These two moments, both from Blanche’s interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, highlight a problem at the root of our political dysfunction.

We want our public officials to be independent and apolitical, but independent often means unaccountable. We want the rule of law to outrank the decisions of men, but the foundation of American law — the U.S. Constitution — puts all law enforcement power in the hands of one man.

Finally, we want powers to be neatly separated and lines to be sharply drawn, but our fallen species can create only the imperfect City of Man, and not the perfectly just City of God.

Blanche, in brushing aside “independence,” was invoking the unitary executive understanding of the Constitution.

This is a simple theory with clear textual grounding: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” It’s not vested in the President and the bureaucracy. It’s not vested in the Cabinet. Executive power is vested in the president.

The Justice Department is part of the executive branch. Enforcing the law is clearly an executive function. DOJ’s priorities are set by political figures, which is good insofar as you like democracy.

You could see the FBI and the attorney general, like a Treasury Department bureaucrat reviewing beer labels, as specialized appendages of the president.

But at the same time, we do want some independence from the executive branch, and especially in the DOJ. We want our bureaucrats to use their expertise and follow the rules, rather than the whims of the president.

We certainly don’t want our prosecutors and the FBI becoming the goon squad to harass, persecute, and prosecute the president’s enemies while protecting the president and his friends.

And so when Blanche says he’d follow the president’s lead, he’s got good constitutional footing. But when Welker suggested this would include abusing prosecutorial and investigative powers, she was just as well-grounded.

Trump directed his DOJ to go after all the prosecutors who went after Trump, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). He sicced his DOJ on former President Barack Obama and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA). In Trump’s first term, he fired his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for not stopping a counterintelligence investigation that implicated him.

But while NBC News might not acknowledge this, the idea of an “independent attorney general” has not been a reality in a while. Obama called Attorney General Eric Holder his “wingman.” President John F. Kennedy’s attorney general was his brother.

One defining trait of the Trump era is taking things to their logical conclusions: If former President Bill Clinton is fine, then moral character doesn’t matter. If a first-time senator is qualified, so is a reality TV host. If Attorneys General Holder and Kennedy are OK, then why should any of them pretend to have independence?

Less cynically, since the Constitution grants executive power only to the president, logically, shouldn’t our FBI agents and prosecutors consider themselves appendages of the president, like some Treasury Department functionaries?

But this is a mistake, because in human affairs, there are many things we ought not take to their logical consequences. Men can engineer suspension bridges and microchips with amazing precision, but those things are made with silicon and steel.

Men cannot engineer human systems that work flawlessly. Out of the crooked timber of man, Immanuel Kant noted, no straight was ever made — not even by James Madison and George Washington.

The Constitution makes Congress the superior branch — it is the boss of the executive — but gives the president full control over how to execute. It’s not hard to imagine how this could (and consider how it has) created contradictions. Such contradictions don’t undermine the Constitution, but they do undermine the notion that interpreting and applying it is easy.

MAGAZINE: AOC’S LONELY ROAD

So, yes, we want our attorneys general to be independent of politics but still subservient to the polity. And yes, we understand that this is strictly speaking impossible.

That’s where norms and character enter the picture. When norms are ignored and character is in short supply, the crooked timber of mankind will produce particularly crooked results.

The federal government brought in $334 billion in the month of July, with most of that coming directly out of workers’ paychecks. That same federal government spent $766 billion in July, with most of that covering Social Security benefits, Medicare bills, and interest payments on the national debt.

This left a deficit of $432 billion for the month — the largest deficit for any July in American history. Combined with the deficits from the first 9 months of the fiscal year, puts this year’s deficit at $1.799 trillion. By the time Fiscal Year 2026 ends on September 30, the annual deficit will probably be $2.1 trillion, also a record high.

This is bad, and there is no reason to believe it will change anytime soon. Yet neither party is talking seriously about bringing federal spending in line with federal revenues.

As official Washington ignores the deficit, ordinary Americans need to brush up on the topic, because every time Uncle Sam spends a dollar he doesn’t have, he’s placing a burden on consumers of today and the homeowners and taxpayers of tomorrow.

What is the deficit and why does it matter?

The federal deficit is easy to confuse with the national debt, a related but different measure. Both the deficit and the debt are very big numbers measured in trillions of dollars. Both reflect overspending by the federal government.

And the deficit causes the debt.

Consider the analogy to an individual consumer: If he spends more in a month than he earns, that excess spending is his monthly deficit. If he doesn’t have savings on which to draw, he must borrow — say, run up credit card debt. Every month in which he overspends, running a deficit, he necessarily adds to his mountain of personal debt.

If he ever runs a surplus (earning more than he spends), he can pay down some of that debt — which would be a good idea, because he’s paying interest every month on that debt.

Instead of a credit card, Uncle Sam funds his excess spending by selling Treasury Bills, Treasury Notes, Treasury Bonds, and some other financial products. Banks, insurance companies, and other investors are the typical buyers of Treasuries, which is to say they are the lenders to Uncle Sam. Regular Americans also buy Treasuries. Foreign governments and companies also own billions in U.S. debt. Everyone who buys a Treasury is lending money to the federal government.

To finance July’s $432 billion shortfall, for instance, the federal government sold about $361 billion in Treasuries, and used other means (including spending down some operating cash) to cover the other $70 billion.

Currently, about $38.9 trillion in Treasuries is outstanding, which is to say, the national debt is $38.9 trillion. But about $7.7 trillion of that is money that one part of the federal government loaned to another part, and so the rest is the “debt held by the public” — the debt that future taxpayers will have to pay — which is currently is around $32.1 trillion.

Last month, the federal government paid $104 billion in interest on that debt. By the time the fiscal year is over, we will have spent $1 trillion on interest payments on the debt.

That is, the deficit is a problem not only because deficits create problems, but because deficits add to the debt, which creates problems.

For starters, deficit spending causes inflation. When the government spends more than it takes in, the government is actually increasing the amount of the money in circulation. That July $432 billion in extra spending didn’t cause $432 billion in new goods and services to appear, it largely resulted in more money chasing the same amount of goods and services — and that is the recipe for inflation.

Also, there’s the threat of a debt spiral. Last year, our economy grew by $1.5 trillion (from a GDP of $29.3 trillion to $30.8), which exceeded the $1 trillion in annual interest payments. But as we continue to run annual deficits, that interest tab will grow, and soon our interest payments will exceed our economic growth. At that point, we are financing our borrowing costs entirely with more deficit spending, which is a like entering a gravity well of debt.

How did it get so big?

The U.S. government ran a surplus in fiscal year 2001. Now it is running a $2 trillion deficit and nearly 30% of all of our spending is covered by borrowing.

How did the deficit get so big?

Democrats will blame tax cuts under Presidents George W. Bush or Donald Trump. Republicans will blame overspending by Big Government liberals. Both of these answers are incomplete.

For one thing, Republicans are no less profligate on spending than are Democrats. (The only time spending growth is constrained is when a Democratic President is working with a Republican Congress.)

Also, while tax cuts this century have reduced federal revenues, and thus increased the deficit, the historical evidence suggests that different tax regimes don’t do much to squeeze revenue out of the economy.

Since the end of World War II, federal revenue has been equal to about 16% of GDP. It has never hit 20% and it fell below 15% only once, during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Since 2019, when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was fully implemented, federal revenues have averaged 16.82% of GDP, basically the same as the post-war average of 16.81%.

If we returned taxes to 2001 levels (about 19% of GDP) without harming the GDP, we could bring in maybe an extra $700 billion a year, reducing the deficit by one third.

On the spending side, the problem is also not what most people think. Go back to our balanced budget in Fiscal Year 2001: The federal government spent $1.835 trillion, of which about $640 billion was “discretionary spending” — spending approved by Congress in the annual appropriations process. The rest was “mandatory spending” prescribed by earlier laws, including $422 billion on Social Security and $220 billion on Medicare.

Adjust those 2001 numbers for inflation, and that would be $800 billion (Social Security) and $420 billion (Medicare) in today’s dollars.

In Fiscal Year 2025, the federal government spent more than $7 trillion, including $1.38 trillion on Social Security and $955 billion on Medicare. That is, these old-age entitlements have nearly doubled, even when accounting for inflation. The growth rate in these two items, combined with our interest payments, add up to nearly the entire annual deficit.

Politicians often blame overspending outside of Social Security and Medicare for the deficit. Surely, military and domestic spending has grown unchecked, but the other popular villains here are relatively tiny.

During the Biden Administration, foreign aid was historically high, averaging almost $90 billion a year, with Israel and Ukraine receiving the bulk of it. That is, every month of Social Security benefits costs more than a year of foreign aid when foreign aid was at its peak.

To fix the deficit, we need to fix Social Security and Medicare.

Can we fix it?

Of course, fixing Social Security and Medicare isn’t easy politically.

Social Security has been presented as something other than a government benefit, but rather an insurance product or even an investment account: You pay into Social Security through your payroll taxes, the government tells you what benefit you’ve earned through your work, and then you get “your” money back out in retirement.

If Congress were to cut Social Security benefits, millions of working adults would object almost as if Congress had just dipped into their retirement accounts.

But if we don’t cut Social Security and Medicare, we cannot close the deficit. If Congress left Social Security and Medicare alone, it would need to cut more than 50% of the entire rest of the budget — including national defense — to balance the budget.

SOCIAL SECURITY INSOLVENCY IS HERE

Closing the deficit will realistically require significant cuts to Social Security benefits, some tax increases, and significant cuts to discretionary spending.

Currently, workers do not pay Social Security tax on any income over $184,500. Many liberals and some conservatives want to abolish that cap or raise it higher. Also, individuals who have worked more than 30 years and earn high incomes can receive over $4,000 a month in Social Security. There’s a case for making those larger benefits less generous.

Again, both of these changes would be very unpopular. The alternatives, though, is a growing deficit, leading to a burgeoning debt. The consequences of that won’t be popular, either.

This may be progress. While the old guard of her party — think Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer — put family front and center, the next generation of the party’s leaders has been less family-oriented.

But this week, AOC, age 36, announced she will be freezing her eggs, because she doesn’t want to have children now, and is unsure about the future. Then a couple of days later, amid news reports that her long-term engagement with Riley Roberts had ended, she posted a video on Instagram warning women of getting married young, for fear they would end up with “losers.”

Everyone has their own personal journey, and we don’t know why AOC and Roberts didn’t tie the knot or even set a date earlier. One’s late 30s is when most college-educated left-wing women first consider having children, but one’s late 30s is when the most ambitious politicians first consider running for president. So, for AOC, it’s complicated.

But what about her massive audience? What about her 9.6 million followers on Instagram, and the 9% of Democrats, mostly young and mostly female, who would pick her for president? Should they follow AOC’s lead?

We should all hope America’s presidential candidates aren’t our role models, but again, AOC seems to be grounding her candidacy in a particular lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle peddled by plenty on the Left, but still is a minority preference.

Almost no Americans, for instance, believe the best time to get married or start having babies is after age 35.

And while feminist writer Jill Filipovic writes that “I would also advise women not to get married before 30,” only 15% agree, and only 20% say the 30s are optimal for having a first child.

But on these personal questions, the most common American answer is “whatever.” Nearly 50% say there is “no best age” to get married, and 40% say there’s no best age to start having children.

While it’s certainly true that there’s no one best path for everyone, there is a lot of data that points in a certain direction, and it’s not the direction AOC is pointing.

Married women are significantly happier than unmarried women, and marriage seems to even be good for one’s health. While having children later is correlated with some positive outcomes, freezing one’s eggs in hope of becoming a mother around age 40 is not a great bet — less than 10% ever return to use them, according to a 2025 study by UCLA scientists, and not all of them are successful.

AOC CAN HAVE A ‘FULL’ LIFE WITH A CAREER AND A BABY

Everyone’s circumstances are different. Many people take a long time to meet the right gal or guy. But on average, focusing on career and autonomy until the eve of 40 is a risky bet.

AOC’s circumstances are extraordinary. It might work for her. But the yearslong-engagement, don’t-get-married-until-late-30s-or-later, freeze-your-eggs-for-a-baby-in-your-40s plan is not a well-trodden road to familial bliss.

If you’re the financial press or a liberal academic, you call this a “troubling employment trend,” you lament it as a “sign of the Trump times,” and you sound the alarm over “a mom-cession” rooted in “structural inequities in work.”

You see, nothing upsets the media class and academia more than a stay-at-home mom.

Here are the specifics of this “troubling trend,” as summarized by one editor: “Labor-force participation among Black mothers with young children has fallen to a 31-year low.” According to that same article, “After being hit disproportionately by cuts to federal employment and to diversity programs, many are having a harder time finding new work.”

But the last line is misleading.

The unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, has fallen over the past three months for prime-age black mothers, 25-54, with young children, down to 5.1%. That is, black mothers who are seeking a job are more likely to have a job than at any time in the past year, and more than in most months since before the pandemic.

What’s down is the labor-force participation rate among prime-aged married black mothers. “Labor force participation alack mothers aged 25-54 with children under 5 has fallen 11.5 percentage points in just three months.”

Bloomberg, citing a race-and-equity expert, dives deeper: “Married, college-educated Black moms in particular have seen a decline in participation, likely because they can rely on a partner’s income. … Participation among their never-married peers, by contrast, has actually increased in recent months, she found.”

Every single normal person would think this is good: Single black women have jobs. Black mothers seeking jobs are getting jobs. Married black mothers with college degrees are 10% more likely to exit the workforce and spend time with their babies and toddlers.

What could cause someone to think this is bad?

Girlboss feminism, for one, says it’s a tragedy every time a woman chooses her husband and child over her boss and her clients. Some green-eyed-shade econ-types hate anything that could subtract from the GDP, such as walks with one’s toddler or homemade meals.

These feminist and workist mindsets are minority mindsets, except in the media and among Democratic politicians.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who not too long ago lamented the “Two Income Trap,” now calls stay-at-home moms women who “got knocked off track.” Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen wrote in 2021, “A lousy myth about moms, kids and work makes a comeback.” The myth: “that many of these women are better off for cutting their (paid) work hours and downscaling their professional aspirations in favor of tending to family responsibilities.”

Meanwhile, real America sees things differently.

A recent YouGov poll would send shockwaves through any Democratic congressional office or big-city newsroom. Pollsters asked 867 women, “If either option were available, would you pursue a career outside the home or stay home to care for your family?” The answers were split evenly, with 43% choosing career and 43% choosing family. Keep in mind, this sample includes women who do not have children, women whose children are grown, women who are 18 and not even considering marriage, much less motherhood.

Two-thirds of parents say their ideal childcare situation is Mom, Dad, or both taking time off work to watch the kids, according to a recent survey from New America Foundation. Only 20% preferred formal daycare or a nanny.

Narrow it down to mothers of young children, and it’s pretty lopsided. One recent poll of mothers with children 5 and under shows that only about 40% of them say they want to work a full-time paid job. Meanwhile, about 75% of mothers with young children do work full-time.

WHAT IS POST-LIBERALISM, AND WHY IS IT TRENDING?

Democrats and reporters will insist that women mostly choose to stay home because they cannot find high-quality, low-cost daycare, but there’s no evidence for that. Repeated studies over the past two decades have found that introducing no-cost, reliable daycare does not induce married mothers into the workforce.

So those black married mothers opting out of the workforce are not, the evidence suggests, being “knocked off track” by “workplace inequity.” They are choosing to be mothers and wives first. It’s hard to understand why anyone has a problem with that.

On ABC News, AOC was trying to shield Wisconsin gubernatorial hopeful Francesca Hong from any accountability for her calls to literally abolish prisons and police, and so in her typical grad-student-just-spitting-out-slogans-to-fill-the-air style, she said, “During this time and especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window … The doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place … Of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

Then she channeled left-wing New York City Councilman Chi Osse and said, “Woke 1 was crazy.”

Yes, the Peak Woke era from 2018 to 2024 was crazy — because people like AOC and Osse didn’t merely advocate crazy policies, they attacked and called for the cancellation of everyone who disagreed with them.

Some went crazier than others. AOC and her socialist comrades in particular were wild. AOC, for instance, attacked a priest who gave his life to serve lepers in Hawaii as a “colonizer.” Osse declared that “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the [City] Council.”

The list of crazy positions and statements would be a mile long, so here are just a few I thought of, omitting all commentators, reporters, academics, and public intellectuals. Here are just three “Crazyyyy” positions (one for each extra y) by elected Democrats.

Booker thought it was racist for cop to save black girl from being stabbed

A Columbus police officer saved a black woman from being stabbed by a crazed assailant, and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) called it racist. See, the cop was white and the crazed assailant was black, and it was 2021. For that reason, Booker took the maximally woke position and tried to beatify the stabber and vilify the cop.

The whole thing was caught on video, and it was obvious what happened. Here’s how NPR — one of the most devoted followers of wokism — described it: “Bryant was killed in April by Columbus police officer Nicholas Reardon as she swung a knife at a young woman, just seconds after pushing another woman to the ground. Bryant was Black and Reardon is white. Police were responding to a 911 call made from Bryant’s foster home about a group of girls threatening to stab members of the household.”

Booker never took down the post, apologized, or acknowledged the shooting was justified. Facts didn’t matter during Peak Woke. Only narratives did.

Minnesota lieutenant governor endorsed stabbing those who dissent from gender ideology

The tide of wokeness brought with it an increase in political violence from the Left. One of the people advocating political violence against Christians and conservatives was Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota. While giving a speech, Flanagan wore a shirt that read “Protect Trans Kids” around a knife. She made sure to flash the T-shirt to cameras so that she could broadcast as far as possible her call for violence.

Complete intolerance of dissenting opinion is a hallmark of wokism. Here, she made clear that she thought people should stab anyone who didn’t agree that a man became a woman by identifying as a woman.

Harris said U.S. taxpayers should cover cross-sex surgeries and chemical treatments for criminals and illegal immigrants

This one was so crazy that Democrats and news media types all assumed Donald Trump made it up when he mentioned it in his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. He didn’t.

The ACLU had asked Harris in a 2019 questionnaire about cross-gender treatments for inmates, and her campaign wrote this:

“It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition. That’s why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates.”

Democrats had to pledge allegiance to the craziest things back then. Now they are suffering politically for it. They cannot explain whether they were dumb or lying back then, or whether they are lying now. So they try to make it a joke.

Vice President JD Vance has called himself part of the “post-liberal” Right. Among conservative intellectuals these days, the hottest debate is over post-liberalism: Does it make sense? Is it conservative? Does it have a future?

The direction of conservatism and the Republican Party is very much unsettled as President Donald Trump begins to exit the scene. The debate between the post-liberals and the classical liberals will heat up, and it won’t merely be an academic matter.

Will the Republican Party be a party of free markets and limited government, or one of industrial policy and activist government? Should the government be confined to fighting crime and preserving liberty, or should it take an active role in promoting morality and preventing self-destructive behavior?

In some ways, this is a debate about the conservatism of the past 50 years, but it’s also a debate over the founding of the United States.

What ‘liberalism’ are the post-liberals talking about?

A crucial clarification at the start: The “liberalism” being debated here isn’t the same as “progressivism” or “leftism.” In this debate, we’re using an older, broader understanding of the world, closer to what is often called “classical liberalism.”

The participants in this debate will argue over the meaning of “liberalism,” but here’s a rough sketch:

Liberalism is an attitude of general neutrality that gives the individual maximum liberty. Free-market capitalism is liberal in this sense. In contrast, Trump’s tariffs or Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) intensive regulation are illiberal because they put the government in the position of steering the economy.

Freedom of speech is a liberal tenet, while the less liberal impose restrictions on what can be said without official punishment — for instance, the Left’s university speech codes or old-fashioned conservatives’ indecency rules.

While this notion of liberalism sounds laissez-faire or libertarian, neutrality is just as central: Our laws should treat a KKK rally the same way as a pro-choice rally, which we should treat the same as a pro-life rally. Justice must be blind. Our tax code should simply collect revenue, not try and pick winners and losers.

Equality under the law is a keystone of liberalism.

The post-liberals reject many of these ideas or believe they have gone too far.

Drug use and compulsive gambling are now rampant. Elites in media, academia, and half of our politics reject as “Christian nationalism” the idea that the U.S. is founded on Christian ideas, or that our rights are God-given.

What’s more, argue leading post-liberals such as Patrick Deneen, liberalism run amok has actually restricted our freedom. Live-and-let-live sexual mores have led to gay marriage and the official embrace of transgenderism. In turn, these “acceptance” movements led to the persecution of Colorado bakers and speech codes banning “misgendering.”

The recent excesses of wokeness have stoked conservative interest in post-liberalism, as did Trump’s election in 2016. Trump ran on openly illiberal approaches to international trade, immigration, and freedom of the press. He openly rejects neutrality in favor of a politics of helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. Trump has none of the conservative movement’s qualms about picking winners and losers in the economy.

Another driving cause behind post-liberalism: Liberalism arguably gets the blame for the erosion of civil society — downtowns replaced by big-box shopping centers, community-mindedness replaced by individualism, religious congregations emaciated by secularization, and rootedness replaced by cosmopolitan hypermobility.

The collapse of belonging and the crisis of loneliness are at the root of our most pressing social problems, such as the baby bust, the retreat from marriage, falling trust, and rising despair.

The post-liberal view

Some of the Trump-era post-liberals focus on economic nationalism — most notably Vance. Others focus on using government to discourage vice and promote virtue, or even to reestablish Christianity as a pillar of American society.

There is no unified post-liberal agenda, but it has included establishing more explicitly Christian cities through the use of military force, propping up domestic manufacturing because factory jobs support breadwinners, more strictly policing vice, among other ideas ranging from reasonable to utopian.

Some post-liberals reject the American founders, while others try to claim them. Some talk of Catholic integralism, while others leave their prescriptions vague, focusing instead on what they see as the failures of liberalism.

Catholic integralism is an absurd idea in the 2020s. There is no public support for banning contraception and in vitro fertilization, barring commerce on Sundays, or prohibiting indecent dress in public. Attempting any of these policies would spur massive blowback. Even banning pornography or criminalizing adultery might not be politically feasible.

Bold post-liberal policymaking may not be feasible these days, but the post-liberal diagnosis of our problems certainly deserves attention.

Liberalism unchained

Liberalism is best considered an attitude rather than ideology. Liberalism has long been understood as rules of the game.

As long as it was limited to this role, liberalism has promoted human flourishing, material wealth, and healthy politics. But liberalism seems to have slipped its leash in recent decades. What was once an approach to government and a method for making pluralism work is rapidly becoming a belief system in itself — even an anthropology.

If equality, neutrality, expressive individualism, and capitalism are held up as goods in themselves, then we start to see ourselves as fundamentally autonomous individuals whose interactions with others are best thought of as consensual transactions. This contrasts with a Jewish or Christian view of humans as fundamentally relational and familial.

Academia and the commentariat regularly peddle this liberal anthropology. Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, in describing the benefits of liberal immigration policy, argued, “A diverse population reduces social solidarity, which is good for economic growth because people don’t want wealth-destroying policies to help out people who look different.”

Less connection to neighbors, friends, and family yields more reliance on the free market. This is true, but it seems odd to consider it a good thing.

Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, recently went on a New York Times podcast and rejected the notion that parents are the best judges of their children’s interests.

“I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children, and part of our goal, I think, as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents.”

Liberating children from their parents — and from tradition and religion — is the clear goal of many public school systems.

Likewise, the logic of capitalism often creeps into our personal relationships.

Suze Orman is one of the most famous personal finance gurus in the country, and she advises all married people to keep separate bank accounts. “You all should be autonomous human beings. You’ve come into this relationship as an autonomous human being.”

A New York Times op-ed writer praises divorce as replacing living together with “a lot of very tidy and businesslike communication” that is “transactional” and “freeing.” She recommends all couples adopt such a transactional, businesslike, contractual 50/50 custody agreement.

This is what happens when liberalism becomes a lifestyle.

Consider also how neutrality has spilled out of its proper boundaries. It’s good for government to be neutral on whether you drive a Tesla or a Ford. Also, it’s really nobody’s business if you have three beers with dinner, paint your dining room orange, or call your wife “sweet cheeks.”

But these days, we seem afraid to admit that some things are better than others. The prime examples are our baby bust and retreat from marriage.

Our schools and our media seem afraid to say that marriage and family formation are a good thing, for fear of being too prescriptive. All lifestyles and family models are to be judged equal. If an employer offers maternity leave and accommodates nursing, that’s discrimination against non-mothers — and where’s the neutrality in that?

Liberalism as an ethic means you shouldn’t have an opinion on how anyone else lives his life. Even giving people life advice becomes uncouth. This ethic would prevent you from criticizing the marijuana, pornography, and gambling businesses that are obviously ruining the lives of young men, endangering our future, and corroding our culture.

Now you see where the post-liberals are coming from. They see real evils in society, and they see that liberalism run wild is at the root of these evils.

Deneen, among others, argues that liberalism by its nature will always run wild — it will always escape its pen. And so they declare liberalism a mistake.

BAPTISTS AND BOOTLEGGERS: WILDERNESS PILOT OPPOSES ROADS

But again, the dream of a post-liberal conservatism does not seem realistic, if only because nobody has found how to centrally plan an economy effectively and a Catholic theocracy is not really attainable right now.

It may be that liberalism has failed, but that rather than scrapping it, we need to fix it.

Lobbying against this road are some locals, some environmental groups, and an airplane pilot who currently makes money by ferrying people and equipment across this very terrain, where there are no roads.

Yes. The guy you need to hire because there are no roads is one of the guys lobbying against the road.

This detail was almost buried in this excellent Bloomberg investigative piece on the Ambler Road project. The most important part of the Ambler Road story is how the Trump administration is using its regulatory control over this area to extract concessions from a mining company.

The pilot-lobbyist detail was the second-most interesting story. It’s a classic case of Baptists and bootleggers.

The bootlegger is the guy who profits from delivering a product amid constraints, wants to keep the constraints, and so he teams up with the Baptists, who have more moralistic reasons for supporting the constraints — in this case, the environmentalists.

Here are the relevant passages from the Bloomberg piece:

“More than most, Dirk Nickisch has a deep knowledge of the Ambler Mining District and how the road will change it. A few times a week, Nickisch flies along the Ambler Road as the co-owner of Coyote Air LLC, delivering tourists throughout the Brooks Range and resupplying camps in the area….

WHEN A CONGRESSMAN IS HITTING ON HIS STAFFERS, IT’S WORSE WHEN HE’S MARRIED

“Sometimes, Coyote Air restocks mining camps, helps fix mining helicopters and transports seasonal workers for mining outfits, an uneasy alliance given Nickisch and his family are staunchly opposed to the Ambler Road’s construction. ‘We’ve always taken that money, and then we’ve used it to lobby against the road,’ he says. ‘It’s kind of, you know, blood money. So it has to go to the right thing.’”

Yes it’s an “uneasy alliance,” because Nikisch is lobbying to raise his customer’s cost, just like anyone who tries to use big government to limit competition.

Read the NPR coverage of Edwards’s behavior, and you’ll get many of the cringey details, absent a really important one: Edwards is married and has been for more than 45 years.

It’s bad that a boss, holding a position of public trust, made his employees feel uncomfortable with all sorts of inappropriate borderline-romantic attention. But it’s 10 times worse that this was a married man basically trying to go on dates with young women.

These accusations are, in effect, accusations of impropriety. The people of western North Carolina would surely want to know that their congressman is accused by two staffers of infidelity, because marital infidelity reflects on moral character, which is part of one’s fitness for office.

But NPR never mentions his marital status in its only piece on the matter, and this is the norm for the major news media to totally leave that out.

NBC quotes from the Ethics Committee report’s list of some of his alleged behavior: “providing the young women with lavish and recurrent gifts, making comments regarding their appearance and dress, inviting them to intimate dinners and vacations, sending notes regarding his effusive affection, and inviting them to other activities as a way to spend time together.”

Obviously, anyone would be made uncomfortable by a boss doing this. NBC notes that Edwards is 65, which makes it more embarrassing for him and unpleasant, but it also makes it worse for a young woman when the old guy hitting on you is married, yet that goes unmentioned by NBC. Likewise, the Associated Press never mentioned his marital status.

I wrote about this phenomenon recently regarding former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and NFL coach Mike Vrabel. I noticed the trend years ago, when I stated some specific reasons the marital status matters, two of which are relevant in the Edwards case:

DOES IT MATTER THAT ERIC SWALWELL IS MARRIED?

First, there’s a second victim here: the wife. Second, old married guys are supposed to be safe.

Our news media are wedded to a particularly weird, atomized worldview that diminishes marriage and all familial relationships and treats all vice and sin as human resources violations. The ignoring of marriage is one result.

Throughout history and across the world, governments have functioned as shakedown artists. President Donald Trump is more blatant than any recent U.S. president in this regard, and closer to a third-world strongman than to the American norm.

One case in point: The Ambler Road in Alaska.

In October, the White House announced it had approved construction of a road to a mining site in Alaska. The Biden administration, heeding the cries of environmentalists, banned the road. Trump last year approved it.

“The permits for the road have been held for years due to protracted litigation,” the White House states, “and the President has finally allowed this project to go forward to support the Administration’s energy dominance agenda.”

Bloomberg News this week told the full story of this approval, though. Trump approved it in exchange for a 10% federal stake in the mining company.

Trump’s project of building up federal stakes in dozens of companies deserves plenty of scrutiny. I call it “venture socialism,” and it will have unforeseen (mostly bad) consequences down the line.

But it’s worth considering why these companies end up playing ball with Trump: Because they feel they have to.

Why do they feel they have to? Because the federal government has so much control over their industries.

Consider one anecdote from the Ambler Road story in Alaska: One tribal chief, Harding Sam, opposed the road project after the mining company refused to give his tribe an equity share in the company. Surely, the company wanted his endorsement, but they didn’t need it.

Trump has a lot more leverage, and Trump never gives up leverage without getting something in return. The mining company needed Trump’s approval because it crosses federal land.

Here’s how Bloomberg tells the story:

“The administration’s ask for some kind of equity stake, one person says, was met with surprise by both Trilogy and South32, which said they would have to consult their respective boards. Ultimately, the government said it would be willing to authorize the permit for 10% of Trilogy.

Backed into a corner, the person says, Trilogy took the deal.”

A YEAR OF CRONYISM AND SELF-ENRICHMENT

The Federal government owns much of the American West, including much of Alaska. Environmentalists see this as a way to check private interests. Donald Trump sees it as a way to extract what he wants from private interests.

The “quid pro quo president” has so many quids to give because the federal government has so much power.

This claim has a dozen things wrong with it — for instance, Democrats tied their gerrymandering legislation to other measures including banning voter ID — but the fundamental problem was that nobody agrees on what gerrymandering is.

For instance, the Democrats’ “gerrymander ban” would have required states to tie together black-majority precincts that may be geographically distant. This is, by any normal definition, a racial gerrymander. To Democrats, this was “banning gerrymanders” because presumably they limit their definition of racial gerrymandering to efforts to reduce minority representation.

I proposed a gerrymandering ban in February, and laid out 5 rules:

1. Require states to respect existing county, city, and town borders. Many states have rules like this. The rule has the virtue of generally, though not perfectly, keeping people with similar interests together. The bigger benefit is that this constraint makes it harder, not impossible, for partisans to draw an unfair gerrymander.
2. Encourage compactness. If a more compact map, which respects county lines as much, would yield less partisan imbalance, that should count as evidence that the less compact map is a partisan gerrymander.
3. End mid-decade redistricting. Expedite any legal challenges to a given map, and make it illegal for states to redistrict mid-decade except in the most extreme circumstances.
4. Make all Voting Rights Act rules on redistricting subordinate to the above rules.
5. Allow districts to vary in population by up to 10% if necessary, with respect to existing boundaries.

This had a mixed response, including many objections:

Again, we don’t agree on what counts as a gerrymander.

Sean Trende, a political scientist with plenty of experience drawing legislative districts, had an essay at the American Enterprise last week that explores the ambiguity of the term:

“Defining a gerrymander is not easy, nor is it scientific. It’s a question that involves deep theoretical questions and policy questions, and voters should be wary of anyone who oversimplifies it. The Supreme Court could not have resolved this debate without making the type of arbitrary choice that it is ill-equipped to make, but that legislatures handle well.”

I recommend the essay. One question he wrestles with: Is a congressional map unfair if it favors one party over another? Behind that question is a debate: Should the maps aim for political fairness and competitiveness, or just for cultural coherence?

Trende’s main question is whether intention matters when calling something a gerrymander. He says yes, and I agree.

I think progress can be made on banning gerrymandering, but I do think we need a more shared definition of the word before we can get far.