Maximillian Garely

For decades, we on the liberal right have been sold the fiction that Republican lawmakers are fighting for small government. There are many reasons why the state seems to relentlessly expand no matter who is in office; an important, though overlooked, one is that it is incredibly difficult to persuade voters that smaller budgets and reduced employee counts can achieve equal or superior results. Voters might dislike bureaucracy, but they fear what happens when the machinery behind it is dismantled – what if the alternative is worse? One needs look no further than the backlash against DOGE to see that the right needs to prove a smaller government can improve citizens’ experience in dealing with it.

Like most evenings recently, I was scrolling X to fill some idle time. Within seconds, I came across a rather rage-inducing post by New York State assembly member and congressional candidate Claire Valdez. Invoking Mexico’s struggle against “empire,” she promised to carry that struggle into Congress. Her framing, focused around the thinly veiled disdain for “empire,” raises an obvious question. What role does America assume in this story? Is the American political community one that she, alongside her DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) comrades, wants to improve, or is it an adversary to be dismantled from within?

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on freezing rents for rent-stabilized tenants. Since taking office earlier this year, he has done just that. How? By appointing two-thirds of the supposedly independent Rent Guidelines Board. Last month, the board voted to freeze rents on one and two year leases, affecting a million properties. It’s the biggest NYC rent freeze in living memory.  Right-wing populists have long been accused of attacking independent institutions and undermining their credibility. Their left-wing counterparts appear to have developed a subtler, more insidious approach. Instead of attacking institutions, they capture them. In doing so, they predetermine outcomes and present the result as an independent judgment.

Speaking at The Hill’s Nation Summit last week, Florida Republican Kat Cammack claimed that the Chinese government was deploying “digital twins” of every member of Congress. These twins, digital replicas of individual lawmakers, are reportedly built from publicly available data and used to manipulate American politics. Cammack offered no evidence for this allegation, while the broader media largely ignored it. American academics had already published a proof of concept Yet, Cammack’s statement is more interesting than critics might recognize. China may or may not have built 535 virtual legislators. But it easily could. More importantly, somebody almost certainly will.

As tensions with Iran once again push the US toward the possibility of further involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, a novel brand of anti-interventionism has swept American politics. After two decades of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both the populist right and progressive left have grown more willing to question the assumptions underpinning American military engagement abroad. Politicians as ideologically diverse as Thomas Massie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now openly criticize interventionist foreign policy, while public fatigue with the post-9/11 wars has become increasingly visible across the political spectrum. Yet even as Americans tire of foreign interventions, cuts to the defense budget are politically untouchable. Wars end, defense spending does not.