The Democratic Party is not dying. That would be too simple. It is splitting. One part still walks through the old doors. It knows the donors. It knows the consultants. It knows the language of restraint, order, NATO, markets, growth, moderation, and responsible government.

Most of us are taught to speak about the economy as if it were a machine. It grows. It slows. It overheats. It cools. It corrects itself. We speak as if it sits above the country and moves by its own laws and answers to no one. But the economy is not the weather. It does not happen to us. People make it.

John Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden, ‘I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.’

I read what they said, Starmer and Macron, and it struck me that they said nothing. They stood on a podium or on the floor in Parliament and their mouths moved and sounds came out but when they spoke they said nothing. Politicians have this gift. They speak but say nothing and with that nothing comes no action.

Trump built his message to voters on “Make America Great Again.” MAGA. These four letters did the same work Weyl described in his paragraph. Trump knew the trick.

One narrow passage. No redundancy. Absolute dependence. And now a country that has learned it can hold the world's economy by the throat with twenty drones and an insurance market.

The Pope stood at a window of the Apostolic Palace. The square below was full. It was Sunday and the light was on the stone and the crowd waited. He was seventy years old and the first American to wear the soutane.