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America Won’t Be Easily Forgiven—Even After Trump Is Gone
New Republic • Feb 11, 2026

America Won’t Be Easily Forgiven—Even After Trump Is Gone

In a 1975 episode of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers meant to satirize the Britons who clung to anti-German sentiment decades after World War II, hotel owner Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese, struggles and ultimately fails to conceal his lingering resentment from a group of German tourists as his repeated Freudian slips mentioning the war reduce a young woman to tears before he makes a Hitler mustache with his fingers and goose-steps through the lobby. The scene is one of the series’s best-known; a reliable laugh-getter. More than a half-century later, President Donald Trump’s near-obsession with setting fire to alliances that have served Western interests in good stead plays like an unfunny parody of Fawlty’s comic preening.Let’s not get things twisted—even Donald Trump’s worst offenses pale in comparison to Nazi crimes, and invoking the Holocaust to make political points is never acceptable. But the Fawlty Towers episode illustrates something that’s keenly relevant today: When a nation breaks the world’s trust, forgiveness does not come quickly or easily. That’s a hard lesson that Americans, even the liberals and progressives who might absolve themselves of contributing to Trumpian misrule, will have to learn as we grapple with the damage Trump has done to our international standing only a year into his second term.Opinion polls reveal the shocking extent of the damage. In September, as Trump openly mused about making Canada the fifty-first state, an Ipsos poll found 60 percent of Canadians said they “could never trust the Americans the same way again,” while Canadian trips south of the border have cratered. European attitudes toward the United States have seen a similarly precipitous fall. A new poll by YouGov found that Western Europeans’ perceptions of the U.S. have turned sharply negative, particularly—and not surprisingly—in Denmark. On the economic front, loss of investor confidence has sunk the dollar, while Canada and the EU are forging trade deals with China, India, and the South American trade bloc Mercosur that leave the U.S. excluded. Even Queen doesn’t want to tour here.But polling data, currency exchange rates, trade deals, and rock band touring schedules don’t quite capture the deep well of anger and the sense of betrayal that many people, especially Canadians and Europeans, feel toward the U.S. now.It seems different from Bush-era anti-Americanism. When I lived in China from 2001 to 2004, any cab driver or shopkeeper who found out I was American would inevitably bring up the Iraq War. While visiting Zhengzhou, I was screamed at and physically assaulted. The anti-American stain from back then eventually faded. It will be much harder to wash out this time.A Dane in his fifties living in the U.S. for more than 20 years, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said Nazi Germany was not an ally that turned on its partners, whereas before Trump’s belligerent rhetoric, America had been seen as a friend, “and betraying that friendship cuts far deeper than being invaded by a known aggressor and agitator.” While Americans initially dismissed the rhetoric about Greenland as just another silly idea from a silly president, he said he had entirely different feelings and the administration’s actions signaled that Trump was not just a fool but a megalomaniac.“On a personal level, I’m trying very hard not to hate or despise everything and everyone American for allowing this to happen—but I will never again trust an American,” he wrote in a private social media message.Trump’s fixation on acquiring Greenland—without regard for what its mostly Indigenous Inuit inhabitants want—isn’t new. As early as 2019, he was trying to get the Danes to sell it. But as with his stated desire to annex Canada, and with his imposition of tariffs on trading partners, what many Americans treat as fodder for jokes or serious media analysis is, to Canadians and Europeans, a sign that their onetime ally has become a dangerous predator.Kristina Spohr, a professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, compared Trump’s bullying of Europe to Russia’s.“If one person is constantly using bullying tactics or resorting to political blackmail and only takes a step back when you are really firm, then we are dealing with something very similar to what Europeans have learned in their dealings with Russia because Russia is always testing weaknesses,” Spohr said. What is so damaging is that unlike Russia, the U.S. is supposed to be on the same side as Europe and to share the same principles and values, defending freedom and democracy. “That’s also why Europeans, both leaders and ordinary people, are just flabbergasted.”Americans’ neighbors to the north are no less flabbergasted. That’s the case with Darlene Dale, a 62-year-old Canadian Army veteran living in New Brunswick, who served alongside American forces in Afghanistan as a combat medic in 2003 and 2005. She used to travel to the U.S. frequently, including a 2016 road trip from Seattle to New York and frequent hops across the border for shopping and eating. Now, she says, she regards the U.S. as unsafe to visit and vows never to set foot on American soil again as her trust in the U.S. has been eroded “beyond repair.”“Fought side by side, and now they turn their backs on us and threaten to make us [the fifty-first state]. No going back. Too much was sacrificed for them,” Dale wrote in a message.Revelations that Trump met with Alberta separatists haven’t improved attitudes. Nor has the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen’s removal of flags honoring the Danish soldiers killed in Afghanistan.Nina Janz, a Luxembourg-based historian, said that Trump’s policies have indeed destroyed trust in the U.S. and the perception of its reliability as a partner. But she said many relationships may survive him.“In the end, the network and the old political and institutional establishments still exist and will likely survive this period, despite Trump—at least this is what I hope,” she wrote in an email. “I actually think the damage done through mistrust may be even stronger within the U.S., internally.”But any Americans thinking global perceptions of their country will return to some pre-MAGA kumbaya if they simply elect Democratic congressional majorities in the 2026 midterms and a Democratic president in 2028—assuming those elections are even free and fair—are kidding themselves. What, after all, is to stop American voters from getting into another snit about egg prices or foreign conflicts and electing another Republican Congress in 2030 and another fascist demagogue as president in 2032—especially when a huge majority so vividly put feelings and vibes ahead of facts and reason in 2024?Explanations for the 2024 election results tend to focus on Democratic and Republican party strategies and the issues that animated voters. But it’s important to remember that Trump didn’t win just because 77.3 million Americans voted for him. He also won because 2.9 million voted for third-party candidates like the Green Party’s Jill Stein, while 89 million didn’t vote at all.However much the media fail to hold voters accountable and behave as if they lack agency or control over their actions when they elect bad leaders, the consequences of more than 169 million Americans reelecting Trump by commission or omission are now on horrifying display. The people around the world bearing the brunt of Trumpism aren’t likely to look on U.S. voters charitably.They have ample reason not to: More than 780,000 people in developing nations, two-thirds of them children, are estimated to have died from infectious diseases and malnutrition due to cuts to USAID, which were explicitly advocated in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—a document that the U.S. media did not treat with the seriousness it warranted. Meanwhile, Ukrainians shiver in subzero temperatures as Russian missiles destroy their homes, even as Trump sends his Kremlin talking point–parroting real estate buddy Steve Witkoff to Moscow to negotiate Ukraine’s future despite Witkoff’s Russian financial ties.No American voter can claim they didn’t know what was coming if they reelected a man who had incited an insurrection against Congress, used the Covid-19 pandemic to divide the public as more than one million Americans died, falsely accused Haitian refugees of eating people’s pets, and even said he’d put people in camps. It’s just that they wanted or tolerated a second Trump presidency as long as whatever awfulness accompanied his second term only affected people other than themselves.That so many Americans knowingly and willingly allowed such a clearly dangerous individual back into power lays bare an American body politic awash in callous self-absorption. Who is genuinely surprised that a society that has reached such depths of moral decay that it does nothing to stop gun violence even after mass shootings of children would hand the keys to the White House to Trump and his Cabinet of horrors because its citizens just “didn’t find [Kamala] Harris compelling,” wanted to cosplay as Western saviors of the people of Gaza—who, by the way, preferred Harris—or believed Trump would lower their living costs even as he campaigned on inflationary tariffs?Whatever excuses Americans might make for letting Trump become president again are meaningless for Kenyan mothers helplessly watching their children starve to death or Greenlanders lying awake at night terrified that the U.S. will invade them.Spohr speculated that if the midterms run smoothly, and if there’s a change of administration in 2028, things might not go back internationally to how they were before Trump 2.0, but there may be a return domestically to something more ordinary in terms of how democratic governance and the judiciary function. As it stands, she said, the state is being dangerously dismantled before our eyes, while an imperial presidency has taken hold.“Trump may have warned of ‘Europe’s erasure,’ but it is rather in the U.S. where the very darkest tendencies of political culture have taken hold,” she said, adding that “still, I think it’s too early to say it’s all in the bin.”If there is to be any hope for the U.S. regaining the world’s trust, everyday Americans need to come to grips with their role in undermining it.Because of the power we have to influence events all over the world, American voters have a far greater responsibility than our counterparts in other nations to consider how our voting decisions will affect the lives of people who have no say in our elections. In 2024, 169 million Americans consciously chose to shirk that responsibility.What Americans, even those who voted for Harris, collectively face now is an obligation to demonstrate that we’re grown-ups and not a nation of selfish brats. That will likely require criminal penalties for members and enablers of the Trump regime, drastic changes to how the country is run, a full reckoning with the societal dysfunctions that contributed to Trump’s rise—e.g., the legacies of slavery and settler colonialism—and a length of time probably lasting decades.Even though my Romani heritage would likely have gotten me killed under the Nazi regime, the German citizenship I have in addition to my American citizenship means I share Germany’s collective responsibility to ensure National Socialism never takes power there again. This is not to compare the Trump administration to Nazi Germany, but it is Germany’s postwar struggle to return to the world’s good graces that serves as the object lesson for what Americans will have to do unless we want our country to be permanently isolated as a pariah nation, with former allies in good standing ignoring and stepping past us.Americans should have no illusions about the struggle that awaits us.“Something fundamental has been broken,” wrote Tricia Castle, a 55-year-old Toronto retiree who has American family members, in an email. “The trust is gone, and the damage runs too deep to pretend things will simply ‘go back to normal.’”As we embark on that struggle, much like Basil Fawlty’s German guests, we should not expect the rest of the world to let us live down our nation’s terrible choices anytime soon. We have much for which to atone.

The Anti-Homelessness Plot Against the First Amendment
New Republic • Feb 11, 2026

The Anti-Homelessness Plot Against the First Amendment

Alabama and 19 other Republican-led states are asking the Supreme Court to blow up more than a century of First Amendment precedents. In their place, they are urging the high court’s conservative majority to replace them with an originalist history-and-tradition test that would wipe away many of the free speech protections that American currently enjoy.Taylor v. Singleton is ostensibly about whether Alabama can criminally punish a man for holding a sign asking for help under the First Amendment. Beneath the surface, however, the GOP attorneys general are hoping to pull off a counterrevolution against America’s rich, enduring tradition of free speech and expression.The case began with a homeless man in Montgomery, Alabama. Jonathan Singleton, who is indigent and unhoused, often holds up signs along the state’s highways and sidewalks to call attention to his plight. As a result, according to his lawyers, he has been cited six times for violating the state’s pedestrian solicitation statute.The most recent sign barely counted as solicitation or begging: It simply read, “HOMELESS. Today it is me, tomorrow it could be you.” Singleton was holding up the sign on the grassy side of a highway exit when last cited. In 2020, he filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the Alabama solicitation ban, as well as a counterpart law that banned loitering “in a public place for the purpose of begging.”Efforts to criminalize homelessness have been met with a mixed reception at the Supreme Court. In June 2024, the justices held in Grants Pass v. Johnson that an Oregon city’s ordinance against sleeping and camping in public spaces did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, even if the defendants had nowhere else to go. The high court’s decision overturned a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision to the contrary and gave Western states broad latitude to criminalize homelessness.On the other hand, the Supreme Court has also struck down multiple state and local statutes that seek to criminalize public solicitation. In the 1980 case Village of Schaumburg v. Citizens for a Better Environment, for example, the court rejected a Chicago suburb’s ordinance that sought to restrict public solicitation unless a group in question met certain budgetary and licensing conditions.Such requirements, the court ruled, were too sweeping and poorly tailored to survive First Amendment scrutiny. Justice Byron White noted in his majority opinion that while the court had sometimes allowed states to ban commercial solicitation, it had generally resisted restrictions on charitable solicitations, even in residential neighborhoods, because doing so could infringe upon the solicitors’ free speech and free exercise rights.Alabama’s ordinances covered a wide range of expressive signs and actions. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, or ALEA, one of the defendants in the Singleton case, “has made arrests under the begging statute for holding a sign that said ‘homeless anything will help’; for holding ‘a plastic jar’ for ‘Birmingham Restoration Ministries’; and for approaching vehicles with a hat in hand ‘in an effort to beg,’” Singleton’s lawyers told the high court. For that reason, it is unsurprising that the city of Montgomery and its police department reached settlements with Singleton at an early stage of the litigation.But the state of Alabama, which represented ALEA, did not settle. It first took a defeat in the district court to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with Singleton. A three-judge panel concluded last April that begging was constitutionally protected speech under the circuit’s prior precedents, in line with the Supreme Court’s solicitation rulings, and that it was bound by that precedent until the Supreme Court says otherwise.Now Alabama has asked the Supreme Court to intervene and hopes to establish that begging is not a constitutionally protected right. “Governments need ‘the full panoply of tools in the policy toolbox’ to address the homelessness crisis plaguing their streets,” the state claimed in one of its briefs, quoting from the Supreme Court’s ruling in Grants Pass. “Regulating begging is one such tool, prophylactically turning off one spigot to downstream harms like public intoxication, drug abuse, and encampments before they happen.”This formulation does not inspire confidence that Alabama actually understands how homelessness works or how to address its root causes. Nor does the friend-of-the-court brief from 19 other GOP-led states, which tried to caveat their argument by explaining that the states “are not seeking to criminalize poverty but rather, to discourage destructive responses to poverty and the impacts those responses have on society.” What is truly disturbing about this petition is how Alabama wants to win. Federal courts have developed a wide range of doctrines to assess when and how government officials violate the First Amendment, what kinds of speech are protected, and whether the violation is justified under the court’s balancing tests. Alabama argued that that entire framework should be scrapped and replaced with a flat “history and tradition” test to rule in its favor.“Courts across the country have reduced the freedom of speech to a ‘mechanical jurisprudence’ of ‘oversimplified formulas’ that ‘treat … society as though it consisted of bloodless categories,’” the state claimed in its petition. “The Court should grant certiorari to restore the role of history and tradition in an area of First Amendment jurisprudence where it is badly needed.”In this particular case, Alabama argued that its anti-begging law is constitutional because states in the founding era had a wide range of laws to punish people for “vagrancy” and similar offenses. “At the founding, States commonly prohibited idleness, wandering about with no course of business or fixed residence, begging in the streets, and the like,” the state claimed. “The basic theory, inherited from the English, was to distinguish those who could work (but refused) from those [who] could not. The law demanded ‘honest labor’ from the former and charity to the latter.”Singleton took a much different view of this history, which he described as “shaky originalism right out of the gate.” He noted that vagrancy laws fell out of favor because post–Civil War constitutional amendments destroyed the basis for their existence. “The Thirteenth Amendment forecloses the theory of involuntary servitude that undergirded many of the founding-era vagrancy laws,” Singleton explained to the justices, quoting from recent precedent, “and the Fourteenth Amendment forecloses the use of vagrancy laws to ‘maintain … racial hierarchy,’ as attempted by southern states in the wake of the Civil War.”The Supreme Court recently experimented with history-and-tradition tests for other constitutional rights. It hasn’t gone well. In 2022, the court’s conservative majority ruled in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen that gun regulations presumptively violate the Second Amendment’s individual right to bear arms unless they could be connected to some analogous law from the eighteenth or nineteenth century.That “history and tradition” test led to chaos in the lower courts as federal judges acting in good faith reached starkly different conclusions about which laws passed historical muster. Eventually, the justices were forced to scale it back in United States v. Rahimi in 2024 by widening the scope of what counted as a historical analogue. Justice Clarence Thomas, the author of Bruen, found himself as the sole dissenter that time around.The Rahimi setback has not stopped Thomas from trying to introduce similar jurisprudential time bombs into First Amendment law, most recently in the 2024 trademark case Vidal v. Elster. At issue was whether the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office could refuse to register trademarks that disparaged living people—in this case, the phrase “Trump too small.” The court upheld the agency’s refusal in part because federal trademark law had consistently rejected such applications.“Our courts have long recognized that trademarks containing names may be restricted,” Thomas wrote for the court. “And, these name restrictions served established principles. This history and tradition is sufficient to conclude that the names clause—a content-based, but viewpoint-neutral, trademark restriction—is compatible with the First Amendment. We need look no further in this case.”Beneath the surface, however, he received pushback from an unlikely source: Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who took issue with his ham-fisted usage of history and tradition to resolve a case that could’ve been dealt with under existing First Amendment doctrines. “Relying exclusively on history and tradition may seem like a way of avoiding judge-made tests,” she explained in her partially concurring opinion. “But a rule rendering tradition dispositive is itself a judge-made test. And I do not see a good reason to resolve this case using that approach rather than by adopting a generally applicable principle.”Barrett had good reason to resist Thomas’s approach. Reducing the First Amendment to a mere history-and-tradition test, as Alabama proposes, would amount to the most severe reduction in Americans’ free speech rights since the republic’s founding. Founding-era state legislatures imposed restrictions on a much wider range of speech and expression than any Americans have experienced in living memory.Multiple postrevolutionary states had anti-blasphemy laws, and they were infrequently enforced throughout the nineteenth century, as well. Some early American states had much lower thresholds for libel; a history-and-tradition test would likely make it much easier for wealthy Americans to punish speech that criticizes them. The federal government might even be able to enact laws that make it illegal to criticize the president or other government officials, pointing to the Alien and Sedition Acts as a historical analogue.Alabama does not really deny that diminishing Americans’ free speech is its goal. “While the Court may be unlikely to walk back the First Amendment’s application to profanity or blasphemy,” the state coyly claimed in response to Singleton’s brief, quoting from concurring opinions by Thomas, “‘these changes appear to have reflected changing policy judgments, not a sense that [the founding-era laws] violated the original meaning of the First or Fourteenth Amendment.’”It is unclear whether there will be four votes to take up the case, let alone five votes to rule in Alabama’s favor. Barrett’s challenge in Vidal signals that at least some of the court’s conservative justices wouldn’t be on board with it. But it is deeply disturbing that this many Republican-led states would be behind such a concerted attack on free speech. And it is deeply ironic that they might bring back blasphemy laws by enforcing an ordinance that is itself a blasphemy against the New Testament.

Meet the Candidate Challenging Iowa’s Most Sacred Cow: Ethanol
New Republic • Feb 11, 2026

Meet the Candidate Challenging Iowa’s Most Sacred Cow: Ethanol

A retired water scientist named Chris Jones is running in the Democratic primary for secretary of agriculture in Iowa. That may not sound like a blockbuster race. But Jones is an unusual candidate: It’s rare for anyone on the ballot in Iowa to be so critical of the state’s total commitment to the ethanol industry. If Jones receives even slightly more support than expected in the primary, it may show that the chokehold that a powerful ethanol bloc has had on farm politics for more than 20 years is finally loosening.Iowa’s water is heavily polluted, and agriculture is responsible. Excess quantities of nitrogen fertilizers and astonishing quantities of manure are sprayed on crops. When they wash out of the soil and into rivers and streams, nitrate—the fertilizing nutrient that plants are meant to take up—seeps into the water supply, along with traces of agrochemicals ubiquitiously coated on seeds and doused on plants. This is a toxic combination; nitrates and pesticides in drinking water are each implicated in Iowa’s climbing cancer rates. Add in E. coli and other bacteria from manure, which combine with excess fertilizer to generate algal blooms in the state’s rivers and lakes, and it’s no surprise that water quality is a constant struggle. All summer, state beaches are regularly closed to swimming. The state’s major water utility maintains a costly emergency nitrate removal system, which has even been running this winter after a historic peak this summer.Chris Jones doesn’t pull punches. The causes of this crisis, he says, are a lapse in federal laws that required water-conscious farming, irresponsible disposal of the state’s overwhelming superabundance of manure produced by factory farms, a better-safe-than-sorry culture of overuse of synthetic fertilizer, and a general commitment to growing corn on every square inch of land that will support it.As a research engineer funded by the state legislature, it was Jones’s job to turn data from a statewide water-quality sensor network into scientific insights. He published research but also felt a responsibility to explain to the public what the data showed, and why nothing was getting better. While his humble blog on the university website became influential, politicians defunded the system of sensors he drew from. Jones told press that he’d heard the blog was being used as a threat against the rest of the program’s existence, and retired. This was 2023. He now blogs on Substack to a subscriber base of over 5,000—modest in the grand scheme of things but impressive for chart-heavy pieces focused on ag reform. His 2023 book The Swine Republic: Struggles With the Truth About Agriculture and Water Quality also exceeded expectations, garnering coverage in the Des Moines Register for its surprising three printings under a month after its release.One of Jones’s most controversial arguments is that ethanol, a notorious third-rail topic in farm country, has to be phased out in order for water quality to be restored. Ethanol is shorthand for a usually corn-derived biofuel. The industry was marginal until 2005, when the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency mandated oil refineries blend a minimum ratio of ethanol into U.S. gasoline. Production grew meteorically. About half of Iowa’s corn now gets made into ethanol. This means that half of the production of the most productive corn state, on untold acres of some of the highest-yielding farmland in the world, is burned in cars—an oddity that is only possible because of federal policy. In our food system, there’s abundance, there’s waste, and there’s ethanol, which is the perfect encapsulation of the horror of both.Jones wants Iowans to rethink the state’s reliance on ethanol. The biofuel’s environmental benefit, he notes, is questionable at best. In terms of jobs and growth, the refineries don’t pay sufficient dividends. And because the ethanol market props up the price of corn, it holds together a system that incentivizes all-out production—meaning copious applications of fertilizer and pesticide, farming right up to the banks of local creeks and rivers—at the direct expense of water quality.But Iowa corn growers don’t stake their livelihood on what happens to the commodity after it leaves the grain elevator—they care about the price. And ethanol, a law-ordained industry that burns corn far more efficiently than anyone can eat it, absorbs a huge portion of supply. Without this outlet, we would be left with the unmistakable reality that there’s too much goddamn corn, and there has been for a long time. The specter of millions of bushels of grain with insufficient demand is the scariest ghost in Iowa, and it haunts lobbyists and senators relentlessly.On the other hand, if you can topple the ethanol narrative, then you’ve got a good start on remaking the system completely. With a thoughtful transition, eventually you could start growing food again, and introduce incentives that make for soil- and water-friendly farming. This is the basic proposal that Jones presented in a Facebook reel posted by the campaign. The comments—245 of them and counting, on an unremarkable campaign post for a primary race for minor state office—are notable for their volume alone. Their tone is mixed to negative. The typical knee-jerk is present (“Why is he anti Ethanol? He is Lying, we need Ethanol!”), along with other alarmist rebuttals that the corn market would tank if ethanol were to disappear overnight. (Jones is campaigning for a “strategic retreat,” not an immediate ban.) The assent, not all of which is enthusiastic, comes from many corners, forming no coherent voice—which might be to Jones’s advantage, if an ethanol-critical platform winds up uniting people of varying backgrounds and political allegiances. More than anything, Iowans seem to want to talk about ethanol, for or against it—and Jones’s is the only campaign that is willing to make the conversation interesting.As long-shot campaigns go, this one has the makings of an overachiever. Jones has already built himself a high profile as a dissident. His tour stops around the state in the coldest period of a frigid winter—I’ve seen such stops in presidential primary season produce single-digit attendances—seem to be drawing a respectable number of supporters. The small but mighty progressive media voices in Iowa love him, and the grassroots are going to give everything they have. The other advantage his campaign wields is that he’s a genuinely new voice. His focus on clean water doesn’t put farmers front and center or cater to them directly. He’s running on environmental outcomes first, with a message of shared prosperity instead of promising to build farm wealth and hope that it trickles down. In Iowa politics, this approach is unprecedented.At its most practical, the campaign advocates proposals that Jones has argued for all along—that farmers should be required to make basic, specific adjustments to their practices to prevent the ruination of the state’s water supply. Simply making the case that farmers should be regulated is spicy stuff in Iowa.Jones isn’t running, however, for an office that can actually enact these policies. The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, or IDALS, cannot make state law. It funds modest, piecemeal water and soil conservation projects. Weather and crop information, along with food and animal safety, are the large part of its duties. Real change lies in the state legislature, which has sweeping power to transform the industry, particularly through the state Department of Natural Resources, which can punish polluters, regulate farming practices, and limit industrial agricultural development. Only federal power can undo the ethanol mandate. Jones says he’s “realistic” about the possibilities of winning the race and is clear-eyed about the limits of the position, but affirms that until the substantive discussion changes, nothing will.Should Jones win the primary, his Republican opponent will be the former Monsanto lobbyist and incumbent two-term Secretary Mike Naig, who has already commented on Jones’s candidacy, “I think you could say he hates ag, he hates farmers, and he intends to increase regulation and cost.” Meanwhile Jones’s Democratic primary opponent, Wade Dooley, sounds like the many moderates that come before him, running on a bingo card of buzzwords with few specifics, let alone plans for accountability. Dooley offers a “practical, results-focused approach,” pledging to “measure what works” while “working across differences.” Jones, by contrast, says: “Corporations public and private have stripped the wealth from Iowa and continue to do so, and they leave us with pollution and cancer. Iowa’s political leaders have helped them do it. So have the liberal elite.”If Jones breaks out in this campaign, it will likely follow a pattern similar to Zohran Mamdani’s in New York City. Both cases are characterized by a dual-party establishment that has locked itself into positions characterized by vacuous shibboleths that sound credible to a general public until one day they don’t. The establishment parties have gotten used to silencing alternative viewpoints with fear and hatemongering, while for many on the ground, the status quo has become increasingly contradictory and oppressive. At some point, the shibboleths start to sound delusional and the once-taboo arguments seem like the voice of reason. The right voice enters at the right time, and the dam breaks.It’s hard to say whether Chris Jones will be the right voice at the right time. It’s easy to predict that he won’t be the state’s next agriculture secretary. But for a long time Iowa voters have had no other choices. Eventually, something as contradictory and damaging as ethanol has to be overcome by a new common sense.

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