Rights and Wrongs

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, January 30, 2026

 

I have a long-standing and consistent belief in the value of labels. My underrated second book was basically an extended discussion of how important words (concepts, language, labels) are for the work of civilization. My standard question for people who say they don’t believe in labels is some variation of, “Do you remove all the labels from your canned goods, prescription drugs, and cleaning products when you bring them home? Why don’t you give that a try?”

 

More pointedly, in my experience, the people who object the most vociferously to labels in politics tend to be people who are frustrated by the fact that the labels they object to make it harder to enact the policies they want.

 

Here’s how it typically works. Say you want to offer “free”—as in government-funded (i.e., taxpayer-funded)—housing to everyone. I call this idea “socialist.” You respond, “Oh, come on. Can’t we move beyond these tired labels? Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean you can demonize it with words like ‘socialist.’”

 

My response: “You, sir, have it backwards. Just because something you like is socialist doesn’t mean I shouldn’t call it socialist, because that will make it less likely to happen, because socialism is unpopular. And by the way, you can call it ‘pragmatism’ or ‘social justice’ or ‘nationalism’ or ‘Cleophus the Seven-Eyed Dog.’ That won’t change the fact that what you’re talking about is socialism. Changing the name doesn’t change the reality. If you don’t believe me, drink this glass of ‘lemonade’ I just scooped out of the toilet.”

 

I want to be very clear: I haven’t changed my mind about all of that. Still, I have a question: What’s the value in calling things right-wing or left-wing today?

 

I have my own answers, but let me talk about why I ask the question.

 

In search of things to write about, I was reading Nellie Bowles’ always-fun Friday newsletter and came across an announcement from Jeremy Boreing, the co-founder of The Daily Wire. Boreing told the hosts at the Triggernometry podcast that Tucker Carlson is different than Candace Owens, because Owens is in effect an empty vessel ideologically and intellectually. These are my words, but that’s the gist. Owens is just an avatar for audience capture. But Carlson is different, Boreing said:

 

Tucker Carlson is part of a small cohort of people, cohort includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, cohort includes Steve Bannon, cohort includes Nick Fuentes—although I’m not saying that Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson believe all of the same things. But these are people engaged in an actual political project. These are people who are engaged in trying to create a new American majority, premised on left-wing economic populism and right-wing social populism. You can say what you want about that, whether it’s good or bad, you can say what you want about it, but it is a political enterprise. They believe that they can create a majority, and that that majority can rule the country, and it’s a new vision in terms of the ruling class in our country. It’s not that there’s never been people who put forward that vision, but it’s never been as poised to seize actual political power as it is right now in the hands of that group of people.

 

Now, I think this is interesting, and it’s worth taking Boreing seriously. I also think it’s wrong or misleading in important ways. But the fact that he thinks it’s true is significant all by itself. So: Boreing is broadly right that Carlson, Fuentes, Bannon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are “engaged in an actual political project.” It’s been reported that Bannon wants to run for president in 2028 in order to build a movement (and, I’m told by some who know him, to pay his bills). Bannon is a left-winger on economics, full stop. He is a right-wing populist on cultural stuff. So right there is evidence in support of Boreing’s claim. Therefore, it’s certainly possible that they hope to “create a new American majority” based on a fusion of left-wing economic populism and right-wing cultural populism.

 

Where I part company with Boreing is when he says this vision has never been as poised to seize actual power as it is right now. First of all, something very, very close to that vision held sway in this country under Woodrow Wilson and FDR (which is, I suspect, one reason R.R. Reno wants to rehabilitate Wilson). But that’s an academic debate for another time.

 

The likelihood of such a project succeeding is my real objection. In short: fat chance. I don’t for a moment think that the Misfit Toys Brigade has it in them to midwife into existence a new American majority that can be counted on to win elections and stay cohesive. It’s entirely possible this group can make some progress in that regard. But come on—Carlson, Greene, Bannon, and Fuentes are not a Mount Rushmore of political strategists and statesmen. I can get into the nitty-gritty if you like, but as political science I just think this is preposterous. The fact that Boreing thinks it isn’t preposterous is interesting and troubling, but I’m still not buying it.

 

But I should get to my point. If we’re reaching the stage where many of the most famous right-wingers in America are willing to fully embrace left-wing economics, how useful is the phrase “right-wing” anymore?

 

Almost 20 years ago, there was a fun debate in my world about “liberaltarianism,” an idea promoted by the brilliant, and all-around solid dude, Brink Lindsey. If memory serves, The New Republic screwed him by slapping the “liberaltarian” label on the essay that introduced his argument. (“Hey, let’s come up with a word less euphonious than “libertarian”!) Basically, the idea was that libertarians should join the ranks of “liberals,” i.e. progressives, because the left was more enlightened on social issues and foreign policy, and in the process the left should give up at least some of its commitments to economic planning and social engineering. My argument then, and now, is good luck with that. What makes the American left the American left is its commitment to directing the economy and reorganizing society to fit its moral or aesthetic vision of the good. Asking it to embrace laissez-faire economics would be like asking the Dalai Lama to take up investment banking.

 

Economics is like, you know, a really important part of politics. It’s the place where government policy and daily life intersect—at least most of the time. The central thrust of liberaltarianism was to ask sincere left-wing people to stop being left-wing on the issues many of them cared about the most. I’m not saying a liberaltarian worldview is impossible—Lindsey’s a liberaltarian (or was). So is, broadly speaking, my friend Cass Sunstein, and many so-called neo-liberals in Europe probably fit that description as well. I have no doubt many Dispatch readers come close to such views as well. That’s great. I don’t have any first-order objections to it as a set of ideological priors.

 

My only point in bringing this up is that if a left-winger agrees to becoming a free-market, limited-government person on economics, we should probably stop calling them a left-winger. Likewise, if a right-winger wants a new New Deal—as Bannon does—or if a right-winger embraces Elizabeth Warren’s economic agenda—as Trump, Vance, Carlson, et al. have done at various times—in the American context maybe right-wing doesn’t work very well as a label anymore.

 

And that brings us to right-wing social populism, as Boreing calls it. I definitely think it’s possible to grow a new American majority that attracts new factions by combining left-wing economic populism with right-wing cultural populism. You know why? Because that’s what Trump did, electorally. The white working class and, to a lesser extent, working-class black and Hispanic men have been moving rightward on cultural issues for a while. Unions are still the backbone of left-wing economics, but the rank and file of the heavy industrial unions have been fleeing the Democrats for a long time. (Public unions, especially the teachers unions, are still wholly in the Democratic column.) What helped attract them was Trump’s leftward lurch on economics, especially trade.

 

There are ideas that fuel right-wing populism that I think are not only defensible, but objectively correct, at least directionally. Making more room for religion, traditional values, being more family-friendly, celebrating America as a good nation, etc.—these are things I can get behind, even if I find some specific policies and rhetoric off-putting or worse.

 

But a big chunk of what passes for right-wing populism is explicitly identitarian. One of the things that still infuriates critics of my first book, even among the minority of critics who read it, was my claim that Nazism’s identitarianism was left-wing. I wouldn’t put it that way today. But I’m not willing to defenestrate the argument entirely either. I think identitarianism runs counter to the American creed. Picking winners and losers based upon accidents of birth, skin color, ethnicity, religion, etc.,  is fundamentally un-American. When I wrote Liberal Fascism in 2008, the left was defending identitarianism full stop. There were even academics who effectively wanted to revive the “one-drop rule” for purposes of hiring and other benefits. I think state-imposed discrimination based on race is wrong, regardless of the race that is benefiting. It might be more wrong when aimed at whites than at blacks, but that’s a different argument.

 

I get that this is kind of a meta point. But if you believe—and you may not—that directing resources and benefits to people based on their race, sex, etc., is left-wing, then wanting to do it for white people as, say, Nick Fuentes and Pat Buchanan have floated, either means that your belief is wrong, or that you have embraced a left-wing idea.

 

Think about it this way: I grew up believing that the left wanted to use the government to organize and direct the economy to a large degree. I think that idea is wrong. Now, we’re told that the right wants to do it too. That it wants to favor different interests and industries doesn’t change the fact that it has the same idea about the role of government.  Either that means those right-wingers have joined the left (which means the left won the argument), or it means those right-wingers aren’t right-wingers on economics anymore. Now use the same logic about identitarianism.

 

I understand that at this level of abstraction, a lot of practical politics gets erased. There’s a real difference—morally, philosophically, and politically—between wanting to use the state to help white people versus using it to help black people. There’s a big difference between wanting to help “green industries” and wanting to help fossil fuel industries or industries that contributed to your campaigns. (But don’t fool yourself—Democratic environmental policy is as influenced by donations and rent-seeking from green companies and unions as Republican environmental policy is influenced by donations and rent-seeking from “traditional” industry.)

 

But in my politically homeless corner of the remnant, I have the luxury of standing outside the fishbowl on many issues. The tyranny of small differences is one of my favorite topics, but we don’t have time to get into all of that. I bring it up just to illustrate a point. If you’re not a Muslim, the theological differences between Shia and Sunni are very difficult to really understand. Don’t even get me started on the differences between the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, or the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front. 

 

The point isn’t to say the differences aren’t important to the people involved or in some larger sense. But when I hear a lot of political arguments today that are supposed to be about great issues of high principle and truly conflicting visions, I see a lot of violent agreement between warring sides about means and a lot of low-principle disagreements about ends. And when you try to sort out what’s really going on, “right” and “left” just seem like different labels for very similar products.

Europe Stood Up to Donald Trump. What Next?

By Dalibor Rohac

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

Until last week, flattery and self-humiliation were the most visible outward elements of Europe’s strategy for dealing with President Donald Trump. Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, who famously called Trump “daddy” at the NATO summit last June, epitomized the collective effort to ensure the U.S. president does not have any reason to turn on America’s European allies.

 

There were other Trump whisperers as well—-Finland’s Alex Stubb, who probably appealed to Trump more because of his looks, height, and interest in golf than thanks to his formidable intellect, or Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, whose political party, Brothers of Italy, traditionally shared some of Trump’s policy intuitions, on issues from from immigration to “wokeism.”

 

The U.S. escalation over Greenland and Europe’s response, however, mark an important shift. Last week, the U.S. president threatened to impose 10 percent (and eventually higher) tariffs on exports to the United States from eight European nations unless Denmark handed over Greenland. It was an extraordinary, stunning ask, without precedent in the postwar history of the transatlantic relationship. With the threat of tariffs, as well as increasingly aggressive rhetoric from the likes of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, it was impossible to dismiss the demand as a joke or empty bluster. 

 

This time, Europeans decided to stand their ground, though nervous about their vulnerabilities and dependence on the United States. But they have also concluded that accommodation would no longer work—and that the hope for any return to business as usual is misplaced.

 

After Trump’s threat and ahead of world leaders gathering at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, several European countries made small, symbolic troop deployments to Greenland—not with the intention of actually fighting off an American invasion but with the aim of increasing the political price Trump would have to pay if he did press ahead with a forcible takeover. Further, some Danish pension funds started divesting from U.S. debt, citing poor economic fundamentals. The initial moves were modest, but European financial institutions hold more than $3 trillion in treasuries, or 40 percent of all holdings overseas, in addition to trillions of other U.S. securities.

 

Ahead of the European Council meeting in Brussels on Thursday night, the EU was readying to deploy its “bazooka,” the so-called anti-coercion instrument, for the first time. Few know exactly what the legal instrument does, but the legislation, which was devised to counter Chinese economic blackmail, would likely empower the EU to respond to U.S. tariffs with countermeasures that could go beyond just trade.

 

Instability on financial markets on Tuesday, anticipating a possible transatlantic trade and financial war, almost certainly helped to change Trump’s mind. What played a role too was that Trump’s plan was spectacularly unpopular at home, with a CNN poll showing 75 percent of Americans opposed to the plan (including half of Republicans). That proportion would surely go up if it became evident that the takeover involved actual economic pain or the destruction of alliances.

 

Trump left Davos without Greenland and having surrendered on tariffs. The question, of course, is whether the EU’s shift was a one-off or whether it is now likely to play hardball with the United States as a default. There are some, such as University of St. Andrews professor Phillips O’Brien, who believe that the EU should extend its muscular tactics to Ukraine. “One of the reasons Trump talks incessantly about Europeans needing to spend more on defense,” O’Brien writes, “is that he is keen to have them buy as many US weapons as possible. This has been a major theme of his all year. The Europeans should, politely but firmly, use that need to try and pry out more military support for Ukraine (and at better prices).”

 

Whether Europe has what it takes to adopt a more confrontational style with the United States as a new baseline remains to be seen. Whatever state one thinks NATO is in, Europeans need at least the simulacrum of an alliance with Washington until they can genuinely stand on both feet—a prospect that is still distant. U.S. military platforms, technology, and equipment are ubiquitous within European militaries, making them dependent on the U.S. for spare parts, maintenance, and servicing contracts. Replacing key U.S. “enablers”—satellite intelligence and targeting, refueling in flight, etc.—will require more investment still, which will come to fruition only over long time horizons.

 

What is beyond any doubt, however, is that the Greenland episode has damaged the transatlantic relationship in a way that the United States, under Trump or under some future president, will not be able to simply undo. True, in a narrow sense, the outcome of the stand-off is a good one. A deal that addresses reality-based U.S. concerns (sovereignty over military bases, exclusion of China from mining, etc.) is infinitely preferable to a military takeover, which would have ended NATO, or a Danish handover of the island under duress, 1938-style. Yet, it also remains true that the administration could have easily reached the exact same set of arrangements with Copenhagen by simply asking politely—without any of the grotesque threats that the administration addressed to one of America’s most exemplary allies.

 

What Europeans will remember from the opening weeks of 2026 is an America that has no inhibitions in treating them worse than its adversaries—and only backs off in the face of considerable pressure. On the surface, the facade of the transatlantic relationship today might look the same as it did last year. NATO still exists, the U.S.-EU trade deal is still on (pending ratification), Greenland remains a Danish territory, and Trump seems to have moved on to other subjects. Yet, the residual trust that Europeans had in the United States as a benign, friendly nation, albeit governed by an eccentric and mercurial president, has all but evaporated.

 

Restoring that trust will take much more than Trump’s defeat at the hands of another Democrat who will declare that “America is back,” as Joe Biden did. It will necessitate a far more thorough repudiation of the MAGA foreign policy agenda than what is likely to occur in the next few election cycles. As a result, it is perfectly believable that U.S. policymakers in the 2050s or later will still be grappling with the fallout from Trump’s megalomaniacal, and totally unnecessary, mistreatment of U.S. allies. And in doing so, they will likely face a Europe that will have moved on from its overwhelming reliance on the United States. It seems unlikely that Americans will like all the practical ramifications of such a new reality.

NATO’s Not Dead

By Eric Edelman & Franklin Miller

Saturday, January 31, 2026

 

No one should gainsay the damage that the Davos debacle over Greenland has done to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Nonetheless, the direst predictions by some that this indicated that the second Trump administration would withdraw the U.S. from NATO have not come to pass. In fact, the National Security Strategy released in December and the new National Defense Strategy published last week both accept the continuation of NATO’s collective defense mission.

 

That the premature obituaries spread wildly is a symptom of the fact that we live “in the moment” in an information environment driven by the constant drumbeat of social media. Major developments are reported and instantly command commentary to audiences of millions by presidents and prime ministers, politicians, media personalities and others — many of whom know nothing of the history of a given issue, its broader ramifications, or how it might best be managed. The series of events surrounding President Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland are a case in point, and they have led a host of people on both sides of the Atlantic to proclaim that NATO’s demise is nigh. Those prophecies, however, are grounded in basic misunderstandings about the alliance and its history.

 

According to the pundits, the president’s intentions created “the greatest crisis in NATO’s history.” This belies that fact that the alliance has been beset by crisis since the ink was drying on the 1948 North Atlantic Treaty and betrays ignorance of or amnesia about the failure of NATO to meet its Lisbon conventional force goals in 1952, the 1956 Suez crisis with Britain and France, de Gaulle’s withdrawal from the integrated military structure and expulsion of NATO from France, Europe’s refusal to join the U.S. in Vietnam, the neutron bomb and Euro-missile crises, the French and German refusal to join George W. Bush in the War in Iraq, and Obama’s “pivot to Asia.” Each was a major crisis, but in each case, diplomacy, wisdom, and time allowed the framing of a successful resolution. Trust broken became trust restored.

 

Another modern misunderstanding of NATO history is that despite repeated claims by isolationists and so-called foreign policy realists that the American contribution to NATO is simply a subsidy for Europe’s bloated welfare states, the United States did not help create and then join NATO as a gift to Europe. After two world wars, U.S. political and military leaders finally recognized that our national security was imperiled if Europe was dominated by an aggressive and hostile power. Such was the case in 1949 — and such is the case today. If Vladimir Putin came to exert military and political power over NATO’s European states today, America’s global status, our ability to project military force, and our worldwide economic influence and interests would be at risk and held hostage by the Kremlin. With that said, Europe has underspent on its own defense. Thanks to pressure from President Trump and his predecessors, as well as the brutal war on Ukraine begun and continued by Putin, that situation is changing. Many European NATO states have pledged to raise their defense spending over the next ten years, and some have actually begun doing so. The situation is still not satisfactory, but it is moving in the right direction.

 

Also, it is foolish to believe that the European members of NATO by themselves can create a combined military force to deter and defeat Russian aggression with high confidence, as some pundits have surmised. Various alliance members have extremely impressive military capabilities, but none possesses the overall integrated capability to match Russia across the board — including conventional, command and control, intelligence, space, cyber, and nuclear. Serious European experts and leaders recognize this as well. In fact, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (a former prime minister of the Netherlands) has just testified before the European Parliament to this effect. “If anyone thinks here . . . that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the U.S., keep on dreaming,” he told lawmakers. “You can’t.”

 

And finally, no matter what the pundits say, the British and French nuclear deterrents are not sufficient in and of themselves or even in combination to protect the alliance against Putin’s demonstrated nuclear adventurism and blackmail. (In fact, French nuclear forces — at French insistence — are not even integrated into NATO’s planning process.) As NATO’s guiding policy document, the Strategic Concept makes clear: “The strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States, are the supreme guarantee of the security of the Alliance. The independent strategic nuclear forces of the United Kingdom and France have a deterrent role of their own and contribute significantly to the overall security of the Alliance.” In the wake of the Greenland imbroglio, some European scholars and parliamentarians and even a former senior American and NATO official have pushed for a European nuclear deterrent. But such calls are dangerous, as they create false expectations in Europe while simultaneously feeding the hopes of American neo-isolationists that Europe can provide for its own defense without America’s crucial extended nuclear deterrent.

 

So what does all of this mean?

 

First, NATO has weathered serious internal crises in the past, and if the alliance’s leaders exercise good judgment, keep their messaging tight, and avoid hyperbolic, apocalyptic predictions, they can do so again. Thanks to the internet, this is more difficult than in previous crises, but it can be done. Leaders should avoid emotionally laden words such as “rupture” when talking about the future of NATO, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in his Davos speech. Presidents and prime ministers (and their key aides) need to relearn the lesson that quiet diplomacy can accomplish much more than populist speeches and tweets.

 

Second, NATO should focus on the very serious threat that Russia, even with the limitations exposed by the war in Ukraine, presents today and the potential that China and Russia together might threaten the High North because of their expressed interest in the Arctic, rather than on creating and exploiting the internal divisions that benefit no single capital or politician and actually hurt the overall alliance effort.

 

Third, the situation NATO is in is by nature an evolving one. Because NATO is an alliance of democracies, no one leader or ruling coalition lasts forever. Presidents and prime ministers are replaced. Today’s problems are not necessarily those that will bedevil future generations of leaders. A review of NATO’s previous crises suggests as much since the changing character of war and intensifying cooperation among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea may well bring challenges we can only guess at today.

 

Finally, NATO is an institution which has flourished, evolved, and survived for almost 80 years.  It is the most successful politico-military alliance in modern history. It has survived numerous crises over the decades and has withstood a few premature burials, all because at the end of the day its purpose — to preserve peace and security in Europe — is so critically important and serves the national interests of all of its members.

 

One can acknowledge that NATO is likely to emerge from its current predicament looking a bit different from the pre-Trump alliance without composing a premature obituary. Instead of living solely in the here and now, it’s imperative that the adults in the room learn from what has happened before.

Ballot Harvest

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, January 30, 2026

 

The only interesting thing about yesterday’s FBI search of an elections hub in Fulton County, Georgia, is that the feds got a warrant before carrying it out.

 

That should have been the least interesting thing about it, especially in context. The operation stank of irregularities that would have been extremely interesting under any other administration but are day-ending-in-Y normal for this one.

 

For instance, the federal prosecutor listed on the search warrant isn’t the local U.S. attorney in Atlanta, it’s a U.S. attorney from Missouri. We can only guess why, but the New York Times notes that Missouri prosecutors are tangled up with “Eagle Ed” Martin, a staunch “2020 was rigged” true believer and one of the most sinister henchmen in Donald Trump’s Justice Department.

 

The search was also curiously star-studded. Andrew Bailey, the highest-ranking official in the FBI apart from Director Kash Patel, was on scene to assist. Strangely, so was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, having reportedly “spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials.” So that’s what she’s been doing instead of her job.

 

Three sources inside the Trump administration, two of them at the Justice Department, told Politico they don’t understand why an official tasked with sniffing out foreign threats to the United States is participating in domestic law enforcement. Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, observed that there are only two possibilities:

 

Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus—in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees “fully and currently informed” of relevant national security concerns—or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.

 

Every MAGA fever dream about diabolical Washington corruption eventually proves correct, with the catch that it’s Trump’s own administration that ends up doing the proving. Lawless jackbooted feds killing Americans with impunity? Yep, that’s real. Preposterously swampy corruption and cronyism happening in plain sight? Also real. Suspicious connections between high-ranking government officials and pedophiles? Quite real indeed.

 

The head of America’s “deep state” making off with hundreds of thousands of ballots? As of yesterday, very much real.

 

It was a day ending in Y—except for the fact that a federal magistrate judge was convinced by the evidence she saw that there’s probable cause to believe a crime involving elections was committed in Fulton County. Per the Wall Street Journal, “the warrant … said the materials were being sought as part of an investigation into possible violations of federal law against destroying election records and another statute dealing with the submission of fraudulent votes.”

 

That’s genuinely interesting. Turns out the 2020 election was rigged after all.

 

Probable cause.

 

Well, no, probably not.

 

The 2020 election in Georgia was examined by Trump’s own campaign, members of his first administration, and state officials led by a Republican governor and Republican secretary of state. The closest anyone has come to identifying meaningful wrongdoing in Fulton County was human error that led to some absentee ballots being double-counted but didn’t affect the outcome.

 

One consultant to the president’s 2020 operation who looked into the possibility of fraud sounded flabbergasted when the Journal asked him about the FBI’s Fulton County raid. “That election is six years in the past,” he said. “There’s no undoing it. I can’t imagine there aren’t more important things to look at.”

 

Trump’s reelection in 2024 made an obsession that was already absurd that much more so. How and why would the vote have been successfully rigged against him six years ago, when his own staff wielded the power of the federal government, but not successfully rigged against him four years later when the Biden administration was at the helm? Did the cabal that stuffed the ballot boxes in 2020 have a change of heart and turn MAGA in the interim?

 

To believe in 2026 that Trump’s loss to Joe Biden was a product of chicanery is like still believing in Santa when you’re 20 years old. Yet the judge who signed the warrant obviously saw something in the evidence to suggest criminal activity. What did she see?

 

I suppose the feds might have uncovered honest-to-goodness proof of vote-rigging that eluded everyone else, true vindication for the president at last. That would throw Georgia’s 16 electoral votes into doubt—although not the result of the national election, which Biden won by a margin of 74. Time for Tulsi Gabbard to start raiding election archives in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania too, I suppose.

 

More likely is that the feds have evidence of some type of malfeasance that didn’t impact the result in Georgia. No one (except possibly Trump) believes the result of the 2020 election will be overturned retroactively; the point of this investigation—or one point, rather—is to simply flatter the president’s aggrieved paranoia about Georgia and give him a pretext to say “I told you so” about his suspicions of what happened there. The fact that Fulton County also happens to be the jurisdiction that tried to prosecute him for election tampering is icing on the cake.

 

Credibility.

 

There’s a third possible explanation for the search warrant, though, one we wouldn’t normally consider but are now obliged to. Maybe the evidence the feds presented to the judge to obtain the warrant was bogus.

 

Following yesterday’s raid, the chairman of Fulton County’s Board of Commissioners warned reporters that he can’t vouch for the integrity of 2020 election ballots now that they’re in Trump’s and Gabbard’s custody. “Once they left that facility last night in those FBI trucks, I don’t [know] where they are now. I don’t know what they’re doing with them,” he said. “Are they opening the boxes? Are they stuffing other ballots into there? I have no clue.”

 

In a political vacuum that would be an outlandish accusation, every bit as conspiratorial as the president’s own fantasies about ballot-stuffing. But the raid didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened under an administration that twice in the last month alone lied straight to Americans’ faces about why its officers had killed people after video proof of the truth was already circulating.

 

And while, in the past, it might have been unfair to hold lies told by loathsome political toadies like Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller against Justice Department prosecutors who are bound by a code of ethics, it no longer is.

 

The same FBI that carried out the Fulton County search has spent the past year rifling through its files to find excuses to harass the president’s political enemies. Just this morning, former CNN anchor and longtime Trump critic Don Lemon was arrested “at the direction” of Attorney General Pam Bondi for his part in a disruptive protest at a Minneapolis church—even though one federal judge had already refused to sign an arrest warrant for him and, reportedly, federal prosecutors in two different offices believed charging Lemon would be unethical.

 

Last fall, the website Just Security published a long analysis supported by scores of recent judicial rulings to make the case that the Trump Justice Department should no longer be entitled in court to the “presumption of regularity”—that is, to the presumption that the claims it makes are factual and offered in good faith. Why should anyone extend that presumption to how they went about securing a search warrant in Fulton County, or how they’ll handle the 2020 ballots they left with?

 

I repeat here for emphasis what I said elsewhere recently: There is no doubt that this scummy administration, with our scummy DOJ’s help, would have misled the public and covered up the circumstances in which Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed had recordings by witnesses not made that impossible. A law enforcement agency that’s worked day and night to obliterate its own credibility by faithfully executing the president’s many “retribution” fantasies isn’t entitled to a lick of grace on its election investigation in Georgia from anyone.

 

Which is not to imply that the Fulton County search was mainly about retribution.

 

November.

 

At the risk of stating the obvious, Trump’s obsession with 2020 isn’t entirely backward-looking. There’s an election coming in November, he’s plainly worried about it, and he should be. In fact, when he was asked yesterday what Gabbard was doing at an FBI operation, he answered in forward-looking terms: “She’s working very hard on trying to keep the election safe.”

 

He’s going to try to tamper with the midterms. It’s not just a matter of character being destiny, either. The logic of postliberalism leaves him no choice.

 

The Times identified the scheme that’s likely in motion in Georgia. In 2021, in response to local “rigged election” insanity, the state’s new voting law empowered the Republican-dominated State Election Board to take over a county’s election office if local officials are behaving incompetently. Fulton, which includes Atlanta, just so happens to be the most populous county in Georgia and tilts heavily Democratic. If Republicans are willing to stoop to out-and-out crookedness to oust Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff this fall, seizing control of ballot-counting in one of his strongholds will greatly boost their chances.

 

“The [Georgia election] board … has asked for the Justice Department’s help in investigating Fulton County,” the Times noted—and now, conveniently, it’s gotten it. Yesterday’s search warrant will help establish the pretext that the local GOP needs to commandeer Fulton County’s election office.

 

That’s not the only way Bondi’s DOJ is amplifying Republican election messaging, either. Last week, in a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz dated the same day that Alex Pretti was killed, she proposed several “common sense solutions” to the ICE crisis in Minneapolis. One seemed to come out of left field: Give my department access to your state’s voter rolls, she demanded, so that we can make sure your voter registration practices comply with federal law.

 

That request isn't ridiculous on its face. But coming from a stooge-ified Justice Department, it stinks of a political ploy. The president will inevitably explain Republican losses this fall with fantasies about immigrants voting illegally en masse (he’s done it before); Bondi is helping to lay the groundwork for that by casting aspersions on Minnesota’s election integrity practices at a moment when its immigrant population is in the national spotlight.

 

And in laying that groundwork, she wasn’t above using Homeland Security’s masked goon squad as leverage. The threat is implied: The state’s intimidation campaign will continue until the voter rolls are surrendered.

 

If nothing else, then, the Fulton County search will provide rhetorical ammunition to help the right cope during its next psychological breakdown over a painful election defeat. Should Democrats rout the GOP in November, the suspicions stoked by yesterday’s raid will make it easier for populist Republicans to believe that the outcome is illegitimate. (Fear not, the real truth will come out in six years or so.)

 

But I suspect the Times is right that the plan in Georgia—and elsewhere—involves more than cope and spin this time.

 

The next rigged election.

 

To repeat the key point from yesterday’s newsletter, postliberalism prioritizes favorable outcomes over fair process, and ruthlessly so. The MAGA right’s reaction to Minneapolis is an example. They don’t care about ICE’s abuses or its culture of impunity or the fact that two Americans are dead. They care about outcomes and will justify egregious processes that achieve them. Terrorizing illegal immigrants will lead to less illegal immigration. Shoving, tackling, and occasionally shooting left-wing protesters will lead to fewer left-wing protests.

 

The same postliberal mentality explains why Greenland remains an irritant for Trump. Acquiring the island would be a favorable outcome for the United States and for him personally, cementing his legacy of national greatness by expanding America’s borders. No one can stop his army from taking it by force should he give the order. What’s stopping him is process, specifically the postwar liberal consensus that territorial acquisitions are illegitimate unless they occur through peaceful processes between willing parties—and Denmark isn’t willing. It’s driving the president batty, I’m sure, to be stymied by Americans’ reservations about his means when it’s within his power to secure the end he desires.

 

Elections are an affront to the postliberal sensibility in the same way that the Greenland is and the Minneapolis episodes are. There’s only one outcome to this fall’s midterms that the right will regard as favorable and the democratic process appears poised not to deliver that outcome. Why shouldn’t they and their leader prioritize good outcomes over fair process, as usual, by interfering with the latter to improve their chances of the former?

 

The existential stakes in which postliberals routinely frame elections make interfering with the midterms that much more tempting. No one, Trump included, believes failing to acquire Greenland would be the end of America. Few, Trump included, believe that retreating from Minneapolis would be the end of America—although in the furthest Matt Walsh-ian reaches of the online chud right, you might hear the claim made. But losing control of the federal government? That’s always an irreparable calamity. “Flight 93” logic is eternal.

 

And so the ethos of Trumpism points always and inexorably toward refusing to relinquish power in the name of averting a national “emergency.” It would betray the spirit of a rotten movement to graciously stand aside and permit Americans to make the supposedly suicidal mistake of returning power to Democrats. The president and his toadies might not go fully nuclear over the midterm by attempting to cancel it or overturn the results—although one never knows—as they’d doubtless prefer to save that playbook for the next presidential contest. But they’ll look for, and occasionally even create, pretexts to intervene in the process in various ways. The Fulton County raid is one such pretext, almost needless to say.

 

In fact, as I think more about it, it strikes me as a perfect miniature of this era. It’s a superb pairing of Trump’s two most distinctive and probably most durable contributions to mainstream American political culture: conspiratorial rationalizing and imperious authoritarianism.

 

Yesterday, hours after the powerful federal police agency he commands seized election records in a U.S. state, the president promoted a barely lucid post on Truth Social alleging that the 2020 election was rigged by Barack Obama, the Chinese government, U.S. intelligence, and Italian officials, with “the Dubai Embassy” tossed in as a go-between. Reelecting him in 2024, after four long years of him chattering endlessly about the “rigged election,” necessarily meant lending the force of law to his paranoid fantasies. Americans sowed the wind, and yesterday Fulton County reaped the whirlwind.

 

From Minneapolis to Greenland, power has granted postliberals the opportunity to fulfill all sorts of perverse fantasies. They won’t pass on their opportunity to fulfill another in November.

Mamdani Has Learned Nothing from Rent-Control History

By Anastasia Boden

Saturday, January 31, 2026

 

By embracing rent control, New York City’s mayor is recycling a policy that feels compassionate but fails everyone it touches.

 

In November 1992, a group of residential landlords in New York City met to organize a “full-fledged campaign” to repeal the city’s rent-control and rent-stabilization laws. They said the laws, implemented during World War II, were “buying votes on the backs of property owners.”

 

“Rent control puts an unfair burden on the small landlord,” said Lee Sterling, then director of the American Property Rights Association, at the meeting in downtown Brooklyn. He complained that the rent laws were damaging because “the big landlords can benefit from tax abatements and tax exemptions that the little guys cannot receive.” But his concerns were ignored, and rent control stayed in place.

 

Two weeks before the meeting, a baby was born who would one day become mayor of New York. And given Zohran Mamdani’s current support of rent-control laws, it seems as if he knows nothing about the effect of rent control for the first five decades before he was born, nor for the subsequent 33 years he has been alive.

 

The idea that rent control doesn’t work is one of the most settled issues in economics. Because it reduces the incentive to build, it exacerbates housing shortages. Because landlords cannot raise rents to reflect costs, it discourages proper maintenance and leads to aging housing stock. And because it nudges people to stay where they are, it leads to a system that benefits only those who get there first — not necessarily those who need subsidies the most.

 

Mamdani’s administration has effectively admitted as much. In a recent court filing attempting to stave off a company’s purchase of a slew of buildings in New York City, attorneys for the city argued that the sale would “not lead to a supportable business” by virtue of being rent-controlled. In other words, the low rents mean the buyer wouldn’t be able to keep the properties up to code. Yet Mamdani has forged ahead with a promise to freeze rent on the city’s nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. Such a plan would affect nearly 30 percent of New York City’s population.

 

New York, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other major U.S. cities, is undoubtedly suffering from too few homes and too high prices. But rent control does nothing to address the root causes of these things: arbitrary zoning laws; lengthy and expensive permitting systems; and parking, solar, and other expensive mandates that thwart innovative housing solutions. These forces are at work in New York City, which has steadily limited high-density zoning and continues to implement an expensive permitting scheme that can take months, if not years, to surmount. Price caps slap a highly visible but sloppy Band-Aid on a problem that, in the long run, exacerbates the wound while allowing politicians to claim they lowered prices.

 

It’s obviously bad policy, but is any of it legal? Because rent control interferes with the right to control one’s property, it implicates serious constitutional concerns. After all, under the takings and due process clauses, the government cannot take private property without offering “just compensation,” or deprive people of their constitutional rights without good reason. The Supreme Court has blessed rent control in the past, but it did so under wartime pressures and an influx of returning soldiers after World War I. Back then, the Court justified the burden on the property rights of landlords as a necessity of “emergency.”

 

Under modern circumstances and with the benefit of decades of economic research, the Court might reconsider. After all, some forms of rent control prevent landlords not only from setting rent on their own terms but also from evicting tenants — forcing them to tolerate people on their property against their will. The right to include (or exclude) others is one of the most basic aspects of property ownership. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch therefore have serious concerns about the constitutionality of these schemes. In a case directly involving the constitutionality of New York City’s rent-control ordinances, Thomas (joined by Gorsuch) said that though the particular case was not a good vehicle for the issue, he would be willing to take it up on behalf of a different plaintiff. And indeed, new plaintiffs are already lining up with the hopes of getting a case before the high court.

 

Rent control is not a bold idea. It is an old one — tried, studied, and discarded everywhere that serious housing reform has taken place. Its political appeal lies precisely in its failure: It creates visible winners quickly while quietly imposing costs on everyone else. New York can either confront the real causes of its housing crisis or continue to recycle policies that feel compassionate but fail everyone they touch. Mamdani has chosen the latter. History suggests the city will regret it.

 

 

 

 

Don’t Cap Credit Cards

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, January 30, 2026

 

Prices are not only numbers printed on labels on egg cartons or emailed in Amazon receipts—wages are a price (the price of labor) and interest rates are a price (the price of credit), and if there is a single reliable principle that can be applied to economic policy in the modern world, it is this: “Woe unto him who messes around with prices.”

 

Even when the price is the interest on credit cards.

 

The struggling consumer masses of the world are united in two things: their hatred of credit card companies and their desire for more and better credit cards. I get it, I do—I often have observed that all Americans would be advocates of free-market capitalism if not for their experiences with indecipherable medical bills, trying to cancel a gym membership, dealing with cable companies, and credit card issuers. Nobody loves the bank—but, then, nobody has to. The bank is like the power company: It just has to work. If you’re thinking about it at all, then something is probably wrong.

 

Donald Trump, who once crowned himself the “king of debt,” wants credit card interest rates capped at 10 percent. He has urged the industry to adopt that cap voluntarily—which is not going to happen—but also has suggested to Congress that it should impose such a cap through law. The effect of doing this would not be to save Americans money on interest payments. The effect would be to deprive many Americans of access to ordinary consumer credit, beginning with those who have lower incomes and lower credit scores.

 

Trump, of all people, is well positioned to understand how this works in the real world. During his time as an incompetent real estate developer, Trump made almost as many appearances in bankruptcy proceedings as he did on Page Six. Trump is a known deadbeat and a bad credit risk. When you are a bad credit risk, you pay higher interest rates and get credit on generally worse terms. And then, at some point, you simply cannot get credit at all, at least through ordinary channels. Toward the end of his run in real estate, Trump found it practically impossible to get loans from any of the major lenders with which he had been associated—often to those banks’ regret—over the years. Trump is, at the moment, legally prohibited from taking out commercial loans from banks in the state of New York after having been found by a court to have engaged in financial fraud.

 

But most borrowers are not as outlandish in their behavior—or as wealthy—as Donald Trump. Ordinary borrowers see their credit ratings dinged from time to time over things like unpaid bills or late payments, too much debt relative to their incomes or savings—all the familiar stuff. Interest rates charged to consumers take into account credit risk—the banks’ chances of not getting paid back or of having to spend money and time recovering money owed—but also things such as opportunity cost (Why lend anybody money at 3 percent when you could just park those assets in an index fund and expect to make more money?) and, of course, the ultimate arbiter of interest rates: the market. People with poor credit scores or low incomes pay higher interest rates in part for reasons having to do with risk but also because there is a lot more competition to lend money to multimillionaires with 840 credit scores. The old bankers’ proverb holds true: You don’t want to lend money to people who need it—it is far better to lend to people who don’t need the money.

 

Capping interest rates at 10 percent would, to be clear, simply destroy the credit card business as we know it. High income people with very high credit scores typically pay more than 15 percent as it is, whereas lower income people with worse credit scores pay a lot more—and the average rate is around 20 percent. At 10 percent, there would be more profitable things for firms to do with their money rather than take on the risk and work of operating a credit card business. If you think a bank could make a good go of it by offering credit cards at 10 percent, then my advice for you is: Do it. If you succeed, then you probably will end up being one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world.

 

But back here on Earth, where Wells Fargo charged off $1 billion in bad consumer loans in 2025 (and that was a very good year for the bank on that front) banks demand more than 10 percent not because they are greedy (of course they are greedy, but that isn’t the reason) but because markets are really good at aggregating and conveying information about prices—and prices go both ways. Credit-card lenders experience financial losses and recovery costs, among other expenses.

 

Banks often measure their business health by “net interest margin,” meaning the difference between interest income (what borrowers pay banks) and interest expenses (what banks pay depositors), which on average has run between 3 percent and 3.5 percent in the past few years. That isn’t the same thing as profit margin, but it is worth knowing about. In terms of actual profit, some banks have had a good run of it lately, with profit margins above 20 percent, and some have had less success, with Citigroup, for example, earning only 8.5 percent margins in 2025. Meta, for comparison, enjoyed a 41 percent profit margin for the year.

 

Thanks in part to Zohran Mamdani, there is a specter haunting Donald Trump—not communism but affordability. Because Trump is both an economic illiterate and a populist (the terms often are interchangeable), his instinct is to try to paper over rising prices with cheap money—which is itself a cause of higher prices. (That is where we get the term inflation—from inflating the money supply.) And so Trump has these daffy ideas that would make things more expensive in reality while trying to make them seem more affordable in the short term: His absolutely imbecilic idea to create 50-year mortgages to help would-be homeowners afford houses at today’s painful prices would put upward pressure on prices (for the same reason people buy more expensive cars with six-year financing than with two-year financing) and ensure that borrowers are paying more in interest while building less equity in the property. Credit card interest rates are not the problem: Credit card balances are the problem for many families, because post-COVID inflation—which Trump’s big-spending policies and tariffs have made worse—has eaten into household incomes. That is not a problem that is going to be fixed by monkeying around with interest rates.

 

Representatives of several conservative and market-oriented advocacy groups signed a joint letter to the administration advising against this. (My Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague John Berlau is a signatory.) Among other concerns, they note that a “10 percent cap could eliminate credit card access for up to 190 million Americans, or close to 90 percent of American cardholders.” Which is to say, Trump would replace your high-interest credit card with no credit card. Given the way credit cards facilitate commerce even for people who never carry a balance, it is easy to see how this would cause chaos for businesses ranging from Amazon to American Airlines, both of which offer credit cards of their own but, more significantly, depend to a great degree on the credit-card network for payments.

 

This isn’t going to be a problem if you have a Centurion card. Or—probably—even a platinum AmEx. But for middle-income and low-income people with ordinary credit needs, it is, like so much of what Trump offers, a catastrophe hidden inside a handout.

 

Why is it foolish to mess with prices? Because market prices are real things, reflections of an underlying reality that does not change just because some politician wants it to. Raise prices beyond what the market determines and you will see a reduction (possibly a collapse) in demand, e.g., businesses investing in automation when minimum-wage increases raise labor costs beyond too far beyond the real market price; cut prices below what the market determines and you end up with scarcity and rationing, as in the “free” health care enjoyed by our British cousins. The economic problem facing struggling American families is that their incomes are insufficient to enable the level of consumption they desire and expect. All the price-fixing in the world will not improve that but will instead make it worse. The only question is whether the policymakers in this case propose to make it a little bit worse or a lot worse.

What Tearing Down Housing Projects Did for Kids

By Idrees Kahloon

Thursday, January 29, 2026

 

One popular strain of urban-policy thinking opposes gentrification—the arrival of affluent people into poor neighborhoods—and argues that poverty should be rectified by ever greater expenditure on public housing. The opposite might be true: Government spending can help, but it can also hurt, as badly designed public-housing projects have done. So long as gentrification brings rich and poor together, and offers the latter greater opportunity to take part in a healthy economy, it looks less like a villainous process and more like a heroic one.

 

Few places illustrate the aspirations and failures of American housing policy as well as the Techwood Homes in downtown Atlanta—one of the first federal housing projects. Its completion, in 1935, even drew the attendance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who switched on its electricity. To make way for the development, the old slums—in which roughly a quarter of residents were Black—had been cleared away. But the 604 new units were for white tenants only until 1968, when civil-rights laws forced integration. Like the ramshackle shacks it replaced, Techwood fell into disrepair. By the 1990s, Techwood had resegregated, becoming almost exclusively Black, and turned into a byword in Atlanta for urban decline. Gates and windows lay shattered; residents complained of squalid living conditions; drug trafficking and gang violence were out of control.

 

In 1993, Atlanta received one of the first grants awarded by the federal HOPE VI program—which aimed to knock down the most decrepit public-housing projects in America and replace them with better housing—to demolish and rebuild the Techwood Homes. The demolitions took place just before the city hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics. If you went to Techwood’s site today—sandwiched between Georgia Tech and the Coca-Cola museum—you would see a commemorative plaque but almost none of the original brick buildings that fell into dilapidation. Instead, you would find yourself in Centennial Place, a mixed-income community with subsidized apartments alongside private, market-rate housing. It was intentionally designed to reduce the isolation of the urban poor—and it’s succeeding.

 

A new, rigorous study of 200 HOPE VI sites, including Techwood, shows that the redevelopment significantly improved the lives of children. The reasons reveal a crucial fact about economic opportunity: To have social mobility, you need social integration. “Just giving people cash, just giving people education, doesn’t do as much as if you pair it with connections that then help them,” Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors, told me.

 

From 1993 to 2010, HOPE VI spent $17 billion to knock down and remake projects. The program was controversial from the outset. The original residents did not have a right to return to the townhomes and other smaller structures that replaced the demolished larger complexes, and ultimately only 28 percent of residents came back. There were fewer units in the lower-density replacements. An influential 2002 report by the National Housing Law Project and other groups titled “False HOPE” argued that the new mixed-income model was “a social engineering scheme built on a number of inaccurate, irrelevant, and harmful assumptions about low income families and their neighborhoods.” These critiques were made during a time of growing revulsion against slum clearance and heavy-handed urban-renewal attempts; the reentry of the creative classes to city centers was only beginning to gain notice. Activists and some academic critics derided HOPE VI as a state-sponsored gentrification program, doomed to harm the people it was intended to help.

 

But the new study, “Creating High-Opportunity Neighborhoods: Evidence from the HOPE VI Program,” found nothing of the sort. Chetty and six colleagues at Harvard, Cornell University, and the Census Bureau used tax-return data to track outcomes for residents decades after they lived in neighborhoods changed by the HOPE VI experiment. The benefits to children living in the new low-density housing project are considerable: Their earnings in adulthood increased by 2.8 percent for every year they lived in the new developments instead of the old ones, the researchers calculated. This holds even when the researchers compare siblings within the same family. Overall, children whose families moved into revitalized units earn 16 percent more than they otherwise would have earned, they are 17 percent more likely to attend college, and boys are 20 percent less likely to go to jail in adulthood. The future-income increases alone greatly exceed the up-front cost of rebuilding, the authors argue.

 

The paper contends that the HOPE VI program delivered such significant benefits to children because the demolitions and reconstructions “increased friendships between children from low- and high-income families in high schools near public housing sites.” (In this case, cross-class friendship is measured empirically through proprietary data from Facebook.) “Distressed public housing projects were essentially islands that had limited social interaction with nearby communities,” the paper argues. “The HOPE VI program built a bridge to surrounding communities, allowing public housing residents to benefit from interacting with those residents.” The exact reason is still being worked out: It could be straightforward—that high-achieving peers boost education for others—or more subtle (for example, that closer contact with surrounding areas yields more introductions to parents who can provide job referrals). But integration does seem to matter a great deal. The researchers’ results show that simply living in the newly constructed projects was insufficient. Children who moved into these revitalized neighborhoods but experienced no increase in cross-class friendships saw essentially no benefit.

 

The study does not focus on children displaced by the demolitions. But Matthew Staiger, one of the paper’s co-authors, has separate research showing that they too went on to have markedly higher earnings. For adults, however, the findings are more mixed. Although neighborhoods became considerably richer after the HOPE VI revitalizations—household incomes increased by 45 percent, and poverty rates dropped by 12 percentage points—this is due entirely to richer adults moving in. The residents of the original projects, most of whom are scattered to other neighborhoods, are no better off in terms of income even years later. One recurring finding in social-mobility research is that interventions targeted to poor children yield significant results; for adults who are already in poverty, improvement is harder to attain even with expensive interventions.

 

Our understanding of what kinds of Americans experience upward mobility—and which ones don’t—has improved immensely over the past 10 years. Much of that progress is due to the work of Chetty, whose use of administrative data collected by government agencies has provided granular answers to questions sociologists and economists have debated for decades. These papers, often co-written with prominent economists such as Nathaniel Hendren, John Friedman, and Lawrence Katz, point toward a cohesive set of findings: Whatever their parents’ circumstances, the kind of neighborhood children grow up in substantially affects their life outcome, for better or for worse. Economists are used to explaining life outcomes as a result of financial or human capital, but Chetty says the cumulative research shows that social capital is just as important.

 

This lesson is especially stark when applied to childhood poverty. It is unsurprising that poor material circumstances at birth predict poverty in adulthood. Less obvious is the fact that poor children living in concentrated poverty—like those in infamous superblock towers—face worse outcomes than poor children who live near wealthier peers. We know this from studies following the life trajectory of children living in poor, segregated neighborhoods after they were moved by government programs—as in the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program from the 1970s to the 1990s and the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment in the 1990s. The MTO results, written by Chetty, Hendren, and Katz and published in 2016, stunned the economics field after finding that young children whose families left high-poverty census tracts after receiving housing vouchers went on to have 31 percent higher incomes in adulthood (alongside improvements in college attendance and reduced rates of single parenthood). The HOPE VI results show the converse of the MTO experiment to be true too: Kids don’t necessarily have to change locations to improve their life outcome—neighborhoods can be made to improve around them.

 

These results in economics ultimately vindicate foundational ideas in sociology—developed by scholars such as William Julius Wilson and Robert Sampson—that the concentration of disadvantage and social isolation worsen the effects of material disadvantage. The findings also raise an immediate question: If the primary reason that HOPE VI improved outcomes was that it boosted social capital for disadvantaged children, how can that positive intervention be replicated elsewhere? Laura Tach, a Cornell sociologist and co-author of the paper, told me that the HOPE VI program could have boosted social integration through several mechanisms: The demolition of towers (which in many cases were packed together in huge superblocks) made the outside world physically easier to access, reductions in violence and crime made outside connection psychologically easier, and complimentary community-support services for job training and after-school programs may have directly brought people of different social backgrounds together.

 

There is another process that improves neighborhoods around poor children, both by bringing higher-income peers nearer to them and by reducing the violence they are exposed to. This process often occurs without explicit governmental intervention or cost. The problem is that it is regularly dismissed as gentrification, a phenomenon that is not usually cheered. The most common objection to gentrification is that it results in displacement of incumbent residents. The empirical evidence for this is weaker than conventionally assumed. One paper examining children who received Medicaid benefits in New York City from 2009 to 2015 found no elevated rates of moving for those in gentrifying neighborhoods. The HOPE VI study suggests that gentrification should improve outcomes for kids, so long as it actually improves social integration.

 

This is not guaranteed, certainly, but is perhaps more likely to happen than further governmental action. HOPE VI remade some of America’s worst public-housing projects for the better. But it also cost the government $170,000 per unit (in 2022 dollars). The Trump administration has called for a 43 percent reduction in public-housing spending. It is especially hostile to the idea of using federal funds as an explicit tool to break up concentrations of poverty. The lessons of HOPE VI provide a tantalizing clue about how social mobility can be engineered in America by building bridges between rich and poor. How unfortunate it is that the current administration is unlikely to even try.

 

 

America Can Have the Oil

By Gisela Salim-Peyer & Nancy A. Youssef

Thursday, January 29, 2026

 

María-Elena Pombo has created “petroleum weavings,” turning threads made from oil into elaborate yarnlike wall hangings. Oil, she told us, has shaped her life. Her father, an oil engineer, met her mother after he moved to Cabimas, an oil town. Because of Venezuela’s oil wealth, Pombo, now 37 years old, studied for free at an excellent public university in Caracas.

 

For decades, all Venezuelans enjoyed the perks of living in a land where oil was a birthright. They could fill their cars for almost nothing. Education and other public services were heavily subsidized as well. Academics might argue over the wisdom of the state’s largesse. But people expected, at the very least, affordable gas as a material benefit from the nation’s abundance of oil.

 

President Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela this month was, in part, a bid to seize the source of this wealth. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. Trump made no secret of his desire to exploit them in what many have criticized as an act of naked imperialism and the theft of Venezuela’s economic patrimony: “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil,” Trump said in an interview after the January 3 attack that captured the strongman President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

 

Yet many Venezuelans in the country and abroad celebrated the strike. María Corina Machado, the popular leader of the opposition, has welcomed Trump’s actions. Last February, Machado was a guest on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast. When he asked why Americans should care about Venezuela, her first response was: “Oil and gas.” Machado’s strategy could appear to have been a devil’s bargain—tempting Trump with the prospect of petrodollars in exchange for ousting Maduro, her nemesis. But her feelings reflected something broader, too: Venezuelans who once viewed oil as a source of wealth and pride, a limitless resource that had shaped their identity and set their country apart from its poorer neighbors, have come to view it more as a curse.

 

Venezuelans in the past two decades have watched as the regime squandered the wealth that oil had created, let the country’s oil infrastructure rot, removed gasoline subsidies, and welcomed a bigger hand from Cuba, bartering oil for professionals and intelligence operatives from Havana. Pombo says her generation is the last that benefited from oil. Today, the university where she studied is in such a sorry state that the roof of one of its buildings collapsed. In the former boomtown of Cabimas, in northwestern Venezuela, people grew so desperate that they jury-rigged refineries in their own backyards because gasoline had become so scarce and expensive.

 

By that measure, ceding the oil industry to the United States at least holds the promise of importing industrial know-how with some financial benefit for the country. A poll by The Economist found that a majority of Venezuelans “somewhat” or “strongly” supported the capture of Maduro and were optimistic about their economic prospects. Fewer than 35 percent thought that the Venezuelan government should continue running Venezuela’s oil industry. Or as Sary Levy-Carciente, Machado’s economic adviser, put it to us, the Americans will be “better clients.”

 

***

 

At a ranch in Cabimas one day in 1922, local farmers were awoken by a bang followed by a black rain. Workers for Shell, an Anglo-Dutch company, had been poking holes in the ground, looking for oil—and struck it rich. A plume spouted for many days. Some viewed the discovery as a divine gift, while a local priest chastised the explorers for unearthing Satan, saying the blowout was God’s punishment. Word traveled northward, and the Rockefellers of Standard Oil and the Mellons of Gulf Oil saw a business opportunity. The episode ushered in more than a half century of relative prosperity.

 

Even then, some saw signs of trouble. In the 1930s, Arturo Úslar Pietri, an influential intellectual and historian, argued in an essay that the country needed to “sow the oil” by investing oil profits to cultivate other industries. Generation after generation of schoolchildren have heard these words repeated as advice that the country should have followed but didn’t. Instead of sowing the oil, Venezuela became dependent on it.

 

American companies arrived to drill the wells and build the fields. They brought with them country clubs and baseball. The companies made deals with whichever military despot was in power in Caracas, angering young intellectuals such as Rómulo Betancourt, who harbored dreams of a democratic Venezuela. In his writings, he condemned “the aggressive, juvenile impetus of North American capitalism” and advocated for Venezuelans to be the owners of their oil.

 

Betancourt became president through a coup in 1945, putting him in position to fulfill his goal of a democratic constitution. But he exercised caution over oil. He didn’t kick out the Americans but instead persuaded them to pay more. He then used those proceeds to build schools, hospitals, and roads. Starting in 1948, American companies extracted the oil and gave roughly half of the profits to the Venezuelan state, an arrangement known as el fifty-fifty.

 

Betancourt’s stance that Venezuela resented America but needed America is reflected in Miguel Otero Silva’s 1961 novel, Oficina No. 1. The story follows pious, rural Venezuelans who leave everything behind to move to a nameless town where newly arrived Americans are extracting oil with little foresight or planning. The Trinidadian driver who takes the Venezuelans to the fields sings a song in English, as if warning about the type of people the Americans are: “After Johnny eats my food, / After Johnny drinks my rhum, / After Johnny wears my clothes, / Johnny comes back and takes my wife.” But the Venezuelans pay him no mind. They moved to a town with no name because that was their best hope.

 

Yet many Venezuelans idealize this period. The years of el fifty-fifty were some of the most prosperous in Venezuelan history—a time when migrants were eager to come to Venezuela, rather than leave it, as they have in droves more recently. Hundreds of thousands from Europe and elsewhere arrived for the glorious tropical climate, golden Caribbean beaches, and plentiful job opportunities. The possibilities felt limitless. The country built some of the world’s most futuristic highways and was early in eradicating malaria. When Christian Dior decided to open his first shop in Latin America, he opened it in Caracas. The Concorde, that majestic superfast airplane, flew in at least once a week. Oil was the draw that brought the world to Venezuela. Even Venezuela’s shanties were made with solid construction materials such as brick and concrete, made cheap by a strong bolivar, Venezuela’s currency. It was not uncommon to see new cars parked outside. And although the Venezuelan poor could not afford the shopping trips that the country’s rich made to Miami, they could go to Margarita—a Venezuelan island famous for its beaches and low tax rates.

 

By 1976, however, Venezuela’s political class had tired of el fifty-fifty. The government seized the assets of American companies and nationalized the oil industry, creating a state-owned giant Petróleos de Venezuela, known as PDVSA.

 

For years, the company thrived. José Guerra, a Venezuelan economist, told us that graduates aspired to land PDVSA jobs. (He didn’t make the cut as a young man, and had to settle for a job at the central bank.) The government funded scholarships so that the best and brightest could study abroad and become PDVSA engineers and managers. For Luis Soler, who worked at PDVSA for 30 years, the company represented a certain idea of meritocracy. It had an American-style work environment complete with 9-to-5 workdays and a corporate ladder for promotion. “We had discipline, values,” he said.

 

By the 1990s, PDVSA had become one of the largest and most influential state-owned oil companies in the world, second only to Aramco, its Saudi counterpart. Venezuelan leaders proved to themselves that they could competently manage the country’s oil.

 

Yet as Pietri had predicted more than a half century before, the country had failed to spread the wealth sufficiently to bolster other industries. “We just traded it! We traded it, and for what? Cars from the United States, whiskey from Scotland, fabrics from Italy, perfumes from France,” Rafael Quiroz, an oil economist at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, told us. “And as time passed, we didn’t build anything. We didn’t use the oil to make an economy.”

 

Those outside the circle of PDVSA profits grew resentful. Seeds had been sown, but not for broad economic growth, as Pietri had once hoped, but for revolution.

 

***

 

The socialist Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999 and managed PDVSA for priorities other than maximum profits. He replaced thousands of highly trained company employees with party loyalists. And for the first decade of the 21st century, the state used oil as a tool of diplomacy, with Chávez lavishing petrodollars on tiny island nations whose votes he courted in the Organization of American States, a regional diplomatic forum. Venezuela replaced Russia as Cuba’s main oil supplier, a favor that Cuban President Fidel Castro returned by becoming Chávez’s mentor on authoritarianism. The consequences of the mismanagement were profound. A country that fully depended on oil became ill-equipped to produce it. After the oil boom, Venezuela somehow ended up poorer, beset by corruption and hyperinflation.

 

When Chávez died, in 2013, Maduro inherited a failing oil industry and did little to improve it. By 2020, Venezuela’s refineries had crumbled to the point that the country had to start importing gasoline from Iran. Even during the worst years of a humanitarian crisis, Maduro continued supplying his friends in the Cuban government with oil. (In January, the U.S. assault to capture Maduro killed 32 Cuban officers on the president’s security detail.) Venezuela now produces only about 1 percent of the oil in the world, a mere 1 million barrels a day.

 

The perception that Maduro gave away oil to keep himself in power has made some Venezuelans more comfortable with the idea of giving oil to America, the country that got rid of the strongman. “Venezuela is going from having a government controlled by Cuba to having a government controlled by the United States,” the historian Pedro Benítez told us, adding that the U.S. can help with the huge investments needed to revive the oil industry.

 

The rise of Machado is its own testament to changing attitudes about oil. Of all the opposition leaders, Machado has spoken most consistently in favor of privatization and foreign investment. For a long time, these preferences made her relatively unpopular. But in recent years, her views have spread widely. Many Venezuelans would have liked to see Machado replace Maduro as part of a transition back to democratic government. But so far, the Trump administration has shown little interest in that, preferring instead to work with Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, and the rest of the regime. Like Betancourt, she portrays the United States as an unwelcome imperial power: “Enough of Washington’s orders to Venezuelan politicians,” she said on Sunday. But when it comes to oil, she’s ready to deal. In a speech before legislators this month, she said that she would proceed with an “agenda of cooperation” nonetheless. “Let’s not be afraid of contradictions,” she said.

 

***

 

American companies are poised to develop Venezuela’s oil industry anew. Trump said this month that Venezuela would provide 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S., and that the sale of this oil would “benefit the people” of both nations. Rodríguez said that Venezuela had received $300 million from the sale, the first payments from those barrels. She celebrated the country’s much-needed share of the revenue.

 

Trump sees a fresh era of American investment from the oil giants of today. He recently hosted the chief executives from the major U.S. oil firms at the White House to pitch them on the prospect. But the challenges are legion, including the need for political stability in both Venezuela and the U.S. There are no guarantees that a new American administration would take the same tack as Trump. And although working with the regime has brought its country near-term calm—Venezuela is secured right now by pro-government militias—the Trump administration has spoken about an eventual political transition. This leaves Caracas in a governing limbo and U.S. companies wary. Only a stable government can provide sufficient security for the companies to commit to long-term investments.

 

Over time, the key power brokers in Venezuela may splinter over their new fifty-fifty-style deal with the U.S. “The current arrangement is unlikely to be convenient at the same time for all of them. One of them or some of them will try to change it,” Jana Nelson, a top Pentagon official on Western Hemisphere affairs during the Biden administration, told us.

 

Even so, many in Venezuela seem guardedly optimistic. Guerra, the former central-bank official, used to be critical of the opposition for courting a U.S. intervention, but he’s now bullish about the economy. He envisions the U.S. government placing conditions on how the regime can spend future oil revenues to make sure the nation’s natural wealth is used to revive Venezuela.

 

We pointed out that this scenario rests on the assumption that Trump cares about the fate of Venezuela and its people. “Well, we cannot assume anything else,” Guerra told us. The Venezuelan people, he added, are “just onlookers, not actors. We are just looking at what’s happening, hoping for the best. We don’t get to determine anything.”