The Unwelcome Return of Sentimental Socialism

By Christine Rosen

Saturday, August 08, 2026

 

There are many ways of looking at the recent political successes of the Democratic Socialists of America. Thoughtful analysts have compared the DSA to the earlier Tea Party movement and the later rise of President Trump’s MAGA movement — groups that moved the GOP more firmly to the right, as the DSA is moving the Democratic Party to the left. Others have viewed young Americans’ positive views of socialism as a legitimate expression of concern about economic opportunity and social mobility that DSA candidates have cannily capitalized upon. Still others have noted the DSA’s skill in turning itself into a political movement with a very broad tent, where haters of Israel and haters of landlords can all peacefully coexist at the same hip pool parties and where embittered graduate students can mingle with content creators and children of wealth and privilege such as far-left streamer Hasan Piker, all while discussing the evils of late-stage capitalism.

 

But one aspect of the DSA’s appeal has been too often overlooked, particularly by conservative critics: its appeal as a form of instant community for a generation that often lacks one. DSA supporters are a highly homogenous group: 85 percent of DSA members are white, and 80 percent of them have college degrees. But it turns out that one of the things this knowledge-class proletariat is seeking (besides the abolition of prisons and the end of landlords) is . . . friends?

 

Reporting from the recent DSA summit, the New York Times noted that “for many of its members, the DSA is both a political and a social home.” One DSA leader told the paper that “the DSA fills the same social function for him that the Catholic Church played for his parents when they were in their 30s.” Another young DSA leader echoed the sentiment: “Our generation is so alienated — when you go to a canvas [canvassing for a political campaign], it’s a huge social affair.”

 

The Times found similar positive social impacts during Zohran Mamdani’s run for New York City mayor last year, describing Mamdani campaign events (which included organized scavenger hunts, board game nights, singles meetups, and crafting sessions where devotees made beaded bracelets spelling out “Zohran for NYC”) as “a salve” for young people suffering from anxiety. “It’s honestly what I would prescribe for the loneliness epidemic,” one Mamdani supporter said.

 

Socialism as a cure for loneliness might seem farcical (the jokes write themselves: You’re never alone in a bread line! etc., etc.). But paired with the DSA’s youthful and ironically hip aesthetic, it’s no wonder it’s proved to be an intoxicating brew for a population of young people grown weary of both established political parties. During the DSA summit, at a nearby dive bar, DSA acolytes “punched their fists in the air” and “formed a sea of sweatshirts that read ‘Red Hot Socialist Summer’” while a nearby socialist merch table hawked copies of The Communist Manifesto (which sold out).

 

Self-aware DSA types in the media often downplay the fact that DSA members are a rather privileged group. A recent piece in the New Yorker acknowledged that “they are indeed ‘privileged’ in the boring sense of that word,” as if being college-educated, living in gentrified neighborhoods in blue cities, and being economically not “particularly worse off than their boomer parents were at the same point in their lives” were irrelevant facts; Marx and Engels came from great wealth and privilege, after all. And so we are meant also to sympathize with the revolutionary tendencies of what the New Yorker describes as “a college-educated voter in her early thirties who isn’t making as much as she thought she would.” Why? Because “what matters isn’t so much the specific policies but rather the promise of upheaval.”

 

This would not be the first generation of youth to revel in such abstractions. The current iteration of socialism resembles an earlier movement: sentimental socialism. Described by British socialist Ernest Belfort Bax in 1884 as adherents of a type of “unscientific” socialism, 19th-century sentimental socialists share some similarities with their modern counterparts. Bax described them as “the young people of the well-to-do middle class” who “think human nature susceptible of higher aims than the current ones, and meet in drawing rooms for the apparent purpose of passing resolutions to that effect.” He found that “the sentimental Socialist desires above all things to be broad and comprehensive.”

 

Like today’s DSA supporters, sentimental socialists were motivated not by concerns for the working class, but by their own ennui: “The young men and women of our blasé middle-class civilization require a stimulus; this stimulus may be aesthetic, philanthropic, or social,” Bax noted. “It may consist in languishing vapouring on art, on improved dwellings, on social reconstruction.” Bax was a bit impatient with their navel-gazing complaints: “The whole movement is born of the morbid self-consciousness of our Christian and Bourgeois civilisation run to seed.”

 

Like sentimental socialists of old, the current crop of socialist youth, surrounded by others exactly like themselves and marinating in resentment about their circumstances, risks falling prey to what William James called the “sentimentalist fallacy,” or the tendency to “shed tears over abstract justice and generosity, beauty, etc. and never to know these qualities when you meet them in the street.” His example was “the weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside.” Today’s equivalent might be the Sey Coffee barista with a Ph.D. in post-colonial studies who is invested in seeing herself as downtrodden (while ignoring the genuinely struggling working-class people who surround her).

 

Writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, former Democratic congressman Daniel Lipinski tried to calm fears of a radical takeover of the Democratic Party by the DSA. He claimed “it is best to understand what is happening inside the Democratic Party today not as a widespread endorsement of the DSA platform, but more broadly as a protest by those fearful about the future and feeling betrayed by the perceived fecklessness of party leaders. Such emotions make fertile ground for demagogues.”

 

Today’s DSA demagogues-in-training already know this; the question is when their young followers, busy with their communal political gatherings and reveling in sentimental abstractions, will see how deeply cynical — and harmful to a free society — the political program they are supporting really is.

Is Anyone in Iran Willing to Accept Trump’s Surrender?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 07, 2026

 

Some have speculated that, when dealing with state terror sponsors with nuclear ambitions, Trump’s conduct of the war against Iran risks discrediting the military option. Well, at least in Trump’s case, it should.

 

Those doing the speculating would be hard-pressed to find an advocate for a muscular, extroverted American presence on the world stage who would endorse the president’s bipolar war-fighting strategy.

 

As any reasonable observer should be expected to concede (as evidence of his reasonableness, if nothing else), Operation Epic Fury was a tremendous tactical success. Even America’s failures — such as the shooting down of an F-15 Eagle — were a success, lest you believe that America’s adversaries take no notice of our ability to establish a forward-operating airbase deep inside Iran that successfully exfiltrated our airmen. Even if America’s adversaries are emboldened by the war’s strategic failures, no one can afford to ignore America’s unparalleled ability to project sustained and efficacious force anywhere on earth.

 

But if the war was a triumph, the cease-fire and all that it entailed was disastrous.

 

The cease-fire to which Trump agreed in early April should have lasted no more than a week. That was how long it took to conclude that the Iranians were not abiding by its terms. Moreover, the conditions that supposedly justify Trump’s hesitation are unpersuasive.

 

If the depth of America’s defensive ordnance magazines was a problem then, as it is now, they can be supplemented by offensive capabilities. After all, American offensive strikes had held Iranian missiles in check during high-tempo combat operations. If the Strait of Hormuz was going to be closed, as just about every war-game scenario projected (indeed, the U.S. opened the strait by force in the late 1980s), then Trump should have implemented his blockade of Iranian ports at the outset of hostilities.

 

But after the bombs stopped falling in April, the president swiftly revealed that the reason he wound down the campaign was not that the primary target list was exhausted and dual-use civilian infrastructure was about to be hit next. Rather, he’d simply had enough.

 

The so-called memorandum of understanding was designed to codify Washington’s quiescence — ceding much to the Iranians in return for parchment promises on which the Iranians themselves never delivered. But the remnants of the Islamic Republic were not content to allow the president to slink away. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ periodic strikes on shipping in the strait and civilian targets in the Gulf ultimately forced Trump to start shooting once again.

 

And yet, at no point did Trump resort to truly coercive measures. Instead, he opted to attrit Iranian capabilities, signaling both his indecision and his own reluctance to invite another encounter with his pain-tolerance threshold (Brent Crude at about $110 per barrel).

 

No one with an ounce of strategic sense would fight a war this way. And if Trump’s example discredits his on-again, off-again war fought with the smallest possible force posture — a conflict he sought without consulting the public, their representatives, or America’s treaty-bound allies — we should be grateful.

 

“Far from discovering a new way of war, Trump has merely discovered new ways to lose,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Kori Schake wrote for Foreign Affairs. Had the president observed the Powell Doctrine, she observed — e.g., deploying all state resources, including overwhelming and disproportionate force, in pursuit of clearly delineated objectives — Trump would have more options at his disposal and the IRGC would have fewer.

 

A “cataclysmic defeat” in Iran “is not yet inevitable,” Schake contended. But only an adversarial Congress can dissuade Trump now from sacrificing America’s vital strategic interests to extricate himself from the conflict he started. If the legislature has any intention of saving Trump and the country from the president’s cravenness, they had better act fast.

 

Officially, the Trump administration’s position is that it will oppose a deal that includes Iranian impediments to maritime traffic in the strait — “meaning no approvals or permissions and no tolls or charges,” as one U.S. official put it. But that is what the terms of an Iran-Oman deal would reportedly allow. The U.S. side of this equation hasn’t voiced any objections to that deal — not yet, at least. Even as Iran continues to fire on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and as Iran’s terrorist proxy in Yemen, the Houthi militia, menaces traffic entering the Red Sea — menacing Saudi and Western European assets alike — the president continues to broadcast nigh delusional optimism.

 

Perhaps the administration doesn’t want to get ahead of the negotiations, which might be wise. But the president and his allies are signaling their satisfaction with what are, as publicly reported, unacceptable conditions. Trump is telegraphing his desire to withdraw from the fight, even if that sacrifices America’s role as guarantor of free maritime navigation rights and sets the stage for future challenges to U.S. naval dominance by aggressors far more dangerous than the Islamic Republic.

 

The only ray of light piercing these dusky geopolitical clouds is the degree to which the Iranians, emboldened as they are, don’t seem willing to take yes for an answer.

 

The IRGC overplayed its hand in July, compelling Trump to withdraw the waivers that allowed Iran to sell its oil openly for U.S. dollars. That’s not an outcome the regime wanted, and the intra-regime tensions it caused quickly spilled out into the international press. Iranian negotiators are now reportedly pushing for a deal that would allow them to extort funds not just from incoming ships but also to impose that deal on Washington without Trump’s input. Flush with confidence, the IRGC will not allow Trump to save face.

 

The Iranians may have miscalculated just how much leverage they have over Trump. They’ve certainly misjudged his willingness to admit error, which is what Tehran seems to want. With luck, the Iranians’ obduracy will persuade the president not to give away America’s generational geostrategic heritage — if only because doing so would be too humiliating to bear.

 

As causes for optimism go, that’s not much. But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the president you’ve got.

In the Battleground States, Voters Like Their Economy More Than ‘the Economy’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 06, 2026

 

Navigator Research has released a new poll. It features answers from 1,500 likely 2026 voters, across 67 competitive congressional districts. Among its findings is this:

 

A majority (65%) rate the national economy negatively, including more than four-in-five independents.

 

That’s pretty disastrous stuff! It also found this:

 

High costs are having a direct and personal impact. More than a third (36%) say their personal financial situation is bad.

 

Hang on a moment. That’s a bit odd, no? Here are the full results:

 

 So 63 percent of respondents said that their “personal financial situation” is either “excellent” (11 percent) or “good” (51 percent) — up from 55 percent in May of this year; 64 percent of respondents said that their “personal financial situation” is “better” (15 percent) or “about the same” (49 percent) as it was “a few months ago”; and yet just 34 percent of respondents said that the economy is either “excellent” (5 percent) or “good” (29 percent).

 

I will confess to finding this confusing. One of the criticisms that I often leveled against Joe Biden — and have also leveled against Donald Trump — was that it is impossible to tell people that their financial situation is good when they do not think that it is. It simply does not work. People can see their receipts, their paychecks, their bank accounts, and so forth. They can see their bills. They know how much pizza cost last year relative to this year, or whether they feel secure in their obligations, or whether they are progressing toward their goals. Try as one might, one cannot fake consumer sentiment with happy talk or tell people that they are confident when they are not. If people say that their personal financial situation is a mess, it is fruitless to talk to them about “the economy” as an abstraction.

 

But what happens when those same people say that their personal financial situation is good, and yet remain convinced that, as a general matter, “the economy” is bad? In the Navigator Poll, 63 percent of those asked said that their finances were either “good” or “excellent,” but only 34 percent of those asked said that the economy was “good” or “excellent.” Surely, if one is to remain consistent, then one ought to consider the first answer much more important than the second? It is true, of course, that people’s perception of “the economy” is more than just their own finances. But it shouldn’t be so much more that we see a gap of that size.

 

Ultimately, the economy is the people. If 63 percent of Americans said that their personal financial situation was “not so good” or “poor” but only 34 percent said “the economy” was bad, we’d be shocked, right? We’d say that the economy “wasn’t working for real people”? We’d say that the statistics were useless or fake. Well, shouldn’t we be shocked here, too? And shouldn’t we perhaps reconsider whether the economy is good or bad? Ronald Reagan famously asked, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” He didn’t ask, “is your vague conception of ‘the economy’ more positive than it was four years ago?”

 

Within a democratic system such as ours, it presents something of a problem when nearly two-thirds of the public says that their situation is good or excellent, but just one-third of the public says that the economy is good or excellent. It’s almost as if they’re answering a different question . . .

A Foreseeable and Dire Munitions Crisis

By Rich Lowry

Saturday, August 08, 2026

 

During the 1979–1980 hostage crisis, a defiant Iran starkly demonstrated the limits of American power.

 

Forty-five years later, it is doing the same thing, although in vastly different circumstances.

 

Back then, when the post-Vietnam military was at a low ebb, we didn’t strike Iran, and a long-shot rescue operation ended in abject failure.

 

Now, with the U.S. military at its most proficient and professional in history, we have inflicted punishing blows against the regime but still haven’t been able to impose our will, in part because we are running low on the munitions necessary to prosecute the war.

 

Not only is this embarrassing, it is dangerous.

 

If Operation Midnight Hammer — last year’s lightning strike against Iranian nuclear facilities — demonstrated the prowess of the U.S. military and sent a useful deterrent message to our enemies, the Iran war is now doing the opposite.

 

We’re running low on missiles and interceptors in a monthslong conflict with a beleaguered second-rate power. What would happen in drawn-out war with a major adversary?

 

President Trump has posted a thunderous denunciation of leaks to the media about our depleted weapons stocks, and they are indeed irresponsible. But this problem is a matter of public record and has been tracked by outside organizations.

 

At the end of July, the think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated that out of an arsenal of 2,330 Patriot interceptors before the Iran war, we had roughly 800 remaining. We were down to roughly 250 THAAD interceptors from 450 of the ballistic-missile interceptors at the start of the war.

 

On top of this, news organizations are reporting that we are almost out of ATACMS — a ground-launched precision-strike missile — and Precision Strike Missiles, the newer, longer-range successor to ATACMS.

 

This isn’t comforting at a time when a war with China could be in the offing. Even before Operation Epic Fury, a war game involving a conflict in the Taiwan Strait conducted by CSIS had the U.S. running out of key munitions in days or weeks.

 

What happened? This is a crisis a long time in the making. As defense analyst Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute has warned for years, skimping on the acquisition of munitions was an easy way to meet constrained Pentagon budgets, and we relied on optimistic scenarios about potential wars to justify chronically insufficient production.

 

For some understandable reasons, we also emphasized sophisticated missiles and interceptors over “good enough” systems. This led to Iran, for instance, forcing us to use highly expensive, difficult-to-replace interceptors against cheap, bulk threats from drones.

 

All this means that we’ve expended ordnance that will take us years to build again. According to media reports, we’ve used about half our supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles, when we’ve been manufacturing fewer than 100 a year.

 

We need to put missile production on a wartime footing and leverage hungry new defense firms to produce cheaper precision missiles and interceptors at scale.

 

In World War II terms, it’s the difference between the easy-to-maintain and mass-produce Sherman tank and the exquisite and powerful, but ultimately impractical, Tiger. Whatever advantages the Tiger had in armor and punch, you’d still rather be the U.S. with 50,000 Shermans than the Germans with 1,500 Tigers.

 

The Trump administration has been talking the right game, and there have been encouraging moves. It has signed agreements to acquire 10,000 cruise missiles over three years at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars each, far less than a Tomahawk at more than $2 million.

 

Wars always bring surprises. It should have been a shock to no one, though, that contemporary military conflict is largely missile warfare, or that we’d have trouble sustaining prolonged hostilities given that we started out with inadequate stocks.

 

The American way of warfare is often to mess it up before adjusting and getting it right. The course correction here should be considered the most urgent priority of U.S. national security.

When Does the Democratic Establishment Just Throw Up Its Hands?

By Judson Berger

Friday, August 07, 2026

 

Dark days have fallen on the Democratic establishment.

 

At official headquarters, DNC Chairman Ken Martin is in “survival mode,” the AP reports, avoiding media appearances amid fundraising woes and calls for his ouster. The organization’s troubles keep getting featured in the New York Times (with details Jeff Blehar says point to a party in crisis). Socialists are winning primaries and flexing muscle, amid lingering consternation over the DNC’s misbegotten 2024 “autopsy.”

 

It is perhaps an added cruelty, then, that the Midwest, the region Martin calls home, is the site of the party’s latest trials and humiliations. In Michigan this week, the radical Abdul El-Sayed narrowly pulled off a victory over establishment choice Haley Stevens in the hard-fought primary race for Senate. From National Review’s editorial:

 

His win is an ill omen for the current direction of the Democratic Party — and a terrible development for Michiganders and Americans alike — but an enormous and deeply symbolic victory for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

 

As Jeff wrote ahead of the result (which ended up being closer than expected), the coming general election battle will be competitive, despite President Trump’s unpopularity, “because Detroit cares a lot more about the fate of the auto industry than it does the fate of Gaza.” Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, is by no means a lock but says he is confident he can break Democrats’ 25-year hold on Senate seats in the state.

 

“The crazy train has arrived in Michigan, and AOC is the engineer, and Bernie Sanders throws coal in the fire, and my opponents, with all of their endorsements are riding that train. It’s just not who we are here,” the candidate said in an interview with NR’s Kamden Mulder.

 

Then again, as the editorial cautions, “the problem with a major political party losing its mind is that a goodly number of the candidates it nominates will, if the circumstances are right, make it into office.” Either way, Michigan is now critical for the GOP’s hopes of holding onto the chamber.

 

While El-Sayed has denied he’s a socialist, Kamden notes he’s been outspoken about far-left beliefs:

 

He supports abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, expresses anti-Israeli sentiments, and wants to end the Senate filibuster. He also supports Medicare for All, which is one of his most talked-about issues — aside from Israel — with supporters on the campaign trail.

 

El-Sayed’s rhetoric is out of step with the more moderate stances of his [now-defeated primary] opponent, and many establishment Democrats in the state.

 

That’s just Michigan. Wisconsin is up next, with a gubernatorial primary next week that, in the words of NR’s editorial, could mark the return of so-called sewer socialism, but worse. Again, the establishment is in danger of being steamrolled:

 

Marquette’s latest polling for the state’s gubernatorial race, published on July 29, has Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong at 38 percent, 22 points in front of second-place Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor who lost a Senate race against Ron Johnson and just dropped out. Wisconsin’s Democratic leadership prefers the third-place David Crowley (7 percent), the current Milwaukee County executive. Governor Tony Evers endorsed Crowley after his lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, also withdrew from the race because of gross financial mismanagement. The single primary debate saw Hong go unchallenged while Barnes and Crowley did yeoman’s work convincing viewers that neither of them is up to the job.

 

In short, the field is a mess in Wisconsin’s Democratic race, with voters now “seriously considering a journalism dropout” and holiday-hating weirdo in Francesca Hong, despite the party’s historical success with more boring candidates, as was the case in Michigan for years.

 

Primary voters are making ever-riskier bets, and by all indications, party leaders cannot do a thing about it.

The Concept of America Is on the Ballot This November

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, August 06, 2026

 

For the foreseeable future, any Republican president will be, at minimum, deeply disliked by most Democrats, and any Democratic president will be, at minimum, deeply disliked by most Republicans. The grassroots of the opposition party will outright hate and detest the president.

 

Donald Trump began his presidency with very little approval among Democrats (–70 on the YouGov poll) and now has almost none (–92 in the same survey). It was a similar story in Trump’s first term: He started with a job approval among Democrats around 10 percent and finished around 5 percent.

 

Joe Biden experienced the same dynamic: He started with a job approval among Republicans around 10 percent and finished around 5 percent, coming awfully close to zero every now and then.

 

It hasn’t always been like this. Ronald Reagan’s job approval among Democrats ranged from 20 percent to 40 percent for almost all of his presidency. Bill Clinton’s job approval among Republicans ranged from 15 percent t0 40 percent. George W. Bush’s job approval among Democrats underwent a post-9/11 surge to 80 percent, but by 2004 it was around 20 percent and then declined to 10 percent. Barack Obama’s job approval among Republicans started around 40 percent but quickly dropped to 10 to 15 percent and stayed there.

 

It is just about impossible to imagine a 2028 Republican ticket that has more than minimal support among self-identified Democrats, and vice versa. The only Democrat with any significant level of support among Republicans is Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who is a strange outlier; a June Quinnipiac poll of registered voters in Fetterman’s home state found that 77 percent of surveyed Republicans said they approve of Fetterman . . . while just 19 percent of Democrats do.

 

Back in 2023, surveys found that about 38 percent of Kentucky Republicans approved of the job that Democratic Governor Andy Beshear was doing.

 

It is extremely difficult to find any Republican with significant support among Democrats; perhaps Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski comes closest. (If you’re thinking of Maine’s Susan Collins, as of last May, 88 percent of Maine Democrats said that Collins did not deserve to be reelected.) For a long stretch, Vermont Republican Governor Phil Scott — who was simultaneously one of the country’s most popular governors and one of its lowest-profile nationally — had a high job approval among Democrats; a late June poll found about 30 percent of Vermont Democrats intended to vote for his reelection.

 

Even if the 2028 presidential race featured a Democratic ticket of Beshear-Fetterman and a Republican ticket of Scott-Murkowski, a significant portion of the grassroots of each party would likely convince itself — or be convinced by media in our polarized political environment — that the opposing party was a threat to all they hold dear and that this was the most important presidential election of our lifetimes. Try to imagine a world where Fox News Channel prime-time hosts declare, “You know, the Democratic nominee isn’t that bad,” or MS NOW hosts conclude, “The Republican nominee has some real strengths and appealing qualities.”

 

When you outright hate the president, it’s a short step to outright hating the people who voted for him. When you detest your political opponent, it becomes very easy to conclude, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” Or perhaps you take your guidance from our current president: “[Charlie Kirk] did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”

 

And when you outright hate the electorate that voted for the president . . . well, your love for your country declines. Poll after poll this year has shown that on average, Democrats feel significantly less patriotism than do Republicans. A Gallup survey in late June found that “70 percent of Republicans, 28 percent of independents and 14 percent of Democrats say they are extremely proud to be American.” The YouGov survey conducted around the same time found: “The vast majority (96 percent) of Republicans say they are proud to be Americans, compared to just 58 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of Independents. One percent of Republicans, 23 percent of Democrats, and 21 percent of Independents are not proud to be Americans.”

 

Many Democrats feel like the rest of the country betrayed them by voting for Trump, in many cases for a third time. A September 2025 poll found that “40 percent of Kamala Harris voters say it is acceptable to cut off a family member over political disagreements. Nearly half of young progressives say it is reasonable to sever friendships. By contrast, only 11 percent of Donald Trump voters said the same.”

 

A May study from UC Irvine psychologists found that “47 percent of Democrats reported having experienced a political breakup, compared to just 29 percent of Republicans. Independents fell in between, at 39 percent. . . . Among those who reported a political split, 66 percent of Democrats said they were the one who ended the relationship, compared to only 27 percent of Republicans.”

 

This brings us to Michigan’s Senate race pitting Republican Mike Rogers against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

 

NR’s editors note that El-Sayed’s agenda is primarily one of abolishment: abolishing private health insurance, the filibuster, the Electoral College, ICE, and Israel. Despite his denials, he has also called for abolishing the police. El-Sayed wants to end lifetime Supreme Court appointments, impose term limits, and allow each presidential term the same number of Supreme Court appointments.

 

Asked about his supporter Hasan Piker’s “America deserved 9/11” comment, El-Sayed said that Piker’s comments had been taken “out of context.” (Take a moment to try to imagine a context in which “America deserved 9/11” is not morally reprehensible.)

 

Yesterday our Noah Rothman wrote,

 

The GOP has a steep hill before them in Michigan, but it’s one that they must climb. This is no ordinary race. The consequences of failure extend well beyond the bounds of American electoral politics. The race is a proxy fight — a referendum on America as a civilizational proposition. It’s an up-or-down vote, and we cannot afford to see it fail.

 

Over at the Free Press, Eli Lake wrote that El-Sayed’s buddy Piker “represents a strain of American politics that demonizes the republic.”

 

Between now and Election Day, you’re going to see Republicans contending that “Abdul El-Sayed hates America.” He’ll deny it and insist that the charge is an Islamophobic slur. But I think a more precise way of making the argument is that El-Sayed hates America’s current constitutional structure and form of government, to say nothing of its current political consensus (to the extent it has a political consensus). El-Sayed wants the Overton window to be not merely widened but dramatically relocated along the political spectrum.

 

As do many of his most ardent political allies. The Democratic Socialists of America platform calls to abolish the U.S. Senate and “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

 

You cannot want to eliminate the Senate and make the executive and judiciary subordinate to Congress and simultaneously be willing to take the oath to which every elected member of Congress swears at the start of his or her term: “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

 

In a recent television interview, the co-chair of the DSA, Megan Romer, affirmed that her party’s agenda includes abolishing borders and giving amnesty to anyone currently in the U.S. illegally, abolishing prisons, and instituting government or public ownership of most large corporations. (If you abolish prisons, what do you do with someone who defies the law by establishing a prison?)

 

Our Charlie Cooke examined this agenda and concluded that what the DSA really wants to abolish is America as we have always known it:

 

The American system of government is built atop the presumption that the government exists to secure the natural rights of the people, and little else besides. The DSA’s vision represents a perfect inversion of this premise. Romer and her friends want to shirk all the basic responsibilities of the state — national defense, territorial integrity, policing, the protection of individual liberty — while micromanaging all of the private tasks that have traditionally been the preserve of civil society. Running Apple and Denny’s is in; maintaining an army and navy is out. Providing housing is included; superintending the punishment for murder is proscribed. “A wise and frugal government,” Thomas Jefferson submitted during his First Inaugural, “shall restrain men from injuring one another,” but “shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits.” Evidently, the DSA prefers the opposite course.

 

We should point out that the ideas of the DSA fringe are not nearly as far on the fringe as they ought to be. Our Dan McLauglin noticed that Pete Buttigieg — Harvard, Oxford, U.S. Navy, former McKinsey consultant, the epitome of the white-collar Democratic establishment — is on board with a lot of the DSA-style constitutional overhaul:

 

In an interview on Steven Bartlett’s podcast, The Diary of a CEO, Buttigieg comes out yet again for destroying the American systems of electing presidents (the Electoral College), Congress (single-member House districts), and our Supreme Court (via Court-packing). Buttigieg shot to prominence in 2019 by pushing Court-packing, which reminds us that no, it’s not a response to Dobbs or other post-2020 decisions. He tells Bartlett that “our entire existence has been about creating a different kind of political system and introducing it to the world,” but now we should be “reforming, tuning up, changing that political system.”

 

There’s a whole bunch of reasons to be upset with Republicans and the Trump administration. (See Tuesday’s edition of this newsletter, or below.) But what the Democrats are offering is not a course correction to the pre-Trump status quo. They want to toss out and replace large swaths of the U.S. Constitution, because in their minds, any constitution that allows the election of Donald Trump twice must be a failure.

 

ADDENDUM: In the entirety of the 2018 Texas Senate race, Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke, with then-record fundraising and unprecedented gushing national coverage, never led Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in any public poll. Not a single time.

 

In this year’s Texas Senate race, between Democratic candidate and bizarre reanimated Howdy Doody doll James Talarico and Republican candidate and human slug Ken Paxton, Talarico has led the last three public polls. Two more of the seven most recent public surveys have shown ties.

 

The most recent YouGov poll shows Paxton trailing by two percentage points. Meanwhile, every other Republican running statewide leads by three to seven percentage points.

 

This is not a Texas Republican Party problem. This is a Ken Paxton problem. You’re already hearing people getting ready to blame the National Republican Senatorial Committee if Talarico wins. Hey, at any point do we hold the candidate responsible for his own atrocious behavior, scandals, and lousy campaign? How about the president who endorsed him over an incumbent who would have waltzed to reelection?

 

Democrats can win in a deep-red state if the Republican nominee is awful enough. Doug Jones beat Roy Moore in Alabama in 2017. Character matters, and a candidate with awful character can fumble away a winnable race in the friendliest territory. But apparently this is a lesson that Republicans do not want to learn.

Hasan Piker Is a Symptom, Not the Cause

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 06, 2026

 

It’s pretty bleak out there. But if you’re looking for a sliver of hope, it seems that a critical mass of Democrats understand that most Americans did not like 9/11.

 

That’s the liability — one of so many, in fact — that the far-left podcaster Hasan Piker brings to the table.

 

Democrats in the orbit of the party’s establishment have warned that Abdul El-Sayed’s eager and sincere embrace of the Maoist influencer is destined to backfire on the party’s Michigan senatorial nominee.

 

Before the state’s primary voters anointed him, El-Sayed’s association with Piker was a point of contention.

 

Former Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow branded Piker “the biggest antisemite in media.” Before she dropped out of the race, State Senator Mallory McMorrow called him a “provocateur” who regularly broadcasts “misogynistic and antisemitic” things. New Jersey Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer went so far as to support a House resolution condemning Piker. “Mr. Piker traffics in antisemitic and anti-American extremism that has been met by silence from many on the Democratic left,” he wrote in the New York Times.

 

Even Bernie Sanders is giving voice to his qualms with Piker, while being quick to talk himself out of his own conclusions. “No,” Sanders said when asked if he was “comfortable” with El-Sayed’s proximity to the podcaster who said America “deserved 9/11.” And yet, even if Piker has some intemperate views, “he’s saying things that are making sense to a lot of people.”

 

Senator John Fetterman called on El-Sayed to renounce his affiliations with Piker — a call that the candidate rejected:

 

 

El-Sayed has been consistent in his refusal to condemn his booster. He has previously insisted that he has as many differences with Piker’s views as he does with the hosts of Fox & Friends, but he would no more renounce his buddy than he would eschew the opportunity to speak to Fox’s viewers.

 

And, honestly, shouldn’t we all be as concerned with the company Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers keeps? “I think people get real worried about him, but you think about who Mike Rogers has been palling around with, right?” the candidate said in an attempt to deflect from the liability Piker represents. “I think it’s important for us to just remember what Mike Rogers is and what we’re up against.”

 

Really, what’s the difference between Brian Kilmeade and Piker? Well, one of them said that approximately 3,000 Americans deserved to be murdered by Islamist terrorists because their country liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. He has repeatedly contended that Hamas terrorists occupy the moral high ground. He’s called for the murder of the people he regards as his class enemies, including (specifically and by name) Republican Senator Rick Scott.

 

Tomato, tomahto. Who are we to judge?

 

In one sense, El-Sayed’s obduracy is commendable. He can no more renounce his associations with Piker than he can shed his own views, which are not qualitatively distinct from those of the Bolshevist influencer from whom he has been inseparable for months. What Democrats want is for El-Sayed to lie to Michiganders about who he is. Credit where due: he will not do that.

 

Maybe Democrats want a plausible way to justify their vote for El-Sayed that allows them to say they didn’t know who he was. Blessedly, El-Sayed will not give them that. If they’re going to pull the lever for anti-Americanism (in one Democratic congresswoman’s words), they’re going to have to do so with clear eyes.