Dec
4
2025

Try Taking Another Guess

Veronique de Rugy doesn't care for either end of the horseshoe: The American Experiment Isn't What's Failing.

Spend five minutes listening to the American Left's most theatrical tribunes — Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and you'll probably hear tales of a country on the verge of collapse, crushed by a rigged system that can be fixed only through a radical redesign of government. Then spend five minutes with the New Right — including Vice President JD Vance, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and any number of nostalgists yearning to restore an idealized 1950 America — and you'll hear much the same.

The American experiment is failing, they say. The economy is broken. Our society is in decay. Only sweeping power exercised by government can save us. For two camps that claim to despise one another, their worldviews are actually quite aligned.

The populist poles of the Left and Right are now linked in what political scientists call the "horseshoe." As each gets further from the center, it bends closer toward its counterpart on the other side. Both distrust markets, both want to micromanage industry, both are protectionist, both romanticize manufacturing work and resent the disruptions that come from open global competition. Both, in other words, are hostile to the core tenets of the liberal economic order that made America prosperous.

Politicians on the horseshoe ends are awful. But to a certain extent, they're just responding to the sour and resentful moods of their spoiled-brat voters. (I can say that because I'm not running for office.)

Also of note:

  • Unlike a sinking drug boat, it's a moving target. Jim Geraghty has been paying attention to The Trump Team’s Convoluted, Conflicting Accounts of the Drug-Boat Sinking. After liberally quoting what Trump, Rubio, Hesgeth, et al. have been saying over the past few weeks…

    Depending upon which administration official you’re listening to or when, the boat was “headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” and it was also “an immediate threat to the United States.” It remained an “immediate threat” even after it turned around. The president said that Hegseth told him a second strike on survivors “didn’t happen.” Hegseth said he “watched that first strike live” and also said he “did not personally see survivors.” Hegseth is “going to be the one to make the call” and also simultaneously, “Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.” The target of the second strike was the cargo, or the target of the second strike were the survivors, to ensure they did not call anyone to pick them up and retrieve the cargo. Also, President Trump said he wouldn’t have wanted a second strike on survivors.

    And the entire narrative of a second strike is “completely false,” according to the Pentagon spokesman, except for the parts that were later corroborated.

    No doubt, there are plenty of Democrats and members of the media want to create as many headaches as possible for the Trump administration. But the administration creates problems for itself when it does not give a straight story, based upon verifiable facts, from day one. And unsurprisingly, members of Congress — both Democrats and Republicans — get hostile quickly when they feel like their requests for additional information are being ignored or rejected.

    I can't exactly blame people who pick and choose what they want to believe out of this morass of probable lies.

  • The "MRGA" hats are probably being made as I type. Jeff Jacoby looks at Putin's number one fanboy: Trump's Ukraine 'peace' plan makes Russia great again.

    RUSTEM UMEROV, the head of Ukraine's security council, did his best to put on a brave face. "US is hearing us," Kyiv's lead negotiator said to reporters in Florida, where Ukrainian and American officials held four hours of talks on Sunday. "US is supporting us. US is working beside us," he said, as if he were willing those words to be true.

    Alas, they aren't true. Under the Trump administration, the United States is not supporting Ukraine as it fights for its survival, and it is certainly not working beside those who have been valiantly defending their sovereignty against a ruthless aggressor.

    There has never been much question where President Trump's sympathies lie. From blaming Ukraine for having "started" the war to fawning endlessly over Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, from insulting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as an incompetent and an ingrate to using his bully pulpit to reinforce the Kremlin's talking points, Trump has left little doubt that he is drawn irresistibly to the American enemy who launched this war and indifferent to the pro-Western nation resisting it.

    But now the administration's betrayal of Ukraine has reached a shocking new extreme. The White House is pressing for a "peace" that would amount to Ukrainian surrender and a Russian victory — a Munich for our time.

    Jeff repeats the "old maxim": "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but fatal to be its friend."

  • Thanks of a grateful nation. Bjørn Lomborg speculates in the WSJ: Climate Change Might Have Spared America From Hurricanes. (WSJ gifted link)

    The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ended on Sunday, and not a single hurricane made landfall in the continental U.S. this year. This is the first such quiet year since 2015; an average of around two hurricanes strike the U.S. mainland annually. You’d think this would be cause for celebration—or at least curiosity about what role, if any, global warming played. Instead there has been resounding silence.

    We heard plenty about Hurricane Melissa, the monster storm that hit Jamaica in late October with 185-mile-an-hour winds and flooding, causing roughly 100 deaths across the Caribbean. Headlines screamed that climate change was to blame. Attribution studies quickly followed, concluding that human-induced warming made Melissa more likely and worse.

    Yes, the narrative must be promoted: Climate change can only make things worse, never better.