Editor: I first subscribed to The New Review of Books in 1970! Side notre: One might think that Barbara Epstein was the actuals Leftist?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 21, 2026

Editor: Mr. Snyder offers this in his first 1115 word diastribe, a cast of bad actors !

Trump’s capitulation before to Iran leads us back to what Trump really cares about: not losing any of his power in the congressional elections of this November.

He had to surrender for the basic reason known to all serious students of war: the Iranians were able to affect his political situation more than he was able to affect theirs. Now, the “deal” is a mess, and the “process” is a mess, and the war in some way might continue. But the terms to which Trump has already agreed are a capitulation; and as time passes he will, if anything, have to settle for something even worse. He might be irritated by this or that, or disrupted by yet another Israeli attack in Lebanon (or Gaza), or delayed by all the money made by his friends. But he will surrender as quickly as he can (as he has now shown) because the clock to the November elections is ticking.

As an aspiring tyrant in a flawed democracy, he has to be concerned about the economy in general and gasoline prices in particular. The Iranians knew this and exploited it. But the fact that Trump capitulates to Iranians does not mean that he will abandon the utopia of violence as such. He has never really had a problem with subordinating himself to foreign dictators; lacking any sense of personal shame or any notion of American patriotism, he can shrug off defeat to Iran, just as he accepts everyday obedience to Russia. What matters to him is the convenience and comfort that comes from the presidency, and that logic leads directly to another use for the American armed forces: to intervene in the midterm elections this November or the presidential elections two years from now.

Such a move would be in keeping with Hegseth’s career and thought. Like Trump, Hegseth lacks any sense of what the interests of the United States as such might be. His ideological purge of the top officer ranks is inconsistent with battlefield success; it is consistent with the aim of creating a Trumpian praetorian guard whose only mission is to intimidate Americans. Indeed, the natural trajectory of the Department of Defense under a complete incompetent such as Hegseth (whether he explicitly wishes this or not) is to render the armed forces capable of little more than civil war against fellow citizens.

Hegseth is concerned only with the general idea of enemies, and for him the main enemies are Americans. He does not believe in the Constitution: for him, any rights come from God, and he decides whom God protects. “Sometimes,” he writes, “the fight must begin with a struggle against domestic enemies. Those who would violate the Covenant that binds us as a community of faith and that grants us blessing.” He tells us that “the Left” plans “utter annihilation” for everyone else, which of course would justify annihilating Americans defined as “the Left” first. Hegseth makes it quite clear that the violence he wants is directed against other Americans: “In more ways than you can imagine, leftists have surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism. The only option for survival in a near ambush is to charge; to close with, and destroy, the enemy.”

Reasonable people can draw a reasonable lesson from defeat in Iran: even putting ethical questions aside, violence will not lead where you think. History, however, instructs us fairly clearly about how utopians of violence interpret defeat in foreign war: they blame an “enemy “at home for their own poor judgements and failures, and then claim that this enemy must now be defeated. The poor performance of the armed forces cannot be explained by their own ideological folly or their own manifest incompetence; it must be the fault of someone else. It will be quite easy for Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) to shift from their current (and risible) claim that we won the war to the claim that we would have won it if not for the stab in the back at home. And that way of seeing things then becomes the justification for putting soldiers (and ICE) on the streets during an election, or claiming that a terrorist attack (most likely a fake one) means that we have to have a state of emergency instead of an election, or something else along those lines.

That is where the minds of Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are likely to go. Vance, too, is a utopian of violence; he believed that invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying troops in Minnesota would have crushed protests and brought stability. This is unlikely; the use of violence, at home even more than abroad, opens new avenues of unpredictability, and almost never goes where you think it will go. But Trump, Hegseth, and Vance have not thus far shown themselves to be people who recognize basic social realities; they do not question their own utopias of violence, but only the motives of anyone who notes their folly. Just as they were overcome by strong feelings that violence would change Iran the way that they wanted, they will likely have strong feelings that violence in America will change America the way they want. This is very unlikely to be true; the utopianism, the faith in feelings, puts the republic in danger. But Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are unlikely to see matters that way.

And so the rest of us have a simple duty: to recognize the utopias of violence, to note the risk to the republic. The fact that Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are thinking about using violence at home does not mean that it will actually happen. Seeing a utopia of violence for what it is makes it far less likely to be realized. Indeed, the only way we get to soldiers at voting booths is by determinedly looking away and pretending that this isn’t what Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) wish for.

Utopian thinking can be a sign of weakness rather than strength, as it is in this case. Trump is extremely unpopular, as was his war, as are his policies generally. His charisma depends on a televisual projection of strength, but he just lost his whimsy war and looks terrible. The men who stand behind him are still less popular. Their utopianism is unappealing; and their desire for personal power is naked. It should not be hard to recognize all of this and to agree, recognizing that we will disagree about other matters, that there is no place for American military action at home, and that our elections should be held in peace.

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Editor: Timothy Snyder as Public Moralist failes to look in a mirror, any mirrow, as to his own War Mongring in Ukraine! The psychological inability to recognize one’s own prejudice or biases is most commonly referred to as implicit bias!

Newspaper Reader & Old Socialist