In another op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Rahm Emanuel exhorts Democrats to pursue a “positive agenda” when they gain control of the House next year:

Nearly every data point suggests that Democrats will ride to victory this November, making it very likely that we’ll take control of the House and possibly the Senate. While we shouldn’t take anything for granted, we need to think through how to maximize our opportunity, both politically and in enacting a substantive agenda.

Here are some of the measures he has in mind:

What is that agenda? It should begin with raising the minimum wage, which hasn’t been changed since 2009. We should pass a ratepayers’ bill of rights. We should fight to lower healthcare costs. We should end the scourge of social media on children. And we should pass an ethics-reform package that cleans up Washington and bans insiders from betting on prediction markets. That should be our focus in 2027: forcing Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress to veto and vote against bills that unite us, divide them and lay the foundation for our electoral and substantive victories in 2028 and beyond. As with the tax hike in 1990 and work on children’s healthcare in 2007, we need to highlight issues that exploit the GOP’s fissures to our strategic advantage.

I think that Mr. Emanuel’s advice is both tactically and strategically sound, much what I would expect from him. The question I have for Mr. Emanuel is what makes him think the new Congress will heed his advice?

Illinois is often described as a “blue state” but that obscures more than it reveals. It is not a progressive state in the mold of California or New York; it is a machine state. “Democrat” here has traditionally meant a particular sort of organization-driven, patronage-oriented politics rather than ideological progressivism. Think Dick Durbin not Bernie Sanders.

That is precisely what makes the recent primaries noteworthy. Even within that environment, nearly every successful candidate ran on themes like “Fight Trump,” “Defund ICE,” and “Medicare for All.” In most of these districts the primary is dispositive. The general election is a formality so those are the incentives that actually matter.

There is a simple, nearly iron law of political behavior: politicians tend to keep doing what worked. Expecting a Congress elected on those incentives to pivot toward a disciplined, incremental “positive agenda” for strategic reasons strikes me as unrealistic.

Which raises the question for Mr. Emanuel: if, as he himself warns, the political energy of the moment inclines toward “retribution and vindictiveness,” what makes him think it will be channeled into the sort of program he proposes?

Much as I might agree with him, I think he’s dreaming of a Clintonesque Democratic Party that was rather than the one that exists today.

The editors of the Washington Post speculate on how the Supreme Court will deal with President Trump’s edict against birthright citizenship:

President Donald Trump’s executive order claiming to deny citizenship to children of immigrants in the United States temporarily or unlawfully has been uniformly blocked by lower courts, and on Wednesday the Supreme Court will hear arguments on both sides. The administration’s chances of a win in Trump v. Barbara are extremely low, but one question is whether the justices opt for a sweeping constitutional ruling or a narrower one that gives Congress room to legislate on the subject.

They explain:

One option for the justices is to leave the constitutional debate for another day. That’s because — as an amicus brief from 217 members of Congress points out — the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 probably codified birthright citizenship independently of the 14th Amendment. It uses the same “subject to the jurisdiction” language as the 14th Amendment, and legislative debates in the 20th century strongly imply that members of Congress took birthright citizenship for granted.

Even if the history around the 14th Amendment is too ambiguous for a firm constitutional holding, in other words, the justices could decide that Congress has written birthright citizenship into the country’s immigration laws more recently. The president can’t override immigration law with an executive order.

I am no augur of Supreme Court behavior. I suspect the justices will find that the 14th Amendment means what it says about birthright citizenship which will certainly not please either President Trump or his supporters. That is consistent with longstanding precedent as well as a minimalist approach to interpretation. That wouldn’t be my preferred outcome but I think it’s the likely outcome.

For what it’s worth my preferred outcome would be for the justices to find that states and jurisdictions with “sanctuary” policies hold those in the country illegally outside of federal jurisdiction so the 14th Amendment and the citizenship provisions in the Immigration and Naturalization Act don’t apply to them. If a jurisdiction affirmatively refuses to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, it raises a serious question whether individuals shielded by such policies are meaningfully “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in the sense contemplated by the 14th Amendment and the Court could resolve that ambiguity by concluding that they are not. That would uphold existing law while flashing a warning sign at state and local governments but it would also maximize chaos which I why I don’t think the SCOTUS will rule that way. Historically, courts tend to avoid rulings that create administratively unworkable distinctions across jurisdictions.

The provisions of the 14th Amendment and the INA are overdue for an overhaul. They don’t deal with what’s called “birth tourism” or the sort of citizen via surrogacy farm that was in the news not long ago, both of which exploit a legal framework that ties citizenship to geography alone rather than to any durable civic connection. And neither envisioned mass immigration of the sort we have had for the last several decades. Our present situation is unprecedented in its combination of scale, legal complexity, and administrative fragmentation.

We can’t expect a single case to solve all of the problems with our immigration law. While the Court will almost certainly avoid creating chaos the only institution capable of resolving the underlying contradictions is Congress and it has shown little willingness to do so.

Could someone please explain to me how the United States actually wins our war with Iran? Not how we have air superiority and can strike every military target. Not how the U. S. and Israeli militaries can strike at the Iranian leadership virtually at will. Not that Iran has provided ample provocations over the last 50 years. Not how we could just walk away from the war at will.

Walking away is not the same as winning and declaring victory does not make it so.

How can we win?

We have means, but no theory of victory. Absent that, “victory” becomes rhetorical rather than real.

I’m acquainted with Rahm Emanuel at least to the extent of having once ridden up the elevator in the Thompson Center and chatted with him. That brief encounter, combined with watching his career as a political consultant, chief of staff to Bill Clinton, congressman, mayor of Chicago, and ambassador to Japan, leaves me with a consistent impression: he is intensely focused, relentlessly transactional, and unusually effective. In other words, a formidable political actor and, in my view, someone who would likely make a capable president.

At Politico, Adam Wren argues that Democrats have a “Rahm Emanuel problem,” describing both his style and the challenge he would pose to a party that has drifted leftward, particularly on social issues. The implication is that Emanuel could force a reckoning, that his candidacy would be a kind of “rolling Sister Souljah moment for the party”.

I think that’s right as far as it goes. But I also think it misses the more important point: Rahm Emanuel is very unlikely ever to be the Democratic nominee for president.

Not because he lacks ability. Quite the opposite. He is arguably too well-suited to an earlier version of the Democratic Party.

The problem is coalition mismatch.

Start with generation. Four of the last five presidents have been Baby Boomers; Joe Biden is Silent Generation. Rahm Emanuel is a Boomer. It is tempting to treat Biden’s election as evidence that Democratic voters are comfortable with candidates of that age. I don’t think that’s right.

Democrats had already rejected Biden twice in presidential primaries. In 2020 he was not the natural expression of voter preference so much as the beneficiary of a very specific and unlikely confluence of events: the pandemic, a fragmented field, a consolidation of party elites, and a widespread sense of urgency about defeating Donald Trump. It was, in that sense, a panic nomination. And it worked. But that does not mean it revealed a durable preference for older candidates. If anything, it looks more like an exception that proves the rule.

Since then, the pressure for generational turnover inside the Democratic coalition has only intensified, not diminished.

But generation is only part of the story.

More important is the growing gap between Emanuel’s profile and the priorities of the Democratic primary electorate. He is combative, pragmatic, and institutionally oriented. He believes in bargaining, in trade-offs, in incremental gains extracted through leverage. That is a political style that fits comfortably within the party as it existed from the 1990s through roughly the Obama years.

It is a less comfortable fit today.

Consider one concrete example: Israel. Emanuel’s connection is not merely rhetorical; he has deep personal and political ties, including time spent as a civilian volunteer with the Israeli Defense Forces. A decade ago that would have been unremarkable within Democratic politics. Today it is not.

The Democratic coalition has changed. Younger voters, activists, and key parts of the party’s intellectual infrastructure have moved in a markedly different direction on Israel. You don’t have to take a position on that shift to observe that it exists and that it has consequences in a primary election where activists and highly engaged voters play an outsized role. Emanuel’s stance is not just a difference of emphasis; it is, for many of those voters, disqualifying.

That same pattern shows up more broadly. Emanuel is male, white, and 60-something. None of those characteristics is disqualifying in isolation. But taken together, they place him out of phase with a coalition that is increasingly diverse, increasingly younger, and increasingly attentive to representation as well as policy.

Put differently: the issue is not that Democratic voters consciously reject candidates who look like Rahm Emanuel. It’s that, when given a choice, they are now consistently drawn to candidates who do not.

There is, of course, a counterargument. Emanuel’s supporters would say that his very willingness to challenge the party’s left flank—his “pugilism,” as Wren puts it—is precisely what makes him attractive. In a general election environment shaped by polarization and conflict, a candidate who can fight, bargain, and govern might be exactly what Democrats need.

That argument shouldn’t be dismissed. It may even be right in a general election context.

But it runs into a more immediate constraint: getting through the primary.

And the Democratic primary electorate, as it is presently constituted, is unlikely to reward a candidate whose profile, priorities, and instincts are so visibly out of alignment with its center of gravity.

So I find myself in an odd position. I think Rahm Emanuel would probably be a good president. I might well vote for him.

I just don’t think Democratic primary voters ever will.

Of all of the Democrats who are running for their party’s nomination for president or appear to be running the one I favor most at present is New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. This post at The Hill by Alexander Bolton provides a good explanation for what that is:

Asked by NBC anchor Kristen Welker whether Democrats are making a mistake of shrinking their coalition with purity tests, Booker responded that his party “has failed this moment.”

“I’m proud of so many things that my Democratic colleagues are doing. But as a whole, our party has failed this moment. It’s why I’ve called for new leadership in America,” he said, going on to argue that party leaders have gotten too mired in partisan fighting.

“I’ve called for generational renewal because this left/right divide is killing our country. And our adversaries know it. They come onto our social media and try to whip up hate in America. That is one of our biggest crises,” he said.

That’s similar to the reason I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. This echoes the rationale that led me to support Barack Obama in 2008. In that case, however, the bipartisan tone of the campaign did not survive contact with governing—whether due to political constraints, party incentives, or presidential choice.

Booker’s case differs in at least one important respect. He brings a broader governing background, having served both as a mayor, an executive role requiring practical coalition-building, and as a U.S. senator. More importantly, he has sustained this message for over a decade rather than adopting it solely in a presidential campaign.

The relevant question, therefore, is not whether Booker can articulate a bipartisan vision but whether he can maintain it under the structural pressures that have pushed recent presidents toward partisanship. His record suggests a greater likelihood than we have seen in recent cycles, though those pressures remain formidable.

Whether a President Booker could sustain such an approach remains uncertain but it is, in my view, a more plausible prospect than it has been in roughly twenty years.

Poli sci professor Jennifer Murtazashvili in a Washington Post op-ed notes how divergent the narratives about the American and Israeli war against Iran are from her lived experience in Tel Aviv:

Something strange is in the air. I wake up every morning in Tel Aviv having survived another day. Sirens go off in the middle of the night; we go back to bed countless times. We wake to news that the Iron Dome intercepted the vast majority — 92 percent by official counts — of incoming rockets.

Here’s her observation about the sharp divergence between narratives and her experience:

We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe.

She is implicitly treating her lived experience as ground truth but lived experience is itself a narrow and filtered signal stream. Whether it’s actually objective, falsifiable reality is itself the problem she’s calling out.

To some degree what she’s observing has always been the case. Clausewitz wrote about the “fog of war”. Governments have always produced propaganda. Audiences have always necessarily filtered the accounts they hear through their own experience and priors. Today there is an important difference that I don’t believe Dr. Murtazashvili recognizes, at least not explicitly. The difference is not the existence of fog but its source: not too little information but too much of the wrong kind.

I would offer her this. Information is signal minus noise. The cost of producing signal has been reduced to near zero. Today there is an overwhelmingly large amount of signal and an even more daunting amount of noise. The lack of actual information is something I have complained about. The problem is not merely that people construct alternate realities, but that the ratio of noise to signal has become so unfavorable that doing otherwise is extraordinarily difficult.

After some discussion of the worried emails she receives on a daily basis from friends, family, and colleagues, she provides her analysis:

What worries me more than the fake videos are the people who cannot fathom that this war is going well for the United States, for Israel and maybe even for the long-suffering people of Iran. The strategic picture is more favorable than the online narrative suggests. Iranian options are narrowing to outcomes that all leave Israel better positioned than before, whether that is regime change in Tehran, a negotiated arrangement under American pressure or a ceasefire along the lines of the Houthi deal.

and concludes:

This is the defining feature of the alt-war. It is not that people lack information, but that the success of the war conflicts with their priors and so they have constructed an alternative war: one in which Tel Aviv is burning, Washington never heard of the Strait of Hormuz before last week and the whole enterprise is doomed. Because that is the only version they can psychologically accept.

I think there’s (at least) one additional source of what I would call “noise”: the Trump Administration. That narrative varies on a day-to-day basis, so wildly that identifying the information it contains becomes increasingly difficult. When official narratives are unstable, they themselves become a major source of noise, because they destroy the reliability of one of the few high-bandwidth signal channels available during wartime.

Meanwhile, I continue to try to separate signal from noise in an environment where both the volume of noise and the instability of primary sources are unusually high..

I had to mull this Washington Post editorial over for a while before I recognized what the actual question being raised was. The editorial opens with a condemnation of equity in an Australian mining company owned by the federal government:

The United States government became the second-largest shareholder in an Australian mining company last week. If there’s a compelling case to gamble taxpayer money like this, the Trump administration hasn’t made it.

and continues with an explanation of it:

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation announced plans Wednesday to convert a $31 million loan to Syrah Resources, which operates a graphite mine in Mozambique, into a 20 percent equity stake. The move is an attempt to counter China’s control of the world’s supply of graphite, which is essential for rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles and energy storage systems for the U.S. grid.

and a bit later notes that the federal government has equity stakes in a number of other foreign concerns:

The administration has already used taxpayer dollars to buy equity stakes in other critical mineral companies, such as Trilogy Metals, Lithium Americas, MP Materials, Vulcan Elements, Korea Zinc and USA Rare Earth. It’s also entered into an agreement to take a 10 percent stake in Intel, the chip manufacturer, and secured a “golden share” of U.S. Steel while negotiating the acquisition of that company by Japan’s Nippon.

before making the following recommendation:

There may be a case for limited government intervention to guarantee the supply of certain inputs into products crucial for national security. But a better way to ensure that happens is reducing trade barriers with allies rather than allowing bureaucrats to bet on which firms might be successful.

They never address the underlying questions: should the federal Development Finance Corporation (DFC) exist at all and, if so, what should it do?

The DFC was created as part of the 2018 BUILD Act which had broad bipartisan support. It makes loans to foreign corporations and takes equity stakes in them, ostensibly for national security reasons. Both loans to foreign corporations and equity stakes taken by it are treated as subsidy costs without consideration of possible future earnings.

I understand the editors’ concerns. They accept the goal of secure supply chains. They would prefer trade liberalization over government investment. They never come to terms with whether that’s actually feasible under present geopolitical constraints.

Gold is where you find it—we can’t control where the materials we need will originate from. And, yes, private companies can take equity stakes in overseas companies but will they? CEOs evaluate investments based on cost, risk, and return. Must the federal government guarantee those investments in some way? Should the federal government be in the business of guaranteeing private investments?

Trade with allies does not change the geographic concentration of minerals, China’s dominance of some strategic commodities, or reduce the risks that political instability in some of the places that produce strategic materials introduces. Are the editors concerned about the risks involved or how the DFC’s investments are scored?

I have mixed feelings about all of this. I think we should maintain low tariffs with Canada and Mexico and encourage U. S. companies to invest in Canadian and Mexican companies. I’m not as confident about concerns in countries that are separated from the U. S. by 10,000 miles of ocean. Many but not all of the strategically sensitive materials we’re trying to secure with the DFC we continue to have in considerable amounts but block companies from producing with environmental and other federal regulations. Liberalizing or eliminating those would go far to solve the problem the DFC was intended to.

I wanted to make one remark about Noah Smith’s recent observation on AI’s “sales pitch”:

“Hi. Do you have a moment? I’m from the Cursed Microwave company. Our product is much better than a traditional microwave. Not only can it automatically and perfectly cook all your food, it also microwaves your whole body, so you and your family are paralyzed and unable to ever work again. Don’t worry, though, because when everyone has a Cursed Microwave, our society will probably implement Universal Basic Income, and you and your children can just go on welfare! Oh, by the way, we estimate that there’s a 2 to 25 percent chance that our microwaves will put out so much radiation that they destroy the entire human race.”

If a door-to-door salesman gave me this pitch, I would gently see him out the door, and then quickly call the FBI.

Quite to the contrary, it’s a great sales pitch if you define “great” as one that converts paying customers. But neither Mr. Smith nor ordinary people are the intended audience.

It’s a compelling pitch to short-horizon, competition-constrained decision-makers even if the long-term equilibrium is unclear or unstable. Phrasing it more kindly the pitch is:

Using AI you can accomplish the same results you are now with fewer employees. We can improve your bottom line.

It’s perfect when you identify its audience correctly.

Last night my wife and I saw Gabriela Lena Frank’s 2022 opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego at Lyric Opera, our last opera of the 2025-2026 season. We were drenched by the sudden downpour in downtown Chicago during the walk from our parking garage to Lyric’s home at Civic Opera House.

The picture above gives you a good idea of what the opera looked like. The production design drew heavily from the works of both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. I thought the concept and book were great, the production good, and the staging a throwback to the way operas were staged 50 years ago with the performers standing in lines across the stage and singing to the audience. Some of that may have been deliberate.

I found the music unengaging. In a sort of revival of opera seria it was cerebral and static, maintaining a slow, stately andante and similar vocal and orchestral densities throughout. The final scene, which should have been an emotional highpoint, maintained the same, detached tone.

My wife asked a good question: “Is this magical realism?” I think it sat right on the boundary of both, leaning more into fantasy. In magical realism the supernatural is ordinary and expected. In fantasy it is more extraordinary and used as a sort of intellectual device.

All in all it was a decent conclusion to the season but won’t become one of my favorite operas.

Kyle MacMillan, Chicago Sun-Times

Bringing together piano, celeste, gongs and myriad other percussion with traditional orchestral instruments, Frank draws forth a rich palette of sometimes hard-to-identify, discordant sounds. The music can be spooky and foreboding with rumbling marimba runs, shrill piccolo blasts and alien-sounding trumpet lines or moving and reflective with gently cascading harp or searching clarinet.

Intrinsic to this opera is the first-rate Lyric Opera Chorus, which is almost a constant presence, either seen on stage or heard offstage, helping to shape the opera’s reverential, almost sacred feel at times. Sometimes these singers are part of the action as cemeterygoers or underworld denizens, but other times they act as a kind of Greek chorus, prodding or commenting on all that is happening.

Hannah Edgar, Chicago Tribune

This review is more about the revival of interest in Frida Kahlo than it is about the opera itself.

Lawrence A. Johnson, Chicago Classical Music Review

El último sueño de Frida y Diego has much going for it: Frank’s compelling score, a strong cast, and a striking, at times visually stunning production. All elements came together Saturday to create a vivid, colorful and impressive night of theater.

Frank’s flowing, restless music is powerful, often haunting and eminently listenable. Even when the stage action was static or dragged, the crystalline timbres and iridescent scoring coming out of the pit consistently beguiled the ear.

And yet, paradoxically, engaging as Frank’s music is, there is little that sticks in the memory (an issue I’ve also had with Frank’s orchestral music). More crucially—and Cruz’s libretto bears some blame for this—there are no true musical peaks or standout solo moments for the singers. Yes, there are solos and a late quasi-duet for Frida and Diego. But they appear and go quickly in an efficiently scrolling theatrical canvas that doesn’t pause long enough for the singing to make a strong impact. At times Frida y Diego feels less like an opera than a Nilo Cruz play with intriguing incidental music.

Once again, Mr. Johnson clearly saw the same opera I did.