“Earlier this month—on May 7th—British voters put Labour to the sword in elections across England, Wales, and Scotland. The results are indicative of a political realignment, one that British political historian Stephen Davies forecasted more than a decade ago, and which he sets out in thoughtful detail in his latest book, The Great Realignment: Why the New Right is Here to Stay.” (05/26/26)
“This year marks the centennial of zoning in the United States, when the Supreme Court upheld comprehensive municipal land-use restrictions over the claims of property owners. The decision, Euclid v. Ambler Realty, was a milestone in the progressives’ campaign to overcome constitutional impediments to their plans for social engineering. In the ensuing century, zoning fundamentally altered the geography of American life, turning what had just become an urban-majority nation into a suburban one. Critics on both the libertarian right and woke left condemn zoning as a back-door version of apartheid, a stealthy way to keep immigrants and blacks out of ‘desirable’ neighborhoods.” (05/26/26)
“‘I helped set in motion a revolution that aims to rebuild something like a true liberal democracy in America,’ Barry C. Lynn wrote two years ago in Harper’s. The claim is notable less for being impossibly grandiose than for being more or less correct. Lynn is the intellectual godfather of what is now known as the neo-Brandeisian movement, which identifies corporate consolidation as the singular, villainous force behind everything that has gone wrong in the United States. … The effects of his revolution on the party and its ability to govern are far greater than many intellectuals, politicians, and staffers seem to grasp. To attribute all problems to a single cause is to reject every solution but one.” (05/26/26)
Source: Fox News
by Carlos Trujillo & Alberto Martinez
“On May 20, 1902, the Cuban flag flew for the first time over an independent country. One hundred and twenty-four years later, the Cuban people are still not free. Every president before Donald Trump either did nothing about Cuba, did too little, or did too much for the regime. Trump is the first to recognize that the regime is a threat to America itself and to resolve to confront it once and for all. That his predecessors failed to do so is not only the Cuban people’s tragedy. It is ours. Cuba’s communist regime is a designated State Sponsor of Terrorism. It ran two of the most damaging espionage operations against the United States in modern memory. It was the intelligence backbone of the Maduro narco-state. It has served as a coordinating hub for the migration flows and drug routes flooding American communities. The suffering Havana exports has cost American lives.” (05/26/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Karthik Sankaran
“For all the uncertainty about what will happen next on the military and diplomatic front in the Iran war, there is certainty about what has already happened on the economic front. And it is not good.” (05/26/26)
“A two-millennia-old institution with one foot in the Roman Empire challenges Silicon Valley’s masters of AI and automation to do better. That’s the generic read on Pope Leo XIV’s debut encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, dramatized by photos from the Vatican of the pontiff shaking hands with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. And that’s true enough: ‘artificial intelligence’ is right there in the encyclical’s subtitle, and many of its 245 paragraphs are devoted to the topic. Yet Magnifica Humanitas only incidentally concerns the promise and peril of the AI revolution. A closer examination reveals that Leo’s ultimate project is nothing less than a defense of moral and political universalism — the collective struggle for ‘a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason,’ as the pope puts it — just when universal reason is menaced on every side by various irrationalisms.” (05/26/26)
“I’ve spent much of my career as a historian criticizing any idealization of 1950s marriages. Domestic violence and child abuse were much more common then than today. It was perfectly legal for a man to forcibly rape his wife. And depression among homemakers was so widespread that by the end of the decade, physicians had labeled it the ‘housewife’s syndrome.’ … But I now believe I’ve been too dismissive of such nostalgia. The sense of loss that underlies it is not ‘all in people’s heads.’ Instead, I’ve come to see it as an example of what physicians call ‘referred pain,’ like when a problem in one part of the body is experienced as pain elsewhere. So too, I think, much of the pain we feel in our social and family relations originates in a deeper part of the economy and the body politic.” (05/26/26)
“In a controversial conversation platformed by the New York Times and recently discussed in The Atlantic, streamer Hasan Piker implied that he might steal a car if it carried no consequences. In the interview, author Jia Tolentino also casually admits to shoplifting lemons from Whole Foods. Although petty theft is common, the interview clip spread quickly because the justification for looting felt oddly assertive. Piker referred to the iconic anti-piracy campaign that sought to use moral vibes (rather than rational arguments) against taking physical property to convince people to further control their impulses and not copy music without paying. The anti-piracy clip ‘You Wouldn’t Steal a Car’ indicates an implicit assumption from 2004 that American society was broadly agreed on the stability of physical property. In other words, most Americans do not think ‘property is theft.'” (05/26/26)
