The Democratic Socialists of America Hate Billionaires — Except Fidel Castro

By John Fund

Sunday, August 23, 2026

 

We all know that the Democratic Socialists of America hate billionaires. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani says they shouldn’t exist. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), the diva of the Democratic Socialists, says: “You can’t earn a billion dollars. . . . You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.” But there’s one billionaire that the DSA does celebrate — the late Fidel Castro.

 

On the occasion of what would have been Castro’s 100th birthday this month, the DSA praised him as “an organizer, a fighter, and stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination,” while bizarrely denouncing U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for supposedly committing genocide against the Cuban people.

 

The DSA leadership has refused to walk away from its statement of admiration for Cuba. Former Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos pressed DSA national co-chairs Ashik Siddique and Megan Romer on whether they regard Cuba — as well as Venezuela and Nicaragua — as a dictatorship. Neither would say so. Romer, in fact, claimed that “Cubans have access to their democracy in a way that we do not.” She apparently believes that the Cuban government is more democratic than the American. Siddique invoked the familiar dodge of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, as if that is to blame for Cuba’s problems rather than the fact that Castro was a committed Marxist. Siddique added, “It’s hard for us to judge other countries being dictatorships when we have Donald Trump as president.”

 

This kind of moral equivalency infuriates many moderate Democrats. Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz, who defeated a DSA member in a primary election this month, told CNN that he has many people in his district who escaped socialism during the Mariel boatlift, a mass exodus of refugees from Cuba in 1980. He says they find it inexplicable when they see the DSA “embrace 100 years of Fidel Castro,” or when media commentators such as DSA favorite Hasan Piker dress up as Mao Zedong and praise the Soviet Union.

 

Castro was a master at exploiting Cubans, ruling over them with an iron fist for over half a century while 90 percent of the population lived in extreme poverty. One of his bodyguards, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, who defected, wrote a tell-all book in 2016, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo. He detailed Castro’s 29 luxury homes, four yachts, and his private island (Cayo Piedra), which featured a dolphinarium, a floating restaurant, and a helipad.

 

Monica Showalter, who used to report on the world’s wealthiest individuals for Forbes, says that in 2006, the magazine’s research listed Castro’s wealth at $900 million and growing. His extended family now sits on cash reserves of $18 billion, with many of its members living in Europe and the U.S. She expresses contempt for the DSA’s take on billionaires, noting that the organization views uber-entrepreneur Elon Musk as “the bad guy,” while Castro, “who stole and hid his wealth is the hero.”

 

She adds:

 

They don’t hate billionaires at all. They like them if what they do to become billionaires is steal from the public, not serve the public. That is what they like: lionizing bandits while raining hatred on anyone who produces things of value.

 

Is it possible for the DSA to go any farther down the path of depravity to make excuses for dictatorships? Apparently, yes.

 

The Sunday Times reports that five high-ranking activists of the DSA visited China last year on a trip organized by Chinese officials. Among their stops was a parade attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Dee Knight, a DSA member who sits on its China working group, reported that “Beijing buzzed with excitement” during the parade. He has also been an apologist for China’s ruthless treatment of the Uyghur population. Reportedly, after a previous visit to China, he insisted that he “found nothing to support western accusations of slave labour.” According to the Times, Alexander Reid Ross, a professor at Portland State University who studies extremist politics, says of the DSA’s pro-China wing:

 

It looks like what they’re doing is laundering an authoritarian state’s preferred narratives in exchange for VIP treatment. In my view that opens up serious vulnerabilities regarding who they’re working for and to what effect.

 

Is North Korea next on the hit parade of the DSA’s favorite foreign tyrannies?

Vice Cannot Build Virtue

By Nathan Beacom

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

Are there two different moralities for public and private life? For centuries, the mainstream answer in the Western tradition was no. For Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero, Boethius, and the Scholastics, it was natural to think that those who held authority in a political community should have exceptional virtue. To be virtuous meant not just achieving good outcomes, but achieving them in the right way and for the right reasons.

 

But later, a different answer emerged from the pen of Niccolò Machiavelli. The Italian diplomat reinvented virtue, not as a nobility of soul expressed in justice, prudence, and self-control, but as the ability to win, hold, and exercise power. To do this well, he wrote, the leader must have a flexible disposition and be willing to do evil in service of the state.

 

Machiavelli was writing in 1532. But in a fascinating recent conversation at the New York Times, this debate played out again, this time with journalist Ezra Klein siding with the classical mainstream and activist Christopher Rufo appearing to take a more of the secular-modern approach. Because Rufo professes—both to Klein and in general—to be building a culture of virtue in America, Klein pressed him on the apparent viciousness of the leaders of Rufo’s political movement. “I guess one thing I think about, when I think about Donald Trump and virtue, is corruption … The number was about $4 billion in this term,” Klein said. “It doesn’t look virtuous.”

 

In response, Rufo appealed to Machiavelli. “Politics is always a conversation between virtue and virtù,” he said. Here, virtù refers to Machiavelli’s conception of political excellence, defined not by moral rectitude, but by an “ends justify the means” approach to gaining and wielding power. Rufo also dismissed academics who want political practitioners to use “pure means” to reach “pure ends” as laughably naïve.

 

This “realistic” approach to politics, which would allow us to look past right and wrong in our pursuit of power, is a race to the bottom. And while Rufo himself would balk at such a philosophy taken to its extreme (he is willing to acknowledge and push back on some of the problems with his own side when pressed by Klein), there are those in political life who are willing to go further than he. The more we excuse bad behavior to achieve our own ends, the more we justify the bad behavior of others. Thus we foster an environment where the public competes to outdo one another, not in virtue, but in vice.  

 

***

 

Rufo is not alone in his espousal of Machiavelli. Patrick Deneen, one of the most prominent conservative intellectuals in America today, has written (in his book Regime Change) that we must “use Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” The problem is that, almost by definition, Aristotelian ends are inseparable from Aristotelian means. Virtue ethics is characterized by a belief that, in order for an action to be good, it must be good the whole way round. As Aristotle famously pointed out in the Nicomachean Ethics, a virtuous act is one that is noble in its object, intention, and execution. You cannot, for Aristotle, do something that is intrinsically wrong, even for the sake of something good. Aquinas followed the philosopher in this opinion, too: “An evil action cannot be justified by reference to a good intention.”

 

Suppose that, in order to start a public conversation on a topic you consider important and insufficiently discussed, you felt it was necessary to invent a salacious story in order to rile up public passions. Suppose you made up a story that immigrants were stealing and eating people’s pets in order to start a conversation on immigration. For a virtue ethicist, a good end and a good intention (supposing, for the sake of argument, that prompting a public discussion of border security is the good being aimed at) cannot justify an act that is in itself bad, in this case the act of lying and the act of slander.

 

Cicero, in his great work De Officiis, had harsh words for those who imagined that political expedience could be disconnected from moral standards. “Bad men,” the Roman statesman wrote, “are accustomed, in considering any question, to weigh the morally right against what they think is expedient; good men are not.” For a good man, there is no question of the politically expedient trumping the morally right. For Cicero, the answer is easy: “It is the error of men who are not strictly upright to seize upon something that seems to be expedient and straightway to dissociate that from the question of moral right. … Away, then, with questioners of this sort for their whole tribe is wicked and ungodly.”

 

We sometimes seem to think that we can deceive, massage the truth, manipulate, propagandize, tolerate corruption, and sow division so long as, at the end of the day, we win political influence and push our policies through. But you can see how this becomes a race to the bottom indeed, as competing factions with competing ends concur only on the underhanded means they will use to achieve victory. One side’s lowering of moral standards lowers the bar for the other. A culture of cynicism develops in which everyone assumes that other actors are acting in bad faith and, as a result, makes excuses for their own bad faith.

 

You can say, if you like, that this is just the nature of politics, and nobody likes to see how the sausage gets made. Yes, politics involves policy compromise, it involves accepting imperfection, and it involves strategic thinking. But to say that this compromise extends to the moral character of our means is to create a crooked culture in which only the most cynical win. Policy compromise is necessary. Moral compromise undermines a republic.

 

Republican government relies on the self-government of citizens and leaders, because it is a form of rule in which the citizens have a wide latitude of freedom and a voice in the direction of their own community. Montesquieu, one of the key influences on America’s founding, put it this way in his Spirit of the Laws: “There is no great share of virtue necessary to support a monarchical or despotic government: the force of laws, in one, and the prince’s arm, in the other, are sufficient to direct and maintain the whole: but, in a popular state, one spring more is necessary, namely, virtue. When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community.”

 

John Adams, in a letter to his friend Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, put the relationship between public and private virtue in a republic plainly: “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” Public and private virtue are not severable; they are manifestations of one and the same moral character. One cannot be an Aristotelian at home and a Machiavellian in the office.

 

***

 

Rufo further justifies support for immoral leaders by explaining that politicians are “not your priests. They are kind of blunt instruments”—the character of a political leader does not matter; what matters is whether you can use him to advance your agenda. This manner of thinking seems to have become more common. Voters have become far more tolerant of breaches of public trust and bad character.

 

But again, this cuts against the grain of the classical tradition. It struck Aristotle as common sense that a ruler needs to be a person of good character. “If the ruler is not temperate and just, how will he rule well?” he wrote. Elsewhere, he said that “the statesman, the man who controls or is competent to control … the administration of the commonwealth, must essentially also be a good man.”   

 

Here again, Cicero is helpful. In his Laws, he held that the morals of the people were most influenced by the example of those who lead them.

 

My opinion is, that the manners of mankind change with those of their superiors. Hence, great men of a vicious life are doubly pernicious to the state, as being not only guilty of immoral practices themselves, but likewise of spreading them far and wide among their fellow-citizens. The mischief they do, is owing not only to their being debauched themselves, but also to their debauching a crowd of their foolish imitators. In a word, they do more harm by their example than by the crimes they commit.

 

The crowning moral tradition of the East, Confucianism, holds a similar view. The book of Mengzi’s sayings and doings begins with the philosopher reproving a king for his obsession with profit, on account of the fact that his example will lead everyone in the kingdom to the same vice, ending in “total usurpation.”

 

***

 

William Wordsworth, after the death of Lord Nelson in 1805, composed a famous poem describing his vision of the ideal leader: “Character of the Happy Warrior.” Among the qualities of the happy warrior are a steadiness in the face of struggle, endurance under suffering, and a sympathy for those whom he leads.  

 

But there is another quality essential to good activity in public life: a refusal to use bad means for the sake of good ends. Wordsworth had been chastened by his observations of the French Revolution. As a political idealist, he had thrilled in 1789 at the cry of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” but he soon was disillusioned as he watched the supposed heroes of liberty and virtue, in mobs and kangaroo courts, massacring innocent people. The ancien régime was corrupt and unjust, yes, but the medicine had become worse than the disease.

 

What Wordsworth observed in his poem was that much of the world’s evil comes from men who consider themselves to be pursuing good ends. A good statesman, a happy warrior, does not make this mistake. He will not advance by shady means, he will not win the public by deceiving them, he will not grovel before evil men for the sake of influence and power. “He labors good on good to fix, and owes/ To virtue every triumph that he knows.”

 

When virtuous policies are implemented through wicked stratagems and by bad people, those policies themselves are discredited. We might think, for example, of the manner in which the personal and political vice of Joseph McCarthy did more to discredit reasonable concerns about Soviet influence in America than to address them.

 

A lasting culture of virtue cannot be built on unvirtuous means. A perception of hypocrisy and cynicism reigns among the public with regard to their political leaders when it is discovered that they have lied, twisted the truth, or cheated the system. Vice does not propagate virtue; it propagates further vice.

 

More than this, our souls, our characters, are not left untouched when we give up virtue for Machiavellian virtù. The great historian Will Durant summarized virtue ethics with the memorable phrase: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” We cannot expect that if in politics we are hateful, scornful, rude, dishonest, equivocating, and temporizing, we will remain kind, generous, honest, courteous, and courageous in our personal life. We cannot live long as both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

 

This is not an idyllic demand for a utopia of flawless morality. There is no world in which the ship of state is manned top to bottom with perfect saints—all the more reason why the hands at the helm and at the watch should be people of integrity, all the more reason why officers should set an example of virtue for the humblest deckhand to follow.

 

The health of our polity, of our republic, will depend upon those who are willing to be called naïve, people who will not do a thing they think is wrong for the sake of political victory. Men and women who will not give up their integrity are like a ballast by which the ship of state keeps an even keel. Without them, the Scylla of civil strife or the Charybdis of tyranny will bring a republic to its end.

Democrats Take Aim at the Civil Rights Act

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

Last year, as the Trump administration continued its investigations into anti-Semitism at elite universities, several civil-rights attorneys at the Department of Justice were temporarily transferred to the agency running the anti-Semitism probe to help with the workload. One of those was Haley Van Erem.

 

The events that followed produced lessons in three problems that have held back the government’s attempts to restore the civil rights of America’s Jewish college students:

 

1. The ideological opposition to combating anti-Semitism among career bureaucrats.

 

2. Those same bureaucrats’ resentment at being told to apply civil-rights law, specifically Title VI, to Jews.

 

3. The Trump administration’s aversion to process norms.

 

Van Erem quit and has now filed a “whistleblower” complaint that appears aimed at derailing the application of civil-rights law to Jews, even as she perfunctorily denounces anti-Semitism.

 

Van Erem contends that the administration began the investigation already believing the colleges violated Jewish students’ civil rights. That’s probably true: by the time Van Erem grudgingly joined the inquiry, civil-rights violations had been happening in full view of the public. These included university employees discriminating against Israeli students on the basis of national origin, mobs physically blocking Jewish students from accessing areas of campus, and the uneven application of university codes of conduct to the detriment of Jews.

 

Van Erem also complains that she was given overly strict deadlines that prevented her from dragging out the process to her satisfaction, and that she was often overruled by her superiors—though her complaint actually paints a picture of her bosses being surprisingly receptive and willing to incorporate the objections of an employee who made clear that she didn’t want to be there. Last, Van Erem describes an administration that would launch investigations without evidence of wrongdoing, but because of the sheer volume of anti-Jewish agitation permitted on these campuses, this particular claim is so ridiculous and self-discrediting as to make one question whether Van Erem is engaging in some form of interpretive performance art.

 

The Trump administration’s aversion to process norms is real, but Van Erem vastly inflates their importance because her motive seems to be to fatally undermine federal application of Title VI processes to Jews. Therefore, the occasional example of genuinely inappropriate interference in education—Trump’s team proposing external curriculum monitors at Harvard, for example—must be exaggerated into something that rises to the level of actionable legal reprisals, such as “gross mismanagement, by departing from investigative sequencing and quality controls as required by regulation.”

 

That last point, the desire to put in legal jeopardy those who investigated anti-Semitism at top universities, is key to understanding this whole event.

 

Like clockwork, Jamie Raskin, the Maryland congressman and ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, took the baton handed to him by Van Erem and promised retribution for Trump officials. He called the anti-Semitism investigations a “frame-up operation” and threatened to push changes to the Civil Rights Act itself.

 

Raskin’s promised lawfare against federal employees involved in strengthening the enforcement of civil-rights law is no doubt the goal of complaints like those voiced by Van Erem. Raskin, further, is the perfect receptacle for these complaints. His Jewishness provides cover for Democrats who are, as Raskin presumably is, intent on dismantling federal protections for Jews and insulating the Democratic Party from accountability for its exploding anti-Semitism.

 

Raskin is also a co-sponsor of legislation that would enforce a partial arms embargo against Israel. He has fought anti-Semitism-related legislation and has been critical of Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre since the beginning of the Hamas-instigated war.

 

Raskin also demanded testimony from Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, alleging that it was a “a distinct possibility” that Dhillon “deliberately orchestrated a scheme to attack universities, their faculties, and their administrators for political purposes while defrauding the American people and the courts.”

 

If the Democrats, as expected, win control of the House in the midterms, they are vowing to use this power to make government officials pay, and pay dearly, for daring to investigate universities’ discrimination against Jewish students. In the past, this would have struck most observers as a bizarre choice of priorities. In 2026, it’s what the public has come to expect from Raskin and company.

The Plight of America’s Overextended Carrier Fleet

By Stephen Walsh

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

Ten aviators killed or missing, six imprisoned, four enlisted sailors lost in mishaps, and 20 aircraft destroyed: That was the price paid by the USS Midway during history’s longest aircraft carrier deployment, from April 1972 to March 1973. Imagine if the USS Abraham Lincoln, which left the Middle East this week after more than 270 days at sea, returned without two of its four fighter squadrons. It is an unfathomable thought.

 

But the Lincoln is paying a different price born from an overreliance on aircraft carriers for deterrence and intractable combat. Even at the Vietnam War’s climax, Midway entered port about 10 times during that deployment, allowing stressed crews to briefly escape the ship before resuming their daily brushes with death. No such luck for the Lincoln. The United States’ supply of aircraft carriers cannot satisfy the demand imposed upon them as the most visible symbols of U.S. commitment. Only systemic reforms or major capacity expansion can solve the 11-ship carrier fleet’s supply-and-demand problem.

 

A friend aboard the Lincoln estimated that sailors received seven hours of liberty in Guam last December, and another 18 in Oman in July, for approximately 25 hours of liberty over 285 days at sea. This is the newest manifestation of a trend that has been building for years and is a hell of the Defense Department’s own making.

 

The idea that sending Lincoln to port outside the Middle East sometime over the last few months would have meaningfully diminished U.S. strength likely overstates the dependence of combat operations on carriers. The U.S. has surged massive power to the Middle East. Through March and April, the U.S. Air Force, with help from the Lincoln and Gerald R. Ford strike groups, dismantled Iranian air defenses before settling into familiar “therapeutic bombing” wrapped in more aggressive language and deterrent posturing over the summer. In April a third carrier, USS George H.W. Bush, joined the campaign. That is a huge force for trading limited blows.

 

The Ford was sent home in May after its own 11-month cruise, prompting concerns that reduced firepower would weaken negotiations, despite the presence of the Air Force, a naval surface armada, and two other carriers. The Lincoln was prevented from leaving CENTCOM for rest and resupply for similar reasons. Aircraft carriers seem to be the only palatable symbols of U.S. military resolve.

 

This problem didn’t start and won’t end with the Lincoln. Carriers were extended for deterrence in the Middle East and Europe, and combat operations in Somalia, Yemen, and Venezuela in the decade leading to Operation Epic Fury. Lincoln’s logistical issues were extreme, but the reasons for the extension were common, despite the war. The U.S. Navy wielded 16 attack carriers and numerous supporting antisubmarine carriers in Vietnam. But today, as Rear Adm. Thomas Moore famously said in 2013, “We’re an 11-carrier Navy in a 15-carrier world.” Reducing demand through improved strategic discipline or more creative messaging seems unlikely, and the effects of constant extensions are well documented.

 

 

Understanding fleet overcommitment requires a command structure crash course. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act solidified two separate chains of command. Service chiefs, including the chief of naval operations, develop and equip their branches. They advise the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but can’t command operations. The geographic combatant commanders (CoComs) lead the uniformed operational chain of command, responsible for seven territorial regions. Carriers deployed to the Middle East are under the control of CENTCOM’s commander, tasked with theater objectives over force development. The Pentagon’s Global Force Management process reconciles CoCom requests and service training needs with the secretary of defense as arbiter.

 

The Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP) prescribes seven-month cruises in a 36-month cycle meant to avoid overtaxing ships. Combatant commaders must ask the defense secretary if they want to exceed this length by 30 days or more. Extensions and “double pumps”—deploying twice within an OFRP cycle—are used to maximize ship availability. Lincoln’s deployment is the second of a “double pump.” It has spent about 14 of the last 27 months deployed, well beyond OFRP’s policy of seven to eight months every 36.

 

The OFRP was implemented in 2014, seeking to restore fleet health as leaders prioritized competition with China in the mid-2010s. The plan worked initially, with just one of nine deployments between 2016 and 2018 extended. But the fleet was too small to sustain seven-month cruises.

 

The first Trump administration extended only three of 12 boats but relied on double pumps with minimal port visits to overcome COVID-19, maintenance problems, and the president’s fixation with Iran. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 2020-21 double pump established the punishing precedent that a carrier can operate without port calls. The Lincoln made headlines in 2019 when its deployment was extended to nearly 300 days to deter an "imminent threat” from Iran, despite skepticism that its presence actually affected that country’s behavior. The Nimitz was extended in January 2021 after being ordered home, when its exit provoked negative media coverage like Ford’s in 2026. Iran’s continuing intransigence after being pummeled by carriers makes one wonder if all this was worthwhile.

 

The Biden administration initially kept carriers out of the Middle East but extended the USS Harry S. Truman in the Mediterranean when Russia invaded Ukraine, despite the land-based theater’s ample Army and Air Force presence. Officials argued that carriers were reassuring to allies, but the mission’s abandonment after Hamas attacked Israel in 2023 suggests it wasn’t really necessary.

 

Carriers returned to CENTCOM for “the most intense naval combat since World War II” in the Red Sea. Crews shot down drones, flew large strikes into Yemen, and came under rocket and cruise missile attack. Six of seven participating carriers were extended.

 

Only two carriers deploying from the continental U.S. have returned on time without being double-pumped since 2019: the USS Carl Vinson in 2022 and the USS Nimitz in 2023, both of which operated in the Pacific without being redirected to the Middle East. The USS George H.W. Bush is the only ship of the second Trump administration to have avoided extension so far, but it has been at sea for just four months. Even if the Iran War ends tomorrow, extensions will likely continue.

 

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (PACOM) has gotten the worst of this deal. Each West Coast carrier like the Lincoln in CENTCOM is one fewer that can be used for Asian partner engagement and deterrence of China. The USS George Washington, the Japan-based carrier intended for crisis response in the Pacific, relieved the Lincoln in the Middle East. This was highly unusual and signaled PACOM’s descent down the priority list.

 

The Navy also bears the costs of carrier overuse as it pivots itself for war against China. A potential fight over Taiwan in 2027 has provided the service’s modus vivendi for years. Naval aviation and the carrier force are trapped between the war they want and the one they’re stuck with. The service absorbs the maintenance costs, retention problems, and material diminishment inflicted by campaigns it can’t control.

 

A larger fleet can expand supply, or systemic reform can reduce demand. Either way, resolution requires legislative intervention. Both Republican and Democratic administrations overuse carriers for strategic messaging, and attempted strategic pivots have been ineffective. As retired Adm. James Foggo wrote in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, “Navy attempts to deny [requests for forces] diplomatically and internally have failed.”

 

Fleet expansion is a popular cause and would increase supply. But there are three problems with the Navy’s shipbuilding plan. First, the Navy has an unfortunate track record of over-cost or failed acquisitions through the last several decades. It has, according to the Congressional Budget Office, consistently underestimated shipbuilding costs. Second, U.S. shipyards suffer from low manning and production, often struggling to complete major projects.

 

Third, the plan does not call for increasing the number of active carriers. As new Ford-class ships enter service, they will replace aging Nimitz-class boats. The total number of warships would increase but the carrier fleet would still be taxed unless other types of ships are used for strategic messaging—a prerogative of the executive branch. If senior leaders will only accept carriers as signals of U.S. strength, regardless of the other assets present, then the current shipbuilding plan won’t help.

 

Goldwater-Nichols Act reform could reduce demand by increasing services’ power and reducing that of the combatant commands. The act corrected serious problems with military disunity and was a major legislative victory, but detractors have argued it took too much influence away from the individual services, disrupted acquisitions processes, and produced strategic incoherence. Jim Thomas, former vice president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has been a leading voice on this front. He proposed in 2015 congressional testimony that a general staff could act as the military’s “global brain” to ensure forces are allocated more sensibly. He argued, “there is no central military entity today that has the authority to prioritize efforts across regions,” a capability critical to Gen. George Marshall’s successful World War II mantra: “Win in Europe, hold the Pacific.”

 

But there are serious civil-military relations concerns with a general staff, which was resisted in 1986 as an affront to civilian control of the military. The Hudson Institute’s Bryan McGrath argued in 2022 that tension between services and combatant commands is inherent in the constitutional order. Civilian control of the military, it follows, guarantees that short-term political objectives affect military deployments. “Assuming that the process can either account for or eliminate politics,” he admonished, “represents the conceit of the technocrat.”

 

Systemic reform that preserves the American character would be a generational undertaking. James Locher, an architect of the original legislation, has expressed openness to reform but warns that “the intellectual and political challenges of formulating this legislation will be staggering.” Likewise, fleet expansion requires massive taxpayer investment and congressional commitment. But carriers will continue as overextended symbols of fraying American power without congressional intervention.

 

The Lincoln’s journey has been terribly difficult but at least its crew left the Middle East safely. An F/A-18 Super Hornet was captured on video narrowly avoiding a surface-to-air missile last spring. Thankfully, that pilot did not pay the price that Midway’s lost aviators did. But if naval aviators must be on the line dodging missiles, they at least deserve a few port calls.

A Swedish Palestinian Lawmaker Sets an Example for the West

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Simona Mohamsson, leader of Sweden’s Liberal Party, was born in Germany to a Palestinian father and Lebanese mother, both Muslim. On the debate stage Monday night, Mohamsson wore a Star of David necklace.

 

“I am the minister for integration, but first and foremost I am wearing this star to show solidarity with Sweden’s Jews,” the 31-year-old said. “Today, all party leaders must pledge that they stand behind the security that Sweden’s Jews deserve, and ensure that they keep their own parties clean. That is what is at stake. There are children today who do not dare to live out an important part of their identity because antisemitism is being used to terrorize an important minority in Sweden.”

 

In one fell swoop, Mohamsson schooled nearly the entire Western world.

 

Since October 7, 2023, even the most generous approaches to anti-Semitism from left-of-center politicians can best be summed up in Joe Biden’s 2024 convention speech, in which he said that the Hamasnik demonstrators outside the hall “have a point.” Thus, even those who didn’t fully sympathize with the terrorist sympathizers have held to the following concept: Western anti-Semitism, while bad, cannot be disentangled from the State of Israel’s actions.

 

It’s an easy trap to fall into, to tell oneself that people are upset at what they are being told about a faraway conflict and they just “take it too far,” or some similar excuse. “You can criticize Israel’s actions without resorting to anti-Semitic caricatures,” responsible adults will say, as if that is some novel breakthrough in civility.

 

And of course it’s true. But when addressing anti-Semitic violence aimed at Jews around the world, why pretend it has anything to do with Israel at all? Those who attack Jews on the streets, those who harass Jewish children, those who firebomb synagogues—these people are not making political statements about Israel. They are not making any statement at all. They are just trying to harm Jews.

 

Israel is not part of the conversation unless you make it part of the conversation. And if that’s what you do, then you are reacting to anti-Semitism by looking for a reason people might hate Jews. The fact is, it doesn’t matter a whit what someone’s post-hoc justification or pretext for racial violence might be.

 

If someone attacks Jewish children in the street, I don’t care what they’re angry about. It’s entirely irrelevant. Every single instance of anti-Semitism is inexcusable.

 

That’s what Mohamsson understands. A government has an obligation to its citizens, period.

 

We should also raise our own standards. Yes, a Palestinian should be expected to follow Mohamsson’s example. The expectation that Arabs, especially those from Palestinian backgrounds, ought to be forgiven for withholding empathy from Jews because of a conflict in Israel is deeply corrosive to society and, frankly, insulting to Palestinians.

 

Two other aspects of this act of solidarity are noteworthy. First, the Liberal Party is polling poorly, and rather than seeking to raise its popularity by bending the knee to the populist mob, it is showing spine and adhering to its principles.

 

Second, Mohamsson is also a human-rights activist. The self-proclaimed human-rights community is rarely concerned with human rights; too often they are Israel-obsessed anti-Zionist activists. It is nice to see an actual-human rights activist who advocates for human rights.

 

Sweden’s Left Party, according to a recent investigation, is chock-full of those who have expressed support for terrorists, denied the Holocaust, or made statements in support of the October 7 attacks. Many of the party’s parliamentarians also wrote a letter of support to convicted Palestinian terrorists.

 

Ebba Busch, leader of the Christian Democratic Party, echoed Mohamsson’s gesture, according to a translation from Israel Hayom’s Hebrew edition: “There is nothing Swedish about a five-year-old girl in Gothenburg, who walks around wearing the Star of David that Simona is wearing today, deserving to hear threats and hatred and even [threats] to die.”

 

May we one day live in a world in which such stories aren’t newsworthy.

Why 2026 Could Be a Bigger Blue Wave Than 2018

By John McCormack

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

If the bottom falls out for Republicans in November and they lose control of the Senate, a big reason will be that President Donald Trump’s approval rating on the economy is far worse now than it was during the midterm elections of Trump’s first term.

 

Back in 2018, even as Trump’s overall approval rating was in the low 40s, voters consistently gave him a net-positive approval rating on the economy: His economic approval rating sat at or above 50 percent, according to Gallup. But in 2026, Trump’s overall approval rating has sunk to the high 30s, and his rating on the economy is significantly worse than his overall rating. American voters disapprove of his handling of the economy by nearly 2 to 1.

 

Earlier this month, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Democrats with a slight edge over Republicans on the economy (37 percent to 36 percent) for the first time since 2017. Fox News polling this year has similarly found Democrats opening up an advantage over Republicans for the first time since 2010—with the Democratic advantage at 9 points in July.

 

David Wasserman, elections analyst for The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, noted that the groups in which the decline in support for Trump has been most pronounced are independents, Hispanic voters, and white voters without a college degree. “We’ve seen bigger declines in Trump support and Republican support among those groups because they’re where he made the biggest strides and therefore had the most ground to fall,” Wasserman told The Dispatch. “These are voters who rehired Trump to the White House because they were nostalgic for what things cost during his first term, but are inclined to either sit out the election or vote for a Democrat.”

 

“I would be betting my life it’s going to be worse than 2018,” one GOP campaign strategist told The Dispatch. The strategist pointed to private campaign research showing that white women without a college degree, a demographic that backed Trump by a wide margin in 2024, had turned against the president and the GOP, and that shift is “almost entirely economically driven. Basically these are women to whom Trump offered an alternative economic vision that was appealing to them, and none of that stuff has, from their perspective, panned out.”

 

The alternative economic vision that Trump campaigned on in 2024 wasn’t that the rate of inflation would merely slow relative to the Biden presidency—but that prices would actually drop if Trump was elected. “Prices will come down. You just watch. They’ll come down and they’ll come down fast. Not only with insurance, with everything,” Trump said at an August 2024 rally in North Carolina. “We intend to slash [energy and electricity] prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months.”

 

Of course, prices continued to increase during Trump’s second term. Over the past 12 months, overall inflation was a little over 3 percent—north of the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target—and energy inflation was 15 percent.

 

“People really, really don’t like inflation,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Dispatch. “That resolves a lot of the mysteries of trying to interpret what’s happening with people’s perceptions of the economy.”

 

Voters aren’t merely upset that inflation is 3 percent rather than 2 percent over the past year—they remember overall prices being 30 percent lower back in 2020. Trump’s approval rating on inflation is shy of 26 percent, according to Nate Silver’s average of polls.

 

But Trump isn’t simply the victim of setting expectations too high, he’s also the victim of self-inflicted political wounds. His tariffs remain deeply unpopular: Only 33 percent of voters approve of Trump’s trade policy, with 60 percent disapproving, according to an average of polls compiled by Silver. A YouGov poll from July found 72 percent of Americans saying that Trump’s tariffs had increased prices.

 

“A lot of the stuff you buy at the grocery store is imported, and a lot of the stuff you buy at retail stores is imported,” Strain said. Beef prices, for example, jumped nearly 20 percent since Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025. Trump effectively conceded his tariff policies have raised prices on Americans when he announced on Friday that he would allow 300,000 metric tons of beef to be imported over the next three months not subject to higher “out of quota” tariffs (and claimed importers pledged to sell the beef for 25 percent below current market prices).

 

Strain added that “whatever the merits of the war in Iran are, just analytically speaking, that has led to higher inflation rates at the gas pump.” Gas prices are now $1 per gallon more expensive than they were a year ago.

 

Mortgage rates, now hovering under 7 percent, put a house purchase out of reach for many Americans, and Trump has done little to reassure bond markets that drive those rates. “I think his fiscal policy has put upward pressure on the rate of inflation by running huge deficits,” Strain said. Still, he noted that in many other respects the economy remains “very strong” like it was in 2018, with the unemployment rate now around 4 percent. “The difference really is inflation,” Strain said.

 

Voters’ perception of the economy is just one important factor among several that will affect the outcomes in November. If the economy were the only thing voters cared about, after all, Democrats wouldn’t have swept to power in the House in 2018.

 

But the GOP’s strength on the economy in 2018 is one reason they were able to oust a Democratic incumbent in one purple state (Trump had carried Florida by just a point back in 2016) in addition to flipping three deep-red states (Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota) while losing seats in two purple states (Nevada and Arizona).

 

In 2026, Democrats need to gain four seats on net to take control of the Senate, which will require them to flip seats in at least two states that Trump won by double digits (Texas, Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio) in 2024. Democrats are heavily favored to flip North Carolina, while Maine, where incumbent Republican Susan Collins has defied gravity, remains a tossup. Democrats are only playing defense in Michigan, where far-left Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s nomination has kept the race competitive.

 

“People underestimate just how red Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska are,” Sean Trende, elections analyst at RealClear Politics, told The Dispatch. “These are states that are redder than New Jersey and Virginia are blue.” (In 2024, Trump lost those two blue states by about 6 points while carrying the four red states by 11 to 14 points.) But even with that tough map, Trende still thinks Democrats have roughly a 2-in-5 chance of taking control of the Senate, while Silver’s model gives Senate Democrats closer to a 3-in-5 chance. “We both agree that it could easily happen,” Trende said of Silver’s model. “He thinks it’s a little easier than I do.”

 

Meanwhile, in the House, “a really great night for Democrats would be getting back to the same seat count they ended up at in 2018 at 235,” said Wasserman, who noted that gerrymandering and other factors have reduced the number of swing districts. “That’s harder to do this cycle because they’d have to reach deeper into Trump territory. Whereas in 2018, Democrats were able to win a variety of districts that Trump carried by mid-single digits in 2016, this time around, Democrats would need to win some double-digit Trump seats to get to that same result.”

 

But with Trump’s overall approval rating in the high 30s and his economic approval rating in the low 30s, there’s a decent chance they’ll do just that in November—especially if voters follow the request Trump made at a rally on Friday night to “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.”

The Self-Destructive Opposition to Data Centers

National Review Online

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

Anti-data-center sentiment is sweeping the nation, and, this being an election year, politicians of both parties are jumping to indulge it. In blue New York, Governor Kathy Hochul has signed an executive order that enacts the country’s first moratorium on “hyperscaler” installations. In purple Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro has reversed his previously bullish position on data centers, taken to describing their developers as “bullies” and “speculators,” and established what he proudly describes as the “strictest guardrails in the nation.” In red Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has halted all approvals for new data centers, pending the results of a comprehensive state audit that will take months to complete. By the end of the year, one would expect skepticism — if not hostility — to be the default mode in all 50 states.

 

The politics surrounding data centers have certainly changed. A year ago, most Americans were ambivalent on the question. Today, polls consistently show that a supermajority of voters is opposed to the construction of new facilities near their homes and, more broadly, that the very term “data center” has become toxic. The reasons for this toxicity vary — some respondents cite water usage, others electricity prices, environmental concerns, and noise pollution — but the message does not. Per Gallup, only 7 percent of Americans “strongly favor” the construction of a data center in their area.

 

Not all of these concerns are unfounded. There is, for example, no reason that taxpayers should provide subsidies to the corporations that are building data centers, or that eminent domain should be used. And while most of the concerns about noise or pollution are unfounded, it is entirely legitimate for the citizenry to demand sensible zoning regulations in the same manner as it would elsewhere. Still, the sheer scale of the opposition — and the speed with which it has coalesced — is redolent of a moral panic akin to those that attended the introduction of nuclear power or fracking or 5G. Bluntly put, the vast majority of the sensationalist claims that are made about data centers are nonsense. They do not use a notable amount of water. They do not tend to increase the cost of electricity. They are not unusually noisy. Indeed, compared with almost any other industrial project, they are astonishingly clean.

 

As has occasionally been his wont, President Trump seems to be the only politician in the United States who is wholly unmoved by these broader trends. Asked recently about the issue, Trump said, “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.” Trump added, “It’s going to create success. It’s going to create tremendous innovation medically.”

 

On PBS, James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, described these words as “tone-deaf.” And perhaps they are. But politics is about more than merely following the crowd, and when Trump insists that “if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it,” he is undoubtedly correct. The internet — and, more specifically, artificial intelligence — are here to stay. As such, the question is not whether more data centers will be built, but where. The answer to that question can be, “In America, by Americans.” It can be, “In China, by the Chinese.” It can even be, “In space.” But make no mistake, there will be an answer. At the risk of also being “tone-deaf,” we believe that the answer ought to be, “In America, built by Americans, for Americans, with the jobs, economic benefits, and tax revenues benefiting Americans.”

 

Since its founding, America has been a place where people build. We approve of this, and we would like to see the United States own this technological revolution in the same way as it has owned so many others — from mass-produced automobiles in the 1910s, to commercial radio in the 1920s, passenger aviation in the 1930s, integrated circuits in the 1950s, lunar exploration in the 1960s, personal computing in the 1970s, GPS in the 1980s, the internet in the 1990s, smartphones and cloud computing in the 2000s, and fracking in the 2010s. There are no obvious historical examples of Americans rejecting a new development and benefiting from that rejection. The AI build-out is unlikely to serve as an exception to that rule.

Trump Is Choosing the Wrong Korea

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

Add South Korea to the list of allies dumped on by President Trump.

 

In a Truth Social post over the weekend, he wrote that “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea.” He criticized the cost of the exercises and added that the maneuvers “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile.” The president then informed the public that he had directed his defense secretary to “reduce Joint Military Exercises!” and ended his post with the stinger that South Korea refused to join U.S. efforts to denuclearize Iran.

 

He followed up with comments to reporters at the White House about his anger that South Korea wasn’t helping in Iran (and mentioned that they’d also stopped paying the U.S. a fee for U.S. troops stationed in the country during the Biden years).

 

It’s worth remembering when considering this fracas that nearly 150,000 Americans gave their lives and limbs defending South Korea after North Korean forces, backed by Communist China and Soviet Russia, crossed the 38th Parallel on the morning of June 25, 1950. In the 76 years of unresolved cease-fire since, a South Korea has been established that is free, functional, and under threat of nuclear annihilation every day from its neighbor to the north. It’s been an official American ally since 1953. No worse friend, no better enemy — to borrow and bowdlerize General James Mattis, paraphrasing Lucius Sulla.

 

The president can be upset that South Korea isn’t materially contributing to the campaign against Iran (it’s generally been good about chipping in to other, past major U.S. military operations), but asking South Korea to denuclearize authoritarians thousands of miles away while in the same breath praising the nuclear authoritarian in its backyard is perverse.

 

There is a decade of history here, between Trump and Kim. The first Trump administration vacillated between fraternal overtures on the one hand, and the 2017 reroute of the USS Carl Vinson strike group from Australia to the Korean peninsula, joined by Japanese assets, for a potential beheading action against the Kim regime on the other. No doubt the president thinks this latest episode will further the diplomacy he’s employed in the past, but it lacks any sense of calibration. Consider, he is ordering his defense secretary to reduce joint exercises with South Korea at a time when North Korean forces are learning next-generation warfare on the Russian frontlines.

 

A serious U.S. distancing from South Korea would not only increase the likelihood that the country grows closer to North Korea and China but also remove the possibility that South Korea’s maritime heavy industry, one of the greatest outside of China, will build the fleet we need to restrain China’s advance on Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan.

 

Now, when American carriers are pulled from the West Pacific to support efforts near Iran, the president should be doing all he can to reassure allies of our steadfastness while communicating to our foes that we remain vigilant in the lands and waters that provide Americans and the world the means to advance human flourishing.

Chasing Lost Edens

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Political types are often tempted to ascribe their opponents’ undesirable ideological positions to their being paid, evil, stupid, or in thrall in one way or another to a dastardly enemy lurking somewhere behind the scenes. This temptation is understandable but misguided. There are, indeed, a few among us whose commitments are the product of perfidy, ignorance, or greed, but mostly we remain infantry within what Thomas Sowell famously termed our “conflict of visions.” Why is it the case that, as Sowell put it, “the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again”? Because, he proposed, each side is animated by an opposite “sense of how the world works.” In consequence, Sowell concluded, the bulk of our contemporary political disagreements are the result not of varying exposure to the facts but of differing moral intuitions and value judgments.

 

Sowell was writing in the 1980s, and he focused on the divide between the left, which exhibits what he terms the “unconstrained vision,” and the right, which exhibits the “constrained vision.” To my mind, his work is as persuasive today as it was then, and it continues to explain many of the fault lines within our politics. Nevertheless, I might offer an addendum to his theory that I believe is of growing importance in our era: that, in addition to one’s view of human nature, the most potent predictor of one’s current political disposition is whether one is comfortable living in America as it actually exists in the year 2026 or one so resents the present for its many perceived failings that one wishes one had lived in an earlier time.

 

Consider how common it is at the moment to hear people on both the left and the right talk of a given period within the recent past as if it represented Eden before the Fall. On the left, the period in question might be the New Deal, or any time “before Reagan,” or perhaps any day up to and including the one before Donald Trump became president. On the right, the period might be the 1920s, or the 1950s, or the week before Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. Pick an epoch; the details don’t especially matter. What matters is that, for whatever reason — be it the latest cost of housing or health care or burritos; the existence of billionaires; a sense that there are insufficient opportunities for the young; the decline of religious belief — millions of people have decided that the past was preferable to the present, and those millions of people do not sort into neat left/right groups.

 

That alone sets this predictor apart from the others. One would expect self-described conservatives to be more prone to nostalgia, and yet polling shows that, in 2026, self-described Democrats are more likely to take a backward glance than self-described Republicans. Asked earlier this year by Pew whether America’s best days were “ahead of us” or “behind us,” only 34 percent of Democrats answered “ahead of us,” compared with 46 percent of Republicans. Historical polling suggests that this gap is a by-product of the incumbent president’s being a Republican and that it will be reversed when a Democrat is next voted into the White House. But this underscores rather than diminishes the point — which is that within both parties, a majority of voters are of the view that modern life is inferior to what preceded it.

 

This matters, for just as a man who has been given two weeks to live will make profoundly different choices from those of a man who expects to live for another 60 years, so an American who is comfortable with contemporary life — and who expects to remain so — will behave differently than one who is not. Among other things, those two individuals will adopt differing opinions about the integrity of their civic institutions, about the virtue of their regnant culture, about the wisdom of their fellow citizens, and more. One will become habitually pessimistic, the other habitually optimistic. One will be open to change; the other will feel perpetually in danger of losing his national inheritance. One will be more likely than the other to have children, build a business, and otherwise engage with what Edmund Burke described as the “little platoon we belong to in society.”

 

***

 

Once one acknowledges this divide, one sees it everywhere. Take, for example, the recent intramural fight over Christopher Nolan’s production of The Odyssey. Ostensibly, the fight was over a movie. In reality, though, it was a proxy argument about how comfortable right-wingers ought to be with modern American life. On one side of this argument were a bunch of people who are so appalled by the state of things that, having learned that the cast would include a black woman as Helen of Troy and a trans actor as Sinon, they considered even seeing the movie as an act of cultural treason. On the other side were a bunch of people who, while they may criticize the state of things, are fundamentally happy in the world. I am a conservative, and I suspected I might agree with some of the criticisms that the movie’s antagonists had offered up. But I went to see it anyway — and I enjoyed it anyway — because I regarded its flaws less as an indication of the ongoing collapse of Western civilization and more as nicks on the hull of a generally admirable and satisfying work. Which, of course, is pretty much how I see America in 2026. Yes, I have a series of strong political opinions, which I share enthusiastically — sometimes caustically — in this very magazine. But I would not want to live anywhere else. I would not want to live in another time. And, if I tally up the good and bad, I find myself filled with optimism, gratitude, and the conviction that the future is bright.

 

One might suppose this means that I do not take my strong political opinions seriously — or at least that I am willing to ignore them in favor of thinking happy thoughts. But that is untrue. I am, for example, sincerely pro-life, which in practice means that I consider the vast majority of American states to be sanctioning murder. I am a constitutional originalist, which in practice means that I consider an enormous amount of what the federal government does every day to be flatly illegal. I dislike the president, as I have disliked every president we have had since I moved to this country in 2011. I think that the media is a national disgrace, that academia has fatally beclowned itself, and that the entertainment industry has lost its way. If you were to invite me to gripe, you would, after the end of the second hour, wish to throw me out of an airplane.

 

It’s just that I also think that we live in the midst of an unparalleled miracle, and that, while every age features terrible problems, not every age has the upsides that ours enjoys. I could rehearse, as I often have, the intellectual case in defense of this view. But here’s the thing: While making that case is important, doing so will not be sufficient to overcome the great divide I am describing, because the great divide I am describing is not the result of disagreement about the facts. Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley Jr. had access to the same facts, and yet one of them experienced life as tragedy and was perpetually uncomfortable in the world, while the other offered his critiques with sprezzatura and remained at ease even among his adversaries. Could either man have argued the other into altering his disposition? I think not.

 

I do not mean to suggest that debate is futile, that political conversions are impossible, or that the attitudes displayed by our public figures are irrelevant to the fate of the nation. If I believed that the future of this country were foreordained, I would never write another word. I merely mean to propose that, as our politics becomes more muddled, it is worth looking outside of the traditional ideological axes to determine what is going on. If one does, one will find some strange bedfellows. In theory, the so-called post-liberal conservatives and the democratic socialists are sworn enemies, and yet if one listens to the descriptions of American life that both promulgate, one discovers that they actually have a great deal in common. Both groups believe that American life has been hollowed out by shadowy forces, both believe that this hollowing out was made inevitable by the design of the American system, and both believe that the solutions to America’s problems come from thinkers from other places and times. So similar are these two groups in disposition, in fact, that they routinely reserve their fiercest anger for those who are nominally on their side. The democratic socialists hate the moderate Democrats more than anyone else on earth, while the post-liberals are so incandescently angry with the Reaganites that they respond to any suggestion that life in the United States is tolerable by insisting triumphantly that such sentiments will turn people into socialists.

 

And perhaps they will. But by rights, they ought not to, because life in the United States is, indeed, tolerable — and usually a great deal better than that. Negativity may well be a character trait, but it is one that, like sloth or self-indulgence or impatience, ought to be treated as a flaw and worked on. Nostalgia may well be an inevitable hankering, but when it causes one to undervalue one’s actual life, it ought to be suppressed as an impediment to flourishing. (There is a good reason that nostalgia was originally classed as a disease.) A traditional conservative concern was that the arrival of mass affluence would lead people to forget by what mechanism they were liberated from want and thereby to kill the golden goose. To this, conservatives might want to add a related worry: that, having been freed from the need to fret about their subsistence, Americans would come to consider their own time frivolous and fall in love with the phantoms of a golden era that did not exist — and never will.

What Totalitarianism Could Not Destroy

By Anna Smith Lacey

Sunday, August 23, 2026

 

Every August 23, Black Ribbon Day commemorates the victims of Europe’s totalitarian regimes. The date marks the anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the 1939 agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that divided much of Central and Eastern Europe between them. For millions of Europeans, totalitarianism was not an abstraction debated in classrooms. It came to their villages, knocked on their doors, and called them by name.

 

My father was born in a picturesque small village among the vineyards of northeastern Hungary’s Tokaj wine region. It was founded in 1750 by German-speaking Catholic settlers from the Black Forest. They cleared the land, planted vineyards, built stone houses, and raised a church. Swabian by ancestry, Hungarian by homeland, and Christian by faith, they created an orderly and industrious community whose descendants still live there today.

 

The 20th century taught the people of Hercegkút how dangerous such an identity could become when the state claimed the power to assign guilt collectively.

 

Before the war, Hercegkút had a small Jewish community. Its first known Jewish resident arrived in 1808. At its height, in 1880, the community numbered 38 people. Its members included the Weinstock family, who operated the village general store and extended credit to local farmers until they could pay after the harvest.

 

After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, all Jewish villagers were taken first to the ghetto in the nearest town and then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. None of Hercegkút’s Jewish residents returned. A presence that had endured in the village for more than a century disappeared completely. Only some gravestones remain, alongside the intricate parts of the wrought iron gate of their old cemetery.

 

Then came another totalitarian power — with a different ideology but the same doctrine of collective guilt.

 

On January 2, 1945, Soviet troops ordered Hercegkút’s able-bodied men between the ages of 17 and 45 and women between 18 and 30 to report with three days’ food, two changes of clothing, bedding, and eating utensils. My great-grandfather was among them. My great-grandmother was spared only because she had a young child to care for — my grandmother.

 

They were told that the men and women were leaving for a few days of public work — malenkij robot, “a little work.” In reality, 135 villagers were loaded into railway cars and transported approximately 1,000 miles east to forced-labor camps in the Donbas, in today’s Ukraine. Their “crime” was their German ancestry.

 

Many of the men had only recently survived the destruction of the Hungarian Second Army on the Don River on the eastern front of the war. Some walked home from the war barefoot. They returned from one nightmare — only to be carried away into another.

 

The deportation hollowed out Hercegkút. The very generation that should have rebuilt the village after the war was instead sent into coal mines and labor camps hundreds of miles away. Fifteen of the 135 deportees never returned. The last 13 survivors did not arrive home until October 1949.

 

Those who came back were weakened to the extreme, traumatized, and frequently silent. They had been warned not to speak about what had happened. By then, Hungary’s Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship consolidated its control, and the victims understood that even memory could be politically dangerous.

 

In less than a year, Hercegkút — like the rest of Hungary — was struck by two totalitarian regimes. The Nazis eradicated the village’s Jewish community because of their ancestry; the Soviets deported much of its working-age population because of theirs. Different ideologies, same deadly principle: People were condemned not for what they had done, but for who the state decreed them to be.

 

It would be understandable if the story ended here. But, remarkably, it didn’t.

 

To understand how this village endured, one must only walk into its church and look up. The local church dedicated to the Our Lady of the Visitation was built in the late 18th century with the labor and contributions of the villagers. In September 1955, the parish council decided that its smoke-darkened interior urgently needed repainting. The scale of the project was extraordinary: Its estimated cost equaled roughly six years of the parish’s operating budget. The villagers planned to finance it partly through a collection of wine after the harvest, and parishioners built the scaffolding themselves.

 

Work began in the summer of 1956 — the same year in which Hungarians rose against Soviet domination and were crushed by Soviet tanks — and was completed in 1957.

 

The artists, the brothers Emánuel and Leó Petrasovszky, were men of profound Christian faith. On the walls and vaulted ceilings, they painted Hungarian saints and blesseds, the four Evangelists, scenes from the life of Christ, and the patron saints of the village’s traditional feast days.

 

Consider what that meant. Hungary’s church schools had been nationalized. Religious orders had been suppressed. Priests and believers were watched, harassed, and imprisoned. The regime’s officially atheist ideology sought to drive Christianity from public life and eventually wipe it out of human memory.

 

Yet in a little wine-growing village recently emptied by deportation, people sacrificed years’ worth of resources and their own labor to cover the ceiling with hope.

 

While the communist party promised a new world without God, the freshly painted church walls quietly disagreed.

 

It is difficult to imagine a more beautiful act of quiet, diligent, strong resistance. It was not a march or a manifesto. It was a community repairing what had been damaged and handing down what the state wanted forgotten. In a system built on fear and historical amnesia, the villagers chose hope and memory. Under a regime that claimed the future, they painted for generations they might never see.

 

Totalitarian regimes are obsessed with permanence. They erect colossal monuments, stage outsized military parades, rewrite textbooks and burn books that disagree with them, rename streets, and insist that history has culminated in their rule. They demand not only obedience but professed belief.

 

Then there’s a breaking point. Their monuments are pulled down. Their slogans become museum pieces. The officials who spoke in the name of history are themselves consigned to it.

 

But the parishioners keep praying. Children learn the names of those who were taken. Grief becomes memory, memory becomes duty, and duty makes renewal possible.

 

A state can confiscate property and abolish institutions. It can turn ancestry into a crime, put innocent people on trains, send soldiers from the Don to the mines of the Donbas, and frighten survivors into silence. It can even succeed in erasing an entire community from a village.

 

But it cannot finally possess the human soul. Faith, family, memory, love of home, and the quiet loyalty of one generation to another remain beyond its rightful reach. These are not sentimental refuges from politics. They are defenses against the state’s most radical ambition: to determine not merely how people live, but what they are permitted to remember, love, and worship.

 

Black Ribbon Day should recall more than what totalitarianism destroyed. It should also remind us of what it could not crush.