Rediscovering the Soul of Conservatism

Rediscovering the Soul of Conservatism, Part II

Daniel J. Mahoney, The American Mind

Preserving liberty and engendering civic gratitude.

Read Part I here.

In the first part of my extended reflection on the character of conservatism, I warned that the American Right is confronted by a “pseudo-Rightist culture of repudiation” that in important respects mirrors the intellectual and political Left. The crude white nationalism and vociferous anti-Semitism of the so-called “groypers,” who delight in the nasty, transgressive utterings of the internet chameleon Nick Fuentes, present the most recent example of that phenomenon.

On another front, a spirit of ingratitude dominates in certain precincts of the Right. There is a marked tendency to dismiss even the most admirable conservative wisdom of the past as outdated, irrelevant, or worse. A young critic of mine at The American Conservative, who writes very much in that dismissive spirit, accuses me of making “rote” appeals to the likes of Burke and Churchill, as if deep immersion in the thought and action of these two great conservatives can only be formulaic and irrelevant.

But a conservatism that forgets the most capacious meaning of the social contract, the enduring bond that connects the living to the dead and the yet to be born, and the multiple reasons for gratitude to our noble if imperfect forebears—Burkean themes par excellence—has lost essential bearings, and will rather quickly lose its soul.

Similarly, a conservatism that ignores Churchill’s great insight that opposition to the totalitarian negation of man requires a full-throated defense of “Christian civilization” and “Christian ethics,” and not merely fealty to abstract liberal principles (see his incomparable “Finest Hour” speech), would be both impoverished and disarmed. Nor does the Churchill who reminded us at the height of the Cold War that “meeting jaw to jaw is better than war” need to be reminded of the limits of bellicosity. Contrary to a repeated misuse, Churchill knew that it was not always Munich 1938, and opined that a more traditional Germany, authoritarian but not totalitarian and genocidal, might have been accommodated (not “appeased”) in the 1930s, as he put it in his classic work, The Gathering Storm.

I would suggest that my young critic take the time to study Burke and Churchill with the same care that he parses the “ironic” rhetoric of Nick Fuentes.

In my earlier essay, I made another suggestion that drew fire from other corners. I suggested that two warring factions on the Right, post-liberals and more traditional pro-American conservatives, could conceivably form a common front to oppose the racialism, anti-Semitism, and neo-paganism of the pseudo-Right. Offered in a spirit of statesmanship, which characteristically knits together factions for a common purpose, I do not disown or withdraw that suggestion, while acknowledging how difficult effecting it would be. To do so, moreover, would require some reflection and soul-searching on the part of both parties.

For truth be told, the post-liberals, whose honor I do not question, have contributed to the atmosphere of generalized ingratitude by their assaults on the American Founding, which is in their estimation the product of “liberalism”—and nothing but liberalism. They too often facilely dismiss, or systematically mischaracterize, the achievements of conservative statesmen and theorists of the past. Their treatments of Buckley and Reagan read like caricatures, and express little or no gratitude for what these men did to sustain the cause of ordered liberty against moral nihilism and collectivism at home and totalitarianism abroad.

Now, one can recognize the limits of an earlier fusionism that was arguably too willing to accommodate expressive individualism and ongoing denials of the conservative foundations of the liberal order, as I called it in my 2011 book of the same name. These foundations include a vigorous and independent civil society, the so-called bourgeois family, religious faith, and a self-governing nation-state, not to mention an educational system that passes on the ideas, real history, and achievements of country and civilization.

One can argue that the old fusionists rightly esteemed freedom while inadequately defending its crucial preconditions. They were slow and rather inept in standing up to the massive challenge that the spirit of nihilistic repudiation posed to the health and well-being of republican government in the United States. A populist conservative correction to their complacency was in order.

The post-liberals are not wrong to point out many of the serious limits of theoretical or philosophical liberalism. Nor are they wrong that liberalism has been increasingly defined by excessive individualism, contempt for tradition and traditional wisdom, and a doctrinaire secularism and scientism that undermine the dignity of the human person and the preconditions of a free and civilized society. Liberalism has in decisive respects been historicized. It has succumbed to the progressivist replacement of the sempiternal distinctions between good and evil, truth and falsehood, by the spurious ideological distinction between progress and reaction. And many of these tendencies indeed had their origins in the thought of early modern political philosophy.

But the post-liberals tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They partially attributed this debased liberalism to the American Founders themselves, as if the freedom they esteemed was relativistic, hedonistic, anti-religious, and devoid of public spirit. Unlike an older tradition of Catholic reflection about America, they fail to think through the crucial differences between the American and French Revolutions, the spirit of American republicanism, and the debasement of liberty, equality, and fraternity in the guise of Jacobinism.

Alexander Hamilton, an eminent Founder, wrote in 1794 that the French revolutionaries were “fanatics in political science” who rejected “moderate and well-balanced government,” drew on “irreligion and anarchy,” and saw in religion and government “unwarrantable restraints upon the freedom of man.” Their “impiety and infidelity” led to “prodigious crimes heretofore unknown among us.” At their best and indeed most characteristic, the Founders saw the inextricable link between moral anarchy and what came to be called “totalitarian democracy.”

As Matthew Spalding makes clear in his wonderfully thoughtful and accessible new book, The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence, the Declaration is far from being a purely Lockean document, even if it draws on the constitutionalism of Locke’s Second Treatise, while eschewing the hedonism and relativism of the Essay.

As Jefferson wrote a year before his death, the Declaration was an “expression of the American mind,” with its sentiments being found in “the elementary books of public right” authored by “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney etc.” It also appeals nobly to “prudence,” “rectitude,” “magnanimity,” and “sacred Honor.” The Declaration’s political theology, in part added by the Continental Congress, is deeper and broader than Jefferson’s Socinian religious thinking. It appeals to a providential God who is at once “Creator” and “Supreme Judge of the world,” not just “Nature’s God.” As Spalding aptly puts it, the Declaration appeals to “[m]an’s rational understanding of a general revelation that is open to further revealed truths.” Thus, while valuing the inestimable good of religious liberty, the Founders still assumed and promoted a “friendship of politics and religion.” That friendship has frayed, and dangerously so, but this was in no way the design or aim of the Founding Fathers, as Washington’s Farewell Address makes clear.

Today, though, we are faced by the specter of what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard Address called “anthropocentricity.” He defined this as a [merely] humanistic way of thinking, which proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of evil in man, nor any task higher than the quest for earthly happiness, and…fashioned the dangerous tilt toward the worship of man and his material needs into the basis of modern civilization.

Such anthropocentric humanism denied what the Founders (and Tocqueville and Lincoln) readily acknowledged: that nature and God provide a standard of morality above the human will. In a speech in Lewiston, Illinois, that serves as the epigraph to Spalding’s book, Lincoln appealed to the Declaration of Independence as an obstacle to tyranny and a spirited proclamation that could help sustain “truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues.” With these facts in mind, let us not reduce our rich civic tradition to liberalism alone, or see every variant of liberalism as a materialist and atheistic humanism that helped usher in the totalitarian deformation of modernity.

On the other hand, as Solzhenitsyn also reminds us in the Harvard Address, we need to recall that previous ages more attuned to “the spiritual” often consigned our “physical nature” to “perdition.” A serious consideration of history reveals that there is no political golden age, classical or Christian, to which we can retreat or recreate. The anthropological renewal, the “new height of vision” that Solzhenitsyn called for, is thus a most demanding task: it must knit together both elements of our human nature in a way that respects both, but preserves their right order as well. Put in more contemporary terms, we must repudiate those doctrines that have pushed God and the soul aside, while building on the “liberty under God and the law” that is at the heart of our civic and civilizational inheritance. This is a task large enough for chastened and self-aware American liberals and post-liberals to contribute to, if they so choose.

We must move forward in a spirit that draws on the best of conservative and liberal wisdom and practice while understanding (and working against) the propensity of modern liberty toward self-radicalization and self-destruction. In that spirit, we can revive what Roger Scruton called “the crucial idea of free community, in which constraints are real, socially engendered, but also tacitly accepted as a part of citizenship.” Some conservatives have called this “ordered liberty,” and others have labelled it “republican self-government.” All Americans should appreciate that no human being has the right to govern another human being without his consent. But that crucial insight does not mean that human beings are autonomous beings who are free to do what they will, a notion the American Founders clearly denied. Liberty must be guided by an “order of things” that gives meaning to our freedom and makes sense of our search for truth.

As the Catholic political philosopher Orestes Brownson wrote in his underappreciated The American Republic, “[M]an is not God, independent, self-existing, and self-sufficing.” Rather, “man is dependent, and dependent not only upon his Maker, but on his fellow-men, on society, and even on nature, or the material world.” With this recognition, we are at the meeting point of true conservatism and a chastened, noble, and ennobling liberalism that, individually and together, repudiates repudiation in all its forms.            

Daniel J. Mahoney is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a senior visiting fellow at Hillsdale College, and professor emeritus at Assumption University. He has written widely on French politics and political thought, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the moral grounds of opposition to totalitarianism. His latest book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, is available from Encounter Books. 

The Great Entitlement State Grift

WALL STREET JOURNAL DISCOVERS MINNESOTA FRAUD

Three (3) items published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal

touch on different aspects of the fraud crisis gripping Minnesota.

Bill Glahn, Powerline

From the Editorial Board,

The Great Entitlement State Grift:
The giant Minnesota fraud shows that GOP reformers are right.

The Board poses the timely question,

What happens when welfare becomes not a temporary hand up but an ingrained expectation of American life? For an ugly glimpse, look at the astonishing fraud unfolding in Minnesota.

The Board runs through the basic facts of the multi-billion-dollar frauds, of which you, the reader, are all-too-familiar.

Minnesota’s “nation-leading” Scandinavian-style, cradle-to-grave, guaranteed-income welfare system has ended up being the state’s downfall. The Board writes,

Mr. Trump is highlighting that the alleged Minnesota scammers are ethnic Somalis. It’s true that Minnesota’s generous welfare state has become a magnet for Somali immigrants. But the main problem here isn’t ethnicity or migration. It’s the incentives for indolence and fraud at the heart of the welfare state. All that free money with few guardrails is an invitation to theft.

Getting to the heart of the matter,

Democrats won’t acknowledge fraud because they want more Americans on the dole. Welfare is central to their political business model.

Also yesterday, around the same time, the Journal published an opinion piece by Kimberley Strassel, under the headline,

The Lesson of Minnesota’s Fraud: Republicans have an opportunity to run against an out-of-control welfare state.

Her advice? Echoing the Board, she recommends downplaying the Somali angle and focusing on the broken welfare system, as she writes,

And of a state that preened as a model of social welfare, its own lavish benefits drawing many immigrants, and invited a plundering.

Specifically,

But Minnesota raises to alarm level a separate need for reset: The system itself—the government machine—is broken. Its heaving, duplicative federal-state programs, awash in forms and bureaucracies and ancient mainframes, has already suffered Soviet-style collapse. The system serves more as a cash machine for criminals than a safety net for the needy.

All true. Her bottom line,

The argument: We need to move many people off government dependency not just for moral and societal reasons, but because government has an obligation—to taxpayers and to the truly needy—to right-size and return to a system that can function.

I agree with her that it’s time to reimagine government.

Later last night, the Journal published (nonpaywall version) a news piece under the headline,

A Sprawling Fraud Scandal Puts Minnesota’s Somali Community in the Spotlight

The Journal reports on the basics of the scandals, which you already know. My favorite line from the piece, referring to Gov. Tim Walz,

His office didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Expect to see that repeated until November 2026. 

Requiem for a scandal

 

REQUIEM FOR A SCANDAL

Byron York, Washington Examiner 

Nearly four years ago, on Jan. 18, 2022, this newsletter wrote about a frenzy that was sweeping the anti-Trump world. It had to do with a novel theory regarding the 2020 presidential election dispute. From the newsletter:

Here’s the short version: Trump supporters in a few states — Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, and New Mexico — were so brazen that in the days before Dec. 14, 2020, when the Electoral College voted to confirm [former President] Joe Biden’s victory, they actually forged documents falsely purporting to be Electoral College results for [President Donald] Trump and sent them to the appropriate authorities in Washington and in their home states. They then planned to use the forgeries to steal the election on Jan. 6, 2021. All the while, they hoped no one would notice.

It was a crazy theory, for a number of reasons discussed below. But the notion of so-called “fake electors” would not only consume Resistance World, but would spread among Democratic officials in the justice system and become a key part of the anti-Trump indictments of 2023 and 2024. 

Now it has all fallen apart. With the recent withdrawal of the case originally brought by the disgraced prosecutor Fani Willis in Georgia, the theory that sparked so much excitement on the anti-Trump fringe is finally dead. What is remarkable is that the glaring flaws in the “fake electors” theory were obvious all along. It just took this long for the wheels of justice to turn.

After Willis was taken off her own case following the disgrace of her top deputy, Georgia officials faced a daunting question: Who wants to pick up this prosecution and run with it? It turned out nobody did, and the case eventually ended up in the hands of the non-partisan head of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, Peter Skandalakis. Last week, Skandalakis released a carefully argued 22-page memo supporting his decision to drop the Willis case altogether.

As far as the “fake electors” theory is concerned, the substance of Skandalakis’s discussion bore a striking resemblance to the newsletter from January 2022. That’s because the facts of the case have always been the facts of the case, before and after the anti-Trump activists got so excited.

First, Skandalakis explained that what the Resistance calls “fake electors” were, in fact, contingent electors. In this way, in early December 2020, the Trump campaign was litigating the results of the election in Georgia. But the date was approaching — Dec. 14 — on which the Electoral College would have to vote. Republicans were concerned that Biden’s electors would be chosen on that day while the lawsuits were still pending. If Trump eventually won the litigation, he would then have zero electors. So, acting on the advice of the campaign’s lawyers, the state Republican Party picked conditional Trump electors who could become real electors if and only if Trump won the lawsuit and was declared the winner of Georgia. They were contingent electors.

“Nothing in the evidence suggests that [the contingent electors] conspired to overturn the election,” Skandalakis wrote. “On the contrary, the record overwhelmingly demonstrates that the electors believed their actions were legally required to preserve Georgia’s electoral votes in the event President Donald J. Trump prevailed in the then-pending lawsuit in Fulton County challenging the election.” Skandalakis noted that the evidence also shows that “the electors convened the meeting pursuant to the advice of counsel.”

Also, the contingent electors did their work in public. Back when the scandal was raging, MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow called the “fake electors” story a “previously unknown, mysteriously coordinated effort to have Republicans in multiple states forge election documents after the last election and present themselves as fake electors to the Electoral College.” In fact, the contingent electors announced their meeting. They invited the press to cover it. They tweeted about what they did. There were several news accounts about it. And they hired a court reporter to make a transcript of the proceedings, which proved extremely valuable to Skandalakis as he reviewed what happened.

It is important to point out that all this was known at the time of the 2022 “fake electors” freakout. Even Maddow could have known it, had she looked

Now, you could say the contingent electors were acting on pure faith when they did what they did. Certainly, there appeared to be no chance of Trump winning the litigation and thus winning Georgia. Indeed, that did not happen. But that does not mean the contingent electors had ill intent. “It is not illegal to challenge election results,” Skandalakis concluded. “As a prosecutor, I am loath to use the criminal justice system to pursue law-abiding citizens who, in good conscience and upon the advice of counsel, were asked to perform certain tasks in connection with the litigation of an election challenge.”

Fani Willis knew all of this when she charged one of the contingent electors, then-Georgia Republican Party chairman David Shafer, with violating the Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act; impersonating a public officer; two counts of forgery in the first degree; three counts of false Statements and Writings; and criminal attempt to commit filing false documents. Others faced the same charges. The “fake electors” prosecution was BS from the beginning. And now, at last, it is over.

Gavin Newsom’s ‘Plant Police’ = deadly Palisades fire

 

Smoking gun: Gavin Newsom’s ‘Plant Police’

set the stage for deadly Palisades fire

Joel Pollak, New York Post 

Eleven months after the Palisades Fire destroyed thousands of Los Angeles homes, we may finally have the smoking gun linking Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration to the deadly blaze.

A newly discovered “Wildfire Management Plan,” quietly issued by California State Parks just weeks before the Jan. 7 wildfire, states Newsom’s policy bluntly: “Unless specified otherwise, State Parks prefers to let Topanga State Park burn in a wildfire event” — disregarding the park’s proximity to residential neighborhoods.

The document, prepared in December 2024, was unearthed this week through legal discovery in a civil lawsuit against the state.

Attorney Alexander “Trey” Robinson, who represents thousands of Pacific Palisades residents, says the manual outlines new procedures for fire management.

Those procedures could have barred local firefighters from fully extinguishing an earlier blaze that later re-ignited in high winds. 

Federal investigators say the Palisades Fire was rekindled from the much smaller Lachman Fire on Jan. 1, which was started by alleged arsonist Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, of Florida.

The Lachman Fire began “on land owned by the local Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority . . . and spread onto land owned by California State Parks (Topanga State Park),” according to a federal indictment against Rinderknecht.

Local firefighters put out that fire in the wee hours of New Year’s Day, and came back on Jan. 2 to make sure it was fully extinguished. 

But according to text messages first unearthed by the Los Angeles Times, they were ordered to leave “even though they complained the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch.”

That was likely a fateful decision.

Investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives later determined that the fire continued within the root structure of plants “approximately 20 feet south” of the original blaze. 

In the extreme winds of Jan. 7 — a seasonal Santa Ana wind, made stronger by a jet stream at high altitude — the conflagration reignited and spread from the chaparral of the park to nearby homes.

Locals have wondered for months why the firefighters left on Jan. 2, given the high risk that the fire could start again and spread from the state park to homes in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Highlands, just a few hundred yards away.

Some residents — notably reality TV star Spencer Pratt, who lost his home and has been investigating the fire ever since — have claimed that State Parks officials told firefighters they could not use heavy equipment to clear the perimeter of the fire, because doing so would harm engendered plant species.

Newsom has denied any state responsibility for the blaze.

His office has even called residents who are suing the state “opportunistic plaintiffs.”

But one local citizen took a photograph of a California State Parks employee — wearing a jacket with the department’s logo — talking to firefighters working on the Lachman Fire.

And the “Wildfire Management Plan” provides a key piece of evidence linking the disaster to the state’s apparent negligence.

The document defines “Avoidance Areas,” which contain “all sensitive Natural and Cultural Resources,” and where “no heavy equipment, vehicles, and retardant are allowed.”

Shockingly, the document says the public should not be told where these areas are: “Avoidance Areas should be shared with the Incident Command, but measures should be taken to keep the information confidential.”

The document also advises firefighters to use “modified fire suppression” techniques in these areas.

When performing a “mop-up” of an extinguished fire, firefighters are told to “consider allowing large logs to burn out.” 

It adds: “No mop-up techniques are allowed in avoidance areas without the presence of an archaeologist.”

Robinson, who obtained the Wildfire Management Plan on Tuesday thanks to a judge’s order, alleges that the Wildfire Management Plan prevented the Los Angeles Fire Department from fully extinguishing the Lachman Fire.

“We believe this is the reason LAFD was restricted from performing a normal mop-up of the Lachman Fire,” he told The Post. “I suspect State Park ‘Resource Advisors’ shared the avoidance map with the Lachman [Incident Command] and LAFD was forced not to mop up” in those designated areas.

“My personal opinion is that we will learn this is why the fire rekindled,” he added.

“The Plant Police prevented LAFD from doing their job.”

That — and the lack of an archeologist.

Joel Pollak is The California Post’s Opinion Editor. The California Post, a sister publication to The New York Post, will be launching early in 2026.

It’s Not “Racist” to Notice Somali Fraud

 

It’s Not “Racist” to Notice Somali Fraud

The recent scandal reveals an uncomfortable truth: different cultures lead to different outcomes.

Christopher F. Rufo, City Journal 

Last week, my colleague Ryan Thorpe and I broke a story about widespread fraud committed by Somalis in Minnesota. Members of the state’s Somali community allegedly participated in complex schemes related to autism services, food programs, and housing, which prosecutors estimate have stolen billions of taxpayer dollars. Even worse, some of the cash has ended up in the hands of Al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization in Somalia.

The story quickly reached the White House. Within days, President Trump announced that he was revoking the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for all Somali migrants in Minnesota.

Progressives have suggested that our reporting and the subsequent policy change were “racist.” While many of those indicted in these schemes are Somali, these critics argue, the federal government should not hold Minnesota’s Somali community corporately responsible for the actions of individuals.

This criticism is superficially appealing, but it isn’t persuasive on closer inspection.

First, a description of the facts should not be measured as “racist or not racist,” but rather as “true or not true.” And in this case, the truth is that numerous members of a relatively small community participated in a scheme that stole billions in funds. This is a legitimate consideration for American immigration policy, which is organized around nation of origin and, for more than 30 years, has favorably treated Somalis relative to other groups. It is more than fair to ask whether that policy has served the national interest. The fraud story suggests that the answer is “no.”

Second, the fact that Somalis are black is incidental. If Norwegian immigrants were perpetrating fraud at the same alleged scale and had the same employment and income statistics as Somalis, it would be perfectly reasonable to make the same criticism and enact the same policy response. It would not be “racist” against Norwegians to do so.

Further, Somalis have enormously high unemployment rates, and federal law enforcement have long considered Minneapolis’s Little Mogadishu neighborhood a hotspot for terrorism recruitment. We should condemn that behavior without regard to skin color.

The underlying question—which, until now, Americans have been loath to address directly—is that of different behaviors and outcomes between different groups. Americans tend to avoid this question, rely on euphemisms, and let these distinctions remain implied rather than spoken aloud. Yet it seems increasingly untenable to maintain this Anglo-American courtesy when the Left has spent decades insisting that we conceptualize our national life in terms of group identity.

The reality is that different groups have different cultural characteristics. The national culture of Somalia is different from the national culture of Norway. Somalis and Norwegians therefore tend to think differently, behave differently, and organize themselves differently, which leads to different group outcomes. Norwegians in Minnesota behave similarly to Norwegians in Norway; Somalis in Minnesota behave similarly to Somalis in Somalia. Many cultural patterns from Somalia—particularly clan networks, informal economies, and distrust of state institutions—travel with the diaspora and have shown up in Minnesota as well. In the absence of strong assimilation pressures, the fraud networks aren’t so surprising; they reflect the extension of Somali institutional norms into a new environment with weak enforcement and poorly designed incentives.

The beauty of America is that we had a system that thoughtfully balanced individual and group considerations. We recognized that all men, whatever their background, have a natural right to life, liberty, property, and equal treatment under the law. We also recognized that group averages can be a basis for judgment—especially in immigration, where they can help determine which potential immigrant groups are most suitable and advantageous for America.

These principles are in tension but not in contradiction. As a sociological matter, a policy of equal rights for all individuals will result in unequal outcomes among groups. This is not a sign of injustice per se; it is an inevitability. No two groups are the same, and therefore, no two groups will have the same outcomes in a system of individual liberty and equality.

The firestorm around the Somali fraud story was so intense precisely because it forced this question into the spotlight. For decades, America has given Somali immigrants special privileges through TPS. We have expected Somalis to play by the rules, contribute to the country, and assimilate into the culture. Some individuals have certainly done so, but as the fraud story suggests, many others have not. A rational government would amend its policies accordingly.

We can see the same process playing out in other parts of the world. In the United Kingdom, mass immigration from incompatible cultures is creating a civilizational crisis. Rather than replicate the policies of our sister country, we should accept reality and adopt a more thoughtful policy, which recognizes cultural norms as a reasonable measure of capacity to assimilate and to contribute.

The president should stand firm. Little Mogadishu in Minneapolis has a real problem, and it is about time that our government began facing it.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution.

Mayors to Cities: Drop Dead

Mayors to Cities: Drop Dead

Far-left policies on policing, education, and taxation are pushing Los Angeles, Chicago, and others to the brink.

Joel Kotkin, City-Journal 

Rick Cole has spent several decades running cities, both as an elected official and as a planner. He has worked in suburban Azusa, California, and progressive-dominated Santa Monica and currently sits on the Pasadena City Council. Yet as he looks out at the urban future, he feels despair—most particularly, about the city of Los Angeles, where he recently departed as deputy mayor and chief deputy controller.

“The progressives are not focused on governance,” he suggested over sushi in Little Tokyo, a stone’s throw from City Hall. “They prefer virtue-signaling to running a city.” Cole’s is not the complaint of a conservative but someone who identifies as “a pragmatic progressive,” even a “sewer socialist.” The problem, he says, is that today’s progressives lack a “results-oriented approach” that actually helps residents.

Innovation is barely possible at the moment, he says. Los Angeles has a special place in this lifelong Catholic’s heart: he went to college here (to Occidental, like Barack Obama), raised his kids here, and considers L.A. “the most fascinating city in the world.” But his head tells him that progressive mayor Karen Bass and an increasingly far-left city council have failed to address, among other major problems, a swollen budget, decaying infrastructure, and awful schools—to say nothing of their staggeringly inept response to the recent wildfires.

Perhaps never in recent history have American cities so badly needed strong, pragmatic mayors—and gotten so few. Congressional Republicans, with few urban constituencies, won’t be of much help with mass transit or other city services; big cities will have to “go it alone.” But rather than realigning city budgets and working toward self-sufficiency, many mayors favor far-left policies on policing, rent control, education, and taxation that amount to what the late Fred Siegel described three decades ago as “a suicide of sorts.”

This autumn could well see a neo-socialist, Zohran Mamdani, win the mayor’s office in New York. In Minneapolis, a Mamdani clone, 35-year-old state senator Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the dominant Democratic Farmer Labor Party (later rescinded, following allegations about voting irregularities at the party’s July convention). Leftists have also scored victories in smaller cities like Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo. And Seattle, which suffered some of the most destructive effects from 2020’s “summer of love,” as its clueless then-mayor called it, appears likely to replace the moderates elected in the 2020 aftermath with a new slate of far-left politicians.

Cities cannot afford such choices. Today, major American metropolises constitute a smaller portion of the nation’s population than at any time in the past half century. Employment has steadily shifted away from cities since the 1950s. The production of great office towers, those temples of urban prominence, has fallen to levels a small fraction of those of the 1990s and may soon dip below the rate of spending on new data centers. According to the Financial Times, many global firms are planning to reduce their office footprints by between 10 percent and 20 percent. The industries that traditionally drive high-end employment, like finance and professional services, are also those most often receptive to remote or hybrid work.

Past urban leaders met equally daunting challenges, most recently in the 1990s. A generation ago, major American cities seemed to be decomposing, but reformist mayors managed to slow and even reverse decline in cities as diverse as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Houston. A repeat is not inconceivable: moderate, results-based leaders have recently won mayoral elections in San Francisco and Houston. But for the moment, the tide still runs leftward.

For some pundits, Zohran Mamdani’s “cost of living” campaign—based on a rent freeze, free city buses and child care, and city-owned supermarkets—seems to promise a road to power for the hard Left. Rent regulation allows urban progressives to live in their preferred cities rather than face the choice of locating somewhere else. This constituency, Mamdani’s base, understandably worries about how, in New York, one needs to earn $135,000 a year to afford a rent that doesn’t consume more than 30 percent of income—an equation more demanding than in any American city except San Jose, where pay tends to be much higher.

The progressive knowledge class has replaced the traditional, family-oriented urban middle class as the key urban cohort. Middle-income families have been leaving cities for decades. Between 1970 and 2000, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income areas in core cities shrank from 45 percent to 23 percent of the city as a whole. Job losses for manufacturing and middle-management jobs, notes MIT’s David Autor, were “overwhelmingly concentrated in urban labor markets.” In the process, many working-class voters—Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans—moved out of the urban core, too. These were the residents who helped elect reform mayors Rudy Giuliani, Richard Riordan, and Bob Lanier in New York, Los Angeles, and Houston, respectively. Today, a new demographic forms the center of gravity in these cities.

Yes, cities continue to attract young professionals, globe-trotting elites, and culture creators. In New York, for example, while the overall population has declined, the number of ultra-wealthy residents has not yet dissipated. But however much they love the opera, fashion, or Broadway, many cherish their bottom lines even more. Between 2018 and 2022, more than 100,000 wealthy taxpayers left the city for Florida alone, draining an estimated $10 billion from New York’s coffers.

The key constituency for urban socialism is not the working or middle class but the largely affluent young, single professionals who are unlikely to have children (a majority of Manhattanites have never married). Marxist campaigners thrive wherever young progressives congregate: parts of Queens, Brooklyn, Chicago’s Near North Side, and trendy parts of L.A. like Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Hollywood. These highly educated, low-income voters constitute the tip of the socialist spear in New York and other cities.

This population feels aggrieved, knowing that it no longer can reasonably aspire to buy an attractive market-rate apartment. Their employment forecast is getting cloudier, even for those with expensive advanced degrees. Their jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence, including in finance, business services, and even in “creative” professions that historically have clustered in cities.

These highly motivated millennials have allies among those who benefit from ever-expanded government, such as the poor—including immigrants—and those working for the government or the nonprofit sector. In almost all progressive cities, unionized public workers represent arguably the most powerful political force.

The prospect of ever more radical progressive rule in New York would be a boon for places like Palm Beach, Austin, and Dallas, which is building a stock exchange to challenge Wall Street. Even former governor Andrew Cuomo, running as a New York City mayoral candidate, says that he’s headed to the Sunshine State if he doesn’t win in November.

Some see in this new progressive alliance a road map to reviving the Democratic Party, which faces historically low popularity numbers, but the track records of progressives currently in power offer little to boast about.

Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, in office since 2023, was elected by a Mamdani-like coalition of minorities, public employees—notably, his former teachers’ union colleagues—and the Windy City’s largely progressive white population. Under Johnson’s steady misrule, schools deteriorate, even as he pushes through fat raises for teachers and other public servants, leaving the city with cripplingly high pension debt. A situation that was already dire has moved toward the catastrophic.

In a saner world, Johnson would present a cautionary tale for progressives. His poll ratings are abysmal by any measure, dipping below 30 percent in one survey and even below 10 percent in another. Certainly, he makes a poor comparison with Midwest mayors like Mike Duggan in Detroit, a Democrat whose commonsense, centrist governance has helped halt the Motor City’s long decline, with a revitalized downtown and improved public safety. Duggan has recently broken with his increasingly leftist party and is now running for Michigan’s governor’s office as an independent. (See “Detroit—Back from the Dead?”, Summer 2025.)

Urban analyst Pete Saunders, a Detroit native and longtime Chicago-area resident, suggests that the Windy City’s politics have become less pragmatic partly because of the migration of middle-class residents, particularly blacks, to suburbs and the South, while the poor remain behind. Together with the radicalized young and childless progressives, these cohorts would work to defeat any moderate politician who might challenge them. “Chicago is stuck,” Saunders suggests. “We have barely grown for 50 years and there’s no real sign of anything like the comeback in Detroit.”

Perhaps nowhere is the demonstrated failure of progressive urbanism more obvious than in Los Angeles, a city with enormous physical advantages and a history of industrial might. Mayor Karen Bass may be more likable than Johnson or former New York mayor Bill de Blasio, but, as Cole notes, “she’s not an administrator.” That’s an understatement. Bass impressed few during last year’s fires, and the city’s performance in rebuilding has been abysmal. By late July, Los Angeles County had issued just 137 rebuilding permits for the 12,048 buildings damaged or destroyed by the wildfires.

Initially, this failure sparked some opposition, and even a recall drive, financed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ally Nicole Shanahan. But the effort ran out of steam and shut down. Crime rates have recently dropped somewhat, as they have around the country; but under the influence of the city’s militant public unions, Los Angeles suffers from a deepening budget hole.

With Los Angeles lacking a well-organized and influential business community, the public-sector unions get no pushback, notes recently retired L.A. city treasurer Ron Galperin. “The business community has packed it in. They are less organized and engaged,” he observes. “Decisions are made for ideology but not focused on results.” Billions spent on the homeless have been wasted on various housing and rehabilitation schemes, with little to show for it. The city, he suggests, has been “underinvesting in infrastructure” while its budget, he says, is assembled with “smoke and mirrors.”

Like New York, Los Angeles suffers from an exodus of middle-class and aspiring working-class families. Once described by Siegel as “the capitalist dynamo,” the city has become an economic backwater. Progressive critics at publications like The American Prospect want to blame Trump policies—in this case, the administration’s ICE raids—for the economic difficulties. But L.A.’s decline long predates the 2024 election. As the Drucker Institute’s Michael Kelly suggests, had the city merely seen economic growth in line with the national average over the past decade, it could have created 300,000 jobs.

Residents are fleeing a place once known as “the city that grew.” Los Angeles has lost overall population since 2010. If current trends continue, according to the state’s Department of Finance, it will be home to 1 million fewer people by 2060. The young are prominent among the departees; the city is home to 750,000 fewer young people than in 2000. Younger Angelenos, according to one UCLA survey, are even more dissatisfied than older ones.

Left behind are an L.A. version of Mamdani’s progressive college-educated supporters (albeit a shrinking constituency) plus a large, mostly poor population, dominated by more than 3 million immigrants—twice as many as any other county in the United States. Once the cost of living is included, Latino workers do far worse in L.A., Chicago, and New York than they fare in many smaller and Sunbelt cities. Los Angeles now suffers California’s highest poverty rate and one of the worst in the country. Since 2010, Latinos and other foreign-born Americans have been moving to Miami, Houston, and Dallas, while their numbers diminish in Los Angeles.

As the ambitious move, an underclass stays behind. Violent incidents remain commonplace, particularly around downtown, with everything from smash-and-grab attacks on retail stores to random assaults on individuals and gang-related homicides. Delinquents have vandalized Metro buses and stolen copper from city streetlights. Empty luxury high-rises in downtown Los Angeles, never completed, have become notorious among tourists for their elaborate graffiti.

One might think that such failure would disqualify the current political class, but hard times seem only to have reinforced the Left’s political prospects. The city’s decline was already evident in 2022, when Bass handily beat moderate Rick Caruso. Political experts believe that Bass is poised for reelection against likely meager opposition.

For Bass, the ICE raids have been political manna. Events in which demonstrators break laws, attack police, set fire to Waymos, and wave foreign flags—as seen in the immigration protests—may be horrifying to most Americans, but that hasn’t been the reaction in Los Angeles. One local political leader even called out the city’s notorious gangs for not joining the fight against ICE. It sounded like an invitation for progressive-approved vandalism on a grand scale. Bass’s fervent rhetorical attacks on ICE agents could help clinch her reelection bid.

Four Democratic Socialists of America members currently sit on the 15-seat city council, including recently elected Ysabel Jurado, a DSA activist who does not just want to defund the police but abolish them. In the left-wing hothouse that increasingly defines L.A. politics, “the numbers don’t support a reform candidate,” suggests well-connected Democratic consultant Dave Gershwin, a top aide to previous mayor Eric Garcetti and Senator Alex Padilla.

Crime has been progressives’ Achilles heel. The recent drop in crime owes much to the rediscovery of the novel notion of enforcing the law. City residents have voted out a dozen George Soros–funded DAs in cities including Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

San Francisco, which had drifted relentlessly leftward since moderate Mayor Frank Jordan left office in 1996, may be the surprising epicenter of a new centrist push. A city that had everything going for it, from a mild climate to the presence of elite universities and industries, San Francisco seemed determined for years to create a California version of a Third World city. Homeless people wandered its streets, property crime soared, and the downtown, particularly during the pandemic, became largely deserted.

Now San Franciscans appear to have had enough. Besides turning out far-left district attorney Chesa Boudin, along with some radical city supervisors and school board members, the city last year elected reformist mayor Dan Lurie. Two critical factors—demographics and economics—work in San Francisco’s favor. Its large Asian population (Asians account for nearly two in five city residents) has been moving to the political center and even the right. Though still strongly liberal as a whole, San Francisco enjoys one of the highest per-capita incomes of any city, with a base of affluent families and professionals.

Unlike in Los Angeles, the city’s business elite remain engaged. Himself a scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, Lurie has gotten property and tech executives organized to promote recovery. Most business leaders now see San Francisco, once written off, as primed for a major economic rebound.

The arrival of new AI-related companies has been critical. Open AI, Anthropic, and Inflection AI have all established major real-estate footprints. Lurie has focused on modernizing the tech capital’s poor public safety, shifting the police focus toward petty crime, and taken steps to address the persistent homelessness problem. He has looked to plug budget shortfalls with cuts in staff and services.

Most impressively, the city is seeing sharp declines in overall crime, which has dropped 35 percent. It still suffers from high downtown vacancy rates, but overall economic indicators such as tourism and conference attendance are up. The city is slowly countering its recent dystopic image. (See “San Franciso’s (Partial) Comeback.”)

Another promising model can be seen in Houston. The city is a sprawling and less than conventionally attractive place; but like San Francisco, it has retained a large multiethnic middle class. And where the City by the Bay boasts tech preeminence, Houston retains its status as the capital of the global energy industry, with many firms still domiciled within city limits.

Notwithstanding County Judge Lina Hidalgo, elected in 2018, progressives have never achieved the governing hold on Houston that they have secured in San Francisco. The departure of term-limited mayor Sylvester Turner, a conventional free-spending liberal, opened the door for the city’s business community to boost its own candidate: longtime Texas legislator John Whitmire, who took office in 2024. A key factor in Whitmire’s success is his lack of ideological rigidity, notes longtime Texas political consultant Kevin Shuvalov. Unlike his predecessor Turner, closely tied to public-sector unions, Whitmire has built an alliance with Republicans and moderate Democrats—still a robust presence here—and has stressed job creation and encouraging new residential construction.

“Whitmire has engaged the business community, and that makes a difference,” says Shuvalov. “He is changing the city culture and sees government not as an end but an entity where the business is customer service. He is what we need now. All Biden did was give cities money; but now, you need leaders who know the party is over.”

Progressive socialism continues to pose a grave threat to the recovery of urban America, but a return to sanity in major American cities is possible, and maybe even inevitable. It’s hard to see how the platform of Mamdani’s DSA party, which seeks “the abolition of capitalism” and the “social ownership of all major industry and infrastructure,” will play in the real world. People may not respond well to progressive ideas about taxing “whiter” areas, as Mamdani has suggested, or characterizing the NYPD as “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety,” as he has done in the past.

As jobs, talent, and investment head to Sunbelt cities or the countryside, some MAGA partisans may cheer the troubles of places like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. But their decline is no blessing for the United States. To see New York, or any of the other great cities, fall victim to the politics of grievance instead of pursuing growth, innovation, and advancement, would remove “a beacon of hope and opportunity for people around the world for centuries,” as the American Enterprise Institute’s Sam Abrams puts it.

Cities are hard to kill—they’ve survived riots, pandemics, and even, in Gotham’s case, Bill de Blasio. But they can’t mount a resurgence unless they abandon their ideological fixations and start meeting the needs of citizens, and at reasonable cost. “Excellence in governance is not impossible,” Rick Cole insists, as we walk through the crowded streets of Little Tokyo. The obstacle? “Cities have an arrogance that is almost nihilistic. People see the iceberg, but they don’t seem to want to avoid it.”

Joel Kotkin is Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas–Austin.

Massive welfare fraud exposed

 

Massive Welfare Fraud

Massive welfare fraud exposed in $100 Billion Federal SNAP program

186,000 dead people, 500,000 multi state claims, 226,000 bogus claims

THE CAPITALIST, Substack 

USDA uncovers rampant fraud in the SNAP program

All applicants will be REQUIRED to reapply to the program

Rampant fraud in SNAP program prompts reapplication decision

The Trump administration ordered all 40 million SNAP food assistance recipients to reapply Monday, launching a sweeping crackdown on rampant fraud after uncovering benefits to 186,000 dead people and $102 million in losses, vowing to restore integrity to the $100 billion program.

• Massive Fraud Exposed: USDA data reveals 186,000 deceased recipients, 500,000 multi-state claimants, and over 226,000 bogus approvals, which have fueled a 60% quarterly spike in illicit transactions to $102 million.

• Aggressive Cleanup Launched: The USDA already axed 700,000 ineligible participants and nabbed 118 for EBT card scams like skimming, with Secretary Rollins declaring fraud’s era “over” to while continuing tp aid truly needy families.

• State Data Mandated: Only 29 mostly Republican-led states have shared recipient info so far, delaying full verification amid nationwide push to curb misuse in high-impact areas like New Mexico and D.C.

• Spending Surge Scrutinized: SNAP costs hit $99.8 billion last year—up from $128 billion peaks in 2021—prompting re-eligibility checks across the system

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