Long War

DARWINIST IN CHIEF:

Trump blames recent attacks on ‘genetics’ of assailants (Alexandra Marquez, 3/13/26, NBC News)

“They’re sick people, and a lot of them were let in here. They shouldn’t have been let in. Others are just bad. They go bad. Something wrong — there’s something wrong there. The genetics are not exactly, they’re not exactly your genetic,” Trump told Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade in an interview released Friday. “It’s one of those problems, Brian. It’s a, it’s a terrible thing, and it happens.”

OUR POSTLIBERALS ARE THEIR POSTLIBERALS:

Lessons from the Ayatollah (Max J. Prowant, 9/19/23, Law & Liberty)

What is new among the post-liberals is the insistence, first, that liberalism itself is to blame for today’s woes and, second, that the solution requires affirming a public commitment to a more comprehensive view of the common good. In this they hope to correct liberalism’s pretenses to neutrality and the extreme license it gives its citizens. In short, they want to replace liberalism with some new, unifying outlook that better captures and answers man’s natural, moral longings.

The most extreme solution is offered by the Catholic integralists who explicitly seek to subvert “temporal power” (i.e., the state/government) to “spiritual power” (i.e., the Catholic Church). Along similar lines, Patrick Deneen proposes “Aristo-populism” to oust corrupt liberal elites. Add to the bunch National Conservatives, new-age Pentecostals, and Reformed Protestants and it seems that all the cool kids are coming up from liberalism. No solution is agreed upon. But all agree that the regime centered on the protection of individual rights must be replaced by some new system with more intrusive powers to direct our lost souls.

The leaders of this broad coalition are not stupid and, therefore, their arguments should be confronted honestly and given due diligence. But dissuading them from their objectives will require more than pointing out how illiberal, homophobic, or un-democratic they are. Nor will it prove sufficient to point out how unrealistic their aims are in the context of the United States. Movements always begin with foolish hopes. What is needed instead are modern examples of states where similar revolutionary projects have been executed and produced less-than-ideal results. One state fits the bill nicely: the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini’s project in Iran was surely more extreme and violent than what most post-liberals would endorse. But given the authoritarian affinities of many post-liberals (consider their muted defenses of Vladimir Putin, East Germany, and the Chinese Communist Party), a comparison to Khomeini’s Iran is more than appropriate. Indeed, given the character and aims of Khomeini’s Iran, it is necessary.

The example of Khomeinism in Iran is instructive because it illustrates two lessons that classical liberals have long known. First, when a special class of moral guardians is permitted to be above the rule of law, there is no check on their own corruptibility, which all but ensures future abuses of power. And second, using the full powers of the state to enforce religious belief will render both the state and its religion illegitimate in the minds of the people. If post-liberals are serious about reviving moral virtue or shoring up religious faith, they should study the tragic example of Khomeini.

TRUMPISM DOESN’T WORK:

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.

APPLIED DARWINISM:

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.

LET MY PEOPLE GO:

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.

TAKING THE MAGA OUT OF MAGYAR:

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.

NO ONE HATES JUST MUSLIMS:

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”