Relevant because it demonstrates a significant change in energy policy for the UK compared to the Starmer cabinet, and could lead to the Rosebank oil and gas field in the North Sea also being approved. Goodbye degrowth idealism, hello hard-nosed pragmatism?

WASHINGTON—Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration, U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter said.

Both Musk and President Trump have expressed anger at Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries in recent weeks, which the president blames for high energy prices. Last week, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network, the people said, rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless.

Musk and Trump discussed the Starlink decision in a call soon after the slowdown became public, while the president was campaigning last week, two of the people said. One of the people also claimed Musk and Trump discussed the matter prior to the decision to throttle Starlink.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s public complaints—namely that Ukrainians could die if the unrestrictive service wasn’t restored—led to widespread confusion about who ordered the slowdown, and to an informal investigation inside the White House.

Julio Herrera Velutini really wanted a pardon.

A billionaire banker from a prominent Venezuelan family, Mr. Herrera faced felony bribery charges in the United States and struck an unusually lenient plea deal in August 2025 for a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. But he felt that reduced charge was still a stain on his record.

So Mr. Herrera deployed his lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, the former Florida solicitor general who was on Mr. Trump’s personal legal team, to help with a plea for clemency. His 27-year-old daughter, Isabela Herrera, who is an American citizen, donated $3.5 million to a super PAC tied to Mr. Trump. But as of last fall, the pardon remained elusive.

Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department. They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.

Under the agreement, Ms. Habba would become general counsel at Concord Partners, a company that Ms. Herrera set up in late October 2025 in Florida. The company has no public profile and its business remains unclear even to some people associated with the Herrera business empire. Ms. Habba finalized her deal days after the company was registered.

At the time, Ms. Habba was also a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, overseeing U.S. attorneys. She had an office at the Justice Department and a protective detail from the U.S. Marshals, a holdover from her time serving as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

She formally began her work for Concord Partners on Jan. 1. Weeks later, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon.

The sequence of events raises questions about how Mr. Herrera secured the pardon and who might have helped him. People familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.

Ms. Habba denied any role in the pardon.

“Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the D.O.J. — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false,” she said in a statement.

Ms. Habba was a special government employee at the time, which allows individuals to work for the federal government for up to 130 days and maintain outside employment with conflict-of-interest restrictions.

She declined to discuss her work for Concord.

Ms. Herrera and Mr. Herrera did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did their companies. In a statement, the Justice Department said Ms. Habba did not speak to anyone about a pardon.

A White House official said that Ms. Habba had nothing to do with the pardon and that the administration follows a pardon review process that includes the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department.

In Mr. Trump’s second term, a pardon industry has sprouted up, with wealthy criminals paying well-connected lawyers, fixers and lobbyists to appeal to the administration and its allies in an effort to secure pardons. Many pardon seekers have come to the conclusion that supporting Mr. Trump and his political agenda is the fastest way to secure clemency.

Some people looking for pardons have reported paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or even $1 million to hire people promising access to the president or influence over the pardon process.

For Ms. Habba, the job from the Herrera family came at a pivotal point in her life and career.

She resigned in December 2025 as U.S. attorney in New Jersey after a panel of federal judges ruled that her appointment by Mr. Trump had been carried out unlawfully. Her second marriage was also falling apart.

The arrangement with the Herreras provided her with a new level of financial security. She also found new love. Shortly after the pardon was issued, Ms. Habba started dating Turhan Mildon, a Turkish investor.

They were married last month in a lavish ceremony in New York. The guest list included Attorney General Todd Blanche; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; and Will Scharf, the White House counsel.

The couple is now engaged in high-profile feud with Richard Grenell, a longtime Trump ally. Ms. Habba has accused Mr. Grenell of misallocating a donation from her husband to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Mr. Grenell was running at the time. Mr. Grenell has denied her accusations, calling them absurd.

Ms. Habba brought those accusations directly to Mr. Trump, who directed Mr. Scharf to investigate them. The Times has previously reported that the investigation centers on a bank transfer from the Democratic Republic of Congo to a Texas defense company.

Mr. Herrera, who also has Italian citizenship, is a member of the Herrera family, a banking, real estate and fashion dynasty that dates back to the 14th century. The family owns estates and castles in Caracas, Venezuela; the Canary Islands; Spain; and Germany.

Mr. Herrera founded a bank based in Puerto Rico in 2008.

In August 2022, he was charged for his role in a scheme to bribe Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico to dismiss a regulator who was investigating the bank. Mr. Herrera, Ms. Vázquez and a former F.B.I. agent who had worked as a consultant for Mr. Herrera all pleaded not guilty to felony charges.

Mr. Kise, Mr. Herrera’s lawyer, helped negotiate a deal with the Justice Department under which Mr. Herrera pleaded guilty in August 2025 to a single misdemeanor campaign finance charge. Ms. Vázquez and the former F.B.I. agent also pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, disappointing career prosecutors who had pushed for harsher sentences.

All three were pardoned by Mr. Trump at the same time, shortly before they were scheduled to be sentenced for the misdemeanor charges.

In July, Banvelca, the Herreras’ family office since 1781, announced that Ms. Herrera, a member of the eighth generation and the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, was assuming leadership of the company. Neither the news release nor her bio on the company’s website makes any mention of Concord Partners, the vehicle employing Ms. Habba, who now goes by Mrs. Mildon.

Controversial vaccine researchers who have been praised by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, had their offices in Guinea-Bissau raided by judicial police, who seized doses of hepatitis B vaccines, officials said on Facebook.

The researchers have been at the heart of an ongoing dispute over research on African newborns, supported by $1.6m from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and matched by the Pershing Square Foundation and the Bluebell Foundation for a total of $3.2m.

The police search took place on Monday, involving “investigative procedures aimed at clarifying the circumstances related to the said batch of vaccines”, according to the social media post, which was translated from Portuguese. The announcement noted that seizing the immunizations did not point to “irregularities in the quality, safety, or effectiveness of the vaccines”.

The Bandim Health Project recently posted a letter of approval for the trial from Guinea-Bissau’s national ethics committee at the ministry of public health, dated 14 July and signed by the committee’s president, Mouhammed Djicó Ould Ahmed. A Danish research ethics committee, which had to change its rules to consider a clinical trial, also approved the study earlier this month.

Quinhin Nantote, the health minister of Guinea-Bissau’s transitional government, disputed reports that the trial would move forward.

“This is not even remotely true,” Nantote told the Guardian in Portuguese on Thursday.

The study was redesigned over the summer, but it would still deny hepatitis B vaccines to 7,000 newborns in the first six weeks of life, in a country where about one in five adults have the virus. Hepatitis B kills 15% to 25% of people with chronic infections, causing cancer and liver failure, and newborns are particularly vulnerable – but vaccination within 24 hours of birth is safe and highly effective at preventing illness.

Any study that would deny the vaccine to participants was “unethical and exposes newborns to serious and potentially irreversible harm”, said Tarik Jašarević, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO), calling hepatitis B vaccination at birth an “essential public health intervention”.

Through its country office in Guinea-Bissau, the WHO and its partners have been advising the ministry of health on the planned introduction of the hepatitis B vaccine and the potential impact of this study, Jašarević added.

The Bandim Health Project was founded by anthropologist Peter Aaby in 1978, and it is now co-led by his wife, Christine Stabell Benn, an epidemiologist.

Kennedy has repeatedly praised their work, calling them “the deities of vaccine research” at a recent anti-vaccine conference. He has several times referenced the results of a study they conducted on the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP), which the same researchers later conducted again and found completely different results. Even so, Kennedy called Aaby a “very famous” researcher on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2023 and cited his research when he halted US funding to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

Stabell Benn was a member of the hepatitis B working group of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), helping present evidence to the US committee that voted to end the universal birth recommendation before such decisions on vaccines were stayed by a federal judge. Stabell Benn also hosted a podcast with Tracy Beth Høeg, a former top official with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) who said she wanted to end “unnecessary” vaccines.

Aaby, Stabell Benn and Frederik Schaltz-Buchholzer, the lead researcher on the project, did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the trial and the police search.

The Bandim organization is deeply enmeshed in Guinea-Bissau but has done little to improve the country’s health and research capacities in five decades of operation, according to a report from the non-profit Stand Up for Science (SUFS). The organization is now fundraising to help roll out the vaccines at birth to all newborns in the country.

“Our investigator encountered significant distrust of Bandim by the citizenry of Guinea-Bissau,” said Colette Delawalla, an American health researcher and founder of SUFS. “However, because of the lack of public health infrastructure, Bandim is often the only option in situations where people are desperate to access medical care of any kind.”

The police raid underlines the fact that Guinea-Bissau is a “fragile” nation that experienced a military coup less than a year ago, Delawalla said. The country lacks the stability needed for clinical trials, she added.

“Guinea-Bissau is in the difficult situation of trying to protect their youth, their future, from exploitation by two powerful western nations and they are using what leverage they have to do so,” Delawalla said.

The White House has blocked the transfer of Patriot missiles to Ukraine, US officials have said.
The transfer of interceptor missiles from countries friendly to Ukraine requires the approval of Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary.
While Mr Hegseth has not formally rejected the deals involving countries other than the US – as the manufacturer, it retains control over the weapons – he has not completed the steps required to approve them, sources told The Washington Post.

Online memes are spilling over into real-life rallies as young conservatives rebrand the far right as a hip aesthetic

Relevance to the sub: assassination of political dissidents abroad by an authoritarian regime pursuing an efficient PR strategy through international summits and sports competitions

Robert Kabera, a former military officer who fell out of favor with Paul Kagame's regime, has been found decapitated in Uganda where he had been sheltering for years. Kabera, 50, served as a sergeant-major in the powerful Rwandan Armed Forces and was a lead singer in the Army Jazz Band, which routinely tours in Africa and beyond as part of Rwanda's cultural outreach.

In 2020, he fled Rwanda after allegations of rape which he denied as fabrications by the government to sanction his dissent. Sheltering in neighboring Uganda, he worked as a musician and moonshined as an influencer with 145,000 followers on his social media platforms, where he regularly and overtly criticized the Rwandan government and Paul Kagame's political practices, corruption and authoritarianism.

Paul Kagame has ruled Rwanda since the RPF's military victory that ended the genocide perpetrated by the Hutu supremacist government and paramilitaries that saw the mass killing of 800,000 Tutsi, Twa and non-supremacist Hutu.

Kagame has been credited with pacifying Rwanda after one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century and presiding over the economic reconstruction of Rwanda, but is also criticized for heading an authoritarian regime that severely oppresses political opponents and journalists and refuses to allow other political forces to fairly compete in the political arena.

Under Kagame's rule, Rwanda got directly involved in the deadly wars in eastern Congo on the side of anti-Kinshasa rebels, and has provided support to Mozambique's authoritarian government to suppress the protests against election rigging that cemented FRELIMO's 50-year rule in 2024.

The journalism consortium Forbidden Stories released in 2024 a series of investigations revealing the depth and reach of Kagame's repressive machinery, whose security services were able to directly target, harass and even murder opponents across the African continent and into Europe.

Despite this, Kagame's Rwanda remains a choice destination for international conferences and sports events thanks to a remarkable PR campaign conducted by the Rwandan government, who expanded the cyclism competition Tour du Rwanda in the 2000s to attract tourists and sponsors, and the organization of a Formula One competition, planned for 2030.

SS: The loss Bahrain as a strategic military hub will go down as one of the largest self inflicted errors in US history

In late August, President Donald Trump announced what he called the “biggest oil deal in world history.” Since then, the full text of the accord — which grants the U.S. sweeping access to Venezuela’s oil reserves — has been one of the most sought-after secrets in Washington, D.C.

ProPublica has reviewed a copy of the 18-page strategic partnership agreement signed for the United States by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The document reveals carefully constructed terms that favor U.S. interests at every turn and cements the power of a small group of people handpicked by the Trump administration to govern and profit from the deal. The role of the Venezuelan government and the potential benefits to its people are largely absent from the text.

One of the most criticized aspects of Trump’s announcement has been his choice of a partner: Alejandro Betancourt, a globe-trotting Venezuelan oligarch who has faced money-laundering investigations in three countries.

The Trump administration is taking a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by acquiring shares in a Barbados-registered parent company. The deal document provides little information about the owners and investors behind the parent company, who could receive enormous wealth from the arrangement.

The agreement also safeguards Betancourt’s position as chief executive of NABEP and says the U.S. government will work with the parent company to appoint a powerful seven-member board to govern the venture for an initial 15-year term. Those aspects of the deal, according to people with knowledge of how it came together, were designed to prevent future U.S. and Venezuelan leaders from dismantling the enterprise.

Orlando Alvarado, a name not disclosed by the Trump administration as a party to the accord, signed the agreement on behalf of the parent company, alongside Betancourt, Hegseth and Rubio. Alvarado has held senior roles in multiple Betancourt businesses, including as chief financial officer of an energy firm that became embroiled in scandals a decade ago. According to the Miami Herald, federal prosecutors identified Alvarado as an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to embezzle money from Venezuela’s national oil company.

NABEP spokesperson Terry Wade said that “neither Mr. Betancourt nor Mr. Alvarado has ever been charged with any crime in any country, and any claims against them are baseless.”

Key aspects of the plan differ from the Trump administration’s public pronouncements. Trump has said the deal will secure America’s energy dominance for the next century. But the text indicates that U.S. purchasing rights expire in half that time and that the underlying operating rights appear to run afoul of Venezuelan laws limiting oil concessions to 25 years.

The agreement does ensure the United States a deep discount from fair-market value on 20% of NABEP’s oil, as Trump has said. It does not, however, explicitly guarantee that Betancourt’s company is obligated to pay the estimated $200 billion in royalties and tax payments to Venezuela that the White House has said would benefit the country.

There are also significant caveats related to Trump’s central selling point to Americans — that the deal will bring a gusher of low-cost oil imports.

The agreement gives the U.S. the right to purchase 20% of NABEP’s oil at a discounted rate of $30 a barrel, or less than a third of what oil has sold for in recent months, according to one of three supporting documents reviewed by ProPublica.

But this fee does not account for the cost of getting Venezuela’s oil out of the country. Much of Venezuela’s raw crude is so thick that it won’t flow through pipelines unless it is first blended with 20% or more of oil thinner products. Under the deal, the potentially significant cost of importing millions of barrels of those blending materials is not included in the price.

The White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the energy company NABEP all defended the agreement, saying in statements that their new public-private venture will provide meaningful and lasting economic benefits to both countries that cannot be captured in a legal document.

The newly revealed details of the agreement are nonetheless likely to raise more questions about whether the unorthodox marriage of the United States and a foreign energy baron can bring lasting benefits to either country — and which private parties might benefit along the way. Trump’s oil deal is likely to face scrutiny in both the United States and Venezuela, especially if Democrats win one or both chambers in the midterm elections, according to former U.S. diplomats and congressional staff.

In public comments, Delcy Rodríguez, who won the backing of the Trump administration to serve as Venezuela’s interim president, praised the accord as “historic.” She has asserted that Venezuela will retain sovereignty over its natural resources and defended the choice of Betancourt.

People with knowledge of the Trump administration’s behind-the-scenes decision-making and negotiations with Betancourt spoke to ProPublica on condition of anonymity because they were either not authorized to do so or were fearful of retribution.

One reason that the precise terms of the deal have remained hidden until now is that the signed agreement is marked as a “sensitive” government document. That classification is commonly used to shield a variety of federal records from public release, including those containing personnel information, details about ongoing law enforcement operations and matters protected by attorney-client privilege. The document also contains a confidentiality clause barring Betancourt’s company from disclosing the “existence and terms” of the U.S. government agreement.

One person familiar with the deliberations said that people close to the Trump administration seemed keen to partner with Betancourt’s company because of the privacy and flexibility it offered. That appeared to give NABEP an advantage over publicly traded oil companies, which would be obligated to shareholder reporting requirements.

BERLIN, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) said on Tuesday that it was investigating the online publication of ​emails stolen by unknown hackers during a cyberattack ‌last month.

An AfD spokesperson said hackers had targeted a hosting service provider used by the party and apparently copied data from ​a small number of email accounts, most of ​which had not been used for years.

"The recent ⁠online publication of what is presumably a portion of ​this data is currently being investigated," the spokesperson said. "A ​preliminary assessment can only be provided once this investigation has been concluded."

The spokesperson did not say how much data was stolen.

The statement ​followed a report by Bild newspaper saying over 420,000 ​emails linked to the party had been published online.

According to Bild, ‌the ⁠material included emails sent by party figures such as co-leader Alice Weidel as well as bank statements, academic certificates and membership lists.

The website hosting the material was offline ​by Tuesday ​afternoon, but archived ⁠versions showed a trove of 281 gigabytes of data under the headline "The party's own ​records, unedited".

The leak comes as the AfD, ​which ⁠has topped national opinion polls and made gains in recent state elections, faces calls from some politicians and civil ⁠society groups ​for it to be banned.

What is the most worrying threat to liberal democracy today? Donald Trump’s kleptocratic, would-be authoritarian presidency? The semi-fascist MAGA movement’s capture of the Republican Party? Both are strong contenders, but my nominee is Alternative für Deutschland. After a recent breakthrough election win in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, this extreme-right party leads the German opinion polls and has a discernible path to national power.

AfD proposes to expel millions of people (including naturalized German citizens), take Germany out of the European Union, side with Russia against Ukraine, crack down on “anti-German” art, withhold state benefits from LGBTQ and other “deviant” families, and reconstruct the state on ethnonationalist lines. “The AfD’s legislators in the new state parliament include a former pornographer convicted of theft and men under investigation for ties to right-wing extremist groups,” writes the Brookings Institution’s Constanze Stelzenmüller in the Financial Times. “The state AfD leadership has consistently refused to disavow staffers with links to a banned neo-Nazi organization.”

That’s right, folks. We are talking about an extreme-right party rising meteorically in Germany.

Given Germany’s geographic and strategic centrality and its not-so-ancient history, can you think of anything quite as disturbing, or as bizarre? After all, Germany today is not the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, where people used wheelbarrows as wallets. Whatever challenges it faces, Germany is a brilliant national success story: rich, secure, strong, democratic, peaceable.

What in the world is going on? Why are Western publics so disillusioned with liberalism? Why gravitate to authoritarian populism, which is invariably corrupt, repressive, and incompetent? Why now, when Western countries are objectively richer and safer than any time before the end of the Cold War—if not ever?

We liberals are rightly obsessed with those questions, and a stream of recent books addresses them. I have reviewed some of them here, here, here, and here. Now come two more, one by a Nobel Prize-winning economist, the other by a British historian. One of them is a tour de force that will change the way you think about the problem. Spoiler: it’s not by the Nobelist.

Daron Acemoglu is an economist at MIT. He and collaborators Simon Johnson (a LibCon2026 panelist) and James A. Robinson won the Nobel in 2024 for their work showing how a “narrow corridor” of institutional arrangements generates conditions for prosperity. In What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, Acemoglu, writing solo, tackles the global political crisis.

In the 20th century, he argues, liberal markets and politics succeeded by dismantling “absolute power of certain groups over the rest,” creating conditions for self-government, and sparking a virtuous cycle in which technological progress, markets, and wage growth bolstered social mobility, economic prosperity, and participatory democracy.

Unfortunately, the cycle went into reverse. What he calls the “industrial compact” (“the combination of industrial-era economics and politics”) struggled while inequality, mass migration, and globalization heightened social tensions. Automation, deregulation, and the decline of unions added to the pressure on working-class well-being; and then, of course, China stormed into world markets.

As if that had not damaged the postwar industrial compact enough, liberalism “completely turned its back on the economic priorities of the less educated and has come to focus on cultural and global issues.” Worse still, liberals lost their “moral fire.” Neglecting their legacy as economic and social reformers, they became a technocratic establishment that was too smug and insular to command a mass following.

So where are we now? “History shows that when liberalism falters, its enemies rush in,” Acemoglu writes. “We are only at the beginning of this unraveling.” In his last chapter, Acemoglu argues that “if liberalism is to endure, it must be rebuilt”—and “it must rise with the working class at its heart.” To that end, he ticks off programs and ideas, such as more apprenticeships, “appropriately targeted” redistribution, “pro-worker AI,” “a common narrative” that can “bring people together,” “renewed understanding of the value of community,” and—I guess you get the idea. Every author dreads the “solutions” chapter, and this grab-bag exemplifies why.

Acemoglu has written a commendable account of the economic changes that have riven and challenged Western societies. Like many liberal critics of liberalism, however, he seems too eager to blame liberalism for—well, everything. “I believe that these noxious [antiliberal] currents are alive only as a result of liberalism’s crisis and weakness.” My italics, because ... only? It’s all our fault?

While no one disputes that liberal governments committed mistakes and oversights, none of their failings explains, much less justifies, the movement of an enviably privileged electorate like Germany’s toward a party like AfD. Up to a point, I’m all for self-critical introspection by chastened intellectuals; but when, one wonders, does self-criticism shade into self-absorption? Sure, liberals need to reform and improve; but when we see a global political wave empowering the worst kinds of opportunists and demagogues, maybe it’s not always our fault.

So it is refreshing and revelatory to turn to The Great Realignment: Why the New Right Is Here to Stay, by Stephen Davies, the author of books about Brexit, economic innovation, and empiricism (and a contributor to The UnPopulist). He, too, tackles the question of why liberalism is under threat everywhere and all at once, but he is most interested in the specific nature of the threat. “The pattern almost everywhere in the developed world is increasing success for a new kind of right-wing politics,” he writes. The question is “why this kind of politics has sprung up now and in so many places” (his italics). That, it seems to me, is the right place to start.

Like Acemoglu, Davies takes note of the disruptions that liberal democracies and markets have struggled to cope with: social media, economic globalization, mass migration, growing gaps favoring big cities over the countryside and college-educated over non-college workers, and anxiety about demographic and cultural change. Also like Acemoglu, he dings liberals for losing touch with ordinary people by prioritizing “ideas and perspectives generated in the academy” that “tended to serve the interests of a class of qualified professionals.” All of that, you’ve heard before.

Davies’ contribution is to put those developments in a much larger context. Where others see a concatenation of mistakes or failures that strained liberal democracies to the breaking point, Davies sees a playing out of political forces that nobody could have prevented or preempted. In other words, even if liberals had done everything right, it might not have mattered.

Why? Davies’ central concept is that of alignment: the organization of politics around issues that define what are usually binary debates. An alignment establishes political alliances and arguments in ways that are more or less stable, often for several generations. During these stable periods, “political identities are known and persistent.” Every so often, however, a defining conflict is resolved or becomes obsolete and a new conflict supplants it. The result is, per Davies’ title, a “great realignment.”

Major realignments have several characteristics, Davies thinks. One is that, after a while, they settle down into predictable political patterns; but in the meantime, they seem chaotic and frightening, especially to those whose mindset is stuck in the old order. For a while, nothing makes sense: radical actors and ideas come out of nowhere and surge from the margins of politics to the center; “friends and allies become enemies while deeply divided opponents suddenly find themselves allied.”

Another characteristic is that major alignments can be delayed or obstructed, but they cannot be prevented. They are driven by structural changes in societies and economies and by tectonic changes in public sentiment—not by the to-ing and fro-ing of everyday politics. When a realignment happens, politicians arise to meet the moment. If not for Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen, someone else like them would have emerged.

Third, and a point Davies is at pains to stress: realignments are not random events or ephemeral disturbances that burn themselves out. They are about something. Even if the disrupters seem disreputable, they speak for millions and represent substantive positions on fundamental issues. Whether or not you like the new combatants and battle lines, they are (as the book’s subtitle says) “here to stay.”

What are those battle lines? Writes Davies:

The core of the present realignment is this. We are moving on from a world in which the aligning issue is how large a role government should play in the economy and in redistributing resources—capitalism versus social democracy or socialism. ... Instead, there is a new one. This is about identity and the nature of governance; the choice now is nationalism versus cosmopolitanism and globalism.

Crediting and extending David Goodhart’s 2017 book distinguishing between localist “somewheres” and cosmopolitan “anywheres,” Davies argues that recent decades saw the world divide into two groups with different sources of identity. On one side are people who see themselves as rooted in their place, nation, job, and faith; on the other, denizens of globally connected metropolises who identify with liberation from local and national constraints. In the United States, he says:

the realignment is complete. Instead of a division between Republicans and Democrats based on support for tax cuts and deregulation and smaller government on one side versus redistribution and more regulation on the other, there is now one between a nationalist party that is conservative on a range of cultural questions and a more globalist party that is more relaxed about immigration and radical on cultural questions.

We see the same divisions everywhere: multilateralism and internationalism versus nationalism; progressive versus conservative values; globalization, free trade, and relatively liberal immigration versus economic nationalism, trade protection, and reduced immigration and even mass deportation. According to Davies, this conflict will frame world politics for decades to come.

His argument, rich and fascinating as it is, has its blind spots. While Davies is right to take populist nationalism seriously as a worldview, he does not take seriously enough the populist threat to the very existence of democracy and the rule of law. (See: U.S.A., January 6, 2021.) He also takes too little account of the fact that the prescriptions of the populist right—such as protectionism, cronyism, nativism, and anti-intellectualism—are ruinous and oppressive. (See: everywhere.) His breezy confidence that “politics is not in chaos” and “will soon stabilize” seems, shall we say, premature.

Nonetheless, the implications of Davies’ argument deserve attention. One is that the conservative-libertarian alliance in support of free markets is dead. “In the new politics the dominant ‘right’ position will be one that combines nationalism and anti-globalism with economic interventionism,” he says. “To be a Thatcherite today is like being a Gladstonian Liberal in the 1920s—charming and admirable but ineffectual and unrealistic.”

Another implication is that the realignment has no reverse gear. Now that it is in place, it has redefined politics and superseded its original causes. As a result, “technocratic economics will no longer work politically.” Fattening voters’ pocketbooks can help win the next election but will not change the fundamental partisan loyalties of voters who are asking not “How am I doing?” but “Whose country is it?”

If Davies is right that the political paradigm has shifted, then it’s no longer the economy, stupid! Building more houses and improving health care, while worth doing, will not catalyze a new majority for Democrats and other parties of the center-right and center-left. Instead, the main battle is over culture and identity. Germany’s AfD is betting on that, and as of now it is winning.

Interesting paper looking into whether the one-off billionaire tax will be a net positive to the state's coffers.

TLDR; "The present value of permanently lost income tax collections from departures more than offsets the one-time wealth tax revenue, yielding a net present value of negative $38.9 billion."

The Trump Administration is repeatedly taking equity in U.S. chip companies. If they truly wanted to encourage foreign investment in domestic capacity, they would stop.