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 20th-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.
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