How should the new Democratic-dominated Congress proceed against Trump and Trumpism?

This was one of those rare weeks where Democrats could watch the news for days on end and feel like celebrating!

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries offered a cautiously vague to MS NOW on how Democrats in Congress should proceed the next two years: “The American people don’t want us to get even, they want us to get things done on their behalf. We ran on affordability, we won on affordability, and now it’s our job to govern on affordability.” But as Paul Waldman notes, unlike mayors such as New York’s Zohran Mamdani or Governors like Michigan’s newly-elected Jocelyn Benson, Members of Congress can’t do much to directly affect how quickly potholes are filled, or expediting processing of building permits in municipal planning departments, or impose local rent controls.

And with a hostile, far-right President holding veto power, enacting specific policies that will deliver immediate relief on the cost of living will be a big challenge for the new Democratic Congress.

The truth is that there is very little Democrats can do in the next two years to “get things done” and bring down the price of groceries, healthcare, housing, or much else. They can pass some bills that Trump will veto, and from a political perspective that’s fine. But this is what they most need to learn from the 2026 midterms: They have nothing to fear but fear itself. ...

[T]he administration tried to use federal power to meddle in the election, attempting to deploy the Postal Service to stop delivering mail ballots, intimidate state election officials to bar people it erroneously identified as non-citizens from voting, and even void the Alaska Senate election. It all failed - because Democrats and state officials fought back.

In all of these cases, the weapons the GOP and the Trump administration deployed were indeed powerful, and most had worked in the past. It was because Democrats were resolute in opposition that those weapons were defused. [emphasis in bold added]

David Rothkopf of the DSR Network assembled three of his favorite commentators to evaluate Tuesday’s results.

Longtime Congressional observer Norm Ornstein on the panel warns that the Democrats will need to manage the hearings very differently than we have too often seen before, including from Republican-run hearings the last two years: “You get an opening statement by the chair, [then] an opening statement by the ranking member, and then they go on these back-and-forth ping-ponging, five minutes by a majority, five minutes by a minority.” Instead, the Democrats need to keep investigations focused and not let the Republicans turn them into FOX News entertainment.

He also suggests that the Democrats’ focus need to hold hearings on various topic sequentially to avoid having hearings on three or four different problems and scandals competing with each other in a single week for public attention.

David Rothkopf’s panel members also emphasize the need to investigate the misdeeds of the TechBroligarchy, including Elon Musk and Big Balls and the rest of Musk’s DOGE project.

Another important tool the Democrats will have is to introduce and clearly publicize important legislation.

Rosa Brooks in particular warns against complacency by the Democrats embracing an attitude of “oh, just back to business as usual, things are normal again.” That would be politically disastrous.

And Michael Tomasky strongly recommends that the Democrats get rid of Senate filibuster. Otherwise, the Republicans will be able to use the filibuster to block any legislation that the Democrats pass. Then instead of saying, “We passed popular bills A, B, and C” and Trump vetoed them,” they will be stuck with the standard inside-the-Beltway excuse of, oh, gee, we tried to pass bills A, B, and C but those mean Republicans wouldn’t let us. This has never been a persuasive argument and is basically an excuse. The filibuster rule is a Senate rule. A majority of the Senate can abolish it altogether at any time by a simple majority vote. And a majority of the Senate can suspend the rule for any particular vote.

Scott Lucas joined Maddie Hale on The Trump Report to discuss possibility for constructive political fights the Democrats can undertake the next two years. Such as impeaching Pete Hegseth. And using their investigative powers to highlight abuses of Trump 2.0 regime, including:

• Creating maximum pressure to release the Epstein files
• Exposing Trump foreign deals and the Trump family’s highly-dubious cryptocurrency business
•  Publicizing the outrageous misconduct of Trump’s ICE Gestapo and how they often like a violent political militia
• Highlighting the most outrageous instances of corporate influence, donations, favoritism. Including those involving Elon Musk.
• Trump’s Executive Orders

The new Chairman of the House Oversight Committee will be Robert Garcia of Long Beach, California, who sounds like he’s willing to take on major instances of abuse and corruption:

As Josh Marshall recently put it, “The singular lesson of the Trump Era has been that no system can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow and enforce the rules that govern it.” And those participants include the American voters, of course!

From the Oversight Committee website:

As Josh Marshall recently put it, “The singular lesson of the Trump Era has been that no system can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow and enforce the rules that govern it.” And those participants include the American voters, of course!

So if the Democrats have a Senate majority and fail to pass important legislature because of “golly gee, the filibuster rule,” that means that the Democratic leadership failed to get 51 of their caucus members to pass it. Period. They failed to deliver. One of the worst instances of the Democrats trying to run such a pretense was on the 2022 vote for the renewal of the Voting Rights Act that the reactionary Supreme Court has largely nullified. Fifty-one Senators voted in favor of it, including the rightwing Democrats Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema. But Manchin and Sinema voted against suspending the filibuster even for that one bill. So the Democrats failed to pass a critical protection for basic voting rights that still is very much needed, period. The filibuster rule was a sad excuse for their failure on that critical bill.

As Waldman observed of the Republicans’ voter-suppression efforts this year, “It all failed - because Democrats and state officials fought back.”

That’s what the Democrats in Congress will need to do in the next two years: show the voters that they stand for constructive and serious governance – and that they will fight for their own side. And that means making sure that Trump’s continued efforts to rule by corruption, ICE cruelty on American streets, and abuse of Presidential powers fail. Just as the Republicans failed in the 2026 elections on Tuesday.

This post originally appeared on the ProDA Progressive Caucus Democrats Abroad Substack.

Polarization and Democracy

Lilliana Mason recently published an article in the Journal of Democracy recalled "Polarization is Not the Problem." It’s part of a series on “Polarization and Political Violence.” (1)

The Journal of Democracy is a project of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has come in for criticism over some of its "democracy promotion" efforts abroad. But that's not the fault of individual contributors to the journal.

The first three pages or so had me thinking it might be a standard, lazy, both-sides-do-it take. But it includes useful factual observations like, "Vilifying and dehumanizing attitudes are indicators of moral disengagement, which allows people to harm one another while still feeling morally good."

But after that, she makes it very clear that she's not making a both-sides-do-it" pitch. Including this: "The problem is the existential threat that a reempowered ethnonationalist strain poses to pluralistic U.S. democracy writ large." (The same can be said for some European countries.)

To restore a functioning and pluralistic democracy in the United States, reversing over a decade of democratic backsliding in the world’s oldest democracy, the thing to 'fix' is not polarization. Polarization is the country’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic, and intentionally divisive faction grabbing for disproportionate power to the detriment of national success, reputation, and democratic self-government. Tamping down that immune response only allows this minority faction to have greater control. [emphasis added]

The people causing the backsliding are definitely not dope-smoking hippies, feminists, or black and brown immigrants attempting to impose "transgender for everybody" - the latter being one of the weirdest concoctions emerging from Trump failing brain.

A piece in the same issue by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way looks at the state of democracy in the US now, which they describe as currently being in a state of “competitive authoritarianism,” a category in which they include Türkiye and Hungary under Viktor Orbán.

When we began writing about competitive authoritarianism a quarter-century ago, we never imagined applying the concept to the United States. Our initial study of 35 post–Cold War competitive authoritarian regimes centered overwhelmingly on postcommunist and lower- and middle-income countries with weak states and weak civil societies. But in the early twenty-first century, a set of “new” competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in countries with more established democratic institutions. ... The United States joined that group during Donald Trump’s second presidency, which began in January 2025. The U.S. slide into competitive authoritarianism was modest and reversible - but it was real. ...

Competitive authoritarianism is a regime in which parties compete in meaningful elections but incumbents systematically abuse state institutions to tilt the political playing field against their opponents. Unlike traditional dictatorships, opposition parties genuinely compete for power. Parties are legal and operate above ground, and they view elections as the principal route to power. Elections are often highly competitive affairs in which incumbents are forced to sweat. Occasionally, incumbents lose - as they did in Malaysia in 2018, Poland in 2023, Botswana in 2024, and Hungary in 2026. (2)

They go on to describe the various authoritarian measures undertaken by the Trump 2.0 regime: intimidation of law firms and universities; frivolous investigations and lawsuits; purging of civil service professionals; and efforts to bring major media under partisan regime control. The partisan misuse of the Justice Department is a particularly ugly concern. As PBS/AP reported early this year (3):

Justice Connection, a network of department alums, estimates that more than 230 lawyers, agents and other employees from across the department were fired last year, apparently because of their work on cases they were assigned or past criticism of Trump, or seemingly no reason. More than 6,400 employees are estimated to have left a department that at the end of 2025 had roughly 108,000, the group says.

The Justice Department says it has hired thousands of career attorneys over the past year. The Trump administration has characterized some of the fired and departed workers as out of step with its agenda.

The Justice Department is part of the Executive Branch of the federal government. But its obligation is to enforce the rule of law. And to do so requires a commitment to independent administration of justice. There have been structures and practices established over more than two centuries to achieve that goal. Political democracy and the rule of law are not separate concepts. They are two sides of the same coin. Democracy has to have laws and procedures that are reliable and that apply equally to all political actors. And the rule of law does not mean only that laws are enforced fairly and consistently. Rule of law also means that that the laws are made with the consent of the people through democratically elected representatives, a concept that was central to the Magna Carta tradition in England. Christian Tomuschat refers to the development of the concept in the US, Germany and France:

In the German legal tradition the concept of Rechtsstaat and Rechtstaatlichkeit [both terms for democratic rule of law] emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and today it constitutes the core element of the constitutional system, after the abominable crimes committed during the Nazi period. The Basic Law of 1949 establishes that ‘the legislature shall be bound by the constitutional order, the executive and the judiciary by law and justice’ (‘Gesetz und Recht’), a proposition that encapsulates the essence of the rule of law. It is significant that the text does not confine itself to manifesting confidence in the law (Gesetz as statutory law), but species that ‘justice’ (‘Recht’) as a concept including both customary law and elements of legitimacy, that may, if need be, correct undue rigors of the law (in the Anglo-American system, the principles of equity serve a similar function), binds government institutions. In France, the concept of ‘état de droit’, originally derived from the German ‘Rechtsstaat’, has also taken its place in the legal literature. Despite learned examinations of the different virtues, shortcomings, overlappings, incongruences, and minor inconsistencies of the various terms mentioned, it appears that they have a largely identical content. (4)

Polarization in itself is neither good nor bad. The current sense of democracy, including concepts like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion, evolved through a long history as a constructive way to resolve conflicts – aka, polarization – without the necessity of bloody civil wars and violent religious conflicts. Rainer Forst has done a good job of explaining this history in the modern West. (5)

For instance, the Trump regime’s current effort to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s citizenship is an act of intolerance that shows contempt for democracy and the rule of law. And, yes, partisans of democracy and the rule of law are polarized against it. And they should be. (6)

In the current European context, democracy supporters including conservatives should be polarized against far-right, anti-democracy parties like Germany Alternative for Democracy (AfD) – instead of trying to pander the way too many conservative parties are doing to the far right’s central issue of promoting xenophobic hatred. (7)

The Shrub Bush polarization

The disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush – who the late, great Molly Ivins famously called “Shrub Bush” – who was still President two decades ago, managed to provoke a notable amount of polarization. Looking at the situation in a 2007 book, George Edwars and Desmond King wrote:

Bush is the most polarizing president in polling history. The first Gallup poll of Bush's tenure found that he had the highest level of disapproval of any new president since polling began (Gallup Poll 2001). Similarly, Gary C. Jacobson reported that the public's initial reception of Bush found the widest partisan differences for any newly elected president in polling history. In the 28 Gallup and CBS/New York Times polls taken before September 11, 2001, Bush's approval ratings averaged 88 per cent among self-identified Republicans but only 31 per cent among Democrats (Independents averaged 50 per cent). This 57-point difference indicates an extraordinary degree of polarization (Jacobson 2003). Yet this gap between the assessments of Democrats and Republicans was just the beginning. In the 21–3 May 2004 Gallup poll, the difference between his approval among Republicans (89 per cent) and Democrats (12 per cent), was an astounding 77 percentage points! That gap of 70 points or higher has been common since Bush's fourth year in office. ...

These are extreme and unprecedented levels of polarization. No president, dating back to Harry Truman, has had a partisan gap above 70 points in any Gallup poll in a re-election year. Moreover, Gallup had never before found such a high proportion of partisans with such strongly opposing views of a president. ...

The war in Iraq has been the most important policy of the Bush Administration. Although the president enjoyed majority support for going to war in the spring of 2003, by 2005 the public's evaluations of both the war, the postwar US occupation of Iraq, and the president's management of it split along party lines. This division was much greater than it had been for any other US military engagement since World War II including the Vietnam War, widening the partisan gap in overall evaluations of the president in the process. [emphasis in bold added] (8)

So polarization isn’t new. There had been high polarization in US politics before, including over the post-World War II Red Scare/McCarthyism period, over the Korean War, over desegregation policies in the 1950s and 1960s, over the Vietnam War and Watergate.

One distinction between the Shrub Bush years and earlier instances is that from the 1940s into the 1970s, there were still substantial numbers of conservative Democrats in the South who still voted for the Democratic Presidential nominees. So measures of partisan polarization prior to 1970s or so would not reflect the level of ideological polarization. And even in the 1970s, there were still “liberal Republicans” like Oregon’s Sen. Mark Hatfield in Congress.

It’s worth remembering that the polarization during the Shrub Bush years was the role of Bush’s Vice President, Dark Lord Dick Cheney. That particular polarization played a significant role in the 2024 Presidential election, when polls showed that Democratic turnout was depressed by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ ill-considered decision to campaign with the Dark Lord’s daughter, Liz Cheney, who had fully supported her father’s worst policies, including the criminal torture program for which he so strongly advocated. The Bush II Presidency made the name Cheney a polarizing element in US politics until this day.

Finally, it’s also worth remembering that the best known of the Federalist Papers is James Madison’s Federalist #10 essay, which was about, yes, political polarization and “factions.”

Notes:

(1) Mason, Liliana (2026): Polarization Is Not the Problem. Journal of Democracy 37:4, 105-114. 10/04/2026. <https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/1001900> Publicly available at this writing.

(2) Levitsky, Steven & Way, Lucan A. (2026): Competitive Authoritarianism in America. Journal of Democracy 37:4 10/04/2026, 5-25. <https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2026.a1001893> Publicly available at this writing.

(3) Tucker, Eric & Richer, Alanna D. (2026): How the Trump administration erased centuries of Justice Department experience. PBS/AP 01/16/2026. <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-the-trump-administration-erased-centuries-of-justice-department-experience> (Accessed: 2026-29-10).

(4) Tomuschat, Christian (2013): Democracy and the Rule of Law. In: The Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights Law, 475-476. <https://doi.org/10.1093/law/9780199640133.003.0021>

(5) See: Rainer Forst, ed. Toleranz: Philosophische Grundlagen und gesellschaftliche Praxis einer umstrittenen Tugend (2000); English version: Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present (2013); Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate (2014).

(6) Barrett, Develin et. al. (2026): Homeland Security Agents Search Home of Rep. Ilhan Omar. New York Times 10/12/2026. <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/12/us/politics/ilhan-omar-home-searched.html?unlocked_article_code=1.IFE.xdZp.o34iHMTWLRli&smid=bs-share> (Accessed: 2026-12-10).

(7) Fischer, Leandros (2026): Nur eine politische Polarisierung von links kann die AfD aufhalten. Jacobin (Germany) 09/25/2026. <https://jacobin.de/linke-afd-polarisierung-sachsen-anhalt/> (Accessed: 2026-27-09).

(8) Introduction to The Polarized Presidency of George W. Bush (2007). <https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217977.001.0001>

Foreign policy concerns on US election day and beyond

Trump in his continuing, obvious mental decline has been threatening to resume the Iran War after the election. And there’s news about some US strikes resuming already:

The ⁠US launched limited strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island late on Monday, ⁠according to reports in US media, hours after vice-president JD Vance said he was optimistic diplomatic efforts to end the war were moving in the right direction.

The strikes were reported as being “defensive”, and not thought to be a signal of a return to full hostilities, but came on the eve of crucial midterm elections in which Donald Trump’s Republican party is expected to be punished by voters for the cascading effect the war has had on the US cost of living. (1)

There will be plenty of foreign policy drama after today’s election. With the US President unable to conduct anything resembling normal diplomacy. And the Iran War is obviously not the only major foreign policy issue right now.

Here’s Anatol Lieven assessing “Who’s Actually Winning the Ukraine War?” (2)

Short version: It’s still a nasty war of attrition. And, for better or worse, Russia has the advantage. And without a minimum of competent diplomacy from Washington, any stable halt in the war can scarcely be expected. It’s an ugly picture. And there will likely be continuing jockeying, vague threats, and low-level shadow war. And headlines like this: UK and European peacekeepers in Ukraine would be allowed to fire back at Russians Guardian 11/03/2026.

John Mearsheimer gives one of his dour but highly informative perspectives on the concept of limited nuclear war. With the US now a highly dubious entity as a NATO ally, this is increasingly important for European defense planning. We’ll be hearing a lot more about it. And very possibly in the Middle East, too. (3)

And, of course, this will be a big week for American political news!

Notes:

(1) Yerushalmy, Jonathan (2026): US reportedly strikes Iran’s Qeshm Island as Vance voices optimism about a deal. Guardian 11/03/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/nov/03/us-strikes-irans-qeshm-island> (Accessed: 2026-03-11).

(2) Quincy Institute YouTube channel 11/01/2026. <https://youtu.be/PnwrKy9uxx8?si=r5pJMIZqlC80FoqB> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).

(3) International Law Only Binds the Weak. John Mearsheimer-Offensive Realism YouTube channel 11/02/2026. <https://youtu.be/z7JtiVQQPqs?si=76DnBHNxfNmgWV34> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).

The Democrats’ fight against Trumpism after November 3

The invaluable Dan Froomkin is looking forward to what a Democratic majority in one or both Houses of Congress can do over the next two years.

Writing for The New Republic, he quotes Ezra Levin on the Democrats’ task of rebranding themselves over the next two years – revitalizing is as a party willing to show the voters it is willing to seriously fight for its own professed goals and promises:

Democrats are running “on an argument of corruption and affordability,” says Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots organization with over 2,500 local chapters. “If you then don’t use the power available to you, you will undermine your party’s reputation—for good reason—because you will have demonstrated that on the campaign trail, you’ll say whatever it takes to get elected, but once you’re governing, you’re not going to do s***.”

Levin says, “That’s the number one problem that the Democrats face now and in the future. It’s not an individual policy disagreement that they have with the voters. It’s that most voters think Democrats are feckless and don’t mean what they say. And so, a major project at the Democratic Party over the next two years has to be to revitalize its brand; prove [to] the voters that when you elect us, change happens.” (1)

As Froomkin puts it, “By staking out bold territory on policy, Democrats can make what’s at stake in 2028 more vivid.”

There are many things that go into an individual winning candidacy: a candidate who’s serious about the race; an campaign organization who can organize TV and podcast appearances, public events, and get-out-the-vote operations; and at least enough funding to make sure his/her candidacy reaches a large number of voters; competent messaging; and a clear focus on issues that mobilize their voters.

All of these things are actually interrelated. Name recognition is important, so just getting the candidate’s name well known is a necessity. Some commentators draw a clear distinction between “messaging” and “issues.” Most candidates require some of both. And some people are just better at campaigning than others whether by temperament or experience or what pundits might call “natural talent.”

Issues do matter. But offering a rote checklist of issues – no matter how popular the individual issues are – doesn’t accomplish what candidates like Zohran Mamdani (now the popular Mayor of New York) and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed have been able to do: articulate clear and popular positions on issues but also display the confidence to respond to Republican attacks without giving added credibility to the attacks to which they are responding. Once in office, Mamdani quickly followed up with popular actions consistent with his campaign positions, i.e., filling potholes. In other words, he campaigned on doing things voters wanted, then followed up and started doing some of them and also making sure his constituents knew he was doing so.

When voters see a candidate get elected and follow up on what they claimed to stand for in their campaign, voters can see they are fighting for their own side, i.e., the Democratic voters who elected them!

It’s worth noting since Mamdani ran explicitly as a “democratic socialist” within the Democratic Party, that he has been following up by practicing what was once known in the first half of the 20th century as “sewer socialism” – a term that referred to pragmatic accomplishments, not to dirty and dishonest accusations against the other side. Milwaukee, Wisconsin was one of the most prominent examples of decades in which politicians who identified themselves as democratic socialists provided capable and politically popular local government. Ironically, the self-identified Socialist practitioners of such policies disliked the term “sewer socialism,” because they worried it detracted from their larger long-term vision of a better national society.

A lot has changed since Milwaukee elected an explicitly Socialist mayor in 1910. But the challenge of showing immediate, popular results in governance without sacrificing a larger vision is a perennial challenge for politics across the ideological spectrum. If a party can do what the Republicans under Trump have done – making “owning the libs” (e.g., making Democrats angry) the prime goal of their voters, they don’t have to worry so much about articulating a broader vision.

If the Democrats win one or both Houses of Congress next Tuesday, they will have an excellent opportunity to use their Congressional investigative power to constantly hold the abuses, corruption, and criminal acts of the Trump regime and the Republican politicians who support it up to public light. If the Democrats hold both Houses, they can pass one popular bill after another and force Trump to veto them. Trying to sell the public on the abstract value of “bipartisanship,” vague appeals to vaguely-defined “centrist” voters, or issuing strongly worded letters that neither Trump nor anyone else will take seriously are not likely to show the voters that Democrats are serious about restoring functioning democratic government and holding Trump officials who committed cruel and/or criminal acts to account for their actions.

Joe Biden’s famous prediction that the Republicans’ “fever” would break on the Republican side was well-intentioned. But it sadly proved to be a false hope. (He was making that prediction in 2012 even before Trump took over the party!)

This post originally appeared on the ProDA-Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2026): The No Kings Movement Is Already Planning for 2028. New Republic 10/26/2026. <https://newrepublic.com/article/216864/no-kings-movement-election-2028> (Accessed: 2026-28-10).

A weird group of rightwingers being financed by RFK Jr.’s HHS

Michael McGrady, Jr. writes about one of the many scams run by rightwingers with Republican ideological allies and friends in the government. The entity involved is called Our Rescue, formally known as Operation Underground Railroad. Our Rescue has received $158.1 million from Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a no-bid contract. The group’s CEO is Derek Brenner. During his tenure, McGrady writes for the City Weekly, “Our Rescue has continued to serve as the central node within a network of strange bedfellows.” Brenner served as a senior ICE official during Trump’s first term: “When he held that position, Benner was instrumental in ‘sting operations’ to mass-arrest immigrants. He occupied the role during a highly controversial HSI sex trafficking sting, Operation Asian Touch, which was an effort to probe illegal conduct at Asian massage parlors in Arizona.”

The HHS contract:

... is for Our Rescue to provide legal aid to unaccompanied migrant children currently in the care of the government.

But Our Rescue has little prior experience in that field, and critics have warned that its new revenue stream comes at the costly expense of legitimate aid networks specializing in such legal representation.

“I think it’s clear that the priorities of this presidential administration are to deport as many people as possible,” said Stephanie Richard, director of the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative and a visiting associate clinical professor at Loyola Marymount University Law School in Los Angeles. “Threatening the legal services for youth, who are some of the most vulnerable, shows the administration’s commitment to that.”

Our Rescue was contacted several times for comment on this story. No response was given by press time. [emphasis added] (1)

McGrady goes on to explain that some of those “unaccompanied migrants” are children whose parents have been snatched by Trump’s ICE Gestapo and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). And Richard warns:

... that the children Our Rescue is now paid to represent are also the children who face the greatest risk.

“What I can say is that if these kids are not provided appropriate legal services and support, it is more likely they will end up trafficked,” she observed.

Jeffrey Epstein is dead and gone. But his disgusting heritage lives on.

McGrady reports for The Pitch:

Hundreds of secular and religious organizations exist in this space, working to counter human trafficking. Many of these groups are led by recognized human rights activists and human services practitioners, emphasizing care and recovery in the overarching frameworks of bodily autonomy, gender equity, and mutual respect.

Many of these so-called “anti-trafficking” groups, however, are antithetical to the human rights viewpoints on these matters, citing “tough on crime” and mantras characteristic of the many right-wing and far-right groups operating in this space.

Missouri and Utah are what I consider two leading hubs of an explicit brand of anti-trafficking activism that is a blend of modern white slavery myths and conservative, dominionist Christian nationalist viewpoints of our society. In collaboration with Salt Lake City Weekly, The Pitch uncovered and traced a powerful influence network of so-called anti-trafficking and anti-pornography activists, law enforcement officers, and far-right politicos all tied, directly or indirectly, to the highly controversial Tim Ballard and the charity he formed, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which rebranded to Our Rescue in the years since his tenure. [emphasis added] (2)

If Democrats in Congress in 2027-28 don’t spend an extraordinary amount of time investigating, exposing, and legislating against these kinds of corrupt, sleazebag, and criminal activities, that will be political malpractice of the first order by the Democrats! And when Trump and his cult followers scream and cry and how the Mean Dem-u-crat Party is persecuting sex traffickers in league with corrupt government officials, well, let them cry.

McGrady’s long report in The Pitch gives us a disturbing glimpse of a particularly seedy corner of the Republican Right where Christian Right prudery mixes with racist xenophobia and highly dubious contacts with the sex-trafficking and private-prison worlds.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2023: (3)

Notes:

(1) McGrady, Jr., Michael (2026): Tim Ballard’s fall from grace hasn’t stopped big money flowing through Our Rescue’s disputed charity work: Anti-Trafficking, Incorporated. Salt Lake City Weekly 10/21/2026. <https://www.cityweekly.net/news/tim-ballards-fall-from-grace-hasnt-stopped-big-money-flowing-through-our-rescues-disputed-charity-work-91870b66> (Accessed. 2026-23-10).

(2) McGrady, Jr., Michael (2026): Savior Complex: Inside the right-wing money machine behind anti-trafficking performance politics connecting Missouri and Utah. The Kansas City Pitch 10/21/2026. <https://www.thepitchkc.com/savior-complex-inside-the-right-wing-money-machine-behind-anti-trafficking-performance-politics-connecting-missouri-and-utah/> (Accessed. 2026-23-10).

(3) Women accusing OUR founder Tim Ballard of sexual assault speak out. The Salt Lake Tribune YouTube channel 11/22/2023. <https://youtu.be/wq17yH_31XI?si=RsliNKG8nrKXy20r> (Accessed. 2026-23-10).

Court Reform priorities for Democrats after the election

Kate Shaw of the University of Pennsylvania has been looking at ways the Congress can reign in real abuses by the judicial branch, and especially by the Roberts Supreme Court, which has been remarkably partisan. As Shaw observes:

It also feels different because this is a precarious moment for American democracy and for the mechanisms of democratic participation — and because it’s impossible to ignore the Supreme Court’s role in creating this instability. In this election cycle, state legislatures have aggressively redrawn congressional districts to maximize their partisan advantage and, in Southern states, to extinguish Black political power; the ultrarich are spending tens of millions of dollars helping to elect their preferred candidates; and the president has sought to radically change the rules for voting by mail, while openly promising voters payouts for helping his party retain control of Congress.

True, the court has rebuffed some of the most egregious efforts at election subversion this year. But it has laid the foundation for the electoral upheaval we are experiencing.

In that essay, she makes the argument that a rogue Court can be a real danger to democracy and the rule of law.

There are still Trump cultists who would surely argue that decisions like the 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional were illegitimate overreach by the Court. Even though Brown was based on a straightforward reading of the actual language of the 14th Amendment. And, in any case, subsequent Court decision like Milliken v. Bradley (1974) and Parents Involved (2007) have nullified much of the substance of Brown. They also set the stage for Chief Justice Roberts’ majority decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which then laid out the course the rightwing Court took to nullify the Voting Rights Act, which had been renewed in 2006 for 25 years by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in both Houses of Congress and with the backing of then-President George W. Bush. As Kevin Morris wrote earlier this year:

This week [in April 2026], the Supreme Court destroyed what little remained of the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana v. Callais on Wednesday, the Court eliminated the law’s protections against lawmakers drawing maps that dilute the political power of minority voters. The decision continued more than a decade of the Court’s assaults on what is often called the crown jewel of the civil rights movement.

The opinion’s reasoning is based in part on a claim that is simply not factual. Pointing out that Black and white turnout reached parity in “two of the five most recent Presidential elections,” Justice Samuel Alito assured Americans that racial disparities in voting are no longer a problem. But Alito’s claim represents egregious cherry-picking, as he was not referring to recent elections, but to those in 2008 and 2012 — the years that Barack Obama ran for president. In the three most recent presidential elections, the trend shows exactly the opposite. The indisputable fact is the racial turnout gap is widening, and the Roberts Court is partially responsible. [emphasis added] (1)

Shaw calls attention to the Court’s anti-rule-of-law decisions allowing Trump to break the law in his role as President: “Since it declared presidents all but above the law in Trump v. United States two years ago, the court has created a permission structure for much of President Trump’s second-term lawlessness.”

This is the background in which Democratic majorities in either or both Houses will have to use their Congressional powers to dramatically call attention to the dangerous situation the Court has created through its reliance on the rightwing theory of the Unitary Executive - for which Dick Cheney deserves credit among his many attacks on democracy and the rule of law in his long career. Congress can use its investigative power to highlight and publicize the many abuses of the Trump regime and propose remedies.

Since the Equal Rights Amendment guaranteeing women equal treatment before the law failed to be ratified, Democratic members of Congress seem to have effectively forgotten about the power to amend the Constitution. There have been 27 Amendments since the Constitution first took effect, so they can scarcely be considered a radical new idea. So the Democrats can propose, for instance, a Constitutional Amendment that says straightforwardly that the US President is required to obey the laws of the United States. And they could make sure in demanding it that a large majority of US voters understand that the Republican Party in Congress is overwhelmingly opposed to the idea that the President should obey the law!

Shaw’s editorial and this podcast interview put forward a number of ideas on how the Democrats can highlight the problem of a rogue President whose abuses are being enabled by the very partisan position of the current Republican-dominated Supreme Court. And by the extreme laxity of the oversight of the Court even on serious corruption concerns. One of here suggestions is a dull idea that has been in the Constitution from the start and has been used by the Congress, which is known as “jurisdiction stripping.” While this may sound like a wild-and-crazy concept, it isn’t. And the Supreme Court since the days when John Marshall was its first Chief Justice has explicitly recognized that limitation on its own power.

A quick look at the Supreme Court’s “liberal” reputation

Certainly, from the late 1930s to at least 1980 (the beginning of the Reagan era), the Court had generally been seen as liberal, in both the ideological and in the broad “liberal democracy” (competitive elections and the rule of law) senses. This was not an unbroken record, however. In Korematsu v. United States in 1944, the Court upheld the legality of the race-and-national-ancestry-based imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War, now rightly remembered as one of the Court’s most notorious acts. (2)

Sad to say, the majority opinion and the and a concurring opinion included some of the best-known liberal Justices in the Court’s history: Hugo Black, William Douglas, and Felix Frankfurter. Black had been a literal member of the Ku Klux Klan in 1923-25, so perhaps the ruling was not so surprising from him – and Black was the Justice who formally delivered the opinion. In the 1960s, no Justices were hated by segregationists and Nixon Republicans more than Hugo Black and William Douglas, because of their generally liberal rulings. Except perhaps Earl Warren, Chief Justice from 1953-69, who as Governor of California during the Second World War was an enthusiastic booster for the Japanese-American internment program.

By far the most notorious and destructive Supreme Court decision was the Dred Scott decision of 1957, which had denied freedom to the slave Dred Scott, whose white master had taken him to a free state and argued that therefore he should be considered free. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion went even further, declaring explicitly in what is probably the most notorious pronouncement the Court has ever made:

A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States. …

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” [emphasis added]

That decision effectively eliminated the realistic possibility of ending slavery without a civil war. Which is what we got.

Roger Taney, the most infamous Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

There is some bitter irony as well in Taney’s decision. As a young lawyer in Baltimore, he had done pro bono work defending escaped slaves whose masters were seeking to have them returned to bondage. Taney was the brother-in-law of Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He later became Attorney General in Andrew Jackson’s Administration, where his biggest task was to fight to abolish the Bank of the United States, which Jacksonians took as the chief symbol of what they called the Money Power. Although the term “populist” had not yet been invented, that fight was in today’s terms a populist one, in which the Jacksonians claimed – legitimately in this case – to represent “The People” against “The Elite.”

But Taney will forever be remembered as the author of what is still considered the Supreme Court’s most infamous moment, and certainly the one with the most obviously destructive consequences.

Summary: No, the Supreme Court does not have the last say when it comes to defending democracy and the rule of law. It’s a job for all three branches of the federal government - and most of all for the American people whose government it is. Democrats could certainly benefit from recalling Franklin Roosevelt successful fight with the reactionary Supreme Court that was striking down New Deal legislation on the flimsiest of legal justifications.

This post originally appeared in the ProDA-Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

Notes:

(1) Kevin Morris, Finishing Off Voting Rights Act, Supreme Court Declares Racism Over – Again. Brennan Center 04/30/2026.

(2) David Neiwert’s 2005 book on the internment, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, has recently been republished.

Protests and familiar responses to them

As various commentators have recalled recently, mass protests France have been a part of the European scene since at least 1789.

FRANCE 24 has this report from October 22 on the current European protests – which aren’t restricted to France (1):

The actress Pamela Anderson attracted attention eight years ago by speaking out on the “yellow vest” protests at that time:

The French protests first began as a response to President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed fuel tax increase, something he has said would help the country’s green initiatives. But they have since encompassed everything from the minimum wage and taxes to demands for the dissolution of parliament and Macron’s resignation.

“I despise violence … but what is the violence of all these people and burned luxurious cars, compared to the structural violence of the French – and global – elites?” Anderson tweeted on Monday.

The photos of the destruction in Paris made for captivating viewing, she said, but it was important to examine what the motivation behind the protests were.

“[It] came from the rising tensions between the metropolitan elite and rural poor, between the politics represented by Macron and the 99% who are fed up with inequality, not only in France, all over the world,” she added.

On her Pamela Anderson Foundation site she further elaborated the following day.

The yellow vest movement, she wrote, “is a revolt that has been simmering in France for years. A revolt by ordinary people against the current political system which – as in many other western countries – colludes with the elite and despises its own citizens.”

Despite what critics of the movement have said, she wrote, the average person in France is not opposed to environmental initiatives, they simply don’t think the burden of paying for it should fall on them while the wealthy are given tax breaks.

“When some protesters destroy cars and burn shops, they symbolically attack private property that is the basis of capitalism. When they attack police officers, they symbolically reject and challenge repressive state forces – forces that primarily protect the capital.” (1) [emphasis added] (2)

Lots of things are involved in political protests. People who are upset about something. There is a government or a company or some other entity they want to do something about it. There are streets and parks and bridges and buildings they use for their protest. Other people will be inspired by the protests. Police, administrators, schools and businesses and property owners will have opinions to express on the protests. Politicians, parties and political activists will try to use the protests somehow to their advantage. Some churches and religious groups may be sympathetic to the protests, others will consider them a revolt against God and basic decency. If the protests are large enough to rate “front page” coverage by urban newspapers – or top promotion by digital algorithms – there will be at least some minor vandalism in the form of broken windows or spray-painting or at least excessive trash on streets and sidewalks.

Far be it from me to throw shade on decisive actions by political leaders, like Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer’s famous “sternly worded letters” to President Trump. But public protests are also an essential part of democratic politics.

How public officials, particularly the police forces in places where the protests are occurring, is obviously very important. As are the responses by politicians. The reporting on recent protests in France suggest that the police have been fairly ham-handed in their responses in some cases. And the far right, notably including former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, part of the Peter Thiel’s stable of sponsored politicians, to rant about foreigners and Muslims causing all the trouble.

Le Monde/AFP reported on some of the events on Saturday:

French police fired tear gas on Saturday, October 24, to prevent protesters in several cities from advancing to their centers, in fresh nationwide demonstrations held a week after riots broke out, AFP journalists saw.

Police fired tear gas at protesters in Lyon, Lille, Toulouse, Montpellier and Nantes, hours after Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez warned: "We will not tolerate any violence or any disturbance of public order."

Authorities deployed 70,000 security forces across the country for the new marches held against the cost of living, after ones a week ago degenerated into street violence that saw public buildings vandalized, hundreds of shops looted and 2,700 people arrested. …

Police said 110,000 people were taking part in a protest march in Paris, where shops were boarded up and the Louvre and Musée d'Orsay museums closed. Scores of riot police stood guard to prevent protesters getting onto the city's ring road.

The main demonstration in the capital, pushed to its southeast rim under a last-minute order by authorities, was held largely in a calm and festive manner, with some parents and their toddlers looking on from the sidelines.

But there was also widespread anger at President Emmanuel Macron for banning non-union demonstrations his government deemed "illegitimate" and keeping all protesters away from city centers. [emphasis added] (3)

A New York Times report summarized the recent French protests and related events with this introduction:

The nationwide unrest in France began with a handful of student demonstrations at high schools in suburban Paris last month.

Now, in cities across the country, antigovernment marchers are protesting expensive living conditions, high fuel prices and conditions in schools. Using the unrest as a smoke screen for vandalism, rioters and looters have also joined in.

With the protests in their second month, the police have arrested thousands, and politicians are divided over how to respond. (4)

In the late 1960s in the US, various mass protests around civil rights and the Vietnam War produced a lot of discussion often polarized around conservative “law-and-order” rhetoric, which has persisted on the right. Except, of course, in instances when rightwing gun nuts murder somebody and claim that hate a stand-your-ground right to do so. Republicans as a group were remarkably lacking in outrage after Donald Trump on January 6, 2026 knowingly sent an armed, violent, howling mob into the US Capitol to attack member of Congress and stage a coup. Republican legislators in Oklahoma passed a law in 2021 to allow drivers to legally ram their cars into protesters.

Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, signed HB 1674 on Wednesday, even as advocates excoriated their elected officials for undermining democracy. ...

Legislators passed HB 1674 following historic protests against police brutality and racial injustice last summer, both in Oklahoma and across the country. The mass demonstrations – most of which were peaceful – faced sharp criticism from Republicans, who decried property damage and violence by some protesters.

Meanwhile, cars have become a weapon among those hoping to disrupt demonstrations, or drivers who get flummoxed and enraged. People drove their vehicles into protests more than 100 times last summer, and at least two protesters were fatally struck, according to USA Today. [emphasis added] (5)

On the one hand, it’s ridiculous to see such organized mass protests as we’ve seen recently in France and elsewhere in Europe as just some kind of nihilist phenomenon, as their rightwing critics would prefer to have it. Seeing them as an Islamist uprising against Western civilization as xenophobic politicians would prefer to see it, is pretty much on the insane spectrum of opinion.

In the case of the French students and also with some of the large recent protests in other European countries, there are valid complaints, such as the seriously deficient funding for public school systems. France’s national government is directly responsible for schools, a more centralized structure than in other European countries where it’s more of a function of state/provincial governments than it is in France.

But austerity economics as practiced in the EU – particularly in the eurozone, the countries which have adopted the euro as their currency – has been causing deficiencies in public services from schools in France to maintaining the railway system in Germany, and much else. A central plank of austerity economics is to protect the wealthiest and most profitable countries and individuals as far as possible from requirements that they pair a fair share of taxes to support the countries and the communities who make their wealth and profits possible.

Notes:

(1) How far will youth-led protests go? <https://youtu.be/4v0G5lXPK_4?si=AnSAoKHtYAz4Y6KG> (Accessed: 2026-24-10).

(2) O'Neil, Luke (2018): Pamela Anderson's political activism – from French riots to broken capitalism. Guardian 12/06/2018. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/06/pamela-anderson-political-activism-is-no-flash-in-the-pan> (Accessed: 2026-24-10).

(3) Le Monde/AFP (2026): French police fire tear gas during fresh protests, say 110,000 marched in Paris. Le Monde English 10/24/2026. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/10/24/france-braces-for-new-protests-tightening-security-and-boarding-up-shops_6762835_7.html> (Accessed: 2026-24-10).

(4) Sands, Leo (2026): How a Small Student Protest Spread Across France. New York Times 10/24/2026. Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/world/europe/france-protests-timeline.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LFE.Cwsh.20AT8u9z27fO&smid=url-share (Accessed: 2026-24-10).

(5) Villarreal, Alexandr (2021): New Oklahoma law targets protesters while protecting drivers who hit them. Guardian 04/22/2021. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/22/oklahoma-law-protesters-drivers> (Accessed: 2026-24-10).

Democrats and progress in the next two years

David Cay Johnston has been covering Donald Trump for decades. In the first part of this recent interview, he talks about various ways that Trump may try on Election Day to suppress the actual vote. It also discusses the recent reception that Trump and J.D. Vance are encountering in public and Trump’s recent authoritarian performances. (1)

 

He also comments on some ongoing disgraces including the fact that the US minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009 when it was set at $7.25/hr. So the feeling of voters that the Democratic Party too often fails to deliver on its basic promises is not simply the result of effective Republican marketing. This will be a particular challenge if the Democrats successfully win control over both the House and the Senate in the Nov. 3 election.

Democrats can’t stop the Republicans from using messaging like: “See? The Democrats control all of Congress and they still can’t deliver on anything!”

But the Democrats do have real possibilities to make sure the voting public can see that they are promoting popular policies. They can pass bills on popular issues, like a minimum wage increase and legislative solutions aimed at limiting campaign contributions, i.e., to remedy the damage done by the Supreme Court with Citizens United and related decisions. The raising of the minimum wage and undoing Citizens United have been consistent Democratic talking points since early in the Obama Administration.

But it’s one thing to make issues like that part of a list of issues on a fundraising e-mail. It’s another to convince the majority of voter that the Democratic Party is collectively serious about doing something to fix the actual problems.

Selling pardons, corrupt business deals, shady deals favoring foreign oligarchs from whom the President’s family and business allies benefit in large and even spectacular ways – these are all issues that ordinary voters understand are connected to bad governance. It’s a hopeful sign that Democrats have been stressing the corruption issue in the final weeks of this year’s campaigns.

But the Democrats cannot afford to let the corruption issues become blurred into some vague “good government” idea. With control of one or both houses, they can use both legislative initiatives and the extensive investigatory power of Congress to keep the focus on problems caused by the Republican President and Republican policies.

“Bipartisanship”

When Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic Convention famously declared, “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America” – a theme that John Kerry used as the Presidential candidate that year – that sounded to at least many Democrats like a welcome relief from the ugly partisanship of the Clinton and Bush II years.

What the country needs are good policies, like elections that can’t be bought by billionaire oligarchs. Like secure health insurance for everyone, i.e., Medicare for All. Like much more progressive taxes on those oligarchs. Like practical regulations on AI (“SI” in TrumpSpeak). Like a higher minimum wage. Like requiring the President to obey the laws of the United States.

But one of the peculiar features of American politics is the strange hangover of the idea that “bipartisanship” is somehow a virtue in and of itself. From the end of the Civil War until around 1980 at the latest, the ideological divisions in US politics were played out across both parties. There were conservative and liberals in both. FDR relied on Republican support for his major New Deal programs. The Republicans (at least until recently) would periodically remind the public that Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act could only pass with Republican votes.

That era of that kind of bipartisanship essentially ended with Ronald Reagan’s election as President. The Trumpist Republican Party doesn’t bother with such bipartisan posturing. They’re currently calling the whole Democratic Party communists and terrorism supporters of terrorism.

But in 2026, essentially no voters actually consider “bipartisanship” as somehow a virtue in itself. And the Republican Party certainly does not. Of course, we need both parties to support the basic Constitutional structure with democracy and the rule of law. And when the Democrats get solid legislation passed with Republican votes, that’s great! But they should make sure that everyone knows that those Republican votes were welcome because they supported a good Democratic bill. The same is obviously also true for foreign policy.

The author Gil Duran is one of many people currently calling urgent attention to the threat to democracy from TechBro oligarchs, as in the following interview. (2) This is an issue the Democrats need to urgently address – no matter how much or how little “bipartisanship” Republicans may decide to show.


This post was originally published on the ProDA-Progresssive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

Notes:

(1) Trump Frantically Looking For Ways to Dupe Voters as Hecklers Take Over Rally. Mark Thompson Show YouTube channel 10/21/2026. <https://youtu.be/HGKHdT42bUQ?si=bgqiMC9zO-CB6Nyy> (Accessed: 2026-22-10).

(2) 'You're with the billionaires or you're with the people' — Interview with Gil Duran. DW News YouTube channel 10/21/2026. <https://youtu.be/2176dnVR02E?si=5a2jrV3yk9NldDiY> (Accessed: 2026-22-10).

Hot Times in Europe this October

Le Monde English recently published a story summarizing protests in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. (1) They included this photo that probably was not selected for its intrinsic news value:

Sebastian Kurz, the smarmy rightwing former Chancellor of Austria who is now part of TechBro oligarch Peter Thiel’s stable of wholly-owned politicians that includes J.D. Vance, in a Facebook post blames the current student protests in France on immigrants and especially them thar’ Muslims. The video he features there is what you would get if you told AI to create a scene that would excite xenophobic white folks.

France has been known for its periodic mass protests since, oh, 1789 or so.

John Mearsheimer starts off this interview commenting on the French protests and reminiscing about the time he got tear-gassed during one of them in 2018. (2)

Near the end of that video, we also see a clip of Benjamin Netanyahu suggesting that Hamas is behind the demonstrations in France: “And let me tell you, if we don’t stop Hamas here, if we don’t dismantle Hamas in Gaza, you’re see them on the streets of Paris. And that’s exactly what is happening right now.” I’m sure we all look forward to seeing dozens and dozens of Hamas members demonstrating in Paris for more school funding in France.

The focus of the recent protests in France has been around the longterm neglect of the public school system as a result of the austerity economic policies followed by far too many of the EU leaders, including conservative French President Emmanuel Macron. Rightwingers like Kurz, of course, tend to take a hostile stance toward popular protests and jump at the chance to blame any vandalism or violence on “the left.” Which in the rightwing imagination in the West these days, includes Muslim fundamentalists whose ideology tends to be rightwing by most normal measures. Le Monde reports:

In Brussels, in a rare move, the European Commission – which is usually silent on the domestic policies of EU member states – commented on Monday, October 19, on the protests that took place in France on Saturday and especially on the violence that accompanied them.

Through its spokesperson, the European Commission condemned the looting, calling it "unacceptable," and reminded Paris that the right to peaceful protest "must be protected." In the European Parliament, the center-right European People's Party (EPP) and the far right quickly sought to politicize the issue by organizing a debate on Monday evening in Strasbourg, whose title sparked controversy within the chamber: "France, Italy, Belgium: Anti-democratic violence and destruction perpetrated by far-left groups." [emphasis added]

This is all taking place in the context of far-right groups like Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Germany) stressing immigration in particular as a menace. In the European parliamentary systems, the far right can’t take national power without the cooperation of the traditional conservative parties, i.e., the “center-right” EPP parties. Many conservative parties have tried to pander to xenophobic themes to compete with the right. The results have been remarkably consistent in Britain, France, Italy and other countries: it strengthens the far right parties.

Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s ruling far-right party has distinguished itself from ones like the AfD by not embracing a particular Russia-friendly in its foreign policy orientation. But she’s willing to engage in rightwing demagoguery on other issues:

In Rome, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni held an emergency security council meeting on Monday afternoon to assess the situation after the weekend's riots and looting. On Sunday, she took to social media to denounce the "gangs of thugs" who "set cities ablaze," such as Milan, where clashes broke out between youths and the police, and where 271 rioters were arrested, including 220 minors – scenes of "urban guerrilla warfare," according to RAI, the public broadcaster. …

This toxic social climate came to a head on Saturday in Rome, where the CGIL, the country's largest labor union, brought together nearly 100,000 people, joined by opposition leaders including Elly Schlein of the center-left Partito Democratico and Giuseppe Conte of the populist Movimento 5 Stelle. Maurizio Landini, secretary general of the Confédération générale italienne du travail (CGIL), called for a general strike on November 20. [my emphasis] (Le Monde)

In other words, it’s a broad-based protest movement. And Meloni is willing to indulge in Trump-style demagoguery with her talk of cities set ablaze. Does Netanyahu also blame the Italian protests on Hamas? Inquiring minds want to know.

On an anecdotal note, some of my acquaintances are currently touring in Italy including Rome. They are visiting interesting churches and other famous tourist sites. Somehow, they seem not to have noticed the “cities ablaze” that Meloni cited.

Belgium: Protests over schools and general austerity measures. Spain: Protests for the last three weeks demanding better access to housing and more adequate funding for schools. Portugal: Protests over inadequate housing.

These protests are about real issues that are a product of chronic conservative austerity policies heavily favored by the European economic establishments.

Notes:

(1) Italy, Spain, Belgium, Portugal: Social unrest spreads across Europe amid soaring energy prices and a housing crisis. Le Monde English 10/20/2026. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/10/20/italy-spain-belgium-portugal-social-unrest-spreads-across-europe-amid-soaring-energy-prices-and-a-housing-crisis_6759435_4.html> (Accessed: 2026-20-10).

(2) Prof. John Mearsheimer: Has Trump Found an Iran Exit? Judge Napolitano YouTube channel 10/20/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/cgKmBQSbvOw?si=uQ9NQG4OdD0LKD_S&t=154> (Accessed: 2026-20-10).

Democrats coming on strong in swing states

One of the surprises of this election year – a pleasant surprise for Democrats – is that several states that were considered likely Republican ones for this year’s election have turned into very competitive ones for the Democrats.

YouGov posted this table on October 7 on the race in seven states:

Florida: Democratic state representative Angie Nixon achieved a surprise win in the Democratic Senate primary. Commonweal recently described her race against Republican incumbent Ashley Moody this way:

Nixon has shrewdly put economic pressures at the center of her campaign … After her primary victory she … restyled herself as an independent-minded populist, affiliated with an array of progressive organizations but not in lockstep with any single one. That effort may neutralize crude attempts by J. D. Vance and Moody’s other surrogates to slander her as un-American. “I’m aligned with what folks have referred to as ‘the FDR Democrats,’” she has said, emphasizing that her motivation, as a café owner and former single mom, is to fight for working families.

Nixon is being actively supported by Sen. Bernie Sanders. She has heavily criticized her opponent Moody for having approved the diversion $10 million in public funds “to political action committees - one controlled by [Republican] Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Chief of Staff James Uthmeier - that helped defeat 2024 ballot initiatives on abortion and marijuana.” (USA Today)

Commonweal uses the term “big tent” populism to describe Angie Nixon’s Florida campaign, a term which could describe other 2026 Democratic candidates, as well. While there have been hard-fought primary campaigns involving candidates that clearly identify as progressives and others who identify as more centrist, the losing candidates in these races have rallied around the winners.

Kansas: The Democratic Senate nominee in Kansas is Rev. Adam Hamilton, Methodist pastor (and former Republican) who positions himself as a centrist: "I'm a liberal conservative and a conservative liberal, depending on the issue and the day of the week." His opponent is incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall. Polls currently show Hamilton with a lead of 1%-5%. (NYT) The Kansas City Star notes that Kansas “hasn’t elected a Senator from that party in nearly 100 years has led Republican President Donald Trump to plan a visit next week.” Whether a Trump appearance on his behalf will help Marshall more than it hurts him!

Michigan: The Democratic Senate in Michigan hardly needs an introduction at this point. He’s family physician Abdul El-Sayed who provokes hysterical fantasies in Donald Trump and other Republican critics. He is very mediagenic and draws support from both progressive and more moderate Democrats. Barack Obama and Kamala Harris have expressed their support for him. El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers, who is adopting the normal level of Republican civility by running an ad “an ad featuring a young Persian American man arguing that El-Sayed is too closely linked to radical Islam and al-Qaeda.” But Rogers is leery of being tied too closely “an unpopular president; he’s tried to mildly break from Trump over the trade war in Canada, for example.” (American Prospect)

Nebraska: The state Democratic party has endorsed Independent Dan Osborn in the Senate race against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts. Osborn is a former union leader who led a strike at the Omaha Kellogg’s plant in 2021. The winner of the Senate Democratic primary was Cindy Burbank, who declined the nomination after the election to endorse Osborn. Burbank’s opponent in the primary was William Forbes, who certainly looked like a “spoiler” candidate. Forbes told CNN that he had voted multiple times for Trump. (Nebraska Examiner) Osborn has produced a catchy ad taking a populist-tinged poke at Sen. Ricketts for his support of data centers and tech oligarchs:

New Hampshire:

In New Hampshire, four-term Democratic nominee Chris Pappas is facing incumbent Republcan Sen. John Sununu. Retired Gen. Don Bolduc, who ran again Sununu in the Republican primary, has endorsed the Democrat Pappas for the general election. As the YouGov table indicates, Pappas is showing in the polls as a likely win. Pappas is also highlighting his opposition to big tax subsidies for data centers:

Ohio:

Former Senator and Democratic stalwart Sherrod Brown is running against the incumbent John Husted, who was appointed to take the Senate seat vacated by J.D. Vance when he became Vice President. Brown is also targeting data centers. He also has taken an aggressive approach to throwing sleazy polemics back in the Republicans’ faces:

Texas: Texas in the past produced statewide Democratic victories like Sen. Lyndon Johnson and Gov. Ann Richards. Democratic Sen. nominee James Talarico has been running an aggressive Senate campaign against incumbent Republican Ken Paxton, an exceptionally unattractive political figure. A former Presbyterian seminarian, Talarico is also explicitly talking about humane Christian religious principles in a way reminiscent of Jimmy Carter.

Talarico is also making a clever pitch accusing Paxton of being anti-puppy.

And Texas Republicans seem to be really worried about their party’s prospects next month., including the gubernatorial race, in which Regina Hinojosa is the Democratic nominee.

This post originally appeared on the ProDA-Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

A reminder that war analogies can be very tricky

Robert Pape has an update on Pakistani and French forces being deployed to Saudi Arabia, which is currently at war with the Houthis of Yemen and with Iran. (1)

The US-Israel War on Iran that began in February a major military attack on Iran is now a big mess. And it’s spreading.

Pape’s analysis of this situation is always worth hearing because he’s an actual expert on war with Iran. I do have big reservations about the analogy with which he opens this segment and continues later, which is the analogy he makes to the beginning of the First World War. One of the biggest problems the US brought upon itself during the Cold War was the heavy but often careless application of historical analogies. To this day, the US can’t have any foreign policy confrontation without pundits and policymakers invoking the Munich Analogy. It is understandably said of the US neoconservatives in particular that for them, it’s always 1938 and Hitler is always on the verge of seizing the Sudetenland. Jeffrey Record is one of the military scholars who has warned that careless analogical approaches can lead to serious threat inflation and bad policy responses – and has done so repeatedly. (2)

Beware the World War I analogies

Obviously, it’s important to learn lessons from actual wars! And the miscalculations the various sides made in the lead-up to the First World War were serious. But even today, the origins of the First World War are still very much disputed to this day. There’s the “sleepwalker” thesis that the European powers stumbled into a war without really meaning to. And there was certainly stumbling in the leaders’ decision-making!

John Kenneth Galbraith once put the stumbling of those prewar days into a particular framework:

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged feel also that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. …

There was a final consideration [on the beginning of the First World War], one that it is always thought a trifle pretentious to stress. Rulers in Germany and Eastern Europe, generals in all countries, held their jobs by right of family and tradition. If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement. Nor is its absence likely to be a disqualification. On the contrary, intelligence is a threat to those who do not possess it, and there is a strong case, therefore, for excluding those who do possess it. This was the tendency in 1914. In consequence, both the rulers and the generals in World War I were singularly brainless men.

None was capable of thought on what war would mean for his class - for the social order that was so greatly in his favor. There bad always been wars. Rulers had been obliterated. The ruling classes had always survived. To the extent that there was thought on the social consequences of war, this was what was believed. [emphasis added] (3)

Galbraith narrated his view of the beginning of the war in a television series of the same name: (4)

Something like the stupidity problem Galbraith discussed is also part of the current Iran War. The great European powers in 1914 were at least capable of conducting sophisticated diplomacy, even if they ultimately failed miserably in their aims. But Donald Trump has shown very little ability as President to manage complicated diplomatic challenges like those with the Iran War and the Russia-Ukraine War. Settling either of those with something like a stable peace would require very difficult and elaborate diplomacy, for which Trump has show little ability in either his first or second terms.

But neither carelessness nor stupidity adequately explain the beginning of that war. German historian Fritz Fischer in his 1961 book Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (English title: Germany’s Aims in the First World War) argued what became known as the “Fischer Thesis,” which stressed the responsibility of the German leadership for the beginning of the war. It’s clear that after the assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Kaiser Bill’s government in Germany pushed the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph to declare war on Serbia, which triggered the network of alliances that the European powers had set up in the previous decades to undertake a mass disaster of the war. As Galbraith put it:

In 1914, all the continental powers had immensely detailed mobilization plans - plans for getting troops into uniform and to the frontier. Once started, this mobilization had a further momentum of its own; the act of mobilization signified an intention to fight. And, given the importance of territory, it naturally signaled a preference (and thus an intention) for fighting on someone else's land. Better, if you were the other party, to mobilize, strike first and fight beyond your frontiers. Mobilization in 1914 did not, as is sometimes suggested, make war inevitable. It did provoke the atmosphere of fear and crisis in which rational decision was even less probable. [emphasis added]

But 1914 was a long time ago. There is no Austro-Hungarian Empire anymore, no Austrian Crown Prince to be assassinated. Although the current Iran War began with a “decapitation strike” which killed the Iranian Supreme leader and several other senior members of the government. But using easy analogies is a risky approach to foreign policy. Galbraith also noted that the European rulers in 1914 still were heavily influenced by the longtime fixation on war for territory as being critical, as opposed to warfare aimed at destroying the enemy country’s ability to continue a war.

Jeffrey Record had a straightforward caution for policymakers on dealing with historical analogies in dealing with current military threats, here using the Mother Of All Historical Analogies for American foreign policy wonks, the Munich Analogy. Here, Record uses the word “appeasement” in the 1930s sense of making concessions in a compromised. After the results of Munich, “appeasement” became in practice a synonym for cowardice and fecklessness in foreign policy:

The democracies' choices in the 1930s were severely constrained by war weariness, domestic politics, fiscal and economic considerations, perceptions of military inadequacy, and Hitler's effective strategic deception regarding Nazi Germany's intentions and capabilities.

Appeasement of attempted German revision of the Versailles Treaty made both moral and strategic sense because the treaty was unjust, strategically short-sighted, and unenforceable. And it was not politically possible for the democracies to forcibly oppose the reunification of the German nation within a single state. The victors of 1918 had violated Woodrow Wilson's sacred principle of self-determination by prohibiting union of Germany and Austria and by creating the polyglot state of Czechoslovakia with unhappy German majorities in that state's border areas with Germany. Appeasement became untenable the moment Hitler demanded, under the threat of force, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia - which was not only a democratic state prepared to grant the Sudeten Germans considerable political autonomy but also a significant military counterweight to German territorial ambitions in eastern and southeastern Europe. Yet neither Britain nor France was in a political or military position to defend Czechoslovakia, although Chamberlain's threat of a general war deterred Hitler from seizing all of Czechoslovakia.

Security policy decisions are not made in a political and strategic vacuum; all are contextual and made by fallible human beings who can and do make mistaken judgments based on bad information, poor reasoning, ideological bias, disbelief, fear, overconfidence, stubbornness, and pride. Chamberlain clearly misjudged Hitler, but so did a lot of others, including conservative German nationalists who supported Hitler until his war-ensuring revolutionary intentions became apparent. [emphasis added]

Notes:

(1) Prof Robert Pape: LAST WEEK TODAY - CHAOS IS COMING. Prof Robert Pape YouTube 10/17/2026. <https://youtu.be/n6DOoYayQNA?si=Mm7RHlZPf8lzaZHj> (Accessed: 2026-17-10).

(2) Record, Jeffrey (2005): Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s. US Army War College Press. <https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/736> (Accessed: 2026-17-10).

(3) Galbraith, John Kenneth (1977): The Age of Uncertainty: A History of Economic ideas and Their Consequences, 22, 137-138. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

(4) The Age of Uncertainty Episode 5 Lenin and The Great Ungluing. sveinbjornt YouTube channel 10/17/2011. <https://youtu.be/sxAoymq_SEA?si=5NXcezHvEnQULTsR> (Accessed: 2026-17-10).

(5) Record, Jeffrey (2007): The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler, 116. Dulles VA: Potomac Books.