One of the things I want to explain in my forthcoming book on Leo Strauss and his influence on the American right is how some of his students (and students of students) ended up embracing the figure of Donald Trump and advocating for him or another likeminded Republican president to rule as a “Red Caesar.” I hope to show both that this way of thinking about present-day politics partially follows from certain assumptions they inherited from Strauss (along with certain moral convictions they erroneously thought his writings validated) and that Strauss would not endorse such judgments himself.

The term “Red Caesar,” which journalists covering the American right began to cite in the aftermath of the insurrectionary uprising of January 6, 2021, comes from a 2020 book by Michael Anton with a characteristically measured and not-at-all-hysterical title of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. Anton is, of course, the author of the notorious “Flight 93 Election” essay from September 2016 that advocated, in pretty incendiary terms, that all conservatives should enthusiastically vote for Trump. Nothing less than the continued survival of the country was at stake, Anton claimed. By 2020, after serving as a national security official during the first Trump administration, Anton had begun speculating about situations in which a breakdown in the capacity for self-governance in the United States had proceeded so far that a dictatorial seizure of power would become necessary.

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Anton described the possibility of a “Blue Caesar”—a Michael Bloomberg-style technocratic dictatorship—but he clearly preferred a “Red Caesar,” the reimposition of order and authority from above by someone on the hard right. A year or so later, Anton hosted a two-hour-long Claremont Institute podcast conversation with Curtis Yarvin in which the tech-bro monarchist talked through scenarios whereby a Trump-like figure could seize power and install himself as a Caesarist dictator.

Where did this idea come from? And how did Anton come to believe it might be a good or necessary thing for the United States? The answer is that such ideas and beliefs came from his teacher Harry Jaffa, who was himself a student of Leo Strauss.

The Origin of American Bonapartism

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This post appears simultaneously in Persuasion.

Liberals across the democratic world received a much-needed confidence boost this past weekend when Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party suffered a sweeping electoral defeat after 16 long years in power in Hungary. Where once Orbán appeared unbeatable (as much because of his popularity as his numerous efforts to rig the electoral system against any and all challengers), both he and his allies around the world suddenly look not only beatable but severely weakened.

Might liberals be on the cusp of a decisive victory in their decade-plus-long battle with the populist right?

The answer, I believe, is no—though this shouldn’t be demoralizing. Both sides of the divide are prone to viewing political conflict in zero-sum existential terms: Either the populist-nationalist right is on the verge of a final victory that will issue in a “regime change” that vanquishes liberalism once and for all. Or else liberals are approaching their own decisive triumph that will drive a stake through the heart of the populist-nationalist right for good.

Neither outlook is correct. The truth is that since the mid-2010s, the democratic world has been living in a populist era in which incumbents and establishment institutions face intense gales of popular discontent. When liberals inhabit those offices and institutions, they become vulnerable to populist politicians and movements, who often succeed in winning power; but when populists prevail and begin governing, they become vulnerable to precisely the same dynamic, with liberals now placed in the unlikely role of leading an insurgency against the powers-that-be.

Which means we now reside in a world in which centrist liberals and right-populists are the primary forces vying for power, oscillating between ruling and standing in opposition. If this is, in fact, our new normal, then both sides would be wise to stop acting like the next election will deliver a knock-out blow to one faction or the other.

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Patterns of Mutual Suspicion and Recrimination

We’ve been here before. Right-populist parties and politicians have won power across the democratic world—in Turkey, India, Hungary, Poland, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Chile, and of course the United States. They’ve also risen to within striking distance of power in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

But of course, many of these parties and politicians have also been voted out of office—most recently in Hungary. In the United States, the country’s leading right-populist, Donald Trump, has even been returned to power after a prior win and loss.

That certainly sounds like the normal oscillation of parties in a democratic system. Yet things are complicated by the distinctive character of right-populist politics. Such parties and politicians often deploy a rhetoric of existential threat aimed at liberal (center-left and center-right) parties, politicians, and allied leaders of corporations, universities, and NGOs, whom they accuse imposing a unified progressive ideology favoring open borders, free trade, cultural liberalism, and liberal internationalism.

Right-populists point to this sweeping, multifront agenda to back up their claim that liberals constitute an anti-democratic ruling establishment—or “regime”—that must be toppled and replaced. When populists depose this regime at the ballot box, they govern in a way that seeks to lock in their own hold on power, while corruptly enriching themselves in office.

Orbán’s Fidesz party did this in numerous ways. It expanded and packed Hungary’s Constitutional Court with ideological allies. It forced out career civil servants and replaced them with loyalists. It sharply gerrymandered parliamentary districts and changed the electoral system to enhance the number of legislative seats captured by whichever party won a plurality of votes in an election. (This was designed to entrench Fidesz, but, ironically, opposition leader Péter Magyar’s newly formed Tisza party won by a wide-enough margin in last Sunday’s vote to benefit from it.)

Fidesz also shut down independent media outlets, strictly regulated political advertising to disadvantage opposition parties, and restricted those same parties from appearing on state-run media platforms.

The result was a textbook example of what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections were free (opposition parties were not outlawed, and Orbán quickly accepted his loss and conceded the election) but far from fair.

Liberals understandably respond to such systematic unfairness by describing the right-populists the same way the right-populists once described them: as an anti-democratic force seeking to thwart the will of the people. Liberals argue that populist assaults on the rule of law require coordinated acts of liberal “resistance.” Magyar enacted such resistance by following the example set by Poland’s Donald Tusk when he defeated the right-populist Law and Justice party in 2023. Magyar bypassed state media entirely to campaign tirelessly in small rural towns and villages, eagerly listening to grassroots discontent. He didn’t allow himself to be baited into fighting cultural issues, and refused to denounce a 2025 law banning LGBTQ+ Pride events that was supported by many of those rural voters.

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Democracy is Compatible with High-Stakes Politics

The strange thing about the pattern of mutual suspicion and recrimination between liberals and right-populists is that there’s nothing intrinsic to right-populist policy commitments that necessitates rigging a country’s electoral system to benefit one party over another. In fact, Orbán was defeated by a center-right candidate who agreed with Fidesz’s substantive positions on most issues, while primarily criticizing Orbán for corruption and electoral manipulation. In most areas, Magyar looks likely to continue enacting Orbán’s agenda, only without the authoritarian aspirations.

Right-populists have a point when they claim that liberals have too often treated immigration restrictions, protectionist trade policies, and socially conservative viewpoints as fundamentally illegitimate and incompatible with democracy. But liberals also have a point when they accuse right-populists of attempting to insulate themselves from public opinion and electoral checks on their power.

The best thing for our buckling political systems would be for both sides to recognize that normal, democratic political contestation no longer pits left against right—at least, not as these terms used to be understood. Instead, it pits liberals against right-populists. One faction of voters wants a more open society while another wants one that’s more closed. Neither is illegitimate; neither is fated to win or lose. Each must compete for votes and then allow itself to be held accountable for the policies it pursues and enacts. Each will win some and lose some, and then be permitted and encouraged to come back and vie for power in the next election, and in the one after that.

For this to happen, right-populists need to convince liberals that they won’t attempt to rig the next election as soon as they gain power. They can retain most of their substantive policy commitments without eroding fundamental democratic institutions, like Orbán did and Trump is attempting to do. Liberals, meanwhile, need to avoid the tendency to frame right-populists’ policy commitments as inherently illegitimate, and to accept that both sides will need to challenge their opponents’ ideas in the court of public opinion.

Of course, the liberal/right-populist axis appears to involve much higher stakes—rooted in questions of collective identity (Who are we?)—than contests focusing on tax levels and regulatory policies. The temptation is to treat them as too weighty to be decided in the democratic arena.

But as Viktor Orbán has just discovered, short of imposing a thoroughgoing authoritarian system with no democratic accountability at all, there really is no alternative to giving voters a way to make their voices heard, fairly as well as freely. After all, the very things Orbán did to insulate himself from democratic accountability assured his eventual defeat.

That’s a lesson everyone competing for power in our politically troubled era would do well to learn and remember.

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Patriotism is not enough for the same reason that the most doting mother is happier if her child is good than if he is bad. A mother loves her child because he is her own; she loves what is her own. But she also loves the good. All human love is subject to the law that it be both love of one’s own and love of the good, and there is necessarily a tension between one’s own and the good, a tension which may well lead to a break, be it only the breaking of a heart.
—Leo Strauss

I was raised as a secular Jew deeply attached to the state of Israel. My conversion to Catholicism at the age of 31 did nothing to change those feelings of attachment to the Jewish state. When I stepped away from the Catholic Church and reaffirmed my identity as a Jew 17 years later, I did so in defiant terms, as an expression of solidarity with Jews around the world confronting the specter of newly resurgent anti-Semitism. If Jews were once again going to suffer persecution, I wanted to stand with them and fight for our collective self-defense—here, in Israel, everywhere.

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But I am not and never have been an Israeli citizen. I’ve never even set foot in Israel. I’m an American. An awful lot of American Jews work very hard to deny that such distinctions are in any way a problem or complication. America and Israel are spiritual brothers, they tell themselves and anyone else who will listen. The two countries are kindred spirits, both devoted to cultivating and defending a free society, both vulnerable to their enemies, both willing to fight unapologetically in their self-defense. What is in Israel’s interests is in America’s interests, and vice versa. As the elder and stronger sibling, the United States should provide support in many forms—military aid, intelligence, diplomatic cover, joint military operations in the Middle East, whatever might be necessary for the common defense.

This happy story, if it ever made sense, has now become untenable.

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Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission tells the story of a depressed academic named François whose life and career are upended by an election that brings a moderate Islamic party to power in France. As I explained in Part 1 of this post, during the weeks surrounding the vote and the months following the election, François loses his lover and job at the Sorbonne, endures the death of both of his parents, and watches as France and all of Europe undergo a cultural, moral, and civilizational transformation in the direction of Islam. Just when he reaches rock bottom, seriously contemplating suicide, François is approached by Robert Rediger, the intellectually formidable Muslim convert now running the Islamicized Sorbonne, who uses a blend of the argument from design, Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity’s life-denying asceticism, and the anthropology underlying the sadomasochistic erotic novel Story of O to make a case for François’ conversion. As the novel concludes, François has become a Muslim and a new man—or rather, a rejuvenated version of the same man he’s always been. Part 2 of this post begins just prior to where the previous entry left off. (The last two short paragraphs of Part 1 are reproduced below.)

The primary plot point during the closing pages of Submission is François’ happy conversion to Islam and return to teaching at three times his former salary, with the prospect of marriage to as many as three women awaiting him in the future. As he puts it in the book’s final lines, “I’d be given another chance; and it would be the chance at a second life, with very little connection to the old one. I would have nothing to mourn.”

As it is for François, so might it be for Western civilization.

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The Politics of Male Wish Fulfillment

If you were a psychoanalyst with a patient who showed up to his session telling of a dream that mirrored the plot of Houellebecq’s Submission, you might begin by suggesting the story was likely the expression of a wish. In this case, the content of the wish is all too clear.

Modern life for many men is lived in the shadow of a past (partly real, partly imagined) in which they enjoyed a great deal of status and deference just by virtue of being men. Their role in life was to stand at the head of the family, providing for its well-being and protection, and sometimes to seek glory and recognition of excellence in great public deeds for which they would be rewarded with honor and admiration, just as their wives and children would revere them and submit to their headship in the private sphere of the household.

Looking around at today’s far more egalitarian modern world, many men on the right view this change as an unalloyed loss. They regret it, and they want to reverse it. But first they must answer how we got here. As Sam Adler-Bell lays out in his recent superb essay for New York magazine on women who are ditching the MAGA movement over its rank misogyny, there are two broad explanations and responses offered up by the right.

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This essay ended up double the length of my average post, so I’ve broken it into two parts. The first half runs below. The second will appear on Monday.

It’s fitting that those of us working to understand the rise of the populist right around the world focus most of our attention on the anti-immigrant sentiments of those who support these movements, along with their related views of race, nationhood, and the necessary particularism of political solidarity. Together with their related hostility to free trade and internationalism in foreign policy, nativist convictions are what first conjured these ideological configurations into existence in the middle years of the 2010s.

But there is another prominent and arguably distinct aspect of right-wing populism that gets noticed and discussed, though somewhat less often and usually with less sustained analytical rigor. That is its furious hostility toward the autonomy of women in the contemporary world. Often labeled misogyny, I prefer to use other, less polemical terms to describe it. Not that hatred of women isn’t a big part of what motivates many on the harder, populist right. Anyone who enjoys listening to Nick Fuentes or admires Andrew Tate can accurately be described as a misogynist, just as many of those most fervently opposed to immigration and in favor of mass deportations are motivated by racism and xenophobia. Yet describing them as such can be, and often is, a way of shutting down conversation and blocking understanding, including the empathy to which I committed myself in launching this Substack nearly four years ago.

In that spirit, I’m going to devote this two-part post to thinking through the psychological and spiritual dimensions of right-populist attitudes toward women and relations between the sexes in our cultural moment. To do so, I’m going to use Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission as my guide. (The English translation was published the following year.) I’ll write an additional post after the end of the spring semester about my experience teaching “The Reactionary Right” at Penn this spring, but for now I’ll just say that I’ve found most of the thinkers we’ve studied so far to be pretty unimpressive. But Houellebecq is the exception.

I enjoyed the novel when I first read it several years ago, but reading it this time, for this class and in the context of the second year of the second Trump administration, it made a powerful impression. Houellebecq clearly shares many of the concerns that motivate the reactionary tradition of political thought more broadly, but at his best he surpasses them in his capacity to dive deeply into its motives and reflect rigorously on them—and to do so with just the right amount of ironic detachment. That makes him something quite rare: A window into the soul of the reactionary right, including the wishes that animate it and what it would take to fulfill them in the world.

(A multitude of spoilers follow below.)

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The End of Things

In his illuminating review of Submission in the New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla described it as both “a minor work” and “a classic novel of European cultural pessimism that belongs in whatever category we put books like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.” Both judgments strike me as exactly right.

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On one level, coming up with something to say about politics in the Trump era is extremely easy: There’s always some new story, outrage, bad decision, sign of corruption, or debasement of our institutions to make note of and explain.

But on another level, finding something fresh or newly illuminating to say about all of it is extremely challenging. After more than ten years, we’ve seen it all already: the bullshit, the bluster, the maliciousness, the incompetence, and on and on and on. What more is there to say or understand?

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That’s what made me sit up and take notice of a new essay by John B. Judis in a digital journal called Notus that uses G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of history to try and understand Trump in the broadest possible way. Provocatively titled “Trump as Alexander the Great: A Theory That Explains Iran (And Everything Else),” the piece helps us to gain much-needed perspective on the destabilizing whirlwind of the present.

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Long-time readers know how much I appreciate and respect Jonathan V. Last’s daily “Triad” posts at The Bulwark. I frequently quote from them in my own writing and often forward the essays to friends I think might benefit from Last’s insights and arguments. I should also note that my appreciation isn’t diminished by reading posts of his that I disagree with. Those are often the ones that prove to be the most useful to me, because when Last makes an argument I think is wrong, that becomes an occasion for reflection on the sources of the disagreement, which are often buried in unexamined premises (his and mine) that benefit from excavation and analysis.

This is definitely how I felt after reading his post from this past Tuesday, “In Praise of Stove-Touching.”

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Hot Stoves and Boiling Frogs

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It’s not uncommon for people who spend large amounts of time following the news during the Trump era to describe feeling exhausted.

To cite one example among thousands from the past ten or so years, Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau responded ironically this past weekend to Donald Trump’s latest Iran threat (open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours or we’ll blow up all of your power plants) by producing a mashup of the contradictory messages we’ve gotten from the president in just the past couple of days: “He’s winding down the war and looking for an off-ramp but will blow up all their power plants unless they open the Strait which we don’t need and will open itself anyway which is why he might send ground troops to the country he already blew off the map.”

See? Exhausting.

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But that’s not the primary feeling that’s been plaguing me lately. The emotions I struggle with over and over again while trying to process the rapid-fire chaos of the second Trump administration are anger and sadness, blended in novel ways from hour to hour and day to day. If you find yourself struggling with similar feelings, I urge you to read on. You may find some modicum of solace in our shared ire and sorrow.

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Christopher Caldwell is as good as it gets on the American right. No analyst is smarter, more informed about the world, or as capable of weaving historical, cultural, and economic evidence into fresh accounts of how and why we’ve ended up in our deranged, and deranging, present. He was the best writer at the old Weekly Standard in the times Before Trump, and he’s the best writer now affiliated with the rabidly MAGA Claremont Institute.

But even Homer nods—and even Caldwell can lose his way in trying to make sense of the senselessness unfolding all around us. It’s clear to me that this is what’s happened in his latest column for the U.S. Edition of The Spectator.

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Who or What is Trump’s Base?

Much of the essay, “The End of Trumpism,” I admire and agree with. Caldwell has never shown an interest in serving as a propagandist for any cause or politician, and here he doesn’t hesitate to hit Trump hard for various moves over the past 14 months, including the ruinous global tariffs and risky bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer. But those are just a prelude to the column’s main event, which is a reckoning with Trump’s decision to join Israel in launching a vastly larger full-scale war on Iran.

As I’ve made abundantly clear in two recent posts, I’m with Caldwell on this. But I draw the line with the following:

Trump has escaped other predicaments of his own making, but there is something different about this one. The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project. Those with claims to speak for Trumpism—Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly—have reacted to the invasion with incredulity. Trump may entertain himself with the presidency for the next three years (barring impeachment), but the mutual respect between him and his movement has been ruptured, and his revolution is essentially over.

Caldwell is hardly the only one on the right pushing this interpretation of events. The paleoconservative American Conservative magazine and its “restraint”-minded spokesmen do so every day, as do Carlson and Kelly, not to mention their down-market ideological compatriots Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens.

But how many Americans do these people speak for?

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It was cathartic to write my last essay before the “Ask Me Anything” post that preceded my week away from the newsletter. Bluntly titled “Zero Cheers for Trump’s Regime Change War,” the post was fueled by anger at the advent of a new war in the Middle East, this time with the country of Iran. For those who agreed with me, my rant was appreciated. But others were perplexed. During the Biden administration, I had supported a fairly tough line in defense of Ukraine against Russia’s aggression. My position on Hamas’ bloody invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023 was to express fatalistic support for Israeli self-defense (though this later curdled into disgusted pessimism with regard to Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the conflict).

With those positions fresh in the minds of subscribers, my impassioned opposition to the American and Israeli attack on Iran came as a surprise to some. If you’ve been reading me on foreign policy since I became a columnist at The Week, my response didn’t come as a shock. But those who’ve come to know my writing and thinking more recently feel somewhat at sea. Where is this coming from? How do I think about American foreign policy? Have I merely succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome, reflexively expressing disgusted opposition to anything the president does, even when I’d support the same actions if undertaken by just about any other commander in chief of either party?

Such questions came to a head last week in a Twitter exchange with center-right data researcher Zach Goldberg. It began with a sardonic tweet of mine expressing doubt that the Iranian people would rise up against their government when Israel is the country leading a military assault on the country. In response, Goldberg wanted to know why, in this and other tweets over the past week, I had expressed so much confidence that the war would end badly. Shouldn’t I display greater epistemic humility, sit back, and hope for the best? Unless I want Iran’s theocratic government to prevail, which Goldberg doesn’t assume I do, wouldn’t it be more responsible for me to pipe down and wait to see what happens?

That’s a fair criticism, and one I want to address in this post.

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Why am I so hostile to the war Israel and the United States are waging against Iran—and so sure it will end badly? Don’t I recognize the loathsomeness of Iran’s government, how much it threatens its neighbors, and how thoroughly it sows instability across the Middle East?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Yet I still oppose the war and remain fairly certain it will end badly. (If I turn out to be wrong about that, I will happily admit and learn from it.) Some of my reasons for holding these views follow from the specifics of the second Trump administration. Others are motivated by my longstanding exasperation with certain assumptions of Washington’s foreign policy establishment. And then there is the most important consideration of all, which blends both (disdain for Trump’s team as well as leading figures in the DC think-tank world).

Against Trump’s Way of Warmaking

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I’m afraid this is going to be one of those posts that will prompt some readers to say with more than a hint of sarcasm, Tell us what you really think, Damon.

Donald Trump has led us to war with Iran, and I’m not happy about it. Not one bit.

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Misreading Trump on Iraq

My break from the right had many causes, but it began over the Iraq War of 2003. I have never wavered in thinking the decision to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein was a terrible mistake—basically, the geopolitical equivalent of committing negligent homicide in an act of drunk driving. I came to that view very early, before the war had begun, at a time when I assumed Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. (I thought he could be deterred—and doubted the post-invasion attempt to foster a stable democracy would be successful.) My views obviously didn’t soften or reverse once we discovered there were no hidden stockpiles of weapons. Hussein had been bluffing—to deter Iran and other regional powers—and the bluff turned out to be far too convincing for the dictator’s own good.

Over the remainder of the Bush administration and then the entirety of the Obama administration, I listened to leading members of the Republican Party and its media cheerleaders stake out a position on foreign policy that was a grotesque caricature of Ronald Reagan’s stance toward the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Rather than blending displays of principled strength with hard-nosed pragmatism, as Reagan did, we got poses of swaggering toughness, Manichean moralism, and the know-nothing presumption that anyone anywhere living under a tyrannical government was a little Thomas Jefferson in waiting, eager and able to found a stable democratic government and liberal society the moment the American cavalry rode to the rescue. It was childish and reckless—deployed more for domestic political consumption than emerging from an informed and thoughtful geopolitical strategy beyond an amorphous commitment to maintaining American “primacy” across the globe.

This is why, though never tempted to vote for Donald Trump, I nonetheless appreciated his willingness in 2016 to say on debate stages he shared with major figures of the Republican establishment—including Jeb Bush, brother to George W. Bush—that the Iraq War had been an unmitigated disaster. At the time, it felt like a dam breaking, and I cheered it on from the sidelines.

In retrospect, it’s kind of incredible that two major factions of the intellectual right concluded from Trump’s break with Bush 43’s quasi-eschatological commitment to “ending tyranny in our world” that he was some kind of “isolationist.” Of course, the so-called “neocons” believed this and thought it was terrible, while the Buchananite “paleocons” believed it and cheered it on. What both factions failed to notice was the precise character of Trump’s criticism of Bush and the Iraq War. He never said we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq or toppled its government. He said, rather, that the war had been a disaster (by which he meant the years-old occupation, effort at nation- and democracy-building, and participation in the country’s bloody insurgency and civil war) and that we had failed to “take the oil.”

Meaning: We should have withdrawn quickly, not expended large quantities of blood and treasure, and made a deal to pocket a pile of oil revenue as a fee for having rid Iraq of its Hussein problem. Trump didn’t care if the country became a basket case. The fact that it did become one from roughly 2004 to 2009 only mattered because our troops were there. In place of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule—“If you break it, you own it”—Trump would substitute an altogether different approach to the world: “If you break it, who gives a shit?”

Regime Change Idiocy

Trump has now broken Iran, less than two months removed from breaking Venezuela.

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Of the hundreds of posts I’ve published since I launched this Substack, the one I return to more than any other ran in mid-December 2022. “Judgment Is All We Have” was focused on the Twitter Files story that was consuming a lot of oxygen at the time, but it also referred back to the debates surrounding the 2003 Iraq War. My point was to say that prior to and alongside the positions people stake out in matters of public controversy are elementary judgments about what is going on in the world at any given moment, whether those events are good or bad, and precisely how good and bad.

So, for example, where one came down on the wisdom of launching an invasion of Iraq in March 2003 usually followed from the judgments one made about how much of a threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States in the post-9/11 context, whether that threat could be contained without needing to depose him militarily, and how difficult it would be for an American occupying force to install a stable democratic government after Hussein was removed.

These judgments, often rendered somewhat mysteriously on the basis of an elementary “sizing up” of the situation, usually followed from a blend of empirical evidence with ideological priors. For some of those making policy decisions within the Bush administration, the ideological priors were used to shape raw intelligence to make it seem like the empirical evidence supported what they already wanted to do, which was eliminate the intolerable threat of the Hussein regime.

My point in rehearsing all of this, in 2022 and now, was and is to highlight the crucial role such judgments play in guiding us through the world of politics. If it sometimes feels like our political conflicts have slipped beyond simple good-faith disagreement among people inhabiting a shared world of facts to become a cold civil war being waged by people entrenched in mutually exclusive epistemological realities, that’s because the positions staked out by people on different sides of our disputes make fundamentally different and incompatible judgments about our country, its history, and future trajectory.

This can be seen with uncommon clarity in debates on the right between various factions of the so-called “postliberal” right.

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Just How Broken Are We?

As I explained most recently in my critical take on two negative reviews of Brink Lindsey’s book The Permanent Problem, I think it’s important for people engaged with politics in our moment to take seriously the fact that many voters think our public institutions are badly broken. But among the “brokenists” there is a wide range of views. Some favor modest reforms, others support more sweeping changes, and still others consider the present system so irredeemably corrupt and/or dysfunctional that they support burning our institutions to the ground in the hopes or starting from scratch on the far side of a civic cataclysm.

Whether one is a brokenist at all, and then what kind of brokenist, is a function of judgment, with the harshest and darkest judgments of all justifying the most extreme revolutionary or reactionary forms of political action.

Consider a debate that took place on Twitter/X this week.

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In what is clearly the most significant decision of the second Trump administration thus far, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 last Friday in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the president cannot impose tariffs under the provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Since the decision effectively nullified Trump’s protectionist trade policy, setting the administration up for years of legal battles over whether it must refund tariff revenues already collected, and how it could do so, Learning Resources initially looked like a devastating blow for the president. Finally, the judicial branch has stood up to Trump and firmly said No!

It took just a few hours for observers to figure out that the consequences were far less cut and dried than they first appeared. First, because the decision (authored Chief Justice John Roberts)—including a lengthy concurrence by Neil Gorsuch, a lengthy dissent by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and several other concurrences and dissents—was highly complex. Second, because Trump responded to the decision with rage and by claiming the power to authorize the tariffs already in place on Friday morning, as well as to impose a whole new round of tariffs on every country in the world, under a different statute.

What follows are a series of enumerated observations about the decision and what it means for the near- and longer-term American political future.

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Observation #1: Good Decision. But Why So Slow?

I was initially greatly cheered by the tariff ruling. It was good to see such a firm rebuke of the Trump administration from the Supreme Court with six of the justices (three of the liberals along with three of the conservatives) standing behind it.

The Constitution assigns the tariff power to Congress. Part of what was at stake in Learning Resources, as was perhaps clearest in Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent, is whether Congress can delegate such legislative powers to the executive if members of Congress so choose. Thomas says, Yes, it can. Roberts and those who signed onto his majority opinion say No, it can’t. The majority outcome on the negative side of this disagreement is a good thing for American democracy, as is the discussion in Gorsuch’s concurrence of the crucial importance of Congress in our system of self-government. Nothing that’s so far happened during Trump 2.0 has cheered me more than these passages of this decision.

Yet I can’t help but note that it’s far from ideal that, under this same system of self-government, if the president claims statutory authority to act, as Trump did in early April 2025, it can take a full ten months for the judiciary to reach a final, binding determination that the claim to authority is invalid. That means the system potentially permits the president to act lawlessly and dictatorially for nearly a year before he can be reined in. Other than urging the high court to move more swiftly, I’m unsure what the remedy for this might be. But it seems quite a bit less than ideal that, with Trump now changing how he will justify his tariff authority going forward, the country could potentially end up with unconstitutional tariffs for close to the entirety of the first half of the second Trump administration.

Observation #2: Trump’s Natural Next Move

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I’m late in posting this video of my November 2025 debate with Ross Douthat about whether everyone should be religious. I think it’s fitting, though, that I should publish it at the opening of this post, which resonates with so many related themes.

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I’ve written enough posts about Rod Dreher down through the years that I could almost dedicate a stand-alone section of this newsletter to him. (That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. Here is the most recent post, from just a few months ago, in which he plays an important part.) When I write something on him, my most engaged readers usually respond in comments that they used to admire Dreher and read him fruitfully but that at some point he became a reactionary and racist crank they could no longer abide. I’ve had periods when I’ve felt like that. But I keep coming back to him, even as he’s drifted further and further away from the (perhaps idiosyncratic) skeptical and pessimistic liberalism I affirm in my work.

One reason why I keep coming back to Rod is that I know him personally, we developed a friendship nearly a quarter century ago, and I don’t believe in dropping friends for political reasons. There are limits to that, of course. (A friend who began telling me Adolf Hitler made a lot of good points in Mein Kampf would no longer get invited over to dinner.) But I try as best I can to exemplify the ancient virtue of liberality in my dealings with people. That means demonstrating generosity and openness to difference.

But it wouldn’t be entirely honest to suggest I remain drawn to Rod purely out of a principled commitment to tolerate a longstanding friend who holds views with which I sharply disagree. The truth is that I feel like I “get” him on a deep, spiritual level. That’s never been clearer to me than it was while reading a new and really excellent profile of him by Robert F. Worth in the latest issue of The Atlantic.

The Politics of Cultural Despair

Near the top of the profile, Worth suggests that “Dreher offers a full-fledged portrait of the cultural despair that haunts our era, a despair that has helped pave a road toward tyranny.” I think that’s exactly right.

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This was a week when ongoing discussion and debate about AI reached a fever pitch online. The occasion was a viral tweet/essay on Twitter/X (76 million views as of Thursday afternoon) by a tech entrepreneur named Sam Shumer with a history of even more egregiously dishonest hype than the norm in the hype-infused high-tech sector of the economy. Yet Shumer’s post was still worth reading and grappling with, even while ignoring its practical advice, which included urging readers to spend a minimum of $20/month subscribing to a top-tier AI platform. (The world is soon coming to an end! But for one low, low price, you can be among the few to thrive in this scary emerging reality I have just conjured for you….)

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Approaching Disruptions

The post is worth your time because it powerfully and compellingly describes a near-term future in which most white-collar (knowledge-worker) jobs have been rendered superfluous by AIs capable of doing a lion’s share of the work currently undertaken by human beings. Many people have been talking about this possibility for years, while also getting sidetracked into philosophical debates and fantastical dystopian nightmares about the possibly imminent emergence of an artificial Superintelligence that might plausibly seek to take over the world and/or exterminate the human race.

As stimulating (and anxiety-inducing) as those conversations sometimes are, I think it’s worth spending more time focusing, as Shumer does, on less wildly speculative scenarios. The reason why Shumer wrote his post now (most likely with considerable AI help) is the recent crossing of a threshold that has shaken the world of Silicon Valley programmers and app developers over the last few weeks. Apparently, AIs have become capable of writing code to produce and test apps vastly faster and more efficiently than human programmers and developers are capable of doing. All that’s needed is a human prompt in ordinary English directing the AI to make an app to perform specific functions with a specific look and the AI competently fulfills the request. AIs have also begun writing/updating their own code, a little like a person who takes responsibility for eating well and working out.

If true, and it appears to be, this will rapidly put a significant portion of programmers, perhaps most of them, out of work. (Despite what you might have heard over the last decade or so, don’t learn to code!) Shumer leaps from this looming likelihood to talk of AI having a similar impact on law, medicine, journalism, and other knowledge-intensive fields in the near-term future.

Will it? I suspect so, though probably not to the extreme Shumer suggests. There will still need to be lawyers who know how to interact with clients and juries and judges. There will still need to be doctors and nurses who can talk to patients and perform examinations, procedures, and surgeries. There will still need to be journalists who know how to cultivate a source and weave his or her perspective into a broader, highly complex story that only a mind familiar with the lived reality of the human world can tell in a plausible, persuasive way. The same goes for highly creative acts like writing novels and short stories, scripts and plays, symphonies and songs. People are already trying to get AIs to accomplish these most humanistic of tasks, but I’m confident only the most dumbed-down members of the audience will ever be tricked into falling for these simulacra of authentic creativity.

Am I right about this? Time will tell. But it is a deeply rooted conviction (or faith) of mine that most human beings will rebel against dehumanization when aggressively confronted with it.

From Blue-Collar to White-Collar Apocalypse

Though that isn’t what I want to focus on in this post. This is a post about those who do more quotidian forms of work—not the most creative or highly skilled, but the most common, even in the relatively high-status knowledge-based professions.

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My favorite posts are the ones where I bring my knowledge of political philosophy and history to bear on the present. My previous post wasn’t like that, and neither is this one. I promise I’ll revert to a more intellectual mode of writing in the near future. But at the moment, I find myself struggling to assess even what is going on right before our eyes. The feeling of disorientation was especially acute last week, and it’s continuing on through the weekend. That has left me with the desire to look around, take stock, and size up various trends before launching into a philosophical take on What It All Means.

Hence my decision to make this post a continuation of my last one. It wasn’t just the persistence of my unsettled mood that sealed it. It was also reading Jonathan Last’s Triad post on Friday, which I liked so much I attempted to repost it to my Substack to share with my subscribers. But the Bulwark apparently has that function disabled. So I’ve decided to devote a chunk of this post to a summary of Last’s points, which fit nicely into the “bad news” category of my previous post while applying that judgment to news stories I didn’t even mention there. After that, I’ll move on to a pair of additional stories that muddy the waters a little bit, giving us further bits of evidence in favor of hope.

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Bad News: Four Stories Illustrating the Corruption of Politics and Civil Society

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I don’t know about you, but I feel pretty unsettled right now.

As any regular reader of this newsletter is well aware, I’ve been appalled at the trajectory of events in Minneapolis over the past few weeks—enough so that in my last few posts I abandoned my characteristic quest for empathy and understanding and embraced an impassioned militancy in its place.

I certainly wasn’t alone in that, as we can see from a wide range of polls. Trump’s approval is sharply down, as are his party’s prospects in November’s midterm elections. And support for ICE has cratered, too, as Americans of most ideological stripes (aside from the most fascist-adjacent precincts of MAGA world) have recoiled from the news out of Minnesota. Suspicion of overweening state power is woven into the fabric of American civic life and easily activated by such images and stories. It’s good to be reminded of that. Very good indeed.

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Yet I still feel on edge. It’s been a week without a single overarching story to unify the news cycle, and the blend of medium-sized stories has given us what I consider to be a mixed bag. And so, after several lengthy, complicated, and anger-fueled posts, I’m here today with something a little terser, a bit more informal, and a lot less suffused with indignation. Let’s do a rundown of various stories circulating this week, with an eye to sorting them into two categories: good news and bad news. We’ll start on the upside.

Good News: The (Momentarily?) Chastened Trump Administration

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I lost my shit on Twitter/X this past Saturday afternoon.

It wasn’t the initial video of ICE officers shooting and killing Alex Jeffrey Pretti, for seemingly no justifiable reason at all, that did it. I didn’t yet know Pretti was a 37-year-old nurse who worked in the intensive-care unit at the Veteran Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, or what preceded the shooting, or if the victim had pulled a weapon on the officers. The event looked really bad on my laptop screen. It was extremely upsetting to watch. But I was willing to withhold judgment for a time to wait for additional evidence.

Then other videos began to surface showing the events from multiple angles. It looked like Pretti was filming ICE officers from the sidelines as they interacted with some protesters, that he walked toward the commotion and was quickly pepper-sprayed while holding his camera in one hand. Then several officers grab Pretti and wrestle him to the ground while one of them begins beating him with a pepper-spray canister. Then another officer appears to remove a gun from near Pretti’s right hip and walk away from the skirmish with the recovered weapon. (Later on Saturday, we learned that Pretti had a permit for the gun; there is no sign on any of the videos that he drew the weapon on the officers.) Then one of the officers fires four shots at Pretti from close range. He sinks to the ground. Within five seconds a total of ten shots are fired by at least two of the officers.

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It sure looked like an unprovoked extra-judicial execution by masked and armed agents of the state. An even less justified one than the shooting and killing of Renee Good a few weeks ago, which was certainly bad enough. (We’ve since learned that the shot that killed Good was fired through the driver’s side window of her car, after the officer who fired his initial shot at her windshield was no longer in any danger of being struck by her vehicle, so ICE’s actions appear to have been gratuitous there as well.)

But it wasn’t seeing several additional videos of the shooting that pushed me over the edge. It was the instantaneous decision of senior members of the Trump administration to follow the playbook from the Good shooting in lying, egregiously, about what we could all see with our own eyes—calling Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” reflexively defending the ICE officers prior to any investigation, blaming the victim for provoking his own death—combined with swarms of right-wing “influencers” on Twitter/X mocking the murdered man and issuing fulsome cheers for those who killed him.

It was the latter, especially, that set me off.

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I was struck, in reading columns this week from three center-right analysts I respect, that even intelligent, decent, thoughtful people who made their careers in the old Reaganite dispensation may not be making the right kind of elementary inferences about political reality as it currently exists. Reading these columns—by Ross Douthat, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Jonah Goldberg—I felt like I was watching intelligent, decent, thoughtful people bury their heads in the sand, or avert their gaze, or some other metaphor meant to convey a refusal to face facts and come to what, to me, appear to be obvious conclusions.

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This will be a post devoted to shaking these pundits by the shoulders in hopes of breaking the self-induced spell.

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