The Oligarchy Myth

By Michael Dresdale

Saturday, June 13, 2026

 

In California’s gubernatorial primary, Tom Steyer — the billionaire investor and patron of progressive causes — was widely seen as the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party’s socialist faction. He won the endorsements of the Bernie Sanders-founded Our Revolution and progressive stalwarts like Representative Ro Khanna (D., Calif.), despite the vast personal fortune he amassed as a hedge fund manager — a job that sits just below Big Oil executive in the progressive hierarchy of moral opprobrium.

 

But despite having poured over $200 million of his own money into electing himself, he will ultimately be on the outside looking in come November. Steyer outspent former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on advertising by a nearly twenty-to-one margin, but Becerra has advanced to the general election; Steyer, in contrast, failed to secure enough primary votes to get the second spot on California’s November ballot, losing out to Republican Steve Hilton.

 

Steyer’s underwhelming performance has exposed the limits of the very charge he and Sanders have spent the past year prosecuting: that what fundamentally ails America is oligarchic control of politics.

 

In barnstorming the country on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Sanders has pressed his case in characteristically blunt terms: “You have to be blind not to see that what we have today is a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.” Yet when billionaires themselves have tried to convert dollars into votes, the results have been disappointing-bordering-on-dismal. Beyond his gubernatorial bid, Steyer spent nearly $350 million boosting his run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — an effort that failed to win him even a single delegate. Michael Bloomberg, whose fortune makes Steyer’s look like a modest nest egg, spent over $1 billion on his own 2020 campaign; for all that expense and trouble, the only primary contest he won was American Samoa’s — presumably home to many grateful users of the Bloomberg terminal. As New York’s June primaries approach, Representative Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) — scion to the Levi Strauss fortune — looks to be on the cusp of political annihilation at the hands of former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, despite outraising Lander three-to-one and pledging to match every donated dollar.

 

To be fair, the claim that American politics is fundamentally oligarchic does not rest on billionaires holding office themselves. Politicians must still raise money to campaign, and that necessity creates an opening for the moneyed classes. Billionaires need not enter the scrum, this view holds, when so many elected supplicants will do their bidding.

 

The contention that politicians serve their donors rather than their voters is as old as electoral politics. Political scientists have long tested its explanatory power in contemporary American politics. In 2014, two of them, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, lent the view support in a paper finding that the preferences of the rich overwhelmingly shape public policy. A subsequent stream of research, however, challenged the assumption that those laws were passed because they pleased the donor class. To cite just one paper complicating the Gilens and Page view, Alexander Branham and his co-authors found that a huge swath of the rich’s apparent wins could as easily be credited to the fact that their desired policies also enjoyed middle-class support. When their preferences diverged from the middle class’s, the rich won only 53 percent of the time — and even then, the policies leaned in no consistent ideological direction.

 

Step back from the regressions, and the pattern of which causes have won and lost this century suggests that the Business Roundtable and its allies have not held the whip hand in our politics. In 2013, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the institutional home of Sanders’s reviled plutocrats — spent $50 million backing Congress’s push for comprehensive immigration reform. That effort died in the Republican-controlled House at the hands of grassroots opposition. Thirteen years later, neither President Trump’s immigration crackdown nor his dizzying array of tariffs ranks high on corporate America’s wish-list.

 

Perhaps nowhere do America’s billionaires appear more politically impotent than in their own backyards. New York and California are home to 38 percent of the nation’s billionaires, many clustered in New York City and San Francisco. But the two states levy two of the highest top marginal tax rates in the country, with New York City throwing in an upper-bracket income tax of its own for good measure. Moreover, the recent political trajectories of both states — and their most dynamic cities — bear little imprint of billionaire control. In New York City, the mayoralty was won by the self-avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani, who ran on ratcheting up taxes on the wealthy. The state declined to enact the full suite of Mamdani proposals, but one tax it did adopt falls on the expensive apartments that the rich keep as second homes. Mamdani has pressed his agenda by picking fights with individual billionaires. In California, meanwhile, several billionaires have fled the state to escape a proposed wealth tax headed for the November ballot, one that would carve a one-time, five-percent chunk out of their fortunes.

 

The more one wrestles with the many instances of billionaire interests losing in the political arena, the clearer it becomes that “oligarchy” has become a political crutch for the left — a way of explaining away defeat as the work of class opponents cunningly deploying their financial power, rather than as the expression of sincere disagreement on the part of the mass of American voters. Many people may have discrete complaints about America’s imperfect capitalist reality, but few of them, false consciousness or not, are eager to see it thrown overboard wholesale.

 

The danger of the left’s embrace of the oligarchy thesis is that it risks blinding the public to a genuinely valuable aspect of American capitalism. “Oligarchy” does fairly describe many economies, past and present. The Economist’s crony-capitalism index captures the difference: It measures the share of a country’s billionaire wealth drawn from state-dependent, rent-heavy sectors — telecoms, mining, casinos, defense — against the share generated in competitive ones. Unsurprisingly, the 2023 rankings put Putin’s Russia at the top, with crony wealth equal to 19 percent of GDP. In the United States, the figure was 2 percent.

 

The left blurs this distinction, treating inequality as equally condemnable whether it springs from cronyism or from competition. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D., N.Y.) insistence that there is no ethical way to amass a billion dollars underscores the point. Earning a billion dollars — or many times that — by building a company that hundreds of millions of people freely use is a supremely pro-social act. Of course, we can debate in good faith how much a productive billionaire ought to pay in taxes. But our scorn should be reserved for those whose path to wealth runs through a Machiavellian climb into the inner rings of power, only to use that proximity to exploit their fellow citizens rather than serve them.

 

One of the strongest criticisms of the Trump administration is that it, too, is blurring the lines between these two modes of capitalism through the intense personalization of the executive branch. As the Wall Street Journal has documented, Trump has taken a personal hand in the Food and Drug Administration’s drug approvals, the Federal Trade Commission’s merger reviews, and the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over broadcast licenses. The administration can offer a plausible rationale for any one of these interventions. Cumulatively, though, they leave a different impression — that the administrative state’s technocracy has been restored to a clientelist species of democratic control. Unsurprisingly, spending on lobbying targeting the White House has surged to record levels.

 

Robert Dahl, the political scientist and great student of American government’s messiness, described America’s pluralist political reality as one of “multiple centers of power, none of which is or can be wholly sovereign.” The threat to that reality does not come from a creeping control by business over government, but from government’s desire to insinuate into every corner of business — a tendency visible in different forms in both political parties. Should the trend hold, and a growing share of our companies come to feel that their fates rest on the centralized decisions of regulators and politicians rather than the dispersed judgments of investors and consumers, then today’s overheated accusations will be borne out as tomorrow’s sober predictions.

California’s Wealth Tax: Let’s Go Serfin’

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

 

In the most recent Capital Letter, I wrote about Elizabeth Warren’s proposed Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, a wealth tax aimed with various degrees of viciousness at those worth more than $50 million, which I saw as a neofeudalist move:

 

Under the “classic” feudalism introduced in England by the Normans after their hostile takeover in 1066, ownership of land and anything built upon it ultimately belonged to the crown. Movable property was a different matter. What was yours was essentially yours, if subject to levies at awkward moments. That probably means that Senator Elizabeth Warren thinks of William the Conqueror as having been a soft touch. Should her Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act pass (and be found to be constitutional), everything, however contingently, will become property of the state. . . .

 

I noted that “the progressive clamor for wealth taxes is growing louder and is reflected at both the state and federal levels as well as internationally.”

 

And so, right on schedule, California progressives have reportedly gotten the signatures they need for a vote on a “one-off” wealth tax on the assets of Californians worth more than $1 billion, a process that would include ascribing a valuation on voting interests in a company that exceeds a billionaire’s equity stake, a provision so stupidly destructive that it can only be understood by seeing wealth taxes for what they are: a weapon deployed by a progressive elite out to knock out potential competition.

 

As I argued:

 

The spite and the jealousy displayed by wealth tax activists toward the “rich” is no less genuine for being strategically useful. They, one part of the elite (or would-be elite), see what another part has, and they crave it for themselves. They are enraged at the thought that they have been left behind by people they see as money-grubbing moral inferiors. Their egalitarianism is a tool to create a system in which they and their acolytes take the spoils.

 

Meanwhile California’s billionaires are taking note.

 

The Wall Street Journal:

 

Billionaires are already leaving the state. California Tax Foundation visiting fellow Jared Walczak estimates in a new paper that “reported departures already total $777 billion,” and more “‘quiet departures’” that do not draw media coverage” are likely this year since “there are solid legal reasons to believe that the initiative’s residency date and approach could be challenged successfully in court.”

 

By his estimate, the wealth tax exodus could total $1.23 trillion and reduce annual state tax revenue by $3.53 billion to $4.49 billion, mainly from lower income-tax collections. He calculates that “the net present value of these ongoing losses outstrips the one-time revenue projected by the initiative’s proponents effects.” That means the tax will over time cost the state more revenue than it raises because of out-migration and slower economic growth.

 

Read on:

 

In addition, [Walczak] warns, “eroding existing tax bases could amplify the perceived ‘need’ for ongoing wealth taxation.” If voters approve the tax, expect progressives to push soon to extend it or reduce the wealth threshold at which it hits. That’s the history of income tax hikes. The referendum also lets the Legislature and Governor amend the tax, so Democrats won’t even need voter approval. [Emphasis added.]

 

Warren’s proposed tax is supposed to raise $6.2 trillion over a decade. The money is aimed not at debt reduction, but at funding new spending programs. But what if, as quite a few believe, it falls short of its revenue targets? If revenues disappoint, will spending be cut or will taxes be increased?

 

I added that that was a rhetorical question.

Progressives Give Wealth Confiscation Another Go

National Review Online

Monday, March 30, 2026

 

It’s the 2020 Democratic primaries all over again. Just as they were then, progressives are trying to one-up each other with increasingly outlandish fiscal proposals. One of the worst ideas from that year’s frenzied contest — a direct tax on household wealth — is back in fashion.

 

The same characters are back to reheat old redistribution. Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) got the ball rolling, outlining a 5 percent annual tax on all billionaires’ net worths. Not to be outdone, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) is more ambitious. Her plan is to tax all household wealth above $50 million at 2 percent each year, with a 1 percent surtax on fortunes over $1 billion. Both senators would use the proceeds not to trim the gaping deficit, of course, but to fund a laundry list of new entitlements.

 

Although Warren’s wealth tax would be slightly kinder to billionaires, it would apply to far more Americans than Sanders’s plan. Targeting what she calls “ultra-millionaires,” it would hit an estimated 260,000 households. Sanders limits his confiscatory scheme to the 900 or so billionaires in the country, though it would surely discourage more entrepreneurs and investors from joining their ranks.

 

Like today’s wealth-tax proposals, the federal income tax was originally intended to target only the richest Americans. Less than 1 percent of people paid the income tax when it was enacted in 1913, at a rate of just 1 percent of net earnings. Once the government identifies a revenue source, however, it inevitably expands: Three-fifths of households now owe income tax at marginal rates up to 37 percent.

 

Warren is expanding the wealth tax before it has even been enacted, but it could swell further. One of the senator’s top influences, the inequality-obsessed economist Thomas Piketty, once floated the idea of taxing household wealth above a threshold as low as $260,000.

 

One reason lawmakers may broaden a wealth tax is that it would raise much less revenue than advocates project. Determining the value of every asset owned by every rich household has proven an administrative nightmare for the countries that have tried. That is largely why many European governments have abolished their wealth taxes. The rich avoid assessments by shifting their money into hard-to-value assets, such as private companies, or simply by leaving the country. Admittedly, the latter risk is far smaller in the case of the United States because, after allowing for certain “breaks,” the federal government taxes its citizens and permanent residents wherever they live.

 

The United States also imposes an “expatriation tax” (to oversimplify, taxing any unrealized capital gains above a certain limit) on people renouncing their citizenship or, subject to certain time requirements, their permanent residence status. This is not enough for Warren, who would like to see a draconian 40 percent “exit tax” on those who would otherwise be subject to her tax if they renounced their citizenship.

 

If a wealth tax could somehow raise the trillions in revenue that Sanders and Warren anticipate, it would be an enormous tax on productive investment. The tax would apply to all assets regardless of when they are sold or whether they yield income. On top of regular taxes on capital gains and dividends, even a seemingly modest rate could wipe out yearly returns. Rather than reinvesting in new ventures, billionaires and millionaires would be incentivized to spend down their wealth as quickly as possible before the government nabs it. Reduced investment would dampen growth, leaving a smaller economy and lower wages for everyone.

 

Even if Congress passed a wealth tax, it could very well be blocked by the courts. The Constitution prohibits the government from levying direct taxes — including on property — without apportioning them among the states. Income taxes are allowed under the 16th Amendment, but even the most sympathetic judge would have difficulty defining unsold assets as earnings.

 

Above all, a wealth tax would be unjust because it aims to perpetrate the very expropriation that republican government exists to prevent. The purpose of the tax code is to pay for legitimate state functions, not to seize money from one set of citizens and dole it out to another. Contrary to popular belief, the richest households already contribute the bulk of federal revenue and pay higher effective tax rates than anyone else. Any leftover wealth is rightfully theirs to spend as they see fit.

 

Absent a compelling message on affordability, progressives are attempting to channel voters’ economic discontent into class resentment. But a punitive tax on the rich would do no one any good, while risking U.S. investment and competitiveness. Sober-minded Democrats should mark the wealth tax down as a liability.

The Thin Line Between Meatballs and Mystery Meat

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, March 13, 2026

 

I’ve had a minor disagreement with some friends about whether or not the Strait of Hormuz is closed. My friends who are quite supportive of the war in Iran argue that it isn’t closed because Chinese and certain other ships can still use it. Even Iran has insisted that it hasn’t officially closed the Strait. This is all technically true. The problem is that shipping companies can’t get insurance to go through it. Also, some companies and crews just don’t want to go through it for the same reason insurance companies don’t want to insure them: They can get blown up.

 

I can understand Donald Trump’s frustration with this fact. But I don’t think yelling at the shipping companies to “show some guts” and make a run for it is great advice. Nor do I think it buttresses the administration’s case that it fully anticipated this threat to the Strait. Are we to believe that the plan was to respond to several attacks on oil tankers with a presidential exhortation to man up and deal with it?

 

Regardless, this strikes me as a perfect example of the difference between de jure and de facto. If a grizzly bear is hanging out in your local 7-Eleven, it’s not technically closed. But you’re probably not going to get your spicy Jamaican beef patty there until the bear is removed (not least because we all know that bears love spicy Jamaican beef patties even more than drunk college kids do).

 

In his press conference today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “The only thing prohibiting transit in the Straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit, should Iran not do that.”

 

Well, yeah.

 

Hoping for success.

 

Speaking of the war, I want it to succeed. I don’t like the way we got into it. I don’t have a lot of faith in the administration’s strategic vision. But we’re in it. I agree with a lot of my friends that there’s a rush to pronounce this thing a disaster. It’s not one yet—and, God willing, may never be. I think the New York Times’ Bret Stephens is on solid footing when he says:
 

 

I’m flabbergasted by the relentless pessimism I’m seeing in much of the commentariat. We are less than two weeks into a war that will almost surely be over by the end of the month, and already there are predictions that it’s “another Iraq.” American casualties, heartbreaking as they are, have been minor for a conflict of this scale. Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors diminishes by the day: We’ve seen this in the sharp decline in its ballistic missile and drone attacks. I have to assume that before this war is over, we will find a way to remove Iran’s remaining stores of highly enriched uranium, which greatly enhances global security over the long term. And Iran’s leaders, for all their swagger, now know they are not immune from reprisal, which will make them think a lot more carefully as they plot their retaliation. We may not see regime change now, but this regime is likely to become a zombie state before the next, all-but-inevitable, popular uprising.

 

The only thing that I’m somewhat flabbergasted by is his flabbergastedness (flabbergastidity?). We’ve spent more than a decade hearing recriminations, remorse, regret, and historical revisionism about the war on terror, the Iraq war, forever wars, and the like. Is it really so shocking that a lot of people on the left and right are down on a war they were not really warned was coming? Bret’s a brilliant guy, and a fellow Trump critic, but surely he can understand that Trump has not done much to earn the benefit of the doubt from a lot of folks. Indeed, the MAGA types freaking out about the war were the last constituency in America willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and they feel betrayed.

 

(They’re also pissed because this war has exposed the fact that many of the self-proclaimed leaders of MAGA opposing the war have been revealed as paper tigers. There is simply no data indicating that actual MAGA voters agree with their supposed leaders.)

 

When a president explains what he’s doing and gets buy-in from Congress and the public before he goes to war, he gets some insulation against the pessimism Bret laments. When war with Iran is just the umpteenth thing the president has done unilaterally and, at least seemingly impulsively, that insulation doesn’t exist.

 

We’re in this war. I’d rather it continue for as long as it takes to be successful on some objective metrics. If it redounds to the benefit of Trump, so be it. My concern is that Trump’s metrics are always subjective.

 

That’s a spicy meatball.

 

The Senate passed, and I assume the House will too, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott’s bill called the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Needless to say, I hate the title. “ROAD” is an acronym for Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream. The wordplay says it’s a road leading to an abstract noun. “Housing” may look like a gerund, but it’s not, damn it. It’s got no verb-mojo to it. But I shouldn’t dwell on the obvious.

 

“Think of this bill like a meatball,” Sen. Warren explains. “It’s got a lot of different ingredients in it, but it’s the fact that it’s all there together is what makes it so delicious.”

 

Look, I get what she’s going for. Meatballs can be delicious if all the ingredients are good and work together. But meatballs can also be a form of mystery meat, like various institutional meat loaves, scrapple, various members of the head cheese family, and potted meat. Word to the wise: Potted meat can taste good but only if you don’t read the ingredients. The whole cliché about legislating being like sausage-making—widely, and probably falsely attributed to Otto von Bismarck—is a cliché for a reason. Big bills with a zillion provisions are a great way to include ingredients that don’t pass the sniff test. “We’ve got a ton of iffy chicken in the fridge. Grind it up and put it in the sausage—or meatballs.”

 

From what I’ve read, there’s some okay stuff in Warren’s meatball. But there’s also some meat product that smells a lot like Steve Bannon’s socks.

 

For some, the worst fare is the ban on big investors buying housing. Despite all the media and activist attention, the share of homes owned by large investment firms “account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock,” according to the Wall Street Journal, “and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).”

 

If you like an apartment or house and it’s affordable, why would you care very much if a big corporation owned it? I can see plenty of benefits to the Ramjack Corporation being your landlord instead of some small owner. All things being equal, I’d prefer a big company with a dedicated maintenance staff over some dude who has to watch YouTube videos to figure out how to fix my toilet.

 

More importantly, a big corporation has the resources to make housing affordable. McDonald’s makes hamburgers at scale, so they tend to be more affordable than what you find even in a greasy spoon. I guess I don’t want to live in a country where only big corporations own all of the housing, but that isn’t a possibility.

 

Indeed, where else in your life do you make this sort of distinction? Do you buy your computers and phones from mom-and-pop outfits?

 

Don’t get me wrong, I like mom-and-pop businesses, but I like them when they’re good at what they do.

 

Still, the real rancid stuff in the bill isn’t the large investor ban, as stupid as that is. It’s all the grants and subsidies that give people money to buy houses. Let’s just stipulate for argument’s sake that they’re all well-intentioned and will probably help some people on an individual basis. The big problem is that subsidizing demand makes housing more expensive.

 

When I got into the punditry business, I was promised there would be no math, so I’m going to keep this simple. 

 

Let’s say you are the mayor of an island community with a hundred inhabitants. You have to import a lot of things you can’t produce on the island. But let’s focus on peaches, ripe summer peaches. The island gets one shipment every August, and—to keep the math simple—everyone wants one and they normally cost $5 each. But this year, the shipment only contained 50 peaches.

 

The sole grocer has a few options. She can raise the price to, say, $10 so the people who want the peaches the most will pay more for this scarce resource. The people who don’t care that much about peaches won’t care that much. But a few people will be pissed off that the peaches are just too expensive. One problem with this approach is that it’s entirely possible that one or two people who really love peaches might buy more than their “fair share” and snap all of them up, angering even more peach-lovers. The grocer can raise the prices more, or you, the heroic mayor, can step in and announce a rule to thwart the peach-hoarding scum: only one peach per customer.

 

Another way of addressing the problem: raid the rainy-day fund and give everybody a one-time gift of $20 to spend on peaches.

 

You see the problem? Neither approach will make peaches more “affordable” because the supply of peaches hasn’t increased. Give everyone more money to buy a thing and that thing will become more expensive.

 

The only reliable way to make peaches more affordable is to increase the supply of peaches. What is true of peaches is true of housing. Both are ripe, fuzzy, tree fruits. No, wait—that’s not right. But you get the point. If you give everybody, say, $50,000 to buy a house, the price of housing will go up because the price will adjust upward. The only reliable way to make housing more affordable is to make more housing. The bill has some features intended to increase housing, but the fundamental approach is to give federal regulators power over the housing market. The Trump administration likes the bill because it polls well and because it is in full “do-something” mode on housing and affordability. Bipartisanship on bad ideas is often much worse than a partisan defense of good ideas.

 

The 2007-08 financial crisis was fueled by politicians doing everything they could to goose homeownership, so we’ve been down this road before.

 

 

Elizabeth Warren’s Abundant Mistakes

By Jonathan Chait

Thursday, January 15, 2026

 

The Democratic Party has two competing plans to “pick up the broken pieces from the 2024 election,” claimed Elizabeth Warren, in a widely touted speech she delivered Monday at the National Press Club. “One vision says that we should shape our agenda and temper our rhetoric to flatter any fabulously rich person looking for a political party that will entrench their own economic interests,” she argued. The other vision—hers, as you might guess—is noble and pure.

 

Warren’s account of the party’s internal divide is nonsensical demagoguery. Almost nobody in the Democratic Party—perhaps literally nobody—believes it should design its message to flatter selfish billionaires.

 

But the existence of an internal schism is quite real. And the fact that Warren, who has long styled herself as an intellectual and political leader of the party’s progressive faction, must resort to grotesque mischaracterization of her opponents within the Democratic Party is an indication of how poorly the argument has gone for her side over the past year and a half.

 

***

 

The actual claim moderates tend to make about why their party lost in 2024 is that Kamala Harris was unable to credibly separate herself from the toxic social-policy stances she adopted during her 2020 campaign—the highest-profile being her promise to support taxpayer-financed gender-reassignment surgeries for prisoners and detained migrants. She also did too little to distance herself from the Biden administration’s unpopular governing record.

 

Many progressives reject that analysis, especially the first part, which implies that the party needs to abandon unpopular positions. They argue that the social views held by a majority of the electorate are (as one progressive strategist put it) “unacceptable.” Rather than compromise with the holders of those unacceptable beliefs, Democrats can simply focus public attention on the evils of the billionaire class, a message thought to be powerful enough to overcome the political drag created by any nonnegotiable social-policy stances.

 

Warren’s speech articulates this strategy—though it might be more accurate to say that it carries out this strategy by ignoring or mischaracterizing the views of her internal Democratic Party critics and instead depicting them as puppets of the wealthy.

 

In her speech, Warren repeatedly argued that the moderate analysis of Democrats’ shortcomings is that they lost because they offended rich people and therefore failed to raise enough money. She decried “the temptation—in this moment of national crisis—to sand down our edges to avoid offending anyone, especially the rich and powerful who might finance our candidates.” She insisted, “A Democratic Party that worries more about offending big donors than delivering for working people is a party that is doomed to fail.”

 

Revealingly, Warren did not cite any Democrat who holds this supposedly influential belief. Through insinuation, however, she tried to associate it with advocates of the abundance agenda. “Reid Hoffman is sending everyone he knows a copy of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book on abundance and backing pro-abundance candidates,” she warned. “Running on small, vague ideas that may also raise costs for families—instead of on full-throated, economic populist ideas—is a terrible plan for winning elections.”

 

In fact, the abundance agenda is neither small nor vague, nor a plan for winning elections. It is not a political strategy but a set of policy arguments that have caught the attention of liberal intellectuals. The agenda, in short, argues that cities should permit more housing to be built, that the government should make building public infrastructure easier, and that the government has been too bound up by procedures and regulations that prevent swift action.

 

The abundance agenda is designed to make it easier for government to carry out the energetic work that progressives desire, which has inspired an earnest debate over its wonky particulars. Yet it has drawn withering fire from the left, perhaps because it points the finger at progressives themselves for tying up government in knots. In particular, it blames left-leaning interest groups for upholding well-intentioned rules that make governing costly and slow and that freeze the built environment in place. Progressives such as Warren believe in maintaining a firm alliance with the very groups that the abundance agenda blames.

 

The abundance agenda intersects with the political arguments moderates have made, because both the abundance proponents and the moderates decry the excessive influence of the groups. Many people who believe Democrats should move to the center also embrace the abundance agenda as a set of governing priorities. Despite their somewhat common set of targets, however, abundance proponents and moderates are not the same thing.

 

The biggest reason some progressives detest the abundance agenda seems to be  that they, like Warren, genuinely adhere to the populist analysis of American politics, which takes it as axiomatic that every problem is caused by nefarious wealthy interests.

 

At one point in her speech, for instance, Warren claimed that Donald Trump “is trying to push out the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and complete his corrupt takeover of America’s central bank—so that it serves his interests, along with his billionaire friends’.” Is it true that Trump’s billionaire friends would benefit from undermining central-bank independence? The billionaires don’t seem especially excited about this aspect of Trump’s power grab. An alternate explanation for Trump’s behavior is that, rather than carrying out a clever plan to enrich his allies, he doesn’t understand monetary policy very well. To the populist monomaniac, however, there are no dumb ideas, only plots.

 

The abundance agenda, by contrast, is premised on the belief that at least some problems do stem from misconceived ideas, including the left-wing variety. The abundance proponents do not defend the role of the wealthy, nor do they imply that Democrats should steer clear of taxing the rich and regulating harmful business practices. (Most of the prominent advocates of the abundance agenda, including Klein and Thompson, favor such steps.) They simply call attention to the existence of some problems that are not entirely the fault of billionaires.

 

If you are unable to imagine any economic problem that is not the product of billionaire greed, then you naturally assume that anybody who sees the world differently is a tool of the rich. Yet the Democratic Party is completely unified on the merits of raising taxes on the rich and spending more on benefits for the poor and middle class. Its true divide concerns Warren’s fixation with wealthy interests as the source of all evils, and whether this political style offers the party a path to the majority.

 

***

 

We have three broad ways to measure the political appeal of Warren’s message. First, she has run for Senate three times. She has won those races. But because she is a Democrat in Massachusetts, one of the most overwhelmingly Democratic states in America, winning alone tells us little about her appeal. The election-data-analytics firm Split Ticket found that in 2018 and 2024, Warren ran 9.4 points and 10.8 points below the vote share that a generic Democrat would have attained—making her one of the party’s poorest performers each cycle. The database in that measurement does not include 2012, the year Warren first ran for Senate, but in that race she ran seven points behind Barack Obama in her state, even though Obama was facing Mitt Romney, the state’s well-regarded former governor, at the top of the ticket.

 

Second, Warren ran for president in 2020 and performed miserably. Lots of candidates ran in that cycle and failed to break through. Warren attracted huge amounts of donor support; the media covered her like a front-runner. Her problem was that the voters simply didn’t choose her. She finished third in Iowa, fourth in New Hampshire and Nevada, and fifth in South Carolina before dropping out after losing her home state. Her high-profile defeat did not inspire any obvious recriminations. Warren’s campaign memoir expresses bewilderment that her successful courting of progressive activists did not translate into votes among Black and Latino primary voters, without questioning whether those activists represented large numbers of real voters as opposed to just the progressive donors who funded their work.

 

Third, and most revealingly, despite crashing and burning in the primary, Warren built enough prestige among Democratic Party elites to gain deep influence over both the staffing and the policy agenda of its ultimate victor. As the nominee and as president, Joe Biden adopted many of Warren’s campaign proposals, co-authored an op-ed with her, and frequently solicited her advice. “President Joe Biden is enlisting a small army of her former aides and allies to run his government,” reported Politico in 2021.

 

How did Warren’s speech process the humbling fact that her policy blueprint was implemented, and Americans rejected it at the ballot box? Mostly by ignoring the entire four years.

 

The moderates have blamed Harris for failing to separate herself from Biden—most infamously, when she told The View that she couldn’t think of a single policy on which she differed from him. In the speech, Warren’s only specific criticism of Harris’s relationship to Biden came when she attacked her for failing to pledge to keep Lina Khan, a Warren favorite, as head of the Federal Trade Commission. (Warren, of course, blames this decision on billionaires.)

 

Warren’s speech also insisted that “we can’t rebuild trust by excommunicating Biden-administration law enforcers who, for the first time in decades, actually fought to hold corporations accountable for driving up prices.”

 

Excommunication in general is a rather stringent penalty that ought to be employed only for serious offenses, and ideally by a church. Still, it is revealing that Warren’s only takeaway from the Biden administration is that the Democrats should bind themselves to keeping his staff in place indefinitely.

 

Warren blithely credited the Biden aides with holding corporations “accountable for driving up prices.” But did this actually prevent inflation? Or did it at least make the public give Biden credit for fighting inflation? The answer to both is no. Yet this is the blueprint she demands the party follow into the future.

 

In the airtight world of populist logic, no evidence for Warren’s beliefs is necessary. Blaming corporations for any given problem is self-evidently correct, and failing to embrace this logic can be explained only by corruption. Warren has put Democrats on notice that if they resist her moral certitude, she will question their integrity. The lesson they should draw from her speech is that, if they want to build a majority more durable than Biden’s, questioning Warren’s dogma is a necessity.

The Saddest Part of This Recent Economic Lunacy

By David L. Bahnsen

Monday, January 12, 2026

 

Economic conservatives find themselves increasingly isolated in today’s politics as the reality of horseshoe theory plays out in the current populist moment. This past week, President Donald Trump explicitly suggested all four of the following policy ideas, some taken verbatim from the policy portfolio of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren:

 

1.      An outright ban on institutional buying (if those investors own more than one hundred properties) of single-family residential real estate

 

2.      Government control of executive compensation at defense and aerospace companies, along with, under loosely defined circumstances, a ban on such companies’ returning capital (whether by share buybacks or dividends) to investors

 

3.      The implementation of quantitative easing by ordering the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities

 

4.      A federally imposed limit of 10 percent on the interest rates that credit cards can charge borrowers

 

Of that list, only No. 3 is arguably allowed within the powers of the presidency (and even that only because the federal government has foolishly maintained the conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie 17 years past their demise). To the president’s credit, his Truth Social announcement regarding No. 1 (a ban on institutional ownership of residential real estate) acknowledged a need to get the codification of Congress. But even if all of these ideas go the way of his 50-year-mortgage idea of not that long ago (it has already been abandoned), even mere ideation on social media carries consequences. Not only do these proposals stroke the emotions of his populist base that demands that the government “do something,” but they offer credibility and support to future endeavors to do the same thing that may prove more serious and substantive.

 

Even if there were proof that these four policy ideas would work toward their desired aims (cheaper housing, better quality, more rapidly produced military equipment, and a lower cost of credit), significant arguments exist against their implementation. On principle, one should object (as I do) to the federal government’s telling sellers whom they can sell their homes to and telling buyers where they can and cannot put their capital to work. One should object to the concept of quasi-nationalization of our defense and aerospace industry. One should object to the distortive interference of the heavy hand of government in the supply and terms of mortgage financing. And one should object to the statist imposition of price controls in the highly complex (and risky) world of unsecured consumer credit.

 

However, I would be perfectly willing to forgo the objections of the preceding paragraph and to engage these four policy issues only along the lines of whether they are likely to work and achieve their stated aims. Indeed, these policy prescriptions not only do not work, but they actively hurt the very people they are intended to benefit.

 

In economics, we refer to the idea that some policies deserve legitimacy because of their intentions as the “piety myth.” It was Thomas Sowell who most lambasted the idea that left-wing ideas or general collectivist intentions warrant more grace as long as the policies “mean well.” With each of his proclamations, I believe the president finds political value in a midterm election year and, to some degree, believes that they would benefit, at least superficially or marginally, the people for whom they are intended. The opposite is true.

 

1.      An outright ban on major institutional buying of single-family residential real estate. Despite the fact that the very premise of the idea is deeply flawed (that institutional ownership of real estate is driving home prices higher), the solution proposed is even more problematic. The existence of more buyers in the market produces more incentive to build and develop, and if there is any viable solution to the supply–demand imbalance that has driven prices higher, it is an increase in building and development. Taking out an entire class of capital contributors to the space would put downward pressure on production. It not only takes away a category of buyers, but it limits optionality for sellers — that is, it stunts total transaction volume. More activity promotes more supply. It fosters capital formation and brings fluidity to a sector that has been hobbled by regulation and risk–reward headwinds since the financial crisis. Pricing is a by-product of supply and demand, and whether the buyers are institutions looking to add rental stock or individuals looking to enjoy a primary residence, eliminating entire actors from the marketplace pushes the supply curve the wrong way.

 

2.      Government control of executive compensation at defense and aerospace companies, along with a complete ban on such companies’ returning capital to investors. The president may have missed the ironic undermining of his own argument in his social media post. He claimed that our military equipment and defense innovations are the greatest in the world but went on to bemoan the return of capital to investors via dividends and stock buybacks, claiming that these companies ought to produce the greatest defense products in the world only because doing so is great for America. He is correct that the technology, innovation, and precision of our defense industry are the greatest in the world, and I can think of no greater way to undermine that than to treat the capital that undergirds it poorly. It is not an accident that our defense sector shines — it is well capitalized and well incentivized to perform. Nationalized defense companies in other countries trail by leaps and bounds. The investors (in both private and public companies) put forth capital that drives these innovations and continue doing so when they find the return on their investment worthwhile. Government intervention in that process would be destructive, and the wholesale elimination of capital return would stultify the sector, quasi-nationalize the space, ensure mediocrity for a generation in the ability to hire and retain talent, and freeze companies’ ability to attract capital.

 

3.      The implementation of GSE quantitative easing by ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities. This endeavor can succeed in bringing down long-term yields as non-price-sensitive buyers overwhelm the market with mortgage bond purchases that drive prices up and yields down, but if the goal is to create greater affordability for home purchasers, this would only exacerbate the problem. Those on the right already know the talking points, having just (accurately) used them barely a year ago against then–presidential candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, when she naïvely suggested subsidizing down payments for first-time homebuyers. The rebuttal, valid then as it is now, was that such a step would merely be priced into the market, fueling demand but doing nothing to address the supply side of the market’s disconnect. Much like Harris’s proposal, using the purse of government-sponsored enterprises to manipulate the mortgage market with quantitative easing fuels the demand side but does nothing to address the deficit of supply. Any action in housing policy that increases the demand curve yet ignores the supply curve would make housing more expensive, no matter how much those who might be first to benefit from lower rates would enjoy the idea.

 

4.      A federally imposed limit of 10 percent on the interest rates credit cards can charge borrowers. As was the case in Bernie Sanders’s bill from a year ago to do exactly this, this plan for federally sanctioned price-fixing ignores the obvious consequence when banks are told they cannot price the risk of this unsecured lending themselves: the wholesale removal of credit from riskier borrowers. Those with lower incomes or troubled credit histories will not enjoy 10 percent credit card interest but rather no credit card interest, because millions of borrowers will lose access to credit. Their need for borrowing will not subside, though, so they will pivot to payday lenders, pawn shops, loan sharks, or otherwise less reputable outlets at a cost far greater than they incur now. If 10 percent were the right number to meet the risk–reward trade-off of unsecured consumer lending, some bank would have already priced it right there, knowing that it is far less than what competitors currently charge, and it would soon dominate the market. JPMorgan wrote down $7 billion of charge-offs in its consumer-credit business last year, an indication of the high risk that exists in this space. That risk finds remuneration in higher interest rates, and attempts by Washington to “fix” that price would result in a huge percentage of the population’s being cut off from access to credit, an access they enjoy now as they seek to rebuild credit and financial standing.

 

Economic populism is a dangerous thing, even when its stated policies may work for a period. Being untethered to first principles leads to a slippery slope of abuse, distortion, malinvestment, and even corruption that undermines optimal conditions for human flourishing. But economic populism, as embodied in the aforementioned four policies, becomes a double whammy when it not only violates the principles of our American experiment but also woefully fails to deliver on its very own terms.

Trump and Warren Are Wrong About the Debt Limit

By Dominic Pino

Wednesday, June 04, 2025

 

President Donald Trump has yet again called for abolishing the federal debt limit, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has yet again agreed with him. This issue last came up in December, when Trump demanded that the lame-duck Congress suspend the debt limit for his entire presidency or eliminate it entirely. Republicans such as Representative Chip Roy (Texas) spoke out against it, and Congress did not oblige.

 

Roy said in December that he would not vote to raise the debt limit unless there were significant spending cuts attached. In doing so, he was being consistent with decades of precedent in how Congress has approached raising the debt limit.

 

Critics of the debt limit, which puts a cap on how much debt the Treasury is allowed to issue, argue that it is arbitrary and ineffective at constraining spending. It is certainly arbitrary, in that there is no reason why it should be set at any given number or date. It does not directly constrain spending because it only applies to debt issuance, which is separate from Congress’s approval of spending levels. The U.S. is the only country in the world with a debt limit separate from its budget. If one were to design the fiscal system from scratch, it might not make sense to have a debt limit.

 

All of that being said, Congress isn’t designing a new fiscal system from scratch. Though fiscal irresponsibility has been par for the course for many years, the fiscal situation would be even worse without the debt limit.

The debt limit is one of the few things that gives fiscal conservatives leverage to demand spending cuts. That’s likely why Warren is so enthusiastic about getting rid of it. She knows that if it gets abolished, progressives will be able — long after Trump is gone — to spend unencumbered by the periodic debt limit deadline when annoying conservatives have a chance to demand cuts.

 

Securing spending reforms in exchange for raising the debt limit is not a hypothetical power Congress has. A new memo from Advancing American Freedom, the conservative advocacy group founded by Mike Pence, goes through the history of deficit-reduction laws that were attached to raising the debt limit.

 

“The statutory debt limit has been successfully paired with spending cuts and reforms eight times over the past 40 years,” the memo says. It gives the following examples of conservative policy wins that happened thanks to the debt limit:

 

·         1985 — Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act: Required a gradual reduction and eventual elimination of budget deficits over FY1986-FY1991, specified annual deficit limits, and established a budget sequestration process.

 

·         1987 — Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Reaffirmation Act: Extended the balanced budget target to FY1993 but revised the budget sequestration process that had been invalidated by the Supreme Court.

 

·         1990 — Budget Enforcement Act: Included $324 billion in spending cuts and debt service savings, established discretionary spending caps and PAYGO procedures.

 

·         1993 — Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act: Included $255 billion in spending cuts and debt service savings and extended discretionary spending caps and PAYGO procedures from the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990.

 

·         1997 — Budget Enforcement Act: Included $198 billion in spending cuts and debt service savings and extended discretionary spending caps and PAYGO procedures through FY2002.

 

·         2010 — Statutory PAYGO Act: Reestablished statutory PAYGO enforced by sequestration.

 

·         2011 — Budget Control Act (Cut, Cap, and Balance): Established statutory discretionary that immediately cut spending by $917 billion, established a Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to report legislation reducing the deficit by $1.5 trillion over FY2012-FY2021, and established automatic cuts if the committee, Congress, and the president failed to enact at least $1.2 trillion in savings over that period.

 

·         2023 — Fiscal Responsibility Act: Established discretionary spending caps for FY2024 and FY2025, rescinded unused COVID funds, and rescinded some expanded funding for the IRS.

 

Those laws have proven to be far from enough to get federal spending under control. But the picture would be even worse without them, and there is no other tool that fiscal conservatives have been able to use eight times in the past 40 years to cut deficits. Elizabeth Warren knows that, which is why she wants to get rid of it. Republicans would be foolish to listen to Trump and do it for her.

Elizabeth Warren Runs Out of Room to Lie

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

 

Regrets? Liz Warren has a few — then again, too few to mention. She’ll never be president, sure, but the shrill progressive harpy and affirmative-action fraudster does at least have a lifetime position as senator from Massachusetts, which beats tenure on the faculty of Harvard Law these days (especially given impending budget cuts). The progressives may be gearing up to primary that old fuddy-duddy Ed Markey next year, but nobody would dream of threatening American progressivism’s own Madame Defarge. All in all, she is living her best life: as a phony who leveraged a fraudulent ethnic identity to climb to the top of academia and subsequently converted it into a lifelong political sinecure. Nice work if you can get it.

 

So it does my heart good every time this useless, officious busybody and hypocrite scold is humiliated in her failed attempts to practice retail politics. And poor Liz took a whomping for the ages today, when she spectacularly failed to answer a question still on the minds of Democratic and Republican voters alike: Why did you lie to America about Joe Biden’s mental state up until the exact moment, onstage at the debate, he melted like a wax candle?

 

Warren went on the podcast “Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso,” and it’s worth seeing the full context of the one-minute clip currently causing her so much heartburn among the chattering classes, because the context makes the sting of the moment that much sweeter. After about 50 minutes of chat — none of which I bothered to listen to — Fragoso headed into the concluding segment of the podcast by (quite reasonably) challenging her about the inadequacies of the 2024 campaign, doomed as it was by Biden’s senescence. “Why are we so slow to pivot? Why can we not get past our past?”

 

Warren responded by saying, “I’d like to answer a different question,”  which is the point where the host betrayed visible exasperation as he accused her of always reframing his questions and answering something other than what he asked. Fragoso complained that he was nearly out of time. Warren responded, “I’m going to run out the clock here.” She then offered some gormless mush about how looking back “just isn’t helpful” unless we can do better moving forward, etc. etc. — typical politician slop, only delivered this time with that signature tone of Warren’s, the one that exudes the warmth of a lizard.

 

At that point Fragoso smiled and gently followed through:

 

FRAGOSO: Do you regret saying that President Biden had a mental acuity, he had a sharpness to him? You said that up until July of last year.
[pause]
WARREN: I said what I believed to be true.
FRAGOSO: And do you think he was as sharp as you?

 

The facial expression Warren makes in this moment must truly be seen to be appreciated — no single still image can do it justice, for its grandeur is conveyed in the kinetic body language of full moral collapse. Warren shudders, struck dumb as if slapped in the face. Her posture crumbles, her face reels into an involuntary smile — the recognition that she’s humiliated herself flickering ever so briefly across her shocked visage. It is a beautiful moment, friends; I felt like I was watching Warren’s soul physically leave her body for a split second rather than deal with the social awkwardness of it all.

 

Her attempt at a recovery was even worse: “Um . . . I said I had not seen decline — and I hadn’t at that point!” Here, Warren pauses to pull a face for Fragoso, a “maybe you’ll buy that?” expression. Fragoso immediately returns Warren’s attempt with a smirk of disbelief. “You did not see any decline from 2024 Joe Biden to 2021 [sic] Joe Biden?,” he asked skeptically.

 

WARREN: Not when I said that. The thing is, look, he was sharp. He was on his feet. I saw him at a live event. I had meetings with him a couple of times.
FRAGOSO: Senator, “on his feet” is not praise. “He can speak in sentences” is not praise.
WARREN: OK. Fair enough, fair enough.

 

I was almost expecting a “Ya got me!” there at the end. Warren’s clunkiness is so funny it almost inspires pity; few have ever been less successful as political prevaricator, which would matter less for her were she not so prone to telling big, dumb, obvious lies. (Think of Jon Lovitz’s “Liar” character from Saturday Night Live: “I had meetings with him a couple of times . . . Yeah, that’s the ticket!”) Warren’s inability to answer basic questions explains well enough why she never made it out of the Democratic primaries; her inability to answer this specific basic question reflects not just on her but on the actions of the entire Democratic Party during the Biden administration.

How to Respond to an Assassination — and How Never To

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

 

Once news that Luigi Mangione (the self-confessed assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson) had been captured in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, the takes began to roll in from hoi polloi of social media, commentators, and politicians alike. You’ve already hopefully read my take, and if you want to jump into the algae- and filth-clogged sump that is Bluesky or X, you can find an unrepresentative sample of hard Left opinions as well. But perhaps it’s more valuable to focus on what politicians say — after all, they’re the lawmakers, and we are mere spectators. Their opinion matters!

 

First, let me reintroduce you to John Fetterman, who I think it’s fair to say has upgraded his way from earning “Strange New Respect” in the eyes of centrists and even conservatives to “every Democrat should be like this guy” status. The irony with Fetterman, as I have pointed out before, is that any objective look at his votes in the Senate shows him to be a faithful party line Democrat, there with Chuck Schumer on important votes. He hasn’t played the Kyrsten Sinema “wild card” role in his caucus yet, nor does he seem likely to. In a Pennsylvania that just ousted Bob Casey Jr. in favor of Dave McCormick and cast its electoral votes for Donald Trump, Fetterman has found a way to become electorally bulletproof simply by carving out a niche as the Democrat willing to speak truths such as this, his on-the-spot reaction in the Senate hallway to the capture of Mangione:

 

He’s the asshole that’s going to die in prison. Congratulations if you want to celebrate that. A sewer is going to sewer. That’s what social media is about this. And I don’t know why the media wants to turn that into a story, just with these trolls saying these kinds of things anonymously like that. I don’t know why that’s news. Remember, he has two children that are going to grow up without their father… It’s vile. And if you’ve gunned someone down that you don’t happen to agree with their views or the business that they’re in, hey, you know, I’m next, they’re next, he’s next, she’s next.

 

There was exactly zero time given to moral equivocation in that statement. Fetterman did not use it as a platform to make a political point about health care, he did not cavil, and he appropriately pointed out the horrifying stakes of encouraging an ultra-minority of radicalized online freaks to believe they have the media wind at their backs: People will quite likely be killed.

 

I’ll admit it: I’ve really come to like Fetterman on a personal level, ill-kempt lumpensenator that he is. Perhaps in part that’s because the first thing I ever wrote for the Corner was an October 2022 piece about how he was clearly unfit for office because of his stroke. His comeback trail since then has been remarkable and really quite heartening, but that would be a minor human interest story had he not also acted as a blazing beacon of moral clarity after the October 7 attacks on Israel — standing out among non-Jewish Washington Democrats for his unabashedly straightforward clear-sightedness about the moral issues at stake. He’ll never be a conservative or Republican, and I’m honestly happy with that — I’d like to see many more Democrats like him, even if they vote in lockstep with Chuck Schumer when it counts. Beyond that, his willingness to poke fun at both Bob Menendez and Matt Gaetz demonstrates the sort of intolerance for obvious stupidity that I naturally gravitate toward simply because it’s so rare to see in a politician.

 

Meanwhile, what can you do about an embarrassment like Massachusetts senator Liz Warren? (Except celebrate, if you’re a Republican.) Thankfully, I don’t have to give you a lengthy recap of her serial egregiousness because my excellent colleague Charlie Cooke laid it all out this morning with the contempt she deserves. (He even drew the same comparison with Fetterman that I do, albeit with fewer pokes at his state of dress.) The matter of direct relevance is, as Charlie described, the forever damning “but.” “Violence is never the answer, but” — and at that point you can stop talking, lady, because everything that comes afterwards betrays the falsehood of everything that came before.

 

I won’t repeat Charlie’s thesis, though we are in complete agreement. I felt the need to speak about it a second time, however, because, like him, I found Warren’s act to be particularly vile even for a bitterly shell-shocked, endlessly degraded era of political morality as is late 2024. It is the cynical use of the killing as political leverage that betrays a monstrously instrumentalist soul underlying that superciliously lecturing tone of hers. Like most leftist academics, she sees a human tragedy as a teaching moment — to teach her values, ones that she herself played no small role in helping to falsely impart to the killer. I normally can talk a mean line when it comes to politicians whom I find contemptible, but I lack the vocabulary to fully explain how antihuman I find what Warren said was — the way she views the world, as revealed by statements like this. Her statement reflects perhaps the worst of our politics precisely because it adopts that gently coercive tone ubiquitous to the modern progressive elite, lecturing us about the need to “learn the right lesson from this.”

 

No, Senator Warren: The right lesson to take from Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson is — as John Fetterman was happy to point out — that Luigi Mangione is a mentally disturbed, cold-blooded murderer. There is no further lesson to learn. One Democrat understands this, instantly; another one does not. One of them is the spiritual future of their party, if it is to survive; the other is not.

Elizabeth Warren Is a Disaster for the Democrats

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

 

It’s always the “but” that gets you. There you are, hurtling through the start of the sentence, making all the right points, saying all the necessary things, conveying all that needs to be conveyed, and then, Bam!, out comes that pesky coordinating conjunction that ruins the exercise in an instant. In her revolting statement on the assassination of Brian Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fell prey to this trap. “Violence is never the answer,” Warren said. “But,” she continued, “people can only be pushed so far.”

 

Ah.

 

As one might have augured, Warren’s “but” was the overture to a catastrophic series of statements that, taken together, rendered all that came before them entirely moot. The killing represented “a warning,” Warren suggested,

 

that if you push people hard enough they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.

 

There’s a word for this sort of argument in the expansive English language. That word is “justification.”

 

Contrast Warren’s words with those from her fellow Democratic senator, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. About the murderer, Fetterman said, “He’s the asshole that’s going to die in prison.” About those celebrating him online, Fetterman said, “A sewer is going to sewer: that’s what social media is about.” About the mainstream press’s sympathetic takes, Fetterman said, “I don’t know why the media wants to turn that into a story, just with these trolls saying these kinds of things anonymously like that.” His conclusion was perfect: “Remember,” Fetterman advised, “he has two children that are going to grow up without their father. It’s vile. And if you’ve gunned someone down that you don’t happen to agree with their views or the business that they’re in, hey, you know, I’m next, they’re next, he’s next, she’s next.”

 

Americans seeking good examples should resolve to be a Fetterman rather than a Warren.

 

The results of the 2024 elections have accorded the Democrats the opportunity to wonder who they are and to debate who they ought to be. The contrast on display between John Fetterman and Elizabeth Warren might be useful in that endeavor. Broadly speaking, the Elizabeth Warrens of the world do not help the Democrats win power or advance their ideas. Broadly speaking, the John Fettermans of the world help to achieve both. Were an alien to descend into America in the hope of discerning some patterns in our politics, one trend he would swiftly sniff out is that the country does not much like aloof Massachusetts progressives. Along with Minnesota, which produced both Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, Massachusetts’s modern claim to fame is that it produced Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. There is, it seems, something in the way that lefties from Massachusetts behave that gives the electorate the heebie-jeebies. By excusing murder, Elizabeth Warren has confirmed that this habit will be tough to break.

 

As a matter of fact, one can construct a plausible case that Elizabeth Warren and her batty worldview are directly responsible for many of the Democrats’ current woes. It was Warren’s lurch into extremism that inspired Kamala Harris to adopt many of the positions she promulgated in 2019 — positions that Harris struggled to shed during this year’s presidential election. And it was the coterie of Warren-inspired White House staffers who successfully seized the moderate Joe Biden after his winning 2020 campaign and transformed him into a myopically left-wing president whom a majority of Americans came to loathe. It should perhaps have been obvious that Warren was a crank when she started tweeting out sentiments such as, “Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy” without having first been threatened with waterboarding. But if it was not clear then, the consequences of her influence have now made the indictment clear. Warren is a disaster for her party, a disaster for America, and a disaster for the basic human decency that we are entitled to expect from our politicians — no ifs or buts apply.

Once Again, President Biden Caves to the Bernie Sanders Left

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, May 11, 2024

 

Since May 8, when President Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett that the United States would not supply Israel with weapons if the IDF enters Hamas’s stronghold in the Gaza Strip, many of Israel’s supporters in the United States have felt a sense of shock, confusion, anger, betrayal, abandonment, and dread.

 

Shock at the suddenness of the policy reversal and the banal setting of Biden’s major shift. Confusion at the incoherence of a policy that denounces antisemitism one day and protects Hamas the next. Anger at the news that Biden tried to hide his “pause” in munitions shipments to Israel so that it would not interfere with coverage of his speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Betrayal at his threat to deny Israel the tools it needs to finish the task of ending Hamas as a coherent military force. And dread at what might befall the United States and Israel during the remainder of this presidency.

 

What happened to the Joe Biden who exhibited moral clarity toward Israel? Did he shuffle off the stage in search of ice cream?

 

For a while after the October 7 attacks, it looked as if Biden might back Israel to the hilt. As Biden said in Tel Aviv on October 18, Hamas’s despicable acts “recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world.” In America’s campaign against ISIS, we dropped heavy bombs on urban environments. Not because we wanted to. Because terrorists who burrow underground and use civilians as shields force us to.

 

Then the war in Gaza ground on. Media outlets amplified Hamas propaganda. Biden’s poll numbers dropped. He lost the plot. He began to waver. And he retreated to his usual corner: the Bernie Sanders left.

 

Sanders’s priorities have informed Biden’s governance as far back as the unity task force in the summer of 2020. Biden filled his government with allies of Sanders’s left-wing ally, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.). True, Biden repudiated Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Defund the Police, and Abolish ICE. But his “Build Back Better” agenda would transform the United States into a social democracy. His Inflation Reduction Act and electric-vehicle subsidies and environmental regulations are catnip for the green movement. He’s done little to stop the millions who have crossed the southern border illegally. His regulatory agencies are anti-business. His student-loan-forgiveness initiatives are an unconstitutional sop to the campus Left. Biden hasn’t endorsed the Sanders-Warren program. He just dances to its tune.

 

Consider: On April 22, the same day Biden denounced “antisemitic protests” as well as “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians,” the president met with Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). Ocasio-Cortez supports illegal pro-Hamas encampments on college campuses. She has repeated the disgusting slander that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. And she belongs to the notorious “Squad” of antisemitic Democratic members of Congress like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman.

 

Biden was all smiles with the extremist AOC. “I learned a long time ago: Listen to that lady,” Biden said before the private meeting. “We’re going to talk more about another part of the world, too.”

 

On May 3, around the time Biden denounced the campus protests in brief remarks, Sanders told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that, like LBJ and the Vietnam war, “President Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated, not just young people, but a lot of the Democratic base, in terms of his views on Israel and this war.” Sanders went on to say he hoped Biden “stops giving a blank check to [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, and I would hope that they understand that from a political point of view, this has not been helpful.”

 

Message received. Among the few lawmakers who unequivocally backed Biden’s “red line” against Israel: Bernie Sanders.

 

If Biden sees short-term gain in his alliance with Sanders, he is mistaken. Daylight between the United States and Israel emboldens Iran and its murderous proxies. This isn’t guesswork. It’s the story of Barack Obama’s presidency.

 

Obama downgraded relationships with traditional U.S. allies such as Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to withdraw America from the region under the cover of the Iranian nuclear deal. Wars in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, a supercharged global Islamist movement, and an Iran engorged on oil money and sanctions relief were the result.

 

No one should want to repeat this bloody history. But that is the path Biden has chosen. “We’re not walking away from Israel’s security,” he told Erin Burnett. “We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”

 

Does he even know what “security” means? Israel is not waging war in places like Rafah for fun. Israel is fighting Hamas because Israel was attacked on October 7 and because the terrorist organization poses an existential threat. If Hamas remains in power anywhere in Gaza, it will regenerate, replenish, and plan future atrocities. Israel won’t be secure.

 

Worse, if Hamas survives the current hostilities, it will be seen as the victor throughout the Greater Middle East and in the Arab and Muslim world more generally — not to mention in places such as Russia and China, or inside faculty lounges and tent encampments throughout the West. The risks to Israel will multiply. The tactics used in antisemitic marches and protests will be legitimized. Harassment and violence against Jews will grow.

 

If Israel cannot achieve its aims of defeating Hamas and recovering the hostages, then Israel will suffer a tremendous blow to its credibility as a state. Israelis will lose confidence in their government’s capacity to protect them from Iran’s ring of fire. Some Israelis may look for the exits. Other Jews may think twice before migrating to the Holy Land. The foundation of Zionism — that the Jewish people will find security in their national home — will be undermined.

 

That is why Israel has no choice but to continue its war. That is why “walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas” is the same as walking away from Israel’s security. Weakening the U.S.-Israel alliance, pressuring Netanyahu to tamp down or pause military operations, forcing on Israel a cease-fire weighted toward Hamas, and otherwise constraining the actions of our democratic ally of 76 years serves no constructive purpose whatsoever. All it does is degrade and destroy.

 

Biden may think that, by listening to Sanders and to Ocasio-Cortez, he is walking away from Israel’s war. He is not. He is embracing a morally blind and strategically unsound position. And more voters will walk away from him.