedive right now.

 

Things haven’t been going great with Iran over the last two weeks, you may have noticed. The president declared the ceasefire required by the peace agreement “over” on July 10; the U.S. has bombed Iran every day since and the Iranians have retaliated, killing three American service members and wounding dozens more. The effect all of that is having on gas prices is precisely what you’d expect.

 

Yet Republicans have gained nearly 2 full points in the RealClearPolitics average over the last 12 days, the opposite of what we’d predict. What gives?

 

One possibility is that there’s some sort of “lag effect” to higher gas prices, where it takes a week or two for trends in the cost of fuel to be reflected in trends in public opinion polling. But I dunno: There didn’t seem to be much lag in May, when prices were rising. Gas hikes aren’t like other news developments that take time to percolate through the electorate; Americans confront them every day when they fill up and form an opinion instantaneously.

 

Which leads us to another possibility: Maybe a “red scare” backlash to socialists’ primary victories in June really is in motion and that’s the thing that’s been lagging in polling, only showing up this month as Americans finally hear about it and grapple with the implications.

 

The oppressive cultishness of Trump’s base makes it easy to forget that many GOP voters remain lukewarm about him. “The poll finds 45 percent of Republican voters approve of Trump strongly compared with 83 percent of Democrats who disapprove strongly,” the Post noted in its new poll. If you’re among the “soft” 55 percent in his party that doesn’t strongly approve of him, your willingness to vote GOP this fall will obviously be more conditional and event-dependent than the average red-cap-wearing zombie’s will.

 

I can absolutely believe that news coverage this month of ascendant “communists” igniting a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party has driven some of those wayward “soft” Republicans to come home to the GOP reluctantly. The president himself began hyping the red scare only very recently, perhaps causing news about June’s primaries to break through belatedly to the sort of casual right-winger who’s heard about the war and gas prices but doesn’t follow politics closely enough to know who Darializa Avila Chevalier is.

 

Or maybe the fact that the far left’s position on Israel is increasingly the Democratic Party’s position has at last begun to penetrate the consciousness of the normie Republican, who remains favorably disposed to the Jewish state and its government (although not as much as in the past). Negative partisanship can be slow to awaken, but once it’s up, it’s up.

 

If all of that is true, then the upcoming Democratic Senate primary in Michigan could be the best thing to ever happen to Republican enthusiasm. Progressive favorite Abdul El-Sayed is a nationalist bogeyman par excellence for the same reasons that Zohran Mamdani is: He’s young, Muslim, far left, and prone to equivocating about terrorism in ways that would curl any right-wing hawk’s hair. But whereas Mamdani’s rise could be dismissed as a product of a very blue city behaving the way very blue cities do, El-Sayed is competing in a Midwestern swing state.

 

Should he win the primary, it will touch a match to the postliberal right’s fears that members of alien tribes—nonwhite, non-Christian, overtly socialist—are an electoral threat nationally, not just in progressive strongholds like Williamsburg. And so, the more credible the red scare becomes, the more we might expect the generic ballot to tighten.

 

I can think of two reasons it might not, though.

 

Conventional war.

 

One is the conflict with Iran, of course, which looks likely to get worse before it gets better.

 

“Iran has adapted to U.S. defenses, firing missiles that travel at extremely high speeds and can maneuver as they streak toward the earth,” the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend. A source told the Post that “the U.S. is planning for a wider war” but worried that the White House doesn’t seem to fully appreciate that our military is saddled with “dwindling stockpiles of air defense and long-range munitions and constraints on the ability to surge more troops and aircraft into the area because of battle damage.”

 

There’s even been chatter about a “vast and costly ground operation in southern Iran” to secure the Strait of Hormuz, from which many casualties would surely result. Barring an unlikely Iranian capitulation due to economic hardship caused by the U.S. naval blockade, it’s hard to imagine any endgame to the conflict for the United States or for the president’s party that doesn’t involve more Americans dying, gas prices rising, and public anger spiking. The red scare won’t blunt that effect entirely in November, if at all.

 

The other X factor is the unusual convention that Republicans are planning for Dallas on September 9 and 10, which doesn’t seem crazy to me in the abstract. The recurring problem for the majority before every midterm election is shaking its base out of its complacency and getting them as fired up to vote as the out-party is, right? Well, here’s the solution—a two-day pageant where the president and his candidates can appeal to GOP voters directly.

 

There will be oodles of red-scare programming on the agenda aimed at ambivalent “soft” Republicans, no doubt.

 

But increasingly the idea looks foolish. By definition, it’s bad advertising to have the president remind swing voters that he’s the face of the party when his approval is already below 40 percent and headed downward as the war spirals. The best use of a convention like this one would be to turn it over to Republican congressional candidates and keep Trump away from it, letting them introduce themselves to voters on their own terms instead of enveloped in a toxic orange miasma. Needless to say, that won’t be happening.

 

What’s really foolish, though, is giving Democrats a reason to unite at a moment when the establishment and the left are at each other’s throats. In Michigan, for instance, the primary between El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens has turned so bitter that there’s a realistic chance the loser’s voters will boycott the general election to some meaningful extent. The best way to ensure that they don’t is for Trump to barge into the middle of their feud in mid-September, muttering about communists and gushing about ICE, to show them who the real enemy is.

 

The GOP convention will do more to motivate Democrats and (temporarily) heal the rifts between them, in all probability, than it will to boost Republican enthusiasm. And maybe that’s the key word in all of this—enthusiasm.

 

Most of the recent generic ballot polling showing a GOP surge has been of registered voters, as is common at this stage of an election cycle. But not every registered voter ultimately turns out, of course; for a clearer forecast of Election Day, you need to focus on likely voters. And Democrats have a big advantage among likely voters right now.

 

The same Washington Post poll released this weekend that found them ahead by 3 points among registered voters saw the lead balloon to 8 among voters who say they’re “absolutely certain to vote.” The share of Democrats who say they’re certain to vote this year exceeds the share of Republicans who say so by a wider margin than the share who said so in the “blue wave” year of 2018, in fact. And Democrats are considerably more likely to say that it’s “more important” to vote in 2026 vis-à-vis previous midterms than Republicans are.

 

The red scare might be scary enough to alter voters’ preferences yet not scary enough to get them off the couch on Election Day, especially with bad news about the war and the economy drowning it out. But, barring a terrorist attack on the country or something similarly terrible, it’s the best bogeyman Trump’s got.

Kamala Harris’s Advisers Are Delusional

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

New York magazine’s David Freedlander assembled a variety of juicy quotes from Democratic insiders for his piece on Kamala Harris’s insatiable hunger for power. Most of those insiders seem only to want Harris to go away.

 

Some took the diplomatic track. They’d profess their undying affection for the former vice president but also wonder if she can raise the requisite funds or stay focused on the future given her inextricable association with Joe Biden’s administration. Others were less tactful. “I hope she runs,” said one Democratic strategist. “Because then she will lose and we will never have to hear from her again.”

 

As Freedlander observed, Democratic  political professionals are inclined to respond either with that fury or with a “heavy sigh followed by a long pause” when the subject of Harris’s ambitions arises. Democrats haven’t recovered from the trauma they experienced in 2024. And as long as Harris’s advisers continue to torment them with the delusions that they’re deploying to draw Biden’s veep back into the limelight, they won’t.

 

To the claim that nominating Harris would only force Americans to relitigate the Biden years, for example, her brain trust offers this compelling rejoinder: Nuh-uh.

 

“Look how quickly voters forgot about Trump’s first term,” said one Democrat in Harris’s orbit. “People have short attention spans and short memories, and for all the criticisms that could be directed at Biden today, who knows what they [will] think 12 or 16 months from now.”

 

That’s just nonsense. Americans hadn’t forgotten about Trump’s first term by 2024. Not only did they remember it, they remembered it fondly. Trump’s “nostalgia bump” was revealed in surveys of American voters and widely reported in mainstream outlets. Harris’s allies are asking Democrats to internalize a revisionist history of the 2024 campaign. That’s a lot to ask of anyone, much less those who owe you nothing.

 

Just as Americans still remembered Trump’s first term by 2024, they remember the Biden administration today. And their outlook has not improved. For instance, Donald Trump’s approval rating when it comes to immigration is, today, underwater. His heavy-handed approach to deportations and the sometimes-deadly confrontations between ICE agents and protesters in the streets have left a sour taste in voters’ mouths. But Trump’s troubles have not redounded to the Democratic Party’s benefit.

 

In May, with ICE-related scandals dominating the  news for months, CBS News’s pollsters found that only 34 percent of voters believed the Democratic Party had “the better approach to immigration right now.” Trump and the Republicans? Thirty-eight percent. Voters remember not just Biden’s lax approach to border enforcement (with which Harris is intimately affiliated) but also the financial hardships they struggled with during the Biden years. While just under one-third of respondents said Democratic policies would “help” reduce their costs of living, 41 percent said they expected those policies to “hurt” their prospects.

 

The former vice president’s aides know they have an uphill battle ahead of them if they’re to recapture the party from Harris skeptics. Oddly, their response to that adversity has been to attempt to muscle the party’s establishment into submission.

 

Presumably, it was Harris’s boosters who were quick to remind Freedlander that women and minority voters “are the backbone of the Democratic Party,” and Harris is both. Democratic institutionalists should know, therefore, that “any attempts to knock her down a peg will risk getting into thorny issues of race and gender.” Oppose her ascension too strenuously, they seem to warn, and Democrats risk “bogging down the party with questions about identity.”

 

That’s not even a thinly veiled threat. But is it credible? Harris staffers think so. “A number of staffers for potential 2028 candidates pointed to the recent Texas Senate primary,” Freedlander wrote, “in which James Talarico ultimately prevailed over Jasmine Crockett but did so at the risk of alienating key Democratic constituencies in the process.”

 

What are they talking about? Talarico’s victory over Crockett has not riven the Texas Democratic Party with racial strife. To survey the latest New York Times/Siena College poll of that race, Texas Democrats are perfectly happy with their party’s Senate nominee. Talarico enjoys the support of nearly two-thirds of young voters, 56 percent of women, 60 percent of Hispanics, 80 percent of black voters, and 94 percent of the Democratic Party. Indeed, one of the demographics with whom Talarico performs best is Harris 2024 voters, 95 percent of whom are backing the Democratic candidate.

 

Maybe the Democratic Party can be cajoled and coerced into giving Harris another shot, but Freedlander’s piece won’t persuade her critics to keep their qualms to themselves. Harris’s aides seem to have utterly misread the landscape, and they vastly overrate the leverage their candidate has over the party she seeks to commandeer.