Former Democratic Socialist Jake Altman lays out an interesting case in a post at City Journal:

Well, I know the DSA, and as someone who was a member and served in local leadership, I can say that Chait has it right: today’s DSA is not a harmless organization. It includes disciplined, radicalized networks that have methodically expanded their power over the last decade in pursuit of extremist goals.

As the Democratic Party grapples with the DSA’s growing influence and extremism, it would do well to recognize that the same dynamic underway now—first accommodation, then capture, then surrender to insurgent radicals—already played out on a smaller scale within the DSA itself. The only defense is to out-organize it.

He concludes:

What happened to the DSA can and will happen to the Democratic Party if more moderate Democrats don’t organize against it. As Reuther, a man with experience fighting Leninists, wrote in 1948: “You have to show [Communism] up in the marketplace of ideas, expose it by honest dealing.”

But the battle is not merely ideological. Reuther’s victory over the Communists in the United Auto Workers union was the result of a clear-eyed strategy of exposing, isolating, and driving out those who rejected democratic norms. He also built a broad anti-Communist coalition. Dissident Democrats would do well to take inspiration from him.

Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA, graduated from the same high school I did, albeit several decades earlier than I. I often wonder what he’d think of today’s DSA. They’re a long way from Dorothy Day’s vision of voluntary charity and personal responsibility.

I frequently think that the best way to gauge someone’s actual views is to consider what they accomplish rather than what they promise. If leaders consistently prosper personally while advocating socialism, that tells us something. If jurisdictions they govern consistently fail to become more peaceful, prosperous, or orderly, that tells us something else. Campaign rhetoric matters less than observable results.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve linked to a New York Times editorial but I thought this one raised some interesting questions and was worth your time. The editors remark:

Let’s concede what is true in the case for candidates like Mr. Platner. Democrats do need fresh, charismatic, younger contenders, and they should stop treating the next name in line as an entitlement. A party is strongest when it is a genuinely big tent, willing to host real disagreement rather than enforce a single approved script. Voters can tell the difference between a coalition and a focus group, and they are drawn to the former.

But a big tent is worth pitching only if something is argued inside it, and that is precisely what this midterm cycle has lacked. Handed the chance to litigate what the party actually believes, Democrats have mostly declined. What is the party’s answer on immigration, moving beyond its proper outrage at President Trump’s methods to include an affirmative account of who should be allowed in and how? What would it do about the cost of housing, beyond lamenting it and suggesting inadequate fixes? What does it want from the public education system? What is its response to the disruption that artificial intelligence is about to send through the work force and society more broadly?

They conclude:

What the party owes voters this year is not another savior but a set of answers — plain, specific, sometimes divisive answers to the questions constituents are asking to improve their lives. That is how you convince someone that you are listening: not only by hunting for a better messenger but also by finally having something to say. Right now, too much of the Democratic Party’s identity is defined by what it stands against. The trouble in Maine goes beyond a single candidate. It is a party still hoping a contender will spare it the harder work of deciding what it stands for.

I think the party is also suffering from being too closely identified with public employees’ unions. That in turn has led to delegating the functioning of government to the civil bureaucracy. Now Supreme Court decisions, e.g. Trump v. Slaughter, threaten that strategy. Consider this chart from Gallup:

The Republicans have been bumping along at that low level of approval for some time but that’s a new low for the Democrats. That is a picture of brand erosion. Political brands are shaped less by campaign messaging than by the way a party governs. When brand erosion happens you must quickly adapt, lock in your core messaging, and focus on “customer experience”. I’m far from the first to point that out—the recent emphasis on “affordability” reflects precisely that concern. The challenge is choosing the right values and ensuring that ordinary voters experience government in a way that reinforces that.

Yesterday we had a small earthquake in Lake Michigan adjacent to Chicago. It was a 2.6. Nothing to be particularly concerned about.

I grew up in St. Louis where 4s or 5s are pretty commonplace. The Chicago metropolitan area has an earthquake every couple of years, typically in the 2-4 range.

The significance of this and why I’m calling attention to it is that Venezuela has had two major quakes and there was a notable earthquake in Northern California not long ago. The earth’s crust is interconnected. We should keep our eyes open and be ready for something really big.

In a recent post about Graham Platner James Joyner noted the scandals surrounding Robert Torricelli and Graham Platner and observed that Republicans undoubtedly had similar late withdrawals from political campaigns due to scandals but he couldn’t think of any. I can and here are two.

In 2004 Jack Ryan was running against Barack Obama for the Senate seat vacated by Peter Fitzgerald. He withdrew from the campaign after revelations about his private life. And in 1990 in Minnesota Jon Grunseth withdrew from his campaign for governor of Minnesota over a sex scandal.

Although each of these cases was different there were some similarities. Robert Torricelli is the outlier. He was a well-known, experienced politician and the issue was one of corruption in office. All three of the others were political newcomers.

Some are reacting to Graham Platner’s withdrawal in Maine with calls for more substantial vetting of candidates. I see it somewhat differently. Serving in the U. S. Senate should be the capstone of a distinguished career not the beginning of a political career. Individuals running for such offices, state governors, or even Congressional representatives should be well-known to the communities they wish to serve not political newcomers. A candidate who has spent decades in business, law, medicine, education, or civic life in a community has accumulated a public record. Friends, rivals, colleagues, reporters, and political opponents have had years to observe him. Serious character issues are therefore less likely to emerge only after a nomination has been secured. Had that been the case any issues in their pasts would have emerged much earlier.

That sort of public knowledge depends in part on a vigorous local press. Candidates who have lived and worked in a community for years should not arrive on the statewide stage as strangers.

The editors of the Washington Post urge our NATO allies to give their stocks of Patriot missiles to Ukraine and for President Trump to guarantee that the U. S. will replace them:

Early Monday, Russia fired a large salvo of attack drones and missiles at Ukraine, killing at least 22 people — most of them in Kyiv, where rescuers pulled bodies from collapsed apartment blocks.

Ukraine’s defenses had swatted down most of the drones. But of the 29 ballistic and hypersonic missiles in the barrage, they intercepted exactly zero. Compare that with three weeks ago, when Ukraine managed to shoot down 15 of the 19 Russian ballistic missiles lobbed at its capital.

That’s because Ukraine is out of Patriots, the U.S.-made air defense missiles it has used to defend itself since 2023. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t mince words. “As long as Patriot missiles remain in our allies’ stockpiles,” he said in a statement on Monday, “Russia is only encouraged to keep ‘vanquishing’ residential buildings.”

Zelensky is right. The main impediment to peace is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Negotiators say the outlines of a deal to stop the fighting are visible. But Putin has dug in his heels, demanding Ukraine hand over territory his army has failed to seize by force.

The shortage of Patriot interceptors gives Russia a lift. The Iran war has badly depleted U.S. stockpiles. Analysts project Patriot stocks won’t recover for years despite welcome ramp-ups in production and warn that replenishment will take precedence over deliveries to allies.

Trump has insisted that the United States will no longer pay to arm Ukraine. He need not go back on his word to help Ukraine’s stockpiles recover. Under the mechanism his own administration built — the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List program — allies foot the bill for American weapons.

The hard problem isn’t money; it’s fear. European governments hold interceptors that could be handed to Kyiv in weeks. But that would make a hole in their own defenses. Many European governments don’t trust that Washington, busy refilling its Iran-drained magazines, will ever help them rearm.

I don’t disagree with the spirit of the editorial. My objection is that it ignores a simple arithmetic constraint.

Even if our allies conveyed their stocks of Patriot missiles to Ukraine and even if President Trump swore to replace them and even if he tried to replace them, Ukraine is using its Patriot missiles faster than we can replace them.

By one estimate in a single four month period in late 2025 and early 2026 Ukraine used around 700 Patriot missiles. Even if that estimate is somewhat high, it illustrates the scale of the problem. According to Defense News, Lockheed-Martin produces about 650 of them per year. In other words, Ukraine consumed more Patriot missiles in roughly four months than American industry currently produces in an entire year. Even with Lockheed’s planned production increases it would produce just 100 more per year.

Even if those production targets are achieved, closing the gap assumes corresponding increases throughout the supply chain.

This is the consequence of treating defense manufacturing capacity as something that can be recreated on demand. Without dwelling on it, we erred in reducing our defense expenditures and procurement 30 years ago. We used the money for other things including balancing the budget. Trying to undo that error will be even more costly than not making it in the first place.

I’m having considerable difficulty understanding the point of David Petraeus’s and Clara Kaluderovic’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. There’s a strong opening paragraph:

Ukraine is conducting a campaign with few precedents in military history. It isn’t merely defending its front lines or carrying out occasional deep strikes. It is imposing persistent strategic pressure on a much larger adversary by attacking Russia’s front lines, air defenses, fuel depots, logistics and military infrastructure and by trying to isolate occupied Crimea.

which they immediately follow by calling the effectiveness of the “strategic pressure” into question:

Ukraine almost certainly can’t destroy Russia’s war machine, but if it can keep enough of that machine disrupted, degraded and short on fuel, it can change the strategic equation.

The difficulty is that disruption is an operational concept; victory is a political one. As Clausewitz argued two centuries ago, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Military operations matter because they change the political relationship among the people, the government, and the armed forces. Petraeus and Kaluderovic never explain how Ukraine’s campaign of disruption produces that political result.

This claim is interesting:

History suggests that Ukraine’s strategy will give it the upper hand. The Allied oil campaign against Germany showed that modern armies can’t fight without fuel. The U.S. submarine campaign against Japan showed that a country can be strangled by attacking its logistics and supply lines. The Battle of the Atlantic showed that victory often goes to the side that adapts faster. Ukraine is combining elements of all three—cutting off Russia’s energy, targeting its supplies and adapting faster—while using a 21st-century tool kit.

Is that in fact what the history suggests? Those campaigns were enormously important, but they were conducted as part of a strategy aimed at the enemy’s complete defeat. The Allied objective was not merely to impose continuing costs but to eliminate the enemy’s capacity and ultimately its willingness—to continue the war. Indeed, Japan’s willingness to continue fighting long after its fuel reserves and industrial capacity had largely collapsed suggests that logistics alone do not necessarily produce political surrender.

That is not to say that the actions of Ukraine are completely irrelevant; they aren’t. They’re damaging to the Russians. But will they alter the strategic landscape sufficiently to secure victory for Ukraine? I’m skeptical.

Gen. Petraeus and Ms. Kaluderovic themselves acknowledge the limitations:

Despite its achievements, Ukraine hasn’t solved every problem. Russia continues to strike Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, and the front remains brutal. Moscow is exploiting Ukraine’s shortage of missile-defense systems and interceptors, and the introduction of jet-powered Shahed drones may pose a new challenge for Ukraine’s largely piston-driven drone interceptors.

I think the lesson is somewhat different and it is illustrated by both Ukraine and Iran. Precision weapons, inexpensive drones, and dispersed manufacturing have lowered the cost of continued resistance. A state that could once have been rendered militarily helpless can now continue imposing costs on its opponent for a very long time. That certainly changes the strategic equation but not necessarily in a benign way and not necessarily in a way that produces decisive victory.

I think that Walter Russell Mead is applying his own priors in his most recent Wall Street Journal column:

Whenever somebody tells me that America is a creedal nation, I think back to my own experience growing up in the Carolinas. Not once in my childhood or adolescence did I ever think of my American identity or anybody else’s as creedal, nor did I meet anybody who thought this way. We were Americans not because we believed a set of ideas. We felt American the way Turks feel Turkish and the French feel French.

Spoken like a true American. No, they don’t. The Turks don’t believe that a lot of the people whose 12 times great-grandfathers were born in Turkey are Turks. For the French, to be French you must speak the French language. Turkish and French identity rest on histories, languages, and ethnic traditions that are fundamentally different from the American experience. The United States has had to develop another basis for national cohesion because it is a nation of many ancestries.

When supporters of the creedal nation theory come at me brandishing copies of the Declaration, I respect their sentiments but maintain my dissent. The Declaration isn’t a set of propositions in political science issued by an academic committee. It was issued “in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies.”

That’s the challenge that faces us in a nutshell. The Declaration of Independence is an example of the American Creed not its totality. Accepting what’s in the Declaration of Independence doesn’t make you an American. Even being a citizen of the United States does not make you American. Being an American includes a substantial framework of beliefs:

• limited government
• constitutionalism
• representative institutions
• federalism
• liberty under law
• private property
• voluntary association
• civic responsibility

That’s a lot more than the Declaration of Independence.

I’ll provide an example. If to achieve your own version of the American Dream, controlling the behavior of your neighbors is essential, you might want to revisit whether you actually believe the American Creed.

We face a challenge new in our history. There are more notional Americans who are from somewhere else now that at any time in our history. America has always welcomed immigrants. But becoming American has historically required more than legal residence. It has required transferring one’s primary political loyalty from the old country to the United States. If old national quarrels remain one’s primary political identity, assimilation remains incomplete.

I suggest he watch the 1945 short The House I Live In. Its premise is simple: what makes someone American is not where his ancestors came from but whether he embraces a common civic identity. That’s much closer to what I mean by the American Creed than a mere recitation of the Declaration of Independence.

In recognition of our quarter millennium anniversary I thought I’d muse a little bit into where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going as a country.

Over the last few years and, particularly, the last few days, I’ve seen a number of opinion pieces comparing us with Greece and Rome. Consider this from The Guardian by Brit Jonathan Freedland:

As Tom Holland, historian of the ancient world, puts it, the US was “founded as a simulacrum of the early Roman republic. And the lesson of Roman history is that at some point, a republic will become an autocracy.” The ink was barely dry on the 4 July declaration, says Holland, when Americans started “dreading the emergence of a Caesar”.

Uh, no we weren’t. There are several reasons. The first is that the Founding Fathers didn’t take the early Roman republic as a model but as an object lesson. They were asking a different question than Mr. Holland implied. He implied they were asking “How can we make this new country like pre-imperial Rome?” They weren’t. They were asking “How can we prevent this new country from falling victim to the same plight that pre-imperial Rome did?” They were not asking how to reproduce Rome. They were asking how to avoid becoming Rome. In his A Defence of the Constitution John Adams consider Polybius’s claim that “it is impossible to invent a more perfect system of government [than the Roman]” going on to add that he wanted the states’ constitutions “will prove themselves improvements both upon the Roman, the Spartan, and the English commonwealths”. That is definitely not founding “a simulacrum”. In Federalist #63 Madison argued that a “well-constructed” Senate was needed because it was so easy for one branch of government to swallow another. He made a similar argument for a strong executive in #70.

The second reason is that we are so drastically different from Rome. The early Roman republic was an oligarchy not a representative democracy. Rome was a city not a continent-spanning country. However moderns may think that women were downtrodden 250 years ago in America, they were treated much worse in ancient Rome. Roman women enjoyed far fewer legal rights and no political role whatsoever. Although slavery existed in eighteenth-century America, it had already become the subject of moral criticism in a way that slavery in the Roman Republic largely was not.

The third reason is this. It is not surprising that the Founding Fathers treated Rome as an object lesson. That is precisely what they knew of Rome. The Founders did not know Rome directly. They knew Rome through a textual tradition that had survived two millennia of copying, editing, and selection. Manuscripts were not preserved at random. Some works were copied because they were admired, others because they were useful in education, others because they could be reconciled with prevailing religious and political institutions. Still others were altered or simply ceased to be copied. The Rome the Founders inherited was therefore not antiquity in its entirety but antiquity as filtered through centuries of institutional judgment.

One consequence of that filtering is that the Founders encountered a Rome that repeatedly illustrated the fragility of republican government and the emergence of autocracy. Whether other perspectives were lost to history is impossible to know but it would be remarkable if centuries of selection had left the surviving corpus entirely unaffected.

These were not incidental differences. They were fundamental. The Founding Fathers were not attempting to recreate the Roman Republic. They were attempting to build a republic appropriate to eighteenth-century America while avoiding what they believed had destroyed Rome.

That is all the past. What about the present? I share Mr. Freedland’s concerns about our present:

And so, the American in rose-tinted glasses could enjoy Saturday’s barbecues and fireworks displays, insisting that this too will pass. That yes, a crude, venal braggart is in the Oval Office – one who, we learned this week, personally pocketed $2.2bn in his first year back in office; and yes, he launched a disastrous war that has made one of America’s sworn enemies, Iran, stronger and the US weaker; and yes, he has set about dismantling a post-1945 rules-based international order from which the US only ever benefited, growing stronger and richer; and yes, he and his vice-president seem determined to replace their country’s animating “creedal” conception of national identity, in which citizenship is open to whoever subscribes to America’s core ideals, with a definition that instead demands blood-and-soil ethnic heritage – but all of that will pass. In this view, an America that has survived a civil war, Jim Crow racial segregation and the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 1940s and 1950s, can survive Trump and Trumpism.

Add to that the phenomenal might of the US military and US economy, both set to be handed a further advantage over their rivals thanks to the US head-start on AI, and the outlook is positively sunny.

And yet, I’m not convinced.

In a recent Substack Nate Silver’s associate Eli McKown-Dawson observes:

Still, there has been a real decline in patriotism that I don’t think we should discount. Historically, American pride was somewhat exceptional when compared to other countries, so much so that the American tourist who slaps an American flag on everything is a common trope. Have smaller countries — particularly those in Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Asia — always topped the patriotism charts? Absolutely. In the latest WVS wave, 97 percent of Jordanians were “very proud” or “quite proud” of their nationality, while 92 percent of Venezuelans and Colombians felt the same.

But we used to hang with that crowd. In the first WVS wave, concluded in 1984, 95 percent of Americans were very or quite proud of their nationality. That figure was higher than the average share in Latin America (83 percent) and much higher than the European average of 77 percent. Throughout the late 20th century, the U.S. was a patriotic outlier compared to other large developed nations and our peers in Western Europe. Just 19 percent of Germans and 32 percent of French people were very proud of their nationality in the 1993 WVS wave, compared to 74 percent of Americans.

Fast forward to 2022, and “just” 78 percent of Americans were very proud or quite proud of their nationality; that’s a 17-point drop since the 1980s and lower than the 2022 European average of 81 percent. People in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are hovering closer to 90 percent pride, on average. While other regions’ national pride has held steady or increased, ours has fallen.

I think there’s plenty to be concerned about. I’m concerned that we may diverge into a class system. People in the United States frequently say “class” when they mean “income”. Increasing income inequality is concerning of itself but the greater reason to be concerned is that it may devolve into an actual class system. European countries still have classes. Historically, we didn’t or, at least, our classes were of greatly reduced significance. If we have a group of people who have considerably lower income than the rest and that’s likely to remain the case, we’ll have a class system, too.

I’m concerned that we’re using our military promiscuously without advancing our interests a great deal.

I’m concerned about the “cult of personality” that surrounds President Trump. Indeed, I’m concerned about that in any president including Obama.

I’m concerned that so more people are employed in finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) than at any time in the past. I’m also concerned that more people are employed in healthcare. I’m concerned that so few people are employed in primary production.

The decline in patriotism that Mr. McKown-Dawson calls attention to may merely be a reflection of the increased partisanship in today’s America or it may simply be disapproval of President Trump. I’m still extremely proud of my country but it’s hard to be proud of our government.

Having thought a little about the past and the present, let’s turn to the future. I’ve mentioned some of my concerns which are themselves concerns about the future direction of the country. I want to highlight some additional thoughts about our future. We have spent a great deal of time asking whether we are becoming Rome, Europe, China, or something else. I suspect the better question is whether we are becoming something entirely new. The United States has repeatedly confounded historical analogies. Artificial intelligence, demographic change, and technological transformation are likely to make those analogies even less useful. History can illuminate our choices but it cannot make them for us. We are, in the end, on our own.

I’ll present some of my prescriptions in a future post.

Yesterday was the annual Sauganash Fourth of July Parade. As I’ve observed before, in my neighborhood “parade” is a verb rather than a noun. I won’t show you as many photos as I usually do—just a few.

More people march in the Sauganash Parade than watch it. I’d estimate there were between 300 and 500 of my neighbors participating yesterday: children and adults of every age, multiple races and ethnic groups, and just about every size and shape of human being.

There was quite a variety of vehicles, too: automobiles both classic and modern, some decorated and some simply taking part; trucks of many varieties (though no semis this year); police cars, fire engines, golf carts, wagons, and baby carriages.

Several local politicians marched as well. Above is State Representative Mike Kelly’s contingent. I thought the balloons made for an especially colorful display.

When my wife and I moved into this neighborhood 40 years ago, our local grocery store, Happy Foods participated. Yesterday the new owner took part—I counted five Happy Foods vehicles. No camels or tigers, however. I presume the new owner decided one owner being kicked by a camel was enough.

There are bigger parades and more spectacular parades. I’m not sure there are many better ones, because this one is less a performance than a community activity.