Wealthy Students, Wealthy Colleges

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. 
 
The Meritocratic Consensus and Stratification in Higher Education Zachary Bleemer and Jesse Rothstein * August 2026

Abstract 

American colleges and universities are highly stratified by pre-college academic achievement, family background, and institutional resources. We study the meritocratic consensus in American higher education: colleges that high-testing students (who are generally also from high-income families) attend spend dramatically more on instruction than do those that enroll lower-testing students. Stratification by test scores has been largely stable since the 1960s, but the stratification of instructional resources has risen sharply since 1970 at both private and public institutions. Non-academic admissions criteria like athletics, legacy, and affirmative action are second-order in determining the allocation of students to universities. Potential economic justifications for the positive association of instructional expenditures with student prior achievement– q-complementarity between achievement and resources, convex social returns to high human capital, and incentives to invest in learning prior to college– have little empirical support. Resource stratification across universities has not increased in the past decade, largely due to increased public funding of universities that enroll lower-testing students through financial aid programs like California’s CalGrant, but stratification within institutions is now rising swiftly. JEL Codes: I23, I24, N32, Z13

 

Noncitizen Voting?

 Many posts have discussed immigration. Illegal voting by noncitizens is rare.

Jude Joffe-Block and Miles Parks at NPR:

In a call with Nevada state election officials earlier this month, the Trump administration's point person on noncitizen voting insisted her team was working "in good faith."

"We are an open book here," said Heather Honey, an official at the Department of Homeland Security, who previously worked to push election falsehoods before her current post. "We are acting in very good faith. And we just want to help you."

But more than a month after President Trump touted in a primetime address that his administration had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of Nevada and just three other states, those states are still asking for proof or even a complete list of the voters federal officials say should be investigated.

In the Nevada call, federal officials did more to detail how they arrived at their numbers, but their statements also undermined the broader claim that American elections are rife with noncitizen voters.

DHS initially announced it had found close to 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada's voter list. But a DHS official acknowledged in the meeting with Nevada officials that number was "the ceiling" and each voter still had to be manually reviewed. Then, a day later, DHS provided the state with a list of 185 ID numbers pertaining to voters the agency said it was confident were noncitizens. NPR acquired records and a recording of the video call, first reported by The New York Times, via a public record request.

Nevada asked for more information on that smaller group of 185 voters, and the data points used to match them to noncitizens. DHS declined to provide that. The agency did say it still had more than 14,000 Nevada voters that "need additional review," and it also provided the state with a list of more than 6,000 voter IDs the agency said were "higher confidence" matches but had yet to be reviewed.

Confidence in College

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. 

 Daniel Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

Most people believe there is a problem with higher education. In the last 10 years, confidence in college has collapsed among the public. Gallup found that only 38 percent of Americans report having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, a nearly 20-point drop from 2015. Politics is an obvious culprit for the country’s diminished confidence. Republicans have experienced a more precipitous slide in support than Democrats, widening a modest partisan divide in views of higher education into a chasm. But there is another issue that looms even larger over higher education. Its cost. A Pew poll asked all Americans what they saw as the biggest problem in higher education and found the nearly universal issue was lack of affordability. Most Americans say that colleges are doing a lousy job of preparing students to find well-paying jobs. Fewer, but still a substantial number, say schools are failing to expose students to diverse perspectives. However, cost almost always tops the list of complaints. Even Americans who are the most dissatisfied with the direction of higher education—a group that is more right-leaning—are as likely to say it has to do with cost as politics.

This is a very predictable result of the massive increase in the cost of four years of college. Public and private universities have both seen dramatic price increases over the last few decades. The average cost of a college education in the early 70s hovered around $13k. Now, it is over $30k a year. The price tag at many small liberal arts schools, like Bates, can approach $100,000 per year. Students routinely graduate with loans that reach the six-figure territory and take years, or even decades, to pay off.\

The ideological battles being fought on many campuses are almost exclusively waged among elites. Debates over DEI initiatives, Gaza, antisemitism, and transgender rights dominate public attention rather than conversations about what can be done to make colleges work for the working class. The students who need the most. When public support for higher education wanes, the biggest losers are those who need them to work—not as bastions of progressive thought, but as drivers of economic opportunity, civic responsibility, and social solidarity. It’s no coincidence that some of the fiercest critics of higher education are found among those who have amassed considerable wealth and influence.

Why Has Violent Crime Dropped?

  Many posts have discussed crime in the United States.

Mike Allen at Axios:

By the numbers: The U.S. violent-crime rate plunged 9.7% in 2025, the largest annual decline since FBI national estimates began 90 years ago.The murder rate fell 18.5% to 4.1 per 100,000 people, tying 1955 and 1956 for the lowest since national estimates began.
And the decline hasn't stopped: An Axios analysis shows violent crime in big cities fell again in the first half of 2026.

Criminologists describe a complicated picture of why crime is down. No one's sure, but several overlapping forces seem to be driving the drop: 

• Vice consumption cooled: Pandemic-era spikes in alcohol consumption, illicit drug use and firearm purchases — three factors linked to the 2020–2021 homicide surge — have receded.
• Return to routine: COVID lockdowns disrupted community guardrails and displaced young men and teens. Employment and social routines have since stabilized.
• Law enforcement tech boom: Police departments are using more AI tools, predictive analytics and platforms such as Palantir's Gotham to deploy resources and identify crime hotspots.

 Under-the-radar demographic and health trends are also quietly reshaping public safety:The proportion of young people in America is declining, shrinking the demographic most historically linked to street crime. In a fascinating medical twist, the explosion of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs (like Ozempic) has been clinically linked to decreased alcohol abuse and improved impulse control — two major factors in violent offenses.

"An Outsourced Staff" --Cicero Institute and Homelessness Policy

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.

Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle at NYT:

A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.

It was their third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails. “We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that,” a Republican state senator, Ron Alting, said last year, urging a more caring approach.

But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump’s, had made its initial efforts. Mr. Trump had issued an executive order on homelessness that so fully reflected Cicero’s agenda it was hard to tell 
where the group stopped and White House policy began. The sponsor of the Indiana law was fresh from a Cicero conference, Cicero lobbyists worked the bill, and three Cicero analysts testified that the threat of arrests would push homeless people into treatment for mental illness or addiction.

The ban passed just before the legislature adjourned.

...

With few rival groups working on homelessness, the institute had its lane. After Texas passed a statewide camping ban in 2021, Cicero made it into a model bill to take to other states.

Cicero was too small to matter in Washington, but about two dozen states had Republican control of the legislature and governorship. For harried legislators frustrated by encampments, Cicero’s bill offered a stance. And with no housing or services included, it required no spending.

“In most states, state legislators don’t even have policy staff,” explained Jared Meyer, an early Cicero recruit, on Mr. Lonsdale’s podcast. “The best thing you can do is be an outsourced staff.”

Race and Refugees

Many posts have discussed immigration and asylum.  Critics suggest that race might just possibly influence administration decisions on asylum.

Shifra Dayak at Pew:

The number of refugees admitted to the United States has fallen significantly during President Donald Trump’s second term in office and could hit its lowest level on record this fiscal year, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department data.

The federal government has admitted 10,258 refugees through the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026, which ends on Sept. 30. That’s down from 38,102 refugees in fiscal 2025 and 100,034 in fiscal 2024. (President Joe Biden was in office for part of fiscal 2025 and all of fiscal 2024.)

...

Refugees from South Africa make up almost all the refugees to the U.S. so far in fiscal 2026. Before this fiscal year, South Africans never appeared among the top origin groups. In fact, fiscal 2025 was the first year that the U.S. admitted more than just one or two South African refugees.

The large increase in South African refugees reflects an executive order Trump signed in 2025 that said the federal government would prioritize resettling Afrikaners – an ethnic group descended from mainly Dutch, German and French colonial settlers in South Africa. The executive order said the group faced “government-sponsored race-based discrimination” in South Africa, including the government seizure of farms owned by White South Africans. Those claims have been disputed.

The influx of refugees from South Africa marks a major change in the makeup of refugees to the U.S.
\
People from the Democratic Republic of the Congo made up the largest share of refugees to the U.S. every year from fiscal 2016 through fiscal 2024. The nation has seen ongoing fighting and internal displacement that’s peaked in recent years. So far in fiscal 2026, the federal government has not admitted any refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ticking Debt Bomb

 Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Zachary Basu at Axios:

Zoom in: President Trump said in 2016 that he could eliminate what was then roughly $19 trillion in national debt within eight years. On Tuesday, the debt crossed $40 trillion, after growing by $3 trillion in the past year alone.About $32 trillion is owed to investors and other outside holders. The rest is debt the government owes to its own accounts, including Social Security and other federal trust funds.

Treasury must refinance $9.7 trillion in debt coming due this fiscal year while covering a deficit the Congressional Budget Office now projects at roughly $2.1 trillion.

That creates a punishing cycle: Old debt comes due, Washington replaces it with more expensive debt, and the resulting interest bill feeds future deficits.CBO projects annual deficits will average $2.4 trillion through 2036, pushing debt held by the public to 120% of GDP — above the record set after World War II.
...

The big picture: America's debt burden is approaching the point where it starts reshaping household finances, presidential politics and the country's economic choices.Long-term Treasury yields have climbed to their highest levels since 2007, raising borrowing costs across the economy — from mortgages to business loans — and making Washington's own debt more expensive to refinance.

Social Security's retirement trust fund is projected to run dry in late 2032, during the final months of the next president's first term.

Medicare's hospital trust fund follows in the second quarter of 2033.

Between the lines: Trump and Elon Musk promised to break Washington's addiction to debt without forcing Americans to swallow painful sacrifices.Musk launched DOGE with ambitions of cutting as much as $2 trillion from federal spending. Its final public tally claimed just $215 billion in savings — barely a tenth of that goal.

A federal audit released this month found billions in unsupported or inaccurate savings claims, including $27.4 billion tied to contracts that were still active.

Dark Days at DHS

Many posts have discussed immigration. 

Vanessa Romo at NPR:

One of the last remaining checks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and private-prison contractors running immigration detention centers has all but collapsed, leaving thousands of people trapped in a system with nearly nonexistent oversight, according to an NPR review.

The grievance system in immigration detention is designed to offer a safe channel to report violations of detention standards and seek redress, without fear of retaliation. It's often the only recourse for people to submit complaints about detention issues, including mistreatment, unsanitary conditions, medical neglect and sexual assault. But an NPR review of documents, available data and interviews with experts has found the system — which in the best of times was a complex patchwork — barely operates and even at times backfires for those using it. It is one of the few remaining safeguards for immigrants in federal custody after the Trump administration effectively dismantled other oversight offices.

...

Trying to enforce the rules of the grievance system has always been challenging, Chris Brundage, the former deputy of the now-closed Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, told NPR.

That's partly because it's not one single set of standards that all operators must follow, Brundage said. "It's a patchwork system that has never worked as intended," he said, explaining that there are at least three different sets of detention standards that operators are working under, depending on when they signed their contracts. (Some operators are following guidelines established in 2011. Others, an updated version from 2016, and those with new contracts are following 2019 standards.)

...

The Office of Detention Oversight, created by Congress to conduct internal inspections, and the Immigration Detention Ombudsman's office tasked with investigating detainee deaths and other issues have had their budgets gutted and suffered massive layoffs. Both agencies sit within DHS. In the case of the ombudsman's office, one of the only places that detainees could turn to to challenge a grievance denial outside of the immediate detention facility, it was fully shuttered in May.

Another office whose budget has been slashed is the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Brundage noted. In 2025, the administration slashed the CRCL staff from roughly 150 employees down to just a handful, effectively halting operations. The Government Accountability Project reported more than 500 active civil rights and detention-abuse complaints — including allegations of medical neglect, sexual abuse and dangerous conditions in immigration detention — were frozen or left uninvestigated.

...

"I think what happened when these offices were effectively gutted and shut down, you lost that … legitimacy. And legitimacy means that they're following the laws, regulations. But what happens if you don't have transparency into the process and you don't have accountability? Without those two things, that legitimacy erodes, " Brundage said.

You Have a Right to Record the Cops

Many posts have discussed freedom of speech and the press.

 C.J. Ciaramella at Reason:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit issued a landmark ruling Monday that a Connecticut man had a First Amendment right to film a police station from a public sidewalk, but it also ruled that the officers who arrested the man are immune from his lawsuit.

A three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit held that Keith Massimino, a self-described "First Amendment auditing hobbyist," had a constitutional right to film the exterior of a police department in Waterbury, Connecticut, on an October evening in 2018.

"When the government wants to preserve its privacy, it may build a fence or close a door—but not ban speech," U.S. Circuit Judge Myrna Pérez wrote for the majority.

The panel's opinion creates binding precedent in Connecticut, New York, and Vermont, and, according to the opinion, it makes the 2nd Circuit the ninth federal circuit to agree on the issue. Although the Supreme Court has not ruled on the matter, every circuit court that has considered the issue has found an unambiguous First Amendment right to record and monitor the police, so long as one isn't physically interfering with or obstructing an officer.

California Political Geography

Many posts have discussed California.

PPIC:

California’s political geography reflects both growing national polarization and enduring regional differences. Using survey data and sophisticated modeling to estimate public opinion across 46 areas of the state, this report shows that while partisan alignment increasingly shapes views on major issues, Californians broadly agree on several policy topics. At the same time, a persistent coastal-inland divide—and the distinct political and economic position of the Bay Area—continues to structure differences in attitudes and lived experiences across the state.

• A strong coastal-inland divide defines California politics. Coastal regions are far more Democratic and liberal, while inland areas anchor Republican support. The modern center of California conservatism is the far north of the state. These broad partisan tendencies shape the geography of a wide range of issues, from immigration to the size of government to climate change and perspectives on the economy. →
• Independents are numerous but typically partisan in practice. Most lean toward a party and vote consistently that way. Democratic-leaning independents are concentrated along the coast, while Republican-leaning independents are more evenly distributed. →
• Most Californians agree on several key issues. Though the exact level of support varies, majorities across the state support abortion access, view immigrants as a benefit, and favor state action on climate change. Opposition is mostly limited to very conservative areas in the far north of the state. A broad geographic range of Californians also want a smaller state government, despite the state’s overall liberalism. →
• The affordability crisis is spreading inland. Residents on the coast are the most likely to say housing is a big problem in their part of the state, but concern about housing has grown the most in the interior over the last few years. Likewise, Bay Area residents have the most negative economic outlook, though those in inland California worry the most about paying their bills, including housing costs. →
• The Bay Area is distinct politically and economically. It is the most liberal and Democratic region, showing the strongest consistent support for progressive policies. Despite high housing prices in the region, Bay Area residents are also less likely to share the affordability concerns of the rest of the state.

"Government Censorship Is Deeply Un-American"

Complaint by ABC et al. against FCC: 

1. Government censorship is deeply un-American.  That fundamental principle predates the Republic, with our Founders recognizing that “the freedom of the press is one of the great[est] bulwarks of liberty.”1  And it is no less true today, as the Supreme Court unanimously 1Va. Declaration of Rights § 12 (adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention of Delegates, Williamsburg, Va., June 12, 1776). 1 Case 1:26-cv-02902     Document 1     Filed 08/18/26     Page 3 of 46 reaffirmed only two years ago: the government may not “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.”  Nat’l Rifle Ass’n v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 188 (2024).   

2. This case concerns the Administration’s sustained effort to do just that.  Acting through the Federal Communications Commission, the Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts.  

3. That campaign began in this Administration’s earliest days and has only intensified since.  Again and again, the Administration has attacked ABC’s speech—the stories its journalists report and the viewpoints its network programs air.  Over time, those attacks have escalated into express demands that ABC be stripped of its broadcast licenses because of its speech. 2   

4. In prosecuting the Administration’s campaign against free speech on network television, the Commission fights on several fronts using its expansive regulatory powers.  What has unfolded, in the words of sitting FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, is “a sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control, carried out through the weaponization of the FCC’s authority as a federal regulator and aimed at pressuring a free and independent press and all media into submission.”3   

5. The Administration has not been shy about openly coercing ABC into changing its programming.  For example, in response to on-air comments by ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, the FCC’s Chairman issued an ultimatum to Plaintiffs: “We can do this the easy way or 5. The Administration has not been shy about openly coercing ABC into changing its programming.  For example, in response to on-air comments by ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, the FCC’s Chairman issued an ultimatum to Plaintiffs: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.  These companies can find ways . . . to take action . . . on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”4   

 6. For months, the Administration has steadily increased the pressure on ABC, culminating in the present threat to the broadcasting licenses of the eight ABC Owned Stations (“the Stations”).  The day after the President objected to additional on-air comments by Mr. Kimmel, the Commission issued an unprecedented order requiring the Stations to file early applications to renew their licenses—years before any of their licenses would have come up for renewal in the ordinary course and allowing only thirty days to file applications which ordinarily take months to prepare.  Until the day before that order issued, the Commission had not called for a renewal application ahead of schedule in more than half a century.  Nor had it ever demanded simultaneous early renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a single broadcast network—much less stations with the record of public service and award-winning journalism like these Stations.  In a contemporaneous interview, the Chairman did not mince words when explaining the Commission’s decision to ramp up its pressure on ABC: “If you didn’t take us seriously, now you should.”5   7. The Commission has demanded a review of the Stations’ licenses extraordinarily early.  For all but two of the Stations, this early review comes before their current license terms have even reached the halfway point, and years before the Commission is statutorily authorized to grant renewal.  That timing underscores the Commission’s true purpose: coercing and retaliating against a network that refuses to bow to the Administration’s demands.

Price Controls

 Anthony Salvanto, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus at CBS:

Though a slight majority, along with most Democrats and independents, [Republicans] would be okay with government price controls.

Nixon tried price controls, and they inflicted economic damage that lasted through the 1970s.  In his memoirs, he made a rare admission of error

What did America reap from its brief fling with economic controls? The August 15, 1971 decision to impose them was politically necessary and immensely popular in the short run. But in the long run I believe that it was wrong. The piper must always be paid, and there was an unquestionably high price for tampering with the orthodox economic mechanisms.

Viral Disinformation About Iran Nukes

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Trump's war drove gas prices up.  Now Vance says that the war's purpose is to lower gas prices.  Incoherent.

Steven Lee Myers, Ronen Bergman, and Farnaz Fassihi at NYT:

On the morning of Aug. 5, an anonymous account on X in India posted seemingly sensational news. The commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had vowed that his country would never give up its nuclear weapon ambitions as long as Israel and the United States possessed those weapons, the account said.

It was not true, and there’s no evidence that the commander made the remark or that Iran has developed nuclear weapons. The claim soon caromed around the internet anyway.

The quotation appeared on Israeli accounts, and then a television channel there posted it, calling it the first public declaration that Iran was working to build a nuclear bomb. That evening, it made its way into remarks that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, the country’s national cemetery.

In the United States, Mike Waltz, the Trump administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, reposted the quotation, as did Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican. Fox News also reported the claim, as anchors and guests cited it as evidence of Iran’s duplicity.

The quotation, attributed to Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, was part of a campaign that succeeded in misleading politicians and news organizations around the world, according to a review by The New York Times. The claim’s spread showed how easily viral disinformation can twist the public debate over matters as serious as war and peace.

It is unclear who fabricated the quotation. However, it appeared intended to bolster Mr. Netanyahu’s longstanding claim that Iran is determined to build a nuclear weapon and that war against Iran was necessary.

President Trump, who had tried to justify the war by citing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, has been searching for a way out of it, and the quotation went viral three days after he said he was halting all attacks on Iran to give peace negotiations a chance.

“This quote was clearly crafted to drive a wedge into peace negotiations,” said Darren L. Linvill of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, who tracks how disinformation and propaganda spread on social media.

Deleting Data -- Update

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.  The Trump administration has killed off or limited access to many such resources, including the CIA World Factbook, State Department X posts, and DOJ press releases about the January 6 insurrection.

Scott McCain at TechTimes:

Treasury's own 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment documented active cases of drug traffickers, cybercriminals, and fraudsters laundering proceeds through anonymous U.S. shell companies — and then, three months later, the agency permanently eliminated the only federal database designed to expose who owns them.


FinCEN issued a final rule on August 11, 2026, permanently removing the requirement for U.S. companies and U.S. persons to disclose beneficial ownership information — the identities of the individuals who actually control a business — to its national database under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). The rule took effect upon publication in the Federal Register on August 12. FinCEN simultaneously pledged to delete every record previously submitted by U.S. persons — names, addresses, and identity documents collected throughout 2024 when the law was briefly operative.

JP Alegre at The Deep Dive:

A machine-learning project a Canadian university student built in high school has become the basis for the most complete public archive of a quarter-century of USAID program evaluations, after the Trump administration took the original database offline last year.

USAID’s Development Experience Clearinghouse dates back to 1975 and has grown to include more than 168,000 documents on the agency’s foreign aid work. Its website went dark in early 2025 without warning as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency moved through the agency, and workers reportedly hauled its servers entirely away.

Musk wrote on X at the time that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

...

Ketevan Gallagher had no connection to that fight when she downloaded more than 4,000 evaluation PDFs from the DEC in 2024, for a senior research project using machine learning to analyze the reports. She’s now studying computer engineering at the University of Toronto. She reached out to AidData, a development research lab at William & Mary, when the DEC went offline the following year, to see if it could preserve her collection.

AidData published the archive this month at usaid-archive.aiddata.org, describing Gallagher’s organized dataset as “a unique solution for those searching for lessons learned” from decades of US foreign aid work. It now holds roughly 4,500 evaluations spanning 2000 to 2023, a subset of the original collection. Gallagher said she was “very grateful that AidData was able to preserve this data.”

Party and Patriotism

 Many posts have discussed patriotism and American exceptionalism.

Ruy Teixeira and Karlyn Bowman at AEI:

The reasons why our politics has been a cold shower for Americans’ patriotism are not hard to discern. One of them is the president. Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by framing the U.S. as a nation in terminal decline, and he has frequently drawn a moral equivalence between the actions of foreign dictators and America’s own foreign policy. In the period since Trump overtook the Republican Party, right-wingers have become much more critical about America as it actually exists. And though Trump regularly expresses patriotism, his pageantry and truculent manner have been more polarizing than unifying. He seems to miss no opportunity to associate love of country with his own personal MAGA brand.

But it’s by no means just the fault of Trump and his party. Democrats have long practiced what we might call a “yes, but” approach to patriotism. The general idea is that patriotism is kind of okay but only if it’s immediately linked to the terrible things that America has done in the past and the injustices that still exist today. Simply being patriotic, full stop, is viewed with suspicion if not outright hostility. And on the party’s ascendant far left, the Democratic Socialists of America—which stands to see a number of their members elected to Congress in November—recently released a platform that called for getting rid of the Constitution altogether.

But you don’t just need to look at the radical left to find Democratic objections to patriotism. Just this week, Fox News reported that Christina Bohannan, an Iowa Democrat trying to swing a critical House seat, called patriotism “sensitive and controversial” in a statement she issued in 2021. And last month, moderate Democratic representative Tom Suozzi of New York bemoaned his party’s aversion to patriotism. “The choice Democrats face is clear,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “We can allow patriotism to become a partisan label, or we can reclaim a tradition that rightly belongs to every American.”

Disappearing Town Halls

Kate Santaliz at Axios:

The congressional town hall is becoming an endangered species.

Why it matters: August recess once meant lawmakers returning home to face constituents — sometimes friendly, sometimes furious. After a wave of explosive confrontations last year, many lawmakers have stopped them altogether.

Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) is among the dwindling number of lawmakers who still regularly subject themselves to the traditional, open town hall.

"You've got to show up in the town square and answer the questions. I told people I'd do it when I ran, and I kept my promise," Flood told Axios.

Flood holds three in-person town halls a year. He said his forums last year each drew about 750 people, while attendance this year has ranged from 235 to 315.

Zoom in: Only 11 lawmakers have town halls scheduled for the rest of August, according to LegiStorm's town hall tracker.For a ritual once synonymous with August recess, that's a remarkably thin showing.

Flashback: Republicans got screamed at — a lot — at town halls last year, as constituents vented over DOGE, federal layoffs and the Trump administration's spending cuts.Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) was booed, heckled and repeatedly interrupted at a March 2025 town hall in Asheville as he defended Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE cuts.

During an August 2025 town hall, constituents shouted at Flood, "Liar!" and "You don't care about us!"

The angry confrontations prompted NRCC chair Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) to tell Republicans to stop holding in-person town halls.

In summer 2009, Democrats faced angry voters at their town hall meetings across the country as constituents protested the Affordable Care Act. (As of January 2026, public approval of the ACA was 61%, according to KFF.)Democrats suffered historic losses in the 2010 midterm election.

Saving Social Security: Lotsa Luck

 Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Jeff Stein at NOTUS:

A group of eight centrist senators is attempting to compel Congress to revamp Social Security, in what many in Washington see as the first real effort at overhauling the government’s biggest program in more than a decade.

The push, led by retiring Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), sets the stage for a major confrontation later this year with potential consequences for the 59 million seniors who currently receive benefits.

Their bill, the PROMISE Act, does not directly cut Social Security benefits or raise taxes to avert the program’s approaching budget shortfall. Rather, it would task a bipartisan board with writing a plan to keep the pension system funded for another 50 years, likely through trillions of dollars in tax hikes and benefit cuts. The legislation would also establish parliamentary rules aimed at pushing Congress to act on the board’s proposal.

...

AARP — the roughly 40-million-members-strong seniors’ organization — has begun urging lawmakers to reject the bill, highlighting polling that suggests 85% of Americans support maintaining or increasing benefits. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has begun calling for Senate Democrats to reject benefit cuts and instead stand behind financing Social Security by repealing the existing limit on payroll taxes for those earning more than $184,500 per year, arguing “the Democratic Party is ever to regain the faith of ordinary Americans it must stand firm on the issue of Social Security.”

Even conservatives who have long called for Social Security reform are mobilizing against it. Grover Norquist, the antitax crusader who leads the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, said in an interview that he has begun lobbying congressional Republican leadership to oppose the bill. Norquist called the legislation a “very real effort by the left” to convince Republicans to support tax hikes.

One Senate Democratic aide, granted anonymity to candidly assess legislative dynamics, said, “I will eat my shoe” if the bill passes this year.

Durbin acknowledged those odds: “Miracles do occur,” he said.

In another potential sign of the legislation’s radioactivity, half of its original sponsors — Cassidy, Durbin, Tillis and Republican John Cornyn of Texas — are leaving the Senate at the end of this year. (Cassidy and Cornyn lost their primaries against Trump-backed challengers.)

Boomers Cling to Wealth and Power

Many posts have discussed demographic trends, especially the decline of births and the aging of the population.

Bruce Mehlman:

The first of the Baby Boomer generation turns 80 this year, with the fourth and likely last of the Baby Boomer Presidents well-into his second term. Leadership will eventually pass to younger generations. But Boomers still hold much of the wealth and many of the offices, and they appear in no hurry to hand things over. A brief look at generational inheritance.

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Decades of rising earnings and asset values left Baby Boomers and older Americans holding nearly two-thirds of assets. And the wealth has outlasted the traditional handoff: Americans are living and working longer, while judges, Senators, House members and CEOs are markedly older than they were a generation ago.

Older generations are also sticking around longer in government & business… the average age of judges, Senators, House members & CEOs climbed for four decades and remains at or near record highs.