They Just Came Out and Admitted It!

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 03, 2025

 

Nothing so offends quite like unwelcome reality. It’s, therefore, unremarkable that Democratic partisans tore at their garments and pounded the table when Politico reporter Rachael Bade confronted them with it.

This unobjectionable observation about the causes of the ephemeral political crisis in Washington that everyone is presently trying to “win” provoked manic fits in those who count on social media to ratify and reinforce their fantasies.

 

“This is not Karoline Leavitt’s account. This is supposed to be a reporter’s,” Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden sneered. “I guess those White House tips don’t come for free. Gotta earn ’em.”

 

Michael Linden, a senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and onetime Office of Management and Budget official, agreed. Bade wasn’t just advancing Republican talking points; she was promulgating false talking points. “If we had insisted on a partisan [appropriations] bill, with no negotiations, that we knew Rs couldn’t support,” he wrote, “does anyone think for a second that Rachel Bade would have blamed Republicans for the ensuing shutdown?”

 

“Wrong,” documentary filmmaker and executive director of American Family Voices, Lauren Windsor, declared. Republicans “control all branches of government,” she wrote. “They can pass a budget if they want to.” Her previous advocacy for abolishing the 60-vote threshold preserved by the legislative filibuster suggests she was at one point familiar with the obstacles Democrats have put before the Republican majority. Maybe she just forgot.

 

Dozens of the other lesser-known groundlings who populate this Pit hurled similar invective in Bade’s direction. Her views exposed the closely guarded fact that “media is secretly Republican.” She was castigated for overvaluing “the chess moves” in Washington (“and by extension,” herself) rather than focusing on the grand moral arc of American politics. And there were countless internet sleuths who congratulated themselves on sniffing out Bade’s latent fascist and white supremacist sympathies. Surely, their relative anonymity and irrelevance are cold comfort to Bade, given their numbers. The response was overwhelming.

 

And it was delusional. Bade was, of course, covering her beat, and she was covering it not just truthfully but in ways to which Democrats on Capitol Hill did not object.

 

“People hate shutdowns. And I hate shutdowns,” Vermont Senator Peter Welch told Semafor reporters this week. “So why are we doing it?” he asked, “It’s because, essentially, the whole Obamacare healthcare success we have is being unraveled.”

 

Indeed, by refusing to vote for a “clean” continuing budget resolution that makes no changes to last year’s budget save for funding additional security for federal constitutional officers (a necessity given the heated climate, of which the reaction to Bade’s post is illustrative), Democrats invited the shutdown so they could relitigate the fight over this summer’s reconciliation bill — a fight they lost the first time. It’s a risky move, Welch admitted. “If it seems about health care,” he posited, “then this will have been worth the effort.”

 

How else are we to interpret the point-blank admission that “we” are “doing it” so that it “seems” like we’re demanding the extension of Obamacare subsidies? That sure sounds like Democrats don’t mind if you blame them for the shutdown. They and their partisans only mind if you blame them for the shutdown and don’t like it.

 

They are perfectly content to take ownership of this impasse if you approve of it. And Bade’s critics got the sense from the tone of her post, not its content, that she betrayed a troubling lack of enthusiasm for their fraught project. Whose side are you on, Rachael?

 

It was a revealing reaction — one that is as attributable to Democratic partisans’ belief that legacy media outlets should be team players and that muscling dissenters into silence might change how we perceive our shared reality.

 

Bade shouldn’t feel too bad. The bitterness she encountered is a feature of the story she’s covering. Democrats started this fight to satisfy a base that is spoiling for one regardless of the prospects for victory. The subjects of her reporting on Capitol Hill are responding to the demands of that very cohort — hallucinatory though they may be.

Dress Codes vs. Codes of Honor

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 03, 2025

 

I used to dislike dress codes, and, in some ways, I still do. But I have come around a little.

 

When I was in high school, we had a fairly restrictive dress code, with a particular emphasis on policing the length of shorts and skirts, which did not inconvenience me personally inasmuch as I was not much inclined to wear either but which did cause some discomfort for some of my more heat-sensitive peers. Our school was a brick building constructed in 1901 and had no air conditioning, which is a serious thing in Texas. It is serious enough that a Texas judge recently ruled that lack of air conditioning in Texas prisons amounted to unconstitutional cruelty. I will spare you my lecture about the similarities between public-school architecture and carceral architecture.

 

This being the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was also a good deal of Satanic panic in the air that influenced the dress code, and our local school superintendent caused a bit of a furor by circulating a list of “occult” symbols for teachers to be on the lookout for—one of which was the Star of David. That would have been bad enough for the ... I think three ... Jewish families with students in our school, but the cherry on top of the hot-buffoonery sundae was that the superintendent’s last name was “Moses,” which was a gift to the editorial cartoonist at my high school newspaper. The local superintendent went on to be the state education commissioner and the superintendent of schools in Dallas, enjoying an excellent reputation in both roles. Perhaps he grew on the job, like his namesake.

 

Public school students are (as the architecture suggests) a kind of captive population, which inclines me toward a more liberal approach to regulating their outfits, but I have come around on dress codes elsewhere. I lived in Las Vegas for a time, and I can tell you that you will not see Sean Connery in a dinner jacket at the baccarat table in any of the casinos there—you will see a lot of board shorts and flip-flops. Casino gambling is going to be gross one way or the other, but I’d still prefer if it were a black-tie affair. Similarly: I try to avoid fancy restaurants, but I recently met a friend for dinner at a nice place where the reservation confirmation came with a gentle reminder that the establishment maintains and enforces a dress code. Not much of one, to be sure, but a general prohibition on sweatpants and that sort of thing. I remember a heat wave in Philadelphia so intense that the Union League club briefly relaxed its requirement that men wear a tie to lunch, and I regretted that a little bit, even though I myself probably looked a little funny with my blue blazer and tie on my motorcycle. (The coat-check clerk never seemed to know what to do with my helmet.) The WASP-y septuagenarian gentleman who was my usual host at the Union League knew something about standards of dress: “It’s always a special occasion when I meet you for lunch,” he said. “I’m wearing my second-best toupée.” At that time, Philadelphia nightclubs advertising on the local rap stations made a point of emphasizing their dress codes: “No sneaks, no Tims,” one put it succinctly, “Tims” meaning Timberland boots. In the cartoon that goes with my pieces (the one where I look like the snooty butler in a 1980s comedy), I’m wearing a tuxedo for a wedding (not mine) at Lake Como, and it just wouldn’t have been the same if everybody had been dressed like we were tailgating before the Texas-OU game. On that score, I prefer how they tailgate at the Radnor Hunt, with women in fancy bonnets and many guests arriving by carriage—steeplechase isn’t peewee football.

 

What matters about a dress code is, at heart, what it is intended to do.

 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who had a short and undistinguished if perfectly honorable low-level military career before he became an undistinguished if perfectly anodyne low-level talk-show host, recently hauled in almost every general and admiral in the U.S. military for a command performance during which he lectured them about, among other things, military dress and grooming standards. As one senior officer remarked after Hegseth’s dorky, strutting performance, it could have been an email.

 

Hegseth indulged his pogonophobia in particular:

 

No more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards, and adhere to standards. If you want a beard, you can join Special Forces. If not, then shave. We don't have a military full of Nordic pagans.

 

Point of fact: We do have a few Nordic pagans in the military, a fact that has come up from time to time in a different area of presentational standards: tattoos. Religious tattoos are generally acceptable (with certain limits, mainly regarding size and placement) under military rules, but neo-Nazi, racist, and hate-group symbols are not. There’s some crossover between the benign (if excruciatingly silly) neo-pagan stuff and the white-power knucklehead stuff. Would-be soldiers can be rejected because of such tattoos, and soldiers in service can be discharged for regulation-violating ink. You would think that Hegseth would know this, inasmuch as a great deal of attention has been paid to his own tattoos—including a Jerusalem cross and the slogan “Deus vult,” both of which are associated (though not exclusively) with sundry far-right, racist, fascist, or neo-Nazi movements, as indeed are many other medieval Christian symbols. The reactionary nutjobs like to imagine themselves as Teutonic knights practicing what Hegseth calls the “warrior ethos.” They are, in the main, dorks.

 

The United States has had bearded soldiers for a very long time, including some of our best: Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman leap to mind. In World War I, British national Bhagat Singh Thind, who was studying in the United States at the time, joined the U.S. military to go and fight the Germans, and did so wearing a beard and turban. He was, as you might have guessed from his name, a Sikh, and Sikhs have a long and proud military tradition: Japanese troops trying to invade India via Burma during World War II ran into a wall of beards and turbans, which were the last things many of them saw. Naik Nand Singh of the 11^th Sikh Regiment, who never hosted a Fox News program, was a genuine badass who captured a series of German positions, some of them single-handedly, after being shot in the leg and the face, and he was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery. He was killed by short-range machine-gun fire in the Indo-Pakistan War, and the Pakistanis, after parading his corpse through a nearby city—he was a very famous soldier by that point—disposed of his body in a garbage dump, from which it was never recovered. Beard or no beard, he would be too good to serve under such a figure as Pete Hegseth.

 

I will believe that Hegseth is serious about this stuff when Hegseth starts acting like he is serious about it. As a few observers have pointed out, Hegseth’s Beverly Hills, 90210-style sideburns often extend to a length that would be prohibited under military grooming standards. But there is another area of dress convention that Hegseth violates in practically every public appearance, one that is in fact relevant to his current position: the Flag Code.

 

The Flag Code is written into federal law, though there is no penalty for violating it. It forbids wearing the flag as an article of clothing, a rule Hegseth routinely flouts with his dopey flag-lined suits. It specifically forbids using the flag as a handkerchief, which Hegseth does habitually, tucking it into his chest pocket as a decorative pocket square—and surely, surely not because doing so makes it look like he is wearing some kind of military decoration. Hegseth, Donald Trump, and the members of the movement they represent are habitual violators of the Flag Code, which is not merely an aesthetic concern.

 

Part of the point of the Flag Code is the notion that the flag is not to be treated as though it were merely an item of personal property. It is not to be used for tawdry, tacky, or self-interested purposes such as advertising. Hegseth has obvious contempt for rules of this kind, and Trump has equally obvious contempt for any kind of rule that would put any kind of limitation on his self-aggrandizement and vanity. You can be sure that if Hegseth or Trump preferred to wear a beard, then beards would be mandatory in the military, possibly even for women.

 

What should be understood is that Hegseth is not a patriot, and his flag abuse is not a sign of patriotism in any meaningful sense of the word. What Hegseth has done—and what Trump and his cult have done much more significantly—is to transmogrify patriotism into a category of identity politics, just as they have done to Christianity. Patriotism is not a self-transcending duty to country–it is a self-aggrandizing tribal marker, like Hegseth’s tattoos. Donald Trump has never had a sincerely Christian impulse in all his nearly 80 years walking this Earth. As he made clear during his plainly heretical performance at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, his religious sensibility, to the extent that he has one, is pagan, oriented toward glory, reputation, and earthly things. But he treats Christianity as a kind of badge, brandishing a Bible from time to time. (He ought to try reading one.) Trump, of course, has only the pagan vices, and not the pagan virtues: He loves the idea of manliness and martial heroism, but when his country came calling to ask him to fight, he showed himself to be a plain sniveling coward, reportedly paying a doctor to invent a medical condition that kept him from being drafted—a condition that magically went away, with no treatment, as soon as the threat of glory had passed.

 

His tattoos aside, Hegseth has nothing in common with the crusaders who gave up a great deal—from physical comfort to, in many cases, their lives—in the service of what they believed to be a Christian mandate. Hegseth is more of a camp-follower, part of one of those trains of merchants and prostitutes that long followed armies into battle for self-interested commercial reasons. His flag displays are a matter of—to borrow Hegseth’s own words—“superficial individual expression.”

 

I know something about that.

 

The allure of delusional self-adoration can be powerful. When a junior high vice principal made me cut my hair (picture your obedient correspondent at 15 with a blond Robert Smith-circa-Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me rats’ nest), I was much offended. I believed, in the sincerest possible way, that I was a unique, very special, possibly heroic 15-year-old, one destined for great things, and, above all, one whose autonomy and personal sense of self had to be respected at all times, damn the rules. It all seemed incontrovertible at the time. But I am not in junior high school anymore. Pete Hegseth somehow is. Princeton owes him a refund.

 

And his tailor owes him an apology.

The Great Relearning

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, October 02, 2025

 

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a glossy feature on Laurie Cooper, a seasoned socialite and “influencer” who is urging women to engage in a risky strategy to meet potential mates. She is telling them to go to bars.

 

Cooper dubbed this month “Sit at the Bar September,” figuring it would be a better alternative for women than endlessly scrolling through men on dating apps.

 

“A vast majority of us just haven’t had the confidence to execute it,” Mikaela Phillips, 28, a producer in Los Angeles, told the Times. “Now it’s become acceptable: Head out and give this a shot. Hopefully the men are catching on and open to it just as much.”

 

Of course, for many men, “Sit at the Bar September” is known by its more common name, “September.” It is impossible to contemplate the fortunes bars have spent over the past few decades trying to lure women to their stools. Owners know promotions like “ladies’ night” bring the women to their establishments. And yet it took a recommendation by a veteran bar-goer to actually (reportedly) make it happen. (The article doesn’t say how many trips around the sun Cooper has experienced, but it is clear she would have been more Team Robert Redford than Team Harry Styles.)

 

The Times’ story is newsworthy only because in silly eras, common sense passes for innovation. Over the past 25 years, the online world has promised to simplify the dating process, with algorithms linking like-minded people without requiring them to do oppressive things such as leaving the house.

 

But even with today’s artificial intelligence, nobody really knows what attracts people to each other. Not everyone wants to date someone exactly like themselves. The heart wants what it wants; the world needs to be open to such unlikely matches as, say, a loudmouthed, philandering, chubby, spray-tanned real estate developer and an aloof, high-cheek-boned, Slovenian supermodel decades his junior. Miracles do happen!

 

Yet, on an almost daily basis, we are having to relearn lessons forged by humans over centuries of interaction and experience. Example: For years now, students have been outsourcing their essays to ChatGPT or its AI cousins, producing immaculate five-paragraph manifestos on topics they barely understand. Teachers are catching on, and some schools are reemphasizing the radical idea of writing things down on paper with a pencil. This, too, is something we used to know — that learning isn’t just about the final product but about the messy process of thinking, erasing, rewriting, and getting a hand cramp. (And should be done in school without the constant distraction of cellphones, another obvious lesson we are still only beginning to process.)

 

During the Covid era — itself a lesson in relearning our powerlessness in the face of nature — Americans immediately resorted to old-timey, tried-and-true hobbies to kill time. People were clandestinely buying yeast from dealers on street corners in order to make sourdough bread. Sales of books spiked. More people started writing journals and working on puzzles. (I even bought a bicycle, which a major national publication decided should be worldwide news.)

 

Even today, though, America remains very much in the “FO” part of the “FAFO” formulation, despite centuries of experience that should have helped us avoid our current plight. No “FA” was necessary to contemplate the consequences, for instance, of the government pumping trillions of dollars into the economy just as it was roaring back from the Covid downturn. The simplest of analyses and centuries of examples taught us that dousing the economy with cash, as if it were a World Series winner being sprayed with Champagne, would overheat the markets and lead to inflation.

 

We knew that escalating tariffs would keep that inflation high, as already overstretched American consumers would be saddled with paying the new import taxes. And yet President Kool-Aid Man decided to ignore virtually every economic analysis and crashed through the tariff wall, using it as a bargaining chip, which few trade partners have decided to cash in on. As an economist who specializes in red, sugary, powdered drinks might say, OH, NOOOOOO!

 

The Trump era has compelled us to reexamine a significant number of ideas and concepts we once believed to be settled. For instance, the Founding Fathers implemented a First Amendment for a reason — to prevent government retaliation for speech a thin-skinned president may not like. We have had to reassert the plainly spelled-out right to birthright citizenship found in the 14th Amendment. For some reason, we have had to convince people all over again that vaccines save lives and that pregnant women can safely take Tylenol, as their doctors have long told them.

 

This is what makes the modern era of conservatism so disappointing. We are the ones who have learned the lessons from history and demand that courts apply the law as it was meant when written. We are the ones who believe in a society formed by tradition. We are the ones who have demanded serious presidents who didn’t behave like a drumming Muppet. Republicans were once the reflective and resolute ones, but the party of small government is now shepherded by a leader who will enthusiastically use powers he does not actually possess to meddle in matters large and small, from the military to Taylor Swift’s hotness.

 

In the past, the need to relearn fundamental lessons has been the bailiwick of progressivism, whose charge has been to straighten Immanuel Kant’s “crooked timber of humanity,” whether humanity asks for it or not. Progressives believe that human nature can be suppressed to create a new version of women and men who identify themselves in terms of groups rather than as individuals, in contradiction of virtually every uprising staged by freedom-loving people looking to escape the boot heel of government.

 

Consequently, the progressive experience has taken a beating in recent years. Leftists are learning that people want to live in cities that haven’t been overrun by homeless drug addicts. They are figuring out that using taxpayer money for prisoner “gender-reassignment” surgeries and allowing surgeons to mutilate the bodies of children who’ve been told they can change genders might not be a big political winner. They are beginning to realize that handing the Democratic Party over to their most virulent culture warriors has repelled middle America. In Donald Rumsfeldian nomenclature, these have always been “known knowns.”

 

So what’s going on here? Partly it’s arrogance. Every new generation believes that it’s smarter than the ones before it. Partly it’s convenience: apps are easier than awkward conversations, and having AI write papers for you is a real time-saver. And partly it’s just human nature. Forgetting and relearning is how we stumble forward, mistaking rediscovery for progress.

 

So as we watch young men and women nervously attempt eye contact at bars again, or students scratch out essays with pencils, or a president run up against the First Amendment, maybe we should take comfort. Yes, it’s frustrating to keep relearning the obvious. But it also means the cycle works: we do remember, eventually. Civilization survives on these little rediscoveries.

You Actually Don’t Want to Drive Your Opponents Crazy

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 01, 2025

 

Republicans with long memories are experiencing some foreboding déjà vu.

 

The Democratic Party’s loudest, if not most representative, voters are spitting mad. They appear to reserve most of their manic hostility not for their Republican opponents but their fellow Democrats. They demand catharsis from their legislators — grand futile gestures that trade tactical soundness for visceral pique. And they are increasingly succumbing to magical thinking.

 

Of that, the ongoing government shutdown is illustrative. In the weeks leading up to the present impasse, Democratic lawmakers were positively funereal when describing their unenviable position to reporters. “We may not have the luxury of a victory scenario,” said Democratic Representative Jared Huffman. He was one of many Democrats who could not conceive of what a shutdown could possibly accomplish but who were resigned to one if only because they would be pilloried by the firebrands in their party if they didn’t surrender their better judgment to the mob.

 

For example: “This is about people being able to insure their children,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Tuesday night. “What I’m not going to do is tolerate 4 million uninsured Americans because Donald Trump decided one day that he wants to just make sure that kids are dying because they don’t have access to insurance.”

 

That’s the sort of cheap demagoguery that puts butts in seats. There is, however, no logical sequence of events that gets Democrats from point A, the shutdown, to point B, the fruition of all their worldly demands. If you clap hard enough, perhaps you can force Republicans to reverse their only major legislative achievement of this Congress. And if the GOP continues to balk, it’s because you didn’t clap hard enough. Don’t dare ask how. Only those with the stomach for the fight — even a doomed, foolish, strategically incomprehensible one — have the gumption to meet the measure of the moment.

 

If that sounds familiar to you, you’re not imagining things. According to the most recent Pew Research Center survey, the Democratic rank and file’s opinion of their elected officials is lower than it has been at any point in the last decade. Indeed, the Democratic mood is eerily redolent of the fatalistic outlook that consumed the GOP in the middle of the last decade.

 

At the outset of 2015, the Republican Party maintained a 247-seat House majority. They held 54 seats in the U.S. Senate. Republicans controlled 31 governorships, 68 of the country’s 99 legislative chambers, and, in half the union, the GOP claimed “trifecta” control of all the levers of government. That was also when the Republican Party’s “base” voters convinced themselves that Republicans only ever lose. Their opposition was perfunctory — “failure theater,” they called it. Even in victory, the GOP wasn’t worth much because its pointy-headed tactics and attachment to scruples no one else observed ceded the country to malign forces. The nation was so far gone that there wasn’t even much worth salvaging. Perhaps it was time to “burn it down” and let something better emerge from the ashes.

 

It was illogical and impulsive, but it wasn’t unprovoked. Democrats and their media allies probably don’t remember the degree to which they made goading Republicans into a sport, whipping their members and representatives into a deliberate fury with the aim of exploiting their blinding rage.

 

They don’t fully recall the radicalizing campaign to brand Mitt Romney a homicidal racist, nor do they remember the similar verdict they pronounced on his voters. They have forgotten the Republican Party’s “war on women” contrivance predicated on a knowingly misleading reading of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. They don’t remember the “code words” only they could hear, the efforts to transform the assassination of police officers into a national conversation on the legacy of slavery, or the degree to which the liberal activist class nakedly celebrated the “gift” represented by the deaths of unarmed African Americans for the rhetorical opportunities they presented.

 

Nor do they recall the president’s condescension. Not even a dim recollection comes to mind when Republicans reflect on Obama’s efforts to blame Republican bigotry for his administration’s failure to contain the spread of radical Islamist terrorism, with the willing complicity of the media. There’s no indication that Obama’s efforts to mock concerns over the last decade’s refugee crisis — grown men “scared of 3-year-old orphans” — rings any bells. If they remember that administration’s attempt to anathematize Fox News and exile it from the White House grounds, they only remember it as righteously justified.

 

At the time, it wasn’t even especially controversial to observe that Obama and his allies loved “bringing out the worst in Republicans” because it “serves both his political and his policy purposes,” as liberal blogger Bill Scher put it. Slate’s editors deemed Obama’s approach to politics “refined cynicism,” but the article by CBS News broadcaster John Dickerson put a finer point on it: “This is trolling,” he wrote.

 

That’s exactly right. Obama’s efforts to provoke, not for provocation’s sake but to put his enemies on their back foot, cloud their judgment, and mask his party’s electoral failures from its voters was quite effective. It achieved all of those objectives, radicalizing the unstable as well as the well-adjusted but deeply and sincerely concerned.

 

Obama’s agitation drove Republican voters to distraction, and, as a result, the GOP did become marginally less appealing to the American voting public. Not since 2015 has the Republican Party approached the level of political dominance it enjoyed at the time, after all. But the GOP was not shut out of power. Voters prioritize many things, and sometimes their public policy objectives trump other concerns.

 

Indeed, those other concerns have ensured that Donald Trump has stood astride the American political landscape like a colossus for a decade. There is a lesson in that for Republicans as they successfully imitate Obama’s approach — needling Democratic voters to the point that they take leave of their senses.

 

There are too many such incidents to count. Only the most recent involve making an AI-generated video featuring Chuck Schumer denouncing his party alongside Hakeem Jefferies bearing a handlebar mustache and wearing a cartoonishly large sombrero. Episodes in which Pete Hegseth muses publicly about using American cities as “training grounds” for urban warfare exercises and the president’s profligate prodding of Democrats with Trump 2028-branded merchandise feature prominently in that list. Threatening the city of Chicago, which is “about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” in a social media post featuring an image of Donald Trump as Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now flanked by a fleet of Huey helicopters against the Windy City’s skyline, serves no higher purpose than to drive Democrats insane.

 

Well, it’s working, but perhaps not to the Republican Party’s long-term benefit, to say nothing of America’s. If the Democratic Party’s trajectory resembles the GOP’s, its beleaguered doyens who no longer understand their own voters will be gone soon — swept away in primary challenges or retiring from public life in advance of their voters’ judgments. Those Democrats will be replaced by a feistier sort, more ideologically dogmatic and less inclined toward compromise. Democratic voters may summon from the ether a demagogue who reflects and harnesses their passions in much the same way that the GOP manifested Trump. And just because that intemperate, maximalist version of the Democratic Party seems to depart from the erstwhile American civic consensus, that doesn’t mean voters will block its path back to power.

 

So, beware Republicans. That emotionally gratifying troll sure is tempting, and your Democratic targets willingly give you exactly the reaction you’re looking for at every turn. But you risk unforeseen consequences when your prey resolves to mete out revenge and voters give them the tools to pursue it. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Fight Club

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, October 01, 2025

 

Being a pleonast means spending a few thousand words on a subject that can be explained by a bar graph at a glance.

 

Why have Democrats, traditionally the anti-shutdown party, forced a government shutdown? What do they hope to gain from it? What does the endgame look like?

 

Here’s the answer to those questions. If you want to skip the rest of this piece, feel free.

 

Talking Points Memo editor and fellow pleonast Josh Marshall elaborated on the rationale for a shutdown in a piece titled “Let It Happen.” Democrats “need to show there is an opposition out there willing to fight the imposition of a presidential autocracy,” he wrote. “If they’re not, who else will have the courage or inclination to take any risks and fight? An opposition requires morale to remain in the fight and endure while its opponents are holding most of the power.”

 

Three sentences, three uses of the word “fight,” zero mentions of a realistic policy goal. To repeat what I said in March, the last time Democrats considered doing something like this: I’ve seen this movie before. And it sucked.

 

The fight that the two parties are about to have is based on false pretenses, in fact. Democrats are doubtless sincere in demanding that Republicans extend federal subsidies for Obamacare insurance plans and roll back the cuts to Medicaid made under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but health care policy isn’t why so many leftists are clamoring for obstructionism.

 

They’re clamoring for it because they want to punch the fascist bully in the nose. They’re scared and demoralized by America’s turn towards authoritarianism, as they should be, and are frantic to exert what little power they still have in Washington to stop Donald Trump from getting his way once again. They’ve chosen to frame the fight in terms of health care rather than creeping Caesarism because they’ve digested the grim lesson of the 2024 election, that modern Americans don’t care about democracy. They care only about their own bottom lines.

 

The coming battle over health care is a test to see if the minority power retains any leverage whatsoever over the direction of a country that looks more third-world every day.

 

What I can’t figure out is what would need to happen for Democrats to believe that they passed that test. What does winning this “fight” look like? What sequence of events would have to unfold for liberals to say a few weeks from now, “That was absolutely worth doing”?

 

The bad news for liberals is that I can’t come up with a solid answer. The good news is that it almost certainly doesn’t matter. Goldfish-brained voters don’t care about shutdowns.

 

Risks.

 

The first problem for Democrats in trying to win the battle for public opinion is that, for once, they’re the ones who are taking hostages in hopes of obtaining a ransom.

 

The side that favors a so-called “clean” continuing resolution to fund the government has an irresistible argument in its favor, that it simply wants to maintain the level of spending that the two parties previously agreed to. Traditionally that’s been Democrats; now, implausibly, the renegade Trump-era GOP has been thrust into defending the status quo.

 

It’s hard to convince voters who care only about their own bottom lines to support a major disruption in government services that will affect their bottom lines. And it’s hard to convince the governing party to compromise when it has a compelling political incentive not to: If it rewards hostage-taking by the minority, that tactic will obviously be used again later to try to extract further concessions.

 

Republicans tried repeatedly during the Tea Party era to secure lasting, meaningful spending reforms from Democrats by defunding the government. They failed. There’s a lesson there about how likely Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are to get Trump, a figure who lives in terror of being seen as weak, to cave now.

 

The second problem is that Schumer is playing a weak hand.

 

Yesterday, before the shutdown even began, three members of his caucus switched sides and voted with Republicans to keep the government open—Angus King of Maine, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. (Fetterman has embraced the “maverick” brand so tightly that he may be the only person in Congress on either side who’s pleased with Trump’s trade war.) If Democratic unity is already fracturing on day one, it’s reasonable to wonder if Schumer can prevent a mutiny among his moderates that ends the shutdown prematurely. Even if he can, Democrats now face having prominent figures in their own party arguing the GOP’s case for passing a clean CR.

 

To make matters worse, Russell Vought is poised to make this hurt.

 

Vought is the head of the Office of Management and Budget, the arm of the White House responsible for deciding how federal agencies should operate when funding runs out. Normally OMB would be looking for ways to reduce the pain of a shutdown for Americans, but Vought is an authoritarian fanatic (he wants a veto over Congress’ power of the purse, for instance), and like all authoritarian fanatics he revels in ruthlessness. His ruthless solution to Democratic hostage-taking is to take hostages of his own: He’s threatening to use the shutdown as a pretext to fire thousands of federal workers, perhaps beginning as soon as tomorrow, to continue the work of Elon Musk and DOGE at the start of Trump’s presidency.

 

If Vought follows through, Americans might blame him and the president for the bloodletting—or they might blame Schumer and the Democrats, the party that triggered the shutdown, for creating the circumstances that made it possible. How steadfast do we think moderate Senate Dems will remain once panicked federal employees are dialing up their offices en masse, begging them to make a deal before they’re canned? Will America be better or worse off once Vought and Trump begin replacing career civil servants with likeminded authoritarian fanatics recruited from the MAGA bench?

 

You might interject at this point to say, à la Josh Marshall, that all of this is beside the point. Everyone understands that Democrats won’t have their demands met. The shutdown needs to happen anyway simply to show the liberal base that its leaders are willing to put up a fight. It’s a morale-building exercise at a moment when left-wing morale is about as low as it can realistically be.

 

Is it? Let’s think this through.

 

Morale.

 

Do you think liberal morale will improve if eight Senate Democrats end up knuckling under to Vought’s threats and voting with Republicans to end the shutdown?

 

If this is a test of whether the minority party in Washington can muster a meaningful stand against authoritarianism, it’s hard to imagine a more spectacularly demoralizing failure than that.

 

It’s hard to imagine any outcome that doesn’t further anger the base, in fact—another lesson we all should have learned from the right’s Tea Party era. I suspect former congressional staffer Matt Glassman is right in expecting a relatively short shutdown that ends with “handshake assurances” between Schumer and Republicans that the parties will negotiate an extension of Obamacare subsidies after the government reopens. And I suspect I’m right that liberals will lose their minds when that happens, accusing Schumer of having forfeited his leverage in exchange for nothing more than a gentlemen’s agreement with a movement that no longer contains any gentlemen.

 

The only way to impress one’s base in a “fight for fight’s sake” standoff like this one is to force the other side to capitulate totally, a near-impossibility. And here’s an interesting quirk of the current shutdown: Even if the president did capitulate totally, that still might not do much good for left-wing morale long-term.

 

Democrats have reportedly identified Trump himself as the potential weak link in the GOP’s united shutdown front, and for good reason. Yes, granted, the president won’t want to look soft, but there’s nothing he loves more than a deal. He’s also been known to get squeamish about his positions as the economic stakes rise, which they will if the shutdown drags on. And he’s allegedly “obsessed” with retaining control of Congress in next year’s midterms, enough so to have egged on an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting effort in red states.

 

All of that being so, if you’re Donald Trump, would it be the worst thing in the world to give in to Schumer’s demands?

 

Unlike more traditional conservatives like Senator Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson, the president doesn’t care about federal spending. He knows that Democrats are planning to run on health care next fall, knows that voters who lose their Obamacare subsidies will be furious at him, and presumably knows that polling on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is terrible. Schumer is essentially inviting him to solve those problems and take the left’s most potent issue off the table. Why shouldn’t he accept?

 

Republicans have such a strong incentive to make a deal on health care before the midterms, argues Ed Kilgore at New York magazine, that Democrats don’t actually need to twist their arms over it by forcing a shutdown. “Why not just keep the government open and negotiate with Trump on their one realizable goal [i.e. extending Obamacare subsidies],” he wonders, “knowing that if a deal doesn’t happen the president and his party will totally get blamed for the premium spikes?”

 

The solution to the liberal morale problems can’t be to throw the White House into a political briar patch. Democratic voters won’t be gratified by a “win” that leaves Trump functionally in a stronger political position and does nothing to achieve the submerged goal of this fight, dealing a blow to authoritarianism. There will be nothing left of left-wing morale in 2027 if the outcome here helps the GOP hold onto its majorities in the House and Senate next fall.

 

There might not be much left in a month, frankly, if Republicans’ talking point about Democrats fighting to provide “health care for illegal immigrants” catches on with swing voters. No one seems to know what they mean by that (coverage for DREAMers? “Emergency Medicaid” for ER visits?) but outlets like Fox News are hammering it hard enough that I’ve had MAGA-friendly relatives repeat the claim to me verbatim in conversation. Presumably it means nothing: It’s just something that a demagogic nationalist party says to encourage suspicions that Democrats care more about foreigners than they do about Americans.

 

But that doesn’t mean it won’t work. Imagine the state of left-wing morale if this shutdown ends with most Americans siding with Republicans because they’re convinced that sombrero-wearing Hakeem Jeffries couldn’t bear the thought of illegals losing taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies that they’re not actually receiving.

 

Still, there is some good news for the left in all this.

 

Goldfish brain.

 

The first bit of good news is that Democrats could plausibly win this fight, if by “win” we mean earn a greater share of public support than Republicans. Already some surveys show Americans more likely to blame Trump’s party than Schumer’s for a shutdown. A New York Times poll that found 65 percent of respondents opposed to Democrats shutting down the government nonetheless found independents twice as likely to blame Republicans for a shutdown.

 

Wherever the numbers land, though, it’s unlikely that either side will gain a decisive advantage over the other. (One nonpartisan poll this week saw 35 percent blaming the White House or Republicans for a shutdown versus 34 percent who blamed Democrats.) And without a decisive advantage, it’s hard to see how this will matter in a month, let alone a year.

 

The second bit of good news is that Americans don’t care about shutdowns. That is to say, even if this one goes sideways for Democrats, Chuck Schumer’s party probably won’t pay a price at the polls.

 

Again we find precedents in the Tea Party era. There was no more quixotic shutdown than the one Ted Cruz led in 2013 to try to block Obamacare from taking effect, and Cruz’s party suffered for it—or so it seemed. A year later, Republicans obliterated Democrats in the midterm elections and gained nine seats in the Senate.

 

If voters were too goldfish-brained to remember the 2013 stunt in 2014, they’re really unlikely to remember the Democrats’ current stunt next November given the pace of America’s third-world devolution. You read this newsletter every day; you know how much gonzo postliberal derangement this country has endured since January and will yet endure over the next 13 months. By next fall, we’re more likely to be talking about Trump trying to get the military to nuke Portland than we are the political merits of Chuck Schumer’s distant shutdown gambit.

 

Which brings us to the last piece of good news for lefties. This episode is unlikely to increase their party’s leverage over Trump, but it certainly could increase progressive leverage over the party.

 

That’s because liberals have lost confidence in their leadership. Asked if their party has strong leaders, 80 percent of Republicans say so compared to just 35 percent of Democrats. Only 21 percent of Republicans think their party needs major changes; 57 percent of Democrats say so of their own side by comparison.

 

For various reasons ranging from weakness on law-and-order issues to status-quo biases to passivity towards Trump’s constitutional assault to growing hostility to Israel on the left, popular esteem for the Democratic establishment has collapsed. One new poll found 59 percent of Democrats now disapprove of how their party’s leaders in Congress are handling their jobs; in 2014, at the height of Tea Party fever on the right and on the eve of Trumpism, a nearly identical percentage of Republicans said the same about the GOP’s congressional leadership.

 

Like House Speaker John Boehner in 2013, Chuck Schumer is moving forward with a shutdown that he almost certainly believes won’t succeed because he fears the intense anti-establishment mood among his base and is hoping to mollify them. By giving rank-and-file Democrats what they want, he aims to show them that they don’t need new leadership. Their current leaders can and will do their representative duty by “fighting” when the grassroots insists.

 

And like John Boehner before him, it will almost certainly blow up in his face.

 

When Schumer fails to win meaningful concessions, those same grassroots Democrats will cite it as proof that the party desperately needs new leaders who’ll fight hard and enthusiastically, without needing to be browbeaten into doing so. The Republican establishment spent most of Barack Obama’s two terms picking fights with the then-president to appease their own grassroots, without much to show for it; in 2016 their voters punished them for that failure by handing the party to a postliberal goblin who’s set about trying to dismantle everything that traditional conservatives ever believed in.

 

You can’t win a legislative “fight” in which the unconditional surrender of one’s political enemies is the only victory that’s acceptable to your base, but you can—and will—be faulted for losing it. Boehner and Mitch McConnell learned that lesson the hard way. I expect Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries will too.

The Ineluctable Logic of Regime Change

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 01, 2025

 

A little less than a month ago, we learned of the first lethal U.S. military operation targeting what Trump administration officials claimed were Venezuelan drug boats bound for ports unknown in the Caribbean. Following that action, I pointed out what I thought was the primary strategic flaw (to say nothing of its legal and tactical shortcomings) in what the administration promised would be a sustained kinetic campaign:

 

The problem with a drug war are the trade’s twin pillars — supply and demand. The demand is not going away. Many have tried to use the power and influence of the state to compel Americans to abandon their taste for illegal intoxicants. All have failed. So, the administration is going after the suppliers. They and their sponsors will adapt to these attacks, shift tactics, and perhaps even attempt to retaliate. Even if those efforts come up short, there will be drug boats so long as there are suppliers and a market for their goods.

 

Invariably, then, American military planners will be compelled to target suppliers closer and closer to their sources. Those options are surely already available to the president. If those sources cannot be disrupted because of their support from the regime, regime targets must be next. So, up the escalatory ladder we go.

 

The administration was correct to conclude that the illegitimate, criminal, anti-American regime in Caracas would continue to pose a threat to U.S. interests so long as it remained in power. “That is why the logic of a kinetic war on the drugs that emanate from Venezuela invariably will lead to escalation,” I wrote.

 

Welp.

 

“The push by top aides to President Trump to remove Nicolás Maduro as the leader of Venezuela has intensified in recent days, with administration officials discussing a broad campaign that would escalate military pressure to try to force him out,” the New York Times reported Monday.

 

The four-bylined dispatch identifies Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio as the foremost advocate of a broad strategic effort aimed at securing regime change in Venezuela. It contends further that Rubio is supported in that initiative by CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the president’s domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller.

 

“Because administration officials assert Mr. Maduro sits atop Venezuela’s cartel network, they can argue that removing him from power is ultimately a counternarcotics operation,” the Times report continues. For now, the administration is “focused on fighting drug cartels,” but the U.S. has not amassed the naval firepower that is presently floating off Venezuela’s coast to interdict drug boats. The president has options.

 

“Some people briefed on the discussions suggested that Mr. Rubio and his allies were first looking for ways to oust Mr. Maduro without having to resort to direct U.S. military action,” the Times concludes. And there are voices inside the administration who advocate covert and diplomatic offensives designed, if not to usher Maduro out of power, at least to safeguard America’s economic and strategic interests in the region.

 

But those interests will not be wholly secured without the collapse of the Maduro regime and, perhaps, its sponsors in places like Havana. It always seemed like that was where the logic of the president’s muscular approach to relations with Venezuela was going — not a repudiation of the hated neocons, what with their penchant for the maximum, disproportionate application of force in the pursuit of strategic objectives, but a ratification of the rationale that culminated in Saddam Hussein’s ouster.

 

You can practically hear the gears turning as administration officials wrestle with their own cognitive dissonance.

America’s Young Communists Really Believe True Communism Has Never Been Tried

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, September 29, 2025

 

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal offered a deeply reported analysis of the young socialists who are fueling the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left in the past years, tracing it back to economic anxieties of the Great Recession. There’s an eye-opening description of a meeting of communists in Philadelphia:

 

On a recent evening, 15 comrades from the Northwest Philadelphia cell of the Revolutionary Communists of America gathered for their weekly meeting in a classroom at Thomas Jefferson University.

 

The mostly 20- and 30-somethings had eschewed the Mao caps and Che Guevara T-shirts of previous generations. Soon, though, terms like “ruling class,” “parasitic,” “bourgeoisie” and “dialectic” were bandied about the room as they settled into an earnest discussion of the assigned reading, an article entitled “Morality and the Class Struggle.” References to the 2008 crisis were also plentiful. Several members invoked it when explaining what prompted them to ditch “the milquetoast” left, as one called it.

 

Zach Bickel, 34, blamed the crisis for taking his father’s job and causing his community in central Pennsylvania to be “whittled away.”

 

“The system never really recovered from 2008,” said Nico Melton, 25, who claimed to have become disillusioned while studying at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, the capitalist bastion that is Trump’s alma mater. Melton was one of just a few members when the cell was formed about a year ago.

 

At times, the meeting felt like a support group—in this case, for people suffering from the modern economy. Communism, they acknowledged, hadn’t worked anywhere in the world it had been attempted—at least not yet.

 

Now, I just want you to take a moment to savor the off-the-charts arrogance to look at the entire evil history of communism, with its gulags, secret police, invasions, wholesale suppression of dissent and free speech, political prisoners, forced labor camps, the Holodomor, the Great Purge, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Cambodian genocide, and modern-day North Korea . . . and then to conclude, “Yes, but we can make it work better. It will be different when we do it!”

 

Every previous group of communists has been equally convinced that this time, everything will turn out differently, concentrating massive amounts of power in the state won’t lead to the corruption of those running it, the stifling of dissent will be for the greater good, the state punishment of those who disagree will be fair and not abusive, and a worker’s paradise is just a five-year plan away. It would be funny if it didn’t represent such willful blindness, and if people like this weren’t gaining more strength in the modern Democratic Party.