Just Desserts

They said, “I don’t get what I deserve.” And the deserving—who’s deserving? That is the question.

– Thomas Zimmer,
“How to Stop Trumpism from Rising in Germany and Europe“

This week’s featured post is “What Germany teaches us about ourselves“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Missouri gerrymandering case (discussed below) shows just how far MAGA is willing to go to seize an unfair advantage. The Luttig article (also discussed below) raises an even darker possibility.
  • Climate change. NOAA says 2026 had the hottest summer in US history. Meanwhile, the EPA is about to scrap limits on the amount of CO2 coal and gas power plants can emit.
  • The Iran War. The Houthis seizing control of the south end of the Red Sea is a major development, which I talk about below.
  • Ukraine. Jared Kushner frames Ukraine as the obstacle to peace, because it refuses to surrender territory to its invader: “President Putin laid out his line of what he wants to achieve. If Ukraine wanted to withdraw to that line, then obviously, you know, we have the rest of the deal set up and put together. Ukraine right now does not want to do that.” Kushner views Ukraine’s stubbornness as temporary: “right now”. Of course, Putin could end the war at any moment by bringing his troops home to Russia, but that goes unmentioned. The Trump regime is on Putin’s side and always has been.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about distractions like the Trumpapalooza

where nothing important happened. Trump’s dubious offer to give $5K to each adult American if Republicans retain majorities in both houses got a lot of attention, but no one believes it. The only remotely newsworthy thing about the GOP Midterm Convention is that so few people showed up or watched it on TV.

and how AI is going to kill us all

Anthropic is the company that makes the chatbot Claude, while OpenAI makes its rival ChatGPT. Tuesday, Jacob Coxon posted to X:

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. … The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

Evan Hubinger, a safety researcher at Anthropic, replied:

Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.

It’s hard to know what to make of stuff like this. Tech researchers are always claiming amazing positive things are about to happen soon — Elon Musk has been promising self-driving Teslas since 2013, and they’re still only kinda-sorta here. So I can easily imagine their negative predictions are just as off base. (“Did we promise to end the world this year? Sorry. Things came up. Next year for sure.”) Something about the industry makes everyone think in grandiose terms. An out-of-control AI can’t just kill a few people. It has to be everybody.

The essential problem, as best I understand it, is that AIs don’t carry around the breadth of context that humans do. So if you’re thinking about some problem at work and the thought “I could just kill everybody” pops into your head as a solution, you naturally take a step back, say “That’s crazy”, and start over. Because you know that a world where people solve their problems with mass murder is not someplace you want to live.

An AI doesn’t know that unless someone has thought to explicitly code that knowledge into it. An AI has a problem to solve, and it does all its thinking inside the box where the problem lives. There is no bigger context in which a solution is judged. So unless someone has thought to constrain possible solutions to avoid mass murder, that might be what the AI comes up with.

This happens in fiction all the time. In the X-Men universe, the Sentinels are robots tasked with wiping out mutants (like the X-Men). But eventually they realize that mutants come from humans, and that some small percentage of human babies will necessarily be mutants. So the only really complete solution to their problem is to wipe out humans.

Anyway, pondering grand dystopian possibilities is probably not the best use of what time you have to think about AI. And these scary headlines distract us from a much more mundane problem: If AI does revolutionize how our society works and how we produce goods and services, who is going to benefit?

Right now, we’re on track for a handful of Tech Lords to design the future. If they do, they will almost certainly design it for their benefit, not ours. We can already see this tendency in the existing internet systems. (Read Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification, which I reviewed in July. Or read The Nerd Reich, which I have now finished and plan to review soon.)

If you can’t help thinking about this stuff, though, and if you’re a TPM subscriber, check out what Josh Marshall has been assembling in his Editor’s blog. Also, most of these kill-everybody articles are way too vague about how exactly we all end up dead. Noah Smith has got that covered. (Basically, some disgruntled human will want to kill us all, and a superintelligent AI will help him figure out how.)

but we should have been talking about the Houthi advance

Iran’s allies, the Houthi faction in the Yemeni civil war, have captured strategically important territory.

On Thursday and Friday, a rapid Houthi advance southwards along Yemen’s western coast resulted in the capture of the port city of Mocha and then the strategic island of Perim in the the Bab al-Mandab strait. Pending a counter-offensive from government forces, the group is now in a position to control shipping through the strait.

Here’s why that’s important: The north end of the Red Sea is the Suez Canal. The south end is the Bab al-Mandab strait. If Iran shuts the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off shipping through the Persian Gulf, and the Houthis shut Bab al-Mandab, then Saudi Arabia has only one outlet for its oil: the Suez Canal, which makes for a very long trip to markets in East Asia.

And that’s only if the Saudis can get their oil to the Red Sea. The oil fields are close to the Persian Gulf, but a pipeline can carry oil across the country to the Red Sea port of Yanuba. That pipeline is currently shut down after an attack from drones apparently launched from Iraq.

The Yemeni government that the US recognizes looked to Saudi Arabia for help, and they looked to the US, who said no. Phillips O’Brien notes that US arms sales to the Saudis are 4% of all state-to-state arms sales in the world. Why wouldn’t we step in to help our client state? He speculates:

The reasons for the US unwillingness to step in to help the Saudi government at this moment, when everything in US strategic history would have indicated that the US should, are probably down to American military degradation. The US can barely fight the Iranian regime and protect US bases and forces against Iranian attacks. As such, opening up a new front in the war might be beyond US capabilities. It is not like there is some free US aircraft carrier strike force that can be easily deployed away from Iran to fight the Houthis. The US has already stripped the western Pacific—the cupboard is bare. … So what we are seeing is a weakening US, having to abandon its key strategic and economic allies, as its flounders around running out of munitions and losing advanced equipment fighting Iran. …

The Saudis purchased such masses of weapons from the USA not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they believed that this meant that if they were faced with real peril (like they are now) that the US would come to their aid. Now, the USA is too weak to do so. What the Saudis are experiencing will also accelerate a move away from military dependence on America from other states in the Gulf. 

The price of oil is rising this morning, and is back over $100 per barrel. This is yet another Iranian move that the Trump regime failed to anticipate.

and what just happened in Missouri

So we all remember last summer, when Trump was pushing all the red states to redraw their congressional maps to make them even more gerrymandered. Missouri stepped up with H.B.1, a bill designed to eliminate a Democratic seat (currently held by a Black man, Emanuel Cleaver) in Kansas City. So the 6-2 Republican advantage in the state’s delegation should grow to 7-1.

Let’s let David French pick up the story:

The Missouri Constitution, however, contains a provision that says that the people of the state “reserve power to approve or reject by referendum any act of the general assembly, except as hereinafter provided.”On Dec. 9, 2025, a coalition of Missourians who sought to overturn H.B. 1 submitted a referendum petition that contained more than 300,000 signatures — more than enough to put it on the November ballot.

So in a law-abiding world, H.B. 1 becomes a ballot proposition rather than a law, and the fall elections are held using the 6-2 maps. Prior to the MAGA fascist era, that’s what would have happened under a secretary of state from either party. But Missouri’s SoS Denny Hoskins is MAGA, so he did a very Trumpy thing: He came up with a bogus re-interpretation of the law that made an exception for what he wanted to do. So: the ballot proposition is invalid and H.B. 1 is a law that applies this fall.

But even then, there’s a clear responsible path Hoskins could have followed: announce his decision in plenty of time to let the courts rule on it before the primaries on August 4. Instead, though, Hoskins announces on August 4 itself and holds primaries using the 7-1 maps.

On Sept. 3, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion holding that voters do have the right to overturn redistricting legislation by referendum, that the petition was sufficient to put the referendum on the November ballot, and — as a result — “H.B. 1 is not the law and has never been the law.”

So Missouri appeals to the U. S. Supreme Court, but that noted liberal justice Brett Kavanaugh refuses to issue a stay on the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling. Again, in a law-abiding world that’s the end of the story. But not here.

On September 8, a Trump-appointed federal judge finds federal grounds to throw out the 6-2 maps, and orders Missouri to proceed with the 7-1 maps. Hoskins sends an email to local election officials instructing them to do that. The Trump-judge’s order winds up back at the Supreme Court, which stays that ruling, restoring the 6-2 maps. Hoskins’ argument in that case is that restoring the 6-2 maps would create chaos, given that (due to his own bad-faith actions) the 7-1 primaries have already been held.

The Missouri Supreme Court has a hearing on whether Hoskins is in contempt, and even there, Hoskins’ attorney won’t commit to following the court’s order. Finally, after being found in contempt, Hoskins agrees to obey the law. The 6-2 maps, somehow, will be used in November.

That’s a sort-of-happy ending, but French draws a broader conclusion: Going forward (like in the mail-in ballot dispute, for example) we shouldn’t get too comfortable just because the laws are on our side and the courts are mostly enforcing them. We can expect MAGA to play chicken with the courts, creating chaotic situations and then insisting on outside-the-law outcomes to deal with the emergency they themselves caused.

and Judge Luttig’s warning

Michael Luttig is a Reagan-era Republican who was appointed an appellate judge by George H. W. Bush. He held that post until he retired in 2006. He is a widely respected conservative legal thinker who has sometimes been compared to Anton Scalia, for whom he once clerked. In short: not a left-winger.

Thursday, Luttig published an article in a liberal magazine, The New Republic: “The Final Battle for America’s Democracy“. In it, he outlined where he thinks the Trump regime has been headed ever since his failed coup on January 6, 2021: to reach an end state where democracy no longer matters, and the American people have lost their ability to check his power.

He assumes that the current polls hold, and that — in spite of gerrymandering, in spite of voter suppression, in spite of whatever tricks Trump pulls with mail-in ballots — Democrats win the November elections, at least far enough to take control of the House of Representatives.

But then we get to January 3, when the Congress comes back into session. Luttig pictures Speaker Mike Johnson doing something similar to what Trump tried in 2021: Using all Trump’s rhetorical nonsense about Democratic cheating, illegal aliens voting, and so forth, Johnson will claim that some large number of the new Democratic representatives were elected improperly, and will refuse to seat them in the new Congress. In this way, Johnson avoids losing his power as Speaker and the GOP avoids losing control of the House.

Since the current Republican majority is so small, a mere handful of Republican congressmen could save democracy by (together with Democrats) refusing to go along with this. But will they?

If there are any such Republicans in the Congress today, they should announce well before November 3 that they will not be party to Trump’s and Johnson’s attempt to steal the midterm elections from the American people.

Luttig has confidence in the current clerk of the House, but Johnson could replace him. Then “the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress.”

The omitted Democrats can then go to federal court for a court order. But what if the clerk simply refuses to obey the court order? (See the Missouri situation above.)

Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis, helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Then we run into the Missouri situation again: Trump and Johnson can argue that the ensuing chaos (which they intentionally provoked) creates an emergency situation, allowing Trump to claim extra-legal emergency powers. Will the Supreme Court, this Supreme Court, stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law?

I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.

But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.

And even if it does, what if Trump refuses to listen to them?

and thinking deeper about right-wing appeal in Germany and the US

That’s the subject of the featured post, leaning heavily on an interview with history Thomas Zimmer and a column by Paul Krugman.

and you also might be interested in …

A Russian oligarch put hundreds of thousands into paying for Trump Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas. If Don were a Biden he’d be in real trouble.

In Ireland on Sunday, during a taxpayer-funded trip to visit his own golf course, President Trump urged Ukraine to stop its most effective attacks:

Mr. Zelenskyy has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel because he’s causing a shortage of diesel. This isn’t done by the Middle East; this is done by what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine.

Diesel in the US went over $6 a gallon Friday, a record high. This is bound to affect the price of anything shipped by truck, making life harder for Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Of course that’s Trump’s fault for starting his stupid war with Iran. But nothing is ever Trump’s (or Putin’s) fault, so he has to blame Ukraine.

Trump’s FCC again censored Jimmy Kimmel, threatening ABC stations with losing their licenses if they aired Kimmel’s interview with Texas senate candidate James Talerico.

So Kimmel posted the interview on his YouTube channel, where it got way more views than it would have gotten on the air. (9.2 million last time I checked.)

The interview reinforces something I’ve felt about Talerico from the beginning: Republicans don’t know what to do with a real Christian. They have so co-opted and distorted evangelical Christianity that they no longer recognize the actual teachings of Jesus.

So all they can do with Talerico is try to keep him off the air. This time, they succeeded in a way, but failed in the larger view.

and let’s close with something restful

OK, it’s been a tough week and I’ve made you look at a lot of disturbing things. You deserve a cute little lamb that never decides it’s had enough petting.

September 14, 2026 – 12:37 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

What Germany teaches us about ourselves

What if both kinds of Democrats are taking the wrong approach to resisting fascism?

The victory of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt region eight days ago led to some interesting thinking this week. AfD in Germany is sort of like MAGA in America, but sort of not. Comparing the two creates opportunities to tease apart the various strands of each.

At the New Republic, Perry Bacon interviewed historian Thomas Zimmer, who introduced the topic like this:

[I]f you approach [AfD] as the German equivalent to MAGA, that gets you actually pretty close. It gets you very much in the correct direction. It’s make Germany great again. They definitely share the same enemies. They’re similarly fueled by this sort of sense of radicalizing grievance, right? It’s defined by this sort of resentment towards a society that has been moving away from them, right? 

In a sense that this is of this desire to restore dominance over those who they deem lesser somehow. And who they deem lesser—that’s very much … racialized and gendered. It’s the grievance of predominantly white male people who are consumed by this feeling of having been deprived of their rightful place at the top.

So it’s very anti-egalitarian more than anything, anti-pluralistic. And I think it’s also, just like the MAGA movement, not at all conservative, right? In no reasonable sense of the word, in conserving, preserving, is this a conservative movement. They’re all in on radical measures. They talk about revolutionary change. They’re extremists.

In short, both MAGA and AfD fit the definition of fascism I gave back in 2015 when I started using that term to describe Trump and his movement.

Fascism is primarily a phenomenon of social psychology. I would summarize it as a dysfunctional attempt of people who feel humiliated and powerless to restore their pride by:

  • styling themselves as the only true and faithful heirs of their nation’s glorious (and possibly mythical) past,
  • identifying with a charismatic leader whose success will become their success,
  • helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence,
  • under his leadership, purifying the nation by restoring its traditional and characteristic virtues (again, through violence if necessary),
  • reawakening and reclaiming the nation’s past glory (by war, if necessary),
  • all of which leads to the main point: humiliating the internal and external enemies they blame for their own humiliation.

The thing that makes fascism hard to talk about coherently is that it’s not really a political or economic philosophy at all. There aren’t defining principles like democracy’s human rights and the sovereignty of the People, or communism’s public ownership of the means of production. It’s purely an Us-against-Them movement. Any action at all — like adding a gilded ballroom to the White House — can be fascist or not, depending on who wants to do it and who benefits.

While the similarities may be instructive, so are the differences. Paul Krugman looked at the economics of Germany and Saxony-Anhalt, and concluded that many of the economic explanations of MAGA’s popularity may not hold water.

[R]elative to the size of its economy, Germany runs trade surpluses and retains large-scale manufacturing employment to an extent that lies far beyond the wildest dreams of Trumponomics. And none of this appears to make a bit of difference to the resentment that underlies right-wing extremism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Saxony-Anhalt sits within the boundaries of the former East Germany, and after reunification it went through a period of having much higher unemployment and much lower per capital income than the rest of Germany. So it qualified as a “left-behind region” in the same way rest-belt Ohio or coal-country Kentucky does. But both factors have virtually vanished over the last 20 years, and Saxony-Anhalt is much closer to the German average in both areas than it has been since reunification. So AfD is not a reaction to economic despair.

What, then, is the moral of this analysis? Mostly it’s negative: Crude economic factors don’t explain the fascist shift in Germany. And Trumponomics, even if it worked (which it doesn’t) wouldn’t end the resentment feeding our own authoritarian movement.

Zimmer hits a similar point from the other direction: If economic issues aren’t what picks out Saxony-Anhalt as an AfD stronghold, what does that say about the progressive Democrats’ strategy for resisting MAGA?

Every single one of these Western European countries, aside from the UK, has a significantly stronger social welfare net than the United States. It doesn’t matter. There’s no correlation whatsoever across Northern and Western Europe between the strength of the social welfare net and the strength of the right-wing parties. There’s no correlation whatsoever. You have countries with super strong social welfare systems, like the Scandinavian countries, and yet the far right over there is also basically as strong as anywhere. Like, polling at 25 to 30 percent, whatever, right? And sometimes they get more and sometimes they get less, but roughly speaking, they have gotten stronger and stronger.

But the moderate/centrist Democratic approach fares no better. What is sometimes called “popularism”, adopting right-wing positions that poll well, doesn’t work either.

Again, we have a mountain of evidence that adopting these far-right positions on immigration and on any other sort of, quote-unquote, “culture war issue,” and adopting their framing—the effect of that is, you’re not gaining back voters from them. Because A, voters will generally see this as merely a tactical adjustment. They will not believe you, right? B, you are constantly legitimizing and normalizing this sort of framing of the problem. If the Labour Party in Britain constantly tells the people, Oh yeah, no, the far right is correct. Immigration is this great threat. It is the biggest problem that we’re facing, then people do not vote for the Labour Party. They vote for that party that says, We are the answer to this, the far right, these sort of ethnonationalists. And so the only thing you’re doing is you’re shifting the entire discourse to the right by adopting their frameworks and their answers to the problem, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

The current UK government is a good example. In the last two years, things have gotten significantly worse for trans folk and immigrants in the UK, just as the right-wing parties demanded. So you’d expect voters to say, “OK then, we don’t need a far-right party to represent our interests.” And yet, polls indicate that the right-wing Reform UK party has nearly doubled its support since 2024.

So if the key motivator for right-wing politics isn’t economic despair and can’t be mollified by serving up scapegoat groups like trans folk or immigrants, what should we do?

Zimmer points to an interesting clue:

There was a very, I think, revealing question in these exit polls on Sunday in this Saxony-Anhalt election, where people were asked, do you feel like you’re getting what you deserve in Germany, or less than you deserve, or more than you deserve? And the voters who said, “I’m getting less than I deserve,” the AfD got most of those people, right? And so, to look at this and say, Oh, they probably mean wages or social security, or they don’t know how to pay the rent—no. They didn’t say that, because they were also asked those questions, but that’s not what they said. They said, “I don’t get what I deserve.” And the deserving—who’s deserving? That is the question. And this who is deserving is so clearly defined in racial, and gendered, and sort of ethnic terms, right?

In other words, some percentage of the population is nostalgic for a more hierarchical society, where men are above women, Whites are above Blacks, straights above gays, and so on.

It would be nice if that weren’t the issue, because then we could offer a win-win solution: We’re all good people. If we all get opportunity, we all get a safety net, and so on, then we’ll all be happy.

I think there’s just this sort of enormous incentive to sanitize the discourse, and sanitize these sort of political choices of people who are coded as, quote-unquote, “regular folks.” And that’s sort of white people, right? That’s white conservative people.  We are constantly asked to come up with explanations of what they’re doing politically that sort of preserve their innocence, right? There’s this sort of idea of white innocence, right? And, by the way, this is not a new thing. When David Duke in the early ‘90s was close to winning a governorship in Louisiana, the next day what you read in the Los Angeles Times was, Oh, goodness me, economic anxiety must really be quite pressing in Louis— That sort of thing, right? It’s always been like that, right? Sort of this sanitizing thing.

Instead, progressives need to

accept that, unfortunately, a significant portion of the people around us are simply not on board with this idea of an egalitarian pluralistic democracy, and that is a fight that you cannot hug away. You cannot find the right tone, and then they will be all, OK, we get it now. You can’t just—I don’t know. Again, you can’t just solve it with just economic policy. But then what do you do? And at that point, I have to admit, me personally, I have to admit, I don’t know. Other than, you have to fight the fight, right? You have to accept you are in this fight, and you have to fight it and win it.

In other words, we need to make the idealistic case for egalitarian society — because that’s just what’s right. And that means defending everybody, even the unpopular folks that the Right is framing as scapegoats.

In other words, Abdul el Sayed has it right:

We are being told that if we do not line up against other people’s rights, then ours will be taken away. But it is when we line up against other people’s rights that we are assenting to ours being taken away. And I think we need to understand that rights are rights are rights are rights. And that there is a responsibility — right? when you break a finger in sports, they tie it to the other finger. And I think we have to think that way. Which is to say: You may never understand how somebody uses their rights. But you damn well better show up for their rights if you would like people to show up for yours. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, if your coalition is not uncomfortable, it’s not big enough. And so we’ve got to ask people [when] rights are on the chopping block, [people] who might never understand how somebody else might use their rights, to show up for one of those rights.

September 14, 2026 – 10:33 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a week where so many bright, shiny objects obscured the really important things that were happening.

We had the GOP’s Trumpapalooza midterm convention on Wednesday and Thursday, which was as near a non-event as it could possibly have been. Few people attended, few people watched, and the big headline afterward — $5000 for everybody if Republicans keep both houses of Congress! — is obviously never going to happen, as even the most ardent Trump cultist probably knows.

Then a couple AI researchers went public with their worry that AI might kill us all. There are real issues with AI, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a government where people understood that? There could be an international conference that included China and the EU. Some kind of standards could be written, and we could avoid needing the Butlerian Jihad they had in the Dune universe. But how likely is that with the know-nothing expertise-despising regime we live under now?

I don’t know how to start the kind of thoughtful, nuanced public discussion we need. But going around panicked about AI killing us all is probably not the right approach.

So what should you have been paying attention to this week? Well, for one thing, Iran’s Houthi allies took control of the strait at the south end of the Red Sea, potentially cutting off the Saudis’ main way of avoiding Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz. I’m not sure what happens next, but it sure looks like Iran has outflanked us in the current war.

And then two things should have drawn your attention to the threat of Trump stealing the midterms. First, the dispute over Missouri’s congressional maps demonstrated MAGA’s dangerous willingness to play chicken with the courts. The courts won this time. But it’s easy to imagine the line not holding next time. And then conservative Judge Michael Luttig, appointed by Bush the First to an appellate judgeship that he retired from in 2006, described how a constitutional crisis might unfold in January, if the current House leadership simply refused to seat the newly-elected Democrats.

And finally, there’s what we can learn from last week’s biggest news: the victory of the neo-Nazi AfD party in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany. Germany is both similar to and different from the US, making it an interesting case study in how not to control the extreme Right. Worryingly, what we can learn from the Germans undermines both the progressive and centrist Democrats’ strategies.

The featured post will be about what we can learn from the Germans. It should appear around 10 EDT. The weekly summary will handle the rest, and I hope to get it out by noon.

September 14, 2026 – 8:56 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Freakish Events

My worry is that this gets filed away as a freak event, when the same small river flooded 14 months earlier and nobody moved a gauge onto it. “Freak” is the word that we use for things we decided not to measure.

– Gwen, Critical Latitude
“Everything we know about Nepal’s flood“

This week’s featured post is “Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Trump’s attempt to control mail-in voting is obviously beyond his legal powers. But he has appealed to the Supreme Court, where laws have no meaning.
  • Climate change. The Nepal flood is another of those extreme events that scientists can’t 100% nail down as a consequence of climate change. But climate change makes events like this much more likely.
  • Ukraine. We’ve been around this track many times before: Trump sends his people (Kushner and Wittkoff this time) to Moscow. They have “substantive” or “productive” talks with Putin. They go to Kyiv to present Putin’s demands to Zelenskyy, who says no. “The war will continue.“

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the postal service

Under normal circumstances, the US Postal Service is not national news. It delivers mail, does it wonderfully in some ways and disappointingly in others. But during an ordinary presidency the most newsworthy thing it does is add a few cents to the basic letter rate or close a post office somewhere.

USPS used to be an independent agency. But that was in the days before the Supreme Court signed on to the unitary tyrant executive theory, which basically wipes out all independent agencies, placing them under the control of the President (at least until a Democratic president gets elected; whether s/he will have the same powers the Court has given Trump is anybody’s guess).

So Trump is trying to use his authority over the Post Office to cheat in the fall elections. Democracy Docket summarizes:

Under the new USPS rule, written to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting, states’ mail ballot envelopes must include certain design changes, such as new logos and barcodes. The rule also requires states to submit personal information on voters who’ve requested mail ballots to a federal online portal. States that fail at either requirement would not receive mail ballots from USPS.

The cheating part is the submission to the federal portal, which would check those states’ lists against a list complied by DHS of US citizens, and not deliver ballots to people it deemed ineligible. The alleged intent is to keep non-citizens from voting — which is a laudable goal, but is nearly achieved already: No study has shown any significant number of non-citizens voting in any state. But the actual intent is more sinister: to make the Trump regime the arbiter of who can legitimately vote.

According to the Constitution, managing elections is the job of the states. Congress can pass laws regulating federal elections, but the executive branch without Congress has no authority to issue new rules.

24 states are suing to block the new rule. They initially won their suits, until the Supreme Court weighed in, saying that the suit (at that time) was premature, because the rule was only proposed and had not been finalized. Then it became final and the circus started all over again.

Friday, a district court blocked the rule. The Trump regime responded by skipping the usual appellate court and going straight to the Supreme Court, asking it to stay the lower court ruling and allow USPS’ new rule to go into effect in time for the November elections.

As so often happens these days, the law is clear. But whether the Supreme Court will follow the law or make up new laws is anyone’s guess. Maybe I’m naive, but I think the Court is going to follow the law this time.

and dissent inside the Pentagon

That’s the subject of the featured post.

and Trump’s clueless midterm strategy

You may not have heard about it yet, but there’s going to be a national political convention this week.

This week in Dallas, Texas, the party will stage a midterm convention for the first time. Donald Trump will deliver a keynote address on Wednesday and closing remarks on Thursday in Dallas, Texas. Other speakers include Vice-President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. The convention has been billed as a “primetime showcase” to boost morale, nationalise congressional elections and galvanise Republican voters.

One reason I’m optimistic about Democrats taking not just the House but the Senate: Trump doesn’t seem to understand the problem. He lives in Natalie’s fantasy world where he has done all these amazing things. The only problems he sees are that his people are demoralized and the good news of his many achievements just isn’t getting out for some reason.

Everybody was wondering what he would spend his massive PAC on. But if his first ad of the season is any indication, he’s going to spend it praising himself

He is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves. When the world needs courage, vision, and inspiration, it is still turning to America. There is no challenge Americans cannot overcome, no frontier too vast for us to conquer. We will be prosperous. We will be proud. We will be strong, and we will win like never before.

So he’s not ending the war or getting gas prices down or resolving the trade war with Canada or forgetting about his unpopular ballroom and triumphal arch until after the election. And he’s not holing up in the White House and letting Republican candidates fend for themselves. He wants to be the big issue of the midterms, and Democrats want that too.

Sadly, few people will probably watch this convention. (Being on opposite the start of the NFL season is just one of its many difficulties.) I expect the low ratings for Trump’s speech to spark an epic Truth Social tirade from the Mad King. But it probably won’t move the needle in either direction, because nobody is going to watch.

Much is being written about Trump’s desire to leave a legacy of monuments to himself. He would do well to consider this: There is no Eisenhower monument, but there is an interstate highway system. There is no Johnson monument, but there is Medicare. There is no FDR monument, just Social Security.

Trump needs his arch and ballroom and coin and airport and all the rest of it because he has accomplished nothing of note. If he doesn’t use his power to construct some physical edifice (or to carve his name on something constructed by or for some other president), no one will ever think of him again after he leaves office — at least not in a positive way.

Missouri had passed a gerrymandering map with the intent of getting rid of one of its two Democratic congressional districts. But the state supreme court blocked the move. The situation is a little confusing, because primaries were already held using the gerrymandered map.

and Germany

The far-right Alternative fur Deutschland Party (AFD) got 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, one of Germany’s 16 regions. The other major parties are firmly against a coalition with AfD, so it will be interesting to see how Saxony-Anhalt forms a government.

The AfD stands for “remigration” of immigrants back to their original countries, even if they entered Germany legally. It also wants to end Germany’s support for Ukraine and improve relations with Putin’s Russia.

Here’s how far out AfD is:

France’s National Rally under Marine Le Pen kicked the AfD out of its grouping in the European Parliament two years ago, for being too “radical”.

and you also might be interested in …

Not quite two weeks ago, Nepal suffered a catastrophic flash flood.

At least 1,342 deaths and 4,886 missing persons were confirmed in Nepal with an additional 43 dead and 519 missing in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. The flood carried the bodies of some victims 240 km (150 mi) away into neighbouring India.

One reason this event was so deadly is that in the 50 minutes between detection and the water/debris sludge sweeping a town away, nobody warned them.

Early explanations blamed the flood on an earthquake in the high Himalayas. A later explanation said it was due to a glacier breaking up. But the current explanation says that unusually warm weather melted the centuries-old ice that had been mortaring the mountain rocks together. That led to an avalanche, which fooled seismic sensors into announcing an earthquake.

Is this climate change in action? It’s very hard to look at one particular disaster and definitively attach it to climate change. But it sure looks like the kind of thing you’d expect to see more often as the Earth warms.

If you have half an hour to spend on this topic, I strongly recommend this video by the Critical Latitude podcast. It explains why the various false explanations arose, how they were debunked, why warnings didn’t make it to the people in the path of the flood, and where else in the world conditions like this might occur.

It’s been decades since I’ve been to the Burning Man festival in Nevada. I remember it as a temporary Shangri-La where you could be free from people trying to dominate you or judge you or sell you something. It’s hard to appreciate an environment like that until you experience it. You might think it’s effortless to filter out all that dominance and judgement and salesmanship, but then somebody turns it off and the quiet in your mind is amazing.

One price you pay for that freedom is that you have to follow some simple rules, like you don’t take pictures or videos of people who haven’t consented. There’s good reason for that: It would be hard to feel really free in whatever you’re doing if you had to worry about your picture showing up on social media and somehow making it back to your workplace. (My late wife once briefly wound up on Nightline, presumably because she was one of the few people who was fully clothed and willing to talk on camera.)

So anyway, according to this account by Friendly Atheist, a proselytizing Christian group showed up at Burning Man, broke a bunch of those rules, and got thrown out of the event. They then started a persecution narrative on their social media accounts, claiming they were thrown out for being Christian.

Would you look at that? Another story of Christians assuming they can break the rules and get away with it because of their faith. Another violation of consent. Another example of Christian privilege followed by false accusations of persecution. … If Burning Man is all about radical inclusion, that still very much extends to people with absurd religious beliefs. But their rules don’t have exceptions for followers of Jesus. The missionaries’ dishonest attempt to turn their eviction into a story of persecution is just another reason you should always fact-check Christians’ stories whenever they claim they’re the victims of discrimination.

I admit that I do not check out every Christian-persecution story I run across. But every one set in America that I have checked into turned out to be bogus. As best I can tell, there is no actual persecution of Christians in the United States.

and let’s close with something incongruous

When you see National Gallery of Art curator Allison Williams, her 77-year-old appearance doesn’t seem to fit with her Gen Z slang. Watch her video.

September 7, 2026 – 12:48 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon

Obeying orders doesn’t mean you can’t drag your feet.

In January 2025, a few weeks before Donald Trump would be sworn in to begin his second term, the America First Policy Institute issued a warning about career government employees who might try to sabotage what the new president wanted to do.

Many career staff diligently and impartially serve whoever holds office. However, there are those who do not. Some career employees resisted the president’s agenda during the [first] Trump Administration. Interviews with former Trump Administration appointees reveal these employees used similar strategies to stymie the president’s policies. These included:

  • withholding information;
  • refusing to implement policies;
  • intentionally delaying or slow-walking priorities;
  • deliberately underperforming;
  • leaking to Congress and the media; and
  • outright insubordination.

This opposition embedded within the government constitutes the dreaded Deep State: unelected bureaucrats who have their own ideas about what they’re supposed to be doing, ideas that sometimes contradict the orders that come down from the top.

Right-wing opinion-makers excel at demonizing a word or phrase: DEI, critical race theory, socialism, open borders, fake news, illegal immigrant, and so on. Denizens of the right-wing media echo chamber can be counted on to respond according to their Pavlovian training. So no one needs to explain what woke people do or why it’s bad. Leaders just have to attach the label to someone, and the faithful know to start growling at them. The Right has been using this technique for decades. Back in the 1980s, Reaganites demonized the death tax, and before long even minimum-wage workers were outraged that the government might try to add friction to the path of generational wealth as it oozed down plutocratic family trees.

But few phrases are as thoroughly demonized as Deep State. The Deep State is supposed to be a kind of shadow government, a hidden cabal of officials who (like the Devil) can be attached to any conspiracy theory. The villainy of the Deep State explains why conservative governments consistently fail to keep their promises, and — no matter how many job-creating tax cuts the rich get — the vise around the American working class continues to tighten.

What the Deep State really is. Back in the first Trump administration, I started looking at the way Deep State was being used, and I came to a conclusion that surprised me: The Deep State really exists, but it’s nothing like its conspiracy-theory description. It’s not a conspiracy at all, it’s a culture, and it changes from one part of the government to another: The Deep IRS, for example, is nothing like the Deep FDA. What the Deep State actually consists of is government employees whose first loyalty is to the mission of their organization, rather than to the chain of command.

If you imagine making a career in the federal government, this makes perfect sense. Many young people are probably just looking for a job when they join the government, but the best candidates — the ones who become leaders and create the organizational culture — have choices. They commit themselves to the part of the government they believe in most, the one whose mission best reflects their inner values. So if you believe in public health, you join HHS or the CDC. If you want to protect society from crime, the FBI appeals. If you are inspired by the visions of science fiction, an offer from NASA sparkles in a way that no other agency can match.

If you have that kind of relationship to your organization, you are nothing like the soulless drone or petty tyrant Fox News wants its audience to imagine when its hosts say bureaucrat. You go to work with a spring in your step. You are fighting the good fight and holding back the forces of darkness.

Now what happens when a new administration wants to turn your organization against its core mission? When the EPA is asked to find or create loopholes in the laws that restrain polluters? When DoJ is directed to ignore crimes by the President’s friends and invent reasons to prosecute his enemies? When DoJ’s Civil Rights Division is tasked with protecting the privileges of Whites or Christians, rather than the rights of people who actually need protection?

Maybe you quit, like countless DoJ prosecutors have done since that department was corrupted by the likes of Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche. But maybe you have a family and a mortgage, or you only need to hang on two or three more years to qualify for your pension. “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” you tell yourself. “Maybe I can avoid the morally revolting assignments and still find parts of the job to believe in.”

Or maybe you think the mission your agency was created to pursue, the one that may still be embedded in the laws that established it, is too important to leave to the ever-changing whims of an 80-year-old simpleton and his cronies. Maybe you stay because you can imagine the know-nothings and yes-men who will be appointed if you leave.

Now you start doing the things AFPI found so threatening. You don’t get a membership card or learn the secret handshake, but you have nonetheless joined the Deep State.

The Deep Pentagon. Liberals like me aren’t used to siding with the Deep Pentagon. We remember Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex. We know about the infighting between the Army and Navy, and the Pentagon’s desire to keep a weapons program funded even if the early tests aren’t going well. Too often a plane or vehicle that should be simple and nimble becomes a camel that is supposed to do everything for everybody, and gets bloated with options and gear. Generals and admirals are too easily seduced by the prospect of high-paying jobs in defense corporations after they retire.

Is there corruption in the Pentagon? Yes. Waste? Of course.

But simultaneously, there is a sense of mission: You want to protect the country. You want to preserve the geo-political prominence of the United States. When a strutting Napoleon wannabe and his unqualified Secretary of War Defense threaten that prominence and leave the nation open to attack, you start to rebel.

That’s what we’ve been seeing lately.

Enter Hegseth. When Pete Hegseth took control of the Pentagon, he did not have the respect of the officer corps. Yes, he had been in the military, rising to the rank of major. He deployed to combat zones and was awarded two bronze stars for “meritorious service” (which is actually quite different from getting a medal for valor). Prior to his confirmation, reports of a drinking problem and sexual improprieties came out. His ability to manage people has always been questionable; in civilian life he had managed only small organizations and not terribly well.

He was nominated as SecDef for two reasons: He was a Trump loyalist, and as a former Fox News personality he looked good on TV. Neither of those virtues ranks high in the value system of a general.

It could have worked if Hegseth had played to his strengths, if he had stayed out of major policy matters (that he knows nothing about) and been the Pentagon’s front man in the White House and Congress. But instead he has acted as if he alone understands war. He has assumed that any Black or female officer must be a “DEI hire” who lacks merit, so he has refused to promote them any higher, and has pressured some to leave. He has brought the culture wars into the military, espousing a “warrior ethos” that has little to do with modern high-tech warfare. Some of his proposals have seemed like jokes, like the one that will test the testosterone levels of all the men in the military and fund testosterone replacement therapies for those who fall short. (This is gender-affirming care for cis men.) Now he seems to be running for president, which is anathema to US military traditions.

But the real problem is the Iran War, which was launched on the assumption that it would be over quickly, and with little-to-no planning for what would happen if it wasn’t. Obvious Iranian counter-moves, like closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking the bases in allied countries that are essential logistics hubs, were not foreseen or planned around. (That flaw was made obvious by the sad conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, but is a much larger story.) Having made no attempt to raise public or congressional support prior to the attack, Hegseth has left the Pentagon out on a limb now that the war has gone badly. The supplemental appropriations the military needs to keep fighting this war are stalled, because Trump and Hegseth don’t want to answer questions in Congress, while even Republicans are reluctant to authorize more money without having a chance to ask.

The result is that the rest of our defense establishment is being raided to fund the war. If you are a commander somewhere else in the world, facing your usual responsibilities without your usual resources, you’re not happy. If, say, you’re supposed to be ready if China decides to attack Taiwan or Russia invades Estonia, you know you’re not ready. When the USS George Washington finally relieved the Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf of Oman, it left the entire western Pacific without an American aircraft carrier.

Normally, the Pentagon keeps its discontents under wraps. But then, somehow, the Washington Post got its hands on reports about the classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book.

Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief.

The warnings — detailed for Hegseth by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America — appear in the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), these people said. They described the assessment to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because the document is classified.

The SDOB, typically produced twice monthly, outlines the worldwide availability of U.S. warships, aircraft, personnel and weapons systems. It reflects the president’s priorities for the force, which are carried out by the defense secretary, and includes insights from the military’s top generals and admirals that inform the directives the Pentagon issues.

Those “insights” can include a “non-concur”, where some regional commander can express his disagreement with orders s/he is nonetheless carrying out.

Then last Monday, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll resigned, after much feuding with Hegseth about Army leadership.

When Hegseth took office last year, the Army had 10 four-star generals on active duty. Today, it has five.

Nearly a year ago, when Hegseth abruptly called top officers from around the world to Washington to hear political speeches by himself and Trump, many tried to read the stony faces of the generals and admirals in their seats. We’re still trying to read their faces and interpret the clues they leave.

But if they are coming to the conclusion that the Trump/Hegseth regime is undermining the safety and security of the United States, don’t expect them to stay in line. I don’t expect a coup or an assassination, as might happen in some country with a lesser tradition of an apolitical military. But there are ways to act out, and I expect to see more of them.

September 7, 2026 – 11:03 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

Tagged , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Pete Hegseth’s fight with his generals boiled over last week with the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. There have been many signs of discontent in the Pentagon over the last few weeks, as the ill-planned Trump/Hegseth Iran War drains resources from our military units elsewhere in the world. I’ll look into that in more detail (and explain my theory of the Deep State) in “Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon”. I’ll try to get that out between 10 and 11 EDT.

That leaves a number of stories to the weekly summary: Trump’s attempt to use the Postal Service to take over the mail-in portion of the midterm elections is going to the Supreme Court, raising once again the question of how far the Court’s partisan Republican majority is willing to go to give its party and its president unfair advantages; Trump’s desire to make the GOP midterm campaigns all about himself, which is exactly what the Democrats want; a seismic victory for the far-right in one German region; a fascinating explanation of the Nepal flood; Canada’s refusal to fold in its trade war with the US; and a few other things. Expect to see that between noon and 1.

September 7, 2026 – 8:20 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Margins of Permission

Bullies seem to have a finely tuned awareness of where the margins of permission lie as regards abuses, and choose their targets based on whose suffering will be most broadly acceptable to others.

– A. R. Moxon “Soon You Too Will Be a Commie“

This week’s featured post is “Hazards and pitfalls of moving to the center“.

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Canada

Here we see a combination of a substantive issue with one of those blood-boiling but essentially meaningless things we see over and over: We find ourselves in an all-out trade war with our nearest neighbor and closest ally. That’s important. And Trump has ordered the name of Lake Ontario changed to Lake America, which is annoying but of no real consequence. (As soon as Trump is out of office, no one will say “Lake America” or “Gulf of America” ever again.)

The Toronto Star reports:

As [Prime Minister Carney] described it, he was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.

Paul Krugman explains why the US will lose this war. The US may be the much larger economy, but

an all-out trade war would create a lot of pain in the U.S. in addition to inflicting severe damage to the Canadian economy. And all indications are that the Canadians will be much more willing to bear the pain of a trade war than Americans will – especially given that the great majority of Americans are already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management.

Former Trump official Miles Taylor sees Canada’s resistance as a harbinger of nations getting fed up with trying to appease Trump. “nothing on earth scares Donald Trump like an opponent who fights back.”

Unlike Google, MapQuest is just not having this Lake America thing.

and the fall elections

Trump’s bid to control who can cast a mail-in ballot had another set-back Thursday, when his executive order was blocked by a federal judge. A previous block had been lifted by the Supreme Court just a few days before, but on technical grounds that didn’t reach the merits of the case.

Things continue to look good for Democrats. A series of polls in Michigan have El-Sayed up slightly. Josh Marshall concludes:

I’m not saying El-Sayed has this wrapped up. I’m saying that the idea that he can’t win or that the results of the primary were some kind of decisive setback for Democrats’ chances just can’t be squared with the available evidence. At least not so far. This is very much a race and it’s one in which El-Sayed kind of has to be viewed as a favorite to at least some degree.

So-called “centrist” pundits like Jonathan Chait really need to calm down. His column is about how El-Sayed needs to denounce this guy and separate himself from that guy more strongly than just saying he disagrees with what they’re saying. Chait says virtually nothing about what El-Sayed himself says or believes or hopes to do in the Senate.

Last week, I described the Democrats’ chance of winning a Senate majority this fall. I went through the states commonly viewed as having competitive Senate races and came out with a winning scenario — far from a sure thing, but more than wishful thinking. I didn’t consider any of the true long-shot races Jay Kuo covered Thursday: Mississippi, Kansas, South Carolina, Nebraska, and Arkansas. I’d be surprised if any of these red states seats flipped, but Kuo makes a good case that it’s not impossible.

and Venezuela

Friday, Trump announced on social media “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” The deal, which AFAIK still hasn’t been confirmed by any on-the-record American government office, supposedly involves 17 oil fields with 65 billion barrels of proven reserves.

The agreement allows for the United States to partner with an unnamed private operator in Venezuela to create a new private company to take hold of the reserves, according to a U.S. official familiar with the contours of the deal. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, added that [Venezuelan President Delcy] Rodríguez granted the company 100-year rights to develop the oil fields. The deal gives the United States 55% effective output of the new private company — including an ownership stake and rights to buy oil at cost. The company would be the second largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco, according to the official.

Phillips O’Brien points out that there all kinds of problems with this arrangement. For one thing,

it is not clear what element of the US government (if any) either can or will hold the equity stake in any new company

The American stake would have to be controlled and overseen by some particular department or agency, and without any congressional action it’s not clear who could do that. And without Senate ratification, this isn’t an official treaty. Like Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, it could be cancelled by any future president.

There are also problems on the Venezuelan side, because their constitution does not allow the government to sign away the country’s natural resources. If a future Venezuelan government thought it could get away with taking the oil fields back, it would face no legal barriers.

And finally, who are we making this agreement with? When we deposed Maduro, we were supposedly bringing freedom to the Venezuelan people. But since then we’ve ignored the democratic opposition and recognized Maduro’s henchmen as the government. O’Brien sums up:

I am providing this information so that there is no mistake about what the Trump administration is, and has been doing. It got rid of Maduro to entrench even more ruthless alleged criminals, the exact kind of people with which it can and, indeed, likes to do business.

Add to the mix that the country’s oil industry is a mess and requires huge amounts of capital investment (which so far the major oil companies haven’t been willing to fund). It will take years to substantially increase production. Also, Venezuelan crude oil is heavier than most American refineries can process, so there won’t be any big increase in gasoline production any time soon. Clean Technica has a fairly technical analysis that comes to the conclusion:

Raising output materially would require something closer to $100 billion over a decade. That scale of capital must be patient, politically insulated, and confident in long term demand. Even if someone was willing to pay for it, significant increases are a decade away in a world clearly pivoting away from oil and toward renewables and electrification.

and you also might be interested in …

I hope to review Gil Duran’s “The Nerd Reich” before long. In the meantime, check out this five-minute video about J. D. Vance and his puppet-master Peter Thiel.

David Frum looks at how other countries have recovered money from their past despots, and speculates about using civil suits to claw back Trump’s “ill-gotten gains”.

For about a year Christopher Armitage was a corrections officer in a prison. It taught him something about politics and the psychology behind MAGA.

I began to see a pattern that my psychology training wouldn’t let me ignore. The same personality traits that concentrated behind bars, what psychologists call the “dark triad” of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, were appearing throughout our political system. The empathy deficits that defined prison life weren’t confined to cellblocks. They were running for office, hosting talk shows, and writing legislation. … American conservatism has become an ideology that systematically suppresses empathy. It rewards the prison mentality: dominate or be dominated, trust only your tribe, see kindness as weakness. It’s created a political movement that mirrors the psychological dynamics of incarceration, complete with gang colors in the form of red hats and protection rackets in the form of vote-for-us-or-the-criminals-will-get-you rhetoric. …

The prison mirror reflects perfectly here: just as inmates must perform toughness to maintain status, conservative politicians must perform cruelty. Expressing empathy for the wrong group, immigrants, trans kids, the poor, marks you as weak, a “RINO” who’ll get primaried

A Stanford student newspaper won its suit against the Trump administration. It claimed that international students were afraid to write articles for fear they would be deported if Trump disagreed with what they said. The judge ruled that foreign citizens on student visas have the same free-speech rights Americans do, and that they cannot be deported based on what they have written or said.

and let’s close with a look back

I’m sure you’ve had no trouble finding coverage of Dolly Parton, who died Tuesday. She was one of the few public figures — it’s hard to find a comparable one — whose appeal spanned the political divide. She was an authentic up-from-poverty success story who never forgot about the kind of people she grew up around. Late in life, her philanthropy was as famous as her music.

If you wonder what the fuss is all about, The Guardian provides a curated list of 10 of her best songs. As someone lost a spouse less than two years ago, I resonate with her final hit “If You Hadn’t Been There” about her husband Carl Dean who died in 2025 a few weeks before their 59th anniversary. “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been there.”

August 31, 2026 – 1:42 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (7)

Hazards and pitfalls of moving to the center

Labor Day is the traditional signal for Democrats — but usually not Republicans these days — to abandon their edgier positions and “move to the center”. In some situations this is common sense. In others it’s dangerous.

A classic business-school homework problem concerns where to place snack shops on a popular beach. If there are two competitors, where should they set up to get the most business? The best solution for customers — assuming the beach is evenly populated and nobody wants to walk further than necessary to get a Sno-Cone — is to put one shop 1/4 of the way from the left edge of the beach and the other 1/4 from the right edge. That way, nobody has to cross more than 1/4 of the beach to get served.

But now imagine you’re running leftmost shop. If you nudge a little to the right, you may pick up some of the other shop’s customers, while losing few of your own (i.e., only the ones at the far left end who look at the longer walk and decide they’d rather do without). Of course, the same logic motivates your competitor to shift left, and the process continues until your two shops are side-by-side in the center. Customers overall are worse off, but that’s market capitalism for you. Nobody ever said the market produces ideal solutions. (Oh, wait. I guess some people do say that. Never mind.)

For a lot of political professionals (especially Democrats, for some reason), that homework problem frames their fundamental thinking about campaigns. Politics happens on a left/right spectrum, and the ideal marketing position for your candidate is in the center. If you’re unfortunate enough to be working for a left-leaning candidate, you need to nudge him or her to the right as far as you can. Doing so puts your political shop closer to more of the electorate, so it’s just common sense.

Arguments against this way of thinking revolve around what the model leaves out. For example, it removes the moral dimension from politics. No one lives or dies because they have to walk a little further to get their Sno-Cones. But lives clearly do hang on decisions about war, healthcare, abortion, foreign aid, and many of the other issues decided by our political process.

The Right clearly understands this. Take the abortion issue for example. If you believe that every fertilized ovum has a soul that is sacred to God, then abortion is murder and is always wrong. (I critiqued this position several years ago.) Republicans know this position is far outside the American mainstream, but they never move left in any serious way. (Thought experiment: How much support could you raise on the Right for a compromise that capped the number of legal abortions in America, establishing some criteria for who gets those abortions? If a million baby-murders is unacceptable, how about 100,000? I’m guessing the answer is no support at all.) One Republican position after another is rooted in Christian nationalism, with its underlying frame of spiritual warfare between Good and Evil. Compromise with Evil is wrong, even if it could win you a few votes.

Another factor left out of the snack-shop model is authenticity. People who get to the front of the line never doubt that the shop wants to sell them the items on its menu. But when politicians say things that are popular but out of sync with their previous positions, do you believe them? If Mike Johnson announced that government spending cuts had gone too far, or if AOC promised to get tough on illegal immigrants, would you buy that? Even if you liked the new position, would you be more likely to vote for them? Or less likely, because you might doubt that they had any authentic beliefs at all?

And finally, what do “left” and “right” mean, anyway? Free trade used to be a conservative position, but now tariffs are. If I defend San Francisco’s sanctuary city policies, is that a left-wing position (because it’s globalist rather than nationalist) or right-wing (because I’m defending local control against federal intervention)? If you want to stop corruption and keep inflation low, are you liberal or conservative?

The primary “center” position is that you are willing to “work across the aisle” to “get things done”. But what things?

So here’s the point I’m trying to make: Calls for Democrats to move to the center do have a logic to them. But to evaluate the wisdom of those calls, you need to reconsider the factors the beach-snack-shop model leaves out. What particular positions are we being asked to change? Would anyone believe us if we did announce those changes? And who are we abandoning when we do?

Let me suggest a list of people to bear in mind when you ask that third question.

  • Asylum seekers. In the wake of the Holocaust, the nations of the world recognized that people who are facing dire situations in their home countries need to have somewhere to go. We signed those treaties and implemented their principles in law. Currently, our asylum system is swamped, and its delays create opportunities for immigrants to game the system. But the right solution is to fix the system, not abandon the principles embodied in our laws and agreements. We shouldn’t turn people away just so they can be killed back home.
  • Women with problem pregnancies. Laws that protect fetuses often endanger pregnant women. In some states, a pregnant woman’s life needs to be in immediate danger before she can get an abortion. Even if that danger is predictable, it can’t be acted on until it arrives. And sometimes doctors wait too long.
  • Trans people. Something I know from my own friend group (and their children) is that trans people are real. They aren’t making it all up, and they’re not looking to gain some advantage. To move to the center, do I have to pretend that they’re not real? Do I have to support laws that solve no problems, but mark them for harassment? Do I have to stop parents from using their best judgment about what medical treatments their children need?
  • The working poor. Many Americans who have jobs and work full schedules can’t afford health insurance for themselves and their families. Do I need to become OK with that?
  • Victims of ICE’s crimes. The world saw the murders of Rene Good and Alex Pretti. Nothing has been done to bring the murderers to justice or reform the organization that employed and shelters them. Seldom does a week go by without some shocking abuse of ICE’s power. Do we just ignore this, or blame it on a few bad apples (who nonetheless must be protected)?
  • People in poverty. In poor countries, the cost of saving lives is fairly small. Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID seems likely to result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. The endangered people are also real. Should we not care about them?

A final question to ask about reaching compromise in the center: Who are we compromising with? Are they offering some actual compromise, or just demanding our approval for their abusive policies?

An important article to read when thinking about this question is A. R. Moxon’s “Soon You Too Will Be a Commie“. Moxon puts a completely different frame on the Right: They’re not a rival snack shop on the other side of the beach, they’re bullies looking for people that they can abuse without consequences. He recalls his own childhood bullies accusing him of being gay, him denying it, and them beating him up anyway.

[B]ullies seem to have a finely tuned awareness of where the margins of permission lie as regards abuses, and choose their targets based on whose suffering will be most broadly acceptable to others. Seems to me bullies always seek to expand the margins of permission for their violence, and one of their standard tactics is expanding the definition of whatever group is broadly acceptable, to include more and more people. Seems to me that when you insist that you aren’t in that group, or take pains to demonstrate that you aren’t in that group, you appease the bully’s premise that a person who [is] in that group deserves abuse. Seems to me that when you get the abuse anyway, the bully has successfully completed the expansion of permission wherein that group now includes you. In a bully’s world, where gay means a beating is deserved, eventually you’ll be gay, too.

Moxon is focused on a somewhat different issue — the pressure Democrats are under to denounce “far-left” allies. (See Abdul El-Sayed and Hassan Piker, which I’ll say more about in the weekly summary.) But the same principles apply to many of the groups on my list above. One complaint I have often heard about Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign is that she shouldn’t have talked so much about trans rights. But here’s the problem with that critique: During her 2024 campaign, I don’t believe Harris talked at all about trans rights. It was the Trump campaign that relentlessly raised the trans issue: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Trump (falsely) accused a Olympic medal-winning boxer of being trans. But Harris had defended trans rights in the 2020 primaries (making up for a mixed record previously), and that was all it took. No number of speeches about kitchen-table issues could make the trans issue go away.

What would she have had to do? Come out against trans rights? Repeat some anti-trans framing, the way Rep. (and current Senate candidate) Seth Moulton did after the 2024 election? (“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”) Become a bully herself?

With regard to protecting any of the groups I listed above, what is the compromise position? (Restoring half of the money Musk took from USAID? Funding fewer ICE concentration camps?) Who would those compromises appeal to, and how many votes would they be worth?

It won’t work to just stop talking about those issues, because Republicans have a lot of money to keep raising them. That’s the lesson of the Harris campaign. And no maybe-you’re-right rhetoric will be strong enough. I don’t think you can split the difference between bullies and their victims. You can either defend the victims or join the bullies.

August 31, 2026 – 10:53 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Next weekend is Labor Day, which is the traditional let’s-get-serious moment in American election campaigns. Ad wars heat up, and people who don’t pay a lot of attention to politics begin to wonder what offices are up for grabs this time and who they might want to fill them.

The conventional wisdom says this is the time to stop trying to rally your base and start talking to the swing voters, who occupy some theoretical “center” of the political spectrum. It’s time to drop your edgier positions and focus on so-called “kitchen table issues” like the price of gas. That’s the question I address in this week’s featured post “Hazards and pitfalls of moving to the center”. In that post, I try to give move-to-the-center its due as a logical path forward, while examining what this kind of thinking leaves out.

The question I come down to is: When you get down to the nuts-and-bolts of exactly which positions you would need to change or de-emphasize, who would you be abandoning? I’ll try to get that out by 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary, I’ll continue the practice I started last week of separating substantive developments from the ones that just boil your blood, for example separating Lake America from the larger trade war with Canada. Among those substantive issues are the apparent deal to control Venezuela’s oil, the heat build-up in the oceans, the fall elections, and the continuing effort to control the worst excesses of the Trump regime through the courts. And I’ll close with a farewell to Dolly Parton.

August 31, 2026 – 9:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Best Descriptions

Here is the thing. If you tell me that you believe that race is a biological category and that it is a guide to the objective superiority and inferiority of groups of people, I am not calling you a racist to insult you, I am calling you a racist because it best describes your beliefs.

– Jamelle Bouie

This week’s featured post is “Can Democrats take the Senate?“

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about our strange foreign policy

So North Korea is good and Canada is bad. Got it?

As North Korea goes full speed ahead on building the nuclear weapons we’re spending billions to keep Iran from getting, Trump wants a summit meeting with Kim Jong Un. To make himself more attractive to Kim, Trump cut short our planned military exercises with South Korea, saying that the exercises are “inappropriate and hostile” to the North, which is in the running for the most oppressive country in the world. If you’re looking for some good behavior that Trump is rewarding, you won’t find any.

Trump has maintained that he enjoys a “great relationship” with Kim, telling reporters on Wednesday: “He likes me”.

That’s all that matters. Previous American presidents didn’t think having a “great relationship” with one of the world’s bloodiest dictators was a worthy goal, absent some concession from the North Koreans. But Trump is focused on himself, not on the interests of the United States or the free world.

Meanwhile, we have entered into a trade war with Canada. Phillips O’Brien summarizes: The dispute is

is about far more than trade, it is about Canada’s right to exist as a sovereign state. … Canada is faced with a USA that is now fundamentally dishonest and rapacious. Moreover, it is faced with a US government that denies its ultimate right to exist and speaks openly (and regularly) about how Canada should be annexed into the USA.

All through Trump’s second term, foreign leaders have been treating him like a crazy uncle: Flatter him. Don’t do anything to set him off. Don’t call him on his bad behavior. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is done with that. He described the impossibility of coming to any agree with the Trump regime.

We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.

In other words, an agreement with Trump only lasts until he decides he wants something else from you. Friday, tariffs on an estimated $20 billion of Canadian goods went into effect, and Trump is threatening 50% across-the-board tariffs on January 1.

Also, he turned up his rhetoric.

US President Donald Trump has said Canada wants “the benefits of being a state, without being one” after trade talks between the two countries collapsed late on Friday.

He has repeatedly said that Canada should be “the 51st state”. How do you negotiate with that?

and control of the Senate

That’s the subject of the featured post. Democrats’ odds are only improved by the tone-deaf candidates Republicans are running in key states. Here, North Carolina Senate candidate Michael Whatley disparages the anti-data-center movement.

You gotta remember that this opposition to data centers is not organic. This is being ginned up.

As if the big money were against data centers rather than behind them.

and some outrage stories: Harp and the USS Trump

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t know what to do with stories that grab public attention, raise people’s blood pressure, and maybe illustrate character flaws of certain important people, but have no direct impact on our lives. Lately, though, they’ve been turning up so regularly that I feel like they need their own category. Feel free to skip down to the next section.

This week we heard endlessly about Natalie Harp, Trump’s closest aide. It all started with this fairly innocuous line by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who is running for reelection in November.

While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.

[I’ve added links in case you don’t recognize the news stories Ossoff is referencing. They’re all legitimately fact-based.]

Now, the heart of Ossoff’s charge is “He doesn’t want to do the job.” We’re at war, and we appear to be losing. The economy is beginning to stall out. Working Americans are having a harder and harder time paying for basic necessities like groceries and fuel — not to mention health insurance. The annual budget deficit may exceed $2 trillion before the fiscal year ends next month. We’re continuing to do nothing — and even go backwards in a lot of ways — in the face of climate change. But our president doesn’t have a lot to say about any of that. If you retain anything from Ossoff’s quote, that’s what it should be.

But that’s not what the White House responded to. Trump and all his minions appeared to take deep offense at “He wants … to travel with Natalie.”

But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought. But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.

This is known as the “Streisand effect“: By objecting to a fairly minor story, you turn it into a major story. So anyway, Natalie Harp is a 35-year-old executive assistant who makes around $150K a year. She is with Trump constantly, prints out flattering news stories and social media posts for him to read, and helps him post his Truth Social rants. She — and not Secretary of State Rubio — was with Trump in the catering truck when he ditched Air Force One in Ankara.

She is devoted to Trump in a way that does not seem terribly healthy. “You are all that matters to me” says one of her notes to him. Some people think she does — or is trying to — look like his daughter Ivanka.

Ossoff’s flip mention of her might be interpreted as hinting that she has a romantic relationship with Trump. But he didn’t exactly say that, and most of the follow-up commentary doesn’t say that either. (Compared to the attacks Trump regularly dishes out — with Natalie’s help — what Ossoff said was fairly tame.) And even if she does, it may seem a little creepy, but it’s neither my business nor yours; consenting adults and all that. The far more damaging interpretation of her role — also probably false — is that the big bag she is always carrying contains his supply of adult diapers.

Here’s the part that does matter:

  • Trump often says stuff that makes you wonder what world he’s living in. Well, it’s Natalie’s World. Both her behavior and the relentlessly worshipful stuff she shows him communicates to Trump that he is a uniquely successful president who is widely admired and universally loved by the American people. Those ridiculous AI-generated images he posts of himself as Jesus or a great general — where do you think he gets them?
  • She worked for a year without a security clearance. Given her constant proximity to the president, you have to assume that she’s seen or heard some of the nation’s most important secrets. But she didn’t have clearance because she didn’t submit the appropriate forms.
  • She is the most egregious example of a general trend inside the Trump regime: The sole qualification for any job — attorney general, defense secretary, whatever — is abject submission and obsequious flattery.

But for the most part, I think we should all feel silly for having spent this much time on her. I know I do.

Another story that is more symbolic than consequential: According to ABC News and “three sources familiar with the matter”, the Navy is thinking about renaming an aircraft carrier under construction. The USS Doris Miller may be renamed for Donald Trump.

If true, this is outrageous in both directions: In the United States, we don’t name things after sitting presidents. Or at least we didn’t used to. Honors like these are supposed to be History’s to decide. Worse, Trump has no military record, and is widely believed to have dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by speciously claiming to have “bone spurs”. He’s also in the process of losing the Iran War.

But as in the previous note, the Navy knows that flattery is the way to get what you want from Trump. And Trump knows (I believe) that future generations will be ashamed of him and the things that happened during his presidency. If he waits for the judgment of History, there won’t be any Trump aircraft carriers or battleships or airports or performing arts centers.

The other side of this swap is to dishonor Doris Miller.

Doris “Dorie” Miller (October 12, 1919 – November 24, 1943) was a U.S. Navy sailor who was the first black recipient of the Navy Cross and a nominee for the Medal of Honor. As a mess attendant second class aboard the battleship USS West Virginia, Miller helped carry wounded sailors to safety during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He then operated an anti-aircraft gun and, despite no prior training in gunnery, officially shot down one plane (according to Navy Department records), but Miller and other eyewitnesses claimed a range of four to six.

What makes Miller’s story even more inspiring is that in 1941 Black sailors weren’t assigned significant combat duties. Without the chaos of Pearl Harbor, he might have spent the war peeling potatoes and ladling out soup.

But Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is doing everything it can to erase the contributions of anyone who isn’t or wasn’t a White man. Naming an aircraft carrier after a Black hero? Impossible!

Your life and everybody else’s will go on as before, but it’s hard to look away.

The ring tone of our quack HHS secretary is a quack.

When people tell you about how “far left” or “out of the mainstream” Democratic candidates like El-Sayid are, remind them of Victor Marx, the Republican candidate for governor of Colorado. In Marx’s book, he describes physical battles he has fought against people possessed by demons.

His detailed descriptions include claims that one man “transformed” in front of him, developing “pointy” ears and “superhuman strength.” In another episode, Marx said a “demonized” teenage girl “turned reptilian” before his eyes.

and you also might be interested in …

The Abraham Lincoln is now headed home, to be replaced by the George Washington.

The latest Trump regime effort to control the press: It fired Erik Slavin, the editor-in-chief of the military newspaper Stars & Stripes, as well as Middle East reporter Lara Korte.

Slavin said he was being fired “for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” … “I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies,” Slavin said.

Korte said on X: “Today, I was informed that the Department of Defense is firing me for insubordination after I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes — not the Pentagon, not the administration, and not any policy maker.”

As our HHS Secretary and President keep badmouthing vaccines, kindergarten vaccination rates are headed downward. The rates vary considerably from one state to the next. Idaho is the least-vaccinated state, with only 75% of kindergarten children getting the MMR vaccine, compared to Maine’s 98%.

Often this gets framed as a personal choice by parents, but it’s more than that. When vaccination rates dip below the level of herd immunity, diseases can spread widely. Some children are unable to benefit from vaccinations, so herd immunity is their only protection. Each unvaccinated child creates risks for other children.

Texas is refusing to extradict an ICE agent accused of shooting a Minneapolis man through a home’s front door and then lying about it, falsely claiming that the man had attacked him. TPM pulls together several examples of Trump or Trump allies preventing criminal ICE agents from facing justice.

and let’s close with something aspirational

Going to a dance lesson this afternoon. Think I’ll come out looking like Astaire?

August 24, 2026 – 12:46 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)