“By any conventional measure of power, the U.S. remains formidable. Its military power is unmatched, and it still possesses the world’s largest national economy. Yet power in the 21st century has never rested on material capabilities alone. For decades, America’s true strategic advantage lay in something less tangible but more potent: its capacity to attract. Its ideals, openness and professed commitment to universal values conferred a moral authority that made alliances easier, its influence deeper and its leadership more legitimate. That advantage is now being squandered.” (03/05/26)
“In March 1776, while the redcoats remained under siege in Boston, a torrent of copy about the colonies continued to flow from the printing press in London. Every notable British writer felt obliged to take a stand for or against the American cause and on the rights and wrongs of war. On March 9, there appeared the weightiest contribution of all …. It was ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,’ by Scottish polymath Adam Smith. … Europe’s empires in America had their origins, Smith wrote, in ‘folly and injustice,’ the thirst for gold that led the conquistadors to Mexico and Peru. Smith thought British colonies to be the best of a bad lot, ‘only somewhat less illiberal and oppressive than that of any of the rest.'” (03/05/26)
“The guilty verdict Tuesday in the murder-by-proxy trial of a father whose son is accused of killing four people in a school shooting in Georgia sets a devastating and absurd precedent for imprisoning people for essentially being bad parents. Colin Gray, 55, was found guilty in a case involving his son Colt Gray’s alleged actions before the latter’s guilt has been determined.” (03/05/26)
“I’ve written in the past about how Hegseth’s vision of the American military is preoccupied with an ideal of the male form — one that’s a kind of modern mishmash of Spartan imagery and homoerotic fascist machismo. But that is only one facet of the Trumpian right’s fixation on the body. Another example is the now well-known phenomenon of Mar-A-Lago Face, wherein the women of the right doctor their appearances with filler, cosmetic surgeries, and absurd excesses of makeup. My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li has astutely observed that the prevalence of steroid use and plastic surgery on the right constitutes its own form of gender-affirming care in an era of reactionary fantasies. What matters here to me is that the body is the primary subject of Trumpian politics.” (03/05/26)
“A House committee voted Wednesday to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Five Republicans joined with all Democrats in support of a motion to call the nation’s top law enforcement official up to Capitol Hill for questioning, and the motion itself was offered by GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. It underscores the increasing frustration with Bondi among members of her own party, catalyzed in part by the Epstein saga. The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.” (03/04/26)
“aby Boomers should be remembered in domestic terms for enervating the U.S. economy with Total Boomer Luxury Communism. That generation vacuumed up current and future revenues to fund their luxe retirements, while young people struggle to find good jobs and homes while staring down a desolate future of debt and constraints. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is very much a Boomer foreign policy, and in a similar sense. The second Trump administration has lit small fires across the world and let them burn, while accruing the costs of putting them out well into the future.” (03/05/26)
“This essay was prompted by my reading of John Passmore’s book, The Perfectibility of Man, which was first published in 1969. I read the book mainly because of James M. Buchanan’s suggestion that ‘it remains the most definitive work on the history of ideas’ relating to the extent to which classical liberalism depends on some presumption that man is perfectible.” (03/05/26)
