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Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious.

July 6, 2026 – 10:07 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By weeklysift | Tagged democracy, economics, framing | Comments (19)

Immigration is about Race

June 29, 2026 – 10:17 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syria is also a Level-4 country:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alito brushes this off:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it’s obvious: racism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By weeklysift | Tagged immigration, law, race | Comments (4)

Story Games

June 22, 2026 – 9:02 am

How narrative turns into destiny.

I’ve mentioned before the writer A. R. Moxon and his blog The Reframe. [See endnote 1.] He doesn’t do the weekly news processing I do here, but instead writes the kind of long-form think-pieces that I only get around to occasionally. This week he posted “Winning the Story Game“, where he looks at the way the people at the top of our systems — Elon Musk and Donald Trump particularly — go from lie to lie, crime to crime, and failure to failure without ever being held to account.

So Elon Musk is about to become the planet’s first trillionaire, I’ve learned. Or he already is one? It’s hard to tell once you’ve reached such levels of cartoon villainy and pretend money. I say “cartoon villainy” because you don’t get a trillion dollars by providing value to humanity, and I hope we’re all savvy enough by now to know that. You get a trillion dollars first by capturing the mechanisms of power and influence that decide what value is and how it is counted, and then by pointing those mechanisms right toward yourself while cutting off as many avenues that don’t point toward you as you can. Corruption and exploitation, in other words.

He describes how Musk became a trillionaire:

by telling lies to the market about what his technology will do and when it will do it, then reaping the rewards of the market’s credulity on his grandiose claims, deploying all the reputation he fraudulently gained in order to hoover up government contracts, using the wealth he gained to acquire genuinely valuable things that other people have actually created [2], and finally corrupting those things to his own benefit and enrichment, all the while never paying any penalty for his mendacity as he simply keeps moving out the delivery dates on the technologic miracles he was obviously never able to deliver, and indeed rarely seems interested in even looking like he is bothering to try. Musk got his final boost into trillionairism on the strength of what sure seems like a fraudulent or at least bogus valuation for the recent IPO of his SpaceX company, propped up on typically grandiose and specious claims, unaccountable market credulity, captured government contracts, and rules changes favoring specious-to-fraudulent valuations, including loosened regulation and mandatory purchases by index funds. Index funds are where most of our retirement accounts are, by the way, so if Musk and his shareholders want to dip out with all their gains, it will be everyone else left holding the bag.

None of this is a secret. Nor is it a secret that Trump lies constantly, nor that his presidency has enriched himself and his family by several billion dollars. And yet …

[T]his disrepute doesn’t impact the way our systems of government and finance and influence deal with them. Trump and Musk’s next grandiose claims—about the end of the conflict in Iran, say, or about putting a colony on Mars—will be reported as if it actually news, without the context of their long history of lies, without the assumption that these are just the latest lies. The markets will respond to the claims as if they are based in reality. The justice system will go on ignoring their crimes. The money will keep flowing to them, and to other billionaires, too. And billionaires as a class are increasingly in disrepute, yet the money keeps flowing to them, even as more and more people struggle to survive, even as billionaires get more and more open about their intention to control our bodies and lives, to enslave most of us and devour the rest.

Fewer and fewer people want this, it seems, and yet more and more of us are getting it. There seems to be a fundamental disconnection between the will of the people and the will of our systems of government and finance and influence. This tells me that whatever changes we need to make, they need to be systematic and fundamental—radical, in other words.

Moxon is not the only person to notice this, but he goes on to ask why. And he connects this corruption with the stories we tell ourselves through our popular media: Once our superheroes were selfless beings who felt an inner pressure to use their power responsibly, in service of the people they had the power to rule. [3] But then came the Marvel cinematic universe.

Iron Man aka Tony Stark was the central hero of these dominant stories we told ourselves. He was a capitalist genius billionaire arms dealer who saves the world by single-handedly developing increasingly autonomous mechanized weapons over which he has an ever-increasingly level of personal control, which he deploys throughout the world however he sees fit. I remember when this would describe the villain of most stories, but over the last two decades of our dominant mode of storytelling, Tony Stark was our central hero. His wealth was proof of his goodness; his development of technology was proof of his right to use it; his genius enabled him to make, all by himself, the marvels that brought salvation to the universe, and the creation of those marvels bestowed upon him license to decide how those marvels should be best used. It shouldn’t perhaps surprise us that after a decade or so of this we wound up with Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Two world-shaping geniuses meet in Iron Man 2. Which one is fictional?

But supremacist story cycles have a way of falling apart eventually, because people start connecting them to the harms they cause. In the first half of the 20th century, a popular story cycle — from The Birth of a Nation to Gone With the Wind — idealized the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan that was fighting to restore the South’s former glory. [4] That story falls flat today. [5]

Confederates seceded with an open defense of their right to slavery, but their modern defenders have discovered they can’t tell the story they defend on its own terms. Southern scions of human slavers don’t like being thought of as scions of slavers, these days, and those who serve as Confederate apologists don’t like being thought of as apologists for slavery. These days most racists don’t like being called racists and most supremacists don’t like being understood as supremacists, and most fascists don’t like being called fascists. Instead, they try to cast their critics as the real racists, and those who try to resist their oppression and suppression as the real supremacists, and antifascists are the real fascists. There seems to be a reputational cost that attends their actual beliefs, one they’d rather make others pay, and they seem to know it.

So supremacists have to keep coming up with new stories to justify their dominance. Moxon says we need to get quicker at noticing and undermining these new stories, and get better at coming up with counter-stories of our own. Intriguingly, he claims to be drafting future essays about how to do that.

[1] A book collecting some of his essays, Fighting in the Dark, is coming out in August.

[2] Many people believe that Musk founded Tesla, or maybe even invented its technology. He didn’t.

[3] The idea that changes in superhero myths mark changes in society is something I worked with in my 2010 UU World article “Reclaiming Krypton“. I followed up in 2021 with a blog post “Return to Krypton“.

While I’m mentioning it, let me say that “Return to Krypton” deserves a look. The superhero stories since 2010 focus on an ambivalence about legacy, and point us towards a process of discernment, where we separate the legacies we are grateful for from the legacies we must reject. There are good and bad sides to being, say, Batman’s protege. And that invites us into a discernment process about our American legacy: “I revere this Thomas Jefferson. I revile that one.” Once you enter the debate over whether we should admire Jefferson or be ashamed of him, you’ve oversimplified American history.

In contrast to Musk and Trump, the superhero myths of the 1940s and 1950s gave us “the wise men“, six incredibly influential people who shaped postwar and Cold War American foreign policy. Most were from well-to-do families who gave them elite educations, and Averell Harriman inherited considerable wealth, but none of the six used their public-policy influence to capture billions for themselves. Today, only history buffs can tell you who they were.

[4] Here I’m reminded of my 2014 post “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party“. It was the most viral Sift post ever.

[5] Something similar has happened to the old-fashioned cowboys-and-Indians western. Portraying Native Americans as mindless savages just doesn’t work any more. How the West was “won” has become a much more ambiguous tale.

By weeklysift | Tagged culture wars, framing | Comments (4)

All Americans Need Pride Now

June 8, 2026 – 10:21 am

It’s the nature of fascism to keep expanding its list of enemies. No matter who you are, they’ll get to you eventually.

“First they came for the Communists …”

Martin Niemoller’s famous poem about the Nazis has been quoted so often it’s turning into a cliche. It describes how a tyrannical regime can peel off its enemies one little group at at time, allowing the rest of society to imagine it is somehow safe — until it isn’t.

When we repeat that poem today, we often imagine that the Nazis had all this planned from the beginning, that they were always going to come for Pastor Niemoller, and were just waiting until they had disposed of all his potential allies first. But quite likely that was not true. Going after one group and then another doesn’t have to be premeditated; it is baked into the fundamental nature of fascism. The list of enemy groups will inevitably keep expanding until the regime falls. Let me explain why.

I’ve been honing my definition of fascism ever since I first applied it to Donald Trump’s movement back in 2015. I wanted to use the word fascist in a meaningful way, rather than just as an insult. So rather than just throw it around, I defined what I meant by it and argued that my definition applied to the case at hand. I decided fascism is:

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.

Eleven years later, I think that holds up pretty well, and matches closely what we’ve seen from the MAGA movement. Today, I think I’d sum up the fundamental fascist attitude more quickly: “Our nation was great and strong when we were pure. Now we are tainted and corrupt, but if we purify ourselves we will be great and strong again.”

Fascism looking outward is a quest for dominance, while fascism looking inward is a quest for purity.

To MAGA, purity has a number of key elements: white, English-speaking, male-dominated, Christian, and espousing traditional gender roles. Not every individual has to embody all those characteristics, but those factors have to be dominant in society.

But fascism inevitably fails to achieve its goals, because greatness has nothing to do with purity. When failure happens, though, there’s always a way to explain it away: “We just didn’t go far enough.”

We’ve seen this pattern in many places already. Capitalism is not making the bulk of our population prosperous any more, so the solution is more capitalism. Tax cuts haven’t created jobs, so the solution is more tax cuts. Cutting the government’s safety-net benefits hasn’t pushed people into the workforce, so we need more benefit cuts. And so on.

The same thing happens with purity. Trump won in 2024, partly on the idea that “illegal immigrants” were creating all our problems. Across the board, they were “poisoning the blood of our country“”like vermin“.

More specifically, they were criminals, so getting rid of them would solve the crime problem. They took our jobs, so if we got rid of them jobs would be plentiful. In spite of all those stolen jobs, they also bloated our safety-net programs, so getting rid of them would save money. And they were also somehow leveraging all those welfare payments and sub-minimum-wage jobs to bid up the price of housing, so getting rid them will make houses more affordable. They bring drugs and diseases, so getting rid of them will solve those problems. And so on.

So now that Trump has shut down the border and pushed many thousands of immigrants into concentration camps, all those problems should be getting better, right? But (other than the continuation of a long-term decline in violent crime), none of them have budged. We still have crime, under-employment, people on welfare, unaffordable housing, drugs, diseases, and the whole mess. Because in reality, undocumented immigrants had very little to do with any of that.

Of course, the Trump regime isn’t going to say “Sorry, I guess we were wrong.” It will claim, and is already claiming, that the reason an increase in purity hasn’t decreased our problems is that we aren’t pure enough yet.

So we don’t just need to cut out undocumented immigration, we need to cut documented immigration also. We’ve virtually stopped admitting non-White refugees (while seeking out White refugees). On the advancing edge of MAGA, we’re already hearing about “remigration“, i.e., plans to send non-White American residents (and even citizens) back to their ancestral homelands.

And it’s not just racial purity, it’s also purity in the sense of sexual morality. At the moment, the focus of MAGA’s sexual oppression is on trans people. But what happens after they have been suppressed, and America still has problems? If you draw the conclusion that we’re still not pure enough, who do we go after next? Gays and lesbians, I suppose, and then women who have gotten abortions. And promiscuous women. And then straight men and women who don’t act masculine or feminine enough. (You can see a preview of this in the campaign to smear Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.)

What about religious purity? If you buy the bogus argument that America was founded as a “Christian nation”, then all non-Christians are suspect. They already started with Muslims, because many of our external enemies are Muslims. But atheists won’t be far behind. And what if that’s not enough to solve all our problems? Hindus? Jews? Talarico-like Christians who foolishly try to follow the teachings of Jesus rather than Trump? (The Pentagon just reduced its list of recognized religious faiths from 211 to 31, 22 of which are Christian. My faith, Unitarian Universalism, is no longer recognized.)

You see where this goes. Once you’ve committed atrocities in the name of purity, you can’t admit that purity is a bogus value that has nothing to do with America’s problems. If problems haven’t been solved, we just haven’t gone far enough yet.

So here’s the thought I want to raise during 2026’s Pride Month: You may believe that Pride has nothing to do with you. Maybe you’ve never even thought about being a different gender. Maybe you’re happily rooted in a White heterosexual Christian marriage, with 2.3 children and a picket fence. Maybe you think the wave of oppression and bigotry will wash out long before it gets to you.

But it won’t, at least not on its own. Because purity is not a solution, and the further they travel on that road, the stronger the temptation to keep doubling down, to keep finding new enemy groups to purge. If they’re not stopped, they’ll get to you eventually.

So maybe we should stop them now, while they’re mostly just coming for immigrants and Muslims and trans people. Even if we’re not immigrants or Muslims or trans.

If any group of people are classed as subhuman, as vermin or poison, then everyone’s humanity is in doubt. If anyone does not deserve human rights, or can be shipped off to a hellhole without due process, then we’re all in danger.

We need to stand together while we still have people to stand with.

By weeklysift | Tagged culture wars, race, religion, Trump administration | Comments (10)

Has Trump finally pushed Republicans too far?

May 25, 2026 – 11:04 am

I hate to even ask this question, because it’s been discussed so often over the years, and the hopes raised have (up until now) always been dashed. But maybe? Maybe?

Way back in 2015, when Trump came down the escalator characterizing Mexican immigrants as rapists, and then a few weeks later denigrated John McCain’s war record, the conventional wisdom was certain that he had gone too far. Outrageousness had always been his shtick, but this was too much. Surely even his supporters would start backing away from him now.

Needless to say, it didn’t happen. It also didn’t happen after he bragged to Billy Bush that he could “grab ’em by the pussy” and get away with it. Or when two dozen women verified that he really did behave that way. Or when a jury unanimously concluded that he had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll.

It didn’t happen when he said he trusted Vladimir Putin more than American intelligence services. Or when his mismanagement of the Covid pandemic expanded the death toll by hundreds of thousands of American souls.

It didn’t happen when he withheld aid approved by Congress in an attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into launching a bogus investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. Or when he was impeached for that. Or when he incited rioters to attack the Capitol to reverse the result of the election he lost to Biden. Or when he was impeached for that. Or when he pardoned the rioters of all the crimes they had committed in his name, including hospitalizing over a hundred Capitol police.

Every time, very smart people told us this was it, he had finally gone too far. But it was never true.

So why might it be true now?

The downward slide. Hemingway once said that bankruptcies happen two ways: gradually, and then suddenly. The undermining of Trump’s popularity has been following a similar pattern.

For months, Trump supporters have been getting less and less sure of themselves. Maybe it began with the Epstein Files, which Trump had campaigned on releasing, and then did his best to hide once he got into office. (His Justice Department is still dragging its feet, and Trump keeps flirting with the idea of pardoning Epstein’s primary accomplice — the only one currently in jail for Epstein’s crimes.) Or when the prices he said when come down “on Day One” kept climbing — often due to Trump’s own policies like illegal tariffs and the effect of his war with Iran. Or when he attacked Iran for no discernible reason after running on not starting foreign wars.

That all resulted in a steadily declining approval rating from the general public, to levels unlike anything he had seen before.

That set the stage. But more recently three events have brought it into focus: the White House ballroom, his insider stock trades, and (most of all) the $1.776 billion fund he has illegally created to reward the same violent criminals he pardoned for the January 6 riot.

Primary voters. Probably the last people to leave Trump will be the MAGA faithful who show up to vote in Republican primaries where he has made an endorsement. Recent results have shown him to still be strong there — strong enough to punish Republicans in Congress who step out of line.

So Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) lost his primary on Tuesday after being targeted by Trump for (among other things) pushing to release the Epstein Files. Last week Republican Senator Bill Cassidy also lost his primary five years after voting to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial. Neither Massie nor Cassidy, though, had defined himself as anti-Trump. Both pitched themselves as loyal Trump Republicans who maintained just a smidgen of independence.

But that’s not good enough for Trump, and he clearly retains enough sway with Republican voters to punish elected officials who cross him in any way at all. Tomorrow we’ll get another test: Trump has endorsed Texas’ corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton, over Senator John Cornyn, who not long ago was in contention to be Majority Leader. Cornyn’s sins are even less tangible than Massie’s or Cassidy’s — he hasn’t been enthusiastic enough about Trump’s agenda to want to scrap the Senate filibuster. Trump also ousted Indiana legislators who refused to redraw their state’s congressional map.

Republicans in Congress. But Republicans in Congress don’t just have primaries to worry about. In spite of gerrymandering, some have to win in competitive districts, where they need votes from independents and maybe even a few Democrats. Senators, meanwhile, have to run statewide. So unless they’re from clearly red states, they also need support from more than just Trump and his most fervent followers.

That’s where you would expect to see the cracks form first — and we’re seeing them in two places: the reconciliation bill trying to move through the Senate, and the war powers resolution attempting to limit the Iran War. In both cases, Republican leaders in Congress adjourned for the Memorial Day recess rather than hold a vote that they would lose.

The reconciliation bill. Remember how this started. After Trump’s masked police (some combination of ICE and the border patrol) terrorized Minneapolis, murdering Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Democrats refused ICE and CBP any further funding without putting some common-sense restrictions on these rogue agencies.

first, federal immigration agents need to remove masks, turn on their body cameras, and wear visible, clear identification. Second, Democrats want to end the roving patrols. This is a nation of laws guided by the Constitution that everyone—including ICE—must abide by. This means that federal immigration officials must stop racial profiling and end random arrests; and agents must obtain a judicial warrant signed by a neutral judge—not an administrative warrant—to enter private property. They also cannot detain Americans for hours or use excessive force against them just for peacefully protesting in support of their neighbors and friends. Third, Democrats are demanding accountability. ICE and Border Patrol squads cannot indiscriminately smash in car windows, use tear gas on protestors, and shoot at people without any accountability.

Republicans refused any meaningful limits on ICE, and resolved to fund the mass-deportation agenda without Democratic votes (the same way they passed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” last year). That was the origin of the current reconciliation bill.

Since then, the bill has become a Christmas tree with all kinds of baubles on it. Trump wanted it to include $1 billion for his White House ballroom — which originally wasn’t supposed to cost the taxpayers anything (beyond the cost of whatever favors Trump offered donors). Senators balked at this, but then were bailed out by the Senate parliamentarian, who ruled that the ballroom funding violated the arcane rules that govern reconciliation bills. Trump then demanded that Majority Leader Thune fire the parliamentarian, which he has not done.

The reconciliation bill doesn’t fund Trump’s corrupt “anti-weaponization” fund, which the Justice Department claims it can create with money from a fund previously established to pay settlements of lawsuits against the government. But there is no settlement in this case. Settlements are overseen by courts, and probably no judge would sign off on what Trump wants.

On May 20—the same day the parties’ jurisdictional briefs had been due—[the judge] issued an order formally closing the case. In her order, she noted that the Justice Department, which has an “independent obligation to uphold the ‘public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources,’” had “neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.”

So if it’s not in the bill, why is the fund a problem for Senate Republicans? The reconciliation process allows the opposing party a chance to offer amendments. Democrats are almost certain to propose an amendment saying that no federal money can be spent on the anti-weaponization fund, or perhaps just that no money be awarded to people who have been convicted of assaulting police officers or committing sedition against the United States. Since those are precisely the people Trump wants to reward, he will demand Republican senators vote against such an amendment. And how will they explain such a vote to their constituents?

That prospect set up a tumultuous private meeting between Republican senators and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is spearheading the anti-weaponization fund effort. Mitch McConnell came out saying this:

So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick.

The upshot was that the reconciliation vote wasn’t held before senators left for the Memorial Day recess. Whether any of this can be resolved after they come back in June is still up in the air.

Iran war. We’re now three months into a war that Trump insisted was won on the first day. He has never explained the goals of the war to the American people, and has never gone to Congress for authorization. He just wanted to attack Iran, so he did. Why does anybody need to know any more than that? The reasons he gives may shift from tweet to tweet, but why does that matter?

Democrats have been proposing resolutions to limit the war since it began, but Republicans have been holding them at bay. But defections on the Republican side have been building up, and a resolution asking Trump to withdraw American forces by the end of June looked ready to pass the House Thursday, forcing Speaker Johnson to delay the vote until after the Memorial Day recess.

Of course, Trump could veto that resolution even if it passes, and there aren’t nearly enough votes to override such a veto. So the legal effect of passing the resolution would have been nil. But putting the House on record opposing Trump’s war would be a big deal.

And eventually, Congress will need to appropriate some money to pay for all the bombs and missiles and military deployments. What will happen then?

Where are we? Opposed to the now-he’s-gone-too-far conventional wisdom is the Trump-has-a-floor view that his base of support is unshakeable. What seems to be true is something in between. The process of Trump’s fall should go something like this: He’ll lose the support of independents who voted for him in 2024 (which has pretty much already happened). Then Republican senators and congresspeople will peel off one-by-one, which has been happening slowly for several months. Then the drip-drip of leaking support will become a flood. Eventually, even previously fervent supporters will go silent, or forget that they were ever MAGA.

It won’t happen all at once. There’s even a chance that a deal-on-paper with Iran will reduce the pressure on the GOP congressional majorities to assert themselves, or that some fig-leaf concessions on the ballroom or the weaponization fund will allow the reconciliation bill to pass.

But the erosion is still happening. Long-term, I don’t think it can be stopped.

By weeklysift | Tagged democracy, Trump administration | Comments (4)

Is Corruption the Democrats’ Unifying Theme?

May 18, 2026 – 12:00 pm

Maybe the reason the government is working so badly for you is that it works so well for him.

Ever since he came down the escalator in 2015, Donald Trump has posed a unique problem for his opponents: There’s so much to run against, how do you focus?

Maybe his ongoing attack on democratic governance and the rule of law is the most serious problem. But that can sound legalistic and abstract to a low-information voter. Harris tried to make democracy a major issue in 2024, and it didn’t get traction.
Maybe in the long run his gutting of the already-inadequate Obama/Biden response to climate change is the most serious thing. But there you run into a fossil-fuel-company disinformation campaign that has been going on for decades. Lots of Americans just don’t believe in climate change and don’t see why they should make sacrifices to head it off.
Maybe we need to turn around his “Promises Made; Promises Kept” slogan and point to all the reasons his supporters should be disappointed: Inflation is worse, not better. The deficit has gone up, not down. Tariffs and deportations haven’t opened up manufacturing jobs for Americans. Quite the opposite of exposing Epstein’s co-conspirators, his Justice Department has been helping hide them. Rather than curb wasteful government spending, he has pushed for expensive vanity projects like a billion-dollar ballroom and the Arc de Trump. After claiming that Harris would get us into another expensive war, he has gotten us into another expensive war.
Maybe we should push a class theme: Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” cut billionaire’s taxes and paid for it by cutting food and healthcare benefits for the working poor.
Maybe Trump’s personality is the problem: the constant lying, the childish insults, his mistreatment of women, and the way he demands a North-Korea-like level of praise from everyone in his administration. But Trump has a unique teflon-coating in this area. His over-the-top rhetoric channels the free-floating anger many voters feel.

I could go on. But if you don’t focus, if you catalog everything, you sound obsessive. Trump’s counter-narrative is that his critics have Trump Derangement Syndrome, an irrational urge to denounce anything Trump does. (The real TDS, in my opinion, is suffered by the Republicans who abandoned their previous principles to follow Trump: the libertarians who are now pro-autocracy, the deficit hawks who support both cutting taxes and fighting unnecessary wars, the religious leaders for whom Trump’s personal immorality doesn’t matter, and so on.)

The underlying problem is that everything is a distraction from everything else. Picking out one thing seems to imply that the others are acceptable. And that gets us squabbling among ourselves rather than uniting in opposition.

If only there were a theme that was unifying rather than divisive. Is there any aspect of the Trump regime that could serve as a trunk, with all the other objections as branches?

The Hungarian example. Péter Magyar faced a similar problem when he ran against Viktor Orbán, the neo-fascist autocrat of Hungary. Like Trump, Orbán had been an across-the-board negative influence on Hungarian society for many years. But as a result, the people who ought to oppose him did not form any coherent whole. So how could they be united behind a single party or candidate?

Magyar chose to focus on one central issue: corruption. And it worked.

Could it work for us?

Trump’s corruption. There’s a lot to work with here. To start with, there’s the bottom-line result: Trump’s net worth has skyrocketed since he got re-elected. Somehow, being president again has tripled his wealth in less than two years.

How? According to Forbes:

His cryptocurrency ventures, stalled out before the election, exploded after his victory, adding an estimated $1.8 billion to his fortune overall. Another $500 million came in court, where Trump’s legal team succeeded in eliminating a half-billion judgement against him. His once-dormant licensing business surged $400 million, as foreign developers clamored to do business with an American president.

Then there are the bribes channeled through lawsuits. For example, Trump filed a legally baseless lawsuit against CBS, but the parent company Paramount paid $16 million to the Trump Library to settle it — and got approval for its merger with Skydance. ABC had previously settled a similarly frivolous lawsuit for $15 million.

Then there are the indirect bribes, like Qatar giving a $400-million airplane to the Trump Library rather than directly to him, or the government contracts his sons are getting, or son-in-law Jared Kushner doing billions of dollars in private business ventures with the same governments he’s negotiating with for the United States.

This level of corruption has filtered down to his appointees, like border czar Tom Homan, who reportedly was taped taking $50,000 in a bag. (The investigation into Homan was quashed and Pam Bondi refused to answer questions about it in a congressional hearing.) Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly commissioned her own “palace in the sky” for $70 million.

This week’s self-dealing. But it’s hard to find a more blatant example of corruption than Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Supposedly, this is about the damage he suffered from having his tax returns leaked to the New York Times.

Bear in mind that all presidents since Nixon have released their tax returns voluntarily, for free, because the American people have a right to know how their presidents have been making money. Trump repeatedly had said he would release his returns, but always claimed there was some reason it couldn’t happen immediately.

Who knew that information was worth $10 billion?

Trump also has filed claims against the government for $230 million, concerning fantasized abuses of the investigations into his dealings with Russia and the successful FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home. (Both were entirely justified. Most obviously the Mar-a-Lago search: Trump illegally kept classified documents after he left the White House and became a private citizen. He told the government he had turned everything in. But the FBI searched for additional classified documents and found them.)

So anyway, these are claims in which Trump as an individual is suing the government he heads. He is effectively controlling both sides of the process — literal self-dealing. In April, a federal judge objected, requiring both “sides” to write memos explaining how this suit belongs in an adversarial process, when the two sides are not adversaries.

Rather than do that, according to both ABC News and the New York Times, Trump planned to “settle” with himself, by using $1.7 billion of taxpayer funds to create a slush fund controlled by Trump that could be used to pay off anyone who claimed to have been damaged by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the Justice Department: For example, the violent criminals who assaulted police officers on January 6.

All weekend, the obviousness of this scheme created bad publicity for the Trump regime. But that didn’t stop him. This morning, Trump dropped the lawsuit and the slush fund got created.

How is corruption a unifying theme? Trump’s corruption deserves to be an issue in its own right. It’s unparalleled in American history. (Even past corrupt presidencies typically didn’t enrich the president directly. Grant, for example, wrote his memoirs as he was dying so that his widow could have some money to live on after he was gone.) Any of a dozen or so similar scandals would have sunk any previous administration. (Think about how the Republicans tried to spin Hunter Biden, and what small potatoes all that is compared to Jared, Eric, and Don Jr.)

But Magyar made corruption unifying like this: The government isn’t working for you because it’s not trying to. It’s trying to work for him.

Do you not see what you’re getting from the Iran War? You’re not supposed to. It’s not for you. Tariffs? That was about bullying foreign governments into cooperating with Trump; it was never about you. Inflation? Trump was too busy designing his ballroom (and making sweetheart deals with contractors) to worry about it. Climate change? The big money is with the oil companies, so who cares about your children’s future?

And finally there’s the democracy issue, which is famously difficult to package in a way that reaches the voters we need. To many, it all sounds like politicians fighting turf battles: Who cares about Trump defying court orders or usurping Congress’ power-of-the-purse? How does any of that affect me?

It affects you like this: What Trump has consistently done is bulldoze any power center in government that could stop him from stealing. That’s why there are no independent inspectors general in government departments any more. That’s why cabinet secretaries won’t answer questions in congressional hearings. That’s why he wants to pre-determine elections through gerrymandering and voter suppression. He’s taking power away from anybody who could call him to account for his corruption.

By weeklysift | Tagged corruption, democracy, Trump administration | Comments (10)

Phillips O’Brien’s “War and Power”

May 11, 2026 – 9:50 am

Why have predictions about recent wars gone so horribly wrong?

Ukraine. On February 21, 2022 — just three days before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — Robert Kagan, a foreign policy specialist who had served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, wrote a forward-looking article in The Washington Post: “What we can expect after Putin’s conquest of Ukraine“. Kagan skipped over the oncoming war entirely, to the post-conquest aftermath, when Ukraine would “cease to exist as an independent entity” and be incorporated into Russia, which would now border four new NATO countries (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania) in addition to the previous Estonia and Latvia.

Kagan’s view was a typical expert take on the military situation. Earlier that month, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, told Congress that Kyiv might fall only three days into a full Russian invasion. After the invasion began, President Biden offered to evacuate Ukrainian President Zelensky, to which Zelensky famously replied “I need ammunition, not a ride.“

If there would be any hiccup in this conquest at all, Kagan imagined, it could only be in the form of an insurgency after Russian troops overran the country.

Some analysts today imagine a Ukrainian insurgency sprouting up against Russian domination. Perhaps. But the Ukrainian people cannot be expected to fight a full-spectrum war with whatever they have in their homes. To have any hope against Russian occupation forces, an insurgency will need to be supplied and supported from neighboring countries. Will Poland play that role, with Russian forces directly across the border? Will the Baltics? Or Hungary? And if they do, will the Russians not feel justified in attacking the insurgents’ supply routes, even if they happen to lie in the territory of neighboring NATO members? It is wishful thinking to imagine that this conflict stops with Ukraine.

And yet, four years later, Ukraine is still resisting the Russian invasion — not as an insurgency, but as a nation with a free capital and territory under its control. Zelensky is still president, and still in Kyiv. Who will ultimately prevail in this war is still very much up in the air.

The kind of mistaken certainty military experts expressed prior to the first shots being fired in Ukraine is far from unusual. The United States was supposed to defeat North Vietnam and the Taliban. The Iraq War was expected to end quickly with a more clearly favorable outcome. The Soviet Union was bound to succeed in Afghanistan. China should have had no problem handling Vietnam. The Trump administration expected that the successful decapitation strike the US and Israel mounted against Iran at the end of February would bring the Tehran regime to its knees and end the war quickly.

None of that happened. But why didn’t it? And why did so many learned people think that it would?

Phillips O’Brien’s War and Power is an attempt to answer that question, and to apply that answer to the current rivalry between the US and China. (The book came out last October, before the attack on Iran.)

O’Brien deserves a certain amount of credit right now, because he did not think Russia would roll through Ukraine. In “The New Appeasement“, published in January, 2022, O’Brien wrote:

If we have relearned any lesson over the last two decades, it is that military operations are expensive, usually counterproductive, and with the constant possibility of going dangerously wrong for the richest and most advanced economies, let alone weak ones. … If Russia we actually stupid enough to attack Ukraine, it would tax their military in a way not seen since the Cold War ended.

Why did he see Russia vs. Ukraine differently? War and Power is a study of the factors that make for success in war.

Existing forces. Too often, O’Brien says, analysts focus on the immediately available resources of the two sides: number of soldiers, quantity and quality of equipment, and so on. They take those assets and use them in war games that play out various strategies. Often, those games produce some decisive outcome in a short period of time.

Actual wars, he argues, looking back at the wars of the last two centuries, seldom work out that way. All the nations entering World War I, for example, had war plans that resulted in some quick victory. None of those plans became reality.

What is likely to happen instead is that the war quickly chews up the resources that were available at the beginning: Soldiers get killed or wounded, equipment gets destroyed, and sometimes entire types of equipment (and the tactics that go with them) prove to be obsolete in the face of new realities. (The cavalry charge, for example, had to be abandoned due to machine guns. Horses that would have been the stars of a 19th-century battlefield became mere draft animals, and then lost even that role to trucks.)

So the outcome of a war winds up depending not just (or even primarily) on the resources available at the beginning, but on each side’s ability to replace their loses with new weapons developed to match the challenges the war has posed. This depends on the entire societies involved: How wealthy and technologically sophisticated are they? Do their populations have the will to keep fighting? Does the war engage the innovative abilities of the whole nation? What kind of allies does each side have, and what can those allies provide?

What O’Brien saw in Russia was a corrupt system in which units often did not have the equipment that existed on paper, and the equipment that existed in the real world often did not perform as designed. (My favorite first-days-of-the-war story was of a Ukrainian farmer on his tractor who found a broken-down Russian tank in his field. He offered to tow it back to Russia.) The Russian military had never fought against a determined, sophisticated foe, and had no experience organizing complex operations like the suppression of air defenses. Their command structure did not give lower-level officers the power to change tactics that weren’t working. Putin himself lived (and still lives) in an informational bubble, making decisions based on the facts that people aren’t afraid to tell him.

The result was that much of the Russian advantage in tanks an similar equipment was wasted. Poor logistical planning produced traffic jams on the few roads to Kyiv, making those tanks sitting ducks for air power that Russia was unable to suppress, as well as artillery and attacks from small units of Ukrainians. Ukraine’s army proved to be resourceful and creative. As the war has dragged on, Ukrainians have mastered the new warfare of drones, which pre-war analysts did not see coming. Ukrainians in the field knew what they were fighting for and were willing to do so, while Russians often did not and were not.

So here we are, more than four years later: Russia has taken enormous losses and still is no closer to victory. Putin’s stooge Trump has backed away from supplying the Ukrainians, but Europe has increasingly stepped up. The outcome is still in doubt.

National interest. O’Brien is also critical of geo-political analysis that focuses on “national interest” as an abstraction that denies the significance of choices made by leaders. The field has shied away from what it contemptuously calls the Great Man Theory of History in favor of larger forces that constrain leaders to follow certain paths.

But leadership matters. O’Brien points to the late 19th century, when Great Britain could have felt threatened by the rise of the United States, but chose not to. So leadership of the world crossed the Atlantic without without Americans and Englishmen needing to shoot at each other.

Throughout the world wars, the choices of leaders mattered, for good or ill. For example, in the late 19th century Britain sought an alliance with Germany, but Kaiser Wilhelm rejected the idea, forcing the British to ally with France and Russia instead. How World War I might have played out in a Britain/Germany world — or if it would have happened at all — is anybody’s guess.

O’Brien could not have asked for a better example of leadership choices than the Iran War that has played out since his book’s publication. Trump need not have torn up the agreement Obama had negotiated to restrain Iran’s nuclear program, and need not have gone to war at all. Even after choosing war, he could have stated clear goals and rallied the nation behind them, but did not.

So even as Iran endures massive destruction and casualties, it may well outlast Americans’ willingness to pay high gas prices.

China vs. the United States. The rise of China is the kind of development that doesn’t have to lead to war (see the US vs. Great Britain), but often does. An obvious flash point is Taiwan, which China covets and the US protects.

What will happen if we go to war?

The final chapter of War and Power applies the concepts O’Brien has been developing. He does his best not to sensationalize his conclusions, but I have a hard time seeing how the US wins this war (short of escalating to nuclear weapons).

Initially, he says, the US would have several big advantages: US equipment is generally more technologically advanced, and US forces have a lot of war-fighting experience, while Chinese troops and systems are largely untested (and didn’t do well when they fought Vietnam in the late 1970s). It’s hard to imagine the Chinese pulling off the kind of complex operation the US did to snatch Venezuelan President Maduro out of his own palace.

So a quick American knock-out is a possibility. But if the war lasts, the advantage turns: The Chinese are good at making stuff, and we aren’t any more. As planes are shot down, ships sink, and ammunition from bullets to missiles gets used up, the Chinese will replace their losses much more easily than we will. The productive advantage that won World War II for us might win the next war for China.

And in the Trump era, Americans have lost all sense of diplomacy. So could we count on South Korea or Japan to stand with us and make the things (like ships) that we no longer manufacture in any quantity?

In the end, the war might hang on the Taiwanese themselves. How badly do they want to stay independent? In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, we saw the fruitlessness of propping up an ally that doesn’t want to fight. Taiwan might prove as resilient as Ukraine. Or it might not.

By weeklysift | Tagged war | Comments (10)

What to do with a lawless Supreme Court?

May 4, 2026 – 11:58 am

Can democracy flourish, or even survive,
if two-thirds of the justices on the Supreme Court don’t believe in it?

[A previous version of this post didn’t load for some users, so I republished under a similar title.]

One of the great moments in American politics happened on March 15, 1965. It was barely a week since “Bloody Sunday“, when Alabama state police attacked civil rights demonstrators trying to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma.

Police (and non-police actors like slave patrols or the Ku Klux Klan) had been beating up Black people for over 100 years, but this time it was on TV, where the whole nation could see it. Nonviolent protesters had brought the reality of oppression into the nation’s living rooms: White people could maintain their dominance, but only by being villains, by brutalizing people who posed no threat.

How would the nation respond?

President Johnson answered by addressing a joint session of Congress, saying these words in his White Texas accent:

There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. …

What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall overcome.

Johnson backed those words up by proposing the Voting Rights Act, which he signed into law a few months later.

Undoing that landmark piece of legislation has been the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts. Wednesday he finished the task.

Immediate and long-term perspectives The decision the Supreme Court released Wednesday, Louisiana v Callais (called just “Callais” in most media coverage), requires explanation both in an immediate and a long-term sense. Immediately, it blesses a practice the VRA was passed to eliminate: “cracking” minority communities and spreading them among multiple districts so that all (or nearly all) districts have a White majority. Or, looked at from the other side, Callais makes illegal the practice of intentionally gathering minority voters into a district where they might form a majority and elect a candidate of their own choosing.

Possibly immediately (if Louisiana can get away with the redistricting it now wants to do even after some absentee votes in its primary have already been mailed, and if other southern states can follow suit), but certainly by 2028, red states in the Deep South will redraw their maps so that maybe ten or so Black congresspeople are gerrymandered out of their jobs. By 2029, the congressional delegations of many Southern states may be as lily-white as they were before the VRA passed in 1965.

Bad as that outcome is, you can’t appreciate the full horror of this decision without seeing the larger context: Callais is the culmination of John Roberts’ 13-year program to repeal the VRA by judicial fiat, in contravention of the intention of the Congresses that passed it and kept renewing it. During those years, a series of corrupt decisions [1] have built on each other to get us where we are today: It is now hard to imagine any state action — no matter how racist — that could be reversed by bringing that state to court under the VRA.

In 2013’s Shelby County decision, Roberts threw out Section 5 of the VRA. Section 5 required a list of states with a history of Jim Crow election practices to get any changes to their election rules pre-cleared by the federal Justice Department. Roberts decided that this provision (which had been re-authorized by Congress as recently as 2006 and had been upheld in numerous Supreme Court precedents) violated the “equal sovereignty of the states”. He got around the precedential history by saying “things have changed dramatically” since the first version of the VRA was passed in 1965.

Here’s what I had to say about that at the time (in a piece I demurely titled “This Court Sucks“):

“Things have changed” is not a legal argument. It’s a fine point to make on a blog or at a dinner party, but a Supreme Court justice has to do better than that.

If Roberts were being a real judge here, he’d spell out what “equal sovereignty” has and hasn’t meant in American legal history. He’d enunciate an abstract standard by which Jim Crow was “exceptional” in 1965 and which justified the steps taken then. He’d explain how that standard was violated by the renewal of the VRA in 2006. And he’d lay down a set of conditions that Congress would need to satisfy to make the VRA acceptable today. (If you want to see what a real legal opinion looks like, read Justice Ginsburg’s dissent. Whether you agree with her or not, she is clearly doing something far more rigorous than what Roberts is doing.)

Roberts doesn’t do any of that. The VRA was vaguely justified in 1965 and is vaguely unjustified now, because “things have changed”. If I were a congressman, I would have no idea how to revise the VRA so that it passes constitutional muster. If Congress does revise it, lower court judges who rule on it will just be guessing about its constitutionality. It will have to go back to the Supreme Court before anyone knows whether it’s really a law again, because there are no standards in Roberts’ opinion by which a revision can be judged.

This isn’t law. It’s politics. It’s mush.

The mush has continued since. If Shelby County eliminated blocking racist election laws before they take effect, the Brnovich decision in 2021 made it harder to use Section 2 of the VRA to challenge such laws after they take effect. On a parallel track, the Rucho decision in 2019 said that partisan gerrymandering cases were “nonjusticiable”. In other words, partisan gerrymandering might be an unsavory practice, but neither the laws nor the Constitution give the courts power to do anything about it.

Sleight of hand. And that brings us to Wednesday’s Callais decision, written by Justice Alito. Once again, we are told that “things have changed”, so laws protecting minority voting rights are no longer necessary. [2] That sets up two legal sleights of hand: intent, and the confusion of partisan with racial gerrymandering.

One issue has run through the history of the VRA’s interpretation: Does the VRA only outlaw intentionally racist election practices? Or does it outlaw practices that have the effect of disenfranchising minority voters or diminishing their power, regardless of motive? The difference is important, because intent can be hard to prove in court. Many of the Jim Crow practices didn’t explicitly mention race: Poll taxes might be justified as a way to raise revenue, and the effect of discouraging poor people from voting, or the fact that Black voters are disproportionately poor — that might be portrayed as entirely accidental. Literacy tests might simply be a means of raising the quality of the average voter, unrelated to an educational system that favors White children. And so on.

This kind of thing was well understood even in 1965. [3]

As Justice Kagan explains in her dissent, the Court hobbled VRA enforcement by shifting to an “intent” interpretation in a 1980 decision. So Congress rewrote the VRA in 1982 to specify an “effects” interpretation. Alito denies that he is reinstating the “intent” view in contravention of Congress, but he is. He explicitly writes:

§2 of the VRA requires evidence giving rise to a strong inference of intentional discrimination.

The second sleight-of-hand makes use of the corrupt Rucho decision on partisan gerrymandering.

The upshot of Rucho was that, as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting. And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb. Imposing liability “based on the racial effects of a political gerrymander in a jurisdiction in which race and partisan preference are very closely correlated . . . would, if accepted, provide a convenient way for future litigants and lower courts to sidestep our holding in Rucho that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable in federal court.” Alexander, 602 U. S., at 21. “Instead of claiming that a State impermissibly set a target Republican-Democratic breakdown, a plaintiff could simply reverse-engineer the partisan data into racial data and argue that the State impermissibly set a particular [racial] target. Our decisions cannot be evaded with such ease.”

Since intent is what matters, and a pro-Republican gerrymander looks just like a White-racist gerrymander, it’s impossible to prove racist (rather than partisan) intent. So the VRA’s protection against racial gerrymanders — effectively the last piece of the VRA still standing — is effectively dead.

But Kagan’s dissent calls Alito on his shenanigans:

[T]o its (modest) credit, the Rucho Court did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding. To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were “incompatible with democratic principles” and “lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.” (The Court’s rationale was only that federal courts lack competence to deal with gerrymanders, not that they were protected by law or beneficial as policy.) Today, though, the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders. For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process?

Rucho wrung its hands over partisan gerrymandering as a disreputable practice, and claimed only that the Court had no power to interfere with it. But now, Alito presents partisan gerrymandering as a state’s right, which Congress dare not impinge on and the Court is obligated to protect. There is, of course, no legal argument to back up that claim. It’s just how the Court’s Republican majority wants things to be, so Alito has slipped it between the lines. [4]

In fact, Alito has the logic exactly backwards: He says courts can’t throw out racial gerrymanders because they might accidentally throw out partisan gerrymanders. But the VRA says courts must throw out partisan gerrymanders if they have the same effect as a racial gerrymander. That’s the law as written, but under this Court, written law doesn’t mean much.

How to handle a corrupt court. Not long ago, when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, some members of the party suggested expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices, so that four new justices could outvote the corrupt Republican ones. This proposal never got close to implementation, because it was widely viewed as too radical. The party’s center saw raw exercises of power like that distasteful, as something dirty that we needed to keep clear of if we ever wanted to restore purity to our government.

In view of what Trump has been doing in his second term, and the increasingly aggressive partisanship of the current Supreme Court majority, that view now seems naive.

The purity viewpoint has already begun to change, as we have seen in the recent gerrymandering battle. Democrats could have clutched their pearls and held onto their purity as Texas made five Democratic seats in Congress vanish. But Gavin Newsom decided to fight fire with fire in California, and the state’s voters backed him up. More recently in Virginia, “centrist” Governor Abigail Spanberger made the same choice, and the electorate of her swing state agreed.

Legal purists worry about the Supreme Court losing authority if it is seen as just another political branch of government. But that’s what it already is, and public respect for it is waning, for good reasons.

We’ve been here before. In 1937, FDR called for a plan to expand the Supreme Court, which had been invalidating just about everything he tried to do. That proposal failed, in that it did not pass Congress. But it also succeeded in making the Court back off.

If Democrats take power again in 2029, a similar strategy is called for: Immediately pass legislation to restore voting rights, and to undo the other excesses of this corrupt Supreme Court. And have a court-expansion proposal ready to vote on if the Court tries to interfere.

The Roberts Court has become the enemy of multi-racial democracy. If we’re going to make up the ground that we’ve lost, and someday go beyond our previous accomplishments to achieve the democratic republic Americans have long envisioned, we’re not just going to have to overcome white supremacists or Republicans or oligarchs. We’re going to have to overcome a corrupt, partisan, racist Supreme Court as well.

And we shall overcome.

[1] I use the word corrupt carefully. It would be one thing if Roberts and the conservative majority that has been built around him professed some different-but-arguable legal theory that made the VRA unconstitutional or unenforceable. But I’ve been reading these decisions since Shelby County in 2013, and none of them make a recognizable legal argument. They are simply results that the Court majority wants. Josh Marshall explains:

In our thinned out political discourse people often use the term “corruption” to refer only to venal corruption – bribes, conflicts of interest mostly involving money, kept Justices like Clarence Thomas. That is neither the only nor the most significant form of corruption. In most cases venal corruption is significantly self-correcting. It gets exposed and prosecuted. The more general meaning of corruption is when a form of rot takes over an office or institution because of systemic and ingrained abuses of power. That is the case with the Supreme Court and it’s especially dangerous with the Supreme Court because a mix of history and restraint have left very few checks on its abuses. The Supreme Court is given specific powers to achieve specific ends. Over the last 15 years it has assumed vast new powers and used them consistently for anti-constitutional ends. Far from interpreting or defending the constitution it is at war with it.

[2] Justice Kagan’s dissent nails this perfectly:

So the majority moves on again, now to a grab-bag of “developments” that it somehow thinks license it to rewrite a statute. The majority first summons the slogan of Shelby County, in which the Court ordained itself the arbiter of when civil rights laws are no longer needed. “ ‘[T]hings have changed dramatically,’ ” today’s majority echoes, pointing to increases in African American voting registration and to the success of “ ‘African-Americans attain[ing] political office’ ”—“particularly in the South, where many §2 suits arise.” No doubt that is so, in large measure because of the Voting Rights Act. But it is a separate question whether those gains will endure once the Act’s protections are gone. See Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 590 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (noting the fallacy of “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”). And surely—but apparently not—the proper actor to answer that question is Congress. … It is for the people’s representatives in Congress to decide when the Nation need no longer worry about the dilution of minority voting strength.

[3] Johnson said as much in his speech:

Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of state law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write. For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin.

Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now have on the books–and I have helped to put three of them there–can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it.

So the VRA was designed to go beyond “the existing process of law”. That is precisely what Roberts, Alito, and their allies have undone, because (in their judgment and their judgment alone) “things have changed”.

[4] It’s tempting to give a pass to the Republican judges who didn’t write on this topic: Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett. But they had to see the logical holes in this argument, and they then chose to vote for it without posting a dissent on any particular.

By weeklysift | Tagged 2026 election, law, race | Comments (6)

What to do about a lawless Supreme Court?

May 4, 2026 – 10:56 am

Can democracy flourish, or even survive,
if two-thirds of the justices on the Supreme Court don’t believe in it?

How would the nation respond?

President Johnson answered by addressing a joint session of Congress, saying these words in his White Texas accent:

There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. …

What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall overcome.

Johnson backed those words up by proposing the Voting Rights Act, which he signed into law a few months later.

Undoing that landmark piece of legislation has been the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts. Wednesday he finished the task.

Here’s what I had to say about that at the time (in a piece I demurely titled “This Court Sucks“):

“Things have changed” is not a legal argument. It’s a fine point to make on a blog or at a dinner party, but a Supreme Court justice has to do better than that.

If Roberts were being a real judge here, he’d spell out what “equal sovereignty” has and hasn’t meant in American legal history. He’d enunciate an abstract standard by which Jim Crow was “exceptional” in 1965 and which justified the steps taken then. He’d explain how that standard was violated by the renewal of the VRA in 2006. And he’d lay down a set of conditions that Congress would need to satisfy to make the VRA acceptable today. (If you want to see what a real legal opinion looks like, read Justice Ginsburg’s dissent. Whether you agree with her or not, she is clearly doing something far more rigorous than what Roberts is doing.)

Roberts doesn’t do any of that. The VRA was vaguely justified in 1965 and is vaguely unjustified now, because “things have changed”. If I were a congressman, I would have no idea how to revise the VRA so that it passes constitutional muster. If Congress does revise it, lower court judges who rule on it will just be guessing about its constitutionality. It will have to go back to the Supreme Court before anyone knows whether it’s really a law again, because there are no standards in Roberts’ opinion by which a revision can be judged.

This isn’t law. It’s politics. It’s mush.

This kind of thing was well understood even in 1965. [3]

§2 of the VRA requires evidence giving rise to a strong inference of intentional discrimination.

The second sleight-of-hand makes use of the corrupt Rucho decision on partisan gerrymandering.

The upshot of Rucho was that, as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting. And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb. Imposing liability “based on the racial effects of a political gerrymander in a jurisdiction in which race and partisan preference are very closely correlated . . . would, if accepted, provide a convenient way for future litigants and lower courts to sidestep our holding in Rucho that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable in federal court.” Alexander, 602 U. S., at 21. “Instead of claiming that a State impermissibly set a target Republican-Democratic breakdown, a plaintiff could simply reverse-engineer the partisan data into racial data and argue that the State impermissibly set a particular [racial] target. Our decisions cannot be evaded with such ease.”

But Kagan’s dissent calls Alito on his shenanigans:

[T]o its (modest) credit, the Rucho Court did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding. To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were “incompatible with democratic principles” and “lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.” (The Court’s rationale was only that federal courts lack competence to deal with gerrymanders, not that they were protected by law or beneficial as policy.) Today, though, the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders. For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process?

In view of what Trump has been doing in his second term, and the increasingly aggressive partisanship of the current Supreme Court majority, that view now seems naive.

The Roberts Court has become the enemy of multi-racial democracy. If we’re going to make up the ground that we’ve lost, and someday go beyond our previous accomplishmens to achieve the democratic republic Americans have long envisioned, we’re not just going to have to overcome white supremacists or Republicans or oligarchs. We’re going to have to overcome a corrupt, partisan, racist Supreme Court as well.

And we shall overcome.

In our thinned out political discourse people often use the term “corruption” to refer only to venal corruption – bribes, conflicts of interest mostly involving money, kept Justices like Clarence Thomas. That is neither the only nor the most significant form of corruption. In most cases venal corruption is significantly self-correcting. It gets exposed and prosecuted. The more general meaning of corruption is when a form of rot takes over an office or institution because of systemic and ingrained abuses of power. That is the case with the Supreme Court and it’s especially dangerous with the Supreme Court because a mix of history and restraint have left very few checks on its abuses. The Supreme Court is given specific powers to achieve specific ends. Over the last 15 years it has assumed vast new powers and used them consistently for anti-constitutional ends. Far from interpreting or defending the constitution it is at war with it.

[2] Justice Kagan’s dissent nails this perfectly:

So the majority moves on again, now to a grab-bag of “developments” that it somehow thinks license it to rewrite a statute. The majority first summons the slogan of Shelby County, in which the Court ordained itself the arbiter of when civil rights laws are no longer needed. “ ‘[T]hings have changed dramatically,’ ” today’s majority echoes, pointing to increases in African American voting registration and to the success of “ ‘African-Americans attain[ing] political office’ ”—“particularly in the South, where many §2 suits arise.” No doubt that is so, in large measure because of the Voting Rights Act. But it is a separate question whether those gains will endure once the Act’s protections are gone. See Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 590 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (noting the fallacy of “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”). And surely—but apparently not—the proper actor to answer that question is Congress. … It is for the people’s representatives in Congress to decide when the Nation need no longer worry about the dilution of minority voting strength.

[3] Johnson said as much in his speech:

Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of state law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write. For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin.

Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now have on the books–and I have helped to put three of them there–can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it.

By weeklysift | Tagged 2026 election, law, race | Comments (2)

Fixing the Asylum Mess

April 27, 2026 – 10:53 am

A bad process, but a good cause.

One of the first things President Trump did in his second term was to “declare that an invasion is ongoing at the southern border” and respond by directing “that entry into the United States of such aliens be suspended until I issue a finding that the invasion at the southern border has ceased.” His order also denied the right of migrants at the border or having entered the US to contest removal by applying for asylum.

A federal court previously found that the president had overstepped the bounds of his power, and Friday the DC Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

we hold that the Proclamation and Guidance are unlawful insofar as they circumvent Congress’s carefully crafted removal procedures and cast aside federal laws that afford individuals the opportunity to apply and be considered for a grant of asylum or withholding of removal.

This topic is a bit messy to discuss, because several things are true at the same time.

Our laws about asylum exist for very good reasons.
Our current asylum process doesn’t work well and is open to abuse.
Processes established by law need to be changed by Congress, not by the President.

Why do we grant asylum? Asylum allows people escaping oppression in one country to seek refuge in another.

Any discussion of asylum needs to start with the voyage of the St. Louis, an ocean liner in the Hamburg-Amerika fleet. After Kristallnacht, many German Jews decided that it was not safe to stay in Germany. The St. Louis left Hamburg on May 13, 1939 with 937 passengers, nearly all of them Jews. The original destination was Havana, where many of the passengers hoped to wait until they could be granted admission to the United States. But the Cuban government allowed only 28 of them to land. The rest remained on the ship, which then tried to go to Miami, where the passengers were also denied entry. (Direct appeals to President Roosevelt went unanswered.) The St. Louis then returned to Europe. Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France accepted most of the passengers, at least temporarily. But few managed to get out of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France before the Germans conquered those countries. Eventually, 254 of the St. Louis passengers died in the Holocaust.

Often when we look back at the Holocaust, we ask “Why didn’t more Jews leave while they could?” The answer is that many did try, but had nowhere to go. Hundreds of Jews who would ultimately die in the Holocaust made it as far as Miami’s harbor, but were sent back.

Much of the world made a Never Again pledge in response to the horror of the Holocaust. That sentiment got institutionalized in several international agreements, like the Convention on Refugees, the Convention Against Torture, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States is party to all these agreements, and Congress has passed laws to implement the promises we made there. When the Trump regime announced that it would no longer accept applications for asylum, it was violating not only US laws, but the treaties we had signed.

What’s wrong with our asylum system? I’ll let the Trump regime make the case in its own words. Here’s Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau speaking to a UN conference in 2025:

I think now in the year 2025 – we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century – we take a step back and we see that there are massive migratory flows taking place, and a lot of times massive amounts of people are claiming asylum. In our system at least, when these claims get adjudicated, 90-plus percent of people are found not to be eligible for asylum. And we all know this kind of abuse is happening, frankly. And people who are economic migrants are coming in, in our country, saying that they are – that they should be given asylum. Our problem is when you have hundreds of thousands of people who arrive all at once and claim this, that really requires an individualized adjudication.

So now, we are in a sense saying, okay, well, please, you take a number and we will be back for your individualized interview in six years. And in the meantime, people can live in our country legally. They can start – they might get married. They can work. And so in a sense the migration – the asylum system has become a huge loophole in our migration laws. And we just have to be realistic about this, right? And I think the UN has a responsibility – just as it was instrumental, I think, in encouraging countries to adopt these kind of laws, I think we have to be realistic that these laws are now being abused. And we have to just acknowledge that.

Now, this is a Trump official, and the Trump regime is famous for fudging numbers. So ignore some of Landau’s specifics, like the 90% and the six years. But here’s the liberal Brookings Institute saying something similar:

Further complicating the task of managing the southern border was an historic change in the nature and sources of unauthorized border crossers. During the final decades of the 20^th century, most of such crossers were working-age young Mexican men. But during the current century, the mix shifted to families from Central America and beyond who sought asylum in the United States by claiming a “reasonable fear of persecution” in their country of origin.

The evidence suggests that most asylum seekers were fleeing poverty, lack of economic mobility, crime, and political disorder — all good reasons for leaving but these do not meet the standard for being granted asylum. Nevertheless, the law requires that asylum claims be assessed on a case-by-case basis, and as the number of cases rose sharply, the institutions responsible for adjudicating them were overwhelmed. During the past decade, the share of immigration cases resolved each year has fallen by half, and the backlog of pending cases rose from about 400,000 in 2013 to more than 3.1 million by the end of 2023. Few were held in detention for long periods; most were released into the U.S. with court dates far in the future, a policy that critics denounced as “catch and release.”

So the gist is: Yes, you’re poor and you long for the kinds of economic opportunity you might find in the US. But you’re not the future Holocaust victim our asylum laws were meant for.

The problem with a system like this is that once the problem becomes known, it gets worse: The swamped immigration courts result in longer delays, which encourage more people to apply even if they don’t have a good case. And that swamps the courts further.

What to do. Obviously, we need to process asylum cases faster. If we could do that, the motivation to file a flimsy asylum case would diminish, reversing the vicious cycle we’re currently in.

There are two ways to do this:

Create more immigration courts to work through the backlog faster.
Streamline the process so that each case takes less court time.

Each way has a downside: More courts require more money, and a streamlined process may not give asylum seekers a fair opportunity to present their cases. So a certain amount of care needs to be taken. But both are preferable to just shutting the door, as Trump wants to do.

In any case, the solution needs to take account of our treaty obligations and the laws Congress has already passed. And that means that Congress has to pass the solution; it can’t just be imposed by the President.

What stands in the way of a legislative solution is that Trump does not know how to make a win-win deal. He wants what he wants, and he wants to get it without giving up anything. But Democrats are going to want things too, like a path to citizenship for the Dreamers and limits on mass deportation. Congress is a place for compromise, and Trump hates compromise.

Partly that’s just him, but it also represents the people who elected him. In 2024, a compromise immigration bill was ready to go through Congress, but Trump urged Republicans to pull out of the deal so that he could have a better issue to run on against Biden or Harris. And before Trump, back in 2013 a carefully crafted bipartisan compromise passed the Senate before House conservatives rejected it. (Arguably, his role in crafting the compromise was what scuttled Marco Rubio’s presidential candidacy in 2016.)

Above all, we need to do something. There are still oppressive governments in the world and still people in need of refuge. When the next St. Louis liner arrives in Miami, we don’t want to turn it away.

By weeklysift | Tagged immigration | Comments (14)

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What to do with a lawless Supreme Court?

What to do about a lawless Supreme Court?

Fixing the Asylum Mess

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