France & Britain: Slip Sliding Away

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, September 02, 2025

 

Britain and France are still heading toward financial crisis.

 

The yield on Britain’s 30-year government bonds (Gilts) continues to rise, and at the time of writing has hit 5.65 percent, taking the latest spike (the fifth, depending on how you measure them) to a new high for the year. Meanwhile, a pound bought €1.21 at the beginning of the year. Now it buys around €1.16.

 

The signs are that a crunch is not far away, but Britain may have two advantages over France, which, of the two, may be the first to face some sort of reckoning.

 

To start with, Britain’s economic crisis is unlikely to be exacerbated by political chaos, at least in the immediate future; the longer term is a different matter.  However awful it may be (very) and however ominous some of the signs of deep discontent, Britain’s hugely unpopular government is not about to fall: It has a massive parliamentary majority, and its MPs know how they would fare at the ballot box should they revolt in enough numbers to trigger a snap election. Moreover, an overwhelming share of the U.K.’s government debt is denominated in pounds, meaning, at least in theory, that it can print itself clear of any default — for a while.

 

France is not going to default either, but a major political crack-up may be less than a week away. France’s prime minister, François Bayrou, heads a (sort of) center-right minority government, which has survived in power with the tacit support of either the Socialists or Marine Le Pen’s RN. Bayrou has now called for a parliamentary vote of confidence on September 8 on his proposed package of budget cuts and tax increases.  As of the weekend, both RN and the Socialists have said that they will vote against the package. If so, that will be that.

 

But what will that be?

 

No one really knows, but The Spectator’s John Keiger comes up with some thoughts:

 

President Macron could appoint France’s fifth prime minister in two years. But who would want the poisoned chalice of applying austerity measures with no possible majority in the present National Assembly? The President could call new elections as he did in 2024. But opinion polls suggest another minority government, albeit clearly dominated by the Rassemblement National. A third scenario would be for President Macron to resign. That would lead to a new RN French president, by no means committed to austerity measures.

 

I doubt if Macron has any interest in resigning early (his term does not end until May 2027). His first move will be to try to see if someone can be found to pick up that poisoned chalice. That would mean appointing a prime minister to head a caretaker government (which has only limited powers) until a replacement is found, which took nearly two months in the aftermath of the last parliamentary elections. There is no formal time limit for this process, and the longer it lasts, the greater the unease in the markets is likely to be.

 

The implications of the latter could be grim. France’s debts are almost all denominated in euros, a shared currency. Some technical wheezes apart, Paris does not have access to a euro printing press. If the interest rates it has to pay start rising still further, there is no resort to that dangerously “easy” out. That said, the EU does not want a rerun of the eurozone crisis, only this time centered on France, its second largest economy, rather than little Greece. Despite, presumably, German grumbling, in the event of panic, the European Central Bank would somehow be drafted in to restore calm.

 

But how politically realistic would the usual quid pro quo — austerity — really be?

 

After all, as Keiger points out:

 

With a 6 per cent budget deficit and national debt to GDP ratio at 113 per cent (predicted to rise to over 120 per cent), France is already operating at twice the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact requirements. In November last year, the country was placed in excessive deficit procedure (EDP). As a result, under Article 126 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, France is required to provide six-monthly plans to the EU Commission on the corrective action, policies and deadlines it will apply to return to a 3 per cent deficit by 2029, failing which astronomical fines could be imposed.

 

There is little chance France can comply with the plan.

 

The EU is “rules based.”

 

It is (almost) always a good idea for a country to have its own currency.

 

Only one of the foregoing two sentences is true.

Something Wicked Is Being Loosed in an Online World

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, September 02, 2025

 

The last year has, I confess, been quite the education. A miseducation, perhaps, for I have learned nothing good. I have become (more) cynical with the quality of political media coverage and discourse. My true “Dark Enlightenment” came from being tasked with writing constantly about matters such as Joe Biden’s public meltdown, the fantasy-vibed Kamala Harris 2024 campaign, the Trump renascence, and our current blitzkrieg administration — and seeing how various media outlets and figures comported themselves during this period. To say that the liberal mainstream media forfeited its credibility during this era is, at this point, almost a stale commonplace; the only question is whether that credibility will ever be regained. (My guess: Betteridge’s Law applies here.)

 

It wasn’t just the “mainstream” media, or progressive outlets, that I was paying attention to. The print-centered places and even cable are no longer where the “action” is when it comes to the most pronounced hackery — it’s on social media instead. Because with the age of the social-media influencer, and with hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money floating around behind the scenes, Twitter/X has now almost completed its metamorphosis into a mindless propaganda hive mind, whose trends are often driven by cliques of networked “influencers” working from pre-arranged talking points. Nothing feels entirely real anymore, including the topics that “trend” and/or we are jostled into writing about. (Sydney Sweeney was an organic media obsession, because even journalists love gabbing about buxom starlets; Cracker Barrel was not.)

 

It is the unceasing gush of it all that ages a man prematurely. You readers, perforce, have a different relationship to the news than I do. You are allowed to look away. I used to be able to as well! Now I cannot, and the relentless, seemingly accelerating onslaught of both news and “news” in the New Trump Era has required us all as commentators to refine a set of skills: the ability to determine what does and does not matter in our glutted media environment. There is so much noise out there in the political media world nowadays, and very little true signal. The real task is to stay connected to that signal, to what matters, and to keep transmitting it to you through the wire.

 

Something Wicked This Way Comes

 

Speaking of things I wish I were allowed to look away from, I did not want to write about the shooting in Minneapolis last week. I still don’t want to address the specifics in any way, if for no other reason than that I believe that the sorts of people who commit these acts dream of laments like that being written — the promise of infamy. Aside from that, the horror is also beyond my power to describe, and I’m not sure what value would come of such an exercise in any event. There is simultaneously everything to say about it, and little at all to add.

 

For example, there is less to say about the killer’s specific motivations than most think. I’ve seen the “manifesto video.” I’ve read the translations of the killer’s inarticulate, self-contradictory journals. They are the cruel visions of a madman, little more. There is no explanation to be found there, only the pathetically warped rationalizations and half-logic of the deranged.

 

I can really only offer this: The starting point here is mental illness. But the ending point is the online sump into which mental illness now collects itself, like a malarial pool, cross-fertilizing into ever more virulent strains of social disease. Our modern world is breeding nihilistic evil, even as it lets age-old demons loose. The killer’s (apparently semi-renounced) transgender identity is relevant, but only as a symptom of a much broader, and darker, underlying problem facing America.

 

Others are less philosophical about such things, however, and just couldn’t help themselves. So I’ll chime in only to point out what a malevolent ghoul the Democratic Party’s self-appointed national mascot Gavin Newsom has become in his pursuit of the spotlight. Newsom let it be known a week or so ago that he had actually hired a spicy young social-media whippersnapper to write and post his recent Twitter/X material. And I had to laugh, because it was a transparent attempt to disclaim personal responsibility for his account’s contents, disguised as “sharing the credit.”

 

Perhaps he was trying to get ahead of the game. Because last week, in response to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defending the value of prayer as a reaction to the atrocity, Gavin Newsom (or “Gavin Newsom”) felt compelled to respond on Twitter by mocking the idea of prayer itself as utterly worthless: “These children were literally praying as they got shot at.” (Left implied: “Fat lot of good it did them, or will do you.”)

 

I now understand why the staffer who purportedly writes Gavin’s tweets is paid for her work: She captures his “voice” with such eerie perfection. Because that right there is the true Gavin Newsom, his spirit in one rotten sentence. The callow glibness, the contemptuously dismissive tone, the clangingly materialist hollowness: Either Newsom wrote that tweet himself (and I suspect he did), or this lady deserves a raise for being an incredibly gifted impersonator.

 

Newsom, of course, is chasing controversy, and what disgusts me the most is that he may be onto something, however cynical his calculus. He has a sufficient left-wing base already prepared to back him on this specific case for the simple reason that it beats having a long and unpleasant discussion about the nexus between transgenderism and mental illness. And all the while, as this mindless political thrum carries on in the background, my thoughts instead turn to even darker quarters, those more indebted to W. B. Yeats than Gavin Newsom.

 

I fear we are on the verge of a great societal breakdown — one right out of the late Sixties and early Seventies — and we are not prepared for it. Something wicked this way comes. The atrocity in Minneapolis is but one articulated edge in a far larger fractal pattern of violence and madness creeping across our landscape. Once the progress was imperceptibly slow, but technology has proven to be the accelerant. The threat is pre-political, generational, and perhaps even civilizational. The worst are full of passionate intensity. Things are falling apart, crumbling at both the margins and the center of our societal self-conception.

 

What comes next? I suppose we’ll find out.

Divide and Be Conquered

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, September 01, 2025

 

God must love Americans—why else would He have made so many of us? In particular, the Almighty seems to have a soft spot for clickbait-addicted and Facebook-addled U.S.A.-type rage monkeys. While I am loath to criticize the Architect of the Universe regarding His production schedule, it does seem to me that we are oversupplied in that category and that, pound-for-pound of total organic matter, the world would be better off with more hummingbirds or giant redwoods or moose. Memo to follow, etc.

 

The size of the American population means that we have an enormous market and an enormous electorate—and the vast scale of American life also ensures that the American market and the American electorate must come to resemble each other in certain ways. In the United States, you can be a boutique firm—or a boutique political tendency—and still appeal to millions upon millions of clients. If you have 10 million customers in the United States, you haven’t even quite hit 3 percent of the population—but that same 10 million figure would encompass 95 percent of the population in Sweden, nearly 200 percent of the population in New Zealand or Ireland, 250 percent of Panama, etc.

 

The size of the American enterprise as compared to that of smaller countries has always ensured that American life interacts in a particularly intense way with mass media. All modern societies are vulnerable to mass-media influence, of course, but consider, for comparison, a country such as Iceland, which is a real country, a rather nice and decently governed one—with a population about the same as that of Pulaski County, Arkansas. For better and for worse, there is a kind of intimacy in a small country such as that, and social trends driven by mass media—including, in our time, those driven by social media—will be somewhat dampened by personal relationships and direct personal knowledge of relevant facts and relationships. (I remember a writer visiting from Iceland when I was in college, and pretty much the first thing she said was: “Yes, I know Bjork. Of course I know Bjork. I know everybody.”) A comfortable majority of Icelanders belong to the same church (the established state church, which is Lutheran), 93 percent of them are members of the same ethnic group, and they speak a complicated language that was inherited from Vikings and has more genders than Republicans are comfortable with. It is harder to pull off divide-and-conquer demagoguery in a population like that—and, if you did manage to get 3 percent on the march, you still wouldn’t be able to fill up the high-school football stadium in Odessa, Texas, or even get close to doing so.

 

Things are different here in the United States. Even if we take at face value the Catholic Church’s probably inflated membership numbers, no more than 20 percent of Americans belong to the same church. That is a smaller share of Americans than the share who speak a language other than English at home (about 22 percent), and, depending on how you count, there are around 400 languages spoken in this country. If we pretend that “non-Hispanic white” is a meaningful ethnicity, that is still only 50-odd percent of Americans. If Americans who were born in another country were counted as a country of their own, that country would have about 130 times the population of Iceland, or a population a smidge bigger than that of Spain or South Korea.

 

Big American numbers and big American diversity ensure that sophisticated practitioners of modern digital communication—commercial or political—have many opportunities to slice and dice the population in ways that can produce various kinds of economically viable enterprises based on affinity groups that are relatively large in gross numbers even if they are quite small—even minuscule—as a share of the overall population. The phenomenon is driven largely but not exclusively by economic factors—or, more precisely, by factors that are most easily understood and explained in economic terms. A television show can get a million viewers without leaving much mark on the wider culture (I wonder how many white people watched an episode of Mann & Wife), books that sell more than 1 million copies sink with barely a ripple on the wider literary culture (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was well-reviewed and sold a million-and-a-half copies, but I suspect that most readers of modern fiction who are not on TikTok have never heard of it), microtrends in fashion, music, dance, and slang become very big deals for very narrow populations.

 

This is old stuff, I know, but it is worth revisiting: In the old days of three television networks (yeah, yeah, I’m a Generation Xer raised on hose water), towns with two or three cinemas and one or two bookshops, relatively expensive travel, limited venues for live performances, entertainment products (and most other products) had to be crafted to appeal to relatively large audiences—large both in absolute terms and large as a population share. You know the numbers: Nearly half of Americans watched the final episode of M*A*S*H*, many more people watched Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on a given Tuesday night than all of the contemporary major-network late shows combined, etc.

 

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) spent 67 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list, while M. Scott Peck’s self-help book The Road Less Traveled (1978) spent an astounding 694 weeks on the list. And you still get some of that in the world of books—Diary of a Wimpy Kid was on the list for 600 weeks, and the Harry Potter books were so dominant that the Times created a new children’s list just to give everybody else a chance at the main one. I suspect that this has something to do with the physicality of books. (Ask Adam Bellow.) Digital books are a thing, but the enduring popularity of physical books means that the book market of today looks a lot more like the book market of 1980 than the newspaper (“paper”) market of today looks like the newspaper market of 1980.

 

I suppose there is a neo-Marxist point hiding in there somewhere about how society is shaped by the means of production—and, in the case of film, television, and news media, by the means of distribution. Economically, it is in our time often much more effective to discover and then strip-mine an energetic and underserved niche than to create (if it is even possible) a product with the kind of mass appeal that Johnny Carson or network sitcoms had. The old model was based on addition. (“How do we add one-tenth of a point to our audience? Cute dogs? An obviously stereotypically gay character who is never acknowledged to be gay? Maybe Fonzie could do a motorcycle jump over a shark?”) But the new model is based on division. “Division” is a word that has a bad odor among some people, but the old model produced a lot of very bland pabulum while it was creating that common popular culture so often lamented—go back and watch some Ozzie and Harriet or My Three Sons or the Andy Griffith Show, and I think you will see that none of it is as good as you remembered. As it was on television, so it was at the movies: The 1970s may have been a golden age of American cinema, but there was a lot of uninteresting dreck on the silver screens on Saturday nights.

 

We have a fractured political marketplace for the same reason we have a fractured market in television and movies and music. That presents some problems, a critical one being a version of the old “agent-principal problem” that presents itself in business management. The heart of the agent-principal problem is that the people we pay to do things on our behalf have incentives different from ours—and, sometimes, incentives that are antithetical to ours. The classical example is corporate management: The shareholders, who are the owners of the company, have an interest in maximizing profits; the management team has an interest in maximizing its own income, even if that reduces overall profits. (Businesses have tried to fix that over the years by paying executives in stock options or doing other things to align management’s incentives with those of shareholders.) Political parties, campaigns, other political institutions, activist groups, policy shops, communications platforms—all of these have people who get paid something, and who sometimes get paid a great deal. They also have paid workers and volunteers who are looking to use their positions in a campaign or in party leadership to advance their own economic (and non-economic) interests, parlaying those jobs into highly paid cable-pundit gigs, comfortable academic or corporate-board appointments, or a spot on the bestsellers list.

 

Now, here is a question to answer honestly if only to yourself: Would you rather earn $100,000 a year managing winning campaigns or $1 million a year managing losing campaigns? You can live on $100,000 (most Americans live on less), but you can live really well on $1 million. Or: Would you rather earn $100,000 a year managing a responsible and intelligent social-media operation on behalf of your party or interest group, or would you choose instead to earn $1 million a month running a gross, ugly, embarrassing one that ultimately does your team more harm than good? I have no idea what my friend David French earns but, without even asking, I can tell you that, ceteris paribus, I’d rather have Joe Rogan’s paycheck.

 

You can be a good political consultant and do everything right and still lose the election. But you also can lose the election without being a good political consultant and doing everything right. You can be a good, responsible, intellectually honest commentator or advocate or activist and earn a pretty good living, even a very good living—or not. But you also could be someone like Candace Owens or J.D. Vance and advance your interests by means of risible buls—t that gets you what you want while ultimately undermining the project that you supposedly are trying to advance. From that point of view, Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett (a former National Review colleague of mine) and Tucker Carlson (whom I used to think I knew) are really two guys in their same occupation (it is the oldest occupation) but working different sides of the street.

 

There are certain features of our politics—such as the political inertia in effectively single-party states (such as California and Oklahoma), the prevalence of noncompetitive legislative districts, the centralization of congressional decision-making in party leadership, polarization in the electorate, and the abovementioned splintering of the media environment—that work together to enable the advancement of political figures who are largely untested in a competitive electoral environment. Kamala Harris, to take an obvious example, had only twice faced a Republican in a general election—and in her 2010 attorney general’s race, she beat the Republican by less than a point … in California. In her election to the Senate, there was no Republican in the race.

 

The Democrats should not have nominated Harris in 2024, of course (as so often is the case, they missed an opportunity to listen to me), and when she was the candidate, it was plain that she did not know how to run such a race and that she could not tell good advice from poor advice. But the money came rolling in, anyway—and when you put more than $1 billion on the table, somebody is going to figure out a way to pick up that money. (And then some—the Democratic Party recently agreed to pay off some $20 million in Harris campaign debt.) A lot of consultants got some very non-mediocre paydays selling Harris mediocre advice.

 

Donald Trump, who surely must once have failed a remedial course titled “Your Ass and a Hole in the Ground: A Comparative Study,” got a lot of bad advice on his way to losing to an effectively housebound Joe Biden in 2020—he was poorly served by the richly paid. And Biden, let us recall, had very little experience with tough campaigns, having been second banana tagging along to the coronation of Barack Obama, before which he hadn’t been involved in a truly competitive race since 1972. In 2020, Trump wasn’t running against Machiavelli—he was running against the Spiro Agnew of the geriatric ward, and he lost.

 

Political consultant Bob Shrum had already lost seven out of seven presidential races when John Kerry brought him on board in 2004. Shrum extended his unbroken losing streak to 0-8, but he still had a pretty nice vacation home in Cape Cod and a chair at USC.

 

Not all of these principal-failing agents are alike. Maybe Shrum and Steve Bannon and lefty YouTuber/poster boy for literal nepotism Hasan Piker are better sorts than I think they are. (Probably not, but, I could be wrong.) But it seems to me that figures such as Hasan Piker and Candace Owens (same sport, different jerseys) are pretty obviously net losers for their teams, and that they are more the rule than the exception.

 

This stuff has real-world consequences. Consider this from the New York Times: “The Texas Democrats Won by Losing,” reads the headline. (That’s how it came in the morning email; it’s different on the website.) The Democrats are engaged in a time-honored strategy, according to the Times: “Losing loudly has been a crucial feature of successful political movements.” The attached essay was written by two philosophy professors with a book to promote, titled Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change. I am something of a connoisseur of the “moral victories” of Texas Democrats such as Wendy Davis. Texas Republicans are happy to let Texas Democrats have all the moral victories they want—the Republicans are satisfied with their actual victories. Some of those are moral victories as well as electoral ones, but then there’s Ken Paxton.

 

If Texas Democrats had about 10,000 votes for every “moral victory” they’ve scored in recent years, then Beto O’Rourke would be a senator and Ted Cruz would be a servile invertebrate, but one earning a decent living in private legal practice. It is not as though no one ever has “won by losing”—there is some precedent in Texas: It is true that you don’t get the victory at San Jacinto without the slaughter at the Alamo, but when the guys who run the show are getting paid by the casualty, then it’s just one more Alamo after another after the next. In close political contests, mostly you lose by losing. College basketball coach Bob Huggins once was asked about his game plan and famously answered: “Score more points than they do.”

 

And I’m all for sticking to your principles even when it means losing an election—but the trollification of our politics isn’t about putting honor over ambition. Ain’t nobody going to mistake Gavin Newsom for Cato the Younger.

 

The people at the top of the political heap on both sides owe it to their teams to figure out—and be clear about—what it is they are doing. Appealing to ever-narrower and ever-more-angry sub-sub-subdivisions in the electorate is a good way to build a cable-punditry career or a social media following or to sell doggie vitamins or hair tonic or whatever, but when it comes to carving out functional political coalitions, you want to be Rick Ross: “Cut ’em wide, cut ’em long, cut ’em fat.” (That’s what Rick Ross is talking about there, right? Team-building?) Otherwise, it’s just a wide, long, fat payday for people who have learned how to be relatively big fish by seeking out smaller ponds.

 

And Furthermore ...

 

In their defense, those win-by-losing philosophy professors know that they are pushing some weak product, which is why their essay has more qualifications than James Baker’s résumé:

 

“Texas Democrats’ stand gave their cause time to move the needle of public perception. Their battle invigorated a nationwide conversation about how elected leaders can resist America’s anti-democratic turn.

 

“Losing loudly doesn’t always work. In Texas in 2013, the state senator Wendy Davis famously filibustered an anti-abortion rights bill, initially defeating the measure and giving a shot in the arm to supporters of abortion rights. But not only did a similar bill ultimately pass, less than a decade later the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.

 

“A reasonable skeptic might also predict that losing in public would tend to discourage a movement’s supporters. In sports, the idea of “no moral victories” is a cliché. But researchers who study social movements find the opposite. Once people persist in the face of a likely defeat, they often keep fighting.

 

“Why? People willing to lose loudly aren’t deceiving themselves about their power or their prospects.

 

“ ... A comprehensive analysis of protesters in places including Russia, Turkey and Hong Kong found that they were not motivated primarily by belief in their immediate effectiveness, but instead by factors including a shared sense of identity and faith in protest as a way to build a movement.”

 

Just so. And it does seem that Texas Democrats are about as close to accomplishing their goals as the democracy activists in Russia, Turkey, and Hong Kong! So they’ve got that going for them.

 

Words about Words

 

Seriously—have you ever seen James Baker’s résumé? Neither have I.

 

But I do remember receiving a press kit for an event he was doing (a speech at the University of Texas, if I recall correctly) a long time ago, one that included a biographical sketch that was, in essence, a résumé. It was one page long. When I was a youngster, we used to think a great deal about the writing of résumés, which were thought at the time to be a big deal. (And maybe they were, though I don’t think I’ve really ever been asked for one.) And there were a great many 22-year-old holders of bachelor’s degrees who were veterans of three summer jobs, two internships, and one club presidency who refused to believe that the splendiferousness and nuance of their careers so far could possibly be captured on a single page.

 

James Baker was on the losing side of a lot of political campaigns, but he led the winning side of a big one (George H. W. Bush for president in 1988) and a lot of very important policy fights, including some that were instrumental in seeing the United States achieve an affirmative victory in the Cold War and fortifying our dominant position in the post-Cold War order. He was secretary of state and White House chief of staff and had a big-time business career, too. After the White House, he had a hand in everything from climate policy to African politics. He ran George W. Bush’s team during the 2000 Florida recount. It’s the kind of résumé you’d associate with a man running for president more than with a guy running the campaign team.

 

The most recent bio on his website is about 500 words, including the note about his having 17 grandchildren.

 

Fewer but better–that good advice applies to words as well as to possessions. There is something to be said for verbal economy in résumés, bios, eulogies, and obituaries. It is difficult to imagine anybody will ever top Christopher Wren on that score: “SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS,” reads the engraving at St. Paul’s, “CIRCUMSPICE.”

 

That, I believe, is what they call a flex.

 

In Closing

 

Happy Labor Day to all you toiling masses.

 

Labor Day is a special holiday for me, one that I generally do not take off: The first piece I ever published at National Review was a Labor Day essay, one that noted that I had never held a minimum-wage job (and I still haven’t—so far!) even though I had a lot of jobs that people think of a minimum-wage jobs: Burger King flame-broiler guy, 7-Eleven clerk, furniture mover, day laborer. Think of all the radically different thinkers—from Josemaría Escrivá to Mohandas Gandhi to Ludwig von Mises—who have put the dignity and goodness of work at the center of their various philosophies.

 

My friend David Bahnsen has written a book on the subject: Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, in which he makes a case for rejecting the idea of “work-life balance” and instead integrating work into our self-conception as beings created, in God’s image, to work.

 

There is a cartoon version of conservatism in which the conservative is a well-heeled guy in pinstripes sneering at a beggar with a tin cup: “Get a job.” Well. “Get a job” is often excellent advice, something one appreciates all the more if one has had the experience of needing employment and not having it. Of course there is an enormous element of luck and randomness and chaos in life: I wonder how different my life might have been if I hadn’t decided to write that Labor Day piece on a whim or if I hadn’t sent it to Kathryn Jean Lopez on a day when she needed copy.

 

But we ought not allow ourselves to fall into a false dilemma: No, we may not have control over everything, or even much, but we do have control over some things, and hard, consistent work can make up for a lot of deficiencies in other areas. That is one of those eternal truths that can slip away from us as we grow comfortable or complacent, and, as such, it is one of those eternal truths to which we must regularly rededicate ourselves with purpose and conviction.

U.S. National Security Is Being Attacked From Within

By Kevin Carroll

Monday, September 01, 2025

 

The Trump administration is gutting America’s national security apparatus. Undoing the damage could take decades.

 

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently confirmed that the Trump administration had revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former national security officials. Gabbard even publicly circulated the names of these officials—heedlessly blowing the cover of at least one CIA case officer in the process—and baselessly accused them of “politicizing and manipulating intelligence, leaking classified intelligence without authorization, and/or committing intentional egregious violations of tradecraft standards.”

 

These moves, coupled with purges of counterespionage prosecutors and intelligence officials across the federal government, present a clear and present danger to United States national security. The result could be generational harm to America’s foreign intelligence and internal security services, leaving the country vulnerable in future armed conflicts with its adversaries.

 

Many of the officials whose clearances Gabbard lifted last week came to the attention of right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer because they earlier signed a public letter questioning President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful effort to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Others were targeted for accurately warning of Russia’s attempts to covertly influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Meanwhile, career national security personnel have been fired for reasons ranging from investigating and prosecuting participants of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots to contradicting Trump’s claim that U.S. strikes in June had left Iran’s nuclear sites “completely and totally obliterated.”

 

In apparent retaliation for his criticism of the president, former National Security Adviser John Bolton lost first his clearances, then his Secret Service detail—even as Iranian operatives were indicted for plotting to murder him for his role in the first Trump administration’s killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani. Finally, last month, the administration ordered FBI raids of Bolton’s home and office as part of an investigation into whether the former Trump official illegally shared or possessed classified information.

 

Much of what the administration is doing now is illegal, and will likely be overturned by the courts in due course. There’s good reason to believe the public and politically motivated purges violate a number of federal laws, including the Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act, and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. But as a former Army and CIA officer myself, I fear the White House’s meddling in the meantime will inflict lasting harm on the intelligence community’s ability to protect the homeland.

 

First, there may be a rush to the exits within America’s intelligence, foreign, and security services by those who disagree with the Trump administration’s policies, particularly experienced personnel with vested pensions. Mid-career officials who possess the skills and work ethic to succeed in the private sector will similarly depart, leaving behind some who lack similar talent and drive. Meanwhile, years’ worth of expensively recruited, vetted, and trained probationary employees have already been dismissed.

 

Worse, who will seek to join organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency or the Foreign Service under the present circumstances? Many of the best recruits for intelligence and diplomatic work have traditionally come directly from elite colleges or graduate schools, or a few years later, from Wall Street banks and law firms, to engage in meaningful public service. This career choice always involved financial sacrifice, as well as hardship and even danger, but it also came with respect and job security.

 

But if civil servants can be fired at will—and libeled or slandered on their way out the door—why choose a modest government salary instead of lucrative, comfortable, and safe work in consulting, finance, or technology? Certainly few national security officials will now encourage their children to follow in their footsteps.

 

Second, Trump’s neuralgia about public or even private criticism by his subordinates of Russia’s Vladimir Putin or China’s Xi Jinping, strongmen whom he deeply admires, leaves the door wide open for these adversaries’ espionage services to infiltrate the U.S. government. At the same time, FBI agents are being reassigned from counterespionage duties to provide perimeter security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on illegal immigrants (a sizable majority of whom have no criminal record), and the Department of Justice’s counterintelligence section is hemorrhaging experienced prosecutors.

 

And counterintelligence problems can take decades to resolve. The United Kingdom’s security and intelligence services were tied up in knots for four decades over the damage done by the “Cambridge Five,” a ring of spies whom the KGB used to penetrate MI5 and MI6 during World War II and into the Cold War. The CIA and FBI are still hunting for the as-yet unidentified turncoat who, along with the agency’s Aldrich Ames and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, fatally betrayed America’s human sources in Russia in 1985. Individuals being seeded into the U.S. government or turned within it by the Russians and Chinese now will present counterespionage problems for decades to come.

 

Finally, Trump’s unwillingness to hear from his intelligence services information that he does not like, simply because he believes it makes him look weak or wrong, as well as his willingness to fire those who dare to speak candidly, risks catastrophic failure.

 

Trump foolishly believes Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un are his friends, to the extent that he has refused to listen to reports of the growing threats they pose. The president desperately wants a massive trade deal with China, such that he praised Xi’s “transparency” during the opening days of the COVID pandemic. He is convinced U.S.-led forces defeated the Islamic State in 2017, just as he is determined to believe that a single bombing run destroyed Iran’s nuclear program in June.

 

What if multiple corroborative reports suggest that Putin plans to seize a Russophile part of a Baltic state’s territory in order to break NATO unity, thereby fracturing its Article 5 collective defense guarantee? What if all-source analysts conclude that North Korea plans to conduct an atmospheric test of a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile over the Pacific? What if a vetted source with excellent access says that China plans to blockade Taiwan and strangle it into submission?  Or what if Islamic State members from Central Asia who slipped across the U.S. southwest border during the Biden administration plan a terror attack on the homeland? What if Iran quietly continues to progress toward a nuclear weapon? 

 

Will DNI Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, or FBI Director Kash Patel present that unwelcome reporting and analysis to Trump? If they do, and the president is displeased, will Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth back their colleagues up? Given the administration’s record of revoking intelligence officers’ clearances, firing law enforcement personnel, and forcing generals into early retirement, I doubt it.

MAGA Has a New Favorite Slogan

By Jonathan Chait

Friday, August 29, 2025

 

Whenever the White House announces a new criminal investigation into one of Donald Trump’s enemies—an event that occurs with Stalinesque frequency—the administration and its allies have a go-to line: “No one is above the law.” FBI Director Kash Patel, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, and others have gleefully deployed the tagline. It’s a smirking, knowing stand-in for the claim that Joe Biden did the same thing to Trump while insisting that Trump was not above the law, and so turnabout is merely fair play.

 

As defenses of the naked politicization of federal law enforcement go, this rejoinder is not terribly convincing. But it is essentially the only defense that can be found for Trump’s campaign to turn the law into a shield for his allies and a weapon against critics and dissenters.

 

The first problem with this argument is that the Biden administration did not politicize law enforcement—in fact, it went out of its way to avoid doing so. Biden put the Justice Department in the hands of Merrick Garland, a widely respected figure who had bipartisan support and who pledged to operate independently, and who followed through on that pledge by appointing a special counsel to insulate the federal Trump investigations from political influence. Trump nominated Pam Bondi, a crony with almost no Democratic support and who doesn’t even pretend to value the department’s independence. “We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump,” she declared in March. (Trump nominated Bondi only after his first crony with no Democratic support, Matt Gaetz, proved too noxious even for some Republican senators.) Biden kept in place an FBI director chosen by Trump; Trump then replaced him with a cartoonish loyalist.

 

Conservatives have an answer for this, of course. Biden, they say, maintained the appearance of prosecutorial independence while secretly manipulating the Justice Department. The only difference is that Trump isn’t hiding it. “He’s cast aside any pretense that the Justice Department is independent (and Mr. Biden had turned this into a pretense) and is openly issuing directives for investigations,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel argues.

 

This defense makes sense if you believe, as Strassel writes of the Biden administration, that “almost all their efforts aimed at politically hamstringing one man: Mr. Trump.” If, however, you were sentient during the Biden years, you will recall that Biden’s DOJ went after a long list of Democrats, such as Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas, and Representative T. J. Cox of California. Most inconveniently for Trump’s defenders, the Biden DOJ even prosecuted Hunter Biden. What’s more, the department appointed an independent prosecutor, Robert Hur, to look into Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents during his time out of office. Hur produced a devastating report describing Biden as elderly and suffering from memory loss. Merely trying to imagine Trump’s Justice Department investigating a Trump ally, let alone, say, Don Jr., gives a sense of how wildly the two administrations differ.

 

The second flaw in the turnabout defense is that it pretends the cycle began under Biden. “It was Democrats who introduced the noxious art of lawfare, though master retaliator, Donald Trump, is perfecting its use,” Strassel claims.

 

Wait—Democrats introduced the idea that presidents should lock up their opponents? In fact, this concept was totally absent from the American political debate until Trump introduced it as a major campaign theme in 2016. His conceit was that Hillary Clinton should be locked up for using a private email server. Here again, this theme was available only because Clinton was being investigated by the FBI under a Democratic administration—under the very administration in which she had served as secretary of state—demonstrating levels of independence that would be unimaginable today.

 

Trump is leaning much harder into political prosecutions during his second term than he did during his first, a fact that some conservatives point to as evidence that Democrats are merely reaping what they sowed. “The barrage of prosecutions of Trump while he was out of power probably made his second presidency more willful and vindictive,” the Washington Post columnist Jason Willick argues.

 

In truth, Trump tried repeatedly during his first term to get the Justice Department to investigate his enemies and go easy on his friends. He had limited success not because Biden had yet to invent lawfare but because the department was still run by figures who believed in a degree of prosecutorial independence and the rule of law. What held Trump back from abusing his power in the first term was a lack of willing partners, not some spirit of restraint or generosity.

 

The payback theory has one more, very large, flaw. It’s that Trump is, in fact, a huge and notorious crook. Conservatives have sought to elide this inconvenient data point by focusing on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s strained effort to prosecute Trump for campaign-finance violations. Bragg’s charges were technically correct but represent the kind of case you would bring only if you were looking to find a crime—a point that many liberals conceded at the time.

 

However, just because you’re the victim of prosecutorial overreach doesn’t make you innocent. The other cases against Trump were much more solid. He took a load of classified government documents, stored them in ludicrously insecure facilities, lied to government officials about their whereabouts, and repeatedly ignored demands to return them. There was also the small matter of his attempt to stay in office after losing reelection.

 

This behavior came after a career spent treating laws as suggestions. Trump’s public life began with his defiance of Justice Department orders to allow Black tenants into his father’s apartment buildings, and proceeded through a series of deals that ranged from sketchy to outright scams, such as “Trump University.” Trump was open about dealing with mobsters, and other Republicans described him, accurately, as a con man.

 

The Occam’s-razor account of how it is that Trump became the first ex-president to face criminal investigation is that Trump is the first professional crook to be elected president. This would also neatly explain why he invented the idea of locking up the president’s enemies. Crooks are generally cynics who think that everybody in power is a criminal, and the only difference is that some people are hypocrites about it. (“My father’s no different than any other powerful man,” Michael Corleone says in The Godfather.)

 

Barack Obama did not threaten to lock up John McCain or Mitt Romney. The idea that the law is a weapon the president uses to protect his friends and harass his enemies was brought into American politics by one man. He now happens to be the one man who is very definitively above the law.

Celebrating the Decline of Big Labor

National Review Online

Monday, September 01, 2025

 

Labor Day this year is a cause for raucous celebration: For the first time, the share of U.S. workers who are union members has fallen below 10 percent. Looking only at private-sector workers, the share who are union members is 5.9 percent.

 

Those numbers are all the more remarkable because they come after four years of the Biden administration doing everything it could to boost organized labor. Biden called himself the “most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration,” and he was probably right, at least since Franklin Roosevelt.

 

The Biden administration bailed out union pension funds with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. It mandated union labor for infrastructure projects and baked union-favorable provisions into the CHIPS Act. It backed the “buy American” rules, prevailing wage rules, and protectionism that unions love. Biden’s NLRB appointees backed unions at every opportunity. And Biden himself was the first president to walk a picket line, joining UAW workers in Michigan in 2023.

 

Biden inherited a record-low union membership rate of 10.3 percent in 2021. It set a new record low in 2022 of 10.1 percent, then another in 2023 at 10 percent, and then another in 2024 at 9.9 percent. No other president has set a new record low every year he was in office since Ronald Reagan — impressive!

 

No matter who is president, the union membership rate has been declining for decades, and it has yet to see even a dead-cat bounce. That’s because the American people, by and large, aren’t interested in having union bosses skim their paychecks, give some of the money to politicians, keep some for themselves, and purport to be acting in their best interest when they know full well they aren’t.

 

The relatively few workers who do find union membership advantageous tend to work for the government. Despite government workers only making up about 15 percent of the U.S. workforce, they make up about half of the population of union members. About one-third of all union members are in the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers, the two largest teachers’ unions.

 

The blue-collar hard-hat image of union members refuses to die even though it stopped being true years ago. Eighty-four percent of transportation and warehousing workers, 90 percent of construction workers, and 92 percent of manufacturing workers are not union members. Policies that benefit unions in general mostly benefit public school teachers and bureaucrats in practice.

 

Two of the largest growth industries for organized labor are journalism and higher education. The latter, which is the result of an Obama NLRB ruling that has spawned such groups as the UAW chapter at Columbia University that played a major role in the anti-Israel protests that shut down campus, may diminish soon. A student at Cornell is challenging the Obama ruling, and Trump’s NLRB appointees may overturn it.

 

Blue states lag behind the overall trend. New York and California have 17 percent of U.S. workers, but almost 30 percent of U.S. union members. The states with the lowest rates include the Carolinas, which do not allow collective bargaining in the public sector.

 

More states should look to abolish public-sector collective bargaining, as Utah did this year. And more states should pick up where Republicans left off in the early-to-mid 2010s by passing right-to-work laws. The first order of business should be restoring Michigan’s law that Democrats repealed. In 24 states, private-sector workers can still be coerced to join or financially support a union.

 

Public-sector workers no longer can be coerced, according to the Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision in 2018. But some still are because states have failed to update their laws to reflect that decision. All states need to end automatic dues deduction and make clear to new hires that union membership or agency fees are not required for government employment.

 

As WFB wrote in National Review’s credenda from the first issue in 1955, “The public has been taught to assume (almost instinctively) that conflicts between labor and management are generally traceable to greed and intransigence on the part of management.” The media try their best to keep up this impression, with breathless coverage of every organizing drive and hype around union bosses like Shawn Fain. Because of a series of conservative wins in the past 70 years, fewer Americans see things that way.

 

“National Review will explore and oppose the inroads upon the market economy caused by monopolies in general, and politically oriented unionism in particular,” the credenda goes on to say. And that’s really the rub: Unions are government-backed monopolies, and Americans don’t like government-backed monopolies, no matter how often they are told they should, and especially if those monopolies take some of their hard-earned money and send it to politicians they don’t like.

Does Big Labor Truly Represent the American Worker?

By Michael Watson

Monday, September 01, 2025

 

Those hoping to hear workers’ voices need to find an alternative to union bosses, who have shown they barely speak for their members, much less all laborers.

 

Since at least the 1930s, if not the late 19th century, labor unions have claimed the power to speak on behalf of all American workers. But, on this Labor Day, should we still give them that power, when labor unions represent less than 10 percent of the workforce?

 

Politicians act as if union bosses do speak for all workers, perhaps conditioned by the fact that seemingly every group, from accountants to zookeepers, has at least one advocacy or trade coalition working on its behalf. This may have been defensible in the days of George Meany, who led the AFL-CIO from the 1950s through the 1970s, when as many as one-fourth to one-third of wage and salary workers were unionized.

 

But recent Bureau of Labor Statistics reports indicate that less than one in ten workers, and less than one in 16 workers in the private sector, are union members. Meanwhile, almost half of union members work for state, local, and federal governments, even as less than 15 percent of all workers in the U.S. work for government. Perhaps unsurprisingly given that career path, the Union Membership and Coverage Database estimates that union members are more likely to be college-educated than the workforce as a whole.

 

So union bosses actually speak, at most, for a disproportionately privileged, government-employed segment of workers. This is a warning to political figures and campaigners who would use union bosses as a proxy for the voice of workers as a whole: The bosses are unrepresentative, and they answer to a segment of workers that is not of the hard-hat and lunch-pail set that many politicos hope to reach.

 

Indeed, union bosses’ approach to politics is nakedly partisan and ideologically committed to the Everything Leftism of the professional activist class that staffs the union office. It’s easy to spot the partisanship: OpenSecrets’ compilation of union political spending in 2024 shows unions sent 87.3 percent of their contributions to Democrat campaigns, with 11.8 percent sent to Republicans.

 

These contributions are far more Democratic leaning than union families themselves. Exit polls from the 2024 general election showed that then–Vice President Kamala Harris beat Republican President Donald Trump by only a 53–45 margin among the 19 percent of Americans who are members of “union households” (pollster-speak for union members and their families).

 

The divergence between more centrist-leaning union families and the Democratic Party’s left wing, occupied as it is by union bosses, suggests Big Labor maintains a model of politics that wouldn’t be out of place in a Russian revolutionary cell in 1917. Because the workers have not attained appropriate class consciousness, their power must be directed through a union’s professional-activist staffer class functioning as a nominally elected dictatorship of the proletariat until the workers adopt the politics of graduate students (who have, not coincidentally, proven to be one of the few fertile organizing grounds for Big Labor in recent decades).

 

Those hoping to hear workers’ voices need to find an alternative to union bosses who have shown they barely speak for their members and their families, much less all laborers. And those workers need the freedom to ensure that their voices can be heard over the voices of union bosses who erroneously purport to speak for them.