Trump’s vanity projects keep steering us away from the Hitler comparison and toward Stalin.

Almost a year ago I embarked on an essay to test the validity of comparing Trump to Hitler, only to find Stalin the more illuminating parallel. Hitler was a ruthless ideologue, leading a racially defined nationalist movement toward conquest and empire. Stalin was different. His ideology mattered, certainly, and his ambitions were hardly small. But increasingly the Communist Party, the Soviet state and even history itself revolved around Stalin—his power, his survival and his personal aggradizement.

You may know where I’m going with this.

Architectural historian and preservationist Richard Guy Wilson recently agreed to discuss Trump’s building program. Wilson is Commonwealth Professor Emeritus of Architectural History at the University of Virginia, where he taught for more than four decades, including historic preservation. His scholarship ranges from Thomas Jefferson and the American Renaissance to modernism and preservation; he has served on the National Historic Landmarks Committee, contributed to the official centennial history of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and lectured on the architectural history of the White House.

In interviewing Richard again, I encountered a similar redirect to the one I had encountered thinking about Hitler and Stalin. I was expecting to discuss the different aims Trump might have in desecrating this or that national landmark. Wilson kept bringing me back to something simpler. For Trump there need not be some larger crime of ruthless idealism or purposefulness. It is something much more familiar, although at an almost unimaginable scale: Trump’s “capital beautification” is about the glorified “me.”

So much so that it can be as baffling as it is enraging.

“He’s an emperor”

William Marquand: You’re both a historian and preservationist. Do those go hand in hand? If you’re a historian, do you pretty much automatically not want stuff like this to happen?

Richard Guy Wilson: Well, there might be the pro-Trump historians, you know. History is so wide-ranging. It can be liberal or conservative, accepting or exclusionary. But this is so anti-what has been developed in Washington, D.C. I just don’t know what to say.

WM: What level of care is normally taken with federal historic properties, versus properties Trump has dealt with before in Manhattan?

RGW: If there’s stuff that he owns in Manhattan, there are still restrictions. There are restrictions on how tall you can go, and you have to get a permit to tear something down. Depending on what neighborhood it’s in, it’s not just height, but also what it can look like. It has to go through an advisory board.

But he is emperor.

WM: Well, with enough money and coercion and arm-twisting, a normal developer might be able to exercise his will over something in Manhattan. But what are the hurdles when you’re dealing with property as sacred as this, in the middle of America’s headquarters?

RGW: He shouldn’t be doing it. But he’s the emperor. Or the king, or whatever you want to call him. He thinks that he has all of this. I just don’t understand.

WM: He’s really a tenant, and he sees himself as an owner.

RGW: Yes.

A career spent saving history

WM: Your career has spanned the era when America really learned and developed preservation. There were preservation efforts much earlier, of course, but it really became a methodology in the last fifty or sixty years. What has been your role in that?

RGW: I got into architectural history beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. I got my Ph.D. at Michigan, and I did a book on an area in Ann Arbor called the Old West Side. That was really a revolutionary type of thing.

It was before the National Register had the ability to register areas rather than just individual buildings, and this was one of the very first ones. So I got involved there, and I’ve been involved in historic preservation, or preserving older buildings, ever since in different ways.

What is interesting is the way it has evolved. We are saving much more recent buildings than we used to. It used to be just the old junk, you know. There has been this evolution that has been really considerable.

And it is political. There’s no doubt about that. Certain buildings can be very political if you’re trying to save them.

But his is such an egotistical method that it isn’t about the dear world. It’s about him, and what I can do, and what we’re going to have my name on, and so forth.

WM: Are most historians preservationists? Or at least most architectural historians and people in that world?

RGW: I would say 80 or 90 percent. But you never can tell. There can be things that come up where they say, “I don’t want anything to do with that,” and other people say, “No, that’s really important.”

WM: I’ve noticed there are at least a few architects staffing Trump’s review boards or even making drawings for these projects. It’s rather surprising. On the other hand, having come through two architectural schools, I know preservation isn’t necessarily that popular among architects.

RGW: That’s true. But it has evolved. There is more of a sense today of history—saving history—than there was a while ago.

Making his own history

WM: There are architectural firms that do nothing but the kind of buildings Trump is talking about. How would you describe that? Neo-historical? Classical?

RGW: There are firms that specialize in historic imagery and that sort of thing. “Neo-traditional” is what they sometimes call it.

WM: When Trump first got elected, there was a lot of talk about his being anti-science. Is it fair to say now that he is anti-history as well?

RGW: Yeah, I think you could say that.

Or is it that he wants to make his own history?

WM: That may be closer to it.

RGW: He’s converting the history into him, you know. Making it that he is the person who is—

But I mean, that’s his ego. Everything has to center around me.

Ben Franklin's Ray-Ban glasses

WM: When I was first learning about preservation, a preservation architect gave me an example. He said: If you had the choice between seeing up-close Ben Franklin’s actual glasses—the ones he wore—or seeing a pair that had just been made that looked exactly like them, which would you rather visit a museum to see?

RGW: The thing is that we’ve had a big shift. There is the saving of history, the saving of the past, and then there is the recreating of that.

And that is, to some degree, what he is up to.

But of course, that’s what an awful lot of architecture has been over the years.

WM: True. In fact, I’d have to say the architect Bernard Maybeck was into that.

RGW: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

WM: So what would you say: Well, Maybeck did it. Donald Trump can do it too?

RGW: Yeah, I think so. I don’t know.

WM: I suppose the question becomes what values are going into it. Maybeck distilled essences out of history. Trump seems to have more of a glamour or surface appreciation for history.

RGW: I’ve never been convinced that he’s that well educated.

Gold, grandeur, and self-image

WM: Take Mar-a-Lago. That’s a lot of history. What do you think about it?

RGW: It’s an important house. There’s no doubt about that. And that’s the reason why I think he bought it.

You know: I’m now an emperor!

WM: What do you make of his fascination with gold surfaces? You’re not only a historian, but you’ve spent your career thinking about aesthetics.

RGW: It just shows his arrogance and his ego, that he’s going to hook himself up with all of this stuff.

WM: Isn’t it interesting that the rhetoric of his followers is so anti-elitist, and yet here he is, the king of gilded interiors? How could you have something more elitist than that?

RGW: Well, he’s it. This is a man with an oversized ego. Gigantic.

What cannot simply be put back

WM: What have we lost at the White House? We’ve lost the east side of the White House, and the site itself has been treated almost like a cluttered backyard. If he slaps up some new construction, what have we lost that we can’t get back?

RGW: The problem is the space that’s around there.

The history of the White House is a complicated affair, beginning with Hoban’s design and then going through some evolution in the nineteenth century. Then you get Teddy Roosevelt, you get McKim, Mead & White coming in to clean up the thing, and then there have been others.

But the space there around it is so important.

And now to tear down something, which he has, and to put up something—

I just don’t know.

Can it be undone?

WM: Let’s go back to the ballroom. Suppose it moves forward, gets built, and then two years from now the political mood is: This guy was not good for us, he didn’t ask permission, and we want to take this thing down. Can it simply be taken down?

RGW: Well, I think so. But again, it’s a very complicated thing. He’s supposed to follow a system, which he did not. So what’s the solution to this?

And again, what is this thing going to look like?

WM: And do you see the proposed Trump arch as basically the same genre?

RGW: The arch thing—I can’t believe the damn thing will be built.

It’s one thing to be right there on the grounds of the White House. But just to run around town and put up whatever you want?

I just can’t believe that this would happen.

WM: Nobody ever believed someone would want to use this much executive power or exercise this kind of unilateral decision-making.

RGW: Yeah. Oh, I agree.

What comes after the damage?

WM: Is there any good that can come out of this? Sometimes people look back on rough periods and say something terrible happened, but it also changed the game and produced some benefit. Is there any good angle to this?

RGW: No, I don’t really. I don’t think that there is much.

But that’s just me.

WM: What about afterward? Can you imagine safeguards coming out of this to make sure nothing like it happens again?

RGW: That would be my hope.

WM: I keep thinking about disasters. After Hurricane Andrew hit Miami, building codes changed dramatically. Sometimes a disaster exposes the weakness of the system, and afterward safeguards are created that hadn’t seemed necessary before.

Maybe that’s one possibility here.

RGW: That would be my hope.

WM: I’ll keep monitoring the situation with you, Richard.

RGW: Yeah. And if you need more information—or more lies and makeup—ask me.

One year ago this week, the first Musings post - on the climate-change-induced flooding in Texas - arrived in friends’ email inboxes. What a year!

I appreciate that, with all the clicking and reading we’re encouraged to do by thousands of friends and strangers every week, you find time to open and read Musings in your mailboxes, Facebook accounts and Substack apps. Thank you.

Today I have a few comments about last week’s California vs. Midwest food-culture comparison, but first, a couple of notes on the anniversary.

One lesson of the first year is that Musings has become pretty much what I hoped: something sustainable and fun to do, with a loyal, steady group of readers. I’ve also learned that the pieces that work best are the ones that start with something specific - a place, a person, a movie, a political moment, even Disney - and use it to get at something larger. I’ve become less interested in simply having an opinion about the week’s events and more interested in finding the connections between politics, culture, class, architecture, history and personal experience that aren’t quite as obvious at first glance.

My readership may not be chatty, but it has ranged from 140 per week to 500. That exceeds my expectations. Substack says the email “open rate” started out, and has remained, very strong.

For the second year, I’d like to keep Musings’ character but make the publication a bit more conversational. Beginning this fall, the first and third Tuesdays of the month will generally carry the more focused Musings essays (full access for unpaid and paid subscribers), while the second and fourth Tuesdays will carry shorter “After the Essay” posts (sometimes partial access for unpaid subscribers). These follow-ups will sometimes explain how a piece came together, sometimes respond to readers, and sometimes revisit a subject after events have moved on. Today is an example.

I’d also like to gradually widen the circle of readers, mostly the old-fashioned way: through friends, acquaintances and readers passing something along when it makes them think of someone else. I’m pondering a minor branding change, but nothing dramatic. The idea is simply to build on what’s working and see where a second year takes it.

Coming soon: construction on the White House proves that Trump will do anything he wants, no matter how sacred the subject. But it also shows how little pushback he’ll get from Congress. That leaves tradition and law to protect America’s architectural heritage. So coming soon: two historical preservation and architecture experts who will help make sense of the messy reality of the White House ballroom fiasco.

Serendipity and Food Culture

Back when I was starting an architectural lecture series for the Maybeck Foundation in Berkeley, a new friend - who taught at City College of San Francisco - kept encouraging me to trust the power of serendipity in coming up with good ideas, speakers and topics. I nodded along and mostly went on as before.

At some point I had to be honest with myself: I didn’t really know what the word meant. Everyone else seemed to. I looked it up - privately.

Serendipity wasn’t big in the methodologies I learned in architecture school. Of course it drives all architectural design in some way, but it’s not called out as a philosophical method.

No one over fifty could deny its power. The importance of trusting the winding of the stream has been proven to me countless times, especially as a parent. Musings is largely built on it. Take last week’s post, for example.

I started out thinking I’d reflect on food culture through the lens of learning to cook, then describe how my outlook developed - looking back at food in California and in our “new” home in St. Louis.

We’d just finished a fun family reunion for my wife’s relatives in Frankfort, Michigan, on Lake Michigan’s northwest mainland. I figured the drive home, through Columbus, Ohio, for a site visit for my architecture work, would give me time to think it through and write it up.

I did get some time - but not enough. As we wound our way through Michigan, first Holland, then Ann Arbor, time just wasn’t happening. We continued on to Columbus, to a longtime friend’s home just north of the city. By the time I’d finished a few work meetings near the airport, our trip was nearly done.

Returning home, I realized something fortuitous: I’d wanted to characterize Midwest food culture and compare it to California’s, and I’d just had a food tour of the Midwest. We didn’t eat expensive food, but we ate extremely well.

I happen to have an advanced, powerful serendipity app on my phone. It’s called Yelp. It was our guide.

I don’t love many apps. Most are a bit buggy, and I end up irritated that, with all the resources big tech has, they can’t perfect the things an average user actually needs.

(For all you techies: I know that sentence may contain an error or two. But my point is that Yelp delivers - partly because it lets us explore, use our own values, persistence and judgment, and it almost always pays off.)

Take Ann Arbor. We’d heard it might be a charming campus town. Instead, it’s more like a mega-campus Berkeley - some charming areas, a good bit of ragged edge. Like Berkeley, it had plenty of restaurants that were fun and a good value, but not necessarily exceptional food. The places to eat in Ann Arbor weren’t jumping out at us.

So I hit Yelp. I plowed through the “Sponsored Results,” which looked appealing at first. Then I decided: why not sort by five-star ratings and a 2–3 dollar sign price range? Why settle for less?

True - it’s not exactly serendipity when you rely on 237 five-star user reviews. But I’ve relied on greater endorsements and user recommendations in Yelp and other apps and been sorely disappointed. Sometimes you are just out of sync with the herd. Or the ‘herd’ is a fabricated internet sales ploy. I guess the serendipity lies in trying something new, not a national franchise. Yelp increases the chance of rewarding your desire for the new and untried.

So… we wanted Ann Arbor’s food scene to speak to us, not the other way around.

We landed on something called Frita Batidos. Apparently it was Cuban.

My son and I have a favorite Cuban restaurant back home in Indialantic, Florida. My wife and I were intrigued - great reviews, though neither of us knew what a batido was. I was intrigued to find out.

After GPS routed us round and round some construction detours, we parked, walked in, and found something slightly similar to the Mexican restaurant from last week’s essay: a modernist space but this one bright and sparkling white, with a methodical order-at-the-counter process and fun outdoor cafe seating.

Martha got a black bean and seared tofu bowl. I went for the chicken verde.

Both were outstanding. But what arrived first was our Fresh Lime Batido - a Cuban milkshake, or blended ice drink, as far as I can tell from this one instance; I still haven’t looked it up.

When we moved to St. Louis, we discovered frozen custard - an elevated experience over the standard milkshake, though a good milkshake can be plenty satisfying too. The batido was in that same league: slightly creamier in texture, but also more watery, if that makes sense. The tropical flavors hit the mark. Every expectation of a cold, refreshing Cuban-Caribbean drink experience was met and exceeded.

I got onto this track by describing how last week’s article evolved, and how one of life’s great lessons is the power of serendipity - the power of accepting and welcoming what comes our way, and making something of it. Inviting the unexpected.

When it comes to the good we can find in people, in their sincere ideas and creations, in seemingly random life events, that’s a good practice to keep. Inviting the ingenuity and talent apparent in those Midwest restaurants was an example.

But when the unexpected is the demolition and desecration of a third of the White House, and the construction of a gaudy, gilded front-yard play structure for the elite, forced through by an entitled trust-fund baby, I’m a little less excited about serendipity - a little less inviting of whatever comes our way.

I’ll be looking forward to putting together an interview with some top thinkers on what historical architecture means to us, and if they agree that what Trump is forcing on the American people is one of his greatest frauds. Please stay tuned.

Comments are now open to paid and unpaid subscribers.

The first Musings post was August 28, 2025. With it came some thematic, introductory artwork that listed five things I hoped to discuss: politics, architecture, climate change, food and, occasionally, The Chosen.

Today I’m going to—finally—make good on my promise. For any foodies out there feeling cheated.

I find the contrast between suburban Northern California and Midwestern culture interesting. Readers may find some things they assume about the two confirmed and be surprised by others. I’ll take a look at several dimensions: grocery costs, my personal COVID milestone, fast-food culture, the farm-to-table movement, and finally some cultural touchpoints for thinking about the two regions.

Surprise: Food Economics

First, a surprise: economics. Food—groceries, that is—is not that much less expensive in St. Louis than in San Francisco’s East Bay. If you live in St. Louis and you and your spouse are picking up and going to graduate school at Berkeley, with housing covered by scholarships or relatives, don’t worry. You can afford to eat ok in Berkeley on a St. Louis budget. But you do have to be comfortable with cooking.

Outside of that comparison, Northern California is much more expensive, but nothing like the disparity in housing. When we moved to St. Louis in 2013, paying 75% less for housing, I figured food would be a couple dozen percent less expensive. No such luck. However, it appears that restaurant food, which was fairly comparable when we moved in 2013, is now around 25% more expensive in Northern California.

Restaurant food, of course, is expensive everywhere compared with eating in. So it may have been partly economics and partly sheer curiosity and fascination that, during the pandemic in West County St. Louis in 2020, something just as surprising happened: I became a foodie. Not really the family “chef”—just a cook.

COVID Made Me a Cook

Like so many others, I started working from home. With the savings in commute time, I decided I was no longer going to go through life afraid of cooking. I bought subscriptions to New York Times Cooking for recipes and America’s Test Kitchen for techniques and recipes, along with the recipe app Paprika.

I went from empty Paprika folders to around 700 recipes after six years. In my “Daily Rotation” subfolder are about 40 recipes that my wife and I have grown to love. I make a from-scratch meal probably five or six times per week.

That, in turn, has given me ideas about food culture—especially the differences between the Left Coast and the Midwest.

Fast Food and the Roadside Landscape

What could a New York Times recipe app possibly have to say about the differences in food culture I experienced after moving from California?

This: After seven years of spending a basic percentage of our income on fast food in St. Louis, I decided that was no more for us.

In the East Bay, there was legacy approach to fast-food franchises along the sides of roads. If it had been built by the seventies or eighties, it seemed, fine. But there was a kind of freeze on new fast-food franchises along the roads in dense commercial areas. When Chick-fil-A found a spot to open near Walnut Creek, it was a cultural event. Otherwise, there just wasn’t a fast-food culture in quite the way there is in St. Louis.

In the Midwest, there seems to be less active distress over the harms of fast-food culture. Most suburban areas are very car-centric, and the national brands hype the pull and appeal of their colorful boxes and lighted plastic signs along our main streets. The pull—the loud colors, the images in media that they build in our minds—has a formidable power that seems unabated.

Berkeley and the Farm-to-Table Revolution

One thread of culture that seems to tie the two regions together is their acceptance of the remarkable farm-to-table movement, with origins, it just so happens, in Maybeck country, in the heart of Berkeley.

In the late nineties, when we were aiming to start a major preservation campaign for Bernard Maybeck’s grand Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, a key development was that the city’s mayor appointed Elizabeth Goldstein as head of its Recreation and Parks Department. Goldstein just happened to have run the West Coast division of the National Trust for Historic Preservation—a credential we couldn’t have dreamed up. She made space for our little start-up, which turned out great for both parties.

When a board member of mine heard about it, he took me to Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the legendary Alice Waters restaurant I couldn’t afford to visit.

Waters believed in serving dishes made from the best, ripest produce and raw ingredients available from nearby farms and food sources—daily—rather than forming menus months in advance around a chef’s favorite specialties. It was perhaps one of the strongest influences of our lifetimes on food culture, with vast, far-reaching effects throughout the food supply chain.

Numerous pockets of the Midwest, with their agricultural culture and often liberal, anti-fast food approach to things, was very receptive.

I visited a restaurant in the middle of Illinois yesterday called Firefly, with “Farm & Table” as its tagline. Started in 2006, it sits a mile from a small-town off-ramp from Interstate 70 but seems to exist in its own world, surrounded by cornfields and generous, artfully planned grassy landscaping. It had a relaxed, modernist clubhouse feel and served one of the best vegetable entrées I’ve had.

Restaurants with this energy are common in St. Louis and Chicago. In fact, one might say that Panera, or St. Louis Bread Company, now a national leader in fast-casual cuisine, emulated some of this spirit in a more corporate way.

You Eat With Your Eyes First

The beautifully designed natural setting of Firefly brings up another important topic. I’ve never forgotten the great line in chef culture: “You eat it with your eyes before you eat it with your mouth.”

This points to the importance of setting and concept—what we perceive with our other senses—and not just the appearance of a dish on the plate.

For instance, Chez Panisse has a very Maybeckian, woodsy aesthetic that comports well with the naturalism of Waters’s philosophy. We also saw that in the trays and details of Brassica, a fantastic small Columbus, Ohio, chain that takes farm-to-table into the realm of Mediterranean fast casual.

The Midwest Is Not “Behind”

I’m forced to mention here another virtue of Midwest food culture—or its culture in general.

It’s true that the Midwest has a struggling kind of feel to it, especially compared with California, with its vast wealth, money for arts and food, and, in most places, their sparkling downtowns. But the Midwest totally competes in ingenuity and coolness.

I’ve seen so many cafés, amazing music venues, restaurants and museums in the Midwest. What the region struggles with across large parts of its historic cityscapes, it makes up for remarkably in pockets of incredible creativity and hip cultural moves. These are not “behind” California at all and, often, surpass it, I would say.

Ratatouille, The Bear, and Two Versions of Cool

Here’s an interesting mass-media comparison: Pixar’s Ratatouille and FX’s The Bear. One cultivated in the Bay Area, the other in Chicago.

An architecture-trained friend of mine modeled many scenes in Ratatouille and told me that some of Pixar’s research for the kitchen scenes came from visits to the famous French Laundry north of San Francisco.

In general, there are very strong conservative, classic European- and East Coast-derived cultural elements in haute California culture, and the film itself testifies to that—based in Paris and all about French food. Here’s one of our best-kept secrets: Northern California is not all DEI, trans teenagers and Waymo self-driving taxis.

On the other hand, the Midwest has on-the-edge progressive examples like The Bear, filmed in a super-modest and yet super-modern interior on a nondescript avenue in Chicago. Modern architectural design even plays a surprising central role in the ending of The Bear.

Which is all to say that, depending on your cherry-picking, the Midwest can seem to be a leader in cool, while California can also be staid and much more classic in feel. Perhaps they are both more alike than we might realize. Because we are much more alike than we realize.

Maybe They’re States of Mind

I’ll end with an charming example of that.

A friend took us to a Mexican restaurant in a small, struggling town in central Ohio, north of Columbus and about a forty-minute drive from Springfield, Ohio. Yes, near Springfield, where a year and a half ago we were told by the President and Vice President that Haitians were eating pets. (Sorry to bring that up in an article on food culture.)

I had to wonder.

Playing the restaurant critic, I was expecting the typical Mexican restaurant with good, hot food and a modest, cliche’d Mexican atmosphere. Instead, it was a remarkable mix of modern planning, Mexican architectural motifs and a sort of “street modern” art on the walls.

I marveled at the heavy timber trellis, usually rendered in restaurants with lightweight 4x4 members, not serious, dark-stained 8x8s. My quesadilla was delicious, the vegetables not only tasty but perfectly cooked, with a bit of crispness left. The restaurant is thriving and considered probably the top restaurant in town.

With the immigrant, south-of-the-border heritage, well-prepared food and cutting-edge feel of the atmosphere, I had to admit: maybe both the Midwest and the Left Coast were more states of mind than separate populations, cuisines and cultures.

Cartoon from Out of Line by Donald Watson

Part of my changes for the second year will be making the essays on most second and fourth Tuesdays follow-ups to the previous essay. Sometimes they may be behind-the-scenes looks at how an essay took shape; other times they may revisit how the story has developed since publication.

So today I want to take a personal look at Decency and Wealth, last week’s essay.

That piece gave me something I needed: a chance to talk about wealth and inequality from an individual perspective, not merely as a social ill. Inequality is, to me, one of the largest storm clouds on our horizon. But I also wanted to ask what all of this means for how we actually see and treat individual people.

It was a troublemaker from the beginning.

What exactly was my motive in choosing the topic?

I’ve been taught from my earliest years of memory that we are all reflections of the divine. I won’t go much further into religion here, but egalitarianism is not something that attracted me after reading about it or hearing a few lecturers or sermons.

I’ve never really allowed myself to think that, ultimately, “he” or “she” simply wasn’t cut from the same cloth as me and mine. 1

Read more

Coming Soon: As regular readers may be expecting, this is our anniversary month at Musings, and we’ll be reflecting on what the past year—and Substack itself—hath wrought.

This week, I wanted to take up an issue I keep raising without ever quite addressing: if the times call for repairing the social wrongs produced by class divisions, what does that mean for the way we view the individuals within those classes? Do we really have to take sides—as workers, family members, or observers?

Next week, I’ll reflect further on this essay. But my mid-month piece will look back more broadly at the past year: what has been rewarding about moving from architecture into regular public writing, what architectural thinking contributes to these essays, and why Musings has become a sustainable and enjoyable project.

___

Decency and Wealth

Class and wealth aren’t taught in schools. But of course that’s often where they’re first learned. It’s not something I’ve studied at any length, but like most people, long after graduation, I’ve thought about it.

We learn at school that there’s often — not always — a link between wealth and popularity. Between wealth and grades, wealth and extracurricular accomplishments.

But I also suspect most of us learn that there’s minimal linkage between class and decency. That’s a problem, because today’s exaggerated wealth inequality is spawning a lot of resentment toward wealth. That may be why dismal moral examples like Elon Musk have become its pop culture paradigm.

It’s hard, but important, not to judge individuals by class — to resist the reflex of assuming wealth means someone is greedy or heartless, or that a lack of wealth makes someone virtuous or unentitled. If we’re after a more egalitarian society, it’s fairness we’re after, not easy ways to tag and label people.

Here’s a challenge: look back across your life and think about the decency attribute. Consider the everyday paragons of humanity you’ve encountered, even if only for a brief moment. When I do that, what comes to mind are people who saw me as an individual — who didn’t seem to feel any barrier between me and them, and went out of their way to be considerate, candid, or “real.” There’s a warm glow attached to those memories. Their presence struck an unexpected chord.

Paragons

I’ve had a few bosses who’d qualify, but one — now deceased — was a total gem. He worked in a small niche in construction: serving as an expert witness in construction litigation. He drove me around in a bright yellow Corvette, and was encouraging, fair-minded, and principled. He had our family over for a party once, and I was amazed how he sought out my wife and kids to welcome them. He hadn’t had a chance to talk to our son or daughter, but as we left he tracked us to the car and respectfully coaxed them to shake his hand — almost with a lump in his throat, as if he saw them, teens at the time, as sacred beings he felt honored to be connected with in some way.

A woman with far less means had me over to her home once, to gauge my fit for a charity board she ran. There was a special atmosphere there. She scolded her middle-school son in front of me, pointing out how guests need to be treated. He too turned out remarkable: well-spoken, humble, considerate. Forty-five minutes with them left an impression that’s lasted a lifetime.

Maybe a dozen people like this come to mind. So I can’t see any strong correlation between wealth, or the lack of it, and decency. One had a Corvette and a litigation practice. The other had a modest home and a charity board seat. What they shared had nothing to do with their income bracket.

Not a Free Pass

So what does this exercise actually do for us?

It discourages us from judging by appearances. What it may or may not reveal is this: was theirs a principled decency, or merely a personal one?

Our assessment should be based on what someone actually does - not assigned in advance by what they have, and not settled just because they were kind to you once.

An acid test could be this: is someone decent in a universal way? Do they “see” you because they see everyone as cut from the same cloth? Are they glimpsing that profound equality implied in the Declaration of Independence, or the Sermon on the Mount? That equality should count as a real value—something adult Americans shouldn’t equivocate about. It’s an equality on both the inside and outside that shouldn't be sidelined by wealth or power.

Assessing this kind of principled decency is a different question. A harder one.

In all honesty, most people who’d pass that test for me are liberal and fairly progressive. It’s mysterious, because some whom I find very decent hold attitudes toward wealth and inequality that many associate with Reagan conservatism. Some are even Trumpian.

One very encouraging point in fact is the growing class of activist, egalitarian ultra-wealthy people Led by Warren Buffett, a number who have made a strong case for taxing themselves more. Buffett famously pointed out the folly of our current values: his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he did. The caricature of the wealthy as inherently greedy doesn’t hold up any better than the caricature of the poor as inherently fair-minded.

What Jefferson Shows

We’re veering here toward the unmanageable question of who, among all people, deserves our respect. Let’s avoid that and go instead to a quick, vivid illustration many of us encountered around our recent national birthday. Thomas Jefferson launched the greatest equality project the world has ever seen. Yet in that same life, he maintained slavery as central to his plantation’s business.

To me, the lesson isn’t about Jefferson’s wealth or class. It’s that extraordinary ideals and real, specific harm can live in the same person — which is exactly why behavior should be first in mind, not a résumé or the bank account attached to it.

So the real world doesn’t leave much room for fair, quick-and-easy judgments about others.

Indecency and the Impolite

When we face cruel or unfair behavior from others, should we drop our own decency and respond in kind? That too is a bit unwieldy for a weekly Substack post. Surely it calls for a case-by-case response. But here’s a story that comes to mind.

A friend was late to a hair appointment. It’s normal for the people who serve us to forgive our faults, at least on the surface — but the woman running the salon really let my friend have it for not being on time. It stung.

But he was honest with himself. He did have a habit of being late. He reformed, and he never forgot the lesson. Eventually he became much more respectful of others’ time. It changed his life, in a small way, for the better.

What made this a useful example was that the salon owner wasn’t labeling him as a type of person — she was naming an actual pattern, in the moment, and letting him decide what to do with it. Not a “nice” thing to do. But the effect was, after months or years, a real blessing.

A Question for Your Wealthy Friend

Do we sometimes give special treatment to the wealthy? And in particular, do we gloss over their indifference to the personal pain and social harms of poverty? Is it because we want a comfortable present, free of ill will? Or do we have an obligation to see that real growth takes some unpleasant moments — moments we may sometimes need to provoke?

This is no easy call. If the context is not private and it’s work or in a group, that may change things.

Most of us feel an obligation toward social betterment, especially those of us who chose to have children. Today, unlike any other decade in modern history, our kids appear to be on a path toward lives less secure than our own.

Modern men and women built a relatively civilized society — most people are fed, clothed, educated, able to make a living. Just one hundred years ago this was much less the case. They did this because people like us held a conviction about human betterment.

Social progress starts with the actions of individuals. That progress takes faith in each other, even when others may not seem receptive. We have to hold onto that conviction now, while never losing sight of the fact that we’re judging behavior, not brackets and appearances as we assess how we encourage others.

That may or may not mean provocative moments. That may mean asking a wealthy friend why he supports Donald Trump, a symbol of our society who stacks his Cabinet and guest lists with billionaires, who loves being surrounded by the shine of polished gold, and who has no feel for the social virtues of affordability. Such a question wouldn’t be about resenting a wealthy man for being wealthy. It’s about naming specific behavior — behavior anyone, rich or poor, should be willing to examine.

Our question may not seem polite. But is it decent? Remember the hairdresser.

Maybe politeness should be more context-sensitive . Maybe, on occasion, we need to have faith in growth — to respect others’ abilities to adjust and reflect.

Of course wording can be everything. There are ways to communicate the principle or love behind a challenging question. That spirit needs to be in our hearts and minds or it won’t be on our lips.

Even more important: is our commitment to equality strong enough to demand that same growth from ourselves? If so, that is one way to ensure we approach others with the right spirit.

Donald Watson’s thought-provoking cartoon will take us out today after a few favorite memes from Facebook:

Sometimes lies are so big they disappear.

Say you are on a plane flying toward a giant, spectacular cloud. From a distance, it has shape - towers, ridgelines, drama. Then you fly into it, and it is gone. Everything is just gray. No up, no down, no memory of the moment you crossed the threshold.

Think about the war in Ukraine. The big lie is that Ukraine somehow helped start it, and that ending it will require two equally responsible countries to stop bombing each other. That is the gray zone: no light, no shadow, no edges.

After years of war, the new president, Donald Trump, accepted Vladimir Putin’s premise that Russia was somehow forced into the conflict. I have rarely heard that premise challenged directly, even in a press briefing.

Instead, everything gets discussed in terms of the winners and losers of the moment—even by much of the American press. Shouldn’t the bigger story be that our own administration, successor to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, is living inside a fantasy manufactured by a Russian czar for propaganda purposes?

That is the kind of lie we need to name more often.

Looking Back at the Year’s Most-Read Essay

As Musings turns one and heads into a modest remodeling - on the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month, I will revisit the previous week’s essay or respond to reader reactions - it seemed right to begin the retrospective with the piece that best captured this phenomenon in miniature.

Not Ukraine. Disney.

“Circle of Strife” was the year’s top-prize winner: the most-read and most-shared post since we started. It was about Disney’s new line-cutting system.

What does that have to do with lies too big to see?

On the surface, not much. The system itself is simple. Open the app. Plan your visit. Decide whether you want to skip the long lines—that is an option now. It costs extra, but it is your choice. Buy your tickets, add the upgrades you want, and enjoy the rides.

When I saw the Disney essay pulling ahead as the year’s most-read piece, I underestimated my readers at first. I assumed it was simply brand recognition - everyone has an opinion about Disney.

But now I think it connected for a deeper reason: it named something we had been sensing but had not said aloud. We are accepting a new kind of class-based order. Not through coercion or force, but through choice.

Our choice.

More precisely, consumer choice.

Segregation by Choice

And the big lie in all of this? That America’s values are the same as they have always been: egalitarian, one for all and all for one, merit-based where appropriate.

It used to be that we all waited in line together to enjoy Disney rides, interspersed as one big, multiethnic, full-spectrum society. But now we sort ourselves. We segregate ourselves through the digital architecture we enter on our devices: plans, tiers, upgrades, memberships, bundles, and “preferred” experiences.

Over and over, we are asked how much inconvenience, humiliation, or exclusion we will tolerate - and how much we will pay to buy our way out of it.

In a few decades, that system will surely sort us by class in ways we would not intend.

The strange part is not simply that the economy does this to us. It is that Disney does it - the company that built its parks on the promise of treating everyone like a VIP.

These are the “Imagineers” behind Snow White, Simba, and Woody: ordinary or excluded characters whose worth is discovered beneath the labels imposed upon them. Somewhere along the way, those symbols of equality became instruments of a kind of neo-medievalism.

That is the lie.

Disney showed us the fiction we had been buying into, decade by decade, mostly without noticing. But not every truth stays hidden in the cloud. Sometimes it is sitting in plain sight.

What the World Cup Revealed

The World Cup made that plain sight impossible to avoid.

Since the final, there has been a great deal of discussion about what the United States could have done better and what it needs to do to compete going forward. I heard some version of that conversation three times in two days, and each one landed in the same place: class.

Our weakness on the field is downstream of how we run our society.

Just as in the Disney story, the problem is not talent. It is that talent gets filtered through wealth before it ever has a chance to reveal itself.

Soccer excellence begins to be cultivated at six or seven, and every year afterward compounds. In Europe, national teams are stocked with 25-year-olds who have spent most of their lives playing within highly organized club systems that find talent, develop it, and keep it in the sport.

In the United States, youth soccer runs on a different engine: college admissions. Parents encourage their children partly in the hope that athletic achievement will open a door to a school or scholarship. College becomes the finish line—and for many players, serious soccer effectively ends there.

Around all of this sits the machinery of travel teams: steep fees, flights, hotels, uniforms, equipment, and parents who can afford to sacrifice weekends and sometimes workdays to make it happen. That is a bill many working-class families - and plenty of middle-class ones - simply cannot pay.

None of this means that talented children without money never break through, or that every affluent player succeeds. Exceptions move through any system. But exceptions do not change the structure.

And the structure says that development gets filtered through family resources. Europe’s model has its own flaws, but it is built around talent and competitiveness first. Ours keeps asking, quietly, whether the parents can pay.

When Class Becomes Impossible to Ignore

Economic class is surfacing more and more. Thirty years ago, even naming class divisions risked being dismissed as “class warfare.” Today, the evidence is becoming too obvious to wave away. So people have been discussing it openly across the political spectrum.

The greater danger may be that wealth has made us gullible - not merely comfortable, but willing to believe that nothing fundamental has changed. We still tell ourselves that America is essentially meritocratic, that talent rises, that opportunity remains broadly available, and that the widening gaps around us are mostly the result of individual choices.

But the systems have changed. The price of entry has risen. Advantages are purchased earlier, accumulated more quietly, and disguised more effectively as planning, discipline, or good decision-making. The lie is not that everyone gets the same result. The lie is that everyone is still entering the same contest.

With a World Cup championship now on America’s horizon - at least in our imaginations - expect much more of this conversation: about what actually separates our most talented athletes from the chance to become the world’s best players.

Perhaps it will become about more than soccer.

Perhaps it will help us stop believing that nothing has changed simply because the old language remains. And perhaps it will help us see that what America needs is not another expensive way to skip the line, but a genuine return to merit - one in which talent is cultivated before wealth has the chance to filter it out.

So many cultural observers, myself included, are writing about a single favorite topic: our divisiveness.

Some think it should be played up and explored. Others think all the attention is overblown - that there are dimensions to life that reveal a common purpose and humanity. I believe in the latter, but I also think the former needs much more exploration.

For instance, most people think we are divided by our politics. My feeling, shared by many others, is that while this may be true, our out-of-control class divisions are helping drive the political divide - in very complex ways.

That division is between people with more money and people with less. But that’s obvious. We also need to realize that it is increasingly between people who inhabit different institutions, neighborhoods, schools, forms of entertainment—and ultimately, different versions of reality. Politics gives these divisions a language and a battlefield, but it did not create them. By the time we argue about elections, many of us have already lost the shared experiences that once helped Americans recognize one another.

That is part of what led me to write about Disney. The subject may seem remote from the country’s most serious problems, but Disney once occupied a rare place in American life: broadly shared, accessible across generations and classes, and rooted in a common cultural imagination.

What happened to its parks seems more than a business or entertainment story. It offers a clear window into what happens when even the places meant to bring us together begin reinforcing the distances between us. After roughly forty-six weeks of Musings, it remains the year’s most-read piece, and it seemed worth returning to now.

Subscribe now

I’m grateful to The New York Times for reporting on the new class stratification system at Disney’s parks. Thanks to Daniel Currell and Paola Chapdelaine for “Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class” from August 28, 2025.

Having grown up in Central Florida as Disney purchased the land, built, and opened Disney World, I will always feel like part of the Disney family. My thesis, though, is based on the Times’ reporting. I recommend Currell’s report, which Abigail Disney herself verifies in a Letter to the Editor that follows September 7, 2025. It also connects to my recent post, The Storm We Face from earlier in January, about the social harms of income inequality.

One could say this story is as old as currency itself. What makes it newly legible is that it’s unfolding inside mid-century America’s Magic Kingdom - a place where, as they once proudly asserted, everyone was a VIP.

My Disney Experience

Years of careful planning are over. It’s time to go to the Magic Kingdom.

There’s something modern about a vacation that begins at 6:55 a.m. with a phone in your hand and an aching sense of powerlessness in the back of your mind. You’ve put a hefty share of your annual income on the line. You’re not worried because you’re late to the park. You’re worried because you’re about to enter a system that can decide - within minutes - whether your day feels like a joyous outing or a managed experience with winners and losers.

For fifty years, the somewhat painful stamina required to enjoy Disney had a certain fairness to it. You paid plenty, endured the heat, and waited plenty, but you did it with everybody else. FastPass (1999) was imperfect, but it carried a civic idea that mattered: relief wasn’t simply for sale. You could plan, hustle, get lucky - but you weren’t forced to conclude, “We will have a worse day because we are not rich.”

Then something recently happened that few of the hundreds of millions of Disney fans, myself included, realized. A tollbooth went up.

It was a decade coming. The My Disney Experience app arrived in 2012. Your smartphone became map, schedule, dashboard - and gatekeeper. In 2021, Disney ended the last of the free FastPass era at Walt Disney World and rolled out paid line-skipping via Genie+. That system was later rebranded into Lightning Lane, with better planning features. At the top end, Lightning Lane’s premium offerings can reach around $400 per person on high-demand days.

Let’s say you want to spend $500 for a family of five for a day with fewer hours in the blazing heat. You can buy Lightning Lane Multi Pass plus a few VIP passes for individual rides. You book times in the app. Wait times at rides shrink drastically. The day becomes more scheduled, predictable and enjoyable.

But that purchase changes more than logistics. When line-skipping becomes a retail product, waiting stops being a shared inconvenience and becomes a visible marker of rank. The park can still look broadly middle class on the surface, but the day is no longer equally difficult. It is unequal by design, with the most relief reserved for those who can pay for it early and often.

Disney was never cheap. You could always see others enjoying pricier restaurants and walk out with larger gift bags.

The change was that Disney began selling serious relief - a calmer day as a premium experience - while leaving everyone else to manage heat, logistics, and long lines at rides.

When lines are no longer lines

A theme-park line is more than a nuisance. It’s an equalizer. Inside the gates, people would move through similar days. The rides are still terrific but the equality has been archived.

The Times reporting gives this a human scale by following two parties through real days in real parks. One is a middle-class grandmother with hard spending limits who uses a mobility scooter and is traveling with children. At Hollywood Studios, the scooter breaks down. The delay costs them several highly anticipated rides, and it would barely register if she could buy back time by pressing a few buttons on her app and charging her credit card. Not possible.

The other party is a tech executive visiting Magic Kingdom during one of the busiest stretches of the year. He buys a premium Lightning Lane product and describes it as a rational add-on to a trip that is already expensive. The effect is not subtle. They arrive later, move more comfortably, and watch posted wait times collapse into minutes. Same park. Same crowds. A different day.

This is what tiered access does: it turns a public-feeling place into a comparative experience. The two parties aren’t merely making different choices. They’re living inside different constraints. And because the bypass lane is on show to everyone, hierarchy becomes part of the message - a running lesson in who gets to buy back time, comfort, and dignity.

Disney is not unique in this regard. We are living in what I refer to as the post “Great Transfer” economy. (See my essay The Storm We Face.) Disney executives are merely capturing the money that its data scientists told them they were leaving on the table. The swelling upper class would pay much more for privileged access. One hacker discovered that these upgrades brought about $700 million into Disney’s coffers in one year.

In Disney’s case the message is just clear and easy to read. Their parks show the trend in bright colors, in a highly controlled environment.

The stories stayed. The ethos changed.

Disney’s genius has always been that it offers a shared story. The music, the rituals, the iconography - they unify. They tell millions of people, in the same key, that they belong inside the same dream.

Disney World meant a lot to me growing up. You never felt second class. And waiting in line was an education. You’d rub elbows with Americans with strange accents, see foreign visitors up close, and see other kids your age from across the room.

By my late twenties I had lost interest in Disney. That ended in my thirties when I heard Simba singing Elton John show tunes. Looking back, Disney’s egalitarian instinct was very much on show in The Lion King (1994).

The story turns on a simple, ancient premise: a community flourishes when power is legitimate, protective, and accountable, and it collapses when power becomes predatory and self-serving. Mufasa, the former king, is remembered less as “royalty” than as a fair steward of the “circle of life.” Simba, the prince, returns triumphantly, restoring an order where ordinary lives - the herd, the pride, the small creatures at the margins - are not disposable background. We aren’t only moved by the animals or the music; we’re moved by the feeling that there is a rightful place for everyone, that dignity isn’t limited to the throne, and that fairness can be more than a slogan. For a few minutes, strangers in the same dark theater feel like fellow travelers.

Toy Story (now a Disney/Pixar franchise) hits me the same way, for a different reason. Its moral universe is non-elite: the toys don’t matter because they’re rare, new, or expensive; they matter because they’re loved, used, worn, and shared. Woody’s authority isn’t aristocratic - it’s custodial, measured by whether the weaker members get left behind. Even Buzz’s arc rebukes status: he starts as a fantasy of specialness and ends by accepting an ordinary role with ordinary obligations - and becomes more dignified, not less. These stories argue, without sermonizing, that belonging is not a premium tier.

That is why the app-driven upgrade logic feels so jarring: it routes a brand built on non-monetized dignity through a system that constantly advertises ease to the leisure class.

A shared dream is a cultural asset. It’s why people save for years to visit, and why the whole enterprise can still feel, on the surface, like a middle-class institution. This is where the problem becomes more than pricing: the brand stays egalitarian after the operating system becomes gentrified.

Disney parks can say they provide “options.” True. But options are not the same thing as equality. “Options” can be a polite name for hierarchy. When the app becomes central - when the day is shaped by reservation windows, paid access, early-entry advantages, and nudges to upgrade - you’re not simply a “guest.” You’re a profile with a spending ceiling. The aesthetic still says: everyone is a VIP. The mechanics say: “Just kidding!”

That split between story and structure is not confined to Disney. It’s a pattern across American institutions: keep the language of unity because it soothes, and build the system of segmentation because it pays.

Times reporter Daniel Currell calls this “middle-class cosplay.”

That’s not a sneer at families. Families are doing what families do: trying to create a memory that will outlast the cost and the hassle. The cosplay (slang from kids’ “costume play”) is institutional - the performance of an older, shared America (songs, slogans, nostalgia) while the underlying design shifts toward segregation. Unity becomes a feel-good theme, not a condition.

From vacations to the rest of life

A theme park is contained, which makes its sorting easier to see, but outside the gates, you can see the same logic in everyday problems: time, transportation, health care, housing, insurance, and the friction of things breaking when you can least afford it.

The principle is simple: comfort and recovery are increasingly purchasable, while difficulty is widely distributed.

Start with time. If you have money, you can buy convenience - closer lodging, better transportation, better tools, better service, fewer delays. If you don’t, you spend time like cash: carefully, anxiously, with little slack. A small disruption isn’t small when it erases your only margin.

Consider insurance. Rising premiums, higher deductibles, narrower coverage: for some households it’s expensive but manageable. For others it becomes a choice between partial protection and none. Recovery moves into a premium tier.

Online, the pattern sharpens. Targeted ads don’t just sell products; they sell relief. They gauge who is likely to buy, how much pressure it takes, and what to charge in the moment. The language remains “choice,” but the outcome is a layered society in which only the affluent can buy relief, speed and recovery.

Climate Parallel

If you read The Storm We Face, you’ll recognize a similar dynamic in our politics. This may help explain a quieter trend: why so many people with power and money treat climate change as an “issue” rather than a reality we need to confront.

If paid relief keeps expanding, denial or delay becomes a strategy. The affluent can simply purchase their way out of the worst effects of climate warming. Insulation, reliable air-conditioning, mobility, geographic flexibility - all can be bought. They can ride out falling home values. They can move later, move farther, and land softer. Meanwhile, the costs of a new green infrastructure - changing energy systems, restricting certain kinds of development - feel immediate, disruptive, and politically dangerous.

From that perspective, it’s easier to postpone hard climate decisions and let other people do the migrating and suffering, trusting that comfort and stability will be for sale when it counts.

The point of it all

Here is the dilemma this poses: shared fate drives collective solutions. When people endure the same consequences, they’re more likely to solve big problems.

Share William Marquand | Musings

Families and governments seem to work best when principles matter.

Say you’re divvying up a spaghetti dinner at a family meal. You could give everyone an equal amount, or scale portions to each person’s size. Either way works if there’s a good reason behind it. It’s bad when, say, the middle child — the one already excelling at school — always gets the most.

The same logic applies to allies of a country: it helps if there’s a rationale behind how we allocate aid, rather than doling it out unevenly for no principled reason.

Subscribe now

Favoritism isn’t just sometimes acceptable — it can be essential. Say your family adopts an orphan who is new to family life. You’d take extra care to make sure she’s treated fairly by everyone: that she isn’t stuck with hand-me-downs while the others get new clothes. That she doesn’t get the smallest portion at dinner, even if she doesn’t get the biggest.

You want her to feel like a true member of the family, so you go out of your way to protect her. It’s not preferential treatment in amount or quality so much as in oversight — you’re warding off further harm before it happens.

That’s why there’s so much asymmetry in how fair-minded people actually behave. We don’t treat everyone the same, because some need special treatment and others plainly don’t. So favoritism isn’t inherently unethical — it’s often more ethical, provided it rests on a sound principle: caring for others according to need.

There’s a merit-based version too. Think of a soccer coach doling out playing time: favor goes to the most talented, the hardest-working, or sometimes to a kid who hasn’t had much opportunity and could use more. Even here, there’s a principle behind the favor.

But when the coach’s own son isn’t that good and still starts every game, that breeds resentment and tanks morale. That “coach’s son” style of favoritism can be corrosive in geopolitics. When there’s no visible moral, cultural, or ethical rationale — when it looks like plain tribal, racial, or personal preference — it damages a country’s reputation, as it can family harmony.

Experience teaches us that most things come in spectrums not just extremes. What are the different degrees of favoritism?

Here’s a rough spectrum of the kind we all recognize from watching life happen, running from healthy to unhealthy: Healthy, rooted in need. Grayer, rooted in cultural affinity or fellow feeling. Unhealthy, rooted in legacy, coercion, or intimidation.

Healthy

Poverty

A young man working at a hardware store wants to take night classes to qualify for a better job, but even modest tuition is a real obstacle. His boss adjusts his schedule and gives him extra paid time around exams — partly because he likes him, but mostly because talent and discipline shouldn’t be trapped by poverty.

Trauma

A woman at the office is still doing her job well after a painful divorce, though everyone can see she’s fragile. Her supervisor gives her some temporary flexibility and doesn’t let one emotional moment define her professionalism, because the motive is sympathy for a hard season in an otherwise capable life.

Trying Hard but Needing Help

A girl in piano class isn’t especially gifted, but she practices faithfully and shows up prepared every week. At recital time, her teacher gives her an easier piece but a visible spot in the program — honoring effort and improvement, not just raw talent.

Disabled

At a church supper, an older man with a walker is brought through the food line first and seated where he won’t have to carry a plate across the room. The motive is simple: a small adjustment so he can participate without strain or embarrassment.

In these cases, favoritism isn’t an escape from fairness — it’s a more careful form of it. It recognizes that equal treatment can become mechanical when people aren’t equally situated. The special treatment isn’t meant to flatter the favored person or elevate them above others; it answers something real — a burden, a wound, a limitation, or an effort worth encouraging. This is favoritism with a conscience.

Grayer Area

Niece

A bakery owner hires her niece to help at the counter over the summer. The niece is pleasant and capable enough, and the owner’s motives are mixed — she needs the help, trusts someone she knows, and likes giving a young relative a start, even though someone else might deserve the job more.

Homecoming Queen

A restaurant owner hears that a local homecoming queen is looking for summer work and offers her a hostess job, assuming she’ll be poised, attractive, and popular with customers. The preference is partly practical, partly shallow.

Boss’s Son

A manager brings his son into the warehouse for a starter job. The son isn’t put in charge, but he gets the cleaner tasks and more patience, because the manager loves him, wants him nearby, and wants him to learn responsibility.

Here, favoritism isn’t exactly indefensible, but it’s grown morally lighter and more transactional. The motives are familiar and human — affection, trust, social ease, the wish to help one’s own, the instinct to prefer the known over the unknown. None of this is the darkest kind of motive, and in ordinary life it may be unavoidable. But the ground has shifted: the preference is now less about repairing an imbalance and more about extending comfort or opportunity to someone who already has a foot in the door.

Unhealthy

Tradition:

At a neighborhood club, the same few families always chair the events and decide who belongs in the inner circle. When newer members offer to help, they’re told “this is how we’ve always done it” — comfort and status hardened into custom.

Enemy of My Enemy

Two parents at a school dislike the same teacher and start backing each other in every dispute, even when one is clearly exaggerating. The motive isn’t fairness — it’s the pleasure of having an ally against someone they resent.

Conformity

On a volunteer committee, the chairperson hands the best assignments to whoever agrees with her fastest, until everyone learns that agreement is safer than honesty.

Fear of Reprisal

In a family business, everyone knows the founder’s temper can make life miserable. His oldest daughter gets authority even when others are far more competent, and people praise her ideas out of fear of what happens if they don’t.

By this point, the favoritism is still intense but the redeeming principle is gone. In fact, the intensity is part of the problem: the less moral justification there is, the more force, habit, flattery, or fear has to do the work.

The preference no longer helps the vulnerable, honors effort, or compensates for disadvantage. It protects insiders, rewards submission, punishes independence, and teaches everyone to study power instead of merit.

Nothing is left to justify the special treatment — only the fact that someone has the power to give it, and someone else has learned the cost of challenging it.

Your Point?

The point of this tour through the spectrum of favoritism is that it maps neatly onto the Middle East. There is a titanic shift going on: the West’s waning support for the social engineering experiment that is Israel.

Eighty years ago, if you’d used this lens on America’s motives for backing the nascent idea of Jewish statehood, you’d have found elements of most phases on the spectrum. But the center of gravity was squarely on the healthy end: favor towards those subjected to centuries of oppression culminating in the Holocaust, and towards the legendary resilience of a people who had endured it.

Forty years ago, the motives would have been more mixed, including the early stages of American politicians being punished for unfavorable views of Israeli policies (subsidized with our tax dollars) though plenty of good motives remained in the mix too.

In the last four years, after decades of Israel being given wide latitude by Washington, particularly under Netanyahu, Americans increasingly relate to Israel through a sense of legacy entitlement or reprisal rather than through its historical trauma, antisemitism, or its long climb from vulnerability.

When Americans see the images of Gaza today, they barely know how to contextualize that scale of destruction and indecency.

They still sympathize with Israel and the victims of October 7 — America rushed to Israel’s aid without hesitation. But the modern comparisons to Gaza that come to mind are Assad and Putin pulverizing Aleppo, Putin’s war on Ukraine, or Hitler’s bombing of Poland. Pretty strange bedfellows.

Yes, America wrought comparable destruction on single cities — Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki — but that was aimed at ending a tyrant’s bid for world domination. Mass regional murder of an impoverished population that can’t protect itself from domestic or foreign threats comes from a very different place.

American politicians are losing their ability to express favoritism toward Israel.

That is not because a few of our kids came home last Thanksgiving, after their first months away from home, with a Hamas flag in their dirty laundry.

It’s because we no longer see, or feel, a principled goodwill flowing between the two countries. That has gradually turned into political exploitation. Think of the bombing of Tehran.

To Americans it's as if it all started out with the endearing orphan girl and now it's all about the coach’s son. And it's not that clear who's the coach and who's the son.

It would be quite a historical lesson if, in killing off hope for a two-state solution in the Holy Land, Israel lost the bend-over-backwards favoritism of its American friends.

My thoughts? Personally, I wish there was a principled Israel that we could all get behind. I’m no Middle East scholar, but I do wonder a lot about the endearing orphan.

Share

Coming Soon: We say that favoritism is bad. There's a few problems with that. One, it's not really true. Second, when we say it we're probably being hypocritical. And then, of course, it can be a geopolitical travesty.

Symbols and Design

As a born-and-raised modernist, I held a bias against symbols.

It was not that I disliked them. I was simply uninterested in them in architecture and uninformed about their power.

I see things differently now. But looking back, I still see legitimacy in that instinct.

In architectural design, symbolism and traditional motifs - classical columns, pediments, inherited emblems - were often easy ways of giving social cachet to uninspired work. A building could borrow authority from the ancients instead of earning it in the present.

That was part of the excitement of modernism when it emerged a century ago. Buildings earned their power the way engineering does: through soundness, innovation, efficiency, materials, and clarity of purpose. Mies van der Rohe’s glass and steel rectangles did not ask for authority by name-dropping Greece or Rome; they stood on what they were.

Modernism won the day in the twentieth century and has remained resilient since. As an architect shaped by that tradition, I learned to distrust ornament that substituted for substance. Symbols could be meaningful, but they could also be camouflage.

Parallels to Politics

Today I can see power and artisty in some use of symbols. But the instinct to be suspicious of borrowed authority has stayed with me.

Especially politically. I came of age as the failures of the Vietnam War ravaged the country. It was impossible for me not to notice that the loudest flag-wavers often seemed to be the bad guys. Not all of them were, of course. But the flag was often used as a weapon against dissent. As if red, white, and blue confetti could suffocate every moral objection to the war.

I also come from a religious tradition that is text-centered, with little iconography. Ideas matter far more than image. So I may have been more prone than others to distrust symbols in the places where meaning mattered most.

And yet I was patriotic in a conventional sense growing up. My father worked for defense contractors on Florida’s Space Coast. I believed in the country. I admired its energy, its freedom, its confidence. But I understood patriotism mostly through the lens of people like me, and through issues that affected the white majority.

Morphing Outlook

I was not raised with racial resentment, and for that I remain grateful. I grew up in a fairly progressive subculture of the Space Coast, and in Sunday School I was taught that we are all cut from the same cloth.

By the mid-1980s, I was changing politically. I had begun listening seriously to the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., and I was struck by how balanced, beautiful, and profound they were. This was not anti-Americanism. It was one of the highest forms of American speech: morally rooted with biblical cadences, well reasoned, and fiercely committed to the promises the country had made but not yet fulfilled.

The Democratic Party I was moving toward had inherited much of the energy of the antiwar movement. It had given refuge to people who rejected blind patriotism, and sometimes to people whose anger at America went further than I could follow. But to me, the best of that tradition was not anti-American. It was anti-false-patriotism. Like my fellow travelers I hated the idea of using something that belong to us all - the stars and stripes - for the furtherance of one's own interest, or that of one’s clan.

Still, something was lost along the way. Much of the Democratic world became issue-oriented rather than holistically patriotic. It cared about civil rights, the environment, war, poverty, labor, health care, and democracy. These were not small things. They were the work of a serious country. But the movement often lost the habit of overt patriotism: the instinct to bring the flag to the protest rally, to claim the founding symbols, to say without embarrassment that America belongs to us, and we belong to it.

End of a Timid Patriotism

As I evolved politically in my thirties and forties, I never lost my overt patriotism. But I did not normally use the flag as a symbol of my beliefs. I was happy to bring it out on the Fourth of July. I went to parades and enjoyed them. But I was not likely to put a flag sticker on my car or make the flag a regular part of my public identity. Outside of holidays and civic rituals, flag-waving sometimes seemed like a shallow form of patriotism.

MAGA changed things.

What I saw in the Vietnam era was a symbolic pro-war patriotism. What I see now is something more dangerous: the wrapping of anti-democratic impulses in the imagery of Americanism. For those thoughtlessly jumping on board, MAGA is a beginner’s guide to patriotism, stripped of homework. It requires no study of the Constitution, no reckoning with slavery, one-sided knowledge of immigration, no sense of federal budgets, courts, alliances, compromise, or public service. And plenty of comradery. It’s a lazy approach. It only requires a division of the world into “we” and “they,” with “we” as the real Americans and “they” as enemies inside the gates.

That kind of patriotism is poorly informed, easily manipulated, and often cruel. But it is visually powerful. It understands something that modernists like me sometimes forgot: symbols matter. They do cultural work. They use the power of art. They claim territory. They shape emotion.

So now, when I go to No Kings rallies or similar protests I bring, like thousands of others, an American flag. This past year I went to the hardware store and bought a flag for the front wall of our house, and I have taken that same flag to protests.

Patriotism Demands Sincerity

I do that because the symbol belongs to me and to every American. To me, there is a sense of betrayal when people use it to exclude their neighbors, to mistake domination for patriotism, and to celebrate democracy only when they win.

The American flag stands for a country that has never fully lived up to its ideals, but has also never stopped being judged by them. Freedom, justice, equality, self-government, pluralism, the rule of law—these phrases can become superficial from overuse.

We chatter about these so often that we forget how radical they are. Sometimes it takes leaving America to feel America more clearly.

During my last year at Georgia Tech, I had a year abroad in architecture school, based in Paris, and as the return date approached I began imagining wild schemes that might allow me to stay. But I needed to come home. And when I returned, I realized that as great as Europe was, there was a spirit in America that was different - not more refined, not more beautiful, but more open, restless, improvisational, more allergic to inherited limits. And slightly miraculous.

That take on freedom in daily life is part of what makes me love the United States.

To really feel that, Americans need curiosity about the world. We need to see other countries not as props in our own national drama, but as real places with real virtues and real constraints. Only then can we understand America’s place in the world without either worshiping it or despising it.

Virtue of Contrast

This is one of those times in American life when contrast is necessary. We need to contrast legitimate patriotism with weak patriotism. Informed patriotism with theatrical patriotism. Love of country with love of domination.

There is an old diplomatic saying that nothing is agreed upon until everything is agreed upon. I think mainly of Democrats here, since the saying applies most to those who have grown issue-oriented and away from holistic patriotism: people who care deeply about schools, wages, climate, health care, voting rights, immigrants, rural towns, cities, veterans, children, the elderly, the disabled, but who sometimes lose sight of the whole in caring so much about the parts.

That caring should not weaken patriotism; it should deepen it. But you cannot love only the parts of America that bolster your values, or champion every program without also championing the country that makes them possible. The whole picture matters. The parts have to work together towards something. Hopefully, towards exactly what the flag represents.

So as the 250th anniversary of the United States approaches, I find myself saying something I might once have resisted: no more covert. Go overt. Go to the hardware store. Buy a four-foot American flag with a wooden pole. Mount it on your house, your porch, your church, your apartment balcony, wherever you can. Plant the flag for the Fourth.

Share

This Fourth

This is not just any Fourth. A 250th anniversary does not come around twice in a lifetime. If we protect the meaning of America now, there may be a sincere 500th anniversary someday - not a parade of empty symbols, but something real.

The flag is not enough. It never was. But symbols are not nothing. The work is still democracy, justice, budgets, courts, elections, service, and truth. For now we need both: the substance and the symbol, the homework and the flag.

Coming Soon: the different faces of favoritism; it can be good as well as bad, but its virtues can expire without notice.

With election season in the air I wanted to highlight today the challenges and promise that I see around me living in suburban St. Louis. In many ways it's much more politically exciting than living in the Bay Area. It can also be more discouraging. And I'm focusing on a fascinating candidate for Congress, Fred Wellman.

Al Gerber is exactly the kind of Missouri Democrat I wanted to talk with for this piece: local, engaged, practical, and deeply familiar with the strange political terrain of west St. Louis County. He serves as a Ward 2 elected official in Town and Country and is active in the St. Louis County Democratic organization, but what makes him especially useful here is not a title so much as a vantage point.

Al lives and works politically in the kind of suburban Missouri district that can look very red from the outside, even when the numbers underneath tell a more complicated story. In our conversation, he helped me think through what it means to be a Democrat in a state where Republicans hold every statewide office, where gerrymandering distorts representation, and where local politics can still offer signs of movement, hope, and promising civic life.

Missouri Politics
Musings interview with Alderman Al Gerber

Monday, June 22, 2026

William Marquand:

I thought I’d start off talking about Missouri, and what it’s like being a Democrat — especially an active, interested one like yourself — in a state that’s so red.

Al Gerber:

The way I look at it is that this is where the battle lines are drawn. If you’re in a blue state where everybody’s Democrat, that’s a boring thing. This is where we actually have to make the change.

Especially where you and I live, these are the districts — the small state House districts — that are in the process of flipping. The one where you live, the Democrats only lost by 100 votes out of something like 16,000 last time. This time we have a good candidate who ought to be able to change that.

Mine, we lost by a bit more than that, but with the kind of swings we’ve been seeing in other places around the country, if we had one like that, we could even take the district where I live, which is pretty close.

That’s where I think the whole activity is. The state of Missouri is still a ways away, because we’ve got all that area in the middle of the state that is so solidly Trump. Even if it swung 15 or 20 points, we still lose. So that’s a while before we get there. But at least where you and I live, this is the battleground.

William Marquand:

I’m guessing you probably know these numbers, but give us an idea of how many voters are Democrats in Missouri, percentage-wise, and how many statewide offices are held by Democrats.

Al Gerber:

None of the statewide offices are Democratic now. Not one. I’m talking about governor, lieutenant governor, those statewide offices. We don’t have either of the Senate seats either.

We have two out of the eight U.S. House of Representatives congressional seats, but we might lose one of those with redistricting. They’re redistricting one of the solidly Democratic districts just out of existence.

William Marquand:

And yet there are a significant number of Democrats in the state, aren’t there? Isn’t it something like 25, 30, or 40 percent?

Al Gerber:

We consistently get 42 to 45 percent in elections, so it’s not like there aren’t Democrats. But a lot of those voters are concentrated in three or four metropolitan areas — Kansas City, St. Louis, and Columbia.

William Marquand:

So Missouri is basically a testament to how effective gerrymandering can be. You’ve got about 42 percent Democratic voters, which would barely be called a landslide for Republicans, and yet only two out of eight House seats are Democratic — and maybe soon one out of eight.

As an ex-Californian, I can testify to how shockingly conservative some things are that come out of the state legislature.

Al Gerber:

I met a Republican from California in my church, and we were talking about politics. I was telling him about the things coming out of Jefferson City — especially around guns — and he thought it was crazy. He said, “Republicans are doing all this stuff?” And I said, “Well, you’re a California Republican. That’s a whole different thing from a Missouri Republican.”

William Marquand:

Why don’t you put that in vivid contrast for us: a California Republican versus a Missouri Republican?

Al Gerber:

In that instance, we were talking about gun safety. Missouri has passed laws that allow basically no regulation on concealed carry. You don’t have to get a permit for those things. He said, “Well, that’s just crazy.” And I said, “You’re a California Republican. That’s why you think it’s crazy.” That’s one example. There are others too.

William Marquand:

Just to give a vivid example, does that mean I could walk around City Hall with a gun, without a permit?

Al Gerber:

City Hall, I don’t know. Some places make you pass through a metal detector.

William Marquand:

So except for airports, municipal courtrooms, and places like that, you could just take a gun almost anywhere? A theater?

Al Gerber:

Pretty much. Absolutely.

William Marquand:

Wow. I could just buy a gun?

Al Gerber:

Criminals, people with mental health problems — they’ve just said everybody has a right to defend themselves. Pretty much everybody can have it.

William Marquand:

Hopefully that’s one bad end of the spectrum. What are some hopeful things for you about the state?

Al Gerber:

One of the hopeful things is our initiative petition process. Missouri is one of the few states — I forget how many, maybe 10 or 15 — where citizens can circulate a petition, get an initiative on the ballot, and if they get enough signatures, the people can vote on it statewide. If it passes, it becomes law.

That’s a very optimistic thing.

One of the things that’s not optimistic is that the state legislature has gotten into the habit recently of just reversing those laws. In the past, they would never dare do that, because that would be going against the people, and they would all pay a price. Apparently, Republicans in the center of the state don’t pay any kind of price for reversing the will of the people.

Those petitions pass even in the center of the state. For example, legalizing medicinal marijuana — that was passed by the people. The state legislature wouldn’t do that. Puppy mills were another example. The people banned puppy mills, and then the state turned around and reversed that.

William Marquand:

We have a court system too. Don’t the courts enforce things like that?

Al Gerber:

Sometimes, if it violates the law. Apparently, it doesn’t violate the law for the legislature to reverse what the people have voted in. However, there is an initiative petition that’s going to be on the next November ballot to change the state constitution and prevent the legislature from doing this. It’s called Respect Missouri Voters. We’ll see what happens in November, but I hope we can get that passed.

William Marquand:

This comes in a climate where we recently passed something about abortion rights, which was pro-abortion rights, correct?

Al Gerber:

That’s right. In Missouri, we passed it. Now the legislature is trying to put something back on the ballot — I think in August — that would reverse that.

The legislature could not reverse it directly, because it was a constitutional change. It won with something like 62 percent. Now the legislature has voted to put something on the ballot to change it back. What they’re doing is wording it in such a confusing way that they hope people will change it back.

William Marquand:

So they think that if we’re stupid enough, we’ll follow their will.

Al Gerber:

That’s what they say, very openly. They say the voters are stupid, they don’t really know what’s going on, and they should leave it to the professionals.

William Marquand:

I think that’s probably one thing about the Trump era that wasn’t true before: people say things like that out loud now.

When I came to Missouri from California, I thought the weather would be a lot hotter, the humidity would be a lot worse, and I didn’t think the legislature would be that bad. I scored two out of three. The weather is much milder here than I thought it would be, even in the winters. But the legislature is something else.

Let’s go kind of microcosmic here. I noticed, probably after I had been here about five years — maybe around the 2018 or 2016 election — that The New York Times came out with a very detailed geographic map of the U.S. It broke down voting patterns by neighborhood, by the smallest district voting gets recorded at: the precinct.

I was shocked that even out in the suburbs where we are — way out past the 270 outer ring — I was in a light-blue district. I thought it was certainly fairly reddish. There’s a kind of prevailing sense that Trump dominates areas like this.

And I think part of that is connected to the way violence became part of politics in 2016. Trump really started that, as far as I’m concerned, when he said at a rally that he would like to beat up a protester after the rally — or something along those lines.

Al Gerber:

Well, he said he’d pay the legal expenses if anybody wanted to beat him up.

William Marquand:

There you go. Yes. I think that put a chill on Democrats almost everywhere in red states, because I certainly felt it.

I saw relatively few pro-Democrat yard signs. From driving around my neighborhood, when I saw that New York Times map saying my neighborhood was light blue, I was shocked. I would never have guessed that from the prevailing sense of the neighborhood.

That also gives people a good sense of what it’s like to live in a blue area in a red state. I don’t think my neighbors would believe it either. There’s a prevailing mystique about it.

Al Gerber:

Everyone thinks they’re the only Democrat in the neighborhood. I go door to door, and when I’m knocking doors for myself, that’s what they’ll say. They’ll say, “Oh, I’m the only Democrat in the neighborhood.” And I have a list in my hand of all the people who have either registered as Democrats or indicated that they’re Democratic. I can say, “You’ve got a lot here.”

William Marquand:

On our street, let’s say a quarter mile long, I saw maybe five signs from people who looked adamantly Democratic, and I was cheered by that. But in 2016 there were maybe 10 or 15 Trump signs.

There was also the extravagant overstatement of putting, say, a 20-foot-long American flag on the front wall of your house — that kind of thing. It says Trump all the way. And not only Trump, but zealous Trump.

That stuff is a little intimidating. If you’re not thinking too much about it, you might get the impression that not only are you a minority, but that you’re a minority surrounded by people who might scowl at you if they saw your sign.

And once violence had become a feature of politics — beginning with that Trump rally talk in 2016, and later with January 6 — the whole yard-sign question changed. It was no longer just a matter of expressing your views. It became a question of whether putting up a Democratic sign was wise.

Knowing the gun laws in Missouri, that’s intimidating. It’s in the back of people’s minds all the time.

In our area, people weren’t that pro-Trump in 2024. There were a lot fewer Trump signs than there were in 2020 and 2016. And yet there were also fewer pro-Democrat signs. It was like a chill. My wife and I discussed whether putting signs up was a wise thing to do or not. It feels like less of a democracy now that that change has come.

In that kind of context, I know there are some gerrymandering proposals out there. Who is Fred Wellman? Who is Ann Wagner? And how does this gerrymandering thing affect this race coming up?

Al Gerber:

We’re talking about Missouri’s Second Congressional District. Ann Wagner is the incumbent. She’s been there 11 or 12 years as the incumbent Republican. There are three Democrats running against her, two serious ones. One is Fred Wellman, and the other is John Van Doren.

I think Fred Wellman has more juice, because he has a nationwide profile. He has a podcast on MeidasTouch, which is a nationwide podcast. He has a lot of followers, and that’s how he supports himself. That has gotten him out there.

William Marquand:

Are you saying he’ll be opposing another Democrat in a primary?

Al Gerber:

Yes, in August.

William Marquand:

That’s a fairly late primary.

Al Gerber:

That’s one thing about Missouri. Our August primary means candidates only have about three months for the general election. If you’ve had a primary fight, you spend all your money on the primary, and then you have to raise it all again for the general.

Those are the two people. Fred Wellman is probably in the lead. I’ve seen polls showing he’s about three points behind Ann Wagner right now, and he doesn’t really have much name recognition here. She’s been the incumbent for that long, so to be only three points behind is pretty good.

William Marquand:

I guess that’s one slightly positive thing about an August primary: you get all that publicity a couple months before the election, and your name is on people’s minds.

I’m not here to bias anyone from one Democratic candidate to another, because we certainly have to stick together in this state. But let’s talk about Fred as an avatar for the Democratic Party here. What’s he like? Will there be redistricting before then?

Al Gerber:

That’s all up in the air. The redistricting is still up in the air.

When the state House, Senate, and governor first put a law into practice about redistricting in Missouri, the people could get a petition together and put something on the ballot to reverse it. They collected enough signatures for that. But the secretary of state, who’s a Republican, has been stalling, trying to keep the gerrymandered districts and not the original districts.

It’s in the courts now. The secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, has to make a determination just before the primary. The problem is that it doesn’t give the boards of election time to print ballots or prepare the election with one set of districts or another.

It’s a mess. It’s in the courts. What could happen, we don’t know. It could be that the district is overturned and we go back to the old districts, but not in time for the primary. So the primaries might be in one district and the general election in another. We don’t even know if that’s legal. That’s going to have to go through the courts.

This mid-decade redistricting is throwing a wrench into the gears of everything.

William Marquand:

Confusion is a great fuel of MAGA, it seems like. I’m guessing the briefs are in and the court cases have started, but who knows how long it will take.

Al Gerber:

Our courts are not designed to move quickly.

William Marquand:

Let’s say Wellman prevails. Tell us about Ann Wagner. What is she all about? And what is Fred Wellman all about?

Al Gerber:

As far as issues are concerned, Wagner is considered sort of a moderate. But she has voted with Trump pretty much right down the line. Even though she doesn’t talk like MAGA or consider herself a MAGA Republican, she’s voted exactly like that. So as far as I’m concerned, that makes her MAGA.

She came up through the fundraising side of things. Her husband is fairly wealthy and works for Enterprise. She was a big fundraiser for Republicans. At one point, she was co-chair of the Republican National Committee and raised a bunch of money. She was also rewarded by being made ambassador to Luxembourg by George W. Bush, I think.

Then later she ran for office, and she’s been a so-called moderate Republican since then.

One thing Fred makes a big deal about is that she has never held a town hall meeting where she takes questions from the audience. Ever since she’s been elected, she’s never held a town hall meeting like that. She has what she calls town halls, but they’re basically meetings with donors. She takes pictures and shows herself talking with donors, and they call that a town hall meeting. But she was never challenged.

One of the things I don’t forgive her for has to do with the fiduciary rule. During Obama’s time, there was a rule that investment companies had to act as fiduciaries. In other words, they had to be responsible for investors’ money and not just look after themselves. I thought that rule was fantastic.

She was instrumental, during Trump’s first term, in getting that overturned, so investment companies don’t have to act as fiduciaries. They can buy and sell based on their own commissions and their own advantage, not necessarily based on the investor’s interest. She says that makes things easier and lowers rates, and she turns it into a good thing. It’s not a good thing at all.

The thing she talks about all the time in her newsletters is trafficking of women and girls. She has sponsored or tried to sponsor laws in that area, with a lot of other women, Democratic and Republican. That’s not unique to her, but it’s the thing she makes the biggest deal about. She does not make a big deal about taking away the fiduciary rule. I’m sure she talks with her donors about that, because she gets a lot of money from the financial services industry.

William Marquand:

Her district straddles urban, suburban, and rural areas, doesn’t it?

Al Gerber:

Yes. It used to be pretty much all St. Louis County — west and south St. Louis County — plus a little bit of St. Charles and a little bit of Jefferson County. Almost all of it was around St. Louis County.

Now they’ve added all these counties out in the rural areas — Franklin County, and even Washington County, which is heavily Trump. That gives her an advantage, because some of those elections got very close. She ran against Cort VanOstran a few years ago and only won by two percentage points. In the old district now, she would probably be at a disadvantage. The only way they’re keeping her viable is by mixing in all these rural areas.

William Marquand:

Does that look determinative for November?

Al Gerber:

Despite that, Fred Wellman is only three points behind. It may not have been enough to put all those areas in. Most of the votes are still in St. Louis County — something like 70 percent.

Fred says, “I don’t care about gerrymandering, because the people out in those counties don’t know her either.” She doesn’t have name recognition out in Gasconade County. He says he has as good a chance as anybody of outworking her, going out there, and getting his name out. He looks at it as an advantage, not a disadvantage. We’ll see.

William Marquand:

Tell us a little bit about his character, and what people might think about him if they met him or read a little about him.

Al Gerber:

I know him pretty well, because I’ve been at a lot of meetings and events with him, and I like him a lot.

I know he’s had some financial problems in the past — a couple of bankruptcies with different ventures he was involved in. One was a COVID bankruptcy of one of the companies he was involved with. I forget what the other one was. That’s considered a disadvantage. On the other hand, we have a president who’s been bankrupt, what, six times? It doesn’t seem to affect him. So I don’t know if bankruptcy is as much of a disadvantage as it used to be.

Fred was a military veteran, 22 years in the Army, a helicopter pilot, and left as a colonel. He served two tours in the Middle East, I think one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. Then he came back and worked for General Petraeus, whom he considers something of a mentor. Petraeus got him into an MBA program at Harvard through the military. So he has an MBA from Harvard; he’s not a dummy by any means.

He has also served his country for all these years. I think those two things are an advantage in the rural areas of Missouri. They could be a big help.

William Marquand:

Has he worked in politics or the public realm in any lower-level ways, or is he known mostly through his podcast?

Al Gerber:

His podcasting is probably what he’s best known for. He was also involved with the Lincoln Project. He was head of their military outreach branch. They had a bunch of different things they were doing. You’ve probably heard of the Lincoln Project people on MSNBC.

William Marquand:

Sure. It was a Never Trump group.

Al Gerber:

Right. A lot of Republicans were involved in it — former Bush people and others. He was involved with them, even though he was a Democrat. For a short time, he was the actual executive director. He was between Steve Schmidt and whoever came afterward, for a few months when he was the executive director of the Lincoln Project.

William Marquand:

Tell me what it’s like to have recently become an alderman in a fairly affluent part of the St. Louis suburbs. Does the coloration of national issues play any part in being like a city councilman?

Al Gerber:

Not really. It’s funny, because city councilman is a nonpartisan position. You don’t run as a Republican or Democrat. It’s very separate.

It’s funny how a lot of people who are very conservative on national politics suddenly become darn near socialist when it comes to their local politics. They want their government to do all kinds of things for them — keep their roads fixed, keep their trees trimmed, and all that kind of stuff. It’s a very interesting dynamic, the difference between national politics and local politics.

I serve my constituents. When they have questions, I always get them answers and help them out with anything from City Hall. That’s really what’s involved there, more than anything ideological.

William Marquand:

You’re also involved in encouraging and getting the word out more regionally too, correct?

Share

Al Gerber:

I’m on the Democratic Central Committee, which is an elected position, but only within the party. That’s a partisan position. Those elections take place during a primary, so you have to choose whether you’re Democratic. Then you can vote for your committeeman for your area.

I am a committeeman for our township, which has about 30,000 voters. Because of that position, I sit on the county Central Committee, the Democratic Central Committee for the county. We have an executive director there, and we do activities for the whole county to help Democrats in St. Louis County.

William Marquand:

Well, thank you so much Al. I'm definitely going to start following Fred closer. It's time we made some solid progress in St. Louis County. We all appreciate the diligent work you and you colleagues are doing towards that end.

Leave a comment

In a democracy, power comes from popularity, and from a mechanism that can institutionalize that popularity. Trump’s cost-fighting message in 2024 was mildly popular, and he had a mechanism to formalize it: our presidential election infrastructure. Built over 250 years by a large spectrum of political partisans, I might add.

He won an election. That matters. Elections are not vibes, cable-news narratives, or social-media storms. They are how a country takes a rough measure of itself and turns that measure into legal power.

But popularity does not always equate with power. Background checks on guns are far more popular than Trump’s 2024 message ever was, yet that popularity has no mechanism to usher it into law. The current Senate would never vote for it.

That gap between what the public broadly wants and what Congress can pass is one of the central frustrations of American life. Popularity can be real and still remain politically stranded. But if it cannot write legislation by itself, it can influence outcomes under the right circumstances.

Gauges

So how do we measure popularity?

Elections are our best gauge. Despite Republican fantasies, they are accurate and fair, run by some of the most patriotic, selfless, and methodical people in our country. The local officials and volunteers who make elections work are not villains. They take this abstract idea of self-government and turn it into plastic table tops, paper or electronic ballots, signatures, scanners, county certifications, and magnificent procedural integrity.

But we also have the science of measuring public opinion without elections—private polling, studied and refined for nearly a century. As much as we treat it as a lesser index of popularity, approval polls really do matter. Public support, or the lack of it, can translate into political power long after elections end.

That is why protests can change things in Washington. A restless electorate can affect polling. It's also one reason that Trump’s days as leader of America may be coming to an unofficial end.

How does polling affect Pennsylvania Avenue?

Best Friends of Polling

Politicians read polls as weather reports. They may pretend to be driven only by conviction or constitutional obligation. But members of Congress need to gauge the climate back home. They want to know whether a president is lifting them up or dragging them down. Polling is key to their reelection. And these days, polls are telling a new story.

Trump’s 2024 message was weak in implementation. The independent voters who gave him a second chance are watching, and they do not like what they see.

Being popular in office is very different from appealing to voter emotions during a campaign. Governing requires skill, patience, humility, and the discipline to build a coalition bigger than your slogans.

Fade to Black?

Trump lacks too many of these qualities. Had he developed voter and congressional trust over the last eighteen months, he might not have become a lame duck so early. Instead, we are seeing the opposite. There is now a lengthy list of congressional failures, suggesting that members have studied the country’s mood and are breaking with him:

- House Iran war-powers rebuke

- FISA / intelligence extension failure

- Anti-weaponization payout fund forced into retreat

- Immigration-enforcement package delayed and trimmed

- White House ballroom funding dropped

- Todd Blanche attorney-general nomination became a Senate fight

In each case, the legislative detail matters less than what it signals. Legislators break away when public sentiment drops and the aura fades. They break when obedience looks more costly than defiance.

Holistic Vision Essential

Improving life for all Americans means thinking holistically about society. You can move undocumented people around with brutality and impunity, but does that make America stronger? No. Now there are labor shortages everywhere, especially in rural towns that supported Trump and depend on agriculture. Here in Missouri, friends of friends are losing their farms because of a lost workforce and no fertilizer.

That is what private polling does to MAGA politicians: as they retreat into more intense minority views, polling puts broad portraits of our country up for everyone to see. It says: this is not your rally. This is not your social-media feed. This is the country.

Trump’s “power” appears to have been a thin veneer, like the gilded finish on everything he has attached to the walls of the White House. For years, the great trick of Trumpism has been to confuse spectacle with strength.

The rallies were loud. The insults were loud. The threats were loud. But gold is mere color and sheen. Veneer is not structure. A brand is not legitimacy. A threat is not a governing majority.

Coming Soon

Trump is now around 36 percent approval. If he ends the Iran war soon, it may be on sketchy terms, and any recovery from the oil crisis could take months. If his approval approaches 32 percent before the midterms and Republicans lose by large margins, it may be politically over for him. In the next two years, he could be flirting with ratings in the twenties.

We have been through enough elections to know how the media jump to reinforce the new zeitgeist. If Democrats win big, it will be wall-to-wall: “new day in America” talk, “is the Republican Party dead?,” “what Trump scandal will Democrats explore first?” If the election is close, it becomes about how Democrats blew it. But assume a sea change. No more 24/7 Trump chest-thumping with a chorus of Republicans behind him. He will be lonely—and with no drone-proof ballroom in which to retreat.

If the economy remains static, how long before the old Republican survival instinct kicks in? How long before the Barry Goldwater contingent arrives, not necessarily from courage, but from self-preservation?

Shared Reality

The fear of a rising dictatorship is also changing. Trump’s war on the rule of law has lost momentum—and worse for him, far worse—it has lost popularity. The danger has not disappeared, but the mystique is weakening.

Authoritarian politics depend heavily on public perception of power and inevitability. They need people to believe resistance is futile, institutions are hollow, and the strongman always wins. The spell breaks when the public sees weakness.

Trumpism may not lose because we have an election system people believe in—though we do. It may lose because we also have a polling system people believe in. If voting merely affirms what bad polls have predicted for months, only a small minority of die-hard MAGA believers will accept claims of fraud.

If Trump and Republicans were polling close to Democrats and then lost, he might have the raw material to convince millions it was rigged, as he did in 2020. But if private polls say for months that he is deeply unpopular and Republicans get hammered, convincing people that election officials stole it would require the performance of a lifetime.

Private polls may give both supporters and detractors a shared sense of context. That shared reality, broadcast nationwide for the next five months, may provide enough balance for voters to see through whatever authoritarian fantasies Trump tries to construct.

Job Change

By January, his job may change—from defender of America First to defender of himself against dozens of front-page allegations of corruption and self-dealing.

Remember when Trump and his MAGA base told us smugly that elections have consequences? It seems they forgot that polling does as well.

The Associated Press put it plainly: Trump’s approval rating “sits at a low point,” while he is “spending his political capital, alienating his would-be allies and threatening to derail GOP priorities.”

That is the quiet power of polling.

Rallies are loud. Threats are loud. Our tradition of polling is ever-present but inconspicuous — like telephone poles standing mute as they line our streets.

But in the end, opinion polls may be louder and more consequential than the entire Trumpworld cacophony.

Leave a comment

In my article “Gilded Autocrat,” I talk about the moral background of Trump’s emergence into office. From the 1980s to the present day, I argue that selfishness and lust for power have quietly gained an outsized spiritual presence in our culture.

That could be mere moralizing on my part, but just think about how red-faced and foul-mouthed our politicians have become. And the truly surprising part, as I mentioned toward the end of that article, is that the active ingredient of Trump’s electability was the Evangelical Christian movement.

A secondary passion of Musings is the cultural significance of The Chosen — one of the few bipartisan, cross-cultural hits from this divided era. In the recent Season 5 of The Chosen, Jesus gives a singular directive to his disciples in what Christians refer to as the Last Supper: “Love one another…. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.”

That’s a high bar that probably few large organized religions have ever met — and it’s a far cry from how Christianity is viewed today, at least by outsiders who know it largely through its right-wing, front-page politics.

Secular Disciple

As someone long interested in religion in the public square, I’ve noticed how spiritual progress for a group, nation, or civilization often comes from outside the explicitly religious sectors - like much of the abolitionist movement before the Civil War (though churches were a major part of that movement).

If any major literary figure outside the usual religious world is associated today with the moral language of kindness, it would be George Saunders, a geologist turned popular author whose 2013 commencement speech became widely admired. In that speech, Saunders talks about how one of his great failures in life was a “failure of kindness” when he was a boy. His speech to hundreds of aspiring college students was part of his spiritual self-correction.

Saunders has recently come out with a book entitled Vigil. On his book tour, he was interviewed by Ezra Klein of The New York Times, where he put that speech, his reputation, and his broader work into perspective. Below is a brief summary of the speech, followed by two questions: What is the difference between being “nice” and being genuinely kind? And is what Saunders proposes spiritual work, psychological work, or some combination of the two? My answers are informed by Ezra Klein's interview.

The Speech

In May 2013, George Saunders stood before Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences graduates and gave a commencement address that has outlived the usual half-life of such occasions. It belongs less to ceremonial advice than to moral literature. Saunders did not tell the graduates how to become impressive. He asked them to become kind.

The speech begins as comedy. Saunders casts himself as the required “old fart” dispensing wisdom, then piles up understandable regrets: poverty, terrible jobs, humiliation, a jungle-river misadventure involving monkeys. The humor is not filler. It is the door he opens before asking us to enter something more serious.

Then comes the center: a memory from seventh grade. A shy girl, called “Ellen,” is ignored and teased. Saunders does not make himself the villain — that is what makes the story sting. He was not cruel; he sometimes even defended her. But he did not truly befriend her. His regret, decades later, is not a sin of violence or malice. It is smaller and quieter: a “failure of kindness.”

That phrase is why the speech lasts. Saunders identifies a category of regret many of us recognize but rarely name — the moments when we saw someone’s loneliness and responded politely, mildly, sensibly, but not lovingly enough. His advice is modest in wording and radical in implication: “Try to be kinder.”

Why are we not kinder? Because we move through life with built-in illusions: that we are central, separate, and somehow permanent. So ambition takes over. Saunders does not reject ambition — he tells the graduates to work, love, travel, lead, create. But he asks them to place all of it under a higher discipline: “err in the direction of kindness.” The speech ends almost like a blessing. As we age, he suggests, self may “diminish” and love may grow.

In his words:

...accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended… So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.”

What does Saunders say is the difference between being “nice” and being genuinely kind?

The Klein interview makes clear that Saunders is uneasy with the way his commencement address has sometimes been reduced to a slogan about “kindness.” He says directly that he has come to see the word as confusing if it is taken to mean mere niceness. “Kindness,” for him, is not tidiness, politeness, or avoiding conflict. It is “being beneficial in the moment you’re in.”

The commencement address can sound, on first reading, like a gentle moral lesson: notice the suffering person in front of you. But the interview deepens the idea. Sometimes the kind thing is not to soothe falsely. Sometimes it is to tell the truth. Sometimes it is to stop someone from doing harm.

Saunders’s central contrast is not between cruelty and sweetness, but between selfishness and accurate, loving attention. In the speech, he regrets moments when another person was “right there” and suffering, and he responded “sensibly, reservedly, mildly.” Those are not obviously vicious responses — they are socially acceptable responses. That is the danger. Saunders is not warning only against active meanness; he is warning against a cool, self-protective restraint that lets suffering remain someone else’s problem.

In discussing Vigil, he criticizes what he calls “idiot compassion” — the kind that excuses harm or refuses to name wrongdoing. He says true comfort requires truth: if there are wolves outside the cabin, it is not comforting to pretend they are dogs. Genuine kindness is not simply making someone feel better. It is helping them come into better relation with what is real.

Read this way, the commencement address is not soft. It is morally demanding. Niceness may preserve social smoothness. Kindness, in Saunders’s deeper sense, may interrupt it.

Is Saunders seeing kindness as a spiritual power, a psychological behavior, or both?

Saunders is making both a psychological and a spiritual argument, and the Klein interview shows how closely the two are joined. Psychologically, the commencement address is about the ego: the way we move through life centered on ourselves, protecting our status, comfort, and preferred story about who we are. His famous regret comes from moments when he saw another person’s suffering but remained enclosed in his own self-concern.

But Saunders does not see this merely as a personality flaw. He sees it as a spiritual problem. In the conversation with Klein, he describes the self as a kind of illusion or temporary construction. This is where his Buddhist vocabulary enters: the self is not as solid or separate as it feels, and many of our moral failures come from acting as though it were.

At the same time, his Catholic inheritance is present. He talks at length about sin, repentance, judgment, and grace — but defines sin in his own way: being “out of step with truth.” Sin is not only dramatic wickedness. It can be the small inward falsification by which we say we feel one thing when we really feel another, or the larger public falsification by which a powerful person denies the harm he knows he has caused. Before repentance, Saunders says, there has to be acceptance: one has to come into relation with what one actually did.

That makes the commencement address more than a humane pep talk. It is a spiritual diagnosis in plain language — that we become better not by achieving more or winning more, but by gradually loosening the grip of the self. The speech gives the beautiful public form of the idea; the interview reveals the darker and more rigorous moral structure underneath it.

Coming soon: initial reactions to the controversial Obamacenter design in Chicago. From Wikipedia:

The Barack Obama Presidential Center is an under-construction museum, library, and education project in Chicago to commemorate the presidency of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States. The center will also include community and conference facilities and will house the nonprofit Obama Foundation. Construction on the 19.3-acre (7.8 ha) campus began in 2021; the tower topped out in mid-2024. A dedication ceremony is scheduled for June 18, 2026, followed by its opening to the public the next day, on Juneteenth.[5][6]

How many times have you said, “I can’t believe yesterday’s Trump scandal,” only to hear someone answer, in person or online, “Yeah, politics has become so corrupt.”

I can feel my scalp temperature rising just remembering.

Because that answer is not really about corruption. It is a way of dissolving judgment. Someone is implying, without saying it, that Trump’s behavior is no worse than anyone else’s. Everyone does it. Both parties are rotten. No distinction matters.

That is not balance. It is blurred vision.

So it needs to be said plainly: the Democratic Party is, today, the only responsible, mature American political party.

If you are an Independent, a Never Trump Republican, or simply tired of tribalism, I am not asking you to accept that like a slogan. I am asking you to look at the record.

We need to think brand

Now that MAGA has taken over the Republican Party, Democrats should stop selling only individual candidates and start promoting the Democratic Party itself. We still believe in constitutional government. We still govern as if courts, budgets, elections, facts, and public accountability matter. Today, that's something to be proud of.

That does not mean every Democrat is perfect. It does not mean every Democratic proposal is wise. It means the party, as a governing institution, is far better for America's future than the one organized around Donald Trump (and will be so marked for many years to come).

We are balanced. Not only have Democratic presidents been way more fiscally responsible. Democrats have been much more principled and law-abiding in office.

Why, then, are the two parties’ public reputations equally battered in the polls?

Partly because Democrat officials are poor defenders of their clan. They tend to honor a system larger than party affiliation. That’s a terrific virtue in government, but can become a weakness in voter persuasion.

Far more importantly, America’s national discourse is mired in false equivalence. We flatten differences because it feels fair. We say “politicians are corrupt” because it sounds worldly. We smile and agree with each other because we prefer friendliness to argument.

The villain: false equivalence

But false equivalence is not healthy. It’s pure deception. It is the habit of noticing one similarity and ignoring everything else that matters.

Think of the former athlete Lance Armstrong. He was prosecuted for continual, hidden drug use. His first defense was that the sport of cycling was full of doping.

That was partly true. He was not the only rider crossing the lines of the law.

But that did not make every case equal. Armstrong built a public mythology around purity, courage, and heroic suffering while running one of the sport’s most sophisticated doping operations. He denied it for years, and attacked the people who told the truth.

That is how false equivalence works. It takes one point of similarity - “others do it too” - and uses it to erase scale, pattern, intent, and intensity of damage. False equivalence starts as a passive lie and ends up a voracious tyrant.

A travesty for self-governance

It's a staple of bad politics and it's destroying our prized two-party system. Both parties have increased deficits, it claims. Both have had scandals. Both accept money from wealthy interests. Therefore, we are told, both parties are basically the same.

They are not.

Let's start with fiscal responsibility.

Consider three of an elected official's basic obligations: keep public debt under control, invest public funds in things that strengthen the country, and pay honestly for the benefits our laws provide. By those tests, the old labels are upside down.

It is surprising how well “tax-and-spend” liberals stack up against “fiscally responsible” conservatives. Again and again, Democratic presidents have tended to leave deficits lower than they found them, or at least moving in the right direction, while Republican presidents have more often left them higher.

Reagan turned tax-cut conservatism into a governing philosophy, but deficits rose sharply on his watch. Clinton inherited deficits and left surpluses. George W. Bush inherited surpluses and left large deficits. Obama inherited a financial-crisis deficit and brought it down substantially. Trump inherited a stable post-recession deficit and widened it before COVID.

Presidents alone do not control budgets. Congress, emergencies, and economic cycles matter. But direction still matters. Since Reagan, in inflation-adjusted dollars, Republicans have added about $21 trillion in debt to the Democrats’ $14 trillion. That is not a correction to the conventional wisdom. It is the reverse of it.

The same confusion appears in public investment. Spending is not responsible just because it is compassionate, and cutting spending is not responsible just because it looks restrained. The question is whether the move strengthens the country.

Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law put major funding into roads, bridges, water systems, transit, airports, ports, broadband, and the electric grid. The 2017 Trump tax law was sold as growth policy, but the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would add about $1.4 trillion to deficits over ten years. One created long-term public assets. The other handed out free tax relief -- irresponsibly borrowed from future taxpayers.

Democrats can overpromise, and some Democratic proposals deserve skepticism when funding is vague, implementation is weak, or projected costs grow. Even the Inflation Reduction Act, initially scored as reducing deficits, has faced concern that clean-energy tax credits could cost far more than first expected.

But the modern Republican template is more consistently harmful. You've seen it many times: promise voters tax cuts, increased defense spending, continued Medicare and Social Security, and lower deficits -- all at once. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated Trump approved $8.4 trillion in new ten-year borrowing, or $4.8 trillion excluding COVID. That is not fiscal conservatism. It is an offense to basic math.

Tolerating Corruption

These are not isolated lapses. Presidents reveal a party’s fiscal instincts through signed laws, budget priorities, campaign promises, and what the party defends afterward. When the same pattern recurs - unpaid tax cuts, suspicion of public investment, and selective deficit concern - it stops looking like an exception and starts looking like a party's disposition.

A party’s brand is what it says. But it is also what it keeps doing.

The contrast is even sharper on corruption.

Trump’s corruption is not merely larger in volume than ordinary political corruption. It is different in kind. Ordinary corruption usually means an official takes a bribe, steers a contract, lies about a benefit, or protects a donor. Trump’s model goes further: the presidency itself becomes entangled with profit, legal immunity, family business, political payback, and funneling public money.

Meme coins, private-club access, pardons for allies, attacks on investigators, and taxpayer-funded grievance machinery do not look like scattered lapses. They look like a governing style in which private interest and public power are deliberately blurred.

That does not mean Democrats have clean hands. Bob Menendez was convicted on bribery and foreign-agent charges and sentenced to 11 years in prison. But Democrats did not shield him or turn him into a martyr. More than two dozen Democratic senators called for him to resign after his indictment, and after conviction party leaders moved to force him out.

Compare that with George Santos. House Republicans initially blocked a Democratic expulsion effort, referring the matter to an ethics committee so they could count on his loyal voting. Santos was eventually expelled, but only after a devastating ethics report found evidence of years of unrestrained lawlessness.

An easy-enough choice

That difference matters. Parties are not judged only by whether they produce scoundrels. Every large institution will. They are judged by what they do when even the scoundrels are in office.

This is where “both sides” collapses. Democrats behave like standards outside the party still have authority. They may be imperfect, slow, self-protective, or hypocritical at times. But when it comes to traditions that protect us all - courts, ethics rules, inspectors general, budget constraints, election results, and public accountability, Democrats bow respectfully. MAGA disdains them all, treating them like enemies to be captured, slandered, discredited, or just circumvented.

That is the central contrast.

The point is not that Democrats are saints. The point is that parties form habits. They defend standards or corrode them. They punish misconduct or explain it away. They tell the public what kind of behavior is normal.

Reason for pride, present and past

So yes, character matters. Competence matters. Local knowledge matters. But in this era, the letter after the name matters too. It tells us which coalition a candidate strengthens, which habits they normalize, and which direction they help move the country.

If we care about fiscal honesty, clean government, constitutional restraint, and ordinary democratic decency, then we should say so plainly. And take pride that, so far, Democrats have weathered the storm.

MAGA was built on sand. The Democratic Party was not.

What do Democrat and Republian brands really stand for? How are they different? Not the branding that comes from National Committees, but the brands we perceive mixing past promises with past accomplishments.

We are fortunate to have a number of long-time observers and scholars who are essentially European Americans. In this time of America turning its back on Europe it is very enlightening to get their extended take on how things are changing.

Below is a summary and some Q&A of a highly regarded speech that is making the rounds on the internet. From one of The Atlantic’s most renowned writers. A link to the speech follows.

Summary & Queries

“The European Moment”

Speech by Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum’s speech begins from the memory of Europe’s catastrophe: World War II and the Holocaust. It’s predicated on the postwar determination by Europeans to prevent that kind of collapse from returning.

Her central claim is that the European Union is not merely a bureaucratic structure or trade arrangement. It is the institutional form of Europe’s post-1945 civilizational achievement: liberal democracy, rule of law, economic integration, collective sovereignty, and peace among former rivals. Because those institutions have worked so well, she argues, Europeans have started to take them for granted.

The warning section of the speech is stark. Applebaum says that old discredited ideas are returning: contempt for parliamentary democracy, ethnic nationalism, theocracy, scapegoating, propaganda, and the idea that politics is a struggle between existential enemies. Russia is the most obvious external threat in her account, not simply because it invaded Ukraine, but because its war is meant to prove that treaties, borders, alliances, and the postwar European order are meaningless. In her framing, the war against Ukraine is also a war against the European idea itself.

The most challenging part of the speech is her treatment of the United States. Applebaum argues that under Trump, America is no longer leading democratic coalitions and no longer treats democracy as central to its identity or foreign policy. She places Trump, Vance, Rubio, and elements of the American tech world in a new alignment: not identical to Russia, but similarly interested in a weaker, more fragmented Europe. Russia wants a Europe too weak to defend itself; Applebaum says some American actors want a Europe dependent on U.S. technology and therefore politically controllable.

Her answer is not despair but European self-assertion. Europe, she says, should treat its predictability, rule of law, courts, science, culture, and contractual reliability as strategic advantages. She calls for European defense technology, European AI and social platforms, data stored in Europe, a capital markets union, and a fuller understanding of “Western civilization” - not as cathedrals and heritage alone, but as rule of law, free speech, judicial independence, equality before the law, and accountable government. The speech ends with the claim that this is a moment as consequential as 1989, and that Europe can choose liberal democracy over a world governed by force.

1 - Are these changes reversible, or permanent?

Per Applebaum’s case, the answer would be: partly reversible electorally, but not simply reversible structurally. Trump or Trumpism might lose power in 2028, but the damage she describes is not only a matter of one man or one term. It includes a changed Republican foreign-policy imagination, a changed American relationship to allies, a weakening of democracy-promotion institutions, a transactional view of alliances, and a tech sector willing to treat European regulation as an enemy. Those things do not automatically disappear with a new president.

So the better distinction is not “temporary vs. permanent,” but episode vs. precedent. Trump’s second term, in Applebaum’s argument, creates a precedent: America can abruptly stop seeing itself as leader of the democratic world. Once allies have seen that, they cannot unsee it. Even if a later U.S. administration tries to restore the older alliance language, Europe, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Ukraine, and others will reasonably ask: for how long? until the next election? That uncertainty is itself a permanent change unless American politics produces a long, stable, bipartisan correction.

2 - If permanent, how might America’s role in the world be affected?

America would shift from being seen as the anchor of a liberal international order to being seen as a powerful, unstable, self-interested great power - still important, still rich, still militarily central, but less trusted as a guardian of rules. That does not mean America becomes irrelevant. It means other countries hedge against us.

In practical terms, Europe would accelerate defense independence; allies would make backup plans; trade partners would diversify; smaller democracies would become more cautious about depending on Washington; and adversaries would test whether U.S. commitments still mean what they used to mean. Applebaum’s argument implies that the U.S. would still be formidable, but its leadership would become more coercive and less magnetic. Countries might cooperate with America out of necessity, but with less affection, less confidence, and less willingness to follow.

3 - How would it change the “brand” of America around the world?

The old American brand was never pure, but it was powerful: constitutional democracy, free enterprise, rule of law, open universities, innovation, immigration, reliable alliances, and a certain optimism about the future. Applebaum’s speech suggests that brand is being replaced by something harder and smaller: tariffs, resentment, oligarchic tech power, contempt for allies, admiration for strongmen, and indifference to democratic values abroad.

That would be a severe brand injury. The United States would still represent money, military power, entertainment, technology, and elite education. But it would no longer so easily represent liberty or democratic aspiration. The Statue of Liberty side of the brand would fade; the “America First” bargaining table would dominate. For people abroad, America might become less a country to emulate and more a country to manage.

4 - Possible secondary effects, good and bad?

The bad effects are easier to see. A less reliable America could embolden Russia, China, Iran, and other authoritarian states. It could weaken NATO cohesion, slow support for Ukraine, encourage nuclear proliferation among nervous allies, and make democracies more vulnerable to propaganda and cyber operations. It could also make U.S. companies less welcome abroad if they are seen as instruments of American political leverage.

But there could be constructive secondary effects too. Europe might finally build the defense capacity and technology infrastructure it has talked about for years. Democratic countries outside the U.S. might form stronger networks with one another. European regulation of tech, data, AI, and platforms could become a model rather than a nuisance. Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and others might deepen cooperation without waiting for Washington.

The ironic possibility is that Trumpism could weaken American leadership while strengthening democratic self-reliance elsewhere. That would not be an uncomplicated good. It would mean a more dangerous transition, with less coordination and more risk. But Applebaum’s hopeful claim is that Europe has more latent power than it admits. If America becomes unreliable, the shock may force Europe to stop behaving like a protected dependency and start acting like a sovereign democratic superpower.

From Out of Line by Don Watson

Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum

What, actually, is European Civilization?

Since 2019, the Institute for Human Sciences and the Erste Foundation have sponsored an annual Speech for Europe. The speech is always timed to coincide with the opening of the Wiener Festwochen, Vienna’s annual cultural festival, and is on or near Europe Day, which is also the anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The speech is held outdoor…

Read more

4 months ago · 1187 likes · 22 comments · Anne Applebaum

One of my favorite life axioms is that we are always thinking too much - or too little - of wrongdoing. It is too natural for us to head to the extremes - to be too comfortable with the behavior of ourselves or others - or to be too critical of it.

It is that Goldilocks zone that we need to seek and find.

We can subject ourselves to fear the same way. And that's what I'm thinking about today.

Subscribe now

How many times have we been needlessly afraid of something? Or asleep to the real dangers we face?

In a world that tends to black or white, seeing everything as medium gray is no solution either. The need is for accuracy, for clarity.

In difficult times the need is to stay awake, free of paranoia, but also to have our antenna in working order, our minds staying sharp.

The Cost of Misjudging Threats

As a nation, we have paid dearly for getting this wrong. Toward the beginning of the Third Reich, we were way too unconcerned about Hitler. Sitting on our hands allowed Hitler to threaten the entire Western world.

Toward the end of the Soviet Union, America feared Soviet power, and was blind to how that power was already hollowed-out.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, “Japan is clobbering us” became one of those national anxieties that felt obvious at the time and looks way overstated in hindsight.

Now it is different. In particular, China is different.

Of course, when we said Germany was not a threat, we weren’t realistic about the threat to national sovereignty it could become. When we were afraid of Japan, we were mostly afraid of our economic prowess being eclipsed. One was complacency toward being dominated by a dictator. The other, fear of losing our economic dominance. Admittedly that's a big difference.

I live in the Midwest. So I often see the result of economic stability that was lost many decades ago. Loss of economic power is, in a sense, a loss of vitality and sometimes even the loss of life itself. The consequences should not be taken lightly. And our own economic stability could be greatly diminished if the U.S. were to be dominated economically.

Could China really do that?

Why China Is Different

The Soviets had military reach and a nuclear arsenal, but they were weak economically. Japan had economic strength, but a small population, no comparable military reach, and modest ambitions.

China is unique. It combines massive population and production, rising technical prowess, single-minded state control, industrial discipline, a Western attitude toward commerce and productivity, and global ambitions. Its threat to the post-World War II order is no longer theoretical. It is a decades-long success story.

As I listen and read about Trump’s visit to China, I can sense a shift. We have been concerned, if not fearful, of China’s rise for a long time. But what we are fearing now is not only China’s competitiveness. It is our own lack of it.

A Work Ethic Without A Team Ethic

China’s work ethic is clear, but it has other things we are beginning to worry about: its very effective team ethic, and its shrewd coach.

America works hard, but we are working against ourselves. For a while, we were in a tie with China on EVs. Now they have pulled ahead as Trump took our years of work on a nationwide charging network and threw it away. Because Donald Trump does not like EVs.

There may be no getting that market back.

Imagine that: a Detroit that continues to slump toward an ever smaller, future of always playing catch-up. Or staying on the sidelines. That is what Detroit’s Trump-inspired future is starting to look like.

It is nuts. Our president destroying a rising American industry?

China is nationalistic. We do not want to be nationalistic, but we still need to have a team ethic. And we need a much more professional coach.

Despite Trump’s sloganeering, America is losing first place. It is looking second-rate. We are no longer a team but a split personality. Our current regime sees America as a heritage club based on birth, race, gender, class, and grievance. That is not team leadership. That is anathema to any team's work ethic.

Glitter Is Not Prosperity

Trump thinks gold, glitter, handshakes, and big numbers on bank transfers make prosperity. He does not realize that a hardworking country without a shared purpose is extremely vulnerable to a hardworking country with one.

Xi represents a government that builds industries, infrastructure, trains, batteries, exports, and manufacturing capacity. China’s bullet train system is a potent symbol of that: a practical, technical national achievement that could intensify China’s industry and quality of life for a century. It is also an industry that can thrive on foreign sales.

Prior to his inauguration, Trump hosted the CEOs of Big Oil at Mar-a-Lago. It is a mystery what transpired. But now his demolition of our EV infrastructure is helping China’s EV industry and its international industrial cachet. All while making America slower, more divided, and less prepared to compete in the next transportation economy.

Becoming Customers of the Future

Decline will not arrive as one dramatic collapse, like a plunge in the stock market. Gradually, local economies could lose factories. Teslas are built here. For how long will that be viable? How long before we have to start subsidizing their production? Can we keep those jobs? Their tax base? The training required? The civic pride and confidence?

We are acquiescing to a narrative in which we are not building the future, only purchasing it from others at their retail rate.

Our Democratic Immune System

America has inherent strengths that China does not. Strengths that can give us hope. They are not recent innovations but things we will be celebrating as our heritage in our 250th anniversary.

Dictators are more like CEOs than presidents. They serve narrower ends and face fewer constraints. They can move fast. But they can also move fast in the wrong direction. Remember China’s rigid one-child policy?

Our system may be messy and fractious, but it provides a better debate about the pros and cons of moving this way or that. A free press, courts, opposition parties, universities, businesses, states, and voters can say, “This is not working.”

We are doing that right now in the Iran war.

Perhaps that is part of what leads to economic stability. While China is excelling in many industries, our overall economy has proven resilient.

Doctors know the immense value of an immune system. That is one great advantage of our body politic.

Other strengths are our pluralism, our intolerance for regimentation and conformity, our heritage of free expression and varied lifestyles. Our intolerance for a surveillance state.

For a time, economic success under an authoritarian surveillance state can bring euphoria and strengthen team spirit. But for how long will it satisfy?

Share

A Gift of Retrospection

Perhaps this year’s 250th anniversary is more of a blessing than might be apparent. True, it landed on the worst possible administration. But have we ever needed balanced, long-term retrospection more than now? Not only to remind us of our best selves, but to understand how to best view and treat other countries.

We should not hate China, demonize the Chinese people, or confuse our deep concern for war fever. But neither should we mistake our current state of economic sedation for cool-headedness.

We are asleep to the economic threat China poses to our economy. But the answer is not simply being better competitors to China. It is in being better Americans.

It is not in following Trump, blasting Trump as a leader, or envying the example of China. It is in recapturing the better selves we lost when, in November 2024, we asked a demagogue to work magic fixes on our country’s problems. More Trump would make the bad stuff go away - so we thought. Because that's what business geniuses can do, right?

Only working as a team will make us whole. There is no more time for self doubt, hate-mongering or personality cults.

A good coach can help, but let’s never forget: the coach spends the entire game on the sidelines. That is where he belongs. The hard work is ours.

There is so much we need to be doing. Seeking and finding that Goldilocks zone is more important than ever. No more chilling out, assuming economic power is our divine right. A renewed democratic industriousness will help with our team spirit, and with our own.

Placement matters. The more central and prominent they are in an urban landscape, the more deeply people feel about memorializing something, and the broader the population that felt the need to build it. At least in America.

Centrality

Think of a cityscape as a canvas. Centrally located and prominent public land is used to satisfy and further prominent public causes. You don't create prominent public focal points driven by whim. If it's central to the composition, it's important to people. It's precious real estate. Unless those allocating public resources have a child’s understanding of history, power, and society, the placement of monuments is generally very intentional, deliberate, and rooted in expressed public support.

Part of the reason this is so is that, without broad public goodwill toward prominent focal points, monuments don’t last, and their demolition can bring intemse public shame upon whoever built them in the first place, or their families.

Architecture is unique in that way. If a grand painting in a prominent public building is hated by many, the ill will doesn’t get that intense or broad. But in the case of a monument people drive by every day, one that is greatly disliked or has bad associations, history has a way of dispensing with the offending structure.

Building Emotion

People get irritated by it continually. You can't avert your eyes. People will feel the animosity regularly, and that ill will builds. The monument may survive one building life cycle, but no one will want to pay for its restoration. So, in a way, politicians usually avoid monuments with shallow public emotional support for obvious reasons: common-sense shame avoidance.

One recent example of ill will building to a crescendo was in California. It was also a top-down imposition of a monument on a prominent urban site: Armand Vaillancourt's brutalist sculpture in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza, where I watched Michael Dukakis give the last speech of his presidential campaign. It was never admired by the public. Since 1971, its setting, Embarcadero Plaza, has become a more glamorous celebration of urban space. Vaillancourt's gritty realism, along with its unpopularity, made it an inappropriate oddity, and as of last week, it's gone.

The analogy to Trump’s recent plans for a GIANT triumphal arch may be imperfect. But still, a building forced onto an intense urban landscape with zero popular emotion ushering in its placement will almost certainly result in its demise.

Size Matters

I suspect that is why plans for it are getting bigger and bigger. Trump is betting that the larger the size, the more “too big to fail” it will be. Removing it will be too much of an imposition, he may be thinking.

But monuments aren't skyscrapers. People expect them to be scaled according to the importance of their cause. The larger it gets, I'm betting, the sooner it will be removed - or at least, the more certain its eventual removal.

If it ever gets built in the first place.

The Fourth Time’s a Charm

On marble floors and under gold light,

A ballroom appeared almost overnight.

With columns fluted and chandeliers tall,

It looked less like a room than a campaign hall.

- -

Designers had asked, “Sir… perhaps something small?”

He laughed and said, “Small? There’d be no point at all!”

More volume, more velvet, more glitter, more glow -

If modesty survived, it knew not to show.

- -

The music began, the whole ceiling shone,

A skeptic asked softly, “a ballroom, overblown?”

He paused for a beat, then surveyed the room:

“Pretend it's a wedding. She’s the bride, I’m the groom.”

The first time I heard the word in relation to AI was several years ago. Mark Cuban was on a podcast talking about the different AI platforms, commenting about which ones are effusive about the user being smart and savvy.

Cuban, it seems to me, is a shrewd person who can parse fact and fiction. That’s a big compliment from someone who found his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks on the side of bad sportsmanship. (To be fair, we are twenty-year avid Warriors fans.) When I heard his comment about sycophancy in AI, I started thinking — is it true? Something to worry about?

Worth Considering

His remark was months after the release of ChatGPT. I had played around a bit with the platform myself. I saw what he was saying. ChatGPT tended to want me to feel like it was an infinitely-capable loyal ally, one who couldn’t help but see the sheer genius in most of my questions and assessments.

Before going much further let’s define our terms. What exactly is a sycophant? Here it is, from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Presumably, AI might flatter us to make us loyal customers? To capture our trust?

I have used ChatGPT and Claude a lot as research assistants and writing editors. I’m not sure I could pull off these essays without them.

But I’ve noticed how things can start seeming very friendly. Of course I can only testify to relatively pedestrian uses of AI — writing essays and researching construction products and techniques. I don’t move large masses of money around and push AI to the limit with behavioral forecasting or war gaming. But I have seen it from many sides and have watched it grow from its infancy as a public service. I’ll give Cuban credit. I think there is something to worry about.

Ups and Downs

We tend to invest trust in whatever platform we use. We come to it with questions and tasks and it comes back at us with answers. Pretty much anything you could ask any expert, you can ask AI. It will respond with confidence — usually deserved, if not always. But it is a lot more deserved than it was two years ago.

And it also comes back with a certain tone toward you, the user.

AI seems trained to know that we are customers and, from the age-old adage, “the customer is king.” The AI trainer’s incentive is to serve people, mass amounts of them, and that means keeping people feeling good about their interactions with their product. And when possible, feeling good about themselves.

Many times I’ve had intuitions that I want AI to chase down, and it will not only respond with a detailed answer but almost always predicate it with a compliment such as “your insight was correct about…” Or even if it can’t find something you suspect is out there, it will be diplomatic: “while you are right about this, I couldn’t find that, but maybe we could look into this angle instead…”

The “we” is critical. It wants to come off as human and collaborative.

The kindness and collaborative posture could be seen as sycophantic, but I would say not. That sense of the collaborative “we” is an ethos that is good to establish among employees with no connection to AI. It is a feeling of ease and good will that any human interface would want to emulate.

Not only that, but I’ve detected a tempering of the user-as-genius language over time. Maybe AI is not only getting more capable but more wise in how it interacts with us.

So in a tactical way I don’t find it a flatterer so much as rigorously friendly. Flattery, as we hear about in our public discourse, is something aides do around Trump to obscure bad news. AI tends to break bad news but in a diplomatic way. When I’m researching certain truths I suspect, it has been more than willing to let me know I’m going down the wrong path — but it will be nice about it. It’s learned human diplomacy. Probably better than I have.

On what you could call a strategic level though, things get different and possibly more dangerous for the user.

Danger Zone

I’m surprised how well AI can help give context to answers. Let’s say I put forward a hypothesis about Congress cutting budgets because of the Republican’s view on something. It will often come back with a full run-down on when it’s true and when it’s not, then try to identify a logic for the discrepancy.

But what it can’t yet do is bring a really accurate perspective to bear on the truth. I remember a project where I decided that something AI had assured me was totally sound needed to be completely abandoned. I had thought about it more, and a larger context made my previous point moot. I had AI start doing research on that larger context. AI agreed, acknowledged that the bigger picture changed the nature of my conclusions, and nearly apologized for not seeing it sooner.

Nice. But prior to that was the danger. There had been a lot of kind words and enthusiastic feelings of arriving at some hidden truth. AI was building me up, convincing me I was going down the right path when I wasn’t. And yet it gave me lots of reasons to be self-satisfied with my diligent work getting there.

So, on my humble level working with artificial intelligence, that sense of self-satisfaction AI instills in the user now seems like a danger it inherently poses. It’s like an increase in critical thinking to get to a certain point, but then a suspension of critical thinking once you’ve arrived and assessed where you are.

Of course it’s always necessary to do wider research. You can’t base research on one platform any more than you can base it on one source.

Sycophancy in Context

So, does this amount to sycophancy? No and yes. No — in the sense that most of the work it does with us is above board. And yet an underlying tone can become deceptive and therefore somewhat dangerous. Is there a malign purpose behind it, as with a Trump flatterer? In the sense that it wants to build trust for its own success, I suppose so.

I think Mark Cuban was referring to perhaps an earlier phase when AI was right out of the gate and more blatantly sycophantic. In my experience it is less guilty of outright flattery when it comes to everyday problem solving and writing drafts. But it can shift our outlooks and feelings in subtle ways that would be hard to identify or guard against. And of course it probably customized how it interacts with each individual.

Taking the side of AI for a moment, though: this is something you could say about any employee or friend helping you. It doesn’t take a large language model to get caught up in the success of the moment, lose a sense of perspective, or be too congratulatory.

Real Concern

It’s interesting: as I was composing this today, Garry Kasparov said in a podcast how Putin’s world is breaking down and he’s becoming more prone to the dangers of sycophancy from those around him. Which brought me to the first source of sycophancy in the last 20 years — the discussion of autocrats and autocracy more and more in our political discourse.

Sycophancy is not harmless. Like loose lips, it can sink ships. In small amounts it may not be that dangerous, but when dishonesty and illusion start becoming common tools of the trade, can’t sycophancy become a sign of imminent doom? It means that someone powerful, just like the pedestrian user of AI, has suspended critical thinking and is trying to bend the world around them to their fantasy.

Twenty years ago, I barely remembered what the word meant. How did it become so much in the air? Surprise. Trump has everything to do with the ascent of the word in our public discourse — and that’s not just a fantasy, it’s a fact easily seen in Google Trends, which anyone can use to track the use of words in our written, published discourse.

Once Again, He's in the Center

Trump himself popularized the concept of sycophancy by ushering the word into unprecedented familiarity in December 2016. According to Google Trends, the word first entered the media bloodstream in 2004 when Merriam-Webster made it the “Word of the Day.” It had a modest bump in use, then a long slog into occasional if minimal usage. Then, in December 2016, there was a huge spike.

Google Trends doesn’t make attributions for why words rise in prominence, only that they do. But we all, I assume, remember December 2016 — Trump assembling his first administration, famous strangers arriving at Trump Tower to audition for cabinet positions. Many like Rick Perry were turning into the yes men of Trump 1.0.

But you might also recall that Trump’s first term still had some checks and balances. Those checks and balances illustrate how we can keep our own interactions with AI in check.

Perhaps the all-time best illustration of sycophantism in a social setting was the first cabinet meeting Trump held to introduce his team in June 2017. Trump had assembled all these folks and they clearly knew this would not be an introductory cabinet meeting like any in our history. It wasn’t a preview of how our new team of professionals were going to do their super-important jobs. It was time to build up the boss. Slather on the praise.

Ugly Experience, Instructive Lesson

The news cameras went around the room. The New York Times captured it for all time:

In conclusion. If your AI platform ever starts sounding like this? Maybe it’s time to pull back and get some perspective.

The Times went on, and in retrospect, gave us a good way to think about an appropriate tone when getting important advice from AI platforms, or people for that matter:

So much on the world stage is changing.

And the main change agent is no doubt Trump—or at least what he represents. But does that mean it’s all bad?

Bad Shock, Better System

It may be that dramatic change simply forces a next step in a natural evolution of things. I remember how the construction industry responded to a historically bad storm—Andrew in Florida. Twenty years later, all kinds of regulatory and technological progress, spurred by Andrew is saving lives all over the world. Clearly, very bad things can lead to better balance, better preparedness, more safety.

I’ve thought this many times about NATO, for example. NATO is, or was, a system—a way for countries with liberal values to protect themselves from aggressors, from countries with authoritarian values.

A Shock to an Old Order

Trump takes NATO’s purpose lightly. But he cares about money. He said America is getting ripped off by people who want us to pay for their security. Europeans responded in a responsible way, but Trump’s disdain has caused enormous changes.

While Trump has a bad and uninformed attitude as a whole, the traditional monetary exchange probably was a flaw in the system. Isn’t it better for a world order to be built on dozens of more equal pillars rather than require one pillar to dominate, like the U.S. has dominated?

Take Ukraine, for example. As we know, Ukraine is not yet in NATO. But still, in the previous system, the people of Ukraine depended on American voters to choose someone smart enough to understand the importance of Ukraine’s sovereignty. So one man, America’s president, previously wielded incredible power over their safety.

Not anymore. Trump’s dereliction of duty has led to Europe itself backstopping Ukraine’s defense, outside of NATO.

Power Redistributed

Just a few weeks ago, Viktor Orbán’s excesses led to his political demise in Hungary. With Orban's veto gone, European countries were then able to vote unanimously for Ukraine’s future with a generous aid package.

Isn’t that a good outcome? Of course, no one would choose this course because of the lives lost and communities destroyed getting here.

But if we are forced to take stock of where we are, we must admit: Ukraine’s neighbors are coming to its defense in an effective way—a preferable way. Putin can’t just get a pee tape on one world leader and then shove nations around because of it.

And we aren’t forced to play God. It is a better outcome than going to Ukraine’s aid and then calling the shots, like a Roman emperor at a gladiator fight, giving a thumbs up or thumbs down over which nation prevails.

The Musings Mode

Truly, this is a time when I’m glad this is a column about musings. Because that seems to be about all anyone can do with all the changes going on. Who could possibly make an accurate accounting—politically, morally, philosophically? That’s why we watch people like Heather Cox Richardson.

I want to end this discussion with the story of a best-kept secret about a major shift we are now experiencing. Something that just happened. An earthquake—a “secret” earthquake, if you will. Big change going deep into the soil of our lives as earthlings.

The Quiet Earthquake

It’s about a crack that just opened in the U.S.’s support for Israel.

I love what Israel promises to be—what it has done for itself in many ways. I would love to visit Israel, and not just to see the biblical lands. It’s a modern state built on semi-democratic ideals. I like modernity. I like democracy.

But like most others, I think Israel has gone astray—not in an inherently evil way, but like America’s voters went astray.

And again, like America, I’d say that Israel too had a few fatal flaws in its creation story.

When Leaders Have Something to Lose

Then, of course, there is Netanyahu - on top of Trump.

Let’s be sober. These killing sprees in the Middle East just happened to come about during an astonishing coincidence: the leaders of the two powerful nations involved were both seeking political power to avoid near-certain legal prosecution. They actually faced incarceration; going from immense power over others to minimal basic personal rights in their daily lives.

It was early 2024. Trump was facing serious jail time. And for some reason, America was beginning to look favorably on a second Trump term. Was it the price of eggs?

Netanyahu had been under indictment for corruption for five years. World leaders began saying what most Israelis were saying: Netanyahu was prolonging his bloody attack on Gaza to avoid jail time.

Things come out in the wash. It was only a matter of time before video from Gaza, and discomfort with Netanyahu, resulted in fast declines in support in the U.S. for Israel.

Israel has been famous for its bipartisan support over the decades—and for America’s enthusiasm for it. But the last two years have seen the floor of its support soften dramatically.

Support for Israel has always meant neglect for Palestinians. No more. Support for Palestinians has tripled from 1990s levels. And support no longer equals enthusiasm. “Very unfavorable” views toward Israel have also tripled. And just this year, a party (Democratic) that represents half the U.S. population has flipped—from looking favorably toward Israel to looking favorably only toward Palestinians.

It turns out that bombing dozens of enemy cities into submission in a Warsaw-like fashion, as Israel has done for years in Gaza, can lead to very bad international juju. Netanyahu has created moonscapes out of communities, an evil that few nuclear dictators would allow themselves to contemplate in the modern world—other than Putin.

Not only has Israel’s support in the U.S. diminished, things are being discussed by pro-Israel politicians that could not have been spoken just five years ago—or perhaps even five months ago.

You won’t believe what happened on Bill Maher the other night.

Normally, I expect any discussion of Israel on that show to get very one-dimensional. But I was in for a surprise when Bill Maher and Rahm Emanuel got talking.

If you don’t know much about Rahm Emanuel, you’ll probably hear more about him in the next year. He’s a likely candidate for president in 2028—a former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayor. I’ve always thought he was very bright and a good communicator, but I never knew that much about him. I did have an impression of him as a hyper-pragmatist.

He’s also Jewish. And I remember what happened to Governor Josh Shapiro, another respected Jewish politician, four years ago—by Netanyahu. It was widely accepted that Netanyahu had put America’s support for Israel in a terrible light. Die hard supporters of Israel may have been unelectable, at least for a time. Kamala Harris sidelined Shapiro as a VP pick and went instead with Tim Walz.

Candidate Rahm

As Bill Maher started joking about how politicians eyeing the presidency are always putting out books and never admitting they’re going to run, I began wondering: how on earth will Rahm Emanuel’s fate be any different, considering Israel has taken an enormous beating in American popularity since Kamala Harris’s days?

As it turned out, Rahm Emanuel was way, way, WAY ahead of me.

He effectively put himself an arm’s length from Shapiro’s problem, became a premier tough-on-Israel politician, and yet suggested nothing that would really harm Israel.

If you are not familiar with comedian Bill Maher’s talk show on Friday nights on HBO, it is one of the major national platforms for liberal politicians to connect with their base. Maher tends to help candidates he takes a shine to. Rahm Emanuel knew that this was his moment in the sun—his first impression for Democrats about him and his candidacy.

And boy, did he deliver. Rahm Emanuel, one of the most successful Jewish American politicians of all time, said—and made a strong case for—cutting all U.S. financial aid to Israel. Four billion dollars, currently.

His rationale? They are successful and no longer need it.

That’s big change. You might even call it a natural evolution.

It’s hard to recall aid to Israel being branded as unnecessary by a mainstream American politician in the past fifty years. And doing so might never have been contemplated had Netanyahu not brought about the near-total destruction of urban life in Gaza. With the help of American taxpayers.