By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, November 02, 2026
I do not have any better an idea of how Tuesday’s
elections will turn out than you do. There are some things—markets, the
movement of bird flocks, evolution—that are not predictable, neither as a
practical matter nor, more important, even in principle. You never have the same traffic jam
twice. Elections are like the weather: There are trends in which one can have
some confidence, but the closer one moves to specificity the more unpredictable
things get. It is a safe bet that the average day in Houston in August of this
year will be hotter than the average day in January (and the average day in
hell), but if you were wagering on the temperature spread between January 15
and August 9 at 4 p.m. on Runway 13R/31L at Hobby Airport to within 1 degree,
then I’ll bet against you no matter what, because you aren’t going to get it
right.
So, is James Talarico going to win in Texas? Who has the
heat? Ask my wife (who sometimes will casually drop the word psychrometric
in conversation) what the temperature in the living room is, and she’ll ask: Where
in the living room? In the same way, yes, it seems that Talarico is running a
little warmer than his Republican opponent in the race, the execrable and
embarrassing Ken Paxton, but one must consider the margin of error in the
thermometers. (Is the baby running a fever? The margin of error in common
drugstore thermometers under real-world conditions is as high as ±3.7 degrees
Fahrenheit, so ... maybe, maybe not. When the question comes up some morning at
2:43 a.m., this will seem to me more important than polling error margins.)
Anybody who tells you that they know for sure how any competitive race is going
to turn out is lying to you in the service of some financial, political, or
personal interest.
If I were betting my own money on it, I would bet on a
night that is bad for Republicans but not as bad for them as I’d like for it to
be, with the result being a relatively modest but far from dispositive
Democratic victory. What that probably looks like is control of the House and,
if the Democrats perform on the high end of reasonable expectations, a very
small margin in the Senate, though I would not be very surprised to see the
upper chamber go either way. (And who knows what monkey wrenches miscreants
such as John Fetterman may throw into the works post-election?) Democrats may
pick up some unexpected wins in places that did not seem likely and may lose a
few that they weren’t expecting to. I would not bet my own money on Gina
Hinojosa winning the governorship in Texas, but I would not be very surprised
if she did. Democrats may have a better night than expected—or Republicans may.
One thing that is a safe bet, I think: No matter how
tiny, modest, limited, and underwhelming the Democrats’ success may be on
Tuesday, any outcome that sees them taking control of the House will produce a
great deal of idiotic braying about the Democrats’ new “mandate for change.”
Some of that is just convention—American politicians just talk that way, for
some reason—but considerably worse and more worrisome is that some of these
fools are going to believe that nonsense, just as Joe Biden apparently became
convinced that he had early-1937 Franklin Roosevelt levels of political clout
and a mandate to do whatever popped into the ample available space in his head
or was whispered into his ear. That went about as well for Biden as one would
have expected, and Democrats who decide to try to run wild with a “mandate”
after Tuesday will be setting themselves up for the same kind of failure.
Democrats are not going to take advice from me, and there
is no particular reason they should. I am a party of one and do not represent
any powerful faction or desirable electoral demographic. But I will offer some
advice nonetheless on the theory that it might be useful for them to hear even
if they will not act on it.
If the Democrats do have a big night, they will have a
mandate, but only the most obvious one: The Democrats will have a mandate to
not be Donald Trump. That is it.
That’s the same mandate Biden had last time around. And
that is enough—or should be.
I am not among those who believe that there is no
meaningful difference between the parties, that six of one is half a dozen of
the other, etc. That said, the two sides in the 1927 Pharus-Säle brawl, which
saw Nazi brownshirts duking it out with Stalinist KPD goons, had a great deal
more in common with one another than either did with, say, F. A. Hayek, at the
time a postgraduate student observing German developments, with growing
apprehension, from Vienna. Like the two great totalitarian movements of the 20th
century, what our Democrats and Republicans have in common with each other in
2026 is their worst tendencies: Republicans are not the only ones who have
rejected the legitimacy of elections they lost, who have a corruption problem,
who are in thrall to a particularly stupid and vicious kind of populism made
worse by social-media culture, who act without sufficient sense of
responsibility, patriotism, duty, and citizenship. It is true that these
problems have been significantly worse among Republicans for a decade
now—Donald Trump is partly a cause of that and partly a result of it. But
enlightened Democrats surely appreciate that their party is vulnerable to the
same vices as the GOP.
We sometimes talk about the policy situation in
Washington using terms such as “gridlock” and “logjam,” as though the reality
were that there were two powerful factions, each with a positive and definite
political program, neither with the clout to quite get it done in the face of
energized opposition and special-interest maneuvering. But that is not really
the case.
When Biden took over for Trump in 2021, he and his
congressional allies kept much of the worst of Trump’s economic policy, from
tariffs and protectionism and crony corporatism to maintaining enormous
deficits and rejecting any effort at entitlement reform. The Democrats did not
get tricked into following Trump’s economic playbook in the Biden years.
Rather, the Democrats kept the tariffs and the corporatism and the deficits
because these are the product of bipartisan consensus—idiotic,
dangerous, and destructive bipartisan consensus, to be sure, but bipartisan
consensus nonetheless. Republicans have had two periods of unified “trifecta”
government under Donald Trump, from 2017 to 2019 and from 2025 to the present,
during which they have shown themselves unable or unwilling to advance
substantive reforms to anything—taxes, spending, immigration, trade,
national security—through Congress, sinking instead into the bog of Trump’s
ad-hocracy. The result: economic and political stagnation; deficits approaching
COVID-era levels and unmatched by any non-COVID period in modern history as
extraordinary deficits become ordinary deficits; ruptured alliances and utter
incoherence in international relations and military affairs; a business
environment increasingly warped by corporatist subsidies, protectionism, and
favor-granting. Even the success in closing the southern border is a tenuous
thing that can, and may, be undone easily by a succeeding president, so little
having been effected in law.
Of course Democrats have a mandate to not be Trump,
however the election turns out. In a sense, everybody has a mandate to not be
Trump: Trump’s approval numbers are down there with hemorrhoids. But the
mandate to not be Trump is not the mandate to be Bernie Sanders or Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez—figures who are, in important ways, more like Trump than unlike
Trump. The proper response to right-wing populism, extremism, vendetta
politics, hysteria, etc. is not more of the same from a new group of newly
empowered jackasses, old policies applied to a new enemies’ list.
I know that I am not going to get my best-case Democratic
Party scenario—the one in which Democratic leaders go back and read a few
years’ worth of editorials in The Economist and say, “Okay, we can do
that!” But there are better and worse ways for the Democrats to proceed with
whatever newfound
power they have come January. Because I have a very strong preference for boring
government, let’s consider the case of taxes.
At the moment, the Democrats talk about taxes in almost
exclusively moralistic—and punitive—terms. This is an exercise in pure magical
thinking: “If we do the thing that makes us feel morally satisfied, then the
math will take care of itself.” But the math never takes care of itself. The purpose
of a tax policy is not to pursue fairness, morality, social justice, or
anything like that: The purpose of tax policy is to raise sufficient revenue
while minimizing the inevitable damage and distortion that all taxes impose on
an economy. The discussion can be maddening, as I know, having been through it
so many times. It goes like this:
Some nice progressive: “If only billionaires would pay
their fair share, then we could have all the spending we want and balance the
budget, too.”
Pointed-headed right-wing ideologue: “Nope. Here are the
numbers.”
SNP: “But that isn’t how I want it to be!”
P-HR-WI: “Your subjective sense of fairness has no effect
on the underlying economic reality.”
SNP: “Jeff Bezos paid you to say that.”
It does not matter how many times you repeat the relevant
facts—that we actually had slightly lower taxes (revenue as share of
GDP) during the supposedly high-tax Eisenhower years than we have recently,
that high-income people already pay a wildly disproportionate share of federal
income tax, that the low notional rate on dividends is offset by the fact that
these are paid out of business profits that already have been taxed at the much
higher corporate rate, etc.—and people will cling to their superstitions and
fictions and clichés as though their lives depended on it. Anything other than think.
Democrats could put forward a program that would reduce
and stabilize the deficit while fortifying Social Security, Medicare, and
Medicaid. Or they could scratch that ol’ Klassenkampf itch. They could
even do a bit of both, if they were creative: It wouldn’t be the worst idea in
the world to: 1. get rid of the corporate income tax entirely but 2. tax
capital gains at the ordinary income rate while 3. exempting capital gains in
ordinary retirement accounts from taxation but 4. getting rid of the ceiling on
the payroll tax and 5. sharply reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits
for high-income beneficiaries. That isn’t my ideal program, but it isn’t
my party, either. Get rid of a bunch of tariffs and trade barriers to help
bring prices down and stabilize supply chains, make it easier to build a bunch
of nuclear power plants (which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and could
power a whole bunch of desalination infrastructure in California and Texas),
and take a progressive “abundance” approach to reforming construction
permitting—that’s a good 10 years’ work that a great many libertarians and
conservatives would not object to very much (yes, Grover Norquist et al.
will howl about the payroll tax), that would contribute mightily to real
prosperity, and that would look awfully good in comparison to what Republicans
have been offering or are likely to offer.
In reality, any kind of Democratic policy agenda is
likely to take a backseat to other Democratic priorities—especially the
priority of adversarial oversight and investigation of the Trump
administration, up to and including the possibility of a third impeachment of
the president and the impeachment of underlings from J.D. Vance to Marco Rubio
to Pete Hegseth. This is reasonable and appropriate, particularly given that
even an intelligent and enlightened Democratic policy agenda—especially an
intelligent and enlightened Democratic policy agenda, if such a thing should be
exnihilated into being—would be difficult if not impossible to pass while the
Democrats have only small margins in one or both chambers and while Trump
remains president. (Should the Democrats take the House but not the Senate,
then Republicans will still effectively control the initiative where
policymaking is concerned but will continue to rely on unstable executive
unilateralism.) The Democrats will face a complex combination of political crosswinds
when dealing with that: from the Republicans, who will howl about double
standards and opportunism and somehow expect to be taken seriously; from
Democrats, who always risk falling prey to ersatz cleverness and will seek to
game hearings and any possible impeachment for maximum political advantage,
which isn’t inherently illegitimate but which generally leads to bad
decision-making; from the general public, which may be tired of that kind of
spectacle and which may feel that grandstanding in hearings doesn’t do much to
address their affordability concerns, which are fundamental; and from business
elites, whose most influential figures (many of whom have been practically
supine in their efforts to court the goodwill of this White House) desire a stable
political environment and who do not wish to be pulled between Democratic
demands and a Republican administration that, for all of its intellectual and
moral impotence, still controls the DOJ, the FBI, the Commerce Department, the
Treasury, etc., and consequently has the power to make life hell for any given
business or industry.
If the Democrats could channel their moralism and natural
vindictiveness into oversight and investigation while keeping cool heads where
policy-making is concerned, that would be just about ideal—or at least the best
of all the plausible scenarios. But whatever the outcome of the election,
Democrats should keep foremost in mind that whatever mandate they have is not a
mandate to be mirror images of Trump and his party, running hysterically in a
dozen different directions at once, ragefully lurching from one vendetta to the
next and from one act of petty revenge-taking to another, attempting to govern
as though the opposition did not exist and as though there were no tomorrow.
Because tomorrow is coming, and so is the next Election
Day.
And Furthermore ...
Last week, I
wrote about the Trump faction’s last attempted coup d’état and the
one they might be expected to try if the midterm elections go very badly for
them. I pointed out in the piece that most of the major coups in the history of
the Western world for the past couple of centuries—from the ones that brought
Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco to power to the one that helped to clear
the way for Adolf Hitler—is that they generally relied upon some legal pretext,
sometimes before the fact, sometimes after, sometimes both. The fact that an
interested party can make some kind of legal or constitutional argument for a
coup does not make the coup any less of a coup.
Some of the response was the predictable insipid stuff: How
dare you compare Trump to this or that murderous dictator! We aren’t building
concentration camps and disappearing political dissidents or torturing them in
sports stadiums! And that is true. But my argument is not about whether
Trump is conducting a campaign of mass murder against political dissidents at
home. He isn’t. He is conducting a campaign of mass murder of supposed drug
smugglers at sea, but set that aside for the moment. My complaint is the
attempted coup. As Jonah Goldberg sometimes observes, “Trump isn’t Hitler!”
isn’t much of a defense, inasmuch as one can be pretty bad without being
Hitler.
But here’s something to think about: Hitler wasn’t
Hitler, either, until he was. By that I mean that most historians and
biographers agree that when he came to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler did not have
in mind extermination camps and related measures targeting the Jews of Europe and other hated groups–the
program of genocide that has become, for good reason, synonymous with his name.
Hitler was a vicious and violence-minded antisemite, without a doubt, but what
came to be known as the Final Solution seems to have been an idea developed
years after Hitler came to power and partly under the influence of other men.
There were political concentration camps pretty quickly, but the first
extermination camp did not start operating until 1941, after Hitler had been in
power for nearly a decade.
Consider that category of “Bad, but not Hitler Bad”
tyrants. Pinochet did not take power because he wanted to torture people and
murder his political opponents; he tortured people and murdered his political
opponents in order to consolidate power and keep it. The Spanish Nationalists
didn’t want power because they wanted to murder Federico García Lorca—they
murdered Federico García Lorca because
they wanted power. Some of the goals of Franco and Pinochet were (and are)
shared by people of goodwill who reject these monsters and their
techniques—anticommunism is preeminent among these. Anticommunism has a way of
blinding Americans and some European liberals to some truly horrifying things.
Hayek’s tolerant attitude toward Pinochet drew a gentle rebuke from no less a
figure than Margaret Thatcher. (“I am sure you will agree that ... some
of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable.”) Means and ends both
matter.
I do not know whether Donald Trump and those around him
would set up a Lubyanka or a Perm-36 if they had the chance to do so. I do not
need to know. I know that Donald Trump and his gang attempted to overthrow the
government of the United States by nullifying the 2020 election and illegally
maintaining Trump in power. That is all I need to know. And if you are a
politician with an “R” next to your name who cannot speak plainly and honestly
about this—and there are damned few of those—then I know all I need to know
about you, too.
Words About Words
Vance—not me, and not his
critics—has chosen to put Christianity at the center of his public identity.
There is no cognizable Christian principle that could possibly justify Vance’s
active and culpable dishonesty in the Springfield matter or his utter indifference
to the truth—indifference he confesses with his own lips and justifies—in the
Ramaswamy matter.
Of course, it should read “not I,” rather than “not me.”
Mixing up the objective and subjective case is one of those things that
sometimes happens in edits, including the edits in the writer’s head: In this
case, for example, I suspect that the writer was thinking “It wasn’t me that
did that, it was him,” but changed things around, producing the above
illiteracy. Some people.
Another person who cannot quite write in English is Bradley
Devin, this dorkified specimen from the peckerwood-trash crybaby caucus
that Jonah Goldberg highlighted for responding, stupidly and illiterately, to
that John Puri note over at National Review that has so
many right-wing alpha male dresses over so many right-wing alpha male heads. I
will reproduce the tweet in full, for your enjoyment:
Ten years later, @NRO is as Never-Trump as it was
in 2016, just more vapid. This piece is earning great aplomb from the clapping
seals of American decline—from Kinzinger to Kristol—because each link directs
to things Trump has said or done. The ‘atta boys’ are for being a ‘principled
conservative.’ But this banal politics of ‘what if the shoe was on the other
foot?’ is not principle. It is anti-conservative because it is an ideology—some
species of liberal proceduralism—dressed in conservative drag. It’s politics
without politics. It has no conception of ends and goods. Behold, the beautiful
loser, here to ‘um ackshually’ you to death.
Would you not be embarrassed to write that crap?
The first word in J.D. Vance’s bio on X is “Christian,”
which is hilarious; the first word on this low-rent cliché retailer’s bio is
“writer,” which is a lot coming from a guy who doesn’t know what “great aplomb”
means. After “writer” there is a list of résumé stains ranging from The
Daily Caller to being the president of a College Republicans chapter.
Bro.
Beautiful Losers is the name of a Leonard Cohen
novel that isn’t very good, but I don’t think I’d call this guy a beautiful
loser, a formulation that contains an entirely unnecessary adjective.
I don’t know John Puri, but I am sure he deserves better
enemies than people who have never had an original thought or written an
interesting sentence.
Elsewhere
Do read “This
Data Center Crap” from Amelia Christmas Gramling in The Dispatch. A
very tasty slice of American life. Excerpt:
I was early—the courtroom hadn’t
opened yet. So I stood outside with a white-mustachioed retiree named Jack
Takach who asked me if I’d brought any snacks.
Jack used to farm tobacco with my
dad at a homestead called the Flying Frog Farm about 10 miles east of Franklin.
He’d been at another court proceeding regarding the same data center in June
that was a disappointment, or so I gathered, because it had been hard to hear
and he had been hungry (Jack had stood up in the back of the courtroom as soon
as the judge adjourned and bellowed “WHERE ARE THE SANDWICHES?”—but none
materialized). Jack told me the data center was probably a foregone conclusion,
nothing to be done: “Seems like money’s being spread around if you know what I
mean.” He elaborated in a hushed voice that, from Jack, was still basically a
scream. “Like the fix is in, you get me?”
Still, he had come. The last time
Jack had been adjacent to anything like a political action, he’d been a junior
at Towson College protesting the Vietnam draft. Bobby Kennedy had just been
assassinated. COINTELPRO was tapping phones. He spent the next 50 years in the
woods in western Kentucky, where he built a geodesic dome and then a saltwater
pool, and where he had done his best to build a home into which international
politics could not penetrate. His presence at the courthouse meant the prospect
of the data center had grown, even in Jack’s protracted hermitage, too real to
ignore, and too close to avoid. It meant, too—despite what he told me—that he
was still hopeful it could be stopped.
Jack’s hopes, and those of many
others in Simpson County, were pinned on an antique mall. Bright’s Antique
World adjoins the tract of land, out on Steele Road, on which TenKey plans to
build. It is owned by a married couple who met as songwriters in Nashville:
Linda and Riley Bright.
The Brights’ lawsuit was
straightforward and highly localized: It was about two adjacent properties, two
would-be neighbors. The Brights’ complaint was that the development TenKey had
proposed—a hyperscale data center and on-site natural gas power plant—would be
bad for business, i.e., that the smells, sounds, and general “disturbances”
emitted by the plant would dissuade patrons from attending their outdoor
markets. Simple enough. But the stakes of the case, as far as the rest of the
town was concerned, were no less than existential. Denita Brady, a Franklin
native who I met outside of the courthouse bathroom, told me she was afraid.
“Used to be that in a world that was literally burning, Franklin was where we
were still loving our neighbors, raising our kids, you know still the same
town,” she said. “That’s how it was, anyway, before all this data
center crap went down.”
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