Explosive Logorrhea

And The Unbearable Lightness of Moderates

It’s deep midsummer, a time to laze in hammocks and eat smoked ribs, and I find myself struggling to rouse myself into an appropriate level of concern: The political sphere appears to be disintegrating in our grand nation. We are beset by nut jobs left and right.

The prime nut job is Donald Trump, of course. He seems boggled by everything these days, drowning in unpleasant metaphors—like the scum in the Reflecting Pool he just tried to redo. And attempting to blame it on vandals? He is Vandal in Chief. Reasonable observers, foreign and domestic, have to be boggled by the man: He skips from threat to obeisance and back again on an almost daily basic when it comes to Iran. Reactocrats like Marc Thiessen of the Washington Post mistake the serious damage done by the US Military to the Iranian infrastructure as a sign we’re winning the war. By that standard, the damage we did to Vietnam—the napalm, agent orange, more bombs dropped than in World War II—must have been a famous victory. Turned out, it wasn’t. But Neo-conservatives, like socialists, never learn.

The failure evolving in Iran has a doppelgänger—the war in Ukraine, as righteous as Iran is ridiculous. Ukraine could have been a death blow to the neurotic Russian patriarchy (and still is likely to be for Vladimir Putin). Imagine how we’d be regarded if Ukraine had won—as it still should—bolstered by our arms and technology. Our strength would be feared in the world, even China might be quaking a bit. But Trump—he of the near-daily tariff shuffle—must be regarded as a joke in Beijing. If Confucius was the ultimate prophet of order and discipline, Trump seems a homeless bag man, babbling foolishly, changing his tune with every stanza. He has made us a dangerously unstable mockery in the world. The best purpose of power is to preserve rights, order and prosperity.

Even the impressively sober David French of the New York Times is worried that we are slouching toward Armageddon:

I do not think that world war is inevitable, nor do I think it is probable. But it is more possible now than it has been at any other time since the end of the Cold War, and the American government is led by the worst rulers in the modern history of the United States.

World war? Jeez. Trump’s incompetence is astonishing, but that’s as new as his suggestion that bleach was the cure for Covid. His fixation on gaudy tributes to himself is sick. His cast of characters—Hegseth, Kennedy Jr., Blanche, Kash—are overmatched. His minions in the Congress waste time on Tony Fauci’s personal diary. He wants to fire Jeannine Piro, a TV celebrity who should never have been hired as U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, but then he sort of decides not to. Explosive diarrhea is abroad in the land. Now there’s a metaphor.

If only there was an alternative. ..

But the Democrats slide toward appeasement and irrelevance. In fact, Donald Trump has driven them crazy. I used to be disappointed by the unwillingness of moderate Republicans—people I respected—to call out Trump on his blather. But moderate Democrats are neutering themselves in the same way. The admirable Elissa Slotkin wasted no time in endorsing the dreadful, Jew-hating Dr. Abdul El-Sayed after he squeaked past bland Haley Stevens in the Michigan primary. In a Massachusetts Senate debate this week, the perennially uninspiring Ed Markey proudly postured himself as Bernie Sanders’ choice in the race. (His opponent, Seth Moulton, whom I’m supporting, failed to attack: “Does that mean you’re a socialist, too?”)

What is the politics of this evasion? Well, maybe it’s this:

About 34% (roughly one in three) of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults in the U.S. now identify as “democratic socialists,” according to a CNN/SSRS poll released in late July 2026.

Only it’s worse. The equivalent of Democrats calling themselves socialists would be MAGA folk calling themselves fascists. It is an unnecessary irritant, an atavistic anti-American trope of the left. It will lose elections. At the very least, it predicts a further intrusion into the lives of Americans by the state. (By the way, true moderates oppose the intrusion of the state into tax breaks for the wealthy.

But a more likely explanation for the maddening passivity of moderates is fear of Trump. I would never vote for an extremist like El-Sayed over the trad Republican Mike Rogers—a national security specialist— in Michigan. I would never vote for a socialist, period. My friends cavil: But if Rogers wins, the Republicans stand a better chance of holding the Senate. Thus, Trump forces Democrats to support unsupportable candidates from the extremist wing of their party. He is the ultimate weapon the left has: Well, Joe, if you don’t vote to empower Hasan Piker’s pro-Hamas in Michigan, you’ll be voting to keep Trump in control.

Sorry, but that’s an “if” too far for me. I will not vote for candidates I consider reprehensible or feckless. On Israel, there is a bright line: I will vote for candidates who think Bibi Netanyahu and his West Bank Settlers are a scourge. I will vote for candidates who oppose sending Israel offensive weapons (defensive weapons are another thing). But I will not vote for candidates who waffle on the future existence of Israel, who mouth dilettante slogans like “From the River to the Sea…” I believe such people are myopic thugs who may put the lives of my children and grandchildren in jeopardy. If Israel goes, protection for Jews around the world—already a periilous proposition—drifts closer to the historic norm: paranoid Jew hatred and the never-ending pogrom.

Closer to home, I will not vote for candidates who want to close the prisons, abolish borders, defund the police. abolish ICE…although I do agree with the aforementioned Moulton: ICE should be folded into its proper place in the tight legal restrictions of the Justice Department.

There will be no chance of reasonable reform if Democrats continue to absolve the feckless left or worse, parody themselves as socialists. The silence of the moderates will work the same way as their refusal to acknowledge the inequities of DEI and prison sex-change operations. It will cause Democrats to lose elections. It will elect the next right-wing populist surrogate for Donald Trump.