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How the End of the Cold War Saved the Siberian Tiger
New Republic • Feb 19, 2026

How the End of the Cold War Saved the Siberian Tiger

What was it like to live at the end of the Cold War? While Francis Fukuyama mulled Kojève, Hegel, and the end of history, a KGB officer in Dresden was lamenting his leaders’ surrender and would later proclaim the fall of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” A Russian living in that country’s vast eastern territories experienced a dismantling of the state services, which, however imperfect, had guaranteed a basic standard of living—and a dismantling of law enforcement, creating opportunities for poaching. And to biologists in Russia and the United States, the end of the Cold War meant a chance to study a species that they knew next to nothing about, the Amur tiger.  Amur tigers once ranged from the Pacific Ocean all the way to Lake Baikal (which is why the name Siberian tiger lingers). But by 1991, as Jonathan Slaght chronicles in his new book, Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China, they were both mysterious and under existential threat. Rampant poaching and the kidnapping of cubs in the early twentieth century cut the Russian Amur tiger population to a mere 20 or 30. Lev Kaplanov, a passionate tiger biologist, sounded the alarm in 1941, and even as the world careened from world war to Cold War, the Soviet Union banned tiger hunting and cub trapping. There were still challenges—the zapovednik (wildlife reserve) system was forever being tampered with, and illegal poaching continued—but tiger populations managed a recovery: Starting from about 130 individuals in the 1960s, they rose to about 200 by the 1970s, and then to about 500 by the 1980s. But those numbers were the result of protection by a heavy-handed state. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that protection fell away too. Poachers prowled the forests again, claiming as many as 60 tigers a year. Rising incomes in China meant more disposable income to spend on tiger parts for illusory medical benefits. Economic development harmed the tigers too. Foreign companies like Hyundai were hungry for Russian timber and, in the economic free-for-all that followed 1991, consumed large tracts of tiger habitat. Korean pine was in particularly high demand. The pine nuts feed the wild boar that, in turn, feed the tiger. New roads made poaching easier and rendered tigers vulnerable to car collision. Biologist Linda Kerley spearheaded a study that found that “roads decrease the survivorship and reproductive success of tigers.” Whatever else the Soviet state was, it had been better for tigers than what immediately followed. Under these circumstances, basic questions—How many tigers are there? What do they do? How much space do they need?—acquired urgency.Slaght’s book follows the wild and delightful adventure that Russian and American biologists embarked on together to answer these questions and save the tigers from extinction. Slaght is a conservation biologist who brings a deep knowledge of Russian politics and culture to his tale. His first book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, was a splendid account of his time studying Blakiston’s fish owls in the Russian Far East, a blend of natural history and memoir in the tradition of George Schaller and Caitlin O’Connell. Where Owls was a personal narrative, Tigers is a sophisticated history told in the third person. But both books bring the Russian Far East and its creatures alive, and in both, there is a strong current of hope. Tigers is a book not just about animal conservation but about the bonds conservation can forge between humans. In the 1970s, Maurice Hornocker, an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was using radiotelemetry to study cougars and other big cats. Yevgeniy Matyushkin, a Russian scientist, read Hornocker’s work and promptly asked him to bring these methods to the Soviet Union, but for Hornocker, a U.S. government servant, this was not feasible. Hornocker also sought to study Amur tigers in China after the Sino-American rapprochement, but to no avail; habitat fragmentation and poaching had left the species virtually nonexistent in China. In due course, he retired, taking up a position at the University of Idaho and founding an institute for the study of carnivores. There the matter might have rested. But in 1989, a group of Soviet researchers arrived in Idaho for a visit. They sat and talked wildlife with their American hosts by a firepit, Yuriy Puzachenko, one of the Russians, holding the Americans entranced with tales of “cats built like battering rams … solitary creatures adapted to mountain and pine: ice-fringed apparitions that burst from shadow to ambush their favorite food, wild boar, prey that can weigh as much as a grand piano and can have tusks like sharpened knives.” And little was known about them because, Puzachenko pointed out, the Soviet Union lacked the VHF radiotelemetry that allowed for tracking the cats.  No field biologist could resist such a pitch. Howard Quigley, one of Hornocker’s graduate students, suggested cooperation and reported the conversation to his supervisor. The Soviet Union was now open to joint ventures with the United States. Thus was the Siberian Tiger Project born. An initial reconnaissance trip led the scientists to pick Sikhote-Alin—a vast, mountainous nature reserve—as the field site. Hornocker found funding for a year and hired as the American lead Dale Miquelle, whose job description was to “inject himself fully into the tiger’s environment, feel the changes in the weather, struggle up the mountain slopes, and feel everything a tiger did.”The premise of the cooperation was simple. The Americans would bring their expertise in tracking technology, the Russians their field knowledge. That knowledge did not come solely from scientists. When initial attempts to trap tigers using dogs as bait failed, it was a wandering park ranger, Viktor, who explained that healthy tigers were indifferent to dogs and suggested where snares might best be laid. Trapping a tiger proved hard, but eventually, a yearling named Olga was caught, collared, and released. Her collar provided the team with her locations, creating a picture of where she went, what she did, and how she lived.Other successes followed. And something curious happened. As they worked together, poring over VHF data or figuring out why darts were misfiring, the Americans and the Russians found themselves drawing close. Miquelle, whose initial three years in Russia bloomed to 30, became tight friends with Yevgeniy (Zhenya) Smirnov, his Russian counterpart. Slaght’s book abounds with the human moments of which work and international relations are made: celebratory vodka when the team catches three tigers in a day; Smirnov and Miquelle mourning a poached tiger, before rescuing her orphaned cubs; Mariya Ivanova, a Russian woman, looking after Miquelle as a mother might (Miquelle named a tiger after her). In one such moment, a Russian farmer recognizes Olga:The farmer raised his rifle out of habit … then … he stopped. He knew this tiger, he realized. He saw Olga as an individual. Dale and Zhenya had spent many nights at the farm while out tracking her, telling him tales of Olga—the places she went and the things she did. Olga shared these forests with the farmer, walked the coastline as he did, and skirted his field, where she left his cattle to graze in peace. They were neighbors. And this was what he’d wanted to tell Dale, that he understood this.To Miquelle, the moment was stunning because it showed that humans and tigers could live together. But it also showed that a tiger could bring a Russian and an American together, despite all the propaganda and suspicion of the Cold War. “We are all the better for having been soaked in the camaraderie of that collective,” notes Miquelle. That camaraderie was a gift the tigers gave to people. The moment was stunning because it showed that humans and tigers could live together. But it also showed that a tiger could bring a Russian and an American together, despite all the propaganda and suspicion of the Cold War. To save tigers, one has to know where they are and what they require. Data point by data point, a picture began to emerge. In 1996, the first tiger census since 1985 was carried out: a Herculean task, funded by USAID and Exxon Mobil (trying to compensate for the Alaska oil spill of 1989), in which different counting methodologies and agendas had to be wrangled into a cohesive performance. The results found between 415 and 476 tigers. Tigers in protected areas did better than tigers in unprotected areas. That was unsurprising. More interesting was that what seemed like a vast reserve to a human trudging through snow was not sufficiently large to protect a tiger. Tigers were roaming beyond the boundaries of the reserves, where protection for them lapsed. Miquelle, who was on loan to USAID (his successor as Siberian Tiger Project field lead was John Goodrich), worked with the Russian Academy of Science to recommend expanding protected areas. The Sikhote-Alin reserve got an additional 800 square kilometers. Three new reserves were established. This still did not cover the tigers’ full range, but it was a step in the right direction. The government set up an anti-poaching team, Inspection Tiger, which helped stem the losses to poaching. Forests got protection too. Officials, scientists, nongovernmental organization workers, and locals were uniting to conserve tigers. The tigers now had a chance. By 2005, their numbers seemed stable.There were two other indicators of success. The first was that lessons learnt from tiger conservation in Russia went global. Kerley and a Russian partner, Galina Salkina, pioneered the use of dogs to locate tiger scat and match it to known individuals, a technique that Kerley would bring to the study of tigers in Cambodia. Bart Schleyer, who was crucial to the capture efforts in Sikhote-Alin, took his craft to Bangladesh and Thailand. China too had seen Amur tiger populations fall (a better fate than that of the South China tiger, which went extinct). In 1975, a survey found 161 tigers in Heilongjiang. In 1998 and ’99, the Chinese conducted surveys again—this time with the Russian-American team north of the border. There were a possible four to six tigers in Jilin and another five to seven in Heilongjiang. Prey species and habitat had been destroyed.But where the Russians saw a “wasteland,” Miquelle saw adequate habitat and political will from which to build back up. Back in 1968–9, the Soviets and Chinese had been waging war, while the Americans looked on; now, they were walking almost the same spot in search of tigers. Surely, if they could do that, they could work together to restore tiger populations. Miquelle’s optimism proved well placed. Protected habitat in China grew. Slowly, tiger numbers climbed. Between 2013 and 2018, camera traps found 55 individuals using China’s northeast.The other indicator of success was the tigers’ recolonization of former territory. The cubs Miquelle and Smirnov first rescued flew to America, where they took up residence in a zoo. But could an orphaned tiger be rehabilitated and returned to the wild? In 2012, a young tiger named Zolushka was found by hunters. She wound up at a rehabilitation center funded by Russian and foreign conservation organizations, cared for by Katya Blidchenko, who had had experience with rehabilitating wolves. Zolushka learnt to hunt prey while her caretaker watched. The plan was to release her into the Pri-Amur—once part of the tiger’s range but now bereft of the cats. Tigers roam to find new territory, but the Pri-Amur was foreboding:A tiger’s first step into this vast and largely inhospitable place was a courageous one—few tigers mustered the resolve to take it. In addition to braving the vulnerability of the floodplain, they also had to somehow cross the Amur River itself, deep and muddy, in some places nearly five kilometers across. Tigers could not see the peaks of the Bureinskiy Mountains that rose on the far side of this expanse, beacons of a better future with promise of shaded slopes of pine and robust sounders of wild boar, animals that had not smelled a tiger for generations. If tigers had their own mythology, the Pri-Amur would be a place of legend, a lost city of gold. Zolushka was released near these mountains and off she went. More orphans followed. Most proved successful at being wild tigers. Zolushka, eventually, was photographed with cubs of her own. The lost city was lost no more. Success comes with the seeds of its own destruction. The Siberian Tiger Project won fans among locals, but at a national level, tiger conservation became Putinified: The cats came to be seen as nationalistic symbols rather than cats. Why, Russian officials grouched, were foreigners doing tiger conservation? The Severtsov Institute began its own tiger program, inviting Vladimir Putin to collar a captured tiger. (Putin’s tiger, it emerged to much gleeful mockery, was a zoo animal.) Nationalism spelled an end to the days when a bunch of scientists were in it just for the tigers. With foreign organizations now suspect, there was no room for the Siberian Tiger Project to participate in the 2015 tiger census. (One Russian who worked for the project, Sasha Rybin, was asked to join the census but to take temporary leave from his employer. Rybin refused.) By 2022, Putin’s war on Ukraine rendered working in Russia fruitless. So Miquelle and his Russian wife left for Montana. They left a blueprint for tiger conservation behind. But the gift the tigers had given—that joy in a shared project for Russians and Americans—had been spurned. Tiger conservation became Putinified: The cats came to be seen as nationalistic symbols rather than cats. Why, Russian officials grouched, were foreigners doing tiger conservation? Slaght quotes a Russian proverb: “Hope dies last.” These days, Russians telling stories by a fireside in Idaho or an American spending 30 years in Russia seem like tales of a mythic past. And yet, in the saga of the Amur tigers, hope flickers alive at the unlikeliest moments. One of the most memorable stories in this book is that of a tiger named Kristina. Desperate for prey, Kristina killed a horse in Orlovka. She was captured and outfitted with a GPS collar, then released near Terney, where she killed deer. It appeared she was dead: The collar signals suggested she had not moved in hours. A team went out to find the corpse, only to find that she had been sleeping, the collar not reporting on slight movements. Another mortality scare followed—but she was still alive, still moving. “Christ in stripes,” went the wry description; here was a tiger perpetually resurrected. Hence the name Kristina.Kristina wandered far. A man tried to poach her. He paid with lost fingers, but Kristina was wounded. She retreated into the forest. The team tracked her for a bit; she moved with her old fluidity, but hunting seemed harder for her. Her collar eventually stopped giving a signal. It was about time for its battery to fail, and Kristina’s last location had been encouragingly far from human proximity. It was fair to imagine that she still lived “deep in aromatic forests filled with plump, naïve prey.” Hope was never quite dead when it came to Kristina. And in that, perhaps, her example has something to offer humans too. “Amur tigers,” writes Slaght, “move freely across the Sino-Russian frontier; governments, NGOs, and civil society should follow suit, taking their lead from the tigers.”

Why the Democrats Aren’t Sweating the Republicans’ Huge Cash Advantage
New Republic • Feb 19, 2026

Why the Democrats Aren’t Sweating the Republicans’ Huge Cash Advantage

If money talks, national Democrats are getting a harsh tongue-lashing from donors. “For the first time in years,” The New York Times reported last week, “Democrats are sounding the alarm about money problems.” The Democratic National Committee started the year in the red, owing $3.5 million, while its Republican counterpart was sitting on $95 million in cash. And on top of that, the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA, Inc. is sitting on $300 million, a sum no Democratic super PAC can even begin to challenge. This gargantuan cash gap, as the Times warned in its headline, “threatens to swamp Democrats in the midterms.” These figures are more than enough to shake the perpetually nervy Democratic Party base, who have been buoyed lately by polling that shows a potential blue wave in the November elections. “This is a huge deal,” Jake Grumbach, an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, wrote on Bluesky. “After years of leading in fundraising, Dem small donors are (rightly) pissed off at the spam texts and emails, as well as at congressional leadership. Meanwhile, GOP billionaire money is hitting record levels. Perfect storm.” But some party strategists have a message for the rattled faithful: Take a deep breath. The situation is not nearly as dire as it may seem. The Democrats are still in a strong position to win back the House and perhaps even the Senate.Yes, donors are cranky, even angry, over having dumped massive amounts of money into Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign only to see her lose to a convicted felon, these strategists say. But the animus does not extend to the individual Democratic candidates who are seeking to flip both chambers of Congress this fall.“They’re tired. they’re still frustrated over 2024, and they don’t feel like they’ve gotten good answers about why money got spent the way it was,” veteran Democratic strategist Steven Schale said of major donors. But “when push comes to shove, and there are 20 races to decide who wins the majority in the House, not only will the grassroots money be there,” but bigger donors will step up, as well, he said. “I am not concerned about candidates who are in a race they can win in 2026 being short of money.”In fact, the money is already flowing. The candidate deemed the most endangered Democrat by the Cook Political Report this fall is also by far the biggest fundraiser: Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia raised $43 million in 2025 and started the year with a major financial advantage over his three potential Republican challengers, who have a combined war chest of only $12 million. Democratic Senate candidates in Ohio, North Carolina, and Maine are outraising their GOP opponents in those flippable states.That apparent enthusiasm extends to Senate races in some red states too. In Alaska, Democratic Representative Mary Peltola, who announced her campaign after the fourth-quarter fundraising reporting deadline passed, reported raising $1.5 million in the first 24 hours after her announcement last month (versus the $2.8 million that GOP Senator Dan Sullivan raised all of last year). In Florida, Alex Vindman, the whistleblower in President Trump’s first impeachment, raised $1.7 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign last month (versus Republican Senator Ashley Moody’s $2.6 million in direct contributions in 2025). In Texas, both Representatives Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico have raised sums that are competitive with GOP Senator John Cornyn’s haul (and far exceed that of Attorney General Ken Paxton); this week alone, Talarico raised $2.5 million over 24 hours thanks to his canceled appearance on Stephen Colbert’s show.“Senate Democrats have expanded the map by recruiting top-tier candidates in key battleground races, and we’re seeing a groundswell of excitement as our candidates decisively outraise their Republican opponents,” Joe Bush, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in an emailed statement.In the House, “frontline” Democratic incumbents in battleground districts outraised their GOP opponents by 3-to-1, on average, in the last three months of 2025, while multiple Democratic challengers in key races outraised the GOP incumbents there, according to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The biggest fundraiser among House candidates is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who drew a stunning $23 million last year—not necessary for the lawmaker to retain her safe seat, but a sign of how willing donors are to support specific Democrats in a year when the party needs to flip just three seats to take the House majority. In one race, for Pennsylvania’s 10th congressional seat, Democratic challenger Janelle Stelson has outraised the GOP incumbent, Representative Scott Perry, even though Stelson only announced her campaign last summer. In Tennessee, Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder has raised nearly four times as much as Representative Andy Ogles, the Republican incumbent, whose campaign now owes more than it has on hand. And in a North Carolina congressional race that the Cook Political Report ranks as “likely Republican,” Democratic challenger Jamie Ager—who also got into the race last summer—outraised GOP incumbent Representative Chuck Edwards in all of 2025, and collected more than twice as much in individual contributions.Joel Payne, a longtime Democratic operative who is now chief communications officer for the group MoveOn, said these numbers show that while donors may have soured on the Democratic Party as a whole, they’re enthusiastic about specific candidates. “Democrats are not lacking in candidate quality, even if the brand of the party is lacking right now,” he said. That is not to say Democrats aren’t worried about the broader money gap. They are. And their concerns are exacerbated by a looming Supreme Court decision on campaign spending, which may mean the national parties will be able to coordinate more with individual campaigns. That would favor Republicans, who would be able to use more of their national party cash to help individual candidates, and at the lower broadcast advertising rates candidate committees get. Democrats also rely more on small donors. If the coordination rules are lifted, big-money donors (who can contribute up to $44.300 per calendar year to a national party) can have more direct impact on an individual campaign.It may take a while to heal the rift with donors. Schale does not blame DNC Chair Ken Martin, though he says Martin deprived donors of “catharsis” when he refused to release an autopsy of the 2024 race. Many donors are unhappy with how their money was spent, especially since Harris outspent Trump and lost not only the Electoral College vote but the popular vote too, he says.But if history is any guide, the DNC’s cash deficit is by no means a death knell for Democratic candidates this fall. In 2018, the last time Trump was president and the Democrats were in the minority in Congress, the DNC was also at a significant cash disadvantage at the beginning of the year—but the party went on to flip the House. So money isn’t everything, a truism that extends to individual candidates. Look no further than Taylor Rehmet, a Democrat in a deep-red county in Texas who, despite having been outspent nearly 10-to-1, won a landslide victory for a state legislative seat last month.Why, though, does Trump still rake in the cash despite his abysmal approval ratings? Experts attribute it to the sheer fact that Trump is president, and his pay-to-play nature. “Democratic donors give because they believe in something. Republican donors give because they think they’re going to get something,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, who was deputy press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and a senior staffer for the DCCC. “For the next three years, his donors know he’s going to be there. He’s made clear he’s the most transactional president in American history. If you want a pardon, or for [the Department of Justice] to look the other way, or a regulatory change or a tax rate cut, you know exactly where to wire the money.” While those big donors to MAGA, Inc. are sure to get Trump’s favorable attention, their ability to swing the result of the upcoming elections is far less certain. “Trump’s money advantage is like putting gasoline into a car with a broken engine,” Ferguson said. “The problem isn’t the fuel. It’s the performance.”

We Can’t Address Affordability Without Tackling Corporate Power
New Republic • Feb 19, 2026

We Can’t Address Affordability Without Tackling Corporate Power

After a demoralizing defeat in November 2024, the Democratic Party has been enjoying an electoral surge across the country; throughout 2025, the average result in special House races was a 15.6 percent improvement on the 2024 baseline. The party’s worst showings, in fact, were a pair of 13 percent surges in Tennessee and Arizona. Democrats romped to impressive victories in New Jersey and Virginia. An energized left scored major wins in mayoral races in New York City and Seattle. For the first time in decades, the party notched statewide office wins in Georgia. So far, the trend does not seem to be abating; a recent state Senate race in deep red Tarrant County, Texas, saw a 34 percent swing and the election of Democrat Taylor Rehmet. Usual disclaimers about the unrepresentativeness of special elections aside, these are some seismic shifts. A lot has happened in the past year. President Donald Trump is singular in his ability to pack a whole 52 decade-long weeks into a single trip around the sun. But there are some commonalities across all of the Democratic overperformances. They all focused relentlessly on cost of living issues and channeling widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo. Freed from the polite norm of defending a floundering, disliked incumbent, candidates are emboldened to rage against the machine. Whether we’re talking about democratic socialists in New York, middle-of-the-road liberals in New Jersey, or blue-collar unionists in Texas, everyone has built their coalition on a pillar of directly addressing economic anxiety. It even has a name: affordability politics.But just beneath the surface of the affordability messaging that has been propelling Democrats to victory is something far more profound than annoyance at high nominal prices: anger at corporate power. To create a durable affordability agenda, Democrats must embrace widespread feelings of economic powerlessness head on—and embrace making enemies of the corporate behemoths controlling our lives. The party’s leadership that is still in thrall to an outmoded form of politics that no longer works must be jettisoned. Americans are simply fed up, and with good reason: Corporate power is taking a dive for the benefit of Trump.In 2022, jury-selection consulting firm Orrick found that 45 percent of survey respondents had somewhat or very negative perceptions of large corporations, compared to 40 percent with somewhat or very positive perceptions. That represented a doubling of negative sentiment from Orrick’s 2019 findings. And while the firm noted increased skepticism of institutions broadly, distrust of corporations outstripped the other categories Orrick analyzed: the courts (17 percent, up from 8 pre-pandemic) and police (36 percent, up from 11).  In its 2025 follow-up research, Orrick determined that the high level of distrust in institutions, foremost major corporations, had “cemented over the last three years.” In 2025, 86 percent agreed with the statement that “corporations use their power and money to improperly influence regulatory agencies or lawmakers.” Orrick’s findings are not anomalous; both Gallup and Pew have shown marked declines in sentiment toward big businesses. Gallup has big business’s approval rate falling from 52 percent in 2019 to 37 percent in 2025. Pew shows a less marked drop, mostly because it found a far lower 2019 approval rate, moving from 36 percent believing large corporations have a positive impact on the nation’s direction to 29 percent over the same period. Notably, Pew’s research shows that, while Democratic-leaning voters have been relatively consistent—the percent believing large corporations improve society was in the 20s for the entire time—Republican-leaning voters’ faith in big business has plummeted. The American National Election Studies, using data from late 2024, found the most negative perception of big business on record since 1964. This tracks a large and growing body of evidence showing that since at least 2020, Americans have become deeply skeptical of large corporations and their influence over the government and economy. According to polling outfit Navigator, 71 percent of Americans blame the wealthy and large corporations not paying enough taxes for their own tax burden. In 2021, Data for Progress and the Revolving Door Project found that 75 percent believe the federal government “prioritizes the interests of corporations and the wealthy” and 80 percent agreed that “wealthy people and corporations are regularly not punished for breaking the law.” A fall 2025 poll from YouGov and The Economist shows 80 percent of people think the rich have too much power.Crucially, large majorities of Americans blame corporations for their affordability issues. In the YouGov/Economist poll, 72 percent think that developers maximizing profits is somewhat or very important in making housing costs more expensive. Data for Progress and Groundwork Collaborative research in 2022 found 63 percent of people believed large corporations were unfairly raising prices. In 2023, 90 percent of respondents told YouGov that they blamed corporate profit-seeking at least some for inflation, with 61 percent blaming it a lot. The public is right; executives were openly saying on earnings calls, where lying is prohibited by federal law, that they were using the inflationary environment to rent-seek.The rage over affordability issues has everything to do with the public’s exhaustion with being ripped off. Understanding this is the first step toward building a real politics of affordability. The next is to embrace open conflict with the corporate villains extorting the public. The public agrees; the DFP/RDP survey saw 83 percent of respondents say that not punishing the wealthy and corporations for misconduct leaves ordinary citizens to bear the cost of their actions. In fall 2024, Navigator found 73 percent of “economically persuadable” voters wanted “cracking down” on corporate price gouging to be a top priority, the single highest share of all economic issues in the sample. Of all respondents, 83 percent said it should be either a priority or a top priority. Only 4 percent said it should not be a priority at all. In a Demand Progress poll from May 2025, 82 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate if they heard the message: “The thing we need to do to make the government and economy do a better job of serving working and middle-class Americans is to get money out of politics, break up corporate monopolies, and fight corruption.”Whether to crack down on corporate misconduct is only a debate in policy-wonk circles; the public has long since made up its mind that a crackdown is the only way to rebalance the economy and restore affordability. The Democrats who ran on affordability in 2025 realized this. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani proudly promised to take on corporate greed and is, according to veteran finance analyst Albert Edwards, the start of a reckoning corporate America has brought upon itself by raking in profits and raising prices while Americans struggled to keep their heads above water. Our current chapter of Democratic bumbling on “kitchen table”–style politics is downstream of a lasting legacy of economic determinism as a view of politics. Clinton’s famous “it’s the economy, stupid” preceded a chapter of political science and punditry in which elections were viewed largely as predetermined by economic factors. This view has haunted the left-of-center world and is directly responsible for much of the worst politics and punditry of the last two decades. In 2009, Democrats looked destined to ride the coattails of the Great Recession into another period of political dominance. Their ascendance looked to be ordained by the combination of complete Republican humiliation from their botched stewardship of the economy—even if the blame was shared with Bush’s predecessors, including the outgoing Clinton administration, especially for repealing Glass Steagall and blocking oversight of over-the-counter derivatives—and the inexorable march of demographic change that was making the nation less white and more diverse. Then came the 2010 midterms: Democrats were knocked off their high horse before they could ride off into the sunset. The official story of Democratic politics centered around two dueling determinisms. In the short run, the party was always destined to lose significant ground in 2010, because sluggish economic recovery would translate into electoral backlash. All the models said so. In the longer run, Democrats would coast on the shifting electorate, guaranteed success as Republicans became saddled with a shrinking base. Nothing corroborated this view quite so clearly as the 2012 Republican National Committee postmortem on Mitt Romney’s campaign, which reasoned that, because of the growing Hispanic voting population, “we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” A couple paragraphs later, the report said that the party had to become “welcoming and inclusive” to appeal to minority voters and young people. It’s quaint to remember that the GOP once committed these ideas to print. Four years later, Donald Trump would assume the presidency after doing the polar opposite.Those twin prophecies conveniently offered the Democratic political class both an alibi and an undue confidence in their party’s fortunes. Election losses were temporary setbacks, mere speedbumps on America’s drive along the road to true multiracial democracy. And so the erstwhile party of the people withered into a husk of itself. The remaining vestiges of Democrats’ New Deal– and Great Society–style populism were pruned. President Obama famously set up an organizing infrastructure outside of the Democratic National Committee that competed with official party organs for resources. Centrist pundit Matthew Yglesias at the time described the post-Obama Democratic Party as a “smoking pole of rubble.” Official partisan infrastructure has since often eschewed even the pretense of a mass politics. Rather than prioritize the hard work of political education and organizing, the party shifted toward a reductive model of “persuasion,” where votes were won by strategically triangulating on policy planks to try to approximate the median voter. What the entire mobilization-versus-persuasion debate misses is that no one will be persuaded if the message is never communicated. The lack of a mass politics made the liberal chattering class become myopically focused on appealing to an imagined model voter, rather than building infrastructure for grassroots engagement, which is the engine of both mobilization and message saturation. Rather than using politics to construct a durable majority, Democrats spent their years between the wars chasing ghosts.Perhaps the clearest example of this is Chuck Schumer dismissing worries around losing blue-collar voters by claiming that such losses will be more than offset by picking up moderate swing voters like the phantasmal Baileys—the bespoke ghosts that Schumer consults as he slaloms through his decision-making process. Schumer, perhaps, was unaware that it was not his imaginary friends but the blue-collar voters and the unions that represented them that operated the on-the-ground political organizing that had powered the Democratic Party for decades. Schumer modeled explicitly what the party as a whole was implicitly oriented around: abandoning living, breathing constituents for the imagined model voter. But the Baileys don’t vote in the real world.The reduction of politics to an optimization problem was, however, extremely good for the donor class and corporate media. If economic backlash is a flash in the pan, and you’re predestined to prevail in the long term, then the opportunity cost of eschewing old-fashioned populist politics is essentially nil. All of this was happening downstream of what David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher have called a “Master Plan” being implemented from the 1970s onward. Spelled out in the infamous Powell memo, corporate interests were executing a coordinated plan to weaken the left, empower private interests, and subordinate the common good to business interests.Against this backdrop, the Obama administration’s choice to let Wall Street off easy and consistently not pursue the investigation and prosecution of high-ranking executives is entirely rational. Doing so wouldn’t fix the economy in the short term and was thereby irrelevant to the midterms. It was largely irrelevant to the march of demographic diversification and so was totally unnecessary to the party’s long-term performance. All it would do, from this point of view, was antagonize business interests, inconveniently undermine donors’ networks and friends, and make dinner parties more awkward.President Clinton first choreographed this dance when, in 1993, he pivoted aggressively away from his economic populist campaign planks and fully embraced the neoliberal consensus. But it was President Obama’s approach to banks and big business, bailing out corporations and executives while failing to deliver promised aid to homeowners and “Main Street,” that marked the conquest of this view of politics. But politics hadn’t been solved. That inexorable liberalizing of the electorate was revealed to be entirely exorable.Since that fateful decision, Democrats have championed a status quo where the wealthy amassed ever more treasure and privilege while employment conditions have continued to stagnate or deteriorate. The rise of populism, both traditional left economic populism headlined by Bernie Sanders and the faux-populist revanchism of Trump and MAGA, were powered by the widespread discontent with a government that abandoned workers in the name of economic efficiency. The increasing powerlessness we all encounter in more and more economic interactions is part and parcel of a broad shift in how we structure our economy that began decades ago but has accelerated in recent years. Against the backdrop of the “war on crime,” increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement, and mass incarceration, government regulation of corporations and prosecution of white-collar crime have plummeted. Fiscal year 2025 had the lowest prosecution rate for white-collar crimes since at least 1986. The number of white-collar prosecutions in 2024 was less than half of what it had been in 1994. Looking at nearly any benchmark of corporate enforcement, the past decade has seen a major drop in penalties and the number of cases, just in nominal terms. In the context of rising inflation, a growing economy, and population growth, we should be seeing higher penalties and more cases. As inflation cheapens the dollar, penalties need to grow to pack the same punch. As the economy and workforce grow, even a relatively constant rate of illegal conduct would see the raw count of violations increase.And yet, most federal enforcement peaked in the second Obama administration and has since fallen markedly. The number of cases brought against companies for wage and hour violations by the Department of Labor has been dropping since 2012. Total corporate penalties peaked in 2014 and have only come close to the level seen under Obama’s second term once since, in 2023. Some measures peaked sooner. The prosecution rate for white-collar crime hit its maximum of just about 50 percent in 2009; the second George W. Bush term is the only period in the last 40 years that consistently saw more than 40 percent of criminal referrals to the Department of Justice result in prosecutions. And in those rare instances where corporate enforcement has been reasonably robust, billionaires and executives have been visibly enraged. Billionaire donors led by Reid Hoffman made a huge fuss over ditching Lina Khan as a test of Kamala Harris’s fealty to business interests, despite the fact that Khan’s tenure at the Federal Trade Commission was broadly popular and she became something of a folk hero. Gary Gensler’s Securities and Exchange Commission was tarred by the crypto industry and Chamber of Commerce types for daring to (gasp) enforce long-standing securities law. Corporate America responded to Rohit Chopra’s effectiveness at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau in forcing firms to provide restitution for violating consumer protection laws by seeking to litigate the agency out of existence.It isn’t just that corporations, executives, and the ultrarich are above the law; they also flaunt the fact. The billionaire class has, as Michael Hirschorn wrote for The New York Times, “gone full Louis XIV.” People know that our government is more committed to serving wealth and capital than it is to serving citizens because it has become more and more transparent. Student debt relief took over a decade of organizing and campaigning, only to be dashed on the rocks of a Supreme Court case that had to look the other way just to find standing to sue. But when crypto and fintech accounts were threatened by lazy asset management, keeping large deposits in accounts at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank over the deposit insurance limits—despite the widespread availability of tools like CDARs that are able to ensure deposits are split up across multiple banks to be fully insured—the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and Treasury Department created authority out of thin air to functionally guarantee all deposits despite clear statutory text to the contrary. Still no word from the Supreme Court. (This is not to say that the bailout was bad on the merits; something probably had to be done to contain the damage. But it is both something that people can intuit and extremely telling that we parse the legal authority endlessly when it comes to helping everyday Americans but not at all when it comes to protecting wealthy investors.)Similarly, the Supreme Court, over the course of 2025, made obviously contradictory determinations that Congress cannot insulate administrative agency heads who protect consumers and workers from presidential removal, but that it can insulate leadership of the Federal Reserve from presidential removal. The point here is not that leaders at the Fed should not have that protection, only that, if the primary independent regulator is responsible for protecting capital interests through managing price levels and ensuring stable economic conditions and returns on investment (which is, to be clear, often good for everyone), it does not follow logically that the same protections cannot be extended to independent regulators who protect the interests of workers and consumers. It’s a farce so obvious that it feels ripped from a Marxist parody of our government. The past decade-plus has seen the government, our courts, and big business routinely playing Calvinball with the rule of law, right in front of our faces. That’s why we face a rising tide of popular resentment toward institutions broadly and corporations specifically.The onslaught of corporate power is also corroding the basic logic of economic transactions right in front of our eyes. The very concept of prices is breaking down in real time. Everyone is used to being able to talk about “the price” of various goods and services. Obviously there is hardly ever a true, single price. But they have tracked a general price level enough that we can intelligibly talk about price levels, how much something costs, and whether it ought to cost that much. But no longer.Now, different people are often charged different prices for the same product at the same time at the same retailer through proliferating dynamic or surveillance pricing that seeks to extract the maximum price from each consumer through estimating individualized willingness to pay. An investigation in December 2025 from Groundwork Collaborative and Consumer Reports found that on Instacart, the same product was priced up to 23 percent higher based on dynamic pricing.Corporations and some pro-corporate pundits try to paint dynamic pricing as something that will lead to lower prices for some, higher prices for some, and generally be good because it “tailors” the cost to each purchaser. But we didn’t all just tumble off the turnip truck. Executives are saying on earnings calls that they anticipate dynamic pricing to be able to increase revenue through “pricing power.” Revenue can increase through raising prices or moving more product, and executives are not generally talking about moving more product. So the average price most of us pay must be going up.And this all exacerbates the problem of shifting to an “access economy” dominated by platform monopolies. Not only is the basic logic of how much something costs in flux right before our eyes, but more and more, everything we buy is a recurring subscription, rather than a one-off cost. The result is that we are trapped in a growing cycle of paying over and over again while being less able to predict the costs we face. Since the Great Recession, people have watched corporate behemoths amass ever more control over daily life. The affordability agenda has to not just make it possible for people to live within their means but also to renew a sense of economic agency. Rent-seeking is not exclusive to corporations, obviously, though public corporations do operate under a particularly corruptible incentive structure that compels them to ruthlessly pursue financial returns with no statutory countervailing requirement of good corporate citizenship. But while a homeowners’ association also contributes to higher prices through restricting market access, the platforms that render Americans increasingly powerlessness are in the hands of corporate actors. Junk fees, noncompete clauses, predatory training programs that create debt traps, and more effects of concentrated private economic power serve to raise prices or suppress wages. It isn’t merely that people think the standard of living has gotten worse, but that they can tell that it simply hasn’t improved as much as it should. Most Americans today are better off than a pharaoh in ancient Egypt. But they aren’t comparing themselves to Tutenkamen, they’re looking at how they measure up to Elon Musk. As long as our market structure exacerbates inequality and undermines economic self-determination, people will feel like they are barely treading water. Freezing the rent and utility prices is a good start, but only a start. Prosperity is not possible until those who have schemed against the American people are run to ground and held accountable at last.

What the Foodies Get Wrong About Food Reform
New Republic • Feb 19, 2026

What the Foodies Get Wrong About Food Reform

If you want to understand why the vaunted farm-to-fork food revolution has failed to change the food system, consider some common food delights: a well-charred burger with Heinz 57; a Taco Bell bean burrito (no onions); a double-scoop of ooey-gooey ice cream; a sliced ripe tomato with a sprinkle of salt and a dash of olive oil; a strawberry pop tart; a salad of crisp lettuce topped with seared tuna, cucumber, and sliced avocado; fried chicken and a biscuit; silken tofu swimming in Lao Gan Ma’s chili crisp; wok-fired mustard greens over rice with soy sauce; a plump peach, juicy and sweet; a handful of tart cherries; fluffy waffles dripping with syrup.What unites them is that each of them are usually (or in some cases always) pleasures furnished by the modern, conventional, industrial food system. Yes, you can find expensive and local artisanal versions here and there, and, heck, you may even have eaten a sliced tomato you plucked from your very own vine. But unless you live somewhere where all those items are grown and always in season, you access food pleasures the same way most other people do: Ingredients are brought to you from all around the world, and you purchase them at a grocery store or restaurant where you don’t need a reservation.Our food system has a lot of problems, from underpaid workers to grisly factory farms to an obesity epidemic. But the solution isn’t to get rid of industrial food. Instead, it lies in trying to make industrially produced food better, healthier, more sustainable, and less exploitative. This approach to food reform needs the concept of democratic hedonism.If you’ve never heard of Wendell Berry, you have almost certainly read a book, seen a movie, engaged with a social media post, or eaten a plate of food that was shaped by his writing. Berry’s writings helped to launch both the farm-to-fork culinary movement and what is called the New Food Writing, the renaissance of journalistic books published since the 1990s that have sought to diagnose the ailments of the contemporary food system and usually dismiss industrial, “fast” food as worthless sugary garbage corrosive to both America’s teeth and its soul. If you flip through the pages of books by the journalist Michael Pollan, the food writer and restaurant critic Mark Bittman, the celebrity chef Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant, the activist and founder of the slow food movement Carlo Petrini, or nearly any other book written about better food and a better food system, you’ll find numerous references, most glowing, some overwrought, to Wendell Berry. But Berry’s model is a bad one for food system reform. His most famous essay, “The Pleasures of Eating,” is really more of a list of practical shopping and eating chores for consumers: (1) “Participate in food production to the extent that you can.” (2) “Prepare your own food.” (3) “Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home.” (4) “Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.” (5) “Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production.” (6) “Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.” (7) “Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.”There is nothing wrong with these ideas on their face. But eating the locavore way is very expensive and time-consuming, and most people don’t find it pleasurable enough to justify those costs. Dismissiveness about material barriers like scarce time and money suggest that people like Berry lack a realistic theory of change. That’s why, to the extent that the foodie movement has accomplished much of anything, it has mostly shaped the food aesthetics of high-end consumers, the menus of the expensive restaurants that cater to them, the products and advertisements of the upmarket supermarkets and brands that sell to them, and the content of the food pages of newspapers and magazines. This is not inherently bad. Done well, the locavore food aesthetic and flavor is as defensible as any other, and there are elements of it we enthusiastically support. We just don’t think it’s up to the challenge of offering a scalable alternative to the status quo.Improving the pleasures of the industrial food system, while reducing its harms, is where democratic hedonism comes in. The term was coined by Yale professor and political theorist Joseph Fischel to describe a novel approach to sexual ethics, a call to “think more boldly and strategically about democratized access to pleasure and intimacy.” But the concepts both of hedonism and of democracy as a tempering influence apply just as well to food. Democracy demands a pluralistic and inclusive account of what a good life is, who gets to define it, and who is entitled to it. From this perspective, making sure everyone has abundant access to pleasure should be a social project that inspires collaboration, care, mutuality, and solidarity: for other people, for our common planet, and even for the animals with whom we share it.Most people, right and left, rich and poor, want food that is healthy and fresh for themselves and their families. Beyond that, it’s true that some people yearn for elite (and costly) experiences, but most normie pleasures are grounded in values that are tough to square with snobbishness: affordability; availability; familiar, beloved flavors, ingredients, and techniques; and convenience. Most people don’t want eating to be a tiresome chore, another laborious task jammed into a day already as overstuffed as a leaking calzone.Pleasure and choice in society are not equally distributed. Not everyone has the same menu, and some people can only select from limited and unappealing options. Social position, limited resources, energy, and time, and uneven knowledge shape access, and the result is that some pleasurable snacks are too high in the cupboard for some people to reach. And other people have handy stepladders that they’re just not sharing. Meanwhile, people often do things they do not want to do because duty, care, responsibility, and necessity compel them. The gendered labor of food preparation, for example, means that common foodie clichés about the “pleasures of cooking” or avoiding “processed” foods can intensify sexist household burdens or, at the very least, be experienced very differently by men and women. All of this means that democratic hedonism requires that sensual pleasures must be analyzed in relationship to some tempering intersocial goods: capacity, access, and pluralism. Examining capacity requires us to consider not only the pleasures of the moment but a more holistic understanding of what makes a good life: the pleasures of a lifetime well lived. Capacity requires us to think not just about what we are, but the full potential of what we may become. Diets that are momentarily pleasurable but that make people ill in the long term diminish their future capacities over a lifetime and can burden their loved ones, friends, and communities. This is one of the reasons nutrition and health have to stay in the picture.Similarly, following scholars and activists of disability, an emphasis on access requires that we consider how social structures, the built environment, and political power shape the menu from which we select. Sometimes we have to proactively reshape the world to ensure that everyone has adequate access to the things that make up a good life, building new infrastructures that expand access to people who would otherwise be left out. Expanding access to pleasures for some will require imposing costs on others. More funding for school lunch programs, for example, could require taxing pleasurable luxuries such as thick cuts of steak. Too bad! Finally, because tastes differ, democratic hedonism requires pluralism about the pleasures of food, one more invested in empowering people to pursue their own pleasures as they define them instead of smugly dictating to other people what is (and is not) tasty. Like Jan, for example, you may be perfectly disgusted by Gabriel’s desire to eat a ball of mozzarella cheese with his hands like an apple directly from the refrigerator when his husband is out of town, but that feeling has little value in a debate about whether stores should stock mozzarella cheese and whether Gabriel should buy and consume them.Considered this way, democratic hedonism pushes us to ask how we can build a society of abundant and accessible pleasures. The good news is that the extraordinary productivity of American farming already makes abundant and affordable food pleasures possible. Improving the American food system further will require engaging, improving, and fairly distributing modern agriculture’s productivity, not tossing it on the compost heap.Excerpted and adapted from Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg. Copyright © 2026. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Trump Erupts in Angry Panic Over 2026 as Polls Take Truly Brutal Turn
New Republic • Feb 19, 2026

Trump Erupts in Angry Panic Over 2026 as Polls Take Truly Brutal Turn

Donald Trump has the midterms on his mind. A few days ago, he erupted in a wild tirade on Truth Social, raging about voter fraud and voter ID while urging Republicans to make them central in the elections. He’s now pinned this rant to the top of his feed. Over the last 24 hours, he’s been on a tear, elevating half a dozen other tweets on these topics. By “warning” that Republicans must centralize voter fraud, he’s actually telling them to engage in mass voter suppression or perish. He has good reason to panic: One new poll has his approval at 38 percent. Another survey puts Democrats ahead in the House ballot matchup by six points. And polling averages find Trump’s approval on immigration, his “good” issue, at abysmal lows. We talked to Lakshya Jain, head of political data for The Argument. He explains why the numbers are even worse for Trump if you dig into the details, particularly on the economy; why it’s so unusual that Trump is tanking on two GOP issues, the economy and immigration; and why that is creating unexpected opportunities for Democrats. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

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