The Three-Party Problem

By Yascha Mounk

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

The smart money in American politics has always bet against the rise of third parties.

 

The reasons are both obvious and numerous. The two-party system has been firmly entrenched for 200 years. America’s electoral system makes it very difficult for candidates who are neither Democrats nor Republicans to gain traction because voters are rightly worried about “wasting” their votes. And while many people are deeply unsatisfied with the current offerings, they don’t necessarily agree on the alternative they would prefer: Just because Jane and Jill might both like the idea of a third party doesn’t mean they will ever agree on the same candidate.

 

That helps explain why third-party candidates usually fail, often helping to elect candidates who are ideologically very different from those third parties in the process. Ralph Nader’s third-party run likely helped put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000. Jill Stein may have rendered the same service to Donald Trump in 2016. Even Ross Perot, the most successful third-party candidate of the past decades, ultimately helped Bill Clinton win the White House in 1992.

 

The supposedly smart money is often based on conventional wisdom. But the problem with the conventional wisdom is that it is usually right for a long stretch—before suddenly proving to be disastrously wrong. Take, as an example, the longstanding conviction among political scientists studying the American primary system that party insiders ultimately decide who gets the presidential nomination, a supposed certainty that blinded large parts of the field to Trump’s rise in 2016.

 

When it comes to third parties, we may now be approaching a similar paradigm shift. Both in the United States and around the world, structural conditions once favored a duopoly of incumbent parties. But these structural conditions have since eroded to such an extent that the old certitudes no longer apply. A successful third-party bid is much more likely now than it was in the past.

 

***

 

Throughout the history of France’s Fifth Republic, two political parties dominated the country’s politics: the socialist left and the moderate right. These two movements drew the vast majority of votes, occupied the lion’s share of seats in the National Assembly, and won every single presidential election.

 

Support for these two parties had been eroding steadily for years. In 2002, for example, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate, surprisingly edged out Lionel Jospin, the candidate of the center-left, in the first round of the presidential election (though Jacques Chirac defeated Le Pen in a landslide in the second round). In 2017, lightning struck: Emmanuel Macron founded an upstart centrist movement and rose to power on a wave of discontent with the established parties. His star has faded since then—but the traditional parties have failed to recover: Opinion polls suggest that neither the leader of the traditional left nor the leader of the traditional right has any realistic chance of making the runoff of next year’s presidential elections.

 

Germany is undergoing a similar political metamorphosis. For much of the country’s postwar history, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats split the lion’s share of the vote. Between them, they usually took 70, 80, and at times even 90 percent of the vote. But support for these so-called people’s parties has cratered in recent decades. At the last federal elections, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats received markedly less than 50 percent of the vote, a record low. They have fallen even further in recent polls, to about 33 percent.

 

What is true in France and Germany also holds in scores of other democracies around the world, from Austria to Australia. In all of them, two parties once dominated politics. In all of them, these long-established parties have shrunk or altogether disappeared. The number of countries with effective duopolies is vastly smaller now than it once was.

 

In each of these countries, a similar set of causes has driven the gradual demise of the political duopoly: Voters are unhappy with the direction of their country, making it harder for traditional parties to retain their loyalty. The public sphere is increasingly fragmented, making it harder for a couple of catch-all parties to speak to most voters. Social media favors charisma and authenticity, making it much easier for new political entrants to storm the stage.

 

All of these factors are just as strong in the United States—which helps to explain why popular support for both Democrats and Republicans is rapidly eroding. The easiest way to see how much worse the two main American political parties have become at satisfying their voters is to look at partisan self-identification over time.

 

 

As recently as 20 years ago, the number of Americans who identified with either Democrats or Republicans was about double the number who thought of themselves as independent. Under these circumstances, third-party candidates would have needed to win over a large share of voters with strong partisan identities to be competitive—an all but impossible task.

 

Since then, the number of self-identified Democrats and Republicans has shrunk significantly. There are now nearly as many independents as there are Democrats and Republicans put together, creating more favorable conditions for third-party candidates: If a third party candidate can win over a lot of independents, they can, in principle, be competitive with the support of a small fraction of traditional Democrats or Republicans.

 

Third parties are most likely to gain momentum when voters are deeply unsatisfied with the traditional options on offer. And as it happens, discontent with both traditional options is at or near record levels today. Trump is less popular now than he has been at any prior point in his first or second term: Polling averages show that around 60 percent of Americans disapprove of his performance in office, with only about 37 percent thinking he is doing a good job. Trump’s unpopularity has also dragged down support for the Republican Party as a whole. In a recent NBC poll, only 36 percent of respondents reported viewing  the Republican Party positively, with 49 percent viewing it negatively.

 

In a well-entrenched two-party system, one party falling from grace to such an extent would usually boost the popularity of the other party. For much of the second half of the 20^th century, approval ratings for Democrats and Republicans usually moved in opposite directions. Strikingly, that no longer seems to be the case. Even as independents soured on the Republican Party over the past 18 months, they have not become any more enamored with the Democrats. According to that same NBC poll, only 29 percent of respondents saw the Democratic Party positively, with 50 percent viewing it negatively. Net favorability for Democrats is even worse than it is for Republicans.

 

For now, elections remain a choice between two unpopular options. Though Democrats have a worse image than Republicans, the minds of most voters are unsurprisingly focused on the failings of the man in the White House. This year’s midterms are likely to produce a sizable, perhaps even a huge, blue wave. But Democrats would be fooling themselves if they took this to mean that most Americans have a positive view of the party or will necessarily stay loyal to it over the long run.

 

So long as Trump remains toxically unpopular and there are no realistic alternatives, voters will reluctantly flock to the Democrats. There is absolutely no guarantee that these two conditions will remain true forever.

 

***

 

Both Republicans and Democrats are very unpopular. So why has a third party so far failed to materialize? Why does virtually every representative and senator remain affiliated with one of these two parties? The answers have to do with the nature of the American electoral system.

 

In countries with proportional representation, such as Germany, voters can pick a small political party without feeling that they are wasting their vote. Even if a new environmentalist or pro-business party gets only 7 or 8 percent of the vote, it will still send some representatives to parliament and may even enter government as part of a broader coalition.

 

However, in countries with a majoritarian electoral system, such as the United States, a vote for a smaller party is usually “wasted.” If you vote for the Greens or the Libertarians this November, you almost certainly won’t affect the composition of the House or the Senate since those parties are very unlikely to win a plurality of the vote in any district. Even voters who might prefer the ideological profile of a local third-party candidate are therefore likely to “hold their nose” and instead support the major party candidate they dislike the least. (In addition, electoral rules are set by the incumbent parties, and those are unsurprisingly keen to make it harder for third parties to get off the ground; in many states, there are consequently major obstacles to even getting on the ballot.)

 

This helps explain why countries with a majoritarian electoral system have traditionally tended toward especially entrenched party duopolies. In the United Kingdom, for example, Labour and the Conservatives have for the past century split the lion’s share of the vote between them. Even if you liked other parties better, you opted for one of the two main parties.

 

But despite the structural obstacles to the emergence of third parties in the United Kingdom, that has started to change in recent years. While Labour and the Conservatives often took more than 90 percent of the vote between them in the postwar era, their cumulative vote share fell to 57 percent at the last general election and was as low as 37 percent in polling averages earlier this year—a development that looks strikingly similar to those in Germany and France. (Labour has somewhat recovered since Andy Burnham replaced Keir Starmer as prime minister, but it is too early to tell whether he can convert his honeymoon phase into lasting support.)

 

These changes are not yet reflected in the composition of the House of Commons. In a majoritarian system with five or six viable political parties, it is often enough to gain 30 percent of the national vote to sweep to a large majority. But by the same token, a new party can gain a majority at astonishing speed if it is able to rise to similar levels of popularity. If the far-right Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, recovers from recent funding scandals and gains 30 percent of the vote at the next election, it could well win an outright majority of MPs.

 

Majoritarian electoral systems, like the one used in the United States, create serious structural obstacles to the rise of third parties. But when voters get sufficiently disillusioned with the traditional duopoly that this system creates, these obstacles aren’t insurmountable, as the case of the United Kingdom shows. Could America be next?

 

***

 

America, unlike the United Kingdom, has a president who is directly elected. This means that voters pay comparatively less attention to parties and legislative elections, and comparatively more attention to personalities and presidential elections. It is therefore unlikely that the rise of new political parties would take the same form as in Britain or most other parts of Europe. I don’t anticipate that longstanding third parties like the Greens or the Libertarians will succeed in upending American politics by winning a succession of congressional races.

 

Instead, the most likely scenario for a third-party breakthrough would resemble some of the close misses of the past: A charismatic and (probably) rich individual would run for president without the backing of either the Democratic or the Republican Party, possibly succeeding in electing a number of senators or representatives on the candidate’s coattails.

 

To beat the odds, this kind of candidate would need to start with high name recognition and have tremendous financial resources at their disposal—in short, a celebrity who is famous for something other than politics. Billionaires are the obvious possibility, since they can finance their own campaigns. But a sports or movie or music star with a base of fervent supporters and a strong network of high-net-worth friends is also an option.   

 

These conditions constrain what a successful third-party bid would look like. But they are hardly insurmountable. In a country as large, rich, and raucous as the United States, there is no paucity of charismatic celebrities with outsized ambitions and access to money.

 

In this respect, Trump proved to be the model. But while he staged a kind of hostile takeover of an existing political party, his spiritual successors may choose to assail the traditional parties from the outside. In part because Trump for now retains a sufficiently large fan club to block the way to any competitor on the populist right, future third-party candidates may choose to challenge the MAGA movement from outside the structure of the Republican Party.

 

Many readers will think that the fading hold of the duopoly is a good thing. Since most Americans now feel disaffected with both Democrats and Republicans, many of them understandably hope for a third party. I should in theory feel the same way: While I don’t have any difficulty choosing between the existing options, I don’t feel especially well represented by either. Surely, I should be giddy with excitement at the prospect of having more choices!

 

But that anticipation may prove to be premature. The views of independents are highly heterogeneous, and many of the people who now long for the day when they have a third option may find themselves deeply disappointed when the day comes. While I personally would love to have a political option that has moderate views on cultural issues and recognizes the danger posed by authoritarian regimes like Russia’s, I fear that it is much more likely that a successful third-party candidate would combine extreme cultural views with deeply isolationist tendencies.

 

And then, of course, there are the perils of celebrity politics. Given the nature of America’s political system, a third party is likely to be led by a charismatic leader with little prior experience in politics. Even if I should find the program on which they run to be congenial, it is far from clear whether the candidate would, should they succeed in entering the White House, enact a principled political alternative to the status quo or simply use the office as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement.

 

Sooner or later, the day of the third-party candidate is likely to be upon us. But when it comes, many who now find that idea to be exciting may be in for a rude awakening.

 

 

Rama Duwaji’s Radicalism Is the Media’s Blind Spot

By Becket Adams

Sunday, October 04, 2026

 

Our news media tell us the spouses of public figures are fair game for investigative reporting.

 

Just ask any conservative Supreme Court justice.

 

Yet, for some strange reason, this generally accepted convention tends to run only one way.

 

Take Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. She’s an unhinged ultra-left-wing radical, a superfan of anyone dedicated to the mission of humbling the United States and erasing Israel from the map, yet she is nevertheless a media darling.

 

A shiny penny says this would not be the case were she a radical in the other direction.

 

Duwaji just wrapped up attending an overseas wellness retreat known as the “Women Sanctuary,” her third visit this year, hosted by organizers who have called for “abolishing Israel” and “cleansing” it of Jews. To be fair, if this were an isolated incident, it’d be silly to hold Duwaji responsible for the retreat organizers’ rhetoric, as if she were answerable for every word they posted.

 

The thing is, Duwaji is constantly in the company of these types of people, to the point where one feels justified drawing assumptions. The retreat is only the latest in a long string of choices and preferences on Duwaji’s part that all point in one direction.

 

Recall that she skipped America’s 250th-anniversary festivities this year for a “Plants of the Quran” retreat in Mallorca, hosted by the same “cleanse Israel of Jews” group. She also co-hosted a “Mary in the Quran” retreat in Corsica, which recast the Virgin Mary as a “Palestinian woman giving birth under occupation.”

 

Duwaji and her husband staged a big to-do this year where they hosted agitator and anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil and his family at Gracie Mansion on the anniversary of his 2025 detention by ICE.

 

Khalil, who is not a U.S. citizen, helped lead the 2024 anti-Israel protests at Columbia. He has called the U.S. government a “killing machine” and once bragged: “The top echelons of the United States government are coming after me; that means I’m doing something right.” Or he is simply an unbelievably lousy guest. Try telling that to Duwaji and Mamdani, both of whom treat him as a martyr for the cause.

 

And let’s not forget about Duwaji’s social media presence, including a spree of “likes” for posts celebrating and justifying the October 7, 2023, massacre of Israeli civilians. One liked post called the New York Times’ reporting on the October 7 sexual violence against Israeli women a “mass rape hoax” that had been “fabricated.” Other liked posts described the attack as resistance, accused Israel of a “vile land grab,” called the Sde Teiman prison a “concentration camp,” and labeled former President Joe Biden a “butcher” over his support of the U.S. ally.

 

Neither Mamdani nor his wife has offered any serious defense of those “likes,” aside from maintaining that she did all this in her capacity as a “private citizen.” That defense has so far satisfied most of the press.

 

Duwaji also provided an illustration for a collection of essays edited by the activist Susan Abulhawa, who called October 7 “a spectacular moment that shocked the world.” Abulhawa has also called Jewish Israelis “rootless soulless ghouls” and Israel a “cultureless, rootless human aberration in the form of a manufactured ‘nation.’” And she’s complained that “we live in the time of Jewish supremacist demons.”

 

There is more from Duwaji, including social media activity from when she was much younger: sharing a tribute to a Palestinian bomb maker, sharing the message “F*** #TelAviv. Shouldn’t exist in the first place. They’re occupiers,” and boosting allegations that U.S. soldiers are guilty of “mercilessly slaughtering 3rd world civilians” to maintain “American hegemony.”

 

There is quite a body of evidence for Duwaji’s radicalism, all of it pointing to her intense hatred of Israel and her more than admiring regard for actual terrorists and murderers, including those intent on doing the United States harm.

 

Yet, for reasons that are probably as clear as you suspect, you will find hardly a word of this radicalism described in, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post. The scrutiny has come almost entirely from right-of-center outlets.

 

Perhaps the Times cannot bring itself to look too closely at a potential ideological ally, especially when Duwaji’s view of the war lines up so neatly with the paper’s own framing of it.

 

Or perhaps the news media simply do not have the resources and manpower to pursue the matter, having committed the bulk of their investigative assets to tracking which flags Mrs. Alito flies above the family home on holiday weekends.

The Rise of Dumb, Anti-Innovation, Job-Saving Laws in Blue Cities and States

By Jim Geraghty

Sunday, October 04, 2026

 

Our James Lileks laments the City of Minneapolis requirement that self-driving cars have a $31.50/hour nondriver sitting in the driver’s seat, even though they are not driving the car:

 

You expect that they will find new ways to protect jobs threatened by societal advances. Think of all the entry-level pump jockey jobs lost! When people were permitted to refuel their cars on their own! The city should require all gas stations to have someone stand by every pump, doing nothing. After a year at this position, they will be eligible to be promoted to stand by the electric car charging stations, doing nothing.

 

Oh, James! Let us turn our eyes to the Garden State of New Jersey, where pumping your own gas has been illegal since 1949. Raised in New Jersey (Exit 10), I never learned how to pump gas until well into adulthood. Then, while stopping there many years later, I got out and started pumping my own gas like a regular Billy the Kid outlaw until the attendant rushed out and made me stop. Heaven forbid I do something I’ve probably done hundreds of times in other states!

 

Why does New Jersey still require “pump jockeys”?

 

The exact role of a pump jockey is outlined in the New Jersey Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act and Regulations, in which they describe a pump jockey as someone who pumps gasoline and prevents others from pumping gasoline. They are generally minimum wage jobs, earning 16 dollars an hour.

 

The ban is enforced with fees which are primarily intended for gas stations in violation. For pumping your own gas, the first offense ranges from 50 to 250 dollars. There is a 500 dollar fine for each subsequent offence. Attendants, themselves, will also act to prevent consumers from pumping themselves.

 

The primary motivation to keep the ban in place has been to protect jobs and provide a better service. There are estimated to be about 7000 gas station attendants employed in New Jersey. Lifting the ban would cause the loss of these low requirement jobs.

 

If a local or state government could ban assembly-line robots, automated telephone switchboards, automated teller machines, online shopping, self-operated elevators, and pinboys (the folks who used to reset pins at the bowling alley by hand), they would do so.

 

I was going to add banning self-checkout to the list of ridiculous ideas, but California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Washington have contemplated legislation that would require a balance between employee-operated and self-checkout stations, a certain number of employees per self-checkout station, and/or stricter limits on the number and types of items that customers can bring through self-checkout. (This is an anti-shoplifting effort.)

 

Rhode Island passed its law; starting January 1, 2027, any grocery store in the state that provides self-service checkout stations must have a ratio of one manual checkout station for every three self-service stations. Heaven forbid we let the grocery stores decide for themselves! Heaven forbid we allow customers to decide which option they want to use!

‘Just Say It’s a Genocide’

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not even bother to disguise her wholly justified irritation with the far-left agitators who, in the spring of 2024, chased her and her then-fiancé around a Brooklyn movie theater in pursuit of a shibboleth.

 

“Just say it’s a genocide,” one of her pursuers demanded. “Just say it. Just say the word. That’s all we want.”

 

AOC’s harasser deserves points for honesty, at least. At the time, amid the fog of war and with so many global institutional interests invested in portraying Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal, the activist class was as inclined toward intimidation and violence as it was to persuasion. The movement’s members sincerely believed that they had the evidence on their side. After all, everyone worth listening to insisted that they were right.

 

But the campaign to delegitimize Israel predated the October 7 massacre and the war that followed, and it continues today — almost one year after high-tempo combat operations in Gaza concluded in an ambiguous cease-fire. Still, the charge of “genocide” persists, but it does so in the absence of either the fog or the evidence. Today, we know that the so-called famine that was said to prevail in Gaza has been replaced with a minor outbreak of childhood obesity, and the Gazan population (according to even the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry) experienced more growth than almost any other country in 2025.

 

Either Israel is executing the most incompetent genocide in history, or the allegation is and always was unsubstantiated.

 

With contrary evidence mounting, the activist class has placed a peculiar emphasis on just saying the word “genocide.” Indeed, they do so with an urgency that suggests they sense a closing window of opportunity.

 

Maine’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Troy Jackson, recently apologized for telling an interviewer that “It’s unfortunate that there are people here in Maine that don’t like to use that term [“genocide”] only because they’re Jewish.” But as Semafor’s Dave Weigel pointed out, Jackson has been hounded by the activist class to say the word “genocide” as often as possible, despite having long ago checked that box. “Pass the ‘genocide’ litmus test, and you might be forced to re-take it, again and again,” he wrote.

 

In his bid to replace retiring Representative Nancy Pelosi, California State Senator Scott Wiener failed that litmus test earlier this year during a debate when he failed to hold up a sign affirming his support for describing Israel’s actions as genocidal. “Shame,” the crowd chanted. The abuse that followed seemed to teach Wiener a lesson. “Days later — under fire from progressives — Wiener released a video,” KQED reported. “He acknowledged that genocide has occurred.”

 

Michigan Representative Haley Stevens was similarly abused by an irate activist who sought only a declaration of fealty to his preferred myth. Stevens admirably brushed off his hectoring even as she was bombarded with fabrication after fabrication, including the still-unretracted claim published by the New York Times in which it was alleged that Israel had trained dogs to perform sodomy on prisoners.

 

The activists’ demands carry imperative weight. It’s as if they feel they must force as many people as possible to commit themselves, rhetorically at least, to the notion that a genocide didn’t just happen but is ongoing in the Gaza Strip.

 

The hectoring activist class regards mouthing “genocide” as table stakes, and every Democrat must ante up if they are to be taken seriously in progressive politics. In this way, they force their representatives to make a reputational investment in the existence of a genocide that they cannot take back lest they admit they lied or were muscled into promulgating a lie.

 

In this, however, we see the activist strong-arming campaign not as strength but as weakness and insecurity. The evidence for their outlook is elusive while the evidence against it is plain to see. There’s precious little time left to maximize the political effect of the hysteria that accompanied Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre, and the anti-Israel crowd seems to know it.

The Democrats Face Their Own Early-Voting Paranoia Problem

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

In some states, early voting in the 2026 midterm elections has already begun. Many more will follow as this campaign cycle enters the home stretch. That should be good news for Democrats — not just because the prevailing political environment favors the opposition party but because Democrats have recently voted early in larger numbers than their Republican counterparts. By most accounts, Democratic voters are still expected to swamp the GOP in the early and absentee vote, but perhaps not by the margins the party expects.

 

Politico reported on Thursday that a recent NBC News poll finding, in which fewer Democrats said they plan to vote by mail, has led to an outbreak of anxiety inside the party. As the party’s political professionals understand it, the problem is that many in the Democratic base do not believe that mail-in voting is secure against the prospect of presidential interference. Of course, Politico affirms, that’s Trump’s fault.

 

“That confusion comes as Democrats and voting groups weigh how to reassure voters after Trump’s latest effort to restrict mail voting,” the report read, referring to the president’s efforts to impose restrictions on mail-in voting, which the Supreme Court rejected. Generally, the rules at the state level — where elections are conducted — have not changed since 2024. But Democratic voters don’t believe that. As a result, “Democrats, including state election officials who oversee the process, are also looking for ways to boost confidence in the mail system,” Politico concluded.

 

It’s going to take many confidence-building measures before Democratic voters forget about Trump’s threat to the integrity of their ballots. After all, Democratic lawmakers were sounding the alarm themselves.

 

“Everyone can feel just how afraid Donald Trump and Republicans are of losing the upcoming elections by how hard they are pushing their radical and illegal voter suppression policies,” Chuck Schumer said in an April statement following the president’s March executive order and despite its dubious prospects before the courts. “This Executive Order attacking mail-in voting is just the latest in a series of frantic efforts by Donald Trump to rig elections for Republicans by trying to change the rules.” Even after the highest court in the land scuttled Trump’s initiative, Schumer still warned that the president is out to “hijack the election and poison our democracy.”

 

The rest of his party showed similar contempt for circumspection. Along with Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of “desperately trying to rig our elections by making it harder to vote for seniors, Americans with disabilities, members of the military, rural communities and other working families who rely on vote-by-mail.”

 

The fourth-ranking official in the Democratic House caucus’s leadership, Representative Joe Neguse (Colo.), alleged that Trump deliberately sought to “disenfranchise millions of Americans, silencing an untold number of citizens that rely on mail ballots to make their voices heard.”

 

Representative Robert Garcia (Calif.), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, claimed that the administration’s “reckless actions undermine the foundation of our nation’s democracy and violate the basic principle that all citizens have the right to have their vote counted.” Indeed, the White House–envisioned enterprise was “intended to fail,” according to Senator Richard Blumenthal (Conn.).

 

It’s hard to blame the rank-and-file Democrats who failed to keep up with court rulings for deferring to warnings their party’s leading representatives repeatedly issued before this year’s vote. That’s essentially what happened to the GOP after Donald Trump went to war with early voting, creating an early-voting deficit among Republican voters that his own party has tried to remedy, with varying degrees of success, despite the president’s refusal to get on board.

 

Democrats now find themselves in a similar position. By repeatedly warning that their ballots were not secure, Democrats were making a political argument against Trump that is set to cause collateral damage to their party’s participation in early balloting. They probably should have seen that coming.

How to Think About Impeachment No. 3—and the One After That

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

The Democrats are sitting on a clutch of very promising-looking political eggs, but they won’t be hatched until the first Tuesday in November. You never know about chickens, but the widely held consensus is that the Republican majority in the House is fixing to be as dead as the fried ones over at KFC, and more than a few observers are betting on a Senate flip, too.  

 

It is of some interest that Republican dogs are not barking much about impeachment. Donald Trump’s foundering popularity is such that Republicans rat-paddling away from the sinking ship of his administration evidently have calculated that there is not a lot of cheese to be got from squeaking about the threat of a third impeachment. Rep. Jim Jordan, who is only the second most detestable Republican from Ohio on the political scene, complained last week that Democrats would conduct a campaign of “nonstop weaponized investigations” once in the majority. Coming from a Trump loyalist, that is a little like hearing the ghost of Sonny Barger complaining that a few of the mourners didn’t wear ties to his funeral.

 

Mostly, Republicans are not talking much about the possibility of another Trump impeachment, mainly because doing so would perforce remind voters that Donald Trump is still the president of these United States and that they are sycophants groveling along behind in his debased wagon train and making barely a peep as he and his circle loot and murder their way around the globe.

 

Democrats are divided. That is how they like to be, flattering themselves, as they do, that this is a sign of their independent spirit and high-mindedness: “I am not a member of any organized political party, I am a Democrat,” and all that self-aggrandizing Will Rogers humblebrag baloney. Democratic division on impeaching Trump—and Pete Hegseth, and Scott Bessent, and others who need impeaching—mainly is not a matter of principle but a matter of self-interested political calculation.

 

About that: If Democrats do indeed win a majority in the House and—the possibility seems more real by the day—the Senate, too, then all of the ones who promised on the campaign trail to prioritize their own political careers and the short-term interests of their party have my personal permission to make whatever calculation they think best. But the ones who ran for office promising to put country ahead of self and principle ahead of party should probably do that instead, since that’s what they said they would do.

 

What would that mean?

 

A Democratic majority in the House will have to do the bulk of the political work on a third Trump impeachment irrespective of the outcome in the Senate: In case of a small Democratic majority in the Senate or continued Republican control, Democrats will have reasons—substantive reasons and reasons having to do with political calculation—to give the case against Trump and his allies a full, extensive airing in the House rather than hastily sending articles of impeachment over to the Senate, because, absent some currently implausible scenario, a small Democratic majority in the upper chamber would produce the same result as a small Republican majority: The articles would fail to produce a conviction, which requires a two-thirds majority.

 

That is, unless some Republican senators can be shamed into acting like the thing they always boast about being: patriots. As we all know, Republicans at the moment are immune to embarrassment, and all political plans that require the Republican Party to suddenly grow a conscience are nearly guaranteed to fail. Democrats have before them a considerable task of persuasion: They need a few million Americans to come around to their point of view, and a dozen or so of them need to be Republican senators. The Democrats’ historical weakness for sliding into mere moral hysteria and rhetorical excess is a real danger here. What’s needed is careful investigative and political work, not a couple of hundred elected Democrats all simultaneously vying for viral social-media moments.

 

Democrats will have excellent political incentives to drag out investigations, oversight hearings, and impeachment proceedings over the course of many months beginning in January. They will also have good practical reasons to do that: Some of the issues are complicated as legal and constitutional questions, and others will require extensive work in investigating, reporting, and documenting matters of fact. What probably should be understood is that, as tall an order as it would be to impeach Trump and remove him from office, the challenge before Congress—and prosecutors and the courts—is bigger than that. Things are going to be complicated: It is not only Trump who needs to be removed and prohibited from holding office; in many cases, impeachment and removal will be a prelude to criminal charges; in some cases, it is likely that investigators will turn up substantial wrongdoing, including criminal wrongdoing, among people who are not officeholders subject to impeachment or other similar sanction. Oversight proceedings, congressional investigation, criminal investigation, and impeachment-related work all will be necessary, in some cases will need to proceed simultaneously.

 

There are three broad categories of misdeeds to consider, those being personal corruption (the improper enrichment of the Trump family and its allies in matters ranging from the largesse of Russian oligarchs to questionable government contracts awarded to Trump-connected firms), lawlessness (the illegal wars in Venezuela and Iran, the illegal imposition of a new national system of taxation in the form of unauthorized tariffs, ongoing attempts to rule by decree, etc.), and incompetence (Pete Hegseth is always ready for his close-up).

 

It is important to keep in mind that Trump has not acted alone in these matters: Consider, for example, that the Trump administration conducted an unauthorized war on Venezuela, kidnapped its president, and is operating a puppet regime in Caracas for the purpose of appropriating Venezuelan oil wealth—and this was in no small part the work of Marco Rubio, whose relatively mild public temperament should not be mistaken for moral distance from the administration and its crimes. Investigations into the administration’s financial corruption are certain to involve scrutiny of Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick. J.D. Vance’s role as an enabler of the abuse of ICE as a political weapon to be wielded against Democratic cities such as Minneapolis will be of interest. There is plenty of room inside the cordon sanitaire.

 

Democrats should take a look across the aisle at an old nemesis, one whose sad example ought to haunt Democratic leaders: Nobody wants to play Mitch McConnell’s part this time around and leave the one needful thing undone. Yes, Trump should be impeached a third time—and if it comes to it, a fourth time, a fifth time, and twice on Sunday. The work is not done until the work is done.

The Underfunding Myth Is Exposed

By Inez Feltscher Stepman

Sunday, September 27, 2026

 

A rare column from New York Times staff writer and the 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones ignited a firestorm this past week around her decision to send her daughter to an academically stunted public school for social justice reasons. But in questioning how that decision affected her child (if not the rigid political beliefs that drove her to sacrifice her kid’s education), Hannah-Jones makes a tacit admission rarely encountered in legacy media: Money is not the problem at America’s many failing schools.

 

“I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but [my husband] Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget,” wrote Hannah-Jones, in setting up the story of how her checks and privileged advocacy failed to make a measurable difference in the low standards, disorder, and general dysfunction of her daughter’s school.

 

Even the writer does not seem to explicitly acknowledge that her cash infusions did little. Several paragraphs later, she’s back to beating the comforting drum of systemic underfunding. Progressives also might have a ready retort to any attempt to read deeply into her anecdote: Well, surely you can’t expect a single family to make up a school-sized shortfall with a PTA check, no matter how generous.

 

Hang on to your seat, dear reader, when I tell you that the New York City Department of Education says it spent, this year at that very school, P.S. 307 in Brooklyn, around $44,000 per student — and, when including other wraparound services, a whopping $58,000 per student.

 

Hannah-Jones is not alone in her assumptions about school spending. The average American wildly underestimates how much money is funneled into the public education system. High-poverty urban districts like the one in which P.S. 307 resides, contrary to another pervasive myth, usually boast annual revenues considerably higher than the typical middle-class or even upper-middle class district. The vast majority — nearly three-quarters — of voters underestimate per-pupil spending, sometimes dramatically. The most common guess for per-pupil funding is about $5,000 per kid, which is less than half the money spent in the lowest-spending state in the union. The real national average is triple that.

 

A lot of effort has gone into circulating this pervasive lie, which looms over practically all discussions and debates about public schools across the country. Teachers’ union representatives, as one would expect, never tire of repeating it. But dissemination of the myth that we just don’t spend enough on our public schools hasn’t been limited to adults whose salaries depend on it. News outlets continually repeat the claim, and even many state courts take it as an unexamined premise that underfunding is a major problem in public education, setting floors for legislative spending justified by a misguided notion of advancing equal opportunity.

 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the lie is reinforced by the real shortages in classrooms that parents encounter. Families reasonably assume that if their third grader’s teacher is begging for supplies at the beginning of the school year to avoid purchasing them out of her own salary, then there must not be enough in the kitty. In Hannah-Jones’s essay, for example, the tolerance for constant physical fights in the cafeteria is blamed on “understaffing” caused by a lack of funds.

 

Instead, the reality is that these shortages are produced by the education establishment’s spending decisions, which prioritize absurd bureaucratic bloat and pensions over basic classroom needs. Non-teaching positions have exploded by more than 700 percent since the 1950s, and just since the 1990s, money spent on administrative salaries has far outstripped that spent on teachers. In some states, the classroom basics-to-union-graft ratio can only be described as impressive; in Illinois, less than 10 percent of every new dollar spent on “education” goes to anything people would recognize as educational, namely school buildings, teacher salaries, and teaching materials. A popular documentary back in 2009, The Cartel, tried to chase down some of these dollars that were earmarked for a New Jersey classroom, and even found plenty of old-school corruption, like huge construction contracts going to family members of school employees.

 

Nor is the link between spending more money and school performance well supported by the data. The late Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute famously circulated a gut-punch chart plotting federal spending increases against National Assessment of Educational Progress score changes; the former skyrockets up from the 1970s onward, while the latter is flat enough to be a Kansas skyline.

 

But the lie, unfortunately, works. Seventy-five to 80 percent of education bonds placed before voters pass; Americans are usually more willing to open their pocketbooks for schools than for other tax increases. And finding out that their estimates on school spending are wildly off has a huge impact on voter opinions, with the percentage of voters saying education spending is “too low” plummeting from above 70 percent to an underwater 40 merely by encountering the numerical fact as reported by a reputable media outlet. By remaining silent about the numbers while propagating misleading insinuations about underfunding, legacy media outlets are getting the outcome the left wants from purposely uninformed voters.

 

The worst thing about the big underfunding lie, though, isn’t the taxpayer dollars stolen from the pockets of an already-struggling American middle class, exploiting Americans’ goodwill toward “the children” with a false impression of educational impoverishment. No, it’s that “we don’t spend enough” has been a shield against reform and against outrage toward the absolutely criminal performance of the public school system across the board. It’s a shield that is finally — at long last — showing some cracks, and the post-Covid school choice explosion in many states will hopefully bear fruit for hundreds of thousands of American students.

 

But now, even the New York Times has unwittingly admitted that the crisis in American education isn’t about the money.

What Nikole Hannah-Jones Doesn’t Say

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

 

‘My daughter,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2024, “is not worth more than any other child.”

 

This assessment was offered as part of a reflection on a New York Times essay that Hannah-Jones had written eight years earlier on the subject of choosing an appropriate school. In tandem, she imparted two other reflections: that the school she’d made such a commotion about picking was clearly “failing”; and that, regardless, she still believed she had “made the right choice.”

 

Two years later, she has changed her mind. Or, rather: Two years later, her daughter has changed her mind for her. Having eventually learned what her mother had done to her, her daughter “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal,” the writer admitted this week in the Times.

 

For penning this mea culpa, Hannah-Jones has received a good deal of praise. Well, you can count me out of all that. Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. She has always been a ridiculous zealot. Now, she’s a cautionary tale, too.

 

To propose that one’s own child “is not worth more than any other” is an ugly — perhaps even an evil — sentiment. You may call me whatever names you wish in response to this assertion, but you must understand that it will not change a thing. My job as a parent is to prioritize my children. I owe it to them, and they rely upon me to follow through with that obligation. It is true that, in a detached, cosmic sense, my children are no more important than are any others. But for me? Yes, they are. They represent the primary purpose of my existence, and, insofar as it is in my power and is consistent with the law, I intend to advance their interests without apology, embarrassment, or regret. Far from representing a societal flaw or some selfish personal shortcoming, that instinct is the most natural thing in the world — which is why, historically, the only the thing that has ever been able to break it is the entrenchment of totalitarian ideology. The fanatics who “informed” on their family members during the worst days of the Soviet Union were not admirable for their commitment to the cause; they were anti-human freaks who upset the natural balance of the universe. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s sin was far lesser than theirs, but it was still a sin. Outside of a waterboarding chamber, no parent should ever say, “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.”

 

Back in 2016, Hannah-Jones’s husband seems to have reflexively understood that what his wife was proposing was madness. And yet, having been guilt-tripped, he appears to have gone along with it anyway:

 

As I told Faraji my plan, he slowly shook his head no. He wanted to look into parochial schools, or one of the “good” public schools, or even private schools. So we argued, pleading our cases from the living room, up the steps to our office lined with books on slavery and civil rights, and back down, before we came to an impasse and retreated to our respective corners. There is nothing harder than navigating our nation’s racial legacy in this country, and the problem was that we each knew the other was right and wrong at the same time. Faraji couldn’t believe that I was asking him to expose our child to the type of education that the two of us had managed to avoid. He worried that we would be hurting Najya if we put her in a high-poverty, all-black school. “Are we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?” he asked. “Are we putting her at a disadvantage?”

 

The answer, quite obviously, was yes.

 

Some readers have responded to Hannah-Jones’s admission by proposing that the fault lay not in her instinct, but in its execution. I do not think that such a clean distinction can reasonably be drawn, but I can certainly agree with the implication that this entire experiment was built on stuff and nonsense. In her original essay, she expressed a desire to avoid “segregation.” Yet she sent her daughter to a school that hosted more students of her daughter’s race than attended the ones she eschewed. Defending her decision, she explained her belief that a profitable educational environment involved sedulous parental involvement. Yet, by her own admission, she was so neglectful of her daughter’s progress that, for years, she remained unaware that she had fallen badly behind. Her New York Times biography notes that her “journalism has tended to focus on school.” Which makes it all the more shameful that she still has no idea why schools tend to fail. Like many of her colleagues, Nikole Hannah-Jones ignores the available data and instead pins the blame on funding gaps that don’t exist, racism that cannot be identified, and attitudes that nobody in our current era actually exhibits. Perhaps, going forward, she might “focus” a little harder?

 

What does Hannah-Jones believe now? She doesn’t say. By itself, this omission prevents her essay from being “brave” or “admirable” and relegates it to the status of a humblebrag. If she had right-of-center politics, the Times would undoubtedly have forced her to spell out her mistake. The confession would have been the overture; the rest of the performance would have been a detailed explanation of how exactly she was wrong, along with an exhaustive “therefore . . .” that included hard statistics, legible arguments, and the outlining of an alternative agenda. But, of course, the Times did no such thing, and Hannah-Jones has made no such effort under her own steam. Given that she has extremely strong views about what, how, and where other American children should be taught, it would be useful to know what, having watched her assumptions fail her own child, she now thinks America’s education system should look like. She isn’t going to tell us.

 

Which, I’m afraid, is entirely typical. I do not mean to be unduly waspish here, but it ought not to be a surprise that Nikole Hannah-Jones believed that her daughter was getting A’s despite doing no homework, given that getting A’s despite doing no homework is exactly how Nikole Hannah-Jones’s own career has played out thus far. Hannah-Jones is a writer who doesn’t write; a historian who knows little history; an advocate with no mastery of her brief — and for this, she has been rewarded with extravagant public-speaking fees, a cushy sinecure at the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize in commentary, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and at least ten years of the sort of detached, flighty, consequence-free existence that allows one to sacrifice the mind of one’s own child for a couple of mawkish newspaper pieces and the cheap mollification of one’s ego.

The Democratic Socialist Congregation

By Jesse Arm

Monday, September 21, 2026

 

In August, when the New York Post profiled Grace Ryan—a 25-year-old NYU graduate, chocolate heiress, and socialist activist known online as “Lulu Lenin”—it supplied her critics with an irresistible caricature. Ryan had displayed the expensive clothes and vacations of a young woman born to wealth even as she was championing a movement devoted to dismantling class privilege. Confronted with the contradiction, she offered a defense more suited to an Edwardian drawing room than a Democratic Socialists of America meeting: “Y’all never heard of noblesse oblige?”

 

Ludicrous and unknowing as Ryan’s remark was, it was revelatory nonetheless about something very real. The DSA attracts people who have benefited from capitalism but feel cheated by it. It provides them with a moral vocabulary that gives them room to reinterpret personal disappointment as systemic injustice. And, most important, it gives them somewhere to go on a lonely Tuesday night, just as, for thousands of years, religion provided a social basis for Mormons on a Monday, Muslims on a Friday, Jews on a Saturday, and Christians on a Sunday.

 

More than merely an organization with a platform, the DSA is an entire social world, just as a faith tradition is. It supplies friends, status, identity, rituals, instruction, practical obligations, and a story that situates the individual inside a world-historical struggle. For young people whose jobs feel precarious or pointless, or whose expensive educations have not produced the lives they expected, or whose families and religious institutions no longer provide a thick sense of belonging—or a combination of two or all three—the DSA is the answer to a prayer. Perhaps literally.

 

The trajectory of New York DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo is an almost too perfect example. A Yale-educated artist living in a $1.5 million townhouse purchased by his wealthy father, who he falsely claimed was an immigrant from Peru, Gordillo cultivated a public identity as a union electrician even after being dismissed from his apprenticeship for prolonged absence. The extensive renovation of his family-funded home was reportedly performed with nonunion labor, and Gordillo was sued for unpaid rent on a separate apartment while the $1.4 million renovation was underway. He later persuaded DSA members to make his chairmanship a $95,000 salaried position. The organization had given him what the conventional elite economy had not: a vocation, status, and a constituency.

 

Members who derive that much from a movement will give much in return. That helps explain why the DSA’s political influence exceeds its raw numbers. A conventional interest group can produce a scorecard or buy an advertisement. A community can produce an army. DSA chapters train members to canvass, raise small dollars, run meetings, master ballot rules, and endure the tedium of local politics. Their activists can be deployed across the country to knock doors for a favored candidate, then return home with sharper skills and deeper loyalty. They become cadres.

 

No one has benefited more from that infrastructure than Zohran Mamdani. His importance to the movement extends far beyond whatever he can accomplish as mayor of New York. Governing will force compromises and expose contradictions. But his symbolic purpose is to strip “socialism” of its stigma and make a once-marginal ideology seem youthful, convivial, and inevitable.

 

Elsewhere, candidates can adapt the movement’s agenda and rhetoric to local conditions. A swing-state politician such as Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed can disingenuously disclaim the socialist label while benefiting from the same activist ecosystem. In more conservative territory, candidates such as Nebraska “independent” Dan Osborn can embrace nearly all aspects of the movement’s domestic agenda, along with its anti-Western foreign policy, while trading the conspicuous cultural aesthetics of Brooklyn’s purple-haired they/them left for a prairie-populist affect. The immediate objective is to win elections. The longer project is to build an infrastructure capable of moving the boundaries of ordinary politics.

 

Who joins that infrastructure? The statistician Nate Silver recently used more than 400,000 responses from the Cooperative Election Study to identify the most Democratic-voting educational and income group in America: people with postgraduate degrees but with relatively low household incomes, between $30,000 and $60,000. This is also close to the DSA sweet spot. In the organization’s 2021 membership survey, more than 80 percent of members 25 and older held at least a bachelor’s degree, while 45 percent of all members reported household incomes below $60,000. Teachers, nonprofit employees, social workers, academics, health-care workers, and public employees were heavily represented.

 

These people are the opposite of classic proletarians. Nor are they necessarily poor. They are better understood through the political scientist Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction.” A society can mint more people with shiny credentials and expectations than it has prestigious, well-compensated roles for them to fill. Those who lose the competition do not feel like ordinary members of the middle class, who know they will face ups and downs and struggles on a long path to stability and success. These left-behinders feel as if the high towers of the academic and cultural elite guaranteed them continued standing that they no longer possess. Their education has furnished them with the language and confidence to challenge the social order, while their frustration gives them the motive. Some become what Turchin calls counter-elites: ambitious organizers who mobilize popular resentment against the system that denied them the standing they believe they’ve earned.

 

Reihan Salam (who runs the think tank where I work) has shown how neatly Mamdani fits this pattern. Mamdani grew up amid extraordinary cultural achievement; his mother is a celebrated filmmaker, his father a prominent Columbia professor. Matching their success would have been difficult for anyone, and he spent his 20s getting nowhere, toying equally with hip hop and radical politics and speaking in different accents as he did so. His story resonates with a generation for whom the promise of automatic upward mobility has weakened. Among Americans born in 1940, 92 percent earned more than their parents had at the same age. Among those born in 1984, only half did.

 

Yet, as Salam notes, Millennials as a whole are not an immiserated generation. Their median household income at a comparable stage of life is higher than Generation X’s was in the 1990s, and their median wealth has risen quickly. The discontent is more culturally specific. It is concentrated among educated urbanites who compare themselves not with the country at large but with their parents and peers. They may earn far more than the median American and still be unable to buy an apartment in the neighborhood where they believe people like them are supposed to live. Their hardship is often less a real form of material deprivation than it is the expression of frustrated expectation.

 

In an article entitled “Why Do Rich Kids Love Socialism?,” Tyler Austin Harper argues that dwelling on the contradictions inherent in his title distracts from a more interesting question: Why have so many members of the educated professional class lost faith in capitalism?

 

There is something to this. You can think the way these people think without being a hypocrite or a spoiled brat, if your set of convictions is consistent and serious. Affluent people can sincerely support socialism, and beneficiaries of capitalism can legitimately criticize its failures. An heir may sincerely favor higher taxes on inheritances. A professional who has prospered within the existing economic system may still believe that a different one would serve the country better. Political arguments should be judged on their merits rather than the speaker’s pedigree.

 

But this acknowledgment that such opinions might genuinely derive from serious consideration and deep study actually requires a demonstration of that seriousness and studiousness. Without it, what we’re left with is people whose personal behavior is not only unserious but often contemptible. The criticism of Gordillo centers on how he assumed the garb of working-class authenticity, misrepresented his own record, and believed himself justified in stiffing ordinary people to whom he owed money—even as he lectured others about greed and privilege. Anyone may work within a system while seeking to reform it. But if you are going to traffic in moralistic denunciations, you bear an additional obligation. The person issuing them should accept the same rules he seeks to impose on everyone else.

 

More broadly, many affluent socialists engage in what Jonah Goldberg calls a “prolier-than-thou” performance. They pose as authentic tribunes of the working class, speak of wealth and profit in moralistic terms, and treat their own upper-class conceptions of false consciousness as evidence that ordinary people require political reeducation. Their money presents no inherent problem. Their eagerness to stigmatize others for pursuing prosperity while shedding remarkably little of their own creates the contradiction.

 

***

 

Capitalism is neither sinless nor a complete moral order. Mammon is, indeed, a false god.

 

But so is politics.

 

The danger of a religion substitute is not that its adherents believe in something. Human beings need belief, obligation, and belonging. The danger is that it takes a limited human enterprise and makes it absolute. A political movement that becomes a church develops a creed that explains all suffering, a doctrine of sin that divides oppressor from oppressed, rituals that certify righteousness, and heretics whose arguments need not be answered because their moral corruption has already been established. It offers redemption not through repentance or grace but through power.

 

This is why the Jewish condemnation of idolatry offers a key to understanding our present moment. The temptation to idolatry extends far beyond the primitive act of bowing before a statue. It arises whenever human beings take something partial—wealth, nation, appetite, ideology—and grant it ultimate authority. An idol is attractive precisely because it is tangible. It tells us whom to blame, what to do, and with whom we belong. Because it is made by human hands, it reflects human vanity and demands human sacrifice.

 

Judaism answers that temptation through theology and a dense architecture of life: study, prayer, meals, mourning, celebration, obligation, peoplehood, history, and ritual. These practices give ordinary people what radical movements promise—community, identity, purpose, a calendar, a moral vocabulary—while freeing politics from the burden of salvation.

 

Consider the Sabbath. It is a rebuke to the workaholic striver culture that has left many young Americans exhausted and spiritually thin. For one day each week, production stops. The phone goes dark. Families and friends eat together. Human worth is detached from output. The commandment extends rest beyond the powerful to workers, strangers, and even animals. It imposes a limit on the market without pretending that the state can perfect mankind.

 

This insight now travels well beyond traditional Judaism. Ezra Klein, a secular man of the left, has spoken on his New York Times podcast about Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sabbath as a radical critique of the speed and acquisitiveness of modern life. Charlie Kirk, a devout Christian of the right, devoted his final book to the same subject, describing Sabbath observance as an answer to anxiety, distraction, and the barrenness of constant work. Their convergence is instructive. People across the political spectrum recognize that a life organized solely around labor, consumption, and online combat is insufficient.

 

The answer to the DSA, then, cannot be another thin political identity, much less a sanctification of capitalism. It must include stronger communities that meet the human needs the DSA has learned to meet. This is why Jewish parents should ground their children in the substance of Jewish civilization: its faith, certainly, but also its language, nation, history, life cycle, rituals, texts, and obligations. Belief in God cannot be transmuted into a social policy; this connection to the divine goes beyond such temporal concerns, and true faith is all but impossible for many people to achieve. But institutions can teach young people that they are heirs to something older than the discourse of the moment and that they’re members of communities whose bonds transcend political agreement.

 

A lonely society will manufacture gods. A generation denied durable sources of meaning will find them in movements that promise total explanations and instant fellowship. The Democratic Socialists of America get this better than most of its opponents, and that is why the movement is a force to be reckoned with—even if some of its leading voices make fools of themselves trying to justify their own resentments and weaknesses.

What Anti-Zionists Learned from Segregationists

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

 

I used to wonder how segregationists could unabashedly espouse their ideology while also insisting that they harbored no hate in their heart—that they just wanted what was in everybody’s best interests.

 

Then I listened to Western anti-Zionists, and I stopped wondering. It’s like having a time machine.

 

I understand why pundits and activists and politicians would insist they aren’t anti-Semitic. The question that has vexed me is: Why would anyone self-identify as an anti-Zionist?

 

Let’s be extra-generous and pretend for a moment that “anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism,” as the human bumper stickers constantly chirp. I think the past few years have made this assertion, which has always been wrong but at least facially plausible, an entirely irrational and self-discrediting pose.

 

But even if we grant a meaningful distinction, it’s a bit like pleading down from murder 1 to reckless homicide. It’s certainly not an assertion of innocence.

 

Anti-Zionism is the opposition to Jewish self-determination. In purely practical terms, that requires the dismantling of the Jewish state in favor of empowering those who proclaim their desire to murder all the Jews. So the key distinction is that the anti-Zionist claims to be unprejudiced as he brings about the conditions of the inevitable mass killing of Jews.

 

Because anti-Zionism is literally an anti-rights ideology, it also gives us a glimpse into the politics around segregation at a time when opposition to it was not yet the broad consensus and required an attempt at finessing the difference between bigotry as a motive and bigotry as an end goal. (George Wallace’s public speeches are a good example of this rancid Orwellian demagoguery.)

 

To be an anti-Zionist now, at this moment, is to be, by definition, the adherent of a violent ideology. It is to be an enemy of peace. To pretend otherwise is to be the defensive coordinator of a football team while claiming to be “personally anti-tackling.”

 

And so, again, I just keep wondering: What kind of person identifies with this? What kind of person claims to oppose scientific bigotry but embraces practical bigotry? And how on earth would a person expect this to be exonerating?

 

We can be even more generous to the anti-Zionist and say the following: Perhaps they haven’t thought at all of what this means for the status of certain nation-states; they oppose a movement for equal Jewish rights out of some other ideal.

 

That ideal would be irrelevant. No one should care why someone opposes equal Jewish rights. An admission of such opposition is enough to tell me this person is both refreshingly honest and reprehensible.

 

All of which makes the constant stream of artists and celebrities and pundits and others staking their claims to be “just anti-Zionist” so strange. And it conflicts with their other excuse: that they’re just criticizing a foreign state.

 

Criticism of Israeli policy isn’t anti-Zionism; in fact, it can arguably conflict with anti-Zionism in interesting ways. Anti-Zionism holds the state of Israel to be illegitimate. It therefore doesn’t fully recognize Israeli state policy as state policy. If you believe that “Palestine is occupied,” for example, Israel’s legitimate nation-state authority is unrecognized.

 

Accepting the legitimacy of the State of Israel is the key. If you do so, you aren’t anti-Zionist. (Though you might still be an ignoramus; there are many of those around too.) If you are anti-Zionist, it’s much harder to claim you’re just criticizing policy within the nondiscriminatory norm of such criticism.

 

Either way, anti-Zionism itself is an essentially violent ideology that a society dedicated to freedom and democracy and human rights would oppose unreservedly. “I’m just an anti-Zionist” is still an embarrassing self-incrimination.

The Future of Woke

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

The mood was light on the set of ABC’s This Week one Sunday in August as co-anchor Jonathan Karl bantered with his guest, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Suddenly, it seemed, the phenomenon of “wokeness” could be marveled at as little more than an imprudent episode.

 

“I have a local city councilman that has this saying,” said AOC with a laugh, “‘Woke 1 was crazy.’” Karl laughed, too. With that, left-of-center Americans had all the permission they needed to repudiate the mania that had once gripped them. And some did, albeit through gritted teeth.

 

“Woke 1” wasn’t just excessive, the Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian wrote. It was petty and spiteful. Even if the charge of wokeness “has been weaponized by the right to the point of absurdity,” she groused, it should not be hard to admit that “people’s careers were destroyed over perceived ideological and verbal transgressions.”

 

Abcarian cited the novelist Francine Prose, who made a similar point in The Guardian. The woke era’s “inflexible and frequently impractical” codes of conduct and the way they were imposed on individuals and institutions were regrettable, Prose conceded. But right-wingers deserve censure, too. They cynically turned “woke” into a term of derision designed to “mock and discredit anyone who supports racial justice, economic equality,” and “universal health care.”

 

If some on the left were annoyed at AOC for the admission that woke was crazy, they were downright furious at the right for, well, noticing the left’s predicament. Progressives may be grudgingly distancing themselves from “their most excessive past stances,” The Atlantic observed, but “Republicans have no intention of letting voters forget.” As though that’s dirty pool.

 

Why should anyone forget the craziness we are now allowed to acknowledge? Perhaps wokeness’s diehards think the backlash against their philosophy is unfair. Maybe those on the left now denouncing wokeness are only going through the motions. Aside from a few examples, we aren’t hearing a lot of regret from the participants in that prolonged moral panic. So how can anyone call woke a thing of the past, as AOC implied? Perhaps she and her compatriots believe that true wokeness has never been tried.

 

If the activist class acknowledges only that their methods were flawed but insists that their motives were pure, we’re likely to see the phenomenon return in a more bitter, aggrieved, and, ultimately, vindictive form.

 

***

 

Even though it was a movement in which she took a starring role, Ocasio-Cortez tried to blame everyone else for the excesses of wokeness.

 

You see, “during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton window,” she explained to Karl — as if she hadn’t used her own muscle to open it. When there was no stigma associated with it, AOC eagerly cast herself as an avatar of wokeness. She joined her fellow radicals in calling for the abolition of federal immigration enforcement, the erasure of offensive American holidays, and “prison abolition” — all long before lockdown.

 

But the New York Democrat was only racing to the front of a parade already in procession. Well before the pandemic, the voters with whom Ocasio-Cortez tried to ingratiate herself booed Bernie Sanders when he endorsed the civil rights movement’s approach to dealing with “white supremacists.”

 

It wasn’t a Covid-induced aberration for American colleges to devote the end of the last decade to anathematizing conservative speech. After all, how could students be expected to control themselves once they’ve come into contact with bigotry, which of course constitutes the bulk of conservative speech?

 

And it wasn’t Covid that compelled the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish op-eds lamenting the racism and sexism that tainted, of all things, the Apollo 11 moon landing. To search in vain for a “woman or person of color” in NASA’s Apollo-era archives undermines that achievement, the Post piece suggested. “If we do not acknowledge the gender bias of the early space program, it becomes difficult to move past it,” said a writer in the Times. Such sentiments were organic and indigenous to the left. Some advocates of this outlook described it as “woke” even then. Others called it by an older name: “social justice.”

 

We are, of course, not talking about the kind of social justice that Pope Leo XIII espoused in the encyclical Rerum Novarum. The activist left’s version of social justice isn’t even the sort envisioned by its foremost proponent, the philosopher John Rawls. Rawlsian thought prescribes a “veil of ignorance” behind which the maximally enlightened distributors of society’s goods must operate. The modern left rejected the veil.

 

The activists did not seek perfectly neutral justice, which they regarded as neither possible nor desirable. They wanted retributive justice: a balancing of the karmic scales and the righting of history’s greatest wrongs. But how could any society engineer a cosmic comeuppance like that if those who are empowered to rewrite the social contract don’t know whom they’re helping or whom they’re punishing? True justice cannot be blind, as Ibram X. Kendi declared in his hit 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”

 

The theory of collective, identity-based justice favored by far-left activists was incompatible with the Constitution’s protections for individual rights and its promotion of equality before the law. Sometimes, social justice advocates themselves admitted as much.

 

“By insisting on a narrow reading of the First Amendment,” the American Civil Liberties Union “provides free legal support to hate-based causes,” wrote K-Sue Park, a critical race studies fellow at UCLA’s law school, in a 2017 New York Times op-ed. The ACLU promotes a “colorblind logic” that has “never secured real freedom or even safety for all.” Park wasn’t alone in denouncing what Ian Haney López, of the University of California, Berkeley, called “reactionary colorblindness,” which “has become a favored tool among racial demagogues.” As Justin Coles of Fordham’s Graduate School of Education put it, “colorblindness is in fact deeply harmful and violent.”

 

The colleges that followed the guidance outlined in Barack Obama’s April 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter committed a similar sin. The letter exhorted colleges and universities to adjudicate claims of sexual impropriety on campus and apply only a “preponderance of evidence” standard to adduce guilt. As a result, accused students were denied counsel, deprived of access to evidence against them, and made to testify against themselves in campus star chambers amid investigations into demonstrably consensual sexual encounters and nonsensical claims of sexual harassment. Anyone who objected to this assault on the Bill of Rights, as did former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, was accused of sweeping “sexual violence under the rug” or even of “an all-out attack on survivors.”

 

Within this milieu, adherence to the tenets of social justice became a competitive enterprise. Instigators, agitators, and true believers alike made a spectacle of their devotion to their philosophy’s values and policy prescriptions. In the process, they cultivated a peculiar fragility among their disciples. The mid-2010s advent of the “microaggression” fits this pattern. The young and liberal were taught to develop a reflexive sensitivity to almost imperceptible slights or remarks that weren’t remotely intended as such, including anodyne expressions of American patriotism.

 

As the University of California system explained in 2015, the itsy-bitsy indiscretions that students and faculty alike were advised to avoid included promoting the idea that, in America, “everyone can succeed.” That would lend credence to the notion that the U.S. was a meritocracy and not a society defined by structural racism and impermeable social strata. Nor could you call the United States a “melting pot” when demographic distinctions in America are, of course, immutable and determinative. It wasn’t acceptable to say that “race and gender play no part in hiring decisions” or “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” Asserting an absence of bigotry is a false endeavor, since it is impossible to avoid internalizing bigotry in a nation as prejudiced as the United States.

 

There was an element of crushing fatalism to all this. Indeed, for some on the left, that was its appeal. By the end of the last decade, social justice activism had become a hair shirt. And as wokeness continued to evolve from a political program into a totalistic theory of social organization that emphasized strict adherence to a code of public morality, the self-flagellation encouraged by social justice activism became even more pronounced.

 

***

 

Early in this decade, John McWhorter, Columbia University’s iconoclastic professor of linguistics, identified the trappings of religiosity that festooned wokeness. The practice of wokeness, he argued, was absurd by design. Its excesses constitute deliberate tests of faith. By insisting ever more stridently on their preferred irrationality, he contended, social justice activists deepen their fellow devotees’ convictions. After all, everyone has already sunk a lot of cognitive costs into this project, so illogic serves as a testament of fealty. “They are, in this, medievals with lattes,” McWhorter wrote.

 

The essayist Andrew Sullivan agreed. Wokeness, with its prescription for the equitable redistribution of both economic and social goods, “does everything a religion should,” he wrote. “You cannot argue logically with a religion — which is why you cannot really argue with social-justice activists either.”

 

The novelist Michael Crichton didn’t have quite as dim a view of faith as McWhorter’s, but as he saw it, the left-wing environmentalist activism of the late 1990s and early 2000s was a “remapping” of Judeo-Christian theological precepts onto the modern political landscape.

 

To me, wokeness in its early iteration looked less like a faith and more like puritanism, which, as the historian Perry Miller wrote, “was not merely a religious creed and a theology” but “also a program for society.” But whether the movement functioned as a secular faith or not, its accoutrements were aesthetically religious. What’s more, wokeness was liturgical in ways that were perfectly compatible with the Western tradition.

 

In a 2020 spectacle for the benefit of local activists and reporters, police officers in North Carolina washed the feet of black religious leaders in a conscious act of Christian humility designed to “end racism.”

 

The woke years were a time when kneeling to convey both defiance and submission became all the rage. Police captains, big-city mayors, the Democratic House caucus, and even Joe Biden himself knelt alongside activists in the streets in what some likened to the civil rights movement’s appeals to spirituality and faith.

 

Political performance artists replicated George Floyd’s final moments as one might follow the Stations of the Cross. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thanked him for “sacrificing your life for justice.” Los Angeles Sentinel contributor Maulana Karenga deemed him one of the few who’ve “offered their lives in various ways to the sacred cause.” Some went even further than that. “Jesus was arrested for having the audacity to speak out in spaces the authorities of the day wanted to control,” U.S. Catholic contributor Patrick Saint-Jean wrote. Likewise, Floyd’s “primary crime was being a Black body in a white space.”

 

Those were explicit attempts by the woke-adjacent to appropriate the moral authority of the Western canon. And yet, the broader movement’s religiosity was not purely opportunistic. There was real sincerity in the left’s appeals to a transcendent moral arbiter. The activists themselves might not even have realized how completely they caricatured the faithful, but their liturgy would have looked familiar to earlier generations of Americans.

 

Sure, the woke obsessed over the sin of “cultural appropriation” in fusionist cuisine and resolved to eat bugs rather than hasten the climatic eschaton. But in that, they also forswore earthly pleasures in deference to what they saw as a higher moral calling. Yes, they exhorted their compatriots to “do the work,” a labor that could never be finished and that consisted primarily of submitting themselves to torturous struggle sessions. The charitable, however, might see in that the practice of abnegation and self-denial in the misguided but honest pursuit of enlightenment.

 

The woke left’s conflict entrepreneurs made a pastime of identifying racism’s legacy in everyday activities like handicrafts, gardening, bird-watching, and sports. That was, more or less, a manifestation of the timeless American habit of divining temptations to wickedness and deviancy in the banal.

 

“The knitting community is racist,” declared a (white) Scottish knitted-clothing designer, hailing efforts by people of color in that community “to try and educate white knitters” and end the “abuse.” A New York Times contributor tsk-tsked that the “jogging craze” was a phenomenon in which “Black people have not only been excluded” but “relentlessly depicted as a threat to legitimate, white joggers.” GreenAmerica.org contended that tilling your own soil in America carelessly mishandles the memory of the “forced labor of German prisoners of war and Japanese internees.” A Washington Post report, “The Racist Legacy Many Birds Carry,” quoted one ornithologist lamenting that “Western ornithology, and natural exploration in general, was often tied to a colonialist mind-set of conquering” and exploitation.

 

Similarly, left-wing activists discovered in this period that unlimited pours for young men and women at, for example, holiday parties might have socially destabilizing consequence s. Reducing the risk of “unprofessional behavior” is why the Vox media outlet “cut down on the drinks” at its 2017 soirée. In this, the new crusaders had only stumbled upon a bit of ancient conservative wisdom.

 

Well before Covid, woke activists sought to drive sex out of art and entertainment. “It’s becoming a little finicky,” the actor Will Ferrell said in 2019 of the market for ribald comedic scripts. “Sex is disappearing from the big screen, and it’s making movies less pleasurable,” the Washington Post’s film critic, Ann Hornaday, wrote that same year. The market for the romantic frisson hadn’t disappeared, as Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke confessed. It’s just that “the movie business” left that market “by the side of the road.” Why? Because the industry itself was full of the same people whose sexual moralism compelled colleges and even states to try to formalize the mysterious process of courtship with the language and strictures of contracts — an initiative that the opinion writer Ezra Klein approvingly speculated would cause college-age men to “feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.”

 

In this, we see woke 1 as a relatively bourgeois expression of America’s age-old moral hang-ups. In fact, God-fearing Americans of the 17th, 18th, and even early 19th centuries would see shades of themselves in wokester asceticism.

 

Although it was a collectivist movement from the start, woke 1 emphasized individual agency to a pathological degree. Even unconscious thoughts were talked about as though they could have some material impact on the world. Call it the power of prayer for the secular set.

 

***

 

If wokeness is evolving into something new enough to be called woke 2, the movement’s religiosity is getting deleted in the update.

 

Alongside the pantomimed piety, woke 1 also incubated a strain of thought that was hostile toward all things Western. The author Bruce Bawer chronicled the rise of identitarian studies in academic departments devoted to opposing “Western cultural imperialism.” Activists bent on “decolonizing” the college syllabus banished the likes of Hume, Descartes, Plato, and Kant in a campaign aimed at “de-centering” Western intellectual history. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” the Black Lives Matter organization declared in 2020 in language that was adopted verbatim by the United Federation of Teachers later that year. Few summarized the activists’ objectives more succinctly than Chandran Nair in his 2021 essay in Time: “A better world cannot be forged without unmasking and dismantling the global superstructure that perpetuates white, Western dominance.”

 

The social justice movement had incorporated the 20th-century left’s veneration of non-Western cultures as an expression of its activists’ disdain for Eurocentrism. For a time, this imperative coexisted alongside a pageant of Judeo-Christian symbolism. That was not to last.

 

Many of wokeness’s most devoted adherents have spent the better part of this decade gravitating toward Palestinianism, which is not the same thing as being pro-Palestinian. As a doctrine, Palestinianism has been a central feature of anti-Western radicalism for over half a century. The Soviet Union first popularized a theory of “Zionology,” which posited that Israel was an “anti-human” entity, to quote the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, typified by militant chauvinism, racism, and neocolonialism. Moscow’s agitation was picked up by the militant leftists in orbit around Cuba in the second half of the 20th century, some of whom evolved from Marxian “focoist” guerrillas into pan-Arab nationalist militants and, after the 1979 revolution in Iran, unreconstructed Islamists.

 

For the extremists, Palestinianism served as a comprehensive rejection of Western modes. The activism currently in fashion on the far left bears many of the hallmarks of the radical movements of the 1970s.

 

Correspondingly, the second draft of wokeness seems destined to dispense with its gestures toward Western religious traditions. Indeed, its adherents reserve special contempt for all things Western: holidays, cultural expressions, moral codes. But the movement’s loudest voices seem most offended by liberalism, the theory of social organization that emerged out of the Enlightenment and on which most Western governments are founded.

 

The socialist movement overtaking the left, for example, proposes doing away with the Senate and the Supreme Court as conceived in the Constitution, and with them the separation of powers that has preserved liberty and stability in America for generations. Its leading lights flirt openly with the exotic allure of Maoism. At the center of it all is what one Democratic Socialist of America national committee member, Cliff Connolly, confessed was his movement’s “hatred of the Constitution.”

 

The sexual politics that were once so central to the movement’s self-conception are far more muted than they were at the end of the last decade. So, too, is the self-seriousness that characterized woke 1. The scions of socialism today are jocular and winsome, and, in many cases, sophomoric. Supporters of the movement freely confess that they like the “social” aspect of socialism. It seems fun.

 

Some will regard that as an improvement on wokeness’s penchant for humorlessness, but the movement’s new carefree attitude is nothing to admire. If woke 1 believed in individual agency to such an extent that it prescribed dwelling constantly on the world’s injustices, as if that could have a cumulative and ameliorating effect, woke 2 argues that individual agency is a myth.

 

The system is arrayed against you; the obstacles before you are insurmountable. Only a profound societal disruption will deliver us all into the sunlit uplands of history. Wokeness is more happy-go-lucky than it once was, but only because its members are now imbued with revolutionary messianism. When the old order has been swept away, the state will take care of everything. Why worry?

 

The new wokeness is a modern form of a very old radicalism. Its excesses are thus likely to be familiar.

 

It has fetishized violence, for example, particularly against what it construes as the symbols of the dominant American political culture: its statues, its courthouses, its law enforcement officers. It is hostile toward Western conventions, particularly the religious and capitalistic varieties, just as the anarchists of the early 20th century were. Its virtues are those articulated by the Iranian revolutionary thinker Jalal Al-e-Ahmad in his radical tome Westoxification. The Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati summarized the book’s thesis as opposition to “world imperialism, including multinational corporations and cultural imperialism, racism, class exploitation, class oppression, [and] class inequality,” among other social ills allegedly cultivated and exported by the West.

 

New Woke is a more exclusive club and therefore likely to be a smaller one. But it will not be commensurately less menacing.

 

In abjuring woke 1, AOC ignited a backlash among her fellow socialists. The Democratic Socialists of America’s Maoist “Liberation Caucus” denounced their deviationist comrade as an “opportunist.” One of her detractors was the Brooklyn-based writer Andre Gee, who wrote in The Guardian that Ocasio-Cortez’s treachery “exemplifies the hopelessness of electing progressive candidates” beholden to the tyranny of “centrist consensus” over “radical policies.” Not to be outdone, the militant left-wing essayist Natasha Lennard attacked AOC’s “liberal cowardice” as the sort that throttles nascent “rebellions” in their cribs. “There was nothing ‘crazy’ about more than 20 million people taking to the streets in righteous, militant protests against a racist, necropolitical order,” she wrote. Ocasio-Cortez’s counterrevolutionary remarks are a betrayal of “the uprisings’ militant challenge to racial capitalism.”

 

While woke 1 was, on the margins, infatuated with the foreign, it sought influence by appealing to the Western tradition and its highest ideals. Woke 2 has no use for the West, its systems, or those who would work within them to advance incrementalist political objectives — even someone as radical as AOC.

 

Still, she was right, of course. The first version of wokeness was crazy. It was fanatical, obsessive, apocalyptic, belligerent, and predatory. But underneath it all, its enthusiasts behaved as though there was at least something about the West that was worth preserving. Woke 2 disagrees.