On the Brink in 2026: US-China Near-War Status Report

By Michael Klare, TomDispatch

13 July 21

 

---

The single scariest night of my life may have been on October 22, 1962, when I thought that all the duck-and-cover moments of my childhood were coming home to roost. President John F. Kennedy appeared on national television (and radio) to warn us all to duck and cover. The Soviet Union, it seemed, had managed to emplace medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba that could reach major East coast cities. He was ordering a naval “quarantine” of the island. As he put it, “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be faced.”

That was the beginning of what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of course, I’m here today, so neither New Haven, where I was then a freshman in college, nor New York, where I grew up, had its Hiroshima moment, nor did anyplace else in the U.S., Russia, or Cuba. Still, it felt too close for comfort.

Despite all the years of the Cold War still to come, I never again felt that unforgettable sense that a nuclear war might break out. But never say never, not on a planet filled with such weaponry, not when its two major powers, the U.S. and China, are increasingly facing off, particularly over the island of Taiwan.

Last month, for instance, Admiral Sam Paparo, commander of the U.S. Pacific fleet, called China a “pacing threat,” explaining that “I worry about China’s intentions. It doesn’t make a difference to me whether it is tomorrow, next year, or whether it is in six years. At Pacific Fleet and Indo-Pacific Command we have a duty to be ready to respond to threats to U.S. security.” And that “duty,” he added, includes delivering a fleet “capable of thwarting any effort on the part of the Chinese to upend that [world] order, to include the unification by force of Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China.”

Meanwhile, in Army circles, there is increasing discussion of the possibility of stationing a U.S. armored brigade combat team as a “tripwire force” on that very island. That way, should Beijing decide to invade, it would face U.S. troops from second one. And just as such thinking was emerging in military circles here, a Chinese publication put out a “detailed outline of a three-stage surprise attack which could pave the way for an assault landing on Taiwan.” All of this, of course, was happening as the Biden administration ramps up its distinctly anti-China-focused foreign policy.

So, welcome to the world TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, founder of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy, considers as he peers into a future in which the Chinese Missile Crisis of 2024 or 2026 is anything but beyond imagining. Tom

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

---

On the Brink in 2026
U.S.-China Near-War Status Report

t’s the summer of 2026, five years after the Biden administration identified the People’s Republic of China as the principal threat to U.S. security and Congress passed a raft of laws mandating a society-wide mobilization to ensure permanent U.S. domination of the Asia-Pacific region. Although major armed conflict between the United States and China has not yet broken out, numerous crises have erupted in the western Pacific and the two countries are constantly poised for war. International diplomacy has largely broken down, with talks over climate change, pandemic relief, and nuclear nonproliferation at a standstill. For most security analysts, it’s not a matter of if a U.S.-China war will erupt, but when.

Does this sound fanciful? Not if you read the statements coming out of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the upper ranks of Congress these days.

“China poses the greatest long-term challenge to the United States and strengthening deterrence against China will require DoD to work in concert with other instruments of national power,” the Pentagon’s 2022 Defense Budget Overview asserts. “A combat-credible Joint Force will underpin a whole-of-nation approach to competition and ensure the Nation leads from a position of strength.”

On this basis, the Pentagon requested $715 billion in military expenditures for 2022, with a significant chunk of those funds to be spent on the procurement of advanced ships, planes, and missiles intended for a potential all-out, “high-intensity” war with China. An extra $38 billion was sought for the design and production of nuclear weapons, another key aspect of the drive to overpower China.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress, contending that even such sums were insufficient to ensure continued U.S. superiority vis-à-vis that country, are pressing for further increases in the 2022 Pentagon budget. Many have also endorsed the EAGLE Act, short for Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement — a measure intended to provide hundreds of billions of dollars for increased military aid to America’s Asian allies and for research on advanced technologies deemed essential for any future high-tech arms race with China.

Imagine, then, that such trends only gain momentum over the next five years. What will this country be like in 2026? What can we expect from an intensifying new Cold War with China that, by then, could be on the verge of turning hot?

Taiwan 2026: Perpetually on the Brink

Crises over Taiwan have erupted on a periodic basis since the start of the decade, but now, in 2026, they seem to be occurring every other week. With Chinese bombers and warships constantly probing Taiwan’s outer defenses and U.S. naval vessels regularly maneuvering close to their Chinese counterparts in waters near the island, the two sides never seem far from a shooting incident that would have instantaneous escalatory implications. So far, no lives have been lost, but planes and ships from both sides have narrowly missed colliding again and again. On each occasion, forces on both sides have been placed on high alert, causing jitters around the world.

The tensions over that island have largely stemmed from incremental efforts by Taiwanese leaders, mostly officials of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to move their country from autonomous status as part of China to full independence. Such a move is bound to provoke a harsh, possibly military response from Beijing, which considers the island a renegade province.

The island’s status has plagued U.S.-China relations for decades. When, on January 1, 1979, Washington first recognized the People’s Republic of China, it agreed to withdraw diplomatic recognition from the Taiwanese government and cease formal relations with its officials. Under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, however, U.S. officials were obligated to conduct informal relations with Taipei. The act stipulated as well that any move by Beijing to alter Taiwan’s status by force would be considered “a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States” — a stance known as “strategic ambiguity,” as it neither guaranteed American intervention, nor ruled it out.

In the ensuing decades, the U.S. sought to avoid conflict in the region by persuading Taipei not to make any overt moves toward independence and by minimizing its ties to the island, thereby discouraging aggressive moves by China. By 2021, however, the situation had been remarkably transformed. Once under the exclusive control of the Nationalist Party that had been defeated by communist forces on the Chinese mainland in 1949, Taiwan became a multiparty democracy in 1987. It has since witnessed the steady rise of pro-independence forces, led by the DPP. At first, the mainland regime sought to woo the Taiwanese with abundant trade and tourism opportunities, but the excessive authoritarianism of its Communist Party alienated many island residents — especially younger ones — only adding momentum to the drive for independence. This, in turn, has prompted Beijing to switch tactics from courtship to coercion by constantly sending its combat planes and ships into Taiwanese air and sea space.

Trump administration officials, less concerned about alienating Beijing than their predecessors, sought to bolster ties with the Taiwanese government in a series of gestures that Beijing found threatening and that were only expanded in the early months of the Biden administration. At that time, growing hostility to China led many in Washington to call for an end to “strategic ambiguity” and the adoption of an unequivocal pledge to defend Taiwan if it were to come under attack from the mainland.

“I think the time has come to be clear,” Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas declared in February 2021. “Replace strategic ambiguity with strategic clarity that the United States will come to the aid of Taiwan if China was to forcefully invade Taiwan.”

The Biden administration was initially reluctant to adopt such an inflammatory stance, since it meant that any conflict between China and Taiwan would automatically become a U.S.-China war with nuclear ramifications. In April 2022, however, under intense congressional pressure, the Biden administration formally abandoned “strategic ambiguity” and vowed that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would prompt an immediate American military response. “We will never allow Taiwan to be subjugated by military force,” President Biden declared at that time, a striking change in a longstanding American strategic position.

The DoD would soon announce the deployment of a permanent naval squadron to the waters surrounding Taiwan, including an aircraft carrier and a supporting flotilla of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Ely Ratner, President Biden’s top envoy for the Asia-Pacific region, first outlined plans for such a force in June 2021 during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. A permanent U.S. presence, he suggested, would serve to “deter, and, if necessary, deny a fait accompli scenario” in which Chinese forces quickly attempted to overwhelm Taiwan. Although described as tentative then, it would, in fact, become formal policy following President Biden’s April 2022 declaration on Taiwan and a brief exchange of warning shots between a Chinese destroyer and a U.S. cruiser just south of the Taiwan Strait.

Today, in 2026, with a U.S. naval squadron constantly sailing in waters near Taiwan and Chinese ships and planes constantly menacing the island’s outer defenses, a potential Sino-American military clash never seems far off. Should that occur, what would happen is impossible to predict, but most analysts now assume that both sides would immediately fire their advanced missiles — many of them hypersonic (that is, exceeding five times the speed of sound) — at their opponent’s key bases and facilities. This, in turn, would provoke further rounds of air and missile strikes, probably involving attacks on Chinese and Taiwanese cities as well as U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, and Guam. Whether such a conflict could be contained at the non-nuclear level remains anyone’s guess.

The Incremental Draft

In the meantime, planning for a U.S.-China war-to-come has dramatically reshaped American society and institutions. The “Forever Wars” of the first two decades of the twenty-first century had been fought entirely by an All-Volunteer Force (AVF) that typically endured multiple tours of duty, in particular in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. was able to sustain such combat operations (while continuing to maintain a substantial troop presence in Europe, Japan, and South Korea) with 1.4 million servicemembers because American forces enjoyed uncontested control of the airspace over its war zones, while China and Russia remained wary of engaging U.S. forces in their own neighborhoods.

Today, in 2026, however, the picture looks radically different: China, with an active combat force of two million soldiers, and Russia, with another million — both militaries equipped with advanced weaponry not widely available to them in the early years of the century — pose a far more formidable threat to U.S. forces. An AVF no longer looks particularly viable, so plans for its replacement with various forms of conscription are already being put into place.

Bear in mind, however, that in a future war with China and/or Russia, the Pentagon doesn’t envision large-scale ground battles reminiscent of World War II or the Iraq invasion of 2003. Instead, it expects a series of high-tech battles involving large numbers of ships, planes, and missiles. This, in turn, limits the need for vast conglomerations of ground troops, or “grunts,” as they were once labeled, but increases the need for sailors, pilots, missile launchers, and the kinds of technicians who can keep so many high-tech systems at top operational capacity.

As early as October 2020, during the final months of the Trump administration, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was already calling for a doubling of the size of the U.S. naval fleet, from approximately 250 to 500 combat vessels, to meet the rising threat from China. Clearly, however, there would be no way for a force geared to a 250-ship navy to sustain one double that size. Even if some of the additional ships were “uncrewed,” or robotic, the Navy would still have to recruit several hundred thousand more sailors and technicians to supplement the 330,000 then in the force. Much the same could be said of the U.S. Air Force.

No surprise, then, that an incremental restoration of the draft, abandoned in 1973 as the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, has taken place in these years. In 2022, Congress passed the National Service Reconstitution Act (NSRA), which requires all men and women aged 18 to 25 to register with newly reconstituted National Service Centers and to provide them with information on their residence, employment status, and educational background — information they are required to update on an annual basis. In 2023, the NSRA was amended to require registrants to complete an additional questionnaire on their technical, computer, and language skills. Since 2024, all men and women enrolled in computer science and related programs at federally aided colleges and universities have been required to enroll in the National Digital Reserve Corps (NDRC) and spend their summers working on defense-related programs at selected military installations and headquarters. Members of that Digital Corps must also be available on short notice for deployment to such facilities, should a conflict of any sort threaten to break out.

The establishment of just such a corps, it should be noted, had been a recommendation of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a federal agency established in 2019 to advise Congress and the White House on how to prepare the nation for a high-tech arms race with China. “We must win the AI competition that is intensifying strategic competition with China,” the commission avowed in March 2021, given that “the human talent deficit is the government’s most conspicuous AI deficit.” To overcome it, the commission suggested then, “We should establish a… civilian National Reserve to grow tech talent with the same seriousness of purpose that we grow military officers. The digital age demands a digital corps.”

Indeed, only five years later, with the prospect of a U.S.-China conflict so obviously on the agenda, Congress is considering a host of bills aimed at supplementing the Digital Corps with other mandatory service requirements for men and women with technical skills, or simply for the reinstatement of conscription altogether and the full-scale mobilization of the nation. Needless to say, protests against such measures have been erupting at many colleges and universities, but with the mood of the country becoming increasingly bellicose, there has been little support for them among the general public. Clearly, the “volunteer” military is about to become an artifact of a previous epoch.

A New Cold War Culture of Repression

With the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon obsessively focused on preparations for what’s increasingly seen as an inevitable war with China, it’s hardly surprising that civil society in 2026 has similarly been swept up in an increasingly militaristic anti-China spirit. Popular culture is now saturated with nationalistic and jingoistic memes, regularly portraying China and the Chinese leadership in derogatory, often racist terms. Domestic manufacturers hype “Made in America” labels (even if they’re often inaccurate) and firms that once traded extensively with China loudly proclaim their withdrawal from that market, while the streaming superhero movie of the moment, The Beijing Conspiracy, on a foiled Chinese plot to disable the entire U.S. electrical grid, is the leading candidate for the best film Oscar.

Domestically, by far the most conspicuous and pernicious result of all this has been a sharp rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, especially those assumed to be Chinese, whatever their origin. This disturbing phenomenon, which began at the outset of the Covid crisis, when President Trump, in a transparent effort to deflect blame for his mishandling of the pandemic, started using terms like “Chinese Virus” and “Kung Flu” to describe the disease. Attacks on Asian Americans rose precipitously then and continued to climb after Joe Biden took office and began vilifying Beijing for its human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. According to the watchdog group Stop AAPI Hate, some 6,600 anti-Asian incidents were reported in the U.S. between March 2020 and March 2021, with almost 40% of those events occurring in February and March 2021.

For observers of such incidents back then, the connection between anti-China policymaking at the national level and anti-Asian violence at the neighborhood level was incontrovertible. “When America China-bashes, then Chinese get bashed, and so do those who ‘look Chinese,’” said Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University at that time. “American foreign policy in Asia is American domestic policy for Asians.”

By 2026, most Chinatowns in America have been boarded up and those that remain open are heavily guarded by armed police. Most stores owned by Asian Americans (of whatever background) were long ago closed due to boycotts and vandalism, and Asian Americans think twice before leaving their homes.

The hostility and distrust exhibited toward Asian Americans at the neighborhood level has been replicated at the workplace and on university campuses, where Chinese Americans and Chinese-born citizens are now prohibited from working at laboratories in any technical field with military applications. Meanwhile, scholars of any background working on China-related topics are subject to close scrutiny by their employers and government officials. Anyone expressing positive comments about China or its government is routinely subjected to harassment, at best, or at worst, dismissal and FBI investigation.

As with the incremental draft, such increasingly restrictive measures were first adopted in a series of laws in 2022. But the foundation for much of this was the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, passed by the Senate in June of that year. Among other provisions, it barred federal funding to any college or university that hosted a Confucius Institute, a Chinese government program to promote that country’s language and culture in foreign countries. It also empowered federal agencies to coordinate with university officials to “promote protection of controlled information as appropriate and strengthen defense against foreign intelligence services,” especially Chinese ones.

Diverging From the Path of War

Yes, in reality, we’re still in 2021, even if the Biden administration regularly cites China as our greatest threat. Naval incidents with that country’s vessels in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait are indeed on the rise, as are anti-Asian-American sentiments domestically. Meanwhile, as the planet’s two greatest greenhouse-gas emitters squabble, our world is growing hotter by the year.

Without question, something like the developments described above (and possibly far worse) will lie in our future unless action is taken to alter the path we’re now on. All of those “2026” developments, after all, are rooted in trends and actions already under way that only appear to be gathering momentum at this moment. Bills like the Innovation and Competition Act enjoy near unanimous support among Democrats and Republicans, while strong majorities in both parties favor increased funding of Pentagon spending on China-oriented weaponry. With few exceptions — Senator Bernie Sanders among them — no one in the upper ranks of government is saying: Slow down. Don’t launch another Cold War that could easily go hot.

“It is distressing and dangerous,” as Sanders wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, “that a fast-growing consensus is emerging in Washington that views the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a zero-sum economic and military struggle.” At a time when this planet faces ever more severe challenges from climate change, pandemics, and economic inequality, he added that “the prevalence of this view will create a political environment in which the cooperation that the world desperately needs will be increasingly difficult to achieve.”

In other words, we Americans face an existential choice: Do we stand aside and allow the “fast-growing consensus” Sanders speaks of to shape national policy, while abandoning any hope of genuine progress on climate change or those other perils? Alternately, do we begin trying to exert pressure on Washington to adopt a more balanced relationship with China, one that would place at least as much emphasis on cooperation as on confrontation. If we fail at this, be prepared in 2026 or soon thereafter for the imminent onset of a catastrophic (possibly even nuclear) U.S.-China war.

---

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

How to Handle the Press: A Master Class From Bernie Sanders

By Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs

13 July 21

 

f you are unfamiliar with Maureen Dowd’s newspaper columns, know that they are morally frivolous and a waste of the New York Times’ limited space. Dowd writes about politics, but displays zero interest in the human consequences of political decisions. It is rare for serious policy issues to be mentioned in a Dowd column; she is unabashedly interested in Washington D.C. as a soap opera. She writes in an irritating style heavy on “sarcasm, cutesy nicknames, and, most importantly, countless gag-worthy pop cultural references,” and was infamously more interested in cutefying Barack Obama (who she called “Obambi”) than analyzing the consequences of his presidency. Naturally, she was in her element during the Clinton impeachment scandal, and in 1999 won a Pulitzer Prize “for a portfolio of 10 columns, all of them about the scandal and its lively cast of characters.” (Her characterization of Monica Lewinsky is particularly infamous for its lively misogyny; Dowd used her influential New York Times platform to call Monica Lewinsky fat, silly, and crazy, and won the biggest award in journalism for it).

A 2011 Gawker article by Hamilton Nolan called “Why Maureen Dowd Is Not A Good Columnist” explains the core of the problem. Nolan picked a column of hers about former Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, who had recently become CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), making him a top movie industry lobbyist and a clear example of the “revolving door” politics through which corporations create the laws they want rather than the laws preferred by, say, the public. But when Dowd wrote about Dodd’s transition from D.C. to Hollywood, the economics and politics of the situation were apparently of little interest to her. Instead, Nolan says, Dowd’s column tells us that Chris Dodd has “gleaming white hair and laughs with gleaming white teeth,” is “not into the glitz,” his life revolves around his family, he has known many celebrities, he thinks “thinks movies can have ‘a profound influence,’” and he likes Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull. But what about the problem of having ex-senators becoming lobbyists? What about the fact that this was a Democratic senator, offering proof of the rot in both parties? It all went unmentioned, which led Nolan to conclude that Dowd “doesn’t have a single fucking useful thing to say.”

This was back in 2011, and by that point had been true for some time: whatever political instincts Dowd may once have had, she’d given them all up to embody the stereotype of the empty, power-serving gossip columnist. Today, Dowd’s columns continue to impress with how completely she manages to take the policy out of politics. (Is Joe Biden cool? Will Mitch ditch Donald?)

You might have expected that when Maureen Dowd requested an interview with Senator Bernie Sanders, he would have turned her down cold. After all, Sanders is known for despising personality journalism and famously wants to talk about nothing but Medicare For All, free college, and other left policy goals. But Sanders did have lunch with Dowd, and the result is a fascinating example of how a stubborn enough lefty can force a journalist to cover matters of substance against their will.

Dowd’s column begins like this:

I want to talk to Bernie about Balenciaga. And Britney. And Dua Lipa, Sha’Carri Richardson and Joe Manchin’s houseboat. And whether he prefers red or white horseradish on his gefilte fish. And the state of capitalism, and the absurd price of a Birkin bag.

Now, you may be thinking: she’s joking. This is tongue in cheek. She didn’t really want to talk to Bernie Sanders about Britney Spears and a houseboat. But if you think this, you are not familiar with the career and columns of Maureen Dowd. She often makes it sound like she is only ironically interested in these topics, and is mocking the sorts of people who would be interested in fashion and celebrities, but these are quite clearly her favorite topics. Fashion and celebrities are by no means necessarily shallow subjects—for example there are plenty of substantive matters to discuss when it comes to Britney Spears—but it’s unlikely Dowd is interested in a serious discussion of, say, legal autonomy and conservatorships; we can expect she wants to ask about Spears because “Bernie on Britney” would be extremely clickable. But Bernie was having none of it, according to Dowd. When she pulled out her sheet of questions, he produced his own list of the things he was willing to talk about:

He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out his own piece of paper, a list of items written in his loopy scrawl. These are the only things he’s here to talk about. At 79, Bernie Sanders is a man on a mission, laser-focused on a list that represents trillions of dollars in government spending that he deems essential. When I stray into other subjects, the senator jabs his finger at his piece of paper or waves it in my face, like Van Helsing warding off Dracula with a cross.

(That last line is admittedly a fine piece of writing, vivid and true. One of the most disappointing things about Dowd is that under her bullshit she is considerably talented.)

The op-ed is even accompanied by a photograph of Sanders holding up this handwritten list. It says:

Physical infrastructure
-broadband
Climate
Childcare
Paid family & medical [leave]
Home healthcare
Prescription drugs
Expand Medicare
– GME expansion
Higher ed
Housing
Progressive taxation

All of these, I think you will agree, are things that matter a lot and have many consequences for millions of people. They are also woefully under-discussed, not just in the New York Times, but everywhere. Even a cursory look at the average Dowd column shows that she is unlikely to have given attention to any of them.

Sure enough, during his lunch with Dowd, Bernie stuck to the list:

Digging into some eggs over easy and white toast, [Sanders says:] “Does anyone deny that our child care system, for example, is a disaster? Does anyone deny that pre-K, similarly, is totally inadequate? Does anyone deny that there’s something absurd that our young people can’t afford to go to college or are leaving school deeply in debt? Does anybody deny that our physical infrastructure is collapsing? Does anybody except anti-science people deny that climate change is real? Does anyone deny that we have a major health care crisis? Does anyone deny that we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs? Does anyone deny we have a housing crisis? Does anyone deny that half the people live paycheck to paycheck?

Dowd, rather than responding to any of this, tries hard to make her column about the relationship between Bernie and Joe Biden, and about his dual status as outsider and insider, and about the Squad, and whatever other personality matters she can inject. But he remains firm when she attempts to take things in any kind of Dowdian direction:

When I ask Sanders if he thinks A.O.C. could be president someday, out comes the list.
“That’s not what I want to get into,” he barks. “I want to get into what this legislation is about.”
“You don’t want to discuss ‘Free Britney’?” I ask.
“No.”
[…]
“I want to talk about this legislation.”
But wait, what does he think of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s lurking around A.O.C.’s office and calling her “a little communist”?
“You’re getting off the subject here,” Sanders chides, before relenting…
[…]
Before the senator leaves to work the phones, he returns to his list with one last directive: “Tell people what we are trying to accomplish.”

Of course, Dowd does no such thing. She does, as promised, tell us that Sanders was “featured in this month’s Vanity Fair cover story as a friend of pop star Dua Lipa, and that he was an inspiration for a Balenciaga show in Paris in 2017.” But because Bernie wouldn’t stray far from the list, and her column was based on lunch with him, Dowd had to mention at least some of the substantive and important things Bernie said.

Bernie is a broken record, and the record in question is usually some mix of the Greatest Hits on the list he brought to his meeting with Dowd. But you can see why this actually makes Sanders a very effective communicator. He is always on message, always trying to make sure the press has to talk about what he wants them to talk about. With Maureen Dowd, that’s difficult; she has built her brand on “frivolous” topics and light cruelty. But instead of declining to meet with her, he had lunch and simply wouldn’t stop talking about the issues he wanted to talk about. In doing so, he forced her to write a column about his refusal to stray from those issues. It’s not the column she would have written if he’d asked her what questions she had and simply answered each one. It is an exercise in manipulating a journalist to successful effect.

I think leftists can learn a great deal from this. Bernie has his flaws and made serious mistakes in both of his presidential campaigns, but he is very good at politics despite his marginal position. If he goes on a talk show, he will be discussing wealth inequality or the future of democracy, even if he is talking to a manchild like Jimmy Fallon. Staying relentlessly on message—and thinking about what topics we want to spend our finite resources and time talking about—is critical to having an effective, persuasive left. It’s easy to lose focus and forget what actually matters. We can get lost in personality drama. Sometimes leftists spend far too much time criticizing other leftists with very similar policy goals, seemingly forgetting that we need to build a unified movement against the right, a thing which can only happen if we treat each other as comrades (and are definitive about what it means to be a leftist, rather than embracing right-wing faux-populism). Perhaps we should directly lift Bernie’s approach and just keep a damn list. It’s fine to let our minds wander, to indulge in frivolity and amusement. But we have to know what’s on the list and train ourselves to always come back to it. Otherwise we will lose. Professional hacks like Dowd do not care about the lives that are affected by the issues on Bernie’s list. They care about D.C. drama. But it’s possible, as Bernie showed, to force the conversation to be about what you want it to be about. This is what we must constantly be trying to do.