There is a problem with giving the Democrats too much credit for the shellacking the GOP just received, however. It’s a tremendous misunderstanding of American politics.

At a time like this, one must be reminded that America’s modern political system is little more than a two-party cartel masquerading as a liberty-loving democracy. When things go wrong — which, over the last quarter-century, has been more often than not — there’s only one lever for US voters to pull: blue or red. Or, as an Iranian embassy mocked earlier this year, Coke versus Pepsi. One choice is more feminine and multiculturalist, the other more masculine and nativist. But for all their ostensible differences both parties are captured institutions that pursue the ruthless economic agenda of their wealthy donors under the cover of culture-war pyrotechnics.

Not since the fall of the New Deal coalition in the early 1970s has either party genuinely resembled a political organization representing the people. Let’s be frank: both parties have been corrupt as shit for the entirety of Millennials’ and most of Gen X-ers’ lifetimes. They paper over their economic Caesarism with moral-economy crusades enabled lately by social media’s divisive algorithms. It’s a testament to the powerlessness we all feel that this perverse situation is thought of as “just the way things are.”

But history tells us that eventually, the delicate fabric holding a zeitgeist together begins to fray. We’ve seen that potential in the protests across France and much of Europe over the last month. America is on the verge as well — but in a manner more characteristic of its general political passivity.

We all know our politicians are servants of the one-percenters. Most of us live with only modest hopes. Mainly, we wish that a few sizable crumbs will fall off the ruling class’s table every now and again. However, under Trump’s second term, the GOP took advocacy for the one percent to Lex Luthor-like levels. And there’s no better example than how Trump and the GOP have addressed the economic ill effects not only of the war in Iran, but of the data-center gold rush and the trillion-dollar AI buildout that runs adjacent to it. Literally no one — except vested interests — wants data centers built anywhere near their locales, yet the GOP made protecting this industry and resisting all AI regulation their top priority.

Only two days into his second term, Trump stood in the White House with Sam Altman and Larry Ellison to bless Stargate, a half-trillion-dollar data center project, having already torn up the Biden administration’s AI-safety order. Soon after, Trump installed a tech billionaire, David Sacks, as his “AI czar.” Then the GOP leadership padlocked a 10-year federal ban on all state AI regulation onto Trump’s first signature spending bill — drafted so that state laws greasing the buildout could remain legal. Meanwhile, any laws restricting a data center’s power draw or water use become unenforceable. The Senate then, rightly, stripped it out 99-1.

Trump’s response was simply to sign an executive order seeking to preempt the states’ AI laws anyway, a decree which then collided with a surge of state-level data-center regulation laws throughout blue, red, and “purple” states alike.

James Carville might be a tool of the Democratic establishment, but his catchphrase, “It’s the economy, stupid”, is as true as it is cliché, and it’s the core reason for the GOP’s flop. If you get outside the Beltway or the New York media circles, you quickly realize Americans still hate the Democrats. But they now hate Trump and the Republicans even more.

A choice between two, though, is only one more than none. It’s a fact that makes American politics entirely simple. People didn’t like the “Biden economy”, so they pulled the red lever two years ago. They didn’t like what the red lever bought them, so they again pulled the blue lever. If the middle class continues to erode under the Democratic president that might be appointed in 2028, they’ll eventually pull red again. MAGA, though, is dead.

The magic and absurdity of Trump has always been the audacity of his billionaire-populist carnival act. It was the greatest act of class ventriloquism in American politics since the rise of Andrew Jackson and his notorious “Jacksonian Democrats.” For the last decade, through his rambling P.T. Barnum performances, Trump gave America’s poor and working class the feeling of having a leader who understood what took place in their lives. Trump of course never understood working people’s daily dilemmas — but he detested the same people they did. During the mania of “Woke 1.0,” that seemed important.

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For all his flaws, Trump also really understood branding. His followers all got an immediately recognizable uniform and it only cost $34. It didn’t matter that their red hats were actually made in Bangladesh. People gave Trump continual leeway because they hated the woke scolds that much. At the beginning, it also didn’t matter that the billionaire donor class got every single tax carve-out it wanted. Everyone was so tired of the identity-based victimology that burst to the surface under Obama’s administration. They wanted that moralizing control-freak tripe out of their lives, and Trump promised to deliver.

At Trump’s demotic rallies, everyone went home feeling like they finally had a president who wasn’t part of the HR mafia making their work lives miserable. Because Trump talked like them, they assumed he was like them. They were willing to give it time. A public figure who was that hated by the woke mobs earns a long leash with the poor and working class. But patience with their Cheeto Jesus savior was ultimately measured in grocery bills and rent increases.

This week, his time ran out. Over the last two years, voters witnessed the same gaslighting betrayals they had already endured during Obama’s obscene handling of the bank bailouts in 2009 and 2010, then Biden’s paternalistic Covid mandates. The gaslighting became all too familiar over the last two years. Trump was not just “one of the boys” after all. Rather, he was just management in working-class costume.

The signs of GOP disaster have been present for months. In mid-August, manosphere comics Shane Gillis, Mark Normand, and Ari Shaffir appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and began talking about the need for “another Teddy Roosevelt” who would take on big business and super PACs. Rogan stated it plainly: “We thought he [Trump] was going to do it, but it’s clear he’s not going to do any of those things.”

That was the moment everyone should have known it was over for MAGA. For months now, nearly all the Trump supporters I know have been reckoning with a profound sense of shame. Their buyer’s remorse is palpable. They fell for a con man and most of them accept it now.

We must also admit that 21st-century Right-wing populism is an abject failure. Too many populist-adjacent intellectuals hitched their wagon to Trump’s confidence man act. Everyone should have known better, yes. But their excitement to see wokeness get its comeuppance obscured their better judgment. Often, though, the enemy of our enemy is not in fact an ally, much less a friend; at least not when it comes to taking on the greatest system of organized wealth in human history.

Because of Right-wing populists’ ill-fated choice to support Trump, not only JD Vance but any GOP nominee’s chance of retaining the presidency in 2028 is extremely low. There will now be lots of bad-faith “Oh yes, please run her” takes from the Right about the prospect of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez standing as Democrat presidential candidate. But wise observers know AOC has the charisma and the support from the base to win. In the social media age, Americans prize youth and beauty above nearly everything. Anyone who thinks Ocasio-Cortez is too young or inexperienced to be president is naive. This is her moment — just as 1960 was Kennedy’s and 2008 was Obama’s.

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Only a true populist like Marjorie Taylor Greene could potentially save the GOP’s chances in 2028. That is presuming she and Tucker Carlson don’t go through with their recent threats to start a new political party. Regardless, Greene is probably shrewd enough to sit the next election out. All of which means that whether it’s AOC or some other Democrat taking the Oval Office in 2029, wokeness as an ideological imposition is far from dead. The NGO class and the DEI administrative apparatus will ride back into power on the Democrats’ surrogate economy — and Trump will turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to the anti-woke cause.

This is more serious than it sounds. Since Trump’s infamous 2015 ride down the escalator, anti-wokeness has been the magic elixir holding a disparate coalition together. All that’s over now. Voters won’t forget that, when twice given the opportunity to govern, Trump betrayed the middle class, both domestically and abroad. Worse, he used his Roy Cohn-taught tactics to shift the blame for all the economic pain Americans feel onto imaginary enemies. And since the Democrats cannot get significant legislation past Trump’s veto, the GOP will continue to absorb the disaster of today’s AI-driven economy for two more years.

To compete nationally again, the Republicans will have to do more than rail against wokeness and “shitlibs.” They need what the Democrats needed after their years in the wilderness: a Bill Clinton-like figure. Recall for a moment what Clinton’s New Democrats actually did in the early Nineties — they shed the social libertinism that working-class voters blamed for the crime waves and chaos of the Seventies, and then paired a renewed appreciation for social traditionalism with the appearance of economic moderation. That it all ended up as a massive neoliberal con doesn’t change the lesson.

The party rebuilt itself by giving abandoned voters the one thing they’d stopped believing it offered. The GOP needs the same remake, but inverted. It needs genuine economic populism — against the data-center land grab, the AI buildout, the donor class that profits from both — paired with the anti-progressive cultural instincts it already owns.

Will it happen? Every honest observer knows the odds are long. A party remake like that means breaking with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and the rest of the tech-lords — the very men now writing the party’s checks, boosting its top media operations, and building massive data centers in counties that never wanted them. Without anti-wokeness, Wall Street, and tech-billionaire money, who even is the modern Republican Party?

And if the GOP refuses its medicine, the future will belong to another fusion: the AOC-and-El-Sayed “New New Democrats” pairing of the economic populism Americans want with the NGO-designed progressivism they’ve learned to tolerate.

These are desperate economic times. No one should underestimate that pairing’s durability. Voters will hold their noses and swallow the DEI pill — and maybe even renewed mass immigration — if it comes wrapped in anything resembling the New Deal.

Given this seismic shakeup, and Paxton’s polarizing past and personality, many are wondering if Texas — Texas! — can go blue. The answer is yes, but only if Paxton’s opponent, Democrat James Talarico, rejects the failed ideas that led to the Democratic Party’s decline in the state — and instead embraces Texas populism and the state’s surprisingly radical history.

Talarico himself is a different kind of Democrat. A young state representative and seminary student, he has garnered attention for his progressive brand of Christianity, which blends spiritual uplift with fulminations against the billionaire class. He has also raised boatloads of money and is surprisingly nimble with media, both traditional and digital.

But money and media savvy aren’t enough. Since Democrats lost control of Texas some three decades ago, a string of theories has tried, and failed, to envision a comeback. The latest one was “demographics as destiny”: the race-essentialist idea that as Anglos ceased to make up the majority of the population, the state would automatically become Democratic. Trump dashed those hopes, sweeping the state in part by winning over working-class Hispanics and African-Americans. 

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If Talarico has any shot at winning Texas, he will need to reverse this trend. He has some great examples to learn from. In Tarrant County, union leader Taylor Rehmet flipped a seat in the state legislature in an area that Trump won by 17 points. Rehmet’s secret? He ran a class-focused campaign, eschewing the culture war entirely in favor of speaking to the needs of Texas workers. 

But there is an even deeper tradition of working-class politics in Texas, going back to the mid-19th century.

When people think of politics in Texas, they assume “rock-ribbed” conservatism by default. But this is the result of a years-long political project to recast the history of the Lone Star State in the Right’s image. The reality is much more interesting. This is a state where cowboys mounted collective action to fight the privatization of the open range; that was once home to one of the largest socialist parties in the nation; and where a farmer-labor alliance almost toppled the capitalist elite. Texas is red, yes, but the color means more than one thing. 

Following the Civil War, Texas was economically decimated. The state government sought to attract business and finance to Texas with friendly policies, cheap land, and sweetheart deals. Major interests like the railroads took advantage, jacking up freight costs and cracking down on organized labor. A new set of Northern and European landowners entered the scene, like the Capitol Syndicate, a coalition of Northern businessmen and foreign capital, including the Earl of Aberdeen, who financed the Texas Capitol in exchange for 3 million acres of prime real estate in cattle country. 

Barbed wire, then a new invention, was used by a rising class of large landowners to choke off the “open range.” In alliance with the ruling political class in Austin, the new barons banished many Texas “nesters” off their lands. While corporate power swallowed land in Texas, the banks and the merchant class got to work on Texas farmers. Debt became a fact of life for many Texan farmers under the crop-lien system: cash-poor farmers who needed funds at the beginning of the growing season were trapped in a web of debt, as the merchant and banking classes conspired to buy cotton at low prices and keep interest rates astronomically high. It wasn’t uncommon for farmers to pay 100% to even 200% markups on needed goods. This usurious system led many Texans into the humiliating position of serving as tenant farmers on land their families once owned.

But Texans didn’t take these changes lying down. Instead, they launched a full-on revolt against corporate power — and even the very institution of private property. From striking cowboys in the Panhandle to the Fence Cutting Wars against the scourge of the “devil’s rope” to the Great Southwest Strike led by the union leader Martin Irons — Texans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries went to war against what used to be called the “money power.” Populism was thus born in Texas.

The Southern Farmers’ Alliance developed when Texans began asking themselves a simple question: why was it that “those who work most get least, and those who work least get most?” The cotton farmers who initially made up the movement soon struck up an alliance with industrial workers in the railroad system. They were united against the “shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations,” as a movement statement put it. This farmer-labor alliance led to the founding of the People’s Party, often called the populists, which would soon become the second major party in the state, competing directly with the Democrats.

Populism today is a much-abused term, often just used to highlight politicians who use an us-versus-them style, even as they pursue the same-old market-friendly agendas. But real populism, especially in Texas, was much more than just a rhetorical approach; it was a revolt against the way in which capital subjugates all higher pursuits to the profit motive. It was a movement that demanded dignity for working people, who faced daily humiliations from the bosses, the banks, and a dismissive media.

These populists were very aware of the conflict they were fighting. Take, for example, this statement in the official paper of the movement, The Southern Mercury: “There has always been a bitter and irrepressible conflict between the capitalist and the laborer, and this relentless struggle will continue as long as wage labor exists, because the capitalist always seeks to enslave the laborer.” That’s Marx in a Stetson.

Thomas Nugent, one of the early leaders of the Texas populists and its candidate for governor, condemned the new system emerging in Texas not only for the poverty with which it afflicted the farmers, but for the spiritual indignities it engendered. He decried “plutocratic capitalism,” noting that the system “robs genius of its glory, makes of intellect a drudge and a slave, and utilizes the achievements of science to raid the stock markets and enlarge the margin of profits.” 

In a three-way race for governor in 1894, Nugent came in second place, overtaking the Republican Party as the main opposition party in Texas. 

The populists were as defiant of the ruling Democratic Party as they were of the bankers, the landlords, and the railroads. Their ambitious platform took direct aim at the elites. On the labor front, they demanded legal recognition for trade unions, a ban on the use of unfree convict labor, and the establishment of the eight-hour working day, among other reforms. 

They also called for the railroads and communication industries to be brought under common ownership for the benefit of all. And they insisted on government action to curb the unfair land giveaways to the rich and powerful — beginning with restrictions on foreigners from owning land, aimed at the growing class of European capitalists who’d acquired large holdings. 

The corporations and railroad syndicates would likewise be forced to relinquish the land that they were not using for productive purposes. It was only right, the populists argued, as the government of Texas had betrayed the people, “stealing the guise of heaven in which to serve the purpose of hades, they have … squandered almost all the available public domain, the heritage of the people of this and future generations.”

Far from a protest movement, the populists were successful at winning office in Texas. In a matter of a few years, they were able to send 22 state representatives to the legislature, along with two state senators. As a minority, they found themselves effective in working with the more progressive-minded faction of the Democratic Party.

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The rise of a political movement representing the working class prompted accusations of “socialism” from the era’s newspapermen. Nugent turned the intended slur into a badge of Christian honor, writing in the main populist newspaper: “If sordid and foolish men call this socialism, let us not be disturbed. Such socialism is so near akin to genuine Christianity that we can well afford to welcome it.”

Fearful of a future in which politics pitted the masses against the elites, the Democratic Party engaged in a campaign of outright fraud to destroy the populists. After Nugent’s death, the populists organized a compelling campaign for governor in 1896, falling short of outright victory by only a few thousand votes. They were not beaten honestly. Across Texas, Democratic goons threatened voters with violence, with one thug bragging that standing outside of the polling place had deterred all of the black voters from casting a ballot. Ballot boxes were stuffed, and populist votes were not counted. In the following years, Texas would institute a series of “voting reforms,” designed to limit the black vote and the vote of poor whites and thus ensuring that the populist project would no longer threaten the state’s comfortable elites. 

In many ways, the Texas of today mirrors that of the time of the People’s Party. The Lone Star State is fast becoming a playground for out-of-state billionaires trying to run away from tax obligations, labor protections, and democratic oversight. Their power, combined with the steady erosion of the working class’s hard-won achievements, is downright degrading. Texas, for example, leads the country in preventable deaths at work. And while under Texas law, dogs kept outside must have access to plentiful potable water, no such restrictions exist for those working outside. In fact, the Texas legislature has made rescinding local ordinances for water breaks for Texas workers a top priority. In Texas, we treat dogs better than we treat working people.

Texans must revive the questions asked by the Texas populists: “Why does he who works most get least, and he who works least gets most?” If James Talarico is searching for a model for how to win Texas, he should not look toward demographic fantasies peddled by “progressive” race essentialists, nor a return to the HR-style politics that have dominated Democrat politics since the neoliberal turn of the 1970s.

A fight for dignity and for economic populism is much needed in the Lone Star State. While his denunciations of oligarchy are promising, Talarico should plant his feet in the Texas soil and reclaim our long-held populist and radical traditions, demand dignity for working people, and run on an explicit pro-working-class agenda. Not just in rhetoric but in practice.

This essay was adapted from the author’s new book, The Myth of Red Texas.

No wonder the “MAHA Mom” has become such a political powerhouse. A satellite of the MAGA movement, MAHA — “Make America Healthy Again” — has been spearheaded by the health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a lifelong campaigner against the rogue’s gallery of toxins which, to varying degrees of plausibility, are apparently making us fat, ill and mental. The MAHA coalition is increasingly reliant on the concerned mother, a particularly incensed slice of the electorate politicized by health concerns around her children. As waves of both paranoia and rational concern have arisen in recent years — over 5G towers, ultra-processed foods, fluoride in water supplies and so on — this otherwise fairly passive contingent has become practically radicalized, coming to see the assault on the American body as a story of venal elites punishing the little guy, in the tradition of MAGA more generally. Amid rough seas — a Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s emergency tariff regime, alongside the Epstein files furor and a general sense of financial malaise — the MAHA Mom looks to be more critical than ever in securing Republican dominance on the Hill.

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All of which turns one of the more minor-seeming news stories of recent days into a potential catastrophe. On Friday Trump issued an executive order protecting the manufacturing of glyphosate, the preferred herbicide for commercial farming and the active ingredient in the domestic weedkiller Roundup. The administration argued that the chemical was critical to agriculture and defense, meaning the decision was a matter of national and food security. Glyphosate has been connected to high-profile lawsuits due to the alleged link with cancer; during his time as an environmental lawyer RFK Jr himself once won nearly $290 million in a case against Monsanto, Roundup’s manufacturer, on behalf of a man who had developed the disease. Only on Thursday did Monsanto’s owner Bayer announce a $7.25 billion settlement to a class-action suit about the cancer claims.

As it happens, glyphosate is also at the top of one very important voter’s hit list. Ken Cook, who leads the Environmental Working Group, called Friday’s executive order a “middle finger to every MAHA Mom”. Naturally, RFK Jr had to lend his support to the capo di tutti capi: in a way that must have stuck in the craw of many a crunchy Trumpette, he aped parental devotion, arguing that Trump’s decision in fact “protect[ed] American families” by warding off trade and security challenges from abroad. One mama-bear, Kelly Ryerson aka the Glyphosate Girl, underlined the irony of the movement’s figurehead agreeing to “expand… the very same carcinogenic pesticide that MAHA cares about most”.

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As one of the Russian dolls in modern American populism (at the center of which is a plump, painted Trump), MAHA has one of the most passionate, yet also precarious, support bases. They are led by furious moms such as Zen Honeycutt, who set up the grassroots group Moms Across America in response to her sons’ struggles with allergies, autism and mental-health problems. Hers is a typical case within the movement: devastated by family misfortunes, she turned to politics as a solution. Honeycutt appeared on CNN on Monday to express her “outrage” at Trump’s “love letter to glyphosate”, a chemical which she blames for many of her children’s ailments (she once claimed to have cured her son’s autism by feeding him only organic food). Her crusade is personal, and her vote rests on a single issue. Honeycutt was not always a conservative voter; she changed tack when she and her mom friends felt “abandoned by the Democratic Party”.

Rather than a single, destiny-defining battle such as those around immigration and abortion, the MAHA movement is a clutch of flashpoints which matter most to the suburban mother, inspired by an Erin Brockovich-style empathetic instinct. Like Brockovich, the MAHA Mom sees what experts can’t or won’t — in that case, a contaminated water supply quietly poisoning an entire community. She is enthused by the same institutional mistrust that drives her fellow populists: where others might have been swept up in the QAnon pizzagate frenzy claiming to expose a baby-killing paedophilic political elite, she might take her placards to the gates of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who insist — evilly, to her mind — that regulated levels of fluoridation in municipal water supplies is good for teeth and not, in fact, turning our brains to flubber.

Her stock is rising because she is often right: few of us would call her daft for being concerned about carcinogenic food additives, ultra-processed slop and, yes, weed killer — but many of us would sniff at her obsession with unpasteurized dairy, chemtrails and heavy-metal chelation treatments for autism. In some cases MAHA Moms’ views are downright dangerous: Erin Elizabeth, wife of uber-rich homeopathic medicine peddler Joseph Mercola and founder of Health Nut News, claims that turmeric is better for cancer patients than chemotherapy. Of course, the MAHA Mom encompasses many thousands of women, and MAHA is as varied a group as MAGA itself. But the underlying facts tend towards shock and alarmism, favoring the most extreme within the movement: obesity rates have more than tripled in the past 60 years, while autism diagnoses have tripled in 20 (helped in no small part by changing diagnostic criteria). If the body politic feels unstable, the body proper is a mess.

Many have made this connection before. The MAHA Mom’s American progenitors shaped public mores with their reformist stances on the body, from the Progressive Era’s fixation with sanitation as a spiritual companion to the cleaning-up of city governments to the Temperance finger-waggers ushering in the Prohibition. Of this last lugubrious lot, Carrie Nation, the most dramatic of the anti-booze brigade, may be a compelling model for the MAHA Mom if only for her theatrical flair: armed with a stash of rocks or a small hatchet, she would maraud illegal Kansas saloons smashing liquor bottles while singing hymns. Were she here today, Mrs Nation may well be found booting bottles of Roundup out of gardeners’ grasps to the strains of Onward, Christian Soldiers. Or maybe she’d be hanging out with Zen Honeycutt, making her children pose moodily by trolleys full of cereal boxes wearing matching T-shirts that say “GMO-free kid”.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of the most furious frontiers of contemporary populism is manned by mothers; the “Farage fillies” backing Britain’s Reform UK have a similarly maternal angle. So much of American family life has been destabilized by the chaotic past decade: identitarianism, gender debates, a pandemic. The body of the child is the most urgent symbol of vulnerability in a state of chaos: protecting it is therefore a true crusade, which has emboldened and ennobled the MAHA Mom.

Some of her reasoning may be shaky but this voter is nevertheless a folk heroine, a final barrier between the family and entropy if only as the gatekeeper of what goes in the lunchbox. In a West where biopolitics — the statistics-driven interventions into public health — is the norm, she asserts a stubborn sovereignty. She feels most viscerally the weird American paradox of the supermarket shopper, which stands in for the broader national malaise motivating MAGA: how can a country be so rich and yet feel so unwell? Given that she represents Trump’s essential channel to the suburban female electorate, her political capital is only likely to grow — meaning it may be crunch time for Monsanto and, if he fails to stick to his guns, RFK Jr himself. Perhaps our worm-brained secretary of health would be wise to heed mother’s advice. And if she deserted him, where would she go? Perhaps many of these not-natively-conservative voters would be enticed by a future radical among the Democrats: in that case, the parties could find themselves in a minimally processed bun fight for the MAHA Mom’s love.

Earlier this week, House Republicans moved a motion which would have put off a vote on Trump’s tariffs. Three of their members, however, crossed party lines to join all their Democratic colleagues to block the motion. The Democrats will now be to table motions to roll back the tariffs and, in fact, did so promptly, passing a resolution the next day to terminate the ones imposed on Canada. And while the measures are unlikely to succeed — Trump can simply veto the resolutions, even if the Senate can be persuaded to back them — the Democrats will keep jabbing at this fissure like a boxer targeting an opponent’s eye’s wound. They won’t stop driving home the message that Republicans are on board with Trump’s trade war.

It therefore seems likely that more Republican dissidents will surface in the months ahead — the total already rose to six on the Canadian vote — because the tariffs are becoming a political albatross. With polling suggesting that a large majority of Americans, and even a quarter of Republicans, oppose tariffs, the future of Trump’s trade policy is undecided.

The risk that the Republicans would lose their slender majority in November’s House elections was always high. But until recently it was considered a near impossibility for the Republicans to lose the Senate majority. Now, though, the betting markets give Democrats a better than one-in-three chance of seizing the upper chamber too, and the odds have been slowly narrowing. Amid this febrile atmosphere, a growing number of Republicans caught between the monster of Trumpian wrath and the whirlpool of an angry electorate are opting to take their chances taming the latter.

Quite apart from the fact that Trump’s tariffs overturn decades of the party’s free-trading principles, Republicans are also uneasy with them for the simple reason that they’re not doing what they’re meant to. If the President has always held one belief consistently, it’s that tariffs could make the American economy great again — reducing the gaping trade deficit, returning manufacturing jobs to America and boosting workers’ wages, all while costing Americans nothing, since foreign producers eager to sell to America would have to pay them.

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But none of these things have happened yet. Assessing the state of the US’s trade deficit isn’t straightforward, since the figures can vary from month to month, not least when trade policy is as volatile as it has been since last April’s Liberation Day. However, the US’s most recent figures suggest the trade deficit isn’t improving.

The same is true of the employment situation. Plainly put, manufacturing jobs show no sign of coming back. On the contrary, manufacturing employment continued falling through Trump’s first year back in office while in the wider economy, good jobs are getting harder to find. As Wednesday’s employment report revealed, in all of 2025 only 181,000 new jobs were created in the US, a monthly average that would have translated into a rapidly rising unemployment rate were it not that Trump’s immigration crackdown has removed so many workers from the workforce.

That, the administration retorts, is just the point — the deportations are reserving jobs for Americans and thereby boosting their earning power. But in fact, instead of workers seeing gains, the labor share of income has fallen to an all-time low. Wage growth slowed throughout 2025; especially for workers at the lower end of the income scale, the sort of voters who played such an important role in bringing the MAGA coalition to power, it is now barely keeping pace with inflation.

Most ominously, there’s no reason to expect a manufacturing renaissance will come at all under existing policies. For all the White House’s grandiose boasts about the massive investments other countries have pledged in the US — the amount varies but most recently Trump offered a figure of $18 trillion — construction of new factories is currently declining, with no end in sight.

As for being costless, ever since Liberation Day the administration has pointed to a steady inflation rate as proof that the critics were wrong, Americans aren’t paying higher prices for their imported products. It’s true that since Trump started his trade war, consumer price inflation hasn’t got worse. But as the recent producer price index revealed, businesses are paying higher prices. Research by the Kiel Institute has shown that almost the entire cost of tariffs has been absorbed by businesses, with foreign exporters paying an average of a paltry 4% of the cost of tariffs. Federal Reserve economists have come up with a similar estimate.

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It makes sense that businesses should have chosen to absorb the tariffs rather than pass them on to their customers. When the Liberation Day tariffs were first announced, importers rushed to frontload shipments before they took effect, building up good stocks then running them down over the next several months. Thereafter, given the legal challenge to the tariffs before the Supreme Court and Trump’s frequent flip-flopping, with postponements, carve-outs and changes to rates amid trade deals, businesses were reluctant to raise prices and lose market share to rivals, only to find their own tariffs were later lifted.

However, the longer the trade war persists, and that it grows apparent the tariffs are here to stay, the pressure on businesses to pass costs onto consumers will rise. Ironically for the administration, a heads-they-win-tails-we-lose logic may now apply here. As things stand, working Americans have borne the brunt of tariffs not through price increases but through wage growth that has trailed the booming asset gains of richer Americans. The effect has shown up in retail sales that appear to be weakening, all while consumer credit is rising, suggesting ordinary Americans are feeling stretched.

But amid stronger-than-expected job gains in the most recent employment report, some (if not all) economists now think 2026 may finally see an improvement in the earning power of working Americans. But if such came to pass, it seems likely that businesses would feel more confident to raise prices, secure in the conviction that consumers will be better able to afford them.

We might then expect consumer inflation to begin rising in the coming months. This wouldn’t come as a surprise to everyone. Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics has consistently maintained that it would take about a year for tariffs to work their way into consumer prices and if they do, whatever workers gain in better wages may get eaten up in higher prices. What would make such inflation especially fraught is that the inflation rate on the basket of goods consumed by working Americans is higher than that on their wealthy compatriots, who are benefiting disproportionately not only from comparatively lower inflation but from rising stock markets.

Donald Trump’s remarkable achievement was to build a political coalition that united two classes once seen to be in conflict — owners and workers. Owners with deep pockets powered the Republican Party’s fundraising edge, which currently sees the party raising twice the funds of the Democrats. Meanwhile the working class, and especially the white working class, which traditionally was a Democratic constituency, were won over by his populist pledges and provided the bedrock of Republican support.

The owners are as happy as ever — why wouldn’t they be? Their asset values and profits rise by the day and their taxes are falling. But workers appear to be growing disgruntled. What may yet save the Trump coalition is that the attachment of the white working class to the Republican Party appears to be as much cultural as economic, so voters may be willing to swallow their discontent. On the other hand, Trump’s success owed also to his ability to motivate low-propensity voters, and rising discontent at their economic lot could cause many of them to just stay home in November.

If the Republicans consequently lose control of Congress in November, Trump’s entire agenda will get bogged down in inquiries and legislative obstruction. When Bill Clinton lost Congress in the 1994 elections, his political program largely came to an end, and he was forced to govern as a soft Republican. Trump wouldn’t likely shift towards the other side, but he would find his room for maneuver, particularly on the home front, constantly reined in. Democrats could de-fund ICE, launch impeachment proceedings against administration members, block his appointments and pass anti-tariff resolutions.

Along with immigration, trade was to be a signature policy that defined the second Trump administration. At the moment, he appears to be losing control of both narratives, with polls suggesting growing disapproval of his performance on both immigration and the economy. He has less than nine months to turn that around, and for that to happen his policies will need to deliver on the pledges he made. When it comes to tariffs, he needs manufacturing employment to pick up, wage gains to grow and inflation to stay low. Right now, the omens don’t look good for him.

But then, if a week is a long time in politics, nine months could feel like an eternity — for better, or for worse.

Yet the President seems to have overcome his misgivings, for Isaacman has been re-awarded the nomination. Today, Isaacman will face the final hurdle, a Senate hearing. Senators are likely to quiz the entrepreneur, who has never worked for Nasa, on his “Project Athena” report. In the report, which was leaked earlier this year, Isaacman called for Nasa to retire its main rocket program, the Space Launch System, to ruthlessly cut down on bureaucracy, to rely more on private enterprise, and to redirect its energies towards the exploration of Mars. Democrats are likely to be skeptical of some elements of Project Athena. As for the Republicans, Isaacman has evidently been on a charm offensive: donating $1 million to pro-Trump organizations, and giving at least one MAGA influencer a trip in his private jet.

Isaacman has also made a more spiritual pitch. Not two months prior to the hearing, he spoke at a rally organized by Turning Point USA, the Right-wing advocacy group founded by the slain activist Charlie Kirk. “Having gone to space twice and looking back on our planet,” Isaacman told the crowd, “it’s hard not to be spiritual. But it was only recently that I was inspired to pick up the Bible again. I’ll tell you why — it’s because of Charlie, and it’s for Charlie.”

Isaacman’s remarks at the revivalist-like meeting raised alarm among some secular observers. Had Trump nominated a Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalist to lead America’s space agency? They need not be so concerned. Isaacman, as it happens, is Jewish, but said in 2021 that he was not religious. It is conceivable that Charlie Kirk may actually have meant something special to Isaacman, but it would not require extreme cynicism for one to imagine that there might have been an element of political expedience in his Turning Point comments.

If Isaacman gets the job, he’ll be up against a Trump administration determined to wreck many of America’s scientific powerhouses. It is currently busy eliminating the National Science Foundation and radical cuts to the budgets of the National Institute of Health and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Even worse, Trump has appointed RFK Jr., an opponent of modern medicine, to head the Department of Health of Human Services, turning the agency into a propaganda center for anti-vaccine activists.

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Trump said in his second inauguration speech that he wanted to send Americans to Mars. But far from proceeding with any such program, Trump has turned his fire on Nasa, focusing his destructive efforts first and foremost on the agency’s most productive division, which is its Space Science Directorate. This is the part of Nasa that does the space telescopes, the Mars rovers, planetary orbiters, deep space probes, and Earth observation satellites. It gets about 25% of Nasa’s budget, but for the half-century since the end of the Apollo program, it has been responsible for close to 100% of the agency’s accomplishments.

The Trump administration has proposed to devastate this section of Nasa by cutting its budget in half, while leaving the wasteful parts of the space agency nearly unscathed. If the cuts are not stopped by Congressional resistance, some 50 working spacecraft already operating in space — including the Curiosity Mars rover, all the space telescopes except Webb (and maybe for a while Hubble), the Mars Odyssey and MAVEN orbiters circling Mars, the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, the New Horizons and Voyager mission that probed the outer planets and are now probing the Kuiper Belt, and most of the Earth observation satellites — will all be shut down. Furthermore, missions currently in the pipeline, including the Roman space telescope (already built and waiting for launch next year) and the Dragonfly mission to Titan, and many others, will be aborted, and there will be no new starts after that.

If Trump actually were interested in getting Americans to the Red Planet, the last thing he would do would be to destroy the existing Mars exploration program. This is so not only because robotic explorers are the essential scouts needed to prepare and support human expeditions, but for political reasons as well. Contrary to Trump’s inauguration speech boast, there is zero chance that his administration will even attempt a human Mars mission during his four-year term. In order to last long enough to be successful, any humans-to-Mars program will need bipartisan support. Such support could be readily obtained by allying the humans-to-Mars effort with the largely university-based Mars exploration program. Doing so would make a great deal of engineering sense too, as the best way to test out the heavy payload delivery systems human Mars missions need would be to use them first to land large robotic expeditions on the Red Planet. These could deliver dozens of rovers and helicopters to Mars at a time, collectively carrying hundreds of instruments and experiments supported by thousands of university investigators. This would not only produce a massive scientific bonanza, but provide a strong political base for the program among the Left-leaning university research community. But doing this requires scaling up the robotic exploration effort. Instead, Trump is murdering it, in the process putting a mark of Cain on his putative program that would insure its destruction as soon as the political fortunes of war shift.

But it is worse than that. Under the Trump administration’s plan, not only the Mars exploration program, but the entirety of Nasa’s terrific space astronomy and planetary exploration programs will be effectively wiped out. This epic program is not just a jewel in the space agency’s crown. It stands, as the Gothic cathedrals did in medieval times, as the greatest celebration of one of the highest ideals of modern Western civilization — the search for truth through science. Nasa’s space science program is very much the flag of modern science, and the Trumpists are disdainfully burning that flag.

It is quite true that many of the science-wreckers infesting the Trump administration have taken to wearing prominently displayed crosses. But religion isn’t the problem here. While Christianity is certainly not science, it actually shares some important common roots.

A core idea underlying Western civilization, advanced by the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato, is that there is an innate faculty of the human mind capable of distinguishing right from wrong, justice from injustice, truth from untruth. Embraced by early Christianity, this idea became the basis of the concept of the conscience, which therefore became the axiomatic foundation of Western morality. It is also the basis for natural law, the theory that moral principles are real and can be identified from human conscience. The idea that the human mind can distinguish truth from untruth is also the basis for science, man’s search for universal truths through the tools of reason.

As the great Renaissance scientist Johannes Kepler, the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, put it: “Geometry is one and eternal, a reflection out of the mind of God. That mankind shares in it is one reason to call man the image of God.” In other words, the human mind, because it is the image of God, is able to understand the laws of the universe. It was the forceful demonstration of this proposition by Kepler, Galileo and others that let loose the scientific revolution in the West.

Over the years, science and Christianity have frequently disagreed on what the truth might be. But nevertheless, they have agreed strongly on the most fundamental point: that there is such a thing as the truth, and finding it is among the highest of human callings.

It is this intellectual foundation that drove the West’s creation of science, and which has continued to motivate those moved by a Judeo-Christian outlook to broadly support the scientific enterprise. This has not been without practical consequences. The Catholic Church, for example, not only created the first universities, but has extensively funded astronomical observatories and medical research centers right up to the present. In 2005, I was able to convince the highly religious Senate Science Committee Chairman Sam Brownback to reverse the decision by Sean O’Keefe, the then-Nasa administrator, to abandon the Hubble Space Telescope. As I pointed out to Brownback, it is through learning about creation that we can learn about the Creator.

Trump, in contrast, denies the relevance of truth. As part of his political makeover from a sexual epicure to a conservative, Trump has taken to waving crosses around. But the President is more of a Nietzschean than a Christian. For him there is no good or evil, justice or injustice, truth or untruth — it’s all just bullshit. He spouts lies as readily as a sow pisses. And he can do this because he has no intent to convince, but only to confuse.

This is not a worldview that is supportive of science. Where the leader goes, the followers follow. It is impossible to serve both Trump and the truth. The real problem with the Trump administration is not that it is filled with Christians, but that it is packed with Philistines.

And now the Trump administration is promising a return to the Moon via the Artemis program. Yet, put simply, Artemis is a fraud. While vast amounts of money are being distributed to contractors, there is no real intent at the top to use the program to send astronauts to the Moon. This can be seen by examining the program’s design, if it can be called that, which consists of five primary flight elements which do not fit together to enable any functional mission capability. Instead, each of those five elements — the SLS heavy lift booster, the SpaceX Starship, the Orion capsule, the National Lander, and the Lunar Orbit Gateway station — is being funded as an independent project whose primary purpose is to support the companies that are working on it.

The SLS will only fly once every three years, so it is just useless. Starship could be a useful heavy lift vehicle for the program, but in order to create a nominal role for SLS, it will be employed instead as a lunar landing and ascent vehicle. But Starship has an empty mass of 100 tons — 50 times more than that of the Lunar Excursion Module used during the Apollo program — making it wildly impractical to serve in such a capacity. When Starship got the Human Landing System contract, the National Team, led by Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, demanded that they get a contract too. This might have made sense, had Nasa insisted that they build a reusable lander employing the same methane/oxygen propellant as Starship, so that a Starship stationed in lunar orbit could serve as a tanker supporting orbit to surface excursions by their much lighter vehicle.

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But instead, since the goal was just to appease the National Team by sending it cash, Nasa allowed them go their merry way with an expendable hydrogen/oxygen-propelled lander that can’t be supported by Starship or anything else. With a weight of 26 tons, the Orion capsule is too heavy for the SLS to deliver to low lunar orbit with enough propellant to come home, and so can only go to a Gateway station in high lunar orbit instead.  This serves to provide a nominal function for the Gateway, which otherwise serves none. In fact, far from being part of rational lunar program design, the Gateway was conceived of by the Obama administration prior to the invention of Artemis as an (absurd) alternative destination to send astronauts in place of going to the Moon. But the Trump team decided to make it part of Artemis, and to pretend it is necessary, imposed a requirement that all excursion vehicles must travel back and forth from its position in high lunar orbit to the surface instead of from low orbit. As a result, the Gateway greatly increases excursion vehicle propulsion requirements. Instead of being called a Gateway, it would be more proper to call it a Tollbooth — and a very expensive one at that.

Artemis is not a Moon program divided into five independent efforts. It is a flim-flam man’s cover story for five random pork-barrel programs that don’t lead anywhere.

The bottom line is this: unlike the purpose-driven Sixties Apollo Moon program, Artemis is vendor driven. While Apollo spent money to do things, Artemis does things in order to spend money. Artemis was started eight years ago by the first Trump administration, yet a piloted landing on the lunar surface is nowhere in sight. Eight years after John F. Kennedy announced the Apollo program, astronauts were walking on the Moon. The difference is that while Apollo was real, Artemis is bullshit.

Engineering, though, cannot be based on bullshit. Engineering must be based on truth. The truth is that you can’t conduct a Moon program using a random set of vendor-supported hardware elements that don’t fit together. Reality-deniers may pretend that you can, but that is just bullshit. Reality-deniers may claim they are working on getting humans to the Red Planet while they are wrecking the Mars exploration program — but that is just bullshit too.

This is the problem that Jared Isaacman needs to solve if he gets the job. Isaacman is a very accomplished businessman, with a demonstrated commitment to advance science and expand humanity’s reach into space. He is fully qualified to be Nasa administrator, and I believe the Senate will confirm his appointment to that post with solid bipartisan support.

But once he gets the job, he will be working for a team that does not believe reality is relevant. If he wants to save the space science program, let alone get Americans to the Moon or Mars, he will need to restore respect for the truth. That will be the real challenge.

Americans on the Right have reasons to wonder. Recently a number of self-styled spokespersons for MAGA have claimed that the president has betrayed his populist base on issues ranging from foreign policy (with his bombing of Iran and threats of war against Venezuela), to higher education (with his insistence on admitting Chinese students to US universities to maintain university enrollments and budgets). At the same time, old-fashioned conservatives complain that Trump has betrayed the legacy of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes with his stances on trade and immigration. 

Both sides are half-right — and thus half-wrong. Just as he demolished the East Wing of the White House to add a new ballroom, while leaving the rest of the structure intact, so Trump, instead of completely replacing the older version of conservatism, has added a new populist wing based on trade and labor protectionism.

Pre-Trump “fusionist conservatism,” forged by the likes of William F. Buckley and Frank Meyer in the last century, is often compared to a stool with three legs: a hawkish foreign policy, free-market libertarianism in economics, and social conservatism. Trump himself never fit that model. During his 2016 campaign, he described the Iraq War as a “disaster” and vowed not to cut Social Security or Medicare. And while George W. Bush is a born-again Christian, Trump is a thrice-married playboy who told evangelicals at Liberty University that his favorite book in the Bible is “Two Corinthians.”

In contrast to their leader, the priorities of most congressional Republicans in Trump’s second term, as in his first, have been Bush-like: to expand the deficit with tax cuts for the rich, or to attempt to cut or destroy ObamaCare without offering any replacement other than a few half-baked ideas. Little seems to have changed with the GOP caucus since the days when Paul Ryan was House speaker (Ryan himself, feeling betrayed as a “true” conservative, refused to vote for Trump in 2024 and said: “I’m going to write in a Republican”). 

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Yet the betrayal charges — from MAGA populists and doctrinaire Reaganites alike — misunderstand something fundamental about Trump. 

Far from breaking completely with Republican anti-statism, he began his second term by assigning Elon Musk, a libertarian tycoon, and Russell Vought, a veteran of pre-Trump conservatism, with the task of firing as many civil servants as possible and wrecking as many agencies as they could, often in blatant violation of statutory law and the Constitution. 

In foreign policy, it’s true that Trump in his first term was cautious compared to his predecessors. He didn’t start any new wars, unlike George W. Bush, who launched an unnecessary “forever war” in Iraq alongside the one in Afghanistan; and Barack Obama, who presided over a needless war of choice against the Qaddafi regime in Libya and who fueled an insurgency in Syria that empowered an Al Qaeda warlord, now donning ill-fitting suits.

In the first year of his second term, however, Trump has called for the annexation of Greenland and renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” He has bombed Iran, something the two Bushes refused to do. In recent days, he has threatened to invade Nigeria in response to the Islamist persecution of Nigerian Christians, and appears to be making preparations for war with the Maduro dictatorship in Caracas.

Venezuela happens to be No. 1 among the countries in proven crude oil reserves, surpassing Saudi Arabia, and No. 8 in gas reserves. Iran is No. 4 in crude oil reserves and No. 2 in gas reserves. Nigeria is No. 10 in oil reserves and No. 9 in gas reserves. Wars or threats of wars of regime change against an axis of oil-rich countries bring to mind those two Texan oil men, George W. Bush and the late Dick Cheney, and appealing to evangelical voters (as the Nigeria initiative does) in the service of Petropolitik is very Bushian.

Trump, then, hasn’t broken with the legacy Reagan-Bush consensus on all issues. But on two issues — trade protectionism and labor market protectionism through immigration enforcement and restriction — he has departed radically from the older conservative agenda. Trump has won the presidency twice because he has added to the inherited GOP base a bloc of non-college-educated working-class voters — mostly, but not exclusively, white — who were alienated by the support for free trade and mass immigration of the Bush Republicans in the 1990s and aughts. In other words: He has united Reagan-Bush voters with the kind of voters who in the 1990s voted for H. Ross Perot.

Despite his successes in foreign policy, including the prosecution of the Gulf War and negotiations to end the Cold War, George H. W. Bush, who promoted economic austerity and free trade, repelled many white working-class voters who had been “Nixon Democrats” and later “Reagan Democrats.”

Many of these voters were drawn to the folksy Texan billionaire Ross Perot and his personal presidential vehicle, the Reform Party. Perot garnered 19% of ballots when he ran as an Independent in the 1992 election, more than any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt ran as the nominee of the Progressive Party against his Republican successor, William Howard Taft, and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Perot’s strongest supporters included many high-school-educated white men and women and union members in the industrial states — the kind who later put Trump in the White House twice. 

Of Perot’s two main issues, economic nationalism and the budget deficit, the former was critical to his working-class support. NAFTA was negotiated under George H. W. Bush and later pushed through Congress by President Bill Clinton in 1993 with only Republican votes. In the House, most Democrats voted against NAFTA, 156 to 102, while Republican support was overwhelming, 132 to 43. GOP senators voted for NAFTA 34 to 10, while Democrats opposed the treaty by 28 to 27.

Perot was ridiculed when he claimed that the passage of NAFTA would result in a “giant sucking sound” of factories and jobs offshored to Mexico. But he was right. Thanks to offshoring by US companies and investment by European and Asian auto makers exploiting low Mexican wages and access to the American market, Mexico today is the third-largest automotive exporter in the world, above the United States and Japan and below only China and the European Union, while Detroit, the former “Motor City,” is a desolate wasteland.  

With the transfer of production to Mexico and the anti-union American South, the wages of formerly well-paid auto workers, adjusted for inflation, declined by more than 17% from 1990 to December 2018, falling below the private-sector average in general.

In his two terms, George W. Bush compounded the damage done by NAFTA to America’s working class by complacently presiding over the offshoring of much of American manufacturing to Communist China as well as to Mexico and other low-wage nations.  Meanwhile, his administration, on behalf of cheap-labor employers, turned a blind eye to massive illegal immigration from Mexico and elsewhere. “Protectionist” became an epithet in the Bush-era GOP.

In 1999, after Perot indicated he wouldn’t run a third time, Trump ran for the presidential nomination of Perot’s Reform Party but dropped out. The nomination went instead to the paleoconservative firebrand Patrick Buchanan, whom Trump denounced as an “anti-Semite” and “Hitler lover.” In 2015, Trump chose to run for the presidential nomination of one of the two major parties, instead of a third party, and unlike Perot, he became president — twice. 

While most of the pre-Trump Republican coalition of hawks, social conservatives, and free-market libertarians remains, Trump has won back many of the working-class voters of the kind who were drawn to Nixon and Reagan but driven away by the two Bushes. Trump doesn’t owe his success to the “culture war,” which was a specialty of the Bushes, as they tried to divert attention from their country-club economic agenda by waving the flag and thumping the Bible.  Trump won because, like Perot, he made protection central to his agenda — the protection of American industries from foreign competition, and the protection of American workers from immigrant competition. 

In his first term, he rewarded these voters with the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced NAFTA, and in his second term, he has cracked down against illegal immigration, including not only criminal migrants, but also unauthorized workers used as pawns by scofflaw employers to lower wages and evade workplace laws.

But in domestic policy, Republicans remain mostly hostile to organized labor and regulation of any kind, and Trump has gone along with the old anti-government Right in backing Vought and Musk and DOGE. The result under Trump is a hybrid — a synthesis of economic nationalism in trade and immigration policy with old-fashioned anti-government conservatism inside America’s borders.

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Is tariff-fenced free-market conservatism in one country a stable policy? It worked for the Republicans for more than half a century between the Civil War and the Great Depression, when most of the GOP combined support for protective tariffs with opposition to organized labor and costly government. In his second Inaugural Address, Trump declared that President William McKinley, known in his time as “the Napoleon of Protection,” “made our country very rich through tariffs.”

He also echoed President Calvin Coolidge, who on Labor Day in 1924, told a group of union leaders that high wages for American workers depended upon immigration restriction and protectionism in trade policy. A “tremendous influx” of immigrants would be followed by “an almost certain reduction of wages.” He continued: “Under free trade, the only way we could meet European competition would be by approaching the European standard of wages. I want to see the American standard of living maintained. We shall not be misled by any appeal for cheap goods, if we remember that this was completely answered by President McKinley when he stated that cheap goods make cheap men. By restrictive immigration, by adequate protection, I want to prevent America from producing cheap men.”

Such hybridity is a feature of American party politics. Party realignments in the United States never involve the complete replacement of an old party with a new party that differs on every issue. American political parties are Frankenstein’s monsters that are altered with the amputation of some limbs and the addition of pieces of  dismembered parties.

Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party stitched former Jacksonian Democrats opposed to secession and slavery, and single-issue abolitionists to the remnants of the moribund Whig Party.  Franklin D. Roosevelt sewed formerly Republican progressives, black voters, and white-ethnic urban immigrant groups that had been divided among the parties onto the Southern core of the older Democrats. 

In 1968, the American Party candidacy of George Wallace, the segregationist Democratic governor of Georgia, split the Democratic coalition, allowing Richard Nixon to defeat Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee. Four years later, Nixon managed to weld many former Wallace populist voters to the Republican Party, creating a presidential majority coalition that Reagan inherited.

Like Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan, Trump has brought about a genuine realignment, recruiting formerly disaffected voters by adding a fourth leg to the conservative tripod, providing two economic legs, as it were — protectionism and immigration restriction in external economic affairs and free-market libertarianism at home. But his voters, again like Perot’s, are swing voters, not part of the Republican base. 

As Trump himself has pointed out, other Republican office-seekers do best in election years when he is on the ticket. And like their predecessors, they can be driven away from the GOP by too much militarism on the part of the hawks, too much anti-government fervor on part of the free-marketeers, and the kind of religious rhetoric that appeals to the dwindling number of evangelicals in America but repels most other voters.

For all his flaws, Trump saved the GOP from dwindling into a permanent minority party of bellicose hawks, evangelicals, and libertarian opponents of the New Deal. Whether the Trump coalition survives Trump’s departure from office may depend on whether the GOP swaps out the old three-legged stool for Trump’s four-legged stool.

For example, Nick Fuentes, the perma-smirking king of the racial Right, describes Usha Vance as a “foreigner” and a “jeet,” mocks her name (“what the fuck is that?”), and blames her husband for “race-mixing.” Fuentes, who boasts a million followers on X, is having a something of a moment, with Kevin Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, going to bat for him (before apologizing some half a dozen times). But many lesser e-pundits share Fuentes’s views; even a Department of Government Efficiency staffer has called for normalizing “Indian hate.” 

At the intersection of these crosswinds stands Nikki Haley’s son, Nalin. The scion of one of America’s most prominent Indian families, he has shot to online fame in recent months, after he went public with his religious conversion (to Catholicism) and let loose his political opinions — ones that often clash with his family’s.

For one thing, Haley isn’t shy about venting his weariness of immigration of all kinds, not least from India. When Vivek Ramaswamy called for an “end [to] identity politics” this week, Haley replied, “End H1-B visas,” the program used by firms, especially in tech, to import latter-day indentured servants, more than 70% of whom are Indian.

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“We don’t just stop illegal immigration,” Haley tells me by Zoom on Tuesday. “I think we need to stop legal immigration.” With green eyes, impossibly white teeth, and six-pack abs, he cuts a striking figure. He is well-versed in meme warfare and knows just how to “ratio” accounts much bigger than his own — that is, garner more “likes” for his replies than the original poster. Like that of the British-born progressive pundit Mehdi Hasan, with whom he’s repeatedly tussled. 

When I mention his demand that Hasan be “denaturalized,” he interrupts: “and deported.” Tongue in cheek, surely? “No, I quite literally mean that. I’m often sarcastic, but not in this case. I mean, he hates America. If you hate America, you shouldn’t be in America. … Everyone wants to make it so complicated. That’s the thing with the past generation. They always talk about the rules, regulations, process. No, it’s simple. If you don’t like America, get out.”

That’s not how American naturalization works legally, and the e-Right’s calls to denaturalize and deport any immigrant who says the “wrong” thing clashes sharply with both constitutional writ and the spirit of the American tradition. And if that sort of thing were all that Nalin Haley stood for, he could easily be dismissed as just another online loudmouth (albeit, one who puts his name and face to his fulminations). 

Yet behind his bravado is a serious-minded 24-year-old recent graduate emerging from the political shadow cast by his mother. Nikki Haley served as a lawmaker in South Carolina, became the state’s governor, and was tapped as UN ambassador by Donald Trump in his first term before unsuccessfully challenging him for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Her son’s rage — and that of his Gen-Z-male cohort — is a predictable consequence of policies promoted by that older generation of conservatives, who prized cheap labor and free-market dogma far above America’s internal stability and cohesion. 

Nikki Haley supported legal, merit-based immigration as part of a pro-business platform. Her son wants to close the border entirely. Nikki Haley believes “it is not that Israel needs America — America needs Israel.” Her son thinks “Israel is just another country, and if they want to have a better relationship with the United States, they need to stop interfering in our politics.” Nikki Haley believes in an expansive foreign policy. Her son wants to end all foreign aid “as long as we have unemployment, people below the poverty line, medical debt, and bad schools.”

These domestic ills aren’t abstractions to him. “My friend group from high school, all graduated, great degrees from great schools,” he says. “It’s been a year and a half, and not one of them has a job — not one. So I’m angry at that, because I’m having to try and help my friends get jobs when their parents got jobs immediately — not just after graduating college, but out of high school.”

Statistics bear this out: in September, the share of the long-term unemployed, those who’ve been out of the job market for more than six months, hit 26%, according to The New York Times, much of it driven by recent graduates. The jobs that are available for recent grads are often precarious or temporary. “So when you see a bunch of foreigners coming over here to take jobs that [my friends] wanted,” Haley says, “they have every right to be pissed, and I’m pissed for them.”

It isn’t about jobs alone. “I look at the housing market,” he says, “and I don’t see how I’m ever going to own a house. And I do very well for someone my age” — he works in finance on the South Carolina side of Charlotte — “and I still don’t see it.” Again, the generational discontent: “My parents bought their first house for $90,000. I mean, that house probably now is worth $400,000. How can we compete?”

Then there’s the rising crime and disorder. “I live in what is known as a very safe area,” he explains. “Yet someone got shot and killed outside my apartment complex a couple months ago. . .  Outside my apartment in that same couple months, someone got jumped for a bad drug deal. And I’m tired of having to go to CVS to push a button for an employee to come unlock the toothpaste for me. Like, that’s ridiculous.”

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Overall, the effect is akin to “living in some fake world, some fake TV show,” he says. “We are the United States of America, we don’t do this. Things should be safe. Things should work. People should have jobs. Houses should be affordable.” If the son of Nikki Haley feels this way, it’s not hard to imagine the depths of anger and despair among less privileged Zoomers, a reality that probably explains, at least in part, the cohort’s often-brutal political rhetoric.

Nalin Haley was four years old when his mother was elected to the state House of Representatives. But things really changed when she was first elected governor, in 2010. Nalin and his sister, Rena, he recalls, “didn’t know that we had to live in this big house that’s also a museum” — the governor’s mansion.

When they arrived, the main housekeeper asked the two children what they wanted to eat. “And you know, we were very simple. We were like, ‘Well, what do you have?’ And she said, ‘Everything.’ We, having grown up very simple, we just asked for grilled cheese.” By his own account, Nalin’s parents — the governor and her husband, the businessman and military officer Michael Haley — kept him humble. All through childhood, including the years spent in the governor’s mansion, he had to do chores and was expected to work summer jobs.

On matters religious, however, Nalin Haley had to carve his own path. Beginning when he was in fourth grade, his maternal grandparents, Indian-born Sikhs, lived with the family and served almost as surrogate parents amid the political storms of those years. “I had my parents being [Protestant] Christian, and my grandparents being Sikh. As a result, I was very confused.” Which of these faith teachings was true?

To answer that question for himself, Haley absorbed books on world religions when other kids were reading about cars and dinosaurs. Eventually, thanks in part to a spiritual experience he’s reluctant to divulge, he concluded that Christianity is the true faith. He would go on to attend Villanova University, a Catholic institution in Philadelphia. Yet it wasn’t until after graduation that he was received into full communion with the Roman church.

“I needed to research my own faith better in terms of the history, the early beliefs, the Church Fathers,” he says. “When I did that, I felt as though anyone who does that kind of research will walk away a Catholic.” In his choice of denomination, too, Haley is representative of his generational cohort of Gen-Z men, an influential subset of whom is turning to Christianity — and specifically, to liturgically traditional communions like Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

In parallel to his spiritual conversion, he also began to develop his own distinct political ideas — not always the case in other political families like, say, the Cheneys. “I was not just going to have the same political views as my parents,” he says. Yes, he supported his mother in the 2024 Republican primary, but he did this, he insists, mostly to be a “good son.” All along, “I didn’t and was never going to be an advocate for a view that I did not have.” He repeats this point several times, almost like a mantra — a loyal son, but not a political disciple.

Yet when it comes to his views on immigration, critics from both the Left and the Right insist on seeing him as something other than his own man. He’s received his share of racist abuse from the toxic sewers of the online Right, notwithstanding his Christian faith and hard-line restrictionist views on immigration. “I just don’t let it bother me,” he says. “The internet’s not a real place necessarily. It is in some sense, but it’s also not. … I know who I am.”

As for one of the main sources of the racist sludge, Fuentes, Haley insists he’s barely watched the former’s show and doesn’t know his views. “I have no idea what to say about him or what to think about him,” Haley says. “And none of my friends really know about him, either.” I find that hard to believe, given Fuentes’s enormous influence among Zoomers. Still, it’s a relief to hear Haley add that racial animosity is out of the question for him: “As a Christian, I can’t have that. As a Christian, Jesus told me to love everybody, including groups of people who I don’t agree with.”

He goes on: “I get it from both sides. Someone who is biracial, only someone who is biracial can understand the feeling that … You can never feel one way or the other, because one way or the other, those two groups will never fully see you as them.” Christianity, it seems to me, serves as the bridge between these social realms for him — and could do so in an increasingly fractured American polity, if we’re lucky. 

The Left, meanwhile, reproaches him for backing an immigration policy that, if it had been in effect when his grandparents immigrated from India, would have barred them from entry — thus, in a sense, foreclosing his own existence. That line, too, leaves him unfazed. “It’s not 1969,” he shrugs. “It’s just not. We have a different country. We have a different set of circumstances.” It’s reasonable, then, to “adapt” and to “have different policies.”

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In 2025, “we have lawlessness, we have crime, we have unemployment. We have all these issues. So my first thought isn’t, ‘Well, what happened in the past, and how could we have changed the past?’ Because we’re not living in the past. We’re living right now. And so my thought is, ‘What can we do to stop the lawlessness, the unemployment, the housing crisis?’ ”

The 21st-century economy, he worries, won’t produce enough of the kind of high-wage jobs that defined middle-class prosperity in his parents’ and grandparents’ time. If the future is scarce service-sector jobs, why import more unskilled labor to undercut already low wages for such work among native-born workers? “A lot of people are just going to lose their jobs. They’re just going to be sitting around without jobs. And the next thing you know, you’re going to have people saying, ‘We need UBI,’” or universal basic income.

The economic pressure on his generation, he fears, will compound existing trends toward loneliness and alienation, especially between Gen-Z men and women.

“The future of division in America,” he speculates, “is not going to be about race. It’s probably not going to be about income, although that is a big disparity. It’s going to be about gender. It’s going to be men on one side, women on the other. If you look at someone’s” — algorithmically curated — “‘For You’ page on TikTok or on Instagram, for a young man it’s going to be completely different from a young woman’s.”

Gen-Z women are veering sharply to the Left: an overwhelming majority just voted for Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Meanwhile, Gen-Z men like Haley are shifting to the Right, and even the very hard Right that sometimes plays out as crass misogyny online, thus deepening the mutual alienation of the sexes. Yet, Haley wonders, it might not be as hopeless as all that, because both parties are responding to the same set of frustrations: “They’re tired of modernity. They’re tired of technology. All of this modernity is not natural to them.”

What both sexes desperately need, he says, is time together — in person. “They’re being more anti-social,” he observes of his cohort. “Their attention spans are getting shorter. So they only see what’s on the phone. That means that in terms of race, if all you see about a certain race is what you see on your phone, you’re going to have that view of them. If all you see about a certain gender is on your phone, you’re going to think that about them.”

He adds: “But make no mistake, the future of Gen Z, regardless of its men or women, is nationalist.” When I ask him whom he prefers among the suspected contenders for the 2028 Republican nomination, he suggests that JD Vance comes closest but says the vice president needs to “somehow work on his charisma, aura, and likability.” And if the immediate slate of political contenders on the Right aren’t up to the task, Nalin Haley is prepared to enter the arena himself.

“I want someone to fight for me,” he says. “And if no one’s fighting for me, then I’m going to fight for myself and those around me who are suffering.” His anger is often palpable. At times, it’s discomfiting. It’s also, I must admit, at least partly justified. Mere hectoring moralism, without more, will do little to assuage it. Reforming the material substrate beneath that generational rage should be the foremost task of both parties. 

Unfortunately, as conservatives position themselves for the post-Trump future, there are indications that what is coming is likely to be much worse: more conspiratorial, hostile to institutions, and beholden to a pinched and angry nationalism. If anything, Trump has been a moderating force against these tendencies. After him, the deluge.

Consider that last month, the surgeon general of Florida, Dr. Joseph Lapado, and allied legislators announced a sweeping plan to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates. Lapado declared that even long-established requirements for diseases like chickenpox, hepatitis B, and the like “drip with disdain and slavery.” Within days, the proposal began to collapse under political pressure, especially after Trump himself criticized the idea. This forced Sunshine State health authorities to backtrack, converting the plan into a more limited rollback of a few optional immunizations, while leaving core school-entry vaccines intact for now.

The idea of Trump as a moderating force within the GOP might seem absurd at first glance. Yet this is only one of many data points suggesting that he is, in fact, holding back some of the worst impulses and brainstorms pushed by figures who have now gained control over American conservatism.  

There are two indicators we may look for in forecasting the future of a movement. The first involves examining areas in which the base and its spokesmen show resistance against the ultimate leader. There is a natural tendency to defer to the leader of a party, but tensions always exist between him, those in the middle ranks, and the base, and where the pressure points are can tell us something.

This method would have accurately predicted the Republican Party’s hard turn against immigration in the aftermath of the Bush and McCain era, during which talk radio helped dash proposals for a grand bargain supported by GOP elites. We’ve seen something similar on the Democratic side over the last year, with the party mainstream abandoning support for the Israeli war effort in response to pressure from the Left flank.

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The other method involves assessing a movement’s information ecosystem. I would argue that this is a more useful guide than general public opinion within a party, since most people aren’t thinking about most issues most of the time, and it is the opinion-forming class of today within each that shapes what normies will care and vote about tomorrow. On the Democratic side, the relevant elites are the prestige press and the liberal activist class; for Republicans, it’s Fox News, major podcasts, and the community of Right-wing influencers on “X” (formerly Twitter).

Both indicators suggest that the post-Trump GOP will be more conspiratorial, more deeply in thrall to pseudoscience, and more likely to hold uncompromising attitudes toward immigrants and political opponents.

Consider how the GOP base itself has often resisted Trump when he has strayed from its instincts. At the height of the pandemic and for years after, he touted the success of Operation Warp Speed, which invented the mRNA vaccines used against Covid. Trump also encouraged his supporters to take the jabs, only to be met with boos at rallies and open defiance from talk radio and online influencers, forcing him into a sheepish retreat.

More recently, conservative media have been buzzing with demands to release the Epstein files, a subject Trump has largely ignored, given his past associations. Yet the online Right remains unrelenting in its obsession with the issue, even generating memes that characterize Trump as a “pedo protector.”

When it comes to high-skilled immigration, meanwhile, Trump has sometimes gestured toward Silicon Valley’s and corporate America’s desire for more engineers and programmers. Yet grassroots activists, talk-radio hosts, and social-media influencers have maintained fierce anti-immigration pressure, ensuring that any liberalizing reform will be met with an immediate backlash.

Such episodes highlight that there is more to Republican politics now than simple deference to Trump himself. There is a populist current that will outlive him, and it rewards conspiracy-minded narratives and punishes any gesture toward compromise on the immigration issue.

Note that the backlash isn’t coming in response to Trump’s glaring corruption, such as engaging in crypto scams and accepting a private jet from the Qataris. Nor does the base seem all that exercised by cuts to Medicaid and other entitlements, contrary to the expectations of disappointed populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass. That’s not where the GOP base’s heart lies. Instead, it’s immigration and the threat posed by shadowy, vaccine-pushing elites, which include all Democrats and any elected Republicans who fail to go full-bore MAGA. 

The trajectory of Right-wing media is similarly instructive. According to Spotify, the top-four news podcasts today are The Tucker Carlson Show, The Daily from The New York Times, Candace, and Up First from National Public Radio. This supports the general conclusion that Democrats listen to traditional media elites, while Republicans have influencers.

What distinguishes the Right’s influencers at the most basic level isn’t policy outside the aforementioned exceptions of immigration and vaccines — when was the last time you heard Candace Owens’s position on the size of government? — but a general conspiratorial outlook. Carlson has argued that UFOs are interdimensional demons and has spent the weeks since Charlie Kirk’s death hinting that Israel was behind the assassination. Owens is being sued by Brigitte Macron for promoting the idea that France’s first lady was born a man.

Right-of-center influencers who want to climb the rankings must follow this deranged path. Megyn Kelly is also among the top-10 news influencers, albeit toward the bottom at No. 9. Perhaps to boost her audience, she has begun to warn about demons interfering in earthly affairs and implying that vaccines cause autism, deep truths supposedly covered up by the mainstream media. She also declares that she does not care about reports that border czar Tom Homan was allegedly caught on tape receiving a $50,000 cash bribe, as long as he is tough enough on illegal migrants. A once sensible media voice detects which way the wind is blowing, and has changed her views accordingly. 

To be sure, the GOP will be better off without some of Trump’s worst flaws. The cult-like aspect of his movement meant that large numbers of people could look past any level of personal corruption and even storm the Capitol on his behalf. It is difficult to imagine JD Vance or Ron DeSantis acting this way after losing an election, or inspiring thousands of people to risk their physical safety and freedom in a misinformation-fueled effort to keep either of them in office.

But Trump also has a pragmatic streak and common sense when it comes to issues like vaccines and immigration, and whether conspiracy theories are credible. His base, in contrast, makes hostility to foreigners and distrust of the liberal establishment central to its worldview, and the figures that are most successful among conservative audiences reflect the kind of content that Republican-leaning listeners and viewers find compelling. 

If there are countervailing forces within the Republican Party they remain mostly hidden for now. In fairness, mainstream Republicans have put pressure on RFK over his anti-vaccine positions, and likely have stopped the Department of Health and Human Services from embracing pseudoscience even more than it has. When Trump has tried to prosecute his enemies on flimsy pretexts, he has encountered resistance even among his appointees. In order to get his indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, the president had to push out his own US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and replace him with one of his personal lawyers, over the objections of his top-two officials at the Department of Justice, one of whom had also served as his personal lawyer. 

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As with Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it, it is difficult to imagine a similar story involving any other Republican leader. Trump is an outlier both in terms of how flawed he is as an individual, and also in the kind of personal grip he maintains on the GOP base. Top attorneys in the executive branch aren’t Twitter influencers, and have their own code of ethics and professional norms. They will resist a leader who tries to get them to do things that are too far outside of the bounds of legality and established norms. Still, working under Trump makes the ability to draw red lines much more difficult.

Yet when it comes to conspiratorial thinking and anti-foreigner scapegoating, the demand is organic and likely to persist even after Trump. Partly, this is the result of a more general political realignment of which Trump is both a cause and symptom. While people with less formal education and low levels of trust, two predictors of conspiratorial thinking, used to be somewhat divided between the parties, they have now consolidated on the Right, as the decline of gatekeepers allows them to have more of a voice in our politics. The Trump cult in certain ways puts a lid on such instincts, but even as he maintains control over the GOP, divisions between the leader and the base still occasionally rise to the surface. 

 After Trump, the conservative movement will find itself at a crossroads, but one that is unlikely to point back toward moderation or institutional responsibility. Trump’s departure, whenever it comes, won’t mean a simple reversion to pre-2016 norms, because the forces he has unleashed and the informational environment that sustains them are larger than the man himself.

The two lenses for understanding the party’s trajectory — pushback against the leader and the informational ecosystem — reveal the general direction of travel: namely, conspiratorial populism. Elites who try to resist their base, as we saw with immigration reform under George W. Bush or Trump’s attempt to promote vaccines for the sake of his own ego gratification, are quickly punished, and those who play to fanatical audiences are the most richly rewarded.  

When Trump exits the stage, what remains will be a Republican Party still driven by grievance and suspicion — minus a major check on where those impulses can lead.

A Gallup poll last week found that only 54% of American adults drank alcohol in 2025. Drinking among Republicans is in a rapid collapse, with only 46% of Republicans reporting that they drank in 2025, down from 65% two years ago. (Democrats, by contrast, are drinking only slightly less than before, 61% this year, down from 64% in 2023.) The phenomenon seems to be, at least in part, mimetic: President Trump doesn’t drink. RFK Jr. abstains. Charlie Kirk preaches sobriety. Tucker Carlson is sober.

This might seem like a winning issue for the Right — and one that unites the Trump coalition, since the tech libertarians who now finance the party don’t drink, either — but anyone who cares about human conviviality should be skeptical. 

Republican teetotaling is part of a general decline in having fun; partying — drinking, sex, going out — has slumped since the pandemic (during which public authorities told Americans that physical alienation from each other is a responsible social pattern). It turns out that when you lock up members of an already atomized, lonely society, people don’t easily recover the sociality that Aristotle taught is one of the fundamental characteristics of the human animal. Restless un-leisure — doom-scroolling, scrambled attention spans, ordering in — has gradually become more normal than being together. 

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Across the board, alcohol consumption is declining — men, women, white, nonwhite, rich, poor. Biohackers like Bryan Johnson or self-optimizing influencers like Andrew Huberman believe no level of alcohol is safe. Sobriety or “California sober” — no alcohol, but plenty of cannabis — is another emerging trend and is increasingly normal among Gen Z and millennials, who prefer stimulants, nootropics and nicotine. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are also reducing consumption in general, drinking included.

Against the backdrop of a broad decline in social trust and socializing, the general decline in alcohol consumption becomes relevant — and the more specific decline in drinking among Republicans is especially ominous. 

To some extent, the embrace of sobriety on the Right is a reversal, since lately it’s been progressives who are anti-pleasure. But in the longer historical perspective, it’s a return to form. Over the last 150 years, temperance has been a consistently Republican virtue. The reputation for drinking and “fun” belonged to Democrats. 

It was the Republicans who were the “drys” during Prohibition, casting themselves as the party of sobriety, order, and Protestant reform, while Democrats were associated with saloons, ethnic political machines, and speakeasies. The old Republican rallying cry “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” — caricaturing Democrats as the party of booze, Catholic immigrants, and Confederate nostalgia — was first uttered by a Protestant minister during the 1884 presidential campaign. 

Excess drinking and alcoholism are deadly, to be sure, and some people should never drink. For many others, not drinking is super fucking lame; moderate drinking is fundamental feature of a good life. Certainly, that’s been the position of Western civilization both before and after the advent of Christianity. “Mix stronger wine,” Achilles commands in Homer’s Iliad, “a cup for the hands of each guest — / Here beneath my roof are the men I love the most.” Wine is used for cooking, at meals and during religious rituals in the poem. The guests in the Platonic dialog The Symposium negotiate how much they’ll drink at the beginning of the evening — and then go on to imbibe more than planned, joking about their drunkenness and referring to each other as “o my companions in drink.” 

Christianity, of course, incorporates wine in the central mystery of the Eucharist, though sometimes some of the more dour denominations have substituted grape juice. Medieval paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder portray village life as scenes of rowdy and joyous drunken revelry, and the still life tradition in the 1800s showed tables laden with glasses, bottles and carafes. Private drinking parties made life tolerable, for me personally, during the pandemic; good dive bars are part of what justify the price of rent in New York City — or any other big city.

Anything that unites — even accidentally — the neuroticism of tech optimizers, progressive scolds, and rightoid incels is probably bad. Americans need convivial practices like drinking with friends. The decline of drinking is a decline in spending time with other people, learning about them, and knowing them. Temperance promotes isolation and alienation.

Politically, the neo-temperance movement also threatens the plurality and energy of the Trump coalition. Part of Trump’s appeal was his basically liberal attitude toward the good life (he doesn’t drink, but doesn’t proselytize about it, either). The better aspects of Trump-era populism implied solidarity, community, revelry, and a good time, and stood against the dominant qualities of the Left: moral superiority, hyper-rationalism, fear of the body, fear of spontaneous community, fear of mixing it up, fear of confession, fear of the local, the street, the bar, the friend. Drinking promotes a neighborliness and bonding essential to a conservative view of the polis.

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Republican neo-temperance, moreover, not only smacks of a 19th-century purity and social stiffness, but a 20th-century clubbiness and suburban rejection of blue-collar values of the union hall or the bar — and even of the emotions that emerge from working class people in the tempo of drinking. Temperance culture is repressive.

Similarly, a Calvinist-in-spirit shunning of imbibing and inebriation — the spurning of the social and even moral uses of alcohol — is suggestive of a larger rejection of courtship, reproduction, and communal behaviors. There’s something about energy drinks and Zyn that seems suited for staring at a screen, for locking in to a kind of isolated work practice, but not conducive to talking, flirting, boasting, taking pleasure in free-spirited afterwork hours.

The Trump coalition will endure if it stays chill. An abstemious, Puritan attitude threatens the gains of the post-pandemic counterrevolution against progressivism and Bidenism, against the antisocial, judgmental, unpragmatic, and anti-communal behaviors of late progressive culture. Neurotic liberals have already driven less-neurotic liberals out of the Democratic Party; Republicans should remember that those voters can move the other way.

Moreover, temperance is, whenever enacted, unpopular and a losing position. Sermonizing conservative Protestant neuroticism about drinking resembles sermonizing liberal post-Protestant neuroticism about everything else. If conservatives embrace and accelerate accidental temperance, they risk creating a mirror image of the progressive Left: afraid of doing things, afraid of the world, afraid of irrationality.

In the 2020s, a good rule of politics, policy, and culture might be: normal is good. Most of what people were doing 40 or 50 years ago was better than the antisocial mores of today. Social drinking is a traditional good that conservatives ought to be conserve.

Maybe a Republican has a chance to become governor for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reelection in 2006. But probably not. Of the two Republicans battling for their party’s nomination, one is an unimpressive county sheriff who speaks in the dullest of Republican slogans, and the other is Steve Hilton, whose campaign tract Califailure is badly written, poorly argued, lazily researched, barely edited, and entirely uninspiring.

Hilton’s inability to write an inspiring political tract was an odd discovery, because his most prominent role in British politics was doing strategy and communications for David Cameron. Since then, he has remade himself as a Fox News commentator, and now has designs on the governorship. Califailure, then, has taken on new importance since its publication in March.

Not only is it totally unserious as an analysis of the Democrats’ bad policies, it also fails as political messaging. It’s a book written to exercise the emotions of Hilton’s Fox News audience, but a message designed for the geriatric ideologues and fantasists who watch Fox News is not going to break the Democratic Party’s death-grip on California politics. It will do little to help people truly understand the policy disasters that have befallen California, and it will persuade few California voters who aren’t already Republicans to vote against Democratic rule. What Califailure will mainly do is convince faithful Fox viewers in Tennessee and Colorado and Michigan that the cartoon portrait of California they get on Fox News is the truth. Don’t get me wrong. It’s closer to the truth than a cartoon portrait should be, but it’s still a cartoon portrait.

You can see Hilton’s role as a talking head taking over his duties as an author in the table of contents of Califailure. After a short chapter titled “One Party Rule,” Hilton goes on a run of nine chapters whose titles are words that will resonate as incendiary insults with Fox News viewers: “Elitism”, “Narcissism”, “Maoism”, “Climatism”, “Socialism”, “Bureaucratism”, “Compassionism”, “Cronyism”, and “Incompetism”. For those words that aren’t already recognized “-isms” (unlike Maoism and Socialism), Hilton affixes “-ism” to them to indicate that these aren’t just governing tendencies or pathologies but full-blown “ideologies” of their own. For example, the Democrats who run California aren’t just incompetent. They have turned incompetence into a belief system. Thus “Incompetism”. Translating the stubborn pathologies of California’s Democratic governance into discrete and conscious systems of belief serves Hilton’s interest as a Fox News commentator, but it doesn’t help anyone understand the underlying forces of political idiocy that afflict the state.

Take “Elitism”. If you remember what happened in California during Covid, and you have a feel for Hilton’s way with a political message, you can guess where his “Elitism” chapter is heading: it’s heading out for an expensive dinner at the French Laundry. The French Laundry is the famous Wine Country restaurant (three Michelin stars) where, in November 2020, Gavin Newsom and his wife were joined by rich friends and powerful colleagues to celebrate Newsom’s 50th birthday. Even as he was demanding that California residents wear masks when they were inside stores and other public buildings, and limiting California restaurants to outdoor dining, Newsom and his party dined maskless and indoors.

I suppose this is an example of elitism, and the fancy-restaurant destination, as well as Newsom’s status as a pretty-boy scion of a rich and politically connected family, make it a satisfying reason to reach for your pitchfork. But the fact that powerful people think the rules they apply to others don’t apply to them is a fairly generic lesson of politics. Power corrupts, even when it’s attained by popular vote, even in places that aren’t California. Hilton is just rabble-rousing here, eliciting familiar tones from his bell, cueing readers to froth in the clinically predicted ways.

A more telling example — also dating from the lockdown era — appears near the end of the “Elitism” chapter. Hilton points out that expensive private schools, such as those attended by Newsom’s own children, were holding regular in-person instruction while “public”, government-run schools were still doing online instruction, holding classes via Zoom session. “So why didn’t he insist that public schools educating the majority of California’s students open for in-person instruction, and not just the schools attended by his children and the other children of the elite?” He doesn’t answer this question. He takes it to answer itself. And the answer is the title of the chapter in which it appears: “Elitism”. People in the elite like Gavin Newsom just take themselves to be better than the rest of us, and so they get to follow different rules. It’s an ideology.

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But a much better, much more concrete and parsimonious, explanation for why public schools persisted with phony video schooling, in which kids didn’t learn anything, is the strength of teachers’ unions. Teachers at public schools are unionized. Teachers at private schools generally aren’t unionized. Unions took a maximalist view of the Covid risk their members faced. This was not reasonable, from either an educational or a public health standpoint, but from the standpoint of the institutional game that teachers’ unions are always playing, it was totally comprehensible. It’s what you’d expect.

The challenge for a book about the many failures of California governance is not to find the best insult for teachers’ unions. It’s to understand why teachers’ unions have so much power that they can force a disastrous pandemic policy onto students and their families with no resistance, indeed with the full complicity of the other major powers in state politics. The answer is not mysterious. Local teachers’ unions are members of the California Education Association (CEA), and the CEA is one of the most powerful forces in California politics. Since the CEA basically sets its own agenda within the state Democratic party, and since that party has a monopoly of power in the state, the CEA can pursue its favored policies enviably free of electoral or institutional constraints. In other words, the so-called elitism in Hilton’s private school example is entirely downstream of the power of unionized public school teachers, which is entirely downstream of the fact that Democrats have total control of state government.

This line of causality — from the Democrats’ unopposed power to the state’s pathological governance — is pretty obvious and direct in the case of the CEA. In other areas Hilton covers, the connections are a touch more subtle, but they’re far from obscure. For instance, in his “Compassionism” chapter he describes some of the now-familiar examples of progressive officials in California seeming to favor chaos and crime over mundane public order maintained by police officers. Hilton uses “Compassionism” to describe a vague mental condition — an ideology, yes, but also a sort of mental illness, in his treatment — from which California progressives supposedly suffer that leads them to tolerate chaos and oppose measures to control it.

But the destructive and weirdly selective compassion expressed in the state’s Democratic policies — summoned for the criminal targets of police power but withheld from the victims of these criminals — reflects internal political dynamics predictable in one-party rule, in which the strongest pressures are applied from the ideological fringe. I’ve described this phenomenon as it affects my own city of Oakland — progressive politicians facing no electoral constraints from their Right, only the threat of shaming from activists to their Left for their lack of ideological purity. Both social status and political survival in this sort of one-party governance depend on submitting to puritanical ideologues. At some point in the moral bidding wars that drive progressive politics, it becomes socially and politically treacherous for even sensible officials to concede, for example, that the police should enforce the law.

The strange thing about Califailure is that, though it begins with a chapter titled “One Party Rule,” Hilton doesn’t use this basic electoral fact to frame his treatment of California’s bad governance. For the sake of his TV audience, he treats his various pathologies — “Elitism”, “Compassionism”, and so on — as independent variables, freestanding causes that explain the bad governance. But he can’t decide how they explain it. He mostly seems to think that progressives just inherently have these “diseases”, as if one is drawn to Leftist politics as symptomatic expression of clinical Cronyism or whatever, but sometimes he suggests that they take on these mental illnesses willingly. “The pathology of Narcissism,” he writes, “is tailor-made for an elite class that believes its own utopian fantasies can replace… mundane reality….” Tailor-made? On one hand, this is terrible writing, another instance of the crude, sloganeering prose that makes up Califailure. On the other hand, it reveals the trick Hilton is trying and failing to pull off, using the polemical language of sickness but also wanting the sick people he’s talking about to be fully deserving of his scorn because they’ve somehow, consciously chosen their diseases, as a man chooses the cut of his suit. Narcissism is a mental illness and an ideology. Compassionism is an ideology and a mental illness.

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In either case, Hilton treats the excesses of progressivism — his nine silly “-isms” — as independent causes of California’s problems, which allows him to yell about them as he yells about things on TV. But, again, these excesses are better understood as effects of one-party rule. In this context, a party’s extremists hold a potent advantage in negotiation and persuasion precisely because of their extremism. When there’s serious inter-party competition, though, those extremists lose this structural advantage. Faced with electoral competition, party leaders are more likely to resist the influence of purists and ideologues whose favored policies alienate moderate voters.

We Californians don’t get to see this happen in state politics these days, but we have gotten recent glimpses of it as our Governor, who seems to be readying a 2028 run for President, reacts to the demands of national politics, where elections are competitive and moderate voters matter. Indeed, my city has enjoyed direct benefits from this altered political logic. Gavin Newsom doesn’t want national voters imagining rampant crime and homelessness when they hear his name, and so he’s made several high-profile moves in recent years that have angered the Left-wing of his party. Among these moves was dispatching a large contingent from state law enforcement to aid the Oakland Police Department — shrunken and “defunded” by extreme progressives on our city council – as it struggled to fight a devastating crime wave. This worked, and, in working, it showed electoral competition to be a healthy antidote to fanatic-driven policymaking in our one-party city.

But why is there no electoral competition? Why do Republican candidates no longer have a chance in statewide elections? If California’s absurd governance is an effect of Democratic control, shouldn’t a book about that absurdity direct a little curiosity at the other party’s performance through these years of dysfunction? Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. Hilton assigns no blame to the Republicans for their own weakness. Instead, he blames the Democrats. His “One Party Rule” chapter briefly examines the effects of Democratic dominance on Republicans, and he makes a pretty good case that the Democrats have gamed the supposedly non-partisan system for drawing districts for the State Assembly, in the classic manner of partisan gerrymandering. If districts were drawn in a truly non-partisan manner, he points out, the Assembly should be around 40% Republican, reflecting the usual Republican vote in statewide elections. Instead, Republicans hold only 22% of Assembly seats.

This is a fair point. But why should the Republican share of the state electorate be capped at 40%, especially when Democratic rule has made the state into a national laughing stock? Why can’t the Republicans grab enough voters disgusted with the crime and the dysfunction and the overall idiocy to make statewide elections competitive again?

Hilton directs no criticism or even advice or encouragement towards his fellow Republicans on this matter. And these voters exist. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the state’s Republican Party is more ideologically uniform than its Democratic Party. In other words, conservative Democrats are much more numerous than liberal Republicans. But there’s nothing in Califailure about winning over those ambivalent Democrats from their malfunctioning party.

He could have made his book a true provocation to Democratic voters frustrated with their party by focusing on the self-satirizing details of progressive governance and messaging, which are generally hidden from everyday people precisely because there’s no viable opposition party to broadcast these things. That is, instead of the few brief passages he devotes to the specifics of progressive policymaking (especially in his worthwhile “Bureaucratism” chapter), he could have filled his entire book with such things in their infuriating and irrational specifics — the petty, hostile, relentless regulation and taxation of small businesses; the rich payouts to Left-wing NGOs that work to perpetuate rather than to mitigate their pet disasters; the proud non-enforcement of basic criminal law; the unimaginable waste of environmentalist dreams like our bullet-train-to-nowhere, and progressives’ crippling efforts to make us the greenest country in the world when we’re not even a country.

Hilton touches on these things, but his research is lazy and haphazard. He’s easily distracted. He’s more interested in issues that agitate his national audience of Fox watchers than with the concrete troubles of us beleaguered Californians. He can’t help dredging up worked-over culture-war tropes, so that you can forget sometimes he’s even writing about California. His “Narcissism” chapter includes a long rant about the activist neologism “LatinX”, in which he rebuts the need for such a term with a hilariously earnest and misplaced digression on Spanish grammar. It’s as if he’s seeking relief from the shallowness of his own book through a fantasy of being a linguistics professor. His “Maoism” chapter is consumed with Stanford University and the authoritarian Leftism of its administrators. Stanford is technically located in California, but the maddening things happening there are happening at every elite university in the US. These campus issues are national issues. They illustrate nothing about California’s failed governance.

Indeed the focus on rarefied Stanford hints at a sort of elitism in Steve Hilton’s worldview, and in the ways of the state Republican Party he hopes to lead. This elitism, ironically, mirrors that of the state’s ruling Democrats. Just as the Democrats’ insulation from electoral competition allows them to indulge the elitist, utopian fantasies of their activist base, the Republicans’ impotence in this competition enables a similar dynamic, in which ideological purity and fidelity to elites in the national Republican party displace hard thinking and compromise about bread-and-butter issues that affect everyday Californians. Once you decide that statewide victory is off the table, you can let go of difficult, impure politicking and settle into the easier business of placating activists who vote in primaries, parroting the themes of Republican celebrities in Washington, and playing up abstract culture-war fights.

As Mike Madrid, former political director for the state Republican party, said in 2023, “The Republican Party is really not trying to be a viable political party anymore in California. It’s kind of content being this small, regional, marginalized social movement, and for the moment that’s what it is, and that’s probably what it’ll be for a very long time.” You can see how this arrangement would suit individuals at the core of the Republican party, as it suits those on Democratic side. Those people are already where they want to be, enjoying the quantum of reliable influence they’ve been given in our unhealthy equilibrium.

And, in the composition of his dashed-off book, you can see Steve Hilton bidding to secure his own place in this arrangement. Nothing in his book suggests he’s serious about actually winning the statewide election he’s made himself a side-character in. Despite the book’s title, Califailure doesn’t read like something addressed to California voters at all, who will find its fixations only occasionally and vaguely connected to the concrete problems of their state. He’s talking to nationwide consumers of partisan media, who relish their Schadenfreude about liberal California and like to have it reinforced periodically from their TV sets. He’ll still be talking to them after the next election, and still as someone who doesn’t hold political office, and, if his ridiculous book is any indication, he’s perfectly content with that.

One might be tempted to conclude from this data that voters simply agree with Republicans more on the issues. The real story is more complicated. What Democrats are lacking isn’t so much the right policy package, but a demonstrated willingness to stand up to Donald Trump and his agenda in the second term. The issue, moreover, is less one of increasing Democratic unpopularity, than Republicans weathering a general decline in trust in institutions due to the unique connection Trump has with a significant minority of the country. Democrats cannot break this bond; they can only hope to mobilize the forces against it.

Consider polling about specific bills. Last month, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill, the signature legislation of his second term thus far. On average, it had a net approval rating of -23, making it the second most unpopular major piece of legislation under consideration since 1990, only beating out the 2017 GOP health-care bill. In contrast, Biden’s infrastructure bill was at +39 when it was polled.

Put another way: When asked about specific pieces of legislation, voters prefer the Democratic approach of higher spending on infrastructure and social services to Republicans’ spending cuts that only partially offset tax cuts disproportionately favoring the wealthiest Americans.

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Gavin Newsom versus the Nimbys

By Richard Hanania

Nate Silver’s tracking of polls finds Trump’s approval rating to be underwater by double digits on inflation, trade, and the economy. Immigration is Trump’s strongest issue, but even here, net approval is currently at -3. To be sure, the Journal poll shows Republicans to be more trusted on issues like immigration and the economy. Meanwhile, YouGov in May found nine issues where Democrats had an advantage, and 10 where Republicans did. It’s difficult to know what to make of polls showing that voters agree more with Democratic tax-and-spending bills than those favored by Republicans, while at the same time Republicans are more trusted on the economy as an abstract issue. Another contradiction: while Americans dislike Trump’s tariffs, and one would think that Democrats represent a return to the status quo, they still trust Republicans equally as much as Democrats or more on the issue. This shouldn’t be logically possible, and probably again reflects voters not thinking too carefully about their political attitudes.

Issue polling is, in short, a mess. Although we can draw broad lessons about which party owns specific policy areas, I would be hesitant to use it in order to make inferences regarding recent changes in how Americans view Democrats and Republicans.

So if not policy, what does explain the sorry state of the Democrats? It would be one thing if they were cratering with Independents. That would suggest that they are simply out of step with the majority of Americans. In fact, the party leadership is reaching new lows because it faces discontent among its base. In the CNN poll cited above, only 58% of Democratic-aligned adults have a favorable view of their party, compared to 76% of Republicans. Morris and Radcliffe point to a Strength in Numbers/Verasite poll showing that Left-wing Democratic voters are disproportionately unhappy: about 20% of self-identified “very liberal” Democrats now have an unfavorable view of their own party, far higher than the equivalent disaffection among “very conservative” Republicans, who are at 8%. If you factor out this Left-flank discontent, Democratic approval would rise by a net of eight points. In the Strength in Numbers poll, Democrats actually do better with Independents.

The Republican advantage, then, seems mostly or completely driven by very liberal voters not liking the current Democratic Party. Does that mean that, in order to match Republicans in popularity, all Democrats would have to do is move Left? Unfortunately for them, surveys indicate that their voters would like them to do precisely the opposite.

According to a February poll from Gallup, as of early 2025, only 22% of Democrats were content with the party’s current ideological approach — everyone else wanted change. Crucially, 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents said the party should become more moderate, while 29% wanted it to be more liberal or progressive. Among Republicans, in contrast, a healthy plurality of 43% was satisfied with the party and wanted it to stay the course.

What this means is that Democrats might need to think twice before simply trying to satisfy the most extreme voices among their base. Otherwise, they may lose moderate voters in the process, as more of their supporters want them to take a centrist path.

There is nothing all that mysterious about any of this. No matter where the Democrats are ideologically, voters could disapprove of the party from either side. A very liberal Democratic voter and a moderate one might both have gripes, which you would expect in a large, diverse country with only two major parties representing the entire political spectrum.

Perhaps it is a mistake, then, to focus on Democratic unpopularity. Maybe the question we should ask is why Republican approval remains so high among its base, in an era where trust in institutions is collapsing. The Trump-era GOP has taken radically unpopular positions on taxing and spending policy. Yet the Republican base seems to shrug everything off and remains malleable, seemingly due to Trump’s unique charisma. A KFF tracking poll shows that while only 61% of Republicans approved of the Big Beautiful Bill in June, that figure had risen to 78% in July.

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Can middle-aged white guys save the Dems?

By Justin H. Vassallo

Republican politicians now regularly justify their actions based on the idea that they follow the will of Trump. Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma was more explicit than most when he said that he fought against releasing Epstein documents in order to give Trump “cover,” arguing that Democrats would use any information that came out to target the president. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, when praising the recent trade deal with South Korea, urged his followers to “Trust in Trump”. A recent New York Times headline reads: “Texas Republicans Unveil Gerrymandered House Map, Trying to Please Trump,” showing that the president’s influence reaches down to what have traditionally been state and local issues.

The behavior of the current Congress has been downright cult-like. As the Associated Press reports, a raft of GOP proposals would allow Americans to “take the day off work for Donald Trump’s birthday,” receive “a $100 bill with Trump’s portrait on it,” and land at “Donald J. Trump International Airport near the nation’s capital,” among other similar measures.

It’s easy to feel contempt for politicians here. But we can assume that they are simply following their voters, who really love this man. Trump’s approval remains sky high in a party that was famous for turning on its leaders in Congress throughout the Obama era. Since 2023, researchers at Vanderbilt University have been asking Republicans if they consider themselves more supporters of MAGA or the traditional GOP. The first time they posed the question, 37% of respondents reported that they feel MAGA first. Today, the MAGA-first group is at 52%.

This is particularly interesting because MAGA is notoriously flexible when it comes to ideology. Those who consider themselves more intellectual Trumpists have no shortage of complaints about the president, from his bombing of Iran to his Medicaid cuts. A popular meme shows Trump implementing tariffs and being praised for it by a cartoon supporter in a red hat, who then turns around and declares “art of the deal” every time he removes the levies.

The story of falling Democratic popularity relative to Republicans is therefore only partly a story about Democrats. We are in an era of declining trust, which afflicts nearly all institutions, from the media to Congress to the medical system. Of course, the two major political parties are likely to take a hit under those conditions. Yet Republicans are buoyed by a cult of personality that is largely impervious to the effects of bad news or unpopular policy positions.

According to the Wall Street Journal poll, Republicans are currently about where they were in 2010 in terms of net favorability. Meanwhile, Democrats have seen an almost continuous decline. Thus, the notion that Trump is a drag on the GOP likely gets things exactly backwards. While his overall popularity might be underwater, what distinguishes Trump from other politicians is his ability to hold a base of support among a substantial and unshakable minority of the American people. This rubs off on the rest of the GOP, as long as lesser Republicans are seen to be doing the bidding of their leader.

That doesn’t mean all hope is lost for Democrats. While the party is indeed divided on whether it should become more moderate or liberal, there is greater unity on standing up to Trump. In a March poll that asked Democrats how they would grade their party’s response to Trump, 70% gave them a C or lower, with 21% giving an F. Only 17% said that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was doing enough to fight Trump; 61% felt he wasn’t doing enough. Democratic voters overwhelmingly support efforts like trying to block Trump’s actions through the courts and engaging in mass protests.

It follows that Democratic elected officials can likely shore up their own base of support by standing together against Trump’s political priorities. Would that possibly hurt them with Independents? One can’t say for sure, but given that Trump’s overall approval rating is underwater, it isn’t as if they would be going against the tide of public opinion. And Republicans are already extremely polarized against Democrats, and likely to stay that way, given their increasingly propagandistic media-consumption habits.

Trump’s role in the national psyche is so overwhelming that nearly every major political story is, at heart, a story about Trump. Republicans believe what they believe largely based on what Trump says and does. The Democrats are now a party that is ideologically divided, but united in opposition to Trump.

Given the fact that Trump’s base can’t be moved, Democrats might as well show life and pull out all the stops to oppose his agenda. On policy and messaging, it probably makes sense to moderate, rather than move to the Left. On anti-Trump opposition, however, the party must be resolute. In other words, Democrats need a centrism that fights. As the Republican Party becomes more and more enthralled to one man and his personal agenda, there is little to be gained by hoping to appease the other side.

Oppositional centrism would shore up the Democrats’ own base, and likely has the best chance of winning over the small number of Americans who are still persuadable. MAGAs will find a reason to be angry regardless. In order to thrive in the face of an increasingly unified opposition, Democrats cannot keep living in fear of the backlash that might result from standing up to Trump.

The Big Beautiful Bill — or the Big Bullshit Bill, or Beautiful Billionaire Bailout, depending on who you ask — qualifies as the fullest articulation of Trumpism yet, revealing the President’s disregard for debt and love of profligate spending, his worship of the plutocrats and his contempt for those who might need a hand. It’s a bill in which rape and pillage and a dozen more private planes and real estate deals for Eric and Jared could be ensconced somewhere among the 940 pages that took nearly 16 hours to read aloud on the Senate floor, and no one would know. Here is a bill that will add a 10-digit number to the debt limit, inspiring the arch-budget conservative from Texas, Chip Roy, to comment, “I don’t think the math is correct yet” — as if Trump’s thirst to achieve for himself the moment that would ever after define him as the most consequential figure in United States history had anything to do with maths.

That said, a few sums are worth mentioning: billions for border and national security, while billions are subtracted from wind and solar investments in green energy. The biggest cut in the history of Medicaid, totaling around $1 trillion, stripping coverage from almost 12 million lower-income Americans. An extra shot of $150 billion to the Pentagon for bombs and missiles — to be allocated by chat-group addicted, ex-Fox anchor Pete Hegseth, the one with the Crusader tattoos. Billions deducted from food assistance, most notably school lunches for hungry kids, and more than $100 billion in tax cuts for the top one-percent.

The BBB will see $3.3 trillion added to the national debt over the next decade, enough to make even the most ardent acolyte of modern monetary theory blanch, and more than enough to make Elon Musk descend into a rant and against, in the Republicans, the “Porky Pig Party”, whose representatives should “hang their head[s] in shame”.

Musk threatened any member of Congress who voted for “the biggest debt increase in history” with an ominous promise: “They will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this earth.” Not a single “No” vote came of it, although the GOP may rue the day.

Infuriated by yet another betrayal from his erstwhile bestie, the President vowed to launch a DOGE investigation into the world’s über tech-bro, threatening that the MAGA minions over at ICE might send Musk “back home to South Africa”. (That said, the end of Americans’ $7,500 credit for buying Teslas will likely be punishment enough.) On the White House lawn, Trump went so far as to muse metaphorically: “DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.”

During 27 hours of voting and debate, the drama of the Big Beautiful Bill ascended to the heights of tragedy. “It is inescapable that this bill will betray the promise Donald Trump made,” the Republican senator Thom Tillis said on the Senate floor. Knowing full well the fate that awaited him and his party, Tillis prophesied that the Republicans would get trounced in the 2026 midterms. Then he announced that he would not run for re-election. Such roadkill not only satisfied Trump (“Great News!” he wrote), but delighted the Democrats, who view the Tillis retirement as a chance to fill the North Carolina seat with one of their own.

The retirement of Nebraska’s conservative centrist, Don Bacon, similarly made headlines. There were also episodes of comic buffoonery, typified by Joni Ernst, Senator from Iowa, who dismissed fears that the bill would mean that upwards of 80,000 Iowans would lose health insurance. “We’re all going to die,” she flippantly told her critics.

Hours of strong-arming, horse-trading, side-dealing, intimidating, coercing, and internecine negotiations between the true believers, the last of the fiscal hawks, and what was left of the wonk coalition — those who might actually care about the alternative minimum tax and foreign-derived intangible income — lasted until the dawn’s early light.

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After Musk, the deluge

By Malcom Kyeyune

By that point in the debate, weary members of the media had been whipped into a strung-out frenzy of cliché. There was a “needle to thread”. It was “make-or-break” time. The vote would be “a real nail-biter”. While the press called play-by-play, exhausted interns munched pizza and played cards, and Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama lit a cigar.

But as everyone knew from the get-go, the BBB — now the somewhat less sonorous “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — would squeak through the Senate with a somber Vice President JD Vance casting the deciding vote. The pandemonium has now transferred to the House of Representatives, where the one-trillion dollar addition to the deficit has brought frustrations to a climax. As one moderate Republican asked incredulously: “How did it get so much fucking worse?”

It’s “very complicated stuff”, Trump acknowledged, then got on a plane to Florida, leaving the drone of roll-call votes behind him.

“It’s a shitshow,” said Georgia Congresswoman and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

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The futility of fact checkers

By Frederick Kaufman

Whether or not the ceremonial signing will occur on the evening of the Fourth of July, as Trump has demanded, remains a matter of speculation, but despite the rhetoric of suspense there is no doubt that the bill will eventually wend its way to the Oval Office, where it will at long last be graced by the touch of Trump’s omnipotent Sharpie.  

So much for the views of the American people. Harry Enten, CNN’s data guru, described the public opinion ratings gathered by Pew, Quinnipiac, and Fox as “terrible, terrible, terrible”. “The American public, at this particular point, hates, hates, HATES the Big Beautiful Bill,” he said. No matter, so long as the President can deliver $10 billion more for his ready-for-primetime immigration raids.

“It’s bad legislation,” concluded Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. “This is a political gift for Democrats.” Everyone on both sides of the aisle knows Kelly is right — that is, everyone but the fanatics blinded by their loyalty to the king — but everyone also knows that for the time being, Trump’s agenda will in some redacted and compromised form prevail, the dollar will sink to new lows, and the rich will prosper like pigs at the trough.Which is all according to MAGA plan.

But politics are not foolproof. Trump’s opus may backfire, as the Democrats now have an arsenal of images and rhetoric, and are already planning to inform every American that Republicans cut school lunches and Medicaid and sent their hairdresser and housekeeper to a dungeon in the Sudan.

As if to prove the point, just as I was finishing this piece, I received a text from none other than Nancy Pelosi: “Democrats will respond to Republicans’ attack on the most vulnerable Americans,” it began. “I’m calling on a historic 5,000 donations in the next 24 hours to have a HUGE fundraising day for Democrats…”

Will the Republicans finally self-destruct into the long-anticipated splintering, as Elon Musk joins the Freedom Caucus to forge a new, post-Trump juggernaut? Will the Democrats attract the neo-liberal leftovers of the GOP, benefit from a backlash to the behemoth bill, take the House, and impeach what will be a weakened and aged post-2026 lame-duck President? Have the last twenty years of American populism finally hit a tipping point? As lawmakers rush to return to their latest nightmare, as the only certainty that awaits American politics is heavy weather.

The chances are that Trump will win this latest legal battle, just as he won the previous ones. The Supreme Court, where this legal battle may ultimately end up, has a majority of conservative justices. Six have been appointed by Republican presidents, three of them by Trump himself. The court’s most recent rulings have tilted heavily in favor of Trump. It ruled before last year’s election that Trump enjoyed immunity for actions he committed as president. It ruled in favor of the Trump administration in a case involving his decision to remove two members of an independent federal agency; on a case involving the protected status of Venezuelan migrants; and on a case that limited the scope of environmental reviews. The Supreme Court went against him in a decision to deport a Venezuelan accused of gang affiliations. This history of the court’s ruling would suggest the odds are 80:20 in favor of Trump.

But the deeper reason why I think Trump will win is that the New York court’s legal argument would set a very dangerous precedent if confirmed. It would be dangerous for Democrats too. Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act from 1977 to justify his “Liberation Day” tariffs. That act was signed into law by Jimmy Carter. It was meant to enable a president to take emergency measures after the oil shocks of that decade.

Trump’s lawyers argued that the persistent US trade deficits constituted a national emergency that would justify the triggering of the Act. The New York court rejected this line of argument because the US has been running trade deficits since 1976. How can something be an emergency if it has been going on for that long?

The argument is sheer sophistry. In finance and economics, most crises occur due to things that have been going on for a long time. Remember subprime mortgages? They started in 1988. It took another 20 years until they triggered the global financial crisis. Or think about diseases in medicine. Life is full of emergencies whose causes started to build over long periods.

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Why the EU should fear Trump’s tariffs

By Wolfgang Münchau

But let’s suppose I am wrong. Trump loses the court case. Then what?

He still wins. This is because he has so many other ways of imposing tariffs. And on top of that, many more ways of achieving similar outcomes.

It already started on the weekend, when he said he would double the steel and aluminum tariffs to 50%. These tariffs come under a different heading: Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. I have counted five Acts that allow a president to impose tariffs — and there are probably more. Section 232 deals with national security. Joe Biden used it to impose a 100% tariff on electric cars from China. Trump’s car tariff also falls into this category.

Could the courts challenge him over Section 232? I doubt it. Historically, courts have not gone against the President over national security. Trump invoked Section 232 with the argument that the US has become dependent on imports for certain critical goods and materials, like vehicles, steel and also drugs. This is factually correct. You cannot use Section 232 to put an import on champagne and argue that you need to block its flow for national security reasons. But Trump can still do what the Europeans do: establish some food and wine standards that only domestic suppliers can fulfill.

The jargon of US trade and finance politics includes a lot of numbers, which all happen to be in the hundreds. There is also Section 301 of the 1974 US Trade Act. This is about unfair trading practices. Section 301 is triggered by an official investigation by the US Trade Representative. It is a powerful act, but slow. It follows strict procedural rules. They have to launch an investigation, hold hearings, and allow people to raise objections. But when all this is over, the President decides.

And then there is the nuclear device: Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Act from 1930. That is the Act that triggered the Great Depression. Smoot-Hawley allows the President to impose tariffs of up to 50% for the most quotidian of reasons: to shield American industry from foreign competition. Smoot-Hawley is surprisingly still on the statute books.

You want more numbers? There is also Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which gives Trump the power to impose tariffs of 15% for up to 150 days, no questions asked. If you deep-dive into the current bill, which passed the House of Representatives by a single vote last week, you might come across Section 899. This introduces a tax on foreign investors whose countries are deemed to run tax regimes the US considers detrimental to the interests of US business.

I am going to stop here with the numbers. But the bottom line is that Trump will find a way. Only a fool would bet on Trump being stopped by the courts. It did not happen in the past. It won’t happen now.

Behind these serial misjudgments lies a deeper problem. One of the reasons why centrist, liberal democracy is in retreat is its tendency towards lawfare. The German military historian Carl von Clausewitz described war as the continuation of policy with other means. Lawfare is the continuation of policies through the courts. If you don’t win elections, you still have the courts. This is an abuse of the legal system. Democracy is not meant to work that way.

Lawfare also has a tendency to backfire. There are many examples other than Trump’s criminal trials. The UK Supreme Court’s decision to stop Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament in 2019 represented another campaign whose efforts did not have the intended effect. The ruling was celebrated by the Remain campaign, but it also triggered new elections that Johnson won with an unexpectedly large majority. The European Commission also commits lawfare through a procedure they call “rule of law”. It is where politicians vote to withhold payments to recalcitrant EU members. Courts in France and Romania have banned the lead candidates in presidential elections. In Germany, centrist politicians are actively discussing whether to seek a ban of the Alternative for Germany. If you can’t beat them, ban them. That’s lawfare.

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The death of the centre-right

By Wolfgang Münchau

Lawfare fails for two reasons. It rallies the broader support base of those who are subjected to it — which is what happened with Trump, and with the Leave campaign during the Brexit years. But, perhaps more importantly, it has a terrible effect on those who pursue it. The lawfarers relied on the courts to do the dirty work for them. They were not sufficiently focused on defeating Trump in the elections, because the courts lurked in the background.

I see centrist-liberal complacency everywhere. Here in Europe liberals wrap themselves in the Ukrainian flag and promise that they will support Ukraine for however long it takes to defeat Russia. But for that promise to mean anything, it would have required some real sacrifice, like higher taxes, a gas and oil embargo, or comprehensively cutting off Russian banks from the Western financial system. I feel sorry for Ukraine that it has such spineless allies. The problem with liberal centrists is that they fight battles that are legal rather than political. They like something done. But they don’t like to do it themselves. They don’t fight wars themselves but prefer somebody else to fight it for them. The European centrists hate Trump in part because he ended that toxic game.

The reality is that Trump has won two elections, and he has got almost four years left to govern. The intelligent question for his opponents to ask is not how to defeat him in the courts, but how to move forward when they take over from him, and what parts of the agenda they should focus on if they were to win the mid-term elections next year. What should the US-China relationship be? Or US trade policy after 2029? Do you really want manufacturing to come back? What kind of manufacturing?

The reason why electorates are disaffected with incumbents is that many voters are not partaking in the fast lane of the 21st-century economy. It would be a massive job trying to fix this. It would mean reconnecting the average voter with the 21st-century economy. Trump managed to connect with the average voter better than his Democratic opponent, but in the end I don’t think he will deliver for them. The Trump presidency is more likely than not to end in disappointment. The sole purpose of the tariffs is to pay for the tax cuts that will benefit mostly the rich. If you want to defeat Trump, forget the courts. Start solving the actual problem.

Sunstein imagined that Biden might not remember him, as they hadn’t seen each other in years. Yet Biden took Sunstein’s arm and recited his whole biography to the French President, including “details about my life that I only vaguely remember[ed].” But that was only a rare glimpse of a Biden who was no more. A younger Biden would have been able to assert leadership, make the case for his policies, and take arguments about his vision directly to voters. That is not the man we got. Rather, we ended up with a greatly diminished to barely functioning commander in chief.

Yet contrary to the cartoonish narratives of the Right, the debacle revealed not only the weaknesses of the Democratic coalition and mainstream media — but also some of their strengths.

Biden’s deterioration over the course of his presidency is a Shakespearean tragedy. His whole life, he enjoyed being around, and sometimes helping, other people. He finally achieved the position where he could best indulge his sociality and lift up his fellow citizens. Yet by then, Biden simply couldn’t function in the job, as recounted in Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin.

The authors’ portrait of Biden shows a man who is still gregarious and optimistic. But he is unable to reliably go even minutes unscripted without embarrassing himself or causing political headaches. This forced Biden’s top aides to hide the once charming and charismatic politician from the media and the public as much as they could possibly get away with.

Throughout the process, however, there was always dissension within liberal ranks, and much of the media and Democratic establishment were just as fooled as members of the public. There are certainly villains in this story, but also some heroes. These are realities we cannot forget in the Trump era, when previously unthinkable levels of corruption and fealty toward one man have been normalized. 

Original Sin offers necessary background on Biden’s life, followed by a mostly chronological account of his downfall, covering his 2020 campaign through the end of his presidency. It is now clear that the problems that became so glaringly undeniable in the June debate with Donald Trump had been brewing long before Biden won the Democratic nomination. Those close to him trace his mental deterioration to the death of his son Beau from glioblastoma in May 2015, which was followed by Hunter’s downward spiral. 

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How Elon Musk lost the plot

By Richard Hanania

The Hur Report, released in February 2024 after a probe into Biden’s mishandling of classified information, cited tapes from 2017 and described them as revealing “significant limitations” in Biden’s memory and speaking ability. During debate prep in 2019, Biden forgot the name of Mike Donilon, whom he had worked with since 1981. Tapper and Thompson speculate that if it hadn’t been for Covid preventing a traditional campaign that year, Biden would have shown himself unqualified and never become president. 

At one point, the campaign decided that the candidate would have a Zoom meeting with a group of Americans and then release the footage. Yet the product was unusable in the end, with one top Democrat sighing that Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” Another Democratic figure told the authors that, even at that early point, it was clear there was no way Biden could be president. In the end, staffers were only able to release a few minutes of exchanges on the topics of racial justice and health care.

The Zoom debacle was one example of a half-decade-long effort to hide Biden’s shortcomings from the world. The presidency was an endless minefield. Those who led him through it were referred to internally as “The Politburo,” which was composed of Donilon, counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, and White House deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, with other aides, such as Anita Dunn, just outside that innermost circle.

It fell on this group to constantly find ways for Biden to shirk his expected duties. Biden couldn’t pronounce the names of world leaders, so by 2021, staff would write out “President / Prime Minister of X country” on texts he was supposed to read. An organization would ask for a five-minute video from the President; but the White House would only produce one or two minutes, and even then, Biden would botch his lines.

There would be fundraisers at which a politician would normally be expected to deliver off-the-cuff remarks. But Biden aides would ask for a teleprompter setup and insist that the demand was nonnegotiable. The White House was in a constant state of crisis management, always ready to mislead journalists or go on the offensive to try to discredit reporters who raised uncomfortable questions about the President’s age.

What lessons are there to draw from this tragicomedy? The Right has a ready and predictable answer. Once again, the Establishment lied to us. There was an important fact about the world that the vast majority of the American people could see with their own eyes, and Democrats and their media allies wouldn’t acknowledge said reality for partisan and self-interested reasons. There is certainly some truth here. Original Sin makes apparent that things were much worse and for much longer than those of us on the outside had reason to suspect.

Yet to turn this into another elite-bashing narrative would be an oversimplification. Yes, there were real malefactors: Donilon, Richetti, Reed, and First Lady Jill Biden — not to mention the former President himself. They misled the public, and there should be reputational consequences for this. But there were also heroes, and ultimately, the party did push Biden out of the 2024 race.

We learn throughout the book that Democratic members of Congress and journalists had their own suspicions, which is why they were kept away from the President throughout his administration. Presumably, had they known how bad things were, the idea of Biden running again would have been untenable within the party much earlier.

Nonetheless, there was pushback even before the debate with Trump that ultimately led to Biden’s downfall. In June 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that behind the scenes, there was the widespread impression that Biden’s mind was slipping. Journalists added up the number of news conferences and interviews Biden had done, and told the world that he compared unfavorably to recent presidents. Ezra Klein used his position as a New York Times columnist and podcaster to take the remarkable step of calling for the President not to seek re-election — all the way back in February 2024. 

Then, too, Biden’s political, legal, and personal problems in large part stemmed from the fact that Democratic and media elites demanded some adherence to the rule of law and the idea of impartial justice. 

Hunter was put on trial in the summer of 2024, and members of the Biden family sat in the courtroom as they were publicly humiliated. The defendant had lied on his application for a gun by claiming that he wasn’t a drug user. The trial ended up drudging out the skeletons in the Biden family closet. The prosecution recounted how after Beau died, Hunter began an affair with his widow, introducing her to crack.

Hunter’s daughter Naomi took the stand and claimed that her father was progressing in his recovery when he bought the gun. But she was revealed to be lying when prosecutors presented texts showing that he was ignoring her pleas to get together around the same time he had given a drug dealer access to his bank account. Hunter was convicted — and still awaiting sentencing, along with a trial on tax-evasion charges — when his father pardoned him just after the election. 

Biden had the power to stop this at any point, but he chose not to. He could have pardoned Hunter earlier. Going back further, the President himself made the decision to keep Trump-appointed US Attorney David Weiss in his role as he was investigating his son. Biden could have stacked federal law enforcement with complete toadies like Trump later did through appointing figures like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel as top law enforcers.

The Hur investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents similarly required the President to take a hands-off approach throughout the process and refrain from exercising powers he technically had. It was even Biden’s personal attorney, Patrick Moore, who originally found classified documents stored in the President’s former office at the Penn Biden Center. Moore contacted Biden aide Bob Bauer — Anita Dunn’s husband, another one of the staffers responsible for hiding his condition from the world — who informed White House Counsel Richard Sauber.

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This eventually led to an FBI investigation, and ultimately, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the matter. From this came the Hur Report, which concluded that Biden likely violated the law but would be difficult to prosecute because a jury would have too much sympathy for him as an old man with memory problems, which provided fuel to those who questioned his mental capacity.

Needless to say, it is impossible to imagine any of this happening with Donald Trump. 

I have yet to meet a single Trumpian who disagrees with the proposition that Trump would have ever let one of his sons be prosecuted. This isn’t simply because Biden is more personally ethical than Trump, although that is likely true. Democratic elites and the media care about the rule of law, about maintaining fundamental norms, as can be seen in the ways in which law enforcement caused headaches for Biden and his family even as he was in control of the executive branch.

Republican and conservative elites don’t care nearly as much about legal procedure. At least, not under the current populist dispensation. They complain about the politicization of the justice system and corruption among Democrats, and then look the other way as Trump doesn’t even pretend that the DOJ and FBI should operate independent of his personal will; encourages people to send him bribes through purchasing his meme coin; and sits back as his sons strike real-estate deals with foreign governments that he directly benefits from.

Don Jr. and Eric Trump openly attend conferences centered around crypto ventures and the opening of new Trump properties abroad. Trump’s eldest son has even joined forces with members of the administration and donors to start a social club in DC with a $500,000 membership fee. Trump accepting a “palace in the sky” jetliner for his own use from Qatar is only the latest outrage that would have been unthinkable in any other administration. Activities involving far worse corruption than even the worst-case scenario of Biden and his son — if the accusations were proven true — are daily occurrences in Trump World, carried out without the least bit of shame.

There is no political pushback from Republicans to any of this. Trump will, of course, never be in a position to decide whether he will have to pardon his son, because he has made personal loyalty to himself the main criterion for appointing law-enforcement officials and government attorneys, showing few scruples about firing those who refuse to do his bidding. 

In our current moment, it is important to keep two contradictory ideas in mind. Yes, elites make a lot of mistakes, and those responsible for them should suffer consequences. At the same time, things could have been much worse. Indeed, they are much worse with gruff populists.

Democratic elites and the media for the most part didn’t cover themselves in glory when discussing Biden’s mental state. But there was internal dissension throughout the entire unfortunate course of events, as liberals who loved Biden and wanted Democrats to win at least sometimes did their jobs as journalists, attorneys, law enforcement officials, and political leaders. This is not something we can take for granted, and presents a striking contrast to the administration in power now. 

History will remember the personal failures of Biden, and those who worked to cover up his limitations. Yet we cannot blind ourselves to the nature of the developing counter-elites who seek to replace the old liberal establishment. If they have their way, they will bring about a new order with many of the same flaws as the old one, and none of its virtues.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the first name of Merrick Garland.

Yet here I am — still a loyal Democrat. Why is that?

I don’t love modern progressivism. I reject its yearning to reform not just institutions, but people’s souls. Indeed, Marc Dunkelman’s recent book Why Nothing Works has all but convinced me that modern progressivism has turned into a cannibalistic movement chewing to death any attempts at meaningful reform. And with every breath that brings me closer to age 40, I become more and more skeptical of the notion that public policy can right the crooked timber of humankind or alter the fundamentals of human nature.

Given all that, could it be that my loyalty to Democrats has to do with mere tribal identity? I hail from deep-blue New York, which codes entirely Democratic on cultural issues. To a great extent, my Democratic sensibilities can’t help but be shaped by the fact that everybody I knew growing up was Democrat. But tribal identity and teenage gut feelings aren’t solid guides to thoughtful, grownup political participation.

Luckily, there is a better answer, and it has to do with the historical role of the Democrats in America’s modern party system: the fact that in the 20th century, the party has stood for mature governance, warts and all, while the other, the GOP, has been and remains a party too often averse to government as such. When we support political parties, we choose people to govern us. It’s one thing to reject the progressive dream. It’s another to insist upon good governance. 

The Democratic Party was founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren as a vehicle for disaffected farmers and workers. If these groups’ interests didn’t always align, they shared a hostility to the Northeastern establishment, embodied in the Second Bank of the United States, against which Jackson waged war as fiercely as he carried out Indian Removal. As the young republic developed, and sectional tensions over slavery intensified, Democrats found themselves divided in a way that simply wasn’t true of the Republicans, a party explicitly founded in favor of “free labor” and in opposition to the South’s Peculiar Institution. 

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It wasn’t until the 1890s, then, that the modern party system in America really took shape. At that point, the US basically was a single-party state. Having supported secession, pro-slavery Democrats had discredited themselves, and the party as a whole, gifting Republicans with a 30-year run of near-total electoral dominance. The reconstituted Democrats emerged first out of a kind of a yearning for a splinter movement. Attempting to be cutting, a Republican surrogate in 1884 accused the Dems of being the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” but there were enough Catholics and rum drinkers around that the label stuck and became a rallying cry. The Democrats became once more, as in their Jacksonian roots, the party of the underdog and particularly of the urban disenfranchised. 

But that left the Democrats as merely a party of sentiment, not of ideas. The tossing-and-turning of the Grover Cleveland administration — a rare Democratic break in the GOP dominance of the Gilded Age — showed the need for a coherent political philosophy. Cleveland, a man of impeccable integrity, conceived of himself as a mountain of obstruction in the executive branch, scrupulously following the Constitution and vetoing everything that seemed out of bounds. And yet Cleveland was compelled, over the course of his presidency (especially in his second term), to abandon his entire political philosophy.

He sent the feds into Chicago to break a strike — with a number of strikers killed in the chaos. He laid groundwork for the annexation of Hawaii as much as he disliked territorial expansion. And he found himself turning the government into a kind of cash-for-gold program, stocking up gold reserves as much as possible and eventually turning to JP Morgan to bail out the Treasury. As Cleveland said of his reliance on the plutocrats, in a stinging rebuke of the populist wing of his party: “It never occurred to any of us to consult in this emergency farmers, doctors, lawyers, shoemakers, or even statesmen.… The prospect of what we needed might be somewhat improved by making application to those whose business and surroundings qualified them to intelligently respond.”

Every one of Cleveland’s decisions was almost certainly correct under the circumstances, but he left office as a pariah to his own party, at that time undergoing its Populist renovation. His GOP successor, William McKinley, planned to govern with traditional Republican values — above all, a protective tariff — but he, like Cleveland, found himself playing cards from a completely different part of the deck. He committed himself to massive territorial expansion, annexing Hawaii and eventually Puerto Rico, turning Cuba into a protectorate, and extending the US imperium as far as the Philippines. A president who had arrived in office anticipating enclosed continental borders was, by 1898, telling his staff, “it is evident that I must learn a great deal of geography in this [Spanish-American] war.” And protective tariffs — the cornerstone of McKinley’s governing vision — were all but forgotten as expansionism spurred free trade.

If the 1890s showed the incoherence of the governing philosophies of both parties, the 1900s helped to smooth them out. The United States came to terms with its expansionary role in the world — abandoning George Washington’s counsel against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address — recognizing it as a necessary adaptation to the era of high-seas navies, in which overseas territory not picked up by America would tend to fall to a rival. The new power of the executive branch was accepted in an era of heightened international exposure — and charismatically embodied in the almost universally popular Theodore Roosevelt. And the government could conceive of a new domestic role for itself: enforcing nascent antitrust legislation and curbing the monopolistic control of the trusts.

Having entertained William Jennings Bryan’s idiotic silver-standard movement, the Democrats straightened themselves through the Progressive Era, so that, as Dunkelman writes, the 1912 election would come down to “which version of Progressivism … would define the movement going forward.” Government was understood as what John Kenneth Galbraith would call a “countervailing power” checking big business, and an income tax was instituted to overcome the deeply unreliable revenue system of relying on tariffs (which, as often as not, had meant turning to Wall Street whenever there was a crisis).

This, then, is the heart of what the Democratic Party means to me: a robust conception of government, in which government, without ever sacrificing popular legitimacy, carries out executive functions, above all in exercising countervailing power to curb monopolistic practices and in running a coherent, far-sighted foreign policy.

Neither one of these is exactly enshrined in the Constitution, but what everybody in power in the early 20th century discovered was that the Constitution couldn’t solve all problems — that it was necessary to develop a more robust government to deal with new crises: global power politics, predatory business practices, and then the Jim Crow regime that protected itself in appeals to local government and separation of powers.

Republicans would gradually forget all this. In the Twenties, the Republican Party rebranded itself —  very far away from the party of Theodore Roosevelt — as isolationist, strictly laissez-faire in business, but with stultifyingly high tariffs and immigration barriers. That turned out to be exactly the wrong approach to an era of interconnected global crises, whether economic or political, and the result was not only a well-deserved 20-year loss of power for the Republicans starting in 1932, but the dominance of New Deal Democrats through the Sixties. 

The making of the midcentury Democrats involved a transformation arguably more dramatic than Trump’s remaking of the Reagan GOP. Going back to its Jacksonian roots, the Democrats were beholden to a Jeffersonian vision of independent yeomen which saw the Hamiltonian state as, at best, an evil to be minimized and tolerated — barely. There was virtue to this vision, but it failed to answer the problems of the industrial age, when American craftsmen and yeomen became wage-earning employees, who owned neither their own tools nor land, and who were lorded over by enormous oligopolies controlling their respective markets. Prices were no longer a pristine index of supply and demand or marginal productivity, as in the pre-industrial world — but an expression of sheer market power.

Against this backdrop, the Democratic Party managed to refound itself. It adopted a Hamiltonian vision that accepted the rational need for larger institutions. As Dunkelman writes, “these [Hamiltonian progressives] came to believe that the [Jeffersonian] vilification of ‘bigness’ was fundamentally off base. In their view, the salve wouldn’t be in eroding concentrations of power, but in establishing new nodes of public power to hold vast concentrations in check.” In other words, to protect the ideal of republican independence and dignity, it was necessary to wield the apparatus of the federal government: “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends,” in the famous formula of the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

And it was that basic conception that drove the recovery from the Depression, the successful execution of World War II, and the phenomenal achievements of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years. 

The tragedy of the 20th century is that at some point, the Democrats gave up on that political conception. In the Sixties, a progressivism emerged that was essentially nihilist, that believed in tearing-down all concentrated power, that mistrusted the very soul of America. I’m speaking, of course, of the decline of New Deal Democrats and the rise of the McGovernites and their ilk: the cohort that LBJ, the last New Deal Democrat, derided as “Harvard kids.” 

In a way, the acme of this shift was the progressive historian Robert Caro’s ferocious attacks against the legacy of New York’s legendary urban planner, Robert Moses. In his 1974 book, The Power Broker, Caro painted Moses as a liberal autocrat who tore through Gotham’s organic fabric in pursuit of large, rationalized infrastructure. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, representing a similar tendency as Caro, mounted a parallel attack. The enduring result was to delegitimize the Hamiltonian impulse in Democratic government. As Dunkelman puts it, the party’s “previous inclination to build power up had been replaced by an almost insatiable impulse to tear things down.”

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The result was paralysis and red tape everywhere. The Republican Party, having made its own peace with good government under Eisenhower and Nixon, had turned cannibalistic and libertarian by the end of the Seventies, demolishing everything in the American state that wasn’t the military. For their part, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party produced nothing but snarl. Anybody critical of Robert Moses’s excesses might pause to consider the 40 years it took, after Moses’s death, to build a meager extension to the Second Avenue Subway or the city’s utter inability to reconstruct Penn Station. Moses, by contrast, built up several enormous projects in far less time.

Which brings us to today’s Democratic Party. The party today still suffers from the damage wrought by its turn in the Sixties and Seventies. For example, the party’s 2020 assault on policing, now blessedly abandoned, was an echo of the same destructive tendencies that saw Democrats abandon New Deal models and New Deal patriotism in favor of McGovernite suspicion and Leftist excess.

Still, the Democratic Party retains enough muscle memory to be able — maybe, just maybe — to become once more the party of sound government. The movement for so-called abundance, spearheaded by the likes of Ezra Klein, promises to coordinate government and business in order to clear supply bottlenecks, lower prices, and promote the mass, middle-class prosperity that used to be the Democrats’ calling card. Some of this work is deregulatory and involves cutting the kinds of boutique environmental red tape that hinders development in the United States. Some of it, however, would involve — yes — proactive government where the market has failed: industrial policy, workforce training, and the like. 

Compare this to the chaos wrought by DOGE Republicans, as they slash through not just things that need to be slashed — but also funding for the sorts of basic research in the health sciences that form the foundations of US prosperity. This policy can’t but have long-lasting, and destructive, ramifications: researchers and academics leaving the United States in the kind of “brain drain” associated with Third World countries; economic uncertainty prompting other nations to look for new trading partners. 

Allies are caught in the lurch, not sure if they can rely on the United States to maintain its security commitments or even conduct a cogent foreign policy. The United States, whether it likes it or not, is an empire and a hegemon, and the nation owes it to the world to fulfill the imperial obligations it has accrued. That’s what both parties, actually, discovered in the crucial period when the modern party system developed, but the Republicans managed to forget all that and the Democrats almost have. But not quite as badly as the GOP.

So, yes, as much as Democrats drive me to distraction, I remain a Democrat. The party is flawed — deeply flawed — but the job of government, fundamentally, is to govern, and the Democrats are the only party of the two that still takes that task seriously.  

If I underrated the degree of damage Trump would do in those first 100 days — the severity of DOGE was remarkable, and the attacks on free speech have been chilling — my thesis holds: Trump is steadily growing unpopular, and political gravity, over time, will keep tugging him down. He would undoubtedly relish becoming a genuine American fascist, but he simply isn’t. Not yet, anyway. Elections haven’t been canceled, public institutions, if cowed, are not blindly worshipping Trump, and the media still publish freely.

Trump has abused his executive authority in disturbing ways, but so did George W. Bush and FDR when it came to locking up American citizens. Trump is eroding American democracy, but the nation is greater than him. Some of the damage he’s doing might be permanent — reputationally, in terms of Washington’s relationship with the world — but much of it, with another Democratic president, could be reversible. What is ruined by executive fiat can be rebuilt by fiat.

MAGA doesn’t have to consider life after Trump right now, but that life will come. Time is undefeated. Trump will be 82 years old when he ends his second term. He could try for a third, but it’s hard to see him winning. And even if he pretends like he won an election he lost, he will struggle to subdue the military and the security apparatus in time to cling to power indefinitely as an unpopular monarch. On 21 January, 2029, would the American military really obey Trump and not the newly sworn-in president? Would ambitious Republicans who want to be president themselves want Trump lording over them into his 80s and beyond?

Anything is possible. But anything doesn’t have to be likely. Trump will leave the Oval Office, one way or the other, and there will be an American republic after him, however flawed. It will be here, though. Erosion isn’t destruction. If the Roman Empire dragged on for five centuries or so, the United States can at least range beyond 225 years.

In the short-term, Republicans will lose seats in the midterms next year. The operative question is how many. Given Trump’s unpopularity and the possibility that the GOP budget will impose draconian health-care and welfare cuts, Democrats will have much to campaign on in 2026. A repeat of the 2018 blue wave is plausible. I don’t gamble much, but I like the odds of current Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as House speaker at the start of 2027.

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The Senate is a different story, with the Democratic slippage in rural states making the formation of a new majority quite difficult. If Democrats can’t become competitive in states like Iowa, Ohio, and Nebraska again, they will have a hard time forming a Senate majority. At best, it seems, they can claw to a narrow 50-50 split or 51-49 advantage, and even that will not be straightforward next year. They’ll have to play defense in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Georgia (all winnable) and try to flip Maine, where Susan Collins has been quite durable, and North Carolina, where dream recruit Roy Cooper would have a chance to knock out Thom Thillis.

There is no reason to believe Trumpism, as a style and even policy preference, won’t outlast the man. Tariffs will probably lose their appeal because no other Republican is so protectionist and the stock-market slump after Liberation Day actually rattled the political class. Still, on economics, the GOP seems to prefer the new populist flavoring to the decades of neoliberalism that peaked under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Robert F. Kennedy’s attacks on Big Pharma have fit seamlessly into the new Republican Party’s conception of itself.

At the same time, it’s worth wondering how seriously one should take this new populist GOP. If they’re for the common man, why are they trying to gut Medicaid? What about DOGE? That’s all conventionally Republican, even libertarian. Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator, has come out against the attempted Medicaid cuts, but most of the other Republicans have defaulted to their old median. We’ll see how it all shakes out. Beyond 2025 — and even beyond the Trump White House — it cannot be known how long MAGA will persist.

What is it, after all? It’s less political machine than loose movement built around one man. Trump will leave a legacy behind, and he will have, without a doubt, wrenched the GOP in a direction that was unimaginable a decade ago. Will that wrenching continue when he’s out of office? I’m not sure.

MAGA has another three full years in power. In one sense, that’s a very long time. It’s enough of a window for an unhinged executive to continue wrongly deporting people, attacking academic freedom, and eviscerating federal agencies. It’s enough time to blatantly ignore court orders. It’s enough time to behave like an authoritarian and indulge in McCarthyite tactics. It’s enough time to be grossly corrupt. These will be rough years. Even if Democrats have the House, there will be little they can do to combat executive orders beyond filing lawsuits and protesting. That is frightening. It’s important, though, to not give in to either nihilism or catastrophism. As dark as the moment might be, the United States has seen worse.

The first Red Scare in 1919 and 1920 led to the rapid arrest of 6,000 people across 36 cities, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants with ties to Left-wing causes. The second Red Scare extended throughout much of the Forties and Fifties, obliterating countless careers across academia, media, and the arts, and outlasting Joe McCarthy himself. House Un-American Activities Committee hearings roved from city to city, terrorizing Americans who held liberal political views. The CIA and FBI, through programs like COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS, spied on American citizens and infiltrated numerous civil-rights, labor, feminist, and student organizations.

They harassed and intimidated almost anyone who dared to associate with a cause deemed too progressive. And, of course, there was the Bush administration, which erected a vast surveillance state and illegally detained hundreds of individuals at Guantanamo Bay without any due process. Much of what Trump is doing now he learned from Bush the Younger, whose pointless wars brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people across the Middle East and thousands of US service members. It’s important not to forget this.

In short: America is drenched in sin, and America persists. America is not irredeemable; even now, I am proud to be a citizen, and believe in the promise of our Constitution.

To return to the humdrum of electoral politics: What comes next? As someone who is not too enamored with JD Vance, I predict that he is both the probable 2028 GOP nominee and someone who may preside over the crumbling of MAGA. Trump lost an election but pushed onward because he was Trump: he is in possession of an inarguable magnetism, that black magic, which holds the project together. One cannot look away from Trump. But many can look away from Vance, who underperformed in his Senate race and lucked onto the 2024 ticket.

Vance is smart person, even a serious one, but he does not possess Trump’s charisma. It is difficult to imagine him presiding over a rally of tens of thousands unless Trump is there to first lure the MAGA faithful into the tent. Hard, too, to conceive of how Vance will persuade so many millions of casual, disaffected voters to head to the polls for him like they did for Trump. One can’t quite be a fan of Vance, right? He’s not a WWE Hall of Famer.

To be sure, it wouldn’t be fair to count Vance out now, not when we don’t even know who the Democratic nominee in 2028 will be. The advantage Democrats will have, though, is that they won’t be the party of incumbency and Republicans will have little to run on unless there’s a great economic miracle in the next few years. In 2024, Trump benefited from pre-Covid nostalgia, and that playbook can’t be run again. The post-Trump GOP — or one held completely captive by the president — will have to find a new path to victory.

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No single political figure in modern times has dominated a political party like Trump has. If the Reagan and Nixon eras may still be more significantly historically, the Trump era, which began the moment he descended the golden escalator at his tower 10 years ago next month, rivals both for import. Assuming Trump remains healthy, he will have been president or running for president for more than 13 years. He loomed over Biden’s presidency, and for younger Republicans, he has supplanted Reagan in their pantheon of political heroes.

He is sanctified for all time. What this means for the movement he leads is another matter. It is difficult to see how he becomes more popular, as president, from this day forward. Second-term presidencies are a slog, and Trump’s has already proved alienating to a wide swath of people, including those who decided, without great passion, to give him another shot in 2024. Biden’s popularity never recovered from the Afghanistan withdrawal. Trump’s fall into the abyss might have begun with DOGE or the tariffs that wiped out all the stock market gains of the last year (mounting a cumbersome recovery since then). When he was running for president, Trump could always claim he presided over a booming 2010s economy with low inflation and nonexistent interest rates. Even though he was in the White House in 2020, most Americans thought of him as the last pre-pandemic president, and he exploited this to maximum effect.

The power of Trump’s personality permitted MAGA, to some extent, to not keep every promise to the voters who elected him. Trump winning and punishing his enemies was a form of deliverance. It feels, finally, that will no longer be enough. The US economy is still robust, as world economies go, but Trump can’t readily tame inflation, fix the housing market, and kickstart a new national industrial policy to make his tariff proposals workable. He doesn’t think that deeply. There are feints in the direction of bona-fide populism, like his executive order on drug prices, though it’s unclear how it will hold up in court.

Trump, unfortunately, is not terribly interested in dragging the GOP-run Congress towards legislation that might make permanent reforms to the health system. Biden, through the Inflation Reduction Act, allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time. Trump is not leaning on Mike Johnson or John Thune to expand Medicaid, introduce a public option, or tackle monopolization in the health sector.

In fact, Republicans seem intent on undercutting the health care on offer for working-class and poor Americans. Assuming they follow through — and Trump is a willing accomplice — MAGA will lose ground. They will have accelerated the inevitable: the occlusion of one era, and a slow march into an unknowable future.

This essay was adapted from Substack.

This week’s special election defeat in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court race for the Trump-backed candidate, Brad Schimel, is not cause for immediate worry. Democrats have turned out in greater numbers in special elections throughout the Trump era, rendering them poor guides to partisan general elections, and Wisconsin’s results mirror that long-term trend.

Plus, Trump’s job approval rating remains historically high for him at about 48 percent, only half a point lower than in early February. The share of Americans who believe the country is on the right track is also at its highest for decades, save for a brief period in early 2021 after the Covid vaccine became broadly available. Given America’s high level of political polarization and the degree of vitriol regularly spewed at Trump and his team, these figures indicate that Trump has mostly maintained his support and remains politically strong.

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There is nonetheless a growing trend that suggests this might change. Trump is increasingly pushing a raft of policies that appeal mostly to his already-committed base. Tariffs on allies, annexing Canada, and a slash-and-burn approach to the federal budget: such measures excite MAGA World but raise serious concerns among the moderate middle, whose votes sent Trump back to the Oval Office.

If Trump continues down this road, he runs the risk of doing exactly what each of his predecessors have done for the past 30-plus years. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden: each leader won by ostentatiously appealing to the center, only to tack hard to the Left or Right once safely in office or, in Bush’s case, re-elected. The presidents’ parties always suffered as a result, either relinquishing control of Congress in horrific midterm losses, or failing to keep hold of the White House.

This is Trump’s potentially fatal temptation. If he can resist playing to the partisan base, he could go into the 2026 midterms in position to expand GOP control and dominance. If he succumbs, however, 2026 could be a year that will live in Republican infamy.

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Trump’s rise and resurrection are largely due to the continued failures of more mainstream politicians. America entered the post-Cold War era on top of the world as the only global superpower. It has yet inexorably declined, losing wars it chose to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its trade policies created the rival power, Communist China, that Washington now fears. Those same policies led to the deindustrialization that fueled the working class’s shift to the Right. Progressive social policy has shattered America’s social consensus, and mass immigration has both pushed Americans even further apart and heightened the economic pressure on the native-born working class.

Those failures, common across the democratic West, have been magnified by a peculiar American failure. Every president since Clinton’s 1992 victory has campaigned as someone who represented the forgotten center of public opinion. Each in power has instead turned their backs on those promises and the voters who placed their trust in them.

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By David Masciotra

The likes of George W. Bush and Barack Obama instead used their political capital to prioritize issues and stances favored by their party bases. Instead of bringing Americans together, these unexplained about-faces pushed them apart and contributed to the steady rise of distrust in institutions and mainstream politicians.

Clinton set the pattern. He campaigned against incumbent President George H.W. Bush as a “new Democrat”, someone who could reform welfare, reduce crime, and stand up to his party’s Left. Clinton took office with large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress as the country endorsed his interpretation of the Reagan legacy.

He instead moved sharply to the Left once inaugurated. His initial budget included a tax on energy that would have punished ordinary Americans. He sought to allow gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military at a time when homosexuality was still largely disfavored. Most important, he tried to create a universal health system that would have dramatically upended care for everyone.

This was not what Americans thought they were voting for when they backed the charismatic young Arkansas governor. They gave him a historically sharp rebuke in the 1994 midterms, returning the GOP to Senate control and giving Republicans a majority in the House for the first time in half a century.

George W. Bush ultimately followed the same course. He campaigned in 2000 as a “uniter, not a divider”, and originally followed on that course. The 9/11 attack shifted his and the country’s focus from domestic to foreign policy, and the seeming victory in the war versus Iraq allowed him to clinch re-election. Republicans held both houses in Congress and started Bush’s second term in their strongest position since 1928.

Bush immediately sought to use this majority for something he had never hinted at: so-called Social Security reform. It had long been a goal of conservatives to move the government-pension program from a uniform entitlement to one based on individual investment, and Bush began his second term trying to make this dream a reality.

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The War on Terror returns home

By Will Lloyd

His problem was that he had no mandate to do this, having never made it a key part of his platform. Congressional Republicans wanted no part of such a poorly planned scheme, and Bush abandoned it without it ever even receiving a congressional hearing.

The damage was done, though. Moderates who thought they were getting one thing got another, one they neither liked nor understood. The deteriorating situation in Iraq also contributed to the public shifting towards Democrats. The GOP lost control of both houses in a disastrous 2006 midterm election.

Barack Obama took office in 2008 with the potential to remake his party’s fortunes. Democrats rode dissatisfaction with Bush and the economic collapse to give the party its largest majorities in the House and Senate since 1978. Democrats began talking about undoing the Reagan years and returning the party to the decades-long dominance they had held before the Gipper upset their apple cart.

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Bill Clinton won't go away

By Kat Rosenfield

Obama instead led his party to a midterm disaster even worse than Clinton’s. Democrats lost 63 seats in the House, the most any party had lost since 1938. Republicans gained six Senate seats and would have picked up more but for some ultra-conservative “Tea Party” nominees who lost otherwise winnable races.

Obama “accomplished” this by making a Leftward shift more dramatic than Clinton’s. Having pledged to unite Red America and Blue America, he pushed for a cap-and-trade policy to fight climate change that would have dramatically hiked energy prices for everyone. Like Clinton, he made revamping health care his priority, pushing through the unpopular ObamaCare reform that extended government subsidy and control over the nation’s massive health sector. Democratic dreams of a new era of big government were buried in the 2010 midterm graveyard.

Joe Biden was simply the latest in this long line of losers. Americans thought they were voting for a return to normalcy after Trump’s tumultuous first term. They instead got proposals for multitrillion-dollar government spending programs, with inflation adding salt to the wound, and a renewed progressive culture war. Trump’s continued unpopularity limited Democratic losses in the midterms, but the party still lost House control and Biden’s own re-election dreams were doomed by his unpopularity.

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Trump and Biden shouldn't fear death

By Terry Eagleton

Trump, like his predecessors, was elected to end this ideological warfare. Control the border, get the economy moving again, protect entitlements, and end the woke war on common sense: these were the primary themes Trump campaigned on and which voters accepted. His path forward should be clear.

He certainly is moving quickly on two of these. Trump has effectively ended illegal border crossings and is moving to deport as many illegal aliens as rapidly as possible. His executive orders to remove federal funding from institutions that promote DEI and permit transgender women born as men to compete in women’s sports remain widely popular.

Yet Trump seems to be making his predecessors’ mistakes at the same time. Polls show Americans do not want to annex Greenland or make Canada the 51^st state, yet Trump keeps talking about it. People are divided on imposing tariffs, but they largely oppose levying them on longtime allies and only clearly favor them when levied on imports from China. Trump nonetheless seems determined to dramatically upend 35 years of globalization without the slightest effort to explain the rationale behind this sweeping change.

Trump’s foreign policy also threatens to upend decades of policy in the face of public opinion. About 60 percent of registered voters, and about half of Trump voters, have a favorable opinion of NATO. Yet his relentless criticism of the Western Alliance has convinced most other NATO members that he would not fulfill America’s treaty obligations for mutual defense if they were attacked.

The same is true with Russia and Ukraine. Seventy-two percent of Trump voters see Russia as an enemy or as unfriendly, and only 5 percent of Trump voters sympathize with Russia in its war with Ukraine. They may want military aid to be reduced or eliminated, but they do not want the plucky country to fall under the Kremlin’s sway, much less be humiliated by Washington. Yet the administration is bent on going further than the public.

The signs also point to further shifts that excite the base and frighten the middle. Many Trump backers are urging him to defy court orders blocking some of his executive orders, but 82 percent of Americans think a president should obey court orders even if he disagrees with them. Republicans may agree with his continued deportation of migrants in defiance of a court order for him to stop, but independents disagree by a 20-plus-point margin.

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Who is preventing peace in Ukraine?

By David Patrikarakos

Trump’s order to dismantle the Department of Education as much as practicable under law also risks public condemnation. Republicans want him to do that, but independents largely do not. Even a quarter of 2024 Trump voters do not want him to eliminate the department. His tiny margin of victory, and the GOP’s midterm hopes, would dissolve if even a small group of those people switched sides.

It’s easy to understand why Trump is doing this. His most loyal and fervent backers like all of these actions, and Trump likes to reward people who are loyal. The problem is that his majority rests on many people who are not MAGA loyalists or GOP donors.

Especially among nonwhites, that majority includes millions of people who had never voted for him before. They backed him because four years of Biden Leftist incompetence persuaded them that he could solve their problems. Focusing on these new things engenders the same “bait-and-switch” feeling that have led swing voters to become disillusioned for decades.

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The great American exodus

By Gerard DeGroot

There’s still plenty of time for Trump to get back on track. Stop talking about annexing Greenland or Canada. Explain why tariffs will cause short-term pain but produce long-term gain so that voters are willing to ride out any downturn. Show that what you want in the world is allies who can pull their own weight, not making America isolated in a world we can no longer dominate.

Trump should especially focus on showing positive results on his key platform planks by next November. Ramping up deportations while reducing the number of people wrongfully expelled will satisfy his base and swing voters. He should also keep culture-war fights to battles that unite rather than divide Americans.

Above all, he should rally Americans around shared ideals. Next year is also the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Trump should launch a big initiative to promote it and give many speeches that explain how and why that document provides the foundation for everything he wants to accomplish. That would wrong-foot his progressive enemies, who would be unable to resist the temptation to take issue with his words and thus make “what is America’s promise” the defining question for the midterm.

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An elegy for the American Dream

By J.D. Vance

Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting Thomas Paine’s famous line in his 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense: “we have it in our power to make the world over again”. That’s a utopian sentiment, but even Reagan knew that couldn’t happen all at once.

Trump can remake America, but he can’t do it by dividing his coalition and continuing a generational pattern of presidents saying one thing and doing another. Slow and steady wins the race. A little more focus and less scattershot razzle-dazzle could break the destructive pattern and cement America’s willingness to break with the past and move toward Trump’s view of American greatness.

His solution is equally blunt. He and his advisers insist that aggressive, universal tariffs, combined with deregulation and corporate tax cuts, will render cross-border supply chains less lucrative and domestic investment attractive for business.

The problem is that virtually every other Trump action since Inauguration Day has undercut the state capacity needed to rehabilitate core industries and shepherd capital and labor towards new ones. Instead of leveraging state power on behalf of massive public-private projects, research and development, and workforce training, Team Trump has subjected government agencies to DOGE’s ruthless budget cuts, and frozen funds from or threatened to terminate President Joe Biden’s flagship industrial policies.

The Trumpians are plotting to privatize a host of government services, and have sent a chill through research institutes vital to breakthroughs in advanced medicine, technology, and manufacturing. Meanwhile, the administration has largely crippled antitrust enforcement, thereby favoring powerful monopolies that can withstand or circumvent trade barriers over mechanisms to coax healthy domestic competition and investment.

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Trump stole tariffs from the Democrats

By Justin H. Vassalo

None of these actions furthers the purported aims of tariffs and targeted export controls: to create good jobs for the forgotten working class and turn depressed regions into desirable places in which to work and live. On the contrary, slashing and burning state capacity will hinder these goals. Most damningly, the Hamiltonian tradition the Trumpians claim to champion is a powerful witness against the belief that a crippled state can boost manufacturing.

These shortcomings haven’t stopped some of Trump’s most vehement critics on the labor Left, not least United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, from conceding that he is partly right on trade. The bipartisan Washington establishment of the late 20^th century made a colossal mistake in offshoring millions of jobs on the naive assumption that high-tech innovation and services would replace manufacturing, the historic engine of American upward mobility and growth.

But despite being motivated by fear over China’s phenomenal rise, Trump’s strategy has proved mostly incoherent, not to say contradictory, sowing serious doubts over whether America, after decades of outsourcing and regulatory capture by major multinationals, has the institutional know-how to meet the new president’s promise of industrial renewal.

Trump’s approach isn’t merely myopic, though — it betrays the legacy of the GOP statesmen whom champions of his tariffs regularly invoke to defend the current administration.

The populist Right’s evangelism for Trump’s protectionist impulses has long rested on the notion that he is boldly reviving the “American System” school of economics. This tradition stretches from Alexander Hamilton in the founding era and Henry Clay in the early republic to the heterodox economist Henry Charles Carey, the influential lawmaker Justin S. Morrill (architect of Civil War-era tariffs), and Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. These Republican statesmen and thinkers espoused a doctrine of development premised on diversified manufacturing, vast energy sources, scientific progress, and spreading education in the “industrial arts”.

Scholars describe this doctrine as unabashedly mercantilist. Yet 19^th-century Republicans maintained that it furthered the country’s founding ideals of self-government and associationalism: the notion that an industrious, republican citizenry will form voluntary organizations conducive to promoting shared interests that transcend divisions by region, sector, or class.

Neither laissez-faire nor statist, the old GOP that supposedly inspires Trump fused support for large developmental goals from disparate parts of society — inventors, aspiring industrial magnates, prospectors, advocates of “scientific agriculture”, financiers, and tradesmen. The intent was to spread commercial hubs built on regional interdependence, raising manufacturing and agricultural output while also curbing demand for goods from competitors like Victorian Britain.

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Is Trump engineering a crash?

By John Rapley

Tariffs underpinned this system by pushing farmers, merchants, and consumers to purchase US-made goods and support local industries. Post-Civil War, tariffs underwrote pensions for Union Army veterans and their families (then a huge constituency of the GOP). Tariffs were also meant to lessen the competitiveness of imports made by foreign “pauper” labor, attracting the support of skilled workers who had few other avenues to stable wages.

Like Trump, the Republican leaders of a distant epoch believed high tariffs were a means to building national wealth and power. And their aversion to foreign competition ran deep. Cheap foreign goods were, in modern parlance, the real source of “market distortions”, because, unchecked, they made profitable manufacturing less viable and threatened the livelihoods of skilled workers.

Even Republican reformers who, like Theodore Roosevelt, were more attuned to the daily needs of thrifty households and worried that tariffs had given rise to unaccountable monopolies tended to believe that free trade was decadent. On the verge of America becoming a world power, Roosevelt remarked that “pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fiber”. Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was channeling the same sentiment when he asserted in a recent speech that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream”.

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Will Trump trigger a global meltdown?

By Wolfgang Munchau

But this is where the similarities end. In fact, depicting Trump as a descendant of the old protectionist pedigree misses an important dimension of past Republican thought. From the Lincoln era to Eisenhower’s, Republicans deployed a range of policies besides tariffs to stoke development and progress. The party’s Trumpian incarnation entirely ignores these other strategies, when it doesn’t undermine them.

Take the legacy of Morrill, the lawmaker who, in addition to protective tariffs, authored the legislation that created America’s exemplary land-grant colleges. Morrill well understood the relationship between education in fields like agronomy and engineering and productive innovation. The Homestead Act from the same period, which distributed public lands to frontier homesteaders for a nominal fee, likewise reflected the GOP’s belief in the importance of “decentralized” economic growth for a democratic society.

By contrast, Trump’s sweeping cuts to university grants, including for regional public universities that serve his rural base, disregard the country’s pressing skills shortage. Meanwhile, his lofty campaign pledge to build 10 “freedom cities“, still embryonic, evokes not so much the producer populism of westward expansion, but the dystopian “startup societies” dreamt up by Silicon Valley — or a Middle Eastern petrostate.

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Can ‘abundance liberalism’ save the Dems?

By Sohale Mortazaci

The administration’s axiomatic contempt for regulation is also not in keeping with the GOP’s historical view. Reductive histories portray the GOP as always preaching “small government”. But the party once had vigorous debates about the purpose and scope of regulation.

Despite occasionally assailing corporate malfeasance and grilling feckless CEOs in congressional hearings, today’s Right-wing populists have yet to match the Republican “insurgents” from the party’s Roosevelt wing, including the likes of Sens. Hiram Johnson and George Norris, who pushed for corporate regulation, public works, public utilities, and direct democracy, and took a stand against corruption. Though they were rarely “redistributive” in the social-democratic sense, such positions aimed to prevent abuses by the politically connected and to give working people a material stake in democracy.

Earlier Republicans were also quite experimental in their time. President Herbert Hoover, forever marked by his loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt for failing to alleviate the Great Depression, was, during his earlier tenure as Commerce secretary, a consummate technocrat who sought to deepen cooperation between various government bureaus and business associations to make policymaking more scientific.

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The roots of Trump’s realpolitik

By Michael Lind

In stark contrast to DOGE’s modus operandi, Hoover’s efforts to reorganize government were founded on a belief in expertise and the legitimacy of using regulation to make markets more rational; the development of America’s burgeoning aviation sector, improvements in radio technology, and national business standards for product sizes were among his achievements.

Hoover was hardly a central planner. Judged by the current GOP’s ethos, though, his record of bureaucratic oversight epitomized the growth of the modern administrative state.

Of course, the New Deal realignment, which hobbled the GOP’s support for a generation, cemented the popular view that Republicans regularly opposed active government. But until the Reagan era, most mainstream Republicans accepted the New Deal order, occasionally endorsed breaking up monopolies, and eagerly supported generous federal funding for science and technology, even as they ritually affirmed the principle of “free enterprise”.

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Elon Musk and the return of Anti-Federalism

By Michael Cuenco

Most famously, the Eisenhower administration’s vast Interstate Highway System updated Republicans’ past support for “internal improvements” for the Cold War era, further propelling the rise in suburban homeownership that characterized the postwar boom. And progressives’ arch-bogeyman Richard Nixon, now frequently regarded as the last “New Deal president”, signed NEPA and OSHA, the country’s landmark laws, respectively, for environmental protection and workplace-safety standards.

In short, major players in the Republican Party adopted a more flexible and interventionist view of political economy than is commonly recognized. Most MAGA influencers today would no doubt dismiss such evidence as not reflecting “true” Republicanism. Partisan progressives would similarly concur, at most allowing that “progressive Republicans” are extinct because the Democratic Party became their natural home.

This is to be expected. A few conservative think tanks and public intellectuals have sought to create a genuinely “pro-development” and “pro-worker” agenda for Republicans. But the anti-government tirades of Newt Gingrich, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and their successors in the Tea Party movement did much to fix the partisan battle lines of the last few decades, few of which the MAGA movement has redrawn besides disavowing George W. Bush’s embrace of globalized trade.

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Why the future is Henry the hoover

By Oren Cass

Trump’s GOP is thus fixated on slashing and burning its way through the state, rather than restoring faith in positive government. For a little while, even skeptics allowed that a new working-class base, plus rising tensions with Beijing, might push Republicans to embrace an industrial strategy that recovered some of their party’s authentic traditions of domestic progress.

That possibility has come to naught. While Trump proclaims “liberation” is imminent, the rapid loss of state capacity under his watch promises anything but. Tariffs excepted, there is little concrete government action to compel market forces to meet national economic objectives, and the GOP has bent over backwards to accommodate banking lobbies vociferously opposed to even minor restraints on financial predation.

One hardly needs to be a radical populist to see this doesn’t bode well for American society. As the most perceptive believers in the “American System” understood, an economy that fails to maximize its productive forces and promote workers’ well-being is destined to wither. If America is to avert permanent decline, it needs leaders determined to prevent the spread of servitude masked as “liberty”.

No one embodies this paradox better than the world’s richest man.

He who controls Twitter, now X, exercises a vast power over the culture, and the website is now the personal playground of Musk. As a prolific tweeter with some 219 million followers, Musk would have a powerful voice if he were just a regular user who could amplify certain accounts. As it is, he has also changed the tone and ideological tilt of the public square toward his preferred direction through measures like revenue sharing and the algorithmic derogation of links (meaning, if you share a link in an X post, far fewer people are likely to see it).

To say Musk is biased in his posts or that he shows a disregard for the truth doesn’t come close to capturing the constant stream of nonsense he blasts out to the world. This isn’t a matter of being biased or getting things wrong like CNN occasionally does. His feed is more in the neighborhood of InfoWars, where Alex Jones will typically point to a document that actually exists to make wild extrapolations about what Democrats or “globalists” are up to. Musk is somehow more reckless: the things he regularly promotes lack even that kind of nexus to something based in reality.

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Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism

By Sohrab Ahmari

He approvingly retweeted a tweet about a story pertaining to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants being on the voter rolls in California, yet the link in the original post he himself shared was to a Snopes article debunking the claim. Musk has also falsely asserted that federal disaster-relief funds meant to help Americans were redirected towards housing illegal immigrants, even though the two are completely different programs. When a pro-Russian account claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had a 4% approval rating in Ukraine — in contradiction to all reputable polling — he was fact-checked via a community note, which caused Musk to flip out and charge that the system was being gamed. These aren’t isolated instances. Things like this happen all the time.

It might be reasonable to suspect that someone as successful as he is must just be playing dumb online, while displaying a hidden command when it comes to policy. Yet even if you are sympathetic to his goal of reducing the size and scope of government — as I am — focusing on firing federal employees is just about the worst possible way to achieve that end. Fewer people working at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, doesn’t mean regulators getting off the backs of pharmaceutical companies trying to bring drugs to market. Instead, it makes drug-approval processes longer and more arduous. Or consider: Republicans have tended to oppose student-loan forgiveness, but now cuts at the Department of Education may lead to there not being enough workers to collect debt. Put another way: Muskian methods may be enacting a de facto version of former President Joe Biden’s policies.

Federal employees are a small part of the budget, and Musk’s assertions that huge savings might come from uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse is not taken seriously by anyone who has looked into the issue. He has spread false claims about dead people collecting Social Security that were based on a misunderstanding of a government database. All of this is even before getting to the question of how much of what he has been doing will hold up in court, with many of his moves already facing legal setbacks.

Musk is not alone. Other members of the tech oligarchy close to the administration have regularly spread false or misleading information, albeit on a much smaller scale. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen went on the Joe Rogan podcast a few months ago and made claims that were somewhere between vastly exaggerated and completely false about the Biden administration “debanking” its enemies. During election season, a prominent VC investor asserted that there was massive voter fraud going on in California based solely on a text message someone sent him.

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Elon Musk and the return of Anti-Federalism

By Michael Cuenco

All of this means that even for those of us who are true believers in the capitalist system, it has become clear that the traits that make one successful in business do not necessarily transfer into governance. Nor do they equate to having sensible, or even reality-based, views on policy.

Sure, successful entrepreneurs must have a high level of intelligence and a decent work ethic. But if Musk and other tech titans who have come close to the Trump administration are any indication, they seem to have other traits that imply they should be kept as far away from political power as possible.

What is going on here?

In a well-functioning market economy — assuming we are not talking about an exceptional case like a firm that peddles a highly addictive or otherwise harmful product — profit tends to be straightforwardly related to improving social welfare. People pay because they want a good or service, given conditions of scarcity and their own subjective preferences. Markets also take into account how workers are treated, the well-being of suppliers a business deals with, and an endless number of factors and interests that influence how capital and resources are allocated.

Government, in contrast, doesn’t have a similarly crisp measure of success. Sure, there are some metrics that guide policy makers, such as GDP and the unemployment rate. Yet leaders are expected to consider the long-term health and well-being of a society. They are supposed to respect rights and uphold fundamental values, even if we often disagree about what those values are.

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Musk's two-tier vision of free speech

By Kathleen Stock

As Musk goes on a firing spree and seeks programs he can kill, we see that, in the absence of a widely agreed upon metric for success, he has decided to choose ones that will serve his private purpose. The fewer government employees and the less money government is spending, the better he thinks he’s doing. Again, even if you are a libertarian, this is a dumb way to go about achieving libertarian goals. DOGE has the word “efficiency” in its name, but efficiency is hard to define and measure, so employees fired and money saved have served as lousy proxies. Note also his influence on the latest congressional budget process, which was focused on reducing the page count in the legislation.

Of course, even in terms of Musk’s chosen metrics, success has been limited, as a government official, even a high-placed one, lacks the freedom of a CEO. Congress won’t let Musk touch the true drivers of government spending — namely, entitlements and defense. Musk appears to know this, but doesn’t seem to care when he is making exaggerated claims about what DOGE can and has accomplished. Grasping for metrics that are as useful as profits and losses in business has clearly led him astray. Note also that even when he finally acknowledged recently how much of government spending goes to entitlements, he felt the need to lie about these programs and say that they are there so the Left can attract illegal immigrants to the country.

Compounding the problem is the information bubble in which Musk has imprisoned himself. On X, his engagement is overwhelmingly with con artists, conspiracy theorists, and grifters. He now follows Catturd, a man who believes in every conspiracy theory from anti-vax to chemtrails, and whose ignorance and sycophancy towards Trump are legendary among regular X users. When the Trump administration tried to stir up social-media influencers by giving them the “Epstein files”, the results were so ridiculous that even many MAGAs felt compelled to say so. Yet Musk was still spreading the narrative that the deep state was thwarting Trump’s attempts to get to the bottom of the issue. Understand that there is a hierarchy in terms of how insane MAGA influencers are, and even among them, Musk pushes narratives that only appeal to the worst.

There is no indication in his prodigious tweeting that he relies on any newspapers, serious books, or credible sources of information. When a data scientist at X once told Musk that he had fallen for a conspiracy theory that would only appeal to a person at the tenth percentile of gullibility, Musk cursed at him. The man seems to have a deep lack of intellectual curiosity not only about the arguments of his political opponents, but even those of informed observers who would be inclined to support his project.

Again, having a kind of tunnel vision actually works well in business. An entrepreneur can afford to ignore the business press and what is happening in other industries and simply go about pursuing his vision of change. Yet a political actor can’t completely discount the views and opinions of those he disagrees with, because they are going to be part of the landscape going forward. And wise leadership requires a broad perspective on legal, economic and political affairs that raw genius can’t compensate for. Having a policy idea, for example, requires not only knowing whether it will work in the narrow sense, but also whether it can get through the courts and the legislative branch. This doesn’t mean that it would be a good use of his time for Musk to be reading case law, as no one can be an expert in everything, but it is necessary to have a grasp of reliable sources of information.

This leads to perhaps a more important difference between business and political success, which comes down to the ability to negotiate with and placate one’s enemies. An entrepreneur or CEO can act like a conqueror, provided his product is innovative enough or his market power overwhelming enough. If he builds a better, cheaper, faster product, society benefits, and he conquers his sector — or even creates an entirely new market. He never has to even be in contact with his competitors, who are free to do something else if they are less talented or lucky.

In contrast, the fundamental question of democratic politics is how to peacefully settle disputes between individuals and parties that disagree with one another. Healthy democracies celebrate leaders who bring us together, or at least take actions that are conducive to long-term peace and stability. Musk regularly spreads completely fabricated conspiracy theories about his political opponents, has repeatedly implied that those he disagrees or has disputes with are sympathetic towards pedophilia, when not referring to them as pedophiles themselves, and recently called Sen. Mark Kelly a traitor after he posted his support for Ukraine. Mean words directed at a business rival hurt feelings but have little social significance. In politics, however, fortunes reverse quickly, and today’s defeated opposition could be tomorrow’s governing party primed for payback. Moreover, truly lasting change is usually a product of bipartisan efforts.

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DOGE is not radical enough

By Malcom Kyeyune

Finally, successful capitalists often have superhuman levels of optimism. The upside of such an outlook can be huge, and there is nothing wrong with this. If they fail, they simply lose money and distress their investors, who knowingly took on the risk. But public responsibility requires an appreciation for life’s tragic dimension and for the possibility that careless action, combined with bad fortune, can wreck society and millions of lives.

Musk’s reliance on sycophants like Catturd seems related to his overwhelming optimism. There’s little in his past to indicate he has ever sought out people who challenge him intellectually. Again, this trait may not matter in business, where so much depends on taking innovations that exist and bringing them to market. Drive and the ability to inspire a team can be what make the difference between success and failure.

But again, public life is different. Foolish wars are often started because leaders think they’re going to be easy — think George W. Bush’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Say what you will about communist regimes, one thing they have never lacked is optimism about how their plans will turn out.

To be sure, this analysis doesn’t explain everything about Musk’s recent behavior. There may be other dimensions. I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022, whether it was from drug use, social-media addiction, a combination of both, or something else. It’s possible that all his business ventures begin to fail from now, which would indicate a more general decline in his cognition and ability to regulate his emotions. Much reporting has been done on Musk’s drug use, which has been serious enough to worry many around him.

Yet if Musk continues to succeed as a businessman while being this dumb about everything related to public policy, he will end up having given us what was by far history’s greatest demonstration of the non-transferability of insight and skill across domains where wise leadership is necessary for human flourishing.

This is not Trump country — far from it. But despair in Hunts Point, where almost half of residents live below the poverty line, and where drugs and prostitution are rife, is forcing a rethink. One shopper here stops to tell me why Biden lost her vote. “What did he give me?” Rosaria asks. “My groceries now cost a bomb, my gas is up and I’ve never felt less safe here in my life.” Just a few days ago, she tells me, her son’s best friend got “snatched up” — kidnapped — and they still can’t find him. He was last seen buying a drink inside the local bodega, but nobody has heard from him since. Rosaria believes it could be gang-related. “I don’t want my children outside after dark anymore.”

In this year’s election, 27% of Bronx voters plumped for Trump, almost three times more than in 2016. And in Hunts Point, right at the heart of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th district, the Rightward lurch is even starker. In this neighbourhood, Trump increased his share of votes by 50% compared with four years ago — one of the biggest pro-Trump swings in the country. Nor was this trend unique to the Bronx: Queens, Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn are all becoming redder too. Yet as the electoral post-mortems begin, one big question remains: can New York’s conservative resistance grow?

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Trump launches his New York heist

By James Billot

New York City hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Michael Bloomberg (before he switched allegiances) in 2005, and the state hasn’t voted for a GOP president since 1984. But dissatisfaction with the status quo has been rising since 2020 as crime, the migrant crisis and housing all worsen. No wonder, then, that 573,000 New Yorkers abandoned Harris. While she might have won the city comfortably, securing over twice as many votes as Trump, her margin of victory was 16% lower than Joe Biden’s four years earlier.

For the Republicans, the main challenge here is less the Democrats, and more voter apathy. Of Hunts Point’s 11,000 or so residents, only around 2,774 voted (2,039 for Harris, 735 for Trump). This means that if Rosaria is the face of the GOP’s new coalition — urban, working class and Hispanic — then it is people like her who Republicans need to rally to their side. And while she has reservations about the President-elect (the “Mexico is sending rapists” line still rankles), she says she’s more willing to vote Republican than ever.

Other voters in AOC’s district are more bullish about their support for the President-elect. In the heavily Hispanic neighbourhood of North Corona, a corner of Queens where nearly half of residents went for Trump, a group of Latino barbers explained why they voted red. “Our neighbourhood is a wreck,” says one. “No one is trying to fix anything around here.” Another says that in the past two years, four of his close friends have lost their jobs due to rising costs. He wonders if he’ll be next. One pulls out a phone to show me his two young boys wearing the full MAGA uniform: red cap, red t-shirt and camo trousers. They all went to the President-elect’s rally in the South Bronx. “He came out here to speak to us,” he says. “I’ll never forget that.”

One reason for their discontent muscles out all the others: crime. Like Rosaria, they felt disorder in their neighbourhood was “out of control”. And migrants — North Corona has taken in a big chunk of 200,000 arrivals into the city since 2022 — are getting the blame for the concurrent spike in law-breaking. Yet it was in the Bronx that I saw the city at its worst. As I walked west from AOC’s district into New York’s poorest, a fight broke out by a McDonald’s between two groups of schoolchildren. The brawl was eventually broken up by security, but moments later three undercover police officers escorted a boy in handcuffs to a van. Here was the tale of two Bronxes: rowdy locals scrapping outside of boarded up shops and battered police vans while the new Yankees stadium, which cost some $2.3 billion, loomed behind. The stadium was meant to be a symbol of the borough’s rejuvenation, but it acts, instead, as a constant rebuke.

Certainly, Republicans in New York have increasingly understood the electoral power of disorder. Last year, Trump laid out his “plan to restore law and order”, which he said includes a “record investment in hiring, retention and training” for police officers nationwide and bolstering liability protections for law enforcement. More locally, it formed a core part of Lee Zeldin’s 2021 gubernatorial campaign, where he compared the city’s streets to a “combat zone”. In the end, the Trump loyalist lost to Kathy Hochul, but he nonetheless outperformed expectations — a trend for Republicans in almost every election cycle since Covid. The real test for the GOP, though, will be the mayoral election of 2025. Trump, after all, won’t be on the ballot, meaning that Republican candidates will not be able to ride on his appeal in quite the same way. And already, the odds are heavily stacked against the party. For one thing, the city remains heavily blue, with the number of registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans by around six to one.

At the same time, Harry Siegel explains that the Republican ground operation in New York is basically non-existent. “I am not seeing any sort of serious effort for people outside of the Democratic Party machine to build organisations, structures, and a compelling case to take on the party,” says Siegel, a writer at The City. For that reason, Siegel continues, New Yorkers will once again be left with a choice between the “corrupt centre” and the “crappy progressives”. “There are no serious Republicans throwing their hat into the ring,” he laments. “Those in the running have given no thought to how they would actually run the city.” It’s no wonder that it’s hard to get the vote out.

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Yet if a “serious” Republican wanted to run, or an independent like Jim Walden could be persuaded to take the ticket, now would be the time to jump in. Eric Adams, the current mayor, is under investigation for bribery and campaign finance offences, while polls show a majority of New Yorkers want him to resign. If Adams were forced out, or else resigned before the end of his term, that would trigger a special election whereby candidates from any party could challenge the Democrats. It’s a small window of opportunity. But an insurgent candidate campaigning on three key issues — crime, the migrant crisis and housing — could surely energise enough voters and turn those historically low turnouts into a strength.

The 2024 election, after all, was a story not of Republican triumph, but of Democratic passivity. Trump may have added nearly 100,000 votes to his tally from 2020, but over half a million Democrats simply stayed at home. And for those who did vote red, their decision was often deeply personal. Nearly everyone I spoke to said Trump was the first Republican they’d gone for, and many remained loyal Democrats further down the ballot. They don’t see Trump as a Republican, but an outsider, meaning that GOP gains here are by no means guaranteed after the President-elect finally leaves the stage.

New York, then, is for the Democrats to lose. And right now it feels like that’s exactly what’s happening. Between a housing emergency, a migrant crisis, and crime that’s barely back below its Covid peak, fury with the city’s liberal leadership is bubbling over. Those half a million voters who didn’t exercise their democratic right were sending a message to the party. And if they continue to feel ignored, they’re bound to abandon the Democrats. “What more do I have to lose?” Rosaria asked me. In next year’s election, we’ll see if anyone can be bothered to agree.

To an American living through the election season, things look very different. There’s nothing secret about the American psyche these days. Kamala Harris describes former president Donald Trump as “unstable and unhinged”, and compares him to Hitler. And he describes her as having “the mental faculties of a child”.

Enright’s worry that voters are not listening to politicians marks her as a Harris person; Trump people tend to see the problem as politicians not listening to voters. The American elections pit a party of the System (Harris’s Democrats) against a party of the Electorate (Trump’s Republicans). Naturally, worried foreigners will rally to Harris’s side. They know the American system, depend on it, and get all their news from it. They don’t generally know the American electorate and don’t think they depend on it. They might be about to discover they are wrong. Recently there were hopes for a reconciliation between the country’s raging electorate and the elites who run its sputtering system. With less than two weeks to go before Americans count their ballots, those hopes are likely to be dashed.

Time will tell whether Kamala Harris was an adequate pick to replace Joe Biden, once his age-related incapacity could no longer be concealed. But the method of her selection sealed the public’s understanding of Democrats as the party of monied elites — not a good thing to be this year. Concealing Biden’s condition required the collusion of the whole party, Harris included. It wrested the choice of Democrats’ 2024 candidate from rank-and-file voters and delivered it to the party’s billionaire backers in finance, entertainment and tech. The party is taking on a fat-cat profile. It has relied on ruses to hand-pick its presidential candidate in the past three elections. In 2016, the officially neutral chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, worked behind the scenes to see off the socialist Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton. In 2020, donors and strategists, desperate to unify the party factions against Trump and (again) to thwart Sanders, rescued Joe Biden’s failing candidacy by purging other moderates. Biden’s win was a vindication of their tactics. But they damaged the US — because the factions that made way for Biden would all have to be paid off when Democrats took power. The Biden administration was a junta of special interests — Black Lives Matter, immigrant and transgender activists, green-energy moguls, neoconservatives — without, we now realise, any guiding intelligence at its centre. Keeping these special interests together has cost money. That is how the American debt has rocketed to historic highs.

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As a president is supposedly powerful, it was assumed that ousting Biden would require his assent. It didn’t. Once Biden stumbled in a debate last June, a funding strike called by the entertainment and finance billionaires did the trick. Cartoon heiress Abigail Disney, cryptocurrency billionaire Mike Novogratz, Netflix founder Reed Hoffman cut the party off until it agreed to replace Biden at the top of the ticket. In a sense it doesn’t matter which politician the system chooses. The party belongs not to voters but to interest groups, as it did between the Gilded Age and the reforms that democratised the nominating process in the early Seventies.

Donald Trump has turned that into a liability for Democrats. Working people remember fondly the economy as Trump ran it in the three years before the Covid emergency. It was not perfect: growth was lower than under Obama. But it was better distributed. The lowest quarter of workers saw their real wages rise by 5% under Trump, the first sustained improvement for the working poor since the 20th century. The great polling surprise of the 2024 election — the highest Republican support among black males since 1960 — is more plausibly explained by concrete economic achievements than by the intangible factors that pundits usually adduce, from Trump’s “ghetto” ostentation to his troubles with the legal system.

Gains for the working class proved unsustainable under the Biden Administration, amid a flood of 7.5 million illegal immigrants. If one episode could sum up the whole campaign season, it would be the exchange between Trump and Harris, during their televised debate in September, over allegations that Haitian immigrants were — in the Trumpian phrase that launched a thousand remixes — “eating the pets of the people that live there”.

Judged as a contest, the debate was an outright victory for Harris: a drubbing, a shutout. Trump is lazy (he obviously did not even outline a closing statement), ignorant (he did not seem to know what a “bill” is), inarticulate (there were moments when he was nearly as woolly as Joe Biden was in the embarrassing debate performance that drove him from the race).

But Harris’s victory was Pyrrhic. The issues Trump raised, however inarticulately and inaccurately, cut in his favour. Many American swing voters understand that the opening of the country’s Southern border was brought about by concrete actions urged by the immigrant-activist wing of the Biden “junta” and undertaken by executive order in the very first days of the administration in 2021.

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But most Americans had no idea until Trump started going on about eating cats and dogs that there were so many places like Springfield, Ohio, a withering industrial city of 58,000 people that has received 12,000-15,000 Haitians in the last year or so. That sounds like a “minority” problem, but as Germans discovered after Angela Merkel’s invitation to refugees from the Syrian war in 2015, such newcomers are disproportionately young and male. They can become a majority in the public spaces during business hours. They can wind up laying down the law. This does not mean they are violent or even rude. They just have the force that cohesive groups of men naturally possess in the prime of life.

Many of the Springfield newcomers have rent subsidies and food stamps, and — this being the United States — a heavy carapace of rights and protections that derive from civil rights law. When you inject a federally subsidised population of 15,000 people into a small city that has not seen new housing construction in many years, natives’ rents get driven through the roof. American workers have reason to fear competition from workers who were formed in a country where the per capita income is barely $1,600.

Distant people in positions of authority sometimes accuse voters in places like Springfield of grumbling. You can see why: no one ever sets out actively to screw the natives. It’s just something “the market” does to them while the mayor and the federal government are busy patting themselves on the back for their generosity. Under such circumstances, the besieged-feeling viewers of the Trump-Harris debate might well have preferred the guy who sputtered and turned red at the very thought of Springfield to the lady who read her lines and kept her composure.

Regardless of whether he wins the presidency, Trump has won a victory in the argument about immigration that he introduced on the day he announced his candidacy in 2015. It is also a loss for elite-led campaigns of shaming and ostracism. Clearly “Woke” — that set of moral proscriptions about diversity, backed up by the power granted by civil-rights law to harass and disgrace refractory citizens in the courts — has lost much of its power to intimidate. The Trump campaign’s single most powerful television ad shows Harris passionately telling a transgender interviewer that she would back publicly funded sex-change operations for prison inmates. “Kamala is for they/them,” the ad closes. “President Trump is for you.” The Pew Center recently reported that there are more registered Republicans than Democrats for the first time since it started tallying these numbers in 1992. In the closing days of this campaign, three Democratic senators in tight races who had voted to impeach Trump twice — Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania — hurriedly cut TV ads implying that their own positions on immigration were the same as Trump’s. Those who lived by the sword of woke are now dying by it.

We are getting a better idea now of why half the country is willing to be led by a man whose personality would have unfitted him for leadership at almost any previous juncture of American history. Trump’s seeming indifference to policy, a sign of unseriousness at other times, looks like a savvy refusal to be taken in. His vulgarity can look like a post-modern kind of authenticity. After making a crude joke about Kamala Harris’s husband at a Catholic gala in New York, he stared down at his printed speech and admitted others had prepared it for him — something an American politician never does. “That’s a nasty one,” he muttered. “That’s nasty. I told these idiots that gave me this stuff, that’s too tough.” Bizarrely, at times like these, Trump seems like the only sincere political figure in an otherwise rigidly scripted system.

Pandering politicians often assign a set of policy opinions to the citizenry, and then take a bunch of phoney positions to match them. Harris, discovering that swing-state voters like cars and guns, has presented herself in the campaign’s final days as a Formula 1 enthusiast (a backer of Sir Lewis Hamilton) and a gun owner — a gun fanatic, even. “If somebody breaks into my house they’re getting shot,” she told Oprah Winfrey. After not holding a single press conference in the first two months of her campaign, the teleprompter — which she used even at such traditionally impromptu occasions as voter town halls — became a symbol of her campaign.

And Trump’s strange sincerity may be why the various attempts to prosecute him have not been fatal. On the contrary. Harris commonly calls him a “convicted felon”, but what has he been convicted of? A business misdeed so small, so obscure, and brought to a verdict by a process so partisan, that it would be more accurate to say Trump had been designated a criminal than proved one. No Trump opponent has ever managed to explain his offence in a convincing way.

One factor both in blunting the propaganda effect of criminal prosecutions against Trump and allowing the enemies of Woke to rally together has been the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk two years ago. It is not that Musk is in Trump’s corner, although he (stridently) is. It is that, in this election cycle at least, Democrat-aligned tech executives have been unable to slow the movement of narrative-disrupting stories through the news ecosystem — as they were able to do in 2020 with stories concerning the laptop of wayward presidential son Hunter Biden. Under heightened scrutiny American elites are finding it harder to stick together than they did back then.

The question arises of whether these same elites can hold the country together well enough to continue to exercise what they like to call “global leadership”. The answer appears to be no. If the world has become a much more dangerous place under Biden, it owes partly to how he was nominated. Among the interest groups that won a free hand in the 2020 coalition of anti-Trump forces was a bipartisan group of neoconservatives — foreign-policy thinkers who rose through the system under the “democracy promotion” agenda that led Bill Clinton into Kosovo and George W. Bush into Iraq.

They have drawn the United States (and its allies) into a proxy war in Ukraine that the West cannot win without an active Nato military involvement that would be reckless in the extreme. Reckless because, at the core of the Western military/diplomatic system, the American public is too badly divided ideologically to commit to a war anywhere. In January, it is true, President Biden gave a State of the Union address in which he likened both Vladimir Putin and the Republican opposition to the fascists who were on the march on the eve of the Second World War, and yet, with the help of Republican House speaker Mike Johnson, he passed a $60 billion aid bill for Ukraine.

But such bipartisanship is unlikely in the future. As things now stand, Johnson would pay with his career for any future collaboration. Harris is less connected to pre-Trumpian hawks than Biden was, even if she has received the endorsement of Dick Cheney. Trump’s vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is a stalwart opponent of the Ukraine war. And Trump’s own bizarre reminiscences at a late October rally of threats he allegedly made to Putin are neither believable nor the basis for a bipartisan foreign policy.

This is especially since the parties, one representing the raging electorate and the other the sputtering elite, have not been so at odds in a long while. Americans may yet have a future as leaders of the free world. But that will have to await an end to the conflict between Republican populists and Democratic elitists, a conflict that 5 November is more likely to exacerbate than resolve.

When the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced recently that their union was withholding endorsement of either of the presidential candidates, pundits and political operatives alike saw it as further proof of the very thing O’Brien was talking about: an ongoing realignment of working-class voters, away from their traditional Democratic allies and toward the Trump coalition. Indeed, the stated reason for the union’s decision was the apparent desire on the part of a large segment of the rank-and-file membership to go with the Republican candidate. The GOP is said to be transforming into a “workers’ party”, just as college-educated professionals cluster around Kamala Harris.

A culturally conservative base of labourers would, after all, make for a more natural constituency for an American Right that opposed both economic globalisation and social progressivism. Yet there are issues with this years-old narrative; particularly that the Republican Party has been painfully slow in breaking out of its ingrained predisposition for the interests of capital over labour. Their embrace of protectionism and opposition to high immigration may indirectly benefit workers on the ground, but when it comes to issues that directly touch upon working-class interests, such as pensions, labour representation, and the right-to-organise, Democrats in recent years have offered substantively more than Republicans. It’s also worth noting that regional branches of the union across the West Coast broke with national leadership to endorse Harris.

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Rather than a reflection of an existing political reality, O’Brien’s speech was in effect a plea for the Right to take workers seriously at a time when the Left is accused of taking them for granted. The Teamsters’ non-endorsement could be interpreted with similar subversive intent: the downpayment on a political investment toward the prospect of a pro-worker Republican Party. However, in stark contrast, just weeks before, Trump practically patted Elon Musk on the back after the Tesla mogul bragged about firing striking workers, underscoring the former president’s own dubious record on workers’ rights both in office and as a businessman.

If “working-class party” is to be more than a slogan on the Right, it has to be matched by actual policies that materially benefit workers. But how can a party that’s been accustomed for so long to towing capital’s line be converted into a vessel for workers’ interests? For this, we may turn back to a time when labour maintained enough bipartisan engagement to extract concessions from both parties.

The Teamsters’ decision to stay neutral in 2024 is actually far more in keeping with its politically flexible tradition than expected. There was even a time when they were known as the country’s most Republican union. 

Thanks, in no small part, to the animosity between then-Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and the Kennedys. The Brotherhood endorsed Richard Nixon in 1960 and then again in 1972, when they were joined by Meany’s AFL-CIO in dissing the Democrats. During this period divisions over the Vietnam War, as exemplified in the Hardhat Riot of 1970, drove a wedge between workers and the increasingly radicalised Left. The latter’s countercultural values and disregard for national symbols like the flag offended the workers, who in turn defected Nixon’s “Silent Majority”.

This formula under which the GOP appealed to patriotic and traditionalist themes as a means to win over labour appears to be working once again under Trump, but alignment on cultural issues was never enough to seal a realignment. Republicans knew they had to deliver on economic gains for workers as well.

Nixon’s administration, for instance, enacted a slate of pro-labour reforms more far-reaching than at any time since the New Deal, often confounding his liberal critics in the process. These included the entrenchment of workplace protections in the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), strengthening the financial position of millions of workers in retirement through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, and raising the minimum wage. A case can be made that Nixon had been one of the most pro-labour presidents in the 20th century.

This is in stark contrast with Trump’s time in office in which his Labor Department opposed minimum wage hikes and union representation rights; appointed an aggressively pro-business National Labor Relations Board, advanced “right-to-work” in the case Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, repealed the “persuader rule”, which obligated firms to report anti-union advocacy, as well as the much more elementary “overtime rule” which would have allowed workers to be paid more for extra work. On O’Brien’s most urgent policy priority, the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Relief Act, a bill that would rescue the pensions of over 2 million workers, including 400,000 Teamsters, Republicans have been solidly opposed: it had been passed by the Democratic House in 2019 but rejected by the GOP-controlled Senate. Trump’s more recent pledges to ease the tax burden on workers come as small consolation in light of this record. 

And yet, despite Republicans’ lingering hostility to labour, a small cadre of genuinely populist legislators has emerged in the Senate composed of figures like Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance. The group has been supported by new heterodox policy shops dedicated to fashioning a comprehensive conservative pro-worker agenda, a modern equivalent of Nixon’s programme, which a future Republican administration could theoretically take up. But for this to happen, Republicans must acknowledge the inherent tensions that exist between their burgeoning working-class support and that segment of their base, who continue to hold outsize influence, namely the wealthy local elites in the small-business class, known as the “gentry”, who dominate the party at state and local levels.

Unlike the Democratic-leaning professional and corporate sector, the working class and small-business class generally converge in their shared cultural conservatism and patriotic ethos, yet common symbolic proclivities are not enough to wield a coalition together when there are very real differences in their respective economic aims. The gentry prefer low wages and “flexible” labour markets so as to better attract investment; but for quite understandable reasons, unions want the opposite: higher wages, benefits, and levels of protection for workers.

There is no better illustration of this divide than the epic confrontation that took place between O’Brien and Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, a non-college educated plumbing company owner and multi-millionaire. After seeming to challenge each other to a fight on the floor of a Senate hearing — something Jimmy Hoffa could have done — the two had to be stopped by Bernie Sanders of all people. The gentry and the proletariat are, evidently, not natural allies, locked as they are in a zero-sum competition. 

The Republican Party must, therefore, rediscover an older mode of political engagement from before the present era of ideological polarisation, one that Nixon and the New Dealers alike would have recognised: brokerage politics. This harking back to a gentler era sees politics not as a battlefield between moral values or ideological visions, but as a bargaining table on which rival material interests can be reconciled through intricate compromise and deal-making.

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To employ this ideal, a future Republican industrial policy could channel financial resources to struggling red-state and hinterland regions to the benefit of the small-business gentry. This micro-elite could then be entrusted to deploy that capital toward productive ends while having a condition of receiving such assistance could be that the same businesses must employ or negotiate with unionised labour. This effective emphasis on pro-labour “conditionality” is one that Democrats are already employing in their own industrial policy schemes. In this scenario, the gentry would be compelled to deal with labour’s demands and perhaps give up their labour market preferences in exchange for guaranteed business investment; while unions in these parts of the country would accept the continued economic leadership and sway of the gentry in exchange for tangible concessions. In other words, a zero-sum contest becomes a negotiated settlement.

The post-Reagan Right is accustomed to viewing such questions of economic distribution through ideological lenses, as a conflict of virtuous free-market principles against the perversions of socialism and collectivism. But brokerage politics would dispense with such moralism and simply assume a natural divergence of goals while working toward reasonable syntheses.

Rather than being a party exclusively of capital or labour, the GOP could instead play the role of “honest broker” between the two as it had in the days of Nixon, and going as far back as McKinley and Lincoln. It was a time when workers and businessmen alike had reason to vote for a Republican Party, who reconciled their best interests against the backdrop of an industrialising economy. Such an approach would amount to a sober, realistic path to incorporating their material interests into the Right’s agenda, closer to the transactional instincts of the union bosses of old. Under these conditions, neither Republicans nor Democrats would be able to take labour for granted again.

Six days before last night’s speech, Republican National Convention volunteers were in the middle of receiving training when news landed of the assassination attempt and they hit their phones. The man they were preparing to nominate had been felled.

The question on everyone’s lips here in Milwaukee ever since has been: has it changed him? Last night we finally got the answer.

Every day since Sunday has been more giddy, more enthusiastic than the last. By the time final microphone tests before his speech echoed through the hallways on Thursday, people were describing it as “the best convention” they’d ever attended. “Historically, Republicans aren’t unified,” one GOP operative told me, “so it’s quite unusual to be at a convention like this.”

A sense of destiny filled the halls. Each night, the man himself walked into the main event like a UFC fighter, glaring steadily into the cameras proudly displaying his incongruously bandaged ear. He was still here. Meanwhile, MAGA rappers and influencers mingled with blue-suited Republican politicians and soccer moms, reflecting the duality of, say, J.D. Vance — an Ivy League venture capitalist who glad-hands with Marjorie Taylor Greene. And everywhere, that photograph of Trump, bloodied and punching his fist.

Delegates fizzed with the nomination of Vance for Vice President. Amber Rose posed for selfies. Sarah Sanders delivered an unexpectedly electrifying speech, and the President’s eldest granddaughter appeared on stage. Roger Stone wore his sunglasses indoors. Chants of “Joe Must Go” and “Fight, Fight, Fight”, echoed around the Fiserv Forum all week.

Trump, though, said nothing on stage. He told an interviewer that he’d torn up a “real rip roarer” of a convention speech and posted a few videos to Truth Social. During the big speeches, he would nod gravely and rarely smile.

All of it seemed only to intensify the devotion of his fans. Their bond with their leader is personal and deep; they follow him to candidates and ideas that they wouldn’t have considered without his endorsement. And now he had survived a bullet. His resilience attracted new donors and unlikely well wishers. Delegates and loyalists projected confidence. And, yet, nobody knew quite what that bullet had done to the man they were there to celebrate, the man whose name was embroidered on their denim jackets and sequin dresses.

“Trump never changes,” one source in the MAGA movement insisted breezily. “Trump. Never. Changes.”

I asked Kevin Roberts, a friend of Vance and president of the Heritage Foundation whether a new Trump might usher in a new season of unity. “Of all the things I would celebrate about President Trump, probably at the top of the list: his intuition about where we are in the country, at any point, whether that was in 2016, or 2020, or today is just off the charts. I think he has very genuinely understood that what the country wants is normal. And he really is a great messenger.”

“Detractors of his on the Left will sort of tear him down on that,” Roberts added. “But he is a great messenger.”

But what would that message be? When he finally arrived on stage, his name literally in lights, the room erupted. The production was spectacular. The cast-list impressive if idiosyncratic, with Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock and Dana White all taking to the stage.

Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, before delivering a prayer, noted that encounters with death change us all. They “[call] us to reexamine our lives and reevaluate our priorities,” he intoned.

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For a while — almost exactly 10 minutes — that certainly seemed to be the case. Trump was almost unrecognisable. Not in looks, but in temperament. He spoke so gently that it was hard to make out the words as he slowly recounted the events in Butler, paying tribute to the slain Pennsylvanian man by displaying his firefighting suit on stage.

He talked of a “providential moment,” and how — in a particularly Trumpian formulation — “God was on my side.”

There was even evidence of the unifying tone we had heard about. “The discord and division in our society must be healed – and we must heal it quickly.” “There is no victory in winning for half of America.” “Whether you’ve supported me in the past or not, I hope you will support me in the future because I will bring back the American Dream.”

Perhaps this was Trump 2.0? Softly spoken, sober, pensive, conciliatory?

It wasn’t to last. As he warmed up, the riffs got longer. He impishly deviated from the script, revelling in his moment. You could see him returning to form before your very eyes. The mood of near-death conversion fell away and then disappeared. Weaponising the legal system, stealing elections, failing the country — the attack lines returned one by one. He boasted of $250 million of business that he had brought to Milwaukee by choosing it for his convention. “I am trying to buy your vote” he joked. “I’ll be honest about that.”

Having let it be known that he wasn’t going to mention Biden, he mentioned Biden. “I’m not going to use that name again,” he vowed. By the end of an hour and twenty minutes — the longest convention speech in history — the almost eerie spell hanging over the convention had been well and truly broken.

Back in Washington the Democrats are busy adding their own changes to the script, possibly including an exit strategy and a new ticket. Within the week, the sacred atmosphere of this past week in Milwaukee could be consigned to history by the drama of a new political opponent. Come the Democrats’ convention in Chicago, that party could have a new story to tell and Republicans will be left with a candidate who sounds a whole lot like the same Donald Trump.

The myth of Butler will now forever be built into Donald Trump’s story. But the halo effect may not last much longer than the bandage on his right ear. Last night he promised to turn “fight, fight, fight” into “win, win, win.” That is not yet a done deal.

Such a pairing would make for a politically fertile synthesis: while Vance built his electoral brand on his working-class roots, Moreno has advertised himself with a more traditional set of Republican credentials — namely those of a small businessman or, to be more precise, a car dealership owner.

Between these two poles, the outline of a post-realignment GOP may be sketched. Where the Reagan coalition of the Eighties united Wall Street with Main Street business (with some working class defectors), the emergent Trump coalition of the 2020s and beyond will be different. Because of the exodus of the corporate and college-educated segments of America to the Democrats, it will most likely be composed of a more solid pool of working-class voters allied with the petit-bourgeois class of the red-state and hinterland regions, sometimes known as the “American gentry” and stereotypically represented as rock-ribbed conservative car dealers, like Moreno. Yet while much ink has been spilled trying to understand the mindset of the MAGA working class (Vance’s 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy was about precisely the kind of people who would go on to vote for Trump), comparatively little attention has been paid to the Bernie Morenos of America.

A 2023 account of these car dealers by Slate’s Alexander Sammon recounts the awesome scale of their collective wealth and influence on Republican politics: “Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1%”; they (along with other gentry professions like gas station owners and building contractors) make up “a majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year”; members of the industry association donate to Republicans “at a rate of 6-to-1”, through which they have worked “to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states”. Such figures help to make sense of Moreno’s and his fellow car dealers’ status as the cream of the crop among America’s local elites.

Coverage of the gentry more generally diverges along partisan lines: Right-wing commentators usually praise their innate cultural conservatism and strong attachment to place, while Left-wing and libertarian critics decry what they see as the reactionary and racket-like nature of their enterprise, built as it is on intensive lobbying efforts to ensure their entrenched positions as middlemen standing between manufacturers and consumers. Given their political weight, it is surprising to see the dearth of analysis on the future trajectory of this class (other than prophecies that anticipate their extinction) in the context of debates about the fate of the US auto industry, not to mention the role this gentry should play as the Republican coalition lurches away from the Reaganite consensus.

Indeed, a case can be made that the central question for the future of conservatism revolves around this class. It is not whether they will embrace a populist-nationalist political outlook — this much should already be clear to any observer of American politics in the last eight years — but whether they will become populist-nationalist in their economic preferences as well? For beneath their reputation as regressive opponents of change, it should be remembered that it was this unheralded elite of small-town millionaires who came out early and overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016, rejecting free-market orthodoxy and legitimising previously heretical stances on trade and the need to re-industrialise. It was to their ears as local elites spread out across the country that Trump’s incessant calls for rebuilding America’s “bridges, tunnels, freeways, and airports … our great plants and factories” were most resonant.

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In other words, by anointing a brash New York City businessman as their tribune, it was the gentry that arguably did the most to light the spark of the populist-nationalist revolution, though a combination of inertia and diversion prevented a fully-fledged nationalist programme from taking shape when Trump was in office. However, in the years ahead, a more forceful break with laissez-faire policy on their part along with an embrace of state-guided industrial policy would bring them into much closer convergence with the material interests of the working class, and should actually enable Republicans to follow through on the promise that launched Trump’s insurgency: to restore America’s strength and prosperity by bringing industry back to the heartlands. But it remains to be seen how a conservative class of provincial entrepreneurs can be made to support a nationally-directed interventionist agenda.

Turning to history will reveal that it isn’t as much of a long-shot as it seems: after all, it was small business elites — not unlike today’s gentry — who fuelled American industrialisation in the late-18th to 19th centuries under the banners of the Federalist, Whig, and early Republican parties, when the term “nationalist” meant precisely support for the federal government’s role in directing modernising investments toward the country’s developing regions and frontiers. Henry Clay’s “American System” was the most ambitious expression of this philosophy, and later served as the inspiration for Abraham Lincoln’s programme for reshaping of the American economic order during the Civil War. But what would be the equivalent programme for revitalising today’s moribund post-industrial economy?

The answer may have to do with Trump’s unexpected and ingenious proposal, made during a speech at a Moreno rally in Dayton, of letting Chinese firms build car factories in America as the only way around a new 100% tariff wall he’d place for Chinese cars made elsewhere. This would seem to contradict his image as the ultimate China hawk. But as David P. Goldman points out, Trump is a dealmaker first and foremost, and his idea (coverage of which was lost amid furor over Trump’s “bloodbath” comments from the same day) would not only diffuse Sino-American tensions but deliver benefits to US workers, consumers, the auto industry (in the long-term), and yes, the car dealer gentry. The Chinese themselves are in need of new markets, and as Politico reports, for them, “the United States market is the holy grail”.

Trump has claimed, under this proposal, US workers would get to work in the car factories, though the scale of automation involved and the advanced skill set required could mean that most of the existing American workforce may not be qualified enough to man such factories. In any event, manufacturing would still create lots of “spillover” jobs in the communities that receive the factories. Just as American consumers would, of course, benefit from access to the latest Chinese EV models — such as the BYD Seagull.

The auto industry, meanwhile, despite having to deal with fierce new Chinese competition initially, would nonetheless be able to, as Goldman put it “appropriate their IP the way they appropriated ours”. This may sound like a flippant statement, but historically this is how catch-up industrialisation worked, through subtle processes of IP transfer from the more advanced to the less advanced economies, in which case a new cycle would just be repeating itself — this time, to America’s advantage. Or as Goldman wrote: “It’s easier to let [China] bring industrial automation to the United States than to try to catch up after the fact. That’s the path of least resistance, and one that Trump has opened up.” (Though as a means of cushioning the effect of China’s market entry, its factories could be brought in at a controlled pace and assigned to limited geographic areas so as not to overwhelm domestic competition totally.)

But the greatest beneficiaries may be the car dealers, who, in this scheme, would be the ones to sell Chinese cars to consumers. In theory, car dealers should be able to sell EVs such as the Seagull the same way they sell gasoline-powered cars, but in practice, it hasn’t worked out that way because of a number of factors, namely the more expensive costs of servicing EVs and lack of available technical expertise. This is why Moreno and the gentry have been consistently hostile to EVs; and it also doesn’t help that Tesla has sought to market its models directly to buyers through online sales.

But there is another instructive example from the annals of American economic history, namely the state-sponsored mechanisation of agriculture in the New Deal South, where an ultra-conservative local oligarchy profited from state subsidies that allowed them to pay for modern farm equipment, thereby reducing the cost of innovation and helping the semi-feudal South of the Thirties to develop and industrialise. A similar effort to subsidise costs for any EV transition, in which the US government transfers funds and capital assets directly to the dealers, would both accelerate the adoption of new technologies and preserve the civic leadership of the gentry. Such a programme would smooth the economic transition for them–— if not the cultural one, which may prove more difficult, given their engrained suspicion of EVs. In any event, electric would still be far off from becoming the mainstream of the US auto industry and will likely co-exist with traditional and hybrid models for some time: but this endangered class would nonetheless be given a chance to not just survive but thrive amid an otherwise disruptive paradigm shift.

Furthermore, the accompanying new infrastructure of such a programme would be incredibly costly, to say the least, and neither the Chinese nor the US government should be expected to foot the entire bill. This is where the state can step in to channel private capital into the underdeveloped regions where the gentry live by setting up such things as infrastructure banks, guidance funds, and shared manufacturing facilities as the pillars of a modern-day equivalent to Henry Clay’s “American System”. Best of all, through such a programme, Washington — under Trump or any future Republican president — could pressure the financial sector to disgorge its hordes of stagnant capital into these new developmental institutions and stimulate re-investment into the heartland. This would, in effect, create a massive wealth transfer from Wall Street to Main Street, reversing the logic of the Reaganite coalition in which Wall Street called all the shots.

Of course, many things would have to go right for this scenario to take place. The Republicans could fumble their chance at leadership and go back to more Paul Ryan-style tax cuts, which would do nothing but enrich increasingly Democratic-aligned corporate America; or they could actually base their policies on the interests of their primary elite constituency, the gentry, along with the working class. Realising this possibility would require a future Senator Moreno to imbibe the heterodox ideology of his colleague J.D. Vance, as he employs his entrepreneurial skills to convince his fellow Republicans to entertain a programme radically different from the free market dogmas of the past. After all, it was the American gentry that started the Trumpian populist-nationalist revolution: they may yet be the ones to finish it.

Meanwhile, it’s an election year, and pro-choice advocates hope to put abortion protection on the ballot in nine states — causing panic on the Right, since these measures tend to pass with overwhelming voter support. For Democrats, all signs point to this being the defining issue of the 2024 election. “President Biden and Vice President Harris believe health care decisions should be made by women and their doctors, not politicians. Period,” the White House posted this week, throwing down the first of what will no doubt be several gauntlets.

The current administration’s abortion strategy hinges on Kamala Harris, who is currently touring the country to highlight Biden’s commitment to women’s reproductive rights: on her first stop, she was photographed in front of a giant sign that read, simply, “TRUST WOMEN”. It’s an effective slogan, but also a provocative one, when even the activists who would grant the procedure sacred status don’t seem to entirely trust women to know our bodies, and accept the consequences of our choices.

In a world that simply trusted women, abortion itself would be less common, I think, because more trust equals more empowerment and therefore fewer limitations: women would be free to obtain birth control at low cost and without a prescription, a key issue that has been somewhat overlooked amid the heated battles over abortion. Add some straightforward sex education that teaches women from an early age how fertility works — as opposed to the fearmongering version in which pregnancy can happen anytime, anywhere, just from being in the same room as a sperm — and you would get an informed, empowered population capable of avoiding unintended pregnancies.

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Beyond that, the rules would be simple: a woman who wanted an abortion could obtain one within reasonable limits — guided by a scientific understanding of viability, perhaps. And, with the usual caveats — foetal abnormalities, for instance, or a threat to the mother’s life — a woman who sought an elective abortion outside the prescribed window would be in violation of… well, something. If not the law, then the social contract.

The question of just what consequences a woman could or should face for flouting abortion restrictions has always been a thorny one. Any attempts to enforce such statutes can result in innocent women being investigated for a crime after their wanted pregnancies ended in miscarriage — but even in unambiguous cases, society is at odds with itself about just who to punish and how. Two things are true: that most people support laws limiting abortion beyond the first trimester, and that most people are uncomfortable with the idea of holding women accountable for breaking those laws. (Partly for this reason, medics in the UK have recently been advised not to report women suspected of having an illegal abortion to the police.)

It’s a conundrum: a society that truly trusts women would also trust them to follow the rules or face the consequences. But then, we have always struggled with this, too. We like the idea of empowering women, but holding them accountable for abusing that power? Not so much.

It seems to me that in the abortion wars, neither side is willing to trust women — to see them as fully human, fully adult, fully capable of reckoning with the implications of the choice to terminate a pregnancy. Each in their own way would deprive women of agency, if not by stopping them from making the choice, then by never holding them accountable for it. At the root is a shared conviction that women cannot control themselves, a safetyist impulse aptly described by David Brooks in a recent column about the administrators who increasingly rule over every aspect of American life: “The whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature,” he writes. “People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives.”

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The danger of safetyism

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Within the parameters of the debate over abortion rights, you could argue that both sides appear to agree that women are fragile. Much has been written about the horrors of the pre-Roe era; we know the deadly consequences of a world where women cannot safely and legally abort, and we have long scorned the callous politicians who chuckle that the best solution to unintended pregnancy is for women to just stop having sex, you sluts. Less discussed is what the pro-choice side telegraphs about its view of women, when it argues that they must not only be allowed to choose, but to have their options open indefinitely, no restrictions, no limitations.

Academics sniff at the notion that elective abortion should be disallowed after a certain point, decrying the entire concept of foetal viability as “overly moralistic”; the Guttmacher Institute insists that gestational age bans are harmful, full stop, and that abortion should be available to women “on the timeline that meets their needs”. Journalists sombrely report on the troubling implications of the prosecution of a Nebraska teenager who ended her pregnancy with mifepristone — waiting until the 23rd paragraph to mention the relevant and fairly shocking information that she was 30 weeks pregnant at the time.

These arguments lack the spectacular misogyny of the pro-life crowd’s shrieking about sluts, but they are still patronising to women. The implication is that a woman cannot be expected to make up her mind about whether she wants to have a baby within a certain timeframe, nor wrestle with difficult questions about what consideration, if any, the foetus growing inside her deserves. In this we might hear echoes of the old arguments used to control women: that we are fickle, hapless creatures who know little of our own biology and even less of our own minds.

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Of course, it’s become fashionable to speak of women and our bodies this way: in terms of fragility. Our ancestors, on the other hand, recognised that the ability to bear children gives women immense power. In the ancient world, abortion was restricted less as a means of protecting women than to protect other people from them. A woman who terminated her pregnancy deprived her husband of an heir, and her crime was not murder, but a sort of theft; she had shaped his future, his legacy, in ways he could not control. The property and inheritance laws that made a woman’s survival dependent on producing children — specifically a son — were, among other things, a way of subverting whatever power might have come from being the one with a womb.

This makes for an ironic comparison with the contemporary narrative that women are in desperate need of protection — at a moment when we enjoy greater control over our reproductive abilities, and less stigma for exercising it, than we have ever before. For all that we seek to defend women from having to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, we still struggle with the raw exercise of power inherent in choosing to end one, or the possibility that with that power comes a certain amount of social responsibility.

When I was four, a tiny mole scurried out of a hole beside me while I was playing in the garden. It startled me, and I brought my foot down instinctively; I didn’t mean to kill it, but I did. My mother made me bury it, and while I did, she told me she knew I hadn’t meant to, but that it didn’t matter. That in a world populated by creatures smaller and more fragile than you, you are accountable for where you choose to step. 

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Roe v Wade deserves to fall

By Kat Rosenfield

I think about this sometimes — when people scoff that an abortion is nothing, just a bundle of cells, or when I see a woman holding a sign that says, “MY ABORTION WAS FABULOUS”. A mole doesn’t have hopes or dreams; a blastocyst has no sense of itself. If these are arguably lives, they are not especially significant ones, and perhaps this makes it easy to be cavalier: you are not ending so much, when you destroy them. You might even begin to imagine your choices carry no weight at all. 

And yet… “fabulous”?

I don’t expect much reckoning with these questions in the coming year, or ever, necessarily. Amid the urgency and tumult of the post-Dobbs landscape, several things are true: that abortion must remain legal, that every attempt to restrict it inevitably inflicts far worse harm than it manages to prevent, and that if the Democrats are smart, they’ll spend the next 10 months making sure there’s not a person in the country who hasn’t heard about the unimaginable horrors that have followed the draconian abortion bans in Texas and elsewhere.

But this is a way to win elections, not to illuminate the truth: that the instincts of pro-life and pro-choice alike are too often infantilising to women, and that trusting women requires abandoning the pretence that they need to be protected. Safetyism and equality are mutually exclusive: we must insist on women’s absolute right to choose when or whether to be pregnant, even when that choice intersects with some of the most complex moral questions of all time. At the same time, we must also stop pretending that pregnancy does not carry with it a unique and potent strength. Only a woman can bring forth a whole new person from inside her body — and only a woman can choose not to, reaching over the Fates’ shoulder to snatch those first slim threads of life back through the needle’s eye.

The history of abortion restrictions is a history of men trying to undermine this power, because they are terrified by it, and they should be. It is enormous. It is unfathomable. And like all power, it isn’t without its burdens. But it is ours, whether it’s politically expedient to admit this or not.

After his victory in Iowa, Donald Trump is the favourite to become the Republican nominee. Leading commentators on the Left warn that, should he get re-elected, he will become a dictator and end democracy. On the Right, meanwhile, the belief is unshakeable that Joe Biden is mentally incapable of fulfilling the duties of president and won’t survive a second term.

These raw emotions are not simply the quadrennial outbursts of partisan feeling that emerge in an election season. Rather, they are portents of a much deeper dislocation in American society. For over two decades now, Americans have been battered by non-stop crises at home and abroad — from the long War on Terror to Covid and the George Floyd protests — leading to what feels like national exhaustion and a deep pessimism about the future of democracy.

Our pessimism has resurrected the once-unthinkable idea of disunion, or in today’s parlance, “national divorce”. In a 2021 poll conducted by the University of Virginia, more than 80% of both Biden and Trump voters stated that elected officials from the opposite party presented “a clear and present danger to American democracy”. Most shockingly, 41% of Biden voters and 52% of Trump voters stated that things were so bad, they supported secession from the Union. Two years later those numbers remained essentially the same in an Ipsos poll, with a fifth of Americans strongly wanting to separate.

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For those who believe that such concerns are simply hysteria, we should remember that America’s road to the Civil War took decades. In March 1850, southern statesman John C. Calhoun gave a prescient warning to the Senate: “It is a great mistake to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bound these States together in one common Union, are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time.”

It took roughly 40 years — from the first passions unleashed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the shelling of Fort Sumter in April 1861 — for the cords to snap. Since Bush v. Gore in 2000, America is now nearly a quarter-century into a process of delegitimising national elections and demonising our political opponents and fellow citizens. An entire generation has been raised on the cynicism of their elders, fed by social media and sensationalised news media.

The tragic story of the gradual split of North and South offers stark warnings for today. The election of 1860 reflected the culmination of decades of failure to reach an acceptable settlement over the expansion or restriction of slavery in new territories of the West. The 1820 Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act all were grand attempts at coming to a stable modus vivendi. Yet they led ultimately to feelings of betrayal and suspicion, as old agreements, such as Missouri, were undone by later manoeuvrings. Worse, each side felt the other was trying to destroy its way of life, especially in the case of southerners, who knew they were falling behind the North economically and demographically, and who saw any attempt to restrict the expansion of slavery as part of a move ultimately to end slavery everywhere in the Union.

That year, Abraham Lincoln was the nominee of a new political party, the Republicans, and an avowed opponent of the expansion of slavery into the new territories. Though he repeatedly promised to do nothing to threaten slavery where it already was legal, Lincoln nevertheless was labelled as a “Black Republican”, an anti-slavery zealot. Southern activists and leaders all warned that should Lincoln be elected, the South could ensure its survival only by seceding from the Union. Within a month of his victory, South Carolina took the fatal step, followed over the next few months by most of the Lower South. A month after his inauguration, the Civil War erupted with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour.

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A century and a half later, what seems to be shaping up as a Biden-Trump rematch will further divide the nation. If we are to avoid a potential repeat of 1860, we must remember the powerful warning of Lincoln, in his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us… If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

For the past several decades, American citizens and their political class have chosen to court the danger Lincoln identified. Why this is so remains a puzzle. Clearly, the wounds of Vietnam and Watergate never fully healed. Some observers, such as Christopher Caldwell, blame a now-endemic entitlement mindset; others, such as George Packer, point to the unwinding caused by an inequitable social and economic system. Back in the mid-Sixties, Philip Rieff warned of the “triumph of the therapeutic” that unleashed emotion over reason. Whatever the cause, the former middle ground has been blasted apart.

The more America devolves into a nation of extremes, the more difficult politics becomes. A president who encourages his followers to march to the Capitol and a Speaker of the House who physically rips up the president’s State of the Union speech on national television both weaken the bonds of civil society. Zero-sum politics is not politics at all, but rather the result of a failure of politics to create a shared if not entirely satisfactory feeling of compromise and accommodation. Power will wax and wane for both sides, but each increasingly will feel oppressed by the other. As the historian David M. Potter noted in his magisterial history of the coming of the Civil War: “Southern nationalism was born of resentment and not of a sense of separate cultural identity.”

If left to fester long enough, such feelings of oppression and resentment either lead to the belief that one side must utterly triumph, as Lincoln thought, or that the only solution is disunion. As Lincoln warned during his 1858 Senate campaign, “a house divided against itself cannot stand”. The steady poisoning of public opinion in antebellum America fatally undermined a sense of common national identity. Instead, citizens embraced divisive stereotypes of the other side that reinforced feelings of alienation. “This process of substituting stereotypes for realities could be very damaging indeed to the spirit of union,” Potter writes, “for it caused both [sides] to lose sight of how much alike they were.”

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The same is true in today’s America, where both sides see the other party as illegitimate and its supporters as “deplorables”, as immoral if not evil. But there can be no national community when there is no sense that one’s political opponents are at the same time fellow citizens with legitimate beliefs. As our knowledge of American history declines, we are in danger of forgetting that in a republic there is always another side to accommodate to some degree, or else politics is simply about power, leading to unending and worsening struggle.

Those who shout down opinions they oppose, who advocate to curb speech with which they disagree, who intimidate or silence political opponents, or who censor the free flow of information bear a heavy burden for the looming breakdown in our society. Dogma drowns out reason and less strident voices, making it increasingly difficult to find the middle path that alone ensures the survival of a republic.

Most of us, however, do not want to think about all of this. In going about our daily lives, we can be lulled into thinking that this is simply the new normal, or that it is entertainment, or that nothing truly serious will ever happen, and that we will never see widespread civil unrest or actual disunion during our lives. Such insouciance may be a fatal mistake. As Potter reminds us of antebellum America: “The very familiarity of crisis — its chronic presence during three decades — had bred contempt for it. So many rumblings had been heard without a sequel that men began to take the frequency of warnings as a reassurance that nothing would ever happen, rather than as an indication that something ultimately must happen.” Henry Adams wrote a half-century later in his Education that, except for a small minority of secessionists, “not one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or intended it”. And so, despite all the frenetic political activity of the 1850s, Americans largely sleepwalked into the maelstrom.

As hate and panic spreads, is the terrible prospect of citizen pitted against citizen in our current society truly unthinkable? Exactly how 21st-century disunion or civil war would play out is beyond the knowledge of any of us. It could not repeat the course of the 1860s — for we face today not a distinct sectional division, but rather a clash within each city, each state. Even deep-red states have hard-blue cities, making a replay of state secession nearly impossible.

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What about a general social breakdown that pits neighbour against neighbour? Again, the infinite complexity of such a conflict may keep it from ever breaking out, but in Spain during the Thirties, regular clashes between Leftist Republican supporters of the government and conservative Nationalists eventually led to all out civil war in 1936, with the army itself splitting into opposing forces. Have we seen the beginnings of that in our cities since 2020, after George Floyd and now with anti-Israel protests?

The point is, once a people decides that it cannot live together or when a citizenry divides into clearly opposed blocs, it is impossible to predict just how conflict may erupt. But to say that it cannot happen is to ignore history. Even Lincoln downplayed the threat of southern secession during the 1860 campaign, not believing until it was too late that the South ever would take such a final step.

Today, for all the hope that enough citizens will come together to recreate a middle ground, it is hard to avoid the feeling that whatever the outcome this November, large swathes of the country will see the election as illegitimate, their fellow citizens as the enemy. While this time we may escape the full force of a social hurricane, it will likely take its toll, wearing down our defences for the next assault.

Who can blame them? The progressive ideology that in recent years has swept through mainstream American Protestantism is often impenetrable to those from non-Western countries.

And yet, it is just such immigrants who are keeping Christianity alive in our secular world — everywhere from France’s Afro-Caribbean megachurches to London’s Black Majority Churches. In America, the number of citizens identifying as Christians has fallen from 90% to 64% in the last 50 years, while immigrants are becoming more influential: more than two thirds of them are Christians.

American progressives are increasingly stoking fears of an incipient “white Christian nationalism” bringing about a Cromwellian theocracy. But white Americans have actually been secularising at a slightly faster rate than other ethnicities. While black Americans have also experienced secularisation, they are still more likely to go to church and pray than the average American. And African immigrants to the US are more religious than American-born black people. The rise of Latino evangelicals in America has also been receiving mainstream coverage.

“Conservative Christians”, the bogeyman for white progressives, are therefore increasingly likely to be people of colour — the very people whose voices progressives apparently want to amplify. Christians of African origin are far more likely to hold conservative views on sexuality, while Latino evangelicals are quickly becoming a Republican bloc.

White conservatives, meanwhile, have a tendency to bemoan the secularisation of the West and the decline of traditional values, while supporting restrictive immigration processes — perhaps not realising that non-Western immigrants are more likely to be socially conservative than American-born citizens, or perhaps because their economic or tribal instincts trump their religious ones. Both progressives and conservatives are therefore mired in contradiction.

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Despite the fact that liberals are secularising faster than conservatives, for the last decade, the leadership of the United Methodist Church has been adopting views on sexuality and gender identity that are in line with those of secular progressives, triggering a slow-motion denominational schism. Some years ago, I attended a UMC conference with my parents at which some attendees wore rainbow armbands in support of a movement to ordain gay clergy. Almost all of them were white. None of the representatives from immigrant congregations, and few from black congregations, wore the armbands. “Before I came to America, I thought this was a nation built on Christian values,” commented one attendee. “Why are these people going against God’s will?”

A progressive Christian might see this as a contradiction: if Jesus came from Heaven to help the marginalised, why do these marginalised Christians antagonise a fellow marginalised group? Liberal white people, who usually preach multicultural ideals, cannot answer this question honestly without making it sound like Western culture has the “correct” view on sexuality — the major irony being that progressives dismiss Western culture for what they see as regressive views.

While progressives blame “the Christian Right” for society’s ills, religious conservatives often complain about “woke Christianity”. They point to examples such as Allendale United Methodist Church, which had a “non-binary” drag queen deliver sermons and bills itself as “a church that is committed to anti-racism and radical solidarity with folx on the margins”. They argue that such acts are based on ideology stemming from the secular world rather than theology based on Biblical exegesis.

A similar dynamic can be observed in the UK. Earlier this year, the Church of England floated the idea of using gender-neutral pronouns for God, and allowed prayers of blessing for gay couples. The backlash was swift. Many bishops in Africa and Asia rejected the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury — and criticised the Anglican church’s (largely white) leadership. But even within the UK, there was fierce opposition to progressive Christianity from ethnic minorities, who are keeping Britain’s Christian population from declining.

However, the religious conservatives probably have less to worry about than the progressives, in the long run. If progressive Christian churches align themselves more closely to the values of secular society than to religious ones, they will cease to exist. A similar phenomenon can be seen in American Judaism. Orthodox Jews, who take their faith seriously, and mostly vote Republican, are currently in the minority, but they are estimated to grow to become the dominant branch of American Judaism by 2050. This is partly due to birth rates, but also because non-Orthodox Jews, who mostly vote Democrat, are secularising quickly; they are far more likely to partner with non-Jews, stop observing Jewish traditions, or to cease to identify as Jewish altogether. Christianity, too, looks set to depend on the most orthodox sustaining the faith.

It is ironic that Christianity is now seen as “problematic” by progressives, because the roots of liberalism, which opened the door for progressivism, partially derive from Christianity — or Protestantism, to be specific. It was the Reformation that shifted religious practices away from a central authority to that of individuals. As Tom Holland has pointed out, almost every country that has legalised gay marriage has been shaped by centuries of both liberalism and Protestantism.

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It is also ironic that white progressives support multiculturalism over assimilation, because it is the latter that would align the beliefs of immigrant communities with the values of the utopia dreamed of in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion trainings. In other words, though liberalism paved the way for immigration and multiculturalism, immigration and multiculturalism actually weaken liberalism; though Christianity paved the way for liberalism, Christianity could prove liberalism’s downfall.

The tension between a multicultural utopia pushed by secular progressives versus the socially conservative, religious-inflected attitudes many non-white groups hold has led to quite a few awkward skirmishes. While most black people vote for the same party as white liberals, 37% of black Democrats say their religious views influence how they think about transgender topics, compared to only 11% of white Democrats. While 66% of black Democrats say a person’s gender is their sex determined at birth, only 27% of white Democrats say the same.

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Conservatives in America are also tying themselves in strange knots. A common refrain is that Islam is incompatible with Western civilisation. And yet, some conservative Christians find themselves allied with Muslims against what they both see as America’s decadent hyper-individualistic secular culture. In a number of American cities, Muslims have joined conservative Christians to protest the inclusion of explicitly LGBT-themed books in elementary schools, leading to accusations that “some Muslim families” are “on the same side of an issue as White supremacists and outright bigots”. To progressives, a “bigot” is a stereotypical white Christian conservative; to see non-white Muslim families standing beside them in droves caught many off guard. An all-Muslim city council in Michigan was once held up by liberals as a symbol of diversity, until it voted earlier this year to ban Pride flags being flown on city property, to the delight of many social conservatives. Slate has gone so far as to call Muslim voters “the new Republicans” — an unexpected twist after two decades of Republican fear-mongering against Islam.

At the same time, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a Hindu, has gone from a virtual unknown to third place in the Republican primary, by picking up the support of many conservative Christian voters. Ramaswamy does not shy away from his faith, but rather emphasises the similarities between certain schools of Hindu and Christian thought. Many conservative Christians, it seems, would rather ally with conservatives from other religions than Christians on the other side of the political divide.

It has taken a cosmic convergence of contradictions to get to this point. White progressives, with their absolute devotion to immigration, have inadvertently championed immigrants from cultures that outrightly reject progressivism. With their just-as-absolute devotion to multiculturalism, those same white progressives have created a trap for themselves where they are unable to criticise a non-white person’s culture, values or beliefs — even when they actively go against sacred progressive views on gender and sexuality. Meanwhile, white conservatives find themselves forging alliances with people they never thought they’d work with — people whose entry into the country they might have objected to. Old alliances are dissolving — and battle lines are drawn anew.

Gun violence is booming in the US. In the past three days alone, there have been reports that residents of Washington DC are afraid to walk five blocks, because “I don’t want to get randomly shot”; that a New Mexico governor has issued an emergency ban on bearing arms in response to gun violence; and that 60 congressional Democrats have signed an open letter to President Biden demanding that he use “every tool at his disposal” to combat the wave of gun-related deaths.

Within this culture of fear, guns are rapidly ceasing to be the preserve of white men. Since 2020, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), there has been a 43% increase in Asian-American gun ownership, a 49% rise by Latinos, and a 58% increase among black people. And the diversification of gun ownership is intersectional: during the pandemic, Geneva Solomon, co-owner of Redstone Firearms in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles, said that she began noticing “an increasing number of black women, including single mothers and those living alone” coming to her shop to buy guns. “The desire to feel secure and empowered sparked a significant surge in interest,” she told me. Even before Covid, change was afoot, with the National African American Gun Association reporting that, since 2015, half of its new members are women.

Gun ownership increases when people feel threatened; it is well-documented that gun sales spike after mass shootings. Likewise, the increase in violence against people from non-white backgrounds during the pandemic has helped spark a national arms race. Attacks on people of Asian backgrounds in particular exploded, as political leaders began calling Covid the “kung-flu” and blaming China for unleashing it on the world. In liberal states such as California and New York, where large numbers of people from Chinese, Japanese and Korean origin have lived for generations, businesses came under attack and people were subjected to random assaults on the street.

The Latino population, who account for one fifth of new American gun owners, have some more complex, nebulous motivations for arming themselves. American Latinos, particularly those who speak Spanish at home, have traditionally been in favour of gun control. But that support has dropped precipitously. The desire to assimilate to their new lives as Americans has been cited as one factor, as has fear of hate crime. In Texas, where Latinos now outnumber white people, they are increasingly being targeted by white supremacist propaganda and are moving further to the Right — particularly along the Mexico border. There are signs that the same trend is taking place in New Mexico, where there are calls to impeach the Democrat governor trying to ban guns.

For African Americans, the question of gun ownership — something denied to them for long periods of American history — is thornier still. Black people remain the most targeted demographic for hate crimes in the country, while the number of black people killed by police has also increased in recent years. Civilian gun violence also takes a hugely disproportionate toll on black communities, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Between 2016 and 2020, more than 10 out of 100,000 black teens were murdered with guns; the equivalent figure for their white peers was 0.8, and for Latinos 1.9.

But if black people are arming themselves out of fear of violence, the inevitable result has been more violence. Josh Sugarmann, an anti-gun activist and founder of the Violence Policy Center, says that the real effects of a broadening gun ownership base is already having catastrophic consequences within the black community. “We’re starting to see the impact of putting more guns in homes,” he says, “especially as measured by suicide among black kids.” Last year, the gun suicide rate among black teens surpassed the rate of white teens for the first time on record. The most likely result of being armed, Sugarmann says, is that they will use their guns “against themselves, their friends or their family — and never to kill a criminal or stop a crime”.

While discrimination and violence are undoubtedly central to the changing demographics of American gun ownership, there is another factor at play. For the gun industry, expanding its ownership base has been an active project, and an existential one — bred of cold-blooded capitalism as much as radical ideology. Since the Nineties, the gun lobby has conducted an all-out assault to expand its market share, weaponising fear as part of a diversity push to expand its customer base.

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Watching the extinguishing of the tobacco industry, the powerful gun lobby realised that failure to move with the times would see guns, like cigarettes, becoming a fringe vice that was looked down on by the general public. To survive, the industry would have to persuade citizens that its product is a mainstream commodity. Limiting itself to only the “pale, male, and stale” demographic was not only bad for its image — it was bad for business.

Naturally, it turned to advertising. White men would no longer be the focus. Women, people of colour, and the gay and lesbian communities were targeted with slogans such as “Equality? Brought to you by Sam Colt”, “Gun control once kept freedmen defenseless against KKK”, and, “99.8% of rapists polled prefer you unarmed”.

The industry hit their target. One recent study found that videos geared towards protecting women were viewed two-and-a-half times more often than videos that only featured men. Whether these were directly appealing to women, or to men keen on protecting women, isn’t clear. But these ads were onto something. Women’s gun ownership has almost doubled since 2007, from 13% of the population, to 22% today.

In 2015, the NSSF, which has overtaken the NRA as the key industry voice, held a summit. The theme was: Diversity. Its marketing chief Chris Dolnack said that the industry was focused on making changes “to embrace a new consumer audience”.

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This increase wasn’t entirely down to the gun industry’s activities. Tragedies such as the Columbine High School massacre and 9/11 saw Americans of all stripes feel the need to be armed for self-protection. A woman firing off rounds in a bikini might look cute, but it’s fear and loathing that really sells — and wins votes. “Stand your ground” laws, where individuals have the right to use deadly force if necessary to protect against an intruder, have now been enacted in 38 states. People listened. Whereas in 2000, the majority of gun owners cited hunting as their primary reason for possessing a firearm, six years later, two-thirds said it was self-defence. By 2021, the proportion of people who said they purchased a gun for self-defence had risen to 88%.

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What effect this shift in gun-owning demographics will have at the polls next year remains to be seen. It won’t necessarily benefit the Democrats. Gun owners, a historically Republican base, can still be in favour of harsher weapons restrictions and background checks, the traditional domain of Democrats: rights for me and not for thee has never been an unpopular position. And attempts to take on the well-funded and highly aggressive gun lobby have fallen short time and time again.

Addressing the broader social issues that have led many to gun ownership could, in theory, persuade some new gun owners to put down their weapons. But, if the past decades are a guide, there’s only so much politics can achieve here. There’s no getting round the second amendment: it’s baked into American history.

Manchin’s rejection of the Democrats has been a long time coming. His voting record is complex, diverging from the party line on numerous occasions. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), Manchin opposed the more progressive elements of his party after Sandy Hook. And as one of the few anti-abortion Democrats in Congress, he has consistently voted in favour of restrictions on abortion access. Meanwhile, his support for the coal industry — an important economic driver in his home state and the industry that made him a millionaire before he entered politics — has often put him at odds with their green agenda. He was also the only Democrat to vote in favour of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination in 2018, drawing the ire of many within his party, and he voted with Donald Trump more than 50% of the time.

Manchin’s ideology is consistent, though. It’s grounded in the history of West Virginia, a former Democrat stronghold that has become solidly Republican in recent years. And his conservative bent could be perceived as a survival strategy. After all, he is currently staring down a 55% disapproval rating in West Virginia, as he contemplates seeking another term in the Senate. His opponent is likely to be the state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice, a former conservative Democrat who switched parties. And one does wonder: why doesn’t Manchin jump ship to the Republican Party, given his voting patterns seem slightly more aligned with theirs? Trump, in 2022, actually suggested on Truth Social that Manchin be brought into the GOP.

But Manchin’s comments signal a desire to reject both major parties. In America, there is a large cadre of “politically homeless” voters: roughly 49% of the electorate according to some polling. Where once they might have been drawn to candidates who could see the other side’s point of view, these voters now seem disenchanted with party politics altogether, put off by the extreme fringes of the Republicans and Democrats alike. Manchin is appealing to them.

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While polls show dissatisfaction with candidates within both parties, Manchin’s potential candidacy would inevitably benefit one of them. He could appeal to a critical 1% or 2% in Rust Belt swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, which would probably be enough to tilt the scales in favour of the GOP.

More broadly, his rhetoric is a sign of a shift in American politics. Bipartisanship and consensus decision-making, celebrated ideals for nearly three decades after the end of the Second World War, have lost their lustre, ceasing to animate the base of either party. Marginal struggles currently define internal and external political battles. But Manchin and allies, such as former Democrat Krysten Sinema — now representing Arizona in the Senate as an independent — believe there’s still a silent majority to be found in the centre, one that is indifferent to the culture war that drives the loudest political engagement. 

Manchin’s paradox is that, while the most active voters are increasingly drawn towards the extremes of their respective parties, he is gambling on the centre. While his voting record paints a picture of a moderate Democrat — often erring on the conservative side — this suggestion of a third-party candidacy implies a critical redefinition of his political stance. Instead of being the swing vote within his party, Manchin would be a fulcrum between the two major political forces. Would he survive it?

Much of Manchin’s political career has been characterised by his unusual resilience in the face of the onrushing deep-red political tides in West Virginia. His endurance owes much to his somewhat unconventional stances, which resonate with a Rust Belt populace disenchanted by what they perceive as the Democratic Party’s preoccupation with identity politics at the expense of working-class concerns relevant to their area, such as the protection of jobs in fossil fuel industries.

But is there a national appetite for this brand of centrism? The country is polarised. The Pew Research Center has found that twice as many members of the two main American parties now view their opponents unfavourably, compared to 1994. In a sociopolitical environment where labels — LGBTQIA, America First, MAGA, they/them — have become essential to the identities of young people, not to mention their self-marketing, will there be significant support for a “No Labels” campaign?

Third-party bids have gained some traction in America’s political history. Billionaire Ross Perot’s Reform Party campaign racked up some impressive numbers in 1992 and 1996. But while Perot aimed to transcend partisan politics in order to win, Manchin appears more focused on exerting influence to create a moderate shift in policy. If he runs, he’s more likely to follow in the footsteps of activists such as Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, remembered more for inadvertently tipping the scales in favour of Republican George W. Bush in 2000 than for his actual campaign. And since America today is even more polarised than in the Nineties, ultimately the implications of a third-party bid are more dangerous.

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The mooted “No Labels” party does seem like a hurried experiment in political transcendence, a far too simple answer to the broad discontent with the current political binary. But if Manchin wants to be remembered as the man who shed the shackles of partisanship, this move may tarnish the legacy he has already created for himself. His bold attempt to coax the country towards the centre could end up deepening the divisions he has exposed.

This has been the case with his prior attempts to preserve or create a “centre” on controversial issues. On gun control, Manchin co-sponsored the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey bill following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, which proposed expanded background checks for gun sales. Seen by much of the Left as an inadequate middle-ground solution, it failed to gain traction. As a result, the United States has been unable to make even minor changes related to background checks, and the two sides have only become more entrenched.

On energy policy, Manchin’s support for the fossil fuel industry is out of step with his party’s support for a progressive “Green New Deal”, while his reluctance to fully endorse the coal industry’s unregulated expansion has drawn ire from the Right. Manchin has recently joined with Republicans to oppose the climate legislation to which he had added a degree of moderation. But in general, seeking the centrist position in America does not lead to a union of the factions; rather, it leaves the centrist isolated, at odds with both sides.

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His campaign would simply highlight the structural flaws of America’s political system, in which centrism can empower extremism. Part of the problem is the dynamics of party primaries. Candidates often find themselves compelled to pander to the ideological extremes to gain the nomination, pushing them away from the centre. Even if they later shift, their original stances are remembered; in the long run, this discourages bipartisan cooperation.

Here is a lesson for moderates, if they really want to effect change: instead of conforming to extremism, they should look to their long-term influence on political norms and the policy-making process, as Manchin at least tried to do prior to signalling his frustration with the Democrats. They need to somehow communicate the importance of pragmatic governance, and the necessity of compromise in a democracy — ideally through political advertising that emphasises the value of bipartisan dealmaking over ideological purity, of “fighting gridlock” and “getting things done”.

It won’t be easy. Divide and conquer has always been a potent strategy for generating enthusiasm, and centrists such as Manchin are working in an atmosphere where both parties are cynically leveraging polarisation. Democrats have recently started funding extreme Republican primary candidates, whom they believe will be easy to beat in the general election. It’s a manoeuvre that, while it may yield short-term electoral gains, could backfire, by enabling candidates with more extreme views to gain power. And, if moderates abandon the major parties, they will only empower these extreme candidates, driving the Democrats and Republicans further and further apart. It would be an ironic outcome for Manchin, who claims to want the parties to come together.

So what is Manchin really trying to achieve? He has been a self-avowed independent within the Democratic Party for years; his last-ditch embrace of a potential “No Labels” movement, then, could be characterised as an act of egoism. At the age of 75, Manchin is probably not seeking political longevity. Rather, “No Labels” feels like a legacy move. Manchin might just be looking back at his long career of crossing party lines, and making a final, and perhaps sincere, plea for American politics to move back to the centre. 

Then again, if he is against the erosion of collective solidarity by personal politics, there would be an irony in him launching a highly individual campaign. There’s no point standing in the ideological centre if you’re there all by yourself.