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Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon

September 7, 2026 – 11:03 am

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.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (5)

Hazards and pitfalls of moving to the center

August 31, 2026 – 10:53 am

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.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (8)

Can Democrats take the Senate?

August 24, 2026 – 11:07 am

A few months ago it looked like a pipe dream. But maybe …

For some while, conventional wisdom has said that the Democrats were likely to retake control of the House in 2026, but that the Senate was too much to hope for. The GOP’s current margin is 53-47, assuming independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King continue to caucus with the Democrats. A 50-50 Senate is still Republican, because VP Vance would cast the deciding vote. So Democrats need to net four additional seats to get a 51-49 majority. Given the states a Democrat would have to carry — places like Ohio and Alaska — it seemed impossible.

It seems a lot more possible now.

Let’s not underestimate the challenge. To start with, Democrats need to hang on to seats in Michigan and Georgia, neither of which are a sure thing. The most likely flip is North Carolina, and from there it gets tricky. That map above is from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. In order to prevail, Democrats would need to sweep the map’s four toss-up seats: Alaska, Michigan, Ohio, and Maine. Also, the Iowa and Texas seats may not be as secure for Republicans as the map claims.

But the polls look promising. The current RCP polling averages have Democratic Senate candidates substantially ahead in North Carolina and Georgia, and narrowly ahead in Alaska, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, and Texas. In Iowa the Democrat is narrowly behind.

Nate Silver notes that Democrats often poll well in August, only to see the race turn against them in the fall. In red states, marginal Republicans have a way of returning to their established party loyalties as the election approaches, even if they initially found the Democrat attractive. And Republican candidates will have plenty of money to hammer at Democrats, labeling them “communists”, attacking their manhood (Talerico, Ossoff), or raising bigotry against their name and religion (El-Sayed).

What makes predicting the final results tricky is that the various races probably aren’t independent. The electorate will likely focus on a few key points that all the races will hinge on. So if Democrats lose Maine, they probably can’t make up for it by taking Texas. If Maine is gone, Texas will be gone too.

But this is where I get optimistic, because I don’t see the state of the country and the world cooperating with a Republican bounce-back. Trump won’t magically pull out a win in Iran. The price of gas will still be high. And Trump shows no signs of learning election discipline, so he’ll probably keep talking about ballrooms and revenge indictments, and keep being obvious about his corruption. I doubt he’ll focus on making the economy work for the working-class voters Republicans need. So if a wave breaks on Election Day, it should break in Democrats’ favor, with frustrated working-class Whites finally giving up on Trump and his enablers.

Let’s take the key states one by one.

Alaska. The Data For Progress site finds Alaskans focused on affordability, and their Republican governor is deeply unpopular (-23 favorable-unfavorable). Trump carried the state by 13% in 2024, but his favorability has collapsed too. (He’s at -1.)

Alaska has an unusual system. Four candidates come out of its jungle primary, and the general election has ranked-choice voting. (I like this system.) A lot has been made of there being two Dan Sullivans in the race (the Republican candidate and an independent), but probably it will have no effect. If you’re confused about which Dan Sullivan is which, you’ll rank them next to each other and it will all work out. (That’s one reason I like this system. It handles various kinds of election trickery well.)

The Democrat in the race is Mary Peltola. She has won two elections to be Alaska’s only representative in the House, and lost in 2024 by only 2-3%, running well ahead of Kamala Harris in the state. So Alaskans know who she is and she’ll be hard to smear. The RCP polling average has her up 2%, and the betting markets make her the favorite.

Georgia. This is the surprise, at least to me. Jon Ossoff is running a very strong race and is ahead in the RCP average by a comfortable 7.5%. He’s emerging as a possible 2028 presidential candidate. Ossoff is one of the Democrats’ best messengers at framing Trump’s corruption.

Iowa. Seriously? Democrats are competitive in Iowa? This year, yes. This is the seat currently held by Joni Ernst. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R) is running against State Rep. Josh Turek. Turek is running on his centrist record in the legislature — which is probably the only way an Iowa Democrat breaks through — so don’t expect any progressive fireworks.

Anyway, Hinson is running slightly ahead (.7%) in the polls. And that close race is not a fluke, because the Democratic candidate for governor, Rob Sand, currently has a 5% lead. Apparently, the nation’s second-highest cancer rate and contaminated water are big local issues. Also, cheap land and Republican government have made Iowa a target for corporations building data centers.

Maine. A lot of national pundits thought Democrats blew their chance to oust Susan Collins in the Graham Platner fiasco. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Democrats united quickly around Platner’s replacement, Troy Jackson, and Collins is still dogged by the same issues: her deciding vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh (who was the deciding vote to overturn Roe v Wade), her wishywashy position on ICE’s Portland surge, and her general position as someone who expresses “concern” about the Trump regime’s outrages, but will get in line when Trump needs her vote. Maine went for Harris over Trump by 7% in 2024, and you have to wonder how Collins will win over those Harris voters when the national winds are blowing the other way.

The closer we get to November, the further in the rear-view mirror Platner is. Currently Jackson is ahead by 2.3% in the RCP average. Collins has a lot of billionaire money behind her, but that might work against her as much as for her.

Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed beat the Democratic establishment’s chosen candidate in the primary. The party establishment has since gotten behind El-Sayed, but I have to wonder how much hard feeling remains in the electorate. Republicans will spend a lot of money demonizing him as a “terrorist” and raising bigotry against his name and Muslim religion.

In his favor, El-Sayed is a strong candidate. He interviews well, in that he gives quotable answers to hostile questions without sounding abrasive. He keeps his eye on the ball. For example, in response to a question about Islamophobia, he replied:

That’s the best you’ve got? You can’t actually talk about what you want to do? My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war. My name is not the reason you can’t afford your groceries.

Polls currently are close, with El-Sayed narrowly ahead (.7%). Two factors point in opposite directions: Polls overestimated El-Sayed’s support in the primary (which often happens in cases where bigotry is an issue; people get into the voting booth and express prejudices they wouldn’t admit otherwise). But also, time helps Democrats unite, and Republican Mike Rogers won’t know what to do with debates: A smear works better when the target remains at a distance, and El-Sayed is the far more articulate candidate. But not debating looks cowardly.

El-Sayed’s challenge is to get voters to listen to him rather than react to him as a string of labels from attack ads: a far-left Muslim terrorist. I think he’s up to the job.

North Carolina. Here’s a case where the Chuck Schumer model of candidate recruitment worked well. Schumer looks for experienced candidates with name recognition who know how to raise money. In North Carolina, that describes Roy Cooper, a two-term governor who was succeeded by another Democrat when term limits wouldn’t let him run in 2025.

Trump won North Carolina by about 3% in 2024, but his recent approval-disapproval number is -18%.

RCP has Cooper up by 8%, which isn’t a lock but looks pretty good.

Ohio. Sherrod Brown is another familiar face. He won election to the Senate in 2006, 2012, and 2018 before losing to Bernie Moreno by less than 4% in 2024. Trump won Ohio by 11% in 2024. I can’t find recent Trump favorability polls from Ohio, but I think it’s safe to say he’s in negative territory.

Polls are scattered on this race. The only poll since June has Brown up 8%, but the RCP average includes polls since March, and only gives Brown a .6% edge. I might like to claim that Brown has momentum, but nobody has polled Ohio twice, so it’s hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

Texas. This is the long shot Democrats would most like to see come in. Just by his existence, James Talerico is demonstrating the hypocrisy of the Christian Nationalist movement and Evangelical Christianity’s right-wing sellout in general. Talerico is a seminary student who takes the teachings of Jesus seriously, rather than making Jesus the mascot of the home team.

Ken Paxton, on the other hand, is blatantly corrupt. In 2023, he was impeached as attorney general by a legislature heavily controlled by his own party, but escaped removal from office. He has been repeatedly investigated and/or indicted. His wife sued for divorce, accusing him of adultery. I don’t quite see how voters can square all that with Christianity, other than “He’s on our team.”

Talerico is one of the few Democrats with a fund-raising advantage. RCP has him up by 1.2%, but I will be pleasantly surprised if that holds up. I have great faith in the hypocrisy of Texas “Christians”. They’ll find a way to come home to Paxton.

Pull it together. For what it’s worth, my best guess is that Democrats hold their seats in Georgia and Michigan. They flip North Carolina, Maine, and probably Alaska. Meanwhile, Iowa and Texas seem like too much to hope for. That leaves Democrats ahead 50-49, and Ohio decides the majority. If you make me choose, I think Brown puts Democrats over the top, but its very iffy.

Friday J. D. Vance was in Ohio campaigning for a Republican ticket that includes John Husted, whose Senate race against Sherrod Brown is one of the toss-ups that may decide control. I really wonder if J. D. reads his speeches ahead of time:

I believe this November, we will face a choice: Do we demand that our government serves us rather than the fraudsters and the criminals? Do we demand that the American president fight for the American people first?

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The only comment I needed to make was to add the links.

If James Talerico’s approach to Christianity is making you rethink your rejection of that faith, you should check out the blog “Backyard Church” by Dan Foster. Like me, Foster was raised in a denomination where the most important thing was to hold “correct” beliefs. In the post “There Are Two Ways to be a Christian“, he describes that approach as simply one way.

One begins with the question: What do I need to believe? The other begins somewhere else entirely: What kind of person am I becoming? … Suddenly, spiritual growth isn’t measured primarily by how much theology I know or how certain I am about it. It’s measured by what is happening to me. Am I becoming more loving? Am I more patient than I used to be? More generous? More forgiving?

The cartoon refers to a “Christian crusader march” in Dearborn, Michigan to protest the “Islamification of America”. Police had to break it up.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (10)

Some revolutions are too big to see

August 17, 2026 – 9:29 am

If you want to understand the 21st century, take a wide-angle view of the 20th.

During the 1800s, the technological underpinnings of the 20th century economy gradually arose and got implemented on a large scale. The steamboat and then the railroad revolutionized transportation. The telegraph, telephone, and mass-market newspapers revolutionized communication, creating new possibilities for democracy, but also for advertising and propaganda. Eli Whitney’s interchangeable parts allowed low-skill factory workers to mass produce goods that formerly required highly skilled craftspeople. The limited liability corporation and developments in banking and security trading enabled a unified management to wield quantities of capital far beyond what any individual entrepreneur could raise.

Each of those developments was of historical significance on its own, and many people recognized that they were living in an age of wonders. The introduction to Lilaquat Ahamed’s recent book 1873 calls attention to three enormous infrastructure projects that all were completed in 1869-70: the American transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and the rail link from Bombay to Calcutta.

One French paper even hazarded a guess that these three critical links in the global transportation chain would now enable a traveler to go around the world in fewer than eighty days.

What was harder to see than the individual wonders, though, was what they added up to: Large chunks of humanity, tens of millions of people, were becoming economically, socially, and culturally integrated in a way the world had not previously seen.

The first large-scale demonstration of the new possibilities came during the American Civil War, when the North mobilized the Union states into a vast war-production machine, fielding a well-equipped army far larger than Napoleon had used to invade Russia just half a century before. (Unlike Napoleon, the Union managed to keep its army supplied.) That integrated productive machine was largely allowed to dissolve once the war was won, but its example raised a question that first got a full expression in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian time-travel novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887: What if a similar nationwide integration could be directed towards peaceful goals? Could a war-style mobilization provide everyone with enough to eat and clothes to wear and decent housing to live in?

While Bellamy’s vision and others like it may have been politically inspiring, no mobilize-for-peace movement gained power in the United States. But private-sector visionaries like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were grasping the business possibilities of large-scale integration. All (or nearly all) of the oil wells in the country could become Standard Oil. All the steel mills could become U. S. Steel. With Morgan’s capital and guiding hand, industry after industry united into trusts that could monopolize their particular markets. Rather than a dozen or more competing entities risking the over-production that regularly crashed prices in a boom-and-bust fashion, a nation-spanning monopoly corporation could manage production and keep prices consistently high. Simultaneously, the lack of competition for labor could keep wages low. Concentrated wealth enabled political manipulation that kept the laws friendly and insured streams of government contracts for railroads and other infrastructure projects.

The result was the Gilded Age. Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire, but he was just the apex of a wealthy class that became a kind of shadow government. The epitome of the new organization was the company town: a small city dominated by a single mine or factory, whose owner also owned the houses workers lived in and the stores where they had to shop. The town might even have its own money: Workers could be paid in company scrip that could only be redeemed in company shops. The spirit of the times is captured retrospectively in the 20th-century song 16 Tons about a worker in a coal-mining town:

St. Peter don’t you call me, cause I can’t go. I owe my soul to the company store.

Eventually, the progressive political movement pushed back against the excesses of the Gilded Age oligarchs: Antitrust laws were passed, unions eventually were protected rather than broken by police, and government regulation limited corporate power. The process took decades, but Standard Oil was broken up into smaller companies that became known as the Seven Sisters. Morgan’s dominance of banking was replaced by the Federal Reserve, which at least nominally had a responsibility to the public.

Over the same time period, Europe was developing similar technological infrastructure, and in World War I the major European powers shared the American experience of full-scale mobilization: An entire nation could become one big engine powered by a single purpose. By the end of the war, people all over Europe were (in a variety of partial or limited ways) asking Bellamy’s question: Large-scale economic integration made a new level of production possible. What could or should be done with it?

That question raised additional questions: Who would manage this engine? And manage it for whose benefit? One way to read the turmoil of the 20th century (from the end of World War I through the Cold War) is as a battle between different answers to those questions.

  • Fascism took society’s power structure as it found it and integrated the pieces into a corporate state with a single leader. Industries would still be dominated by huge corporations like Krupp in steel or I. G. Farben in chemicals. But the ruling political party would take over the media and the educational system so that it could mold public opinion to its liking. The Leader would have a cult of personality, and the frustrations of the working classes would be channeled to target scapegoats like Jews or foreigners. Gleichschaltung, an engineering term related to synchronization, was a system of political, economic, and social pressure — ultimately backed by the police and the concentration camps — to bring individual opinions (or at least public expressions of individual opinions) into line with the state’s official ideology.
  • Communism upended the existing power structure and replaced it with institutions created by the state. Like fascism, it controlled media, education, and the police. But it demolished private-sector institutions entirely: Individual farms were gathered into collective farms. Leaders of the various industries were government officials without even nominal independence. Centralized authority attempted to script economic development in five-year plans.
  • Liberal democracy roughly followed the model of the Progressive Era United States: Private-sector corporations continued to exist and were allowed to manage themselves within bounds established by an elected government. Wealthy individuals and corporations would, of course, try to influence the electorate or corrupt the government, and would sometimes succeed. But when public misery reached extreme levels — as it did during the Great Depression — a political revolution like the New Deal became possible.

Each of these systems had its moments of success. Fascism took Germany from desperation to a continent-bestriding empire in eight short years, creating the autobahn and other large-scale infrastructure projects. Soviet Russia became one of the world’s two superpowers, with nuclear weapons and the first artificial satellite. Though the quantity and quality of Soviet goods never caught up with the West, Russian consumers who remembered the deprivations of the 1930s felt very fortunate indeed by the 1960s.

But the winner of the 20th-century competition was liberal democracy, with a victory so clear that in 1992 Francis Fukuyama heralded “the end of history“. To be fair, Fukuyama did not mean to say that history was over, but that — on this question at least — it had reached an answer.

the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

You might expect a trend created by technology to be disrupted by subsequent technologies. But the pull of integration was only reinforced by the major developments of the 20th century: radio, television, the electrical grid, automobiles, highways, chain stores, and eventually computers and the internet.

The propaganda industry of World War I inspired a post-war advertising revolution that did not simply announce products but shaped public opinion, creating markets rather than simply responding to them. (See Walter Lippman’s 1922 classic Public Opinion and Edward Bernays’ 1928 Propaganda. By 1967 John Kenneth Galbraith had put it all together in The New Industrial State. Focusing on the Ford Motor Corporation, Galbraith concluded that the market-defining power it shared with GM and Chrysler made it an altogether new kind of entity that Adam Smith would not recognize as a firm.)

It’s important to realize that no major nation refused to integrate. The possibilities of increased production and wealth were just too tempting, both to leaders and to the general public. Much was lost in the transition to the new integrated society: The pressure to conform restricted individuality. Physical and social mobility disrupted families and communities. Materialism challenged religion. By the mid-20th century, we had a new word, totalitarianism, to express the new level of intrusion and oppression that an integrated society made possible. But eventually, ordinary people (most clearly in liberal democracies, but also in fascist and communist countries) came to experience a level of luxury their ancestors could not have imagined. Refusing, or going back, was never really an option.

What the 20th century example means to us. So now let’s talk about the 21st century. It has become a commonplace observation that cheap personal computers and the internet are revolutionary in the way that the printing press was in the 15th century. But the early manifestations of that revolution were fairly trivial: You could order and start reading an e-book without leaving your bedroom, or download a real-time satellite image of the current weather system, or carry your entire music collection on a device in your pocket. Those who didn’t live through this period may have a hard time imagining how marvelous it all seemed. It was indeed an age of wonders. And yet, society was still society. If you wanted to go on living your life as if nothing were changing, you could.

But consider what has happened since, not as a series of individual developments, but as a whole:

  • Surveillance capitalism. The services and devices we all use give each of us an enormous data trail. Your phone knows where you’ve carried it. Your car knows where you’ve driven. Your TV knows what you’ve watched. Your voice-activated Siri or Alexa can listen to your conversations. Your supermarket tracks your purchases. Your smart house knows what hours you keep and what rooms you like to use. Your internet browser knows what you’ve shown an interest in. All those entities are owned by companies that can and do sell the information they collect.
  • Social media algorithms. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube don’t just show you what you look for, they also make models of your interests and suggest what you might look at next. The algorithms that do this are not designed for your benefit. Instead, they exploit addictive patterns in the human mind, hooking you with anger or fear, and then drawing you ever further down various rabbit holes. Their goal is to hold your attention longer so that they can sell the advertising they can show you. In addition, Elon Musk’s X has a clear propagandistic purpose. It privileges Musk’s own neo-Nazi posts, and possibly similar voices. In short, the algorithms don’t just reflect your interests, they can and do change your interests, and perhaps your personality as well.
  • Artificial intelligence. The tech giants are building out a massive computing infrastructure that can process data on scales never before imagined.

The weakness of 20th-century totalitarian surveillance was simple: Who was going to listen to all those recordings or watch all those camera feeds? Who was going to assemble the clues you inadvertently left to figure out what you intended to do? Maybe if you were a world leader or a suspect in some important investigation, the KGB or FBI or some similar organization might assign you enough watchers and analysts to make sense of it all. But the vast majority of us just aren’t worth that kind of attention.

We aren’t worth that kind of human attention. But maybe going forward we will be worth that kind of AI attention.

Similarly, 20th-century marketing and propaganda was based on statistical models. What were most people thinking? How would an average person respond to this message or that one? But 21st-century attempts to influence consumers and voters are increasingly personalized: What message would motivate you to do what the messenger wants?

20th-century corporations used mass-market advertising to create and alter large-scale trends. (How could Proctor and Gamble turn bad breath or body odor into embarrassing social problems that required its mouthwash or deodorant?) But a 21st-century marketer has the time and energy to analyze you as an individual. (Are you ready to buy a new car? What would cause you to choose this one rather than that one?) 21st-century politicians can target a message at you individually, whether the purpose is to change your vote, or just to make you give up on the possibility of figuring out what is true or what you should do about it.

Put it together: Just by living your life, you create an enormous data stream. The capability to analyze that data stream either exists or soon will exist. That analysis might produce a pretty good picture of what you know, what you believe, and how you think. Knowing that, the algorithms that decide what information comes to your attention might know just what to show you to make you do what their clients want you to do — buy a product, vote for a candidate, join a movement, or whatever.

It’s easy to make a dystopia out of this, but hold off on that thought for a second. What this all points to is that a deeper level of social/economic/cultural integration is now possible. That power could be used for good or ill, just as the power created by the previous integration was.

In a dystopia, AI might analyze your data trail, figure out exactly what conspiracy theory might hook you, and at a key moment send you just the right upsetting pseudo-fact that pushes you towards mass-murder or suicide bombing.

In a utopia, the algorithms might cheer you up when you’re depressed, nudge you to make that career change you’ve been thinking about, or even search out (or create) a place in the economy for someone with your exact combination of talents and disabilities.

The near-universal psychological trauma of 20th-century was the thought that the system is indifferent to us, that we don’t fit and there is no place for us. In order to survive, we need to hide our inner selves and become organization men or men in grey flannel suits who are made of ticky-tacky and all look just the same.

In a utopia, the system would not be indifferent. It would try to meet us halfway and find roles we could fill with our authentic selves.

And maybe along the way, we could have another productivity bump, similar to the last one. Maybe in a few decades that increased integration will have ordinary people living in what would seem like unimaginable luxury now, albeit with the loss of some cultural values that seem important today.

Which way things will go depends on the same questions as last time: Who is going to manage this integrated society, and for whose benefit?

Right now, we’re on the Gilded Age track. Musk, Bezos, et al. are managing the transition for their own benefit, just like Rockefeller and Morgan did. They’re collaborating with a corrupt government and using their increased power to squeeze the rest of us ever tighter. We may end up in the online equivalent of the company town, owing our souls to the owners.

But look for each of the three 20th-century competitors to make their cases again. The fascism of the Trump regime is not particularly well-founded in the new possibilities, and is being derailed by Trump’s own greed and ignorance. But the last two years do point out how eagerly Gilded Age oligarchs will line up behind a fascist leader.

Communism may also get a second chance. One reason Soviet Communism failed was the sheer impracticality of central planning in a large modern economy. A market in essence is a distributed-processing system for managing production and consumption. The market-oriented liberal democracies simply had more processing power and greater flexibility and creativity than any Soviet central planner could apply to the job. But a 21st-century central planner’s capabilities may may be better suited.

If we are lucky, liberal democracy will also get a second chance. But for that to happen, some significant number of people need to grasp what’s happening and apply our creativity to doing something about it. Certainly we’ll have to revive the 20th-century progressive tools of antitrust and unions. But we also have to hope that the new possibilities include new tools for fighting back against oligarchy and escaping the company town.

It may seem impossible, but the first Gilded Age seemed unassailable too. As George Orwell put it, “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

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Why the freak-out over El-Sayed?

August 10, 2026 – 10:00 am

Don’t react to labels, paraphrases, or guilt by association. Listen to what he says.

It wasn’t the blow-out the polls had predicted, but progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed defeated the Democratic establishment’s candidate Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary. El-Sayed will face Republican Congressman Mike Rogers in the fall election.

Not being a Michigan voter, I didn’t give this race a lot of attention until last week, when the primary was almost upon us. I knew that El-Sayed was the progressive candidate (backed by Bernie Sanders and AOC) and that Stevens was the establishment candidate (backed by Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer, and $32 million from the pro-Netanyahu group AIPAC). I watched a couple of videos and came to the conclusion that El-Sayed was the more talented retail politician. He’s clearly smart (a doctor and a Rhodes scholar), but he is also uncommonly good at boiling things down in a way that any voter can understand. He focused his campaign on three points:

  • Money out of politics.
  • More money in your pocket.
  • Medicare for All.

So while I haven’t consistently lined up on either the progressive or the establishment side in the Democrats intra-party debate, I was rooting for him. And though he got outspent something like 9-to-1 by Stevens, he won.

Since then, I’ve paid a lot more attention to him and I’ve become a fan.

I’ve seen Republicans launch a McCarthy-style red scare against him. El-Sayed is a “Communist“, Trump says, speaking from his complete ignorance of what Communism is or has ever been. Senator Tommy Tuberville (whose name always comes up when people are challenged to name the dumbest person in the Senate) charged that Sayed is a “terrorist“.

Michigan Democrats just voted to send a TERRORIST to the Senate. Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is a RADICAL ISLAMIST who will do everything he can to destroy America.

I mean, with a name like “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed” (or “Barack Hussein Obama” for that matter), how can he be anything but an America-hating terrorist?

Meanwhile, a few Democrats freaked out about “electability”. This is always a bad topic to keep discussing after the primary is over, because it gives cover to Republicans who lie about the “unelectable” candidate. El-Sayed is unelectable if people start to believe that he’s a communist or a terrorist, and by worrying about his “electability” you’re implying that maybe he is.

So here’s the main point I want to make about El-Sayed: Listen to him. Don’t judge him on his Egyptian name, or his Muslim faith, or the color of his skin, or some objectionable thing one of his supporters said. Don’t judge him by a label somebody else attaches to him, like “socialist” or “antisemite”. Look for evidence. What has he actually said or done that justifies that label? And finally, take a moment to appreciate that we have a charming, personable, articulate candidate. I just love this campaign ad his grandparents made.

I also love the subtle generational message here: He’s young enough to still have living grandparents.

A good place to hear what he has to say is this interview with Katy Tur. The heart of his message sounds a lot like Obama’s 2008 “hope and change”, with a touch of Sanders’ working-class edge.

I’m asking people: “What is it that you want from your government?” Maybe if we broke the chokehold that corporations had on our government for so long, maybe if we actually used this to put money back into our pockets rather than into our politics, and we guaranteed everybody healthcare, maybe life could be a little bit easier. … We need a movement at the federal level that says actually [Medicare for All] is about what we can do when we’re not sending our money to drop bombs on other people and their kids, if we’re using that here at home.

Tur raises the electability issue.

Now, I know I wasn’t supposed to run for office. I’ve got the wrong name, I’ve got the wrong skin color, I pray the wrong way, my family comes from the wrong place. But I’m also not going to use this seat to tell you what you cannot have and you should not fight for. And I know that when we’re willing to have a conversation across the divides they tell us we can’t breach, that we really can build big things. That’s the story of this country.

El-Sayed dismisses labels like left and right, blue and red, and so on. He says that a lot of people feel left out of our system, and there are people from both parties who are locking them out. He wants to stand with the people who are locked out.

Tur also raises antisemitism: Why shouldn’t Jewish voters “feel alienated by a candidate like you”?

I’ll tell you this: Nobody understands better what it’s like to be discriminated against for how you pray than someone who gets discriminated against for how we pray. And most of the time we don’t ask how we pray, most people are asking what you pray for. And I pray for peace and dignity and basic goodness for all of our kids, whether they’re Jewish kids who are a couple house down from me, or my kids who are Muslim.

And I’ll tell you that it’s really important for us to be able to differentiate between Judaism, the Jewish people, Jewish culture, Jewish contributions to this culture (which are vast) and AIPAC and Israel. Those are two different things.

I, when I’m elected, will be the chief opposition to what the Egyptian government does. My family emigrated from Egypt. That doesn’t make me anti-Egyptian. That just means that I want my tax dollars to be spent here rather than sent over there to cement the chokehold of a military dictatorship on its own people. And I apply this same exact principle to Israel. I don’t want my tax dollars being spent to backstop apartheid and genocide, when they could be used to provide things like glasses or healthcare or schools for our own kids.

And I worry that a lot of times people want to use the word antisemitism to spread, to defend a foreign government. And I just think it’s really important for us to differentiate between those two, because I don’t want to be held accountable to what another government does, simply because I share ethnicity with the people who live there. And I know the same for my Jewish sisters and brothers.

And he nails something I’ve wanted to hear for years:

We have a two-year runway to do the things that Democrats haven’t been doing for a very long time, which is about persuading people. I think Democrats, we do this thing where we have these polls, and the poll tells us what’s popular. And we just say the thing that’s popular, and we wonder why nobody wants to join us. … We have given up on the idea that you can actually persuade people. There’s a reason why I go to 101 different cities. Not because they’re all Democrats. It’s because I want to prove that if you’re willing to take your message — if it’s authentic to you, if you believe in it — and have that conversation with folks in places where they say you can’t, you actually can start to change people’s minds.

The case against him revolves around guilt by association: He campaigned with Hasan Piker, who has said things like “America deserved 9-11.” (But Piker didn’t say anything like that in front of El-Sayed, who has called that comment “dumb”. El-Sayed himself has not said anything similar.) He was supported in the primary by the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform includes planks that some people find far-out or objectionable. But El-Sayed does not call himself a Democratic Socialist and has not endorsed that platform.

Pay attention to what he says and does.

So far, the media freakout against El-Sayed isn’t drawing any marquee figures. To her credit, Stevens endorsed El-Sayed immediately after the votes were counted. So has the rest of Michigan’s Democratic establishment. Kamala Harris has endorsed him, and President Obama is working towards party unity.

There is one overriding political threat in America today, and it is fascism, not socialism or communism. We need a Congress that stands clearly in opposition to the fascist and authoritarian vision of the Trump regime. If we have learned anything from watching the Senate lay down for Todd Blanche to be approved as attorney general, it’s that Republican senators will not defend our democracy or the rule of law.

In this situation, I’m for any Democrat. But I particularly like El-Sayed.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (12)

Power is more than just votes

August 3, 2026 – 10:36 am

Good short- and medium-term political news has emboldened some writers to remind us of the longer-term bad news.

The good news is that polls for the fall elections keep looking better. The unpopular and unpromising Iran War, Trump’s tariffs, the continuing inflation that the war and the tariffs make worse, ICE’s repeated acts of unjustified and illegal violence, the regime’s increasingly blatant corruption, the undying plan to reward Trump’s January 6 cop-beaters, and the Mad King’s obsession with his past defeats and continuing vanity projects (ballroom, arch, reflecting pool, coin, and putting his name on train stations, airports, bridges, investment accounts, drug plans, a peace institute, and a performance space) that do nothing to improve voters’ lives — it’s starting to add up.

Trump’s approval rating is at its lowest point ever — lower than after January 6, even. Quinnipiac has him at 32% approval versus 58% disapproval, which includes 52% strong disapproval. (Strong disapproval over 50% seems to be exceedingly rare. Nixon appears to have topped out at 48% strong disapproval, while George W. Bush hit 51%. Trump may be setting records here, with strong disapproval like nobody has ever seen before.) And that’s transferring to Republican candidates: The Democratic lead in the generic congressional poll is now at 11% in the Emerson College poll, which is a bit of an outlier. But every major recent poll has Democrats up at least 2%, with an average of 6.4%.

Polls about individual issues have Trump underwater across the board. And what seems likely to turn around between now and November? Will he win the Iran War? Wow us with some completed vanity project that makes us forget our problems? More likely, low-information voters who generally have liked Trump in the past will start to tune in before the election and say, “What? Is that still a problem? He’s in favor of what? He made how much money since getting elected again?”

Of course polling isn’t perfect and things can always change, but I’m finding this convincing: The fall elections are looking good.

So what’s looking bad? Money, to start with. Elon Musk by himself spent over $300 million to elect Republicans (mostly Trump) in 2024, and that turned out to be a profitable investment. He bought himself new government contracts, massive quantities of government data about people like you, and protection against government investigations. He’s talking about spending $100 million this fall, and that’s probably a lowball estimate.

Now, maybe he’ll waste all that money, the way he wasted $21 million on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race that his candidate lost by double digits. In that race, Musk himself campaigned, and his money became an issue that worked against his candidate.

But what if he’s smarter this time around? He says he’s funding get-out-the-vote efforts. What if those efforts include making deep-fake videos of Democratic candidates and distributing them via targeted social-media advertising? This fall, you may not even know the lies that motivate your neighbor to get out and vote Republican.

But the long-term bad news runs deeper than that, as articles by John F. Terzano and Jason Sattler point out. Basically, they are two points of view on the same unsettling story: Over decades, conservatives have built a political, legal, intellectual, and media infrastructure that is well suited to the way power actually works in the United States. That integrated power-seeking and power-wielding system can survive one or two bad elections and quickly re-assert itself. Terzano sums up what began happening after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964:

Conservatives learned to focus on something much larger than just presidential elections: the institutions that develop and preserve ideas, cultivate future leaders, and sustain political movements across generations. That requires the long-term work of building power from the ground up. It requires discipline, persistence, and a willingness to invest in institutions whose greatest influence may not be realized for decades.

An example of how this now works is the way the Right bounced back from the disasters of the second Bush administration. By the time he left office, George W. Bush had over-50% strong disapproval, just like Trump does. The combination of unwinnable wars and the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression led his party to massive defeats in 2006 and 2008. By the time Obama took office in 2009, he had not just a landslide victory himself, but a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the Senate (though Republican legal shenanigans prevented the 60th senator from taking office until the next summer; Obama’s filibuster protection only lasted until Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s seat the next January).

After that, you might have expected the GOP to spend a couple of election cycles soul-searching and remaking itself, perhaps looking for its own Obama. Instead, it rebranded almost instantly in the Tea Party. Republicans flipped 63 seats in the House in 2010, taking a majority that Obama had to deal with for the rest of his presidency. Almost instantly, the party of tax-cuts-for-the-rich (that didn’t change) had new faces, new slogans, and zero responsibility for anything W had done.

During his brief season of living beyond the reach of the filibuster, Obama did not transform the country or create a new political paradigm. By 2016, Trump represented the rebellion against Bushism (though he still wanted to cut rich people’s taxes). He likewise proved horribly unpopular and lost resoundingly in 2020, ending his term with a failed coup that should have sent him to jail.

But again, the GOP turned on a dime. Trump was back in 2024 and had a clear plan — Project 2025 — for the march towards autocracy that we are seeing now.

More than just elections, conservatives have managed to rewrite the Constitution without anyone voting for the changes. A combination of luck and political hardball has given them a radically partisan 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, despite holding the presidency for about the same amount of time as Democrats since 1992 — and only because their candidates won in 2000 and 2016 with fewer votes than their Democratic opponents.

Repealing Roe v Wade happened with much political attention. But consider these other constitutional rewrites:

  • The unitary executive theory, which was a fringe idea prior to the 1980s, is now in the Constitution. So all the independent agencies Congress created over the decades have lost their independence, and civil service protections are now suspect.
  • Presidential immunity is in the Constitution now.
  • Political contributions are now a form of speech, so virtually any limit on money in politics is now unconstitutional. And corporations have the same freedom of political speech that you do.
  • The “well regulated militia” clause of the Second Amendment is now meaningless, and the Amendment defines an individual right that did not exist prior to 2008.
  • Virtually every provision of the Voting Rights Act is now unenforceable.
  • The insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment is now meaningless.

Amending the Constitution requires a 2/3 vote in Congress and ratification from 3/4 of the states. Do you remember any of that happening with these changes?

Sattler focuses on the media empire the Right has built, with its ability to create new narratives and new issues in virtually no time at all. Everyone understands the role Fox News plays, but most of us don’t appreciate the breadth of the right-wing media machine: Elon Musk’s X is now rigged to promote and distribute right-wing hate while disclaiming any responsibility for it; Meta is becoming a slightly-less-toxic version of X; CBS is remaking itself as a slightly-less-explicit version of Fox; Sinclair puts national messages into the mouths of local broadcasters, as if they thought of this themselves; AM talk radio has not changed since the Rush Limbaugh era; and social media is seeded with small-scale right-wing influencers, some of whom grow into national brands themselves. This combination of diversity and integration allows for experimentation with different messages and framing, together with quick coalescing around whichever new thing works.

The media machine explains how Ken Paxton can ride out his scandals while Graham Platner could not; how “issues” from Obama’s birth certificate to illegal-immigrants-voting can be created from nothing; why the small-scale corruption of Hunter Biden was a much bigger story than the large-scale corruption of Eric and Don Jr.; and so on.

Terzano focuses more on the institutional structure of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Democrats can manage to fund candidates once they begin to catch on, the way James Talerico is raising money now or Bernie Sanders did for his presidential runs. But Republicans have the political equivalent of venture capital: Money is waiting around for start-ups it can fund, like Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA, or the early Tea Party groups. If you are a conservative with a promising idea, you will not go begging.

The number and wealth of conservative organizations provides career paths that young liberals can only dream about. Young conservative journalists, lawyers, influencers, activists, or candidates are groomed and tracked in ways that liberals are not. (Believe me, I’ve watched young liberal political science graduates try to navigate their sparse options.)

Ideas change minds; institutions change history. This became a defining tenet of the modern conservative movement. Leadership pipelines ensure that today’s school board member becomes tomorrow’s legislator, who becomes governor or attorney general. Today’s young lawyer becomes tomorrow’s appellate judge, and someday a Supreme Court justice.

The upshot of all this is that pro-democracy forces can’t relax, even if they retake Congress this fall and the presidency in 2028. The movement that made Donald Trump and John Roberts and Paul Ryan and Charlie Kirk will not be defeated so easily. There will be new faces, new slogans, and new issues almost immediately. And the right-wing media empire will scoff at the idea that any of these new voices should have to answer for the mistakes and crimes of Donald Trump. They will suddenly discover that Trump, like W before him, was never really a conservative. The new voices will be the true conservatives, the authentic representatives of the great American people.

And they’ll still be cutting billionaires’ taxes.

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Why everything seems to be getting worse

July 20, 2026 – 10:54 am

Cory Doctorow’s recent book not only outlines how “enshittification” works, but lays out solutions.

The problem with Google. Recently I was trying to plan an upcoming trip to Paris. Having heard warnings that the Louvre can book up, I set out to buy advance tickets online. Googling “Louvre tickets” took me to louvre-museum-tickets.org, where I was unable to find the 22-euro tickets the guidebook assured me existed. Instead, I was offered significantly more expensive options that combined a Louvre ticket with something else, like an audio guide or a Seine cruise.

Eventually I realized that (in spite of the .org suffix) I wasn’t really on a Louvre web site, but had found an independent ticketing agency. So I googled “Louvre official site”, which took me to another overpriced ticketing agency (paristickets.com) that wasn’t the Louvre. Only after I clicked “Hide sponsored results” did I find the Louvre’s actual site louvre.fr and its English-language page at louvre.fr/en. That’s where the 22-euro tickets were.

In other words, Google knew what I wanted, but just chose to show me something else because it could make more money that way.

I was experiencing Step 2 of a process Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”.

  1. First, platforms are good to their users. They become popular for good reasons. Either through network effects or because monopolistic business practices eliminate competition, they become hard to leave.
  2. Because users don’t want to leave, the platform can degrade their experience to make things better for its business customers. It becomes an essential business tool.
  3. But now businesses can’t leave either, so the platform can degrade their experience as well, capturing all the value for itself.

The result, Doctorow claims, is “a giant pile of shit” that makes lots of money while serving no one.

Not so many years ago, the Google algorithm was a revelation. Previous search engines like Altavista might have produced a many-thousand-entry list of every site that mentioned “Louvre”, leaving me to come up with more search terms to narrow it down. Finding what you actually wanted on such lists was a bit of an arcane art. But Google went right to it. At the time, it seemed miraculous.

That was Step 1 Google. But little did we all realize that providing a valuable service was just a means to an end. Eventually, Google became rich enough to buy the default-browser slot in nearly every app you might use. (Google pays Apple about $20 billion a year to be the default in Siri and Safari.) Since then, Google has no need to give users anything like the value it used to. It has enshittified itself.

Uber, Amazon, Facebook. Doctorow gives plenty of other examples. Uber, for one, used to simply match people who were willing to pay for rides with drivers who were willing to drive them. There was enough slack in the middle for Uber to take a cut while making a good deal for both riders and drivers.

Since then, though, Uber has been gathering data about both riders and drivers, so it has an informational advantage over both. So its algorithm can drive hard bargains in both directions: It simultaneously makes good guesses about both the highest rate you might be willing to pay and the lowest rate a driver might be willing to take. So enshittified Uber captures nearly all of the surplus value its app creates.

Similarly, Amazon’s search engine isn’t trying to find you the best product at the best price. Instead, it’s using everything it knows about you to pitch you the highest-margin product you might buy. Simultaneously, it’s charging manufacturers the most they might be willing to pay to get their products moved up the list Amazon shows you.

But the enshittified platform I feel the most nostalgia for is Facebook. In the early 2010s, Facebook showed you what your friends posted, including the links they thought you should look at. That wasn’t just good for you and your friends, it also created an engine for launching viral blog posts. If you posted a link to something, all your friends saw it. Enough of them might repost it to reach a new layer of readers, and a chain reaction might ensue.

That made Facebook an ally of any aspiring blogger. Every now and then, a Weekly Sift post would hit escape velocity and take off. Two posts in particular went viral, The Distress of the Privileged in 2012 and Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party in 2014, accounting for more than a million page views between them. When I delved into the details of those page views, a large majority of them came via Facebook.

A few years later, I was noticing that it had been a long time since I’d had a 100K post. And then I connected that fact with the option Facebook had been giving me to “boost” my posts for a fee. In other words, if I paid them money, they would do what they used to do automatically — show my posts to all my friends. I refused to pay, and the numbers kept dropping. Today, a Sift post that gets a thousand views at weeklysift.com is a big deal. (This doesn’t count the six thousand or so people who subscribe and get posts by email. I have no idea how many of them read those emails.)

The viral path is still there — I still have friends and friends-of-friends and so on. But (without a monetary “boost”) the Facebook algorithm snuffs out would-be viral posts the way a control rod stops chain reactions in nuclear reactors: Some percentage of my friends never see my posts, some percentage of friends-of-friends don’t see my friends’ attempts to share my work, and so on. So the chain reaction dies out.

Bloggers of all types noticed this phenomenon in the mid-to-late 2010s. And simultaneously, Facebook users noticed that their feeds were filling up with crap: advertisements, links from major-media outlets, posts from famous people kinda/sorta in their echo chamber, and some stuff that defied explanation.

I just did a quick count: Of the first 20 items on my Facebook feed, only 3 are from my friends.

It isn’t just capitalism. You might think that this is just capitalism. Of course middlemen try to charge their customers more and pay their providers less. “Buy low, sell high” and all that; it goes back to the beginning of markets. But that doesn’t explain why enshittification has taken over everything at precisely this moment. Doctorow argues that we’re in a new economic age: the Enshittocene, or the Great Enshittening.

And yes, this is a sort of capitalism. But technology has created new avenues to enshittify products at precisely the same time that the forces containing enshittification have eroded. Corporations are enshittening their products because they can. But why can they? And why particularly now?

When a whole population starts to change in the same way at the same time, it’s a sign that something external and systemic is underway. Rather than looking for the origins of enshittification inside the companies, we should look at the world the companies operate in.

Doctorow identifies four forces that could punish or control an enshittifying company, and finds that they have all weakened in recent years.

  • competition. If a company is taking too much advantage of its users or clients, they’ll go somewhere else, if they can. But anti-trust enforcement has weakened considerably, allowing monopolies, near-monopolies, and collusive agreements like the one through which Facebook and Google set rages for online advertising.
  • regulation. Governments can establish enforceable rules on a company’s behavior. But de-regulation has been in vogue since the Reagan administration.
  • self-help. Users or other companies can create work-arounds to avoid the most onerous features of an enshittified platform, like the third-party ink cartridges for HP printers. But many work-arounds are now treated as illegal hacking or copyright infringement by laws that the software industry lobbied to pass. For example: What if a new e-book reader gave you the option to leave Kindle or iBooks and take your books with you. That would be illegal; it violates Amazon’s or Apple’s intellectual property.
  • worker power. Many tech workers have a dedication to visions of an idealistic mission. Enshittification is not part of that vision, so workers have often resisted it. But the job market in tech has worsened considerably in recent years. If you don’t want to go along, they can easily find somebody to replace you. “Axing twelve thousand Googlers in 2023 and thousands more in 2024 was a small price for Google to pay to allow managers total discretion about when they’d cheat and how. It was a price Google paid gladly, and we’re all living in its aftermath.”

Solutions. All the policies that created the opening for enshittification are reversible. Antitrust enforcement can be strengthened to break monopolies. Regulation can police anti-competitive behavior. The laws that prevent interoperability and competitive hacking can be weakened or repealed. Privacy laws can prevent companies from accumulating data about their users and transparency laws can force them to reveal information that current apps make invisible (like what other Uber drivers are getting for driving similar routes).

Doctorow has a lot to say about each of those paths, and how they can be done in ways that work in the real world. That’s all a little too detailed for me to cover here, and why you might want to read the book.

Enshittification destroys the capitalist myth. If you read the Wall Street Journal or listen to speakers from Heritage Foundation and other pro-capitalist institutions, you’ll often hear arguments based in the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union: Communist governments claimed to be all about the worker and the common person, but long-term they strangled economic growth and made their whole society poorer. By contrast, the capitalist West out-produced Soviet-bloc countries and created a widely shared prosperity. You may not like the economic inequality that goes along with capitalism, but in the end even the people near the bottom are better off than they would be in a society that didn’t let anyone get rich.

If you delve into why that should be, you’ll get an answer something like this: When inventors and entrepreneurs create better ways of doing things, they can’t capture all the benefits for themselves. Invariably, the gains spill over into the rest of society.

So: Thomas Edison got rich from his light bulb, but consumers got reliable cheap lighting, cities became safer, and Edison used his wealth to fund research into more inventions that produced more social benefits.

But here’s the problem: Those days are over.

Inventors and entrepreneurs don’t produce widespread benefits out of generosity. They do it only when they have no other choice. From their point of view, every benefit of their innovations that they don’t capture for themselves is an inefficiency.

As we get deeper into the Enshittocene Era, the big tech companies and their billionaire/trillionaire owners get more and more efficient at capturing the benefits of technological progress. As the era goes on, the benefits of capitalist innovation get less and less widespread. Wealth inequality stops being a side-effect of the system and becomes the central feature.

Technology used to promise us products that would get better and better every year: Faster and cheaper computers with more memory running programs that seemed like magic.

But that’s not our primary experience of tech any more. Now we deal with Google and Facebook and Uber and Amazon and a host of other enshittifying corporations. Every day their products get worse, require us to look at more and more things we’d rather not see, and cost more.

The AI-driven future. Now we’re supposed to be dazzled by the promise of AI. AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are free to play with and sometimes produce amazing results. Yes, it must cost something (maybe a lot) to provide that free service, but companies are burning through investor capital to make it happen.

We all know that can’t last. Eventually, AI tools will lead to more complex systems that can only be navigated by AI agent. Then the free service will end, and you’ll need to pay a subscription fee in order to participate in the economy. And then the AI agents themselves will begin to turn on you. They won’t find the best deals or the best arrangements for you, but they’ll channel you into paths that the AI producers want you to walk.

Don’t start depending on AI until you’ve fully imagined enshittified AI.

An answer for the economists. One of the mysteries economists are confronting right now is why people think the economy is bad. GDP keeps rising. Wages are more-or-less keeping pace with inflation. Unemployment is low. So what’s the problem?

According to a report from Yahoo Finance, consumer sentiment is near historic lows even as objective measures of well-being have reached all-time highs.

Maybe enshittification is the answer. All around you, the world is less and less responsive to your wants and needs. More and more, you have to jump through somebody else’s hoops just to do things you used to take for granted. Maybe it doesn’t show up in your paycheck and isn’t fully reflected in the prices you pay. But every day you are confronted with a world that is not as good as it used to be.

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Graham Platner’s exit, and the debate it leads to

July 13, 2026 – 10:51 am

A quick convention to replace Platner will raise some long-brewing issues.

So Graham Platner is out. Having overcome a number of past controversies, he finally faced more than he could explain away: This week new and more serious allegations surfaced, just about all his endorsers backed away from him, and he was forced to leave the race for Susan Collins’ Senate seat in Maine.

The usual caveats apply: Platner denies the new charges, and if you really, really want to believe him you can. But an election is not a court of law. Voters would be deciding whether to send him to the Senate, not to prison. So they have a right to demand positive confidence in a man they elevate to positions of power, not just reasonable doubt about his guilt. (If only Susan Collins had applied that standard to Brett Kavanaugh. A social-media meme I haven’t traced to its source says: “Graham Platner doesn’t belong in the Senate. He belongs on the Supreme Court.”)

Before talking about what can or should happen next, let me own up to this: Until this week, I was in favor of giving Platner the benefit of the doubt. He tells a good redemption story: He is basically a good man whose military service left him with PTSD. He then went through a dark period where he drank too much and behaved badly, but he came out the other side.

Like a lot of Maine Democrats (whose accounts I was quoting), I found that story plausible. I lost that gamble.

Next? But that’s not the end of the story. With Platner gone, Maine is left with the question of what happens next. Platner pulled out before the deadline that would have kept his name on the November ballot, so the Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to name a replacement. They have a convention scheduled for July 25.

One-hundred and one of [the convention delegates] will be Democratic State Committee members and the remaining 500 … [will be] chosen by Democratic county committees at special nominating meetings convened by the county chairs.

So if party insiders want to pick one of their own, they can. But it’s hard to see how a more inclusive process would work, given the time constraints. One hopes the delegates will stay aware of the 154,058 Mainers who voted for Platner in the primary. The party is at least nodding in that direction:

The first candidate deadline is July 15. Candidates will have to declare their intent to run by 5 p.m. to compete at the convention. Among the requirement is a 300-word statement explaining how the candidate will tap the “grassroots energy” in the Democratic base.

In addition to declaring their intent by next Wednesday, candidates will also have to gather at least 500 signatures from registered Democrats by July 21. Included in that requirement is that candidates must obtain 50 signatures from no fewer than eight different counties.

Mainers vs. national pundits. In the national punditry, there’s a lot of hand-wringing that Platner’s debacle has made Susan Collins a shoe-in for reelection and probably doomed Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate.

Maine voices like Neal Gabler are far more sanguine.

So the first thing I would say I have learned these last two days is that the so-called experts in the punditrocracy have no idea what they are talking about. They don’t know Maine, and they don’t know Maine politics. When they say that the selection process is a “mess,” that is just plain wrong. Given the exigencies of the need for a selection and the cramped time frame, the logistics are difficult, but I get no sense of chaos. The process, as it is being formulated and described, seems orderly to me, or as orderly as any can be under these circumstances.

… Second, the so-called experts tell us that there are deep divisions in the party here, that same old cleavage between progressives and moderates, and that schism will likely affect the selection and the prospects for a November victory. The problem with this assessment is that I sense almost no divisions here, especially now that Gov. Mills, who did rile her fellow Dems, is basically off the scene.

Unlike the national Democratic establishment, Gabler sees the state Democratic establishment as basically progressive. The major candidates to replace Platner lack his “charisma”, but are not unknown to Maine voters and are largely on the same page. He has little fear that Democrats will be bitter and divided when they face Collins in November.

The moderate/progressive debate. Even so, the Maine convention is likely to be a microcosm of the debate Democrats are having around the country: In order to control the Senate, Democrats need to pick up four seats. In theory, Maine should be the easiest Republican seat to flip, given that Kamala Harris won Maine 52%-45%. Conversely, if Susan Collins hangs on, the path to a Democratic Senate majority involves flipping some much redder state like Iowa, Texas, or Nebraska.

So delegates have two questions to balance:

  • Who do I like?
  • Who can win?

Moderate Democrats will tell you that the answer to the second question is obvious: Swing voters are in the center, so a Democrat has to shift to the right to appeal to them.

Progressives argue that this is the old politics. In these polarized times, the number of issue-oriented voters in the center has shrunk considerably. The bigger pool is the disaffected voters, the ones who have lost faith in both parties and believe that no one really cares about them. Trump won in 2016 and 2024 by convincing those voters (falsely) that he did care about them. Rather than real solutions, he offered them scapegoats — immigrants, transfolk, undeserving beneficiaries of DEI or foreign aid, lazy people on welfare, non-Christians, globalists. He would defend you by going after them.

It’s hard to deny that he has gone after them. But it’s also hard to see how that has benefited you. Struggling American families have seen inflation get worse while money gets wasted on another pointless war. Many have lost food stamps and/or health insurance. Jobs are no easier to find.

The right response, progressives argue, is to put forward a bold vision that would make a visible difference in disaffected voters’ lives: child care, guaranteed healthcare, free college. If voters need scapegoats, let’s give them the people who are truly profiting from their distress: the billionaires and their monopolistic corporations. Tinkering around the edges of programs that already exist isn’t going to convince anybody that you’re on their side.

It’s easy to find this debate on social media, or to live in an echo chamber where you hear only one side of it. So far, it doesn’t seem to be a very satisfying or healthy argument: The two sides talk past each other and shout louder rather than engaging each other’s best points.

The two axes. If you want to try to make progress on this argument, I think the first key point is to embrace the two-axis model, which Josh Marshall has been pushing (though mostly behind the TPM firewall).

[T]here are two political spectra in the Democratic party, one that is right/centrist to left and another that is accommodation to fight.

The first axis is the issue-oriented one moderates point to: shoring up ObamaCare vs. Medicare For All, providing more education assistance to needy students vs. free college, and so on.

But the second axis revolves around the question: How serious is the current crisis of democracy? Do we just need to return to the halcyon days before Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, when Congress debated issues but came up with bipartisan compromises to get things done? Or is Trumpist fascism a bigger threat than that, one that requires more drastic solutions?

Marshall illustrated the tension between the two axes by looking at his own response to the Colorado primary, where incumbent John Hickenlooper faced a challenge from the left. One the one hand, Marshall found himself mostly agreeing with Hickenlooper on policy and believing he had the best chance to hold the seat in the general election.

He seems like a very solid guy. I’m sure I’d like him. But it’s my strong impression that he is very much in the camp of Democratic senators who don’t want to do any of the big necessary things: abolish the filibuster, reform the Supreme Court, fight against encroaching autocracy as opposed to preserve decorum and regular order. In other words, he’s approaching the senate gig as though we were still in the 1990s or perhaps the W. era. To listen to my own oft-repeated arguments, he is the problem.

If you focus on the fight/accommodate axis, Harris’ loss in 2024 wasn’t a matter of being too liberal or not liberal enough. It’s that her rhetoric about Trump’s threat to democracy wasn’t matched by what she proposed to do about it. Trump’s resurgence after January 6 proved that electing a Democrat wasn’t a sufficient solution. A Harris administration wouldn’t end the threat any more than the Biden administration had.

How rank-and-file Democrats lost faith in their leaders. A deeper dive into this issue is Brian Beutler’s “The Insurgency Will Continue Until Morale Improves” which fortunately is not behind a firewall. Beutler lays out a history of missed Democratic opportunities, going back to the 2008 campaign.

What was striking to those of us on the outside was that none of these candidates, and no one else in the race, would even gesture at the most straightforward theory of change: that in a democracy, majorities should govern. In 2008 it was too early to foresee that a corrupt Republican judicial putsch would eventually necessitate farther-reaching democratic reforms. But the legislative crisis was already upon us. If Democrats won the election, and grew their congressional majorities, they should be prepared to change the Senate rules and simply legislate their plans into existence.

But the Harry Reid/Nancy Pelosi Congress colored within the traditional lines. They got ObamaCare passed, but the opportunity for real change vanished. McConnell obstructed everything, and when the Great Recession dragged on, Obama got the blame.

How much more could Obama have accomplished without the filibuster? How much more quickly would we have recovered from the Great Recession if Obama and his majorities could have scaled up stimulus as needed to hasten a return to trend? How much less receptive would progressives have been to Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in a climate of full employment? Would Sanders have even run for president?

Again during Biden’s first two years, Democrats controlled not just the White House but both houses of Congress. And again, little happened. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department delayed investigating Trump, allowing the Supreme Court to run out the clock on his most serious indictments. Voting rights bills died. DC and Puerto Rico wouldn’t become states.

Democracy protection would have to wait. There would be hearings. There would be speeches. But the architecture would not change. The official substantive Democratic response to decades of legislative nullification, the theft of the Supreme Court, and a failed coup would be nothing.

So when Harris tried to raise the alarm about autocracy in 2024, it rang false. It sounded more like political rhetoric than something she really believed.

The axes really are orthogonal. The point Marshall keeps making, and that moderate voices like Matt Yglesias refuse to take seriously, is that the two axes really are different. You can take moderate positions on immigration or healthcare or border enforcement or trans rights (if that’s what voters in your state demand), and still advocate that Democrats play the same hardball politics Republicans have been playing for years. You can stop bringing a knife to a gun fight and go all out.

Whoever Maine Democrats nominate, that’s what I really want to hear from them. The old message of “Trust us. Once we get power we’ll put the country back on track” isn’t credible any more.

The economic system is rigged towards the rich and monopoly corporations. The political system is rigged towards Republicans. The Supreme Court has made itself into a super-legislature. Those problems won’t get fixed automatically by putting Democrats into office. Once they get into office, they’ll have to do something about those problems.

Tell me what.

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Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious.

July 6, 2026 – 10:07 am

We’re not in a Manichean struggle between two monolithic systems. We’re just deciding where to draw the line between the private and public sectors of our economy.

If you believe the headlines in our corporate media or the rhetoric of our political leaders, the United States is at a fork in the road. In one direction lies continued Capitalism, which (depending on who you listen to) will either give us unparalleled prosperity or turn the US into a plantation with a few trillionaire owners and a population of serfs. In the other is Socialism, which has either made Northern Europe a 21st-century Eden or ruined resource-rich Venezuela. [1] President Trump would have you believe that the leftward fork is to Communism, “a mortal threat to American liberty”, as if there were no difference between AOC and Stalin.

The occasion for this argument is the improved outlook for Democratic Socialists within the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and AOC have been around for years, but last November they were joined by Zohran Mamdani, who was elected Mayor of New York City on a platform of rent control, child care, and free buses. In the New York primary two weeks ago, Mamdani-endorsed challengers defeated two incumbent Democratic congressmen and won the nomination for a third congressional seat. In Colorado a week later, another incumbent Democrat in Congress fell to a progressive challenger, a former senator lost the primary for governor, and sitting Senator John Hickenlooper survived a more serious challenge than anyone saw coming just a year ago.

This has evoked much hand-wringing in the political and economic establishment, particularly from the editorial pages of billionaire-agenda publications like The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

I think we would all do well to take a step back and challenge the frames we’re being given. In reality, we’re not facing a choice between two diametrically opposed futures. And we’re not about to go off a cliff into some radically new economic system.

The United States has always had a mixed economy, with both a public sector and a private sector. And we have always had an argument about where to draw the line between them. In the early-to-mid 1800s, before slavery became the center of our politics, the Whig Party believed in a bigger public sector, with a national bank and more government-funded public works like the Erie Canal. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party of that day was the low-tax party that wanted to keep the public sector as small as possible.

That’s the same debate we’re having now. Our most pro-capitalist politicians don’t propose abolishing the public sector, and our most pro-socialist ones don’t propose abolishing the private sector. No matter who gets elected, your local pizzeria will remain a private business and your fire department a public institution. We’re all just arguing about where the line should be.

For example, currently healthcare is divided between the two sectors. Most, but not all, hospitals are for-profit businesses. Health insurance comes partly through government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration, but also through big corporations like Aetna, Cigna, and United Healthcare. (My personal health insurance is split: I have basic Medicare, but my Medicare supplemental and prescription drug coverage is through private-sector companies.) ObamaCare uses government subsidies to pay for private-sector insurance.

The flagship progressive proposal, Medicare for All, would shift the line to expand the public sector’s role in health insurance. Meanwhile, conservatives want to make Medicaid more like ObamaCare — government subsidies run through private insurance companies. A recent Washington Post op-ed called for abolishing the National Institute of Health and relying almost entirely on the private sector to do our medical research.

Highways and prisons are generally considered part of the public sector. But occasionally a toll road gets leased to a private company. And about 9% of the nation’s prison population is housed in private prisons. Both of those divisions are controversial. Some Americans would like to take the whole sector back under public control. Others would privatize further.

We also argue about how much of the private sector requires government regulation. But these arguments are also about moving lines, not eliminating one side or the other. Our nuclear power plants, for example, are almost entirely owned by private-sector companies. But I can’t think of any serious politician who advocates complete deregulation. Nor does anyone doubt that industries can be stifled by over-regulation.

These are healthy debate to have. Some things are better handled within a market system while others aren’t. Regulation can be either insufficient or stiflingly onerous. It’s not always obvious which is which.

Paul Krugman posts “There Are Very Few Socialists in America“, noting that we are seeing a shift in the use of the word socialism more than an actual change in Americans’ political philosophies.

Why, then, does it look as if socialism is on the rise? Mainly because right-wing propagandists continually smear social democratic policies as socialist, trying to make popular, mainstream policy ideas sound extreme. And some Americans who are basically social democrats in effect respond by saying, “Well, if that’s socialism, I guess I’m OK with socialism.”

This corruption of our political vocabulary makes it difficult to notice real threats. If Mayor Mamdami is a “communist“, how will we sound the alarm when an actual Mao or Lenin appears? [2]

As I read the room, the recent popularity of Democratic Socialists may not even have that much to do with single-payer healthcare or any other policy. Kamala Harris lost in 2024 (and least in my judgment), not so much because of any particular issue, but because voters associated her with the status quo. Status quo Democratic centrism has essentially no answer to growing inequality, or the widespread sense that corporate power is gradually snuffing out individual choice, opportunity, and freedom. The old politics of reaching across the aisle and being willing to compromise isn’t working in an era where gerrymandered districts make representatives fearful only of the extremists in their own party.

Much of the “socialist” vote, like much of the MAGA vote on the Right, is less about ideological commitment than simply a plea to do something different.

If moderate Democrats want to retain control of the party, they need their own vision of what “something different” looks like. Joining the Republicans and the corporate media in scaremongering against Zohran Mamdami isn’t going to cut it. Whatever you think of his plans, at least he wants to do something.

[1] Arguably, Venezuela’s problem isn’t socialism so much as corruption. If you don’t want the US to go the way of Venezuela, your best course is to vote out anyone connected to the unprecedented corruption of the Trump regime.

[2] That’s why I was so careful in 2015 when I started applying the word fascist to Trump and his movement. I made sure to define the term clearly rather than just use it as an insult. I think Trump’s subsequent abuse of government force, attacks on the free press, aggrandizement of executive power, and efforts to suppress non-White voting have validated my usage.

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Immigration is about Race

June 29, 2026 – 10:17 am

The Supreme Court signs off on Trump’s program to Make America White Again.

Other than openly professing Nazis, the anti-immigrant voices in the US get incensed at the suggestion that what they care about is race. At times they seem to care about anything other than race: disease, election security, jobs, crime, and so on. J. D. Vance has even blamed immigrants for the high cost of housing. Experts dispute the anti-immigration claims in all those areas and are ignored. But O no no, the problem couldn’t be that the vast majority of people coming into the US are black or brown.

Even if you could put all those problems aside (as a decent respect for reality does), there’s still one issue that stands out above all others: respect for the law, and particularly for the laws that control our border. The problem with these people is that they came here without permission and crossed our border without leaving a trace in our systems. We don’t know who’s here, we don’t know who they are, and so on.

Well, the second Trump administration has exposed the lie of that explanation. It has gone after people with temporary protected status (TPS), and it has found excuses to shut the door in the face of legitimate refugees, who our laws and treaties oblige us to protect. (We are accepting refugees this year, but only white ones from South Africa.)

So the shoe has moved to the other foot: It’s not immigrants who are breaking the law, it’s the Trump administration.

But wait until the courts hear about this! We are a nation of laws, and our courts protect even the weakest among us from the strongest. So Haitians and Syrians losing their TPS status sued, charging that Trump’s DHS is violating the law that established TPS. In parallel, an immigrant-rights organization sued to change DHS’s policy preventing refugees from coming to our border and applying for asylum. Lower courts offered at least temporary relief while the cases worked through the system. They did not settle the underlying issues, but ruled that the immigrants were likely to prevail, and so should not have to leave the country before winning their cases. (In the Haitian TPS case, a lower court also found it likely that the Haitians would prevail on the part of their suit that blames the Trump administration’s racial animus for their eagerness to rid the country of Haitian refugees.)

The administration appealed both cases to the Supreme Court, which announced its decision in both cases on Thursday: All the lower court actions were overturned. Hundreds of thousands of refugees will have to return to countries that the State Department says are not safe. Countless others will never get the chance to seek protection in the United States.

But OK, you might think, the Supreme Court doesn’t make policy. It just (in John Roberts’ words) “calls balls and strikes”. Maybe, when a wise court really drills down into the underlying bedrock of law, the refugees are just out of luck.

If you think that, I invite you to read the majority opinions in each case, which were both written by Sam Alito (my least favorite justice). And after you do that, read the dissents by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor.

Both of Alito’s opinions are mockeries of legal reasoning. He had a conclusion to get to, and he got there. He can’t say it in so many words, but he wants to Make America White Again. And the other five conservative justices agreed with him.

At its root, the immigration issue is about race. Nothing else.

Temporary Protected Status. The TPS case is Mullin v Doe, which concerns about 300,000 Haitians and a smaller number of Syrians. All of them are in the United States legally. Temporary protected status (TPS) is a legal designation created by Congress to provide humanitarian aid to people escaping some disaster, either natural or man-made, in their home countries. TPS recipients are allowed to live and work in the United States while they wait for conditions to resolve back home. The program includes no path to citizenship and the TPS residents do not vote. Their status is reviewed periodically by the Department of Homeland Security.

Haitians got this status in 2010 after their country was devastated by an earthquake, while Syrian TPS was a response to the repression of the Assad regime and the disruptions associated with the civil war to overthrow him. According to the Trump regime, their continued presence strains the meaning of the word “temporary”. But the law that established TPS also established a process for terminating it: The DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin currently, is supposed to consult with relevant government agencies, evaluate what they say, and make a determination about whether that particular country is a safe place to go home to. (Notice: Under the law, the relevant point isn’t whether the original emergency is over, but whether the country is now safe.) Having made an official determination that the country is safe now, the DHS secretary can revoke the TPS status.

Mullin did none of this, which becomes clear if you look at the current State Department advisories on travel. Haiti is under a Level-4 travel advisory: Do Not Travel.

Do Not Travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care.

Non-emergency US government employees and their families were ordered out of Haiti in 2023. Those who stay are not allowed to leave the US embassy “for non-essential reasons due to safety risks”.

Syria is also a Level-4 country:

Do not travel to Syria for any reason due to the risk of terrorism, unrest, kidnapping, hostage taking, crime, and armed conflict.

That’s what the Trump regime wants to send people back to.

When the government fails to follow procedures laid out by law, it violates the Administrative Procedures Act. That’s the basis for these lawsuits. The Haitians also charged that DHS’s action was at least partially motivated by race, and so violated their equal-protection rights under the 14th Amendment. District courts in New York and D.C. issued a temporary injunction blocking the revocation of TPS status, and a DC appellate court rejected the government’s motion to stay that injunction.

These rulings are not final judgments on the merits of the Haitians’ and Syrians’ claims, but reflected the courts’ judgment that the immigrants would probably win their cases, and that they should not be ejected from the US while those cases are being decided.

Wednesday, the Supreme Court reversed those judgments. While the merits are still not decided, Justice Alito and his five conservative accomplices decided that the government would probably win the cases and so nothing should prevent the government from sending the Haitians and Syrians home in the meantime. So even if the Haitians and Syrians would happen to win their cases somehow, it will be very hard to come back.

Alito’s reasoning rests on one line of the TPS statute, which explicitly bars

judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary of Homeland Security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.

Read correctly, this is a common-sense provision: DHS is the department Congress designated to make the safe-to-go-home decision, and judges should not substitute their opinions for the DHS secretary’s. But Alito expands this exemption to include the entire DHS decision-making process. Not only is DHS’ conclusion immune from review, but also DHS’ refusal to follow the decision-making process the law lays out. So Alito reads the TPS law to say: “Here’s how you decide whether to withdraw TPS status. But if you ignore what we just said and instead pull a decision out of your butt, no one can do anything about it.” [1]

Alito also slaps down a lower-court finding that the Haitian decision was at least partially based on race, because Alito does not take racism seriously unless the victims are white.

Recall the context: Trump has referred to Haiti as a “shithole country“. He and J. D. Vance explicitly and knowingly lied about precisely these Haitian TPS residents by claiming “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” in Springfield, Ohio.

Alito brushes this off:

None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications. For example, one may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race. And a person without racial bias can provide a harshly unfavorable description of living conditions in some of the countries with TPS designations.

In short, because Trump never said “I hate Black people”, because it’s possible to imagine non-racial motives for his actions if you strain hard enough, and because Haiti actually is a shithole country, the Court should ignore the possible presence of racism here. [2]

Now that it is free to do so, we can anticipate the mother of all ICE raids on Springfield, Ohio and other cities and towns with large TPS populations. The New Republic pictures Springfield becoming the next Minneapolis:

Here’s the thing: If you vote for the ticket that tells you immigrants are eating your pets—the ticket that tells you mass removals are needed to purify and revive the nation and its heartland towns—what you’re actually going to get is social turmoil, violent ethnic purges, and serious economic disruption. If you are upset at the prospect of law-abiding immigrants being violently wrenched from your communities, next time don’t vote for the guys who lied in your faces so viciously about them.

Asylum and the Border. Remember when Bill Clinton wondered what the meaning of is is? Alito’s majority opinion in Mullin v Al Otro Lado is like that, but the two-letter word in question is “in”. What does “in” mean, really?

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 requires immigration officials to inspect every person who “arrives in the United States”, and offer each of them an opportunity to ask for asylum in the United States because they are persecuted in their home country. But what does “arrive in” really mean? If border guards stand on the border and stop migrants while they are still technically in Mexico, have they “arrived in” the United States or not? Can we then ignore our legal and treaty obligations to offer asylum to victims of persecution?

After an elaborate wander through dictionaries and usages, Alito concludes that we can. When Congress tried to codify our obligations under the post-Holocaust Convention on Refugees, it really was that stupid. [3]

Now, back in April I wrote about our broken system of processing asylum claims and what might be done about it, so I understand that there are issues here. But this verbal sleight-of-hand can’t be the way we fix it.

What Alito is doing here is based on a theory of interpretation known as textualism, which is related to originalism. In the abstract it sounds great: We should interpret the words in a law according to the common usage of those words in that era. Who could argue with that?

The problem is that I have never seen this method applied in good faith, just as I have never seen originalism applied in good faith. The textualist/originalist always knows what conclusion s/he is aiming for, and cherry-picks examples of history and usage to get there.

What gets lost is the larger context: Why did Congress pass this law? What problems was it trying to solve? By breaking laws down into individual words, you can ignore all that and come to an interpretation that makes no sense. That’s what Alito has done here.

Why? When you run into such obvious examples of motivated reasoning — and especially when you run into two on the same day by the same author — you have to wonder what the motive is. When such a smokescreen of verbiage is thrown at you, you have to wonder what’s behind the smoke.

I think it’s obvious: racism.

TPS has allowed more than a million brown or black people to come to the United States legally and work here. Many more arrive at our borders and claim asylum — maybe because it takes us years to process such claims and in the meantime they also can live and work in the US.

In some people’s eyes, these programs threaten the identity of the US as a white country. To them, these immigrants “poison the blood of our country“. To get them out, Americans might make up lies about them “eating the dogs, eating the cats“. A government that represents those people might construct outside-the-law justifications to send the one group away and refuse admittance to the other.

And six racially motivated Supreme Court justices might rubber-stamp those justifications.

[1] It’s worth pointing out that during the Biden administration, the Court routinely invented new law (like the “major questions doctrine“) that allowed it to second-guess whatever decisions government agencies made. Now it is ignoring established law in order to preclude lower courts from reviewing decisions made by Republican officials. If the 48th president is a Democrat, we can expect to see the prevailing winds reverse again.

[2] Under Alito’s reasoning, neither Jim Crow nor slavery could be viewed as racial issues. We can imagine race-neutral justifications for either (like a shortage of workers capable of picking cotton, or a revenue shortfall that required a poll tax). And Southern politicians often expressed their great love for their African property. To ignore these statements as having been made in bad faith, and to claim instead that laws were passed out of racial animus — that would violate the deference that courts owe to the executive and legislative branches of the Southern state governments.

[3] If you need a refresher course on how the Holocaust led to post-war laws about refugees and asylum, read Sotomayor’s dissent.

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