Monday, July 6, 2026

A Revolution for All Humankind

By Allen Guelzo

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

No one who takes up a copy of The Federalist Papers ever forgets the way Alexander Hamilton opened the first of that remarkable series of commentaries on the new American Constitution, published five weeks after it was signed in 1787 in Philadelphia. “It has been frequently remarked,” Hamilton began, “that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” It was a decision to which he did not hesitate to attach world significance, since “a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”

 

Which, many people have been quick to say, was typical of the future treasury secretary’s infatuation with his own eloquence. But Hamilton was not the only voice who saw the American Revolution as what Ralph Waldo Emerson would later call a “shot heard round the world.” Only months after the Declaration of Independence was issued, the chief justice of South Carolina declared, “Suddenly arisen in the World” is “a new Empire, stiled, The United States of America.” He added, “America hails Europe, Asia and Africa!—She proffers Peace and Plenty! This Revolution, forming one of the most important Epoch’s in the History, not of a Nation, but, of the World; is, as it were, an Eminence from which we may observe the Things around us.” The Marquis de Lafayette, who dodged a ban imposed by the king of France to cross the Atlantic and join the revolutionary army, insisted that the cause of America in its rebellion against British rule was the cause of humanity, and to the extent that “America is certain of her independence, humanity has gained her cause, and liberty will never be without a place of refuge.”

 

The Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who caught the revolutionary fever during his brief service in America as a Spanish officer, was a convert to the American Revolution. He called it “the infallible preliminary” to a republican and anti-colonial revolutionary movement against Spanish imperial rule over his own native Venezuela, a movement that climaxed in two attempts, in 1806 and 1810, to create an independent Venezuelan republic. Miranda was, as Benjamin Rush described him to James Madison, “the friend of liberty and a believer in the practicability of governments which shall have for their objects the happiness of nations instead of the greatness of individuals.”

 

Uneasy observers like Spain’s ambassador to France in 1783, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, the count of Aranda, were also convinced that the American Revolution signaled the fall of aristocratic dominoes around the Atlantic world, although that was not a result they welcomed. “The independence of the English colonies…is for me a source of pain and fear,” Aranda reported to Spain’s King Carlos III. The new American republic “has been born a pygmy,” but “the day will come in which it grows and turns into a giant, even a frightening colossus.” The ideas it represented—especially “freedom of conscience”—will first “attract farmers and artisans from all nations,” and then “within a few years” it will direct those energies outward to overthrow the monarchies that had once been its allies against Britain.

 

The ultimate statement of the meteor-like impact of the Revolution, however, was reserved for the British-born propagandist Thomas Paine, who wrote in January 1776 that the Revolution offered Americans “every opportunity and every encouragement…to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth.” Even more, “We have in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

 

***

 

If this enthusiasm for the towering image of the Revolution generates in modern American minds a certain skeptical incredulity, a great deal of the reason for that incredulity may rest on the problems that the Revolution did not solve—starting with slavery and extending to inequality, social stagnation, and political violence (the worst example of which was the American Civil War). But an equally important reason for skepticism about attributing a worldwide influence to the American Revolution rests on the ways in which the Revolution succeeded beyond anyone’s hopes—and thereby made its accomplishments something to be taken for granted.

 

In 1776, the Western world still understood human societies as hierarchies, enforced by authority. From classical times, both the physical and political universe had been understood as an orderly and logical stacking of things and people, arranged according to a kind of moral pedigree. The solar system was diagrammed with the earth at its bottom and then, in ascending order of perfection, the moon, the planets, the stars, and finally the firmament, the heavens where dwelt God and the saints. Human society followed the same pattern of hierarchy: Kings ruled over nobles, and nobles ruled over the commons. The lower order served the next higher, and the higher orders were responsible for preserving and protecting the lower. Business (if it could even be called that) functioned according to webs of patronage, not by competition. Buying low and selling high was an actual felony in 17th-century England; in France a nobleman was in danger of losing his title if he engaged in trade. As a form of forced labor, slavery was merely the lowest rung on this ladder, and the entire ladder was understood as the only viable way of holding off anarchy, war, and famine.

 

That world of hierarchy and authority began to crack in the 1600s, as the scientific discoveries of Galileo and Isaac Newton overthrew the old notion of a physical universe governed by moral qualities of superiority and inferiority. The vision of the universe as a hierarchy, with its various parts arranged as a moral pageant from the most pure to the most base, went out the window. Instead, it became an assortment of simple substances, governed only by predictable and measurable physical laws and forces.

 

It did not take long before European political theorists began applying to political society the same refusal to approve authority and hierarchy. In one of the great thought experiments of the 17th century, the English political writer John Locke argued that every society emerges as an organized whole only because people need to look out for their property and their natural rights—not because some royal lawgiver imposes a divine order. There was nothing mysterious or occult about governments, and whenever a society decays or is diverted from that basic purpose of protecting property and rights, the people who made that society can devise something new in its place.

 

This new understanding of politics remained only a thought experiment in European capitals. Even in Locke’s England, where the powers of the king had been slowly but markedly circumscribed by Parliament throughout the 17th century, Parliament itself was still top-heavy with nobility, the landed gentry, and the senior clergy of the Church of England. In Britain’s North American colonies, by contrast, Locke and the other great political questioners of what later became known as the Enlightenment—Montesquieu, Beccaria, Adam Smith—were read with very different eyes, not as the providers of thought experiments but as men who were describing the colonies’ own creation.

 

It was, therefore, not difficult for Americans to imagine that they could do without hierarchies entirely. And when, after 1763, British imperial planners in London began to lay burden after burden on the colonies in the form of taxes and trade regulations that ignored the colonies’ own home legislatures and assemblies, their conclusion was that the home government in England had gone off its rails into corruption. They appealed first to Parliament for redress, and then to the king, and then finally, after the clash of arms in 1775, they resorted to a declaration of independence that disposed of hierarchy and authority in a single eloquent sentence: 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.

 

***

 

Looked at one way, the American Revolution can appear, on those terms, to have been a purely domestic affair, of English-speaking dissenters ridding themselves of an overmighty monarch in order to practice the same humdrum self-government they had always known on the faraway shores of North America. But from the perspective of observers who had never known anything but political hierarchy, and supposed that nothing but hierarchy buttressed by authority could guarantee stability and peace, the American Revolution appeared as a wonder, as the first inkling that governments without kings and nobles, and without mandate and conformity, would not quickly descend into chaos and self-destruction.

 

The unlooked-for success of a republic that disposed of hierarchy and authority unlocked the tongues of Europeans who hoped to rewrite their own hidebound autocracies after the new American model. The Abbé Raynal, the French philosophe and friend of the Revolution, predicted in 1781 that the United States “cannot fail of becoming one of the most flourishing countries upon the globe,” and he did not hesitate to wonder whether “Europe should one day find her masters in her children.” The Marquis de Condorcet praised the “benefits humankind as a whole should expect from America’s example.” He went on, “The example of the equality which exists in the United States” has doomed any belief “that nature has divided the human race, like horses, into three or four categories, and that one of these categories is also doomed to work much and eat little.”

 

Even the new American capital city under the Constitution, Philadelphia, was a model of republican politics to the essayist Joseph-Antoine Cerutti, “entirely populated with brothers and devoid of tyrants, slaves, priests, and without atheists, idle men or any poor,” and deserving “to be the capital of the world.” And in the first flush of the French Revolution, Thomas Jefferson (the United States diplomatic representative in Paris in 1789) was flattered to discover in France’s National Assembly that “it is impossible to desire better dispositions towards us, than prevail in this assembly. Our proceedings have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.”

 

Nor was this admiration limited to the French. Far to the north, in Sweden, the editor of the journal Medborgaren (Citizen) applauded the Revolution for teaching “all nationalities the meaning of the majesty of nations: the majesty of man!” And the king of Sweden, Gustav III, trembled at the thought of an “epidemic of popular disturbances” that would “spread from the soil of America.” The Dutch Patriot movement, which briefly gained power in the Netherlands in the 1780s, hailed the American Revolution as the model for their own claims to representative power. “In America the sun of salvation has risen which shall also shine upon us if we wish,” announced François Adriaan Van der Kemp, the leading preacher of the anti-princely party, in 1782. “America can teach us how to fight the degeneration of the people’s character, to stay moral corruption, to put an end to bribery, to smother the seeds of tyranny and to restore the health of our moribund freedom.”

 

Within the Western hemisphere, restless Spanish colonies took the example of the United States as encouragement and as model. Francisco de Miranda’s Venezuela was only one of the myriad South American republican movements to see their future in the success of the American Revolution. The short-lived Congress of New Granada (which included modern-day Colombia and Panama) announced in 1811 its admiration for “the brilliance and prosperity of the United States of North America,” to the point where one province of New Granada adopted “the fundamental laws of Pennsylvania, another of Virginia, another of Massachusetts, and another all of the laws of Maryland.”

 

Not just revolutionary ideas but the revolutionary leadership in America generated applause. Vicente Rocafuerte, the president of the Republic of Ecuador, created a pocket-sized anthology of documents from the American Revolution in 1821 that could be easily smuggled past Spanish censors. Rocafuerte’s Necessary Ideas for Every Independent American Nation That Desires to Be Free claimed that liberty had begun as an idea in England with Magna Carta, but the verdadero decálogo politico (the True Ten Commandments) of revolution were the Declaration of Independence, and its apostles were “Franklin, Hancock, Hamilton, and that series of great men, whose wisdom the world admires and will admire forever.”

 

Among those “great men,” no one towered in international esteem above George Washington. “Where may the wearied eye repose / When gazing on the great,” asked the radical English poet Lord Byron,

 

Where neither guilty glory glows,
Nor despicable state?
Yes—one—the first—the last—the best—
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom envy dared not hate,
Bequeath’d the name of Washington,
To make man blush there was but one!

 

“The memory of Washington,” added the British political commentator Leslie Grove Jones  in 1827, “will outlive the history of all the other great captains, whether of antient or of modern times, in the proportion that his virtues exceeded their military deeds.” And why? Because “every act of his was for the benefit of his fellow-citizens; he lived but for his country and the advantage of mankind.”

 

***

 

The Revolution also generated some serious domino effects that were technically, but not entirely, apart from the Revolution’s ideas. England, to start with, was far from being of one mind about suppressing the Revolution. The same taxes that had exasperated the colonies before 1775 stoked a rise in smuggling and contraband in England. By 1783, as many as 20,000 people—in a population in Britain of just 8 million—were involved full-time in smuggling tea, tobacco, silk, and alcohol; one Royal Navy sloop caught 300 smugglers trying to unload 120,000 gallons of brandy and 25 tons of tea on a single beach on the English Channel.

 

But nowhere in the British Isles was the American example more direct, or directly cited, than in Ireland, which was ruled by Britain but still retained its own parliament. As early as October 1775, members of the Irish Parliament drew immediate parallels between “the subjugation of America” and the “dependence of Ireland,” and one member announced that Ireland’s best hope “to obtain her own constitutional rights” was in the “complete success and triumph” of the American revolutionaries. The Irish Volunteer movement, which was originally created to raise recruits to resist a French invasion, soon became a platform for Irish independence, with the Americans as its inspiration, and Horace Walpole feared in 1779 that “Ireland has much the air of Americanising.”

 

It certainly did. “See America,” declared Henry Grattan, the leading Irish parliamentarian. “America is not only free, but she thinks like a free country.” Beware of attacking American liberty: “What you trample on in Europe will sting you in America.” The imperial government in London temporarily backed down, granting the Irish Parliament considerable latitude for self-determination—but only until the American war was over. A desperate revolutionary movement was launched in 1798, only to fail, and to see Ireland officially subjugated to British rule and its parliament disbanded.

 

That did not prevent other revolutionary movements still farther afield in place and time from appealing to the American example. In India, Britain’s distraction with America gave an opportunity to Haider Ali, the sultan of Mysore, to strike back at creeping British colonialism on the subcontinent, and his success prompted one American general in 1777 to propose sending a contingent of American volunteers to aid him. (Ironically, it would be the British general who surrendered his army to Washington at Yorktown, Charles Cornwallis, who would be sent to India in 1786 to make sure that India did not follow the same anti-imperial path as America.)

 

And it could be said with some justice that both Australia and Sierra Leone are the offspring of the American Revolution. In the case of Australia, Britain no longer had American colonies to which it could deport its convicts and chose instead to begin dispatching them to Botany Bay in 1788. As for Sierra Leone, it was the black refugees who fled from American plantations to British garrisons in America who were eventually relocated, first in Nova Scotia, and then on the coast of West Africa.

 

The echoes of the American Revolution kept on coming, even 50 years later. In 1820, after British cavalry killed 11 protesters and injured over 400 more at St. Peter’s Field outside Manchester, Percy Bysshe Shelley angrily contrasted Britain with the American republic as “a highly civilized community” that “has no king…no officer to whom wealth and from whom corruption flows…no order of men privileged to cheat and insult the rest of the members of the state and who inherit a right of legislating and judging which the principles of human nature compel them to exercise to their own profit and to the detriment of those not included within their peculiar class.” Above all, “it has no established church…defended by prosecutions and sanctioned by enormous bounties.”

 

A year later, as Greece rose in revolt against the rule of the Ottoman Turks, the Greek classical scholar and revolutionary sympathizer Adamantios Korais appealed for American sympathy by connecting the Greek struggle with the American revolt of 1776: “Though separated from you, Americans, by mighty oceans, we are driven near to you by your virtues. We feel you to be nearer to us than the nations on our frontiers, and we regard you as friends, fellow-citizens and brethren, because you are just, benevolent and generous.”

 

It was the conviction of Leslie Grove Jones that “the United States of North America” was “founded upon the true and just rights of man,” and its “resistance…against the mother country…should serve as a model for future ages.” The American Revolution “was not an insurrection of factious agitators…. It was a brave and virtuous people struggling for the maintenance of their lawful rights; a people whose struggle was conducted by the wisest, most moderate, most disinterested, and most upright men.”

 

***

 

Americans of the revolutionary generation clearly did not mind the adulation offered them by the Old World. “It is one of the Sweetest Consolations I have found in Life,” wrote John Adams in 1783, “to see that while We have been contending for our own Liberties, We have…Set an Example of political Liberty, religious Liberty, and Commercial Liberty before the Eyes of the present age, and that Mankind in general have shewn so good a Disposition to favour and to follow it…. May every Part of America and Europe, take care, not to loose, the Ground they have gained.” In a pithier way, Thomas Jefferson told Caesar Rodney in 1820 that “we are the world’s last hope,” and 42 years later, Abraham Lincoln still subscribed to the same faith when he reminded Congress that America was “the last best hope of earth.”

 

There were more than a few pious hopes that the Americans would take some part in evangelizing other peoples for liberty. “We cannot but feel deeply interested in their happiness, and wish for their success, in all virtuous measures, to advance a cause dear to mankind,” insisted the New England geographer Jedidiah Morse. “It becomes us…not to confine our benevolent regards to the narrow circle of our particular friends, to our town, our state, or even to our country; but to feel a glow of affectionate good will for all men of every nation, religion and character, on earth.”

 

Alas, the first nation to undertake a successful political revolution after the American one was France, and American onlookers were appalled by its descent into the dictatorship of Bonaparte. Jedidiah Morse wished success to other revolutionaries but only “in all virtuous measures,” and the Reign of Terror that followed on the overthrow of the French monarchy was anything but virtuous. Morse was sickened by “the great impropriety and absurdity of approving and justifying…the conduct of…the French nation” in making a “havock of literature and the arts” and promoting the “barbarous and shocking executions of the innocent.” And when the French Revolution’s diplomatic representative, Edmond-Charles Genêt, tried to appeal to Americans in 1793 over the head of President George Washington, the soldier of the Revolution erupted in fury: “Is the Minister of the French Republic to set the Acts of this Government at defiance, with impunity? And then threaten the executive with an appeal to the People?”

 

No matter how eloquent the appeal, there would be no foreign interventions on behalf of the politics of liberty by the United States until the eve of the 20th century. Until then, the rule of American diplomacy would be the advice of John Quincy Adams, that America “stands forever, a light of admonition to the rulers of men”—admonition, but not intervention. The American Republic “does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

 

There was another hesitation that discouraged Americans from unfurling an overly aggressive banner on behalf of liberty, and that was slavery. No single moral shortcoming in the new Republic matched the cost presented by combining an appeal to natural rights to liberty with the frank denial of those rights to an entire race of enslaved people. Samuel Johnson saw this at once in 1775 when he demanded, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Leslie Grove Jones was struck by the same conundrum half a century later. “It is most strange to witness in the Free States of North America the deplorable condition of the poor Negro” and downright “melancholy, at the very seat of Government, to see whole gangs in chains, collected, and driven away to the South” or to have “the very door of the President of this Free State opened to you by a slave, when you walk in to pay your personal respects to himself and the liberties of his country.”

 

It was melancholy for a number of Americans, too, starting with Thomas Jefferson, who had no decent way of explaining why a republic that took liberty as its gospel could tolerate slavery. “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man!” he admitted in 1786 to Jean-Nicolas Démeunier. A man will “endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment or death itself in vindication of…liberty, and the next moment…inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than that…which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”

 

Seventy years later, Abraham Lincoln would complain, in a more severe vein, that slavery was “the one retrograde institution in America…undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw.” Only, by that time it would be Americans who were incredulous that American promises could be believed. “We, the boasted pattern for the world—we cut down the banner of freedom,” exclaimed a contributor to the Oberlin Evangelist in 1848, “and planted in its stead the black flag of slavery!!”

 

But not every observer around the world thought that the American example had lost its force. After the failure of the democratic revolutions of 1848 in Europe, many revolutionary ears turned instead to listen to the song of Marxist socialism. But not all. “There are gaps and shortcomings in the national character visible at the first glance,” conceded Georges Fisch, the eminent Swiss visitor to the United States in 1862. But observing a nation now embroiled in a war to end slavery, Fisch was impressed by “the strength the North derived from the belief that in this struggle it was not only saving the United States, but also the great principles it represented.”

 

The faith of the Revolution “has not given way,” Fisch promised, and the abolition of slavery “will be a moral prodigy well-calculated to rouse up the latent energies that are slumbering amongst worn-out nations.” It was the example of the Revolution that convinced a youthful Abraham Lincoln that “there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for, something even more than National Independence…something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.” Sixty-seven years after that, the same impulse led Franklin Roosevelt to declare that “in 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy—from the eighteenth century royalists who held special privileges from the crown,” and in 1936, Americans would still “stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

 

In this 250th anniversary year, there is still evidence that Fisch and Lincoln and Roosevelt were not wrong, and that the example of the American Revolution still exerts a hopeful force on the minds of people around the world. David Armitage, in The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, has created a list of more than 190 nations whose declarations of independence have been in some measure based on Jefferson’s Declaration, including Haiti in 1804, New Zealand in 1835, and Czechoslovakia in 1918. And in the fall of 2022, during anti-government riots in Chongqing in southwest China, a student activist was filmed shouting a slogan that many protesters would adopt: “Give me liberty, or give me death!’” Whatever its failings over two and a half centuries, the idea of the Revolution and the overthrow of mindless authority and hierarchy—these live and flourish and give hope.

The Party of the Worker Is Now the Party of the Bureaucrat

By Claire Lehmann

Friday, June 19, 2026

 

Fifteen years ago, I worked for a woman, a Deputy Secretary in the federal Department of Health, who told me something that I have never forgotten. She said that "the federal government just throws money down the toilet."

 

I've remembered that statement for fifteen years. It bothered me at the time, because I knew she was being honest. But after the Budget that was delivered on May 12 of this year, it bothers even more. Taxes on Australian workers keep rising through bracket creep. More taxes have been added to this burden with the scrapping of negative gearing and the scrapping of 50 percent discount to capital gains tax (CGT). Meanwhile the federal government keeps flushing money down the toilet.

 

I understand why many Australians are fed up and are turning towards parties that promise to disrupt the status quo.

 

The title of this talk is "From Waitress, to Public Servant, to Business Owner." I've had all three of these jobs, in that order. Tonight I want to use them to make an argument about where the real fault line in this country lies.

 

For most of this country's political history, the major fault line has been between labour and capital—between workers and the bosses who employ them. That's the fault line that shaped the union movement, and the party that grew out of it. The Australian Labor Party.

 

But that fault line isn’t as clear anymore. I believe that the major political conflict we have isn’t between workers and bosses. And it isn't between the public versus private sector either. The real fault line is between those whose work lifts productivity and those whose work puts a drag on it. Those who lift productivity include the surgeon, the teacher, the tradie, and the founder: anyone whose work makes someone else more likely to produce. One doesn’t even have to be in paid work to be productive. Stay at home mums are some of the most productive people in our society, raising the future human capital of the nation.

 

On the other side of the fault line sits work that exists to administer, monitor, or process the people who are actually doing the producing, often with no clear link back to any outcome at all. Every organisation carries some of that second kind of work. But it’s in government that it's growing the fastest, and where it has the least accountability. Because government is the only part of the economy that gets to write its own cheque and send someone else the bill.

 

Now credit where credit is due. I am not an anti-Labor ideologue. I actually come from Labor family. My grandmother used to cheer on Paul Keating during question time, and when I was at university I gave out how-to-vote cards for Penny Wong in my hometown of Adelaide. I've been the beneficiary of medicare, and our higher education system, all supported by our taxes. And I actually agree with the government's decision to scrap negative gearing and to lift the CGT discount on unproductive assets, namely housing.

 

That being said, the decision to scrap the 50 percent CGT discount on company founders, and implement a minimum tax rate of 30 percent for anyone with a capital gain, no matter how much they earn, strikes me as mad. To compound this, our income tax rates remain some of the highest in the world.

 

All this has led me to conclude that somewhere along the way, something has changed. The Labor Party has gone from being a party of the worker to being the party of the bureaucrat. The same party that purports to defend workers has overseen the highest amount of tax revenue generated from labour in Australia's history. The government collected $349 billion in personal income tax last financial year.

 

The same party that says it wants to promote “equity” hasn't raised the income tax–free threshold, which has been in place since 2012. The same party that purports to stand for the fair go now wants to punish people for trying.

 

I learned what work was from the hospitality industry. My first job was at Hungry Jacks, when I was 14 years old. I was paid $4.62 per hour, and my feet would have blisters by the end of the shift. By nineteen, I was working full-time in one of Adelaide's most popular restaurants, a steakhouse on Gouger Street. I made $500 a week.

 

I loved it. But it was physically demanding work. The pace meant every minute counted—slacking off could have a cascading effect. You were also never separated from the person who owned the place. I used to work alongside my bosses. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what a profit margin was, but I understood that my bosses were not rich. The whole thing only worked because people were grinding to keep the doors open.

 

I also saw the painful side of business ownership. My last job before I finished my degree was at a small Italian restaurant, run by a French immigrant. He worked so hard keeping that restaurant going. But I learned shortly after I had left, that a person I had worked alongside for years had been quietly stealing from the till. By the time anyone noticed, $100,000 was gone. Not long after that, my old boss closed the restaurant.

 

By the time I learned that this little Italian restaurant had closed, I had moved on from the hospitality industry. By the age of twenty-five, I'd finished my degree, and moved to Canberra. I embarked upon what I thought would be a long career as a public servant. I began work at the Federal Department of Health and Ageing.

 

A quick bit of context, for anyone who's never worked in Canberra: not all departments are the same. Some are leaner than others. And some are genuinely well run.

 

And some of the public servants I worked alongside in Canberra were dedicated, capable people. But the Department of Health has a reputation, even among public servants, as one of the more bloated workforces in Canberra. When I was there it had a staff of 4-5000, today it has a staff of over 7000.

 

Let me give you a glimpse of what life is like for a graduate in the department. On my first rotation, I was reprimanded for writing a ministerial letter too quickly. Two hours was sufficient time to write a letter I thought—one that mostly consisted of copy and pasting boilerplate from other letters—but according to the director of the team, I needed to take a day.

 

Why? Because they had nothing else for me to do. There were no meetings, no policies being drafted, and no conference papers for us to work on. So we had morning tea instead. And afternoon tea. We took long lunches. We did crossword puzzles to keep our brains active, and daily "quizzes" to alleviate the boredom. The Director of the section once sent a ministerial letter back to me asking me to delete a comma. I was excited. Because deleting a comma meant that I had something to do.

 

Sometimes there would be a meeting, or a conference, which meant that it was all hands on deck preparing briefing notes for the Minister, and arranging pens on desks for delegates. But most of the interesting work in the department was done by consultants. I wondered why graduates had been hired in the first place, to work as glorified secretaries if all the substantial work was just being farmed out to private industry. Even with a staff of 7000, most of whom from my observation were massively underemployed, the department still outsourced work.  

 

I wasn't the only one who suffered from this situation in the department. Other graduates would confide in me about their despair. One friend of mine used to cry in the bathroom.

 

At the same time however, there were people in the department actively campaigning for less. I was shocked to find a flyer from the union sitting on my desk one morning, advocating for even better conditions—even though we had flex time, we couldn't be fired, and were having morning teas almost every day. I looked at the flyers and thought: how much more comfortable could this possibly get?

 

I should clarify here: it is technically possible to get fired in the federal public service. But the process can take about 12 months, and there is very little incentive to initiate such action. It is much easier to just redeploy an underperformer into another team. And that is what happens over and over again.

 

One woman I worked with on one of my rotations was functionally incapable. She had been at the level of APS 5 for thirty years (as a graduate I was on APS4). She was unable to do a Google search for work purposes, and unable to file documents in alphabetical order. She sat at her desk researching properties online all day. She was paid, in 2011, $65,000 per year. ($94,000 today).

 

For someone who had come from my work background, in busy restaurants, this all felt like a slap in the face. If this is what white collar work is like then this whole thing is a scam, I thought.

 

The budgeting was its own kind of madness. There was an open, acknowledged habit of overspending on purpose—spend the whole allocation every year, whether you needed to or not, because if you didn't spend it, you'd lose it the following year. It's the opposite of every incentive that exists in the private sector, where underspending is the whole point.

 

That's the context for the sentence I opened with tonight. That Deputy Secretary—one of the most senior people in the department told me, matter of factly, that the federal government just throws money down the toilet. It wasn’t a secret. We all knew we were wasting time, and wasting money. So I quit. I felt ashamed participating in what I considered an abuse of the Australian taxpayer.

 

At the time I didn't have the words to describe what I had seen at the Department of Health in economic terms. But it does have a name. Economists call it the free-rider problem.

 

Picture a sharehouse where shared cleaning responsibilities are never enforced. There's always someone who does the dishes, and always someone who just "forgets." If a shared responsibility is never enforced, then the person who is forgetting never bears any cost. The kitchen still gets cleaned, because someone else always ends up doing it for them.

 

Now extrapolate that idea out to an entire department, where nobody can be fired, where overspending is rewarded, and where the people footing the bill—you and I, the Australian taxpayers—have no choice about whether to pay, and no say in how the money is spent.

 

That was one department, fifteen years ago. Multiply it across the whole of government, and you get the budget that was handed down a few weeks ago. Everything I've described to you tonight is about to get a whole lot worse, from both directions: the unproductive side getting bigger, and the productive side getting taxed harder for trying.

 

Since 2022, the APS has grown by 26 per cent. The cost of running it has blown out by 42 per cent—to $114.6 billion, or roughly $8,200 for every taxpayer in this country, every year. Budget papers show that figure being revised up by a further $19.6 billion over the next four years—on its own, enough to wipe out any savings from cutting the NDIS. Government spending overall now sits at 28 per cent of GDP—the highest it's been in my lifetime.

 

But here's what I find most telling: of all the things this budget reformed, the government's own spending wasn't one of them. There was no plan to shrink the size of government, no serious attempt to ask why the APS needs to keep growing so fast. Every other part of the economy was asked to adjust. The one part of the economy that gets to write its own cheque was not.

 

A few weeks ago, the Secretary of the Treasury, Jenny Wilkinson, gave the post-Budget address to the Australian Business Economists. It's worth paying attention to what she chose to talk about, because it tells you something about how this budget was actually built. Her speech was thorough, and serious, and almost entirely about one thing: who has more wealth, and who should have less. Page after page of analysis on lifetime income distribution, effective tax rates by income bracket, who benefits from negative gearing and trusts and by how much. All of it very carefully modelled.

 

But all of the modelling was based on the assumption that wealth just naturally manifests itself.

 

The Treasury Secretary did not model how these tax changes might affect the decision to start a business at all, to take the risk, to build the very thing that gets redistributed in the first place. When she did address the risk question directly, her answer was that the research didn’t support the idea that capital gains tax impacts risk-taking, beyond compensating for inflation. She mentioned one citation, and moved on. The Treasury, by its own admission elsewhere, hasn't modelled the productivity impact of these reforms at all. You can build a very rigorous case for redistribution. It's a different exercise entirely to build a case for growth, and that is what Treasury has not done.

 

Australia is already a hard place to take risks, and it's getting harder. The OECD's latest survey found that Australia has gone from being one of the five easiest countries in the OECD to start a business in the late 1990s, to below the OECD average today. The rate of creation of new companies has been falling since the mid-2000s, and its slowing down. And the conversations I've had, particularly with young people online, about the proposed changes have told me something else: there's very little understanding in this country of why entrepreneurship matters, or what risk actually does.

 

Risk is not just about business. An artist starting a new body of work, a scientist researching a brand new theory, a couple deciding to have their first baby—all of these are bets on a future that hasn't happened yet, made by people who don't know how it'll turn out. A scientist doesn't know in advance whether five years of work on an obscure problem will lead anywhere. A film director doesn't know ahead of time if his film will find an audience or flop. A new parent doesn’t know that their expected child will be healthy. They take the risk anyway—and when it pays off, we're all better off because of it.

 

What we don't see is the risk not taken. The research not pursued. The film not made. The business not started. The children that are never born. When people don't take risks, we can't know what future we've missed out on. Those losses are invisible—which is exactly why they're so easy for the government to ignore them. You can't put a line item in a Budget for the company that never existed.

 

So here's where this leaves me. I believe in the social contract—the idea that we put something in, so that we all can get something out that none of us could build alone. A hospital. A school. A road. What I don't believe is that we're currently honouring this contract. As citizens we are putting in more than ever. But we are getting back a public service that refuses to constrain its own growth, and now a Budget that didn't even attempt to try.

 

***

 

So how do we get out of all this? My suggestion for government is this. Reform the Australian Public Service. Managers and directors need the power to fire underperforming workers without a twelve-month process standing in their way. Ask honestly how much of the public service could be cut without affecting a single deliverable—I'd suggest the answer is not trivial. And the incentive to overspend has to be re-assessed: no other part of the economy works this way. If we want to restore some fairness to the worker, we have to be far more responsible with how we spend their hard-earned money.

 

On that note: I agree with Angus Taylor that income tax needs to be indexed to inflation. The top bracket of $180,000 was introduced in 2008. Had it been indexed since then, it would sit closer to $280,000 today. Instead our top tax bracket kicks in at $190,000. Every working Australian would be better off if the brackets moved with inflation. That successive governments have avoided this reform is a generational scandal.

 

And before we raise capital gains tax on business owners—what the economist Richard Holden has called "a productivity tax during a productivity crisis"—there are other ways to deal with housing affordability that don't require punishing risk. Reducing immigration. Taxing unproductive land. Plenty of credible economists have already mapped out ways to increase housing supply. None of it is exotic. All of it has been sitting on the shelf, waiting for a government willing to do something harder than redistribute what already exists.

 

***

 

Finally, tonight, I want to finish by speaking to the risk-takers in this room.

 

I've noticed, in the past few weeks, a resurgence of something pernicious that can sometimes characterise this country: tall poppy syndrome.

 

I've seen ordinary Australians, who own a modest amount of shares, likened to robber barons. I've seen small business owners described as being "subsidised" by the current tax settings.

 

This is an inversion of the truth. Everyday Australians investing in shares are doing the right thing, and should be rewarded for it, not punished for their thrift. People who take the risk to start a business are not subsidised by our tax settings—they pay income tax, company tax, payroll tax, and GST. When a capital gain finally occurs, it's on money that has already been taxed. This is no subsidy in the equation.

 

We should also remember something this country seems to have forgotten: in a free market, a business only succeeds when it gives customers something better, or cheaper, than the alternative. The value captured by the business owner is only ever a small fraction of the value created for everyone else.

 

The future is built by the saver who buys shares instead of another holiday. The tradie who decides to start a business and hire apprentices. The founder who pays himself $80,000 a year, the surgeon, the teacher, the parent who took the risk of bringing a child into the world.

 

Long live every Australian still willing to build something nobody asked them to build. They are not the burden this country needs to manage. They are the only thing that has ever paid for everything else.

Abolish Everything, Replace It With What?

By John Aziz

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

Imagine a city where racism doesn't exist. There is no social hierarchy. It is a utopia of equality and diversity—the kind of place that exists once the old order has finally been swept away. This is the premise of N.K. Jemisin's short story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” The narrator dares the reader to believe such a place could exist.

 

In the city named Um-Helat those who have encountered race, hierarchy, domination, inequality, resentment are considered dangerous, as they are familiar with the time before utopia. Such a city might exist only in fantasy. But there are people who believe it can be built in the real world. And these people comprise an ascendant wing of American politics.

 

Zohran Mamdani’s ascent has already changed New York politics. His victory has given the city's activist left a solid political footing for gaining electoral power. Last week’s Democratic Congressional primaries showed this in action. Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier each defeated establishment or incumbent-backed Democrats. Some will surely see this as a socialist breakthrough—the fruit of many years of attempts by figures like Bernie Sanders to introduce Americans to the concept of socialism. This label captures part of the story. But the deeper story is the rise of a politics of dismantling.

 

As I wrote about earlier this month, the wokeist movement that burgeoned in the 2010s and crescendoed during 2020 has mutated:

 

The new radical mood is different. It has little interest in designing a replacement order—its instinct is punitive and obstructive. The danger now is what I would call destructivism: the belief that the most necessary form of political action is to destroy the systems one regards as oppressive.

 

This new radicalism operates across a spectrum. At the softer end is the familiar progressive claim that existing institutions are structurally unjust and must be reimagined and reformed. Further along are a series of more explicit demands that go beyond reformism: abolish ICE, abolish the police, abolish prisons, abolish borders, abolish Israel, abolish capitalism (whatever that really means).

 

Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the Mamdani-backed candidates helped launch Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a campus coalition that describes itself as “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilisation.” According to a recent CNN report, she used to tweet pro-communist sentiments from a since-deleted Twitter account.

 

For neo-decolonial activists, Western civilisation reflects all of the things they regard as oppression: capitalism, Zionism, borders, prisons, police, property, universities, legal systems, national sovereignty, and the ordinary habits of middle class life.

 

To call for our civilisation's “total eradication” is to demand a revolutionary unmaking of the world that Western people inhabit. It is a politics of purification. It's hard to view this as anything other than naked destructivism. They are talking about dismantling our whole society.

 

Western civilisation is a lot of things beyond simplistic labels like “capitalist”. Western civilisation is the assumption that government is limited by law; that a person can speak, worship, publish, own property, marry, dissent, sue, vote, and be judged as an individual. Western civilisation means the various habits of argument, self-criticism, contracts, due process, scientific inquiry, and voluntary association that make modern life possible. It is the system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty worldwide.

 

During the George Floyd protests, when another user asked whether there was a better slogan than “defund the police,” Chevalier reportedly replied: “Fuck you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.” When someone suggested that abolition meant ending policing “as we know it,” she corrected them: “No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”

 

The same pattern appears in her views on borders and deportation. Chevalier reportedly reposted the claim that “a world without borders—just like a world without prisons or police—is possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward.” She reposted “Yes, literally, abolish the border.” She reposted that “all deportation is wrong.” When asked recently about that last view, she did not disavow it.

 

She also called Joe Biden a rapist, talked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag, and described interracial relationships involving white females as Black and Arab men “fetishising ugly coloniser women.”

 

One could, of course, say that these were old posts. Lots of people say stupid things online. Politicians clean up their social media histories and develop a more moderate voice when they begin asking voters for power. That is all true. But this is her worldview. This is what Zohran Mamdani and New York Democrats are effectively embracing. This is what the Democratic Party is evolving into. And there are plenty of others on this radical spectrum.

 

Aber Kawas, another Mamdani-backed candidate, recently won a Democratic primary for a New York State Senate seat. In a resurfaced clip, she described 9/11 as being caused by a “long trajectory” of capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia.

 

Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine — and previously reported for having a Nazi totenkopf tattoo, which he had for more than 20 years before covering it up — described himself as a “communist” and called all cops “bastards.”

 

And the pattern is broader than any one candidate. Calls to abolish ICE, for example, have become widespread in Democratic primaries across the country, especially among younger progressive challengers running against incumbents. So what comes after all of this desired dismantling?

 

If the police are abolished, then who deals with violence? If prisons are abolished, then where do dangerous, and predatory individuals go? If borders and border enforcement are abolished, then who is able to come in? Who is eligible to receive welfare? Will the United States even exist at all?

 

If capitalism is abolished, who decides what gets produced? Who allocates labourers to tasks? Who allocates housing, food, energy, and medicine? If Israel is abolished, what happens to the people who live there? If Western civilisation is eradicated, what replaces it? These are the questions that must be asked of the radical left. So you want to tear down Western civilisation and build a utopia? Well, what does that look like?

 

Does it look like China under Mao, whose ideological warriors targeted teachers, intellectuals, temples, books, family authority, and religious practice in the name of destroying the old order? Does it look like Soviet communism, where the Bolsheviks abolished private property and built a party-state whose police function only expanded through the secret police? Does it look like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which declared Year Zero, emptied cities, abolished money, and targeted educated people, resulting in famine, terror, and mass death? Or does it look like Hamas, on October 7th, carrying out murder, rape, kidnapping, and torture in the name of tearing down Israel?

 

A society without police still needs to find a way to enforce order. A society without prisons still needs to deal with dangerous people. A society without borders still needs rules about membership, welfare, voting rights, and obligations. A society without capitalism still needs some mechanism for allocating capital. A society that has apparently transcended Western civilisation still needs laws, authority, restraints, and institutions. The question, then, is simple: who gets that power? And what do they subsequently do with it?

 

***

 

In Jemisin's story about the city where no racism or inequality exists, a man enters who has learned about our world. The world that existed before the establishment of Um-Helat. He has read the old material: the history, the arguments, the ideas, the categories. He has encountered race, hierarchy, domination, inequality, resentment, and the whole mental apparatus of the time before utopia. In Um-Helat, this is treated as subversive. For he now carries forbidden, dangerous ideas.

 

So “social workers” come to his house and kill him. They stab him with a pike through the spine and heart, in front of his daughter. That is the post-police utopia rendered with unusual honesty. The old institutions have disappeared. But what is it replaced with? New forms of coercion more brutal than what came before.

 

 

Trump Is Getting Tired of Losing Election Cases

By Toluse Olorunnipa

Saturday, July 04, 2026

 

Earlier this year, President Trump claimed a new area of expertise: election law. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” Trump wrote on social media, and found an “irrefutable one” that he would soon present. He suggested that it would allow him to bypass Congress and gain approval from the courts to impose his will on the nation’s locally run election system, including requiring voters to show identification while casting ballots in the upcoming midterms.

 

It was a heady time for a man who obsesses over voting policy and is seeking to prove that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him. Two weeks before Trump claimed in his February 13 post to have broken new legal ground, the FBI had conducted a raid of an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials made off with more than 650 boxes of ballots as part of a criminal investigation stemming from Trump’s 2020 defeat, an unprecedented action that the president hailed as a major advance for his unsubstantiated claim that the contest was riddled with fraud. The House of Representatives had just passed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification when casting a ballot.

 

Now a sense of gloom has replaced the hope that Trump and his allies had when they thought they were on the verge of making good on his election promises, which also included eliminating most voting by mail and conducting mass purges of voter rolls. The SAVE America Act is doomed to fail in Congress, and Trump is at war with his own party over it. Nothing, so far, has come of the Fulton County case. And the president’s legal arguments are a lot more refutable than he claimed. Trump is consistently being rebuffed in court; the Justice Department has lost at least a dozen election lawsuits. Some changes to the election system that Trump laid out in a March executive order have been blocked by judges. The president is running out of time and low on options to change the country’s voting policies—which he has denigrated as “rigged” and reminiscent of developing nations’—because the courts, Congress, and the Constitution seem to keep getting in the way.

 

District-level judges have, over the past two weeks, ruled against Trump’s most significant executive orders on voting, blocked efforts by his administration to compel states to hand their voter rolls over to the Justice Department, and outlawed the Department of Homeland Security’s modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. The administration has expanded the SAVE database, which previously focused on noncitizens, by adding Social Security records and other data from native-born Americans to conduct checks of people’s voter eligibility. A judge said that the expanded system “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Other judges are undercutting Trump’s assertion that he can remake the election system—which is administered by state and local officials—as he sees fit.

 

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani wrote in blocking much of Trump’s March executive order that aimed to give the U.S. Postal Service new authority to determine which Americans could vote by mail. She underlined the words does not for extra emphasis.

 

The administration’s “efforts have been rebuked by every court to consider them,” Cathy Bissoon, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania, wrote in a ruling that blocked the Department of Justice’s push to obtain voter data from the state. Bissoon noted that 10 courts had already blocked similar efforts in other states, before punctuating her comments with a footnote: “The administration’s demands have yielded one unexpected benefit, namely, bipartisan agreement. Five of the district judges are Trump appointees.”

 

They include U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie Gallagher, whom Trump nominated to the bench in 2019. She dismissed a DOJ lawsuit against Maryland seeking its voting records. “The Court joins every court to have addressed this issue,” Gallagher wrote in determining that an unredacted voter file is not something a state is compelled to give to the federal government. Trump has also lost in the Supreme Court that he helped reshape: Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote on Monday that states could allow mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, essentially dismissing the president’s argument that such late-arriving votes fuel fraud and distrust.

 

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on Monday that the Trump administration’s cold streak is remarkable. “It is losing literally every single case it’s involved in,” Becker said. “I was a former voting section attorney in the DOJ, and I can’t remember the DOJ or any administration losing more than one or two trial-court cases a year, at the most. We are well into the double digits with this administration, and the year is not even half over yet.”

 

A Justice Department spokesperson told me that the Trump administration is “devoting significant resources” to continue the legal battle, including through its “litigation to ensure voter roll maintenance and a clear focus on ensuring that American elections are decided solely by American citizens.”

 

Publicly, the White House is shrugging off the legal setbacks. “President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement, asserting that existing laws give the Justice Department what it needs to compel states to maintain clean voter rolls. “This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House.”

 

But the president has done little to hide his frustration over his inability to make good on that pledge. The stalled SAVE America Act has led to shouting matches and standoffs over strategy with Republican lawmakers, leaving Congress in a legislative quagmire. And this year’s losing streak is a continuation of the president’s dismal record in the courts when it comes to voting cases. After Trump’s 2020-election loss, the president and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits in an effort to overturn the results. In the end, they lost almost every case. A Washington Post review of court cases a month after Joe Biden’s victory found that 86 judges had ruled against Trump or his supporters.

 

This is not to say that Trump has not had success influencing America’s electoral system, particularly in the past year. The president has elevated MAGA-friendly election deniers into the federal government, sicced the Justice Department on his political enemies, and drafted multiple agencies into his relentless hunt to substantiate his broad claims of voter fraud. The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling in April gutted the Voting Rights Act and cleared the way for several Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps and eliminate Democrat-leaning districts with large portions of minority voters. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rolled back campaign-finance restrictions on political parties, which Trump hailed as “A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS.” At the state level, pro-Trump lawmakers have implemented miniature versions of the SAVE America Act or found other ways to support the president’s vision for voting. At least 10 states have voluntarily turned over the personal information of millions of voters to the Justice Department.

 

“They’re trying to appease Trump in these ways and implement his will in the states,” Gréta Bedekovics, the former director of democracy at the Center for American Progress, told me. In a report released Monday, Bedekovics and her co-author, Devon Ombres, found that at least 12 states have passed laws requiring documentary proof of citizenship for people registering to vote or mandating citizenship-verification checks for voters since 2024.

 

The setbacks that Trump has faced in court and Congress increase the likelihood that the midterm elections will proceed as election officials have intended, even though the president has, with little evidence, continued to denigrate the system as rife with fraud. On Monday, he lamented the “tremendous loss in the Supreme Court” on late-arriving mail-in ballots and said “it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”

 

The president’s growing desperation over election policy has begun to bleed into other parts of his agenda. Last month, he abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill, suggesting that it was a “yawn” compared with legislation on elections. He has likewise encouraged Congress to block other bills, including national-security legislation, if the SAVE America Act—which Trump has deemed a “National Emergency”—is not attached. Congress left town this week mired in disagreement over how to balance the president’s election obsession with other pressing priorities, including the annual defense-spending bill.

 

Time is running out. Judges generally frown on any major actions to change voting laws in the weeks before an election. Early voting for the midterms will begin as soon as September in some states.

 

With Congress gridlocked and the courts repeatedly brushing back Trump, there is growing fear among election officials that the president may try to influence election policy in unprecedented ways, such as seizing voting machines—something Trump has said he regrets having not ordered the National Guard to do in 2020—and deploying federal agents to polling places.

 

The courts have proved to be a solid bulwark against Trump’s push to disrupt the midterm elections. But the president is nothing if not persistent when it comes to trying to bend the rules in his favor. As a result, the sanctity of the vote could rely on whether other government institutions and, ultimately, the citizenry can also mount a stand against the president’s worst impulses.

Europe’s Deadly Aversion to Air-Conditioning

National Review Online

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

Europe’s perennial climate panic has led to countless acts of economic and geopolitical self-harm, but for outright stupidity and life-threatening recklessness, the efforts by its governments to discourage air-conditioning are hard to beat.

 

AC, a product of American ingenuity, has been spreading across this country since the middle years of the past century. The boost that it has given, especially in hotter, more humid states, to livability, safety, and productivity has been a triumph. About 90 percent of U.S. households now have some form of AC, a level roughly comparable to Japan’s, although we lag South Korea. It’s a sign of the times that China is now home to more AC equipment than anywhere else and that demand for these marvelous devices is surging in India, too, albeit from a low base.

 

In Europe, however, AC is harder to find, with a penetration rate of somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, a number that masks higher rates in some of its more southerly countries. This lower take-up owes a great deal to the temperate climate that had prevailed in much of it, and quite a bit to the buildings that survive from that era. Old, grand architecture and AC are not always an easy fit. A certain snobbish/jealous disdain for the comforts of American life has also played its part. And so have electricity prices that are significantly higher than on this side of the Atlantic.

 

This expensive electricity is, in no small part, a consequence of the devotion of the European ruling class (and, regrettably, of quite a few of their subjects) to the “race” to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a race as reckless as it is futile. Participating in it has meant that European governments have made it unnecessarily difficult to install AC. Their explanation is that generating additional electricity for extra AC will mean more greenhouse gas emissions.

 

That said, a glance at France casts some doubt on that excuse. French authorities have been among the noisiest in their opposition to easier access to air-conditioning, yet roughly 70 percent of France’s electricity comes from “clean” nuclear power. There are also genuine fears that succumbing to the extra demand for AC would strain Europe’s struggling electricity grids, although such worries have not stood in the way of the campaign to bully or bribe Europeans into electric vehicles. Needless to say, a key cause of the pressure on European grids has been the billions devoted to “renewables” at the expense of the continent’s electric grid and more efficient power generation. Malinvestment is what it is.

 

That the aversion to AC should be so strong on a continent that prides itself (not always accurately) on its sense of history ought to embarrass Europeans more than it does. Humanity’s advance — there are now more than 8 billion of us spread across the globe, flourishing as never before — is a living monument to our ingenuity and to our adaptability. It is reasonable to expect that those same qualities will enable us to cope with a warming planet without abandoning the economic growth that has taken our species so far.

 

But climate panic is hostile to such thinking. Mitigating man-made climate change was always going to take time and, in all probability, technologies that either do not yet exist or are not yet ready for prime time. In the interim, we will, as in the past, have to adapt — in this case to higher temperatures, among other changes. The good news is that air-conditioning is available to play a critical role in the adaptation. If Europe’s people want to use more of it (many seem to), their governments should get out of the way. To argue otherwise makes almost as much sense as telling people who are waiting for a bus in the rain not to unfurl their umbrellas because a bus shelter will be built in due course.

 

Except this is a life-and-death issue, especially given Europe’s aging population.

 

Numbers are, as in so many areas where climate is concerned, disputed, but roughly 2,000 Americans a year die of heat-related causes, compared with an estimated 24,400 deaths in Europe’s urbanized areas in 2025 (there are other, significantly higher estimates of the toll in Europe). Much of that discrepancy can be attributed to inadequate AC. It is a striking reminder that climate policies can be more deadly than climate change.

The Dutch Lawsuit That Could Undermine U.S. Energy Security

By Michael Toth

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

For a snapshot of what has gone wrong in Europe, look no further than Amsterdam, where Greenpeace International sued the American pipeline company Energy Transfer last year.

 

Filed on the eve of a North Dakota jury trial that would culminate in a headline-grabbing nine-figure verdict against Greenpeace, the lawsuit encapsulates Europe’s defining pathologies: regulatory overreach, hostility toward energy development, and a growing willingness to weaponize the legal system against political opponents.

 

The Amsterdam-based environmental group is, in effect, seeking damages for losing a case in the United States. If Greenpeace International succeeds, it would establish a troubling precedent for relitigating legal defeats abroad, eroding American sovereignty, chilling investment, and undermining transatlantic energy security.

 

The dispute traces back to a decade-old fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline, which carries roughly 4 percent of America’s daily oil production. In 2016, Greenpeace joined efforts to stop its construction, but the protests did not remain within the bounds of constitutionally protected expression. They instead devolved into trespassing, vandalism, and violence, as the court acknowledged.

 

As one federal judge put it when weighing emergency relief, the claim that the demonstrations were entirely protected by the First Amendment “defies commonsense and reality.”

 

The disruption caused delays that cost Energy Transfer and its partner entities an estimated $7.5 billion. The company pursued litigation to recover those losses, first filing federal racketeering and state tort claims against Greenpeace and others in federal court. The federal case was later dismissed after the court concluded that the racketeering charges lacked merit and declined to exercise jurisdiction over the remaining state law claims, leaving them for state court.

 

Energy Transfer then refiled those claims in North Dakota. At trial, it presented evidence that Greenpeace disseminated false claims that the project would obstruct tribal lands and provided “massive” support for the protests, including training and equipping participants with lockboxes used to attach themselves to pipeline equipment. In March 2025, after a three-week trial, a North Dakota jury found Greenpeace liable and awarded more than $660 million, later reduced by the trial judge to $345 million.

 

The fight has now shifted overseas, where Greenpeace International is asking a Dutch court to revisit the legal battle. The case relies on the European Parliament’s 2024 directive designed to deter litigation aimed at silencing free speech and public participation, otherwise known as “strategic litigation against public participation” or “SLAPP,” and was recently allowed to proceed under similar anti-SLAPP provisions in the Dutch Civil Code law. In May, the North Dakota Supreme Court ordered Greenpeace International to refrain from attacking the jury verdict while permitting a “narrowly tailored” argument in the Netherlands regarding other aspects of the dispute.

 

Greenpeace argues that the case is about more than the North Dakota judgment, framing it as a challenge to Energy Transfer’s “repeated abusive lawsuits and defamatory statements.” But at its core, the lawsuit seeks relief from the consequences of that litigation. Greenpeace has itself acknowledged that the $345 million judgment could bankrupt the organization.

 

A ruling for Greenpeace would open the door to relitigating American verdicts in foreign courts. American legal sovereignty is weakened when foreign jurisdictions can effectively revisit domestic jury outcomes simply because one party dislikes the result.

 

It would also export Europe’s increasingly politicized legal climate to the United States. With AI-driven electricity demand rising, the need for new energy infrastructure is becoming more urgent. Investors are unlikely to finance large-scale projects if returns can be disrupted by foreign litigation long after domestic courts have resolved disputes.

 

Beyond economics lies a national-security dimension. Any precedent that destabilizes cross-border energy investment would run counter to the logic of the $750 billion U.S.–EU energy cooperation framework aimed at strengthening European energy security and reducing reliance on Russia and other unreliable suppliers.

 

Energy Transfer alone transports roughly 30 percent of U.S. natural gas, supplying fuel for millions of homes, schools, hospitals, and businesses. Without adequate pipeline infrastructure, producers are often forced to burn off excess natural gas because there is no way to transport it to market.

 

The Dakota Access Pipeline should never have been controversial in the first place. Pipelines are simply a means of transporting oil and gas; they neither create energy supply nor increase demand. The real question is (or ought to be) whether societies have access to affordable, abundant, and reliable energy.

 

Europeans ought to know better. When Greenpeace was protesting the pipeline in 2016, the Netherlands still obtained nearly a quarter of its energy from Russia. Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine transformed that dependence into a strategic liability, helping drive energy prices sharply higher across the continent. Millions of Europeans struggled to heat their homes, and cold-related hardship rose significantly.

 

That is the trajectory of energy unrealism. It’s a story that could repeat itself in the United States if foreign courts gain the power to unwind the consequences of domestic energy disputes after the fact.

Sunday, July 5, 2026

A DSA America? Not Okay

By James Lileks

Sunday, July 05, 2026

 

When I got off the T in Boston last Sunday, I saw a table near the exit with some fliers and signs. A cheerful young lady handed me a piece of paper, and as I took it, she asked, “Considering voting socialist this November?” The flier had a red rose, the symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America, and I handed it back as if it was a piece of blotter paper soaked with Ebola and said “Oh GOD no.”

 

“That’s okay!” she chirped as I walked away. Glad to know. Of course, it won’t be okay if the DSA takes over everything, because then every area of life will be a miserable struggle session to ensure uniform purity. People will be trashing grocery stores and destroying all the eggs because the Chicken-American Community has not expressed the right opinion on Gaza. That will be Monday; Tuesday, they will burn cars to protest inflation-adjusted rent hikes. Wednesday, they will want to throw eggs at a rally of fascists — you know, the people protesting a mandate to install a drag queen in every elementary school to lead everyone in a fierce rendition of The Internationale every morning — except of course the eggs were all destroyed in the prior protest. Thursday, they will occupy the offices of all the grocery store chains to protest Egg Insecurity.

 

I have a long-standing aversion to collectivists and socialists and other flavors of Marxism, because A) it’s dreary, boring nonsense cranked out by a hairy fool who probably had the B.O. of a donkey in August; B) it views humans as vast murmuring mobs, devoid of individuality; and C) I’m supposed to follow some 19th century white guy instead of a 20th century black intellectual like Thomas Sowell? Fine, racist.

 

At the heart is the hammer and sickle, which terrified me as a child. It was a good symbol of the enemy: They either want to cut your throat or hit you on the head. It’s like a political movement whose symbols are a straight-edge razor and a claw hammer.

 

The DSA is more of the same, as their new platform suggests. Give more money to everything that doesn’t work, nationalize every industry that is successful, cut open Elon Musk to get all the golden eggs, turn on the infinite money machine, and replace Presidents’ Day with something that honors some frumpy collectivist who shot a cop and fled to Cuba.

 

If you doubt their ultimate objectives, well, there’s always a tweet. DSA candidates are rarely held to account for their stupid tweets. It wouldn’t matter if they were, but it would be nice.

 

“So when you tweeted, ‘I hate America and want to destroy it,’ what were you implying?”

 

“You can cherry-pick all you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that housing insecurity has created generational trauma among marginally served people with intestinal maladies, or Persons of Cholera, but I’d like to point out that I’ve grown in my thinking and intended that to be a dialectical metaphor for the power imbalances that characterize our oligarchy.”

 

“Right, but your next tweet says, and I quote, ‘and I mean that about hating and destroying, not as a dialectical metaphor for the power imbalances that characterize our oligarchy.’”

 

“Again, this isn’t putting a roof over people’s heads or soup on the table.”

 

I’m sure they think there’s a direct relationship between destroying the American system and putting soup in a bowl for the soupless, or the unsouped, as they’re probably called now. But as long as we’re talking about that, CNN recently ran a piece about DSA darling Darializa Avila Chevalier’s past tweet history:

 

In April 2020, Avila Chevalier shared a post lamenting that people wouldn’t accept communism over a lack of varieties of soup — a reference to the critique that the political system leads to fewer consumer choices.

 

“I just cannot get over the fact that the universe has foisted upon us the perfect illustration of literally every failing of capitalism and people are still like we can’t be communists cuz there won’t be enough types of soup,” the post she retweeted read.

 

Oh, you say, that explains it! She’s stupid! No smart person can talk about the manifest failures of capitalism and off-handedly admit we have a bewildering multiplicity of soup options. The nation abounds in soup choices because of capitalism. Under communism, there is one soup, and they are out of it.

 

Luxury beliefs arise when you think that nationalizing Campbell’s and handing the planning, manufacturing, and distribution of soup to The People results in anything other than bare shelves. The guys who think they’ll be writing poems about soup or designing clever soup labels after the revolution will be sent to chicken-plucking farms. Why? The automated plucking machinery stopped working because the guys who knew how it worked were either purged for saying men cannot give birth through their urethras, or quit because the new egalitarian society decreed that people with technical expertise shouldn’t make more than the people who scoop feed out of bags and dump it on the floor. Now that the automatic machines don’t work, it’s a good thing, because it created new jobs — why, Columbia U’s entire class of ’34 is out there now, plucking — and it has reduced the supply of chickens available for consumption, leading to people “exploring vegan options” in the sense that a sack-of-bones alley cat digging fish guts out of a trash can is “exploring piscine cuisine.”

 

All of this is acceptable, of course, because the goal is equity, racial spoils, and reduced standards of living to save the planet, except for the tireless inner-party members who simply must have real coffee and proper jam and air conditioning to keep their strength up for The Struggle.

 

But why would there need to be a struggle after the revolution? The dewy-eyed young DSA voter asks. Ah, child, just you wait. That’s when the real work begins. Those big pits lined with quicklime aren’t going to fill themselves, you know.