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It's Thursday, August 6, 2026. I'm Albert Moeller, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Well, in one sense, it's predictable. What I mean here is the political disruption in the Democratic Party. Why is this predictable? It's predictable because when you have a considerable period of time in which one of the two major political parties has been out of power, out of office, and most importantly, out of the White House, what happens traditionally is a reconsideration of the party's identity and often a redirection of the messaging, of the understanding of the political party and its purposes, its principles. But what we're looking at right now on the Democratic Party side is nothing less than astounding. Because what we see is that we have gone, in the course of just two or three years and in the most concentrated sense in the last two or three months, into a situation in which the Democratic Party is now looking at a future in which it may be absolutely torn apart by democratic socialism. By socialism. Now, it is really interesting, back in 2025, you go back just to last year, the DSA was gaining new visibility. That's the Democratic Socialists of America. And as a matter of fact, as we said, that's an organization that came to be in 1982 as a merger of the. Of the hard left, the older hard left, and then what was called the New Left, more youngish intellectuals. The big deal was that democratic socialism was to be separated from, say, communism by the fact that democratic socialism was to be produced by the democratic process, which means through elections. Which takes us to Tuesday night in Michigan. Because what happened in Michigan is a game changer in our understanding of the dsa, of the future of the Democratic Party and for Christians, a clash of worldviews between modern understandings of liberty and freedom, historic understandings of human dignity and of how government should be organized, and the dignity, for instance, of something as basic as private property. What we're looking at is a collision between that and an ideology that certainly in its most concentrated form emerged in the 19th century, blasted into international headlines in the 20th century, was represented by the Bolshevik revolution that came to power in what was known as the USSR and basically has animated a good deal of the left wing politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The DSA, as I said, was established in 1982. And one of the big questions of the DSA is how it would move forward in terms of elections, because you don't have any political leverage or political power in the United states unless you win elections. And the fact is that the DSA is at a very significant disadvantage, first of all, because it isn't one of the two major political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats. And the fact is that no third party candidate has, has been elected to major office in most states in terms of statewide election. And certainly when you're looking at the White House, et cetera, since the emergence of the modern two party system. And as you're looking at all this, you also recognize a couple of other things are going on here. For one thing, you had the Democratic Socialists of America decide they would run as Democratic Socialists of America. And as I say, that just didn't get them very far in terms of elections. So the big question came. Do we try to take over one of the two major political parties? Because that would be the other option. And of course, that was the option they took. And of course, if you're going to talk about the two political parties, the Democratic Party is the one that the Democratic Socialists of America would go after. One of the open issues right now is how long the DSA will use the Democratic Party as something of a vehicle, of a train they are riding, a plane they are hijacking, and they're simply going to use it until they are able to stand on their own as the Democratic Socialists of America. Or it could be, as some acknowledge, they just go on running as Democrats, but basically turn the Democratic Party into the Democratic Socialists of America party. Okay, so as we're looking at this over the course of the last several months, and you could even go back, let's go back to 2025, let's just look at this period. You had the election of people like Zahran Mamdani openly. DSA identified RA running as a Democratic candidate, winning the mayor's office in New York City. And by the way, in an undiluted socialist form. He was very open about his socialist commitments. He's been continuing to push those socialist commitments. He also has pushed fellow socialist candidates. And that came down to five important elections in the New York primary and in local elections, in which case you had Zoram Mandani's hand chosen. DSA affiliated candidates beat established incumbent Democrats. Now that breaks the rules in the Democratic Party, first of all, in other words, this is a new set of rules. Previously you didn't run against incumbents in this kind of situation. But the DSA isn't ready to wait. It's ready to push forward. Okay, so then the big issue was, well, New York City's New York City. But you also had to note that similar kinds of candidates are being elected on both coasts. But it wasn't just on both coasts. It was also in some other places where you had very liberal cities, for example, where some DSA affiliated candidates were able to come to some electoral promise. But the big issue was the senatorial nomination of the Democratic Party in the state of Michigan Tuesday. And the two candidates lined up exactly as you would understand the conflict in the Democratic Party. In the Democratic mainstream was Haley Stevens several terms in Congress, very much a stereotypical Democratic candidate from the Midwest. She was Michigan Democrat, basically as a poster girl. But she lost the nomination race. She lost it more narrowly than many had expected with 98.8% of the vote in from Tuesday. The challenger, who was very much the man of the left, not identified with the DSA, but supported by the DSA and identified with the positions of the DSA, and that would be, of course, Dr. Abdul Al said with almost 100% of the vote in, he won with 48.5%. Haley Stevens had 47.5%. Now, there's some interesting breakdowns within that, and that has to do with the fact that conventional Democrats largely voted for Haley Stevens, as did the largest number and percentage of African American voters in the Democratic primary. But there is no doubt that something's now happening. You can't say this is now something that just happens on the two coasts. Now you're going to have to look at this and say, well, it has happened in the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate in Michigan. And by the way, looking at El Said, we are talking about someone who would also be the first Muslim elected to the United States Senate. You're looking at the fact that he has no basic political background, but he is ideologically very well identified. He also is identified by those with whom he is associated. One of them, Hasan Piker, is a Marxist digital streamer who is well identified for making anti Semitic statements and who also said, this is just absolutely urgent for you to hear. He also said that the United States of America deserved the attacks on 9 11. And thus you're talking about someone who makes his political ideological extremism very clear. El Said actually identified with him and refused to separate himself from the comments made by Piker. So we're looking at a situation in which this is a new age in American politics. It's a new age in American politics and it is very much now a struggle for the Democratic Party headline, as I mentioned before in the Wall Street Journal, Band of Socialists, those Panic in the Democratic Party. You also have the Atlantic's Jonathan Chait, very interesting observer of these things, coming out with an article. Liberals are not fighting a two front war. Okay, so let's just break this down in terms of Christian worldview considerations. Number one, we're talking about socialism. And when we're talking about socialism, we need to remember that at the heart of socialism is the end of private property. It is social or basically common ownership of all things. And it also means you have the society. And here we mean government, the state in control of the economy and the means of production. Okay, so that's just classical socialist thought. And of course, it is also synonymous. And President Trump's being hounded by the media for continuing to call these people communists. In the technical sense, they're not communists. But in the economic sense, they are trending towards many ideas in socialism that frankly are hard to distinguish from communism in worldview considerations. We also need to understand that even though there have been Christians who've been identified with socialism at heart, socialism is very difficult to reconcile with biblical Christianity. I mentioned private ownership, the ownership of private property. That is something that is not only honored in Scripture, it's really revealed in Scripture as something essential even to justice. And it has to do with the fact that the Christian worldview, the biblical worldview, has to do with the affirmation that you should have the worker paid his wages. Those wages should be in the control of the worker. Fair work. Planting a field, owning a field and cultivating it. This is actually part of the dominion mandate revealed very clearly in Genesis. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and take dominion over these things. Now, if you just separate that from an individual basis and deny private property and you turn it into some kind of communal reality. Well, here's the reality. You look across socialist experiments. They don't work, and they don't work for various reasons. And people in the United States, if you're looking at this, they could say, well, it's unfair now to bring up the U.S.S.R. okay, so let's bring up Cuba. And I can just tell you, growing up in Florida, it was really, really clear what the alternatives were. Go to Cuba and you'll see what socialism produces. But as you look at this, there's another worldview angle. There are several angles in this. One has to do with the fact that when you are looking at the situation in Michigan and now, this is very much throwing the future of the Democratic Party into question. It just reminds us that every election is a clash of worldviews it is a clash of truth claims, it is a clash of arguments. And I think there are many Christians in the United States and in other nations too, with a democratic form of government, then the ability to vote. They have often just considered, well, this candidate's not that much different than another candidate. Well, you know what? In the state of Michigan, voters who are going to vote in November to elect a United States Senator, they're going to be choosing between absolute political opposites. That has not always been the case. Increasingly, I think given the fact that as these worldview issues advance in the society, the head on collision on these issues is going to become more routine again. It's going to happen in places where you didn't expect it. It was expected on the west coast and say in Manhattan wasn't expected in Michigan. Now, not only has it happened, voters in Michigan are going to have to decide between a basically progressivist candidate who's well identified with socialism, versus Republican Mike Rogers, former member of Congress, who came very close two years ago to winning a Senate seat there in Michigan. We're going to have a really interesting race in Michigan. There are going to be many others across the country in November. But the Democrats have to be incredibly concerned about this development in Michigan. And I mentioned Jonathan Shade at the Atlantic, he's been watching these things for a long time. He points out that the Democrats and actually he says here, liberals, liberals are now fighting a two front war. What does he mean by that? Well, he means that in the Democratic Party we're using the word liberal here in a way that's pretty consistent with the identity of the Democratic Party. It has been basically positioned over against conservatism. But now it's going to have to be directed not only against a conservative argument, it's going to have to be directed against variant Democratic arguments. And there are basically two, and that's the two front war he's talking about here. One of them has to do with socialism and the other has to do with what is called neoliberalism. And neoliberalism is the mixture of economic traditions that was put together by figures in the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, most famous in terms of this fusionism in the United States, former President Bill Clinton. Here's the thing, when you look at the Democratic Party that is moving these directions right now. The Democratic Party with Dr. El Said as a nominee for the United States Senate in Michigan, this is a party that is not only light years from the Republican Party, it is light years from the Democratic Party that nominated Bill Clinton back in 1992. But before we leave this issue for today, it's also important to recognize that in Michigan, it wasn't just a senatorial nomination. It was also a Democratic race for one of the congressional seats there in Michigan. And in this case, you had the leftist win again. The current representative, Democrat, Sri Thanader. He was replaced by Donovan McKinney, a state representative. Once again, this is inside the Democratic Party. This is a race for the Democratic nomination for this congressional seat. And another man clearly identified with the far left, supported by the Democratic socialists, he won and ousted the incumbent. So again, we're talking about Michigan heartland America. We're talking about the future of the Democratic Party. We're talking about the worldview collision that is now arriving not only in Manhattan, not only on the west coast, but in America's heartland. That tells us a great deal. All right, as we shift a bit, I want us to look at Mayor Mamdaami and New York City and understand at least a part of what's going on there. He made two proposals we're going to focus on today when he was running for the mayor's office. One of them was city owned grocery stores and the other was comprehensive government run childcare, basically going all the way up until just after birth. All right, well, it turns out that there are problems with both. Here's a surprise for you. But when it comes to the city owned and city run grocery stores, his argument was we basically will have socialized groceries in New York City. Now it turns out that that was easier to promise than to pull off. It also turns out that the Democratic party includes many people who are involved in the grocery business and especially New York. You have the bodegas, you have neighborhood grocery stores. We're talking about direct competition here. One of these stores is now planned for opening over the course of the next year or so. And Mayor Mamdame is bragging about it already saying that staples that are defined as necessities of life are gonna be discounted about 30% in this store. Okay, so here's the big thing. How would he pull that off? In other words, the groceries are gonna cost what they're gonna cost at the wholesale level. The question is, how can city run grocery stores in New York City? How can they discount staples? That's just the fundamental foodstuffs. How can they discount them 30%? Well, somebody's got to pay for them. Okay, so how does that work? Well, number one, these city owned grocery stores are not going to be paying rent. Everybody else in New York has to pay rent. Okay? So that means money foregone. That is also a cost to the taxpayers of New York. Mayor Mom Donny is not going to want to talk about that. And by the way, the only way to resolve that is by socialism when it comes to real estate as well. It also has to do with the fact that you're going to have subsidies that are going to be worked into this economic system. By the way, when you're talking about a retail business, let's just take retail grocery stores. The margin between the cost of the product and the price of the product is notoriously slim. The only way to make money in the grocery business is to sell a lot of groceries and everything else you can sell in your store and to do so in a way that you sell enough that you can come up with a viable business plan. The other thing is, here's a little secret. In terms of the grocery business, non grocery items have a much bigger markup, which is one of the reasons why grocery stores sell more than groceries. They have to basically to put together a viable business plan. But when it comes to staples, when it comes to milk and eggs and butter and things like that, you are talking about notoriously thin profit lines simply because you are looking at pretty hefty prices coming into the store. And you're looking at prices that have to be paid by customers going out of the store. The margins are very thin. All right. In other words, socialism is going to produce grocery stores that are going to charge less, but somebody is going to have to pay the money in order for them to charge less. And that's going to be the taxpayers of New York. It's an amazing thing. Mayor Mom Dame is going to offer cheaper groceries, but you're going to have to pay them one way or another, because that's the only way it works. The city is going to have to meet those bills somehow. And so you can see how that works when it comes to childcare. Even the New York Times is saying, you know, the math's not adding up. The mayor called for free childcare. And Tuesday of this week, the New York Times ran a headline, Free childcare may cost the city billions more. More. The mayor said that it would cost something like $6 billion a year more. Now that's billion with a B. The New York Times are coming back saying that math doesn't add up. It's going to be at least $9 billion a year more. It is a reminder of the fact that what socialism often promises, it can almost never deliver. And so yes, it is true that with the cooperation of the General assembly there in the state of New York, New York could pull this off, but they're going to have to do so by raising taxes unbelievably. Because even in a city like New York, you talk about adding $9 billion a year. It is a reminder that nothing is free. Nothing is free. And if you don't get a bill for it, say in terms of child care, then you're going to get a bill for it in terms of taxes. There's just no other way. Now, by the way, the liberal way, the progressivist way to try to deal with this, and it's kind of written into socialism, is do your best for some other taxpayer base to have to pay for this. It's one of the reasons why we have some very interesting developments in the state of California. Also in New York, in the state of California, you had a union for health care workers come out with a proposal that there be a 5% one time tax on the wealth of people who are billionaires. Now there are some massive issues such as who's a billionaire and how in the world do you determine who is a billionaire? Because you're looking at all kinds of financial formulas that are going to have to be developed. And the vast majority of the people who are hopefully by the people who are trying to push this tax, what they want is to tax people on their wealth rather than on their income. Now, by the way, that's nothing the US government can do according to the 16th Amendment without direct proportional income to the states. In other words, basically the federal government can't do this. The states, however, can try to do it. But we need to make a distinction. And I think a lot of listeners to the briefing probably don't think in these terms because you don't have to. And so we're talking about two different financial ways of conceiving taxation. One of them is on income. And so that's why we talk about the federal tax as an income tax. The most important tax that you're taxed on income, you're not taxed on unrealized gains in your wealth. Let's make this up. You have 100 shares of company excellence. And that company excellence, it has appreciation. In other words, the shares gain in value. You don't pay an income tax. When your investments gain in value, you don't pay until you cash out that investment, then it's a capital gain, then it's income. But what you have in the city of New York in the proposal from Mayor Mamdani and in the state of California, with the proposal coming from this union now backed as of days ago by the Democratic Party in California, what you have is an attempt to tax unrealized gains. And you could say, well, I think billionaires ought to pay taxes. Well, how do you come up with the estimate of who is and who is not a billionaire? Let's say you have someone who owns vast holdings in terms of stocks and bonds and investments in these companies. Now they're going to be taxed 5% is the proposal. In California, they're going to be taxed one time, we're told, in which case they're going to have to pay 5% of what to a great extent they haven't even realized yet. In other words, that is an investment. The American economy is built upon the presumption that it is to the nation's economic advantage to have people investing in corporations, in businesses, in the markets, et cetera, and that it is to the nation's advantage that that wealth be deployed in such ways that it leads to an increase in wealth and all the rest. What you have in this leftist proposal is the idea, no, if you make the value and you don't even realize the gain, we're going to tax you for it anyway. If it happens in California, if it happens in New York, don't believe for a minute it will stay just in California and New York. Okay, As I said. Now, another one of the problems with this is how you're going to decide who is and is not a billionaire when it comes to unrealized gains. In other words, no one has sold the stock, no one sold the equity. But this man owns 5,000 shares of Whatever. How are you going to evaluate that? Because it's actually not stable wealth. It's wealth that could be up if the stock market goes up. If that stock goes up tomorrow, it could be down. So you have to have an arbitrary date in which you just place it. Okay, here's the other thing. Don't believe this will stay just with billionaires. And just remember this. Almost everyone listening to me right now, either in terms of his or her own retirement plan or the one that you're connected to by a relative. The reality is all of those are built upon the same kind of investments. And you do not face taxation on unrealized gains. You face taxation only when those gains are cashed out. And so you say, well, I'm not a billionaire. I'm not even close to being a billionaire, so this won't affect me. If you believe that, then just look at how the income tax has progressed. More and more people paying more and more taxes. Because you can say we just want to tax billionaires, but there aren't enough billionaires even in California to pay those bills. Eventually they're going to have to come for unrealized gains that you own and you don't even think about owning and you certainly can't pay taxes on until those unrealized gains are. Well, there's the good word realized. Now let me go back to the idea of this city subsidized or city provided childcare in New York City as proposed by Mayor Mamdani. One of the things that no one really wants to talk about out loud is the fact that much of this has emerged from the breakdown of the family, from the breakdown of the economy in terms of paying a family wage. We are looking at the redefinition of American society in which you have costs. In other words, the cost of taking care of children. One of the most interesting news reports here said that if you're talking about older children, you could have, say, one to six. But if you're talking about the youngest babies, you're going to need, say one person just with a couple of babies, maybe four babies, to take care of them. In other words, the economic costs are absolutely massive. I just want to remind you of a biblical, a deeply Christian insight which is you can't replace what is creation, order and natural. It's going to come with a massive discount in terms of both quality and cost. And you can't replace the family, you can't replace marriage, you can't replace parents. I am not saying that government now doesn't have a challenge in knowing how to deal with these things. I am saying that as a society, we've lost the script. At the very least, Christians had better not lose it. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmuller.com you can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.