Under pressure from the national populists and a restless party, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has come out fighting. His landmark speech to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool last week gave his premiership more definition than ever before, firmly in the mold of the modern liberal patriot.

It is political definition that has never been more needed. On the eve of its annual conference, Labour had been rattled by authoritative constituency-level polling showing that its landslide victory just a year ago would be wiped out by right-wing challenger party Reform UK, taking two-thirds of Labour’s MPs with it. 267 Labour MPs, many newly elected, would lose their seats. The British Conservatives would win just 45 constituencies. Reform UK would eat up former Labour and Tory support with 306 gains, putting leader Nigel Farage on course to be the next Prime Minister.

Of course there is no general election imminent, with the next national vote expected in four years, but together with internal rumblings about Starmer’s leadership, it set the backdrop for a bumpy few days at the Labour annual conference after a bumpier first year since Labour returned to power after fourteen years in opposition.

Keep reading in The Liberal Patriot.

Bending laws and norms to the breaking point, President Trump is ordering political show trials of critics, stifling free speech, subjecting Spanish-speaking citizens to police state tactics and choking our economy with tariffs.

Trump’s MAGA followers greet his autocratic power grabs with vindictive glee — finally, we’re on top! Everyone else is asking: Where are the Democrats?

The party establishment seems adrift, unwilling to make a clean break with flawed policies like Bidenomics, climate alarmism and tolerance of illegal immigration and social disorder that have thoroughly alienated working class voters.

Democrats need a new breed of leader — liberals tough enough to challenge progressive orthodoxies and move the party back to the  political mainstream.

For inspiration, they could do worse than look back to Sen. Bobby Kennedy’s (D-N.Y.)1968 presidential campaign. Although tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet, Kennedy’s run offers Democrats valuable clues for building a bigger, cross-class coalition.

Keep reading in The Hill.

The outbreak of political and corporate cowardice in America since Donald Trump’s return to the White House is reaching epic proportions.

ABC’s short-lived suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” is just the latest example. With some honorable exceptions — I never thought I’d be cheering for Harvard — almost every public or private entity seems to be caving in to Trump’s dictates.

The president is engaging in a kind of Godfather cosplay, turning the executive branch into a Mafia-style extortion racket. Nice little network you’ve got there; it’d be a shame if something bad were to happen to it.

His consiglieri in this case was FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who threatened to yank the broadcast licenses of ABC’s affiliates that carry the Kimmel show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” he warned them.

Carr knows better. In 2019 he declared: “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest’ ” He was right then, and his willingness now to act as Trump’s censor is craven hypocrisy.

Keep reading in New York Daily News.

President Trump’s political rise has been a stress test of American democracy — maybe the most serious we’ve faced since the Civil War. To prevent irreparable damage to our economy, our social cohesion, and the rule of law, our country needs a bigger, stronger Democratic Party.

Yet U.S. voters see the opposition party as weak and rudderless. Whether measured in terms of electoral competitiveness, public approval ratings or party registration, Democrats have hit a political nadir.

You don’t have to be a partisan Democrat to think that’s bad for the country — not just for the world’s oldest political party. Robust electoral competition is our best defense against populist demagogues who seek to monopolize political power.

But the party coalition has shrunk over the last decade as Democrats traded breadth of public support for youthful intensity and ideological zeal. By tailoring their governing agenda mainly to the specifications of liberal-left college grads, they have alienated voters without degrees and made themselves uncompetitive in a growing number of states.

How does a failing party turn itself around? By owning its mistakes and dramatically changing course.

Read more in The Hill.

Like all good flimfam artists, President Trump is a master of misdirection.

As Americans grow increasingly skeptical of his inflationary tariffs, deficit-swelling tax cuts and senseless push to gut federal agencies and research, he floods the zone with a firehose of falsehoods to shift media and public attention elsewhere.

Take his grandstanding plan to dispatch U.S. troops to Chicago and other cities, as he’s already done to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. It’s a classic “wag the dog” ploy with a Trumpian twist: Instead of fabricating a foreign military crisis to divert voters from their domestic woes, he’s invading America’s blue metros.

Crime and public disorder, including sprawling homeless encampments, are serious problems. But a rational president would partner with local leaders to alleviate them instead of putting our cities under military occupation.

Trump’s grotesquely exaggerated claims of urban anarchy discredit America in the world’s eyes so he can score political points at home. Hard-core Republicans eat it up, but the rest of the country seems unswayed by the president’s gaslighting.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Over the last two decades, progressive activists have introduced lots of sententious words and euphemisms into the U.S. political lexicon.

Examples include microaggression, intersectionality, cisgender, BIPOC, Latinx, “the unhoused” (that is, the homeless), returning citizens (ex-convicts) and “pregnant persons” (formerly “women”).

For those not up to speed on the latest academic conceits and ideological fads, including non-college voters streaming out of the Democratic Party, progressives might as well be speaking Esperanto.

They have also infused old words with new meanings. Take “equity.” Specifically, it means ownership in a house or stocks. But in its new meaning, it is used more generally as a synonym for fairness.

Now, it has become a pillar of DEI — the hallowed trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion that defines today’s “social justice” ethos. In this context, “equity” conveys a demand for something stronger than mere equality.

Read more in The Hill.

The defanging of Iran — chiefly by Israel, with a strong assist from President Trump and the U.S. Air Force — doesn’t just signal a dramatic power shift in the Middle East. It is also a setback to Iran’s senior partners in the anti-American axis — Russia and China.

Neither has offered their battered ally anything more than boilerplate denunciations of Israel and the U.S. for violating international law. For now, at least, the fearsome “Axis of Autocracies,” bent on disrupting the U.S.-led global order — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — looks rather brittle.

Dictators rarely make reliable allies. Apart from coveting absolute power, each has little in common with other nations’ despots. Their pacts tend to be opportunistic and fleeting. Even as the tide of war turned against them, for instance, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan never found a way to align their strategic goals or military strategies.

Alliances between liberal democracies seem to have more tensile strength. That’s because they are bound together by shared political beliefs and institutions, not just common adversaries.

Even Trump, the arch-realist, may be stumbling into that reality.

Read more in The Hill.