The Hinge, America's Choices Become Stark
July 10, AD2026
Welcome to Friday Flashpoint where I analyze and expose important historical and social developments impacting America’s place in the world.
A lot happened this week but I’ll try to be concise.
Mamdani is up
Platner is out
Talarico is the future
The Iran war is back on
Canada is critical
Fútbol is life
America hasn’t faced choices like this since the 1910s featured Teddy Roosevelt versus Wilson versus Eugene V. Debs.
The United States faces distinct pathways forward that will determine not only its domestic policies but also whether American politics will lead to a healthier engagement with a robust and competitive world.
Zohran Mamdani, the new Mayor of New York City, represents a progressive, Democratic Socialist new way. His is the politics of reform through active government that promotes its activity—a government that realizes that it must not only address problems but be seen to do so, and thus subverts the cynicism that too often excuses lazy politics. Translating that beyond New York City will require adopting the energy of his approach if not the same solutions, as no city in America is like New York. His opponents are in the unattractive position of hoping he somehow fails while he is delivering voters what they seem to want.
Graham Platner represented what many Democrats thought was the rough, blue collar White male populist pathway to countering MAGA. Before officially withdrawing his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Maine following a series of controversies, Platner campaigned as an outsider against the “oligarchy.” His rhetoric, critical of corporate power and the political establishment, resonated with a segment of voters desiring systemic disruption, though his campaign ultimately collapsed under the weight of personal scandals. It has now gone up in flames but there was smoke for quite sometime. The Democratic Party will have to do soul-searching to determine how Platner was able to come from nowhere and defeat an incumbent governor in a landslide primary win, but also why so many party leaders were attracted to a candidate who had worrying signs that he had not only failed to move on from his past problems but that those problems were far more severe than they already appeared to be.
In Texas, however, the Democrats may face their greatest test with James Talarico’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. Talarico offers a pathway of institutional reform paired with religious progressivism. Talarico explicitly grounds his politics in his Christian faith while sharply critiquing White Christian nationalism. Can the Democratic Party tame its aggressive, anti-religious chattering class to make room for candidates like Talarico outside of Texas? This will be required to restore enthusiasm among Latino and Black Americans, as well as first generation citizens voters who are far more likely to be religiously committed than white Americans who support the Democratic Party. If the Democrats want to be a big tent party that can challenge the structurally advantages of the GOP in the South and Midwest, they will need more Talaricos.
In foreign affairs, America faces three brewing foreign relations crises that threaten to further weaken its standing and influence abroad. The first is that the war with Iran is back on. A superpower that cannot terminate wars at will with a supposedly weaker state is no longer a superpower but merely a major power with a grudge it cannot settle.
The second issue, and long-term the most important, is that Canada continues its pivot to Europe with the purchase of up to a dozen submarines from Germany and its entry into the Eurovision contest. Looking back, no historian of strategy will count undermining the relationship along the world’s longest peaceful border as a win. America defanged Europe after the Second World War. That gap in European history is over, they are rearming, establishing new relationships and through Canada, the EU may become a hard-power competitor for the US in the Western Hemisphere.
And finally, there are few major religions embraced with extreme fervor like international football, aka soccer. While the U.S. media has largely moved on from the controversy of the President of the United States contacting officials at FIFA regarding a player on the U.S. team receiving a red-card suspension, the rest of the world has not. Folarin Balogun, the US star player, was officially sanctioned for what is known as “serious foul play.” According to rules in place since the 1970s, that meant an automatic ban from playing. While in theory FIFA can suspend the punishment, when it did so after the US president involved himself, it was the first time it had actually used that power.
Two things happened: the world cheered when Belgium battered the U.S. 4-1 in their July 6 game, and FIFA’s reversal of the ban publicly angered the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the body that organizes the European qualifying tournaments that determine which of its national teams advance to the FIFA World Cup and acts as the continental confederation under FIFA to basically run soccer. It is the sort of incident that sticks with the populations of other countries and creates lingering resentment.
Don’t touch the temple of fútbol.
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