Senior Writer @NRO. author of My Father Left Me Ireland. Making sense of the disruptive politics of the 21st century.
Joined November 2007
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Column today: Why did National Populism Disrupt the Right?
tl;dr Globalization sets economic integration against national sovereignty and democracy.
nationalreview.com/2026/02/w…
Well, if we’re talking affection both sides are slavophiles.
But, it’s perfectly consistent to sympathize more with Ukraine while still not wanting deeper American involvement or permanent Ukrainian incorporation into America’s security umbrella.
Michael Brendan Dougherty retweeted
I appreciate the level of both innumeracy and ignorance needed to reject this chart on grounds that IEEPA tariffs were struck down in Feb 2026.
Innumeracy: If you look at the first derivative (i.e., month over month change), most of the shift occurs by February.
> 2024 rate: (-15k)/mo
> 12/25-2/26 rate: level
> 7/26-9/26 rate: +12k/mo
Or, put another way, acceleration in job growth after IEEPA ruling accounts for less than one-third of the job gain over 2024 baseline rate.
Ignorance: Trump administration immediately replaced IEPPA tariffs with Section 122 tariffs and then Section 301 tariffs. The average tariff rate at time of Court ruling was 5.1x pre-Trump level. Average tariff rate since has been 4.2x pre-Trump level (source: Yale Budget Lab).
If your point is that an effective tariff rate of 13.8% is a policy disaster but a rate of 11.3% is great trade policy that drives manufacturing employment higher... I mean, 🤷♂️
Good chart from this week's The Real Economy @commonplc:
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Supreme Court struck down IEEPA tariffs on February 20, 2026. The employment gains above trend shown in the chart occurred after the ruling. scotusblog.com/2026/02/suprem… fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
Michael Brendan Dougherty retweeted
This was an argument advanced to great acclaim by Norman Angell in his book The Great Illusion.
His thesis was that economic interdependence would guarantee peace, and it was published in 1909.
Michael Brendan Dougherty retweeted
Good chart from this week's The Real Economy @commonplc:
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Supreme Court struck down IEEPA tariffs on February 20, 2026. The employment gains above trend shown in the chart occurred after the ruling. scotusblog.com/2026/02/suprem… fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
I used to believe that people often deluded themselves or comforted themselves by only debating against or highlighting the dumbest possible version of their opponent’s views. Now I’m old enough to know that the dumbest version is always the most prominent and influential.
Wow, imagine if Ireland had a geographically concentrated minority with a blended national identity that connects them to a militarily superior power with a history of worsening famines in their country, and that militarily superior power stoked violent unrest among that minority for years in order to impose partition on a state fleeing the imperial center?
Not trying to be sectarian but what @peteholmes is getting at, in theological terms, is the problem of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, and it is solved by going back to Anselm and ultimately Aquinas for a theory of Vicarious Satisfaction. The Good News isn’t that God has to be merciless to someone and at least it’s not you.
Unsolicited opinion: IBM Plex Sans, and IBM Plex Serif are good fonts.
My mother worked for big blue, and I remember having an IBM PC in the 1980s and a big typewriter. I remember when we replaced both with an IBM Aptiva in 1994.
Any news story describing AI as “rogue” gets an automatic downgrade in my view.
Further, when the aperture of the story is an entire industry, I’m going in assuming that what’s really happening is that people are using AI agents to even out the information asymmetries that this other industry uses to generate profits. We’ve already seen the stories that customer facing banks are afraid AI will allow customers to escape fees or get better interest rates, or otherwise make their money work more efficiently.
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
Michael Brendan Dougherty retweeted
.@michaelbd said this is a monster from from why liberalism failed, I’ll go him one better- it’s straight out of Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void, a state trying to pass micromanagement of private behaviour off as governance because it’s all they’ve got left
Michael Brendan Dougherty retweeted
The domestic foundation of American global power is crumbling. Trump is less the cause than a symptom and an accelerant. Since the Cold War ended, the United States has pursued global primacy under an implicit bargain with the public: dominance would come cheap. Today Americans are no more willing to bear serious costs for foreign policy than they were in the 1990s. But a far more competitive world is driving up the price of upholding U.S. commitments.
No matter who wins the White House in 2028, this gap will constrain American power around the world.
In a new @CarnegieEndow paper, I trace the U.S. foreign-policy consensus from the Cold War to the present and outline three scenarios for the future:
Maybe this a wage-slave mentality but I really dont understand the impulse to publicly slag your former employers by name.
Michael Brendan Dougherty retweeted
Unfortunately, the Right has spent years promoting the notion that dialogue or diplomacy --- any dialogue or diplomacy --- is tantamount to "appeasement."
And pretending that every moment we live through is the 1930s redux.
This ad is like a monster that escaped from @PatrickDeneen's book The End of Liberalism
State trying to free you from the warm physical embrace of your own Gran.
I wrote about the very silly argument about AI making human governance and financial systems opaque and inaccessible to us. nationalreview.com/2026/10/d…
I know for coders it’s very different but AI mostly does things for me that wouldn’t be done at all without AI because it lowers the cost and effort of doing them. Many minorly helpful things I would ask a secretary or PA to do if I could afford one or was assigned one.
I’ll give two examples. I used to use little metal Book Darts to mark passages in physical books. This was handy for me to go back and more quickly browse those books for passages and research. Now my daughter can go through those books for me and photograph every page I marked and we can upload the photos to an AI and it can create searchable digital notes on the passages I marked.
Second, language learning. I wanted to brush up my rudimentary French. Now I translate a few sentences, it corrects me. Then it makes a native recording of the texts for me, divided into short units. It then grabs free recordings of Bach fugues and creates a single 60
minutes MP3 alternating between 4 minutes of native french and a Fugue, then drops the file onto a swim ready headphone set I use at the gym pool. It can then estimate how many times I heard the target setences. It also then makes digital flash card decks.