Dear Weekend Jolter,
If Democrats are handed anything like a mandate next week, expect them to over-read it.
Yuval Levin, at the dawn of Trump Two, explained the pit our politics has tumbled into the last couple presidential cycles, during which each party has gotten a do-over — only to then indulge in the excesses responsible for their time out of power.
It’s not 2028 yet, but Tuesday’s midterms will set the mood. Especially if the pendulum swings back and Democrats succeed in reclaiming both chambers of Congress, it’s looking like the party’s left flank is itching to steer it toward some grand, constitutional-order version of the Green New Deal.
Now, no matter the Democrats’ numbers in the House and Senate, some sensible congressional oversight is in order — indeed, has been earned — given the Trump administration’s (and family’s) self-dealing, its targeting of political enemies, and now questions about favors to Russia. In an ideal world, those investigations would be bipartisan. Apart from the consequent headaches for this administration — plus a probably inevitable third impeachment drive — it is also possible that not much changes for now in day-to-day Washington.
As Jim Geraghty explained in one of two cover stories for NR’s latest issue, President Trump already prefers doing business via executive order. If Congress flips, “a Democratic House and Senate will be louder and angrier than has been the case over the past two years, but Trump will remain Trump, accepting limits on his power only when he truly has no choice.” Or, as Charles C. W. Cooke put it in the other cover story:
If the Democratic Party wins a majority in both houses of Congress in November 2026, I will be nervous, but it won’t keep me up at night. If the Democratic Party wins a majority in both houses of Congress in November 2028, I shall become a raging insomniac.
That moment represents the true pivot point for American politics. NR’s editorial elaborates on the stakes not only for 2026 but especially for the next presidential election:
Unified control of Washington is the ultimate goal. Should Democrats get it in two years, they will attempt to eliminate the filibuster and unlock the path in the Senate for radical, self-serving changes to the system. Even establishment Democrats are talking of adding Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states, and it has become nearly party orthodoxy that the Supreme Court should be “reformed,” either with age limits to jettison conservative justices or by expanding the number of justices.
This is an agenda to overturn the constitutional order for partisan and ideological advantage. The legitimacy of the Senate, with four more arbitrarily added Democratic seats, and the Supreme Court would never be the same. Many Democrats also want to trash the Electoral College, and who knows what else they’d come up with should they take over Washington.
An optimistic reading would be that, should Democrats win on Tuesday, they will focus their energy on oversight and shelve the grand designs of their most radical factions, long-term. But political tides do not seem to be turning that way. Abigail Anthony and Rich Lowry have written about how “woke” politics are reemerging after a brief period of latency. How strident the party becomes in that sense may depend in large part on who composes the progressive vanguard in Congress come 2027: known, if protean, quantities such as a possibly self-moderating AOC, who has an eye on higher office — or the likes of Abdul El-Sayed, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Melat Kiros.
The concern of overreach goes beyond the culture wars. Returning to Charlie’s piece, he, like Yuval, observes the fever of delusion that has stricken both parties: the loudest voices within them “believe that a majority of the country is secretly in love with them” and that they are only thwarted by the “ruthlessness of the other side.” He adds, “Stir in the Democrats’ nauseating tendency to conflate their own interests with the integrity of ‘our democracy,’ and one can easily see how even the self-described moderates within that party could be persuaded to go along with a series of brazen acts of constitutional vandalism.”
Voters could yet restrain these passions. Charles Hilu writes about the importance of Maine’s Senate race, the scene of so much political drama this year. Deroy Murdock explains the difference that low-propensity center-right voters could make on Election Night. Dan McLaughlin breaks down what to watch for next week.
But if the Democrats are gloating come Wednesday, it’s time to start thinking seriously about what that portends for the fundamental structure of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and more.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Our editorial on the midterms, once more, is here: The Stakes in 2026 — and Beyond
On that other election, in Israel: Netanyahu Lives Another Day
Another cautionary tale from California: California’s Act of Fiscal Self-Sabotage
Some operatives in Alaska have watched The Distinguished Gentleman too many times (for updates on the case, see here and here and here): Democrats’ Alaskan Dirty Trick
ARTICLES
Charles Hilu: Ashley Hinson Navigates the Trump Maze in Iowa
Dan McLaughlin: The Senate Will Break Late This Year
Spencer A. Klavan: Why Humanity Needs Death
Becket Adams: Abdul El-Sayed’s Media Hall Pass
Jim Geraghty: What Did Ilhan Omar’s Father Do in Somalia?
Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Need to Manufacture Boredom
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Europe’s Mad Voyage Meets the Whirlwind
Abigail Anthony: The Big Scholarly Lie
Daniel Foster: The Source of Illiberalism No One Talks About
Benedict Rogers: Mbappé’s Own Goal on Chinese Repression
Kamden Mulder: Federal Grand Jury Investigation into Copycat Dan Sullivan Campaign Is Ongoing: Source
Eva Terry: Democrats Reached a Deal with Republicans to Lower Energy Costs. Rashida Tlaib Is Trying to Kill It
Christopher J. Scalia: Rock Stars Finding Their Religion
Andrew McCarthy: The Trump DOJ’s Latest Absurd Charge Against Comey
Philip Klein: Making the Case for Mike Johnson
Brittany Bernstein: Fake Robberies Offer a Real Shot at Legal Immigration Status
Dan Blumenthal & Brady Africk: Why the U.S. Should Rethink a Freeze on Taiwan Arms Sales
CAPITAL MATTERS
John Puri, on the law of unintended consequences: Paper Straws and the Fallible Logic of Perfectibility
Andrew G. Biggs explains why the way we choose to fix Social Security, assuming we do, matters: The Hidden Dividend of Social Security Reform
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen rounds up the month’s art news, “the good, the bad, and the sad”: Ancient Roman Swag Sells, the Smithsonian’s Shunned, and Your Art Critic Visits Cornell
Armond White recommends an alternative to Ted Lasso: A Genuinely Feminist Sports Movie
GO BOBBING FOR EXCERPTS
Charles Hilu reports from Iowa on a candidate’s high-wire act:
As she campaigns across her state for an open Senate seat, Representative Ashley Hinson has had to walk a strategic line around Donald Trump.
Thus far, Hinson has broken with the president on some key issues while taking care not to draw his ire by contradicting him on his most cherished policies. Speaking at a county Republican office on Tuesday, she touted many of the president’s more popular initiatives, such as border security and the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, without making him a feature of her campaigning, even to a GOP audience.
“We have the most secure border in our country’s history because we’ve worked with President Trump to get that done,” she said in a stump speech. That line constituted Hinson’s only mention of Trump. Instead of cheerleading for Trump, Hinson spent much the speech attacking her Democratic opponent Josh Turek.
Hinson, who is locked in a tight race with Turek, is one of several battleground Republican candidates this cycle who has been dragged down by unpopular policies from the Trump administration but who nonetheless cannot break with the president on them, lest she put off the GOP base or the White House.
Farmers have suffered from high diesel prices caused in part by the Iran war and increased input prices thanks to tariffs. The resulting poll numbers are spooking Republicans. In response, Hinson has separated herself from Trump slightly without fully repudiating him. She called for the war to come to “a successful and immediate end” without explaining how the administration could realize both of those two goals. However, she has not issued a similar break broadly on the tariffs the administration has levied, having said in a debate this month that America is “holding bad trade partners accountable when they are breaking the rules and not playing fair.”
But Hinson has criticized the president on issues Trump holds less dear to his heart. In August, she expressed disagreement with the president’s decision to ease tariffs on imported beef. She has also said Trump should not be using taxpayer money to run ads praising himself and knocked his deal to import diesel from Russia.
MBD writes on the importance of boredom, especially in childhood:
Now, for my children, I find myself scheming to create boredom, which is harder than it seems. . . .
Strangely, it is actually by filling their days with activities that we find ways to make them bored: time waiting between dance rehearsals or driving to travel baseball games.
I suppose it’s not even boredom itself that I’m aiming at. Boredom is merely a means to a higher end. What I want for my children are the things boredom brings out of people. First, and most important, the ability to simply develop a real interior life. Contentment and even joy in life are, in my experience, only cultivated to their heights by allowing your own thoughts to occasionally accuse you or discomfit you in some way. I’m always worried for people who need constant distraction, as if they are running away from an internal voice. Secondly, I want my children’s own creativity to have room to express itself. Just as C. S. Lewis discovered the beginnings of Narnia in childhood, so I want my children to cultivate passions and take on projects they’ve assigned to themselves. And lastly, there is a kind of excellence that can only be found by plugging away at something to the point of boredom with it, and then going through it. One of my sons, thankfully, quickly tires of digital distraction — and sends himself out into the yard, kicking the soccer ball around, dribbling it through the fallen leaves, and pounding it against the walls of the house, over and over and over again. He’s not just developing his skills as an athlete, but dwelling with himself in relative silence. I can’t exactly trace the causation, but I believe the interior life he is developing in these hours has allowed the simple things we’ve taught him about the world or his faith to take root and develop into searching questions. He’s more witty, insightful, socially adept, and even subtle. He has more to say than just the weird memetic yelping that is now so common among YouTube-addled peers. Through boredom, he has become more himself.
Ultimately, boredom extinguishes itself, by allowing our passions to grow and allowing us to become interested in things outside of us, and thereby to become interesting to others. Boredom grants us a certain facility with solitude, and that, in turn, makes us good company.
Spencer Klavan attempts to bring the transhumanists back down to earth:
Death has never been a welcome fact, of course, and certain enterprising adventurers have always felt driven to look for ways of overcoming it. In some sense, the noble tradition of medicine is one big intergenerational effort to prolong life, and this places it among our worthiest sciences. But the revolutionary advent of artificial intelligence seems to have encouraged many tech optimists in the more extreme hope of using machinery to cancel death entirely. The process they envision would involve morphing into something altogether more — or at least other — than human.
“We can ultimately — yeah, this is gonna sound pretty weird, but, um—achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” said Elon Musk in 2019 at a launch event for his biotech company Neuralink. That same year, Musk told the Chinese e-commerce tycoon Jack Ma that “you could sort of think of humanity as a biological boot loader for digital super intelligence.” By “boot loader,” he meant a kind of preparatory software that kickstarts a far more impressive computer system.
The idea is that evolutionary biology has stumbled blindly to the starting point of a far better organized and more advanced stage in the development of life, which will now become wondrously digital. Human minds will either merge with this sublime new machine consciousness, or they will simply go on in the natural course of things to wither and die. There are those who hope, like Musk, to make cyborg immortality possible through neural implants. There are others who envision “backing up” their minds in high-fidelity data transcripts, then sparking the results into life when code finally becomes sophisticated enough to achieve sentience.
At this very moment there exists a startup, Nectome, which advertises a kind of high-tech embalming to preserve dead bodies and brains within minutes of death, locking each dendrite in place. “This level of comprehensive detail allows for tracing the connections of the neurons and synapses throughout the brain,” explains the promotional website. When Nectome was getting started in 2018, one of its early prospective customers was Sam Altman, soon to become CEO of OpenAI. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” said Altman in an interview with MIT Technology Review.
It’s one thing to cure diseases, stave off decline, or otherwise labor to improve the human condition. It’s another thing to set your sights on a state of being beyond the human condition altogether. Those who strive to push past the limits of our present embodied form are typically referred to as “transhumanists,” because of their urge to race across the boundaries that make us what we now are.
CODA
CCR for Halloween? Yes, it can be done. (For the original, hear it here.)