Tough Talk

In the early days of January I was reading, with much appreciation, the thoughts of my favorite Democrat on the things his party could do to make it more popular with — maybe even electable in — middle America. Patriotic America, we might call it. Readers may remember my encomium in these pages to Ruy Teixeira, proprietor of the Substack “The Liberal Patriot” (see “Vision Correction” in The New Criterion of June, 2024). At the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, he wrote a series of three articles under the general heading of “The Future of the Left in the 21st Century” in which he listed seven excellent “principles,” all of them involving “realism,” by which the party could hope to improve its standing with voters. They were
• Energy realism
• Growth realism
• Governance realism
• Immigration realism
• Merit realism
• Biological realism
• Patriotic realism
Unfortunately, he forgot to include realism tout court, which suggests a certain lack of realism on his part in his understanding of the reality of the Democratic left in the 21st century, which for years has been labeling as “fascists” or “Nazis” those who already subscribe to his seven types of realism.

Even as the third of his essays was appearing — the one which included “Patriotic realism” — his fellow Democrats were re-doubling the vehemence of their rhetoric against the legitimate government of their country in response to the killing, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross, of Renee Good, a Minneapolitan who had struck Officer Ross with her SUV while attempting to evade a lawful order to exit the vehicle.

Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, had compared the ICE agency to the Nazi “Gestapo” months ago and had, accordingly, joined with Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey in preventing the city’s police from assisting the Federal agents as they attempted to enforce the country’s immigration laws. As a result, a sort of parallel police force whose activities were coordinated and run by a faction of the left, including Antifa, began to conduct a campaign of interference with the ICE agents in Minneapolis in the performance of their duties while personally harassing and taunting them in direct confrontations that made incidents like the killing of Ms Good — or that, just over two weeks later, of Alex Pretti — all but inevitable. These, in turn, raised the rhetorical heat still further.

It seems not unreasonable to suppose that those who encouraged this kind of street theatre with their intemperate language expected something like the killings of Ms Good and Mr Pretti to happen. When the self-confessed Antifa “influencer” Kyle Wagner responded to Mr Pretti’s death by urging his influencees to “Get your f —ing guns and stop these f— ing people,” it seemed improbable that this was the first time the thought of shooting Federal officers had occurred to him. And Alex Pretti himself had been carrying a gun when he was shot and killed, as he did when he fought with ICE agents in the street on an earlier occasion. At the very least he must have known that he was courting some sort of fatal encounter.

As must Governor Walz, at least if he had been just a little more of a realist than, apparently, he was. But as is so often the case with rhetorical firebrands, tough-talking in public is a consequence-free way of fooling yourself, if not other people, into thinking you are the kind of tough customer that people hadn’t ought to mess with when you are really only Tim Walz. One is reminded of Joe Biden’s announcing back in 2018 that “If we were in high school, I’d take him [then President Trump] behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” Or of Governor Walz himself bragging untruthfully about his military record or his familiarity with firearms in 2024, when he was running for Vice President. Most recently he told an interviewer that, instead of debating J.D. Vance, the man who beat him in the race for the vice-presidency, “I would beat the s— out of him now if I could.”

The reader will notice the sad ambiguity in that “if I could.” Perhaps the governor is capable of catching himself in an occasional moments of realism after all.

Mr Walz is only one of the prominent Democrats currently engaged in what Byron York of the Washington Examiner calls “tough-guy progressivism.”

On Saturday, Larry Krasner, the elected Democratic district attorney of Philadelphia, posted a photo of himself on social media. It was a black-and-white picture of a stern- looking Krasner in a dark suit, one hand to his sunglasses. At the bottom of the photo, in all caps, was “FAFO,” which of course stands for “f*** around and find out.” The accompanying message said, “To [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and the National Guard: if you commit crimes in Philadelphia, we will charge you and hold you accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”

The Philadelphia sheriff, Rochelle Bilal, whose main job is transporting prisoners and providing courtroom security, then proceeded to second his defiance (or should we say “nullification”?) of federal law:

We stand with District Attorney Larry Krasner in making it clear: anyone who comes into our city to commit a crime will be held accountable. There will be no cover, no protection, and no hiding. . . . You don’t want this smoke, ’cause we will bring it…to you.

Their tough-guy talk harked back to last June, when Governor Gavin Newsom of California publicly dared ICE director Tom Homan to come and arrest him. Tragically, it also seems to have influenced Rebecca Good in the moments before her partner, Renee Good, was shot and killed. “You want to come at us?” Rebecca had said. “You want to come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy.” Likewise, in an earlier assault on federal agents, Alex Pretty was recorded as shouting at them: “F—ing assault me, motherf—! F— you guys! You’re f—ing trash!” As with Governor Walz, the vulgarisms are meant to reinforce the message. Everybody knows that’s how real tough guys talk.

Not so long ago even people less than liberally endowed with common sense would have recognized such talk as mere posturing by people who, like Joe Biden wishing himself back in high school in order to demonstrate his toughness, apprehended no serious danger to themselves from it. Renee Good obviously saw no threat to her own safety in videos taken just before she was shot by Officer Ross. “That’s fine, dude,” she said to him, “I’m not mad at you.” Moments later, her partner Rebecca was heard to say, “Why did you have real bullets?” It beggars belief that a grown up woman cannot have been aware that police weapons contain real bullets. Perhaps she just forgot. Or perhaps she thought, like Philadelphia Sheriff Bilal, that ICE were “fake law enforcement.”

In an article for the Free Press, headed “Minneapolis Isn’t a Movie,” Kat Rosenfield observed that “there is a pervasive sense that ICE agents are more like cartoon villains than legitimate law enforcement,”

The notion that ICE agents would have anything but real bullets in their guns may seem astonishing, but it surely speaks to how Renee Good, an ordinary woman in early middle age and the sole surviving parent of a 6-year-old, ended up behind the wheel of a car, in the middle of the street, engaged in a confrontation, the true stakes of which she so devastatingly misapprehended.

After Alex Pretti was killed, Michael Shellenberger wrote on his Substack that

Both Good and Pretti were 37 years old when they died, and Millennials, more than Gen X before and Gen Z after, are very progressive and are “heroes in their narratives,” researchers find. The deaths of Good and Pretti are thus the result of a collision of forces that have been building for decades. After World War II, fighting Nazis and fascists became the number one heroic fantasy for Americans and others in the West. And baby Boomers taught their own revolutionary heroic values to their Millennial children, who see fighting Trump and ICE as an opportunity to achieve a form of transcendence.

Like Sean Charles Dunn, who was also 37 when he threw a sandwich at a National Guardsman in Washington, DC last August (see “Of Man & Manners” in The New Criterion of October, 2025), these members of the generation that grew up with a galaxy of super-heroes (and super-villains) as their idea of adult role models are now taking their cue from a tough-guy progressive like Tim Walz, aged 61, whose defiance of imaginary Nazis and fascists shows that he inhabits the same fantasy world that they do.

All of them are playing at revolution just as the Abbie Hoffmans and Jerry Rubins of the “revolution for the hell of it” era did — but now they have the propaganda support of the media, the popular culture, the educational establishment and the institutional Democratic party. They are still losing as revolutionaries, of course — as at least their Antifa sponsors must have known they would — but the polls suggest that they may be succeeding as Democrats, which must have been the media’s and the party’s aim in supporting them, and their revolutionary fantasies, in the first place.

Governor Newsom, one of the pioneers of tough-guy progressivism, has since moved on (and partly backtracked) from his defiance of ICE and instead taken the act to Davos, Switzerland where, with an obscene reference to “knee pads,” he took the assembled world leaders of politics, finance and business to task for not being so bravely defiant of President Trump and, well, tough, gosh-darn it, as he himself was.

Diplomacy with Donald Trump? He’s a T-Rex. You mate with him or he devours you. One or the other. . .Wake up! Where the hell has everybody been? Stop with this [expletive] diplomacy of sort of niceties and somehow we’re all going to figure it out, saying one thing privately and another publicly. Have some spine, some goddamn [expletive].”

“I hope people understand how pathetic they look on the world stage,” he added, apparently not referring to himself. But others of those present certainly understood. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent characterized the performance as “Patrick Bateman meets Sparkle Beach Ken,” and almost everyone knew what he meant.

Almost. One or two of the world leaders present, however, wanted to get into the progressive tough-guy act themselves — especially after President Trump dominated the gathering with a somewhat undiplomatic demonstration of American power. Most of those present were presumably able to tell the difference between the president’s lesson in geopolitical realities and progressive tough-guy preening, but one who wasn’t was the Canadian premier Mark Carney. He declared that Mr Trump had created a “rupture” in the Western alliance and that he and his country were going to go off in a huff about it and befriend China instead — thus demonstrating that “Canadian tough guy” is just about as realistic a description as “Minnesota tough guy.”

Nor was it only Canadian media fantasists who took the prime minister’s role-playing seriously. South of the 45th parallel, professional Trump-hater David French enthused in The New York Times
that Mr Carney had “delivered what might be the most important address of Trump’s second term so far.”

Carney did not receive a rousing standing ovation because he called for submission. Instead, he marked out a path of allied integration and cooperation that could create, in essence, a new great power rival to the United States. Submission, in fact, was never an option. Proud nations do not agree to become vassals. And so the choice isn’t between resistance and submission, but between forms of resistance — whether the “middle powers” will create national fortresses or enter into new alliances and agreements that don’t include the United States. Carney, in essence, says yes to both. Canada, he said, is doubling its military spending and rebuilding its defense industrial base, but it’s also entering into an array of new agreements, including — most troubling to the United States — agreements with China and Qatar.

In Mr French’s view, the Canadian Trump-defier had as good as promised to go to war against the U.S. on the side of mighty Denmark (and doubtless other “middle powers”) in the event of “American aggression” against Greenland.

I am not the first person to notice that doubling one’s defense spending when one hardly spends anything on defense in the first place can only be the emptiest of threats. Canada, alone or in combination with every single one of those potential “middle powers,” could double its defense spending — and then double it again — without coming anywhere near American military potency. Even when it comes to trade policy, the threat of a turn to China is unlikely to scare anyone this side of David French. As Oren Cass and Daniel Kishi wrote for Commonplace that “Canada Doesn’t Have the Cards.”

Whatever pose Carney strikes, Canada’s balance sheet still points south. In 2024, the United States bought 76% of Canada’s exports and supplied 62% of its imports, with Canada running a $102 billion goods surplus in the relationship. China sits on the other side of the ledger: Canada ran an almost $60 billion deficit with Beijing that year, even though the relationship is far smaller in scale. China accounted for 12% of Canada’s imports but took only 4% of its exports. In other words, China sells into Canada far more than it buys from it, making it a source of intensive competition for Canadian producers without offering them a substitute for U.S. demand. Nor could Canada replace the U.S. market with a grab bag of “middle” powers. That’s a playbook it has already tried. As Financial Times columnist Alan Beattie points out, Canada spent the last decade pursuing the same diversification strategy through trade deals with the EU and the CPTPP (a quasi-Trans-Pacific Partnership without U.S. participation). Yet those agreements barely moved the needle: the percentage of Canadian exports to the U.S. market remained in the mid- 70s. Geography, as Beattie puts it, remains close to destiny. For Canada, the upside of middle-power diversification is limited.

Not that you’re likely ever to read any of this in the same media whose main business these days appears to be the promotion of a fantasy world fit for “heroes of their own narratives” like Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom and Renee Good and Alex Pretti and Mark Carney — narratives of brave defiance against the super-villain-cum-T-Rex in the White House. Poor Mr Teixeira’s “realisms” don’t stand a chance, I fear, against the inertial force of unreality in the 21st century Democratic party.