Daniel McCarthy

These are troubled times for self-described liberals in both of America’s major political parties. They are without heirs: the future of the Democratic party belongs not to liberals but to the Democratic Socialists of America. The Republican party already belongs to Trump voters, and the GOP’s next generation appears to be, if anything, even less liberal: it’s socially conservative, economically populist and skeptical of more wars for the “liberal international order.” The DSA speaks for itself, but the young right has no institutional voice.

The kids call it “Nixonmaxxing,” and I invented it 30 years ago. “I think that his historical record is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so,” Vice President J.D. Vance says about Richard Nixon, who has become, as a recent Wall Street Journal headline put it, “an unlikely new icon” for young conservatives. Maybe I can’t claim to have been the first teenage Republican to have embraced Nixon chic, but all the way back in 1996 a young Danny, irked by the banality of college application essay questions, decided to make his pitch to higher education by writing about the merits of the president who’d been taken down by Watergate. It was a way of daring colleges and universities to reject me.

Political lives almost always end in failure, or at least anticlimax, but Lindsey Graham went to his reward while in the midst of achieving his goals. Indeed, even the timing of his death might advance one of the causes dearest to him. He had just returned from a visit to Kyiv and his fellow advocates of greater US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war have questioned whether he might not have been murdered by Vladimir Putin. The evidence is against that but the South Carolina senator certainly had deadly enemies: he was high on Iran’s hit-list as well. For decades, he’d called for the use of force against the ayatollahs’ regime and he lived to see that call answered. The Republican aviary still has many other hawks. But can any take Graham’s place?

There are several reasons to think we won’t see a blue wave in this year’s midterm elections. A basic one is that the Democratic party simply isn’t very popular. In late May, Donald Trump’s approval ratings in the RealClear polling aggregate stood around 40 percent, which sounds bad. Yet Trump is more popular than his party – approval of the Republican brand was in the vicinity of 38 percent. And the Democrats’ ratings were even worse – standing, or one might say wilting, at about 36 percent. Those figures are not to be confused with “generic ballot” polling, which asks voters which party they would prefer in the forthcoming election. Democrats have lately enjoyed a lead of some seven points over the GOP in that category.

What happens when a Republican congressman turns his primary election into a referendum on Donald Trump? What happens when he turns it into a referendum on Israel? The answer to those questions should be stunningly obvious. There was never a reason to expect Kentucky to return a different verdict than anywhere else. Quite the contrary – it’s a staunchly red state. Asked to choose between Trump and a congressman who’d lately been garnering favorable coverage in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Republican voters were not about to abandon the president. The very things Thomas Massie’s newfound friends liked about him made him unacceptable to the people who actually vote in Republican primaries.

The pundits and political professionals of Washington, DC have never had a very good understanding of the Republican party. They hate its conservative and populist elements, and they only know how to evaluate the prospects of those elements using irrelevant criteria, like a chess club judging a basketball team – only it’s the political right that’s more cerebral than the dead center. It doesn’t matter how many times the conventional opinion is dead wrong. The Republican right was supposed to be humiliated, broken and vanquished for good after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964. And then again after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace a decade later. Donald Trump, of course, was totally unelected in 2016.

The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Louisiana v. Callais et al has inevitably drawn strong criticism. In ruling that electoral districts cannot be redefined along racial lines, the Court stands accused of "gutting" the Voting Rights Act, crippling civil-rights law and effectively disenfranchising minority voters.  What the Supreme Court has "gutted" is not the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – but a nakedly racial form of gerrymandering But the Court’s decision was correct on the merits. It also represents a great retrenchment that’s taking place in American politics.

Even when he’s not visiting the United States, King Charles III might occasionally daydream about what his reign would be like today if things had worked out differently 250 years ago. The King is not, of course, the head of government anywhere nowadays, and were Charles the king of America, he wouldn’t necessarily wield any more power here than he does in modern Britain. Yet there’s reason to think he possibly could – for the truth is, Americans love monarchy at least as much as they fear it, and they love the royal family, too.

Are congressional Republicans absolutely determined to forfeit this November’s midterm elections? It sure looks that way. The GOP would hardly be acting any differently if it were secretly run by its enemies. The election-security provisions of the SAVE Act enjoy overwhelming popular support. According to CBS/YouGov polling, requiring photo ID to vote is literally an 80-20 issue, commanding the support of four out of five voters. Yet the Republican Senate, with a 53-47 majority, is struggling to pass the law. Yes, the filibuster gives Chuck Schumer a powerful weapon to use against the GOP, but there are ways around that – ways the GOP chooses not to take. Democrats are killing the bill without even having to be held accountable for voting against it.

Sizable minorities on both the left and the right want America to intervene in fewer foreign conflicts and to exercise more restraint in foreign policy. In the 2006 midterm elections, antiwar voters contributed to the Republicans’ loss of both houses of Congress. They also helped defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary contest and the Republican nominee, John McCain, at that year’s general election. While McCain styled himself a “maverick,” the label could be more accurately bestowed upon the anti-interventionist Republican Ron Paul, who shocked the GOP establishment by showing that an unstinting critic of the Iraq War could mount an insurgency within the party of George W. Bush.

Thomas Massie’s predicament, as he fends off a Trump-backed challenger – and Trump himself – in the Republican primary for his seat in Congress, is symbolic of the vexed relationship libertarians have with the right these days. Massie was not only a Tea Party Republican when he was first elected in 2012, he was a Ron Paul Republican, inspired by the longtime, philosophically libertarian Texas congressman who made his second bid for the GOP presidential nomination that year. The Commonwealth of Kentucky had sent Paul’s son, Rand, to the US Senate two years before, and its 4th congressional district put Massie in the House. Libertarians are natural junior partners in someone else’s enterprise ​Now Trump is trying to take him out.

Win or lose, Donald Trump has begun the last war the United States is ever likely to fight in the Middle East. That might sound wildly optimistic, but what it really means is that war with Iran has been decades in the making. If the mission succeeds, it will mark the end of an era. And if it fails, this war will have exhausted what’s left of America’s willingness to remake the region by force. It’s not just that Iran puts the case for regime change to the ultimate test. America’s relationship with Israel is also on trial.

Elon Musk knows something Jeff Bezos doesn’t. Each has had turns as the world’s richest man, and both are media overlords. But whereas Musk’s purchase of Twitter arguably won a presidential election and briefly put the fate of the United States federal government in Musk’s hands, Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post has bought him nothing but grief. No election victories, no sway in Washington, just the hatred of the journalists he subsidizes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Media power in the 21st century is about platforms, not publications. Bezos shouldn’t have needed Musk to teach him this: the whole strategy behind the business that made him rich, Amazon.