July 2026

WHEN YOU CAN’T EVEN FAKE OUT THE RUBES ANYMORE

July 29, 2026

Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua plans to scrap elections – what that says about today’s autocrats (Felix Wiebrecht, July 27, 2026, The Conversation)

Nicaragua’s elections have long been rigged and repressive. But this marks a new scale of authoritarian rule. The elimination of elections is a rare and extreme case, even in today’s landscape of authoritarian regimes. So this reflects a worrying trend of brazenness on the part of Nicaragua’s president.

Most modern autocrats are what researchers call “spin dictators”. They invest in a democratic disguise and the careful curation of a public image fostered by propaganda and misinformation. Elections play a central role in this playbook.

Hence, most authoritarian regimes nowadays hold somewhat competitive multiparty elections – and only a handful of regimes have resisted the turn towards elections that took off in the 1990s and 2000s. Among those are primarily hereditary monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Brunei and the one-party state of Eritrea ruled by the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ).

While there are differences in how non-democracies design their elections, they all share a playing field that is inherently tilted towards the incumbents. Widely used methods include restricting ballot access for genuine opposition candidates, manipulating electoral commissions and courts to favour the incumbent and controlling media coverage. Incumbents also have the power to deploy state resources for campaigning while harassing or co-opting opposition figures.

Founding

THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER:

July 29, 2026

Humphrey’s Executor Has Been Slaughtered: The Supreme Court has finally brought the administrative state back under elected control. (Ilya Shapiro, Jun 30 2026, City Journal)

[T]he Federal Trade Commission isn’t a debating society. It, along with its alphabet-agency brethren, writes rules with the force of law, investigates private parties, adjudicates violations, and sues in federal court on behalf of the United States. Whatever labels Congress attached to that body in the Progressive Era, the FTC—like the FCC, SEC, NLRB, and so on—today exercises executive power. And the Constitution vests “the executive power” in one president, not in commissioners serving staggered terms, answerable to no one whom voters can fire.

This ruling isn’t a gift to Donald Trump or his successors. It’s a restoration of constitutional accountability. Congress can create executive-branch agencies and specify what they may do, but it cannot create a fourth branch of government and then pretend its officers are independent of the only person the Constitution makes responsible for executing federal law.

Roberts put the point crisply at the end of Slaughter: “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him.” That’s a unitary, not an imperial, presidency, and it’s a hallmark of republican government.

Republican Liberty

THE MIRACLE OF REPUBLICANISM…:

July 29, 2026

Baseball as Covenant: Kendall’s Enduring Symbols of Ordered Self-Government (Clifford Bates Jr., 7/14/26, Voegelin View)

Kendall’s early writings on baseball reveal a deeply conservative anthropology: human endowment is uneven, yet rich in potential, demanding cultivation through practice, discipline, and reverence for the game’s structure. In his teenage pamphlet, Kendall emphasizes “native baseball ability,” quoting Yankees skipper Miller Huggins to underscore that talent cannot be manufactured by rules alone; it must be nurtured. Some players possess natural grace at the plate; others stumble, yet all are invited to participate within the game’s bounded structure. Here, the meritocratic ethos of baseball parallels Kendall’s conception of the American polity: individuals are born with differing capacities for virtue, judgment, and civic contribution, yet the republic offers a framework within which all can exercise these faculties for the common good.

…is that your superiors choose to be your equals.

Books

My Mysterious Search for J.D. Salinger: An obsessive (if strange) pilgrimage to the late author’s New Hampshire sanctuary, where, if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of one man hiding. (Ron Rosenbaum, Jan 28, 2010, Esquire)

There’s a line in Mao II, Don DeLillo’s novel about a Salinger-like reclusive writer who wonders: Why are so many so obsessed with my invisibility, my hiddenness, my absence?

“When a writer doesn’t show his face,” he answers himself, “he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.”

The silence of a writer is not the same as the silence of God, but there’s something analogous: an awe-inspiring creator, someone we believe has some answers of some kind, refusing to respond to us, hiding his face, withholding his creation. The problem, the rare phenomenon of the unavailable, invisible, indifferent writer (indifferent to our questions, indifferent to the publicity-industrial complex so many serve), is the literary equivalent of the problem of theodicy, the specialized subdiscipline of theology that addresses the problem of the apparent silent indifference of God to the hell of human suffering.

And when a writer won’t break his silence, we think of ways to break into it. We think of knocking on his door or leaving messages in his mailbox.

S.’s two mailboxes beckoned to me as I stood at the bottom of his driveway.

Anglospherics

TOUGH BEAT FOR IDENTITARIANS:

July 28, 2026

The creedal nation: A contentious birthright citizenship ruling has re-opened an old American question: is the United States defined by allegiance, or by blood and soil? (Sumantra Maitra, 7/15/26, Englesberg Ideas)

GK Chesterton wrote, ‘America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.’ Often forgotten is that the Declaration of Independence raged against the monarch of Great Britain for opposing migration and naturalisation: ‘He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.’

The American creed is also clearly defined. ‘Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories,’ Alexis de Tocqueville wrote. James Madison argued that the US should never fall under the tyranny of majoritarianism: ‘Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.’

The first major attempt at charting the story of the republic, by George Bancroft in his History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, had this sentence: ‘The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.’ Abraham Lincoln said that America is a nation defined by a proposition, that all men are created equal: in other words, a creed.

Identitarianism

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

July 28, 2026

The DSA Platform Would Destroy American Democracy: The socialist group’s vision of a federal government without three equal branches providing checks and balances would facilitate the whims of a would-be authoritarian. Sound familiar? (Bill Scher, July 28, 2026, Washington Monthly)

To call the DSA platform antithetical to the U.S Constitution is not hyperbole, or an insult to the platform’s authors. The DSA preamble states plainly that the end goal is to “draft a new constitution” to “create a democratic socialist republic.” Such a new U.S. constitution, the DSA envisions, would “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” which would be unicameral after abolishing the Senate.

That last bit about the Senate may sound appealing. The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait called it DSA’s “best idea” since the Senate’s structure gives disproportionate power to voters in less populated states in ratios likely unimagined by the Founders. But it can’t be viewed in isolation from the broader DSA program, which is an obliteration of the Constitution’s system of checks-and-balances among three equal branches of government.

In the DSA view, the Constitution’s diffusion of power is “anti-democratic” and an inherent obstacle to a “democratic society of the working class.” America’s “political and economic system [is] built on private ownership and profit at all costs,” and DSA warns that “as capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism.”

But what DSA fails to recognize is that the Constitution’s diffusion of power is what has prevented Donald Trump and his MAGA minions from permanently installing right-wing authoritarianism.

Which is why the Trumpists hate the Constitution too.

Energy

RENEWABLES ARE INDEPENDENCE:

July 28, 2026

A great idea that everyone hates (Matthew Yglesias, Jul 28, 2026, Slow Boring)

The good news is that there is a very straightforward and well-understood idea that would have a meaningful short-term impact on prices without killing incentives for new investment.

The bad news is that nobody in their right mind even talks about this idea because it’s universally understood to be politically toxic and something everyone would hate.

I’m not here to dispute that diagnosis, just to say that failing to even talk about it is impoverishing the discourse — I keep encountering efforts to essentially recreate it with extra bells and whistles, and I don’t think that anyone coming up with these “new” ideas is taking seriously enough the question of why we don’t just do the straightforward thing.

So what’s the straightforward thing? It’s simple: We could charge household electricity users the spot price of electricity.

Tax externalities.

Israel/Palestine

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL: A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

July 28, 2026

How Netanyahu’s Top General Became His Strongest Challenger: Gadi Eisenkot, whose view of war is shaped by the loss of his son, is, in manner and character, the anti-Bibi. (David Remnick, July 27, 2026, The New Yorker)

The sources of alarm seem inexhaustible: the fighting up north in Lebanon; the Trump Administration’s turn from frenetic negotiations with the newly emboldened regime in Tehran to a prolonged bombing campaign; Netanyahu’s deals of convenience with the ultra-Orthodox, a crucial component of his voting bloc; the deepening hostility toward Israel across the ideological spectrum and all over the world. What is far more rarely discussed, in Kfar HaNagid and elsewhere, is the colossal human suffering and devastation in the Gaza Strip and the mayhem committed daily against Palestinians by settlers in villages throughout the West Bank.

Finally, Eisenkot arrives. He is sixty-six, a man of broad belly and pained expression. When he smiles, he winces as if from a twinge of sciatica. He is dressed in a dark polo shirt, his post-military uniform. Eisenkot’s parents were Moroccan immigrants of modest means. He was born in Tiberias and grew up in Eilat, two cities considered to be on the Israeli periphery. Were Eisenkot to win, he would be the first Prime Minister with such a background.

This presents a problem for Netanyahu. Despite growing up in an affluent neighborhood in Jerusalem, and being the Ashkenazi son of a prominent historian of the Spanish Inquisition, Netanyahu has long positioned himself, and his Likud Party, as the security-minded champion of the working class, the pious, the voiceless, and the Mizrahim, who came to Israel from Jewish communities in predominantly Muslim countries. Most analysts here believe that, in a close election, Eisenkot can prevail if he attracts at least some “soft right” voters in provincial cities like Kiryat Shmona, Ofakim, Ashdod, Nahariya, and Dimona. In many traditional Likud strongholds, the journalist Hilo Glazer wrote in Haaretz, Eisenkot is described by his supporters as dialina, Moroccan Arabic for “one of us.” […]

He is just short of dull and makes a virtue of it. Last year, he founded a party called Yashar—the name meaning straight, upright, just. At the lectern, he briskly ticks through his themes and campaign promises, among them a pledge to restore Israel as a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state.” This sort of phrase is rarely heard from Netanyahu, much less from two of his most racist and reactionary ministers: Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance. Both are unapologetic in their support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.

Health

…AND CHEAPER…:

July 27, 2026

The path to artificial superintelligence (MIT Technology Review Insights, July 27, 2026)

Imagine a healthcare system made up of multiple AI agents: one that manages symptom assessment, another scheduling, a third insurance, and a fourth pharmacy.

Each is an expert in its domain. But they all have their own distinct knowledge and objectives. Today they can exchange data, but they are not yet able to actually coordinate patient care without a human making the decisions.

“The intelligence is already there. What is missing is the connective tissue that turns four strangers into one team,” explains Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president and general manager of Outshift by Cisco.

This “connective tissue” comes from adding a semantic layer—what Outshift calls the “Internet of Cognition”—that enables agents across domains to work together and, critically, “think” together through shared intent, context, and reasoning.

Long War

FAILURE TO DENAZIFY WAS TRAGIC:

July 27, 2026

Reagan was right about Daniel Ortega all along (Jon Miltimore, July 25, 2026, Restoring America)

Ortega, the son of a shoemaker, first came to power in 1979 after dropping out of law school to join the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a socialist revolutionary movement. He became an unapologetic disciple not just of Karl Marx but also of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary who brought terror as well as revolution to Russia.

“I admire Marx, I respect Marx, as I also admire and respect Lenin,” Ortega told the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s.

Like the Bolsheviks, Ortega had little hesitation about expropriating private property, helping himself to the luxurious mansion of a wealthy banker. Throughout the 1980s, Ortega implemented a familiar socialist playbook: nationalizing industries, redistributing wealth, and radically reallocating land, all while enjoying the spoils of what capitalists had built.

President Ronald Reagan famously dismissed Ortega as a “dictator in designer glasses.” Yet many argued Ortega was a reformer disinterested in personal power.

The desire to accommodate remnants of prior regimes–particularly the army and judges–is admirable, but disastrous.

WHEN YOU CAN’T EVEN FAKE OUT THE RUBES ANYMORE

THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER:

THE MIRACLE OF REPUBLICANISM…:

THE ODYSSEY:

TOUGH BEAT FOR IDENTITARIANS:

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

RENEWABLES ARE INDEPENDENCE:

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL: A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

…AND CHEAPER…:

FAILURE TO DENAZIFY WAS TRAGIC:

You Missed

THE MIND BOGGLES:

CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR HOW IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL TO TRANSITION…:

DIRT MAID:

APPLYING DARWINISM: