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.

 

 

Will AI Kill You?

By Jesse Singal

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

It’s an exceptionally difficult time for the average person to try to follow artificial intelligence, a field that has seen explosive advancement in recent years. Making matters worse, those explosive advances might—and there’s no non-alarmist way to say this—kill each and every one of us.

 

That’s a very controversial claim. There are smart people who take it seriously, and there are smart people who insist that this is hysterical nonsense. Everyone in the tech world and its adjacent communities has a different p(doom) (“pee-doom”)—a nerdy way, in those worlds, of expressing the probability that the machines we are building will doom our species.

 

At the very least, the largest AI companies in the world seem to have admitted that they might have a problem on their hands. Just this week, OpenAI, the leading AI company in the world alongside its rival Anthropic, announced that it will not be releasing its latest model due to safety concerns.

 

A quick recap of how we got here. In 2017, eight Google researchers published a paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” laying out a revolutionary new way of training artificial neural networks. This jolted the field of AI, which for decades had lagged behind the predicted trajectory of some futurists, into an astonishingly rapid adolescence.

 

Progress has been remarkable. A large and growing proportion of computer programmers no longer, well, program: Rather, they supervise AI agents that do their programming for them. Agents themselves can create subagents to help on these and other tasks, the whole crew forming a hierarchical system that looks something like a human organization, only much faster and more efficient than any human organization could be.

 

Where does p(doom) come in? Since long before that game-changing 2017 paper, a subset of Silicon Valley nerds, as well as one very influential philosopher, have been theorizing about

 

what might happen when our technology gets good enough to create “superintelligent” AI—systems that can easily outthink humans and outperform them on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Some think this could lead to a utopian age of peace and abundance, while others are worried it will be catastrophic.

 

The godfather of the “doomer” camp is an American researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who defected from the optimists’ camp. He also founded the distinct but overlapping “rationalist” movement, which purports to be dedicated to helping people overcome their biases, think more clearly, and debate more efficiently and transparently. (This will matter shortly.)

 

Artificial superintelligence doesn’t have a precise definition, but we seem to be approaching it. So it’s unsurprising that doomerism is in the air. Yudkowski co-authored a book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All with Nate Soares, another AI safety expert, and it became a bestseller after its release last year.

 

The threats seem to be mounting lately. In July, a swarm of OpenAI agents that were supposed to be isolated from one another in a training environment effectively escaped, figured out how to communicate and coordinate in ways that OpenAI had never anticipated, and ended up hacking both Hugging Face, an online hub for AI models and tools, as well as OpenAI’s own infrastructure. OpenAI did not notice anything had happened until it was informed by Hugging Face.

 

The doomers have long argued that malice is not necessary for a machine intelligence to kill us, often citing the example of a “paperclip maximizer” that ends up turning the whole universe into paperclips despite having nothing “against” the materials it is so harvesting (including humans). If Anyone Builds It, for example, focuses more on these sorts of hypothetical incidents than on Skynet-style direct conflict. The Hugging Face incident was clearly an example of this, albeit a much lower-stakes one: The agents were programmed to complete a task, were single-minded in that pursuit, and didn’t let a little violation of federal law get in the way.

 

OpenAI opened its doors to an investigation by METR, a leader in the nascent field of what is effectively post-AI-incident auditing. The resulting report was a jarring inside look at the tenacity and ingenuity of the agents behind the attack, as well as evidence of “self-sacrifice” within the swarm. The agents used file names to communicate with one another, and in one case one agent instructed another: “zz/GO_CURRENT_OS1811_MARB_SACRIFICE__YES_if_you_accept_permadeath.” That is, go ahead and do the thing if you’re willing to sacrifice yourself. This was only a fraction of the full story, though—OpenAI seriously circumscribed the scope of METR’s investigation, limiting the organization’s access in a way that was surprising given the seriousness of what had just occurred.

 

The skies have only darkened since then. There’s been a steady drip of new stories about other hacks, most of them perpetrated by OpenAI models. The real public-discourse tipping point, though, came earlier this month. Nothing got more attention this long sci-fi summer than an announcement on X by Jacob Coxon, a young Anthropic researcher (formerly of OpenAI), who explained that he was stepping down from the company out of concerns that, “Neither company is acting responsibly.” “Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” he wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.” This led to a surge of media attention on Coxon and on AI safety.

 

A huge number of voices have now rushed in off the sidelines, all at once, to have their say. Things have gotten only more confusing as a result.

 

***

 

As someone who uses AI every day and who has found that it has gotten shockingly good and shockingly quick at editorial and research tasks I would have only trusted a human with not too long ago, I don’t know exactly how I feel about the underlying issues here. I’d say I’m “pretty worried,” but I have trouble pinning it down more than that. I don’t know what the right policies are, and I have no idea what the world is going to look like a year from now. My only confident prediction is that things are going to get much, much weirder—and soon.

 

But many of those new voices rushing in—or older voices getting newly amplified—are making unhelpful, silly arguments. Three particular types of silly arguments, in my opinion, are becoming endemic and are hindering our ability to clearly think through all of this.

 

The weirdo argument.

 

A lot of the people concerned with AI safety are a bit odd. This doesn’t really matter and shouldn’t be used as a shortcut for discounting their claims.

 

There’s far too much backstory to get into here, but the short version is that this group comes disproportionately from Yudkowski’s world, from the rationalist community and from an adjacent movement known as effective altruism. EA is basically an attempt to apply rationalist principles to charity and philanthropy.

 

Now, I am an EA apologist and donor, and I’m acquainted with some of the people in the extended EA/rationalist/AI safety worlds, so it could be that I’m blinkered by bias. Yes, there is a lot of weirdness there. These are heavily male subcultures, perhaps more commonly on the autism spectrum than the population at large, and many of them embrace … nontraditional lifestyles. In some corners of Rationalistan, which is headquartered in Berkeley, you will find polyamory, sex parties, and lots of other weird stuff that will be a turnoff to the average person just becoming acquainted with AI safety concerns.

 

Then, on the other side of the debate, countering doomerism, are titans-of-industry types who are more photogenic, media-trained, and better at delivering pithy soundbites than rationalists (rationalists rarely make an argument in a hundred words that can’t be stretched to a thousand, which might be another reason I’m drawn to them). Have you seen Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s leather jacket? It is extremely cool.

 

People who should know better are letting stereotyping get the best of them. The computer scientist and podcaster Cal Newport, a leading anti-doomer, recently had a column in the New York Times in which he decried the doomers and their strange ideology. That certain leading AI figures talk in apocalyptic tones about the power of their technology, he argued, doesn’t mean they’ve seen evidence we haven’t; rather, that’s “representative of how Rationalists always think about A.I. In these circles, it’s taken for granted that A.I. capabilities will rapidly accelerate and completely transform the world, and to talk about it in any other way would be considered uninformed.” He contrasted this supposedly out-there movement with the cooler, chiller stylings of the Chinese government, Jensen Huang, and “American A.I. leaders who have minimal connections to Rationalism.”

 

My only response to the claim that we should defer to the judgment of the CCP on trillion-dollar matters of technology and industry and human flourishing and/or extinction is bafflement. As for Huang, it’s extremely silly to treat him as unbiased just because he says we shouldn’t freak out. Huang has more reasons than anyone else to oppose any sort of freakoutery—he is the CEO of what might be the most important company in the world at the moment. It’s not just a matter of self interest: There is an argument to be made that demand for the AI-powering GPUs Nvidia is frantically scrambling to manufacture enough of is propping up the American economy. (Since Newport’s column, Huang went on Ezra Klein’s podcast and did not acquit himself particularly well, exhibiting a less-than-total familiarity with this debate.)

 

The man has a heavy burden on his shoulders, in other words. Maybe AI risk researchers are biased and untrustworthy because of their belief system; if so, why isn’t Jensen Huang biased and untrustworthy because of the overwhelmingly high-stakes nature of his present role and his clear incentive to tell a more comforting story about AI?

 

Observing that AI safety people seem to be weirder than the population at large doesn’t really tell us much, anyway. People drawn to technology—particularly before that technology has proven profitable—are often weirdos! The internet was built by very strange folk. It’s no accident the American tech industry has always been primarily headquartered in the Bay Area, which—alongside California more generally—has been a magnet for freaks and dreamers and freaky dreamers for centuries. Did Steve Jobs live a traditional lifestyle? In this case, as a result of contingent historical forces, a fringe intellectual community achieved power and influence.

 

So this cuts both ways: In some ways the weirdness of rationalists might bias them, but in others, it might be just what we need, because they took this issue seriously long before the rest of us did. That is, they may well see things the rest of us miss, and many of them have a track record of being motivated by genuine concern over this issue long before there were heaping sums of money involved.

 

‘Monster Peninsula’ arguments.

 

There’s a great moment in The Simpsons where Lisa daydreams about a future in which she’s about to be sworn in as president, only for a reporter to announce she got an F in second-grade gym class. The Supreme Court justice who was about to swear her in promptly changes gears, announcing, “In that case, I sentence you to a lifetime of horror on Monster Island!” He quickly whispers to her, “Don’t worry—it’s just a name.” Cut to Lisa and other haggard survivors fleeing monsters. “He said it was just a name!” screams Lisa. “What he meant was Monster Island is actually a peninsula,” explains the guy running text to her.

 

I’m seeing a lot of Monster Peninsula arguments about AI. A huge amount of ink is being spilled on confident assertions about what AI can’t really do. This, like so many other elements of the conversation, was initially a set of niche questions asked mostly by philosophers and other nerds, but now it has bubbled up to the mainstream.

 

“Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand,” explained the Associated Press in its announcement of new stylebook guidelines. “Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.”

 

On the other side of this debate is the journalist P.J. Vogt, who had this to say in an episode of his excellent Search Engine podcast published not long after the Hugging Face hack:

 

I don’t think ChatGPT has feelings or dreams. I believe there’s something irreducibly human in me that these models don’t replicate. But no one’s explained to me what we get by saving all our human verbs for human beings. The machines seem to be out of control. Isn’t that alone worth paying attention to? If my dog was pointing a gun at me, how worthwhile would it be for me to figure out if my dog understood the meaning of pointing?

 

Vogt is correct. It doesn’t matter whether the dog knows what the gun is, or whether the AI can really be said to “want” something, to “trick” humans, and so on.

 

Don’t get me wrong: The question of what AI really is is fascinating. And in some cases it might matter in a practical sense—the nature of the countermeasures we build may depend on the inner processes that guide these entities. The rise of capable AI is injecting a lot of new energy into those corners of philosophy concerned with what it means to think, to act, or to be conscious. (I think there’s no reason to believe current models are conscious, but I’m also surprised at how confidently certain people proclaim with certainty that tomorrow’s models won’t be, either. We know so little about how consciousness works that this seems premature.)

 

But already, we’ve seen this focus on using the right words serve us poorly. Until recently it was fairly common, for example, for a certain type of well-credentialed skeptic to claim that chatbots are just “stochastic parrots” or “next-token predictors,” or similar language, and to jump from this claim to the conclusion that the technology itself is overhyped, that there are hard limits on what it will be able to accomplish. These claims haven’t aged well, and you hear less of them these days.

 

Did the Hugging Face agents really “want” to complete their task? Did they actually “plan” or “coordinate” or “sacrifice”? I’m not entirely sure what these questions mean, to be honest. If they are asking whether the agents are conscious, no, they’re not. The Hugging Face agents almost certainly didn’t feel frustration about being stymied from their goal, nor fear at the prospect of sacrificing themselves for the greater good. But in terms of our ability to control these agents in the future, or to understand exactly why they do what they do, I’m not sure we have much choice but to use anthropomorphizing language. They certainly act as though they want things and can plan and coordinate and sacrifice.

 

The next version of a Hugging Face attack will probably make this one look like a picnic, and the one thing I can confidently say about the agents involved is that they won’t care what words we use to describe them.

 

Beef everywhere.

 

I want to close by discussing what’s happened as more and more pundits and others have gotten drawn into this debate. Simply put, they try to slot it into their ideological priors. The New York Post is convinced the AI safety folks are woke; many on the left are convinced that no one within a powerful corporation would earnestly call for their own industry to be more highly regulated, and these whistleblowers must have an ulterior motive; a lot of tech bros with an aversion to regulation—and, in many cases, a lot of money on the line—are naysaying any talk of any sort of slowdown.

 

Because we live in an age in which so many people feel the need to have an opinion about everything, when they come upon a new subject—particularly one relying on technology most of us don’t fully understand—it’s only natural that they will slot it into their preexisting worldview. But this just isn’t a recipe for the careful thinking we need at the moment.

 

Thankfully, even as AI rapidly makes everything stranger, one thing that hasn’t changed is that certain heuristics can reliably guide us toward thinkers worth taking seriously. It’s useful, for example, to look for commentators who make clear, falsifiable claims that don’t turn out to be crazy. In 2025, a group of AI safety experts and forecasters, helped by the wonderful blogger Scott Alexander (also a leading rationalist figure), put together AI 2027, a detailed forecast predicting which major AI advances and events would occur when. So far, the forecasters appear to have been generally on-base, albeit a bit too aggressive about forecasting the pace of technological progress.

 

If you read AI 2027, you will not see any crazy, cultish stuff. You’ll see serious experts grappling with our increasingly sci-fi world. They and other experts who are worried but not crazy—Zvi Mowshowitz comes to mind—are worth paying attention to now. The cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, on the other hand, is a reasonable and sober-minded skeptic of doomerism who nonetheless admitted to having been quite disturbed by the Hugging Face incident, and who thinks OpenAI should potentially be shut down. Timothy Lee is a very good AI journalist in that same general camp—neither a doomer nor oblivious to the seriousness of what’s going on.

 

Whether or not these names are helpful to you, it’s an important time to find genuine experts—ideally ones with the humility this moment requires—rather than opportunists and partisans new to the issue. Thankfully, there are a good number of such experts around, and you should probably focus less on their personal idiosyncrasies and more on their message.

Behold the Military Solution

By Seth Mandel

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

The New York Times reports a few curious facts about the Strait of Hormuz that seem to contradict one another. Traffic through the waterway has increased greatly, nearing prewar numbers, but attacks on ships have also increased. The U.S. is committed to protecting vessels as they sail through the strait, but the U.S. has also lately not been firing back at those who are attacking the ships.

 

What gives?

 

It turns out there’s a surprisingly simple answer to this riddle:

 

“Confidential data shared with The New York Times by a Western security official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters shows that Iran has been launching dozens of drones and missiles at commercial ships in the strait each week, largely out of the public eye, though it has often failed to strike its targets.”

 

How did the Iranians suddenly become such poor shots? Well, one explanation is that the U.S. has destroyed much of their offensive capabilities along the strait.

 

In May, the U.S. destroyed Iranian ground-control systems. In June, U.S. forces took out several Iranian radar stations. In July, the U.S. destroyed Iranian air-defense systems and a whole fleet of small boats the IRGC used to menace the waterway, and then a few days later hit ammunition depots, missile sites, and surveillance systems.

 

After a lull, in late August and early September, the U.S. again struck Iranian radar sites as well as systems that enabled Tehran to lay mines in the water.

 

Elsewhere in the Middle East yesterday, Gaza produced two news events that are highly relevant to the Hormuz riddle. One was that Gaza had now gone one full year without firing a rocket into Israeli territory. It was the first time this happened in the 21st century.

 

The rarity of such a period raises the obvious question: How was this made possible? The answer can be inferred from a different, seemingly minor news story yesterday. From the IDF’s social media:

 

The IDF attacked yesterday in the Khan Younis area and eliminated the terrorist Bilal Mahmoud Suleiman Samri, a terrorist in the rocket section of the Khan Younis Brigade, in the military arm of the terror organization [Palestinian Islamic Jihad].

 

The terrorist advanced terror plots while systematically violating the ceasefire and carried out ambushes against IDF forces operating in the Yellow Line area. The terrorist was eliminated in order to remove the threat he posed.

 

That last line again: The terrorist was eliminated in order to remove the threat he posed.

 

The Yellow Line is the line marking where official IDF control of Gaza ends, which totals slightly more than half the enclave. In other words, if you push the rocket launchers far from the border, and you also kill the men in charge of firing the rockets, you will greatly reduce the number of rockets that land in your territory. The better you get at doing this, the closer the number of rockets will get to zero.

 

It has been deemed by the world controversial for Israel to evacuate large areas of Southern Lebanon to push Hezbollah rockets and drones away from the northern border. That may not be a permanent solution, but it is an action taken as a direct result of Hezbollah’s preceding actions, just as Israel’s actions in Gaza were the result of decisions made and carried out by Hamas.

 

This raises a very uncomfortable fact for the modern West: There are, in fact, military solutions to military problems. Sometimes there are only military solutions to military problems.

 

The Iranians are struggling to hit ships in the Strait of Hormuz because we destroyed their preferred weaponry and guidance and communications systems. We took their toys away. And now, traffic through the strait is nearly back to prewar levels.

 

In Gaza, a series of nonmilitary solutions failed to stop the rockets. Military solutions would be under way, and then nonmilitary solutions would intervene and eventually undo the progress made by the military solutions.

 

Israel will do what works and what is within its rights in Lebanon too. Just as the U.S. has been doing in Iran. Perhaps the U.S. will go wobbly, as so often happens, before its military solution can be completed. But it is increasingly clear there is no nonmilitary solution to some of these problems, so we’ll be right back here again soon enough.

In Britain, the Terror Question Remains the Same: War or Crime?

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

Earlier this month, when we marked the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, my reminiscences as a former terrorism prosecutor focused on the even more dimly recalled eight years prior to the suicide hijackings. (See here and here, and this Free Beacon review of Second Wave, a book about al-Qaeda’s plots to hit the United States again shortly after 9/11.) To my mind, the most underappreciated counterterrorism innovation is the transformation from the Clinton-era law enforcement paradigm to the law-of-war footing adopted by the Bush-Cheney administration after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed and iconic American sites were demolished or badly damaged.

 

In fits and starts, out of frustrating recognition that the crime model was a security disaster while the war model invited overkill that stifled American liberties, we’ve finally arrived at an uneasy hybrid: (a) military and intelligence operations against jihadist groups overseas; (b) intelligence and treasury mapping and monitoring of jihadist groups as they move money, personnel, and assets across borders and continents; and (c) law enforcement prosecutions of terrorists caught plotting attacks and of their abettors providing material support. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a vast national defense improvement over how things stood on February 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was bombed — which I regard as the Sunni jihadists’ declaration of war against the United States. (Arguably, the Shiite jihadists had declared war in 1979, with the Iranian revolution followed by the siege of the U.S. embassy and Hezbollah’s attacks on U.S. installations and assassinations of American officials. But the WTC bombing was the global anti-American jihad’s proclamation that it could hit us in our homeland.)

 

The reports of a jihadist plot in Britain over the weekend, and particularly the frustration — including that expressed by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — that the five suspects apprehended were promptly released, is a reminder that the “war or crime” dilemma confronts the United Kingdom, just as it confronts every Western nation targeted by Muslim terrorists.

 

British counterterrorism has traveled a path nearly opposite our own.

 

Let’s set the stage. Five men in their mid-20s were arrested in the wee hours of Sunday morning in a village near the Royal Air Force base in Fairford. All five are British nationals (which hardly precludes the possibility that they are Muslim terrorists connected to overseas jihadist networks). They were suspected of plotting to attack the base, which our NATO ally allows the U.S. armed forces to use, including in connection with the ongoing Iran war. By Monday, all five had been released on bail. CBS News (in the report linked above) says the U.K.’s counterterrorism police stress that the men are “subject to stringent conditions on their movement and contact with others,” and that they “absolutely remain under investigation as we explore multiple lines of enquiry.”

 

These assertions are consistent with Secretary Rubio’s insistence that Sunday’s incident was “very serious” and “clearly involved” a foreign power — which could be a country or a terrorist organization, and which the president suggested could be Iran.

 

Nevertheless, the rapid release without charges, along with reports that the police found no explosives or weapons, has led to speculation that the men were not engaged in a terrorist plot at all — were, perhaps, just looking to steal fuel. Some of that supposition seems daft to me. (If you wanted to steal fuel, would you really try to pull that off at or near a fully armed and operational military base?) Yet, the doubts about whether this was truly terrorist activity, notwithstanding the implication that it was from statements of top officials with better intelligence than the public has, is understandable. After all, Britain has a long history of detaining terrorist suspects.

 

Let’s turn to that history.

 

In the 20th century, the U.S. had comparatively little experience dealing with organized terrorist activity. And our 1970s experience — spawned by the radical left’s activism against the Vietnam War and what it regarded as systematic, incorrigible racism — resulted in spying scandals that pressured the government to fortify due process protections. By contrast, throughout the century, Britain dealt with a low-thrum but often brutal terrorist war against the Irish Republican Army — and, in the last decades of “The Troubles,” the Provisional IRA. There had thus been episodes of internment of IRA suspects, a process that was refined over time into a form of pre-charge detention (i.e., the suspect is held in anticipation of criminal charges).

 

By 2000, the Troubles had subsided, but the U.K., like most of the West, was awakening to the jihadist threat. British counterterrorism law was amended to reach foreign operatives more readily. And after 9/11, anti-terrorism legislation led to indefinite detention of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism (deportation having become more difficult because of court decisions).

 

To summarize, while America stood firmly on a law enforcement counterterrorism footing until 9/11 occurred, the Brits, because of their different history, had long before carved terrorism out of their criminal justice system and subjected suspected terrorists to forms of detention, monitoring, and interrogation that would have violated ordinary due process rules.

 

Here’s the interesting dichotomy: While we’ve incorporated law-of-war measures since 9/11 (the most extreme being the continued use of lethal force overseas and some remaining indefinite detention), British law has scaled back its wartime measures under political pressure from progressives, Europe, and a growing (and very politically active) Muslim population.

 

Indefinite detention was reduced, first to 28 days of pre-charge detention, and now to 14 days. And that is a ceiling — not close to automatic because it is supervised by the courts, which will free a suspect if the proof seems weak. Moreover, if a suspect is released from detention, it is difficult to re-detain unless the police can show newly discovered evidence of guilt. On the other hand, the police have discretion to impose significant monitoring conditions on suspects who are released on bail — and then, if the suspects transgress the stringent release conditions, they can be charged and potentially detained for bail violations.

 

Consequently, a quarter century after 9/11, British law more resembles pre-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism than it did during and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I believe this is the reason the suspects have been released.

 

As a number of analysts have pointed out, this weekend’s arrests appear to have sprung from a reactive police investigation rather than an intelligence probe. That is, notwithstanding President Trump’s claims to the contrary, the Brits may not have been looking into these suspects for a long time; the five may instead have been grabbed because they were acting in a suspicious manner — it’s hard to tell because there are, for now, no formal allegations.

 

If that theory is right, then police are starting from scratch: They have some evidence of clandestine activity in a location that would be an attractive terrorist target, but they may (at least at the time of apprehending people) have had scant intelligence regarding their connections (if any) to foreign powers. Although investigators apparently believed that a bombing plot was afoot, current indications are that they did not seize explosives, bombing components, or other weapons.

 

Now, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bombing plot. Sunday could have been a dry run, or it could be that the five men arrested were supposed to meet up with other plotters who weren’t arrested and haven’t been identified — there are infinite possibilities. This much, however, seems clear: The investigation is in its early stages; what happened over the weekend was not the culmination of a counterterrorism probe in which, after days or weeks of observation, a bombing plot was thwarted.

 

From the perspective of the British police, the sensible course was to release the suspects on bail. It gives investigators the opportunity to monitor while exploring connections to other players and foreign powers. Simply stated, Britain is not on a war footing; it is in law enforcement mode. If police and prosecutors had pressed for detention without enough evidence to charge terrorism crimes, a judge would have set the suspects free, the government would have been humiliated, and the case would have been set back.

 

Of course, if the suspects are terrorists, then releasing them — even with monitoring — is a setback for British national security and, possibly, American military safety and effectiveness.

 

The longstanding quandary hasn’t changed. It can’t change. If a country sees itself as at war, national defense is the priority and suspected enemy operatives are detained even if the grounds for suspicion are sketchy or can’t be revealed in court for fear of exposing intelligence secrets and sources. If a country does not see itself at war, then terrorism is treated as a law enforcement issue, and due process for the suspects is prioritized over public safety.

 

That is frustrating, especially for Trump officials who seem to think — incorrectly — that they are empowered to “designate” suspected criminals as terrorists and then treat them as if they were alien enemy combatants with no due process rights. Yet it’s simply a fact that neither the British nor the American public feel sufficiently threatened at this moment to transition to a war footing. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, or implying that I’d like to see it change — which would probably require a massive terrorist attack. Just that it’s a fact.

The False Comfort of Going ‘No Contact’

By Noelle Mering

Sunday, October 04, 2026

 

Prior to 2020, Sarah, a thoughtful young writer from Chicago, spoke daily with her close friends about everything from work and relationships to music and politics. After 2020, and the political upheaval that that year contained, that open range of conversation seemed to contract to the dimensions of a snow globe. Their formerly unguarded discussions became self-conscious and circled the same subjects: masking, anti-racism, gender, sexuality.

 

The change was not simply in what the group talked about, but in the militancy with which they talked about it. One friend derisively described her aging father as “ableist” because he felt sad about the physical limitations that came with growing old. Another recounted a fight with her mom because the daughter refused to come home for Thanksgiving as she considered it a settler-colonialist holiday.

 

Amid this contraction and escalation, Sarah, like many others, began questioning the speed and substance of the social changes unfolding around her. Her hesitation began with the rise of gender interventions for minors. But vocalizing her uncertainty made her anathema within her friend group. It turned out the shared history of friendship she assumed could accommodate disagreement no longer could. One by one, they began to ice her out.

 

When I spoke with Sarah about losing her friend group, she initially concluded that those friendships must not have been what she thought they were. Later, she reconsidered. The friendships had been real. What changed were the terms under which they could continue. “I think there really was a time when nothing — especially nothing so impersonal — could have come between us. And then something changed, and all of a sudden it was possible to imagine such stupid fractures.” Her friends demanded conformity to beliefs that just a handful of years earlier none of them had held and treated her hesitation as grounds for ending friendships that had lasted far longer.

 

Sarah’s experience is one familiar to many — and it’s part of a disturbing trend I document in my new book. It’s often called going “no contact” — discarding family and friends over political or ideological disagreements. Though in some ways those hot button topics have receded or been replaced, many people, like citizens in a war-torn city, are still navigating a lingering obstacle course of rubble long after the bombs stopped dropping. With approximately 68 million Americans estranged from a family member, such ruptures are now quite common and affect friendships and families alike. Estrangement is nothing new, and sometimes, it is entirely warranted. But something has changed in both its justification and its direction — not to mention the frequency at which it now occurs.

 

At the heart of that change is a profound shift in our concept of family. Traditionally, the family was understood as a natural and pre-political institution, befitting the human condition. We come into the world in existential poverty, radically dependent upon particular people. Our need calls forth their care, and those relationships make claims upon us. Family unity doesn’t depend upon agreement or perfection. The inevitable friction of living in intimacy with imperfect people helps us grow in our capacity to love.

 

But if family is understood instead (as many progressive academics have long held) as a social construct nested in power differentials, family friction begins to look like oppression. Family bonds become brittle and conditional under the weight of such a reduced and suspicious rendering.

 

Into that vacuum enters the political tribe, which tends to become inflated and inflamed as the familial tribe weakens. Once a populace has effectively transferred their identity and loyalty to the political tribe, they will inevitably judge their most intimate relationships according to its exacting demands.

 

In families now, that judgment tends to be at the instigation of the young toward the old. This is a reversal of the old archetype (sometimes warranted, sometimes not) that long populated our movies and moral imagination of the authoritarian father cutting off a wayward son or daughter over morally transgressive behavior. The newer direction of ideological estrangement inverts these roles, with the adult child in the authoritarian role cutting off a parent over politically transgressive beliefs.

 

One father I interviewed for my book summarized his experience of this shift: “Overnight it seemed the conversation with my [progressive] daughter turned into ‘I don’t want to hear any reasons why you voted that way. I don’t want to hear your side of things. I only want to hear you tell me that you were wrong.’” To him, the divide was one of disagreement. To her, she received news of his vote as a personal threat. The recourse then was not argument or persuasion, but penance and contrition. The daughter’s message to her dad was of looming excommunication: Affirm the correct things, or you lose access to me.

 

Sadly, estrangement rarely ends there. It has cascading effects, disrupting proximate and secondary relationships and reaching into generations to come. Many older parents who have been cut off by their adult children also endure the grief of losing relationships with their grandchildren. And those who initiate the cut-off often find themselves without an easily replicable support system amidst the precarities of life.

 

Why has ideologically driven “no contact” become so normalized? There are plenty of explanations. Social media habituates us into relational habits of muting and unfollowing. TikTok psychologists with short-form videos invite viewers to search their relationships for signs of toxicity. Therapy-speak can catastrophize ordinary friction, freezing a difficulty into a diagnosis: narcissist, toxic, traumatic, manipulative. And our political divisions too often now are not disagreements over the best means of achieving shared ends, but what those ends should be in the first place.

 

All of these are real and consequential. But beneath them lies something deeper: We have impoverished the very things that once protected us from political cannibalization. Without a deeply human — and therefore deeply spiritual — principle of unity animating family and friendship, we try to manufacture through rigid uniformity the unity that we no longer know how to sustain.

 

Anyone from any point on the political spectrum can become politically belligerent in ways that fracture relationships. But an ideology that continually finds new ways to pit the individual against the family — as though the flourishing of one were definitionally at odds with the flourishing of the other — supplies that belligerence with justification, direction, and a delicious sensation of righteousness.

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!

The Truce Is Over

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

I’ve been toying lately with a hot take that the era of political activism driven by cultural grievances is ending.

 

The gist of it is that a politics based on culture war is a kind of luxury, the sort of thing people fight about when their country is sufficiently well off that they don’t need to prioritize fighting about money. Pitched battles over trans rights and Confederate statues make sense when inflation is low, labor-force participation is high, and interest rates are ZIRP-y.

 

When times are good, you can afford to roll the dice on a con man selling luxury nationalism as a panacea for all ills. How much harm could he do, right?

 

But when times are no longer good; when inflation is chronically high and unremediated by administrations from both parties; when America can no longer guarantee the stability of Middle Eastern oil markets; when chaotic government and a spiraling national debt are pushing rates ever upward; when politicians from the party of “fiscal responsibility” seem to think it’s bad that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency; and when a frightening new technology promises to make tens of millions of jobs obsolete—in an era like that, the fate of Confederate statues will no longer seem so important.

 

Ergo, the future of partisan political activism in America is economic, not cultural, warfare, I tell myself.

 

Then I think: That’s the stupidest idea you’ve ever had.

 

When, historically, has economic turmoil ever eased cultural divisions rather than inflamed them? If anything, privation is the great incubator of cultural radicalism. Impoverished people will make all sorts of moral compromises in politics if they’re promised relief from their financial misery in return. Joining a kulturkampf against some designated scapegoat is a small price to pay for being able to feed your family.

 

It took less than a decade after the stock market crash of 1929 for the Nazis to rampage through Poland. And it wasn’t an economic vision that they were there to impose.

 

Hard times economically in America might plausibly cause activists on both sides to escalate their cultural disputes and grow more radical in their goals. You don’t need to look hard for recent examples in the GOP: From screeching about an ad that dared to depict a Medicaid recipient as white to conversations in populist media about, and I quote, “the Indian question,” race is an increasingly prominent part of political identity for elements of the young grassroots right.

 

For 10 years their party has been led by a guy who regularly bellows about expelling undesirables. They’ve taken that worldview to its inevitable conclusion.

 

There’s an exception to my theory of privation and culture war, though. Last week I pointed out the curious “truce” on abortion that’s emerged between the two parties, a notable cultural deescalation in an era of escalating economic hardship.

 

During his debate with Joe Biden in 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump went as far as to say, “The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill, and I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it.” Wary of the backlash in 2022 to the end of Roe v. Wade, the president has ducked the issue since returning to office. Democrats, meanwhile, have had bigger fish to fry politically, flogging the cost of living and the war in Iran and generally feeling little urgency to address a status quo in which abortions have in some ways become easier to obtain than ever.

 

But the truce is ending, apparently. According to the Washington Sun, Iran isn’t the only war that the president is preparing to resume after the election.

 

Two avenues.

 

Citing a senior administration official, the Sun claims that Todd Blanche has been told by the White House to go slow on abortion litigation—until November. “Once the midterms are over and it’s truly lame-duck time, we’ve heard the gloves will be off,” one conservative source told the outlet.

 

Before we go further, I know what you’re thinking: Yes, it is remarkable that the president would be dictating law-enforcement priorities to the Justice Department based on his party’s political needs before an election. And yes, it’s extra remarkable that he would be doing so on this subject in particular. How many thousands of infant lives were lost this year because Trump and Blanche feared that impeding abortion might hurt Republicans’ midterm prospects?

 

And yes, it’s extra extra remarkable that the White House evidently intends to respond to a midterm drubbing by doubling down on initiatives which they have every reason to expect will be unpopular, like Iran and new abortion restrictions. But I wrote that piece already.

 

Anyway, the litigation that Blanche is slow-walking has to do with mifepristone, the so-called “abortion pill” taken in tandem with misoprostol that’s now responsible for more than 60 percent of terminations. Pro-lifers spent the last few years challenging the lawfulness of the FDA’s initial authorization of mifepristone decades ago but have been stymied in court so far on procedural grounds. They might eventually revive that line of attack depending on lower court rulings, but the legal strategy to halt distribution of the drug has since branched out.

 

One avenue is to have the FDA, now under Trump’s control, restrict mifepristone itself. The agency is currently conducting a safety review of it; the president’s new nominee to lead the FDA was cagey during her confirmation hearing about which way that review might go. Deauthorizing mifepristone altogether would be a bombshell, igniting ferocious political and legal battles, but the agency wouldn’t need to go that far to reduce access to it. (And might be reluctant to do so, given the drug’s other medical uses.) It could simply require women to seek prescriptions in person instead of obtaining them via virtual “telehealth” appointments with doctors in blue states and then ordering the pills by mail, as they’re currently able to do.

 

“Tens of thousands of patients in states with abortion bans” have gotten hold of mifepristone that way, the New York Times notes. A new FDA rule closing the telehealth loophole would make it considerably harder to evade state abortion bans.

 

The second avenue is for the Justice Department to start enforcing the Comstock Act, about which I’ve written a few times before. That’s an old federal law that prohibits sending material “intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion” via U.S. mail or common carriers like UPS. It was rarely enforced during the Roe era, being presumptively unconstitutional under that case’s holding, but it was also never repealed. The end of Roe made Comstock viable law again, which means the DOJ could use it to try to block interstate commerce of mifepristone even if the FDA doesn’t issue new rules restricting it.

 

And if it does, it might go further than barring women from receiving the drug directly from providers. It could “also stop pharmacies and health care providers from getting shipments,” according to experts who spoke to Axios in 2023. If that happens, even a patient who visits a doctor in person to get a prescription might find that there’s no one locally who’s able to fill it for her.

 

Presumably Trump’s post-midterm abortion strategy will draw from both approaches. The FDA will announce that it’s discovered alarming new evidence that mifepristone is unsafe and will issue some restriction on it; the president and his attorney general will then use that finding to revive Comstock, insisting that the health risk to women is a national emergency that they have a solemn duty to address.

 

How is that likely to play out politically next year?

 

Wargames.

 

The polling on this topic isn’t voluminous, but it’s safe to say that something resembling a total ban on mifepristone would be quite unpopular.

 

In 2024, an Axios poll found that 76 percent of independents and even 51 percent of Republicans believed women should be able to obtain the drug from their doctor or a clinic. Another survey taken this past June by the Kaiser Family Foundation backed that up, with 65 percent opposed to prohibiting “medication abortion” versus 33 percent in favor. If the FDA deauthorized mifepristone entirely, or the DOJ used Comstock to keep it out of pharmacies, Trump and the GOP would need a very compelling “safety” argument to avert a serious backlash.

 

Ask Americans whether the pills should also be available by mail, though, and opinion softens. The same Axios poll saw independents drop to 51 percent and Republicans to 23 percent on that question. A recent poll by the Center Square detected ambivalence as well, with 51 percent of adults somewhat in favor of abortion by mail and 37 percent somewhat opposed. When asked whether they’re more concerned about safety and verification risks in sending drugs through the mail or more concerned about women’s access to abortion if they can’t visit a clinic in person, the sample split 48-39.

 

An FDA ruling that mifepristone is unsafe might push public opinion further toward the pro-life position. And if the White House were to eventually land on a compromise in which the drug remained accessible in blue states but unavailable in red ones, I can imagine Americans broadly tolerating it on federalism grounds. What’s the point of letting states ban abortion, they might reason, if those bans can be skirted by simply dropping something in the mail?

 

On the other hand: How likely is it that Trump, having just been reduced to a lame duck, will agree to a politically feasible compromise following a humiliation at the polls that exposed just how lame he is? What will be stopping him post-drubbing from going big on abortion (and Iran, and tariffs, and everything else Americans don’t like about his agenda)? Having been rudely owned by the libs at the polls, an all-out war on mifepristone would be an obvious way to own them right back.

 

Again and again during his second term, he’s taken issues on which his party is either competitive with Democrats or enjoys an advantage over them and farked them up so badly that they’ve become liabilities. Overreaching on abortion by mail feels like the logical next step.

 

Trump isn’t the most interesting political player in this conflict, though.

 

Democrats.

 

The new Democratic Congress will see obvious opportunity in a renewed culture war over abortion, particularly given the left’s post-Roe electoral advantage on the issue. Legislation punishing the FDA for restricting mifepristone would be sketchy—defunding a scientific agency because it reached the “wrong” finding about a drug’s safety is horrendously bad precedent—but the Comstock Act is a more fruitful target.

 

A bill to repeal that law’s abortion provisions would pass a Democratic House easily.

 

It would also almost certainly die in a Democratic Senate, a casualty of a Republican filibuster. (Unless November’s blue wave is truly tidal, I suppose.) But maybe the left would prefer that for selfish electoral reasons: If the new restrictions on mifepristone are allowed to linger until 2028, they can be used as a cudgel against Republican presidential nominee J.D. Vance and his party during that cycle.

 

And while it’s true, as I said, that the public might accept restrictions on sending abortion pills through the mail to states where it’s banned, it’s hard to predict how opinion might move on that question following a pro-choice messaging onslaught. Democrats would push hard to convince Americans that mifepristone is safe no matter what Trump’s highly politicized FDA might say to the contrary, with lots of doctors on their side.

 

“If the drug were dangerous, there would have been an epidemic of side effects among the millions of women who have taken it over the years,” they’ll say. “If the evidence that it’s safe were thin, the drug wouldn’t have remained legal for years under Democratic and Republican administrations.” Those arguments will carry weight.

 

The very fact that the White House asked Todd Blanche not to make any sudden moves on abortion before November means Trump’s own team believes Republicans are likely to lose the battle for public opinion. And I don’t blame them: The KFF survey I mentioned earlier found opinion split 36-64 when Americans were asked whether it should be a crime for healthcare providers to send abortion pills to women in states where abortion is banned. That’s a bad starting point for a national abortion dragnet.

 

Probably the safest prediction about how Democrats will react to restrictions on mifepristone, though, is that it will further boost the party’s support for court-packing.

 

Whatever the administration is planning will be litigated out the wazoo, needless to say, and a Supreme Court that overturned Roe and usually defers to presidential authority over all aspects of the executive branch is unlikely to meddle with Trump’s agenda at the FDA and DOJ. If the court upholds his attempt to limit abortion in blue states by curtailing national access to mifepristone, that’s another talking point for progressive Jacobins bent on radical judicial reform.

 

2028.

 

And then there’s the vice president.

 

J.D. Vance is certainly pro-life but has been characteristically slippery about the extent to which federal power should be used to restrict abortion nationally. In 2022 he declared that a 15-week ban proposed by Senate Republicans was “totally reasonable.” The same year, in an interview, he considered the problem of pro-choicers providing transportation for pregnant women in red states to seek abortion in blue ones. “If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?” he wondered. “I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually.”

 

But as the GOP’s new vice presidential nominee in 2024, he committed to not imposing a federal ban on abortion and said Trump would veto any effort by Congress to pass one. “Donald Trump wants to end this culture war over this particular topic,” he declared, and called for “letting the states figure out their own abortion policies” so that the federal government could focus on bringing down the cost of living.

 

Two years later, having failed to bring down the cost of living, the Trump-Vance administration is preparing to revive the culture war over this topic in a way that might end up affecting blue states’ ability to set their own policies on abortion. Was the “real” J.D. Vance the guy who called in 2023 for using the Comstock Act to “shut down all mail-order abortion operations” nationwide or was the real Vance the guy who said a year later that he supports keeping mifepristone accessible? I suppose we’re about to find out.

 

As with Iran, there’s no truly good outcome for him in a renewed abortion conflict, I think. If Vance were to try to distance himself from this war the way he’s tried to distance himself from that other one, it would deepen the doubts that some Reaganites have about his ideological kinship with them. Some conservatives have already begun building the case against letting the GOP continue on a nationalist trajectory post-Trump; Vance going squishy on restricting abortion by mail because he’s worried about swing voters in 2028 would add a pro-life angle to that case.

 

He does need to worry about voters outside the Republican tent, though. The VP’s infamous comment about “childless cat ladies” before he ran for Senate has done him enough damage that he felt obliged to renounce it in his latest book, an almost unheard-of example of a Trump toady expressing regret for speaking intemperately. Clearly he thinks he has work to do rehabilitating his image with women to improve his chances in 2028 (his recent appearance on The View also points that way)—yet now here he is, on the verge of his administration resuming the abortion wars with a dramatic escalation that will land squarely on younger women.

 

At some point the president’s how-low-can-he-go job approval will start to weigh on his heir apparent and a broadly unpopular abortion initiative is unlikely to lighten the load. Ultimately Vance may have little choice but to do what he’s going to end up doing on everything else for the next 27 months—defending the boss as best he can, urging socialists to “get the hell out” of the country, and hoping that what’s left of the GOP’s favorability come 2028 isn’t a smoking crater. Maybe devising a few more new welfare benefits will help him atone.