Hello and happy Saturday. The week kicked off with two pretty big stories and—for the first time in a considerable while—neither of them pertained to the 2024 election or U.S. politics.
Syrian rebels captured the capital of Damascus last Sunday, prompting dictator Bashar al-Assad to flee to Russia and bringing a sudden and unexpected end to a civil war that began in 2011. The Morning Dispatch had a great summary, Charlotte Lawson wrote (in a piece I’ve summarized below) that “the rapid rebel takeover comes with its own set of challenges for Israel,” and we’ll have more coverage next week.
But the most talked about story of the week was the arrest of 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione was caught at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a five-day manhunt.
A day after Thompson was murdered outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel on his way to an investor meeting, law enforcement officials said that shell casings with the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” were recovered from the crime scene, terms used by critics of the health insurance industry.
I can’t think of a better way to describe the “national conversation” that has ensued than the way Kevin D. Williamson did Monday in Wanderland, where he wrote that reactions “have ranged from the insipid to the illiterate to the despicable.” He argues that insurance companies bear the brunt of people’s anger about the high cost of health care because they don’t understand how things work in other countries that have allegedly superior health care systems. He goes into the many reasons that “the U.S. system is a mess,” as he writes, and then he goes into professor mode:
Properly understood, health insurance is—repeat it one more time!—a financial product, not a medical product. It is not a club, nor is it … some sort of pre-paid medical-fee scheme. Insurance is a hedge. Which is to say, it is a way of transferring a specific (very specific! Read the paperwork!) kind of financial risk from yourself to another party, which charges you a fee for assuming the risk. Having health insurance is no more an invitation to consume medical services than having mortgage insurance is an invitation for someone to default on a mortgage.
In the Wednesday G-File, Jonah Goldberg takes issue with the anti-capitalist leanings of those who defend Mangione, the alleged shooter. He criticizes Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who said, “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far.” And he gets a little professorial himself, reminding people that single-payer health care has its own set of problems.
In the U.K., which has precisely the kind of enlightened system the “murder is wrong but …” contexualizers admire, rationing is openly considered a feature of the National Health Service, not a bug. … Reducing human lives to dollars and cents (or pounds and pence) is supposedly not just the cardinal sin of American insurance companies, but the justification for the outpouring of glee over a murder and the mockery of the victim. But across the pond, it’s something to be celebrated if government bureaucrats do it.
Even though Warren, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other prominent liberals tried to contextualize Thompson’s murder, the reactions didn’t fall neatly along the left-right divide. In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio highlighted the fact that two Pennsylvania Democrats, Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. John Fetterman, were both quick to condemn the murder and the man accused of committing it. He uses their statements to kick off a discussion of the differences between economic populism and cultural populism. He puts Warren and AOC in the economic populism camp and Shapiro and Fetterman in the latter camp.
But, in the wake of an election where the Democrats lost ground with the working class and Donald Trump managed somehow to embody both law-and-order cultural populism and empathy-for-the-little-guy economic populism, how should Democrats try to regain support from blue-collar Americans? That’s a key question. Nick writes: “Can any leftist successfully blend the two populisms, as Trump has? How do you advance a working-class economic agenda without leaving the center suspicious that you’re a burn-it-all-down radical? How do you advance a working-class cultural agenda without leaving the left suspicious that you’re a status-quo simp at heart?”
Thank you for reading and have a good weekend. Now, check out some good stuff you might have missed.
Among the arguments Donald Trump and J.D. Vance made for tariffs and a draconian immigration policy was the claim that too many American men are missing from the labor force—7 million to be exact. In Capitolism, Scott Lincicome digs into the numbers and finds a few flaws in Vance’s use of that total. For starters, different men have different reasons for not working: They might be in school or raising a family, they might be disabled or retired. While Bureau of Labor statistics do show that 6.7 million men ages 25 to 54 are not in the workforce, Census Bureau data show that only 10 percent say they can’t find work. Citing an inflated number of “missing men” to defend deportations is not only deceptive, it could be devastating for the economy. Scott writes: “Without a vast reserve of available American workers, U.S. companies will struggle to replace newly deported immigrants or expand into newly protected industries, and that will—barring a robot/AI revolution!—act as a hard limit on future economic expansion, especially as policy diverts already employed workers from more productive enterprises to less-productive ones.”
The fall of the Assad regime is, in many ways, good for Israel. It demonstrated that Israel’s actions against Hezbollah and Iran itself had diminished the Islamic Republic, for example. But, as Charlotte Lawson reports, whatever happens next in Syria is likely to present its own challenges. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the rebel group behind the offensive, is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization led by Sunni Islamists. And the chaotic situation could provide an opening for groups like ISIS. On the other hand, Charlotte writes, “At least for now, as different rebel factions vie for influence in post-Assad Syria, [HTS] may be reluctant to pick a fight with the Middle East’s predominant military power.”
And here’s the best of the rest:
- Joseph Roche provides the latest in his series of dispatches from Ukraine. In this installment, he talked to members of a volunteer unit known as the Witches of Bucha. The unit is made up almost entirely of women who work to bolster Ukraine’s air defenses by targeting Russian drones.
- The proposed purchase of U.S. Steel by Japan-based Nippon Steel presents a conundrum for President-elect Donald Trump. Trump courted unions during his campaign, and the steelworkers union largely supports the deal. But supporting such a deal goes against Trump’s populist instincts. David M. Drucker reports that supporters of the deal are hopeful that Trump can be swayed.
- In Techne, Will Rinehart writes about Trump’s appointment of David Sacks to serve as his “AI and crypto czar.” Sacks is a tech investor who has backed companies such as Uber and other Silicon Valley startups, and Will argues that his elevation represents the “ascension of the Silicon Valley mafia.” But Will doesn’t mean that in a bad way.
- The political group No Labels failed in its bid to put forth a bipartisan presidential ticket in the 2024 election, but it is already looking ahead to the 2026 midterms. Charles Hilu reported from the group’s national meeting, which featured some prominent House members from swing districts in attendance.
- And the pods: On Advisory Opinions, Sarah Isgur and David French spoke with Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti about the recent Supreme Court case that challenged his state’s law banning gender-transition treatment for minors. On The Dispatch Podcast, Sarah leads a discussion with Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and Megan McArdle about the Thompson murder, the alleged killer’s privileged background, and whether the shooting says anything profound about Americans. And for a little break from the news, check out Jonah’s Remnant interview with Razib Khan, the “unofficial geneticist” of the podcast.
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