Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
Experts Agree: Trump Knuckled Under
So, is the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding a humiliation for President Trump? Given that regime change was the vision at the beginning of the Bomb Iran efforts of the last few months, we’d have to say it was a failure.
But. I get the impression that the experience has created a sea-change among the Sunni regimes like Saudi Arabia and the regimes along the Persian Gulf. I suspect that it has solidified them against Iran. We can view this in the context of the Abraham Accords.
The first version of the Abraham Accords was a shock to me. That Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner could negotiate such a deal between Israel and the Arab countries was “inconceivable.” It started in 2020 with a deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
In July 2025, it was reported that the second Trump administration was seeking to expand the Accords to include Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia[.]
It’s not hard to figure out what is going on. The name of the game is the tech economy, and Israel is in the front rank. Who wouldn’t want to get in the game?
Then there is Saudi Arabia and MBS. In a piece in Quillette:
He is constrained by an internal war inside the Kingdom that he has been fighting since the day he took power. These enemies are far more dangerous than the IRGC: they hold the deed to Mecca and they know how to cash it in Washington, Doha, and Ankara.
On the one hand is the House of Saud. On another hand is the “custodianship of the holy sites.” Another question is the project of countering Iran. Then there is the oil wealth, and the question of what the young people of Saudi Arabia are going to do with their lives.
My image of MBS is the 2025 picture of him in flowing robes watching a speech by Donald Trump with Elon Musk in the frame with him. But the holy sites!
What then of regime change in Teheran? Of the Iran proxies: Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis?
And what of the SAVE Act, gas prices, and the midterms?
And what of the hard left turn of the Democratic Party to socialism with woke characteristics?
And the real contest, between AI and green energy.
| Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:47:33 GMT |
Social Democracy was Always Going to Die
I count liberal Ruy Teixeira as a good guy. When I read his stuff I respect his point of view. And he’s admitted that his 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority that he co-wrote with John Judis got it wrong. Now he has written a history on Substack of “The Long, Slow Death of Social Democracy.” It’s helpful to me because I think that he gets it wrong. Says he:
For three decades, social democracy was the most successful product of a working-class movement that had long contained both revolutionary and reformist elements.
Wrong! Social democracy was driven by educated intellectuals. And then
The Keynesian economic consensus in Western industrial democracies during this period produced strong economic growth, low unemployment, rapidly rising living standards, and government action to provide protection and security for the average citizen.
Wrong! Keynesian economics just says spend and tax and inflate. But…
as the 1970s dawned, three factors converged and reinforced one another to undermine social democracy—and eventually lead to its death. First, the social democratic economic model lost effectiveness; second, the social democratic base got smaller; and third, the social democratic influence within the Left weakened.
That, I think, is the conventional liberal view of What Went Wrong.
In my view, “the social democratic economic model” was always wrong. It just got lucky in the post-WWII period, probably because World War II had primed the economy with tons of factories that could be turned from churning out jeeps and tanks and bombers to churning out Chevrolets and Fords and airliners.
Take Boeing as an example. They developed swept-wing jet bombers with Pentagon money in the 1940s and then swept-wing jet 707s in the 1950s.
My Narrative is that the economic problems we have today were created by social democracy, right from the start.
Labor unions. Nothing wrong with the workers forming a union, but plenty wrong when government helps unions boost wages above what the market will bear.
Social Security. A government-run pension system is not a good idea. We coulda mandated IRAs for all. But FDR was looking for an election winner in 1935 so he pushed the pay-as-you-go gubmint system.
Employer and government funded health care. If women were talking to each other about the best and cheapest bargains in health care instead of just complaining about the bureaucracy and delays and denials of care, we’d all be better off.
Government welfare. Net result is that lower class men don’t work much and lower class women don’t marry much.
In my view, “the social democratic base got smaller” because, despite the headwind of government programs, workers graduated into the middle class and didn’t vote Democrat any more. Today, of course, ordinary white Americans experience social democracy as a direct attack on their way of life.
In my view, the reason “the social democratic influence within the Left weakened” was because the Left — meaning the educated credentialed class — went on to bigger and better things like race and gender and climate that curiously funded the members of the educated credentialed class with jobs and grants and political and administrative power, and left the rest of America behind. Which was the name of the game all along, but nobody talked about it.
My Narrative about the last century is that the liberals got lucky, for a season. For one thing, back at the start of the 1930s total government spending leapt from 11 percent GDP to about 20 percent GDP. You could call it buying votes. In the 1950s, when social democracy seemed to be working, government spending was below 30 percent GDP; now it’s 35-40 percent GDP.
Point is that, the higher government spending (and regulation) the more you rigidify the economy, the more that the rulers have decreed “we are going to spend money on this, and regulate that” the less that actors in the economy can wriggle away from government mandates and adapt to changes in science and technology and try new stuff without permission.
The bottom line is that politicians and regulators and academics and activists really don’t have a clue. The more power they have, and the more that the economy is influenced by their passions and mandates, the more likely it is that economic growth and prosperity will be damaged by their mistakes.
But we are all humans. Each of us tends to think that if only they listened to me things would have turned out all right.
And that’s the eternal question unless your name is Elon: how do you know that your idea is the right one?
| Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:09:10 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy — Mao Zedong
Social justice is not justice, it is vengeance.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: An Analysis of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer Theory
