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Kevin Portteus’s essay, “Congress and the Collapse of Constitutional Republicanism in America,” is nominally a meditation on congressional dysfunction. But it’s much more than that. He offers a deep reflection on the administrative state and the breakdown of our institutions under its weight.

Portteus begins by accurately noting that Congress’s favorite activity is not legislating. Instead, it follows the other two branches of the federal government in governing by decidedly extra-constitutional means, including executive orders and actions, administrative rulemaking, and judicial meddling. As he says, “Through both positive action conferring legislative power on others, and the failure to address important issues through legislation, legislative power has steadily passed from its constitutionally-designated home to other actors.” Congress has voluntarily ceded its own authority. So much for James Madison’s argument in Federalist 51 that ambition will counteract ambition.

Legally speaking, any congressional delegation of power that articulates an “intelligible principle”—that is to say, anything that is not absurd—tends to be upheld by the courts. Portteus puts it forcefully: “As it is, there isn’t much reason for Congress to exist. They don’t legislate in the constitutional sense. [And] they lack the independence and expertise to serve as legislators in the Progressive sense.”

This is the second of two debates on recrudescent socialism, hosted by the Institute of World Politics on November 15, 2019. Resolved: That socialism/communism, having failed repeatedly in the 20th century at the economic level, now seeks to achieve its social goals via cultural Marxism.

On the Left, the participants included Micah Uetricht, an assistant editor at Jacobin, as well as the author of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism and Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity; and Nicole Aschoff, the author of The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New Gilded Age and The New Prophets of Capital and an editor-at-large at Jacobin.

The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 became law on September 18, ratcheting up the Trump Administration’s pressure to bring Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table and end the Russo-Ukrainian War. It also gives the president new tariff authority for the first time since the Trade Act of 1974 became law 52 years ago. This comes less than seven months after the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) to impose his tariff regime.

The Graham Act allows the president to impose sanctions on major entities and figures in Russia tied to its defense industrial base, as well as on any other nations that aid its defense sector or import Russian energy. It also enables the president to increase tariffs on imports of Russian energy by up to 500% ad valorem and levy tariffs of up to 100% ad valorem “on countries that purchase Russian-origin crude oil or natural gas or facilitate sanctions evasion.”

Seven years ago, on November 15, 2019, in association with the Claremont Institute, the Institute of World Politics, and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the Imprimatur Group organized a pair of public debates between four members of the Democratic Socialists of America—at that time, a political movement that few had heard of—and a group of four prominent conservative thinkers. Initially dismissed as a fringe movement, the DSA today can boast of electing the current mayor of the city of New York, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, and may well see another of its candidates, Nithya Raman, elected mayor of Los Angeles on Tuesday. They are not so easily disregarded anymore.

A dissent, Antonin Scalia once said, “is never a winner.” That’s a revealing line, not because Scalia disliked dissenting—no justice in modern memory did more to make dissent an art form—but because it reminds us how much of his Supreme Court career consisted of losing beautifully, usefully, and, in the end, not quite permanently.

James Rosen’s Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986–2001, the second installment of a projected three-volume biography, is thus largely not the story of Scalia triumphant but of Scalia frustrated: by colleagues who wouldn’t argue, conservatives who wouldn’t conserve, friends who wouldn’t follow, reporters who wouldn’t understand, and precedents that wouldn’t die. The first volume—which I also reviewed in these pages (“Nino the Great,” Fall 2023)—carried Nino from Queens to the Marble Temple. Volume two shows what happened when he got inside and discovered that the place was not, in fact, a seminar room.

Congressman Michael Rulli of Ohio recently introduced a federal GRANITE Act (Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion) to respond to what is commonly referred to as the foreign censorship threat. The legislation employs the approach devised by lawyer Preston Byrne to fend off, or even punish, what Byrne calls foreign “censorship demands.” But the problem is that foreign censorship is no longer just a threat. As a result of the European Union’s Digital Services Act, it is a widespread reality across all major online platforms. And the GRANITE model cannot stop it.

This model may prove serviceable in rebuffing the extraterritorial demands that British authorities might make under the Online Safety Act, which inspired Byrne’s idea, as his account of the GRANITE model’s genesis makes clear. But the Online Safety Act—ostensibly aimed at protecting minors and requiring the suppression of child sexual abuse material and terrorist content—has not been a major driver of online censorship.

The controversy over birthright citizenship is usually framed as a dispute over a single sentence in the 14th Amendment. Does its Citizenship Clause constitutionalize the English common-law rule that virtually everyone born within a sovereign’s territory is a citizen? Or does “subject to the jurisdiction” require something more—complete political jurisdiction and allegiance to the United States?

Important as that question is, it is not the most fundamental one. Before asking what the 14th Amendment means, we should ask what kind of political community the Constitution presupposes.

The Declaration of Independence announced two propositions that have shaped American constitutionalism ever since. The first is celebrated everywhere: all men are created equal, and governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The second receives much less attention: one people may “dissolve the political bands” connecting them with another and assume a “separate and equal station” among the nations of the earth. Those principles are complementary. Human equality explains why legitimate government requires consent, and the right of a people to dissolve its political bonds identifies the political community capable of giving that consent. That distinction goes to the heart of the current citizenship debate.

The Revolution Against Subjectship

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Midterms Outlook – Where Does the Right Go Now? | The American Mind Podcast

With the midterm elections just around the corner, Americans are gearing up to vote on an entirely different set of issues than in the 2024 general election. Rather than weighing the merits of a potential Kamala Harris administration, voters are now assessing the record of a second Trump term, defined by the rise of AI and military operations in Iran.

Around three weeks before the midterms, AP-NORC queried potential voters’ issue saliency. Economic concerns led at 85%, followed closely by cost-of-living concerns at 84%. Then came the Iran War at 64%, which ranked ahead of immigration and crime, the very issues that carried Donald Trump back to the White House in 2024.

Kalshi election bettors are in mourning after Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva won an unprecedented fourth term on Sunday, beating Flávio Bolsonaro 52% to 48%, a margin of roughly 4.4 million votes—a 10 million-vote increase for Lula from the first round. The Bolsonaro family and its allies have called for the result to be annulled. Flávio and his family fled the country for the United States after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes demanded he turn over his passport after the loss.

Let’s start with the obvious: Lula’s victory is bad for the United States. Brazil remains a pillar of BRICS, and Lula has championed alternatives to the dollar. China bought $69 billion in Brazilian goods between January and July (the U.S. bought $21 billion). In July, Lula made Brazil a founding signatory of the China-led World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization. And in August, Brasília announced a supercomputing project with Chinese companies Huawei and iFlytek worth about $250 million.

Lula refused to join Western sanctions on Russia, declared that the United States “crossed an unacceptable line” in capturing Maduro, and rejected American terrorist designations for two Brazilian gangs, Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho, in May. Four more years of this will undoubtedly cause continued headaches for the U.S.

Here is the tough truth: modern countries have pretty similar family policy profiles. Marriage is weakened everywhere. Most countries allow obscenity and divorce. Contraception is legal, as is abortion in the majority of countries. Many have same-sex marriage and anti-sex discrimination laws. Nearly all have family subsidies of one kind or another, and most subsidize care outside the home.

The differences that do exist do not always support social conservative expectations. What modern country has the lowest out-of-wedlock birth rate? Here’s a hint: it also has no same-sex marriage and arguably the tightest regulation of obscenity. This country has a strong family culture in a sense. But that country is South Korea, which features the world’s lowest birth rate and is the only country where fewer than 50% of adults are married. The institution of marriage is strong in South Korea; it’s just that relatively few enter it. The industrial-scale familial indifference makes South Korea the basement for family life in the modern world.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville describes two kinds of political parties: great ones and small ones. The former are those “attached more to principles…to generalities and not to particular[s],” to statesmen and not to politicians. They are the parties of founders. The latter are just the opposite: “generally without political faith,” these are the parties of disinterested politics, of policy more than of direction.

“America has had great parties,” he writes, though “today they no longer exist.” But much has changed since the early 1830s, when Tocqueville visited the United States. He did not live to see the Civil War, a conflict so well-suited to his description of great parties that the war itself reads like his definition made literal. Neither did he live to see the small parties that followed in its wake.

From the North’s victory over the South, which vindicated the founding’s anti-slavery political principles, to the reorientation of American politics with the New Deal coalition under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the rise of Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement, America has seen its share of great parties. They shared a common thread: each won a decisive victory that set the terms of political debate for a generation.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer marks its 150th anniversary this year. It was first published in 1876, the centennial year of the American Founding. The novel itself marked its own kind of founding moment for American literature, which had been laboring—to borrow a phrase from The Federalist—under the “arrogant pretensions of the European.” America may have broken free of Great Britain in 1776, but we remained enthralled to Europe culturally for much longer. In his 1837 essay “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented that American writers had “listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” and scraped by on the “sere remains of foreign harvests.”

Emerson then issued what Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. dubbed an “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” For Emerson, “genius looks forward.” He wanted to find, as he put it in his 1844 essay “The Poet,” the Homer of America—a bard “with a tyrannous eye” who “knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture [one] so much admires in Homer.” In much the same spirit, Walt Whitman longed for a “democratic literature” filled with “archetypal poems” that could thicken America’s cultural “marrow.”

Over the last decade, Europe’s political establishment has pursued an agenda of mass immigration while neglecting the welfare of its own citizens. The European Right has either contributed to this failure or warned, with varying degrees of success, against unchecked migration and the erosion of national sovereignty. In recent weeks, the consequences of these policies have been on display in the streets of Paris, Milan, and other cities across Europe.

Though the unrest in France emerged largely amid grievances over the rising cost of living, deteriorating public services, and underfunded schools, the demonstrations quickly gave way to violence. Immigrants, Islamists, and organized radical-left activists are committing arson, looting, attacking the police, and breaking into buildings. This domestic terrorism, which is occurring in some of Europe’s most beautiful cities, is a unique evil, perpetrated by those united in hatred of their neighbors and their countries’ heritage. These revolutionary movements are not seeking to reform policy or institutions, but to delegitimize the very civilization those institutions embody.

For years, European political elites have welcomed unchecked immigration and social disorder. Young Europeans, particularly those in Western Europe, have come of age living under institutions that repeatedly fail to provide the security, opportunity, and public services they were promised.

Generals always fight the last war. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan made a similar point when he argued that we understand the effects of new technologies in terms of past ones. He called this rear-view mirror thinking. Right now, Western countries are suffering from a collective exercise in rear-view thinking about the effects of digital technology on mass migration. Rather than seeing the unique functions of digital technology, we have assumed it has the same homogenizing effects as prior information technologies. That exercise of rear-view thinking is accelerating cultural replacement.

Let’s take stock of where we are. Since the 2010s, it has become clear that we are living in the end of the end of history. Having studied the West for decades, China and Russia decided not to imitate it but to pursue their own civilizational paths. Islamic civilization had long been pursuing its own. As the geostrategic ambitions of those three civilizations became clear, the concept of “the West” gained fresh life.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s thoughtful and inspiring speech delivered at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, deserves to be remembered for a long time to come, especially in an age increasingly dominated by ideological slogans and short attention spans. The speech combines impressive erudition and soaring rhetoric with an astute, if inevitably controversial, analysis of the contemporary international scene. More fundamentally, it seeks to come to terms with the foundational virtues and principles that have defined Western civilization since its origins in Greek antiquity.

The Athens speech only indirectly addresses the biblical pole that has also profoundly informed and shaped the Western heart, mind, and soul. Given the immediate purposes of Rubio’s speech, it is somewhat understandable that his remarks seemingly set aside the invigorating tensions—but not irreconcilable differences—between Athens and Jerusalem, and between magnanimity and humility, that have given life and purpose to the Western adventure. But a careful reading of his October 7 address suggests that Rubio is fully aware that one foundational pole cannot thrive today without the other.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Turmoil in France and South Africa – Can the Right Recover the West? | The American Mind Podcast

DOGE was never going to balance the budget.

DOGE was never going to unwind $38 trillion in U.S. federal debt nor reverse the sovereign-debt spiral engulfing every unelected advanced economy. No amount of administrative efficiency can meaningfully alter a fiscal architecture that is already mathematically insolvent.

Even if DOGE had been fully empowered—no obstruction, no lawsuits, no bureaucratic sabotage—it still could not have put the country back on a sustainable path. Because the problem is the structure of the global system and the incentives that hold it in place.

Soros sees the sublimation of political authority into transnational authority. That is how the NGO-Administrative Complex grows, by steady erosion of incentives, forcing governments into dependence on technocratic, supranational coordination to survive the same crises their own policies (and their own voters) can no longer manage. Which means we must confront a terrifying inevitability: A global financial order is coming.

“A people that takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.” — Thomas Babington Macaulay

What does a child need to know about the history of the Western world? The College Board claims to know the answer. Until 2019, the AP World History exam required students to master a sweep of history stretching back 10,000 years, from the first river civilizations to the present. Today, those requirements are much thinner. AP World History: Modern begins its tested content at 1200 AD. Ancient Greece and Rome—the birthplace of philosophy, republican government, Western aesthetics, and nearly everything that follows—are absent from the exam altogether. A student can earn a perfect score without ever being asked about Socrates, Augustus, or the Battle of Marathon.

This is not an isolated retreat. A 2017 report by the National Association of Scholars found that the College Board’s AP European History exam had scrubbed all mentions of religion, intellectual history outside of secular modernization, and the history of political liberty. The College Board later made very limited revisions, and the course remains a shell of what it once was.

The Obama Presidential Center, located on Chicago’s South Side, opened in June 2026, nine years and five months after Barack Obama’s term in office concluded. The politicians who build these centers force themselves to run one final fundraising gauntlet, not to finance an election campaign but to leave behind an edifice that makes an enduring case for their probity, sagacity, and historical importance.

What sets Obama apart is that he began publicly discussing the greatness he hoped for prior to occupying, winning, or seeking the nation’s highest office. “My attitude about something like the presidency is that you don’t want to just be the president,” Barack Obama told journalist Jacob Weisberg in 2006. “You want to change the country. You want to make a unique contribution. You want to be a great president.” Later in the interview he said, “There are, what, maybe 10 presidents in our history out of 40-something who you can truly say led the country? And then there are 30 who just kind of did their best.”

From a young age, we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. Firefighter, doctor, president, mechanic, astronaut, teacher, actor—the list goes on.

Dreams shift as children discover their gifts, what they enjoy, and where the two overlap. The kid who wanted to be a doctor might change his mind after finding out he can design spaceships and likes math better than anatomy.

Allowing people to follow their dreams has always been an American aspiration and part of what makes our country exceptional. Yet today, one group of Americans—young men—is at risk of being shut out from their dreams, largely through no fault of their own.

Mountains of evidence show that our education system and economy are increasingly leaving boys and men behind. This is a national crisis our political leaders must urgently acknowledge and address.

For Exhibit A, simply look at the last 50 years of wage trends. Although earnings for women have steadily increased, nearly doubling in the last half-century, men’s wages have remained largely stagnant. Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted median full-time wage for women has grown by $21,750 since 1976, it has increased for men by only $7,570.

America came closer to going net zero than many realize. To explain its rise, we need to consider a prophetic 1983 essay, “Risk and Culture,” by British anthropologist Mary Douglas and American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. They argued that the risks a society deems most serious are a product of culture. “Each social arrangement elevates some risks to a high peak and depresses others below sight. This cultural bias is integral to social organization,” they wrote.

Douglas and Wildavsky observed the rise of the environmental movement as an insurgent political force, or what they termed the “border.” Led by white Boomer liberals inspired by the African Americans’ fight for civil rights, environmentalists appropriated the movement’s moral absolutism and refusal to compromise.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Europe Lurches Leftward Toward Disaster. Can It Recover? | The American Mind Podcast

I really am—honest—trying to write a rather long and complicated book and don’t have time for things like this. But when one’s good name is impugned, sometimes thumos (to coin a phrase) gets the better of one.

Professional X Troll James Lindsay keeps dragging me into his every little fever dream. I almost always let it pass, though I did once demonstrate that he knows nothing about Plato, Carl Schmitt, or political philosophy generally.

Now he has committed yet another disastrous unforced error, on some level realizes it, and is spinning frantically to direct fire outward at everyone who has shown that he has once again made an utter fool of himself.

The nub is—literally—this: Amanda Milius, a filmmaker and former State Department official, recently gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem. For the record, I was not there and did not watch or read the speech. But I have known Amanda for eight years and doubt I would be surprised by the content.

I came here because supposed friends on the Right, as well as enemies on the Left, are slandering the great realignment that the American Right has been undergoing over the last decade, which led to the coalition that put Trump in office for the second time in 2024.

I noticed that by merely announcing online my plan to attend this conference, I have since been called both a Nazi and a sellout to the Zionists. This dual claim may not make logical sense, but it does give us a sense of what’s happening right now. People are trying to rip our coalition apart.

Many are now being encouraged to conclude that the New Right, the coalition that helped put President Trump back in the White House, and a whole generation of young conservatives have gone mad. And that story is no doubt very useful to the people telling it. The problem is that it’s just not true.

The National Security Strategy released last year describes President Trump’s foreign policy using these words: “realistic,” “pragmatic,” “principled,” “muscular,” and “restrained.” To quote: “It’s not grounded in traditional political ideology. It is motivated above all by what works for America—or, in two words, America First.”

Arizona law does not permit the state to require an employee to undergo training that presents blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex. The wording is not obscure. It addresses the state and its subdivisions, identifies the protected employees, and forbids a particular act. Yet when I sought to enforce that prohibition against Arizona State University for required DEI training, the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) maintained that I had no right to be in court. The legislature may have enacted a command, its argument runs, but it gave the people protected by that command no means of enforcing it.

I have taught philosophy and religious studies at Arizona State University for more than two decades. In 2022, ASU began requiring its employees to complete an online program called “Inclusive Communities.” Arizona had enacted A.R.S. § 41-1494 the previous year. The statute provides that the state and specified political subdivisions “may not require an employee to engage in training, orientation or therapy that presents any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.” It separately forbids spending public money on such programs.

I have spent the last several years learning—the (very) hard way—a lesson that most Americans still have not learned: the courtroom has become the principal battlefield of American politics. And on that battlefield, the Left arrived with an army. The Right brought a checkbook and a prayer. That ends now.

Last week, the Oversight Project announced the launch of a new law firm—a salaried, in-house, battle-ready legal outfit whose mission can be stated in just ten words: defend our friends, and go on offense against our enemies. Backed by a generous philanthropic seed investment from Tom Klingenstein, the chairman of the Claremont Institute, the firm is designed to do what the conservative legal ecosystem has refused to build for 50 years: an institution that treats the legal defense of patriots as a standing obligation rather than a series of one-off charity bake sales.

The Problem Goes Deep

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Beasts, Gods, and Bots: Facing down the Specter of a Post-Human Future | The American Mind Podcast

The morning after you win, the National Governors Association will call. They will offer a seminar, a binder, and a roster of former governors prepared to explain why you should slow down. Take the meeting if you must—but do not buy their theory.

The midterms may cost Republicans the House, and possibly even the Senate. But they will not lose the states. Thirty-six governorships are on the ballot, and the incoming class, with open seats in Ohio, Alabama, Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and others, will likely yield the most conservative slate of new governors in a generation. The federal government will likely be deadlocked in 2027, but the states offer hope for advancing a bold and transformative national agenda.

To carry out such an agenda, incoming governors must reject the advice found in the NGA’s transition manual, which is an apologia for paralysis. On page 39, a former governor offers what the association presents as wisdom: “As a businessman, I spent 90 percent of my time on process and 10 percent on policy. As governor, I find I spend 90 percent of my time on policy and 10 percent on process.” This advice comes from a man who once controlled his own calendar but learned to let someone else control it. Unsurprisingly, he did not transform his state during his term in office.

Americans can’t afford to be complacent about our election security. The right to vote is one of the most indispensable civil rights in a constitutional republic, but it is not self-executing. Laws must protect that right, ensure its proper administration, and defend it against error, fraud, and foreign influence.

Citizenship must be verified when voters register. States must maintain accurate voter rolls and give federal authorities the data to which they’re legally entitled. They must also have reliable proof-of-eligibility requirements and prosecute election-law violations.

This is ultimately not merely an election-administration issue—it is a matter of sovereignty.

The proposition that only American citizens may vote in elections is a cornerstone of our republic. The citizenship requirement preserves self-government and ensures that those who decide our elections are members of the American political community. If these basic rules are treated as mere aspiration rather than an enforceable legal requirement, then American sovereignty is at risk.

The vote—and the machinery that receives, records, verifies, counts, and reports it—is how the American people confer legitimate authority on public officials.

Washington’s Farewell Address is often celebrated as one of the great documents of American history—the political testament of the nation’s founding father. Its authorship, however, has occasioned debate. Some, especially those who viewed Washington as a puppet of closet monarchists, wondered if he was even in charge of his own administration and whatever statements emerged from it.

The record shows that while Washington certainly had assistance during the drafting process, the document was truly his—he dictated what he wanted included and gave the final approval of the text. The tenets espoused reflected beliefs Washington had held for decades—beliefs he hoped could guide the nation from infancy to maturity. The Farewell Address was a worthy capstone to his extraordinary career and a touchstone of American republicanism.

Writing the Farewell Address

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV stood in the Vatican’s Synod Hall and presented Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on artificial intelligence. Beside two cardinals sat the lay speaker chosen to address the room, Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic and self-described atheist working to develop the “soul” of its AI model, Claude.

The Catholic Church, the West’s oldest institution, has long stood at the forefront of the day’s most important moral questions. It has often found itself opposed to insidious ideologies that swept the globe. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Vatican waged a secret war against Nazism. Then it took on Communism. But at the start of the 21st century, a new ideology emerged that would eventually take hold among wealthy tech elites called Effective Altruism, or EA.

Developed from the stark utilitarian philosophy of Princeton University’s Peter Singer, EA claims to use evidence and reason to determine how to benefit others as efficiently as possible. Effective Altruists like Bill Gates and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei direct enormous sums of money toward causes they believe will produce the greatest measurable benefit, regardless of whether those causes are personally meaningful to them.

Because I’m going to be quite critical of Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World, it feels only right to start with three pieces of sincere praise: the book held my attention all the way to the end, I learned things from it, and I read it twice. These are not reactions I expect most new books to generate, let alone one written by someone not yet of legal drinking age. Hence on this basis alone, I would have to concede that Rule (borrowing Baker’s shorthand for a “secret” Stanford class, about which more below) is a real achievement.

The first round of Brazil’s presidential election is on Sunday. Two candidates are locked in a dead heat: Lula da Silva, incumbent president and founder of the center-left Workers’ Party, and Flávio Bolsonaro, the 45-year-old son of ex-president Jair Bolsonaro (2018-2022). Last year, Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of plotting a coup to remain in power after losing the 2022 election and sentenced to more than 27 years in prison.

The parallels between Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro are notable. They were elected in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Both are populist nationalists. Both are coarse, politically incorrect, and hostile to critics. Most remarkably, both lost re-election, after which supporters stormed the halls of Congress seeking to overturn the result. Though Trump, in contrast to Bolsonaro, avoided prison and returned to office, both command die-hard support and lead political movements that dominate the Right in their countries.

It is reasonable to ask why two countries as different as the U.S. and Brazil have followed such similar political tracks since the late 2010s. Why did the Trump model work in Brazil? Trump’s signature issues—illegal immigration and tariffs—were irrelevant there. To answer this question, we need to step back and consider populism in broad terms.

The 2026 midterm elections present a tough environment for the Republican Party, raising questions about how to campaign in such challenging circumstances. As is often the case in American politics, the economy is a central concern for voters. In the last few weeks, prices—particularly for gas—have been too high for the comfort of any incumbent party. What have Republicans been saying to assuage voters’ concerns?

Some have taken a kind of high road, encouraging or even admonishing voters to rise above self-interest and consider the loftier aims President Trump and his administration are pursuing. Yes, gas prices may be high, but the president is trying to end the Iranian threat to American national security. This process is taking longer and causing more economic pain than anyone would like. But it is worth it for the nation in the long run, and so patriotic voters should toughen up. So the argument runs.

This approach, however, has no shortage of critics. They think it is futile or worse (maybe insulting) to tell ordinary voters, whose economic means are increasingly limited, to grin and bear higher prices on the necessities of life. This environment, they suggest, is a recipe for electoral disaster for the Republican Party.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

The Crisis of America is the Crisis of the West | The American Mind Podcast ft. Steve Hayward

There’s nothing Congress likes better than not legislating. The legislative process in theory still takes place in Congress, but the results, which have the name and form of law, are in reality not law, properly understood. Legislative policy is still made in America, but it overwhelmingly takes forms other than laws enacted by Congress according to the process set forth in Article I of the Constitution. By conferring legislative power on others and leaving vital public issues unaddressed through congressional action, members of the legislature are effectively failing to carry out their constitutionally designated duties.

The importance of this change in the American political system cannot be overstated. Delegation—Congress’s abdication of its core legislative function—is key to understanding both the modern Congress and the crisis of constitutional government in America. Congress’s regular use of delegation has led to two seismic consequences: institutional failure on a massive scale and, more fundamentally, a transformation in the very character of the American regime.

Congress and the Legislative Power

Over the past few weeks, Old Guard conservatives have been making a concerted effort to attack Vice President JD Vance and the New Right.

Many were critical of Vance’s support for a Trump Administration proposal to allow federal dollars to go to stay-at-home parents. Dana Loesch suggested that those who accepted such funds weren’t “man enough.” Another conservative called it a “scheme” and “a longstanding tenet of the Postliberal/Orbanist policy agenda.”

Old Guard critic Jay Caruso mocked Vance for saying the administration would not “let” companies exchange American workers “with cheap foreign labor,” accusing the vice president of turning his back on the free market. Simultaneously, a chorus of Old Guard conservatives have been blasting Vance for supposedly refusing to distance himself from Nazis and groypers—and from a group of trinitarian Christians, the Society for American Civic Renewal.

Increasing numbers of Americans are deeply opposed to building more data centers.

Over the summer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro imposed the strictest data center rules in the country, Kathy Hochul ordered a statewide moratorium on hyperscale construction, and Greg Abbott paused new approvals in Texas pending a grid audit. At the local level, dozens of county and municipal fights have followed no reliable partisan pattern. Polling from Heatmap and Embold, collected by the anon Cremieux, shows data center popularity plummeting over the last year.

Though Cremieux argues the opposition is fundamentally driven by NIMBYism, I’m unconvinced. The polling seems to follow the pattern you’d expect if NIMBYism were the primary driver, but posing the problem as a generic national issue produces substantially less opposition. Something else is going on that NIMBYism can’t fully explain.

President Trump’s America First foreign policy asks a simple question of every foreign engagement: What does it do for the American people? A trifecta of developments in July 2026 highlights a threefold answer to this question in regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the central European country formed by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the Balkan War and created two legal entities: Republika Srpska, consisting mostly of Serbian Orthodox Christians; and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, consisting mostly of Muslims (called Bosniaks), with a significant minority of ethnically Croat Roman Catholic Christians.

First, on July 1, 2026, as we were celebrating 250 years of independence from a tyrant named King George III, a non-elected German “High Representative” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Christian Schmidt, who, like George III, has been enacting what our July 4, 1776, Declaration called “Acts of pretended Legislation,” resigned.

Second, our 250th commemoration of the beginning of our Revolutionary War reminds us that wars happen, and our security can never be taken for granted.

Conservative blogger Erick Erickson published an essay last week on Substack, “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off a Cliff,” maligning the Claremont Institute, one of our donors, and a few of our fellows and alumni.

Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Steve Hayward published the first in a promised series (“Is Conservatism In Crisis?”) on his Political Questions Substack, criticizing the tone, rhetorical tactics, and substance of Erickson’s essay. As Hayward shows, Erickson relies on guilt-by-association smears and innuendo that let the juxtaposition do the arguing. Many of his citations come from untrustworthy and hostile sources, like The Guardian, which has published numerous hit pieces against Claremont. Erickson’s essay is a mile-wide, inch-deep bit of motivated reasoning.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

How the Left’s Climate Agenda Caused the West’s Economic Downfall | The American Mind Podcast ft. Rupert Darwall

Amid the Iran War and midterm U.S. electioneering, most Americans probably missed a potentially game-changing shift in President Donald Trump’s war against Mexico’s drug cartels. The administration has pivoted to a consequential new tactic that, according to some Mexico experts, could cripple the cartels if expanded. Though it has received little U.S. press coverage, this new strategy has the potential to be more effective than anything ever tried.

The shift is epitomized by a recent 34-page Department of Justice indictment that named ten past and present senior government officials of Mexico’s ruling Morena party in Sinaloa State, which is home base for the Sinaloa Cartel. All ten have denied wrongdoing.

The indictment alleged that Governor Rubén Rocha Moya (who briefly stepped down but has returned) and his current and former security service appointees took “veritable fortunes” in bribe money to dramatically aggravate America’s crisis of fentanyl-related deaths.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Russell Vought: How to Control the Administrative State | The American Mind Podcast

President Trump may have accomplished something fiscal conservatives have been trying unsuccessfully to do for decades: he got Washington talking seriously about the national debt. All it took was promising a $5,000 payment—what he calls a “Trump Dividend”—to every adult American citizen if Republicans retain control of Congress. With roughly 240 million eligible recipients, the back-of-the-envelope cost is about $1.2 trillion.

Suddenly, the political class discovered fiscal responsibility. Critics immediately pointed out that the federal government doesn’t have over a trillion dollars lying around. They warned that the checks would increase the deficit. They reminded us that the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. They worried about inflation, borrowing costs, and the burden we are leaving to future generations.

Those are legitimate concerns. In fact, they should have been dominating our national political debate for decades.

The federal government has been spending money it does not have at an astonishing rate. Annual deficits that once would have produced political panic are now treated almost as background noise.

AI companies want to regulate their open-source competitors out of existence and regulate themselves into riches. We do not usually think of innovative private companies inviting government regulation of their own industry, but that is exactly what is happening in AI.

Concerns about the pace of AI development have existed since the technology entered public awareness in late 2022. Early fears about AI’s economic impact focused largely on job losses for writers and coders and its effects on writing instruction. More recently, as major AI platforms have rolled out agents—AI bots that can be given a task and carry it out over an extended period—the focus has shifted.

What if the bots carry out a cyberattack? What if they are given instructions and the user forgets to tell them to stop? What if they gain access to the nuclear codes? We have not yet reached the point where people are worried about AI turning the universe into paperclips. We are, however, already in a situation where Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei felt the need to publish an essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which he announced, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”

“Teen takeovers” have gone from a social-media spectacle to a serious public-safety issue. While the name conjures images of high schoolers innocently hanging around a drive-in à la American Graffiti, at its core, this phenomenon is about sowing violence and chaos—and leaving communities to deal with the consequences.

The 2026 Wisconsin State Fair concluded its final evening with a massive brawl, during which violent “teens” swarmed the park and beat unassuming fair guests. One man was kicked and beaten as he lay in the fetal position. Earlier this summer, a teen takeover at a Chipotle in Washington, D.C., forced frightened patrons to scramble as youths began throwing chairs and screaming.

In cities across the nation, the same pattern of brutality has emerged: swarms of young, primarily black teenagers will suddenly invade a public space to fight, threaten police, destroy private property, and occasionally get involved in shootings.

When the definitive history of Joe Biden’s presidency is written, it will likely conclude that his most important legacy was unprecedented immigration levels. The U.S. foreign-born population (legal and illegal) grew by 8.3 million during his time in office, driven mostly by the border crisis that he instigated.

At first, the media called the massive influx “seasonal” or blamed it on pent-up demand after COVID lockdowns. Later, they claimed that every Western country faced a similar situation. Many argued it was inevitable. As David Bier of the Cato Institute argued in the New York Times, “Biden Can’t Stop Immigration. Time to Embrace It.” Of course, nothing about it was inevitable.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the “monster” begins as a creature whose maker abdicates his catechetical responsibility. Victor Frankenstein spends nearly two years learning how to give life to an inanimate body. But at the moment of success, when the creature finally opens his eyes, Victor is overcome with disgust and abandons him without teaching him a word.

Spoiler: the creature receives an education anyway. He leaves Victor’s apartment functionally newborn and learns about his environment through direct experiences with hunger, pain, fear, and the elements. The monster eventually takes refuge in a hovel joined to the De Lacey family’s cottage, where he witnesses examples of familial virtue. He learns history and social order from Volney’s Ruins of Empires and draws on Plutarch, Goethe, and Milton to form his understanding of himself, society, and God. The creature’s education is accidental and ungoverned: no one chooses his curriculum, corrects his errors, or even knows he is listening.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Uncovered: Administrative State Abuses of Military Contracts | The American Mind Podcast

In this special episode, Will Thibeau, director of the Claremont Institute’s American Military Project, sits down with Claremont president Ryan P. Williams to discuss his recent report on the 8(a) Program, its unique weaponization in the Woke Era, and how the military under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is combatting the rampant abuses. Plus: What can America’s industrial base learn from the Iran and Ukraine wars?

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