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The Blue Wave came. What now?

November 9, 2026 – 10:39 am

What happened. My main predictions/observations last week were:

  • The polls look good for Democrats.
  • No pollster can estimate what the last-minute deciders will do, either in terms of who they vote for or whether they vote at all.
  • Probably the last-minute deciders will all do the same thing.

That doesn’t make me Nostradamus, but as far as those predictions went, they look pretty good: The late deciders who voted, voted for Democrats, resulting in a victory far larger than the polls had predicted. I thought one party or the other would take at least 6 of the 7 Senate races that Cook Political Report rated as toss-ups. Not only did the Democrats take 6, but the seventh (Alaska) is leaning their way, and seats that were thought to be leaning Republican in South Carolina and (apparently) Mississippi also flipped. (Expect a final vote total in Mississippi tomorrow. Recounts are not a thing in Mississippi unless a court orders one for a specific reason. Tomorrow is also the day for a final first-round Alaska vote, which will lead to a ranked-choice-voting second round, which shouldn’t take long.) So while Democratic optimists were hoping for 54 Senate seats, 56 is now the most likely outcome.

Just about everybody expected the Democrats to come out with a House majority, but the size of it (259 seats out of 438) is big surprise. Democrats now have 29 of the 50 governorships, and flipped a number of state legislative bodies, including the Texas House.

What it means. There has been a surprising amount of post-election consensus about what this means. Everyone left of Ted Cruz understands that the election was a triumph for Democrats and a disaster for Republicans. The exit polls made the message of the voters clear: They were angry about the cost of living, the war, and the corruption of the Trump regime.

The question is how Democrats should respond. One thing missing from the exit polls is any groundswell of support for specific Democratic programs. Americans are worried about the cost and availability of health insurance, and Medicare-for-All is one way to address that concern, but voters were not specifically asking for it. They want the war to end so that gas prices can come down, but there’s not a widespread call for a war-powers resolution or defunding the forces in the field. They’re upset about corruption, but it’s not obvious that another Trump impeachment would be popular.

Some pundits spin this as “Democrats should be cautious and try to work with Trump as much as they can, rather than antagonize him.” On the other hand, Indian sci-writer Shiv Ramdas observes:

nobody gives you a sweeping mandate like this because they want you to work with the people they just ran tf outta office

I think a more precise interpretation is that the sale is not complete yet. If Democrats are going to address voters’ concerns at all, they’re going to have to do specific things. But all those things will have to be backed by strong messaging that connects the proposal-at-hand to what the American people need and want and asked for. And while some bills may get passed just for the sake of staking out a position (on health care or voting rights, for example), knowing either that Republicans in the Senate will filibuster them or that Trump will veto them, the public also needs to see a few clear accomplishments.

The model here, I think, is the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Trump opposed it, but it was so popular with the American people that some Republicans were willing to back it, and Rep. Thomas Massie was even willing to co-sponsor it. Once it became clear that there would be enough Republican defectors to pass the law, the rest of the party caved. It passed nearly unanimously and Trump signed it. (Then his Justice Department blocked implementing it, which is still playing out in court.)

Another model is the bipartisan housing bill that Congress passed during the summer, which became law even though Trump refused to sign it. Democrats shouldn’t restrict themselves to bills Republicans will support, but finding a few proposals too popular for Republicans to oppose would be a good way to start.

In general, an Epstein/housing path might work like this: A few Republican defectors make a bill likely to pass. If it’s going to pass, more Republicans want to be on the right side of it. If it passes with super-majority support, Trump signs it because he doesn’t want to see his veto overridden.

That path might work for things like raising the minimum wage, an ethics bill to stop members of Congress from trading stocks, repealing some of Trump’s least popular tariffs (like the ones aimed at Canada), universal background checks on gun purchases, and a follow-up Epstein bill that insisted on full release. Restoring Medicaid subsidies might get through this way. Voters were not specifically asking to get aid flowing to Ukraine again and to stop favoring Russia, but Ukraine is more popular than Russia, and a number of Republicans in Congress would defect from Trump on this issue.

Trump might veto all this, but those vetoes would be unpopular. Not a week should pass without Democrats sending to his desk a law that would improve the lives of American workers and families. None of these bills should be show ponies; they should all be things that Democrats genuinely believe in and would be happy to see Trump sign.

I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with the editorial board of the NYT:

Where can a modern national agenda begin? Picture a parent who can afford a child’s medicine without dread. Picture families who can raise young children without drowning in costs. Picture a generation that can once again own a home. Picture an economy in which those who have prospered most, including the titans of artificial intelligence, help build a bountiful future for everyone else. Every idea Democrats advance should pass three simple tests: Will it work? Will it reach as many Americans as possible? Will people feel it?

This focus avoids a trap that Trump will be eager to spring. For many years, discontent has been brewing in the electorate, because many people believe politicians don’t really care about them. This time, that discontent focused on Republicans, because Trump was obsessed with his golden ballroom while they were deciding which bills they could afford to pay this month. But the discontent itself is non-partisan, and Harris paid its price in 2024. It could turn against Democrats again if the public just sees them scoring political point against Trump while continuing to do nothing that helps ordinary people.

Trump is already gearing up to say: “They don’t care about you. They just want to get Trump.”

Investigations. That’s what makes investigations tricky. The public does care about corruption and wants to see people held accountable for it. But it doesn’t want a lot of finger-pointing that leads to nothing. Trump’s pointless persecution of his enemies, where he has repeatedly had his Justice Department investigate and try to indict people on evidence that can’t get past a grand jury, has increased public skepticism.

So investigations, especially at the beginning, need to quickly expose real crimes or shady deals that should be crimes. There should be no equivalent of the James Comey shells-on-the-beach indictment.

There’s already bipartisan support for a Pete Hegseth impeachment. I would focus on the attacks against fishing boats that Hegseth claims were smuggling drugs, because these are basically murders on the high seas. Wikipedia reports:

As of 27 October 2026, at least 243 people had been killed (including 17 who are missing and presumed dead) in at least 80 strikes on over 81 vessels

A simple analogy makes the point: Imagine a bank had been robbed, and a car was seen speeding away from the bank immediately afterward. Police believe the robbers and the money are in the car. No innocent people are known to be in the car. The car is being tracked and police can easily stop it and arrest the people inside. Instead, they blow it up with a bazooka, killing everyone. Is that how American justice should work?

The 243 dead people from these boats were suspects. Even if they would all turn out to be guilty — and nobody was a hostage or just along for the ride — they deserved their day in court and whatever punishments are set out in laws. Instead, Hegseth had them killed.

Other investigations: Why hasn’t anybody been held to account for the murders of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, or Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents? How did companies associated with Eric Trump and Don Jr. get so many government contracts? How much taxpayer money got spent on partisan ads like the “public service announcements” lauding President Trump? What are conditions like in those ICE detention camps?

Overreach? A lot of the national-media center-right punditry is wringing its hands over the idea that Democrats might actually try to do something with their new majorities. The same people who thought Trump’s 49.8% vote total in 2024 gave him a mandate to do whatever crazy thing came into his head are now worried that Democrats’ 56%-43% victory will lead to hubris.

But the problem, as I see it, isn’t that Democrats will try to do too much but that they will try to do too little. The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky makes a very good point:

The intra-Democratic debate that I despise above all others is the one that holds that Democrats must either do X or Y but cannot possibly do both X and Y. It has made me insane for years. … Think of it this way. Have you ever, once in your life, heard conservatives and Republicans engage in an argument like: Well, we can cut taxes, or we can prosecute the culture wars, but we surely can’t do both! I hope you’re laughing, because the idea is laughable on its face.

Obama had ten months of filibuster-proof majorities in Congress, and what he got out of it was the Affordable Care Act. That was his top priority, so he thought it eliminated doing anything else. It was a wasted opportunity.

Overreachy things like Medicare-for-All or a Trump impeachment are only a problem if they crowd out achievable smaller things like raising the minimum wage or keeping rural hospitals open.

Trump’s likely response. If you watched the 60 Minutes interview that aired yesterday, you may have been encouraged. Trump sounded conciliatory, and talked about working with Democrats on a number of issues, including immigration. But between the interview itself and its air date, he appointed Stephen Miller his new chief of staff.

Miller is one of the most polarising figures in the administration and one of Trump’s closest and longest-serving advisers, having joined his 2016 presidential campaign as a speechwriter. He is a former aide to the former senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who would go on to serve as Trump’s first attorney general. In Trump’s first term, Miller was the driving force behind policies such as family separation and a travel ban on Muslim-majority countries. More than a hundred Democrats in Congress signed a letter to Trump calling Miller a “documented white nationalist” and demanding his removal.

Chris Hayes commented:

If you were thinking: what could Trump do to push his approval rating down even further and open up the possibility of a 1964/1980/2008 style victory for Dems in 2028? The answer is: put Stephen Miller in charge of everything. And guess what?

My personal reaction: I want Stephen Miller in front of TV cameras as much as possible. His physical presence makes his message sound just as creepy as it actually is.

Here’s the headline in Le Monde, a leading French publication: “Stephen Miller, reactionary ideologue and white supremacist, promoted head of Trump administration“. Contrast that direct truth-telling with this fascist-friendly characterization in the NYT:

Mr. Miller has been the driver of the president’s most muscular actions, including the use of increasingly hostile tactics to capture immigrants across the country and the bombing of small boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean that he and Mr. Trump declared constituted a foreign invasion.

Apparently “muscular” is a new synonym for “criminal”.

And one more thing. Black turnout was up, particularly in the South. But we should not conclude from that fact that Republican attempts to suppress the Black vote were harmless. Apparently, Black citizens felt so strongly about this election — partly because of the suppression efforts — that they overcame the obstacles that were put in their way. But the obstacles still exist, and in less motivating elections they will make a difference.

“So much of what this administration has done has been to roll back the protections that give us access to the ballot, while simultaneously flooding us with propaganda that tells us that it doesn’t matter,” said Nadine Smith, president and CEO of Color of Change, which worked to mobilize voters across the south before the election. “What you saw was Black voters showing up in the face of an administration that has spent two years attacking our rights, weakening voter protections and redrawing maps specifically to diminish Black political power.

This is just one example of the many ways Trump tried to cheat, but came up short. I haven’t seen a clear what-if-we-had-used-the-old-maps assessment of the US House races, but Trump’s push to gerrymander did not gain all the seats he thought it would, and the redistricting war he started may have been won by the Democrats, whose gerrymanders were fewer but more successful.

The courts blocked Trump’s attempts to set aside ballots that his Justice Department claimed (probably falsely) were being cast by non-citizens. His efforts to turn Alaska’s two-Dan-Sullivans ballot into a criminal case has fallen flat, because no one can name the law it supposedly violates. (I can’t remember who said it, but my favorite assessment is: “If confusing voters is a crime, all politicians should be in jail.”) Trump’s claim that all votes for the “other” Dan Sullivan should be counted for the incumbent senator also goes nowhere, because in Alaska’s ranked-choice-voting system, voters have already said where they want their votes to go if their first candidate can’t win. Trump may claim to know their intentions, but they have already stated their intentions in a legally binding way.

But just because Trump failed to cheat this time doesn’t mean we should ignore the effort. This is part of a general pattern where Trump wants to be treated like a five-year-old, whose cheating attempts can be laughed off because he’s so bad at it. But those politically and racially gerrymandered districts are still standing, waiting for future elections. The myth of non-citizen voters is still widely believed by MAGA cultists. The restrictions on early voting and mail-in voting continue, along with the closing of polling places convenient for non-White voters. The corrupt Justice Department is still in office. The Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is a done deal.

It didn’t work this time, but there’s still a lot to clean up before we can have truly fair elections.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (7)

Your 2026 election-watching guide

November 2, 2026 – 10:10 am

What polls and experts expect to happen. Real Clear Politics’ generic congressional ballot polling average has Democrats up 8.9% (52.0%-43.1%), and that margin has been in the 8-9% range for about a month. Such a lead is consistent with a wave election big enough that gerrymandering the districts shouldn’t matter. So just about everybody expects Democrats to win the House.

Things get interesting in the Senate, where 34 Democrats and 31 Republicans are not up for election this year. Cooks Political Report lists 9 Democrats and 11 Republicans as solid favorites, bringing the totals to 43 Democrats and 42 Republicans. Each party has two seats listed as “likely” and two more as “leaning” in their favor. So if you add those in, it’s 47-46 for the Democrats. That leaves 7 toss-up races, which is an unusually large number. So any outcome between a 54-46 Democratic majority and a 53-47 Republican majority (the same distribution we have now) is plausible. (Democrats have had fantasies about flipping seats in Mississippi and Florida, but that seems like a bridge too far.)

How that happened is fascinating. For months, Cooks has been shifting races towards the Democrats, but not across the board: Races might go from “likely Republican” and “leaning Republican” to “toss-up”, but the toss-up races would not shift to “likely” or “leaning” Democratic. (The NYT/Siena poll does seem to show Dems pulling away, but it could be an outlier.)

That appears to have happened for a few reasons: The worst impacts of Trump’s policies — high diesel prices, closing hospitals, data-center construction — have tended to fall in rural states that usually vote Republican: Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, Alaska. Because these states weren’t supposed to be competitive, the GOP is stuck with some poorly chosen candidates. I mean, Roger Marshall is a sucky senator, but it’s Kansas, so who cares? Darlene Graham isn’t her late brother Lindsey, but it’s South Carolina, so anybody with an R next to her name was supposed to be safe.

Meanwhile in blue states like Michigan and Maine, Democrats have maintained small but fairly stable leads in the polls. In a shifting national environment, you’d expect them to start pulling away, but they haven’t. So the RCP average has Troy Jackson up 3.3% on Susan Collins in Maine, and Abdul El-Sayed up 5.3% in Michigan. Both margins were considerably smaller before averaging in yesterday’s NYT/Siena poll.

You especially can’t count on small margins in a mid-term election, because mid-terms are all about turnout. The difference between Obama’s landslide in 2008 and the Democrats’ “shellacking” in 2010 wasn’t so much that people changed their minds. It was that the 2008 Obama coalition of young voters and minorities didn’t come out to vote in 2010. 2010 was an older, whiter electorate, and it elected a way more conservative Congress.

So a big piece of the Blue Wave theory is that Democrats are more motivated this year than Republicans. Trump voters who believed he would lower prices, end foreign wars, and generally look out for the little guy (at least the White male little guys) are disillusioned and unmotivated. But Democrats who have watched Trump circumvent laws, enrich himself, and send his ICE thugs out to murder American citizens with no consequences — they’re motivated.

And that explains the Republicans’ closing arguments that center on fear and bigotry: Democrats will turn America Communist, let brown people run the country, change your child’s gender, take away your guns, and persecute Christians. El-Sayed is a jihadist, James Talerico and Adam Hamilton are fake Christians, and so on. Those arguments won’t convince anybody who cares about the price of gas or health care, but they’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to fire up the MAGA cultists to go out and vote.

The upshot of all this, in my opinion, is that the toss-up races will almost all go the same way. One party or the other will sweep at least six of the seven. The people who make up their minds at the last minute, the people who may or may not vote — they’re all going to do the same thing. I just can’t tell you what it is.

Last-minute events. The Michigan Senate race got roiled Sunday when Rep. Haley Stevens (who lost to Abdul El-Sayed in the primary) withdrew her endorsement of El-Sayed and made an appearance with Republican nominee Mike Rogers, whom she had previously described as “a rubber stamp for Donald Trump“. In a subsequent interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she dodged and flailed when asked what changed her mind. Even as her social media message absurdly accused El-Sayed of campaigning on “hate”, she appealed to Islamophobia by referring to him only as “Abdul”.

Michigan observers question how much difference this will make. It has been a much bigger story in the national media than locally, and has focused attention more on Stevens herself than on any problem with El-Sayed’s candidacy. Her career as a Democrat is over now, and it’s hard to imagine her as a Republican given her record in Congress. Possibly she’s hoping for a job as a lobbyist with AIPAC, who channeled $30 million into her primary campaign and has also spent millions to support Rogers.

Similarly, the would-be scandal of Democrats recruiting a second Dan Sullivan to run for the Senate in Alaska seems to be more of a national-media story than an issue on the ground in Alaska. The media-criticism blog Finding Gravity comments:

[T]he national news media is doing everything they can to make the central story of the last days of this election season an alleged political maneuver by Alaska Democrats that was, by all accounts, legal, consistent with past behavior by both major political parties, and unlikely to have any real effect on the outcome of the Alaska Senate race. America’s dominant news companies, led by the New York Times, have literally ignored the new rape allegation against the president of the United States while breathlessly hyping the Alaska maneuver, giving Donald Trump the distraction he desperately seeks and a phony premise for his anti-democratic efforts to effectively cancel a Senate election that could determine control of the entire U.S. Senate.

… At this writing, the New York Times has now run more than a dozen reports on this matter in just three days. The Times is in the kind of full-court press mode it saves for things like Joe Biden stumbling over his words. By my tally, the alleged Peltola maneuver has been a primary subject of six New York Times articles, four New York Times newsletters, a New York Times podcast, a New York Times video, and two letters to the editor the New York Times chose to run. At least nine New York Times journalists have bylines on these pieces. I can only imagine what the Sunday crossword puzzle has in store for us.

I have two observations:

  • If Republicans had done something like this, it would be covered as an infuriating-but-clever move to own the libs.
  • It’s a non-story, because Alaska has instant run-off voting. Even if you get confused about which Dan Sullivan is the Republican incumbent, despite the words “Republican” and “incumbent” appearing next to one Dan Sullivan’s name, you just rank the two next to each other. When the “fake” Dan Sullivan is eliminated, your vote will flow to the “real” one. So there is absolutely no chance this maneuver will affect the outcome of the election.

How the night unfolds. There’s a certain amount of tea-leaf reading you can do before any polls close. Exit polling goes on all day. The major media networks are committed not to release any of that information while the polls are open, but their talking heads have probably seen it. They’re generally pretty careful not to reveal anything directly, but I believe they shade their predictions so that they don’t look stupid later. So if MS-NOW folks are still talking about the Blue Wave at 5 p.m., it’s probably still plausible. Likewise, if Fox News pundits are making not-so-fast noises, that could be what the exit polls are showing.

The returns start coming in at 7 p.m. EST, when the polls close in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Virginia, Vermont. (All poll closing times and a summary of the interesting races are in this NPR article. Some eastern time zone districts in Kentucky and Indiana will report at 6.) None of the toss-up Senate races are here, but you can get some insight into how the night will go by looking at margins. The South Carolina Senate race is supposed to go to Republican Darlene Graham by a small margin. How small? If this race stays too close to call for a long time, it’s a good night for the Democrats. If Graham wins with surprising ease, that’s good for Republicans. The WaPo’s Henry Olsen targets five points as the line to watch.

The Georgia governor’s race is also expected to be close.

Florida’s eastern time zone polls close. A number of House races are close, including some recently gerrymandered districts.

At 7:30: North Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia. The big race here is the Ohio Senate race, where Democrat Sherrod Brown has a small lead in the polls, but the race is considered a toss-up. Don’t expect that to get called early either way. The thing I’ll be watching for early is Black turnout in Cleveland and other big cities. The first bad sign for Hillary Clinton in 2016 was low Black turnout in Cleveland. Probably the Democratic early vote comes in first, so Brown should have a big early lead that shrinks as the night goes on.

Roy Cooper is expected to flip the North Carolina Senate seat to the Democrats. Polls have him up double digits. If that holds, and the race gets called early, that’s a sign that the polls are accurate. NC-1 is a toss-up House seat. Gerrymandering was supposed to push Democrat Don Davis out of Congress. If it doesn’t, that’s a bad sign for Republican gerrymanders across the country.

OH-7 is another toss-up race. This time Republican Max Miller is the incumbent.

At 8: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington, D.C.

The Maine Senate race is one of the closest in the country. Chris Pappas is supposed to be ahead in New Hampshire; if he’s not, that’s a bad sign for Democrats. If the Mississippi Senate race is close, then the toss-up races are trending Democratic.

In Pennsylvania the focus is on House seats, where Democrats are expected to flip several. Florida is another test of Republican gerrymandering.

Josh Shapiro and Jay Pritzker will easily get reelected as governors in Pennsylvania and Illinois, but the margins matter if you think of them as a presidential contenders in 2028.

Somewhere in the 8-9 range, expect to hear projections that Democrats will take the House. The majority of races won’t be called, but enough toss-up races should come in to determine the outcome.

8:30. Arkansas. The only real news here will be if the Republicans don’t sweep.

9: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming

Lots to chew on here. Michigan is a toss-up Senate race with last-minute events. Cook has the Iowa Senate race as a toss-up and the polls are very close, but I have a hard time believing Iowans won’t come home to the Republicans.

Texas and Kansas test the liberal Christian message. Will Christian voters stick with MAGA, or do the teachings of Jesus still mean something? Will Christian voters prioritize anti-abortion and anti-gay rights (two issues Jesus never mentioned) or helping the poor, healing the sick, and welcoming the stranger (which he talked about all the time)?

NPR says this about Texas:

Talarico could take an early lead as early voting data and mail in ballots are counted but Paxton will probably start to gain ground as counties will start reporting their totals. While the governor’s race between Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and state Rep. Gina Hinojosa is also close, Abbott is still favored.

New York has some Republican House seats that Democrats need to flip.

By now, you shouldn’t be looking for tea leaves to read any more. The night will have developed momentum one way or the other.

10: Montana, Nevada, Utah. Not a lot of excitement here. Mostly watch for close races from earlier states to begin resolving.

11: California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington. No major Senate races. California is a test of Democratic gerrymandering. But California results take a long time to come in, so we may not know much until Wednesday, if then. Ditto for California ballot questions, like the wealth tax.

12: Hawaii.

1: Alaska. If the Senate is close nationally, it could all come down to Alaska. Put some coffee on.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (10)

At the End of an Age

September 21, 2026 – 9:25 am

Why this lost war is different from the others.

In the current Atlantic, Phillips O’Brien announces the end of the “American age”. (The link is a gift from O’Brien and should work even if you don’t subscribe to Atlantic.) By the American age, I think he means an era when the financial and technological dominance of the United States has allowed it to project power all over the world, and has allowed allies as far afield as Saudi Arabia and South Korea to rely on that power.

Our failure in the Iran War heralds the end of that age, not just because we are losing to a regional power, but because we are losing in a way that undermines our whole theory of power projection. We are losing because we cannot defend our own bases in the region from Iran’s missile attacks, and cannot defend our regional allies.

That makes this defeat different from, say, our loss in Vietnam. There, we were unable to achieve a result we wanted at a cost the American public was willing to pay. But North Vietnam wasn’t able to strike at our bases in Thailand, the Philippines, and Guam. The Japanese and Australians did not have to worry about our ability to protect them. Walking away from Vietnam wounded our pride, but left the rest of our world power structure largely unaffected.

Not so this time. The much-publicized travails of the USS Abraham Lincoln, for example, arose because the Iranians destroyed our logistics base in Bahrain, and so the Lincoln had to be supplied from Diego Garcia thousands of miles away. And the Bahrain base is not just temporarily out of commission. O’Brien notes:

At a recent town-hall meeting, Navy Times has reported, a service member asked Admiral Daryl Caudle about retrieving personal items from the Bahrain base. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle responded. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”

Our era of dominance was bound to end eventually, O’Brien says, but Trump has made it come about sooner by starting a foolish shooting war against Iran and foolish trade wars with our former allies. Around the world, countries are concluding that neither our power nor our word can be trusted, and are beginning to make post-American arrangements.

Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—all long-term U.S. partners—recently signed their own defense pact. Now that Iran is exercising control over the Strait of Hormuz, Oman, on the waterway’s opposite shore, is inching toward closer cooperation with Tehran. Other Gulf States are reaching out to Iran as well. Even Saudi Arabia, which for decades based its security on massive purchases of U.S. weapons and the hosting of U.S. forces, must reassess its choices after Trump told its de facto ruler that the U.S. will not assist the country in its war with the Houthis. Meanwhile, South Korea is improving relations with China, and European states are thinking more and more of a European-wide defense association.

It is quite ironic that this end of American greatness happens under a regime that promised to “Make America Great Again”. What makes O’Brien’s article important — I suspect it will be referenced decades from now, the way George Kennan’s anonymous 1947 “X article“, the one that promoted a policy of “containment” against the Soviet Union, has been — is that the American public has not gotten this message yet. The Trump regime still trumpets its “victory” in Iran, and hubristically compares an ally like Canada to “a little yippy dog“.

The bulk of Trump voters, the ones who live in the MAGA echo chamber, are beginning to become uneasy about the war dragging on, and are tired of paying higher war-induced gas and diesel prices. But they do not yet understand that we have lost, much less what we have lost.

The rest of the public is not far ahead of the MAGA base. Most Americans are coming to understand that Trump has no plans that will lead to victory, so we will at some point have to simply drop the war — probably ending up in a situation far worse than Obama achieved by negotiating with Iran. But even they are imagining a loss like Vietnam or Afghanistan, where we feel embarrassed, but turn the page and go on as before.

What the end of the Pax Americana will mean is still a mystery, even to foreign-policy experts. The last time a world power passed from the scene was over a hundred years ago, with the decline of the British Empire. As Kipling wrote in 1897:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

But even then, Britain could pass the torch to a like-minded ally in the United States. In some sense, what is ending now is an Anglo-American period of dominance that goes back at least to the Napoleonic wars. Today, China is the only power comparable to the United States, and it is neither like-minded nor ready to define a world order.

We are likely to be entering a period of instability around the world. Probably the worst thing we can do is to refuse to recognize it, and to escape into nostalgia for our past greatness. We could go ever-deeper into debt by increasing our military budget, maybe rebuilding bases we still cannot defend, and buying nostalgia-inducing weapons like the Trump-class battleships.

Or we could rethink America’s role in the world. We are a strong nation with outstanding technology and world leadership in many areas. Much can be still be done with that, if we come to a new understanding of both our strengths and our limitations.

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What Germany teaches us about ourselves

September 14, 2026 – 10:33 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zimmer points to an interesting clue:

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

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

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

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

Instead, progressives need to

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

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

In other words, Abdul el Sayed has it right:

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

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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.

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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.

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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.”

By weeklysift | Tagged , , , | Comments (6)

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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