Long War

TRUMPISM DOESN’T WORK:

February 28, 2026

The Post-Liberal Laboratory: Sixteen Years of Orbán’s Hungary (Kaiser Bauch, 2/25/26, LEO)

[I]t is important to acknowledge that the period between the financial crisis and COVID was a great economic time for the whole East-Central European region, propelled mostly by advantageous global conditions. The post-communist EU member states were all growing rapidly—on average about 3.2%.

While Hungary grew above the average and was among the top performers, the problem is that Hungarian growth was driven primarily by rising employment and hours worked. ‘Orbánomics’ was based on attracting foreign capital investment into factories, mostly but not exclusively in automotive, to create jobs. In this, Hungary was successful, yet this growth model—which economists call ‘extensive’ rather than ‘intensive’—started to break down around 2019, before the COVID crisis hit.

It is a model that requires more and more capital and more and more additional labor every year to maintain economic growth. Yet the Hungarian labour force is declining and the country started to experience labour shortages. Moreover, if one looks at labour productivity growth measured as GDP per hour worked in the same period (2013-2019), Hungary was among the worst performers in the region—growing 1.7% on average while the regional average was 2.3%. It also had by far the biggest mismatch between labour productivity growth and GDP growth—meaning that this growth was not sustainable unless the labour force (or working hours) continued to expand. But more on that later.

Since COVID, things have only gotten worse.

At the End of History, there is no viable alternative to liberalism.

Identitarianism

APPLIED DARWINISM:

February 24, 2026

The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem (Tom Nichols, 2/23/26, The Atlantic)

Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

Identitarianism is evil.

Identitarianism

LET MY PEOPLE GO:

February 22, 2026

What I Saw at the Battle of Minneapolis: The national media has moved on. Minnesota is still under siege. (Jonathan V. Last, Feb 21, 2026, The Bulwark)

Nearly every person I spoke to in Minnesota told me about a web of clandestine services that have sprung up to support neighbors targeted by the government.

The Twin Cities have tens of thousands of residents who cannot leave their homes for fear of being abducted by DHS. These people cannot go to work. They cannot shop for groceries. They cannot go to doctors’ appointments. Many of them cannot send their children to school.

Various civic groups have self-organized to help them. Food banks deliver groceries. People donate money to pay rent. Doctors finish their shifts and then make house calls. The governor told us about a group of doulas who make secret home visits to deliver babies to mothers who cannot go to a hospital, because DHS agents view health care facilities as abduction traps.

Think about that: You now live in a country where volunteers deliver babies at home, in secret, off the books, because mothers fear that if they go to the hospital, they will be abducted by masked, armed agents of the state while giving birth.

This is not a hypothetical. It is your lived reality. It is America.

Identitarianism

TAKING THE MAGA OUT OF MAGYAR:

February 22, 2026

Is This Viktor Orbán’s Last Stand? (Paul Hockenos, 2/17/26, The Nation)

[T]he muscle behind Orbán and his party could hardly be more formidable: Vladimir Putin’s Russia, President Donald Trump, and China, too, line up behind Orbán, their favorite European leader.

And, yet, Fidesz is trailing a new opposition party, Tisza, by double digits and the buttons that Orbán’s pushed so deftly for 16 years—immigration, Hungarian nativism, anti-LGBTQ, “peace”—aren’t triggering Hungarians as they had in the past. Magyars appear fed up with the economic backlash of lost EU funding, the high cost of living, ubiquitous corruption, and a long trail of unseemly scandals.

Identitarianism Just So Stories

APPLIED DARWINISM:

February 20, 2026

Why Team Trump Talking About ‘Lethalitymaxxing’ Should Alarm You: Trendy internet slang meets eugenics, the manosphere, and neo-Nazis. (Ilyse Hogue, Feb 20, 2026, The Bulwark)

The fitness-to-radicalization pipeline works like this: A young man who feels defeated by external factors finds power and community in spaces within his control. One of those places is the gym, where self-discipline is celebrated.1 This is not inherently sinister. The desire to be strong, healthy, and competent is deeply human. But if you go deeper into some parts of fitness culture, the message shifts almost imperceptibly from your value is determined by your body to some bodies—and therefore some people—are simply worth more than others.

RFK Jr.’s ‘concern’ about vaccines was never purely about what was in the syringe. He was always alluding to a logic familiar to those within eugenics movements: that strong, healthy, naturally resilient bodies don’t need pharmaceutical intervention, and that those who do are, in some fundamental sense, weaker. It’s no coincidence that Kennedy is now secretary of health and human services, and that Make America Healthy Again is the mainstream-laundered expression of that same ideology, only operating from inside the federal government.

Now, the Department of Defense is getting in on the game. The term “maxxing” comes from the looksmaxxing subculture—a bleak corner of the internet rooted in incel forums and built around the obsessive desire to optimize physical appearance. Where red-pill fitness and MAHA offered self-improvement as aspiration, looksmaxxing suggests natural remedy is not sufficient. Here, the ideology is even more explicit: Human worth is a function not just of genetics but how you can build on it. Your jawline, your clavicle width, your bone structure—these aren’t just aesthetic qualities. They are destiny. To improve them is to improve your social rank, your sexual prospects, and ultimately your value as a human being.

The “looksmaxxing” world grades men on a scale that ranges from “subhuman” to “Chad.” They trade techniques ranging from aggressive fitness regimens to hormone injections to “bonesmashing,” i.e., hitting your own face with a hammer to reshape your cheekbones. The movement’s newest star, a 20-year-old known as Clavicular, has injected his teenage girlfriend with fat-dissolving acid on livestream to reshape her jaw. He says he typically earns between $80,000 and $100,000 a month from streaming.

The looksmaxxing world is, as the Atlantic recently described it, “narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.”

Dragon Has No Teeth

The rising risk of China turning Japanese: Beijing’s stimulus push may delay crisis, but without deeper reform, China risks a slower version of Japan’s long stagnation (Ronny P Sasmita, February 18, 2026, Asia Times)

Whether acknowledged or not, what is unfolding in China today bears a striking resemblance to Japan in 1989.

China’s property sector, which served as the primary engine of growth for two decades, has become a heavy drag on the economy. Developer giants such as Evergrande are not merely failed corporations; they symbolize the bursting of an asset bubble far larger than anything Japan experienced.

China is also beginning to show symptoms of Richard Koo’s balance sheet recession, this time at the household level. Middle-class families, with roughly 70% of their wealth tied to property, feel poorer as housing prices fall. Consumption slows accordingly.

At the same time, deflationary pressures are intensifying across the economy. Should China slide into a deflationary spiral of the kind Krugman describes, massive private and local government debts will become even more burdensome as the real value of debt rises while prices fall.

Identitarianism

NO ONE HATES JUST MUSLIMS:

February 18, 2026

NatCon Chief’s Muddled Brief: Yoram Hazony’s confused attempt to sort out the problem of right-wing antisemitism. (Gabriel Schoenfeld, Feb 18, 2026, The Bulwark)

As Hazony acknowledges, the Republican party is itself at risk for becoming infected by “relentless anti-Jewish messaging.” What he has in mind is not merely arguments about Israeli policy toward Gaza, but “the explicit and savage targeting” by rightwing podcasters “of Jews, Judaism, and Zionism.” Is this the future, he asks, of the Republican party?

The party, in Hazony’s description, is today divided into three distinct factions. A “liberal wing” led by figures such as Lindsey Graham, Mike Pompeo, and Ted Cruz was once dominant, but in the Trump era, it has been in decline and probably represents no more than “25 percent of the party’s primary voters today.”

Then there is a nationalist wing, represented by Trump himself, as well as JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth. Hazony estimates that it makes up about 65 percent of the party and is distinguished “by its support for an industrial policy to restore America’s manufacturing capabilities, its outspoken rejection of compromise on immigration issues, and its skepticism of long foreign wars.”

Finally, there’s the alt-right, “which was mostly a fringe phenomenon until 2023, when big-name media figures Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens moved into this space.” Today, Hazony says, its voters comprise perhaps 10 percent of the Republican party.

But of course, the distinction Hazony is drawing between liberal and nationalist Republicans is completely contrived and even nonsensical. In what ways, fundamental or otherwise, do such “liberal” Republicans as Graham, Pompeo, and Cruz—all of them Trump sycophants—differ from Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth—all of them also Trump sycophants?

Once you unleash the Identitarian monster, you can’t get it to hate just one “Identity”

Identitarianism

ESCAPING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY:

February 8, 2026

A persuasive critique of identity politics: Valorising the victim gives us not a more just world, but a world with less moral and aesthetic content (Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, 2/08/26, The Critic)

The ideology of victimhood operates as an ersatz morality. Once status is conferred by self-appointed “experts”, social, institutional and material advantages often follow. But, as Daouda reiterates throughout her book, there is a high cost to acquiring victim status, namely, the renunciation of one’s personhood as a free-willed agent.

As always, Eric Hoffer described it best:

Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden…We join
a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young
Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared
themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves
cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not
joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?

Identitarianism Just So Stories

WE’LL HAVE PLENTY LEFT WHEN WE CRASH INTO THE SUN:

February 7, 2026

The postliberal war on economics (Phil Magness, Feb 06, 2026, The Argument)

In a 2007 blog post, Deneen predicted an impending societal collapse from environmental degradation, noting “in all likelihood we’ll experience some severe civilizational dislocation in coming months and years as a result of peak oil.”

Peak Oil Theory was a trendy doctrine from the 2000s that foresaw an imminent natural resource depletion, whereupon fossil fuel energy production would enter into a rapid and irreversible decline. Widespread shortages and economic collapse would soon follow as our oil-dependent economy could no longer sustain consumption at current levels.

It has since fallen by the wayside among environmentalists as new fossil fuel exploration and better extraction technologies vastly expanded the world’s estimated oil reserves. Green activists today have shifted their arguments to emphasize climate change as their leading concern, even arguing for intentional fossil fuel sequestration on the grounds that the Earth’s atmosphere cannot handle the emissions that would arise from currently known oil reserves.

But for Deneen, the snapshot claims of late 2000s Peak Oil Theory provided the “eureka” moment that led him to develop postliberalism. He recounted this much on his blog:

[W]hen I learned about “peak oil” – that is, the imminent depletion of roughly half the world’s oil reserves, and by far the easiest accessible and cheapest stuff – it finally made sense to me why a political philosophy that I had long held to be fundamentally false – modern liberalism – nevertheless had prospered for roughly the past 100 years and had gone into hyper-drive over the past half-century.

Modern liberalism – the philosophy premised upon a belief in individual autonomy, one that rejected the centrality of culture and tradition, that eschewed the goal or aim of cultivation toward the good established by dint of (human) nature itself, that regarded all groups and communities as arbitrarily formed and therefore alterable at will, that emphasized the primacy of economic growth as a precondition of the good society and upon that base developed a theory of progress (material as well as moral), and one that valorized the human will itself as the source of sufficient justification for the human mastery of nature, including human nature (e.g., biotechnological improvement of the species) – is against nature, and therefore ought not to have “worked.”

In this telling, the posited resource limitations of Peak Oil Theory revealed not just the source of the coming environmental disaster, but its culpable party, which is to say liberalism — and specifically economic liberalism — itself.

The explosion of economic prosperity from the 18th-century stirrings of the Industrial Revolution to the present day depended upon fossil fuel in the literal sense. In Deneen’s reasoning, that fuel came from a limited resource that would soon be depleted. The Great Enrichment of the modern era, and indeed humanity’s escape from the multi-thousand-year Malthusian Trap of hunger and stagnation, only came about through artificial means that elevated humanity’s economic consumption beyond its “natural” state.

From Darwinism to Marxism to PostLiberalism, no bad idea has done more damage than Malthusianism.

Cheeto Jesus Identitarianism

BERNIE BRO IN CHIEF:

February 5, 2026

The ‘Affordability’ Horseshoe: The president is stealing progressive Democrats’ worst economic ideas. (Scott Lincicome, February 4, 2026, The Dispatch)

Trump was never a doctrinaire Reaganite supply-sider, of course, but his embrace of domestic economic policies championed by U.S. progressives is the clearest evidence yet that the “horseshoe” theory of politics—i.e., that the extreme left and extreme right have more in common with each other than with the moderate center—is alive and well in the United States. The similarities have been clearest on trade, where both the far left and far right uniformly disdain “globalization” and the “elites” who supposedly use it to profit at The People’s expense. But we now see the same parallels in domestic economic policy, too—both in the details and the script that each policy follows: target common enemies and offer easy solutions to complex problems—solutions that don’t actually work and, in fact, can often make things worse for the very people that they claim to be helping.

Trump’s “affordability” proposals follow the “horseshoe economics” script to the letter. Smacking institutional investors (aka “Wall Street”) might make for a great populist soundbite, but as housing expert Jay Parsons explained at considerable length (and as we’ve discussed here at Capitolism), there’s simply no good case for the ban, which would likely harm rental markets yet have a minimal effect on the supply of single family homes—even in investor-rich markets. (My Cato Institute colleague Norbert Michel has more on this myth in The Dispatch this week.)

Trump’s populist attack on Big Meat would be similarly ineffective: As Reason’s Jack Nicastro explains, there’s no evidence that meatpackers are, as Trump alleges, “criminally profiting at the expense of the American People,” because the real culprit for high beef prices is the greatly reduced supply of cattle in the United States and from Mexico, which is struggling to stave off the New World screwworm. (More bad news on that front today, unfortunately. Sorry, fellow carnivores.)

Other proposals, meanwhile, would be downright bad for most Americans

TRUMPISM DOESN’T WORK:

APPLIED DARWINISM:

LET MY PEOPLE GO:

TAKING THE MAGA OUT OF MAGYAR:

APPLIED DARWINISM:

SMAUG DIES IN THE END:

NO ONE HATES JUST MUSLIMS:

ESCAPING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY:

WE’LL HAVE PLENTY LEFT WHEN WE CRASH INTO THE SUN:

BERNIE BRO IN CHIEF:

You Missed

DONALD WHO?:

ALL SCIENCE LEADS BACK TO FAITH:

THE WAGES OF iDENTITARIANISM:

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE: