Do Dumb Ideas Ever Die?

In one of the great scenes of one of the great gangster movies, Mike Newell’s “Donnie Brasco,” an aging Mafioso named Lefty Ruggiero paces a hospital corridor while his son fights for his life following a drug overdose.

“Twenty-eight years, you can read it on his birth certificate: Bellevue Hospital,” Lefty, played by Al Pacino, tells Donnie, played by Johnny Depp, about his comatose son. “Now he’s back, in there, and I’m out here, worried to my death. And he’s asleep in there, same as 28 years ago, with the same expression. He’s made no progress.”

It’s a line that could apply just as well to America’s policy debates.

Twenty-eight years ago — that was 1997, when “Donnie Brasco” came out — we thought we had made progress, at least when it came to answering some of the larger questions that had roiled 20th-century politics.

Trade protectionism? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s showed us the worldwide economic ruin to which that could lead. Government stakes in private enterprise, like the Trump administration’s recent equity stake in Intel? The record of state investment in, or control of, private enterprises, from Solyndra to Sematech (not to mention Alitalia or “Such a Bad Experience Never Again” Sabena), is mostly a story of financial disappointment, taxpayer bailouts, managerial incompetence, political interference and cronyism.

America First? The slogan of Charles Lindbergh and other pre-World War II isolationists should have been buried forever on Dec. 7, 1941. Instead, it emerged from its grave some 75 years later.

But it isn’t just the Trump administration that is reawakening the moral and intellectual zombies of the past. Everywhere one looks there are policy necromancers.

The platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America calls for a 32-hour workweek “with no reduction in pay or benefits”; “free public universal child care and pre-K”; “college for all”; the cancellation of “all student-loan debt”; “universal rent control”; “massive public investment to transition away from fossil fuels”; “guaranteed support for workers in the fossil fuel industry,” and “expansive paid family leave.” Not only would American workers stand to benefit, but so would everybody else, since the D.S.A. wants to offer these benefits to anyone who wishes to come to United States through an open-borders policy.

How would the D.S.A. pay for all this? By soaking the rich, along with “for-profit corporations, large inheritances, and private colleges and universities.” Why did nobody think of this before?

Oh, wait — many did. “Bolivarian socialism,” welcomed by the Jeremy Corbyns of the world, took Venezuela from being South America’s richest country to a humanitarian catastrophe. Sweden attempted a form of socialism in the 1970s and ’80s, only to reverse course after it experienced massive capital flight and a financial crisis during which interest rates hit 75 percent. France’s Socialist government imposed a 75 percent tax on earnings over one million euros in 2012; it dropped the tax two years later as the wealthy packed their bags. Britain’s National Health Service, whose advocates chronically complain is “underfunded,” is in a state of perpetual crisis even as health care, according to the BBC, gobbles up roughly one third of government spending.

“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” Margaret Thatcher once observed. To put it another way, you can’t abolish billionaires, as Zohran Mamdani, the D.S.A.’s poster child, would like, and still expect them to keep footing your bills.

Read the rest here.

A Libertarian Argument for an Interventionist Foreign Policy

Individual Liberty and the Responsibility to Protect: Toward a Neolibertarian Foreign Policy

From here.

Side note: Due to my mother's death there will be little blogging until the 9th of Oct. However, I found this to be a really good read and thought I'd share it. My sisters and I will be quite busy during the mourning period settling mom's affairs. Lastly, I am deeply grateful for the many expressions of sympathy and prayers posted here and communicated privately. They have been a source of comfort in a very dark and painful moment. Thank you.

W's Crystal Ball

George W. Bush called out the MAGA agenda years before Trump rode down that escalator. pic.twitter.com/17U0d1DkBy

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) June 7, 2025

I've had my differences with George Bush, but he nailed this one.

J D Vance and the triumph of the isolationists

MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump didn’t just select a running mate here – he doused political kerosene on the raging Republican fire over foreign policy.

By tapping the 39-year-old Sen. J.D. Vance, one of the party’s leading national security doves, Trump strengthened the hand of the isolationist forces eager to undo the hawkish GOP consensus that has endured since the Reagan era.

Should Trump prevail in November, the non-interventionists will have one of their most articulate advocates at Trump’s side. What worries the hawks is that Vance may also be the last adviser in the former president’s ear.

While toeing the party line and praising Vance in their public comments, in private the interventionists ranged from horrified to merely alarmed that one of the loudest critics of aiding Ukraine could soon be first in line for the presidency. The grimaces, sighs and whispered frustrations from the old guard as they made their way through the convention reception circuit were easy to find in the day after the selection.

Read the rest here.

In case further evidence was required that the Eisenhower Reagan era of Republican engagement with the world is over.

Johnson takes a stand

Political courage from an unexpected source.

The death of the Eisenhower-Reagan GOP

...Ronald Reagan gets most of the credit, but it was Ike, not Reagan, who transformed the G.O.P. from an anxious, inward-looking party into a confident, outward-facing one. He and his internationalist successors believed that the only way to prevent more world wars was to build a multilateral democratic world order. They had the confidence to believe America could lead such an order. The key to success in any political conflict, the political theorist James Burnham argued in 1941, is spirit and willpower: “All history makes clear that an indispensable quality of any man or class that wishes to lead, to hold power and privilege in society, is boundless self-confidence.”

Ike’s confidence launched 60 years of Republican internationalism, gradually creating a party that helped defeat Communism and ushered in more global prosperity. Reagan amplified that sense of confidence and possibility. “Emerson was right,” Reagan told the 1992 Republican convention. “We are the country of tomorrow.” Reagan was confident enough to believe that America could welcome immigrants, benefit from their abilities and still remain distinctly America: “Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.”

In his superb history of conservatism, “The Right,” Matthew Continetti describes dueling essays in 1989 between the conservative commentators Charles Krauthammer and Pat Buchanan that ran in the pages of The National Interest. Krauthammer argued that America should steer the world away from an unstable multipolar order and toward a more stable “unipolar world whose center is a confederated West.” Buchanan, one of the few remaining spokesmen for the older, isolationist G.O.P., titled his essay “America First — and Second and Third.”

At that time, the party embraced Krauthammer’s vision and rejected Buchanan’s. Within a decade Pat Buchanan had left the Republican Party, thoroughly marginalized. In 1999 the editors of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, where I worked, celebrated Buchanan’s departure from the party. In that same issue I wrote a humor piece trying to imagine the most hilariously unlikely version of the G.O.P. future. That piece was headlined “Donald Trump Inaugurated.”

Read the rest here.

Brett Stephens: The Isolationist G.O.P., Again

When historians look back on the early days of 2024, they probably won’t recall what, precisely, an elderly Democratic president couldn’t quite remember about the names or countries of other world leaders. They will note what 26 Senate Republicans chose to forget about world leadership.

I’m referring to Tuesday morning’s Senate vote on a $95 billion supplemental foreign-aid package, including $60 billion in desperately needed military assistance for Ukraine, along with $14 billion for Israel and $10 billion for civilians in conflict zones, including Gaza. The bill must still pass the House, where it faces the opposition of Speaker Mike Johnson and can only hope to survive via parliamentary maneuvering and the votes of Democrats plus some remaining Republican security hawks.

On paper, the 70-to-29 vote looks like a bipartisan embrace of embattled democratic allies. But it marks the moment when Republicans reverted to the isolationism of the original America First Committee of pre-World War II infamy. A majority of the G.O.P. Senate conference, including onetime Ukraine hawks like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, voted against the aid, mostly, they said, because it wasn’t paired with border-security measures.

That’s the same bill they voted against last week — a bill patiently negotiated over months by one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, Oklahoma’s James Lankford. The cynicism would be breathtaking if it weren’t so predictable coming from the Trumpified right.

Let’s walk through some additional points of dissent among Republicans who opposed the bill.

Read the rest here.