The ‘Consumer Socialism’ Trap

By Idrees Kahloon

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

This past January, in his inaugural address, Zohran Mamdani memorably promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” In the parlance of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member, collectivism is a good thing. It is not meant to recall Stalin’s seizure of farms, which resulted in mass famine, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which also resulted in mass famine. American socialism today is different. The DSA still formally aspires to “popular control of resources and production,” otherwise known as seizing the means of production. Yet the New York City mayor’s attention-grabbing policy proposals—to freeze rents, establish city-run grocery stores, and pay for universal child care—are aimed at a more modest goal: socializing the cost of consumption.

 

“Consumer socialism” does not liberate workers from the exploitation of owners; it liberates consumers from the burden of prices. Although its advocates may claim inspiration from both the Great Society tradition of the Democratic Party and Nordic-style democratic socialism, consumer socialism is really a muddle of the two. The Great Society emphasized poverty reduction through means-tested programs such as Medicaid and Head Start; consumer socialism is meant for all. And unlike the Nordic welfare states, which are supported by high levels of taxation for all workers, Mamdani’s approach aims to raise sufficient revenue from corporations and the rich. Consumer socialism tries to have it all: universal social provisions without universally steep taxes. It retains, like other forms of socialism, a supreme optimism in the ability of state planners to shape markets. Where the old central planners failed, the new ones think they will succeed.

 

Mamdani is only one of consumer socialism’s proponents. The newly elected mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, is a former transit organizer who campaigned on both universal child care and spending $1 billion to pay for union-built public housing. The leading candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., is DSA-backed Janeese Lewis George, who also calls for universal child care and massive production of below-market-rate housing. (She is open to the idea of government-run grocery stores as well.) Mamdani, Wilson, and Lewis George have claimed the mantle not of Stalinists or Maoists, but of a different subspecies of socialist—the “sewer socialists” who ran Milwaukee for decades starting in 1910. They made peace with the capitalist superstructure and devoted themselves to good, incorruptible governance and reliable public infrastructure—sewage systems, yes, but also parks, libraries, and fire departments. In their time, they were skewered for practicing “slowcialism.” In a speech he gave to mark his 100th day in office, Mamdani labeled “our 2026 answer to sewer socialism” as “pothole politics”—doing mundane jobs, such as filling more than 100,000 potholes, because “government is not too busy, not too self-important, not too mired in paperwork to fix the problems of this city.”

 

Sewer socialism is attracting renewed interest in America because it is too boring to threaten capitalism. Lenin despised its predecessor, municipal socialism, for much the same reason. In the late 19th century in English and German cities, socialist administrators operated public utilities such as gasworks, electric trams, and even city-owned slaughterhouses. This variation of socialism aimed to blunt the rapacity of capitalism rather than sharpen its contradictions and hasten the coming revolution. Under municipal socialism, Lenin wrote in 1907, “attention is diverted to the sphere of minor local questions, being directed not to the question of the class rule of the bourgeoisie, nor to the question of the chief instruments of that rule, but to the question of distributing the crumbs thrown by the rich bourgeoisie for the ‘needs of the population.’ ”

 

Lenin’s ghost would be similarly unimpressed with contemporary American socialism—too much democracy, too little murder. Still, there’s nothing small-bore about consumer socialists’ desire to overhaul the economy. In their view, high prices are not market failures but moral ones, the result of greed and corruption, which can be vanquished with the right intention. The ideal state is a kind of Lake Wobegon, where every price is below average.

 

***

 

One irony of consumer socialism is that it is better tailored to the laptop classes—which now form the backbone of the Democratic Party—than to the American left’s traditional working-class base. The upper classes disproportionately use child-care centers, while lower-income households rely more on stay-at-home parents and relatives. This is partly because wealthier people can more easily afford formal care services. But not every community may even want to send their kids to a child-care center. Some evidence suggests that Latina mothers prefer to have a relative look after their children, even when cost is no issue. Rent stabilization and controls apply to units, not occupants—which in New York has sometimes meant showering benefits on celebrities and on politicians, such as former Governor David Paterson and the late Representative Charles Rangel. Upper-middle-class meritocrats are generally not exhausted by capitalism. They are exhausted by the costs of rent and child care in desirable neighborhoods—bills that the preexisting means-tested welfare state would never have covered.

 

Mamdani will probably fall short of implementing his vision: Budget constraints mean that buses are unlikely to be free, as he promised; his child-care proposal received funds to last for just two years so far; and New York, a city of more than 8 million people, will have, at most, five city-run grocery stores by the end of his first term. Despite his pledges to tax the rich, he is limited in his ability to do so, and although his recently passed pied-à-terre tax might raise $500 million a year, universal child care would, according to his own campaign, cost $6 billion a year.

 

The natural habitat of consumer socialism—solidly left-wing American cities—imposes serious limits on its ambitions. Unlike the federal government, cities typically cannot run huge deficits year after year, and must quickly reckon with promises that cannot be paid for. In 2018, New York City officials rolled out a voucher program with an unwieldy name, CityFHEPS, and the laudable goal of decreasing homelessness by subsidizing housing. In 2019, the annual cost of the program was budgeted at $25 million; its projected cost last fiscal year reached $1.7 billion, as the number of recipients and the cost per voucher increased simultaneously. Faced with the city’s daunting budget deficit, Mamdani reversed his campaign pledge to expand CityFHEPS and has instead scrambled for ways to hold costs down.

 

Many risks lurk in consumer socialism’s promises of cheap goods and services. If New York City or Washington, D.C., rapidly increases subsidies for child care, for instance, without expanding the number of approved providers, the existing ones will charge more to meet excessive demand. Another complication is that the more generous any city benefits are, the more people will move across municipal limits to use them—creating a cost spiral.

 

The sewer socialists chose their targets carefully. Milwaukee’s mayors had a strong economic rationale for pursuing public ownership of utilities: avoiding the massive, duplicative costs of rival water networks without letting a private monopoly gouge consumers. In contrast, publicly run grocery stores are interventions in a low-margin, highly competitive industry. In his 100-days speech, Mamdani pledged, “At our stores, eggs will be cheaper. Bread will be cheaper. Grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation.” But the mathematics of running retail outlets might prove more flummoxing than he realizes. Many aspects of life in the Soviet Union have come to be retroactively romanticized; its grocery stores are not among them.

 

Optimists think—or hope—that Mamdani-style socialists have a greater awareness of economic constraints than they let on. My colleague Derek Thompson recently said that Mamdani may be sporting “the abundance mullet, which is to say, economic populism in the front and abundance in the back.” Abundance is a term that Thompson coined in this magazine to describe policies that expand supply through public and private investment and deregulation—essentially supply-side economics for liberals. The idea is that Mamdani would win popular support by freezing rents—an idea almost unanimously derided by economists—while simultaneously boosting home-building. But the second half of this bargain may never materialize. Although New York’s Rent Guidelines Board has approved a promised freeze for nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, Mamdani’s efforts to permit more home-building have been plodding by comparison. Absent new supply, restrictions on rent increases will limit mobility for those who receive the benefit, and increase costs for those who do not.

 

***

 

Plans are already afoot to scale consumer socialism across America. National Democrats have realized that the high cost of living makes for a powerful midterm-election theme, and some in the party prefer to address it with subsidies and price controls rather than measures that increase personal incomes and economic growth. The Congressional Progressive Caucus recently released its “New Affordability Agenda,” which includes plans to make child care a nationwide entitlement—staffed by day-care workers paid as much as teachers—and to create a new set of housing subsidies for rent and down payments. Progressives also argue that this can be financed without tax hikes on ordinary people, but through targeted taxes on plutocrats and corporations. Enacting any such changes nationwide would require many more votes than the caucus currently has. And the problem with implementing such plans at the local level is that the rich can always decamp to Austin or Miami, as some of California’s billionaires are threatening to do over a ballot measure that would take 5 percent of their wealth.

 

Perhaps cities like New York will refine a functional version of consumer socialism, in which subsidies are balanced with enormous supply-side expansions in the number of homes and child-care centers, leaving everyone better off. Perhaps capitalism can be appropriately fettered within the confines of a select few cities, inspiring a nonviolent, nationwide socialist revolution. That would be a remarkable triumph for Mamdani’s consumerist ideology, which wears the transgressive label of socialism but is born primarily out of anger over prices (and an innate American antipathy toward taxes). American collectivism may be, as Mamdani promised, warmer than rugged individualism. It will certainly be warmer than Soviet or Maoist collectivism. It could also be just as unworkable. And it will certainly be extraordinarily expensive.

With Graham Platner, Democrats Got Drunk on the Beer Test

By Jonathan Chait

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

Last September, the progressive strategist Morris Katz confessed to The New Yorker that the process by which he decided that Graham Platner was qualified to run for U.S. Senate required less time than drinking a cup of coffee. Actually, it seems to have been less a confession than a boast. “Within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate,’” Katz recalled.

 

In the 10 months that have followed, a procession of unflattering stories have made clear how dreadfully irresponsible it was for Democrats to entrust the task of flipping what seems like the most necessary seat to secure their potential Senate majority to a man who had never run for office or led an organization of any size. The almost-certain final straw is a Politico report that alleges Platner raped a woman named Jenny Racicot in 2021. The story includes messages referring to the incident sent by Racicot two years later, before Platner contemplated running for office. Platner called any allegation of nonconsensual behavior “categorically untrue.”

 

There is no longer much question as to whether Platner is suitable for public office, and even less question as to whether plucking him from political obscurity made any sense. A more pertinent question is: What could possibly drive a professional political strategist to support such a rapid promotion in mere minutes?

 

One plausible reason appears to be political ideology. Katz and his allies have sought out candidates who are willing to castigate the Democratic Party for selling out the working class—which necessitates, or at least militates toward, candidates who have no experience inside the party. And whereas this ideological orientation requires an intensity of commitment, it does not require a mastery of policy detail.

 

Dan Moraff, one of the strategists who helped select and vet Platner, “wants his candidates to back Medicare for All and characterize the Israel-Hamas conflict as a genocide, but beyond that, doesn’t believe voters care about detailed proposals,” The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Having a policy agenda that could fit comfortably on a Post-it note without omitting any important details certainly speeds up the process. Platner, indeed, has boiled down nearly all political problems to the perfidy of sinister oligarchs. Whatever the merits of this worldview, it does not demand much knowledge.

 

But a second, at least as important reason for Platner’s lightning-fast ratification was that he has the desired look for the part. Donald Trump has described liking his appointees to come right out of “central casting,” by which he means that they look like a Hollywood version of the position they are filling.

 

Katz and Moraff have taken an almost literal approach to this “central casting” criteria, searching for candidates whom the camera loves and then offering them to an adoring progressive fanbase. Platner’s qualifications in this regard are obvious. He has a masculine baritone, and works with his hands. Last year, Katz filmed a video of his new protégé shucking oysters, chopping wood, swinging kettlebells, and speaking directly to the camera in a muddy sweatshirt about how the oligarchy had screwed their beloved state.

 

The performance helped make Platner a political star. “I flew here to profile Graham Platner,” wrote Ana Marie Cox in The New Republic last September, “because his announcement video for his Senate campaign (produced by the same company that’s done work for Zohran Mamdani) struck the same deep chord in me as it did in the millions of others who watched it.” A stream of adulatory profiles followed.

 

It soon emerged that Katz’s abbreviated assessment of Platner had missed, or overlooked, troubling details. He had posted inflammatory messages on Reddit and gotten a tattoo associated with Nazi war criminals. Platner claimed that his past indiscretions were the products of post-traumatic stress, and promised that he was a changed man with no additional skeletons to hide.

 

More skeletons kept turning up, though. Platner had sexted with at least half a dozen women after he was married, and reportedly lied about what he knew about his tattoo. He assured Senate backers that no additional negative stories would come out, only for his promise to crumble again.

 

Platner’s enthusiasts initially continued to support his campaign and reject the evidence of his misconduct. When The New York Times reported that a past girlfriend alleged he had physically abused her, the paper dismissed her testimony on account of her being a Republican, ignoring the discrepancies in Platner’s own defense.

 

Matt Stoller, a researcher at the left-wing American Economic Liberties Project, wrote on X, “Graham Platner represents a rejection of Dem HR lady politics.” In a follow-up post, Stoller apologized for the impolitic term, but explained that he meant the party had fallen prey to a form of corporate rule that had especially harmed men. Human-resources departments, he wrote, “increasingly were forced to become bagmen for monopolists who hated labor.” Despising these departments, he reasoned, was actually progressive, because they represented the interests of the oligarchy.

 

At the risk of apologizing for the corporate power structure, one function of the HR department is to ensure the company does not hire somebody whose background contains multiple firing offenses.

 

In reality, Platner was the Democratic-candidate equivalent of the grinning empty suit who gets the job after a handshake because the boss likes the cut of his jib. He looked like the authentic working-class hero so many progressives wanted, so he had to be one. George Burns once quipped, “When you’re playing a role you’ve got to be honest. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” In politics, people call this “authenticity.” But maybe looking and sounding like a working-class dude who hates big corporations is not adequate qualification for high office—or even proof that you can be taken at your word.

Card Sharps

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

There are too many absurdities in the saga of Folarin Balogun’s suspension, and unsuspension, from the World Cup to get very indignant about it.

 

Although I’m willing to get a little indignant. You know me.

 

Balogun is the star striker for the U.S. national soccer team. In the squad’s last match, he was handed a very questionable red card for a foul on an opposing player. That disqualified him from playing in tonight’s round of 16 elimination match against Belgium, the highest-stakes game in American soccer history.

 

The U.S. had lost its best player under dubious circumstances at the worst possible time in a World Cup on its own turf. “Time for the federal government to get involved,” the president surmised, as he often does.

 

Donald Trump reportedly phoned FIFA President Gianni Infantino in the hours after Balogun’s suspension. (You’ll remember Infantino as the man who presented him with the, cough, inaugural FIFA Peace Prize.) What was said between them is unclear, but on Sunday the organization announced that Balogun’s suspension had been changed to probation for a period of one year. He’s eligible to play against Belgium.

 

This will be the first time since 1962 that a player sent off in a World Cup match will take the pitch in his team’s next contest.

 

The first absurdity is that this is the rare Trump scandal in which the president isn’t the most crooked figure involved. That would be FIFA, a byword for institutional corruption to the great majority of the world that follows soccer avidly. Typically that corruption is financial in nature, but the organization isn’t above bending the rules for star players the way it did for Balogun.

 

Ask Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the biggest names in the sport. He received a red card in a qualifying match last fall that should have made him ineligible for Portugal’s first two World Cup matches, tantamount to the NBA suspending Michael Jordan for the first few rounds of the playoffs. Presto change-o: FIFA found a way to postpone the punishment. Ronaldo could play after all.

 

A second absurdity has to do with the circumstances of Balogun’s American pedigree. He’s of Nigerian ancestry, grew up in London, has played professionally in Europe—but, through a twist of fate, was born in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was visiting the U.S. during her pregnancy and tried to board a flight home to the U.K. when she was seven months along, but was refused by the airline. After she was forced to stay put until she delivered, her son became a natural-born American.

 

In other words, one day after the Supreme Court affirmed birthright citizenship under the 14^th Amendment, our anti-immigrant president felt obliged to go to bat for someone whom he and his supporters fervently believe shouldn’t count as American. Don’t tell me the cosmos doesn’t have a sense of humor.

 

The third absurdity has to do with the nature of the call between Trump and Infantino.

 

Sources swore to Axios’ Marc Caputo that the president phoned the FIFA chief merely “to understand the rules, didn’t make a specific ask, & was told it was being independently reviewed.” Laying aside the question of why Trump needed to call the highest authority in global soccer to have a rule explained to him, I bet the sources are right—technically. The words “I’m asking you to overturn Balogun’s suspension” probably didn’t escape Trump’s lips.

 

But what about “FIFA can make a lot of money in America, unless our people hold a grudge because Balogun was ruled out”? Or “If we lose to Belgium, I’m going to smear FIFA by saying that the Cup was rigged because of the dodgy red card”?

 

Which, by the way, the president has now admitted he was planning to do if the suspension hadn’t been lifted.

 

The idea that he didn’t pressure Infantino, explicitly or otherwise, during their chat is preposterous. Sports journalist Ben Jacobs was told that “it was communicated directly to the FIFA President that Trump felt the punishment was unjust” and that “other White House figures also lobbied FIFA.” (Among them, reportedly: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.) The New York Times claimed the president “asked [Infantino] to review the suspension,” at least, and Trump helpfully admitted to that as well in comments to the press on Monday morning.

 

I did not think we were going to get a lesson on postliberalism from the World Cup, of all places. But here we are.

 

Two wrongs.

 

It’s important to the ethical calculus here to understand that the red card awarded to Balogun really was specious. This isn’t a case of the president inventing a nonexistent problem, like a “rigged election,” to create a pretext for some dubious executive intervention. America’s new soccer hero was treated unjustly.

 

“This was not a red card offense,” a professional referee who reviewed the incident explained to ESPN. Yes, Balogun drove his foot into an opponent’s ankle, but he did so accidentally while going for the ball. Referee Raphael Claus didn’t issue a red card in the moment, in fact. It was assessed only after he watched slow-motion replays of the incident to determine the point of contact—which, according to ESPN’s expert, is a violation of instant-replay protocols.

 

To make matters worse, per the Times, Claus had been publicly accused before of “match fixing in Brazil by giving out irregular red cards. Brazilian authorities and FIFA have found no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Claus, but Mr. Trump brought up those allegations in his call with Mr. Infantino.”

 

And as the cherry on top, soccer god Lionel Messi made the same sort of foot-to-ankle contact with an opponent during a play earlier in the tournament. Guess what his punishment was.

 

An obvious wrong was done and now FIFA has undone it. Essentially, the organization was left with a choice between two asterisks. Had Belgium defeated the United States without Balogun, American fans would have claimed that their team’s ouster from the tournament was tainted; as it is, should the United States defeat Belgium with Balogun, it’ll be Belgian (and many other international) fans alleging unfairness. It’s already begun: The Belgians are mad, mad, mad at the extraordinary leniency shown in this case, which forced their team to suddenly scrap its game plan after preparing to face an American side without its star player.

 

Trapped between two bad potential outcomes, FIFA opted for the one that required curing the original injustice. (Which, not coincidentally, sets them up for a win-win. Either Belgium will beat a U.S. team at full strength, removing any asterisk, or the U.S. will advance and soccermania will reach a fever pitch in the world’s richest country.) That’s defensible ethically—or would have been, if not for two things.

 

One is that it’s not clear that FIFA’s own bylaws allow for the sort of appeal that led to Balogun’s suspension being stayed. The reprieve was issued under a rule that permits probation for “disciplinary measures,” but some interpret that as applying to off-field behavior, not on-field offenses like fouls. And Belgian soccer authorities have pointed to another provision that says a one-match suspension after a red card applies automatically, not discretionarily.

 

To repeat: No red cards issued during the Cup have been lifted since 1962. It cannot be that the call on Balogun was so historically bad that it required an administrative intervention not seen since the Kennedy administration.

 

Which brings us to the other unethical element, the president’s intervention.

 

The U.S. national soccer team isn’t a federal agency. It’s governed by the United States Soccer Federation, a nonprofit. The USSF surely has its own lawyers who could have lobbied FIFA for action on the red card. That Trump would assert himself in this matter anyway is everything that’s dumb and ugly about his politics.

 

It’s corrupt, exploiting state power to secure an outcome in an area where the state has no business. It’s boorish, throwing America’s weight around to get something he wants without regard for anyone else’s interests. It’s narcissistic, injecting himself into another cultural spectacle that shouldn’t be politicized by his involvement. And it’s self-sabotaging, as global opinion is destined to turn against Team USA now that its success is tied to Trump’s tactics of squeezing FIFA.

 

“Why would Belgium want to play our team without our best player?” American fans scoffed on Sunday night as Belgians raised a ruckus about Balogun’s reinstatement. “Why would Americans want to win by having Daddy Trump put a thumb on the scale?” Belgians might reply. Surely other teams have been victimized by questionable red cards during this tournament. When do those get overturned?

 

The red card on Balogun was wrong. The president smearing Trump-stink on a World Cup that the entire planet had been enjoying to help the U.S. team is also wrong. Do two wrongs make a right?

 

Americans seem to think so, yes.

 

We’re all postliberals now.

 

You won’t find much angst about Trump leaning on FIFA among U.S soccer fans on social media, including people who are normally harsh critics of his. Sportsball is low stakes, everyone’s rooting for America, and the red card was bogus: How angry can one be at an unethical process when it produced an ethical outcome, Balogun’s reinstatement?

 

But that’s the heart of the difference between liberalism and postliberalism. “Liberalism cares about process, postliberalism cares only about results,” as I’ve said before. In a liberal system of justice, there are rules one has to follow in appealing an unjust outcome and that appeal will be considered on the merits. Whereas in a postliberal system, the president dials up the appellate judge and asks him to “review” an outcome he doesn’t like, with both parties understanding that the judge will benefit if he rules the president’s way.

 

“A proper result validates improper tactics” is just a fancier way of saying that the ends justify the means. Postliberalism is the conviction that certain outcomes are so righteous that they must be pursued even at the price of breaking traditional rules. (It’s what authoritarians mean when they mumble about “knowing what time it is,” and what progressives intend when they chatter about court-packing.) That’s the Balogun matter in a nutshell.

 

Likewise, it’s distinctly postliberal that Trump and his cronies would take such a considerable—and I do mean considerable—interest in the case. All presidents like to see national sports teams do well, partly out of patriotism and partly because good vibes among voters can only benefit them politically. But I have a hard time imagining George W. Bush “instructing his team to find a way to lift [Balogun’s] suspension,” let alone dialing up Gianni Infantino to complain personally. And that’s not because Bush belonged to the “uniparty” or didn’t love America as much as Trump, or whatever nonsense the chud right might tell you.

 

It’s because Bush, being a traditional conservative, shared the classically liberal belief that there are spheres of life in which government shouldn’t intervene. Postliberalism recognizes no such distinction, especially under a cult of personality like the current one. Trump embodies the country, supposedly, and so any sort of controversy in which it’s involved—public or private, political or cultural—is fair game for his intervention. That’s why his interest in the soccer team’s success is so intense, I’m sure: To a nationalist strongman like the president, their success is his success. And doubly so now that he’s squeezed Infantino for them.

 

Even the White House’s case to FIFA on Balogun’s behalf reeks of postliberal demagoguery and paranoia. If corrupt motives had driven referee Raphael Claus to issue the red card, one might think he would have done so eagerly and immediately rather than wait until he’d reviewed the play on slow-motion video. In the Trump White House, however, all adverse outcomes are presumptively due to bias and cheating. And so, rather than simply challenge the call on the merits, “articles examining previous controversies involving the Brazilian referee circulated among senior government officials as they evaluated every possible argument.”

 

I would have guessed that U.S. soccer fans would be annoyed at Trump for inserting himself into the Balogun controversy, and not just because everyone to the left of Sen. Tommy Tuberville is sick to death of him inserting himself into everything. The American team has played well enough thus far to establish itself as a solid second-tier power, not quite on par with the traditional giants but capable of making things interesting against them over the course of 90 minutes. This World Cup had been a coming-out party of sorts for the United States as a team to be reckoned with.

 

Now, on the day of the biggest match in U.S. soccer history, that success has been overshadowed by a story about the president making sure that our guys get special immunity from bad calls that weaker nations don’t get. And if you believe (which I don’t) that FIFA might have overturned Balogun’s suspension even if Trump hadn’t intervened, it’s worse: By creating an appearance of impropriety here, he’s delegitimized what would have been a meritorious reprieve.

 

It’s all here, in short, every grubby little postliberal pathology wrapped up in an unlikely, and unusually silly, minor scandal. Discrediting institutions by aggressively politicizing them. Prioritizing short-term wins over long-term credibility. Reducing questions of right and wrong to crude “us and them” tribal considerations. And alienating every other tribe needlessly by behaving with imperious just-try-to-stop-us arrogance in insisting on getting one’s way.

 

“If you want to know how Trumpists can hoot and cackle over their side ‘winning’ based on corruption, just look at the universal smirking of Americans over the FIFA decision,” my friend Patrick Frey wrote of the Balogun matter. A country that elected Donald Trump twice was destined to have few qualms about how he’s handled this. We’re all—well, almost all—postliberals now.

Goodbye, Graham

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, July 07, 2026

 

If you’re as much of a Norm Macdonald fan as I am, then you can fill in the blanks. And no, Maine’s presumptive (heavy emphasis) Democratic nominee for Senate against admirably resilient incumbent Susan Collins hasn’t been accused of invading Poland yet, but at this point, who knows what thoughts lurk in his heart? When I last signed off the Platner beat in Maine, I ended with these words:

 

Platner is a creation of young Ivy League socialists living in Washington, D.C., not an organic expression of his state’s sensibilities. He is the Democratic elite’s condescending idea of what a working-class hero ought to be; when everyone noticed around the time of his campaign’s launch that he seemed like he’d come out of central casting, it’s because he quite literally was cast in this role.

 

What does that mean for Susan Collins? Nobody can know for sure yet. Among other things, we’re probably not even done learning more about Graham Platner. Ask me what I think after 5 p.m. on July 13.

 

So now after Independence Day, just in time for final calls to be made by Democratic Top Men, out comes the confirmation from Politico that Graham Platner’s repulsive sexual aggression in human relationships is not merely confined to Republican operatives like ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield, or burglars (whom he once promised to rape, “but not in a gay way,” presumably more like a Viking), or even his new wife (whom he was stepping out on with multiple sexting relationships on Kik as recently as last August).

 

No, we finally have the Democratic nail in the coffin, testimony from a Mainer named Jenny Racicot who was in a long-term relationship with Platner. No “D.C. operative” she, not like those who promoted and claimed to know Platner best, those Ivy League progressive Democratic Socialists searching for “blue-collar authenticity” over beers at Tune Inn. Racicot is just a normie Democrat local in Maine, who claims to have been raped by Platner, who — according to her — drunkenly broke into her house a few years ago to force himself upon her:

 

Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.

 

“I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” she said. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”

 

Platner denied the allegations.

 

Yes, no doubt he would. Democrats are now rushing — at this incredibly late hour, Swalwell-like — to un-endorse him. (Among those is perpetually beset Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, who between this and his bosom buddy Swalwell seems to make the most curious of Capitol-area friends.) And, of course, the darker truth is that Democratic grandees have known about this for months if not years. The Jenny Racicot story was in fact part of the bait that the New York Times used to lure Lyndsey Fifield onto the record to advance the — whispered about, but still verboten in progressive spaces — reputation that Platner has long had in D.C. (note: not Maine) as an aggressively braggadocious rapey bartender-type. (Fifield has written about how the Times promised her she would not go on the record alone, then hung her out to dry.)

 

Psychological profiles sometimes require care to properly assemble. The mental path of a guy who proudly sported a Nazi Totenkopf on his chest until last November, when he decided to retcon his downwardly mobile antisocial life to that of a progressive “working class Joe,” is distinctly easier to navigate. Platner is not so much a recognizable human as he is a recognizable hoax, one familiar to all D.C. natives, born from the dreams of frustrated Washington Democratic aspirant activists, a Clayfaced mold upon which the likes of Jon Favreau and the Pod Save America latte class can cast their dreams: “This is what real America is like — a foulmouthed fascist bartender who apes our lingo and attaboys us over free beers!”

 

Let us not kid ourselves. As horrifying as Graham Platner’s entire failson life story has proven out to be, you are finally hearing about this final damning take — with names and ironclad sourcing, free and clear of “it’s GOP tricksiness!” as an excuse — for one reason only: because that 5:30 p.m. July 13 deadline for ballot replacement is still a week away. The Democratic establishment, knowing no other way to stop Platner and the progressives from squandering this seat, are unloading it all now, in one last mighty attempt to push him out and replace him with a blue-coded functionary.

 

They might succeed in pushing Platner out. But I doubt they’ll win the Senate race in Maine now, no matter what happens. Mainers weren’t enthusiastic about Governor Janet Mills. Jared Golden has retired from his ME-2 congressional seat and disclaimed all intent of getting into the race. Can Angus King be somehow cloned in time for July 13?

 

Apologies, therefore, for the abbreviated Carnival this week. I had other things planned, but events are moving fast now in Maine. Up until now, I felt quietly assured that Platner was doomed, and I was looking forward to chronicling the carnage up through November. Now I know he’s doomed and am waiting to see whether he’s a coward, or if he’ll take the honest man’s way out and retire this week into instant shameful obscurity. Let’s hope not!

Democrats Run Out of Excuses for Platner

National Review Online

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

When the initial story about Graham Platner’s abusive relationships with former girlfriends broke, the Democratic Senate candidate made very unconvincing assurances to nervous Democrats that no other shoes would drop.

 

They chose to believe him out of partisan obligation, and now they are paying the price.

 

Over the weekend, Platner’s campaign, without offering any explanation, canceled all of his campaign events. On Monday, Politico reported on the latest bombshell — an ex-girlfriend who said he sexually assaulted her while drunk in 2021. While denying the allegation, Platner said, “Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward. . . .”

 

The bell almost always tolls for campaigns that pause to consider the best path forward.

 

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. As Platner surged toward the nomination in the Maine Senate race in the past several months, Democrats did all they could to talk themselves into the idea that the dirtball socialist who had a Nazi tattoo for decades was just what the party needed.

 

At a time when working-class white voters were turned off by milquetoast Democrats, the theory has gone, maybe they need somebody with an edge. And so they played up the part-time oysterman with a gravely voice and a military background, and looked the other way at his poisonous social media posts and obvious lies about supposedly not knowing the meaning of his own tattoo. He was a changed man, a good and decent man who had overcome emotional turmoil after his military service.

 

There was never any evidence to support this politically convenient narrative about a man who was sexting with other women after his marriage just a few a years ago.

 

In the latest damning accusation, Jenny Racicot, a resident of Maine, said that in 2021, Platner showed up at her home intoxicated after she asked him not to come over, and then he forced himself on her, over her repeated objections. Racicot said she struggled with reporting the incident but had shared details of the encounter with others, including an ex-boyfriend who corroborated her account to Politico. Her story is also supported by additional messages, emails, and documents.

 

Last month, the New York Times reported on Platner’s pattern of abusive relationships. But the article primarily focused on accusations from Lyndsey Fifield, a Republican, which gave Democrats an excuse to dismiss her claims. But that is impossible to do with Racicot.

 

“One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,” Racicot told Politico. “I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person.”

 

The first spate of stories about Platner and women surfaced before the Democratic primary, but after his opponent, Governor Janet Mills, had dropped out. Platner duly swept to victory, but everyone in the know realize that there was an asterisk associated with his win, pending other revelations. Now, Democrats have a couple of days to convince Platner to quit while they can still do a candidate switcheroo under state law.

 

Assuming this happens, the process will be ungainly, but Democrats literally can’t do any worse than Graham Platner, the desperately flawed candidate they all pretended to believe in because he’d found a way to surf the party’s socialist wave.

The Pentagon Must Undertake Its Own Transformation

By Bing West

Tuesday, July 7, 2026

 

Note: The following excerpt is adapted from Bing West’s book Cat 5: The 2033 War.

 

America is on the path to spend the smallest share of GDP on defense since 1937, a year when the country was trapped in the Depression and wholly unprepared for the coming world war. Over the next five years, the White House and Congress propose spending annually 2.7 percent of GDP on defense. Its real purchasing power of the military may drop to 1.7 percent of GDP, as debt service further squeezes the Pentagon budget.

 

Our forces are shrinking, while China’s are expanding. The Pentagon cannot continue with current business practices and weapons selection. Avoiding defeat in the next war requires a radical break with past procedures. The Pentagon must take two decisive steps: 1) slash its vast army of contractors and 2) redirect those funds into inexpensive, AI-enabled drones and other unmanned systems.

 

1. Fire the support contractors.

 

About 650,000 civilian contractors provide services to our military, at a cost of $250 billion, a quarter of the entire Defense budget. These are not the workers building ships and aircraft. Instead, service contractors perform everyday tasks, such as maintaining computers, delivering supplies, patching communications, training the troops, and so forth. Since 1980, America’s combat arms forces have shrunk by 37 percent to about 400,000, while the contractor workforce supporting them has increased by 70 percent. The surge of service contractors during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars persisted long after those wars ended, becoming the new normal.

 

Each service contractor costs taxpayers roughly $450,000 per year. That astonishing figure includes the overhead of enormous corporations with layers of executives, supervisors, and administrative staff, all adding profit margins on top of salaries. Believing that such a structure makes military sense requires the suspension of disbelief. As Lewis Carroll wrote, one can believe “six impossible things before breakfast,” but believing in the efficiency of the Pentagon’s contractor system remains impossible both before and after breakfast.

 

Comfort always expands. In Vietnam, feeding a rifleman with C-rations cost $8 a day in constant dollars; in Afghanistan, feeding the same rifleman MREs cost $60 a day. In Vietnam, contractors were 10 percent of troop strength. In Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors were equal to or greater than the number of U.S. forces. This carried over after the wars into the standard way of doing business, caused in large measure by the fits and starts of Congress not passing legislation in a predictable way. These service contractors are employed not as individuals, but under massive contracts labeled “communications” or “logistics.”

 

A contractor doing the same work as a GS-15 civilian or an O-6 colonel often costs twice as much. Of the $250 billion in mundane contractor support, at least $40 billion must be cut, with the savings applied to the procurement of drones and other unmanned systems.

 

2. Buy a million AI unmanned systems.

 

AI-enabled unmanned systems have changed the face of 21st century war. Conventional warfare has been transformed by the commoditization of digital technologies. In the Ukraine war, low-cost, off-the-shelf unmanned weapons changed the land and sea battlefields. Russian ships have ceased sailing in most of the Black Sea. Drones have struck Russian airbases thousands of miles apart, and account for 70 to 80 percent of the frontline casualties.

 

Ukraine has made drones central to its war effort, devoting roughly 30 percent of its defense budget, while the U.S. military treated them as niche enablers. In Fiscal Year 2025, the Department of Defense budgeted $25.2 billion on drones and autonomous systems — about 3 percent of its total budget. Allocating 3 percent to the most disruptive category of modern weapons is a denial of battlefield reality. We lag far behind.

 

In 2025, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps had exactly zero drones deployed in their 9,000 combat arms squads. In the commercial world, drones are a commodity, costing $500; U.S. military drones cost $50,000 per unit. Drones at the squad level should cost less than $500. They are munitions to be fired like mortar shells, nothing more and nothing less. Our exorbitant costs have placed us at a steep disadvantage.

 

Ukraine uses a tiered drone ecosystem that ranges from very low-cost disposable systems priced between $200 and $1,000, to mid-range strike drones and unmanned surface vessels costing $12,000 to $30,000, and to long-range loitering munitions priced at around $50,000. This ecosystem reflects a strategy based on speed, volume, simplicity, and adaptation, rather than the U.S. preference for exquisite, integrated, and overpriced systems.

 

The emphasis must be on driving the costs of drones down. This requires iterative competitions among many small firms and government–private sector partnerships, tied to real-time feedback from the warfighters. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has authorized the operating forces, such as brigade commanders, to acquire cheap unmanned systems without having to seek permission from higher headquarters. That is the future.

 

Going directly to the commercial market reduces overall costs because dozens of startups will offer their wares at competitive prices. Several hundred brands of shoes are sold annually in the U.S. We don’t demand that everyone wear the same black shoes. Similarly, there can be dozens of suppliers of unmanned systems. Using this diversified approach, Ukraine produced 4.5 million drones in 2025. The concurrent design and construction of different drones will result in failures. That is offset by funding multiple teams, all inserting rapid software updates. For U.S. forces to deploy a million AI-enabled drones and unmanned naval vessels within two years is feasible in technical terms. No country can match the ingenuity of our software engineers.

 

To shift to multiple inexpensive systems threatens not only the Defense Department’s entrenched contractor oligopoly but also the political interests of Congress. The major defense corporations donate millions to favored elected representatives, and those representatives in turn protect the corporations by injecting thousands of restrictive provisions into procurement laws. “We have 1,500 line items on things we need to buy,” a frustrated Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll said in 2025. “We are in a holy war [against Congress] over 1 percent of our budget, to have the flexibility to buy different makes.” Tanks, surface warships, and manned aircraft consume large portions of the budget, each protected by a political constituency that views any shift toward unmanned systems as a threat. Taking funding away from a legacy platform antagonizes presidents, angers congressional committees, and assures opposition from districts tied to old production lines.

 

The military services are also restricted by their own institutional conservatism. Every service jealously defends its legacy systems. Because we are not at war, unmanned systems cannot prove that they offer more warfighting value than the platforms they threaten to replace.

 

In 1938, the best minds in France, England, Russia, and Germany went in different directions in procurement. France defended by engineering, Britain began building fighter aircraft, Russia mass-produced inferior weapons, and Germany manufactured mechanized divisions. Each nation pursued its own theory of victory. Today, our four services reflect that same divergence. Each moves along its own procurement path with inadequate regard for a unified strategy against China, our primary adversary. The Army (20 percent of the Pentagon’s budget) struggles to define its role in the Pacific. The Marines (5 percent of the budget) have no coherent strategy and remain small in absolute terms. The Air Force (31 percent of the budget) is investing in long-range missiles launched from aircraft to strike deep inside China, targeting ports, air bases, command centers, and missile installations.

 

The Navy (26 percent of the budget) is focused on a battle against China at sea. White House and congressional support is strong for large, expensive warships and the thousands of shipbuilding jobs they create. President Trump has advocated creating “pocket battle ships” as the expensive centerpiece of what he calls a “Golden Fleet.” This reflects an emotional reverence for World War II, when armadas of manned ships sailed to victory. In 2025, the Navy allocated $20 billion to surface warships and only $1 billion to unmanned vessels and drones. That allocation defines a mindset out of step with modern warfare.

 

Ships funded in 2025 will not enter service until 2035 and will deploy for the rest of this century. It is difficult to imagine that massive carriers — each larger than three football fields — remaining survivable in the battlespace of 2040, let alone 2100. Retired Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander in NATO, has warned that maritime warfare has reached an inflection point. “We are at an absolute pivot point in maritime warfare,” he wrote. “Big surface ships are highly at risk to air, surface, and subsurface drones. The sooner great-power navies like that of the United States understand that, the more likely they are to survive in major combat in this turbulent 21st century.”

 

China’s surveillance and missile networks have turned the Western Pacific into a transparent battlespace. Any carrier, amphibious ship, or large surface combatant nearing Taiwan will be detected, tracked, and targeted by thousands of precision weapons. The mathematics of modern naval warfare is unforgiving. Defensive missiles cost millions of dollars each; the drones and missiles attacking them cost tens of thousands. The United States must spend $1 million to kill a $50,000 attacker. This is a losing exchange, made worse by the finite number of defensive missiles each ship can carry.

 

China will expand its missile arsenal by 100 percent over the next decade, while increasing its fleet by 17 percent and its airpower by 25 percent. By elementary quantitative measures, the U.S. Navy will confront a stronger China in 2033.

 

This trend can be reversed. Unmanned surface ships between 200 and 300 feet long can carry hundreds of drones or missiles and can be built for a fraction of the price of a Ford-class carrier, which costs between $13 billion and $15 billion. Taking into account both capital expenses and attrition rates per strike, unmanned vessels with AI-guided drones and missiles generate destructive power at roughly one-third the cost of carrier-based aviation. The United States cannot afford to treat the 21st century like an extension of 1945. The mission of both carriers and unmanned vessels is to deliver ordnance on target; the cost per strike heavily favors unmanned platforms.

 

Absorbability — meaning the capacity to take losses and continue fighting — is the reality of battle. China is willing to absorb heavy losses of human life; we are not. Unmanned systems compensate for the vulnerability of manned platforms by absorbing losses at little human cost, while carrying vast numbers of munitions and sustaining strikes over time. If an attacking force can launch thousands of cheap drones and missiles each day, it can overwhelm an adversary whose interceptors cost ten times more. The defender’s magazines empty long before the attacker’s do.

 

The historical precedent for this shift is clear. At Agincourt in 1415, the wealthy French knights brought tradition based on prior victories; the lowly English longbowmen brought cheap mass firepower. English archers remained plentiful, long after France had run out of knights. In 2033, carrier battle groups are the knights — majestic, expensive, impossible to replace — while surface and aerial drones are the archers — disposable, numerous, and replaceable as a commodity. The historical comparison to Agincourt is obvious: The side that can absorb losses at 1/20th the cost wins the battle.

 

In summary, the Pentagon must undertake its own transformation. Congress will not significantly increase the defense budget. Fortunately, the United States military has a tradition of self-criticism, vigorous internal debate, and adaptation. The Pentagon must cut back the bloated contractor corps, scale down legacy platforms, and redirect 20 percent of procurement toward unmanned AI systems. To their credit, the senior civilian Defense officials understand this. Pete Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary David Feinberg have fundamentally altered the procurement system, sweeping out scores of stultifying regulations, opening up competition, and insisting upon rapid innovation in conjunction with best civilian high tech practices.

 

Radical change in procurement practices has begun. But by 2033, interest on the national debt is likely to consume one-quarter of all federal revenues, while entitlement spending absorbs nearly all of the remainder. A profligate Congress must borrow roughly $2 trillion annually to finance national defense and essential public infrastructure. As debt mounts, investors will demand a risk premium, diverting capital from productive private investment, slowing economic growth. It will be a remarkable achievement if sufficient autonomous warfare systems are produced to maintain our military dominance while the Defense procurement is squeezed and legacy systems are protected.

Does Josh Shapiro Have a Fight in Him?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro sounds like he’s itching for a fight with his party’s insurgent socialist wing, whose uncomfortable marriage of convenience with the Democratic Party is, by the insurgents’ own admission, a temporary compromise.

 

“I think what our party has to go through that will be very healthy, and something we’ve not really done since the 1992 election cycle, is to have a battle over what we believe in,” Shapiro told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday. But the governor has a dog in this fight.

 

He singled out just one of the Democratic Socialist firebrands taking his party by storm, the activist Darializa Avila Chevalier. “I have profound differences from that particular candidate,” Shapiro said. “She’s not someone, you know, who, seemingly, I would agree with on many things or that we share similar values.”

 

It’s reasonable to expect that, at this point, Shapiro might have elaborated on the “values” that he believes Chevalier does not cherish quite like he does. But Shapiro did not do that. Rather, he managed only to inferentially accuse the socialist candidate of being a Democrat in name only – a reality that the DSA’s operatives barely bother to conceal, and one that does not seem to concern their voters.

 

That timidity is in keeping with Shapiro’s efforts to retain the good graces of the far-left wing of his party, à la his recent expressions of support for a “radical reform” of the Supreme Court.

 

As the Wall Street Journal recently noted, Shapiro has built a successful political brand for himself as a competent executive with a distaste for theatrics. “But in an era in which Democratic voters have said they want a more combative fight against Trump and progressives are pushing the party leftward,” its reporters pondered, “there is the question of whether Shapiro’s pragmatic, moderate brand of politics can perform in a presidential primary.”

 

The question has been asked and answered. If Shapiro cannot take his own side in a fight, we shouldn’t expect anyone else to pick up his slack.