Tag Archives: democracy

Some revolutions are too big to see

August 17, 2026 – 9:29 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments (6)

Power is more than just votes

August 3, 2026 – 10:36 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they’ll still be cutting billionaires’ taxes.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (7)

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

July 13, 2026 – 10:51 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maine voices like Neal Gabler are far more sanguine.

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

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

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

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

So delegates have two questions to balance:

  • Who do I like?
  • Who can win?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me what.

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Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious.

July 6, 2026 – 10:07 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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Where the Gerrymandering Battle Stands After Virginia

April 27, 2026 – 9:26 am

Iran is not the only war Trump started, but appears to be losing.

Virginia became the latest state to gerrymander its congressional districts ahead of the midterm elections. Tuesday, a referendum to redraw the state’s maps passed by 3%, 51.5%-48.5%. The likely effect is to turn the current 6-5 Democratic majority in Virginia’s US House delegation into a 10-1 advantage.

Vox estimates that this result puts the Democrats one seat ahead in the redistricting battle that Trump started in Texas. Florida could still tip the balance in the GOP’s favor, but probably not by much. [1]

Prior to the current round, partisan gerrymandering had more or less balanced out: In 2024, Republican House candidates got a small majority of the votes and their party wound up with a small majority of the seats, as they should have.

Republicans have gone to court to prevent Virginia’s new map from taking effect. A circuit-court judge blocked implementation, but was overturned by an appeals court. The case goes to the Virginia Supreme Court today. The deadline for candidates to file to be on the ballot is May 26, so this process can’t take long.

Marc Elias writes in his Democracy Docket blog:

Republicans are asking the courts to throw out 3 million votes in an election that they lost.

For Republicans, democracy is nothing more than a word. 

They are content if every person who waited in line to vote or took time off from work to cast their ballot did it for naught. They seek a result that would mean that every election worker who worked the polls wasted their time. They want the people who knocked doors or canvassed on either side of this question to feel as though they have accomplished nothing.

Meanwhile, here’s how the so-called “liberal media” has covered this story.

When Trump started this battle by pushing Texas to redraw it already-gerrymandered maps, hoping to gain five Republican House seats, The Washington Post characterized Democratic opposition as a “freakout”, and reassured its readers that “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.”

But here’s the Post editorial board’s response to the Virginia vote: “Virginia plunges America deeper into the gerrymandering abyss“. It characterized the referendum as “a power grab by Democrats”. The New York Times produced a similar spin, highlighting how “Democrats Once Loathed Gerrymandering. Now They’re Pushing for It.“

But there’s no mystery here, and no hypocrisy to expose. AOC summed up the Republican reaction to the vote as “Wah, wah, wah” and explained the larger context:

Listen, Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set.

One notable attempt to end gerrymandering was the For the People Act, which Nancy Pelosi pushed through the House, but Republicans filibustered in the Senate. AOC says that deal is still available. [2]

If Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to, because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape, and so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.

This obligation to “defend ourselves” represents a major change in Democratic tactics, beginning with Gavin Newsom’s aggressive response to the Texas gerrymander. Previously, Democrats had tried to cast themselves as the good-government party, avoiding the bad-faith tactics that Republicans have used to seek power. [3]

But perversely, joining Republicans in the gutter may ultimately work a good-government purpose. Now that Republicans realize they could lose too, perhaps a bipartisan consensus against gerrymandering will finally develop.

[1] All such estimates are iffy, because voters may not vote the same way they have in recent elections.

Gerrymandering works by spreading a party’s majority thin to stretch it over more districts. So a miscalculation could result in a previously safe seat flipping.

For example: Suppose a state has a 51-49 partisan majority. The majority party could gerrymander its congressional districts so that each district gives it the same 51-49 advantage, setting up the possibility that it could win all the House seats. However, even a small shift in the political winds could turn the situation around and give the other party all the seats.

This question arises particularly in Texas, where the new maps are based on the 2024 results. However, polls indicate that many Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 may regret their vote, or may not see themselves as Republican voters generally. So trying to gain five seats conceivably could result in losing a few seats the GOP had thought were safe.

[2] AOC might have added that liberal Supreme Court judges have tried to find gerrymandering unconstitutional, but conservative justices have supported it, arguing that district maps are a “political question” to be decided perhaps by the very legislatures that have been gerrymandered to lock in one-party rule.

A related court case should be decided soon: In Louisiana v Callais, the Court appears to be ready to drive the final nail into the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. Current interpretations of the VRA require states to draw a certain number of minority-majority districts, so that Black or Hispanic voters have a chance to elect congresspeople to represent their interests. Without this stipulation, a state could spread its minority populations across multiple districts and elect White-only congressional delegations. While this change would likely not take effect until the 2028 elections, it could result in as many as 15 Black House members in the South losing their seats.

[3] For example, Biden re-established the wall between the White House and the Justice Department that Trump had torn down in his first term. Arguably, Merrick Garland’s desire to end DOJ’s politicization is the reason that the Trump indictments appeared so slowly, which allowed him and the partisan Supreme Court to run out the clock.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (5)

Can Democrats gain from MAGA discontent?

April 20, 2026 – 10:17 am

Trump voters are beginning to regret their decisions. But that doesn’t automatically mean they’ll turn around. What Hungary can teach us about the full process.

MAGA discontent. A running theme of many articles the last few weeks has been MAGA dissatisfaction with Trump — something I at least had given up on ever seeing. The cause doesn’t seem to be any one thing, but the constant drumbeat of betrayal: protecting the Epstein perpetrators, making inflation worse, starting an expensive foreign war for no apparent purpose, profiteering off his government power, and so on.

I could list a dozen articles making these points, and you’ve probably seen a number without my pointing them out. But the most interesting to me was Patrice Mersault’s “I Lied My Way into a MAGA Focus Group” (parts 1 and 2).

In a nutshell, Mersault (a pseudonym taken from a Camus novel) kept getting rejected for focus groups when he (the Camus character is male, so I’ll use male pronouns) answered questionnaires honestly, so he created an imaginary MAGAt in his mind and answered as that character. He got in, with the idea that he would pretend to turn against Trump and see how many members of the focus group he could take with him.

Not a good plan, exactly. More of a concept of a plan. The idea was to blend in, say the right things, earn a little credibility, and then, at the right moment, turn. Say what I actually think. Disrupt the room.

But once the conversation moved past why everyone in the room voted for Trump—the familiar grievances: the immigrants, the stolen elections, the belief that cruelty is somehow a form of patriotism—the room didn’t behave the way I expected it to.

It turned out that the other 11 members of the group were fed up with Trump too, even though they had all voted for him three times. (I suppose we have to consider the possibility that Mersault’s entire account is a fiction, but I’ve decided to take it seriously.) Asked to give Trump a letter grade, the participants gave him six D’s and six F’s.

Why? Food and gas prices. The war. Worries about maintaining Social Security and Medicare. Lack of jobs. Epstein.

Who knows how they felt about Trump’s outrageous tweets and behaviors a year ago? But now that they were criticizing him, they didn’t like his manner either. The rudeness, the divisiveness, seeing everyone who doesn’t agree as an enemy. The sense that everything is about him. They didn’t try to defend it; instead, they brought up those criticisms themselves.

So far, so good. But Mersault points out that the voters themselves don’t seem to have changed. He characterized them at the beginning as having a vague and inchoate sense of grievance:

The sense that something had been taken from them. Or was being taken. Or was about to be taken any minute now, unless someone stepped in and stopped it.

The grievances manifested as discontent with a familiar set of issues:

The pandemic. The border. The economy. Woke culture. The various Democratic alternatives, all described with varying degrees of contempt.

None of that has reversed. Nobody had seen the light of liberal wokeness and was saying, “I see now that Black and brown immigrants really don’t do me harm” or “I guess transgender folks aren’t as different as I thought they were” or “Women and minorities do need some government protection”.

They had looked at Trump as “a tool”, someone who would fight back against the forces that they think are taking away their country and their future. They still have that sense of grievance, and they are still looking for a tool to break a system that they see working against them.

The question is: What will they do now? The focus group showed no enthusiasm for a Trump successor like Vance or Rubio. But what are their alternatives? Find some new hero? Stay home? Switch parties?

The Hungarian example. For years, the Orbán regime in Hungary has been a model for the American Right: Get into office and start changing the rules. Get control of the media. Corrupt the courts. Destroy the independence of the universities. Use government favors and regulations as carrots and sticks to make businesses line up with you. Gerrymander. Make voting easy for your voters but hard for opposition voters.

For a long time the Orbán program worked. But then it stopped. On April 12, Hungarian voters decisively rejected Orbán’s party, in such numbers that the tilted playing field couldn’t save him.

The opposition leader Peter Magyar did something American Democrats would like to do: He didn’t just raise dissatisfaction with the Orbán regime. (In fact, he didn’t have to, it was already there.) And he didn’t just get dissatisfied Orbán voters to stay home. He got some large number of those voters to vote for him.

Americans have been trying to read that election for clues about strategy. Maybe, after years of being a model of how a right-wing authoritarian regime rises, Hungary could provide an example of how a right-wing authoritarian regime falls.

The article I like on this topic is by a Hungarian lawyer and mother who blogs under the name Zsofi: “I Lived in Orbán’s Hungary. This Is What It Actually Takes to Bring an Autocrat Down.“

She makes a few salient points about how Orbán came to power and stayed there: Hungarians were really fed up with the previous government, so Orbán represented a genuine uprising. And once he got into power and controlled the media, he made sure that every potential opposition leader was “pre-smeared”. Simply proposing to run so-and-so evoked a reaction of “Oh, not him again.”

But Magyar came from nowhere and represented no previous political movement.

Magyar Péter broke this because there was nothing to work with. He was, until early 2024, essentially unknown — a private citizen with no political career, no failed government, no scandal that could be weaponized. When the attacks came, as they did immediately and ferociously, they simply didn’t stick. Not because he was beyond criticism, but because what was said about him was, from the beginning, simply false. Without a kernel of truth at the center, the whole construction kept collapsing. Voters could feel the difference, even when they couldn’t articulate it. …

He also did something that sounds simple and is extraordinarily hard: he showed up. Over two years, he visited more than 700 settlements, some of them six times. Exhausting just to watch: the energy he put into it was extraordinary. He went to places the opposition had never reached, and talked to people who had never heard an alternative from someone standing in front of them, looking them in the eye. You cannot fact-check someone out of a worldview. But presence, over time, creates the conditions where doubt becomes possible. That is slower and less satisfying than a viral moment. It is also what actually works.

She identifies two deadly ideas: that the regime is inevitable, and that society is irreparably broken into two enemy camps.

The [authoritarian] method is consistent everywhere it has been deployed. Find the genuine fault lines in a society: urban versus rural, educated versus working class, the people who feel left behind versus the people who seem not to notice. Pry those lines open. Make sure every election is a referendum on identity and culture rather than on whether the pension is adequate or the hospital is functional. Keep the two halves of society furious at each other, convinced the other half is the enemy, and make sure your coalition is always the slightly larger half. The culture war is not a byproduct of this politics. It is the mechanism.

Like Trump, Orbán had no authentic convictions.

This is worth understanding, because it changes what you’re actually fighting. You are not fighting a true believer. You are fighting a machine that is very good at finding the line that divides society just enough – and parking itself on the larger side of it.

And this seems like the key point:

The grievances that get exploited are real – that is what makes it work. The sense of being left behind, of being looked down on, of watching your children leave and not come back – that is not manufactured resentment. It is legitimate. The autocrat does not invent it. He finds it, names it, and then aims it in a direction that serves him rather than the people experiencing it. … You cannot say that grievance doesn’t exist because it doesn’t affect you. The autocrat has a ready-made answer for it – simple, emotionally satisfying, and wrong. The alternative is to have a better answer, not to pretend the question isn’t being asked.

The opposition also has to avoid “the performance of contempt”.

The moment you hate your fellow citizen more than you hate the system that is robbing you both, the system has already half-won. … The lesson, though, is not simply that these systems can be beaten. It is about how. You cannot win by playing from their script. The moment you accept their frame – that your society is divided into two enemy camps, one good and one irredeemably wrong – you have lost something you won’t easily recover. The autocrat wins not just when he stays in power, but when he gets you to see your neighbor as your enemy. When the hatred flows horizontally, between citizens, rather than upward, toward the people actually responsible.

The alternative is simpler and harder to hold onto: we belong to each other. We love the same country. We want it to be better. We disagree -sometimes bitterly, sometimes irreconcilably- about how. That disagreement is not a war: it is politics, it is normal and it is supposed to happen.

What I learned in Europe. I spent the first week or so of April on a Viking Danube cruise. I went to Prague, Nuremberg, Vienna, Budapest, and a few other places. I walked through a lot of museums and talked to a lot of tour guides, but I’m going to resist the temptation to claim that I’ve become some kind of expert on Central Europe. I speak only a smattering of German, and no Czech or Hungarian at all. Most of the locals I spoke to (in English) probably aren’t typical or representative. So don’t interpret my trip as some kind of research project. I certainly don’t.

But the Danube trip did give me a good opportunity to meditate on America, and to see patterns in other societies that I should have recognized in my own.

On a walking tour of Prague, we eventually wound up at the castle that had been the seat of the German-speaking Habsburg emperor for a number of years around 1600 or so. The castle itself goes back well into the Middle Ages. While recounting some medieval transfer of power, the guide said, “And that was the last of our kings who spoke Czech.”

That sentence stuck in my mind. One perpetual theme of MAGA influencers is that the ruling elite (whoever you might imagine them to be) don’t understand ordinary Americans. That, they claim, is how you wind up with affirmative action programs and men playing women’s sports and vaccine mandates.

But in Czech history, that sentiment is literal: The kings can’t understand the ordinary people, because they don’t speak Czech. After the Habsburgs fell in 1918, there was briefly a Czechoslovakian democracy. But that fell into dictatorship, and then the Germans took over, and then the Russians. Today, the Czech Republic governs itself, but the transnational European Union is always looking over its shoulder. Czechs are probably fairly suspicious of this, and maybe that’s why they’re one of the few EU nations that don’t use the euro.

When I tried to imagine myself as a small-town Czech nationalist, I looked at Prague with great suspicion. The whole city is subtitled in English for the benefit of travelers. Lots of shops and other businesses seem not to have a Czech name at all. Places that ought to be sacred to Czechs (like that castle complex) are barely accessible, because they’re overrun with tourists speaking every known language. I might question whether Prague is Czech at all any more; it seems a lot like Czech territory occupied by some globalist empire.

That vision gave me a new appreciation of MAGA in America. There is real grievance in rural and small-town America, something I’ve written about before. It’s a sense that the place you live, which is maybe the place you grew up, has no obvious path into the future. The jobs are leaving, the talented young people are leaving, and there seems to be no end to it.

If that were the whole grievance, though, rural and small-town anger might focus where it really belongs: on the big corporations who rig the system in their favor and don’t care where they build things; and on the billionaires who get big tax breaks and leave no money behind for schools and roads and local investment. But laid over the economic grievance is a sense of dislocation: The America I grew up in isn’t just endangered, it’s already gone in lots of places. This gets you to the demonization of immigrants and people whose lifestyles diverge from what was socially acceptable in the past.

So often, when I run into conservatives obsessed with culture-war issues, I want to ask “Why do you care?” If someone with a penis wants to wear skirts and makeup and start using a name like Susan, what’s it to you that you should feel so incensed about it? If two men or two women want to marry, and to live a life not all that different from the one you live with your opposite-sex spouse, how are you harmed?

The dislocation theory makes sense of this. They aren’t harmed in any material sense, but the culture-war issues are symbols of their grievance: This is not their world any more. They used to know how they (and their children and their communities) could thrive, but now they don’t. The culture-war issue isn’t itself a grievance, but they’ve been trained to see it as a signpost pointing to grievances.

It also explains the hostility to cities. The new world, the world where they don’t belong and can’t succeed, has already taken the cities. The cities are territory occupied by a globalist empire.

It also explains the conspiracy theories. When you feel something, any story that explains and justifies the feeling seems plausible. Fact-checking the narrative doesn’t affect that sense of plausibility.

Progressive vs. centrist. At least since the Clinton administration, conflict has been raging between two theories of why Democrats lose and how they can win. The centrist theory says that Democrats lose when they become too liberal and alienate moderate swing voters. The progressive theory says that Democrats lose when they seem inauthentic and fail to give voters a clear new vision of where the country should go.

When they actually get into office, though, the two kinds of Democrats agree on a great deal. Centrists want to focus on proposals that are immediately achievable, while progressives see those same proposals as first steps on their path into the future.

Both factions want to spin current events in their favor. But if I take the lessons of Mersault and Zsofi to heart, I think both framings miss the point: what the reachable voters are looking for is not fundamentally a more liberal or conservative policy. They’re looking for authenticity and for someone they can trust. They want candidates who care about them enough to show up, to learn what they care about, and to speak to them as if they were intelligent people with real concerns. If you do that, you can get away with taking some principled stands they disagree with.

Look at candidates who are surviving or even thriving in what should be hostile environments. Andy Beshear is popular in Kentucky, but he still gets away with vetoing an anti-trans-rights bill. (“My faith teaches me that all children are children of God and Senate Bill 150 will endanger the children of Kentucky. … I heard from children that believe this bill is picking on them, and asking — in many ways — why? I told them that I was going to show them that there is at least one person in Frankfort that cares for all of our children in the commonwealth, no matter what.”) In Texas, James Talarico’s Christianity takes him different places than MAGA Christianity does, but so far he hasn’t compromised his vision. Jon Ossoff is doing well in Georgia, largely because of his way of speaking in terms voters identify with. (Listen to him make the case against Trump’s corruption.) Pete Buttigieg isn’t currently running for anything, but he goes into enemy territory (like Fox News) and holds his own — and not by throwing unpopular Democrats or Democratic constituencies to the wolves.

Of course Democrats, like all politicians, should focus on their popular positions. But they should put themselves in positions to be challenged on unpopular positions, and they should be ready to defend those positions in easily understandable terms, tracing them back to core values that are widely shared, or at least widely appreciated. They need to answer criticism without denigrating the critic.

Most of all, Democrats need to send the message that they will look out for the country, and not just for their own voters.

The moment you hate your fellow citizen more than you hate the system that is robbing you both, the system has already half-won.

But the right path is not to pander to those you disagree with, but to address them honestly, intelligently, and respectfully

Disagreement is not a war: it is politics, it is normal and it is supposed to happen.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (10)

Non-Cooperation

February 9, 2026 – 11:02 am

When does cooperation become complicity? And what other choice is there?

This morning I want to introduce you to a blogger a bit more radical than I am: A. R. Moxon, who writes a payment-optional Substack blog called The Reframe. I often have reservations about what he’s saying, but I find myself consistently challenged (in a good way). Maybe you will too.

Right now there’s a debate going on in Congress about funding DHS, and before that about funding a fairly large swath of the government. Democrats have tried to hone the issue down as small as possible, and to make only the most obvious common-sense demands in exchange for their support: ICE agents don’t wear masks, have to get judicial warrants, can be held accountable when they use excessive force, and so on. Even this is too much for Republicans, apparently. So Democrats will probably eventually water their position down even further to reach some kind of agreement.

This is usually explained as follows: Democrats want to appeal to a reasonable middle of the country, so that they can build a majority and regain power. Making more extreme demands might alienate the center and leave Republicans in power. That makes sense in its way, but more radical voices reject abandoning principle. When ICE may be building massive concentration camps, compromise makes no sense: Would you feel victorious if you got them to agree to fewer or smaller concentration camps? (“I’ll support Dachau if you agree not to build Auschwitz.”)

That’s the view that animates this week’s Reframe post “Hating the Game“. He starts small, with the MAGA meltdown over Bad Bunny headlining the Super Bowl halftime show. Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, which makes him a native-born American citizen — unlike previous Super Bowl headliners like Paul McCartney, Sting, Phil Collins, and other English-speaking White males whose selection raised no controversy at all.

But Bad Bunny is brown-skinned and sings in Spanish, making him too “foreign” for MAGA’s nativist base. He is so unacceptable that Turning Point USA (founded by self-proclaimed non-racist Charlie Kirk) sponsored an “All American Halftime Show” featuring the washed-up-and-never-that-good Kid Rock, whose songs have never been described as family-friendly.

So OK, making fun of that is shooting fish in a barrel. (The Onion: “Conservatives Boycott All Forms Of Entertainment“.) But Moxon goes somewhere with it. He starts with this quote from The Washington Post:

Even if Bad Bunny doesn’t use the stage to explicitly condemn Trump’s deportation campaign, the dueling shows will highlight the nation’s deep divide over immigration, and his performance is likely to be viewed through that lens.

This kind of even-handed framing is so common that it may not even raise your hackles. But it raises Moxon’s:

The Post’s framing only makes sense if, as is often the case, the demand of white bigotry is being accommodated. You can be one of the most popular figures on the cultural landscape and it won’t matter; if white racists don’t like you, you’re controversial and polarizing. White racists, meanwhile, are never framed as divisive or polarizing, no, they’re always “concerned” or “anxious,” and the problem to be solved is never their racism, but always how best to assuage it.

From there, he describes three models of political engagement, which he calls the cooperation game, the murder game, and the non-cooperation game. MAGA, he says, is playing the murder game: They are using the machinery of government to dominate opponents and seize loot for themselves. Democrats are trying to play the cooperation game, where you are seeking common ground on which you can assemble a democratically governing majority. Moxon’s observation is that this doesn’t work.

It’s not just a bad idea to play the cooperation game with people playing the murder game—it’s an impossibility. When you act in good faith with those who have proved themselves capable of limitless bad faith, then you are no longer playing the cooperation game: you are merely cooperating with the murder game, and are, therefore, a participant not in the cooperation game, but the murder game.

He suggests playing the non-cooperation game: Stop giving the benefits of cooperation to those who have dedicated themselves to murder.

For the Super Bowl halftime show, non-cooperation looks like this:

Our response should not be “This response to Bad Bunny’s inclusion shows how divided we are, how can we stop this polarization?” Our response should be uncooperative: “The response to Bad Bunny’s inclusion shows just how racist our society is. Racists are angry about the halftime show? Good! Everything about our society should make racists feel alienated. How do we make racists feel even more alienated from even more of society??

More generally:

[Non-cooperation] can be strategic; refusing to grant even one vote toward the funding of a murderous government, until the death squads have been utterly abolished, and the vile white supremacist serial child rapist of a president who controls them has resigned, along with all of his cabinet, and submitted to prosecution. It can be legislative; refusing to allow voice votes, in order to grind down the apparatus of government. It can be social; refusing to fraternize with Republican colleagues, or refusing to serve members of Republican governments or their death squad in restaurants and businesses. It can be tactical: following the death squads and impeding their work; playing loud music to keep them awake; making them and their abuses known and shaming and shunning and excluding them for daring to murder their neighbors. It can be losing paperwork. It can be deliberately misunderstanding instructions. It can be purposefully dawdling. It can be tripping somebody up, getting them lost and turned around, obstructing the gears of brutality, sabotaging the engines of murder.

It’s not murder, and it’s not retributive; it’s removing all the benefits of human cooperation from all humans who play the murder game—not because we hate the humans (though it’s difficult not to hate people who would murder their neighbors, and I don’t shame those who can’t manage it), but because we hate their vile murderous game.

If you’re like me, you read The Reframe and think: “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” (Example: Do we have to call it “the murder game”? Isn’t that needlessly off-putting?) But why not, exactly?

I’m calling attention to non-cooperation this week for a very specific reason: If the guardrails completely fail and Trump manages to cancel, steal, or ignore the midterm elections, then the only response short of violent revolution is the ultimate form of non-cooperation: the general strike. We need to start talking about it as a real possibility right now. We need to get the general public thinking about it and deciding how they will respond to it. Otherwise, if and when the need arises, most people will brush it off as impossible. But it’s not impossible. It’s an effective tactic whose roots go back to ancient Rome.

There are many possible layers of resistance to a fascist takeover. Currently, I’m counting on the courts and the elections. But if those fail, we’ll need to fall back to more radical tactics. The people who are too radical for us now may someday be our best friends.

While we’re talking about Bad Bunny, Trump hated his show: “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” Because, you know, Spanish. Nobody speaks it.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (15)

A MAGA National Security Strategy

December 8, 2025 – 10:26 am

America used to frame its self-image around freedom and democracy. Now it’s about making money and preserving whiteness.

Back in July, J. D. Vance tried his hand at answering the question “What is an American?” But first he had to say what an American wasn’t, namely, someone who agrees with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time.

I don’t think many people would argue with the over-inclusive part. As Vance observed, there are probably billions of people who agree with the founding principles of the United States. They may even identify with America the way JFK was identifying with Germany when he said “Ich bin ein Berliner.” But that doesn’t make them Americans in any real sense. Now, if they come here, work, pay taxes, and pledge their allegiance to the government defined in the Constitution, we can start to have a discussion. But until then, hardly anyone would claim they’re Americans.

Where Vance caused controversy, though, was with “underinclusive”. If your ancestors fought in the Civil War, then you “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say [you] don’t belong”, even if you don’t believe in the founding principles. Vance seemed to be saying that you could be, say, a Nazi. But if your ancestors fought for the fascist empire of its day, the Confederacy, maybe because they wanted to defend and preserve slavery, then you’re one of us.

In short, Vance’s America isn’t fundamentally about freedom or democracy or any other grand principle.

America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.

This is sometimes described as the “blood and soil” vision of a nation, and it quickly lends itself to what the far right calls “heritage Americans”, who are English-speaking and Christian and (predominantly) White and have a “way of life” that puts men (and not women) at the top of the pyramid. As one author explains:

Non-Christians can be tolerated, as long as they acquiesce to living in an unashamedly Christian America (i.e., submitting to Christian civil law, government support for Christianity, Christian moral, civil, and religious norms and customs, etc.). At the same time, both public and private citizens should be concerned to help the Christian Church flourish in our nation, since a collapse of Christian conversions, church plants, and influence will mark the end of America.

Like so much of Trumpism, this is deniable if you find it embarrassing (as I hope many Trumpists do). Vance didn’t actually spell all that out, and besides, it’s Vance, not Trump. Who takes what J. D. Vance says all that seriously anyway? And since Trump isn’t coherent enough to enunciate such a grand vision, MAGAts don’t have to own up to the full implications of redefining America in blood-and-soil terms.

NSS-USA. Last month, though, the regime put out a document that is harder to deny: National Security Strategy for the United States of America. The text part of it is only 29 pages, but I can’t recommend you read the whole thing, because (like nearly all regime publications) it’s full of praise for how Donald J. Trump rescued America from the pit of despair Joe Biden had left it in. Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of New York, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

But beyond the huckstering, the NSS-USA does have some real content. In particular, it declares an end to the era in which the US tried to be the linchpin of a rules-based global order, and tried (at least some of the time) to promote freedom and democracy. The NSS-USA characterizes this past policy both as “permanent American domination of the entire world” and as “lash[ing] American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty”.

But we’re done with all that now. Instead, we’re going to control immigration, make money, and launch a “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health”. And we’re not going to try to export American values like human rights that disrespect “other countries’ differing religions, cultures, and governing systems.” (So if MBS wants to lure an Washington Post journalist into a foreign embassy, kill him, and saw his body into little pieces, that’s just how they do things in Saudi Arabia, and we want to do profitable business with them. As the Emperor Vespasian supposedly said about raising funds by taxing public toilets, “Pecunia non olet“, meaning “Money doesn’t stink”, no matter where it comes from.)

Here’s what that “reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health” means:

We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. We want a people who are proud, happy, and optimistic that they will leave their country to the next generation better than they found it. We want a gainfully employed citizenry—with no one sitting on the sidelines—who take satisfaction from knowing that their work is essential to the prosperity of our nation and to the well-being of individuals and families. This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.

That’s why we have to turn our schools into propaganda mills that expunge any real discussion of slavery, genocide against the Native Americans, or the ongoing effects of racism and sexism. The American past must have nothing but “glories”, and we must ignore discouraging trends like climate change, the increasing concentration of wealth, or anything else that might cause our people to expect something other than the Golden Age of Trump. The NSS-USA doesn’t define “strong traditional families” or “healthy children”, but I hear a lot of ominous subtext there.

The document then goes region by region. Some of its goals are the same as previous administrations. We don’t want a hostile power to control the oil of the Middle East, and we want to maintain our access to other critical resources. We want to avoid seeing some rival power dominate the world.

But then it starts to diverge. It defines what is basically an American sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere. We want countries that are “reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States”. Beyond that, we don’t care what they do to their people.

The one place where we do want to interfere in other countries’ business is with our allies.

We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.

However, it looks like the regime sees those “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions” mainly in our allies’ attempts to suppress right-wing radicalism. It promotes a view of Europe’s future that sounds a lot like proto-fascist parties such as Germany’s AfD (which Vance endorses). Due to immigration and falling native birth rates, Europe faces “civilizational erasure”. But the US wants Europe to “remain European” and to “regain its civilizational self-confidence”.

Europe’s support for Ukraine against Russia (i.e., its “unrealistic expectations for the war”) is due to its “anti-democratic” aspects.

A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.

Again, what this “reform” consists of is not spelled out, but I suspect the model is fascist Hungary.

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism. … We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.

But that’s not where NSS-USA sees Europe heading, so it wants to “cultivat[e] resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”, I suppose this means supporting blood-and-soil European parties like France’s National Rally.

If Europe refuses to defend its white cultural heritage, though, it sounds like the Trump regime wants to cut them loose.

Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter

I mean, we signed a treaty with white countries. We can’t be expected to honor it if Whites become a minority.

Other than Europe, where we want political change to preserve a native-European racial mix, we care about other countries only as potential business partners. Nothing in the document suggests that Russia is an enemy, a rival, or a threat to anyone in particular. China is a frenemy, a rival we can do business with. I would really worry if I were Taiwan, because this is how NSS-USA views it:

There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters

Taiwan is a fellow democracy and a long-standing ally, but who cares? It produces semiconductors and has a strategic location. China would have to cough up some serious bucks to induce us to turn our backs on that.

The Kagan interview. Robert Kagan is a historian of US foreign policy with whom I have often disagreed. Recently he was interviewed by Bill Kristol, who I also differ with on many things. But despite past differences, I’m fascinated by this interview [video, transcript], which takes a view-from-orbit perspective on American foreign policy. It happened before the NSS-USA came out, but anticipates much of it.

Kagan’s view, basically, is that the American-dominated post-World-War-II world order is a pleasant aberration in history, because for 3/4 of a century other potential great powers like Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have been content to live inside the American orbit. The unspoken contract was that America would take the lead in international affairs, the dollar would be the world’s reserve currency, and so on; and in return, the US would guarantee its allies’ security and wouldn’t use its preeminent position to take advantage of them.

Ordinarily, sovereign nations wouldn’t trust each other to keep a deal like that. (One cautionary historical example is the Delian League, an anti-Persia alliance that got coopted into an Athenian Empire.) But this one has held largely because of the faith all the nations had in shared liberal values like democracy and human rights.

Kagan sees that deal unraveling, largely because Trump doesn’t share liberal values and wants to take advantage.

[T]hat bargain has been exploded. And that’s why we are entering a new era, because if these countries, as is now the case, cannot rely on the American security guarantee, and I think the Trump administration has made it very clear that they can’t, that it’s sort of the intention of the Trump administration to make it clear that they can’t really rely on the United States, on the one hand.

While on the other hand, the United States now is using its superior power to demand, what is in effect, tribute from its allies in the form of these high tariffs. And so the United States is taking advantage of its overwhelming power and abusing it with its own allies. I don’t see how the alliance structure can continue under those circumstances. And now all these countries that have relied on the United States for their security are now going to have to go back to the world that existed before this unusual era in which they can only rely on themselves for security. And that has vast implications for regional geopolitics and global geopolitics that I think, again, Americans have not really begun to contemplate.

(Kagan doesn’t mention this, but from my point of view the contract has been slowly eroding for several years, as the US has used the dollar’s central role to finance enormous budget and trade deficits. In essence, the world sends us goods and we send them dollar-denominated bonds that we could devalue at any time. The Fed could, for example, create enough dollars out of nothing to redeem all the bonds.)

Needing to be able to go it alone, without the US, will probably change the nature of those countries and their governments. Kagan gives the example of Japan, which he says came out of World War I with a largely democratic pro-American government. But in the 1920s, America instituted high tariffs and strong barriers to immigration.

[P]olitics in Japan completely shifts, and then you get the Japan that invades Manchuria in 1931.

For now, our NATO allies may cut deals with Trump and pay his tariffs, while grasping that he no longer guarantees their security against, say, Russia. Short-term, they have little choice. But that’s not a stable situation.

Germany having to re-arm to the point where it can actually meet Soviet power means a completely new Germany again. Now, maybe a heavily armed Germany will still be a liberal Germany, that’s possible. But it’s clear that Germany’s neighbors are going to have the same reaction to that level of German power that they’ve always had in the past. If Japan can’t rely on the United States, it’s going to go become a nuclear weapon state. It’s going to build up its capabilities, and tensions between Japan and China are going to increase exponentially. And if there’s one thing Americans have learned over the past century is that when other great powers get into wars, the United States is immediately implicated in that. That’s the great lesson of World War II. And that’s why we created this liberal world order in the first place.

And again, that’s another thing that I think Americans just are not conscious of. A lot of Americans think we created this liberal order to fight the Soviet Union, which was not true. It was created without regard, even without anticipation that the Soviets were going to be the big problem. It was to prevent a return to effectively a multipolar world.

Trump may think the US can just collect its tribute and live happily ever after. But history has never worked that way before. Picture, for example, a re-militarized Germany led by a xenophobic far-right party like the AfD. What could possibly go wrong?

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