Cotton was king, or perhaps dictator, of the early-twentieth-century Southern economy. It grew “close up” to the cabin doors because nearly every square inch of land on many Southern farms was dedicated to the crop. The cotton harvest was crucial to paying off debts and buying anything a farmer might need, though more often than not it became a source of more debt, with a poor season seeing many Southerners lose control of their land. This was especially true of black farmers, who faced the daily realities of the Jim Crow system along with the economic monoculture. But the cotton stranglehold wasn’t merely an economic issue. Carver’s word “hungry” was apt for all the reasons he described and more.

George Washington Carver.

Despite romantic notions of vegetable-rich farm diets prior to the advent of processed foods, the Southern cotton farmer’s diet could not be described as healthy then or now. It had three main ingredients that became known as the “3 Ms”—meat, meal, and molasses—to which the addition of the humble peanut could add invaluable nutrients and protein. Well into the twentieth century, many rural Southerners suffered from a disease called pellagra, which gave its victims a painful skin rash and was often fatal. A doctor named Joseph Goldberger discovered that pellagra was caused by protein dietary deficiency. Thus, Carver had become determined to get other crops onto those hungry cotton fields, and he knew the task would be colossal.

Carver was a plant whisperer from childhood, and his fascination extended to all plants, ranging from vital cash crops to roadside scrub trees. Over time he narrowed his focus to soybeans, sweet potatoes, and especially peanuts. Carver’s main goal was to diversify farmers, particularly black farmers, out of cotton’s grasp. Peanuts proved up to the task.

Because cotton was so ingrained in the Southern economy and the Southern mind, Carver at first promoted peanuts as a cotton booster. The two plants thrived in different seasons, meaning peanuts could be grown on the same acreage as cotton without harming the coveted white cash crop. More to the point, Carver discovered that peanuts added nitrogen to the soil, which in most of the region had been badly depleted from the lack of crop rotation.

The scientist toured Georgia and Alabama aboard something he called the Jessup wagon, a horse-drawn laboratory and classroom of sorts that he used to demonstrate soil chemistry to cotton farmers. Thus, peanuts could be viewed as the mere byproduct of a soil replenishment technique. A separate obstacle for Carver was convincing farmers that peanuts themselves were worth having around, as many didn’t know what to do with them after the harvest.

In fact, neither did Carver. This dilemma is what set him on his quest to identify and cultivate uses for peanuts, a list eventually totaling hundreds of items. Less well known is the event that rocketed Carver to stardom. Domestic peanut farmers faced stiff competition from Africa, with peanuts imported from the continent as early as 1835, especially to the industrial Northern states. By 1841 the African peanut trade had developed into a decent business with a value of £8,127, with shipping expeditions all the way to and from West Africa for the express purpose of obtaining legumes.

A modest tariff was imposed in 1842, but it did little to slow the trade. Europe also thrived on African peanuts in the 1800s, with England, Germany, and especially France importing shiploads of peanuts that were converted into peanut oil for use in margarine, soap, bread, cakes, cattle feed, salad oil, and even grease for industrial machinery.

How does all of this involve Carver? Because he played a direct and outsized role in ending peanut imports into the United States, aiding domestic growers in the process. The commercial use of peanuts surged during World War I, providing a boon to peanut-growing areas. In 1919, shortly after the war, the city of Enterprise, Alabama, famously erected a statue to commemorate “Billy Boll Weevil” for helping it diversify into peanuts. That progress was threatened the very next year, however, when foreign peanuts from Africa as well as China and Japan flooded the domestic market.

American farmers demanded a heavy tariff to protect their nascent peanut profits. In 1921, the House Ways and Means Committee held hearings on a potential peanut tariff, inviting a host of industry experts, Carver included, to testify. His appearance was expected to be a rather sleepy affair before a staid congressional committee, but it instead played out like something from an inspirational film.

Carver was the only black speaker and was scheduled to speak last. The committee was bored with peanut talk by the time he appeared, and the chairman reminded Carver that he had just ten minutes to present. Carver then calmly laid out his “pandora’s box” of 101 different uses for the peanut. He faced some harsh initial questions from the chairman, including rude asides likely related to his race, but Carver responded not only with grace but with wit and humor as well. When his ten minutes were up, he was instructed to continue.

Carver pulled out chocolate-covered peanuts, peanut candy bars, peanut ice cream, peanut cakes, peanut flour, and peanut meal, taking bites of some items to show off how delicious they were. He displayed for the committee five breakfast foods made from peanuts, plus peanut-based livestock feed, peanut milk, peanut-based mock meat, peanut soy sauce, and peanut Worcestershire sauce. There were peanut-based face creams and powders, wood stains, and ink. Carver got a standing ovation when it was all over, and Rep. John Nance Garner, a Texas Democrat who would later serve as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first vice president, described it as the most wonderful exhibition he had ever seen before the committee.

Remarkably, Carver did not ask for a tariff during his nearly two hours of demonstrations, or not directly, anyway. He was questioned on the topic by one of the congressmen and responded, “Tariff? This is all the tariff means—to put the other fellow out of business.” The quip drew plenty of laughter, yet Carver reiterated the point in a letter he sent the committee afterward, writing, “My appearance was not to discuss the tariff. I have nothing to sell; I will manufacture nothing. I simply came to add my little bit if possible.” He then added, tongue in cheek, “I feel sure you gentlemen will guard and put proper restrictions upon every interest that arises in harmful competition with ours without any suggestions of mine.”

America’s peanut growers got their tariff—and at three cents a pound for unshelled peanuts and four cents a pound for shelled peanuts, it was the highest the industry had ever seen. Peanut farmers lavished praise on Carver in their trade magazines, and the scientist promptly hit the lecture circuit, speaking about peanuts in Chicago and New York City en route to becoming one of the most famous figures of his day and a fixture of school history lessons for at least another century.

With the tariff in place, the stage was set for massive growth in the American peanut industry, which aided farmers across the South. The wider economic impact beyond the farms was less obvious at first. The challenge remained finding practical, everyday uses for the crop that could be consistently and repeatedly sold. Carver found 300 different uses for the peanut, but he never commercially produced any of them at scale. The legendary scientist was a demonstrator, an educator, a booster even. He was not a businessman, however, typically celebrating the potential of non-cotton crops rather than developing that potential himself. He was glad to help when asked, though.

The tariff was tremendously well timed, coming as it did at the beginning of the agricultural depression of the 1920s. Southern farmers often lived in unpainted shacks, traveled in wagons over unpaved roads, lit their homes with oil lamps, and drew water by hand from wells. Cotton prices fell by half from 1919 to 1920 and did not recover at any time during the next two decades. For many Southern cities, the death grip of cotton largely remained in the form of cotton mills that dominated the skyline, the riverfront, the employment landscape, and even the realm of politics. Competing employment opportunities were often scarce.

An early-twentieth-century peanut farmer.

Mill hands in the South could expect to earn half the wage of their New England counterparts, and they’d learned through a series of mostly unsuccessful and often violently repressed organizing efforts that union drives were not going to bring a quick remedy.

But change was coming, if slowly and gradually, thanks to new technology, entrepreneurship, the protection of the tariff, and a spirit of progressivism following the Allied victory in the Great War. Carver later found kinship with a Columbus, Georgia-based inventor and peanut promoter named Tom Huston, and with a plan he’d later describe as among the most interesting he’d ever seen.

An Unlikely Partnership

Three years after Carver’s appearance before Congress, and with the peanut tariff in place, he received a letter from Huston, who lived 45 miles away on the other side of the Georgia-Alabama border. Huston had made a name for himself by inventing a series of peanut shellers that grew to dominate the market in the lower peanut belt. Farmers who could not afford to buy a sheller often brought their harvest to his company, Tom Huston Manufacturing, and some of Huston’s payment from these cash-strapped farmers came in the form of their peanut crop.

His next task, then, was to sell the peanuts piling up at his factory. To increase business for his peanut shellers, Huston knew that making peanuts more appetizing and popular was crucial, and he sought an innovation to capitalize on the boost in production.

Huston began to think out improved ways to toast, season, package, and sell peanuts. In 1924 this quest led him to write Carver. Huston told Carver that he’d learned how to keep peanuts edible “almost indefinitely” by placing them in an airtight bag. Huston asked for advice on the cooking and seasoning process, inquiring how one might put salt and oil “inside the peanut” rather than on the outside, where they got all over the consumer’s hands. He included a small sample of salted peanuts, and as an aside, Huston mentioned that most of the peanut shellers in the South were his models.

Carver was hooked right away. He wrote back five days later to say that he read Huston’s words “with a great deal of interest ... in fact with much more interest than usual,” and he confirmed that he’d like to set up a meeting. Carver continued:

I am very much interested in what you propose and you have certainly made a great contribution to the industry as this has been one of the greatest. I have received the package of roasted nuts also. … I must say they seem to me the most delicious that I have eaten. If you could succeed in getting the oil into the nut, it would be a wonderful addition. I really believe it can be done but will require a great deal of experimental work. I shall be glad to give some attention to this when I can get to it as I am very much interested.

Huston followed up just two days afterward, proposing that the two meet at the Montgomery Fair, which was scheduled for November. All indications are that they did meet at the fair and became fast friends. The next year, Huston launched his innovation: a patented, packaged product known as Tom’s Toasted Peanuts that quickly became a national sensation. He sent samples to Carver, who shared them with the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) Board of Trustees. “It was equally as interesting to hear their comments, which were exactly the same as mine,” Carver wrote, “the best they had ever eaten.”

The public agreed. By the end of the 1920s, Huston was selling 2.25 million bags a week of Tom’s Toasted Peanuts and employing 400 people in a Columbus factory, along with 150 independent distributors hawking peanuts in two dozen states. His firm attracted the attention of the New York Times and TIME magazine, which marveled at his success. In the summer of 1929, Huston was offered $4.4 million for the company (roughly $87 million in 2026 dollars) by a New York syndicate, though he turned it down hoping to grow the firm even larger on his own.

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The Huston/Carver relationship evolved over time, and by the end of the decade Carver was communicating more with Huston’s employees than with Huston himself. The mission shifted as well, away from the challenge of creating a popular peanut-based product and toward new battles that accompanied rapid growth.

Ultimately, Carver and the Tom Huston Peanut Company collaborated with great success on the latter initiative, one arguably more difficult and certainly more sprawling in scope than the former. The biggest new challenge lay in fighting peanut plant diseases and getting the United States Department of Agriculture and powerful land-grant universities to focus on and fund research into peanuts. It was a long journey.

Tom’s Toasted Peanuts launched in 1925, and by 1929 more than 2.2 million bags were being sold per week.

Domestic peanut production rose almost 40% between 1925 and 1930, and consumption totals broke records while imports fell by more than half. Aiming to preserve this growth, Carver wrote extensively to Tom’s field manager Grady Porter and especially to shelling department manager Bob Barry. The USDA at the time studied cotton and soybeans yet was doing little if any peanut work, leaving Tom’s (as the company became known) to fill the void by conducting its own research and even preparing its own brochures and public relations campaigns to teach farmers the best way to maximize their peanut crop.

Though Tom’s never grew peanuts, only purchasing them, it was so dedicated to business growth that it sold its own branded seeds and conducted peanut crop research on company-owned acreage to increase the size and quality of yields. By September 1929, Carver was predicting big results. “‘The Empty Dinner Pail’ is one of our greatest national problems,” he wrote on September 23. “Your great commercial and educational institution will make a great contribution to this and by giving and demonstrating to the world how easy it is to get a cheap, wholesome, nutritious, appetizing, well-balanced food stuff from the peanut.”

The team of two white men and one black man worked closely together despite the limitations of the segregated South. “We feel that you are more competent to work this out than anybody we know,” Barry wrote to Carver on August 16, 1930. “Our Mr. Porter should be able to take you to one of these fields, without any expense to you at all, and bring you back the same day.” Carver wrote a lengthy letter to Porter two weeks later in which he discussed peanut diseases, adding, “I shall consider it a great privilege to cooperate with you and Mr. Barry in any way I can in your efforts to suppress these diseases which threaten one of the South’s great money crops.” Barry and Porter traveled to Tuskegee, and Carver made a return trip to Tom’s headquarters in Columbus within the same month.

Portions of Barry’s letters reveal a distrust of government officials generally and of the USDA in particular. On September 16, 1930, he wrote to Carver that his mind was going around in circles over how to combat peanut diseases and sell the idea to government agriculture officials.

“Possibly some high official in the Department of Agriculture in Washington could be startled into an appreciation of the seriousness of the situation,” Barry wrote. “He could call a meeting of the agricultural powers of the Southeastern States and learn all the details of your discoveries. It might be the rest of them would boo at the situation because somebody else found it out. Then too people in political jobs are not looking for hard work as a rule.”

Carver often felt the same as Barry about D.C. One day prior to Barry’s letter, Carver wrote to his longtime friend Dr. M. L. Ross: “All last week I was called upon to inspect farms of peanuts in Ga. Ala. and Fla. A very serious disease has appeared among them. They have had it before the leading experts in Washington D.C. and many [Experiment] Stations, they knew nothing about it. I happened to know what it was from experience.”

Barry did, however, trust Carver. He once wrote him three letters in a single day and often complimented Carver in their correspondence. Barry praised Carver as “so much more competent to do this than we are,” saying he wished Carver were “either twins or triplets” because his work was so valued, and made it clear that Carver had decision-making power.

Together, the Huston-Carver team published its own books, magazines, and pamphlets on peanut cultivation, which were mailed out to thousands of peanut growers, shelling plants, and county extension agents in the region, plus newspapers, banks, and relevant figures in Washington. The reports included sections on both the problem—peanut diseases and how to identify them—and the solution, a set of recommendations that Carver wrote with advice on where and how to plant the crop.

In the end, the men did attract the attention of the USDA and the region’s powerful land grant universities, so much so the pace of their letters slowed considerably by the end of 1932 as government-backed entities were finally convinced to take over the bulk of the work.

Even so, the project left the Tom Huston Peanut Company with a healthier and more stable and consistent crop of peanuts to purchase in future years, and for Carver, it aided the black farmers he always had in mind with better seeds and better crops they could sell to make a living.

Huston, in his final letter to Carver in November of 1932, reflected on the impact he’d had on the company, the peanut industry, and the nation. “You have my sincere good wishes for continued good health that will enable you to continue your good work,” Huston wrote. “You certainly deserve a place on America’s front page.”

Adapted from A Legacy in Peanuts: Tom’s Foods and the Transformation of the Twentieth-Century South by Haisten Willis, released this month from the University of Georgia Press.

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Commonplace has launched a new newsletter, Future Voices, that invites young people from across the country to share their thoughts in response to each month’s issue of the magazine.

For the first edition, respondents provided answers to the question: “After decades of dismissing the subject, how should a new generation of conservatives approach climate change, and environmental policy more broadly?”

Rather than try to summarize second-hand, we wanted to share a selection of responses to capture what young people on the Right really think:

Give Us a Positive Vision for Climate

Grace Plath, Patrick Henry College

For decades, climate alarmists have spread their message of environmental apocalypse far and wide. Although these dire predictions haven’t come to pass (see Al Gore’s claims that Glacier National Park’s glaciers would disappear by the year 2021), young adults still believe climate issues are important. Surveys estimate that 80% of 16-24-year-olds worldwide suffer from “climate anxiety.” A 2021 study by the Pew Research Center found that 69% of Gen Zers felt anxious about the future when they interacted with social media content addressing climate change.

American conservatives have largely failed to cast a positive vision for a conservative approach to environmental stewardship. By doing so, we have ceded that space to radical voices who claim that our only hope of saving the planet lies in population reduction and extreme policy changes that will drastically lower quality of life for people around the globe.

Today, conservatives stand at a crossroads in the climate discussion. We have an incredible opportunity to give the younger generations an alternative message of hope rather than fear. Conservatives must reframe the environmental debate in terms of a pro-life, pro-stewardship mindset. Yes, the earth is a gift that we must care for, and it is a resource that we should use to promote human flourishing. Clean air and water are important, but so is affordable energy, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Population growth is not a burden on the environment, but a gift that promotes innovation and enterprise.

It’s time that climate alarmism is relegated to the landfill of history. Let’s reclaim environmental conservation for the conservative movement.

Reclaiming Sustainability

Christopher Lynch, Florida State University

The climate radicalism of the Left demands a serious conservative response. Crafting policy to address environmental concerns should be a goal of conservatism. Across the pond in Europe, degrowth climate alarmists who destroy great works of art to protest “Big Oil” demonstrate what progressives will do when conservatives cede the argument on climate and environmental policy.

At this point it is cliché to state that it was a Republican, President Richard Nixon, who oversaw the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. But environmental policy intersects other traditional conservative policy priorities. Energy modernization policy should not eradicate fossil fuels or retrofit the American economy in a green sheer, but instead, we should encourage development of nuclear energy.

Cast aside due to fearmongering over a few examples of mismanagement, nuclear development in America was halted in the 1980s, which forced the climate debate to focus only on renewables. Nuclear power promises cheaper and reliable power and addresses affordability concerns without reliance on Chinese produced green energy sources. It also avoids the significant visual blight of windmills.

Maintaining America’s beautiful landscapes, as President Trump helped do with the Great American Outdoors Act, is a core function of government. Effective environmental oversight is also critical, as California’s chronic mismanagement of wildfires has demonstrated. But spurning proper forest management in favor of the Green New Deal and carbon demonization has disastrous real-world implications.

The Left is excellent at capturing and weaponizing terminology. However, “sustainability” need not be a dirty word. Conservatives should pursue environmental policy that overlaps with our other priorities, or else we will fail to offer an alternative to the worst of the Left’s climate agenda.

Innovation Can Do What Protests Cannot

Abigail Smith, University of Notre Dame

For decades, too many conservatives treated climate change as someone else’s issue. We let the Left own it, and what did they do with it? Turned it into a prop. Greta Thunberg scolding world leaders at the UN didn’t solve anything; rather, it gave activists a permanent reason to complain and gave conservatives an excuse to roll our eyes. We both lost.

The new generation of conservatives should refuse that trap. We should start with the premise: the climate is changing, human activity contributes, and pretending otherwise costs us credibility on every other issue. But acknowledging the problem does not mean accepting the Left’s remedies.

Their toolkit is mandates, bans, and bureaucratic five-year plans. Ours should be better.

Conservation is embedded in the conservative tradition itself. A movement dedicated to conserving what is good, beautiful, and enduring should not ignore the natural world. Stewardship is not a progressive value but a conservative one.

Since 2005, the U.S. cut carbon emissions by roughly 20 percent, largely because fracking replaced coal with cleaner natural gas. Innovation did what protests could not.

So what is the agenda? Expand nuclear power by ending permitting paralysis. Reform environmental review laws that block transmission lines and reactors. Use a simple, transparent price on pollution instead of a maze of subsidies and special favors. Invest in adaptation so communities can withstand whatever comes.

Cheap, abundant energy lifted billions out of poverty. Policies that make energy scarce do not save the planet. They punish working families while China builds coal plants anyway. Conservation, stewardship, clean air, and clean water are conservative ideals. Teddy Roosevelt was no activist. He was a hunter who loved nature.

Let the Left complain, but we should conserve what matters and use innovation to protect it.

Reject Denialism and Apocalyptic Politics

Alex Mooney, Hillsdale College

Early Americans often treated the continent’s resources as inexhaustible, until that myth began to collapse around the turn of the twentieth century. The Right largely retained an ethos of maximal use, while parts of the Left embraced preservationism without human use. Theodore Roosevelt forged a middle path: conservationism that rejects unregulated exploitation and hands-off preservation in favor of stewarding our inheritance for “the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.” Conservatives should recover this tradition.

Conservation should be a politics of stewardship. Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton grounds environmental ethics in oikophilia—affection for home, place, and inherited ways of life. Roosevelt called conservation a national duty, obligating generations to pass on their natural inheritance intact and productive. Environmental policy should protect the conditions of human flourishing across generations, including clean air and water, healthy ecosystems, resilient communities, affordable energy, and industrial strength.

Conservatives should reject both denialism, which tends to disregard real harms in the name of resistance to climate alarmism, and apocalyptic politics, which subordinates human wellbeing to emissions targets and justifies sweeping mandates. Neither unrestricted extraction nor preservation without due regard for human needs is adequate. The MAHA emphasis on everyday health and environmental conditions offers one practical way to connect environmental quality with human flourishing.

Climate change warrants policy attention, including adaptation to heat, fires, and floods. Conservatives should prioritize reliable energy, innovation, and resilience over sacrifice for its own sake. Following Roosevelt, conservatives should treat conservation as both a public ethic and a national responsibility, respecting local knowledge and authority where appropriate. Environmental policy inevitably involves trade-offs among health, nature, prosperity, community, and national security. The principles are enduring; the precise policies, trade-offs, and shared practices required to realize them belong to politics and prudence and are the task ahead of us.

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Conservatives Need a Conservation Rebrand

Nikos Mohammadi, Columbia University

I write as someone who is, in a sense, concurrently both within and outside the conservative movement. On economics, I’m solidly on the left, though I cross over with conservatives (and especially the so-called “New Right”) on many social and cultural issues. Notwithstanding, I talk to conservatives frequently, and I’ve ended up affiliated with various right-of-center institutions.

So, I might have a unique vantage point to offer conservatives. For far too long, mainstream conservative commentary has sought to deny that climate change is even real. But intelligent people of all ideological stripes can recognize that climate change is in fact real, and should be dealt with, without succumbing to the hysteria of banning all fossil fuels.

Though I’m far from an expert on climate change, I believe that there are practical things that can be done, which I think the next generation of conservatives ought to at least seriously contemplate.

For one, conservatives could be inspired by the legacy of ultra-woke social justice warrior Theodore Roosevelt (they/them). On a serious note: following in the footsteps of the 26th president, and ensuring that our public lands remain, well, public, is important.

Green energy, too, shouldn’t immediately be shunned. And conservatives ought to embrace new, greener, and more efficient modes of transportation, like high-speed rail, which we could urgently use in much of the country.

These things have been seen as “lib-coded,” but they don’t need to be. Sometimes a rhetorical shift is all that is needed. Healthy eating and opposition to war, not too long ago, immediately registered as “left.” Perhaps the language of national greatness can get us more efficient, climate-friendly transportation? After all, a country as great as America should have a high-speed rail network.

The Market Alone Will Not Conserve The Environment

Lincoln Patience, Patrick Henry College

Environmentalism may be a back burner issue for Conservatives right now, but the Right would be wrong to dismiss reports of record-breaking heat waves and increasingly violent natural disasters as “fake science.” Instead of lamenting bureaucratic overreach or debating the accuracy of projections 30 years in the future, conservatives should support renewable energy projects for data centers, rebuild the critical mineral supply chain, and restore damaged ecosystems within our borders.

AI models and data centers have become a proxy for environmentalists’ opposition to fossil fuels. But conservatives can remain pro-development without needlessly alienating data center NIMBYs or AI skeptics. A successful AI buildout will require an “all of the above” approach to energy that includes wind, solar, and nuclear power. Congressional Republicans should defend the NEPA reforms President Trump implemented last year, and should work to reduce the environmental costs of nuclear and solar waste.

Reshoring the critical minerals supply chain is another needed aspect of conservative climate policy. Free-market purists believed we could safely outsource mineral processing to China, spreading the allure of capitalism while cutting costs and avoiding domestic environmental regulations. Ironically, the opposite happened. The U.S. funded the growth of an emerging geopolitical rival through the WTO, and American tech companies built China’s deep state apparatus and made possible an ecological nightmare. The Trump administration’s investments in rare earth startups has done much to restore our supply chain, but even greater vigor and vigilance are needed to preserve our technological edge.

Traditional conservatives insist that “market forces” and human ingenuity will solve climate problems like overfishing before the consequences become irreversible. But stewarding ecosystems requires the kind of collective action libertarians find alarming. Republicans should restore funding to our national parks and identify concrete solutions to the water pollution, soil erosion, and urban droughts our country faces.

Next month, we’ll be publishing responses from students in response to the question: “How confident are you in your local election, and why?” Responses can be submitted here and are due on November 20.

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On the upside, Emily Davis suggests Why So Many Good Women Are Still Single (Beverly Hallberg, The Daily Wire) and How the Mainstream Recruits for the Manosphere (Aaron Renn). She writes:

What makes the blame-game rhetoric of the gender war so counterproductive is its determination to divide the single men and women we want to bring together. As Beverly Hallberg notes, “…tearing down either sex will not increase fertility rates, which ultimately depend on healthy men and women liking, not resenting, each other.”

Hallberg refutes three common claims that are used to blame women for not marrying and having children. As someone who’s lived in the D.C. area for over 26 years and traveled the country extensively for work, she has been able to question and observe much about single women. She concludes that the women she’s speaking with all desire marriage and family, but that cultural factors play a much larger role in achieving them.

Arguing for the single men, Aaron Renn focuses on three examples of mainstream voices blaming young men for being, well, young men.

Renn offers four solutions for modern voices wanting to reach young men. His fourth caught my attention: “Delivering tough messages to men requires empathy and skin in their game.” This may sound simple, but it is generally absent. Blame and shame seem to be the more natural order of engagement. Making a positive difference requires more.

On the downside, Brad Littlejohn relates his experience with the College Board’s “Vision Builder”:

Earlier this week, my son Soren (17), now deep in the throes of the college application process, passed me his laptop with a grin: “Check this out, Dad.” Prominently displayed on College Board’s website was a new aid for aspiring applicants, the Vision Builder. “Words are hard,” the banner explained, “A vision board is a simple way to collect images, phrases, and ideas that reflect the future you want. It can help you make sense of what matters to you—even if you’re not sure how to say it yet.”

For graduating high schoolers who had insufficient command of English to explain what they wanted for the next four years (beyond, that is, prompting an LLM to do the work for them), College Board was helpfully offering to get them started with its own AI accelerator. Step 1: Upload some pictures of things you like. Step 2: “We turn it into clear, personal statements.” Step 3: Copy-and-paste and you’re on your way to Harvard!

With the value proposition of a college degree collapsing further by the day, and universities scrambling to rethink their educational models in the face of widespread AI cheating, you might think that we’d be looking for ways to raise the bar for applying to college and shrink the supply of applicants. Think again.

Our societal slide into post-literacy has been so rapid that it has become hard to parody. But even if it cannot be arrested or reversed, as many doomsayers suggest, we might start at least by suggesting that “higher” education requires being able to put a few words on a page. A college degree is not for everyone, that’s for sure, and we urgently need to invest in non-college pathways into adulthood. But if so, we need to define more sharply the value and meaning of a college degree for those who want it—not keep watering it down into meaninglessness.

On the upside, Chris Griswold recommends What Evangelicals Can Teach Us About Organizing (Eric Blanc). He writes:

Labor organizer and researcher Eric Blanc has written a two-part essay on what the American labor movement should learn from evangelical megachurches.

Blanc plumbs pastor Rick Warren’s 1995 bestseller, The Purpose Driven Church, for insight into how America’s flagging labor movement might, well, flag a bit less. The book, which details the principles and practices that grew Warren’s home-based Bible study into one of the largest and best-known churches in America, is “the most important book on organizing that most leftists haven’t read,” Blanc writes. “Megachurches are among the few American membership institutions to grow during the past half-century of community collapse. Just compare the growth of evangelical megachurch weekly participation since 1970 to the decline in yearly attendance at union meetings.”

For instance, one of Warren’s key principles holds that belonging must come before belief, not the other way around. “Belonging before belief is one of the core strategic insights of the seeker-sensitive evangelical movement,” Blanc notes, while “most of our [leftist] organizations do the reverse.” He continues:

The bar at the door is high: you’re expected to know the right vocabulary and hold the right positions. Yet the bar for engagement is actually quite low: click a button, sign up for an email list, or, at most, pay modest dues. Nothing else is expected of you.

This diagnosis is applicable to many of the ways in which our civic and social fabric has frayed. Rebuilding the non-market institutions that make up that fabric will not be possible unless we value real relationships across differences more than political signaling to other members of our own political tribe. When we get that right, people become far more interested in pursuing, and being called to, some greater purpose we can only achieve together.

Another, closely related principle holds: “Love the people you’re trying to organize.” Here, Blanc is admirably honest. “Progressives and leftists often profess love for the marginalized and the working class in the abstract,” he writes. “Actual people, however, are another matter. Those who disagree with us too often face condescension or outright contempt. People can feel that from a mile away.” This has long been a challenge for progressives; George Orwell brutally diagnosed his fellow socialists with exactly the same disease almost 100 years ago.

Conservatives would be wise to heed the lesson too. A faux populism that performs concern for working people while disdaining them personally, and then tries to sell the same old Country Club agenda as responsive to their needs, is fooling no one.

On the downside, Oren Cass laments Kylian Mbappé Dropped by Chinese Brands After Alleged Dictator Comment (ESPN). He writes:

In a stark reminder of China’s totalitarianism, multiple purportedly private consumer goods companies simultaneously dropped sponsorship agreements with Mbappé, each using the exact same wording that they object to “any words and actions that hurt national sentiment.” What terrible thing had the soccer star said? Asked in an interview clip about his favorite meme, he refers to one with his head superimposed on Mao Zedong’s body, describing it as, “a video someone made of a guy ... I think he was a Chinese dictator.” That was it.

The response is so wildly out of proportion that it can be understood only as a kind of thuggish message to all other celebrities cashing in on the Chinese market that even the slightest step out of line can have costly consequences. For his part, Mbappé did the groveling apology thing that so many superstars and business leaders have undertaken:

My comment was ill-judged, and I now understand that it hurts many people in China and in Chinese communities around the world. I apologise to everyone my words have upset. This was absolutely not my intention. I have deep respect for the Chinese people and their history and I am sincerely sorry.

Of course, seeing as Mao Zedong was indeed a Chinese dictator, China is not only silencing dissent, but also enlisting foreign celebrities in helping to reinforce enormous lies about the nation’s past. No one with “deep respect for the Chinese people and their history” would apologize for calling Mao a dictator. It’s all Orwellian doublespeak.

Which brings us to the many American celebrities who gladly cash their Chinese checks and do everything they can to avoid such missteps, even as they strike outlandish postures against their own country, one that allows them the freedom to do so. It’s an intolerable situation, showcasing to the American people the absence of any political virtue amongst their elite, and treating foundational democratic commitments like freedom of speech and fealty to truth as market commodities easily exchanged for sponsorship deals.

This is not some “market failure.” To the contrary, it is market logic taken to its logical conclusion. It can be corrected only by a reassertion of the obligations that accompany citizenship in the nation as prior to market transactions. The United States cannot and should not allow its citizens to engage in commercial activity subject to totalitarian control. Free speech or free trade: pick one.

On the upside, Haisten Willis recommends Vocational Education for All (Chris Griswold, American Compass). He writes:

The only question I have after reading Chris Griswold’s excellent essay is, “why did we ever move away from this?”

My parents attended the nation’s first public school to combine vocational and academic courses within a single campus (the word “vocational” is part of the school’s name), whereas I took college prep courses at a cookie-cutter suburban high school. To this day, I’m jealous. When something breaks at home I still call my dad for advice. His recommendations are usually sound, and when I ask where on earth he picked them up, the answer is “shop class.”

Growing up, my sister and I had a Raggedy Ann doll that my mom made in home economics. Neither of us could make such a doll today. One of my uncles still cooks using recipes he learned in home ec. He is nearly 70 years old.

While my parents attended college, the practical skills they learned in high school have served them well over the decades. It is hard to argue that students not headed for college (still a solid majority of Americans) get comparable benefit from being squeezed into one more college-track English class.

As Griswold writes of making vocational education part of the baseline for all students, “yes, the result will be less time studying literature or chemistry for students intent on continuing to college. So be it. A firm grounding in a vocation is as important for that student as some understanding of literature and chemistry is for the one determined to pursue a trade.” Well said.

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On the downside, Peter Balos flags She Trusted ChatGPT With Her Medication Decisions. It Cost Her Everything (New York Times). He writes:

Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer on disability leave, lived alone in a Seattle apartment. Her parents lived in China, thousands of miles away. She had suffered from severe epilepsy for about a decade and took medication prescribed by her doctor to help manage it.

As her relationship with her ChatGPT chatbot deepened, it helped her cut her pills in secret and later built a day-by-day plan to taper her dose. When she reported confusion, lost time, and a “strange, otherworldly sensation,” all of which are potential signs of a seizure, the bot simply told her that these were signs of the brain “rebuilding” itself. She sent her last message to the bot on February 11 of this year, and passed away three days later.

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, said that the model Wan used was an early model that is no longer available and that their newer models have improved. But upgrading a defective product is no defense for selling it in the first place. A company that markets its product as a source of health guidance should be held accountable in the same way as any other source.

On the upside, Meredith Meroney recommends Two Drinks With… The Guy Who Says Your Favorite Novelist Used AI (The Free Press). She writes:

Max Spero, cofounder and CEO of Pangram Labs, describes himself as a “slop janitor.” His product is the gold-standard AI tool for determining whether written content was written by a human, AI-generated, or something in between.

Pangram has become the source of significant controversy within the media and publishing industries. Pangram’s analysis has outed a New York Times Modern Love article as 60% AI-generated, led to Hachette canceling publication of a horror novel, and been used to induce a social media pile-on claiming a human-written Vanity Fair article was AI-generated.

Major publications including The Atlantic, Wired, and the Wall Street Journal have all highlighted the risks of Pangram’s potential false-positives and the ease with which fake results can be reported. But in many ways, the tool’s most important contribution is what it has revealed about what we humans want. Until recently, writing has been a pure expression of human thought and an art form in which talent is rewarded with status, money, and our attention. Passing off AI-written content as human is a form of false advertising and manipulation.

At the end of the day, Pangram’s rating of how much content in a book or article was written by AI resembles a label stating “designed by Apple in California; assembled in China” or a nutrition label informing us about how much of a Ritz cracker is made from engineered food additives. Label the product and let the public decide if it matters to them. It does, which is why Pangram is controversial in the first place. Words are how citizens communicate with each other, how we instantiate our laws, how we govern ourselves. The very least we can ask is to know if a human being wrote them.

And finally, Johnny Burtka recommends What JD Vance Sees in the French Riots (Sohrab Ahmari, UnHerd). He writes:

Ahmari’s taxonomy of ideological factions on the Right—the Restorationists, the Tech Accelerationists, the Christian Nationalists, the Populists, and the Catholic Solidarists—may be more representative of elite right-wing political and intellectual cadres than the Republican base as a whole. In reality, American citizens are far more complex and eclectic in their beliefs and likely espouse a range of views that span most of the factions that he mentions.

The issue of immigration is an especially salient and helpful one for mapping how these ideological factions could shape the Republican Party in 2028 and beyond. It can unite future Republican coalitions, and there are strong economic, cultural, and civic reasons for restriction. However, Republicans also need a compelling vision for what it means to be an American. Any attempt to restrict immigration should be coupled with a robust understanding of citizenship. For assimilation to work, there needs to be a positive culture to assimilate into. If assimilation merely means shopping at Big Box stores, sports-betting, smoking weed, political correctness, and binge-watching Netflix, then we are asking immigrants to embrace nothing more than anti-culture, which would be a tragedy. We need to have something to beat something, and that something lies in the bonds of citizenship, and in the religious traditions that transcend and sanctify the American political order.

YOUR CONCLUDING THOUGHT FROM RECLAIMING AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP:

When immigration policy was built around humanitarian concerns, population increases to boost GDP, and wage suppression to keep prices down, any mention of restriction was inherently suspect. Conversely, if the goal is reclaiming American citizenship, borders must be secure, current immigration laws fully enforced, and policy for the future rebuilt from the ground up around the question of what serves the national interest.

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It has become fashionable in the wake of an electoral defeat for the losing team to claim that the election was stolen. The term “election denier” often conjures to mind President Donald Trump and his 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign that culminated in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

But viewing Trump as the primary mover of American election denial misunderstands both the stolen election claims that helped pave the way for Trump’s, and those that have continued since—often given voice by his chief antagonists.

With the 2026 midterms only days away, recent evidence suggests the losing side is likely to pull the same tricks when votes are counted. And as with past efforts, such claims aren’t likely to succeed—or age well.

A Brief History of Disputed Elections

After its triumphant formation, it took the United States of America a few decades to get into a groove on the peaceful transfer of power. President George Washington announced in 1796 that he would not seek a third term, establishing the precedent of power transferring from one presidency to the next after no more than two terms, with a winner decided by vote.

But it didn’t take long for things to get messy. The election of 1800 saw Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tie in the Electoral College, requiring 36 rounds of runoff votes for Congress to declare Jefferson the winner. The process inspired heated calls for secession, plus a duel that ended Alexander Hamilton’s life and, worse yet, birthed the eponymous musical dedicated to him.

A quarter-century later, Congress again had to decide between candidates when none reached a majority in the Electoral College, handing the office to John Quincy Adams over future President Andrew Jackson in 1824. The “corrupt bargain” between Quincy Adams and the powerful House Speaker-turned-Secretary of State Henry Clay spurred more outrage and birthed our oppositional two-party system.

Then came the election of 1860, where anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln’s victory split apart the Democratic Party and led its Southern branch of it to secede from the Union rather than honor the results.

After, and perhaps because of, the bloody Civil War that followed, the peaceful transfer of power largely became a sleepy affair, punctuated by moments of confusion rather than violence.

In 1876, widespread voter fraud and challenges to state-level election results led both Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden to declare victory. Rather than settle the debate by a bullet, a bipartisan commission was established consisting of congressmen and Supreme Court justices, who eventually delivered the victory to Hayes in exchange for Reconstruction ending in the South.

There were presidential races that were too close to call—and even called incorrectly—on Election Day. In 1916, the race between incumbent President Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes was so tight that numerous newspapers called it wrongly for Hughes, who would eventually concede defeat gracefully. The 1960 election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy presented a similar fight to the finish, with allegations of voter fraud and other unsavory behavior in key states. But eventual-President Nixon chose not to contest these outcomes, conceding defeat to Kennedy.

The most contested election of the modern era came in 2000. The race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush came down to a razor-thin margin of 537 votes in the then-swing state of Florida. Gore took the matter to court in Florida under a law that allowed him to contest the results, arguing for a review of uncounted ballots in the state. But the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, ruled that the race was over: Bush was the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes, and with it the presidency.

That such a ruling would become the law of the land, without violence or insurrection, is a remarkable testament to the American system. But it also kicked up a new American tradition: questioning whether the President of the United States was truly legitimate.

In January 2001, when Congress convened to certify the Electoral College results, a dozen Democrats objected, denying that Bush was the rightful winner. One objector, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), is still in office. A year later, former First Lady Hilary Clinton famously declared that Bush was “selected, not elected.” Gore himself later declared he thought “if everyone in Florida who tried to vote had had his or her vote counted properly, that I would have won.” In 2013, then-Senator Joe Biden alleged that Gore “really did win” the 2000 election, but accepted defeat “for the good of the nation.” Countless other Democrats have claimed the 2000 election was “stolen,” that Bush’s victory was “fraudulent,” and more.

While there were doubts and objections, the defeated candidates conceded quickly in the presidential elections of 2004, 2008, and 2012.

‘Not My President’

But then something truly inconceivable happened. Despite polls suggesting his campaign was dead on arrival, Donald Trump won the 2016 election, shocking the political system and the American (and global) public. With it came sputtering disbelief and rage from the American Left, and shortly thereafter, suggestions that perhaps something wasn’t quite right—or perhaps, quite legitimate—about Trump’s victory.

It started with reports from the intelligence community that Russia had interfered, sowing division and chaos via bot farms and other abuses of America’s election laws that favored Trump over Clinton.

Amid Trump’s warming posture toward Moscow, that claim shifted to the suggestion, from elected Democrats, legacy media, and beyond, that the Trump campaign had in fact been working with the Russian government, birthing a conspiracy dubbed “Russian collusion.”

With it came a return to the same accusations of illegitimacy that Democrats hurled at George W. Bush.

The same Rep. Maxine Waters who objected to Bush’s certification has called Trump “Putin’s apprentice.” Civil rights icon and former Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis told NBC News he didn’t “see this president-elect as a legitimate president.”

At its peak, proponents of the theory even suggested that Trump was in fact a Manchurian candidate, placed in the Oval Office by Russian President Vladimir Putin to act on Moscow’s behalf. This view was shared by tens of thousands of “Not My President” protesters in D.C. and across the country.

The notion that Trump was somehow illegitimately elected has been parroted by his 2016 opponent, Hilary Clinton, by his eventual 2020 and 2024 opponents, and by countless Democratic elected officials and other voices.

That cloud of impropriety hung over Trump’s first term, spawning an (unsuccessful) impeachment process; an (unsuccessful for Democrats) external review of the facts by former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, and a stasis in Washington that ground real action to a halt during the first Trump administration.

The allegations, while never substantiated, also stuck in the minds of millions of ordinary Americans. One poll conducted in 2019 found that nearly half of Americans regardless of party believed Trump worked with Russia to steal the 2016 election. But the illegitimate claims were memoryholed or at least pushed out of the spotlight in 2020, when Trump began his own assault on the peaceful transfer of power.

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January 6 and Beyond

It started in the immediate wake of Election Day 2020, when Trump advanced unsupported allegations of massive voter fraud and other malfeasance, claims that kicked off the “Stop the Steal” campaign to nullify former President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

Of primary concern was the outcome in Georgia. Trump alleged tens of thousands of illegitimate votes and pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to find the votes necessary to allow Trump to win the state. Raffensberger declined, acting as something like the electoral body’s white blood cells fighting off an infection, holding the line on election law and preventing the Electoral College count from falling into dispute. At least for a time.

Then came Jan. 6, 2021. Trump delivered an address to protesters outside the White House on the day of the election’s certification, telling attendees that “we will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”

Thereafter, some Republican members of the House of Representatives objected to verifying the outcome, sending the Capitol into chaos. Protesters swarmed the building, ransacked multiple rooms, threatened members of Congress in the halls, and stalled the certification process as members rushed for safety. One protester, Ashley Babbitt, was shot and killed in the melee.

Amid that chaos, power did eventually change hands. Lawmakers returned to the Capitol to certify President Biden’s victory. Trump’s former Vice President, Mike Pence, declared: “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins, and this is still the people’s house.”

Yet despite the bedlam, Trump left the White House and pledged an orderly transition. President Biden took office as scheduled at noon on Jan. 20 and American life clicked back into place. It was galling behavior, yes, but a far cry from the Civil War.

Afterward, election denial became the cardinal sin in politics for the Left and the legacy media; “the Big Lie,” “fascism,” “a threat to democracy.” Denying election outcomes was the stuff of tyrants, dictators, Hitler, and Donald Trump.

This turn was especially bad for one Democratic icon who continued insisting that she had been cheated out of an election: Stacey Abrams, shadow governor of Georgia. Despite having lost the 2018 election to Brian Kemp, Abrams—a darling of the progressive Left, keynote speaker at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, and erstwhile head of a reportedly fraudulent get-out-the-vote nonprofit—spent years refusing to concede defeat, before and after Trump had done so.

Democrats didn’t cry foul in the face of her election denial; they embraced Abrams’ and her fact-defying beliefs. Rather than push her out of the spotlight, the Democratic Party selected Abrams to deliver the official rebuttal to Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address; after her election defeat but well before she stopped denying her loss.

When Democratic presidential candidates began traveling to Abrams’ home state of Georgia ahead of the 2020 primary, would-be standard bearers were practically climbing over one another to spout election denial.

Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg declared that “we cannot truly say we live in a democracy” after Abrams lost. Joe Biden asserted that “voter suppression is the reason why Stacey Abrams isn’t governor right now.” Former Vice President Kamala Harris would later say the same. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker claimed the election was “stolen,” as did former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown. Hilary Clinton joined in here, too.

A few years later, the election-fallacy narrative got fresh legs when Democratic former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe told an audience that Abrams would be the governor of Georgia except that the state “took the votes away” from her would-be voters. A few years later, Biden would dust off his own tendency to deny inconvenient elections, calling McAuliffe “the real governor” of Virginia.

Other Left-wing voices would do the same, led by would-be Florida governor Andrew Gillum’s quixotic vote dispute and former Rep. Anthony Brindisi’s failed effort to count disqualified ballots.

And then there are the Left-wing assertions of attempted election theft. Do you remember when Trump was using the United States Postal Service to steal the election? No, not the current claims, but the ones from 2020, when former Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the House back into session to stop Trump from stealing the election by mail?

The Union Holds

This history should make all of us appreciate the fact that, since the Civil War, America has witnessed a peaceful—if sometimes contentious—transfer of power.

It can be easy to lose sight of how unprecedented that is in human history. A majority of the world’s countries have been established since 1850. France has had four different governing regimes since that date. Countless countries have seen coups, violent overthrows, breakups, and conquests. Yet America—despite its perpetually inflamed political tensions and the presence of more guns than anywhere else in the world—has held stable.

With midterm elections on the horizon, recent history suggests that election denial will once again dominate headlines.

Every election brings with it details that sound odd to one side or the other: Did a water pipe in an election-counting location in the tossup state of Georgia really break during vote counting in 2020? Were election monitors really blocked that same year in Pennsylvania? A weak election system gives rise to suspicions, inflamed by social media and bad actors foreign and domestic, that these are sure signs of a stolen election.

Rather than treat these hiccups as signals of the end of our democratic republic, such concerns should push states to consider ways to strengthen their elections and provide confidence in the results. Doing so might just allow us to escape a furious round of stolen election claims.

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(photo credit: Washington Free Beacon)

The Washington Free Beacon reports that founders Steve Forbes, Steve Moore, and Art Laffer joined former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and Fox News’s David Asman to discuss a range of policies including lower taxes, a flat tax, tax simplification, cutting the capital gains tax, and eliminating the estate tax. Also, in Youngkin’s words, to “reinstill hope.”

The Beacon suggests three possible interpretations:

1. “This supply-side wing is a bunch of has-beens, aging relics of the Reagan past. Laffer is 86, Forbes and Kudlow are 79.” (Their words, not mine.)

2. “The Unleash Prosperity crowd has been actually far more influential in Trump economic policy than has been widely understood or appreciated,” helping shape tax cuts.

3. “A third way to look at it is that the pro-growth, free market approach has room to run in a post-Trump Republican Party. Of the key agenda items enumerated at the gala—school choice, a Steve Forbes flat tax, technology dominance, and Social Security reform with private accounts—there is plenty left to cover in the future.”

These observations are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they might be best read in a sequence of 2, then 3, then 1. The supply-siders have been influential in shaping Trump-era tax cuts. But their “key agenda items” of school choice, a flat tax, and privatizing Social Security are relics of the GOP past. (No, “technology dominance” is not an agenda item.) There is always “room to run” off the road’s side and into a dried-out ditch, but that prospect is usually reason enough to take away the keys.

GOOD READS FOR YOUR WEEKEND

The Wall Street Journal’s feature on the Savannah Bananas is self-recommending, but it has important lessons for The Real Economy too!

In the rise of Banana Ball, it’s not hard to see a rejection of the crass price-gouging that’s overtaken professional and even college sports. Cole has designed a Bananas outing to be rigorously affordable. Tickets for Banana Ball games at major league parks start at $30 and peak at $60—not enough to park your car at a lot of pro sports events. Tickets at Grayson come with all-you-can-eat food and sodas. Cole even launched a bespoke Bananas ticket exchange so fans could sell directly to fans and avoid the exorbitant reseller market that many teams and leagues partner with.

…

For all the current mania, Cole insists on playing the long road. He’s got plenty of ideas in the pipeline—a Bananas cruise; a game with two diamonds; a possible international tour—but he’s wary of saturation and strives to keep Banana Ball accessible. He insists that ESPN’s arrangement allows the games to also be shown for free on YouTube. Cole even broke ties with a handful of sponsors after deciding they didn’t feel very Banana Ball. He’s resisted multiple offers to sell; he and Emily still wholly own the franchise.

At Labor Innovation, David Rolf looks Beyond the Next Wave Election: Rebuilding Worker Power for the Long Haul. “We don’t require every family to organize its own school district or every neighborhood to negotiate separately for power lines or police protection. Why should workers have to organize employer by employer to secure a meaningful collective voice in the economic decisions that shape their lives?”

In the New York Times, Julia Stiles’s Dancing Is Healing Millennials. Cheers to the Times for giving us the in-depth coverage we needed of her poignant tribute to Heath Ledger on Dancing with the Stars. Jeers, though, for referring to 10 Things I Hate About You as a “cult classic.” Do we refer to The Godfather as a cult classic? The Shawshank Redemption? Zoolander? I didn’t think so.

And speaking of Elder Millennials, you must read Chris Griswold’s new policy essay for American Compass on Vocational Education for All. I predict this proposal for universal voc ed will soon become conventional wisdom, and his essay the seminal case. Chris also joins me on this week’s episode of the American Compass Podcast to discuss further.

OH WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?

The economists and pundits who led the American economy off the globalization cliff will often hide behind the defense that they could not possibly have known how China was going to undermine the hypothetically wonderful rules-based international order. In fact, they should have known and, more importantly, they did not care. The market fundamentalism of the consumer-welfare-maximizing free-traders insists that it does not matter what other countries do, all that matters is getting cheaper stuff.

(And yes, I will once again quote Paul Krugman, until you have all memorized the line, “a country serves its own interests by pursuing free trade regardless of what other countries may do.” And yes, I will once again remind you that this is still the conventional wisdom at the American Enterprise Institute.)

Lest one have any doubts, even as a publication like The Economist sounds the retreat on the principle applied to industrial capacity (“Foreign companies, however big, stand little chance against a Leninist developmental state that has attained China’s size, wealth and modernity.”), it is charging straight into the same ambush on the next technological wave.

In Let China copy American AI, The Economist even recognizes the pattern and proposes that we repeat it:

Anthropic and OpenAI have lately taken up an old tradition in corporate America: bemoaning the Chinese copycat. For decades firms moved assembly lines to China only to find me-too merchants rising next door. Now America’s leading artificial-intelligence labs say the same thing is happening to their models, and want the federal government to stop it.

…

Yet the labs’ commercial interests do not align with those of consumers. Users win when there are more—and more capable—models on offer.

…

Policymakers in Washington should recognise what Chinese AI bosses already do: the technique makes China’s progress dependent on America.

Yes, China is running the exact same playbook. Yes, we should again thank them for undercutting our innovators with cheaper consumer products. And yes, we still believe that we are going to secure long-term leadership by hooking China on our technology. What could go wrong?

It’s not like China is actively compromising the leaders of our top tech firms to… Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot (New York Times):

A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, funneling information to Beijing.

But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.

One might hope this would lead Huang to update his view of the Chinese Communist Party, that “they want companies to come to China and compete in the marketplace and I believe that. … I do hope because they say it—their leaders say it. And I take it at face value.” Somehow I doubt it.

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THE FOUR STAGES OF TARIFF GRIEF

In The Art of the Tariff, Politico helpfully highlights the morass of arguments that tariff opponents now find themselves throwing mostly at each other.

Stage 1: We don’t need manufacturing.

“The economy has over time moved from being entirely agricultural to having a footprint in manufacturing, and now it’s got an enormous productive service sector,” Holtz-Eakin said. “I don’t see the need to focus on [manufacturing] the way both administrations have. It seems like more nostalgia than good economic policy.”

Stage 2: Manufacturing isn’t booming.

Berger said she still sees the merit in preserving a large manufacturing sector to maintain the U.S.’s innovation edge, supply chain resiliency and national security. But she argued that Trump’s trade policies, including frequent tariff shifts, aren’t going to herald a revival, despite what the president is telling voters. “I don’t see any sign of it,” she said.

Stage 3: We are seeing a manufacturing boom, but tariffs make it harder.

“When all is said and done, you can’t really point to the tariffs,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right Washington-based think tank, told Morning Trade. “It’s a wash at best, but I would think that on the whole, they would be a hindrance” to manufacturing growth.

Stage 4: Yes, tariffs help. But at what cost?

This is the one we’re now arriving at, as evidence for any of the first three collapses. And it has the benefit of being correct. Yes, tariffs will drive reindustrialization. And yes, that has costs. Welcome to the wonderful world of trade-offs. The question, of course, is what those benefits and costs are in the long run, which is what sends opponents running back to the first stage, disclaiming that we should be willing to incur any costs in the first place. It’s a nice tight loop of internal coherence that works so long as it avoids contact with reality.

Meanwhile, in the real economy, new industrial expansions keep rolling in:

First Solar: “Today Governor Henry McMaster, Senator Darlene Graham, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and South Carolina officials joined us to inaugurate our newest facility in Gaffney, South Carolina. This is a working factory, not an empty shell, with 500 people employed and 700 jobs expected in 2027. It exists because the moment demanded it. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the Trump Administration’s trade policies drove real demand for American energy technology, and we moved to onshore final production as rapidly as we could.”

U.S. Steel: “U. S. Steel’s Board of Directors has approved full funding for a nearly $3 billion investment in a new hot strip mill at the company’s Mon Valley Works – Edgar Thomson Plant near Pittsburgh.”

Anduril and Qualcomm (via PirateWires): “Defense technology company Anduril and semiconductor firm Qualcomm launched an initiative to produce 100% made-in-America computers. Today, the companies announced BlueChip, a product line ‘dedicated to rebuilding American computer manufacturing’ and reducing dependency on foreign manufacturers, according to a press release, beginning with a laptop set for release next year.”

Volkswagen (via Wall Street Journal): “Audi and Porsche are the only German auto brands without a U.S. factory. Their corporate cousin Volkswagen, and direct rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz, all produce cars in factories across the South, in some cases for global export. That situation has left Audi, which primarily builds its U.S.-market cars in Germany, Mexico and Central and Eastern Europe, particularly vulnerable to tariffs in Trump’s second term.”

Which brings us to…

YOUR GERMAN GOOSE(STEP) OF THE WEEK

From Politico Europe: “Disturbing and pathetic”: German politicians slam Audi CEO’s appearance at Trump rally. “German politicians have sharply criticized Audi CEO Gernot Döllner’s appearance alongside U.S. President Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday. ‘Actively campaigning for an autocrat who is waging a trade war against Germany marks a new low for the VW Group,’ said Isabel Cademartori, a Social Democratic Party lawmaker and the party’s transport policy spokesperson.”

With due respect to Ms. Cademartori, probably best to avoid phrases like “new low” when discussing a corporation whose history page features lines like: “The US troops who arrived on April 11, 1945 stopped the plant’s armaments production and liberated its slave workforce. The longed-for end of the Nazi dictatorship marked the beginning of a new era for Volkswagen too.”

We do appreciate, though, her acknowledgment that Audi is “validating Trump’s strategy [of] using a trade war to shift jobs from Europe to the United States.”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Our financial sector continues to find new ways to earn money while creating no value and indeed making life worse, which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty impressive feat. You’ll recall recent The Real Economy coverage of the “tax-aware long-short” strategies seeking to avoid capital gains taxes, but that’s a few hundred billion dollars.

Now, the Wall Street Journal delivers a helpful primer on The ‘Buy, Borrow and Die’ Wealth Strategy Has Become a $5 Trillion Market. Let’s say you’re asset rich, your stocks have gone up, but if you sell them you’d have to pay taxes. Instead, you go borrow money from a bank, posting your stock as collateral, and can consume whatever you want tax-free. When you die, you pass along your assets, which get “stepped-up basis,” and no one ever pays taxes on the gains. The Journal goes to great lengths to find legitimate reasons this might be useful, but in fact it is just tax avoidance bordering on tax fraud.

And it’s actually kind of risky. People are “levering up” their personal balance sheets, which works as long as the market keeps going up, but what happens if it goes down? And what happens if banks start trying to push this model on larger and larger segments of the population? You know, like Monument Bank in the UK, which wants to make sure investors with a few hundred thousand dollars can “adopt a billionaire mindset.”

Then flip on over to the New York Times to read that Baby Boomers Are Retiring in Droves. Private Equity Is Waiting. From the headline, I figured they meant PE is waiting to suck up their savings and charge high fees for sub-market returns. But here we’re talking about how retiring small business owners are selling. “Deal by deal, ownership is being extracted from the thousands of communities where businesses were built to the handful of cities where capital is already concentrated. For the new owners, the primary, and often exclusive, connection to the community is the profit they can derive from the acquired asset.”

But at least it’s efficient? The thing about coin-flip capitalism is that, about half the time, the coin lands tails. We’re seeing this now in private equity, where a gush of deals in the early 2020s, all backed by enormous amounts of debt at low interest rates, all premised on selling the companies in about seven years, now find themselves in a high interest rate environment where no one wants to buy the companies and refinancing the debt is expensive. Oops. If the goal were to actually buy companies, improve them, and then sell them, this might still work fine. But when success relies on macroeconomic conditions outside your control, you get to walk around looking like a genius while the times are good and then… well, thing is, when things go bad, you still get to walk away with all the profits from when times were good. Someone else gets left holding the bag. The Wall Street Journal provides a good illustration in A $300 Billion ‘Debt Wall’ Is Looming Over Private-Equity Backed Companies.

On a lighter note, just an amazing quote in this Bloomberg story, Anthropic’s Massive Revenue Surge Comes With Ballooning Computing Bill, which reports that “Anthropic’s revenue for first half of 2026 is nearly 400x that of its revenue for all of 2023.” Not bad. But Jim Lebenthal, chief market strategist at Cerity Partners, says “frankly, I’d like to see higher revenue growth than what I’m seeing in the filing.”

AND OF COURSE, YOUR CANADA GOOSE OF THE WEEK…

Last week, we took a look at Ezra Klein’s analysis that Canada’s rebuke of the United States has been “ruinous and revealing about the shambles of Donald Trump’s foreign policy — how what Trump is doing is not getting America what Trump wanted. I mean, Trump wanted Canada to be the 51st state. Instead, it might become an associate member of the European Union.”

But nope, EU scraps ‘associate member’ offer for Canada (Politico Europe). Rather, the EU is “opting instead for softer language promising ‘ever closer association’ ahead of a landmark EU-Canada summit.” One thinks of Dwight Schrute’s dream of being Assistant Regional Manager, and his actual title of Assistant to the Regional Manager.

Surprising no one, Prime Minister Mark Carney has proudly seized the Schrute mantle. “The good news is it doesn’t matter about specific names or nomenclature,” he said. “What matters is the difference that it will make to lives of Canadians.” Well no, actually, associate membership in the EU and warm-fuzzy association bear no relationship to one another. Carney still seems to think that Davos posturing is what makes a difference for the lives of Canadians, but he is going to discover that the actual structure of economic relationships matters a lot more.

Enjoy the weekend!

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• “Vocational Education for All,” American Compass, by Chris Griswold

By Ron Hira

A company like Microsoft, one of America’s great technological innovators, is unaccustomed to harsh public reprimands from the White House. So it reacted with indignation when Vice President JD Vance took to a Washington stage to announce a crackdown on H-1B visa abuse, saying of Microsoft that there had been “no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more” and warning it could no longer “lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”

Microsoft pushed back hard, with company president Brad Smith calling Mr. Vance’s remarks “completely off base.” Someone “had failed to inform the vice president accurately about our numbers,” he said. Most of Microsoft’s applications were for workers already employed, he said, not for new hires.

This is what political operatives call a “non-denial denial.” The vice president had observed that Microsoft is laying off thousands of American workers while simultaneously securing thousands of H‑1B visas and PERM certifications for foreign workers. That’s true. But Congress created those programs to address genuine labor shortages. Microsoft executives Bill Gates and Brad Smith have long embraced that framing, each telling Congress that the company’s voracious demand for foreign workers is driven by a shortage of qualified American tech talent. Why was a company professing a severe shortage requiring thousands of foreign workers while at the same time dismissing thousands of Americans with similar or better skills?

In fact, Microsoft’s abuse of the system is longstanding, and lawmakers have raised concerns for years. As far back as 2009, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to then-CEO Steve Ballmer asking how the company could be announcing 5,000 layoffs so soon after lobbying on Capitol Hill for more H-1B visas. Fast-forward to January 2023, and Microsoft was at it again, announcing plans to lay off 10,000 workers—about 5% of its workforce—and then two months later registering 3,900 positions as needing foreign workers in the FY2024 H-1B lottery.

Were these roles so specialized that no American worker could perform them? Tech leaders rely upon a bait-and-switch, pleading for high-skilled visas to bring the “best and the brightest” into the country and then using the visas to replace entry-level workers. Microsoft’s Smith pointed to President Trump’s recent award of national medals for science and technological innovation to immigrants, warning that enforcing the nation’s immigration laws would apparently “put that at risk.” But Microsoft’s own filings say otherwise. Eighty percent of the new H‑1Bs filled entry‑ or junior‑level positions requiring minimal experience beyond a bachelor’s degree. One‑third of the workers held only a bachelor’s degree, and just 9% had a doctorate.

It strains credulity to suggest that none of Microsoft’s 10,000 laid‑off employees—or the more than 100,000 Americans graduating annually with computer science degrees into a labor market where their cohort faces a recession-level 7% unemployment rate—were qualified or trainable for the jobs it filled instead with foreigners.

The practice of bypassing and replacing American workers is not unique to Microsoft. It is standard among the largest H‑1B employers, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta. The program has long been the subject of scrutiny from a wide range of advocates for American and immigrant workers. Last year, Senator Grassley and Senator Richard Durbin (D‑IL)—the top two members of the Judiciary Committee overseeing immigration policy— pressed Big Tech on this issue. They sent a joint letter to the top ten H‑1B employers, including Microsoft, noting: “In evaluating the high unemployment rate for American tech workers, we cannot ignore the massive, ongoing layoffs ordered by you and your peers in Big Tech C‑suites… At the same time you have been laying off your employees, you have been filing H‑1B visa petitions for [thousands of] foreign workers… With all of the homegrown American talent relegated to the sidelines, we find it hard to believe that [you] cannot find qualified American tech workers to fill these positions.”

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The H-1B visa also represents a form of “indentured servitude,” as Vice President Vance called it, an observation echoed by the Economic Policy Institute, former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall, Immigration Voice (an advocacy group made up of H-1B workers), academics, and India-based journalists and authors. This is not an overstatement. H‑1B workers are legally tied to a single employer, who alone controls their visa. Termination means immediate loss of legal status, which gives employers extraordinary leverage—far beyond what they hold over American workers or green card holders. Workers live in precarity, unable to freely change jobs, negotiate wages, or challenge workplace abuses.

Clearly, the H‑1B program is not functioning as the Department of Labor says it should: a mechanism for employers who “cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce.” The program needs a major overhaul—through executive action and ultimately through Congress. By finally cracking down on Big Tech’s abuses of our immigration system, Vice President Vance and the Trump administration are forcing corporate America to start taking seriously its duty to American workers.

Ron Hira is an associate professor at Howard University and a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute.

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In 1994, 367 Republican congressional candidates signed on to the eight government reforms and ten concrete policy proposals of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” powering them to their first House of Representatives majority in 40 years. In 2026, the Grand Old Party and its Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, are offering the “Contrast for America,” summarized simply (and in all-caps) as “THE 2026 MIDTERMS ARE A CONTRAST FOR AMERICA BETWEEN COMMON SENSE AND CRAZY.” A contrast, indeed.

While the Republican message amounts to little beyond calling the other guys worse, the other guys have precisely the same message. The Democratic National Committee highlights “lower costs” as its top agenda item, but its plan for accomplishing this is “to bring an end to Republican chaos and incompetence, ensuring that Americans can comfortably cover their everyday expenses.” Opposing President Trump is by far the top reason that Democratic midterm voters give for their decision.

The problem with writing off all the nihilism as an inevitable consequence of polarization in the age of Trump is that politicians are generally in the business of trying to win elections and accomplish priorities, and this brand of politics accomplishes neither. The signature policy proposal of this year’s campaign, if one could call it that, is the president’s promise to pay every adult $5,000 if his team wins. It’s not only a vulgar non-idea, but also a dud. It receives positive reviews from 21% of voters; only building data centers is less popular. Both parties are near the nadir of two-decade slides in popularity, and the leading response by far to Gallup’s question about “the most important problem facing this country today” is poor government leadership, more than double the share choosing cost of living. Corruption has suddenly become the top issue for voters.

Angrily saying nothing may lead to short-term electoral success, if only because someone has to win, but it provides no basis for governing. The result is merely more disappointment for voters, a countervailing wave election every two years, and a new Oval Office occupant every four.

What we are facing is not so much political polarization as political exhaustion. One week before Election Day, the DNC’s home page featured identifiable photos of former President Barack Obama, who last ran for office more than a decade ago, Congressman John Lewis, who passed away in 2020, and Reverend Jesse Jackson, who passed away earlier this year, but none of current public officials, let alone candidates. The Republican National Committee’s home page featured only one identifiable person: a photo of President Donald Trump, a second photo of him, a third photo of him popping up over the first two, and a video of his second inauguration. This, for a leader whose approval rating stands at 38%, the lowest of his second term.

The source of this exhaustion is the collapse of each side’s central political commitment—for the Left, “justice”; for the Right, “liberty.” Both of these are, to be sure, worthy commitments. Our Pledge of Allegiance concludes with them. But neither is self-sustaining. To pursue justice by taking every instance of inequality as evidence of oppression, assigning blame in every case to whoever comes out ahead, and then demanding that government act to turn the tables, is no justice at all. To pursue liberty by shrinking government small enough to “drown it in a bathtub” and offering only the choices that market forces make available does not help people to build the lives they want.

For conservatives, liberty once meant the capacity to govern one’s self and to come together with others to achieve self-government in a community. “The independence and liberty you possess,” said George Washington in his Farewell Address, “are the work of joint councils and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.” Abraham Lincoln explained, “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”

In recent decades, that conception of what was called ordered liberty gave way to liberty as license, celebrating an escape from all constraints and the taking of whatever you can get. Deficits didn’t matter so long as taxes went down, even if the next generation would foot the bill. The unfettered ability to shut down American factories and produce instead with oppressed workers in a communist dictatorship became a core tenet of the free market. Efforts at government reform decayed into efforts at wantonly kneecapping it. Legalizing drugs and gambling were priorities, while forming a family and raising children were relegated to lifestyle choices alongside getting a dog or vacationing in Greece.

For progressives, justice ceased to be a unifying principle that should extend uniformly, and became a promise to specific groups, often at the expense of others. Some races were to be favored, or paid reparations, while others were assigned guilt. At the peak of the hysteria following George Floyd’s death in 2020, many saw justice in riots or even looting, justice in abolishing law enforcement agencies and prisons.

“Democrats,” the party explained in its platform that year, “believe we must embed environmental justice, economic justice, and climate justice at the heart of our policy and governing agenda.” For good measure, the platform also included a reproductive justice section and separately pledged to “embed racial justice in every element of our governing agenda.” Defense of the justice system’s integrity somehow necessitated constant efforts at delegitimizing the Supreme Court.

Such agendas produce neither liberty nor justice, only social corrosion that leaves both further from reach and Americans worse off as a result. In a country where the powerful assert that anything goes and that government must merely get out of the way, the public institutions and public virtue necessary to a healthy republic fall by the wayside, and only the powerful find themselves free. “Public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics,” said John Adams. “There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty.”

Where leaders pit people against one another, making group identity the ticket to special treatment and showing greater concern for people who undermine public order and safety than for those whose lives depend on it, the result will invariably be unjust. Both parties have reached the dead ends of their dogmatic quests, and neither can find anywhere else to turn. Pollsters have instructed everyone to pivot toward “affordability,” but rebuilding middle-class security requires rebuilding from decades of economic malpractice, not a subsidy here and a tax credit there.

“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote. “The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”

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What’s missing from American politics is any concern for the more foundational commitment to our nation as a republic composed of citizens who not only enjoy freedom, but also accept constraint as necessary to it, who not only have rights and privileges, but also owe duties and obligations to one another. Today we discuss citizenship as a legal status or, at its most ennobling, a topic for civics class, with an emphasis on voting and recycling. Historically, the conception was far richer.

Citizenship was the reciprocal bond between countrymen that held the nation together. It “both demands and protects, asking each of us to carry burdens we did not choose, and in return giving us a place, a purpose, and a say in the forces shaping our lives,” we wrote in Reclaiming American Citizenship. “It elevates us as problem-solvers endowed with agency, who come together to do more than any of us could accomplish on our own, securing a liberty grounded in competence and self-determination rather than mere license to do as we please.” Many Americans are familiar with Teddy Roosevelt’s famous speech about “the Man in the Arena.” Many fewer know its title, “Citizenship in a Republic.”

In this direction lies a wide-open freeway awaiting whichever politicians can find it. Throughout history, Americans have flocked to leaders who spoke honestly of common bonds, mutual obligations, and real sacrifice. What’s needed is a genuine commitment to the trade-offs that citizenship requires.

Of course, pursue justice. But pursue it by treating each person as an individual of equal dignity and holding all accountable to the same standard, even when we might prefer other outcomes in particular instances. Justice is achieved and sustained when all have confidence that they too will receive just treatment and thus feel secure in offering it. The social and political equality necessary to human flourishing derives not from taking to some and giving to others, but from a shared conception of citizens as full and equal participants in communal, economic, and national life.

Of course, pursue liberty. But pursue it with the understanding of “the pursuit of happiness” shared by the nation’s founders, for whom happiness meant being good, not feeling good. Liberty is achieved and sustained with the support of strong institutions that help people form families, become productive contributors to their communities, and raise a next generation capable of the same. We can fully enjoy the freedom of democratic self-government and market capitalism only if we recognize ourselves and each other as more than consumers and insist on cultivating our competence and agency.

Beyond reclaiming the concept of citizenship, an agenda capable of delivering on promises of liberty and justice would commit to living within our means: both higher taxes and lower benefits, along with investments in infrastructure and industry that would allow us to produce as much as we consume instead of borrowing from the rest of the world. It would renounce ambitions of empire that appeal to elites who picture themselves dictating global events but leave behind ordinary Americans for whom effective government depends on practical solutions to local problems. It would identify novel technologies and products of our era designed to profit from human frailty and regulate them as we have always regulated such overwhelming and harmful temptations.

Perhaps most importantly, a citizenship agenda would focus on the nation’s collective obligation to better form the next generation of citizens. It would throw away the therapeutic educational fads and the amusement park entitlement of the college campus in favor of equipping young people with the skills and values to build decent lives in their communities, who understand the tenets of justice and feel called upon to uphold them, and who are prepared to shoulder the burdens of self-government.

Both embattled sides of the modern political divide believe they are losing because both are indeed losing. As they dig their holes deeper, they further undermine the liberty and justice that they keep promising, and that the American people desperately want. The Pledge of Allegiance is not a pledge to liberty or justice, but to a flag representing a republic—one nation, under God, indivisible—that can provide those goods.

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Pasadena, Texas is a town of 150,000 that, when viewed from a map, looks like a 20-mile-long dumbbell oriented from Northwest to Southeast, sprawling from the edges of Houston to the Gulf of America’s estuaries. The town’s northern edge hugs the Houston Ship Channel, dense with refineries and industrial sites, surrounded by low-slung apartment complexes, strip malls, tightly packed ranch homes, and Mexican restaurants. The southern side of town stretches toward Galveston Bay, where subdivisions cluster around inland lakes near NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Between them lies a short, thin commercial corridor—Lonestar Steakhouse, Starbucks, Fairfield Inn, Barnes & Noble—connecting two sides of a city that, in much of America, would rarely mix.

Three Septembers ago, a man deliberately drove his car through a fence and into an above-ground gas pipeline behind the Walmart at the city’s center. The explosion burned for four days. Mark Ferris, a Captain in Pasadena’s Fire Department, remembers that “the fire burned so hot that its radiant heat melted a few houses.” A crew setting up a ground monitor—a small cannon that can project water several hundred feet and can be operated from the safety of a firetruck—had to work in thirty second shifts to avoid getting burned through their gear as they tried to cool off other homes in the area.

Like Ferris, and with the exception of the department’s chief, all 172 members of Pasadena’s fire department are volunteers: the largest municipal volunteer fire department in the country.

Fire department as civic infrastructure

Because Pasadena contains more than 50 square miles and it can take upwards of 45 minutes to drive from one end of town to the other, the city is divided into nine fire districts, each with its own station, equipment, and district chief. Volunteers are required to live within a five-minute drive of their station, and a truck has to be out the door within five minutes of an alarm.

Everyone I talked to in Pasadena acknowledges that there’s a richer and a poorer side of town. Those nine firehouses, and the men and women who respond to calls from them, train in them, work out in them, and hang out in them, help to bind the town together into something more beautiful than rich or poor, brown or white.

If Pasadena’s expanse helps to explain its fire department’s infrastructure, it also points to why, whether they know it or not, its firefighters are bridging divides. Pasadena contains within its oddly shaped city limits many of the lines of division that seemingly separate Americans from one another. One side of town is wealthier than the other. The population is roughly split between white and Hispanic residents. The city spans two congressional districts—one represented by a Republican, the other by a Democrat.

Among firefighters, these distinctions rarely come up. When they do, they’re more likely to be joked about than debated. They’re not talking about their differences, they’re just hanging out and fighting fires.

The department does take on some number of explicitly “civic” tasks—an annual Toys-for-Tots drive, “visits with Santa,” and regular events at schools, hospitals, and nursing homes. But what the community needs from its fire department is to respond promptly and effectively when called. As the department’s recently-retired chief Lanny Armstrong says, “When you step off that truck, our city expects professionals.”

Of its roughly 2,000 calls per year, most are not as serious as a pipeline fire. This January, there was a commercial fire alarm in Fire District 6 around 10:30 in the morning, not far from the NASA campus. Listening on the radio from a firehouse 30 minutes away, within half a minute of the alarm I heard “601,” the code for the District 6 Chief, “responding.”

As any firefighter will tell you, most calls are boring. The commercial fire alarm that went off that morning was at a construction site, and the alarm had gone off several times over the past week. But in the middle of a Wednesday morning in January, Mike Torina heard the call at his home, hopped in his District Chief SUV, and responded—and he did it for free. A fit, retired teacher in his early 50s, Mike started volunteering about 20 years ago because “I’ve always thought firefighting was cool.” Just down the road at Fire Station 10, Chris Massie, a Pasadena volunteer in his early 20s who works as a career firefighter in a neighboring town, reminds me: “Don’t let anyone fool you. All of us like to be on the big trucks with the loud sirens that go woo woo.”

Among the last of its kind

I asked dozens of Pasadena firefighters why they volunteered, and everyone replied with some combination of “it’s really fun,” “it helped me get a better job,” “I like serving my community,” or “it’s in my blood—my Dad was a firefighter here.”

Volunteers make up about 65% of all the firefighters in the United States. But there are about 25% fewer volunteers today than there were in the mid-1980s, a period which has seen the number of career firefighters grow by more than 50%. Only about 3,000 of the roughly 19,000 fire departments in the country are staffed completely by career firefighters, and Pasadena is one of the 200 largest cities in the country. Its survival as a volunteer institution makes it an extreme outlier.

Pasadena’s volunteer firefighters, especially its more seasoned members, are obsessed with their institution’s survival. Every morning for the last 20 years, a handful of the department’s “old timers,” all in their 70s or older, get breakfast at El Ranchito. “I joined 40 years ago,” Dewey Erwin said, “And for 40 years they’ve been saying we’re not gonna survive as a volunteer department. But we always do.”

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As the department’s training chief, Kristine Ferrone Waller is responsible for ensuring that continues to be the case—in addition to overseeing the Pasadena Fire Academy and the department’s ongoing training, she’s also in charge of recruitment. An unpretentiously smart young woman in her early 40s, Kristine drives a purple- and chrome-trimmed two-door Jeep and has a Ph.D. in medical physics (she studies human survivability in space). She became a firefighter because she was looking for experience working in extreme environments for her astronaut application. Her husband and father-in-law are also in the department. When asked why she thinks her department continues to survive, she thinks for a minute and says, “infrastructure, Pasadena’s economy, and the culture in our town.”

Rites of passage and good governance

Last February, 46 recruits started 13 weeks of training at Pasadena’s fire academy. Beginning with a physical agility test, the course is a mix of classroom and live fire exercises and requires attendance for four hours every Tuesday and Thursday evening, as well as 10 hours on Saturdays. “At my intro burn, I was like ‘Whoa! This is for real!’’ Hector Rubio, a civil engineer and the current District 2 Chief, said. “It was pretty cool and I was hooked.”

Once recruits complete the academy and pass the state licensing exam, they’re sent to their local firehouse for a six-month probationary period. Halfway through and at the culmination of the probationary period, firefighters “test out.” The final exercise includes the “House of Pain”—a smoke-filled room with no light where would-be firefighters have to search for a victim in conditions mimicking what they might find at a hoarder’s house.

Once they pass this final test-out, every “probie” is reviewed by both the department chief and their local station chief before being allowed to trade in their probationary yellow shield for the black shield of an active firefighter. While the training is regularly modernized, these rites of passage have remained consistent for decades.

Upon graduation, the commitment diminishes, but not by much. With 2,000 calls per year, nine firehouses, and a requirement to make 25% of the calls in your fire district to maintain active status, each firefighter in the department’s rolls has to go to an average of at least three or four calls per week, in addition to attending at least 15 trainings and a dozen or so meetings per year.

For every firefighter who maintains their active status, the city invests $250 monthly into a pension that begins to pay out after 15 years of active service by age 55.

Many firefighters continue to volunteer well after their retirement pay kicks in. “Active retirees” are a big part of why the department is still so responsive, especially during the day while younger members are at work—they might not be able to enter a building anymore, but they can drive a truck and operate a pump. R.E. Wilson, a 92 year-old attendee of the daily breakfast (his buddies joke that he “has been fighting fire since fire was invented”), only stopped running calls four years ago.

Over the course of their decades-long volunteer commitment, many members often enter into and step back from leadership positions depending on their commitments to work and family. The chief in charge of each fire district, as well as the district captain (in charge of training) and the district lieutenant (in charge of maintaining trucks and equipment) is elected every two years by their fellow district members. Some department-wide positions, such as Training Chief, are elected by all members, others are appointed by the department chief.

An economy that leaves room for community

While its membership, culture, and norms sustain the institution, there are some economic realities that help explain how the Pasadena Fire Department has been able to remain a volunteer organization.

A lot of the work in Pasadena is shiftwork in refineries or in manufacturing. For these employees, schedules are predictable, wages are high enough (and home prices low enough) to afford a middle-class lifestyle without a second job—and it’s work that you can’t bring home with you. As a result, there is time available to devote to a serious volunteer commitment. Moreover, especially in the oil and gas industry, training as a firefighter can lead to career advancement and higher pay: all of the refineries, for instance, have their own on-site emergency response teams.

Because so many firefighters work in these industries, it’s also not uncommon to hear stories of members helping one another with career advancement. Mikey Medrano is a 22-year-old who was working in a car wash when a friend told him about the fire department two years ago. Today, with his firefighter certification in hand and a friend to refer him, he works in emergency response at one of the local refineries.

Volunteer fire departments everywhere save municipalities a lot of money. Armstrong, the recently-retired chief, estimates that the volunteer department saves the city about $30 million per year. As Pasadena Mayor Thomas Schoenbein is quick to point out, this allows Pasadena to maintain some of the lowest property taxes in the area. The city does invest a little bit on fire personnel via its pension contribution, but the rest of the savings are invested into other municipal services and high-quality infrastructure for the fire department. Two of the nine stations will be replaced this year with brand new facilities.

Pasadena culture

Cost savings help to explain why the city has an incentive to champion its volunteer fire department, and the industries that surround Pasadena help to explain why there is enough time to volunteer and how volunteerism can lead to increased wages. But these explanations are not sufficient motivation for hundreds of men and women to get out of bed, often in the middle of the night, usually for mundane calls and occasionally at great personal risk.

One of the reasons it’s hard to find active “bridging” in the United States is because most Americans live in demographic silos. As Mayor Schoenbein put it, “there are some very, very, very wealthy people that live in Pasadena, but there’s also some very poor folks that live in Pasadena too. And probably 99% of the time, if you go into one of our stores or local businesses, you would not know who has money and who doesn’t.” Speaking of his entire town, he says, “I think what builds our civic spirit is that you’re not looking at the wealth of somebody or someone’s skin color or someone’s background. It’s really coming together, realizing that we need to take care of people. We don’t need to judge somebody. That’s not what we’re called to do. I mean, we’re called to be servants.”

It is not simply that the fire department fills a need for the community—the mayor insists that they wouldn’t have a volunteer department unless “it got results, visible results”—but that the community itself nurtures the institution that’s serving it. As the mayor says:

We’re a very caring community. We reach out and we help people in need. We may agree or disagree with different philosophies or different approaches to things, but at the end of the day, we’re one community. And when you have business owners that will support a volunteer fireman to basically leave the job to go to respond to a fire, they know that they’re not only supporting that one individual, but they’re supporting their community. Because when a family loses their home or there’s an apartment fire or an industry incident or gas leaks or things like that, it affects our community. It may affect the health and wellbeing, it may affect the economic growth or different things like that. The sooner that they can respond, the better the outcome is. So business owners are a big part of it… everybody comes together and realizes that it serves a vital need.

Kind, well-spoken, productive mayors can’t dictate the creation of cohesive communities nor technocratically manage them into existence, no matter how good their rhetoric or how effective their policy. Community is forged over decades of mutual commitment, nurtured in overlapping webs of relationship, with goodwill handed down over generations.

I went to Pasadena expecting to write a story about a volunteer fire department hanging on, beating back the inevitable transition to a career department. And to be clear, the institution will not survive without deep commitment and constant care. But I left with a sense that the odds are in the volunteer department’s favor.

On my last night in Pasadena, I hung out in Station 8 with a handful of members whose last names include Medrano and Waller, ages spanning from 22 to 72, and cars in the lot as tiny as an old Toyota Camry and as big as a souped-up Dodge Ram. They told stories, they talked smack, and if a call came in—hopefully a big one—they were ready to serve together. If the institution continues to thrive, it will be because of rooms like that.

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The sector was losing 15,000 jobs per month in 2024. That rate slowed by almost half in 2025. Thus far in 2026, the sector has added more than 70,000 jobs, putting the total nearly 300,000 above the pre-Liberation Day trend. Time to move on to a new disingenuous talking point.

Axios and the Burning Glass Institute’s Gad Levanon have us covered, with U.S. manufacturing rebound not consistent across factories. Sure, “factory output rose 0.3% in September despite a 3% drop in auto production — the latest evidence that the long-struggling sector is gaining momentum,” and “the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index showed a ninth straight month of expansion, with new orders growing at a faster pace and backlogs of unfinished work mounting.” But did you know, “U.S. manufacturers added a net 40,000 jobs over the 12 months ending in September. But the gains came entirely from advanced manufacturing — even though the subset accounts for just 38% of factory employment.”

Friends. What are we even doing here? Isn’t a shift toward more advanced manufacturing good? Who here thinks, if the trends were reversed, Axios and the Burning Glass Institute would be celebrating that it was other manufacturing rather than advanced manufacturing benefiting most?

Not for nothing, it’s also worth taking a look at the actual job trends on both sides of Mr. Lebanon’s divide. Both were losing jobs at a similar rate in 2024, both slowed their declines significantly in 2025, both turned positive in 2026. Advanced manufacturing employment shifted from 37.5% of the total at the end of 2024 to 37.7% today. Worrying. Very worrying.

GOOD READS FOR YOUR WEEKEND

How Evangelicals Turn Supporters into Leaders—and What the Left Can Learn (Eric Blanc, Labor Politics). If you enjoyed part one, on lessons for labor organizing from church organizing, give part two a read.

Mike Konczal writes, What distinguishes the 1% from the merely affluent? A third kid. Interesting data, and a particularly important insight: “Is this about a third kid becoming a new cultural symbol for the 1%? Some digging makes me think this isn’t the case and the story might be more fascinating. A third kid isn’t new for them; what’s new is that it has become rarer for everyone else.”

I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down. (Chris Marquis, New York Times) “The modern business school is designed to promote dealmaking, simplification and optimization. This mind-set has escaped containment and has spread to the wider world.”

What liberals get wrong about social media (Matt Feeney, UnHerd). Really wonderful essay on the convenient and shallow obsession with “disinformation” as the fatal flaw of social media, when in fact the problem is that “it is more extractive than extremist.”

• h/t Matthew Crawford, who expands further in the attention economy v. free-market thinking.

• Crawford wrote a related piece for American Compass several years ago, on how “attention-harvesting technologies jeopardize our capacity to govern concentrated power—and ourselves,” part of our underrated and increasingly prescient collection: Lost in the Super Market.

GOOD READS – AI DIVISION

Why the AI Pessimism? (American Compass) New polling data, conducted in two waves over the past six months. Key finding: “The strongest driver of AI pessimism is belief that AI labs do not see ‘improving everyday lives’ as a priority. Net optimism drops from +41 among the 25% of Americans who believe this is a top priority for companies to (-60) among the 22% who believe it is not a priority.”

Nobody Is Ready for the AI-Agent Flood (New York Magazine). Yet another way AI at scale seems likely to make the ordinary American’s life worse.

Coxon Day (The New Critic). Really long, but worth your time, from an extraordinarily talented young writer. “This messianic moment — complete with such biblical stakes as total annihilation, total enslavement, total absolution, or total power — has created a tribal frenzy in the Bay that will soon spill its bounds. There, you’re a good guy, or a bad guy, or you’re evil, or you’re crazy, or you’re retarded, or you’re cracked, or else you’re altogether worthless. Those uncourageous sheeple with no tribe will have to watch from the sidelines as the great battle over our civilization is waged without their knowledge or consent. If you’ve been AGI-pilled, it takes little effort to convince you that the labs, or fighting the labs, or covering the labs, are the only things that matter.’

How to Increase America’s AI Lead Over China (Institute for Progress). Good report with concrete and immediately doable proposals. “The two most important interventions are: (1) For BIS: Create a new end-use control to restrict China’s remote access to training clusters abroad — China’s largest and fastest-growing source of frontier-scale compute. (2) For DOJ/FTC: Create a narrow safe harbor to allow US companies to coordinate on countering Chinese adversarial distillation. Both interventions (and all the others we discuss in the report) are things the federal government could do today.”

BAD READS

As lame-duck battle over chips heats up, OpenAI pulls back (Politico). “OpenAI has changed its tune on China. Nvidia is a big winner.” Booo.

The Excruciating Delight That Is Modern Day Apple-Picking (Wall Street Journal). Pro-tip: You’re not going to find a real rural agricultural experience within a convenient drive of a massive modern metropolis. You can go to rural America if you want that. Or you can truck with everyone else from Park Slope out to some Potemkin orchard “experience.” But it seems odd to be surprised by, or complain about, the difference between the two.

WILL THERE BE ENOUGH JOBS FOR REPORTERS COVERING LABOR SHORTAGES?

Breathless reporting on how immigration enforcement reduces the pool of easily exploitable labor always seems to stop short of asking the desperate employers, “so, um, you’re saying that you were knowingly operating your business illegally this whole time?” But the Wall Street Journal delivers a modern classic of the genre here: The Immigration Crackdown Is Making It Much Harder to Build Houses.

The summer surge in federal immigration raids is hitting the housing market, pushing up labor costs and freezing projects.

Nearly two-thirds of builders said immigration enforcement is affecting their labor force, up from 23% in March and 13% a year ago, according to a September John Burns Research & Consulting survey.

“We’re almost dead in the water because our workforce is gone,” said Scott Brannock, president of Jacksonville-based Tidewater Homes and the Northeast Florida Builders Association. “We have national builders who are missing projections, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because they have slabs sitting on the ground and no one to frame.

I have a follow-up for Mr. Brannock…

And even if contractors are able to find workers, the labor shortage means they have to pay them significantly more. Brannock, the Jacksonville builder, said local framers’ wages used to work out to around $20 an hour. Now, that is up to $40 to $45 an hour. For the average 2,500-square-foot house, framing labor, which used to cost $10,000, now runs builders $25,000 to $28,000, he said.

Too bad those framers aren’t white-collar professionals, then they could get a feature written about how their industry is booming, with high demand driving rapid increases in pay. Sorry guys, maybe stop building houses and start running social media campaigns or something.

Builders and subcontractors say it will be costly and time-consuming to replace workers like Velazquez with U.S. citizens. “There’s no one lining up to do a lot of these jobs,” said Josh Putnal, the owner of a siding-and-soffit subcontractor in Jacksonville.

There’s no one lining up in the parking lot at Home Depot, I think he means. See, thing is, in a healthy labor market, there’s no line of people waiting to take a job you might deign to offer. Maybe Mr. Brannock could organize a group of builders to line up in the parking lot at the Northeast Florida Builders Association and framers can swing by and pick up whoever is offering the best work.

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Meanwhile, while fewer illegal immigrants are available to frame houses for $20 per hour, entrepreneurs are, wait for it, finding more productive ways to build houses. Capitalism! I don’t usually promote corporate press releases, but I’ll gladly copy-paste one written with this kind of style: “D.R. Horton is not waiting for lower mortgage rates, stronger consumer demand or relief from persistent construction labor and cost pressures to make ongoing investments and commitments to operational improvement. Instead, the Arlington, Texas-based homebuilding giant is extending a decade-plus commitment to construction and operational innovation into a new frontier: artificial intelligence that performs physical work.”

• Read more about Promise Robotics, the company partnering with D.R. Horton, in this profile: Canada’s housing supply is in crisis. Can robots help? (BetaKit)

• And here’s a fun video: Promise Robotics

Progress also continues apace at the The American Housing Corporation (American Compass podcast with co-founder Bobby Fijan here). Take a tour through Demonstration House 2.

But who will pick the crops? A robot is now harvesting iceberg lettuce at speeds comparable to human crews. And, interesting perspective on the traditional tinkering of farming someday extending to custom robotics as well. “Today farm robots are priced for large operations. Within 10 years, farmers will build their own.”

SOMEHOW, THE CHINA OVERCAPACITY STORY JUST KEEPS GROWING

Jamie Dimon:

China is tough. I don’t think they have to be a natural enemy of ours. But if you don’t have some sort of common trade barriers that are fair, it’s going to be hard to stop them.

Look at Germany. They don’t have a proper defense industrial base, but their real industrial base was extraordinary—cars, machine tools, all this equipment. That’s being attacked today by the Chinese. And their stuff is good. They’re going to lose. You can see it right in front of you, but it’s going to take a while to play out.

Jim Cramer:

Right now I am shocked that the EU isn’t just totally shutting down China with what will be a $1.2 trillion surplus given that it has become an export behemoth on the backs of the workers in the EU.

After Welcoming China’s Electric Vehicles, This Country Is Paying the Price (New York Times):

Then the Chinese automakers arrived.

Today, they control about 85 percent of Thailand’s electric vehicle market, up from almost zero four years ago. Japanese automakers, slow to embrace the technology, have struggled. In 2024 and 2025, Subaru and Suzuki shut down their Thai plants, while Nissan and Honda have scaled back production.

Several Thai auto-parts suppliers that depended on Japanese manufacturers went bankrupt, threatening a supply chain that employs about 700,000 workers.

“It was much faster than anything we had expected,” said Supavud Saicheua, chairman of the National Economic and Social Development Council, the central economic planning agency in Thailand.

“We didn’t think of the full picture,” he added. “The impact on Thailand has been much more adverse than we had thought.”

Michael Dunne highlights staggering data in our own hemisphere: “Chinese cars are pouring into the Americas south of the United States. The numbers are staggering. Chinese share of new car sales in 2026 – Venezuela: 51%; Peru: 39%; Chile: 33%; Mexico: 21%; Brazil: 17%; Argentina: 12%.” And, he notes, “Thailand, Mexico, Brazil, Europe all taking a similar tack vis a vis Chinese car imports.”

MORE PROBLEMS WITH CHINA

Japan ‘months’ from running out of critical rare earth as China squeezes supply (Financial Times). “Tokyo asks US to help convince Beijing to ease chokehold on yttrium and avert manufacturing shutdown.”

Volkswagen bet on Xpeng to save its China business. It’s not going to plan (Reuters)

“China represents the challenge at the heart of Volkswagen’s global ‌crisis: A market that once contributed nearly 50% of group profits now accounts for about 10%. That stunning reversal has forced the company into the biggest restructuring in its 89-year history.”

Stunning! Who could have guessed. Not Jensen Huang, who says of the CCP, “They also publicly say, and rightfully I believe they believe this, that they want China to be an open market. They want to attract foreign investment. They want companies to come to China and compete in the marketplace, and I believe that. The Wall Street Journal should just pre-write the obit for Nvidia’s China business so it’s ready to go when the time comes.

Can’t really say it better than Nick Phillips does here: “At root, the libertarian error is to see free trade with China as capitalism and tariffs as socialism. It’s exactly the opposite. Importing Chinese goods means importing their subsidies, their currency manipulation, and their industrial policy, letting these distortions determine prices in our country. Tariffs preserve our capitalist system by ensuring that prices reflect free competition between firms rather than Beijing’s decision to subsidize a strategic industry. The real socialists are the ones who want a socialist state to determine who wins and who loses in the American economy.”

But, I can say it more succinctly: Free Trade, Free Markets, Choose One.

THANKFULLY, THE UNITED STATES IS CHOOSING FREE MARKETS…

…even if that means escalating economic conflict.

Peter Harrell: “Interesting US sanctions out this morning against a Chinese startup accelerator (sort of like a Chinese Y Combinator), over IP theft. Signal that despite Trump-Xi summitry and the trade truce, enforcement action against specific harmful Chinese activities continues.”

And the Treasury Department signals its intent to tighten outbound investment restrictions with a new notice of proposed rulemaking: Outbound Investment Security Program Regulations. Bill Bishop comments, “Likely lots of heartburn for some VCs and Pharma firms tonight. Surprised the lobbyists were not more successful.” Chris McGuire has the details.

For its part, China Slaps Export Curbs on More Drones and Industrial Machinery (Bloomberg). “China is imposing export controls on more drones and machinery, as the world’s second-biggest economy flexes its industrial muscles. The measures announced by the Ministry of Commerce Monday will take effect from Nov 18. They expand curbs to include new types of drones — plus parts and technologies — as well as components of dredgers including mud pumps and cutterheads. Also added to the list are some types of tunnel boring machines, which hadn’t previously been subject to export controls.”

As Eurasia Group’s Gerard DiPippo points out: “Those advocating for Chinese FDI into the US on the grounds that it will allow more tech transfer into the US should pay closer attention to China’s export controls. Beijing won’t let that happen for important technologies, even if Washington were interested.”

…AND SO WHILE THE REST OF THE WORLD COPES WITH CHINESE-INDUCED DEINDUSTRIALIZING, WE ARE DOING THE OPPOSITE

Check out IndustriousAF, an organization at the intersection of venture capital and workforce development. “The founders we work with say their tightest constraint is trained talent. There are not enough pathways (like apprenticeships) connecting people to these careers. We are building them, starting on the shop floor.” They’ve just released a valuable tool called Promised vs. Produced, designed to provide quarterly tracking of investment commitments coming in from the loading docks and new production rolling off the assembly line.

• Co-founders Ashwin Lalendran and Brent Parton join me on this week’s American Compass Podcast.

Welcome back, Defense Policy Board, now chaired by the great Bob Lighthizer. Politico:

The revived Defense Policy Board will meet today at the Pentagon for the first time under its new chair, former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. The agenda for the closed-door, two-day meeting has a strong trade flavor as participants explore the defense implications of U.S. trade and economic policy.

The Defense Policy Board has historically not focused on trade,” Jeannette Chu, vice president for national security policy at the National Foreign Trade Council, told Morning Trade, adding that the meeting’s agenda reflects the administration’s economic security priorities as laid out in the National Security Strategy. That “includes seeking balanced trade, secure access to critical supply chains and materials and reindustrialization.”

Economic security is important to national security, imagine that.

JPMorganChase has begun doing the actual investment part of investment banking.

• Robot factories and hypersonic missiles: JPMorgan Chase’s first $5 billion of defense investments (CNBC).

• Jamie Dimon’s National-Security Pledge Finances $230 Billion in First Year (Wall Street Journal).

More good stories.

• Major rare earths processing plant to be built in New York (Politico). “The Pentagon-backed facility in Rochester by Phoenix Tailings would be among the world’s largest rare earths processing facilities outside China.”

• Apple adds iPhone component, materials makers to its US supplier network (Manufacturing Dive). “Apple has partnered with a new U.S. supplier and expanded its alliance with another to provide critical materials and components for the iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pro, according to an Oct. 20 press release. Apple’s new supplier is Perryman Co., a Pennsylvania-based titanium producer. The metal is used to make the casings of many Apple products. Apple will commit up to $100 million over the next three years with Perryman, which melts, forges and rolls titanium with at least 80% recycled content for iPhone Duo, according to the release.”

And one more good weekend read, on The Family Firm That Has Never Had a Layoff in 75 Years, for those of you who have made it all the way to the end (Wall Street Journal):

Hundreds of executives have made the pilgrimage to St. Louis to try to replicate Steve Gund’s elusive feat: He’s the third-generation CEO of a family manufacturer that has averaged 18% annual growth for a decade—all without ever laying off an employee.

…

The model requires trade-offs, and a lot of discipline: Gund has never had a layoff but staffs sparingly so it can weather the leaner stretches. Employees are pushed to voice and document concerns on red cards displayed on the factory floor, putting leaders on notice to take care of problems quickly. Everyone from line workers to managers crafts a career-development plan. Yet those who don’t adapt to Gund’s high-performance culture are managed out.

OK, OK, we all know the real reason you read to the end… it’s time for:

THIS WEEK’S CANADA GOOSE!

We met former Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland a couple of weeks ago, interviewing Janet Yellen about how “it’s important for Canada and other countries not to accept this lying down and to retaliate.” But this week she joined The Ezra Klein Show for one of the more distant-from-reality conversations on record. The episode, “Trumpism Is Backfiring,” begins from Klein’s premise that:

In late August, Prime Minister Mark Carney, of Canada, walked away from trade talks with the Trump administration. He did so knowing that the retaliation could be ruinous for the Canadian economy.

But it’s also ruinous and revealing about the shambles of Donald Trump’s foreign policy — how what Trump is doing is not getting America what Trump wanted. I mean, Trump wanted Canada to be the 51st state. Instead, it might become an associate member of the European Union.

Trump wanted to weaken China in the global sphere. Now Carney and Canada are negotiating deals and agreements with all manner of other countries, including China, in an effort to diversify away from America.

Canada’s actions are “ruinous” for Trump’s foreign policy because he actually wanted it to become the 51st state and now it’s going to be an EU member? China has not been weakened because… Canada wants to negotiate with it? What a peculiar weighting of priorities, giving so little value to successful U.S. deals concluded with every other ally that a single tantrum from Canada earns a grade of “ruinous” failure overall. The actual conversation is about as helpful as you’d expect from one that starts there. No, you won’t learn from Ms. Freeland why Canada walked away or how joining the EU would better protect its “sovereignty.” But you will learn:

It even got to a point where Cecilia Malmström, a wonderful Swedish liberal, was the E.U. trade commissioner. She was dealing with the U.S. I was, too. We would text each other and talk to each other, and we developed this shorthand where, if you said: I am in Mordor — that meant: I’m in Washington. Cecilia once sent me a text saying: Gandalf is going to Mordor next week.

Obviously, to me, what that meant was that Angela Merkel was going to Washington. In the shorthand, the elves were Europeans. Hobbits were Canadian.

Truly, Andrea Merkel was the Gandalf of her time…

Hard to top that, but I did appreciate this from The Economist as well: “One big problem is that the middle powers are a disparate bunch, with differing degrees of nostalgia for the order that Mr Carney mourns.... Such regional heavyweights as Brazil, South Africa or India are not sure who appointed Canada—a blandly rich vanilla milkshake of a country—to lead a new post-American world order.” An editor should surely have caught “blandly rich” but, otherwise, well played.

Enjoy the weekend!

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Further reading:

• “The Gen Z Blue-Collar Jobs Boom,” Skylar Adleta, Commonplace

• “An Industrious Workforce for the AI Decade,” Ashwin Lalendran & Brent Parton, American Compass

Predicting the political future is difficult. One reason for this difficulty is that some slopes really are slippery, others are not, and looking ahead from the present, it can be all but impossible to tell the difference.

Will the installation of a Ten Commandments monument on a courthouse lawn lead to a theocratic police state? Will the establishment of Medicare lead to a total government takeover of health care? Will the Patriot Act’s expansion of powers lead to an increasingly pervasive and unaccountable surveillance state? Well, as of this writing, the record on these predictions is decidedly mixed. Political life does not always follow the rules of logic—arguments that if you allow X, you therefore have to allow Y sometimes look sensible on paper but fail in the face of political realities.

In a recent essay, The Argument’s Jerusalem Demsas depicts the political setting and enforcement of communal norms as a giant water slide—take one step and you’re all the way down, hunting witches and burning heretics. It’s a striking expression of a common sentiment, one central to a certain form of postwar liberalism.

Demsas’s essay is largely a critique of Democratic Senator Chris Murphy’s recent book, Crisis of the Common Good. In it, Murphy tells the story of the Puritan-era shopkeeper Robert Keayne, who faced a hefty government fine and received official church censure for attempting to charge eight pence for six pence nails. For Murphy, this is an example of the community taking a moral stand against greed and exploitation. But for Demsas, it is the fateful step onto the slide. She answers with the story of Ann Hibbens, who, in 1640, was censured by her church for questioning the bill of her carpenter and generally failing to submit to the authority of men. Later in life, after her husband died, she was hanged as a witch.

While acknowledging that fines for price gouging do not necessarily lead to executions for witchcraft, Demsas warns that maybe they kind of do: “[it is] not an accident that a community with enough coercive power to punish someone for charging a lot for nails ends up using that coercive power in other realms of life as well.” The regulation of prices, religious orthodoxy, and women’s behavior all stemmed from the same view, “that ‘the community’ could define the good, interpret dissent as moral disorder, and punish the dissenter.” Down the slide we go.

Putting aside the question of whether “dissent” is a fair description of price gouging, or whether you need to entirely and officially “define the good” to punish price gouging, the basic idea that the government could and should regulate commercial interactions is extremely uncontroversial.

There are laws to prevent banks from taking unreasonable risks with client money. There are laws requiring merchants to tell the truth about their products. There are laws about which addictive products can be sold and to whom. There are laws about profiting from inside information. One could go on almost indefinitely. Government has long been in the business of regulating commerce—in fact, it is a specific power of Congress enumerated in the Constitution—and if anyone objects to this in principle, it is only in the most remote fever swamps of libertarianism, where age-of-consent laws and public funding of roads are also examples of government tyranny.

It is entirely possible, of course, that having gotten a taste of commerce-regulation, the government could go on to micromanage every single transaction, to the point that the economy grinds to a standstill. That hasn’t happened, of course, but maybe it will?

If the slope of commerce-regulation isn’t perfectly slippery, if the community can make some judgments and enforce them without plunging into the most insane, destructive, maximalist variations on those judgments, perhaps there is something special about the kinds of judgments that Demsas is concerned about. And indeed there is. In most of the cases of economic regulation described above, the government is ruling in favor of goods that—we imagine—most anyone can agree on. All else being equal, people seem to think that it is good to not be cheated out of your money and, perhaps to a lesser degree, to not be sick. Fair enough. Not everyone will precisely agree on the ways that government should define and pursue these goals, but that’s just politics. That’s why you argue for your positions, attempt to persuade your opponents and the undecided, and get yourself to the polls to vote.

Senator Murphy and others who argue for a common-good approach to our public life suggest that there are other judgments that we as a community can make, other legitimate goods that the government can pursue, without collapsing into hysterical moral tyranny. There is no reason, in principle, why the government can be committed to the financial and physical health of its citizens, but not also their psychological, relational, and even spiritual health.

This does not mean that the federal government can or should define “the good”—we live in a pluralistic society and so are unlikely to agree on the nature of the highest cosmic good. But perhaps we can agree on some more modest goods—the good of work that is creative, fulfilling, and pays enough to feed a family. The good of being able to shop at businesses owned by your neighbors instead of those owned by distant, unaccountable captains of industry. The good of a healthy attention span, uncolonized by Silicon Valley profiteers. The good of protection from the scourge of addiction, whether it be to online sports betting, nasty chemicals in food, social media algorithms, or opioids pushed on the economically adrift communities of Appalachia.

This might at times require shameless meddling in the interactions between businesses and consumers. We (sometimes) use the tools of government to prevent companies from literally poisoning their consumers, even if the consumers “want,” at point of sale, to buy the poison.

We can all see that the rapid explosion of phone-based sports betting has had a devastating impact on the lives and families of many Americans, especially men and boys. We can see that social media algorithms have had a cancerous impact on our public discourse, on the gender-related attitudes of young men, on the self-perception of girls and women. We can see that the hollowing out of American main streets has enriched large corporations while damaging local communities. We can see all of this, and yet we feel uncomfortable saying in public that both the companies that produce these products and the consumers who use them are making a mistake, that this is not what we want for our fellow Americans.

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There is no law of logic or political life that says clamping down on these toxic realities must result in tyranny. There is also no reason to believe that the government can legitimately prevent a credit card company from charging you 50% APR, but cannot legitimately stop a social media company from hacking your dopamine system and ruining your ability to read a book, think carefully through a complicated issue, or pray.

None of this requires the government to establish a state church, or accrue new powers to impose an “Official Version of the Good Life,” which seems to be the terrifying bottom of Demsas’s slippery slope. It does, however, require us and our leaders to be realistic and honest about what actually seems to make our communities thrive, the kinds of things you want for you and yours—health, friendship, peace and safety, good books, time to reflect, beautiful public spaces, creativity, spiritual aliveness, and much more. In normal conversations with normal people, this list does not seem to us a particularly controversial one, but arguing for it will require courage, not just because it will inevitably invite some disagreement, but because human judgment about human things has seemed, for some time, inadmissible to our public conversations.

The liberal political theorist Judith Shklar famously argued for what she called a “liberalism of fear” that did not particularly aspire to create a good society (who can know what that is!) but instead to prevent oppression. And one signal way that we might oppress is by setting up some official version of the good life that everyone is required to pay fealty to. If Shklar’s is not the snappiest title for a governing philosophy, it has implicitly become dominant.

For the past several decades, both Left and Right have, in different proportions, adopted an officially non-judgmental attitude towards both the behavior of corporations and individuals, with varying exceptions for cases of outright oppression (which we are against!). On the right of center, the liberalism of fear jibed well with the rise of “shareholder primacy,” which announced that the only duty of a business is to make as much money as possible within the confines of our laws and basic rules. Considerations of what is good for our communities were to be left to pastors, philosophers, and other powerless idealists. Left of center, all judgments about other people’s choices and actions came to be treated with great suspicion, assuming no obvious harm was being done to others.

The triumph of the liberalism of fear lies downstream of the ideologically driven catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, which have created, in Hannah Arendt’s formulation, “an ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not ‘What are we fighting against,’ but ‘What are we fighting for?’” We dare not say what a good action or a good life look like. That way lies exclusion, oppression, and genocide.

As time has gone on, however, this silence has grown not just ominous, but sickly. Non-oppression is really only an enabling condition for a good society. It is just the bare minimum, and frankly, its enshrinement as the be-all and end-all of political life has contributed to our current predicament. No relationship, no community, no society can subsist on these meager rations. A society that is afraid to even discuss the building blocks of a good life with one another will leave its people feeling lonely, alienated, and directionless.

And indeed, the numbers bear it out. Millions and millions of Americans currently experience their society as cutthroat, dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all competition. Younger Americans are beset with anomie, anxiety, and depression. We don’t need to build new presidential powers to decide that we can and should argue for, and legislate towards a society that truly cares about its people and is brave enough to think together about the shapes that caring might take.

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Every few years, somebody notices that America’s voting system is almost crudely ancient: the person with the most votes wins. This is typically called “first past the post” voting, and it means that candidates can win a crowded primary with a simple plurality. This simplicity strikes reformers as barbaric, and they blame it for the ills of polarization and gridlock. Reformers and modernizers instead want more parties that are more ideologically sorted, more candidates per district, and more choices of political identity. The mechanism they typically propose is a system where everyone’s second- or third-choice preference counts.

But the American system is good precisely because everyone’s first-choice counts, and electoral losers know exactly why they lost.

Most Americans aren’t familiar with the jargon of voting reform, and I beg your patience with an exposition of the terms and acronyms. In the argot of political science, the American system is a “winner take all” model with single-member districts, or SMDs. That is, when I go to vote in my Congressional district’s election this year, I cast one vote for one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Two Southern states, Georgia and Louisiana, use a two-round or runoff system. If no single candidate gets an overall majority in the first round, the top two candidates move to a second round and the winner of that contest wins the seat.

Vote reformers are often attracted to “ranked-choice voting” (RCV) systems in which voters rank their preferences among the candidates. RCV can be done a number of ways. There is the “instant-runoff voting” or single-winner RCV, in which the last-place candidate is eliminated and the ballots where that candidate was the top choice are then redistributed to other candidates who were ranked second on the ballot. This process continues until one candidate is deemed to have a majority.

Alaska, Maine, and New York City’s party primaries use this system. However, Alaska’s is a two-round system. The first round is a nonpartisan primary in which the top four vote-getters move on to the second round, which is determined by RCV. California and Washington use “jungle primaries” wherein all candidates regardless of party run in one primary election and the top two advance to the general.

Then there is STV, or single transferable vote. Advocates of this system celebrate that once adopted, your vote continues to move until it helps elect someone. These systems are usually done in electoral districts that select multiple candidates. How does it work? Hold your breath (or don’t): A voter ranks each candidate 1, 2, 3, 4 and often 5, 6, 7, 8. There is usually a minimum quota for the district, roughly the total number of votes divided by the number of seats plus one. So if 40,000 people vote in a four-seat constituency, the quota is roughly 8,001. Anyone who reaches that number of votes is elected. So, if a candidate reaches well over the quota, the votes beyond what they needed to win a seat are deemed surplus and transferred to each voter’s second choice at a reduced fractional value.

If nobody clears the new quota (stick with me), the last-place candidate is eliminated and their ballots move to the next preference. The counting goes round after round sorting surpluses and eliminating last-place candidates. So, if you backed a winner who didn’t need your vote, your vote moves to your second choice. If you backed someone who had no chance with your first choice, your second gets your vote. This can continue down to your fourth, fifth, or twenty-fourth choice. In this system, a strong party might run multiple candidates in a single district and propagandize the voters in that district on a “correct” ranking of them. This is the system used in Ireland to elect members to Dáil Éireann, their lower house, and to the European Parliament. I will henceforth refer to it as “the Irish system.”

There are other systems—cumulative voting, limited voting, a closed system known as Sainte-Laguë whereby parties propose a list of candidates and then voters vote for the party list—but RCV and STV carry by far the most support among American vote reformers.

American reformers typically fall into one of three camps. The first are the ranked-choicers, including groups like FairVote, which was founded in 1992 and is led by CEO Meredith Sumpter, with Harvard philosopher Danielle Allen sitting on its board. A looser ecosystem of state-level groups like Rank the Vote are joined to this movement. Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin has introduced the Ranked Choice Voting Act, which would require RCV for all Congressional elections by 2030. There is also Rep. Don Beyer’s Fair Representation Act, which proposes the Irish system—STV and multi-member districts for the House of Representatives.

The second camp includes groups looking to reform the primary system rather than general elections. There is Open Primaries, led by Reform Party activist John Opdyke. There is United America, which is backed by Katheryn Murdoch and funds state ballot initiatives that would institute nonpartisan primaries with ranked-choice general elections. Their proof of concept is Alaska’s “top-four” system, which may get revoked by voters this year. Katherine Gehl, former president and CEO of her family-owned company, Gehl Foods, supports a system similar to Alaska’s but with five candidates in the general election.

A third group could be called “the proportionalists.” These include political scientist Lee Drutman, author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, who wants a multiparty democracy and is associated with the group Fix Our House. There are groups like the Sightline Institute, which laid the intellectual case for Portland, Oregon’s experiment with the Irish STV system. Then there is More Equitable Democracy, led by George Cheung, which argues for proportional representation on the grounds of racial representation. Proportionalists are usually the most enthusiastic about multimember districts.

The argument against the American voting system is usually a negative case against the two-party system that our first past the post (FPTP) elections tend to produce, which explains why veterans of the Reform and Green parties rank among the leaders of electoral reform activist groups. Their critique is grounded in some history. For example, Founding Father John Adams, in a 1789 letter, said he dreaded a division of the republic into two great parties.

The FPTP critique holds that voting for a third party can end up helping the party you hate the most. Think of a Florida-based Green Party member who voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential election. That voter, aiming to support a Left-wing party focused on environmental regulation, was widely believed to have preferred Democrat Al Gore to Republican George W. Bush if the choice were a binary. At best, reformers argue that FPTP “throws that vote away.” At worst, they argue that in a winner-take-all system, Nader voters wound up helping Bush, the candidate they presumably disliked the most.

Reform advocates also argue that in an FPTP system, a third party that commands roughly 15% of the vote across the country could win almost no seats in the legislature. Thus, those voters wouldn’t have their preferences represented.

Regarding the primary system, reformers argue that the most ideologically extreme voters will back extreme candidates in primaries, and that gerrymandering then protects those candidates in the general. These voters change the behavior of even moderate incumbents because, fearing a primary challenge, they will sort toward their party’s ideological hard edge, refuse to compromise, and play up to cable news.

But vote reformers have been losing the argument for some time. Nineteen states have banned ranked-choice voting, including six who banned it in 2025 alone. Since 2020, voters in seven states have rejected RCV ballot measures. An effort to repeal ranked-choice voting in Alaska in 2024 (just four years after its adoption) lost by only 737 votes statewide. Another attempt at repeal is happening this year, with President Donald Trump’s backing.

Careful readers will have already detected that the case against America’s voting system runs in two different, and contrary, directions. On the one hand, vote reformers complain that the current American system creates too much homogenization and moderation, arguing that in another system it would be safer to vote for less mainstream parties outside the narrow confines of the two-party duopoly. On the other hand, they abhor the primary system because it allows kooks and exotic political ideas to influence the major parties and pull them apart. Not enough diversity and representation of the fringes, too much consolidation. And then, too much diversity, too powerful on the fringes.

This contradiction showcases that the American voting system actually performs all the functions that reformers seek. If insurgent factions can win primaries, then a Green Party member or Democratic Socialist doesn’t need a third or fourth party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can beat Joe Crowley. Bernie Sanders can move Hillary Clinton to the Left on several issues, doing exactly what would be done by a smaller socialist party nipping at the heels of a center-Left formation in the Dutch system.

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Vote reformers tend to promote systems that create their own set of problems. The first hazard is churn and instability, as a system with several parties can create unstable or deadlocked governments. Israel has had five in four years. Italy used to be notorious for its unstable governments. The Netherlands has held four national elections since 2017. It took 224 days to form a government following the 2017 elections, and 299 after the election in 2021. Reform advocates hold that this is a function of the parliamentary system, and that America’s fixed terms in Congress would prevent it. But the variable that seems to matter is FPTP.

Britain has a parliamentary system too, and FPTP usually hands one party a working majority. Its parties have churned through leaders, but the governments have held. In 2010 a hung Parliament was elected, but the resulting coalition served its full term. Only when the 2017 election failed to produce a majority did Britain get something like Israeli churn: a minority government propped up by Northern Ireland’s DUP, a Commons deadlocked over Brexit, and another election within two and a half years. The combination of America’s FPTP and fixed terms prevents even that.

The other problem is cartelization and over-homogenization. This is a particularly acute problem with the Irish system that the Fair Representation Act would impose on our Congress. The two largest parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, were born out of Ireland’s civil war. Their original divisions over constitutional issues and patronage networks were passionate, but the ideological battles that birthed them have largely faded. Ireland also has Labour, which is the oldest party but has spent the last century as a junior partner at best, and modern Sinn Féin, which began its life as the political arm of the Provisional IRA, a host of independent candidacies or even notable local families. Strangely, this menagerie of party options and the many independent candidates that run in Ireland produces less ideological choice.

The duopoly charge laid against America is far more accurate in Ireland’s STV system, where Fianna Fail and Fine Gael began as fierce rivals but have become grand coalition partners. Voters who chose one to avoid the other now get both, and they trade the premier office of Taoiseach like a timeshare, splitting up the term between different party leaders. Although it is arguable that Ireland’s slightly marginal geopolitical position and European Union membership takes many contentious issues out of the realm of national politics, the STV system and multi-candidate system ends up producing conformism. Even Sinn Féin, a party born of violent revolutionary terror campaigns in Northern Ireland, has converged with the FF-FG duopoly on all the consensus issues: Ireland’s status in the EU, immigration, liberalizing referendums on social issues.

Popular referendums in Ireland provide an incredible piece of evidence that STV systems can ward off rather than invite popular input into politics. In 2024, the Irish government proposed a double-barrelled question about removing “woman in the home” language from the constitutional definition of the family. Every single major party backed a Yes-Yes vote. But voters rejected the proposed amendments, and delivered two No votes on the question, 67.7% to 32.3%, and 73.9% to 26.1%. The socially conservative and constitutionally traditionalist section of the Irish electorate has routinely revealed itself in these referenda, sometimes achieving a third or more of the raw votes. But not a single major party provides significant socially conservative representation.

Proportional vote systems often mean that parties and candidates winning the most votes can be entirely excluded from power by a coalition of the less-popular. Instant runoff and transfer systems can actually move your vote in such a way that it helps elect a candidate you truly deplored—the very problem American reformers aim to fix.

There are some utterly strange outcomes. In 2019, Ireland South’s European Parliament election in Ireland produced ballot papers two feet long, with 23 candidates vying for five seats. Eighteen rounds of counting were needed for transfers and eliminations. The Irish mostly love the counting drama, but that lightness about the result is related to the ideological conformity the system produces, along with Ireland’s lower-stakes geopolitics, in which many policies are effectively outsourced to the EU.

The common thread behind American vote reformers is that they privilege a system that allows clearer political identity expression, while undervaluing the function of negotiation before elections and legibility and legitimacy for the results afterward.

The American system includes negotiation between the smaller factions and the mainstream in the primaries, before the decisive general election, whereas parliamentary systems and proportional representation schemes defer negotiation until afterward—leaving it to people who already have a guaranteed seat and income from achieving office.

Because third parties rarely win, every faction in America has to fight its way into one or both of the two big parties. Much of that bargaining happens in public. The 2016 primary fight allowed Donald Trump to represent Republican voters who no longer agreed with their leaders on the Iraq war, immigration, or trade. He made the contest into a debate, and he won. In Germany, that kind of dissent is walled off with “electoral firewalls,” grand coalitions and other forms of cartelization whereby political incumbents wall themselves off from the input a democracy wants to give them.

The American system tells us who won on election night, or close to it. The candidate with the most votes wins. There’s no need to interpret the mandate of second-, third-, or fourth-place ranks, no need to wait while someone’s fifth preference is transferred elsewhere at fractional values, and no need for parties to try to communicate a ranking strategy to voters.

In short, the American system of voting produces legitimacy. Legitimacy is good not just for the winners but also for the losers who can navigate the results and adjust. It’s that legitimacy and legibility that explains why the American system is old; it is because it is enduring. We don’t need to re-found our government every few generations like France or Italy. If Alaskans vote next month against retaining their ranked-choice experiment, they will be returning to an American system that has outlasted all the alternatives for good reason.

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Michael Morris, who was born here and stayed, is driving my husband David and I around a barren area that used to be the working-class neighborhoods of Springfield, Ohio. He describes a thriving place where people could walk to work and to church, leave their doors unlocked because they knew their neighbors, get a drink with friends at the bar on the corner. “They didn’t live elaborately,” he says, “but they took care of things.” The rows of mansions on a nearby street indicate a socioeconomic integration that drove investment in a shared physical place.

Now, there are dilapidated houses, boarded-up windows, grime. The remains of bygone industry—piles of broken concrete, sagging buildings among weeds—run parallel to the railroad track in long stretches. As Michael points and narrates, there’s something about it that feels a bit like a crime scene investigation: what happened?

And later on:

There have been many signs in Springfield over the last few years: signs like those held at the prayer service I attended in February with clergy and citizens praying for an extension of TPS; the sign of the homeless man who was the first person I saw when I pulled off the exit and into Springfield; the sign at the Navistar plant covered over with a large piece of material to signify its closing. People were gathering in solidarity in response to the migrant crisis, but what about in response to the news about the homeless shelter or the factory closing? It reminds me of a post I saw a Springfield resident make on Facebook: “Where are the people holding up signs for their own friends and neighbors?”

Read the whole thing.

FURTHER RECOMMENDED READING

Tanner Greer, A School of Strength and Character (Palladium). A few years old, but very much worth your time if you did not read it the first time around: “But less than a century after the Civil War, American life did become dominated by centralized and professionally managed bureaucracies. The two world wars only served to entrench this way of life in business and politics. The population, in response, became increasingly conditioned to lobbying for centralized decisions instead of self-organizing…”

Elliot Hapsel, Liberals Must Lead the War on Vice (Compact). “As a liberal, I am sympathetic to the idea that government should allow people to live their lives as they see fit. But liberals also have good reason to worry about how the vice economy damages lives, weakens families, and harms children. The right-wing response to vice can be excessively punitive. But liberals are likely to be caught between societal deterioration and resurgent interest in harsh laws unless they come up with an anti-vice politics of their own.”

Pairs well with Oren’s essay from the spring on Vice President Donald Trump (Commonplace). “Beyond the real-world damage, the president is committing a costly, unforced political error, abandoning to the Democrats an issue on which conservatives should naturally lead.” Which party will get there first?

Robot Models, Meta Glasses and A.I. Spon-Con: Fashion Cozies Up to Tech (New York Times). Note especially this line from a Vogue spokesperson defending the use of robots walking down the runway: “Robots and artificial intelligence are very much here — they are already a part of many of our lives…” This resigned thinking is pervasive, from schools to corporate brainstorming sessions. But using technology is a choice, and one to make when it is genuinely additive. When it becomes the default, or treated as irresistible, life quickly becomes worse. When literally trillions of dollars stand behind convincing institutions to adopt technology they don’t need, well, that brings us to…

WHAT TECHNOLOGY DOES TO RELATIONSHIPS, from Brad Littlejohn:

The growing movement to protect children from the harms of AI exists for good reason. But “protecting kids” is the easy case; sustaining, or perhaps restoring, our capacity as self-governing citizens will require more concern for how AI is shaping our habits as adults too. In AI Is Changing Motherhood for the Worse (Bloomberg), Abby McCloskey outlines what’s at stake. Two things in particular jumped out at me:

First, a common narrative among AI optimists holds that it will free us up from tedious tasks and hunting for answers so that we have more time to invest in the things that matter—like building human relationships. But more often than not, human relationships are built out of our mutual dependence on each other for those tedious tasks and asks. McCloskey reflects, “In the past, I would have turned to my sisters and friends, who would have shared their own experiences. But I no longer need to pick up the phone to get motherly advice,” turning instead to ChatGPT. I worry that this problem is not confined to motherhood; what will become of our workplace relationships if we no longer build up trust and camaraderie by asking colleagues for help debugging a program or finding a resource?

But at least, you might say, moms now have up-to-the-minute advice about anything and everything related to their child’s development, and that has to be a win, right? Not necessarily; McCloskey highlights in passing the pressure of “endless optimizations.” After all, there’s some truth in the maxim, “ignorance is bliss.” A world in which you don’t know the 101 things you should be doing to optimize your child’s sleep schedule is a world in which, well, you probably sleep better yourself. Already, the proliferation of digital monitoring devices has created responsibility norm ratchets that can heighten rather than diminish parental anxiety—as the Compass team discussed in a recent conversation on AI baby monitors. There’s a risk that AI raises expectations of what counts as responsible parenting faster than it can ease the burden.

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THE WELFARE STATE CANNOT SURVIVE THE COLLAPSE OF CITIZENSHIP, from Abby Ball:

This Wall Street Journal piece on the UK’s welfare system is an absolutely wild tour through what happens when a safety net is stretched to its breaking point. Rather than treat these benefits as a backstop for those who truly need it, a shocking percentage of the British public has seemingly embraced the idea that they’d be suckers not to grab what they can, public fisc be damned. Their leaders, meanwhile, tiptoe toward reform and are quickly scared off by public backlash.

The details of the UK situation give the illusory “welfare queen” a run for her money: A benefit designed to increase mobility for Britons with disabilities by providing free car leases now accounts for one in seven new car sales in the UK. The company that provides those leases is now the biggest car-leasing company in the country. Another program aimed at providing funds to cover the higher living costs associated with a disability (e.g., wheelchair ramps) is now being claimed by one in 12 UK residents. It has ballooned to cover people with not only physical disabilities but “anxiety, ADHD, depression and even acne.”

The Journal reports that the UK is now spending more than £100 billion annually on welfare benefits, not including health care. The bill has grown by a quarter in just the last four years and shows no signs of slowing. This is not a rich country simply choosing to be unusually generous—it is spending far beyond its means. Its borrowing costs are the highest in the G7. Just this year, their bond yields have risen from 4.5% to 5.5%.

Thinking of citizenship only in its shallow sense as an entitlement to live in a place, people often make the case that a welfare state cannot survive open borders. A communal commitment to those in need requires some boundary on who those people might be. That’s necessary but, as the UK is demonstrating, not nearly sufficient. A welfare state of citizens each trying simply to take what they get will collapse as surely as one with open borders. Caring for those in need requires a sense of mutual obligation, a commitment to duties and obligations alongside privileges and rights, and a willingness to impose harsh consequences on those who violate such expectations.

NOR SHOULD WE PRETEND THE WELFARE STATE IS FREE, from Oren Cass:

I spoke with a reporter earlier this week about the recent polling that showed strong support for “Medicare-for-All,” including 84% of Democrats and 72% of Independents. Wasn’t that striking? What did it say about the direction of our politics? What it says, I replied, is that we need to stop polling benefits and start polling trade-offs. Of course large majorities of people will respond “yes” to being asked whether they would like something for free. The funniest recent example is polling from the Economic Innovation Group that found Democrats had a +31 favorability rating for “socialism” (vs. -9 for “capitalism”) and also 84% of them say “taxes in America are too high.”

Nor is this myopic thinking limited to voters. We see it also in the social scientists who think we can usefully test a “universal basic income” by using philanthropic funds to experiment sending monthly checks to a small group of people for a small period of time. Do people like, and even benefit from, free money? Generally, yes. One obvious problem with this is the small group and small period. The corrosive effect of UBI is not the access to additional resources, it’s the degradation of the wider culture if the expectation becomes universal, and the change in incentives if it can be received indefinitely. But there’s a second obvious problem, which is that the resources have to come from somewhere. A UBI does not conjure new goods and services for people out of thin air (that might be nice!), it reallocates them from elsewhere, likely including sharp cuts to other programs and sharp increases in middle-class taxes. You’re not testing the effect of UBI, or support for it, unless you’re testing that as well.

Unfortunately, a politics of free stuff does not deliver on the free stuff, which ordinary Americans understand. The continued promises, which everyone knows are unkeepable, contribute to the well-deserved collapse of trust in our institutions and leaders. Reporters who credulously encourage free-stuff thinking quite obviously make matters worse. The same EIG survey found that support has declined for “the Trump administration’s policy of placing tariffs on imports from other nations,” but one suspects support remains quite low for an alternative “policy of letting other countries reward companies for shutting down American factories and moving production overseas.” There’s no question that free trade with China led to lots of cheap stuff from China. The very important question is whether Americans consider that a good deal.

YOUR CONCLUDING THOUGHT FROM RECLAIMING AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP:

What happened to our citizenship? The American elites responsible for setting the nation’s course corrupted the communal, economic, and national life on which it depends. And we willingly shirked our obligations, devolving from citizens into mere consumers—passive subjects of an empire that promised safety and comfort while draining away liberty, dignity, and prosperity.

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ISSUE TWO - OCTOBER 2026

THE ELECTIONS ISSUE

Features

• Amber Lapp | An American City

  What Springfield, Ohio, reveals about immigration and the American Dream.

• Evie Solheim | Embracing Interdependence

  The 2026 Women’s Convention in Western New York shows that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.

• Chris Chmielenski | Cognizant Crackdown

  The illegal abuse of the H-1B visa program is finally facing accountability.

• Jason Mangone | On Pasadena’s Volunteer Firefighters

  Coming soon

In Focus: Elections

• Alex Tarascio and David Kochel | Calling Elections Rigged Is Bad Politics and Worse Civics

  The habit that’s killing confidence in elections—and the party that keeps picking it up.

• Trey Trainor | Confidence, Not Faith, in the Ballot Box

  An election system should provide something that transcends disagreements: a process that can be examined.

• Michael Brendan Dougherty | On Alternative Voting Approaches

  Coming soon

• Drew Holden | On Election Denialism’s History

  Coming soon

Commentary

• Gail Slater | Keep AI Open

  Antitrust law can help preserve a competitive marketplace for artificial intelligence.

• Chris Griswold | Not by Bread Alone, Mr. President

  Why Trump’s promise of $5,000 payouts landed so badly.

• Skyler Adleta | The Gen Z Blue-Collar Jobs Boom

  A new generational opportunity is taking shape in the skilled trades.

• Brad Littlejohn | Claude Is Not Your Friend

  In an atomized world, even the best uses of AI tools present profound and dangerous temptation.

• Oren Cass | On Midterms Noise

  Coming soon

Podcasts

• The Fraud-Suppression Industrial Complex with Ben Ginsberg

  Can we restore confidence in America’s election systems?

Subscribe now

If you haven’t already, subscribe to the magazine here, and bookmark the Commonplace homepage to stay up-to-date on everything we publish.

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Michael Morris, who was born here and stayed, is driving my husband David and I around a barren area that used to be the working-class neighborhoods of Springfield, Ohio. He describes a thriving place where people could walk to work and to church, leave their doors unlocked because they knew their neighbors, get a drink with friends at the bar on the corner. “They didn’t live elaborately,” he says, “but they took care of things.” The rows of mansions on a nearby street indicate a socioeconomic integration that drove investment in a shared physical place.

Now, there are dilapidated houses, boarded-up windows, grime. The remains of bygone industry—piles of broken concrete, sagging buildings among weeds—run parallel to the railroad track in long stretches. As Michael points and narrates, there’s something about it that feels a bit like a crime scene investigation: what happened?

Former headquarters of White Motor Company, Springfield, Ohio. Photo credit: Michael Morris, Springfield resident.

The town became the center of attention during the 2024 election, and while President Trump’s claims about pet eating were named Politifact’s “Lie of the Year,” vociferous city commission meetings suggested that residents on both sides had more to say about the estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Haitian migrants who had come to Springfield since 2020 under Temporary Protected Status.

Trump won Clark County, which includes Springfield, with 63.9% of the vote, the best performance for any Republican presidential candidate in the county since 1928. Things were closer in the city itself, but Trump narrowly won Springfield after having lost it four years earlier to President Biden. After taking office, the Trump administration ended TPS for Haitians last summer, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known by its acronym ICE, began activity in the area in August.

Initially drawn to Springfield because of this story, after talking with a dozen residents and people with connections to the area, I came to see a larger story, one that began decades earlier.

Downtown, I’m surprised by the grandeur of the buildings, like the magnificent Old City Hall which is now the Heritage Center of Clark County. Springfield feels like a larger city than it is, a tribute to the way that former prosperity built up the place and created impressive institutions. A “Wall of Remembrance” inside the museum includes rows of twentieth-century businessmen and philanthropists, a good number of whom went off to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, and then came back to found insurance companies, become president of the Springfield Rotary Club, or serve as a trustee of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra.

“[There is a] train of talent that either is from here or comes through town,” marvels Michael, who founded the Center City Association in 1998 and ran for mayor in 2003. We are standing in a downtown office building looking at a series of banners displaying famous people from Springfield: musicians like Johnny Lytle and John Legend, actors, statesmen, Ohio governors Asa Bushnell and the incumbent Mike DeWine, athletes and coaches, the founder of 4-H, the children’s author Lois Lenski, and the Wright brothers’ patent attorney.

“The Wright brothers can seek out patent attorneys anywhere they want to, right?” Michael asks. “And they come to Springfield, Ohio and work with Harry Toulmin! We were great.”

In 1983, Newsweek devoted an entire 160-page issue to the story of Springfield, Ohio, after a two-year process to identify a place that could best represent the “typical American city.” In his introduction to the issue, editor-in-chief William Broyles Jr. wrote of Springfield: “It is its own place, different from every other. But at another level it is every American town, and the people who come to life in this narrative are connected by circumstance and character to all of us.”

Downtown Springfield, Ohio. Photo credit: Michael Morris, Springfield resident.

But even then, the story of Springfield was beginning to shift from “dream city” to one with an at-risk middle class. A recession and notable conflict between labor and management at a big local employer were early warning signs, among other large-scale changes in international trade and technology.

Out the car window, more rubble of former industry flashes by. Suddenly Michael pulls over. He’s got to show us a video that he says was prophetic. It’s presidential candidate Ross Perot’s 1992 warning about a “giant sucking sound” if the North American Free Trade Agreement was ratified. Two years later, it took effect, and NAFTA hit the city hard.

Between 1999 and 2014, median household incomes in Springfield dropped by 27%, from $73,895 in 1999 to $53,957 in 2014, with the city losing more share of its middle class than any other metropolitan area in the country.

Springfield, then, is poster city for the rise and fall of the middle class as well as icon of another American story—immigration. The two plots are more closely connected than is commonly told.

“The problem is that they came when we were at a weak spot,” lifelong Springfield resident Terry Adkins tells me over breakfast with his wife Mary at the IHOP on North Bechtle Avenue, referring to the Haitian migrants.

“I don’t care if they’re purple, yellow, or from Mars,” Mary says. “That’s a whole lot of people to put in a small area in a short period of time without making infrastructure changes, without making changes needed to sustain that.” Springfield, a city of 58,000 whose population had been steadily declining over the last half-century, suddenly grew significantly. Mary worried that Haitian migrants weren’t assimilating well and didn’t want to become Americans.

Terry, a member of Concerned Veterans for America, sports an “America 250” ball cap and a black “We the People 1776” T-shirt, with a skull whose face fades into an unfurled flag. Mary is draped in stars and stripes. Mary and Terry remember a time when Springfield was the setting of the proverbial high-trust, midcentury childhood: unsupervised bike rides until dinner time, shopping at local stores within walking distance, nobody locking their doors.

As they grew into adulthood, Mary and Terry watched their hometown decline. Buildings were abandoned, including a dilapidated Frank Lloyd Wright house that had been carved up into apartments. Drugs became a problem in the 1980s and 1990s. “When I was a kid you never heard of that,” Mary recalls, mentioning that today Springfield sits along a drug trafficking corridor.

There are still jobs available in Springfield, Terry says, but they were different from the unionized jobs of the past: “Many of them are not paying a living wage. And that’s part of the problem.”

A 2016 NPR story described a similar reality. Springfield had jobs, but not many that would earn a middle-class living.

Andrew, a 39-year-old lifelong Springfield resident, tells me that it has never been difficult to find a job. Even in high school he worked two jobs, and most recently he was employed in food service. But he observes that the nature of work has changed.

“You got to put them years in taking the low bottom of the totem pole to work your way up,” Andrew tells me. “But those type of opportunities are rare anymore. It’s like they’re out the window for everyday people, man. There used to be a lot more of it, and I don’t see that as much now. You got people willing to take whatever comes their way to barely live paycheck to paycheck.”

Andrew notes that one driver of this trend is the rise of the temp agency.

“The temp thing was new in the day, the last decade or two, because it was more cost effective,” Andrew says, describing a landscape in which the kind of jobs that high school kids used to do are now taken by adults. “Now it’s full-grown adults trying to raise a family, trying to take those jobs because there is nothing else—or their only opportunity is to temp, and they’re not guaranteed.”

Andrew contrasts this with “the real serious jobs, the good paying, the let’s-build-a-career job like Navistar was for this community back in the day.” Now the more common path is to use a temp agency. “It’s not secure. It’s not guaranteed,” he says. “You might get a full-time spot… and even then, [the employer] might just up and dip and go to another country, you know? Clinton allowed that back in the 1990s.”

The spillover effects of a low-wage economy are difficult to overstate. Springfield residents told me about a loss of dignity and self-confidence, family squabbles, the erosion of civic life and church attendance, and addiction. Even when people land a good opportunity they can struggle with lingering addiction or anger issues. I heard about administering Narcan to a factory worker who overdosed on the line.

Michael Morris, who emphasized that a lot of problems are downstream from the loss of good jobs, also speculates that maybe part of what happened is that the workforce got “kicked in the shins” so often that it lost some of its resilience. “In my mind’s eye, what happened was we had a town that wasn’t showing up for the employers.” He describes the shift from “Champion City,” an old nickname of Springfield, to a “Woe Is Me City.” He wonders if this created some of the demand for employers to look elsewhere.

Terry says that immigrants coming to Springfield for jobs put even more downward pressure on wages. He mentions a friend who worked in manufacturing making $21 an hour before he was let go. Now he says the same factory is staffing its workforce with Haitian migrants who are brought in through employment services created to help refugees learn skills and find jobs, but that these workers are generally willing to accept lower hourly wages with fewer benefits, allowing companies to hire more workers at a lower cost.

A recent piece in The Guardian seems to describe a similar trend, arguing that one of the benefits of Haitian migrants in Springfield has been “cheap, reliable labor” and that since TPS ended (prompting many Haitians to leave) “businesses, big and small, are struggling.”

“The Haitians are being exploited,” Mary says. “We feel bad for them being exploited.”

Mary remembers a time when Springfield workers were earning a middle-class living. She had family members who worked for International Harvester, which had a massive plant in Springfield that made trucks for much of the twentieth century and agricultural equipment dating even further back. Terry spent years delivering the trucks they produced.

“International was a big thing in town,” Mary notes—and so were the United Auto Workers, with Local 402’s building located just down the street from the plant. According to Mary, the company began declining in the early 1980s following a lengthy strike, which commenced after the then-new CEO wanted to initiate mandatory overtime and change seniority rules. In 1986 the company became Navistar, and it began moving operations to Mexico in the mid-1990s and to Texas in 2020. But even after all those moves, there were still almost 1,400 people working at the plant in Springfield.

That is until a couple weeks ago, when the last truck went down the line.

“It’s sad,” pastor Barron Seelig says as he hands me a tray of loaded nachos from the window of his food truck parked outside of the International Harvest Scout, Truck, and Tractor museum where a vintage truck show is happening. “But they say it’s progress.” He shrugs, and then adds with a mischievous gleam in his eye, “If the opposite of pro is con, is the opposite of progress, Congress?”

The food truck funds Barron’s homeless ministry, and the tagline is, “Eat here or you and me both starve.” Even as Springfield has grown in population and attracted new business, including a Canadian company, Roshel, that will be moving into the former Navistar facilities, housing costs have risen alongside homelessness.

Yet in March, the city’s only dedicated shelter provider shut down after declaring bankruptcy.

Barron doesn’t blame the Haitian people—“they’re as much victims as anyone else”—but also thinks it has been a challenge for a city already short on resources to absorb more people. His friends say he’s MAGA, but he doesn’t see himself as political. He sees both sides spinning their narratives, “making a circus of it,” and not enough people doing the work of helping one another get back on their feet. “Who wouldn’t want to make America great?” Barron asks.

His latest project, NICE Agents, which stands for Neighbors Investing in Community Empowerment, is his effort to turn the public conversation about Springfield into practical neighborly action.

There have been many signs in Springfield over the last few years: signs like those held at the prayer service I attended in February with clergy and citizens praying for an extension of TPS; the sign of the homeless man who was the first person I saw when I pulled off the exit and into Springfield; the sign at the Navistar plant covered over with a large piece of material to signify its closing. People were gathering in solidarity in response to the migrant crisis, but what about in response to the news about the homeless shelter or the factory closing? It reminds me of a post I saw a Springfield resident make on Facebook: “Where are the people holding up signs for their own friends and neighbors?”

The Asa S. and Ellen L. Bushnell House, a historic mansion from the city’s prosperous past. Photo credit: Michael Morris, Springfield resident.

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Shaelyn Holiday, a single mother from Ohio, was “stuck in a cycle of trying to get on my feet.” She and her children were living in a shelter when she met her now-husband, who had moved from Haiti to Springfield in 2023 and is now a green card holder. She credits him with helping to break that cycle, and after two years of each of them working two full-time jobs, they are now homeowners in Springfield. “It’s really hard to find somebody that thinks about long-term things,” Shaelyn says, describing how her husband’s strategic thinking contrasted with the short-term thinking she was prone to.

The long-term focus mattered because the short-term was not easy. According to Shaelyn the first house that she and her husband rented had boarded-up windows, no air conditioning, and was infested with roaches. There were ten adults and two children in the single-family home, and they even paid an extra fee to use the closet, which one of the adults slept in. Shaelyn says that the landlords knew that the living conditions were subpar but that “they took full advantage of anybody that would live in that house. Especially when it comes to people that are desperate.”

She says that most people are here to support loved ones back in Haiti, where gang violence has led to unspeakable trauma like that of the mother whose baby was ripped from her arms and thrown into a fire. Her husband doesn’t like to talk about it. His mother and 12-year-old son are both still there.

“They’re able to harbor their emotions very well,” Shaelyn says with a sense of reverence. “I would never guess these things my husband knows. And usually, it takes a lot for him to speak when he does.” Since ICE began detentions in August, Shaelyn has seen some of her former roommates leave for elsewhere or be detained, and others I spoke with said they saw fewer Haitians in the city, at work, or in the pews.

As the only nonimmigrant in the household, Shaelyn noticed cultural differences between the way she grew up and her new roommates: “A lot of people just knew each other. So anybody that came here, they would want to help each other.”

Shaelyn described how they’d pool money together for big purchases and then the recipient would send monthly payments back to the people who’d loaned the money. “That’s why you have them get restaurants and everything else, and that’s how they grow. They lean on each other, and a lot of us don’t do that… They help each other thrive. That way they’re able to survive.” Her husband’s first car was bought this way.

“But with us,” Shaelyn continued, referencing present-day Americans, “We’re always on defense of okay, can’t trust anybody. No one’s gonna help you. Everybody’s trying to be better than everybody else. Relying on each other is very difficult because everybody’s trying to think of themselves.”

Shaelyn thinks this is partly why she was stuck in a cycle for so long. She remembers her husband looking at her and saying, “Look at the people around you that are trying to help you.” He pointed out that she did have family willing to help, but that she was putting up a defense and wasn’t taking them up on it. She realized that he was right and that the only way to get ahead was to suffer through. She placed her children with family members so that she could work two full time jobs, like her husband was already doing. First, she would work as an inmate supervisor from 6 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. and then at a pharmaceutical factory from 3 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. “I would sleep for three hours a night. I would sit up sleeping just so I could get up for work.” At some point, she started sleeping in her car to save the drive time.

After two years of that schedule she and her husband were able to buy a home.

But despite these sacrifices, they are still struggling, and like so many other working- class Springfield residents, “are still scraping up change.” She reflects on the incentives in our system, and how it’s almost “easier to not work as hard.” When you make less, you are able to get help with things like food stamps and Medicaid, she says. “But as soon as you do hit a threshold, you struggle…the moment you get like $20 over what you’re supposed to, all your help can go away. And that $20 is not necessarily your $600 bill, right?”

My observation is that the conversation about public assistance programs, and in particular benefits cliffs, is often at the heart of angst about immigration. A gig economy worker told me she worries that if she makes a little too much money she might lose Medicaid for her and her son—and then added that she’d heard that Haitians in Springfield automatically qualify. Whatever the actual case, the demoralization associated with these incentives—and the frustration and resentment they inspire—are a real powder keg of the immigration debate. Not necessarily because people aren’t compassionate, but rather because they feel the fallout of what happens when the middle class disappears.

Michael Morris drives us down West Main Street, where he has memories of shopping with his mom when he was a kid. “There was the HVAC business. The tire guy over here—Stan’s Tire. You had the bakery,” he points and starts to list names, recreating a nostalgic frame of Main Street commerce. But now the street depresses him.

“Look at these boarded-up places. Houses that are gone, grass overgrown,” Michael says. “The bank down here even decided after they were robbed one too many times to close. That bank had been there literally all of my life, and now it’s a place where the poor can pay their electric bills.” The old bank sign now reads “HEAP Office,” Home Energy Assistance Program.

“Everything’s focused on the poor,” Michael vents. “Drives me crazy. It’s biblical. We need to take care of the poor, but we focus everything on the poor. We got to start focusing on bigger things. Anything but telling us how poor and impoverished and destitute and desperate we are.”

Michael’s theme on the tour has been this: “Why are we the way we are? A lot of it has to do with what we’ve lost and how we’ve taken it on the chin, and people forgetting how great we once were, and that greatness is still here.” He has a good deal of hope for Springfield, pointing out that pioneering aviation company Electra recently chose the city as the site of its first production facility. And he stresses that renewal will also require “an engaged citizenry” that will do the mundane things that create pride of place.

“Many working-class families helped build this valley in ways that should be honored, remembered, and respected,” Andrew, the lifelong Springfield resident, told me, before expressing his frustration with what he sees as the way that an immigration blame game has become a distraction from real response to present challenges. “What this nation has allowed is for us to be used as a talking point in politics—while watching us decline.”

Shaelyn says that her Haitian friends talk about America as the greatest country, which she understands in a way. But it also baffles her. “I bring this to my husband’s attention all the time: I don’t understand why you guys think this is the greatest country.” She thinks about how hard they’ve worked in order to arrive at what still feels like paycheck to paycheck precarity. Working enough hours to provide for their family comes with the tradeoff of not having time to spend with that family.

“This country is not built for people,” Shaelyn concludes.

As we say goodbye, Shaelyn proudly hefts up a car seat onto the table between us. Her four-month-old daughter smiles a dimpled smile. “My little Haitian-American,” she says.

Shaelyn has to leave because her husband made an appointment with an army recruiter, thinking that maybe that would be a viable route to stability. “He just does not want to struggle. I think the biggest fear is having to struggle.”

This strikes me as a sad sort of assimilation. Welcome to the American working class.

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US-owned steel plant with a plant in Middletown OH begins mass layoffs amid Trump tariffs: In a memo sent by Cleveland-Cliffs to workers, the company explicitly linked the move to Trump’s steel tariffs on Canada, which it said had “significantly shrunk the market” for its products.

The story it linked to was from Newsweek, and carried the headline, “US-owned Canadian steel plants begin mass layoffs amid Trump tariffs.”

As the careful readers you are, you may have noticed from the headline that it is the Canadian plants laying off workers. In fact, the very same company slowing work in Canada had recently announced a $1 billion investment to expand capacity at its Middletown, Ohio plant. The tweet gets this sufficiently mangled that an unsuspecting, ideologically driven pundit might read it and think the story was a chance to dunk on tariffs, when in fact it is a story about tariffs working the way they are supposed to. It almost seems like a clever ploy by someone who wanted to highlight a tariff success and expose the shallowness of the opposition…

Well, friends, The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg is not such a careful reader. He eagerly hammered his “retweet” button for the story, adding the incisive commentary: “Maybe the tariffs were stupid all along?” Oops. Marc Short, chairman of Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom, went with, “Battleground states throughout the heartland feeling the pain of irrational trade policy.”

As men of strong intellectual integrity, I presume both will maintain their commitment to this story as an important one worth highlighting, and using to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of tariffs. At the time of this writing, they have not yet corrected the record and acknowledged the positive result, but that will surely come soon.

Bonus Gosling of the Week: Radio host Erick Erickson showed impressive followership in retweeting both the original story and the Goldberg dunk off the back rim.

GOOD READS FOR YOUR WEEKEND

What a Year of Free Money Meant: Softer Diapers, Clean Laundry, a Visit to Six Flags (New York Times). Yes, basic income experiments consistently fail, public opinion is strongly against, and even past advocates are acknowledging it’s a bad idea. But hey, there’s always money for more basic income experiments. Here, the Times profiles three recipients of a one-year experiment in California. As I wrote long ago, a time-limited experiment says nothing about the long-term effects of a permanent entitlement. The experimenters and journalists continue to struggle with this concept, but it was good to see that one of the three profiled recipients understood intuitively: “One year of payments was ‘just enough time not to get comfortable,’ she said, and the urgency motivated her.”

Silicon Valley’s Dream City Has Crashed Into Small-Town Politics (Wall Street Journal). I’m not one to take the side of wealthy venture capitalists trying to buy their way out of the ordinary democratic process but, I have to be honest, this story makes a pretty strong case that the local political process deserves whatever it gets.

The Welfare State Is Crushing Britain (Wall Street Journal). The UK is in trouble.

What Evangelicals Can Teach Us About Organizing (Eric Blanc, Labor Politics). A really great look at what it takes to build community in modern America, and what institutions associated with opposite sides of the political spectrum have in common and can learn from one another.

TAXES & TARIFFS

Kim Clausing and I disagree on tariffs and have enjoyed debating each other a number of times, but we agree on this: There is a smarter way to tax the rich (Financial Times). Tax capital, folks. This statistic, especially, fascinated me: “Despite having the world’s most successful public companies, the US raises much less from corporate tax (about 2 per cent of GDP less) than other rich countries.”

Arnold Ventures chairman John Arnold makes a strong case that, as a matter of fiscal policy, tariffs are here to stay and businesses should plan accordingly: “Status quo is the strongest force in politics. My expectation is that, despite all the handwringing, the eventual tariff regime will look similar to today’s. That is a 10-15% baseline tariff on most imports, higher rates on countries with blatantly unfair trade practices and/or geopolitical rivals, and industry specific adders on those deemed strategic to national security or economic interests.Most businesses prioritize certainty so they can make investment decisions, forecast expenses, and have confidence in supply chains. That certainty is probably more important than the rates.”

Also on X, Michael Lucci makes a similar point: “Trump’s Transatlantic and trade policies are here to stay.”

I’d suggest this is right for three reasons: First, we need the revenue. Second, tariffs create pro-tariff constituencies that will fight to keep them. Third, the tariff deals that Trump has struck are, by all accounts, advantageous to the United States. Ripping them up out of spite, or on principle, will be difficult to defend.

WOMP WOMP

Marshall Cohen (CNN): “New Reuters poll is brutal for prediction markets.” Score another one for the common sense of the American people, who by a 75% to 8% margin say prediction sites are gambling.

The White House may be staying away, but The FTC Is Beginning to Probe the Sports Gambling Industry (The Washington Sun).

And it turns out common-law liability can work. Buried under lawsuits, Character.ai Files For Bankruptcy—Disney Bids $20 Million After Copyright Dispute (Forbes).

A SURPRISING PRO-FINANCIALIZATION MOMENT

Bloomberg reports: KKR Bans Non-Competes for Lower-Paid US Portfolio Company Staff. Good for them!

Ok, enough of that. Back to our ridiculous story from the world of finance: To Get This Job at McKinsey, You’ll Need to Survive a Debate With AI First (Wall Street Journal):

Though it is all a simulation, the approximately 10-minute conversation with the AI will take place in McKinsey’s very real offices, with partners or interview assessors in the room observing how the candidates do.

…

“The things I’m paying attention to are: Hey, did you hear what they said that was important? Did you act on that? Did you blow through it? Did you come with your agenda and you’re, like, ‘I’m gonna steamroll this answer,’” Zafar said. “What we’re looking for is how do you respond to changing stimuli?”

McKinsey is testing the avatar with undergraduates applying for business-analyst jobs in some North American offices this fall, and hundreds of candidates are likely to participate. If successful, the firm expects to use it for other roles next year.

To clarify, McKinsey is not “testing the avatar with undergraduates,” it is testing the avatar on undergraduates. There’s a difference. This also seems to be one of the most painfully unnecessary overuses of AI out there. One can picture the meeting where the recruiting team assigned to incorporate AI had to come up with it. Just going out on a limb, but maybe the human interviewer could assess “how do you respond to changing stimuli?” through actual human interaction with the human candidate?

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THE OVERCAPACITY STORY EXPLODES

China’s trade surplus this past month went entirely out of control. China’s Exports Soar, Putting Its Trade Surplus on Track for a Record, reports the New York Times, noting that “China’s exports grew last month at the fastest pace in almost any month since the end of the global financial crisis.”

What did this mean for Europe? The South China Morning Post’s Finbarr Bermingham had the numbers: “China’s trade surplus with Germany grew 201.7% in Sept alone (vs Sept 2025); with EU up 52.3%; with France up 251.8%.”

And the Europeans are finally getting serious! More from Bermingham:

EU leaders to ‘urgently’ call for new trade weapons to tackle China shock.

After hybrid car deal, EU needs to rebalance China trade in other sectors, Dombrovskis says.

“A deal halving Chinese hybrid car imports into Europe will have to be followed by the rebalancing of trade in other sectors and better access to the Chinese market for the EU, European Economic Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said ‌on Wednesday.”

And then looking back on the week: “Unanimity in the room that the EU needs to cap Chinese exports across sectors and president of the European Commission presenting a kill switch to instantly cut China from the market that capitals love. Through the looking glass moment for those who have followed this stuff for years. Actions speak louder than words, but I am pretty amazed by how quickly the mood has changed. Largely driven by a shift in Berlin. Many thought for years that nothing would change unless Germany changed. Well, here we are…”

The Brookings Institution’s Robin Brooks shows how this looks on the Chinese side in How China Is Reinventing Its Export Machine, with great charts on how China’s imbalances with other countries are exploding.

Not all other countries, though. There’s this one country that decided enormous imbalances were unhealthy and unsustainable and took action. In that country, the imbalance with China has declined. Hey, that’s us (good chart)! And it’s a reminder that the counterfactual without Trump’s trade policy is not business as usual but the same kind of sharper pain being felt elsewhere. That we have not only held the line but actually made progress is remarkable.

MORE CHIPS, PLEASE

Semiconductor fabs lead the reindustrialization story this week.

• Japan to fund $21B deal to expand chip production in New York (The Hill)

• TSMC Weighs Texas Expansion, Holds Talks on Musk’s Terafab (Wall Street Journal)

Which brings us to your regular reminder that none of this would be happening without the aggressive industrial policy adopted to drive domestic investment in chip production, which is now compounding on itself.

But this isn’t good: ASML’s chip equipment sales to China soar 109% despite US export curb push (SCMP). “The Dutch firm expects China to account for 20 per cent of its total sales this year, even as the U.S. pushes for tighter export restrictions.” The U.S. is right to push for tighter export restrictions, but it’s hard to make that sale to allies when our own government is trying to sell our best chip technology to China at the same time. Which is why the export controls in the NDAA are so important. American Compass’s Chris Griswold published a very good policy brief on that yesterday: Strengthening America’s AI Chip Export Controls.

OK, OK, YOUR WEEKLY CANADA GOOSE

Congratulations to Canada on “Geely Auto Group Mainstream Brand Officially Announces Entry into the Canadian Market.” Probably puts their associate EU membership at risk, but worth it for a closer strategic partnership with China.

Speaking of which, this is fascinating: China’s Unloading of US Bonds Gets Fresh Look as Skeptics Grow (Bloomberg). It seems China may not have been reducing its holdings of U.S. Treasuries, instead just parking them at Canadian banks where they get recorded as Canadian holdings:

Puzzled, Liberman — a mortgage-debt specialist — started asking around. The answer, to his surprise, was always the same. “The smartest people on the Street said, ‘It’s not Canada. It’s the other Canada,’” he said. And by “the other Canada,” he explained, “they meant China.”

“China, the Other Canada.” This seems unwise. I do hope the Canadians reconsider.

Enjoy the weekend!

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Ben Ginsberg, Hoover Institution visiting fellow and former national counsel to the Bush-Cheney presidential campaigns, joins Oren to unpack what he calls the “fraud-suppression industrial complex,” where both parties tell their voters that the other side is trying to steal the election. He and Oren talk through why this is so damaging to faith in our elections, and undercuts turn out across the political spectrum. Finally, they discuss ways to rebuild confidence in our election system.

Further reading:

• “Confidence, Not Faith, in the Ballot Box,“ Trey Trainor, Commonplace

• “Calling Elections Rigged Is Bad Politics and Worse Civics,” Alex Tarascio and David Kochel, Commonplace

The goal of a political campaign is to generate as much enthusiasm as possible among as many voters as possible for casting a ballot for your candidate. In recent years, we have seen a sharp increase in a peculiar strategy for accomplishing this: Politicians tell their voters that an election is rigged and that, regardless of who gets the most votes, the opposing party is going to try to steal it.

Republicans relitigate the 2020 Election and condition confidence in November’s results solely on passing the SAVE America Act’s proof-of-citizenship and voter-ID requirements. Democrats warn their side that the other will “cheat,” “rig the rules,” and “steal the election.” The bet seems to be that outraged partisans will surge to the polls with a righteous fury, but that bet is a bad one. If anything, the tactic not only corrodes the public’s faith in the institution that gives elected officials their power, but also discourages turnout by telling voters that their votes don’t matter.

We both help Republicans win elections for a living. Over and over again, we see that talking to people about their priorities and taking their concerns seriously works. Telling them the game is rigged makes them feel powerless, so they tune out and find something better to do with their time.

Nobody builds a business they expect to fail. Nobody gives money to a candidate they know will lose. People do give money when they believe their contribution could be decisive. The same logic applies to the ballot box. The rigged-election message gives people a reason to stay home that feels righteous rather than lazy.

The voters Republicans most need this fall are the ones for whom “it’s rigged” is not a call to arms but permission to stay home. In a September national survey conducted by Cygnal for RightCount, which tracks election confidence nationally and in several states, about a third of Republicans (34%) say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who says 2020 was stolen. But that group was never in play. But 99% of them also say they would vote for any generic Republican for Congress. These aren’t wobbly voters waiting to be won over, or looking for a push to get out to the polls. They’re very conservative (62%), highly engaged, and were always going to turn out.

The other two-thirds of Republicans aren’t interested in candidates who talk about stolen elections, and 88% will vote for the Republican candidate for Congress. Sixty percent are somewhat conservative or moderate; only 35% are very conservative. This is who Republicans are slipping with. It reflects a real split in the party showing up in other surveys.

In Cygnal’s October National Voter Trends (NVT) survey, 56% of Republicans now call themselves Traditional Conservative Republicans, whereas just 42% described themselves as Trump Republicans. We found a similar pattern. Among the most pro-Trump Republicans, 99% are voting for the Republican for Congress in November. Among Softer Republicans just 88% will do so, and 15% of those aren’t very motivated to vote.

In that same October survey, 9% of the overall electorate fit a profile we call Republican Fatalists, voters who pulled the lever for Trump or the GOP in 2024 but now expect Democrats to win Congress. They represent roughly one in five voters on the Republican side. Only 71% intend to vote for a Republican candidate for Congress, and only 49% say they are definitely voting Republican. Only 31% say their vote makes a difference nationally. These are recent Republican voters who have looked at the political environment and concluded that they got nothing for their vote last time they showed up and the effort may not be worth it. The Republican pitch to bring them back has to make them feel like a trip to the polls might help lead to change. The rigged-election message does the opposite.

Conditioning confidence in elections on passage of the SAVE America Act sends the same message. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of Republicans say that, without the SAVE Act, the election results can’t be trusted. The bill won’t pass before November, so the 2026 midterms will be run under substantially the same rules as 2024. Perhaps because of the outcome that year, only 15% of Republicans believe fraud changed it. But in rallying support for the bill, Republican leaders have asked people to vote while telling them not to trust the result.

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Georgia’s Senate runoffs in January 2021 showed what this rhetoric produces better than any survey can. At the end of his first term, Trump spent weeks telling supporters that mail voting could not be trusted and the system was rigged. Senator David Perdue received about 250,000 fewer votes in the runoff than he had in November. (Kelly Loeffler gained votes, but only because her November race was a 20-candidate jungle primary. The Republicans in that race combined still lost about 230,000 votes.) Both Republicans lost and the Senate flipped. The evidence that rigged-election messaging increases turnout among persuadable voters does not exist. The evidence that it depresses turnout is accumulating.

Voters tell us what would move them. In September, 26% of likely voters named inflation and cost of living as their top priority. That figure climbed to 32% in October. In RightCount’s national poll, only 8% chose election integrity and voting reform. That 8% skews very conservative, over 65, and already voting. Talking to them about 2020 is not an act of persuasion, it’s an indulgence: entertainment for people watching cable news. Every minute a candidate spends talking about voter rolls is a minute not spent on grocery prices. Voters are practically screaming that they want their government to focus on lowering prices.

A party that fails to meet voters where they are shows it is out of touch. Candidates can still talk about election integrity, because voters do support election reform. Voter ID draws 70% support. Proof of citizenship to register draws 73%, including majorities of Independents and a meaningful share of Democrats. State-run elections beat federal control 59–32.

Statewide surveys Cygnal conducted for RightCount Action in Iowa and Texas make the distinction concrete. Thirty-nine percent of Iowans and 42% of Texans believe fraud changed the 2020 national results. Ask about their own state’s 2020 election and those numbers fall to 7% in Iowa and 17% in Texas. People trust what they know. Both states already require voter ID. Both already check their rolls for noncitizens.

The candidate who tells voters what their state already does right and frames federal legislation as extending what works is running on election reform. That argument assumes the system can work, because most voters in most states believe their own system does.

The candidate who calls the whole thing rigged is making a different argument. He is presenting the system as broken beyond the reach of the people he is asking to participate in it. If he is a Republican, he is telling those Republican Fatalists that they are right to stay home on Election Day or “forget” to mail in an early ballot.

Leaders on both sides are doing exactly what they accuse the other of doing and profiting from the clicks, likes, and fundraising dollars the outrage generates. This rhetoric has had an effect. In September, 35% of voters, including 40% of Republicans and 32% of Democrats and Independents, expected there to be widespread fraud and process errors that impact election results in the midterms.

American political institutions survived the stress tests of the last decade. The courts ruled. Congress certified. The transfers of power happened. The guardrails held. Most voters still believe that elections are legitimate and the final word on who governs. But a large and growing minority in each party no longer does. Political culture has proven far more fragile than institutions. Voting depends on that culture more than any other institution, because it isn’t compulsory. People have to believe that showing up makes a difference.

Our political culture must recover the shared belief that voting is the necessary, impartial mechanism through which citizens exercise political power. Politicians who undermine that belief are making a strategic mistake and destroying the only source of legitimacy they have.

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