The Apocalyptic Style in Woke Thinking

By Jonathan Chait

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

Greta Thunberg was detained last month in Germany, during a sit-in at a munitions factory that sells weapons to Israel. She was wearing a Yalla Intifada T-shirt. Perhaps you thought Thunberg was a climate activist. She used to be. Thunberg gained fame by warning that greenhouse-gas emissions posed a threat to human life so urgent and existential that the world must put aside trifling concerns to solve it immediately. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is,” she told the World Economic Forum in 2019. But someone else will have to put out the fire, because these days, Thunberg is possibly the planet’s most famous anti-Israel protester.

 

Much of the climate movement—particularly its most radical elements—has pivoted to Palestine. The Climate Justice Alliance, Extinction Rebellion, and Climate Defiance, among other green organizations, participate regularly in Free Palestine demonstrations. Most of the campus groups that were previously organized around demanding that their universities divest from fossil-fuel companies now demand that they divest from companies that do business with Israel. The same holds true across swaths of the left. Activists who previously treated racial justice, public health, or trans rights as the cause of a lifetime have determined that Gaza is now the cause of their lifetime.

 

Some of the pre-Gaza activism yielded tangible successes. Climate activists, for example, built a movement that persuaded Democrats to make their cause the party’s highest legislative priority, which is why the Biden administration expended so much effort passing green-energy subsidies. These gains were temporary: Donald Trump proceeded to repeal most of those policies. But instead of continuing to try to put out the blaze, many activists have simply moved on.

 

The draining of energy away from issues that once seemed so urgent has been slightly disorienting, even humorous. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently repeated a catchphrase that has circulated on the left, “Woke 1 was crazy,” which simultaneously laughs off the excesses of the social-justice left while implicitly assuming that a Woke 2 is just around the corner. The reality, however, is that Woke 2 is already here, and Gaza is its current preoccupation.

 

Woke 2 exhibits nearly all of the same behaviors as its predecessor—the fervent demands that society concentrate all of its attention on an apocalyptic crisis, the importation of academic jargon, and the reshaping of the social relationships and everyday decisions of its adherents.

 

To see these characteristics reappear in a completely different context from their original incarnation casts the woke phenomenon in sharp relief. Wokeness is not concern about a particular issue or issues, or even an ideology. It is, instead, a political style, a form of apocalyptic obsession that is serially fixated on different issues, waxing and waning in intensity. It offers the comfort of Manichaean morality—telling adherents that they alone can see the world in its true horror. But what it doesn’t offer, by design, is any practical resolution.

 

***

 

Unlike what the historian Richard Hofstadter once called “the paranoid style in American politics,” which dwelled on imaginary plots, the woke apocalyptic style concerns itself with actual social crises. Greenhouse-gas emissions really do pose a threat to posterity. Israel really has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians. Racism and police brutality, and the coronavirus pandemic—two other causes that inspired apocalyptic forms of activism—were likewise anything but a figment of the left’s imagination.

 

So what distinguishes the woke apocalyptic style from the understandable urgency one would expect activists to feel about any important social problem? The mindset has three defining traits.

 

First, its adherents gravitate toward the purest version of whatever position they select. They are facing down not just climate change, police bias, or a pandemic, but human extinction, racism, eugenics, and other existential perils. Only questions that can be reduced to a pure conflict between good and evil interest them. They generally reject any nuanced view of these issues as an effort to distract from the question at hand and drain the necessary moral fervor (though they prefer to call it “moral clarity.”) Beliefs they themselves held until very recently can become not just wrong but so abhorrent that anybody still endorsing them must be shunned.

 

A 2024 New York profile of the former Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, a seminal figure in both Woke 1 and Woke 2, explained his newfound focus on Palestine as a product of the revelation that the issue was actually quite simple. The profile frames this aspect of his thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in vivid terms: “That it was complicated, he now understood, was ‘horseshit.’ ‘Complicated’ was how people had described slavery and then segregation. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said, ‘when you want to take something from somebody.’”

 

Second, as a way of counterbalancing its tendency toward serial fixations, woke apocalypticism frequently asserts that every worthy cause is linked. During the 2014 protests against police abuse, Free Palestine activists persuaded racial-justice activists that their causes were the same. When COVID-19 seized the attention of the protest community, these same activists emphasized the racial-injustice aspect of the pandemic. “Palestinian Liberation is a disability justice issue,” the “People’s CDC,” a left-wing public-health group, has proclaimed. In the green activist community, the slogan “There is no climate justice without Palestinian liberation” has become almost a ritual incantation.

 

In June, trans-rights activists chased California State Senator Scott Wiener from a trans-rights rally, screaming, “You do not belong here,” because they deemed his position on Israel unacceptably Zionist. (Wiener has accused Israel of “genocide” and called for cutting off U.S. aid for offensive weapons, but continues to support Israel’s right to exist.) All political coalitions try to emphasize links among single-issue activists, but it is nearly impossible to imagine, say, a Republican legislator being ejected from an anti-abortion rally because he supported a gun-control law.

 

The substantive basis for linking every cause together ranges from tenuous (the pandemic did harm minorities somewhat disproportionately) to nonexistent (Palestinian liberation has no bearing on climate change whatsoever). Yet insisting on a relationship upholds the bonds of solidarity among single-issue organizations, giving them permission to operate outside their domain and pursue whatever cause is presently animating their supporters. And it reinforces a sense of omnicrisis, that their project is not a series of discrete policy changes but the healing of a broken world.

 

The third characteristic of this activism is that its demands are irresolvable. The crisis is perceived as literally existential, a form of damnation that a response as small as legislation cannot dispel. Many racial-justice activists have directed their energy into tarring the United States as the sinful product of colonialism and slavery—a diagnosis that, while containing elements of truth, offers little practical redress. Unlike Marxism’s postrevolutionary paradise, woke politics has no end point beyond despair.

 

The Biden administration tried to address racial justice and climate change, two causes that preoccupied left-wing activists at the time of the 2020 election. Yet the impressive array of legislative and executive steps designed to advance both causes did nothing to placate activists, who by 2024 had decided that Gaza was all that mattered. They were not wrong to care deeply about the suffering in Gaza, but the amnesiac way in which they dropped causes that they had very recently proclaimed to be matters of literal life and death suggests that their stated motives cannot be taken purely at face value.

 

What seems to propel these activists is not the specific issue that at any given moment is causing them to feel—as Thunberg once demanded in response to the climate crisis—panic and fear, but instead the need to experience these sensations constantly.

 

***

 

Woke 1 was a tidal wave that crashed over blue America. Nearly anybody who resided in a deep-blue space—academia, publishing, Hollywood, the arts, news media, nonprofits—experienced an onslaught of new terminology and rituals. Some of this (land acknowledgments, for example) has survived as a sort of residue. Other elements (Robin DiAngelo) have receded into embarrassing memory.

 

Woke 2, so far, is more of a ripple. Opposition to Israel has long held a place in the firmament of left-wing causes, but it reached preeminence only after October 7, 2023. A network of pro-Palestinian student activist groups sprang into action immediately after the attack, which they characterized as an act of liberatory defiance. The key dynamic that enabled their cause to expand beyond committed anti-Zionists was the intensity and duration of Israel’s response to October 7, which played directly into the attackers’ goal of creating a humanitarian crisis that would turn Israel into a pariah, elevating opposition to its very existence into a social cause.

 

The cultural manifestation of this movement is most evident in progressive capitals such as San Francisco and New York City. In June, a Brooklyn coffee shop announced on social media that Dan Goldman, a Democratic member of Congress, was a “genocide enabler” and no longer welcome there. The most recent cover story of New York putatively celebrates the coolness of the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) community, but defines it in ideological, not ethnic, terms. “To be in SWANA community,” it states, “meant embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns.”

 

A companion article describes how this dynamic has seeped into the dining scene. “In the three years since October 7, awareness of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and the wars that keep proliferating have turned eating out into just one more way people are expressing their views on Israel, on Gaza, on Lebanon, on Iran.” It reports that one Middle Eastern restaurateur’s “decision not to speak or post about the war publicly has left many fans of his restaurants Miss Ada and Theodora confused about where he stands,” as if café owners, like presidential candidates, should be expected to articulate a foreign policy.

 

In political terms, Woke 1 had a profound effect on the Democratic Party. Demands by activists and staffers pushed candidates to adopt left-wing positions on crime, immigration, trans rights, and climate change that placed them out of step with the majority of the electorate. Woke 2 has had a similar effect, providing left-wing activists with a tool to discredit mainstream Democrats.

 

The movement’s insistence on calling Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians a “genocide” is its most important demand. Scholars do not agree on what this term means or whether it applies to Israel’s conduct, and resolving the question is unnecessary to establish a consensus that Israel’s response to October 7 was excessively punitive, or even that its military has violated the laws of warfare. But the tactic of demanding that Democrats label the conflict a genocide, and treating anybody who refuses as complicit in the murder of children, is not aimed at exposing supporters of Israel’s policy. It instead targets liberals who have traditionally viewed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a cycle of violence for which both sides bear responsibility. Describing the conflict as a genocide frames the problem not as a matter of shared guilt and shared responsibility to compromise, but as the straightforward oppression of an innocent people by a guilty one.

 

The term brings together the perspective of Palestinian nationalists, who see Israel as a source of unique evil in the world, with the apocalyptic left’s orientation toward generalized despair. The left-wing writer Noah Berlatsky recently argued  not only that the case that Israel had committed genocide was “open and shut,” but also that genocide is a routine occurrence. Other examples include British treatment of trans people (“The UK is moving towards, or already in process of committing, a genocide against trans and intersex people”) and Elon Musk’s cuts to USAID.

 

Leftists have discovered that requiring the term is a useful way to discredit Democrats who oppose them on other issues. “This is a moral Rorschach test,” the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said during his primary campaign in Michigan. “If you can’t identify the systematic murder of tens of thousands of kids as a genocide, and then you want to say that you’re a fighter for human rights and dignity, that’s just hypocrisy.”

 

Democrats who refuse to embrace the movement’s preferred term are, by and large, those who hold more nuanced positions on other issues. The demand to use the term genocide has broad application as an ideological sorting device. David Purucker, a sociology graduate student at the University of Oregon and a Democratic Socialists of America activist, recently illuminated the dynamic on a podcast from the centrist Niskanen Center. “And then just on the Palestine question, even though it’s not super salient to the broad Democratic electorate, it is, I think, is a really powerful signal of who is willing to take on the most sort of powerful parts of the establishment and really fight for the economic issues that are your priority,” he said. “I guess the sort of mental process would be like, Okay, if this person isn’t willing to call it a genocide in Gaza, how can I trust them really to stand up to the health-insurance lobby, for example?”

 

The Nation’s president, Bhaskar Sunkara, also a DSA member, likewise told Ross Douthat on a New York Times podcast that Gaza is “being used to separate Democrats who are committed to an old political establishment, including the foreign-policy establishment, and Democrats who are better.”

 

The Palestinian-nationalist movement has long sought to place Israel in a special category of evil. The woke apocalyptic left has assimilated many concepts and terms from that struggle, but its interest in the subject is slightly different. It uses the issue to affirm the pervasive horror of the modern world. Berlatsky’s Substack is titled, fittingly, Everything Is Horrible.

 

***

 

Despite the effort by some leftists to shrug off the craziness of the Woke 1 era, several left-wing candidates who have benefited from the energy of Woke 2 have found themselves haunted by their Woke 1 messaging. El-Sayed, the former candidate for Wisconsin governor Francesca Hong, and Democratic House candidates Darializa Chevalier of New York and William Lawrence of Michigan have all had to explain away or apologize for social-media posts using the left-wing academic jargon that was in vogue half a decade ago, some of them endorsing abolition of the police, Thanksgiving, or other well-liked institutions.

 

Any movement built on anti-Zionism as an organizing principle will tend to attract anti-Semites.When the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn elevated a left-wing faction that was similarly motivated by intense anti-Zionism, it resulted in “a culture within the Party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it,” a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission found. The Democratic Party might be facing an equally grim future, in which what happened to Weiner and Goldman—experiences that Jewish liberals have had with increasing frequency since October 7—grows routine.

 

But there is also reason to expect, or at least hope for, a more constructive outcome. Woke 2 has generated fewer cancellations, firings, and acts of terrified self-censorship. There is no 2026 Harper’s letter defending the right of intellectuals to openly debate Israel, because such a letter is not necessary.

 

Perhaps this is because progressives have learned from their past censoriousness. Perhaps even they find it too implausible to claim that exposure to contrary beliefs about a conflict on the other side of the globe is a form of harm from which they require protection. Or maybe progressive institutions are simply too split over the morality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for woke activists to easily impose a new consensus and ostracize all dissenters. Whatever the explanation, Woke 2, with a handful of exceptions, has taken the form not of a silencing campaign but of a debate—angry and frequently stupid, but engaged in energetically.

 

In an atmosphere that permits deliberation, rage may give way to reason. Liberal supporters of Israel may concede to the Free Palestine movement that Israel’s current government has no strategy other than endless use of force, that it has willingly enabled settlers to terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank, and that American policy has done too little to alter these choices. The Palestine activists might be made to acknowledge that the carnage in Gaza would not have occurred but for Hamas’s desire to murder as many Israeli Jews as possible, and that the group deliberately maximizes deaths among Palestinian civilians by embedding their fighters in schools and hospitals.

 

In other words, the Middle East is complicated. Bringing the moralistic fervor of Western progressives entirely onto one side of a generations-long conflict between warring religious sects claiming mutually exclusive historical and divinely granted rights to control a sliver of land is unlikely to result in peaceful coexistence.

 

Pro-Palestinian activists are correct to argue that American support has enabled Israel to pursue a one-state solution and to rely on military force in place of diplomacy. What they have yet to grasp is that the Western left’s inability to repudiate Hamas has had a pernicious effect on the conflict: reinforcing a co-belligerent in a cycle of violence. The American civil-rights movement is not, in fact, the proper moral lens with which to understand a terrorist group that murders not only Jewish civilians but also dissident Palestinians, and whose objective is not the right to vote and sit at lunch counters but to impose sectarian theocracy. An effective and humane Western form of activism would recognize that disregard for Palestinian well-being is a trait shared by Hamas and Israel, and would challenge both accordingly.

 

The American influence on this intractable conflict can be exercised more constructively. What Middle East policy cannot accomplish—what no reforms in any policy domain can accomplish—is resolving the existential angst caused by a political style that cannot tolerate moral ambiguity.

 

 

I Know Why Everybody Hates Capitalism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

I went to fetch the mail on Friday and saw one of those envelopes, never welcome, featuring the distinctive typography of forms from the Internal Revenue Service. Many of you will guess, immediately, that this was not a note from the IRS but one of those scammy financial things where they send you something that looks like a check but the “check” is the plastic worm on the hook of an unsolicited loan application. I get a few of those every month, along with misleading stuff from people who want to sell me an automotive service agreement, which is packaged as though it were something from the manufacturer about the factory warranty on my car. I get so many automated scam calls—about one an hour, mostly from phony financial firms telling me that my $65,000 (or whatever) line of credit is ready—that my telephone is more or less useless in any traditional role as a telephone, in much the same way that the mailbox has become nearly useless as anything other than a way station between the junk-mailers’ conveyor belts and my trash can. Scam texts purportedly from my bank and credit card companies, very scammy emails from phony political groups that exist only to fleece doddering angry old people, etc.: The sheer volume of scammery and fraud in anno Domini 2026 is astounding.

 

Americans are now subjected to billions of automated calls a year, many of them scams and scam-adjacent, and the number is growing, up by about 16 percent this year, according to industry sources, though it seems like a good deal more than that to me. It is difficult to imagine that this stuff really works, but I suppose it must—it does not cost very much for scammers to make an automated phone call, and the average loss from scams of this sort is estimated to be a few thousand bucks. Some of you will know (or will have heard of) a man whose Saturday night consists of going out to a bar and straightforwardly sexually propositioning every woman who catches his eye—no “Can I buy you a drink?” or anything like that, just the ask, unvarnished, however many times is necessary each night, until getting a “Yes.” It does not cost anything to ask and, if you are psychically equipped for that sort of thing, it is not the worst courtship strategy ever invented. Ask 10 million octogenarians to text you their banking information, and you’ll probably get a few positive responses. It is a volume game.

 

I have written many versions of this sentence, and I’ll repeat myself here: Pretty much everybody in the rich world would be enthusiastically pro-capitalism if not for their experiences with a handful of firms concentrated in financial services and telecommunications: insurance companies (especially health), banks and credit card issuers, collections firms, streaming and (especially) cable services (there is a reason that fewer than 1 in 3 U.S households subscribes to cable today, down from a peak of 90 percent or so), mobile providers, things like that. The problem seems to be nearly exclusive to providers of intangibles, whereas providers of physical goods have a relatively good reputation. However overpriced their goods may seem, nobody hates Gucci or Cartier the way some people hate their banks or insurance companies—UnitedHealth’s profit margins run around 3 percent vs. 22 percent for luxury-goods giant LVMH, but you will not win any votes calling for the nationalization of Louis Vuitton or Moët & Chandon. It is true that luxury goods occupy a special cultural position, but you could make much the same case about Adidas or Dell or Black & Decker.

 

We live in a society that is far more egalitarian in theory than in practice. Airlines are another industry that people hate—and nobody hates them with the Wolf-Rayet heat with which I hate them—but I will say in defense of the airlines that they are at least honest about the one thing Americans find it very difficult to speak honestly about: status. Sure, congrats, you got that round-trip ticket for $129, now take your boarding-group nine ass to the back of the bus with the rest of the proles. Airlines (and airports and the associated enterprises) are run by a particularly vicious bunch of clowns, to be sure, but airlines also are an example of a case in which the great majority of the fault lies with consumers rather than with dopey corporate managers or rapacious shareholders. Most Americans do not take a flight at all in any given year and, of those who do fly, most take only one or two flights a year. But there are a lot of those seldom-fliers, which is why frequent fliers make up only 12 percent or so of the total population of passengers. Seldom-fliers pretty reliably just go online and pick whatever the cheapest option for getting from Cleveland to grandma’s house in Toad Suck, Arkansas, happens to be on a given day, i.e., they discriminate based on price and basically nothing else. So airlines have to compete on price and basically nothing else, at least where these yahoos are concerned. Hence the treatment of economy-class fliers, which increasingly resembles the treatment of factory-farmed livestock, except instead of being force-fed some kind of hormone-laced soy-based swill of the kind that pigs get, fliers are force-fed credit-card solicitations, including that “limited-time offer” from American Airlines that has been going on for, what, 18 years now?

 

That said, airlines still offer a lot of what it is that people hate about capitalism, or what they imagine they mean when they use the word capitalism. For example, airline travelers generally do not have a whole lot of choice when it comes to choosing a carrier, especially if they do not live near a major hub airport. They feel as though they do not have much power when it comes to bargaining over prices, which is true at the individual level but wildly untrue when it comes to economy fliers as a class, who, as noted above, basically set the fundamental terms of service. When there is a delay or a cancellation, passengers feel they have little or no say in how that situation is handled and little or no recourse when it comes to costs that may be imposed on them through incompetence or negligence of the airlines. If the airline does anything to make it up to passengers, it generally does so on its own terms and at its own discretion. When the airline says, “We’re not going to fly you to Tampa, after all,” or “We’re going to fly you to Tampa, but you’ll get in four hours later than planned,” fliers basically have to take it. But if you tell the airlines, “Okay, but I’m going to pay you $200 instead of $300,” you’ll get treated like a crazy person. Your bank doesn’t pay you a $90 service charge every time it is late with something or gets something wrong, but it sure as hell expects you to pay that if you make a mistake—and it has the means to ruin your credit if you fight it, imposing real costs far in excess of that service charge.

 

These are economic losses, to be sure, but they also are matters of dignity, and that, I think, may be more important in the long run. Part of that is the bigness of modern life in a global economy: If you feel that an airline or a hotel or a bank is treating you as insignificant, that probably is because you are, as a mathematical matter, insignificant, at least as an individual customer. And to be treated as insignificant—to have one’s relative lack of power (and status) rubbed in one’s face—is necessarily an assault on one’s dignity.

 

Firms that can figure out a way to treat their customers as significant earn for themselves a great deal of goodwill: American Express, for example, typically does a good job of that with its platinum cards. (Presumably the rarely seen Centurion card, or “black card,” is even better.) I have heard AmEx platinum customers suggest to customer-service representatives that the firm should raise its annual fee in order to thin out the population in the Centurion airport lounge at DFW or Vegas. You will not find many businesses with customers arguing for higher prices.

 

The power disparity in economic relations is at the heart of most complaints about capitalism, which in the greater scheme of things are less often economic in character than social and moral in character. The deck-stacking is obvious and, if it is not necessarily a scam in the same sense those automated calls are a scam, it is no more honest: Everybody knows that customers are not going to read 20 pages of lawyerly prose before checking that box that says one has agreed to the terms of service. It is one of those things we just go along with because we feel that we do not have a real option to do otherwise.

 

At-will employment is another. Most employees are in at-will positions and, even though firms need good people to succeed, the fact that an employee can terminate employment as easily as an employer does not really mean that there is some kind of equality at play: Sure, a business that is down a good person may experience some trouble, but losing one’s job can be a real trauma, especially when it comes as a surprise. (Rather than, say, after an imbecilic smear campaign in the pages of the New York Times and elsewhere.) Some studies have suggested that a man who loses his job is more likely to lose his wife than if he is caught in an affair. There is more on the line than economic inconvenience.

 

When the sexual abuse scandals began to roil the Catholic Church all those years ago, a certain kind of secular liberal could be relied upon to tut-tut that this was an inevitable consequence of clerical celibacy and an all-male clergy, which were treated as being self-evidently barbarous relics from the dark ages. But, of course, similar sex abuse scandals have afflicted Protestant and Jewish religious congregations that do not impose celibacy on ministers, as well as public schools, private schools, summer camps, etc. Hollywood and the broader entertainment industry, where chastity famously is not the rule, produced a great number of sex abuse scandals. “Well, that’s what you get with the rich and powerful, who feel that they are beyond sanction.” Maybe, but there is the inconvenient fact that sexual abuse, particularly abuse of children, is absolutely rampant in the poorest places in these United States: on Indian reservations, in remote rural areas, in the poorest urban centers. Sexual abuse is something perpetrated by everyone from celibate Catholic clergy to Donald Trump to pretty blonde teachers who make their victims “pinky promise” to keep quiet. This ought to lead one to believe that the capacity for such monstrous behavior is part of the human condition rather than something particular to this or that religious practice or socioeconomic group.

 

Likewise, the abuses associated with what we call, for lack of a better term, capitalism. If you think that greed, self-service, incompetence, pettiness, opportunism, etc., would somehow be removed from the human character by abolishing capitalism—if you labor under the delusional belief that abolishing capitalism would even mitigate these—then I would suggest you read the collected works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Václav Havel. But while I am a defender of capitalism—a celebrant of capitalism and a practitioner of it—I do not want to let capitalism off that easy, either.

 

Like many econo-political concepts, capitalism is slippery to define. A colleague of mine used to say, “Capital is what happens when property rights are respected,” and there is something to that, and one can put together a very libertarian definition of capitalism that encompasses freedom of exchange and contract with sensible limits touching externalities, fraud, some kinds of unofficial coercion, etc. But there is more to American capitalism than free enterprise and free exchange. That was true before the nakedly fascist economic policies of the Trump administration were put into place, but the rise of Trump and Trumpism should, perhaps, occasion some reflection. The many excellent arguments offered by my anarcho-capitalist friends notwithstanding, capitalism as we know it happens in a complicated nest of rules, institutions, norms, laws, etc.—and it also happens in a culture, a factor that is perhaps given short shrift. When some obvious fraud, abuse, or Wile E. Coyote-level business scheme runs amok—Theranos, the worst of Enron, a good deal of the current business model of social media companies—we not only act surprised but are surprised. Think of the caliber of the people Theranos managed to hoodwink: former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, William Perry (another former secretary of defense, not the Refrigerator, a man of an entirely different magnum caliber), former Wells Fargo CEO Richard Kovacevich, former Bechtel Chairman Riley Bechtel, etc.—all were board members. Sure, all of them hoped to make some money from getting in early on the next big thing, but there was more to it than that. Americans make heroes of entrepreneurs, and we are right to do so—but getting involved in starting a business does not liberate a man or woman from the ugly fallen facts of the human condition any more than becoming a priest or a teacher does.

 

Deng Xiaoping, that rotten old tyrant, was not wrong when he (apocryphally, alas) said, “It is glorious to get rich,” and it should be understood that he was not talking about individual fortunes so much as the fortune of his country, which had been poor and vulnerable and is now a good bit less poor and overcompensating for its former vulnerability by being an arrogant pain in the ass (and worse) all around the world. Deng even understood that for a country to get rich together necessitated a good deal of economic inequality, hence one of his actual maxims: “Let some people get rich first.” It is glorious that our country is so rich—and it is glorious that it is so much easier to get rich by creating some interesting new thing here in the United States than it is in, say, France or Switzerland, two lovely and perfectly civilized countries (rich, too, especially Switzerland) that simply do not have our culture of venture investing and entrepreneurship. But the same kind of openness to enterprise and cultural deference to business also makes it easier to start a multilevel-marketing scam in the United States or run a really crappy insurance company or a less-than-honest business ofone kind or another.

 

And if you think that the American business class is all rah-rah about free enterprise, think again: Adam Smith famously wrote that men of the same trade cannot get together without the conversation turning to a conspiracy to fix prices, but we go well beyond price fixing, using occupational licensure, financial regulations, and other instruments to create and entrench all sorts of chiseling middle-man grifts (real estate agents and the like) that simply add to the cost of getting ordinary things done. You can be a really good hair-braider—or a really good architect—but if you want to hang out your shingle and practice your trade, you have to pay somebody for permission. (Try organizing a private poker game in Vegas with real stakes on the table and see how fast you go to jail in the place where gambling supposedly is legal.) This stuff is supposedly done in the interest of public safety—you know, protecting us all from outlaw cosmetologists—but it ends up being a full-employment scheme for the lowest-performing members of any given profession, who inevitably end up working in the education-and-licensing end of their business, teaching test-prep courses and things like that, or simply collecting fees from would-be professionals who have no real option but to pay them. It is not quite a scam but not quite legit–and there is a great deal of American economic life that is like that: legal but grifty.

 

And so there is Mr. Average out there, feeling that he has somebody trying to pick his pocket 24 hours a day in ways that range from the merely disreputable to the outright criminal, who “owns” his house and his car but has somebody with his hand out monthly or annually to make him pay for the privilege of keeping his own property, who sees the heavy financial costs of inefficient and incompetence in enterprises ranging from air travel to medical billing pushed off onto him as an individual or as a business operator himself, who regularly deals with businesses with which he would never choose to have anything to do in the absence of a law compelling him to do so, etc. And maybe he blames capitalism, because that is the word he has for the things that make him feel like the most despised drone in the world’s richest beehive.

 

I am keenly aware that I write this as someone who is happy to occupy a modest place in the top income decile in these United States, someone who has opinions about premium charge-card services and airline lounges and such. I have been poor and I have been not poor, and being poor sucks—I remember that well enough to appreciate that what irritates and enrages me about the ugliness, pettiness, chiseling, indignity, and injustice of modern American life is experienced a hundredfold more intensely by people who are genuinely struggling economically in a way that I am not. And so when I hear people talking positively about socialism, I cringe and roll my eyes, because such talk is stupid and generally comes from people who don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Americans can be awfully ungrateful for all the material blessings we have, but those who complain about their bank charges or medical bills or airline experiences are not always and everywhere wrong to do so. They are wrong to think that the problem is free enterprise and free markets, of course, but that is not quite what they mean, I think, by capitalism.

 

There are a lot of cozy business-government relationships out there, a fair bit of feather-nesting, etc., and, consequently, a popular sense, by no means unreasonable, that some people and institutions are a good deal more insulated from the consequences of economic trouble and uncertainty than others are, and that this is not inevitable or natural or just.

 

Two Cheers for Capitalism, Irving Kristol advised in his famous book of that title. Two, two and a half, maybe two and three quarters.

 

Words About Words

 

In the above, I have tried to be careful about the use of the words celibacy and chastity. Celibacy, properly understood, does not refer to a state of sexual abstinence per se—it refers to the state of being unmarried or the state of having sworn off marriage, with the understanding that Christian morality requires sexual abstinence as a consequence of the unmarried state. Chastity, in the Christian moral vocabulary, does not refer exclusively to sexual abstinence, either, but to keeping sex in its place: Catholic doctrine speaks of chaste marriage, meaning one in which the dual unitive (we Catholics love our jargon) and procreative functions of sex are properly integrated into the marital relationship. Chastity may mean abstinence in one context and forbid practicing abstinence in another. Abstinence, of course, is the word for what often is meant by celibacy: abstaining.

 

And Another Thing

 

Of the Donald Trump apologists with prominent perches in the mainstream media, Marc Thiessen is surely among the most irritating—smart enough to know better but evidently unable to stop himself from publishing installment after installment of superficial turd-polishing that would put a real dent in the Washington Post’s reputation for publishing interesting and incisive commentary if it had one.   

 

Six months into Trump’s imbecilically conceived and incompetently executed goat rodeo in Iran, the leaks have started as various White House cretins desirous of having political careers in the post-Trump era do that mustelid sideways shuffle and sing a few choruses of Shaggy’s turn-of-the-century hit, “It Wasn’t Me.” But these leaks (“disloyal,” in Thiessen’s assessment) only prove that—can you guess?—Trump was right all along. The leaks, Thiessen insists, only succeed in “demonstrating what a courageous decision Trump made. Virtually alone, surrounded by naysayers, Trump acted to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

 

Thiessen is playing Avengers games with the timeline: The attack on the Iranian nuclear facility happened in the summer of 2025, the leaks in question relate to the current campaign, which began in February of this year and was oriented toward regime change rather than merely making rubble of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.  

 

But temporal coherence does not seem to be Thiessen’s thing. Trump, Thiessen argues, did what other leaders should have done and took the enemy at his word. Thiessen cites as examples Adolf Hitler’s infamous Mein Kampf and V.I. Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? In Hitler’s book, Thiessen notes, the future German dictator “laid out his plan to establish a thousand-year Reich in Germany and eradicate the Jews,” whereas Lenin in his book “laid out his plans to overthrow the Russian czar and establish a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’” Those would be points of minor interest and limited applicability if they were true, but, as a matter of fact, they are not. Mein Kampf is full of violent antisemitism, but nowhere in the book does Hitler lay out a plan to eradicate the Jews. He probably did not have such a plan at the time he wrote the book. Hitler was a decade away from his rise to power when Mein Kampf was written, and most scholars believe that Hitler himself had not set upon a policy of Jewish extermination until the mid-1930s. Like Mein Kampf, What Is To Be Done? is full of turgid theoretical disquisitions, but nowhere in the book does Lenin lay out a plan to overthrow the czar and establish—Karl Marx’s phrase already was old rhetorical hat by the time of Lenin’s writing—a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The Bolshevik Party had not yet been founded—indeed, much of What Is To Be Done? is dedicated to obscure questions of party organization and Lenin’s defense of the central role of intellectuals above and beyond the “spontaneity” of the workers’ organizations. The only thing Lenin lays out much of a plan for in the book is launching a socialist newspaper, an enterprise that, unlike overthrowing the czar, gets an entire chapter of its own.

 

To take seriously Thiessen’s advice—to take seriously the words of the world’s fanatics and rabble-rousers—would require, at a minimum, knowing what those words actually are. Neither Mein Kampf nor What Is To Be Done? was a manual for how their authors would try to operate government, but, if Thiessen really wants to think of such books that way, then he probably should do what the boys down in tech support used to advise in the 1990s: RTFM—“Read the Manual.”

 

That Marc Thiessen is a lazy columnist who very often does not know what he is talking about is a matter of general knowledge if not a matter of general interest. What is worth thinking on a good bit is the way in which his argument demonstrates the opposite of what he apparently thought his point was going to be: A great deal of what is presented to men such as Donald Trump as “common sense” grounded in “moral clarity” is, in fact, superficial piffle put forward by men and women who have not done the homework and who do not know what they are talking about.

 

Trump is praised by such figures as Thiessen for what is supposed to be his plain good sense, native cunning, gut instinct, whatever you want to call it. But those “disloyal” leaks show—as though it needed to be shown—how limited that sort of thing is. Before launching the current campaign in February, Trump consulted his intelligence advisers. Let us remember that this group was at the time led by crackpot cult member Tulsi Gabbard. But Gabbard apparently passed along the advice of the actual professionals, who warned Trump that wiping out the Iranian leadership probably would usher in a new group, possibly more hardline and even more committed to acquiring a nuclear weapon. They advised that Tehran would close the Strait of Hormuz and that this would play hell with oil prices, that our stockpiles were not stocked and piled high enough, that there were other “readiness problems for an overstretched force,” as the Wall Street Journal put it. Trump launched the war, anyway, hoping—as though hope were a policy—that the Iranians would rise up and overthrow their government, presumably while parading through the streets with placards of Donald Trump.

 

Thiessen was right about one thing: There were naysayers, and Trump did not listen to them. He probably should have. He needs to hear “nay” more than he has.

 

In much the same way that one could not extrapolate the course of German or Russian history from Mein Kampf or What Is To Be Done?, trying to predict the course of Iranian history based on the instincts of Trump’s gut, however ample, was—and continues to be—stupid and dangerous. The ideological origins of the Iranian revolution, and the current ideological character of the Iranian regime, are more complicated than barstool experts such as Thiessen would have you believe—it is not all fanatical Twelver Shiism stuff. It is worth remembering how many of the national liberation movements of the 20^th-century Middle East were led and profoundly influenced by men who thought of themselves as serious socialists—indeed, the Russian revolution had a meaningful ideological influence on the Iranian one, which makes it a little bit ironic that the Soviets were even more surprised by its success than the shah’s American friends were.

 

Thiessen would make do with a rather lighter course of study. He writes that Trump knew enough from listening to the ayatollahs in their own words:

 

For 47 years, the Iranian regime pledged to bring “death to America.” In a 2023 speech, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared, “When you chant ‘Death to America,’ it is not just a slogan, it is a policy,” adding that were it not for America the “artificial Zionist regime would have been destroyed.” In 2022, he declared, “Yes, it will happen. Death to America will happen.”

 

It is a safe bet that Trump has not spent very much time listening to the actual words of Iran’s leaders or reading them. He knows what he sees on Fox News (where Thiessen is a contributor), and he knows what people tell him. Which people? Crackpots such as Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., amateurs and incompetents such as Pete Hegseth, scheming sycophants such as J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, yes-men in Congress, and the occasional Washington Post columnist making confident assertions about books he never has bothered to read.

 

In Closing

 

One of the things that wise people will tell you when you have children is that while it is easier if you have enough money to give them the things they want, what they really want from you, especially when they are very little, is your time and attention. When I fail to resist my inner Clark Griswold, I buy my boys a lot of toys—but, then, I buy myself a fair number of toys, too, so I suppose it is to be expected. Life has not given me proverbial lemons, but literal lemons—those are an excellent investment: The boys like it when I make lemonade with them. This weekend, we made two kinds of lemonade: the regular stuff and a more complicated version with strawberries and just a little bit of rosemary. My oldest boy had helped me plant the rosemary a few months ago, and I commissioned him to harvest some from the garden.

 

A bag of lemons, a bag of limes, some sugar, some frozen strawberries, a sprig of rosemary cut from our own garden, a bowl of watermelon chunks (and, if I’m being honest, some much more popular potato chips) to snack on while we are squeezing the lemons and the limes—that is a pretty good half-hour. And then we have two kinds of lemonade with lunch. A few months ago, they made a mixed-berry pie out of berries they had gathered themselves, and it was the best piece of pie I have ever had, probably for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the ingredients or the baking.

 

It is reasonably cool in August where I live, but still warm enough for a glass of lemonade. The deer are out bothering my lilac and roses, but the lavender is thriving, and the rosemary will find its way to a roasted chicken (Mrs. Williamson is an excellent cook) when the fall weather arrives for real. “Long days and short years,” they say, and, my God, isn’t it true? Only a dozen more summers until the older boy qualifies for a driver’s license, assuming we’re still letting human beings drive cars then.

 

The summers always seemed so long when I was his age. Practically endless. Not now. I do not have a very strong feeling one way or the other on lemonade. Lemonade is fine. But making lemonade with four little boys giggling and squealing and being delighted? With their lovely mother, pleased by the scene, seeming almost as delighted? They tell me that Heaven will be better than any of this, but I am not sure that I believe it. I don’t need it to be, and I am not even sure that I want it to be. The same hand that made these lemons and limes and the good clean water and the late August sun made those four little boys and their mother, and gave their peevish, irritable father just enough sense to wonder whatever he did to deserve such blessings. The children getting juice all over their pajamas or summer shorts, their mother in her sweatpants furtively trying to get a little housework done, the dachshund hoping somebody drops something tasty on the floor, the thirsty rosemary in the garden—do you know what I think? I think Solomon in his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Hegseth’s Pentagon Lurches off the Rails

By Tom Nichols

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

Making Pete Hegseth the secretary of defense was always a huge gamble. A television host with little background in national-security or defense affairs, who topped out as a major in the National Guard, he was nominated based on the same qualification shared by most of Donald Trump’s other appointees: loyalty. And now the price of that gamble is evident. The Pentagon is careening offtrack under a secretary of defense who is firing or forcing the resignations of officers and civilian officials, not because they are unqualified but because he believes they are insufficiently loyal to him, personally.

 

The latest casualty of Hegseth’s ongoing purge is Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who resigned today after repeatedly clashing with the secretary of defense. As my colleagues Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer report, a person familiar with Driscoll’s resignation said that he had “brought up concerns with the administration surrounding Army transformation and readiness and Hegseth’s blocking those efforts specifically by firing the Generals who were responsible.” In the careful circumlocutions of Washington-speak, that means that Driscoll went to the White House to complain about Hegseth, and the president sided with Hegseth.

 

But more issues were in play than “Army transformation.” Hegseth’s tenure has been disastrous on multiple scores. Instead of giving sound advice to the commander in chief and ensuring that America remains secure while the president fights a deeply unwise war of choice, he has been pursuing his political grievances about DEI and other pet peeves against the U.S. military. Hegseth seems to have a special animus toward the Army, an institution he claims “spit me out.” He fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, and he has pushed out other senior Army officers; at this point, the Army has no Senate-confirmed chief of staff or secretary. (George’s replacement, General Christopher LaNeve, so far does not have the necessary votes to be confirmed.)

 

Even in less dangerous times, Hegseth’s irresponsible behavior would be a hazard to American national security. The Defense Department is a huge bureaucracy; it requires a leader who understands more than the mechanics of teaching trainees how to do push-ups or how to handle a weapon. Secretaries of defense must grasp the economics of the defense industry, the nature of alliances, congressional politics, the policy process, and dozens of other issues for which Hegseth seems to care little and about which he knows even less.

 

In a time of war, however, Hegseth’s shortcomings may prove deadly. Leave aside his early stumbles, including the mishandling of sensitive information. Leave aside, even, that Hegseth dissembled about the severity of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf that had succeeded in disrupting the logistical support for American forces in the theater and led to the kind of deprivations that were suffered by the crew of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. Hegseth’s incompetence, and his commitment to staying in Trump’s good graces, helped launch the war itself in the first place.

 

Hegseth was reportedly virtually alone among senior officials in supporting Trump’s decision to attack Iran—when he should have been the one person in the room who knew better. The secretary of state and CIA director were against the idea. According to the The Wall Street Journal, even then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, another of Trump’s unqualified-but-sycophantic appointees, mustered the courage to give the president bad news, telling Trump that killing the reigning ayatollah and striking Iran would “likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons”; that the Iranians “would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market”; and that Iran “would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East,” all of which happened almost immediately after Trump gave the order to go to war.

 

Hegseth, however, supported Trump’s fantasies of a quick victory. A man of principle would have warned his president even at the risk of his job, but Pete Hegseth is not that man.

 

And now Hegseth has banished another enemy, Driscoll, from the Pentagon. But as the saying goes: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Hegseth, more than ever, now owns every aspect of the Pentagon’s dysfunction. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that multiple senior military leaders—those still left, that is—have warned Hegseth that the United States cannot indefinitely extend military operations against Iran. Even the chief of naval operations, Admiral Darryl Caudle (who campaigned for the job by signaling his agreement with the secretary’s culture-war obsessions), told Hegseth that the Navy cannot “sustain its current level of support for the Iran conflict because there is no anticipated end date.”

 

Hegseth’s response to this story was to send his spokespeople out to castigate the press for revealing classified information. In an amateurish bungle, the Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the reports were “inaccurate” but also a “betrayal of the force”—leading sensible people to ask how the stories could be false and dangerous at the same time. And these were just the responses from people who are officially authorized to speak for the Pentagon; another bombshell report over the weekend revealed that the department has recruited online influencers into paid roles, but without either the influencers or the Pentagon telling anyone about their cozy arrangement with the government.

 

Hegseth, meanwhile, has dutifully overseen the raiding of assets from other theaters to support Trump’s war with Iran, leaving the U.S. and its allies exposed to potential threats from China and Russia. When Trump returned to office, Hegseth and others supported a reorientation away from the Middle East and Europe. Now the secretary and the other supposed China hawks have discarded those positions and dumped everything into a war that still has no clear strategy and no clear goal beyond stopping Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon it didn’t have in the first place.

 

Fortunately, even under the strain of a petty and incompetent secretary, and a president mired in his delusions, senior military officers are still speaking up and telling their boss the truth about America’s parlous defense situation. One of the advantages of a large bureaucracy staffed with professionals is that much of it can run and function, at least for a while, under even the most inept leaders.

 

But Hegseth is apparently close to getting the Pentagon he wants: Much like his boss at the White House, Hegseth seems to desire a building full of loyalists who put the boss’s personal fortunes over the national interest. Some reports indicate, for example, that Hegseth wants to replace Driscoll with Parnell—who has no significant qualifications for the post beyond his time fighting with the press on the secretary’s behalf.

 

The result of all this is that the United States is losing a war to a third-rate power in the Middle East. The Russians, meanwhile, are continuing their rampage in Europe and apparently considering things so perilous that the CIA director had to fly to Moscow just to warn the Kremlin off of whatever it was thinking of doing. The Chinese are watching as Trump and Hegseth have stripped the Pacific theater of its only American aircraft carrier. In the midst of this chaos, Hegseth does chin-ups while he ponders calling all of America’s admirals and generals back to another mass meeting so he can again carp at them about fat soldiers and bearded sailors.

 

Pete Hegseth has failed in every mission except one: keeping his job. But firing or forcing out everyone else in the Pentagon will not make Pete Hegseth into the secretary of defense America and its men and women in uniform need. With each dismissal, he exposes only his own insecurities, even as he manages to stay employed—but the people and the armed forces of the United States are paying the inevitable price of his incompetence.

 

 

It’s Not Just the Economics, Stupid

By Mark Miller

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

 

In her new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, Stephanie Slade sets out to describe and recover a political philosophy that faded in the years after it succeeded. Fusionism helped shape the movement that Ronald Reagan led. But what it fused — liberty and virtue — came apart over the four decades since he left office, at least in part because its adherents found it easier to talk about economics than virtue. Slade argues that recovering that connection offers a better path for the future than the alternatives that what she calls “the dissident right” offers.

 

So, to start: What is fusionism? According to Slade, fusionism is a philosophical synthesis, developed in the 1950s and ’60s, holding liberty and virtue together. The two sides of that synthesis began from different concerns. Classical liberals emphasized individual freedom, private property, free markets, limited government, and protection against concentrated political power. Traditionalists like Russell Kirk, on the other hand, emphasized religion, family, community, inherited wisdom, and the moral order. Fusionism argued that these commitments were not rivals; virtue supplied the purposes for which freedom should be used.

 

Fusionism’s leading architect, National Review editor Frank Meyer, did not regard freedom as the highest human good. Virtue was higher. But virtue, to be virtue, must be freely chosen. Government can protect life, liberty, and property, preserve public order, and administer justice. It cannot make a person good. Fusionism married what classical liberals and traditionalists were inclined to separate.

 

Slade also describes those who rejected the fusionist synthesis early on, providing an overview of the relevant philosophical disputes of the second half of the 20th century.

 

For example, Kevin Phillips, the political consultant who developed Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” felt that conservative politicians needed to set aside their preoccupation with free markets and embrace wealth distribution — except to distribute the wealth to those the right favored rather than groups who vote for Democrats.

 

Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother-in-law and Meyer’s colleague at National Review, presented the most important early challenge to that synthesis. If people repeatedly use freedom to undermine religion, family, and the moral order, Bozell asked, why should law — that is, government force — not “guide” them toward the good?

 

Meanwhile, leading libertarians criticized fusionism because they believed that even the limited government role that fusionism supported granted too much power to those in charge of that limited government.

 

But the most important early critic, especially considering where we are today, was Bozell, and Slade devotes pages to describing his objections and his personal history. Bozell eventually concluded that fusionism gave freedom priority over virtue, and for this reason he rejected it as a proper political philosophy. By his lights, that the government should exist only to protect life, liberty, and property was fatuous. Rather, government should be used “to reduce the occasions for sin,” as Slade describes it.

 

“If the state made it harder to legally obtain a divorce, fewer people would be tempted to abandon their spouses; if the state prohibited business from operating on Sundays, fewer people would be tempted to skip church,” Slade writes. “Too much political freedom enabled vice.”

 

Meyer answered that Bozell’s objection to fusionism confused freedom as the politically necessary condition for virtue with freedom as the end in itself. Once properly understood, Meyer’s point was simple: A Bozell approach to virtue could not create virtue, because government cannot make people virtuous. Virtue requires free choice; if virtue is compelled, then it is nothing more than compliance. To force people to be virtuous invites tyranny. Bozell denied “the difference between the authoritarian imposition of human power and the persuasive authority of truth and good.”

 

After making the best case she can for Bozell’s point of view, Slade sides with Meyer. Yet Bozell’s objection is not easily dispatched. The years since have demonstrated that many Americans, from Pat Buchanan in the 1990s to those of today whom Slade labels “the dissident right,” see the world as Bozell did (more on the “dissident right” below). After all, government plainly must prohibit some acts. The question is where we draw the line.

 

Perhaps the best way to make the case that Meyer’s fusionism had it right and Bozell had it wrong is told through invocation of one person and his era: Ronald Reagan. And indeed, Reagan emerges as Slade’s best case for fusionism in practice. She does not contend that he was a perfect fusionist — on his watch, federal spending grew and the national debt increased. But Reagan possessed an unusual ability to connect economics to a morally intelligible account of ordinary life, and it is in this strength that the best case for fusionism is made.

 

Slade does not mention Reagan’s famous “Morning in America” 1984 campaign commercial, but recalling that commercial makes the fusionist case for her. The commercial begins with economic facts. Employment is up. Inflation is down. Interest rates have fallen.

 

But the argument does not stop after making those economic points. It goes on.

 

Lower interest rates mean that families can buy homes. Lower inflation means that young couples can marry with greater confidence in the future.

 

Reagan completed the fusionist argument — he did not rely only on free market economics. By the commercial’s telling, improved economic conditions gave people greater freedom to work, marry, establish homes, support families, assume responsibilities, and build lives together. Economic freedom did not make people virtuous. But it enlarged their practical freedom to pursue virtue.

 

Many of fusionism’s latter-day heirs retained Reagan’s economic claims but lost his ability to explain their human purposes — in the manner that he explained them in the “Morning in America” ad and more generally. Explaining why government planning and too many regulations are bad is not the same as explaining why economic freedom is good. The modern fusionist argument increasingly stopped too soon. It became less adept at explaining what economic freedom allows people to build.

 

In this failure, the heirs to fusionism opened the door to thinkers that Slade calls, collectively, the “dissident right.” Slade uses the term to describe post-liberals, national conservatives, populists, and others who reject the fusionist settlement. They are willing to use government power to direct economic and social life toward preferred moral ends, just as Bozell articulated.

 

And their diagnosis has force. “Markets work” is not an adequate answer to people who believe that their families and communities have stopped working. That people believe their families and communities have stopped working is well described in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. By speaking chiefly in economic terms, latter-day fusionists ceded much of the language of virtue and morality to people eager to use government power to force those traits on others for “the common good.”

 

But identifying the latter-day fusionist order’s imperfections does not establish a better alternative. The dissident right’s economic populism concentrates political and economic power in the same hands, placing that power behind the state’s monopoly on the use of lawful force.

 

The contemporary dispute between the heirs to fusionism and the dissident right thus revives the 60-year-old disagreement between Meyer and Bozell. Slade’s answer, as the book’s title telegraphs, is a return to fusionism: Government must preserve the freedom by which virtue can be chosen. Families, churches, communities, and other voluntary institutions must then form individuals capable of using that freedom well.

 

But how do we do this? If the institutions that cultivate virtue have already deteriorated, how are they to be rebuilt without the government coercion that Slade rightly rejects? She shows why the state cannot restore civil society by taking on its functions. She does not quite show what can restore it.

 

Still, Slade has described the central dispute on the American right more clearly than anyone else has. Slade’s Fusionism should remind all of us that an economic argument is not complete until it explains what economic freedom allows human beings to build. Reagan understood it. Reinvigorating the fusionist synthesis will require the heirs of Meyer and Reagan both to understand what it was and learn to make its case again.

Everyone’s a ‘Fed’ Now

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

Catch me on the right day and I’ll tell you that the Republican who best epitomizes the right under Trumpism is former Rep. Trey Gowdy.

 

A strange choice, I know. Gowdy is intelligent, genial in public appearances, and was enough of a conservative to have endorsed Marco Rubio for president in 2015. He also had the good sense to retire from Congress in 2019, not long before supporting coup plots became the litmus test for being a member of the GOP in good standing.

 

Intellectually, temperamentally, and ideologically, he’s an outlier. How can a guy like that, who hasn’t held office since halfway through the president’s first term, be an avatar of Trumpism?

 

In this way: Better than most Republicans, Gowdy grasps that the ethical lines separating government, media, and business functionally don’t exist under postliberalism. You can work for all three, in practice if not officially, at the same time.

 

Gowdy did work for the president officially—or nearly did. He was tapped to join Trump’s impeachment legal team as outside counsel in 2019 but ultimately did not; Fox News, where he worked as a contributor at the time, initially fired him to avoid a conflict of interest before welcoming him back when his new job fell through. He now hosts his own eponymous Sunday-night show on the network, the latest episode of which featured a very special interview with … Donald Trump.

 

And given how softball that interview turned out to be, it’s not a stretch to say that it doubled as volunteer work for the government.

 

But that’s not all. Gowdy has also resumed practicing law since leaving Congress and now represents white-collar criminal defendants. One of his clients was sports executive Tim Leiweke, whom the Justice Department was after for allegedly rigging the bid for the University of Texas’ extravagantly expensive new basketball arena. Last December the Wall Street Journal revealed how the case against Leiweke was resolved:

 

In an interview, Gowdy said that after playing a round of golf at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 16, Trump asked Gowdy if there was anything he needed. Gowdy, a former prosecutor who had a 3.4 golf handicap in 2023, according to Golf Digest, brought up his client’s case, first asking for help getting a meeting with one of the federal prosecutors handling it.

 

…

 

Over the next few weeks, Gowdy advocated for Leiweke to be granted his own nonprosecution deal. Trump instead issued a pardon.

 

The head of the government did Gowdy a business favor. And last night Gowdy, wearing his media hat, repaid it. Et voilà: postliberalism.

 

All of this is context for today’s Washington Post scoop about the Pentagon having “secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.”

 

It’s not known if those influencers are being paid or what their mission consists of, although some have “been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy,” the Post cryptically alleged. If you’re foolish enough to consume right-wing content on Twitter, you’ll likely recognize their names: Rob Maness, Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas “Cynical Publius” Anderson.

 

A fourth influencer, Jennica “DataRepublican” Pounds, was also exposed last week as a special government employee secretly working for the Pentagon, although, unlike the other three, she isn’t a veteran. And a fifth, Adam “InfantryDort” D’Ortona, isn’t secret at all: He’s an active-duty lieutenant colonel with a “regular presence” at the Pentagon, according to The Bulwark’s Will Sommer.

 

D’Ortona posts political content frequently during working hours, defending Hegseth and attacking the left—activity that, per Sommer, “has long baffled military reporters because it appears to break with traditional standards of military nonpartisanship.”

 

In an America led by a postliberal administration that perceives no lines separating government, media, and business, how big of a scandal is this?

 

Ethics.

 

I think the ethics of this chud-era twist on Operation Mockingbird are less interesting than the strategic mindset that’s driving it. But for the record, and hopefully needless to say, it’s unethical for someone in a position of influence to conceal an affiliation that might reasonably raise suspicions about their integrity.

 

In any sphere that involves mass persuasion, the influencer’s opinion is assumed to be wholly their own unless otherwise indicated. That’s what made payola a scandal in the 1950s. Radio listeners assumed that the music being played had been selected for merit, only to learn that disc jockeys were being paid under the table by producers to spin their records. The daily playlist was effectively advertising masquerading as disinterested recommendation.

 

If you’re a mouthpiece on another’s behalf, ethics requires letting your audience know so that they can assess your credibility accordingly.

 

Postliberals understand all of this and have no objection to it with respect to their enemies. If it came out that The Dispatch had an undisclosed arrangement with the Democratic National Committee to post content critical of the president, it would be treated—properly—as a momentous ethical scandal. We present ourselves as a journal of news and original opinion; in the scenario I described, we’d be guilty of laundering another entity’s opinion and deceiving readers about its origin. That would be fraud.

 

The fraud would be worse if money had changed hands and/or if we privately disagreed with the material we were posting. But even if we took no pay and endorsed the substance of the content, as I’m guessing is true of the military influencers working for Hegseth, the ethical failing would remain. Disclosure is the touchstone: To offer an opinion without disclosing an affiliation is to sabotage your audience’s scale for weighing how much to trust it.

 

The influencers in this case behaved unethically. And if their work for the Pentagon required them to post military-approved content (again, the Post is cagey about what their actual duties are), then Hegseth behaved corruptly by deputizing them to inject government propaganda into the public debate and pass it off as honest opinion.

 

Yet I find it hard to get too worked up about any of it. It’s really this simple: On the right, virtually everyone is a “fed” now.

 

Working for The Man.

 

“Fed” is shorthand for an agent of the federal government, of course. It’s been a dirty word within MAGA since the January 6 insurrection, when populist paranoiacs coped with the shame of that day by convincing themselves that it must have been perpetrated by “deep state” federal agents out to embarrass the president. As Sommer noted in his Bulwark piece, it’s deliciously ironic that populists like Pounds et al. have turned out to be honest-to-goodness undercover “feds” working for the Trump administration.

 

But … so what? Nearly every right-wing influencer in the country with a major following is functionally working for the Trump administration. What’s the difference between Kurt Schlichter and the average MAGA blowhard on Twitter who spends 16 hours a day defending the president, except that Schlichter has a Defense Department email address?

 

Apart from hardcore postliberal ideologues like Tucker Carlson, most of the online right not only expects but demands slavish pro-Trump spin from the media it consumes. That’s how Republican infotainment became so cultish: Anyone who shows “disloyalty” to the president risks losing their audience to more loyal outlets and influencers, which incentivizes everyone to swallow their qualms about his policies.

 

Much of the GOP base plainly views forums of political opinion less as intellectual spaces than as battlefields where “information warfare” is waged and won. If its generals aren’t willing to fight on Trump’s behalf, they’ll be replaced with ones who will.

 

But that creates an unusual ethical dilemma. Is it unethical for someone in a position of influence to push propaganda on an audience at the behest of a secret sponsor if the audience wants propaganda pushed on it? If radio listeners in the 1950s had had some bizarre ideological reason to prefer that DJs take bribes to play certain songs (“It’s capitalism at work, not like those damned Russkies!”), would payola still have been wrong?

 

When the federal government is led by Donald Trump, the right expects everyone on its side in a position of influence to behave like a “fed,” whether they are one or not. So why does it matter whether they are one or not?

 

Imagine that, the day after the Iran war began, Schlichter had begun posting this disclaimer at the top of his Townhall columns: “Because I support the president and our country and hope to see Iran’s evil regime ousted, and because I refuse to abet the Trump-hating mainstream media in its demoralization campaign, I will only write approvingly of the mission—whether or not I actually approve of how events unfold.” Would reaction on the right have been mostly negative, disgusted by the brazen intellectual dishonesty? Or mostly positive, applauding an admirable display of patriotism?

 

The question answers itself. So what would it matter if Schlichter was or wasn’t cheerleading for the war on orders from Hegseth? To his audience, the distinction is irrelevant. Their scale for weighing how much to trust any given political opinion has been damaged so badly over the past 10 years that no one blinks anymore when the president calls for government action against pollsters who post bad numbers for him or reporters who doubt his influence in Republican primaries.

 

The right, simply put, has been conditioned to see ethics as a form of weakness. I’m not sure it’s possible to “behave unethically” toward a cohort like that.

 

Strategy?

 

The obvious response to all of that is that it’s not just the postliberal right that consumes political news online. So does everyone else. How many swing voters might be unknowingly consuming Pentagon talking points that were laundered through influencers like “Cynical Publius” to try to sway public opinion?

 

The answer, I suspect, is not very many. That’s what I meant earlier when I said the more interesting part of Hegseth’s apparent sock puppetry is the strategic thinking, or non-thinking, behind it.

 

Figures like Schlichter and DataRepublican are located deep inside the MAGA swamp politically, far away from where they might put a meaningful dent in mainstream opinion. The sort of far-right audience they might realistically influence to support Trump is one of the few groups left in America that already support Trump. It’s the rest of the country that desperately needs persuading. Take a peek at this graph and tell me: After months of war cheerleading by Pentagon mouthpieces, known and unknown, do Americans look persuaded?

 

So why did Hegseth want to recruit these people as “feds” in the first place? How would he end up gaining more from this gambit than he’d lose if/when it was ultimately exposed by the press?

 

It’s possible that the defense secretary was nervous about right-wing support for the war potentially eroding under pressure from Tuckerites and wanted to make sure there were people with large followings pushing back on the White House’s behalf. But I suspect the explanation is simpler: More so than anyone else in the administration, Hegseth is a postliberal by instinct. He was going to eventually hit upon the idea of smuggling propaganda into forums for public debate because that’s just what fragile authoritarians like him do.

 

“One of the more notable features of the second Trump term has been the administration’s clear desire to build up an alternative pro-MAGA media ecosystem outside the traditional press,” Dispatch contributor Jeremiah Johnson noted recently in The Argument. Hegseth has been especially aggressive about it. Last year he demanded that the Pentagon press corps adopt new rules prohibiting the use of unauthorized sources, then replaced its reporters with toadies from right-wing house organs when they balked. In that case, he excluded private media from a federal forum; why wouldn’t he also think to do the opposite, sending secretly deputized federal agents into a private forum like Twitter to carry forth his message?

 

Governments always scheme to manage the flow of information, but postliberal governments want a chokehold on it. Last week, for instance, Hegseth dismissed the leadership of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes after the paper revealed, among other things, the extent of the chaos at America’s badly damaged naval base in Bahrain. Meanwhile, the Pentagon itself hasn’t held a formal briefing on the war and its challenges since, if you can believe it, May 5. Suppressing damaging truths on the one hand and promoting friendly voices that will overlook those truths on the other: et voila, postliberalism.

 

You’ll find postliberal impulses lurking in all of Hegseth’s stupidest managerial choices, in fact, as his instinctive contempt for liberal norms isn’t limited to his taste for propaganda (which was probably unavoidable for a former Fox News host). For instance, he’s notorious for promoting “friends” and punishing “enemies” in his personnel decisions, laying waste to the Army’s leadership by firing experienced generals and blocking promotions for numerous qualified officers. Of the latter, the New York Times observed that Hegseth “appears to be targeting officers who worked for generals he does not like.”

 

Unlike previous defense secretaries, who eschewed partisan politics to set an example for a military that aims to be apolitical, Hegseth has hit the campaign trail for Republicans this year. (Supposedly he’s eyeing a run for president in 2028 but has denied it, not very convincingly.) The idea that a government agency should serve the personal interests of its leaders, at least when those leaders are right-wing, is another postliberal shibboleth reflected in how Hegseth handles disciplinary infractions that flatter his politics versus those that don’t.

 

His contempt for legal restrictions on war isn’t just a matter of record, it’s a point of pride that he seems to regard as a sort of badge of “anti-wokeness.” Recently ProPublica reported that Hegseth polled military commanders last year on whether the Pentagon should scrap a program designed to protect civilians during U.S. military attacks and was surprised when all of them said he shouldn’t. He “gutted” the program anyway, slashing its funding and scaling its staff way back; his attitude, according to one source who spoke to the outlet, is “bombs away!” And that’s what the military did.

 

Meritocracy, military restraint, institutional neutrality: Is it any surprise that a guy who regards liberal ideals like those as sissy stuff might also reflexively disdain norms against the government using furtive means to try to influence public opinion in its favor? And is it further any surprise that that guy would be enough of a lunkhead to recruit a coterie of chuds as “feds” who are only capable of influencing people whose opinions are already in his favor?

 

The truth is that Hegseth doesn’t really “do” strategy. As the sort of postliberal who believes there’s nothing wrong with the U.S. military that can’t be fixed by making it more like the Russian military, he simply defaults to “more ruthlessness” when attempting to solve a problem. And in its own pitiful way, his secret-agent ploy is ruthless: Renormalizing Operation Mockingbird-style tactics will set a hair-raising precedent for a more competent administration down the road, which is basically this White House’s entire M.O.

 

The most one can say for the “fed” ploy is that it reflects Trumpism’s belief that there’s no conflict in working for the government, for the media, and for one’s own professional interests all more or less at the same time. Ask Trey Gowdy. He knows.