The parts of Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution that we’ve covered so far are mostly introductory, setting the context for the pamphlets that debated and developed the ideas at the root of this country. The next chapter, “Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics” brings us straight into the substance of that theory.

By first a side note: I have not yet reviewed Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, and I feel bad about that. The whole culture is engaged in knock-down, drag-out debates about the proper interpretation of an Ancient Greek poem, and I will not be left out of it. I’m able to peel away just enough time from the last days of my campaign to see the film during the middle of the day tomorrow, so readers should expect some commentary on it this week.

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The title of Bailyn’s Chapter 3 talks about a “theory of politics,” and this is more than just a political philosophy. American political theory rises out of a philosophical view about individual rights and the proper role of government—but it combines that with a view of how a government should be structured to defend these rights and what the social forces are that tend both to threaten and to preserve liberty.

The underlying political philosophy has two main elements, which are also named in the chapter title: power and liberty.

“Liberty” refers to “the natural, absolute, personal rights of individuals…which everyone summarized, with minor variation in phrasing, as ‘personal security,’ ‘personal liberty,’ and ‘private property.’”

Note how individual and “personal” this conception of liberty was. The Founders—and the Enlightenment culture they were a part of—was highly individualist, even if they didn’t quite have the word for it yet.

This conception of liberty is also broad and open-ended. Existing, traditional guarantees of rights were not regarded as exhaustive. As Bailyn puts it, they “marked out the minimum not the maximum boundaries of right.” This is contrary to certain modern theories of interpretation in which a right is only enforceable if it has already been explicitly enumerated and protected.

Opposed to liberty was power.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with a collection of interesting articles on: the ongoing debacle of the Iran War, the consequences of losing expertise and freedom of speech, the ongoing anti-immigrant pogrom, endemic public corruption, the circus of the imperial court, and a reasonable overview on data centers.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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We’re Really Gonna Miss the Freedom of Navigation Now That It’s Gone

The Houthis’ Commandeering of a Red Sea Strait Is a Huge Deal

The Strait of Hormuz remains at a virtual standstill because of President Donald Trump’s foolish war, and now, in what represents a new global energy price nightmare, Houthi militants in Yemen have begun to block a separate corridor that is critical for global oil shipping….

Those Houthi militants, who are allied with and supported by Iran, announced Monday that they would were enacting a blockade in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait against Saudi Arabia. The Houthis said their blockade is retaliation for airstrikes against a Yemeni airport intended to prevent an Iranian aircraft from landing. (Yemen’s Saudi-backed government claimed credit for the attack.) On Thursday, the Houthis said they had attacked two Saudi oil tankers and successfully warned 10 more to turn back. (Saudi Arabia’s official news agency confirmed at least one tanker was hit.)

The Houthis’ blockade is a huge deal. Before the Iran war, about a fifth of the world’s oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Now it’s effectively closed. Saudi Arabia, which had transported the bulk of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, started moving oil west through a pipeline. From there, Saudi Arabia was sending its oil out through the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Thus, the Houthis’ blockade of the Bab al-Mandab Strait means they have foiled Saudi Arabia’s back-up plan. And it’s not just oil that’s at stake in the waterway. The Associated Press noted that “around 12% of the world’s trade, including a fourth of global container traffic, passes through [the strait], moving between Europe and Asia via Egypt’s Suez Canal.”

A Couple of Reasons Trump Keeps Making Bad Decisions

The Shallow, Centralized American State

The Trump administration’s attempt to exercise direct political control over all federal grant-making reveals some trends that go beyond that particular initiative. They include:

• A rejection of any independent source of technical or professional expertise;

• The vesting of decision-making authority entirely in political appointees regardless of their knowledge of the policy issue in question;

• The elimination of any countervailing constraint or check on centralized decision-making among inner-circle appointees….

In theory—unitary executive theory if you want to be cute about it—there is a logic for this kind of streamlining and centralization. A populist would want government policy and government outputs to be the direct outcome of what elected officials and their political subordinates want to do. Centralizing authority and eliminating veto points on executive action enables governments to pivot more quickly towards the policy preferences of elected and appointed officials.

The problems are self-evident, however. Even if one assumes the best of intentions, disregarding professional expertise in the service of a shallow state is a recipe for making catastrophic error after catastrophic error.

After Trump’s Order, West Point Curbed Faculty Speech. One Professor Said No.

The longest-serving law professor at West Point rose to declare the school’s new rules unconstitutional. Within moments, a uniformed colonel stood to challenge him.

Tim Bakken, speaking to dozens of colleagues at a faculty meeting, argued that none of them should be forced to seek approval before publishing papers or giving speeches, as a policy unveiled that day would require. “This violates the First Amendment,” he said, predicting an end to West Point’s professed tolerance for opposing views.

Col. E. John Gregory, according to Bakken and three other people in attendance that day, didn’t want to hear it. “Stop talking,” Gregory, a deputy department head, said in a raised voice, “and sit down.”

Bakken, a 68-year-old who had never served in the military, did not sit down. He reminded the colonel that he had sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution when he accepted his teaching job. “It’s like how military officers must not follow illegal orders—” he began to say.

“We’re a military institution,” Gregory interrupted, according to Bakken and the other attendees. “We follow orders.”

His confrontation with the colonel that day in March 2025 brought the clash to the US Military Academy at West Point, the emerald-green-and-granite campus on the Hudson River that trains the leaders of tomorrow’s Army. Since World War II, West Point had fostered academic openness, advancing the view that dissenting opinions are crucial in forming sound military judgments. But Trump and his top lieutenants, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, argue that West Point must prize patriotic obedience to authority above all else….

He had long argued that a military culture of unquestioning obedience, coupled with an aversion to criticism and a sense of superiority, had caused the US to lose every war it fought since 1945. “Inside America, the last seventy-five years of military intervention have unleashed a flood of incompetence, hubris, and denial,” he wrote in a 2020 book, “The Cost of Loyalty.” “I have been living at the headwaters.”

Things That Will Go in a Museum Someday (And We Will Read These Descriptions and Nod Gravely and Be Too Polite to Ask the People Next to Us, “So What Did You Do to Stop This?”)

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In the previous installment of my notes on Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, I covered his description of the arguments that drove the revolution as a “conceptualization of American life,” in which Americans found (as I put it) “the political ideas to match 150 years of prior experience.”

It struck me that this is a direct answer to the claim you hear from nationalist conservatives these days—a claim that has been implicit in American conservatism from the beginning—that “America is not an idea.”

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In this view, America is not defined by a philosophical or political creed that is open to all but is instead defined by customs, traditions, and ultimately by some imagined original ethnic and racial composition.

In my criticism of this viewpoint, I offered the following argument.

In an 1818 letter, Adams argued that “the real American Revolution” was a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affection of the people,” and he specifically contrasted this to our traditions and customs.

The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprise.

Thus, he recommends the project of “searching and collecting all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills, which in any way contributed to change the temper and views of the people and compose them into an independent nation.” He describes America’s national identity as being forged through a shared ideology.

The project recommended by Adams is, of course, exactly what Bailyn undertook, and it establishes the extent and nature of the philosophical influence on America in far more detail.

That is particularly the case in this book’s second chapter, “Sources and Traditions.” The title is pretty self-explanatory. Bailyn looks at the quotations and references in revolutionary-era pamphlets, as well as the ideas and even specific words and phrases that they drew from previous thinkers. These are very much not what today’s conservatives would have you believe.

Bailyn divides these influences into five categories.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with a collection of interesting articles on: the ongoing war over the Strait of Hormuz, the tragedy of Lindsey Graham, the Graham Platner debacle, more ICE killings of random Hispanic men, the Trump swamp, the non-revival of manufacturing, some interesting perspectives on declining fertility, and Zelensky continuing to turn the tide against Russia.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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It’s a Good Thing We Stopped All Those “Forever Wars”

Strait of Hormuz Ship Traffic Falls to Lowest Point in a Month After Strikes

Just 14 ships passed through the waterway on Sunday in both directions, the fewest in a month, according to figures from Kpler, a maritime data firm.

Mr. Trump said in a social media post on Monday that he would reinstate the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Iranian ports, which would prevent “Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving” the strait.

He added that the United States would provide security for other ships in the waterway but would charge a fee at the “rate of 20% on all cargo shipped” for “any and all costs necessary.”

Before the start of the war in late February, an average of more than 130 vessels transited the strait daily. In mid-June, when the United States and Iran signed a preliminary agreement to reopen the strait, traffic spiked. In the sevendays starting June 20, nearly 400 ships moved through the strait, the most in a one-week period since the war began.

But hopes for a recovery in shipping quickly faded.

Requiem for a Lightweight

Lindsey Knew Better. He Chose Worse.

Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.

Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:

People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power—but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.

Lindsey Graham’s Choices (from Garry Kasparov)

Lindsey Graham knew right from wrong. He just chose not to act on that knowledge….

[S]ome Republicans agreed with Trump’s sentiments. They simply couldn’t stomach Trump’s style. Their objections were cosmetic.

Graham was different. He was once a moderate with bipartisan instincts on issues like immigration and money in politics, and a man with strong convictions about democracy and world affairs. He had real, substantive differences with Trump. That makes his descent all the more galling.

If American support for Kyiv and other frontline allies was Graham’s animating principle, then he did tremendous damage to his own cause, leading isolationist, pro-Russian forces to the apex of their influence in Washington.

The Spectacular Implosion of Left-Wing Trumpism

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with a collection of interesting articles on the Fourth of July, the air conditioning wars in Europe, and the boom and bust of artificial intelligence.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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A Nation of Immigrants

1776 America Had a Higher Immigrant Share Than Today

Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this month. One of the Declaration’s grievances with King George should resonate with Americans today:

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.

…All the major founders explicitly stated the desire for America to be an asylum for the masses of people of all religions and nations from around the world seeking freedom. It’s not just that they favored immigration. They established the freest immigration system in the world. My purpose in this post is to show that the Founders were not naïve. They had witnessed high rates of immigration firsthand and chose to expand that successful policy….

The United States had an average annual legal immigration rate—as a share of the population—of about 0.9 percent from 1700 to 1770, including slaves, and about 0.5 percent excluding slaves. In FY 2026, the rate will likely be less than 0.3 percent, including people already in the United States who adjusted to legal permanent residence. Even in FY 2025, the legal immigration rate was less than 0.4 percent….

We also have complete records on the birthplace of members of Congress, and these records track the same pattern as my estimates of the immigrant share in 1776. Immigrants were 14 percent (8) of the 56 Declaration of Independence signers at the Second Continental Congress. The Constitutional Convention, which is not included below, had a similar percentage, 14.5 percent (8 of 55). The Constitution intentionally allowed immigrants to run for office, partly to encourage immigration to the United States, and the very first Congress under the new Constitution had the highest share of immigrants, 10 percent of members, in US history aside from the Continental Congress. Congress’s immigrant share is less than 4 percent today….

The Founders did not stumble into a diverse, immigrant-heavy society by accident—they lived through it, debated it, and ultimately enshrined it in a Constitution that barred religious tests for office and left the door open to immigrants of every nation and faith. The immigration rate they experienced, the share of the population that was foreign-born, and the ethnic and religious composition of the founding generation all point to the same conclusion: America was never a homogeneous nation that only later became diverse through immigration.

It was diverse and immigrant-heavy from the start.

What to an Immigrant Is This Fourth of July?

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To celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, I’m going through Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution chapter by chapter to draw out lessons for today.

I’ve already talked about why I think this is important. This book was part of a mini-Renaissance for the ideas of the Founders, which influenced our politics substantively for the better—for a while. Going back to this source is a good place to start if we need to rebuild our political system and our political culture.

The introduction of Bailyn’s book, like my introduction to this series, talks about the origins of the project. Chapter 1, “The Literature of the Revolution,” is almost a second introduction, in the sense that it doesn’t really talk about the content of the pamphlets that shaped the American Revolution, but instead talks about the literary qualities of these pamphlets and about pamphleteering as a medium.

The pamphlet…was spacious enough to allow for the full development of an argument—to investigate premises, explore logic, and consider conclusions…. It was in this form, consequently, that “the best thought of the day expressed itself”; it was in this form that “the solid framework of constitutional thought” was developed; it was in this form that “the basic elements of American political thought of the Revolutionary period appeared first.” [These are all quotes attributed in a footnote to other scholars.]

And yet pamphlets of this length were seldom ponderous; whatever the gravity of their themes or the spaciousness of their contents, they were always essentially polemical, and aimed at immediate and rapidly shifting targets: at suddenly developing problems, unanticipated arguments, and swiftly rising, controversial figures. The best of the writing that appeared in this form, consequently, had a rare combination of spontaneity and solidity, of dash and detail, of casualness and care.

When I read this passage, I felt a shock of recognition. This is what I do. Articles long enough to deal with big ideas and fully develop an argument—but connected to fast-moving events and short enough to be easily readable by the public. Basically, the Revolutionary-era pamphlet was a Substack post.

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Bailyn observes that the American pamphlet writers were literarily less polished and professional than the British counterparts from whom they clearly took inspiration, simply because the average American writers was an amateur, someone who took up writing to promote the cause of the day but had not pursued it as a profession. (Bailyn adds ruefully: “The poetry—or, more accurately, the versification—is almost uniformly painful to read.”)

But they were also different in another respect that seems really relevant now.

The American writers were profoundly reasonable people. Their pamphlets convey scorn, anger, and indignation; but rarely blind hate, rarely panic fear. They sought to convince their opponents, not, like the English pamphleteers of the eighteenth century, to annihilate them…. The communication of understanding, therefore, lay at the heart of the revolutionary movement, and its great expressions, embodied in the best pamphlets, are consequently expository and explanatory: didactic, systematic, and direct, rather than imaginative and metaphoric…. The pamphlets aim to persuade.

But something else emerges, specifically from the medium of the pamphlet. The American writers were seeking to persuade, but also to understand real issues and problems that were confronting them. And more: They were seeking to understand the unique conditions of American life that had already been established, but of which the American had not become self-conscious.

Bailyn begins this chapter with a quotation from a letter by John Adams: “What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.” (This is from a slightly different source than another famous version of the same idea.) But Bailyn goes on to make a wider point. In the fifteen years Adams talks about, the American were developing the political ideas to match 150 years of prior experience.

The great social shocks that in the French and Russian Revolutions sent the foundations of thousands of individual lives crashing into ruins had taken place in America in the course of the previous century, slowly, silently, almost imperceptibly, not as a sudden avalanche but as myriads of individual changes and adjustments which had gradually transformed the order of society. By 1763 the great landmarks of European life—the church and the idea of orthodoxy, the state and the idea of authority: much of the array of institutions and ideas that buttressed the society of the ancient régime—had faded in their exposure to the open, wilderness environment of America. But until the disturbances of the 1760s these changes had not been seized upon as grounds for a reconsideration of society and politics.

In short, Americans had built a society no longer based on concepts of religious and political authority. But they were not yet conscious of what they had built, they did not yet have a developed anti-authoritarian social and political theory, and this is what Bailyn suggests they accomplished in the pamphlets of the Revolutionary Era. He concludes by describing this as “the conceptualization of American life.”

Those who are familiar with my theory of history may remember that I place a lot of emphasis on this kind of process of “conceptualization,” in which people find the explicit philosophical terms that sum up the cultural conditions they have already implicitly created. So you know how my ears perked up at this.

Particularly on America’s 250th anniversary, what strikes me as the most important thing we have to learn from the Founders is this method of thinking—the epistemological example they set: the ability to observe, to understand, to persuade, to apply and develop big ideas that illuminate the crises of their time.

This is what seems most revolutionary about the Founders, particularly compared to today, and it is the first thing we need to learn from the people who made the American Revolution.

When we look at the next chapter, we will continue what the Founders discovered when they employed this thinking method.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on three important Supreme Court rulings, freedom of speech, the “dirtbag” left, God leaving the Bible Belt, technological non-unemployment, and the usual good news.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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“Originalism” Survives by the Skin of Its Teeth

Supreme Court Upholds Principle that Almost All Born on US Soil Are American

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion for the ideologically mixed group of justices that included the court’s three liberals, as well as conservative Amy Coney Barrett.

Conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented from the 5-4 majority in ruling the executive order violated the 14th Amendment, but he joined the 6-3 majority in finding the order violated federal law….

The opinion came over the objections of conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Alito wrote a dissent, while Thomas wrote an opinion that Gorsuch joined.

About 250,000 children would have been born without citizenship in the US each year under Trump’s order, or roughly 5 million by 2045, according to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by dozens of professors. Some would probably have been left stateless because their parents would be unwilling or unable to obtain citizenship for their children in their homelands.

The professors argued that Trump’s order would create a permanent underclass.

Or Maybe Not So Much

Ethnic Cleansing in Ohio

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on the wars in Ukraine, in the Persian Gulf, and against algae, the upsurge of “democratic socialism”—and its limits, the conservative threat to free speech, the resurgence of racism here and in the UK, and the grifter’s paradise of MAGA. You will also notice a pattern of putting some good news—often a form of scientific and technological progress—at the end, because we should never lose sight of the fact that this is the real story of human life.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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So How Are the Wars Going?

Turning Crimea from an Asset into a Russian Liability

The best piece of concrete evidence for the isolation of Crimea is that the peninsula is running out of fuel. Yesterday, the Russian governor was forced to take the dramatic step of forbidding fuel sales to civilians. According to a BBC story: “Governor Sergey Aksyonov said individuals and businesses would be turned away from petrol stations, and fuel would only be sold to government agencies ensuring Crimea’s ‘functioning and security.’”

It is hard to overstate how serious the fuel situation must be on Crimea for such a draconian restriction to be imposed on civilians. Putin has always maintained the fiction that Crimea is some happy and functioning part of the Russian state. No more.

Back in July 2024, I wrote that Ukraine isolating Crimea would be a three step process, and at that point only the first step has been accomplished (which was the cutting off of Crimea from the sea). The next two steps would be far more difficult, but if they could be accomplished, the whole process might culminate in an attempt to take down the Kerch Bridge….

I was thinking about this piece a few hours ago, when I saw this Ukrainian boast that they had just disabled the remaining Russian air defense systems protecting the Kerch Bridge.

We Are on a Twin-Track Road to an AI Battlefield

I was very much struck by two very recent claims about how AI systems are on the cusp of changing warfare, both of which came from senior people in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. One claim was made by the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Mykhailo Fedorov. He stated that Ukraine now has an anti-air system that is fully automated after launch and can make all of the decisions from that point until it (hopefully) destroys its target (in this case, a Russian Shahed/Geran attack UAV). He even released a video in this tweet which purported to show the system in action.

The other claim was made by Danylo Tsvok, the head of the Ukrainian MOD’s AI center. He predicted AI systems would soon be unified into a single network overseeing the battlefield, leading to a “war of operating systems” with Russia in the next three to five years—something referred to as a “new paradigm” of war.

“The system that possesses more data and better understands that data, proposes solutions—that system will gain the advantage over the other.”…

If the micro and macro can be merged, think of combining what Fedorov and Tsvok are saying, the result would be a fully automated battlefield. This would dramatically alter the whole idea of warfare.

Ship Attacked in Strait of Hormuz as Iran Threatens UN-Backed Route

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on the connections between Trump’s reflecting pool debacle, his surrender in Iran, and his flirtations with military dictatorship at home—summed up in Timothy Snyder’s trenchant observation about “Utopias of Violence.” Also included: the secret life of Tulsi Gabbard, the looting of the National Opera, the folly of left-wing Trumpism, and buried in there, some good news—a big bipartisan legislative push for the YIMBYs.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Bulldozing the Statue of Liberty

DOJ Declares Trump Has Right to Bulldoze Statue of Liberty

In order to demonstrate Trump’s supposedly far-reaching power to destroy and alter national monuments at whim, the DOJ lawyers claimed that if the president wanted to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty in New York, there would be no one with the standing to challenge him.

“If the government decides very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, the people whose ancestors—that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast—nothing can be done?” Judge Patricia Millett asked, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

“I think that’s right, yes,” the government responded.

The Statue of Liberty, like the White House, is managed by the National Park Service. Demolishing it would require legislative approval and rigorous public and regulatory review under the National Historic Preservation Act.

It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green

Of all Donald Trump’s little DC hobby projects that have caused scandal this year, the snit over his renovation of the National Mall’s reflecting pool has been the one I’ve cared about the least. But you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the snags they’re hitting this week: After months of castigating the “filthy, dirty” pool as a symbol of failed Democratic leadership (“Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is!”), and just days after the White House declared the mission of cleaning it up accomplished, the reflecting pool is once again resolutely algae-green….

[T]he boondoggle is such a striking metaphor for the failures of Trump’s second term that it’s worth taking at least a minute to soak in.

Here is how the president has approached basically all problems since retaking office last year:

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Karl Marx is usually viewed as the ultimate materialist, describing everything in brute physical and economic terms, while deriding intellectual, artistic, and philosophical and religious values as mere rationalizations for the economic status quo.

But we’ve already gotten hints that there is a kind of Romanticism lurking behind this materialist exterior. I’m referring to Romanticism in the philosophical sense: a longing to return to some imagined pure state of emotional freedom and communion with nature, unspoiled by the intellectual overgrowth of too much civilization. The unacknowledged influence of Romanticism on Marx is a major theme of Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism.

Taking the Polish dissident philosopher as a guide, we have already puzzled over how it is that an ideology that claim to speak on behalf of industrial workers gave power to a bunch of intellectuals (and then, following the logic of absolute power, liquidated the intellectuals for the power-lust of a single ruler). But the biggest reason why Marxism was and remains more an ideology of the intellectuals than the workers is that its actual concerns are not material or economic, but spiritual and intellectual.

Marx’s big con was to describe his ideology as a form of materialism. Yet underneath all the talk about economics, underneath his insistence that the cultural “superstructure” of life is just determined by the brute materialist “base” of the means of production, Marx’s fundamental complaint against capitalism is a spiritual one.

I figured this out by reading Kołakowski’s explanation of what Marx meant by “alienation.”

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“Alienation” is a term Marxists have thrown around for a long time, but I’ve never really understood what it means. And there’s good reason for that, because what it means is weird.

As I observed before, the subversive thing Kołakowski did in this book was to go back into the deep sources of Marxism and into Marx’s early writings, many of which had lapsed into obscurity and had relatively recently been dug up and brought back into print in the decades before he wrote Main Currents of Marxism. As I noted last time, the study of these early works was not exactly encouraged, at least not on his side of the Iron Curtain, because the Soviet regime had engaged in a major effort to dumb down Marxism and reduce it to a state-approved dogma.

It’s in some of these early works that Kołakowski finds what Marx meant by alienation, which illuminates his later writings in Capital.1 What he finds is that the root of Marx’s philosophy is a rejection of the division of labor as such.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on an ongoing campaign of war crimes, the deportation state versus the Constitution, the MAGA kakistocracy, the fraud behind the $1.776 billion “slush fund,” and Ukraine’s emerging dominance on the battlefield.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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We Literally Hanged People at Nuremberg for This

The President Has Murdered 200 People Instead of Arresting Them. We Won’t Forget.

More than 200 people have now been killed in Trump’s campaign against “drug boats” since it began in early September….

If you don’t already, I want you to understand that this is not a close legal question, and it never was. I’ve been warning that this exact thing was coming for years because I sat in one of the rooms while the idea was first floated. The first time we showed Donald Trump the map of maritime drug routes into America in 2018, on a trip to Key West, his aides started chattering about ways to go “full Sicario” (the 2015 film about the CIA launching a cartel war) literally on the flight home. Stephen Miller asked whether armed US drones could simply fire on boats in international waters, and whether the people aboard were protected by the Constitution.

The answer back was simple. It didn’t require any legal consultation. It would be illegal, we told him. You cannot kill unarmed civilians because a president has decided to call them terrorists. Stephen Miller dropped it. Yet eight years later, he is reportedly one of the architects of the policy he once denied ever discussing….

Any person involved in this on the inside probably has their Google alerts turned on to notify them of each shred of news about this program. To see if Congress was opening a broader inquiry. To see if people are still talking about whether it’s “legal,” hoping the country will finally forget. Which is why there’s a real chance that someone tied to the drug-boat murders will stumble across this article.

So I want to address the final portion of this piece to them—the people participating in Trump’s deadly strikes.

Maybe you signed one of the pieces of paper that made this possible. Perhaps you stayed in the room when you should’ve walked out. Trust me, I’ve been there before. Or maybe you drafted a talking point you knew was a lie, or relayed an order you knew was unlawful. Right now, you’re telling yourself the comforting thing that everyone in your position tells themselves. They’ll forget about me. I’m too far down the list. I’ll keep my head down, and this will pass.

I’m going to break the hard news to you. We won’t forget.

The Borderline Constitution

The Borderline Constitution

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In the last installment of this series, I wrote about the weird philosophical idea which helped guarantee that a Marxist ideology centered around the “working class” of industrial factory-floor wrench-turners would end up being run by a clique of middle-class intellectual misfits who appointed themselves to administer The Revolution on behalf of the proletariat.

But the joke was on these intellectuals, because they didn’t really get the power. They were, in fact, the next to be crushed in their own machine.

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In Main Currents of Marxism, Leszek Kołakowski describes the pattern.

After the resistance of all social classes—proletariat, peasantry, and intelligentsia—had been overcome, after all forms of social life not ordained by the state had been crushed out of existence, and the opposition within the party had been destroyed, it was time to subdue the last element that might—though it did not in practice—threaten the completeness of totalitarian rule under a single despot: namely the party itself, the instrument which had been used to stifle and destroy every other rival force in the community. The destruction of the party was achieved during the years 1935-9, and established a new record in the conflict between the Soviet regime and its own subjects.

The idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was supposed to mean that the proletariat as a whole would just dictate production, directly, somehow. But of course there is no “somehow” for doing this, so a putatively representative institution, the party, had to be built up and given that dictatorial power. But there could be internal divisions within the party, disagreements about how to proceed, and it was easy to portray one side or the other of those disagreements as an attempt to thwart the rule of the proletariat and serve as a vehicle for bourgeois reactionary forces—all the more so since any sensible response to communist economic policies is probably going to looks more like capitalism.

Kolakowski describes the process by which dissent within the party and the jostling of opposing party “fractions” was suppressed. But what this implies, if the party is going to follow only one policy with no debate or dissent, is that ultimately one person is going to be dictating everything. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” inevitably becomes just the dictatorship of one guy.

Hence the internal purge of the party to ensure loyalty to that one man above all—including above Marxism itself.

The passage above is from the beginning of Kołakowski’s chapter on Stalin’s Great Purge, and he provides the most interesting and convincing perspective on the purge that I have ever read.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with items on the official abandonment of the most apocalyptic global warming projections, the permanent “vibecession,” the raid on the US Treasury, vindictive prosecutions and prosecutorial misconduct, the debacle in Iran, updates on the AI bubble—and an example of the stubborn persistence of progress.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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“A Saner Climate Debate”

RIP8.5

Last month, UN scientists announced publicly what climate researchers have known for years: the most extreme climate change pathway is now so implausible, it really shouldn’t be part of our climate debate. The culprit—known as the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or RCP8.5 to habitués—suffered a peculiarly nasty case of context collapse: a tool developed by a bunch of nerds was set loose on the world only to be wildly misinterpreted, generating mass confusion and buckets of activist dollars on the way to thoroughly disfiguring our climate debate.

Now the UN is mothballing it. Good riddance.

The “8.5” in RCP8.5 refers to the amount of added solar energy the atmosphere will trap by 2100—specifically, 8.5 watts per square meter. That’s very high—likely to bring about a shocking 5 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels.

RCP8.5 was the kind of climate scenario lurking behind Greta Thunberg’s accusation, in her September 2019 speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” It’s the kind of pathway young people in England were thinking about when they decided they needed to launch “Extinction Rebellion.” It’s been a fundraising bonanza for climate activist groups from Adelaide to Zurich, the main player in every single alarmist climate critique you’ve read in the last 15 years….

Perhaps belatedly recognizing how badly off the rails the discourse has gone, the scientists preparing the IPCC’s next assessment report have decided to pull the plug on RCP8.5. The new “high emissions” scenario to be used in climate modeling going forward is considerably less pessimistic than RCP8.5, less pessimistic even than RCP6, the second-worst case scenario in the old IPCC reports.

It’s a significant step towards a saner climate debate.

The Mind Is Its Own Place, and in Itself Can Make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

The “Vibecession” Is Over. The “Permacession” Is Here.

I have been covering the “vibecession” for a few years now, and I thought I mostly understood it. Headline economic statistics are failing to capture the fragility and strain that consumers are experiencing…. But seeing the latest consumer-sentiment figures and comparing them with hard economic data, I found that my usual explanations fell short.

Americans are expressing some of the deepest, broadest, and stubbornest economic pessimism ever recorded….

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with items on how Russia is slowly losing its war—there’s been a steady stream of news about this that hasn’t been featured much in American media—plus some new reporting on the bizarrely optimistic plans behind the botched Iran war, how we’re not going to like the alternatives to Pax Americana, a vindication of the Voting Rights Act, the most spectacularly corrupt act of this or any other administration, and a rundown of the numbers on the most bubbly IPO of the AI bubble.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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The Decline and Fall of the Russian Empire

After Syzran Strike, Only Two Major Russian Oil Refineries Remain Untouched by Ukrainian Drones—Media

Since the start of the full-scale war, Ukraine has attacked all major oil refineries in the European part of Russia except for two facilities beyond the Urals. In total, at least 158 strikes on Russian oil refineries have been recorded….

According to analysts, Ukraine has attacked 24 out of 33 Russian oil refineries with a capacity of more than 1 million tons of oil per year. The year 2025 became the most intense in terms of the number of strikes — 88 attacks were recorded then. In 2026, Ukraine has already carried out 32 strikes on Russian oil refineries, which is almost equal to the figure for the whole of 2024.

Reuters previously reported that due to drone attacks, almost all large oil refineries in central Russia either stopped or reduced production. According to the agency, processing volumes at 16 plants decreased by about 700,000 barrels per day compared to last year.

Has Putin Met His Marianas Moment?

The catastrophe for the Japanese was not just strategic. As the Japanese leadership very well knew, the fall of the Marianas destroyed the entire fantasy that they had been selling repeatedly to the Japanese people. Since Pearl Harbor they had described the Pacific War to the Japanese public as a series of smashing victories against the Americans, claiming to have inflicted so many losses on US forces that the Japanese home islands were safe and secure….

The loss of the Marianas, however, could not be bluffed away.

The Marianas brought most of Japan, including the capital Tokyo, in range of America’s newest bomber, the Very Long Range (VLR) B-29 Superfortress….

What happened over the last weekend was really notable in this war, and has shown to the Russian people, if they really were unaware, that their government has been BS-ing them about the course of the war. If you have not been paying attention, since the full-scale invasion, much like the Japanese of 1941-1944, the Putin regime has been protecting Moscow and encasing it in lies. They have done everything possible to assure Muscovites that the war was going to end up in decisive victory while insulating them as much as possible from economic harm. They even have made sure that there was no major troop raising efforts from Moscow and St Petersburg, focussing on more distant Russian imperial provinces to supply their cannon fodder.

The idea that Moscow can be protected has now been shown to be a myth. The attacks of the last few days demonstrate that for now, no matter how much air defense the Russians concentrate around the capital, the Ukrainians can find a way through. Moreover, as Ukrainian production of long range strike ramps up, unless the Russians can devise a counter, these attacks will get worse.

The Empire Putin Tried to Rebuild Is Coming Apart

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For now, I can’t write directly in this newsletter about electoral politics—but I can write about political philosophy and political theory, and in ways that tend to shine a light on what is going on in our contemporary politics.

There is a strain of American conservatism that I hadn’t previously been aware of, which has come to the forefront in recent years. I would say it is a somewhat obscure theory, except that it was very influential in its own time and has become influential again, so it might be more accurate to say it was submerged—it never went away, it just wasn’t out in the open.

It was brought back to my attention a few days ago when a colleague sent me an excerpt from Whittaker Chambers’s notorious negative review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in National Review back in 1957. This might seem somewhat obscure, but it was a significant skirmish in the jostling of different ideological influences on the American right.

As we will see, it has a surprising relevance to today—and it’s probably not what you’re expecting.

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Here is the excerpt from Chambers.

The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit…. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s “noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau…. [I]n reality,… by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship…. Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.

When I first encountered this review (about thirty years after it was written), I was mostly struck by how little Chambers understood about Ayn Rand’s novel—from getting plot points and character names wrong to missing major philosophical themes, such her rather pointed rejection of philosophical materialism. The review seems to be based on a rather hasty skimming of the novel, at most, rather than an actual attempt to read it, and his real complaint seems to be that Rand puts “man at the center of a godless world.” In other words, the whole thing is just “Atheist Bad.”

But in this passage, there is a theme I missed before. He creates a bizarre argument that Rand, as staunch an advocate of individual liberty as you could find, is somehow calling for dictatorship; the title of the review is “Big Sister Is Watching You.” The Orwell reference is ironic, since Chambers is the one basically arguing here that freedom is slavery.

But this passage indicates how he gets to that strange conclusion.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with a heads-up on a building agricultural crisis and follow-ups on the latest news in Ukraine and Iran, and on the national gerrymandering spree, immigration, the conservatives movement’s adulation of Donald Trump, the state of the conservative media—and the grim impact of “MAHA” health quackery.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Farmageddon

Steep Fertilizer and Fuel Prices Could Squeeze US Farmers for Months to Come, Economists Warn

The price of key agricultural necessities such as diesel and nitrogen fertilizer has soared since the Strait of Hormuz, a vital trade passageway, has largely been choked off amid the war in Iran.

The price of urea, a major nitrogen-based fertilizer, shot up to nearly $700 per ton in late April from $455 per ton on Feb. 27, the day before the war in Iran broke out. On-highway diesel prices clocked around $5.35 a gallon in late April, a hike from the $3.81 a gallon reported the week the war began….

A recent survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation found that about 70 percent of farmers nationwide who responded report they are unable to afford all the fertilizer they need.

In the Midwest, farmers are better prepared for the planting season than in other regions. The Farm Bureau survey found that 67 percent of farmers reported booking fertilizer in advance. In the South, the most affected region, only 19 percent of farmers reported pre-booking fertilizer….

Parum also warned that reducing fertilizer use may not be feasible for everyone and could lead to lower yields.

“We have pretty good storage right now across corn and soybeans, so it might not be that big of a deal, but depending on how long this conflict goes on, if we see really high reductions of yields, it could be a pretty big shock to global supply,” Parum said.

The Last Days of Butter Ridge

The Watsons had been dairy farming since before the Civil War—one of dozens of Watson farms that had spread across northern Pennsylvania over the generations, and then, like dairy farms everywhere, gradually disappeared. The number of dairy farms in the United States had fallen to fewer than 25,000 from a peak of nearly 700,000 in the 1970s. Milk prices had barely risen in half a century, held down by overproduction and a handful of large corporations that dominated the dairy market. The costs of running a family farm had skyrocketed by as much as 500 percent.

Brad had supported Donald Trump in 2024 in part because Trump promised to change all that by becoming “the most pro-farmer president you’ve ever had.” Instead, new tariffs had cut into Brad’s potential export market and the emerging war in Iran had sent gas and fertilizer prices surging by as much as 70 percent. He was losing thousands of dollars each month and falling behind on his feed bill, until he made the call he’d been dreading his whole career. He dialed up an auction house to arrange the Watson family’s final dairy sale last month….

Brad had believed that Trump might help them, and he appreciated the frustration in Trump’s speeches about America’s decline. Brian was more cynical. He’d seen generations of politicians riding tractors and pandering to rural America as more farmers went under….

Farm bankruptcies across the country had risen 55 percent in 2024, 46 percent in 2025, and another 70 percent so far in 2026 as nearly a third of the world’s fertilizer exports were impacted by conflicts in the Strait of Hormuz.

So How Are the Strongmen’s Wars Going?

Trump’s Abrupt U-Turn on a Plan to Reopen the Strait of Hormuz Came After Backlash from Allies

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You may recall that when I switched over the focus of this newsletter to accommodate my run for office, I started a series of articles sharing some of what I learned from reading Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kołakowski. As I explained, it’s not exactly a page-turner, and this huge three-volume work helped me get to sleep at the end of a busy day for about a year. But it offers some fascinating insights into Marxism, and what went wrong with it.

This has taken longer to get back to than I expected. I now understand why politics tends to—how shall I put this?—it tends to select against deep thinkers. It’s a job that doesn’t leave as much time as I would like for just sitting down and doing prolonged thinking. For precisely that reason, I’ve decided to be extra stubborn about making sure I still do it. So even though I probably ought to be planning some campaign events right now, I’m going to take a half a day to return to that series for another installment. I also want to clear the decks of this project so that by July 4, I can switch over to my next planned series on what I learned from reading Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution—a good topic for the 250th anniversary of that revolution.

But first, back to the ideological origins of a revolution that had less happy consequences. And The Revolution is precisely where we left off.

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I wrote last time about a central debate among late-19th-Century socialists. On the one side were the revolutionaries who insisted the only answer was to sweep away capitalism entirely and create a totally new and different system whose structure they could only guess at, except that they knew it would be perfect. (This is pretty much literally how they put it. It’s hard to see what could possibly go wrong.) On the other side were the reformist “social democrats” who wanted, not to overthrow capitalism, but to introduce welfare-state programs and regulations intended to benefit factory workers and the poor. I noted that this second group, who laid the basis for most Western European governments today, achieved far better results.

Part of the reason The Revolution achieved such terrible results is that in addition to creating a totally dysfunctional economic system, The Revolution also created a brutal and tyrannical political system.

Those two results were closely connected. A system in which the government controls the entire economy provides a powerful enforcement mechanism for tyranny. As Leon Trotsky famously noted, after losing out to Stalin in a power struggle, “In a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.”

By the same token, the guys who are most adept at climbing the greasy pole of insider politics in an oppressive regime do not have the skills to run large, complex industrial operations. Even if they did, the structure of the regime prevents them from doing it. Kołakowski notes that Lenin and Stalin kept complaining about the lack of initiative from lower-level officials, who would do nothing without explicit orders from above—yet if someone did make decisions on his own initiative, he could well find himself shipped off to the gulag as a “saboteur” the first time anything went wrong. No wonder everything got bogged down. The Bolsheviks believed in rule by fear, but fear is a paralytic.

From his own perspective some decades later, writing in the years after the death of Stalin, one of Kołakowski’s main concerns was the extent to which Marx’s theories could be blamed for this result. How did Marx’s own ideology explicitly plant the seeds for the dictatorship created by Lenin and consolidated by Stalin?

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, focusing on something that has gotten a bit lost in the background of all the other chaos: the war in Ukraine, where Ukraine seems to be slowly gaining the upper hand by becoming the world’s drone superpower. Before that, there’s a wry note about King Charles in America, and after it, some coverage of the recent Supreme Court arguments on birthright citizenship, an overview of the “vibes-based” SpacEx IPO, and a quick good riddance to Paul Ehrlich.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Oh, the Irony

King Charles Urges Checks on Executive Power as Trump Hosts Royal Visit

During his first state visit to the United States as monarch, Charles stayed scrupulously nonpartisan over the course of a 28-minute address to a joint meeting of Congress. But he promoted what he described as centuries of common interests, including in areas where President Donald Trump has sought a sharp break from U.S. precedent in his drive to reshape American society and governance.

The U.S. and Britain should defend Ukraine, Charles said. An independent judiciary should deliver impartial justice. Diverse societies make countries strong. Societies must protect the natural world. And the U.S. and Europe should “ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking.”

Charles is officially barred from engaging in politics and mentioned no political leader in his speech. The vision of the American role in the world that he outlined, however, stood in stark contrast to that of Trump, who has declared that migration weakens societies, used executive orders to bypass Congress, attacked judges who rule against him, questioned the scientific consensus on climate change and declared his desire to wind down support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. The speech came on the day the Justice Department brought a new indictment against former FBI director James B. Comey, a longtime Trump target.

As the king spoke, the White House posted an image of Trump and Charles on X, calling it “TWO KINGS,” with a crown emoji….

“Executive power is subject to checks and balances,” Charles said, spurring bipartisan cheers and whistles from his audience at a time when the Republican-led Congress has greatly diminished its power largely by acquiescing to Trump’s demands.

The Global Drone Superpower

Ukraine Forces Russians to Surrender Using Only Robots

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, focusing on two main issues. The first is last week’s election defeat of Victor Orbán, who went much farther than Donald Trump in using authoritarian means to entrench himself in power for 16 years—but he still could not prevent a vast wave of rejection by the people of Hungary. The second issue is the Supreme Court’s growing use of a highly dubious “shadow docket” in which it makes often highly partisan decisions with no explanations. In between are a few notes about the Iran war; the corruption, mismanagement, and inebriation of Trump’s imperial court; and the actual effect his policies have had on immigration.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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“Never Again a Country Without Consequences”

How Viktor Orbán’s Hungary Eroded the Rule of Law and Free Markets

Hungary is a small country, but as Viktor Orbán has pointed out: “There is one thing that makes our country an important place: the fact that Hungary is an incubator, where experiments are being conducted for the conservative politics of the future.”…

The sociologist Ferenc Pataki talks about Orbán’s project as “a neo-collectivist, neo-communist experiment,” and similarly, the Fidesz oligarch Simicska has said that the party decided to pick up “the commies’ methods.” But while Fidesz is opposed to free markets and has used nationalization and state intervention to control the economy, it does not have an egalitarian ideology, and the party does not think it is necessary to place ownership in the hands of the state itself, as long as it is in the hands of friends.

Others have called it a fascist system, referring to how the government controls the economy and society through many different institutions and turns to nationalism and xenophobia to rally support. However, while Fidesz’s rhetoric is often aggressive, it refrains from the overt kinds of racist and anti-Semitic legislation that characterize fascist states.

These descriptions also ignore the ideological flexibility of Fidesz’s pursuit of power. Regarding the party, Orbán was onto something when he said: “It is not an organization based on one single coherent system of principles or an ideology—such an organization is incapable of expanding beyond a certain point.” Instead, he described the party as “reality without ideology.” He has been adept at transforming the party’s ideas whenever that helps it cling to power, saying that he has no need for his thoughts “to be forced into the cage of any ideology that can be summarized in a book.”

Bálint Magyar, a sociologist and former education minister, thinks that Orban’s Hungary has become another form of state altogether, a “mafia state.”…

It is not a case of “state capture” in which oligarchs draw the state under their control. Rather, it is a case of “society capture,” in which the government uses procurement, subsidies, regulations, and taxes to replace market actors with its own oligarchs who are offered protection and privileges as long as they stay loyal. If they are not, or cease to be useful, they are taken down and replaced. The primary concern is not principles and ideology but the consolidation of power and wealth for the ruling clique

This is just an excerpt from a much longer and more detailed report that is worth reading.

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