This summer a first-time candidate named Melat Kiros won a Democratic primary in Colorado and knocked off a fifteen-term incumbent. A few weeks earlier, someone asked her about the man who had walked down a street in Boulder the year before with Molotov cocktails and a homemade flamethrower, and set a crowd on fire. They were marching for Israeli hostages. One of them, Karen Diamond, was eighty-two. She died of her injuries. Here is what Kiros said:
I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator. All I know is that he went and attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed. I don’t even know what the people that were at that protest believed, too.
She grants that he burned people for what they believed. She still won’t say the word.
Kiros is serious. Twenty-nine, a lawyer, a doctoral candidate whose research is the economics of reparations and a universal basic income. The kind of person who checked the boxes. That is the part worth staying with. Not the man with the flamethrower. The valedictorian who looked at what he did and could not bring herself to name it.
You know her. You might be her.
She did everything the system told her to do. Good school, then the better one. The job a notch off the one she wanted. The house in the leafy part of town, near the good coffee, walkable enough to feel like she made the green choice. She reads. She recycles. By every measure that is supposed to count, she is a success. And she is convinced the country that produced her is a crime.
I just don’t think the reasons are the reason.
She did not come up from the bottom. It is almost never the bottom. The people who staff movements like hers, fund them, knock on doors for them, are the comfortable and the credentialed. Nobody’s idea of the wretched of the earth, whatever name they march under. The anxious near-top, a rung or two below the summit, close enough to see it, and furious they are not standing on it. On Unqualified Advice we lament the revolution never comes from the 1 percent, and never from the truly desperate. It comes from the 2 percent. People with enough education to build a theory and enough resentment of the rung above them to want the whole building pulled down. The 1 percent vs 2 percent probably does not illustrate it properly, since it invokes economics as the differentiator. Think of it like stations, and the point is that both of these stations, the one being antagonized and the one doing the antagonizing, are privileged.
People call the motive compassion. I don’t buy it. What moves it is guilt and envy wearing compassion’s coat. Guilt at holding more than you can explain to yourself. And envy of the few who hold more than you do. Both arrive as the same demand. Level it. From the inside it feels like empathy. From the outside it looks like a person settling a score with the rung above her, using the people far below her as the excuse.
Illiberal.
If this were only about one primary in Denver, it would not be worth your evening. It is older than that, and a philosopher wrote a great book on it. Neven Sesardić grew up learning to survive Yugoslav communism, then spent his career on one ugly question: why do the smartest people alive keep falling for the worst politics on earth? His book reads like a gallery of geniuses.
Otto Neurath was a founder of logical positivism, one of the roots of modern analytic philosophy. He also ran Stalin’s propaganda-statistics office, drawing cheerful little charts of Soviet farm output in the same years that regime starved several million Ukrainians to death. Hilary Putnam was one of the great philosophers of the century. He spent four years in a Maoist party at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, selling the Little Red Book on a street corner in Cambridge. Gerald Cohen held the chair of political theory at Oxford and grieved when the Soviet Union fell. The same Cohen who said, out loud, that he would rather enjoy his socialism “in the warmth of All Souls College, Oxford, than in the wet of the Catskills.”
His illiberalism and ideas are for you, not for him, after all.
Not one of them ever moved to the paradise he prescribed. They cheered it from a safe distance and mailed the bill to strangers down the ladder. And their brilliance did not save them from any of it. It armed them. A clever person does not reason toward a conclusion she doesn’t want. She reasons her way around it. The same horsepower that makes someone dazzling in a seminar builds the flawless case for whatever her comfort already needed to be true.
So what does a man drawing charts for Stalin have in common with a democratic socialist winning a primary in 2026? One sentence.
We know better.
That is the premise under all of it. Under the central plan, the speech code, the confiscation, the committee that decides which shops may open and which papers may print. The belief that a smart enough, decent enough group of people knows better than the scattered verdict of millions of strangers, and should be handed the power to overrule them. It is a seductive idea, and it fails nearly every single time. Most planners mean well. The trouble is simpler and worse: no one, however brilliant, can hold what a free society knows. That knowledge is smeared across millions of separate heads, and it never sits still. The planner’s spreadsheet always believes it sees more than the market does. It never does. Each small choice is the flap of a butterfly’s wings, sending ripples no committee can trace.
None of this is an argument against a government that taxes, spends, defends, and protects the rule of law. What turns a system lethal is narrower, and worse: the removal of the correction function. The day you can no longer say the plan is failing. No longer vote the planners out. No longer print the objection. A country stays free for exactly as long as it keeps the machinery that lets it find out it was wrong. Break that machinery and you have built a democracy you can vote your way into and never vote your way back out of.
Which is the tell. Watch what a movement wants to do to the people who disagree with it. Every real enemy of an open society works out, sooner or later, that its ideas cannot win a fair fight, so it moves to end the fight. Deplatform. Denounce. Raise the price of the wrong opinion until people learn to keep quiet. Someone sure she is right will take the argument all day. Someone who needs you silenced has already told you something about her idea.
Go back to Kiros, because she shows you in conversation. Which words come out, and which stay in, decided by who is standing in front of her.
She can say “antisemitism.” She said it about the antisemitic tropes of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. She has said the thing never stops at antisemitism, that it curdles into fascism. She is fluent in the word. She just would not spend it on a man who set fire to Jews marching for hostages.
Identitarian.
The same reflex runs the way she talks about the police. In public, her campaign says she has never called to defund them. In a friendlier room, she will tell you that policing “does not actually do any work to prevent crime,” that it “exacerbates it more often than not,” and that spending the money on the community “instead of just policing” is “wildly successful.” The position never moves. Only the word moves, and which word depends on who is listening.
And before you file this under “the left” and feel a negative or positive emotion, don’t. The right runs the same reflex, pointed the other way, at a bigger stage. A mob beat police officers with flagpoles and ransacked the Capitol. Trump called them hostages and patriots, and pardoned nearly every one of them. Same move, and the graver one. She looked away from a firebombing. He looked away from an assault on the machine that runs the country. Both lead down similar paths, though.
The body count is still lopsided. The right’s violence has killed far more, and it isn’t close. But left-wing violence is climbing. By one bipartisan count, 2025 was the first year in three decades that left-wing attacks outnumbered right-wing ones. And when the violence comes from your own side, watch who cheers. A health-insurance executive was gunned down on a Manhattan sidewalk. A crowd formed online to cheer the shooter and sell his face on a shirt. Each side sees the other’s violence in high definition and goes half-blind to its own. The cheap shot is deciding your side is the exception.
I don’t love where this leaves me, because it asks for a patience I don’t have. Few humans do. You do not beat a bad idea by banning it. You beat it in the open, again and again, for as long as it takes. Which means defending the right of people to say things that turn your stomach, people who would never lift a finger to defend yours, while they are out there winning primaries. I have seen the other version up close.
I have walked through the museums they make out of the killing. Phnom Penh, where they photographed every prisoner before they killed them. The old communist East, where the file on you was thicker than anything you ever wrote. Ordinary rooms. Ordinary paperwork.
We talk about the thing that protects us from that as if it lived in the water. Some civic immune system a country just has. It isn’t in the water. It is taught, one generation at a time, or it rots. Nobody is born knowing why an open society is worth more than the certainty of a clever person with a plan. You have to be shown. And we have mostly stopped showing anyone.
There is one question the plan has never been able to answer. Where has it been tried, and what happened to the people who had to live inside the result?
Today’s answer is often Scandinavia, which is the wrong answer. Those countries are open, and their markets are free-enterprise capitalist. Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the United States.
Every other answer is a room like the ones I walked through. That is the whole of the defense, and it holds only for as long as enough of us still know the history well enough to ask. Make the idea stand in daylight and account for itself. It almost never can.
Kiros won her primary by refusing to name a thing everyone could see. That is not the part that keeps me up at night. This is: how many of the smartest, kindest, most credentialed people I know looked at that refusal, and heard empathy.
Sources and Inspiration
The argument’s spine is Neven Sesardić’s study of brilliant people and terrible politics. The Neurath, Putnam, and Cohen cases — and the Cohen quotation — are drawn from it:
When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics — Neven Sesardić
Melat Kiros is quoted from her own words and primary reporting:
Her win, biography, and platform: Melat Kiros — Wikipedia (with its cited Colorado Sun and NPR reporting), and The Colorado Sun.
Her answer on the Boulder attack: 9News.
Her remarks on antisemitism and on policing: Progress Report interview and Firing Line with Margaret Hoover (PBS).
The comparison of left- and right-wing political violence draws on analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Byman and McCabe).