Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 29, 2026

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 29, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Tell Your State To Pass This No-ICE-At-Our-Precincts Model Law. Now.

Josh Marshall, March 27, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]

 I found a piece of model legislation published on March 9th by the Brennan Center.

War

Plans, Platforms And Projectiles — The longer-term meaning of the Iran war.

Aurelien, Mar 25, 2026

…the lack of a strategy for Iran—as opposed to a generalised aspiration to do harm when the opportunity presented itself—meant that the US was not really prepared for this war, and that the effects on US power and on its economy and its political and military system, will accordingly be a lot more severe than they might otherwise have been….

…For this reason, as for others I’ll touch on, it seems highly unlikely that there will be a “deal,” with Iran, let alone a detailed agreement. If you can’t even decide what you want, it’s hard to persuade someone to give it to you….

[TW: Worth reading to the end and their discussion of the high-tech “platform warfare” the US developed during the cold war, and which all its expensive weapons systems are oriented around, versus the “projectile warfare” which is now emerging in the context of drones and inexpensive precision guidance. It appears that the Iranians decided to orient their military to “projectile warfare” and are damn good at it.]

America is Achieving Full-Spectrum Energy Dominance — And Nobody is Paying Attention 

[BettBeat Media, via Naked Capitalism 03-23-2025]

…I have said it many times, and I will say it again: the United States does not lose wars. If it did, it would stop waging them. Whether Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, or Libya — failed states are not failures of Empire. They are the victories of Empire. And Empire is on a roll.

Now the same chorus rises over Iran. Left and right, the refrain is identical: this will be a disaster, America is overreaching, Iran will be its graveyard. The same voices. The same blindness. The same century-old script….

…Medhurst argues that the United States, far from stumbling into another disastrous West Asian quagmire, is executing a calculated seizure of the planet’s energy supply — and that the wars on Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, and now Iran are not separate blunders but sequential steps toward a single goal: total energy dominance. He coins a term for the endgame: the “petro-gas dollar” or the “LNG dollar.” Let us see if the term deserves to stick….

Over 11,000 munitions in 16 Days of the Iran War: ‘Command of the Reload’ Governs Endurance 

[Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies]

Iran’s Ultimatum

“We are at war with the Epstein people. The people eating, frying, and raping kids…”

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

Treason in the Futures Markets — People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets

Paul Krugman, Mar 24, 2026, via Naked Capitalism 03-26-2025]

Sen. Murphy raises the red flag on $1.5 billion in futures bought ahead of Trump’s war announcement

[Drop Site Daily: March 25, 2026]

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) raised concerns about suspicious trades on Monday in the oil market minutes ahead of President Trump touting “productive” talks with Iran and postponing strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure. Murphy cited reports showing $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures bought and $192 million in oil futures sold just five minutes before the post, and asking who had advance knowledge. “Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer? This is corruption. Mind blowing corruption,” Murphy posted. The Financial Times reported bets worth half a billion dollars in the oil market were placed about 15 minutes before Trump’s post, which triggered a sharp sell-off across global energy markets and jumps in S&P 500 stock index futures. One source told the Financial Times, “It’s hard to prove causality . . . but you have to wonder who would have been relatively aggressive at selling futures at that point, 15 minutes before Trump’s post.” A portfolio manager told the paper, “My gut from watching markets for the last 25 years is this is really abnormal,” he added. “It’s Monday morning, there’s no important data today, there aren’t any Fed speakers you’d want to front run. It’s an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk . . . Somebody just got a lot richer.”

Trader made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with remarkably accurate Iran bets

Marshall Cohen, Mar 24, 2026 [CNN, via Drop Site Daily: March 25, 2026]

Trump Has No Soul

Chris Hedges, Mar 26, 2026

Trump is dangerous not simply because of his imbecility and unbridled narcissism, but because he lacks the core attributes of empathy and understanding that define the human soul.

Trump Officials Flee Into the Bunker — The Trump regime must be sensing something in the air — or are they planning it?

[Going Deep with Russ Baker, Mar 22, 2026]

Why are ICE & Border Patrol at airports? 

[Borderland Talk with Jenn Budd, via Naked Capitalism 03-26-2025]

What Was Actually in the Mueller Report

Joyce Vance, Mar 23, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

…Barb McQuade and I wrote a summary of the part of the investigation that delved into obstruction. You can read it here. “Attorney General William Barr did the country a disservice,” we wrote, “when he withheld the Mueller report from public view for weeks, while claiming Mueller concluded there was ‘no collusion, no obstruction.’ That is not what the report says.” We noted, “We start by acknowledging Mueller’s decision that he was bound by DOJ policy that prohibits indictment of a sitting president. Whether that policy is correct or not, prosecutors must follow the rules. Mueller did.”….

If you want more, there is a detailed analysis of the Mueller investigation from Just Security, which I participated in along with some very skillful lawyers. It’s divided out by topic, so you can dig in deeper on anything of interest….

Global power shift

China chip sector targets 80% self-sufficiency with US in its sights

SHUNSUKE TABETA, March 28, 2026 [asia.nikkei.com]

Asian giant’s ambitions include creating homegrown version of Dutch lithography giant ASML…

China’s semiconductor industry plans to achieve 80% domestic self-efficiency by 2030, according to a target set by 13 top company leaders, as the country seeks to catch up to the U.S. through technological development and capacity expansion….

Shanghai-government-affiliated chip tool maker Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment unveiled manufacturing equipment for logic chips using 5-nm and smaller technology. Chairman Gerald Yin announced a plan to raise the share of high-performance products it can supply in-house to above 60% within five to 10 years through technological development and acquisitions.

The Chinese government has positioned semiconductors as a strategic area in its five-year plan for 2026 to 2030, centered on self-reliance and self-strengthening in science and technology….

From years to a week: China unveils superfast software for hypersonic weapon design

Zhang Tongin, 20 Mar 2026 [South China Morning Post]

China’s new software simulates scramjet physics in one week versus years, marking high-fidelity leap in hypersonic engine research….

In just six years, between the 2019 debut of the DF-17 – the world’s first operational hypersonic glide vehicle – and 2025, China has fielded a full spectrum of hypersonic arms.

Two air-breathing models are especially notable: the YJ-19 anti-ship hypersonic missile that can be launched from a warship or submarine, and the long-range CJ-1000 cruise missile that can hit land, sea or even air targets from thousands of kilometres away.

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Israel just publicly assassinated 2 of the most respected journalists in Lebanon. And posted the snuff film of their murder for the whole world to see.

Shaun King, Mar 28, 2026

Fatima Ftouni and Ali Shoeib were not anonymous casualties. They were visible, beloved reporters, and their reported killing demands moral clarity….

What makes this story so sickening is not only the grief. It is the clarity of it. The people killed were not hidden. They were not anonymous figures moving in secret through the dark. They were journalists. They were visible. They were wearing press gear. The vehicle was marked. The word PRESS was not subtle. It was not coded. It was not ambiguous.

And Israel is not denying any of this. Their government literally posted the video for the whole world to see….

Oligarchy

Meet the 16 Billionaires Making Bank by Underpaying Their Workers

Sarah Anderson and Reyanna James, Mar 25, 2026 [Inequality.org, via CommonDreams]

At least 16 US billionaires owe their wealth to one of America’s 20 largest low-wage employers—corporations where a significant share of workers earn so little they have to rely on public assistance.

Felonomics

The Rich Won Trump’s Tax War

Veronica Riccobene, March 26, 2026 [The Lever]

New research is shedding light on just how big a windfall Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act delivered to the wealthy, while monumentally screwing the poor. The richest taxpayers can anticipate thousands more in savings than their low-income counterparts, thanks to Republicans’ tax code changes; and in some states, disparities are far worse than in others. In Montana, for every $10 the poorest households save on their tax bill, its richest families will save $21,940.

In eight states, the poorest earners will now actually owe more. Case in point: In Florida, the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers can expect to pay $150 more on their annual return, while the richest households will pocket an average of $20,160 in tax savings.

Trump’s Corrupt Gift to Big Real Estate — How one merger reshapes real estate

Economic Liberties, Mar 25, 2026 [The Economic Populist]

Trump is the biggest threat to D.C.’s architectural splendor since War of 1812

Philip Kennicott [23 Mar 2026, Washington Post]

…Washington has a composed geometry built up from significant details like this elliptical drive. As with the diagonal avenues that connect symbolically important circles, squares and civic landmarks, the Platonic perfection of this shape is best appreciated from the air. But it is a vital reminder of the care taken, over the past 200 years, in the design of the capital city, and the deference paid to a set of aesthetic and cultural values that came out of the Enlightenment, including a love of symmetry, repetition, iterative patterns and a fine balance between grandeur and grandiosity.

Trump is the most significant threat to the city’s architectural and design legacy since British forces burned the Capitol and White House during the War of 1812. He has already demolished the East Wing of the White House, which dates to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He will replace it with a building that makes James Hoban’s neo-Classical executive mansion a mere appendage to a space meant to function like a hotel-convention-center-entertainment venue. He has proposed (but temporarily delayed) painting the next-door Eisenhower Executive Office Building a blinding shade of white, which preservation groups argue could irreversibly damage the stone facade.

He wants to build a 250-foot-tall memorial arch near the most hallowed ground in the country, Arlington National Cemetery. His “Independence Arch,” which he has said will honor himself personally, would dwarf the largest victory arches in the world, including the arch in Pyongyang, built in 1982 to honor North Korea’s murderous dictator, Kim Il Sung. Only Eero Saarinen’s slender ribbon of steel, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, would be taller. Although it would be built in a traffic circle on the Virginia side of the Potomac, the Trump arch would compete with some of the tallest buildings in Washington, including the Washington Monument and Washington National Cathedral, fundamentally altering a meticulously preserved skyline.

The president’s proposed “National Garden of American Heroes” would introduce a forest of quickly designed statues to the banks of the Potomac almost opposite the new triumphal arch. A sylvan space defined by monumental memorials to Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thomas Jefferson would be cluttered, wax museum-style, with hundreds of stubby tributes to showbiz stars, folk heroes and sports celebrities.

These proposals, the rush to realize them, the stacking of key oversight groups with Trump loyalists and flunkies and the collaboration of firms like Shalom Baranes Associates, have upended and effectively destroyed the process of design review — which has until now preserved Washington as a monumental, picturesque capital….

In 1806, Benjamin Latrobe, perhaps the first great architect in America, sent a letter to Congress, defending his work on the U.S. Capitol, which was then under construction. Latrobe, who also contributed to the interiors of Hoban’s White House, was a proud and difficult man, and his letter to Congress, which exercises authority over the design of the nascent city — a duty it is now shirking — was prickly and defensive. But in it, he articulated foundational principles for the aesthetics and architecture of the new republic, which recognized no kings, and no absolute authority beyond the laws and the Constitution.

“Nothing appears so clear,” he wrote, “as that a graceful and refined simplicity is the highest achievement of taste and art.” American buildings should be “chaste and simple,” and to ornament them just for the sake of surface attraction was folly.

“We find ornaments increase in proportion as art declines, or as ignorance abounds,” he maintained. This was the common language of American architecture at the time — stately, chaste, simple, dignified — and it echoed ideas from a half-century earlier, as capitalism and representational government were together forging a new, bourgeois worldview. In Adam Smith’s 1759 “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” the Scottish philosopher and economist sometimes called the Father of Capitalism wrote that two new aesthetics were in competition as the world industrialized and broke down the old, feudal orders.

One was based on greed, power and avidity; the other on equity, justice and humility. These values would express themselves in our political systems, our economies, our ethics, our art and our architecture….

U.S. to pay TotalEnergies nearly $1B to abandon offshore wind projects

[via Drop Site News, March 24, 2026]

The Trump administration will pay the French energy company TotalEnergies about $928 million to relinquish its leases for two planned offshore wind farms off New York and North Carolina, redirecting the investment toward oil and gas projects in the United States, according to the Department of the Interior. Josh Stein, the Democratic Governor of North Carolina, criticized the policy. “Our state has the offshore wind potential to power millions of homes with renewable American-made energy,” he said. “It’s ludicrous and wasteful that the Trump Administration is spending $1 billion in taxpayer money to pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need.”

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

View / The US has a scientific breakthrough problem 

[Semafor, via Naked Capitalism 03-22-2025]

Health care crisis

Why More U.S. Doctors Are Moving to Canada

[Health Care Un-Covered, via The Big Picture, March 22, 2026]

Wendell Potter, a former insurance industry insider, on the accelerating physician brain drain to Canada—a healthcare system under stress is now exporting its talent. Recruiting agencies report a surge of interest from U.S. doctors frustrated with prior authorizations, corporate consolidation, and insurance red tape that often delays or denies care.

How the Covid Disinformation Ecosystem was established 

[Counter Disinformation Project, via Naked Capitalism 03-27-2025]

…The Council for National Policy (CNP) has operated as the hub for the US radical right since its founding in 1980. It’s a coalition of what has become Christian Nationalism, raw resource industrialists, financiers and the newer addition of tech-bro oligarchs, and has been a driving force behind the culture wars. Billionaires such as Koch, Thiel, and the Mercers are involved.

A leaked recording of a CNP meeting at the start of May 2020 revealed a plan to create an organisation of “doctors for Trump” who would argue against covid restrictions. The CNP were worried that unless the economy was fully reopened soon then Trumps chances of re-election would be severely harmed, many members also had personal financial interests that were being impacted….

I have also added in Peter Thiel, the pandemic proved particularly profitable for his Palantir company. Palantir offered to create digital dashboards for governments for the nominal cost of £1 or €1, many governments took up the offer allowing the health data for entire countries to be fed into Palantir’s platform. Since then Palantir has been able allowed to embed itself into many healthcare systems with dozens of contracts just in the UK. In the US it was a Thiel company that created the data hub used by Emily Oster to claim that covid wasn’t impacting schools and children.

Thiel is also an old friend of Bhattacharya since their students days at Stanford when they were college buddies.

The Horrors That Could Lie Ahead if Vaccines Vanish

Lucas Waldron and Patricia Callahan, March 27, 2026 [ProPublica]

Researchers at Stanford University modeled how many people could die or be disabled in 25 years if vaccines for polio, measles, rubella or diphtheria were no longer available.

Restoring balance to the economy

“We Wanted Them to Feel It”: Ordinary Americans Take on Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in Jury Trials

Matt Stoller, Mar 26, 2026 [BIG]

Over the past week, jurors have made two different important decisions to hold big tech accountable. In one trial, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for addicting and harming a child. They assessed the companies $6 million, opening the floodgates for thousands of similar lawsuits. In a related but different one, a New Mexico jury penalized Meta firm $375 million for violating state unfair trade practice and nuisance laws, based on a suit brought by the state’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez.

These cases are a big deal, because in many ways, they are the closest we can get to ordinary Americans expressing their informed views of corporate power. In a trial, after weeks of evidence, twelve men and women deliberate and make a decision about who is at fault. In both of these cases, they found the oligarchs had violated the law.

Social Media’s Endgame Moment — Even users don’t like it. So when you ask juries to render verdicts, they’re inclined to punish the platforms.

David Dayen, March 26, 2026 [The American Prospect]

…there are many other implications that signal if not the end of social media, then a turning point downward in its history. Their traditional protection from liability is over; their goodwill with the public has dissipated; their ability to buy off public officials has limited reach; and their attempts to transfer the fortunes they made on their platforms to the next generation of technology may become mired in a sea of litigation.

The first important aspect of these trials is that they took place at all. Social media and other websites have benefited for 30 years from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which prevented sites from being held liable for defamation for the conduct of their users, unlike traditional publishers (and with some exceptions). But these trials worked around that restriction. The private lawsuit in Los Angeles was a personal injury case, and the case brought by the state of New Mexico had similar charges. They faulted Meta (and in the L.A. case, YouTube) for knowing that design features like autoplaying videos, sending continual notifications, or designing the algorithm for maximum addiction would keep younger users on the site and expose them to harms. That avoids the 230 shield and shifts the legal landscape to things social media sites affirmatively did, rather than just hosting misconduct by other users….

Part of this stems from the fact that people have come to hate social media, even if they’re heavy users of it. (Present company included.) Social media use is dissipating, one sure sign of disapproval; in polls, respondents reporting no social media use are rising among both seniors and younger Americans. Polling also often shows numerous concerns about the effects of social media and the desire to live without it. These polls are from people who haven’t been put into a courtroom and forced to listen to evidence that social media companies know how to addict their customers, and that this has a direct through line to users becoming depressed, suicidal, and at risk for exploitation, something the companies also know….

Our new antitrust case is about TV

Jeff Jackson (Attorney General of North Carolina), Mar 25, 2026

The biggest TV company in the country is trying to buy one of its biggest competitors. If it does, it’s going to raise prices, downsize a lot of local news, and control a huge chunk of the news our country sees every day.

The big company here is called Nexstar. You probably haven’t heard of it, but it owns about 200 stations, including Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC stations all across the country.

The second biggest TV company is Sinclair. It’s got about 180 stations.

The third biggest is Tegna, and that’s the one Nexstar is trying to buy. If it does, it will become the biggest TV company in American history and will reach 80% of American homes.

No single company has ever controlled that much of American broadcast television, and North Carolina would be the second-most impacted state in the country,….

The federal government has a standard index to measure whether a merger concentrates too much power in one company. The USDOJ and the FTC have used it for decades. Courts rely on it.

When a merger pushes concentration past a certain threshold and increases it by more than 100 points, it’s presumed illegal. In every single NC market affected by this deal, the merger doesn’t just cross the legal threshold, it obliterates it….

GRAPH — How much this merger exceeds the legal trigger in each NC market

Billionaire Wealth Has Doubled So Far This Decade

David Dayen, March 27, 2026 [The American Prospect]

Inequality has boomed so much in the 2020s that a 2 percent wealth tax on multimillionaires initially introduced in 2021 would yield more than twice as much revenue today.

The analysis, from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, reveals the incredible volume of capital income, currently not reached by the U.S. tax code, and could prove vital for the ongoing debate about taxes that has taken over the Democratic Party in recent weeks.

On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) rereleased proposed legislation that taxes households with net wealth of over $50 million annually. The tax is set at 2 percent of total wealth; the legislation adds a 1 percent surtax for households with over $1 billion. To guard against wealthy individuals who respond to this by leaving the country—even though they move at lower rates than middle-class households, even when faced with higher taxes—it adds a 40 percent “exit tax” on anyone with net wealth over $50 million who renounces their citizenship….

Research conducted by Saez, Zucman, and others reinforces the stratospheric direction of the ultra-wealthy. The 19 richest households in America added $1 trillion in wealth in 2024, according to a Zucman study. This was the largest one-year increase on record and an amount that’s greater than the entire economy of Switzerland. That study also revealed there were 1,370 billionaires in the country in 2021 and 1,990 by 2024, a 45 percent increase. Saez and Zucman have a new tracker called Realtime Inequality that will be updated soon….

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

Large Hadron Collider Discovers All-New Particle 

[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 03-22-2025]

A water solution for drought‑prone South Africa: We designed systems to replenish aquifers 

Phys.org, via Naked Capitalism 03-22-2025]

Africa’s longest monorail line begins operations as Egypt opens 56.5km Cairo route 

[Business Insider Africa, via Naked Capitalism 03-22-2025]

Solar and wind reach record 17% of U.S. power generation

Ryan Kennedy, March 23, 2026 [pv-magazine-usa.com, via Clean Power Roundup]

The combined output from wind and utility-scale solar reached a record 760,000 GWh last year, accounting for 17% of total U.S. electricity generation as the sector scales to meet intensifying load growth.

Disrupting mainstream economics

Two Millennia of European History Written on Bones — Well-being and Immiseration

Peter Turchin, Mar 22, 2026 [Cliodynamica]

This week I’ve been analyzing a literal treasure trove of data, compiled by The European History of Health Project. This is a massive, collaborative, anthropometric research initiative, which analyzed over 15,119 skeletons from more than a hundred sites across Europe.

Human bones are an incredible source of quantitative data, because they can last for centuries and millennia under the right conditions. And when they are unearthed by archaeologists, they can tell us a lot about people they came from: what was their health and wellbeing, how likely they were to be injured or killed, and more recently what was their ancestry. Today I will focus on one particular indicator of biological well-being: stature or average population height (and in future posts I plan to deal with other insights that skeletal data can yield)….

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It

[Card Catalog, via The Big Picture, March 28, 2026]

40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won’t, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.

The 49MB Web Page

[That Shubham, via The Big Picture, March 22, 2026]

This is an absolutely devastating deconstruction of the current web landscape. I implore you to pause here, and read Bose’s entire amply illustrated essay. If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

I Tried DoorDash’s Tasks App and Saw the Bleak Future of AI Gig Work 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 03-22-2025]

Jeff Bezos Seeking $100 Billion to Buy Manufacturing Companies, ‘Transform’ Them With AI 

[Slashdot, via Naked Capitalism 03-22-2025]

A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator 

[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 03-24-2025] “Published by the Norwegian Consumer Council.”

Climate and environmental crises

Himalayas’ glacier loss threatens 2 billion people in ‘greatest problem of climate change’ 

[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 03-22-2025]

Resistance

Minnesota Kicks Off Legal Battle With Trump Administration to Hold ICE Shooters Accountable

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

Christian Zionists: A Fifth Column? 

Juan Cole [via Naked Capitalism 03-24-2025]

How the Republican Party Forgot It Was Conservative

Paul Starr, March 27, 2026 [The American Prospect]

…Consider the Republican turn from free-market conservatism to Trump’s “state corporatism.” Trump has repeatedly squeezed or lured corporations into doing his bidding. Eleven companies have given the federal government a stake in their ownership, making the government in most cases their largest shareholder and giving the president leverage over them. Imagine the outrage among Republicans if a Democrat had done that.

This past year, in exchange for an export license needed to sell advanced AI chips to China—a license previously denied on national-security grounds—Nvidia secured Trump’s approval by agreeing to pay the government 25 percent of the proceeds. As Aziz Huq and Vanessa Williamson point out, “Federal export law bars any such license fee, but paradoxically, that works in Mr. Trump’s favor: Since Congress banned the collection of that money, there’s also no statute directing how the funds can be spent.”

The money from Venezuela’s oil is an even more stunning example of Trump’s power grab and the breakdown of congressional control of the public purse. More than a billion dollars has gone into an offshore account in a Qatari bank that Trump has claimed the right to control, though the funds are supposed to go to Venezuela. Sen. Elizabeth Warren points out: “There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military.”

Conservatives once stood for gradualism and a defense of institutions slowly developed over centuries, designed to ensure a government of laws and to uphold principles like due process. Yet the subversion of those institutions is happening on their watch. Trump has sought to politicize the entire government, including institutions with nonpartisan traditions like the armed forces and the IRS….

In his 2017 book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, Daniel Ziblatt….

“Strong conservative political parties,” Ziblatt argues, “led to a stable long-run path of democratization” for several reasons. Conservatives had “a realistic basis for assuming electoral success” and “the resources that allowed them to sideline their own radicals.” They accepted the “rules of the game” in a democracy because they believed they could win that game or at least keep radicals on the left out of power. But when conservative parties saw themselves as likely to lose, they often turned against democracy. That has been the story of recent American politics….

Snowballing demographic and cultural changes since the 1990s have created a rising sense of danger on the right. A high rate of non-European immigration, a falling proportion of Americans identifying as Christian, and increased numbers self-identifying as LGBTQ led many on the right to believe they were irretrievably losing cultural hegemony and political power. Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 intensified the feelings of desperation, and conservative figures in politics and the media stoked those emotions until the Republican Party was ablaze with catastrophism. In 2016, while the Democratic establishment kept Bernie Sanders from winning the party’s presidential nomination, Republican elites were unable to “sideline their own radicals.”

 [My emphasis — TW]

…Republican elites haven’t cared all that much about Trump’s betrayal of conservatism because of what he hasn’t betrayed: the party’s corporate and class allegiances. Trump’s populism is all in the rhetoric and the scapegoating, not the substance of government. His tax legislation in 2017 and again in 2025 has redistributed income upward; his government appointees side with corporations over workers. Pro-business policy is what many Republicans mean by free-market policy. They are not bothered if the “invisible hand” is replaced by a “conspicuous fist,” as long as that fist generally comes down on their enemies….

…Although they must know he is corrupt, because he hardly makes a secret of it, he is also delivering the result that matters most to them: power for “us” over “them.”

Florida Republicans Find a New Way to Kill Teachers’ and Nurses’ Unions

Harold Meyerson, March 26, 2026 [The American Prospect]

…the legislature sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis a bill that would require the state’s public-sector unions not just to win a recertification vote of all the workers they represent in bargaining (whether those workers are members or not), but to do so in elections where turnout exceeds 50 percent of all those workers. DeSantis is universally expected to sign the bill.

Florida law already decertifies any union that doesn’t receive dues from at least 60 percent of the workers it represents. The Republicans’ goal for both the existing law and the pending new one is to kill those unions, which are the linchpin of virtually every Democratic campaign in the state. That their goal is explicitly partisan is made irrefutably clear by their exempting police and firefighter unions from any of these requirements, since police and firefighter unions in Florida support Republican candidates and causes, while the unions of teachers, librarians, doctors, nurses, and other public employees tend, like their members, to support Democrats….

Indeed, if Florida legislators had to clear the same 50 percent turnout threshold to win election, the number of legislators might dwindle to single digits. Florida doesn’t conform to anyone’s definition of a high- or even medium-turnout state. In the November 2022 midterm elections, only 44 percent of adult Floridians cast ballots, despite the fact that Republican Gov. DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott were both on that ballot….

Trump says ‘Iran is dead,’ then calls Democrats America’s ‘greatest enemy’

[MSN.com]

Trump posted: “Now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent, Democrat Party! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT”

The South Rises Again

U.S. Votes Against UN Resolution Calling Slavery a Crime Against Humanity 

[Prism News, via Naked Capitalism 03-26-2025]