The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.

In recent years, Hungary has come to occupy a distinctive place in Europe’s political debates. Questions have intensified about whether the liberal consensus that shaped European politics after the Cold War still commands broad democratic legitimacy.

Few governments have challenged that consensus more directly than the one led by Viktor Orbán. For more than a decade, Orbán and his party Fidesz have pursued a political project that seeks to redefine the relationship between national sovereignty, democratic authority, and supranational institutions.

Today Hungary stands among the most politically consequential states in Europe. Under Viktor Orbán and his party Fidesz, Hungary has become a political experiment that openly challenges many of the ideological assumptions underlying the post–Cold War European order. The parliamentary election scheduled for April 12, 2026 will now test the durability of that project.

The structure of Hungary’s electoral system has also played an important role in shaping the country’s political landscape.

The parliamentary system combines proportional representation with single-member districts, a structure that has historically favored the largest political force. Parties capable of consolidating support across a broad electorate can translate relatively modest vote advantages into significantly larger parliamentary majorities.

Over the past decade, this system has often worked to the advantage of Fidesz, allowing the party to transform electoral victories into durable governing power. At the same time, fragmented opposition forces have struggled to convert their combined vote shares into comparable parliamentary representation.

In most European capitals, political elites operate within a stable consensus built around liberal democratic norms, transatlantic cooperation, and deeper institutional integration within the European Union. Hungary has gradually moved onto a different trajectory.

While remaining inside both the European Union and NATO, Budapest has attempted to carve out a more autonomous position in global politics. This approach has often placed Hungary in conflict with institutions in Brussels and with many Western governments. Yet it has also transformed the country into a focal point of a broader debate about sovereignty, democracy, and the future direction of Europe.

The upcoming vote therefore carries significance far beyond Hungary itself. After fifteen years of political dominance, Orbán faces the most serious electoral challenge of his career. Much more than the future of a single government is at stake. The result will determine whether one of the most influential national conservative experiments in Europe can continue.

To understand the political system that has emerged under his leadership, it is necessary to place it within the broader history of post-communist Europe.

Orbán belongs to the generation that experienced the dramatic transformation of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the twentieth century. As a young political activist, he first emerged during the revolutionary moment that culminated in the revolutions of 1989 that brought down communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe.

Across the region, communist regimes collapsed and were replaced by political systems modeled on Western liberal democracy. For millions of people, this moment appeared to open a path toward prosperity, stability, and integration into the Western world.

Hungary embraced this transformation enthusiastically. The expectation was that integration into Western political and economic institutions would deliver rapid economic progress and a secure national future.

Three decades later, the legacy of that transition remains complex. While the post-communist era produced important gains in freedom and economic development, it also brought profound disruptions. Industrial sectors collapsed during the transition to market economies, economic inequality increased, and many citizens came to believe that political power had shifted away from national institutions toward technocratic elites and supranational structures.

For a growing number of voters, the promise of the post-Cold War order appeared incomplete.

Against this historical backdrop, Orbán’s political project can partly be understood as a reaction to these experiences. His rhetoric frequently frames contemporary conflicts over sovereignty, migration, and cultural identity as the continuation of a longer struggle that began after the end of communist rule.

From this perspective, he is not simply a conservative politician but a political figure shaped by the entire trajectory of the post-communist transformation of Central and Eastern Europe. The political order that now defines Hungary emerged after the 2010 Hungarian parliamentary election, when Fidesz secured a constitutional supermajority in parliament.

That victory allowed the government to implement far reaching institutional reforms. A new constitution was adopted, electoral laws were modified, and the relationship between political institutions was reorganized.

In the view of proponents of these reforms, Hungary’s political system after the democratic transition had become fragmented and ineffective. Institutional consolidation, they argued, was necessary to restore stable government. Critics, however, claimed that the reforms strengthened the ruling party and weakened institutional checks on executive power.

Regardless of interpretation, the result was the emergence of what many observers now call the Orbán system. Over time, this system developed several mutually reinforcing pillars.

Electoral reforms reshaped Hungary’s political competition, strengthening the position of the largest party and reducing fragmentation. At the same time, the government cultivated a network of political, economic, and cultural institutions that reinforced its ideological agenda. Universities, think tanks, media organizations, and business groups increasingly became part of a broader ecosystem aligned with the governing party.

To supporters of the government, this transformation represents the construction of a stable national political order after the turbulence of the post-communist transition.

Critics, however, argue that the concentration of political and economic influence has weakened institutional pluralism.

In this sense, the political order that emerged under Orbán is not merely a successful political party. What emerged is a broader political architecture that combines electoral dominance, institutional restructuring, ideological narrative, and a long-term strategic vision. For more than a decade, this system has proven remarkably durable.

Another factor behind this durability is the transformation of Hungary’s media and political landscape. Over the past decade, pro-government media networks have expanded significantly, while opposition parties have struggled to build comparable institutional structures.

Supporters of the government argue that this reflects the natural outcome of electoral dominance and media market dynamics. Critics, however, claim that the consolidation of pro-government media has weakened pluralism in the Hungarian public sphere. Regardless of interpretation, this media environment has contributed to the long-term stability of the governing system.

Hungary’s relationship with the European Union has become one of the defining arenas of Orbán’s political struggle. Since joining the European Union in 2004, Hungary has been a major recipient of EU structural and cohesion funds. These resources have financed infrastructure, regional development projects, and industrial investment.

In recent years, however, the relationship between Budapest and Brussels has become increasingly contentious.

The European Commission has frozen billions of euros in EU funding intended for Hungary and tied their release to rule of law conditions involving judicial independence and anti-corruption reforms.

In Brussels, these measures are viewed as an effort to protect the institutional standards of the European Union. In Budapest, the dispute is interpreted very differently.

Orbán has portrayed the suspension of funds as an attempt by supranational institutions to override the democratic choices of a sovereign nation. Within Hungary, this confrontation has become a central element of the government’s political narrative.

Migration policy has played an equally important role in the ideological framework of the Orbán government.

Since the European migration crisis of 2015, Hungary has positioned itself as one of the most outspoken critics of the European Union’s approach to border control and asylum policy. Orbán has repeatedly argued that large-scale migration threatens the cultural and political cohesion of European societies.

By constructing border barriers and adopting strict asylum policies, Hungary sought to demonstrate that national governments could still assert control over migration despite pressure from Brussels. Hungary’s border fence along the Serbian frontier became one of the most visible symbols of this policy.

Constructed during the migration crisis of 2015, the barrier was intended to halt the movement of migrants traveling along the Western Balkan route toward Central Europe. At the time, the decision provoked strong criticism from several Western European governments and from officials in Brussels, who argued that such measures undermined the principles of European solidarity and the free movement framework of the Schengen system.

Yet the political dynamics of the migration crisis soon complicated this criticism.

As migration pressures intensified in subsequent years, a growing number of European governments adopted stricter border policies and reinforced external border controls. Measures that initially appeared exceptional gradually became part of a broader European debate about sovereignty, migration management, and the limits of supranational coordination.

For Orbán, the episode confirmed a broader political argument. In moments of crisis, he has repeatedly argued, national governments remain ultimately responsible for protecting borders and maintaining internal stability, even within the institutional framework of the European Union.

Supporters of the government describe these measures as a defense of European civilization, while critics see them as a symbol of the erosion of liberal norms within the Union.

Closely connected to this migration debate is Hungary’s demographic strategy. Rather than relying on immigration to offset population decline, the Orbán government has introduced one of the most extensive family-support programs in Europe. Tax incentives, housing subsidies, and financial benefits for families with multiple children are designed to encourage higher birth rates among Hungarian citizens.

For Orbán and his allies, demographic policy represents a civilizational question. The future of Europe, they argue, depends on whether European societies can sustain their populations without relying on large-scale immigration.

The conflict has also played out in European debates over the war in Ukraine. Hungary has repeatedly delayed or complicated EU initiatives involving financial assistance to Kyiv, using its veto power to influence negotiations inside the Union.

Hungary’s foreign policy has also sought to balance relations between Western institutions and emerging global powers. This strategy reflects a broader shift in the international system.

The post–Cold War order that shaped European politics for three decades is increasingly giving way to a more fragmented and competitive geopolitical environment.

For smaller and medium-sized states such as Hungary, this transformation creates both risks and opportunities. Rather than aligning exclusively with a single geopolitical bloc, the government in Budapest has attempted to pursue a more flexible foreign policy that maintains Western alliances while simultaneously expanding economic relations with non-Western partners.

While remaining firmly anchored in NATO and the European Union, Hungary has pursued closer economic relations with countries such as Russia and China. Energy cooperation with Moscow and Chinese investment in infrastructure projects have often generated tensions with Brussels and Washington.

Orbán has defended this approach as a pragmatic strategy for a medium-sized country navigating an increasingly multipolar world.

These disputes also raise a broader question about the future political balance inside the European Union. For more than a decade, Hungary has been one of the most visible critics of deeper political integration and supranational authority within the bloc. Orbán’s government has repeatedly challenged Brussels on issues ranging from migration policy to rule-of-law enforcement and sanctions policy.

A change of government in Budapest would therefore resonate beyond Hungary itself. It could alter the internal dynamics of the European Union by removing one of the most prominent national conservative voices from the European Council and by reshaping alliances among member states on questions of sovereignty, integration, and institutional power. The country remains economically integrated within the European system, yet it simultaneously positions itself as one of the most vocal critics of the Union’s political direction.

Hungary’s economic model has also played an important role in the durability of the governing system.

Despite frequent political conflicts with Brussels, the country remains deeply integrated into the European economic system and continental manufacturing supply chains, particularly in the German automotive sector. Major companies such as Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW operate large production facilities in Hungary, making the country one of Central Europe’s key industrial hubs.

Germany has remained Hungary’s most important economic partner, and the dense network of German manufacturing investment has created a powerful economic link between Budapest and Europe’s largest economy. The Orbán government has actively pursued this strategy by combining relatively low corporate taxes with generous investment incentives for foreign companies.

At the same time, the government has sought to cultivate a domestic business class aligned with the political system. Large infrastructure projects, state-supported investment programs, and preferential access to public contracts have helped strengthen a network of Hungarian companies closely connected to the governing party.

Supporters of this approach argue that it has allowed Hungary to maintain strong economic growth while preserving national policy autonomy. Critics, however, contend that the concentration of economic power within politically connected networks has increased corruption risks and reduced market competition.

Regardless of interpretation, this economic architecture has contributed to the resilience of the Orbán system and has helped sustain its political dominance over the past decade.

Particular attention comes from Central and Eastern Europe, where debates about sovereignty, migration, and relations with Brussels have reshaped the region’s political landscape.

Across the region, governments and political movements have confronted similar tensions between national authority and the expanding reach of European institutions. Hungary has often been at the forefront of these conflicts, turning the country into a political laboratory whose successes and failures are closely studied by allies and critics alike.

For many nationalist and conservative movements, Orbán’s government represents a political model that is being closely observed across Europe. Parties ranging from Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally have closely followed the durability of the Hungarian model. It raises the question of whether a national conservative government can govern successfully inside the European Union while resisting key aspects of the liberal political consensus.

Orbán’s long tenure has encouraged some movements to believe that such a model is possible.

In a broader sense, Hungary has also become one of the most visible political experiments in what some analysts describe as a post-liberal phase of European politics.

Across the continent, debates have intensified over whether the liberal consensus that shaped Europe after the Cold War still commands democratic legitimacy. Orbán’s government has responded by emphasizing national sovereignty, cultural identity, and majoritarian democracy over supranational constraints and technocratic governance.

Hungary has thus become a testing ground whose trajectory may shape broader debates about the future of European democracy.

At the same time, Hungary’s experience has also demonstrated the structural pressures faced by governments that challenge the ideological direction of European integration.

For this reason, the 2026 Hungarian election is being closely observed far beyond Budapest. For many political movements, the election represents a test of whether the Orbán model remains viable.

Recent polling suggests that the outcome of the election remains highly uncertain, with surveys offering sharply different pictures of the national mood. For the first time in more than a decade, the governing party faces a challenger capable of mobilizing significant public support.

For a political system that has dominated Hungarian politics for fifteen years, this shift represents something unprecedented.

The emergence of a genuinely competitive electoral contest therefore represents a significant shift in the country’s political landscape. Since 2010, the possibility of a transition of power appears conceivable to a broad segment of the electorate.

Whether this shift reflects a temporary protest vote or a deeper realignment in Hungarian politics remains one of the central questions of the 2026 election.

As a result, the vote is widely seen as the first real existential test for the Orbán system. Much of the new political dynamic has been driven by the rapid rise of Péter Magyar.

Magyar’s political rise has been unusually rapid. Within a short period of time, his movement managed to mobilize large public demonstrations and build an organizational network capable of challenging the governing party. His rhetoric often focuses on corruption, transparency, and the concentration of political and economic power in Hungary.

Magyar has attempted to avoid positioning himself as a representative of the traditional liberal opposition. Instead, he presents himself as a reformist figure who seeks to correct what he portrays as the excesses of the Orbán system while preserving elements of national sovereignty and political stability.

Magyar previously moved within the governing elite and has now emerged as one of Orbán’s most serious challengers. His political movement has built its appeal around accusations of corruption, patronage networks, and political stagnation. This strategy has proven effective because it targets the structural foundations of the Orbán system itself.

This positioning allows him to appeal not only to traditional opposition voters but also to former supporters of Fidesz.

Faced with this challenge, Orbán has responded with a campaign strategy centered on sovereignty, geopolitical conflict, and national security.

The Hungarian government has framed the election as a stark choice between war and peace, arguing that deeper European involvement in the war in Ukraine risks escalating the conflict, threatening Hungarian security, and endangering access to affordable energy.

Orbán has escalated this narrative dramatically in recent weeks, portraying Ukraine not merely as a source of regional instability but as an active threat to Hungarian sovereignty and economic interests. The government has accused Kyiv of attempting to sabotage Hungarian infrastructure and energy supplies, particularly in disputes over the Druzhba oil pipeline that carries Russian crude into Central Europe.

Amid a standoff, a Hungarian fact-finding mission entered Ukraine but was denied official recognition and access by Kyiv. It has also deployed soldiers to protect critical facilities as a precautionary measure, while Orbán has vowed to use political and financial pressure to force resumption of transit.

At the same time, Orbán has intensified his criticism of Brussels, portraying European institutions as attempting to impose ideological conformity and override the democratic choices of member states.

Orbán links these external pressures to domestic survival. He warns that a Tisza victory could drag Hungary into conflict, bankrupt the country through higher energy costs, or force concessions on migration and cultural issues. In doing so, he seeks to mobilize his core electorate around the defense of Hungary’s independence and neutrality.

This framing transforms the election into an existential referendum: continued national autonomy under Fidesz, or submission to what Orbán depicts as reckless escalation by Brussels, Kyiv, and transnational forces.

Beyond the immediate election, a deeper question looms over Hungarian politics.

For fifteen years, Orbán has dominated the country’s political life. Even many critics acknowledge that his personal authority and strategic discipline are central to the stability of the system he created.

This raises an important question: what happens to Hungary after his era? The system he constructed is institutional, but it is also deeply personal. Its coherence depends in part on the continued presence of a leader capable of holding together the political coalition that supports it.

The rise of Péter Magyar has therefore attracted attention not only because he challenges the prime minister today, but also because his movement may offer the first glimpse of a possible political landscape after Orbán’s era. Hungary now stands at a decisive political moment.

The election of April 2026 will test the durability of a political system that has defined the country’s trajectory for more than a decade. It will also shape the broader debate about sovereignty, democracy, and the future of European politics.

If Orbán secures another victory, it will reinforce the perception that a national conservative government can maintain long-term dominance within the European Union. If he loses, it may mark the beginning of a profound transformation in Hungarian politics.

The outcome remains uncertain. While some independent polls suggest a path to change, a polarized polling landscape, and a fragmented right-wing vote due to modest gains by the far-right Mi Hazánk party. However, Orbán’s formidable mobilization machine around sovereignty and security could still produce a surprise result in the election.

Whatever the result on April 12th, the vote will mark a pivotal moment for Hungary and for the viability of national conservative governance in an increasingly contested Europe.

Either the Orbán system proves its durability once again, or Hungary becomes the first major test case for what a post-Orbán Central Europe might look like. The stakes extend beyond Hungary itself.

A growing number of political movements question whether the liberal consensus that dominated Europe after the Cold War can adapt to new geopolitical realities. Economic uncertainty, demographic change, and renewed great-power competition have intensified these debates.

In this broader context, Hungary has become more than a national political story. It has become a focal point in the wider debate about the future of European democracy.

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This piece does not seek to critique Greer’s work, but to write in dialogue with him about a matter of historical significance for understanding the United States and our history.

In the article, Greer argues that the historical term “the Eastern Establishment” is preferable to “WASP” for describing America’s largely uncontested ruling elite between 1930 and 1960. Greer rests part of his argument on the fact that many members of this elite were not Anglo-Protestant, and most Anglo-Protestants were not members of this elite.

This piece’s goal is not to contest the overall merits of many of Greer’s points. His article is a corrective and helpfully points out that America’s elite was not solely made up of Anglo Protestants, and—between the Civil War and Midcentury—it was dominated by the political power of the Northeast, to the detriment of other regions.

Indeed, in this period, that region that was the most culturally and demographically Anglo-Protestant, the South, was frozen out of national preeminence, with a Southerner not becoming president until Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in.

Additionally, the term WASP, as highlighted by Greer, is itself a fairly recent term, only being coined in 1964, long after the heyday of the WASPs. However, in spite of this, there is merit to the term “WASP” when analyzing American history.

One linguistic point worth raising is that WASP is not necessarily synonymous with “Anglo” or even “Anglo Protestant” in its formulation.

Since colonial times, America has had a significant German population—much to the annoyance of Benjamin Franklin—with the first Speaker of the House, Frederick Muhlenberg, being of German descent. In using the term “Anglo-Saxon” instead of “Anglo,” the term “WASP” emphasizes the broader Germanic roots of England rather than English culture itself.

In this sense, ethnic Germans (such as the historic elite in much of the Midwest), Dutchmen (such as Van Buren, the Roosevelts), or those from other Germanic backgrounds do not invalidate the thesis that America’s elite was composed of WASPs.

More significantly, while Greer is correct in emphasizing the Eastern Establishment as comprising America’s ruling class, this neglects the critical importance of local WASP elites in the development of the United States.

California serves as a good example to explicate this point.

During the Twentieth Century, California’s elite, for simple geographical reasons, did not play an outsized role in governing the country (as did the elites of New England or New York). At the same time, its ruling elite was discernibly WASP, even if it was relatively insulated from the Eastern Establishment.

Politically and economically during this period, California had captains of industry comparable to those of the Eastern Establishment. William Randolph Hearst, Howard Hughes, Leland Stanford, David Hewes, and the Crocker as well as Getty families stand out as examples of this, just to name a few. While there were non-Anglos as well amongst California industrialists—most notably the Spreckels family—California’s elites tended to be WASPs in every sense of the word.

In education, California WASPs also built their own institutions, both emulating and challenging those of the Eastern Establishment and fitting the mold of what we would consider to be WASPy.

Stanford University, founded by one of the most prominent men in the state, is a good example of this. Additionally, many of the prep schools that dot the state were built in emulation of schools for the Eastern elite.

Socially, California’s elite also built networks and institutions similar to those of the Eastern Establishment. Indeed, some of these institutions would be integrated into the social network of the Eastern Establishment.

The most notable and infamous example is the Bohemian Grove— of which Californian politicians who achieved national status, such as Earl Warren, Ronald Reagan, or Richard Nixon, were members alongside Easterners such as George H.W. Bush.

Ironically, California’s mid-century rise contributed much to the downfall of this elite. California experienced massive population and economic growth after the Second World War, particularly in the south. At the same time, entertainment grew, supplanting older industries and creating a new, much more liberal elite.

California came to epitomize much of the spirit of mid-century America, from its large defense industry to the dominance of its suburban middle class. Part of this process was the decline of its earlier WASP elite from their positions of prominence. At the same time, California’s elite became more integrated into that of the nation as a whole.

Despite this, compared to other areas, contemporary California still maintains, at some level, a greater continuity in its governance with the older WASP elite than most states.

The current California governor, Gavin Newsom, comes from a prominent and, by California standards, old San Francisco family. Newsom’s father was a lawyer by practice as well as a confidant of the Getty family. Indeed, Gordon Getty, a billionaire heir to that family, has stated that he thinks of Gavin “as a son.”

The governor before Newsom, Jerry Brown, likewise came from a prominent California political family— though admittedly an Irish-Catholic, rather than a WASP one.

To understand our country’s present, it is necessary first to understand our past. To create a virtuous elite, we must first understand our country’s past elites to ascertain which traits are worth emulating and which are not.

Tanner Greer, in his many theses on the WASPs, provides an important corrective about America’s earlier ruling class. However, that the term “Eastern Establishment” may be preferable to “WASP” when describing the national ruling class does not rule out the fact that what are commonly thought of as WASPs did exist as an elite group and distinct class, as far afield as California.

Consequently, even if only a subset of WASPs (the Eastern Establishment) had national dominance, I do not think it would be incorrect to describe America’s former elite as the WASPs.

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For a decade, President Trump has presided over a Republican Party that has seen a massive realignment in both its voters and its policy priorities. Now that the Trump era is coming to an end, perhaps the most important political question on the Right is who will succeed Trump.

JD Vance is the heir apparent, the most likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2028, and thus the natural leader of the post-Trump GOP. This makes the political priorities of Vice President Vance a most interesting and important analysis for conservatives in American politics today.

Who is Vance and what does he think about the issues that we care about most While there are many different ways to go about answering these questions (the reason for and topic of my new book), there is one fascinating question worth focusing on, one that sheds light on the divide over MAGA in today’s Republican Party: how did JD Vance go from being “a Never-Trump guy” to a Trump ally, apologist, presumed heir to the MAGA movement?

Many claim cynically that Vance simply shifted with the political winds, but there is a much more convincing and enlightening answer.

Accusations that Vance is simply a political opportunist fail to take into account that Vance has spoken candidly, and quite convincingly, about why his stance on President Trump changed so dramatically.

In 2016, Vance thought that American institutions were in decent shape and that therefore Trump’s position and rhetoric were unjustified and unhelpful, even dangerous.

So what changed?

Vance gives a very insightful summary of how he came around to President Trump’s position within the GOP in a conversation on the New York Times Podcast in October 2024.

The evolution of Vance was not primarily about core political beliefs but about his view of the state of American institutions: “if you believe the American political culture is fundamentally healthy but may be biased toward the Left, then Donald Trump is not the right solution to that problem.”

As Vance continued to observe political and cultural realities, he “slowly developed a viewpoint that the American political culture was…deeply diseased and the American media conversation had become so deranged that it couldn’t even process the frustrations of a large share, maybe even a…majority of the country.”

If things are this bad, the rhetoric and changes in priority that Trump brought to the GOP make more sense.

Many disagreements on the Right are perhaps less about the proper role of government or the policy issues to be emphasized and more about the health of America and its institutions. Where are we as a nation? Is the country simply going through a normal cycle, an excessively liberal time that will likely swing back to a saner, more moderate culture in the coming years?

Is it that most of the nation’s institutions—its government agencies, media outlets, universities, and corporations—been captured not merely by Liberals but by radical, un-American Leftists who want to destroy America as we know it?

The answer to this drastic question will shape an American conservative’s views on Donald Trump and the direction of the Republican Party.

The divide in the Republican Party may be better explained by one’s view of the health of the nation then by “neocon vs. MAGA” policy disagreements. If America remains a more or less healthy nation that happens to be guided by more progressive influences at the moment, then the MAGA movement is not the right remedy for what ails us.

Why engage in fiery, demonize the opposition party, call for the abolition of entire federal agencies, and so on, if all we need is better, more principled leadership in the next election cycle?

One does not need a firehose to put out a candle.

But if the latter view is correct, if we are truly in the grip of advanced cultural decay and even on the brink of national collapse, then Trump and the MAGA shift within the Republican Party are not only understandable but necessary.

If partisan operatives run the Department of Justice and the FBI, prosecuting political enemies rather than administering justice, if career bureaucrats are actually impeding the will of the people and their elected leaders, if the media and the universities are trying to manipulate people to hate America and destroy it, and if the current leadership and government policies are not only misguided but are intentionally destroying American families and the American economy, then perhaps Republicans in the past several decades have not been the fierce fighters they are called to be in this critical moment in American history.

This distinction explains Vance’s shift on Trump. Unlike many politicians who mysteriously changed their priorities and quickly came around to Trump when it became politically expedient to do so, Vance’s account of his Trumpian evolution is reasonable.

From 2016 to the present, Vance may have grown and become more mature and articulate on certain policies, but he has essentially cared about the same things. He has observed drugs, offshoring of manufacturing jobs, and broken, dysfunctional families destroying American communities and he remains committed to prioritizing political solutions to these problems.

The big change in Vance is that, over the last few years, he has come to believe that American institutions are much more corrupt and dysfunctional, themselves much more a part of the problem, than he once thought. This change in Vance’s view of America justifies a much more favorable view of Trump’s policy priorities, his rhetoric, and his fighting spirit.

Trump’s policy priorities and take-no-prisoners style is not a crutch for disaffected Americans but actually a needed part of the solution to what ails the nation.

Vance’s change in stance toward Donald Trump results from a change in his view of the health of America. Vance has been consistently skeptical of Libertarianism, concerned about the plight of the American family, the opioid crisis, and a lack of good, blue-collar manufacturing jobs, both before and after his support of Trump.

What has changed is that Vance once thought Trump’s rhetoric about the state of America was excessively pessimistic and bombastic, but he has now come to believe that American institutions are indeed as bad as Trump and his political allies have been saying for years. Vance’s diagnosis of the problems and solutions in American life have not changed much. What has changed drastically is his diagnosis of the institutions that are necessary to effect changes and implement solutions.

Vance should be admired for his humility. Many politicians have flipped from anti-Trump to MAGA for political expediency, leaving old views and political positions behind as if they were never held. Vance’s move toward Trump does not involve the hypocrisy of pretending that he was never really anti-Trump, nor does it involve a flip-flop on core principles.

Vance cared about the same problems in America in 2016, 2020, and 2024. And he admits that he changed. Just as his view of the health of America shifted, so too did his view of what it would take to fix things.

So what is the takeaway? Vance is clear and humble about the shift. His views on American society have changed: Trump was right and, in a way, Vance was wrong in 2016. Vance is consistent in his views about the problems that any serious conservative politics needs to address, but he has evolved to realize that the problems are much more deeply embedded in American institutions than he thought.

This shift is perhaps the best way to distinguish between those on the Right who have embraced MAGA and those who remain virulently anti-Trump. The former realize that our national institutions– government agencies, media outlets, corporations, school systems and universities– are not simply leaning left. Liberals have marched through American institutions for decades.

Some may be able to be recaptured, but many (think Ivy League universities and mainstream media outlets) are so decayed that they must likely be replaced rather than saved. To understand this is necessarily to reject the weak, right-liberal version of Republican Party politics that dominated in the years preceding Trump.

The “Never-Trump” crowd doesn’t seem to realize the extent to which globalized liberalism has deeply (de)formed the world in which we live.

Tax cuts and modest deregulation are not proper medicine for what ails us. Vance is the best hope for a post-Trump Republican Party that knows what time it is and that is ready to continue the fight.

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On January 3, 2026, the United States launched a special military operation against the Venezuelan regime and captured its beleaguered president, Nicolás Maduro. In the aftermath, critics on the left denounced the raid as a violation of “international law” and an assault on the “sovereignty” of the communist dictatorship in Caracas.

On the right, some decried the strike as inconsistent with President Trump’s stated “America First” and “pro-peace” foreign policy commitments. A realist analysis, however, shows that the operation was neither. On the contrary, the attack was both an eminently justified course of action and well in line with the president’s broader foreign policy objectives.

The central rationale for intervention in Venezuela was not the promotion of democracy, nor even the disruption of narcotics flows from the region, however commendable those goals may appear.

Rather, the primary threat Venezuela posed stemmed from its deep and longstanding alignment with U.S. strategic rivals—most notably China—which threatened to invite hostile great powers into the Western Hemisphere and granted them meaningful leverage over American interests. From a realist perspective, this external alignment, not Venezuela’s internal political character, constituted the decisive issue.

Chinese influence in Venezuela is extensive and well-documented. As the largest purchaser of Venezuelan crude, China exercises substantial leverage over the country’s oil sector, which sits atop the world’s largest proven reserves. Chinese firms have invested billions of dollars in joint ventures that grant them operational control over key assets, embedding Beijing deeply within Venezuela’s energy infrastructure.

Through partnerships between PDVSA and Chinese state-owned companies such as Sinopec, China has secured long-term stakes in major Orinoco Belt projects, gained control over financing channels, and locked in preferential access to crude shipments.

A significant portion of Venezuelan oil exports to China is structured as debt repayment, effectively binding Caracas to discounted, long-term supply arrangements and sharply limiting its ability to redirect exports elsewhere.

Beyond energy, Chinese entities exert influence over Venezuelan railways and mining concessions and operate satellite tracking facilities, underscoring the breadth and durability of Beijing’s presence.

Crucially, this partnership long predates U.S. sanctions, undermining the claim that American pressure forced Venezuela into the arms of U.S. adversaries. After winning the presidency in 1998, Hugo Chávez deliberately sought closer ties with China and worked to distance Venezuela from the United States on ideological grounds.

Maduro merely inherited and deepened this strategic orientation. Once he completed the transition from a flawed democracy to an outright authoritarian regime, this alignment became effectively irreversible absent regime change.

China’s foothold in Venezuela directly undermines U.S. interests by constraining American strategic freedom of action and amplifying Beijing’s leverage globally. By anchoring itself in the Western Hemisphere, China secures energy supplies insulated from U.S. pressure, weakens the effectiveness of American sanctions, and establishes a durable intelligence and strategic presence uncomfortably close to U.S. territory.

This dynamic, in turn, erodes American credibility and coercive power elsewhere—most notably in the Indo-Pacific—by furnishing China with concrete tools to complicate a U.S. response to aggression abroad. A Chinese presence in Venezuela creates opportunities for asymmetric pressure, including intelligence collection, cyber and signals activity, political agitation, and the implicit threat of escalation in the Western Hemisphere at precisely the moment Washington would seek to concentrate military, diplomatic, and economic resources in East Asia.

In a crisis over Taiwan, for example, Beijing could exploit this foothold to stretch U.S. attention, increase the domestic and strategic costs of escalation, and weaken the credibility of American deterrent threats by forcing U.S. leaders to manage simultaneous pressure close to home.

As during the Cold War, permitting a rival great power to entrench itself in the Americas provides strategic depth that can be leveraged far beyond the region itself—narrowing U.S. options abroad and directly undermining its ability to respond decisively in a major geopolitical crisis.

These considerations demonstrate why removing the Venezuelan regime was firmly within U.S. interests and fully consistent with an “America First” framework. Nevertheless, critics maintain that the strike was illicit because it violated “international law” and undermined the so-called “rules-based order.” According to this view, U.S. disregard for these norms encourages other powers—particularly Russia and China—to do the same.

This argument, however, is deeply naïve. It rests on the false premise that the rules-based order meaningfully constrains state behavior and that U.S. legal restraint is what preserves it. In reality, international law lacks independent enforcement and functions largely as a set of aspirational norms rather than binding constraints.

Major powers do not calibrate their actions based on American legal compliance, but on power, opportunity, and perceived costs. Russia did not invade Ukraine because the United States violated international norms elsewhere, nor does China’s posture toward Taiwan hinge on Washington’s fidelity to abstract legal principles.

States act when they believe they can do so without facing decisive resistance. To suggest that unilateral U.S. restraint deters adversaries is to invert the logic of deterrence: it is not legal self-discipline, but credible power and a demonstrated willingness to use it, that gives rules any practical force.

Appeals to international law also obscure a more fundamental reality: international politics is structured by great-power competition, not neutral legalism. Contrary to liberal institutionalist dogma, sovereignty has never been absolute; it is contingent on behavior and constrained by the interests of stronger states.

When a regime dismantles its own democracy, aligns itself with a rival great power, grants that power strategic access, and allows its territory to be used in ways that threaten regional stability, it forfeits any claim to inviolable sovereignty.

The Cold War offers a clear illustration. When Cuba aligned with the Soviet Union and permitted the deployment of nuclear missiles just ninety miles from Florida, the United States did not acquiesce out of deference to abstract notions of sovereignty. Instead, it imposed a naval quarantine and credibly threatened force to enforce a red line.

Stability was preserved not through legal formalism, but through power and deterrence.

Taken together, the Venezuelan operation underscores a fundamental truth about American statecraft in an era of renewed great-power rivalry: restraint divorced from strategy is not prudence, but abdication.

The United States cannot credibly defend its interests or preserve regional stability if it elevates unenforceable legal abstractions above concrete security threats in its own hemisphere.

By removing a regime that had willingly ceded its sovereignty to a rival great power, Washington reaffirmed a core principle of international order, which is that stability rests not on abstract legality, but on the decisive defense of vital interests.

In this light, the strike was neither reckless nor anomalous, but a rational response to foreign encroachment in America’s backyard, fully consistent with an America First realism grounded in deterrence, hierarchy, and strategic clarity.

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On the second episode of our Postliberal Voices series, our hosts interview Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule.

Professor Vermeule is the Ralph S. Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, a published author in the fields of legal theory and public law, and a Managing Editor for The New Digest.

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On Saturday, the United States’ Delta Force captured the President of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, in a daring raid on the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. While our servicemen have again shown the world their professionalism and bravery, the fact of the matter is that the cause in which they were deployed was and is not worth one of their lives. But why is this so?

First of all, definitionally, our country is a republic, from the Latin res publica, literally meaning a thing of the public. Our state thus exists for the benefit of our public and people, for Americans first. Any action contrary to that aim is definitionally contrary to the raison d’être of our government and is not worth the lives of our servicemen.

But why is the action in Venezuela contrary to our interests? Let’s first address the stated rationale and what these actions point towards.

The primary stated rationale of our intervention is the role that Venezuela plays in the drug trade, with it being alleged that Venezuela’s government are “narcoterrorists.” Venezuela indeed is a major country through which the cocaine trade travels, and the drug trade has inflicted severe damage to the American people.

However, Venezuela plays almost no role in the production of Fentanyl (which is made in Mexico), the drug which kills the most Americans, and the cocaine bound for the U.S. is generally made in Colombia and transported through Pacific and Central America.

Additionally, were we to prudentially address the drug issue, how would we do so? Take in point the policy that the Trump administration has prudentially taken towards our Southern border and Mexico, with the goal of stopping the drug trade.

President Trump secured our Southern border, closing a major avenue by which drugs would enter the country. Additionally, the Mexican government has wisely moved its national guard from its interior ministry to its defense one, to facilitate its training by the U.S., so that it might better interdict the drug trade.

A similar U.S. mission to train Venezuelan authorities in drug interdiction, or even limited U.S. anti-drug operations in cooperation with Venezuela, would be worthwhile and in the interests of both nations. However, that is not what we witnessed over the weekend. Instead, we witnessed what can only be definitionally described as regime change.

Capturing the leader of another country, and putting him on trial, is, by its nature, an attempt to change the government of that country. Thus, the question becomes, is regime change (even only a slight one elevating more moderate members of Maduro’s government) in our interests?

Maduro, though an unsavory leader in many respects, was one the United States could work with. When Trump assumed office, he wisely engaged in diplomacy with Venezuela, freeing six American detainees, and working towards a broader detente. Even late into last year, Maduro was ready and willing to engage in talks with our government, demonstrating that he is not as intractably anti-American as has been portrayed.

Additionally, it is unclear whether a leader better than Maduro is likely for Venezuela. It must be noted that Venezuela has never really enjoyed the liberty or free government that we in the United States are accustomed to. Our republic was built on the foundations of a millennium of English common law, as well as by a particular people with particular culture, customs, and inheritance.

Venezuela, as a country, is totally historically and culturally alien to us, and lacking these things cannot be expected to develop a government similar to that which works so well for Americans.

Thus, the most likely outcome of regime change in Caracas is the replacement of one deeply unsavory government with another, even if the latter has slightly different window-dressing. This is not a cause in which American blood and treasure should be spent.

Beyond the point, even were Venezuela to magically adopt an American-style government as a result of U.S.-backed regime change, the blood of our neighbors, friends, and brothers should not be cannon fodder for the political liberation of alien peoples. Our taxes are not paid to provide a bottomless piggy-bank for foreigners to pin their political desire on.

The United States exists for Americans–for both ourselves and our prosperity–not as a tool of foreigners. In this sense, to paraphrase Bismarck, the governance of the whole Venezuela is not worth the bones of a single American Delta Force operator.

There are historical rationales under which the U.S. could kinetically intervene in Latin America, most notably the Monroe Doctrine. But it exists to prevent hostile powers from interfering in our hemisphere, not for us to micromanage the politics of the nations who happen to be located near us. If we were concerned about Maduro’s ties to old world powers, we could have worked with him to lessen these ties.

Even in the absence of action from the U.S., things such as Chinese investment in Venezuela have been decreasing, and it is likely that Maduro would have been amenable towards a deal with the U.S. further decreasing it.

Of course, some people will cast criticism of the Venezuelan operation as disloyalty to Trump. However, this criticism is necessary precisely because of what true loyalty requires.

President Trump is the greatest president of my lifetime and is undoubtedly a patriotic and courageous man. He is someone who has suffered greatly at the hands of his enemies, from the lawfare waged against him, to being wounded by a bullet in Butler Pennsylvania, for his desire to put Americans first.

However, intervening in Venezuela on behalf of the liberal international order does not constitute putting America First. Trump’s love for our country and desire to put our people first obligates us, as Americans, to speak up whenever his advisors steer the ship of state away from that goal.

For this reason, we should be unafraid to point out that regime change in Venezuela is fundamentally contrary to the goals of this administration and of President Trump.

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Now more than ever before, we live in a country that lacks identity. Despite being the greatest nation in the world, America, in undergoing this crisis, threatens to pull itself apart as various subsets of society long for lost or imagined constructions of America that no longer exist.

This is reflected in how Christmas is celebrated in Twenty-First Century America. The actual celebration of Christmas often has a bittersweet, ephemeral nature to it, especially as we grow older and become more nostalgic, that is in direct contradiction with the overwhelming and eternal joy proclaimed by the gospel as the reason for the season.

This contradiction, however, is critically important. The tension between the message of the gospel and the vibes of Christmas, which all too often involve a longing for a long lost and idealized America whether one considers that to be the post-war period, the 80s, 90s, etc., does not diminish or distract from the importance and centrality of the Nativity, but rather accentuates it. These vibes, properly interpreted, should signify to us the impermanence of the actual celebration of Christmas and the impossibility of the perfect Christmas; thereby elucidating the importance of the eternal aspects of Christmas.

Arguably, a chief contributor to the bittersweet, ephemeral vibe of Christmas in the 2020s is Christmas music. I am not talking about the Christmas music you hear in church. No, we are speaking about Christmas music that is the product of our secular, liberal, cynical America; removed from the “trad” mirages of domestic life.

Specifically, I am referring to the 1984 WHAM! hit Last Christmas. A few weeks ago, at the onset of December, two of my friends and I got into a fight with another friend of ours about our top three favorite Christmas songs. The dispute centered around three of us agreeing that Last Christmas is unquestionably a top three Christmas song, and our other friend wagging his finger at us saying Last Christmas was “modern, cosmopolitan overrated garbage,” before rattling off a provocative and not at all trite list including picks from niche artists Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and Andy Williams. Hard hitting stuff, I know.

Are these Christmas songs bad? No, certainly not, and they have their place in the idyllic fairytale Christmas many dream of. However, this does not place them among the best. Last Christmas is in the conversation among the all time best Christmas songs because it is transgressive.

It is not a song about the perfect wholesome and “trad” Christmas. Last Christmas is so great because more than any other Christmas song it has come to embody the wistful, bittersweet, melancholic, ephemeral, and most of all nostalgic, longing sentiments of December. This embodiment of the Christmas season “zeitgeist” is what makes it so real, and thus so great. As we have already discussed above, the cultivation of this vibe is very important to helping us filter out the noise and better understand the mystery of the Christmas season.

As Americans, it is undeniable that we live in the capital of a global, liberal empire, and thus much of the best art that is produced in America is a product of that global, liberal civilization. It is a mistake when conservatives deny reality and refuse to admit that this empire cannot make excellent art, or that excellent art produced within the boundaries of this empire is somehow able to be divorced from any relation to this liberal, globalist consensus (even “conservative art” is often defined by its opposition to this consensus rather than by being something novel).

Last Christmas, as asserted by my friend, an assertion not contested by me, firmly is a piece of liberal art, and it is an excellent piece of liberal art. Conservatives quite often make the mistake of believing that liberals can not produce good works of art, but oftentimes liberals are in fact better at producing works of art than conservatives. To their credit, the urban, educated liberals make great movies and music, certainly better than conservatives’ hackwork like Mr. Birchum and MAGA Christmas.

Conservatives have a reality problem. Their brains have been fried by kitsch on Twitter, and they now lack rational, critical thinking faculties. This Christmas, I call upon all of you to become men of nuance.

Appreciate Last Christmas and the great artistic works of our liberal American Empire for what they are and what they can offer us in understanding the eternal mystery of Christ’s incarnation in the Nativity through those stirred sentiments that force us to ponder the temporal nature of our reality.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.

Bosnia has never possessed a single national identity in the modern sense. Founded in the settlement that stopped the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country remains anchored in a constitutional balance that reflects plurality rather than unity. It remains a shared political space of Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, three historical communities whose memories, fears and aspirations diverge far more often than they converge.

Dayton did not invent this structure. It merely formalized it. Bosnia’s political order rests on the recognition of three constituent peoples whose identities shape the structure of the state.

The Bosniaks, mostly Muslim, form the demographic core of the country. The Croats, largely Catholic, look culturally toward the West. The Serbs, predominantly Orthodox, are historically and institutionally connected to Serbia. Dayton codified their constitutional status and built a political architecture around their coexistence.

International diplomacy often speaks of “Bosnians” as if they formed a unified political people, but Bosnia and Herzegovina has no such demos. Its constitution recognizes three constituent peoples as the foundational subjects of the state, each with its own mandate, its own loyalties and its own understanding of what sovereignty should mean.

The country functions not through national cohesion but through negotiated coexistence.

This starting point is essential. Without it, Bosnia appears chaotic, its institutions opaque, its conflicts irrational. With it, the logic becomes clear: Bosnia is not a nation-state, but a political arrangement designed to manage difference. A system built to prevent domination, yet one that struggles to produce genuine self-government.

Peace holds, but true sovereignty is lacking. Rooted in the settlement that stopped the bloodiest European conflict since 1945, Bosnia and Herzegovina continues to be a country that administers, elects and negotiates, yet does not exercise genuine self-government. It is the only place on the continent where stability is carefully engineered while political adulthood remains structurally impossible. A country suspended between peace and autonomy, governed by its institutions yet supervised by powers above them.

The weight of the Dayton anniversary cannot be understood without recalling the war that preceded it, not as a sequence of military operations but as the moral catastrophe that shattered the European belief that the post-Cold War order had rendered large-scale violence obsolete. It was a conflict that exposed the fragility of Europe’s moral self-image: a war unfolding on the continent at the very moment Europe imagined itself beyond such barbarism.

The siege of cities, the destruction of communities and the collapse of ordinary life revealed how quickly the promises of a new era could give way to the cruelties of the old.

When the Dayton Agreement was signed in Paris on December 14, 1995, the fighting stopped, but the political struggle over the form of the state had only begun.

The war that tore Bosnia apart between 1992 and 1995 was not a civil war in the conventional sense. It was the bloodiest European conflict since 1945, nearly one hundred thousand dead, more than half the population displaced, entire towns erased as if they had never existed.

Europe, intoxicated by the end of history, discovered that its soil could still drink blood in industrial quantities. Dayton stopped the killing, but it did not restore sovereignty. It froze the war into institutions and called the result peace.

Three decades on, Bosnia and Herzegovina remains the last Western protectorate on the continent. Real power does not reside in its parliaments, its three presidents or its fourteen assemblies. It resides in the hands of one unelected foreign official, the High Representative, who can legislate by decree, dismiss elected leaders, annul court rulings, and rewrite the criminal code at will.

This is not a transitional arrangement gone awry. This is managed sovereignty, a living relic of the liberal-imperial 1990s that somehow survived into an age that no longer believes in its premises.

The West watched this collapse with fascination, guilt and paralysis. European diplomacy was trapped between its moral rhetoric and its strategic caution. The United States hesitated to intervene decisively until the final year.

When peace finally came it arrived not through a consistent moral vision but through exhaustion and the recognition that failure to end the conflict would undermine the moral self-image the West had built after the Cold War. The war became a moral debt that had to be paid through the construction of an order that would prevent its repetition.

Dayton was not only a peace agreement. It was a gesture of expiation. It expressed the belief that stability could be engineered if the international community took responsibility for the political life of a country whose institutions had been destroyed.

This conviction shaped the peculiar character of the postwar settlement. The West did not simply want to end a war; it wanted to manage the moral consequences of having allowed Europe to descend into atrocity once again. Dayton therefore became more than a ceasefire. It became the foundation of a pedagogical project: Bosnia was not only to be stabilized, it was to be taught how to function.

What began as an emergency response to a moral crisis hardened into a governing philosophy, the belief that a wounded society could be healed only if its political adulthood was indefinitely postponed. That belief produced a singular political architecture composed of three constituent peoples (Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs), two near-sovereign entities, ten cantons, fourteen parliaments, a tripartite presidency and a labyrinth of veto rights were deliberately designed to freeze politics rather than enable it. The war ended, but politics was placed in cryostasis: peace through paralysis.

At the summit of this frozen structure stands an office never meant to survive this long. Conceived in 1995 as a temporary stabilizing presence, the High Representative was transformed in Bonn two years later into an unelected executive armed with powers unmatched in contemporary Europe. The so-called Bonn Powers allowed for acts that no Bosnian institution may review and no electorate may reverse.

The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina has solemnly declared itself incompetent to judge the actions of its foreign overseer. Sovereignty, resides not in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, or Mostar, but in the hands of a European civil servant answerable to no one inside the country he governs.

What was designed as provisional authority became structurally indispensable. The more the High Representative intervened, the more domestic actors adapted to his presence.

Compromise became irrational when final arbitration always came from above; political responsibility atrophied because it was no longer required. A generation of leaders learned to govern with the expectation of external correction. The office that was meant to cultivate autonomy became its primary obstacle.

Thus a mechanism created to heal a traumatized society quietly evolved into an experiment in post-national governance, a laboratory for the Western conviction that administrative supervision could permanently replace political responsibility, that democratic forms could endure even when democratic agency was suspended, that a state could remain peaceful but not sovereign, functioning but not free.

Bosnia today is the living proof that stability engineered from above can be astonishingly durable and that the price of such durability is the indefinite deferral of self-government. The paradox deepened when the office itself drifted outside the international legal framework that once anchored it.

The current High Representative, Christian Schmidt, was never confirmed by the United Nations Security Council. Russia and China refused to validate his appointment. Western governments responded not by seeking renewed legitimacy but by declaring legitimacy unnecessary.

Schmidt, a former German Bundestag member and federal minister from the Christian Social Union, thus exercises an office whose authority now rests entirely on Western recognition rather than the universal mandate envisioned in 1995. Bosnia is therefore governed by a foreign official whose authority is internationally contested yet domestically enforceable.

Schmidt rules in the image of a colonial administrator who proclaims democracy while exercising absolutism. It is a situation in which the formal architecture of sovereignty is contradicted by the material exercise of power.

This model has no analogue anywhere else. Other protectorates operate, but none with this degree of constitutional entanglement. Occupations occur, but never with this veneer of democratic institutionalization. International trusteeships have been attempted, but never embedded inside what is nominally a functioning constitutional democracy.

Bosnia is neither a colony nor a democracy, neither a sovereign state nor an administered territory. It is governed through an arrangement that cannot be categorized because it was never designed to endure beyond its transitional moment. Its continued existence is not a sign of strategic design but of political exhaustion. It persists because Europe has become unable to imagine a Balkan state that governs itself without supervision. What appears as separation of powers is, in truth, a chain of command. The modern West manages obedience under the name of consensus.

The Constitutional Court occupies a similarly ambiguous position. It appears to embody the final authority of the rule of law, yet three of its judges are foreign nationals appointed not by the citizens but by international actors. Over the years the court has shifted from constitutional arbiter to supervisory instrument, interpreting key provisions in ways that align not with negotiated balances but with the administrative logic of the international presence.

In practice it has become an extension of international oversight, an institution whose jurisprudence reflects not the friction of domestic pluralism, but the priorities of an order sustained from above.

The consequences of this system became unmistakable in 2025, when Milorad Dodik, the elected president of Republika Srpska, was convicted under a criminal article that did not exist until High Representative Christian Schmidt created it himself. The episode exposed not an institutional malfunction but the logic of an order built on delegated authority rather than democratic mandate.

In any constitutional system legislation originates from parliament, is enforced by the executive and is reviewed by the judiciary. These three functions are separated not out of procedural fastidiousness but to prevent the very concentration of power that turns legality into an instrument of discipline.

In Bosnia the High Representative has gradually come to function as all three. He writes the law, he enforces the law and he stands beyond judicial scrutiny.

Absurdity revealed itself fully that year. When Dodik refused to publish a decree issued by Schmidt, the High Representative did not seek political negotiation or judicial clarification. Instead, he amended the criminal code ex post facto to criminalize non-compliance with his own orders.

The investigative organs then opened proceedings not under a statute debated and adopted by an elected legislature but under a provision that existed solely because the High Representative had drafted, enacted and promulgated it. Dodik was prosecuted, tried and sentenced under a legal instrument authored by the very official whose authority he had challenged, a procedure that would disgrace even a military tribunal in a banana republic.

At trial the court piously noted that it lacked jurisdiction to examine the legality of the High Representative’s acts. It treated the OHR’s decrees not as administrative measures subject to judicial review but as an external normative power beyond the reach of the constitution itself.

An elected president was thus removed by a foreign administrator using a statute the administrator had himself created, enforced through institutions he ultimately controls, and shielded from review by a judicial order that acknowledges its own subordination.

Nothing about this sequence represented an aberration. It reflected the constitutional structure of post-Dayton Bosnia with perfect clarity. This was not a failure of the rule of law. It was the rule of law functioning exactly as designed, under foreign occupation.

The decision reshaped the political landscape. The Central Election Commission annulled his mandate, and an interim officeholder assumed the presidency. New elections in the Republika Srpska were scheduled through a chain of decisions that depended not on internal constitutional processes but on an external authority whose law had initiated the sequence.

The vote became a referendum on the legitimacy of the entire supervisory structure. Even Dodik’s opponents understood that the trial had dissolved the boundary between domestic governance and international administration.

International reactions revealed deeper contradictions.

Western diplomats described the case as a triumph of the rule of law while relying on a legal provision created outside the country’s constitutional framework. European officials spoke of judicial independence while defending an institution that stands outside judicial review.

Washington maintained a cautious tone yet quietly reconsidered the effectiveness of coercive tools, eventually lifting sanctions in recognition of their diminishing strategic value.

In Sarajevo, political elites claimed that the ruling affirmed state authority, while in Banja Luka it was perceived as confirmation that the central institutions function only as long as an external guarantor enforces their decisions.

Its significance lies not in the fate of one politician but in the exposure of a system where power is distributed but authority converges in the hands of a foreign official. It revealed that political conflict in Bosnia does not unfold within a sovereign constitutional order, but within a layered hierarchy in which ultimate coercive force remains international. It showed that the mechanism created to secure peace now generates political estrangement and deepens mistrust among the groups whose cooperation is essential for any genuine democratic stability.

Washington has not abolished the Office of the High Representative, but it has moved from active endorsement to strategic constraint. It quietly blocks expansive interventions and signals that the architecture of supervision cannot outlive its geopolitical moment. American diplomacy now speaks of responsible transition, managed disengagement, and a controlled phase-out within the coming political cycle.

The shift in Washington’s posture toward Bosnia in 2025 marked a turning point not only for the country but for the entire postwar philosophy that had governed American engagement in the Balkans.

For nearly three decades the United States treated Bosnia as the moral residue of a conflict it had been slow to stop and therefore obligated to manage. Bosnia was the place where the West rehearsed the idea that post conflict societies could be stabilized through a combination of international oversight, constitutional engineering and external discipline.

That belief, however, depended on a unipolar world, on a geopolitical environment in which American power could be extended almost indefinitely without strategic cost.

By 2025 that world had dissolved. Washington’s attention had shifted decisively to Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific. The war in Ukraine, the rise of China and the erosion of American military overmatch left little room for a Balkan protectorate conceived in the moral language of the 1990s.

The quiet decision to lift sanctions on Dodik reflected this transformation. It was not an endorsement of any local political actor. It was an acknowledgment that punitive tools had ceased to produce outcomes and that the architecture of coercion built after Dayton no longer aligned with American strategic priorities. Washington’s move signaled that the United States no longer intended to enforce the day-to-day mechanics of a constitutional system that Europe insisted on preserving.

It was a break with the assumption that Bosnia required perpetual guardianship. Instead of moral conditionality Washington embraced pragmatic stability. Instead of managing Bosnia’s political class it began preparing to step back and let the political forces within the country confront one another on their own terms.

Europe was unprepared for this shift because the European Union had grown accustomed to treating American presence as the backbone of its Balkan strategy. European policy toward Bosnia was never fully autonomous. It was calibrated to the confidence that Washington would ultimately guarantee stability if European management faltered.

When the United States began to withdraw from this role it exposed the EU’s inability to assume strategic responsibility.

Brussels had built its influence on procedure, not power. It knew how to coordinate dialogues, design roadmaps, and issue communiqués, but it lacked the political unity and geopolitical weight to replace American authority.

Germany’s insistence on preserving the High Representative did not reflect strategic clarity but strategic dependence. It masked the absence of a European alternative with the extension of a mechanism created when Europe was incapable of acting without American initiative.

For European policymakers, particularly in Berlin, this dependence created a deeper attachment to the moral vocabulary of the 1990s. It treats the High Representative not as a provisional mechanism but as a guardian of stability. What was designed to stop a war has become, in European imagination, the precondition of political order itself. It is a worldview frozen in time: moralism without sovereignty, supervision without end.

The year 2025 marked a deeper rupture because it became clear that Bosnia was no longer a central theater of Western moral identity. In the 1990s American intervention in the Balkans had been framed as a moral test of the post Cold War order. Bosnia was where the West believed it could demonstrate that atrocity would not return to Europe.

The the shifting winds of the strategic world of 2025 no longer allow such experiments. The United States is facing simultaneous crises and rising powers. It no longer has the luxury of maintaining elaborate supervisory structures in regions where its fundamental interests were limited.

Bosnia, once symbolically central to the Western narrative, now belonged to the category of inherited commitments that no longer justified attention or resources.

This recalibration was not a retreat, but a redistribution of strategic focus. It reflected the logic of a multipolar world in which even great powers must prioritize. Washington made clear through its actions that Bosnia’s stability would now depend primarily on local responsibility and regional diplomacy, not on American enforcement.

The message was that the era of externally maintained balance had expired. If Bosnia was to function as a state it would have to experience the consequences of its own political decisions, both constructive and destructive. The United States no longer sought to shape outcomes but to avoid entanglement.

Europe, however, interpreted the American shift not as a structural adjustment but as a vacuum. Its instinct was to double down on administrative control, to insist that the High Representative remain the axis around which the entire system turns, to treat Bosnia as a fragile ward that cannot be left unsupervised.

This divergence between American realism and European guardianship revealed the philosophical fracture at the heart of the Western alliance.

Washington sees sovereignty as something that must eventually be exercised. Europe sees sovereignty as something too dangerous to permit. Washington moves toward a world defined by power, competition, and hard choices.

Europe clings to the belief that conflicts can be managed through endless supervision.

The American pivot therefore transformed Bosnia into a geopolitical symbol once again, not of humanitarian intervention but of Western disunity. The country now stands between two fading visions of order. The American vision that once lifted Bosnia into the realm of moral experimentation is giving way to strategic restraint. The European vision that once relied on American power is struggling to maintain its instruments without the partner that made them viable.

The year 2025 did not simply mark a change in policy. It marked the end of an era in which Bosnia served as the stage on which the West enacted its moral drama. What remains is a geopolitical reality in which the country must face the responsibilities of sovereignty because the world that once denied it those responsibilities has no further interest in carrying them.

Each of the three constitutive peoples interprets the postwar order not through abstract constitutional theory but through the wounds and fears that shaped their experience of the conflict.

Dayton did not create a neutral structure that all could inhabit equally. It created a framework that each group reads through the memory of its own survival. The Bosniaks, who suffered the greatest demographic losses and saw the territorial fragmentation of the country as a direct threat to their physical existence, view Dayton primarily as a guarantee against partition. For them the agreement is a shield that prevents the disintegration of a state whose collapse once seemed imminent.

The complexity of the institutional system, the vetoes, and the cumbersome procedures are considered acceptable costs because they preserve the territorial continuity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the Bosniak narrative Dayton is imperfect but necessary, a compromise that stopped the war yet must be defended against any attempt to weaken the central institutions.

Behind this view lies a deep fear that decentralization is simply the slow path to dissolution, a fear reinforced by the memory of a conflict in which geography determined life or death.

The Croatian perspective emerges from the opposite experience. Croats constitute the smallest of the three peoples and are concentrated in regions where their electoral weight is overshadowed by Bosniak majorities. In theory Dayton placed them on equal constitutional footing with the other groups. In practice it gave them equality without weight.

The repeated election of a Croatian member of the state presidency by Bosniak voters, against the preference of Croatian constituencies, confirmed their sense that the system recognizes them symbolically but not substantively. Their municipalities are often governed by coalitions that do not reflect their demographic reality, and the structure of the Federation leaves them with limited political leverage.

For many Croats Dayton is not a protective arrangement, but an unfulfilled promise. It offers recognition but not influence, status without security. What the Croats seek through electoral reform is not a revision of the peace but a restoration of its original equilibrium. They see themselves as the least numerous but most exposed community, a bridge between the Western Balkans and Central Europe, yet treated as a disposable component of a system designed to avoid upsetting the larger actors.

This experience of structural marginalization is reinforced by a recurring electoral phenomenon that has become the clearest symbol of Croatian political impotence. The presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina is built on the premise that each constitutive people elects its own representative. The logic is simple and foundational.

In the Bosnian constitution, constituent peoples are not cultural categories but constitutional subjects with collective political rights.

The Bosniak member represents the Bosniaks, the Serb member represents the Serbs, and the Croatian member represents the Croats.

This arrangement was meant to guarantee balance, recognition, and equality among groups that entered the peace exhausted and deeply skeptical of one another. It was one of Dayton’s essential safeguards, a mechanism designed to prevent domination by the majority and ensure that sovereignty would always be shared.

In practice this principle has been systematically undermined. Željko Komšić, who holds the Croatian seat in the presidency, has been elected multiple times almost entirely by Bosniak voters. His electoral victories are numerically legitimate but politically devastating because they render the constitutional logic meaningless.

Croatian constituencies overwhelmingly reject him, yet he repeatedly takes office through the support of a demographic majority that Dayton was explicitly designed to restrain. What was intended as a mechanism of equality has become an instrument of majoritarian leverage.

Each election of Komšić confirms for Croats that their formal rights do not translate into substantive representation and that their status as a constitutive people is protected in language but not in practice. The effects of this dynamic have eroded Croatian confidence in the state more deeply than any legislative dispute or institutional conflict.

Croats increasingly view Bosnia and Herzegovina as a framework in which their political voice can be overridden at will. Their demand for electoral reform is therefore not a nationalist project but a plea for the restoration of the parity Dayton promised. They insist that no community can be considered equal if it does not have the capacity to choose the person who speaks in its name.

The Croatian narrative of frustration is not rooted in secessionist intention but in the experience of being represented by someone elected against their overwhelming will. It is the clearest example of how a system that was designed to protect all groups has gradually drifted toward privileging one at the expense of another.

The Komšić phenomenon is therefore more than an electoral anomaly. It is the most visible sign that the equilibrium envisioned at Dayton has tilted, that one group has acquired the ability to shape the representation of another and that the international custodians of the system are unwilling to correct the imbalance because doing so would expose the fragility of the order they are trying to preserve.

Western diplomats periodically voice understanding for this grievance, yet no High Representative has ever dared to impose a solution, and no EU negotiation chapter has ever been conditioned on its resolution. The imbalance is treated as a regrettable but immutable fact of demographic life – too explosive to touch, too blatent to ignore.

The Serb interpretation of Dayton is rooted in a distinct historical memory. For Serbs the peace agreement is not an abstract constitutional text but a contract that guaranteed the political autonomy of the Republika Srpska and defined the limits of state authority. They view the postwar decades not as natural institutional evolution but as a steady erosion of that contract.

Competences once belonging to the entities were transferred upward through decisions imposed by the High Representative rather than achieved through domestic consensus. Laws were rewritten without parliamentary authority, officials dismissed without judicial review, and state-level institutions expanded through mechanisms never contained in the original agreement.

What was conceived as a balance of powers became, in their eyes, a gradual centralization executed by an external authority. Defending the autonomy of the entity is therefore interpreted not as secessionism but as constitutional fidelity, a refusal to allow a negotiated settlement to be transformed into a flexible instrument interpreted at will by international actors.

These three interpretations do not coexist peacefully. They collide in every institutional debate and every reform proposal. The Bosniak fear of fragmentation collides with the Croatian fear of political erasure. The Croatian demand for genuine equality collides with the Bosniak insistence on pluralistic representation. The Serb insistence on the original terms of Dayton collides with the Western belief that the agreement must be adapted to create a functional state.

Bosnia therefore operates not on the basis of shared constitutional principles, but on three incompatible historical memories. Each group defends not only its interests but its own version of what the country is supposed to be.

The architecture of the state is inseparable from the emotional geography of the war. Dayton froze the frontlines, but it did not harmonize the narratives that emerged from them. Bosnia’s political system is not simply complex. It is a system in which three different interpretations of sovereignty coexist under one legal roof, each convinced that it is defending the only version of the peace that can guarantee its survival.

Bosnia stands today at the fracture line between two opposing conceptions of how political order is built and sustained. One maintains that sovereignty can be engineered and supervised indefinitely. The other recognizes that sovereignty must be exercised even imperfectly if a state is ever to mature into a political subject rather than remain an object of international management.

The United States is cautiously shifting toward the latter.

Europe remains committed to the former.

No democracy would accept an unelected foreign official empowered to dismiss governors, rewrite legislation, overrule constitutional courts, and sanction elected leaders without judicial review. However this remains the normal constitutional condition of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The anniversary of the Dayton Agreement is not a celebration of peace but a reminder of the limits of managed sovereignty, the illusions of external control, and the political adolescence that results when responsibility is denied for too long.

Bosnia is stable, but the stability rings hollow without the substance of sovereignty. Stability without freedom cannot endure. It is postponement. It is a carefully managed intermission in which sovereignty remains theoretical, waiting for the moment when the custodians step back and the country must finally decide what kind of state it intends to become.

Bosnia and Herzegovina does not require deeper supervision. It requires the return of political responsibility to those who must live with the consequences of their choices.

Thirty years after Dayton, peace endures, but sovereignty remains suspended. A state cannot mature while governed by an external hand. Sovereignty, like faith, survives only where it is lived.

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Recently, a second wave of No Kings protests spread across the nation. Based on the weird dance routines, unhinged leftist meltdowns, and angry sign-waving retirees that the protests produced, the weekend’s antics were a smashing success. The left has successfully alienated normal America.

Regular people want nothing to do with a political program that sponsors repeated melodramatic temper tantrums over a badly lost election. If the protests produce political realignment along those lines, those changes will be all to the good.

Still, there is something extremely sad about the videos that are surfacing on Twitter: first and foremost because they reveal what our nation’s grandparents have decided to do with their retirement. Instead of spending their golden years teaching their grandchildren how to embroider, how to fish, how to pray, or how to bake bread, far too many grandparents, grandmothers especially, are raising their fists at the glowering sky and decrying the impending end of our sacred democracy.

The evidence that they rally to support their claims is thin and does little to conjure up the “educated citizenry” of Thomas Jefferson’s imaginings. Attendees claim that President Trump is a racist, a fascist, and a rude, rude man.

Where do they get this? CNN and the women on The View have been speaking in hushed tones for months about the grave threats facing our nation — evidence enough that democracy is in danger and protests are morally obligatory. Those “facts” are therefore indisputable. The fact that President Trump handily won the popular vote by an extraordinary margin is inconvenient, and therefore is easily ignored.

The nation’s seniors do have one thing right: something is deeply wrong in America. But they have badly misdiagnosed the problem, and instead of looking squarely in the mirror for the source of society’s ills, they have decided that the Oval Office houses a better scapegoat.

One of the measures of a society’s vigor turns on how that society treats its elderly. Communities that care for their aging relatives benefit enormously from their love, wisdom, and insight. Further, the discipline of caring for the elderly helps young people to grow in virtue, in patience, and in holiness.

By contrast, those communities that cast aside their elderly suffer. They lose out on the lessons that elderly people have stored up throughout their lives. They miss the chance to learn about life and death, to grow in gratitude, and to prepare for the end that comes inevitably for us all.

But the obligations that a society owes to its elderly population are not one-sided. Elderly people are responsible for living lives that are honorable so that when they reach the twilight of their life, they have something valuable to impart to the young to whom they still owe a serious duty.

Those who shirk this responsibility and refuse to grow up or refuse to embrace the hardship that comes with living life well end up like hollowed out husks. Their bodies are old but their souls are immature, childish, and weak. Their selfishness creates generational poverty, robbing their children and their children’s children of a treasured inheritance.

Vice President JD Vance famously critiqued the “childless cat ladies“ of the Democratic party, arguing that they had no stake in the future of the country because they decided to raise cats instead of children. Some of that critique is certainly fair, but not all the blame belongs on the shoulders of women who are childless by choice. Much of the fault lies with those women’s parents — all too often, the heroes of the No Kings protests — who failed to teach their daughters (and sons) how beautiful it is to raise children and to nurture a family.

They have no stake in the country’s future either, and now, unsurprisingly, they spend their days imbibing left wing talking points, dying their hair every color of the rainbow, and doing dance routines on major intersections. At best, their behavior is undignified. At worst, it is the dereliction of a sacred duty.

Is it any wonder that the young people of today are rootless, anxious, and in many cases, scared to have children? What kind of legacy have they received? Most importantly, where are their grandparents?

Odds are, their grandfathers are not fixing cars, building furniture, painting houses, and telling their sons and grandsons to man up, love their wives, and go to church on Sunday. Their grandmothers are not reading books, rocking babies, and making Sunday a day of rest and beauty. Those losses have generational repercussions.

Now more than ever, young people desire maturity, responsibility, a return to tradition, and a return to virtue. This desire explains the massive influx toward traditional liturgy, traditional dress, and traditional gender roles; all of which the up-and-coming generation, especially young men, find increasingly so fascinating. These are signs of hope.

Of course, any young person can stand securely on the bedrock of Christian culture and Western civilization, regardless of the failures of parents or grandparents. However, young people deserve forebears who are honorable, self-sacrificial, and decent — people to whom respect is owed, not just because of the commandment but also because their behavior itself commands respect. Only decadent societies ignore the misadventures of their elders. Serious societies treat their public indiscretions like the blaring alarm bells that they are.

Young women lag behind young men in their return to tradition: on every issue, they are much more liberal, from abortion to global warming to gun control. Furthermore, young women today are more liberal than young women used to be.

These sad statistics are directly tied to the demographic breakdown at the rallies over the weekend where, unsurprisingly, most attendees were women. However, in some sense, they are not necessarily to blame. They are following the ideology of their youth and the formation they received to their natural ends: the perpetual unraveling of the whole social order, a project that begins with the destruction of the family.

Starting in the sixties, today’s grandmothers were convinced by the perverse Simone de Beauvoir and her confreres that they belonged anywhere but in the home. In a 1975 interview with Betty Friedan, De Beauvoir said the quiet part of radical feminism out loud, stating that “[i]n my opinion, as long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed.” Radical feminists trained their guns on the family, following another line of de Beauvoir’s thinking from the same interview saying that “[n]o woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. . . . Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”

Many families have been sacrificed on the altar of second wave feminism. Scared of the oppression bogeyman that they were taught to fear, many women since the sixties have rejected softness, meekness, mildness, and the rest of the Marian virtues while simultaneously tossing out the practical trappings of domesticity.

Bereft of their teachers, many young women today find themselves unable to hem a skirt, fix a button, plan a home cooked meal, or properly appoint a home. Worse, many young women appear never to have learned the beauty, poise, and grace that flow from a deep appreciation and understanding of what a gift it is to be a woman and a mother.

Those are lessons that mothers and grandmothers must teach their daughters and granddaughters. When they do not, chaos ensues — a reality our country is now living through. We are all poorer for the loss of the true matriarchy that should have been busy keeping the home fires burning for the last sixty years.

Oppression is a tricky word because it’s bandied about with great facility these days, typically as a tool for creating jealousy, bitterness, and division. That strategy has certainly worked on women.

The radical feminist project — killing the “myth of maternity and the maternal instinct”— did not usher in a new age of female liberation. Rather, it created a generation of deeply unhappy women who, upon successfully throwing off the yoke of joyful family life, desperately needed a new oppressor to train their sights upon.

“Fascism” has become just such a fashionable oppressor — a floating signifier for all unwanted hierarchies which must, of course, be smashed. But to be frank, Trump Derangement Syndrome does not look like liberation, nor does the perpetual war on femininity, maternity, beauty, and order that many on the left persistently wage savor of freedom.

Our country is reaping a poor return on the promises made to the young women of the sixties in real time. Instead of a generation of dignified, lovely, graceful, and gracious grandmothers, far too many of the grandmothers of today choose to spend their days militantly protesting in absurd fashion without a grandchild in sight.

America is a young country, and a great deal can be done, especially in America, by applying pressure to one’s bootstraps. That attitude has its drawbacks; namely, it fosters an individualistic attitude that can stymie instinctual respect for one’s elders.

After all, if achieving the American dream is all a matter of individual effort, then the individual must be all that really matters at the end of the day. Age is just a number. Hustle is more valuable than wisdom.

In America, anyone can be a millionaire. Sadly, this constitutional inclination towards individualism has allowed us to undervalue generational holiness.

As our country ages and goes through the normal growing pains associated with articulating a robust identity, it is critical for Americans to recognize that virtue matters— and not just in the here and now.

Virtue is neither a question of taste nor a matter of private importance. Generations to come will thrive or suffer based on the choices made by the men and women who are coming of age today. An “educated” citizenry alone will not stave off destruction. A virtuous citizenry has a much better shot, and more importantly, the children and grandchildren of virtuous people will be themselves inclined towards virtue, decency, honor, and self-respect.

Young people, especially young women, should heed the warning that the No Kings protestors inadvertently leveled about kingship: “Woman, how divine your mission / Here upon our natal sod! / For the hand that rocks the cradle / Is the hand that rules the world.”

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Europe’s support for Ukraine has become more than policy. It is a moral ritual for a continent that no longer trusts its own purpose. What began as solidarity has turned into self-punishment, a crusade of virtue that drains both wealth and will. Germany, once Europe’s pragmatist, now embodies this strange devotion to decline. The Union mistakes endurance for courage and sacrifice for strategy, spending its future to preserve the illusion of moral clarity.

There are many ways for a civilization to die. Civilizations do not fall like walls; they fade like prayers that no one remembers how to repeat.

Some perish by conquest, others by decadence, still others by exhaustion. Europe’s tragedy is more discreet. It dies not from lack of wealth or knowledge but from a slow corrosion of meaning. It dies while still congratulating itself for being alive.

Out of fear of history, the European Union was born. It sought to tame power with law, to replace the drama of nations with the serenity of administration, to create a civilization so rational that it would no longer need courage. The ambition was noble in theory and lethal in effect. In seeking to overcome tragedy, Europe abolished the vocabulary that gives tragedy form.

Traumatized by the twentieth century, Europe’s elites learned to distrust destiny itself. They sought to build a world where guilt would replace glory, where process would replace providence. In trying to escape the cycle of power and punishment, they attempted to abolish the very grammar of consequence. Having survived its own excesses, Europe sought not renewal but anesthesia. What began as a project of peace became a sanctuary from reality.

What began as liberal humanism has hardened into a moral empire. The creed is inclusion, the liturgy is compliance, and the heresy is doubt. Its temples are ministries, its saints are victims, and its heaven is procedural harmony.

For decades the continent lived under the illusion that peace could be permanent if only it were managed by the right kind of technocrats. The EU turned memory into regulation and replaced sovereignty with procedure. When violence returned, the continent had forgotten how to think politically. It could only think morally.

When the first missiles fell on Ukraine, the reflex was not strategic but sentimental. The aggression itself was brutal and real, a reminder that evil still takes territorial form. Yet instead of facing it with clarity, Europe retreated into performance. The language of values filled the vacuum that once belonged to statecraft. Brussels discovered in Ukraine a mirror for its own conscience. The defense of democracy became a way of defending the European project itself, a grand act of moral self-preservation disguised as solidarity.

Within months, Ukraine ceased to be a country and became a catechism. To stand with Ukraine became the secular confession of the European elite. Flags appeared on ministry buildings, hashtags multiplied, speeches grew solemn. The gestures were precise, the emotion sincere, the understanding superficial. The continent soon transformed empathy into ideology.

In Brussels, empathy has become a kind of incense. It perfumes every meeting room, rising from committees as if from an altar. Policies are drafted as prayers to a nameless deity called humanity, and the bureaucrats speak of moral progress with the certainty once reserved for salvation.

The pilgrimage to Kyiv became a ritual of legitimacy. Each new visit from Brussels was staged like a sacrament of renewal. Cameras flashed, promises were made, new tranches of aid were announced. What mattered was not the effect but the gesture. The act of feeling right replaced the act of doing right.

Since 2022, the European Union has entered a state of moral mobilization without war. The borders of Europe no longer move on maps, but in minds. Bureaucracies speak the language of resistance, economies behave as if under siege, and daily life has taken on the rhythm of a quiet emergency. The continent wages war not against an enemy, but against doubt itself.

Moral intensity remains genuine, yet it conceals exhaustion. The continent no longer believes in power, seeking redemption through compassion instead. The land that once ruled half the world now measures its virtue by its willingness to endure economic ruin for symbolic causes.

This new faith is not Christianity reborn but Christianity inverted. The cross has been replaced by the banner of universal empathy, and the idea of salvation has been reduced to policy language about shared values. The European mind replaced transcendence with tolerance and in doing so lost the grammar of hope. What remains is a civilization fluent in compassion but illiterate in redemption. It mourns injustice yet cannot forgive, celebrates rights yet doubts meaning. The EU’s moral language sounds universal, but it is only the echo of a faith it no longer believes in.

Beneath the surface of institutions lies a deeper crisis, anthropological, not administrative. The Union was built on the fiction of the autonomous individual, yet every human being is born dependent, bound, and unfinished. A newborn cannot feed itself; a dying man cannot bury himself. Between those two helpless moments lies all of politics. A civilization that forgets this truth will replace belonging with bureaucracy and call it freedom.

Few nations have paid so quietly and so dearly as Germany. Since 1945, the country has defined itself through renunciation. To be modern and moral meant to distrust ambition. The result was a political culture that treats every act of self-assertion as a potential relapse into sin. The war in Ukraine gave that neurosis new life.

The price of this moral certainty has been immense, though rarely spoken aloud. Inflation has become doctrine. Electricity rose by more than eighty percent. Gas by over one hundred and forty. Basic food staples climbed by thirty to forty percent.

In 2023, German households paid on average €0.38 per kilowatt-hour for electricity, one of the highest rates in Europe. Natural-gas prices reached €0.1187 per kilowatt-hour, roughly seventy-four percent higher than before the war.

Milk, bread, flour, tolls, even paper bags. Every receipt now reads like a confession. The kebab, once the working man’s lunch in Berlin or Cologne, costs twice what it did before 2022. The hands that prepare it are the same, the ingredients unchanged, but the meaning has shifted. It is no longer food. It is testimony.

Statistics speak the language of economics, but behind each number lies a confession of faith, the belief that hardship itself can purify.

Germany has not been at war, but it has been mobilized. The war did not reach its borders, but it redrew them in the mind. From that moment, the rules of life changed. Every rise in price was explained as moral necessity: higher gas bills as the price of independence from Russia, higher rents as the cost of saving the planet, higher food prices as the proof of European solidarity. To ask about the cost became indecent. To question it was to betray the cause.

Not merely an economic crisis, this is the quiet imposition of a new creed, suffering as virtue. At a small grill in Düsseldorf, a man no longer prints the new price; he says it softly, apologetically: eight euros now, brother, sorry. The gesture is small, but the meaning is vast.

When a street meal becomes a luxury, something deeper has cracked. Germany is not only experiencing inflation. It is experiencing abstraction, the moment when prices rise and questions fall silent.

Sanctions and energy shortages were not merely tolerated; they were embraced as proof of moral seriousness. Industrial decline was reframed as ethical progress. The same society that dismantled its nuclear plants in the name of virtue now dismantles its industry for the same reason.

Germany has confused repentance with responsibility. Germany now taxes like a rich state, governs like a poor one, and signals like an empire. Its contradictions have become theology. Each policy is a sermon, each crisis a rite of purification.

Behind the moral grandeur lies fatigue. The public senses the absurdity but lacks the language to oppose it. To doubt the official narrative is to risk isolation. Only at the edges of respectability does that language begin to reappear.

Movements like the AfD, dismissed as reactionary, have become vessels for questions that the official discourse can no longer contain. The national conversation has become a sermon. A once pragmatic nation now finds its meaning in ritualized guilt.

Across Brussels, institutions function like a stage without a plot. Summits are held, resolutions passed, statements released. Each gesture repeats the same refrain of unity and resolve. Yet the machinery operates without purpose. It produces words as a substitute for will.

In the city that houses Europe’s power, speech has become ritual rather than reason. Its vocabulary is theological, not practical. The most sacred word in this new catechism is signal effect.

Not the consequence, not the cost, but the appearance. The effect of seeming virtuous has replaced the substance of being sovereign. Europe has turned conscience into currency and belief into branding.

The European project no longer promises salvation of souls but salvation through systems. Its theology is technological. Its promised heaven is management.

Dependent for protection and coherence, the Union still lectures the world on moral independence. The relationship resembles that of an aging aristocrat to a younger patron, pride disguising dependence, vanity masking fragility.

Across the continent, governments speak in a double language. Prices rise, wages stagnate, yet every question is answered with a moral slogan. Citizens are told to consume less, to travel less, to heat less, as if restraint were salvation. The continent no longer measures prosperity but purity. Its rulers have turned scarcity into sacrament.

When Washington inevitably turns its full attention to the Pacific, Europe will face the silence it has feared for decades. No alliance can fill the void of conviction. The absence of American supervision will expose the spiritual emptiness that Brussels has so skillfully concealed beneath its rhetoric.

Before 1914, Europe’s unity was not bureaucratic but spiritual. The continent was fragmented by states yet united by form. Cathedrals, universities, and music spoke a common language of beauty. The bells of a thousand towns once marked the rhythm of the sacred week, binding labor to liturgy. The peasant knew the psalm as well as the prince knew the creed. The continent breathed through ritual, and its faith gave weight to every act of work and art.

Faith gave order to freedom, and art gave shape to truth. The balance between belief and reason produced an architecture of meaning that no modern ideology has replaced.

The European Union inherited the shell of that civilization but not its soul. It preserved the techniques of diplomacy without the metaphysics of destiny. It built institutions without transcendence, commerce without communion, prosperity without purpose.

Europe’s skylines still bear the silhouettes of churches, but their towers no longer point toward anything. They remain as stone metaphors for a civilization that remembers the gestures of reverence but has forgotten the object of devotion. The old Europe built monuments to eternity; the new one builds frameworks for compliance.

Modern Europeans can no longer answer the simplest of questions: what is all this for? Their ancestors built cathedrals to praise God; they fund think tanks to measure happiness. The contrast is unbearable, and so they distract themselves with moral performance.

In the East, the European project meets its mirror image. The nations once mocked as provincial — Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia — are now repositories of memory. They remember what the West has forgotten, that freedom is not the absence of authority but the fruit of sacrifice.

These societies still carry the genetic memory of suffering. They know the texture of occupation, the taste of hunger, the humility of survival. In Lviv or Vilnius, in Novi Sad or Zagreb, the elderly still speak of winters when bread was a currency and silence a form of resistance. In these places, patriotism is not a theory but a scar. They have known both empire and ruin, and they know that history does not forgive weakness.

Their suspicion of Brussels is not ignorance, but instinct. They recognize in its bureaucratic idealism the familiar scent of utopia and they know where utopias lead.

For them, Europe is not an abstraction but a fragile inheritance, and they guard it not with lectures but with prayer. The future of the continent may depend less on its enlightened centers than on these stubborn margins that still believe life has structure, that history has direction, and that faith has power.

Ukraine’s courage and suffering have revealed the hollowness of Europe’s moral theater. The invasion by Russia was a crime of power, cynical and merciless, and its victims deserve more than hashtags and resolutions. The war shows what conviction looks like and therefore embarrasses those who speak of it most loudly. In Kyiv one finds a sense of sacrifice that Brussels has turned into performance.

Admiration for Ukraine reveals precisely what the West itself has lost: faith, patriotism, and endurance. It celebrates these virtues in others because it can no longer live them itself. The land that once defined modernity now survives by reflecting borrowed light.

The tragedy of Ukraine is real, but the continent’s fascination with it is psychological. It is the fascination of a culture that senses its own decline and seeks meaning in someone else’s struggle. What is called solidarity is often nostalgia, nostalgia for an age when belief was still possible.

This faith soon found its measure not in words but in money. Since 2022, the European Union and its member states have collectively pledged more than 158 billion US dollars in aid to Ukraine, a sum unprecedented in modern European history. The number is less an act of policy than a measure of belief, a monetary expression of moral anxiety.

Yet moral fervor cannot last forever. Inflation, energy shortages, and political fragmentation will erode the fragile consensus that keeps the illusion intact. Already the social fabric trembles. Populist parties rise not because they promise miracles but because they speak of things that are still tangible: work, land, family, and nation.

In Germany, even the much-maligned AfD has drawn strength from that same hunger for the tangible. It speaks in tones the establishment can no longer hear. Speaking of home, duty, and continuity, words once central to European civilization, is now treated as subversive.

No bureaucracy can inspire loyalty forever. The EU is no exception. Once the benefits dwindle, the moral narrative will collapse. The Union will discover that it cannot command sacrifice without offering belonging.

Europe has turned sacrifice into its last ideology. It has come to believe that suffering itself is proof of righteousness, that exhaustion is evidence of moral depth. Yet a civilization that treats pain as meaning will soon forget the meaning of freedom.

At that moment, the continent will face its most difficult question: whether it wants to remain a civilization, or become an exhibit. If it chooses comfort over conviction, it will end not with an explosion but with applause, surrounded by symbols of a greatness it no longer understands.

Renewal will not come through Brussels nor through Washington. It will begin at the margins, where people still remember the texture of life unmediated by ideology. It will begin in small nations that know their limits and refuse to be ashamed of them. It will begin in communities that rebuild the link between freedom and form, between compassion and order.

To recover, the continent must remember that love of home is not regression but responsibility. It must learn again that peace is not the absence of struggle but the presence of purpose. The future will belong to those who can reconnect justice with gratitude, liberty with loyalty, and progress with restraint.

Its survival depends on rediscovering the humility of rootedness. The parish, the village, and the nation are not relics of a darker age, but are the organs through which culture breathes. Without them, Europe becomes a museum of humanitarian slogans, haunted by the memory of its own vitality.

To rebuild itself, the continent must first learn to stop performing. It must exchange empathy for courage, sentiment for structure, and virtue-signaling for vision. The task is not to resurrect the past but to remember that continuity itself is sacred.

Perhaps Europe’s rebirth will not come through reform but through repentance. The continent may have to pass through the fire of its own forgetfulness to remember what it once was. Renewal begins where pride breaks and gratitude returns. When the nations kneel not before Brussels, but before the mystery of being itself, then Europe will rise not as a system but as a soul.

Nor is Europe’s fate distant from America’s own. Across the Atlantic, the same moral exhaustion gathers under brighter lights. Europe is only the first to forget that politics without transcendence cannot hold.

When the chroniclers of this age examine the ruins, they will find no conqueror, no decisive battle, and no single catastrophe. They will find a civilization that slowly talked itself out of existence. They will note that it mistook procedure for destiny and compassion for command. They will wonder how a continent that once built cathedrals of stone ended up worshipping bureaucratic forms.

Yet history is never entirely merciless. A civilization can die only if it forgets that it has a soul. Somewhere between the Baltic and the Adriatic, between the Pyrenees and the Carpathians, that soul still stirs in language, in liturgy, and in the stubborn memory of what it means to belong.

Before renewal can come, there must be remembrance. A candle lit in a ruined church. A family gathered around a table. A people refusing to forget who they are.

Europe will not be reborn in parliaments, but in hearts that still know silence. The future will belong to those who can pray again.

If the continent is to live again, it will not be through institutions or treaties, but through the quiet return of faith in the truth, in family, in nation, and in God. Only then will the funeral pyre become a signal fire, and the land that once sought to abolish history may yet begin it anew.

What begins in repentance ends in recognition. To see again what is near, to honor what is small, to kneel before what endures, that is how civilizations remember how to live.

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On this first episode, our hosts interview postliberal thinker Daniel Whitehead.

Mr. Whitehead served in the General Counsel’s Office of Governor Ron DeSantis and has clerked on two federal courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. He is a fellow of the Claremont Institute and James Wilson Institute. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Hungary Foundation.

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At the heart of every conservative idea lies the traditional family. That is precisely why the family has been under siege for years. Through the relentless promotion of isolation and radical individualism, the mainstream media has attacked the very pillars of society, the sacred institution of mother and father.

We have been told that a woman is only free if she rejects her family, that husband and children are shackles holding her back from happiness, that fatherhood is obsolete. These are not truths; they are ideological illusions designed to dismantle the family and erode our moral order.

As the family disintegrates, so too does the cultural fabric that sustains a free people. What emerges in its place is a form of soft enslavement, where egoism becomes the only virtue, and consumerism the new temple of our age. The so-called “freedoms” of modern society often mask the worst kind of bondage: submission to appetites, to screens, to markets, to the false gods of a secular age.

Where once Americans dreamed of the family dinner table, media now glorify the atomized individual, disconnected from kin, hostile to tradition, and adrift in a sea of empty slogans.

To preserve the traditional family is to preserve civilization itself. The family is not a prison but a school of virtue, a preparation for citizenship, and a sanctuary where love tempers human weakness.

Yet, in today’s culture, love has been traded for narcissism. We love others only to the extent they resemble ourselves; we no longer cherish differences as blessings but treat them as threats. A society that cannot uphold marriage and family is a society that cannot endure.

The crisis of the family is inseparable from the moral crisis of our time. When man becomes the center of his own universe, he has no room left for God, for neighbor, or nation. Marriage fails, not because it is obsolete, but because we are teaching people to worship the self.

Narcissism rejects responsibility; it cannot sustain a covenant. And without covenant, families crumble. From this decay flows violence, alienation, and despair. The modern world promises progress, yet in chasing technology we have regressed in soul.

Empathy is mocked as weakness; strength is measured in slogans rather than in sacrifice. A godless society inevitably manufactures its own idols turning food, sex, politics, and technology into objects of devotion. Man cannot live on idols; he becomes their slave.

The answer is not complicated. We must return to the enduring truths of faith, family, and virtue. The Church is the great community of believers; the family is the “little church,” the first community of love and sacrifice. To defend the family is to defend human dignity itself. Every society that has abandoned this truth has paid the price in broken homes and broken souls.

Our survival as a people depends on whether we preserve the family. Just as the family once nurtured us, so now we must raise our voices to protect it. Political correctness cannot excuse cowardice. Those who fight for the family have not lost.

With hope and resolve, we look to future generations who will inherit a world where the soul, the family, and moral values still matter. In that struggle, our labor is not in vain.

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The question touches the very core of human existence. Across history, cultures and creeds have wrestled with the meaning of life: religion sees life as God’s gift, philosophy searches for rational principles to safeguard it, and modern science, blind to the spiritual, reduces life to what can be measured and dissected. Our attitude toward euthanasia is inseparable from our attitude toward life itself.

History offers a sobering warning. Euthanasia is not a new idea; it has already left blood on the pages of the past. Nazi Germany’s Aktion T4 program, from 1939 to 1941, killed over 70,000 people deemed “incurably ill.” These were not acts of mercy but systematic killings carried out under the mask of compassion.

This is the danger of blurring the line between empathy and abuse of power. Today’s secular culture cloaks euthanasia as a “right to die,” claiming compassion for the sick and dignity for the suffering. Yet in practice, it gives doctors the role of arbiters over life and death, something diametrically opposed to the Christian worldview.

Christianity teaches that man’s purpose is communion with God, in this life and the next. Euthanasia, however, romanticizes death as liberation and disguises suicide as compassion.

Even the term “euthanasia” has been twisted. From the Greek eu (“good”) and thanatos (“death”), it once signified a noble end, a courageous passing, like Antigone’s defiance or Hector’s sacrifice. It was not an escape from pain but an exalted act of dignity.

Today, it has been rebranded to justify killing, a direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath: “I will not give a deadly drug to anyone if asked, nor suggest such counsel.” A doctor who takes life ceases to be a healer and becomes an executioner.

As scripture reminds us: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). In a society that reduces man to a clever animal, denying his divine origin, euthanasia appears logical, but only because it excludes God as the Giver of life. The faithful pray for “a Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless, peaceful, and a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ.”

That “good death” is not administered by human hands but granted by God. Man is not an isolated individual. His life is bound to family, community, and the Creator. The death of one person is never his alone, it wounds all who love him.

Often, the desire for euthanasia is a cry of loneliness, not a free choice. True “dignity in dying” means to be surrounded by love, not to be dispatched by a syringe. Medical ethics reflect this truth.

In Serbia, as in much of the world, doctors swear not to kill, even at a patient’s request. The Serbian Medical Chamber condemns euthanasia as false compassion. The argument of pain is a false flag: in the Netherlands, where euthanasia is legal, only 4% of cases are due to pain. Most involve loneliness, abandonment, or the fear of being a burden.

In an age of advanced palliative care, with medications capable of eliminating even the severest pain, why should killing be portrayed as mercy?

The Fathers of the Church teach that death is a moment of reflection, repentance, and preparation for resurrection. Illness and mortality remind us that earthly life is not eternal. To paraphrase the teaching of Patriarch Pavle, suffering points us to the deeper meaning of existence.

To romanticize death is to rob it of its truth, and to rob the living of their chance to love the dying until the very end. Modernity preaches autonomy, but autonomy is distorted when reduced to individualism. Life is not private property to be disposed of like a commodity; it is a sacred gift entrusted by God.

True freedom is not the right to destroy ourselves but the ability to live responsibly, in relation to others and to the Creator. Our culture worships youth, convenience, and utility, while fearing death more than ever. This fear, paradoxically, drives the cult of euthanasia, a form of thanatolatry, the worship of death itself.

From liberal strongholds in Europe and North America, we see “death with dignity” movements that extend beyond the terminally ill to the depressed, the disabled, and the socially vulnerable. What begins as compassion becomes license for a culture of death.

Euthanasia is not mercy. It is dehumanization, reducing people to burdens or costs, and denying the sacredness of life. True compassion does not kill, it comforts, accompanies, and loves to the end.

The challenge before us is to reclaim a culture of life: to stand firm against false humanism and to affirm that every life, until its God-given end, is worthy of dignity, care, and love.

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However, Carlson’s footage of the spotless Moscow subway system and the “lack of booze-drenched hobos” throughout the public transportation system was markedly different from the average commuter experience throughout America. This year, President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Washington D.C. has transformed not just Union Station, but the city itself.

The thugs, crackheads, and vagrants pissing in the corner on Metro cars are gone. Tourists and young families can walk the streets of our nation’s capital unmolested for the first time in years. Which begs the question, how can a heavily sanctioned, internationally isolated pariah state in Russia keep public transport safe without deploying the military? The answer comes down to culture and values that are upheld by the state for the common good of the people.

Singapore offers what this author thinks is the answer. It comes down to what former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (often referred to as LKY) referred to as “First World behaviors.” These behaviors are embodied in the story of Singapore’s rise from backwater fishing village into one of the richest countries on Earth.

Today, it boasts a home ownership rate of 90%, and is widely known for low crime rates and a strong emphasis on public order and cleanliness. These accomplishments are even more impressive when you consider that Singapore possesses almost no natural resources or hinterland.

Values and culture, both of which were crafted and enforced by Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, are the reason why Singapore enjoys the prosperity that it does today. President Trump’s boldness in enforcing order over the heads of incompetent city mayors who oversee third-world levels of violencein their cities parallels LKY’s creation of the Singapore of today.

Like LKY, President Trump understands that making America Great Again means establishing a baseline of peace and basic cleanliness within urban spaces, quite literally the public square, to make a country’s great cities to be appealing to its residents and visitors. A country cannot be great if it allows filth to cover the sidewalks and criminals to stalk the streets.

LKY recognized that if his country were to survive, it would need to become an attractive destination for investment from wealthier countries. To attract this investment, LKY knew he had to make Singapore personally appealing for Westerners to visit. “Getting the population that has been behaving like a third world to start behaving like the first world,” was the hardest obstacle LKY encountered in his quest to bring prosperity to his country, regardless of how many houses or schools the state built or how many corporations he attracted to the country.

“We built up the infrastructure…The difficult part was getting the people to change their habits so that they behaved…not like third world citizens spitting and littering all over the place”, LKY remarked to the New York Times in 2007.

The Singaporean government would run monthly campaigns with the goal of eliminating behavior like public urination, spitting, open air drug use, and littering. Those that continued to defy these campaigns were first fined by the police and, if necessary, jailed by the authorities.

LKY understood that to build a wealthy country from nothing, he would need to create a culture of meritocracy and discipline, a “rugged society” that placed social harmony and self-reliance over rampant individualism. This culture meant that everyone was responsible for the common good of public spaces, down to the most mundane locations like public restrooms.

Public restrooms in American cities are largely avoided due to health and safety hazards. That’s not the case in Singapore. The 2010 campaign, Let’s Observe Ourselves (LOO), launched by the Restroom Association (Singapore) (RAS) in conjunction with the Singapore Tourism Board aimed to have 70% of the 30,000 public restrooms in the country achieve a three-star rating for cleanliness.

The criteria for this rating system analyzed whether the public restroom is clean, lacking in odor and litter, and has fully functional amenities. This is very much the bare minimum for Singapore. RAS President Tan Puay Hoon remarked at the time, “For us, toilet etiquette reflects Singapore’s culture. It tells people how civilized we are…We are a First World country, and we want a gracious society to reflect that.”

Think of the last time you used a public restroom in a major American metropolitan area. The experience is night and day.

Americans gaze upon Singapore’s stuffy orderliness and scoff. The police detaining an American citizen for littering, noise nuisances, or general rudeness would be seen as overzealous at best and unconstitutional at the worst. Yet America today is oddly like Singapore during its rise. It boasts considerable wealth, but Americans in our great cities expect and are confronted with third-world behavior and violence daily.

LKY painted a picture of early Singapore where “the unemployed…would sell on the pavements and streets in total disregard of traffic. The resulting litter and dirt, the stench of rotting food, and the clutter and obstructions turned…the city into a slum.”

Any tourist or commuter in New York City knows that this description would also be apt for certain parts of the city. Dead bodies, stabbings, gropers, arsonists and unhinged lunatics like Jordan Neely are regular occurrences on public transit throughout the city.

In Washington D.C., feces, used condoms, and urine regularly cover the platforms at transit stations and the trains themselves. San Francisco has become such a bastion of third-world behavior that an interactive “poop map” was created to track the amount of feces across the city.

Yet these cities are also home to Fortune 500 companies, multimillionaires, and provide Americans with prestigious educational opportunities alongside the highest cost of living in the entire country.

Contrast the pride that Singaporeans have for their spotless metropolis and the forced indifference of the American city-dweller. The Singaporean government’s championing of first-world values and actual enforcement of those values has made Singapore, quite literally, a shining city on a hill.

Citizens take pride in cleanliness, public order, and the subsequent prosperity that follows championing those values. American commuters stare off into the abyss as criminals murder innocents like Iryna Zarutska and smile through gritted teeth that violent murders are just another part of living in an American city.

America still is the envy of most of the third world on Earth, yet our cities champion third world values in the public square. Instead of a “first world oasis in a third-world region” as LKY described his vision for Singapore, the quality of America’s public spaces is usually set by the lowest common denominator: the criminals, the drug-addicted, and the violently mentally ill that roam the urban landscape.

President Trump has begun to reverse this creep of third-world values throughout American cities. The Trump Administration should also launch public cleanliness campaigns, similar to LKY’s 1979 National Courtesy Campaign and the 2010 LOO effort. Not only were LKY’s campaigns about attracting more tourists, but they aimed to increase the quality of life of residents.

Targeting Democratic-controlled cities with these courtesy campaigns will also provide President Trump the ability to pair law-and-order messaging with the National Guard alongside efforts to beautify and physically clean up cities that the Left have allowed to decay.

A truly great country cannot afford to have its great public spaces become nodes of lawlessness and filth. The National Guard has helped push down crime rates in D.C., proving that yes, the President can “just do things” to halt America’s quality of life decline.

If Lee Kuan Yew was able to transform Singapore into a spotless municipality from a mud hut backwater, then America can rediscover a time in our history where our public spaces were the envy of the world under President Trump’s leadership.

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I love rural America. I love southern cotton and East Texas timber and driving in the Blue Ridge Mountains. “The country” is an easy place to romanticize. And it is easy to see why many conservatives advocate “running for the hills,” when we have beautiful rolling hills like the ones in Tennessee.

But “the country” is not representative of America. Our peaceful, political revolution must become comfortable fighting for power in America’s big cities.

Big cities matter because they are the most important parts of any country. They are the centers of power. Look at our American Revolution. It was born in the city. Well-meaning rural conservatives shout “1776!” but the true spirit of ‘76 came from a Philadelphia printing press.

Like it or not, our battle is in America’s cities, and we should like it! Cities allow right-wingers the best opportunity to organize, influence, and grow. Places like Washington, New York, San Francisco, and Boston are full of highly competent people— these are potential allies.

How many urban liberals feel left behind by leftism? How many urban neocons are ready to put away their bowties? We can give them something new!

But if we have abandoned the cities, we will never be able to tell them. They will be lost to Bernie Sanders or Bryan Johnson or some other ideological folly.

Even if they do somehow manage to be persuaded — whether by Twitter, or Aquinas, or divine revelation — we will never know, because we live a hundred miles away from their office, church, and home.

Let’s fill America’s cities with visionary right-wingers so we can organize a multitude and recruit the most promising people. Take, for example, America’s biggest city. Right-wingers that organize in New York have a massive pool of talent to recruit from.

They can trawl a city of eight million people, looking for elite young conservatives to join their ranks. The people they attract might work in powerful, high-paying firms in the city; many others may move to Washington to work for President Trump in the federal government.

So many problems stem from lack of good personnel. Without a strong presence in big cities, right-wingers will never be able to find enough good people to do the things we want.

Not to mention, we have so many people that agree with us! Look at party affiliation maps. The entire country is red — except for three all-important urban dots.

Caesar and his army posed no threat to the Roman establishment when they stayed in Gaul. He did not take power until he brought his people across the Rubicon River into Rome.

So too must we bring our people out of rural America and into the centers of power. We do not have to ideologically occupy a hundred percent, or even fifty-one percent, of the country. We only need to convince or become the top 0.1 percent of people with positions that can make real change. These positions are in the city.

Despite this, many on the right still advocate retreatism. Conservative authors sell hundreds of thousands of copies of books that argue for “heading for the hills.”

If we would only wait for society to collapse, their logic goes, the trads could emerge from their caves and rule the ashes according to the lost wisdom of a Nineteenth Century homestead.

The revolutions in Paris and Petersburg show what happens if we take this route. Immediately after the Jacobins and Bolsheviks took the urban centers of power, they came for the rural churches and farms.

To borrow a phrase from our neoconservative friends: if we do not fight them over there, we will have to fight them over here.

Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option, is perhaps the most well-known proponent of this retreatist ideology. In a March 2020 column, he wrote in defense of his philosophy:

The Benedict Option is about living in such a way that when the bad guys show up at your door and command you to blaspheme or apostatize, you can see who they are and what they are really asking, and find the inner strength to bear witness, even unto death.

Dreher has softened his stance recently, after moving to the city of Budapest, coincidentally, but this attitude remains popular on the right. Too many conservatives want to take the easy way out — abandon the cities, abandon the institutions, abandon any type of fight — and they dress it up as virtue.

That is not virtue. That is cowardice. It is easy to talk a big game while we still have a little liberty left.

But what happens after we abandon Boston and Washington and New York and New Haven? When we do not have enough Christian lawyers?

Then the powerful people from the city will come to the farm and take your kids because your homeschool curriculum does not include transgender sex ed.

I have a better plan: let’s fight the bad guys, in the arena of ideas, in the cities before they show up at our little house on the prairie and make martyrs of our children.

Rural America is great. I wish we could all live peacefully there forever, but the big city is the center of power, so that is where we have to go to save America.

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After less than a generation, the Roman authorities, who once promised peace, sought the spillage of Christian blood.

Under Roman persecution, Early Christians moved out of the synagogues and exclusively into private abodes, outdoor places, or in catacombs below the cities of the Empire.

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It must be noted that Kirk wanted his legacy to be primarily one as a Christian. Kirk was quite clear about this in his public remarks. “I want to be remembered for courage for my faith,” Kirk said in a June podcast. “That would be the most important. The most important thing is my faith.”

In Kirk’s work, he also often took time to honor Christ and proclaim his holy name. “Jesus is the answer,” Kirk told his followers, in what should serve as a reminder to us all that there are things greater than politics— namely God and His sacrifice on the cross.

More recently, and shortly before his death, Kirk reminded us to rejoice in the life that Christ has given us, writing, “Jesus defeated death so that you can live.” This quote spoke to me in particular, as it is easy to be sad about the state of the world and forget the beautiful fact that Christ rose from the dead, trampling down death by death, and granted us new and eternal life.

Kirk notably also went out of his way to honor the Theotokos in his work, encouraging respect and devotion to her among Protestants. While we, as Catholics, hold different views from Kirk on Mary, his promotion of respect towards the Theotokos is commendable as it helped, and will likely still bear fruit and help, greater mutual respect and admiration among Christians.

Above all else, one of the surest marks of Christian faith is the ability to recognize that one is but a helpless sinner without the grace of God. After all, the Way of the Pilgrim, the famous spiritual text on the Jesus Prayer (popular in Eastern Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Churches), begins: “By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my own actions a great sinner.” Kirk himself was quick to admit that he was a sinner, and many Christians would do well to emulate this humility.

While, as Postliberals, we may not agree with Kirk on everything, he was first and foremost a Christian, and we should pray for him and for his family. Beyond that, we must respond to his death in a proper and Christian way. Not with rage or a desire for vengeance, but instead with courage and prudence, which in this case may require the calm and proper use of lawful authority to defeat the power of far-left radicalism. Regardless, we must respond as Christians and respond prayerfully, and hopefully our actions can reflect the faith which Charlie Kirk held most dearly.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.

On September 5th, 2015, a German chancellor refused to close her country’s borders. With one act of omission, an act of withdrawal, a suspension of responsibility, Angela Merkel inaugurated a new epoch. The sentence that followed, Wir schaffen das (“We can do it”), was less a policy than a creed. It was a liturgy for a post-political Europe: the abdication of sovereignty, repackaged as compassion.

In the weeks before, the stage had already been set. On August 27th, seventy-one migrants were

found dead in a refrigerated truck abandoned near Parndorf in Austria. The images of suffocation and horror circled the globe, turning migration from a policy issue into a moral emergency.

Days later, Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees quietly suspended the Dublin procedure for Syrians, announcing it would no longer return them to the countries of first entry. What seemed like a bureaucratic notice was in truth a radical break: a signal that Germany had detached itself from the European asylum framework.

By August 31st, Merkel had spoken her sentence to the cameras: Wir schaffen das. Four days later, in a phone call with Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann, she decided Germany would not close its border. On the evening of September 4th, the first trains rolled north from Budapest. By the next day, thousands streamed across, cheered at Munich’s central station. That was the moment the dike broke.

Germany did not gain newcomers, it lost the ground beneath its own feet. Once Germany’s borders were suspended, the borders of Europe followed. Schengen, the EU’s border-free zone, already fragile, became a fiction. Hungary built fences, Austria deployed troops, the Visegrád states defied Brussels.

What Merkel called a humanitarian imperative others experienced as a forced experiment in multiculturalism. A single night in Berlin sent tremors through Athens, Warsaw, and Stockholm. What happened on September 5th was not the misstep of one chancellor, but the reprogramming of an entire continent.

At its core, the decision was not only political but theological. In place of the broken authority of parliaments and treaties came a new faith: human rights stripped of borders, compassion stripped of prudence, and hospitality stripped of order. Merkel played the role of high priestess in this new religion, intoning a mantra that had no content yet carried the weight of salvation.

Wir schaffen das was less a sentence than a sacrament. It asked for no debate, only belief. To doubt it was to be a heretic.

Still, one question lingered: who exactly was the “we?” Merkel never asked the German people whether they wanted to bear this burden. There was no referendum, nor a parliamentary vote on suspending the nation’s borders. The “we” did not describe a choice freely made, it imposed a duty silently assumed.

In truth, the sentence might have been more honest if spoken as “you must do it.” What was presented as solidarity was in fact conscription. Merkel had taken an entire people hostage to a decision they never made. A nation found itself bound by a word it had never spoken.

Mass migration proved not to be a passing storm but a new gravitational force. According to official figures, Germany registered nearly one million asylum seekers in 2015 alone, more than the entire population of Frankfurt. Within two years, over two million were receiving welfare benefits under the asylum system.

Municipalities became way stations, gymnasiums turned into dormitories, welfare offices into clearinghouses for identities and documents. The logic of the state shifted: the first duty was no longer to its citizens, but to those who had just stepped across its borders. The official word was “integration.” In reality, the policy resembled absorption without digestion.

On New Year’s Eve in Cologne, the promise of safety collapsed. More than 1,200 women filed complaints after being harassed, groped, and in many cases raped by groups of men who had recently entered the country. Police admitted afterwards that they had lost control of the city center. It was not only a crime scene but a ritual unveiling: a society that could no longer protect its women had lost the core of its authority.

The attacks continued. In July 2016, a teenage refugee attacked passengers with an axe on a

train near Würzburg, injuring four. Days later, in Ansbach, a rejected asylum seeker detonated

a bomb outside a music festival, injuring 15. In December, Berlin witnessed the massacre at

Breitscheidplatz, when Anis Amri, a Tunisian whose asylum claim had been rejected and who

was already known to authorities as a radical Islamist, drove a stolen truck into a Christmas

market, killing 12 and wounding more than 70.

Nor was the violence limited to terrorism. In October 2016, in Freiburg, a nineteen-year-old student named Maria L. was raped and murdered by an Afghan who had already attempted murder in Greece. In 2018, in the eastern city of Chemnitz, a German named Daniel H. was stabbed to death by migrants, sparking mass protests that the government and media recast as “hunts” of foreigners, though no such hunts were ever proven. In August 2025, a sixteen-year-old girl in Friedland was pushed under a freight train by a thirty-one-year-old Iraqi.

These cases were not aberrations. They reflected a broader trend confirmed by government

data. In several German states, migrants account for more than 40 percent of suspects in knife

attacks, though their share of the population is far smaller. Entire police reports speak of “youth gangs” without mentioning that the majority are of migrant origin.

For ordinary Germans, it no longer matters whether an attack makes national headlines; migrant violence has become an everyday risk that shapes how people walk home, whether women go out at night, and how children are warned in schools.

Meanwhile, other structures took hold. In parts of Berlin and Duisburg, Sharia eclipsed the rule of the republic. Clan courts settled disputes, honor outweighed constitutional law, and police entered only with caution. The state no longer ruled all its territory.

At the same time, schools became a mirror of demographic upheaval. By 2025, in more than 1,000 German schools, native children were in the minority. Teachers testified that in some classrooms less than 20 percent of pupils spoke German at home. What had once been theoretical became visible in the schoolyard: the future was already shifting.

Financial strain deepened the fractures. Since 2015, Germany has spent more than 150 billion

euros, roughly the size of an entire year’s defense budget, on asylum, integration, and welfare

programs. In 2023 alone, the federal government allocated 27 billion euros for migration-related expenses, more than the budget of the Ministry of Transport.

Municipalities report that up to one third of their annual budgets now flow into housing and support for newcomers, while swimming pools close, libraries reduce hours, and road repairs are delayed indefinitely.

School principals describe classes of thirty where twenty speak little or no German, yet the funding for extra teachers never arrives. What began as an emergency became a permanent redistribution: from pensions to payments, from the infrastructure of citizens to the maintenance of strangers.

Even citizenship itself was diluted. A German passport once symbolized deep belonging, tested by years of integration and loyalty. Today it is handed out after as little as five years of residence, sometimes less. Politicians boast of record numbers of new citizens, but many Germans quietly ask what their passport still means if it can be acquired more quickly than a driver’s license. What had once marked the culmination of loyalty has been transformed into a voucher, detached from culture and history. The passport was not strengthened, it was devalued.

The financial burden did not stop with migration. It multiplied with the energy crisis after

2022. Once the industrial engine of Europe, Germany saw its energy system unravel. Gas prices quadrupled, factories slowed or shut down, and inflation reached levels not seen in decades. Citizens who had been told for years that “there is no money” for pensions, infrastructure, or schools suddenly watched billions flow to migrants and billions more to foreign wars.

For many, the shock was existential: the Germany of stability and prosperity, the Germany of cheap energy and reliable work, no longer existed. What remained was a state that taxed more than ever, delivered less than ever, and justified the decline as a sacrifice for higher ideals. The sense hardened that the Germany they had known was gone, and that what replaced it was unrecognizable.

A generation has now come of age under this tide. Children who were ten in 2015 are young

adults in 2025. For them, Cologne was never an aberration but the beginning. Their lives are

marked by knife warnings, festival posters advising girls to move in groups, police patrols at

Christmas markets, and classrooms where German is no longer the majority language. They

know no Germany before the tide, only the ebb of trust and the habit of fear.

From the start, the media acted not as guardians but as missionaries. Headlines declared a so-

called Willkommenskultur, a “culture of welcome.” Television showed clapping crowds, and any dissenters were branded as extremists. Cologne was downplayed, Breitscheidplatz relativized, Chemnitz rewritten as myth.

The vocabulary itself was weaponized: asylum critics instead of citizens, populists instead of voters, hate speech instead of dissent. Language was patrolled more tightly than borders. What the media preached, the state enforced.

While millions crossed into Germany unregistered, the government expanded surveillance of

its own citizens. Protests were restricted, online speech monitored, and entire movements placed under observation by the domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz. The paradox was complete: open borders for strangers, closed horizons for natives.

Weakness revealed in 2015 was not only internal. It was geopolitical. Erdogan weaponized migration, threatening to open the gates whenever Brussels displeased him. Russia and Turkey expanded influence in the Balkans and the Middle East, while China deepened its economic footprint. A continent that had once drawn others into its orbit now found itself dependent on outsiders for stability. Merkel’s gesture, hailed as moral triumph, was strategic abdication.

Alternatives existed. Viktor Orbán built fences in Hungary. Austria reintroduced border checks. Denmark’s Social Democrats tightened asylum rules. These choices proved that sovereignty could be defended, that compassion could coexist with order, and that politics still had options. Merkel’s “no alternative” was never fact, it was dogma, designed to make resistance unspeakable by declaring it impossible.

In a political climate where dissent was policed, only one party broke the silence. The Alternative für Deutschland, once a small protest party, became the voice of those who had been told they no longer had one. It did not invent anger or despair, but gave them a ballot, a name, a seat.

In 2017, it entered the Bundestag as the largest opposition party, breaking the monopoly of consensus. Whatever its flaws, it alone was willing to say what others denied: that Cologne was not an exception, that mass migration fractured social trust, and that freedom of speech must mean more than a slogan.

Ten years have passed since Merkel’s sentence. Wir schaffen das has become a curse. Once

presented as strength, it revealed only fragility. Declared as unity, the result was division. Wrapped in the language of compassion, the outcome was chaos.

Schengen is brittle, national borders return, trust between East and West erodes, and Germany’s political map has been permanently altered. The AfD, once dismissed, is now entrenched. Still the question remains: what exactly was it that “we” were supposed to accomplish?

Today, even many who applauded in 2015 admit their error. Polls show that nearly two-thirds of Germans now reject Merkel’s decision to open the borders. A majority believes the consequences have been negative for security, for culture, and for cohesion. What was once celebrated as moral greatness is remembered as political folly.

September 5th, 2015 will be remembered as the day the dike broke. A nation surrendered its

sovereignty, and a continent was swept along. The waters have not receded. They have carved

channels, built deltas, and drowned certainties. The Europe that existed before is gone.

What remains is not the task of managing migration but of recovering the political. Germany and Europe must remember that borders are not cruelty, but responsibility. That security is non-negotiable, and that speech must remain free or nothing else matters.

Angela Merkel has since retired from power and published her memoir under the title Freiheit, “Freedom.” The irony is unbearable. For the victims of Cologne, Freiburg, Berlin, Chemnitz, and Friedland, what was taken from them was precisely that: freedom to walk safely, freedom to speak openly, and freedom to live without fear.

To call her legacy freedom is to turn language itself upside down. It is a monument to denial erected in print. Ten years on, the victims have no monument, no protection, and no voice in the official narrative. The book sits on the shelves, but the graves are silent.

The real question is no longer whether “we can do it.” What matters now is whether Europe still possesses the will to survive, and whether it can rise from the waters before it drowns.

For a decade the tide has risen, washing away certainties, swallowing borders, eroding the ground beneath our feet. Whole generations have grown up knowing nothing else.

To rise again will demand more than policies or programs. It will demand the decision to be what we once were, to defend what was entrusted to us, and to speak truth without fear. Either Europe remembers itself, or it will be remembered only as a continent that chose surrender.

September 5th, 2015 was not simply a turning point. It was the day the dike broke.

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Álvaro Peñas is a journalist and author based in Spain. He is the Editor for Deliberatio and he regularly contributes to The European Conservative, Disidentia, and El American.

The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the subject and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.

Álvaro: What is Christian Lawyers?

Polonia: Christian Lawyers is an association, which later became a foundation, and which was born as a result of the attacks against Catholics by the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. It is not that the situation was good before, but with Zapatero there was a turning point because it got worse very quickly. I got married and became pregnant with my first daughter, and I thought that this could not go on like this, that this could not be the world I was going to leave to my children and that something had to be done for the common good. That is why I founded Christian Lawyers in 2008.

Unfortunately, the turning point initiated by Zapatero has gone further, despite the fact that later there was a Popular Party (liberal center-right) government that unfortunately consolidated what was done by the Socialists, and in Christian Lawyers we have more and more work to do.

Álvaro: What does Christian Lawyers stand for?

Polonia: We defend the family, understanding that a family is formed by a man and a woman, life from conception to its natural end and religious freedom.

Álvaro: Earlier you mentioned the turning point with Zapatero. What was your personal turning point?

Polonia: It was a show carried out by a TV personality at the Law School in Valladolid, where I studied, in which he dressed up as the Holy Father, consecrated condoms and threw them to the public. That was our first complaint.

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These are all benchmarks that have significantly worsened over the past few decades. Now, new evidence suggests that the unemployment rate for those with a college education, which was once billed as a ticket into a secure lifestyle, is now lower than that of the general public.

Yet, confronted with these problems, many mainstream conservatives offer few if any tangible solutions. A cursory glance at the latest Fox News broadcasts will leave one nauseated with the same stale platitudes – “go work at Panda Express!,""stop playing video games,” or “have you tried renting an apartment in rural Mississippi?” Seriously?

The problem is generational. As the children of the postwar era, Boomers inherited an economy with high growth, a robust industrial base, tight labor markets, and historically low inflation. In 1985, it took the average male worker 30 weeks of work to afford the basic necessities of a middle class life, those being: housing, family health insurance, a car, and a semester at a public college or a university.

In 2019, that number was 53 weeks.1 Rather than trying to preserve those favorable economic conditions for future generations, however, many older conservatives have exerted a selfish chokehold on our politics intended to advance two main ends: protect their pensions and keep asset prices inflated.

The former is best illustrated by the refusal of either party to consider any reforms of Social Security. The latest estimates suggest that the program will turn insolvent by 2034, leaving millions of workers paying into the program likely unable to reap any of its benefits when they retire.2 Evidence also suggests that the boomer generation is currently receiving a payout much greater in value than what they paid in with payroll taxes during their working years.3

Anyone who dares to suggest any solution to this problem – whether it be privatization, means-testing, or even just slightly raising the retirement age – is ignored or vilified by both political parties. Perhaps this is to be expected of the Democrats, who at this point have come to embrace Modern Monetary Theory as economic gospel, but the Republican Party still, at least nominally, claims to champion fiscal responsibility.

The consequences of the GOP’s refusal to confront the Social Security gravy train are multifaceted. First, it will ensure that real, productive discretionary spending such as that on infrastructure, industrial policy, or family policy will continue to be crowded out by more pension bailouts. Already, the result of excessive pension spending has been that the federal government spends around $5 on seniors for every $1 it spends on children, even as the birthrate collapses.4

Second, refusing to reform Social Security will likely cause the U.S. government to take on more debt to keep the program solvent, saddling future generations with the burden of paying interest on this debt and strangling our financial flexibility. The losers of this dynamic are not only young Americans, but the future of the nation as a whole.

The second, and perhaps even more insidious element of the “generational divide” is the incessant focus on inflating asset prices at the expense of the livelihood of Americans. Baby Boomers own a disproportionate majority of assets, such as stocks, bonds, and real-estate, with a share of over 51.8%. By contrast, Millennials and Generation Z jointly own just 9.4%.

Notably, this phenomenon is a drastic shift from only thirty years ago, when “young Americans held roughly twice as much in proportional assets as they do today,” according to a recent report.5

The inflation of asset prices depends on easy credit and a highly financialized American economy. This financialization has been driven by a deregulation of the financial sector that has disconnected its performance from the real economy. Many older conservatives have supported this action, arguing that it is consistent with the principles of “the free market.”

The tangible result, however, has been increased speculation and asset bubbles such as the one that caused the Great Recession of 2008. Such deregulation has also increasingly channeled profits towards financial markets instead of towards productive activity.

For example, whereas corporations used to retain and reinvest around half of their earnings on real capital, today this share has fallen to just ten percent with the rest paid out to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks.6 The result is a stronger 401K for boomers, and fewer jobs for future generations.

Another aspect of this equation is trade. The financialization of the American economy is sustained by purchases of American assets and debt by foreign capital, which occurs because the United States runs persistent current account deficits with other nations. The trade deficit is a fairly recent phenomenon, as prior to the mid 1970s the U.S. routinely ran surpluses. Even later in the 1990s, manufacturing employment remained relatively steady.

The decision to sell out America’s industrial base to foreign nations was a conscious one. Part of this choice was motivated by ideological sympathies towards globalization, but another factor was certainly the massive payout for the asset-rich classes even as the broader country deindustrialized.

Last, this discussion would not be complete without addressing perhaps the issue on which baby Boomers and Generation Z conservatives disagree the most – immigration. Whereas opposition to both legal and illegal immigration is growing among young conservatives, many baby boomers insist on maintaining the obsolete “legal good, illegal bad” dogma. Again, key to understanding this disconnect is the generational dynamic.

Boomer conservatives no longer have any need to find a job, they have already experienced their formative years in a society that was still relatively high trust, and actually benefit from mass immigration boosting the prices of their real-estate assets.

Generation Z conservatives, on the other hand, increasingly grow up in radically transformed communities, are forced to compete with H1B migrants for jobs, and are often locked out of the housing market entirely.

Despite this, partially because of persistent Baby Boomer dominance of the GOP, it does not appear that any meaningful action to reduce legal immigration levels is yet on the horizon.

Much ink has been spilled debating what factor best explains power dynamics within contemporary American society, whether it be social class, or race, or religion, or some other factor. However, it is clear now that American politics must also be understood generationally.

Throughout American history, an integral part of the social contract was the idea of the “passing of the torch,” the notion that each successive generation would have a central role in governing the nation during its prime years. Many boomers have rejected this tradition, instead clinging onto political power to enrich themselves at the expense of their descendants and the overall future of the nation.

Of course, not all Boomers share the same views, and some, I assume, are good people, but it is time that young conservatives take note of this dynamic and assert themselves more forcefully in the politics. Boomers are on their way out. It’s time for the younger generations to be offered the torch.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of our publication! Your enthusiasm and support means a lot to all of us at The American Postliberal — and we promise we’ll work hard for your investment in our project.

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