In the digital age, all politics is national. Just ask United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who may lose his job following the Labour Party’s sweeping losses in his country’s May 7 local elections.

Less than two years ago, Starmer led Labour’s triumphant return to power with a big parliamentary majority after 14 years in political exile. By ejecting over 1,300 Labour local officials, U.K. voters showed they’ve already lost patience with his government’s inability to deliver the change they expected.

Winning big was the U.K. Reform Party, headed by the flamboyant Brexiteer and MAGA fanboy Nigel Farage. Reform racked up about 1,400 municipal councilors and won 25 percent of the popular vote to Labour’s 20 percent, making it for now Britain’s most popular party.

The populist right’s vault to the top of Britain’s political table captured global headlines. But the election told another story that may have more lasting significance: The fragmenting of U.K. politics and possible end to a long era of two-party dominance.

That mirrors trends all across Europe. Governing parties that brought stability and coherence to electoral competition after World War II are imploding. The crumbling of traditional allegiances amid rising populist ferment feels like the birth pangs of a new political order.

Read more in The Hill

Racial preferences in college admissions have long been deeply unpopular, and three years ago, the Supreme Court declared them unlawful, in a sweeping ruling that portended doom for other race-conscious policies to promote diversity or remedy past discrimination. Some research indicates that, in the aftermath of the civil-rights era, the achievement gap between rich and poor students now dwarfs the gap between white and Black students. Even so, well-intentioned blue-state Democrats keep pushing for race-based affirmative action, to their own political detriment, rather than supporting a much fairer policy of providing a leg up to economically disadvantaged people of all races.

In February, the California State Assembly passed, by a 54–14 vote, a measure seeking to place on the November ballot a change in the state constitution to allow racial preferences in K–12 education and in higher-education scholarships. (The state Senate has not yet acted on the measure.) In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a 375-page Racial Equity Plan last month that said, “New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation and racial oppression”; among other measures, the plan reaffirms the city’s intent to steer contracts to minority-owned businesses. Late last year, Democratic supermajorities in the Maryland House and Senate overrode Governor Wes Moore’s veto of legislation to study reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

In huge swaths of the country, the Democratic brand has become anathema. The party will struggle to recapture the White House and reclaim the Senate unless it can persuade some red-state voters to take a fresh look at it. One obvious move would be for the Democrats, who have hemorrhaged working-class voters, to abandon their stubborn support for politically radioactive racial preferences. Significantly more Americans believe that economically disadvantaged people of any race deserve special consideration in admissions and employment decisions, and such efforts do not run afoul of laws against racial discrimination. Nevertheless, many Democrats cannot bring themselves to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling—or the public’s attitude—even when doing so would help their prospects immensely.

Read more in The Atlantic

President Trump promises “monumental” and “spectacular” celebrations this year to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. For example, on June 14 — his 80th birthday — the White House will host an Ultimate Fighting Championship match.

For this most combative of presidents, nothing honors America like young men punching and kicking the heck out of each other in the Rose Garden.

Despite Trump’s bombastic notions of American greatness — or perhaps because of them — the nation’s deep political fractures cast a pall on its 250th birthday party. Reaching this milestone should be an occasion for reaffirming the nation’s founding precepts and our never-ending struggle to live up to them. Instead, we’re relitigating the most basic question of national identity: What does it mean to be an American?

During the 1976 bicentennial celebration, there wasn’t much controversy about the answer. Both Democrats and Republicans laid claim to the ideals that animated the American Revolution: individual freedom, equality and popular self-rule. Where they differed was in how they interpreted and applied these overarching principles.

But Trump seems to regard them as pious claptrap, a fig leaf for the one thing he does respect: a ruthless will to power. Vice President JD Vance likewise rejects the “creedal” understanding of American identity, which he sees as anchored more firmly in ethnicity, religion and attachment to place than in arid abstractions about liberty and democracy.

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For years, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has long been idolized by MAGA Republicans and served as a point of reference for conservatism around the world. Now that he’s been knocked from power, Democrats could stand to take some lessons from the man responsible, Péter Magyar.

The new prime minister, who ended Orbán’s 16-year rule in Hungary’s April 12 elections, showed that it was possible to take down a corrupt authoritarian in a country where democracy had long been on the ropes. But crucially, he did it with a playbook that seems just as suited for America in the age of Trump as it was for Eastern Europe.

Lesson one? Wage a fight against the corrupt establishment. Magyar previously served in Orbán’s Fidesz government. But he broke with the party and rocketed to fame in 2024 as a whistleblower against official graft and fraud, releasing secret audio that revealed members of Orbán’s circle had interfered with a corruption prosecution case.

He had a flair for spectacle, too: In February, for instance, he filed a public police report accusing the government of surreptitiously recording a “honey trap” sex tape involving him and an ex-girlfriend as a means of blackmail.

Read more in Well News

President Trump is inflicting tariffs on America in a vain attempt to revive traditional manufacturing. Private investment is gushing instead into data centers, where the AI economy is being hatched.

The U.S. is the epicenter of this global investment boom in data centers, which support the internet, cloud computing and the training of ever-more capable artificial intelligence models. Spending on data centers is growing exponentially. Much of it comes from the “hyperscalers” like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Oracle and OpenAI. The first four of these digital giants alone plowed $425 billion last year into centers, a figure expected to top $600 billion this year.

Surging capital investment in data centers and AI has helped propel the stock market to new heights. And for now, at least, it is making America the world’s foremost computing superpower, the pace car in a race against China and others to master AI. More than 4,000 data centers — almost 40 percent of the world total — are located here, compared to just 368 in China.

However, the U.S. digital goldrush is running into a groundswell of local resistance.

In Virginia, which has the nation’s biggest concentration of data centers (570), voters are having second thoughts. Three years ago, 69 percent said they were comfortable with new data centers in their community. That number has since dropped to 35 percent, with 59 percent voicing discomfort. Prince William County has nixed plans for a 1,700-acre campus near the Manassas civil war battlefield, which would have hosted dozens of data centers.

Maine recently became the first state to pause building large data centers pending a study of its energy needs. And Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are pushing a bill in Washington to impose a national moratorium on construction.

The backlash springs from three main sources. First and most pervasive is the fear of soaring electricity bills. Data centers have a voracious appetite for power, putting pressure on utilities to generate more and upgrade local grids to transmit it. Residents worry that it portends higher monthly bills, even as energy costs already are rising faster than inflation. The centers also consume large volumes of water to cool servers, which could mean shortages and higher water bills. That has made them especially controversial in the desert West.

Second, a majority of Americans say they’re anxious about losing their jobs to AI. Such fears may be premature, but they cannot be airily dismissed. And while initially welcomed for creating construction jobs and generating substantial property tax revenues, data centers, essentially warehouses crammed with servers, have turned out to be only modest as job creators. An average facility might employ around 200 people.

Read more in The Hill

Having paused U.S. attacks on Iran, can President Trump be persuaded to suspend hostilities against Europe as well?

His reckless rhetorical overkill is making the transatlantic alliance collateral damage in operation Epic Fury.

Trump has called key European allies “cowards” for not coming to America’s aid — specifically to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He has dismissed NATO as a “paper tiger” and threatened to pull the U.S. out of the collective security pact.

He upped the ante earlier this week, comparing United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer to his Hitler-appeasing predecessor, Neville Chamberlain.

Accusing our NATO partners of being faithless allies is chutzpah on stilts. Trump didn’t consult European leaders before impulsively joining Israel Feb. 28 in launching air strikes against Iran and its Middle East proxies. Nor could he produce evidence to back his claim of an “imminent” Iranian threat to the U.S.

Keep reading in The Hill.

There’s a particular type of lie that dominates American political discourse these days. It’s not a factual lie, but a conceptual mistruth: the promise that you can make life more affordable without actually making anything cheaper. Call it affordability theater.

Whether they march to the MAGA drumbeat or roost on the progressive left, populists share a need for scapegoats. To inflame public passions and convert them into votes, each side vows to stop nefarious villains from destroying America.

President Trump has built his political career upon demagogic attacks on “criminal aliens” and “radical left lunatics” who “hate America.” Progressive politicians, clearly envious of Trump’s grip on working-class voters, believe they can pry it loose by focusing their ire on billionaires instead.

That’s a long shot. Trump is the greatest of all time when it comes to mastering what author William Galston, in an illuminating new book, calls the “dark passions” shaping today’s politics — anger, fear and domination.

Trump’s populist elixir is more potent because it fuses working Americans’ cultural and economic grievances. While progressives fixate on the uneven distribution of wealth and power, non-college voters have more immediate concerns — the high cost of living — and worry that Democrats still lean too far left on social issues.

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The fog of war seems to have enveloped President Trump and his minions. After two weeks of armed conflict with Iran, they have yet to offer a lucid and realistic explanation of America’s war aims.

The White House’s failure to dispatch top officials to last Sunday’s talk shows to drum up public support for the war was telling. Apparently, none could be trusted to speak for a president who himself lurches incoherently from one rationale to another.

Meanwhile, political battle lines have hardened at home. Republican lawmakers rubber stamp whatever Trump wants, while Democrats demand a halt to hostilities, pending a vote on a war powers resolution.

With American forces engaged in combat, this isn’t the best moment for a polarizing domestic fight over constitutional prerogatives. But Democrats are right to insist that the president bring his case for war before Congress for hearings, questions and debate.

Read more in The Hill