On the menu today: The argument that there’s no difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is often wildly overstated. But what is painfully clear is that over the past decade or two, both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have grown more statist in their economics; generally more dovish, noninterventionist, or isolationist in their foreign policy (the Iran war being the glaring exception); and more libertine in their social policies. It’s not that we don’t have a choice, it’s that the Overton window shifted dramatically to the left over the past 20 years — and yet, we’re more frustrated with our politics, government, and conditions in America than ever. I don’t think that’s a coincidence! Read on.
The Bipartisan Descent
Ross Douthat, departing the New York Times and moving on to become a 60 Minutes correspondent, writes in his farewell column that compared to when he started writing in that paper 17 years ago, he’s less certain of who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are. “Each major faction seems potentially dangerous, tempted toward the dark side in some unique way, contested or cross-pressured to a degree that makes me uncertain where the side of the angels really lies.”
If you’re a (relatively) free-market conservative, a hawk — or at least a believer in peace through strength — and a supporter of traditional values, there’s a good chance you feel politically homeless and you’ve felt politically homeless for a while now.
The Republican president keeps taking a government stake in private companies, now up to 30 firms. As the Cato Institute observes, the U.S. government taking an ownership stake in private companies is now routine, and a Republican-controlled House and Senate are ready to make it official federal policy under law, not just some rogue administration’s actions. Zohran Mamdani wants to “seize the means of production”; today’s Republicans want to establish a federal ownership stake in the means of production. A future President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or some other progressive Democrat will appreciate Trump-era Republicans establishing the precedent and the legitimacy of the federal government strong-arming many kinds of companies into giving them ownership shares.
This administration talks a lot about “peace through strength,” but it’s tough to align that talk with a Republican president who constantly boasts about how well he gets along with China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. (“Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed. . . . President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity and other things at very low prices.”) We blindsided NATO by removing 5,000 troops from Germany, and the president pledged, “We’re going to cut way down, and we’re cutting a lot further than 5,000.” There are also fair questions about the execution of that “peace through strength” philosophy; the president who pledged a war against Iran would be wrapped up in about five weeks is stuck in a conflict with Iran that he can’t end, while insisting the entire time that our munitions stockpiles are fine.
This is a socially conservative administration and Congress that allowed Planned Parenthood to receive federal funding again. The Trump administration approved a new generic version of the mifepristone abortion pill. President Trump told Republicans that they had to be “flexible” on the Hyde amendment, which restricts taxpayer funding for abortions. So far this year, America averages about 100,000 abortions per month, a rate indistinguishable from the Biden years and significantly higher than the Obama years.
The administration is now completely comfortable with widespread access to marijuana and is an ally to the $30 billion cannabis industry. It is not surprising that a former casino owner is a supporter of legalized gambling; the Trump administration is a stalwart ally of gambling interests and prediction markets against state regulators.
Do you look around your country and conclude that the problem is too little weed and gambling?
Let’s observe this is a president who is malleable on almost every issue, including his signature issue of immigration, telling Laura Ingraham that the U.S. had to maintain the status quo on H-1B visas because “you also do have to bring in talent.” When Ingraham insisted that the U.S. had plenty of talented people, Trump replied, “No, you don’t. No, you don’t.” In that same interview, Trump said if the U.S. did not continue maintaining its current level of Chinese college students, “You would have half the colleges in the United States go out of business” and “historically black colleges and universities would all be out of business.”
To save the Republican Party, Trump turned it into a party that supports state intervention in the economy, is more dovish or isolationist in foreign affairs, is wishy-washy on abortion and other social issues, and is negotiable on immigration when large employers complain.
There are some former Republicans who have formally switched and become Democrats in the Trump era. This is a little ironic, because Trump himself, a registered Democrat from 2001 to 2009, has made the GOP much more like the Democratic Party on many issues!
As the GOP becomes increasingly statist, dovish, and libertine, these lawmakers have objected to Trump and joined a Democratic Party that is . . . even more statist, even more dovish, and even more libertine.
Vast swaths of today’s Democrats want “Medicare for All,” which is another way of saying they want to ban private health insurance and put the federal government in charge of all health-care funding, which gives the government power over all health-care decisions. Democrats want price controls. They want to institute wealth taxes (where you’re not taxed on the money you made in a given year, but based upon your overall net worth as determined by the government) and to raise the top federal tax rate from 37 percent to 49 percent.
Adam Smith, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said last year, “The Biden administration should have directly talked to Russia. I didn’t agree with this, you know, ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukrainians’ thing. . . . What we need to do — and this is simple to do — [is] much more aggressively embrace diplomacy. I think we should have been much louder during the Biden administration [that] we need to have an arms negotiation discussion with China and Russia.” (Both Russia and China break arms control treaties with metronomic regularity. Recall that President Trump literally and metaphorically rolled out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin in Alaska, with no discernable change in Russian policies whatsoever.)
Democrats have made very clear that they want to end U.S. military operations against Iran; what policy they would want to replace it is much less clear. The Democrats’ usual go-to move is to call for negotiations with the hostile regime, but that’s exactly what the Trump administration has been doing for months, with little to show for it. Yesterday on NBC News’ Meet the Press, Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said, “I will support a deal to end this war and reopen the Strait [of Hormuz]. I am prepared to support a bad deal, to end this war and reopen the strait, because the only deal that is available, at this point of — in time, is a terrible, bad deal.”
A 2024 poll found that 83 percent of Democrats believe that their state should allow abortion at any time for any reason. Roughly half (47 percent) of Democrats believe that abortion providers should not contact a minor’s parents before performing one on a girl under age 18. (Note that at least 45 states have laws prohibiting minors from getting tattoos and 38 states have laws that prohibit both body piercing and tattooing on minors without parental permission.)
In 2022, after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, 46 percent of Democrats said the Supreme Court was “illegitimate.” (You’re an adult and can make your own decisions. But if you voted for a candidate who supports repealing the Hyde amendment and instituting taxpayer funding of abortion nationwide . . . I suspect you’re not quite as pro-life as you want to believe you are.)
A Gallup poll from 2025 found that 68 percent of Democrats believed doctor-assisted suicide was morally acceptable, 27 percent said the same about polygamy, and 11 percent said marital affairs were morally acceptable. (Nine percent of independents and 4 percent of Republicans said the same.) A December YouGov survey found that among those who self-identified as “very liberal,” 47 percent either felt “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” towards Luigi Mangione, who is on trial for murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
And that is all separate from the increasing socialist takeover of the Democratic Party. Ethiopian-born 29-year-old Melat Kiros, who is extremely likely to be elected to Congress in Colorado’s Denver-based first district in November, says, “The Green New Deal, frankly, is a floor now, not a ceiling, for what we need to actually be looking at doing.”
Yesterday, on ABC News’ This Week, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke One was crazy.’” As someone joked on X yesterday, “The fact that even the people who supported Woke 1.0 are now referring to it as Woke 1.0 is kind of ominous — like the Germans referring to World War I in 1925.”
In short, we have two parties who are pretty darn statist in their economics, pretty darn dovish or isolationist in their foreign policy, and pretty darn libertine in their social policies. Neither one wants to do a darn thing about entitlements, neither one cares about the deficit and debt. Both parties intermittently talk tough about China but then get a lot softer the moment they’re meeting face-to-face with Xi Jinping. Both act as if some of the biggest problems facing the country are not enough abortions, not enough weed, and not enough opportunities for gambling.
Right around here, Trump fans will point to his two presidential election victories and argue that his victories prove that his approach is the right approach. But winning a political race doesn’t necessarily make you right. Barack Obama won both of his elections by wide margins. Ted Kennedy was elected to the Senate nine times. Winning a political race just means that either you and your agenda were more popular than the other guy, or you represent a state or district that will vote for an amoeba with the right partisan affiliation in a general election.
A politician promising to tell grocery stores what they can charge is no doubt popular. (President Trump, June 29: “Gasoline Retailers must get their Prices down, IMMEDIATELY!”) It’s also a formula for economic chaos. When you cap how much profit a seller can make, he has much less interest in selling that good.
If you want lower prices on goods and services, you need to increase the supply. (Tariffs do not do that. I can be talked into supporting tariffs on geopolitical foes like China and Russia and using tariffs to discourage trade with those foes, but that still leaves roughly 190 other countries as potential trade partners. Alas, we are heavily dependent upon China for a variety of goods, most notably critical minerals and rare earth metals. You would think we would be able to find alternate suppliers of fireworks, artificial Christmas trees, and coloring books.)
If you want to increase supply, you need more producers and more competition. If you want more producers and more competition, you need to make it as easy as possible to start a new company. (According to a new ranking of states, Florida is the easiest state in which to start a company, and Rhode Island is the most difficult.)
We are in a populist, and some would say “slopulist,” era. When New York Democrats started pushing for a law that would require stores selling food to offer a 10 percent discount to customers using self-checkout lanes, Noah Smith lamented the rise of “slopulism” — policies that sound like they’re helping the little guy but will likely have the opposite effect. (Discouraging automation may protect cashier jobs, but it locks in labor costs and makes it harder for retailers to reduce prices.)
Or governments start enacting tax cuts that are popular but illogical or nonsensical policy.
The president and a bipartisan majority in Congress concluded that if you’re making less than $160,000 in a year, tips should not be taxed as income, even though they’re . . . you know, income. The stripper, the bartender, the barista, and the waiter are indeed working hard, but so are the bouncer, the fast-food cook, the cashier, the assembly line worker, and the construction worker.
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen wants to eliminate all federal taxes for those making $92,000 or less. (In 2025, 40 percent of American households paid no federal individual income tax, mostly those with incomes too low to owe federal income tax after accounting for the standard deduction and other deductions or exclusions, or various tax credits. (Call me a Bolshevik, but I think everyone at every income level should pay at least a little income tax, even if it’s just a token amount. I mean, literally, I’d settle for a Chuck E. Cheese token.)
Giveaways and special carve-outs often sound popular to the masses, but that doesn’t make them good policies overall.
Free-market economics (or at least freer than the status quo), a strong military, strong alliances focused on deterrence, and tempering the human temptation toward vice and indolence through traditional values and restraint may not be popular. But that doesn’t make them any less right. The world outside our window keeps showing us the evidence that the other paths don’t get us where we want to go.
You can’t control the outcome of national, state, or local elections; all you can do is stand up for what you believe in and let the chips fall where they may.
ADDENDUM: I am happy to be less special than I used to be, as another National Review colleague has journeyed to wartime Ukraine to do firsthand reporting. (Mark Wright went in late 2025, and Gregory Slayton practically lives there.)
Andrew Stuttaford, reporting from Kharkiv earlier this summer:
Three days later we were stepping through shattered rooms in the Kharkiv Art Museum, hit during a large drone onslaught on that city, Ukraine’s second-largest, that also took place on June 14–15. True to form, Russia is taking pains to destroy artifacts and architecture that do not fit its narrative. The targets in Kyiv that night had also included an important museum across from the monastery as well as Ukraine’s film museum. The Kharkiv Art Museum had been attacked before and most of its collection had been shipped elsewhere, but some (mainly Soviet-era) work had been left behind. A painting of Lenin was laid out amid the saved, as indestructible as a cockroach. I asked the museum official what came next. “We will rebuild.”
“As indestructible as a cockroach” — put that on my list of sentences I wish I had written.