On the menu today: This will be the last Morning Jolt until Monday, July 6. I hope you have a spectacular Independence Day. Today, before we head into the holiday weekend, some thoughts on how you, as an independent individual, are a plenty powerful force when it comes to building a better life for yourself.

Another Way to Look at Independence

Mark Manson writes books that are a combination of self-help, philosophy, and a bit of history, and he tends to use the F-word in his book titles. Flying back from California, I ran across a passage in his 2019 book, Everything Is F***ed. Manson writes about a college-era run-in with the Lyndon LaRouche crowd:

They were an ideological religion: an antigovernment, anticapitalist, anti-old people, antiestablishment religion. They argued that the international world order, from top to bottom, was corrupt. They argued that the Iraq War had been instigated for no other reason than Bush’s friends wanted more money. They argued that terrorism and mass shootings didn’t exist, that such events were simply highly coordinated governmental efforts to control the population. Don’t worry, right-wing friends, years later they would draw the same Hitler mustaches and make the same claims about Obama — if that makes you feel any better. (It shouldn’t.)

What the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) does is pure genius. It finds disaffected and agitated college students (usually young men), kids who are both scared and angry (scared at the sudden responsibility they’ve been forced to take on, and angry at how uncompromising and disappointing it is to be an adult) and then preach one simple message to them: “It’s not your fault.”

Yes, young one, you thought it was Mom and Dad’s fault, but it’s not their fault. Nope. And I know you thought it was your s****y professors and overpriced college’s fault. Nope. Not theirs, either. You probably even thought it was the government’s fault. Close, but still no.

See, it’s the system’s fault, that grand, vague entity you’ve always heard about.

This was the faith that the LYM was selling: if we could just overthrow the system, then everything would be okay. No more war. No more suffering. No more injustice.

Does the description of a movement telling people that nothing that has gone wrong in their lives is their fault, and that everything is the fault of “the system,” sound familiar in today’s political landscape?

Do you happen to look around the news and see any groups of young people yearning for a vision of a better future, a sense of control over their lives, and a sense of community? And do you see them falling hard for the latest flim-flam snake oil salesmen coming down the street?

Darializa Avila Chevalier, the 32-year-old Democratic Socialist candidate who is near-guaranteed to be the next representative from New York’s 13th congressional district, which covers upper Manhattan and the west Bronx, told MS NOW this week that “she wanted to use her power in Congress to transform the United States into ‘a society where we don’t have murders.’”

Boy, we all would like to have that, wouldn’t we? The good news is that the murder rate has trended down in recent years; we were at nearly 22,000 homicides in the United States in 2020 and 2022. The bad news is that we’re still at about 14,000 in 2025.

We will probably never have “a society where we don’t have murders.” (It may not feel like it, but there is compelling evidence that we are in fact living in the least-violent time in human history.) We can try to bring that murder rate down further — more widely available mental health services might help here and there — but there has never been a society without murders, and it is highly unlikely that the key element we’ve been missing on the path to that nirvana was the magic of having Darializa Avila Chevalier in Congress.

Much like Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, who described himself as a communist in 2021, Chevalier also denies she is a communist. That was a youthful dalliance with the world’s most murderous ideology way back in . . . er, 2020.

Those of us who have cracked a history book or two can argue that after Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Kim Il-Sung, and others, being an openly declared communist is indistinguishable from being openly very, very, very pro-murder. Being a communist and saying you opposed all the mass murder committed in its name is not all that different than being a Nazi and saying you opposed all the genocide.

(I wanted to joke, “enough about Platner,” but Platner looks around the globe, and in a world with Uyghurs being forcibly sterilized in Chinese concentration camps, ethnic mass killings of the Zaghawa and Fur communities in Sudan, and the systematic destruction of the food system of the Rohingya in Myanmar, Platner only sees one genocide worth denouncing: Israel’s response to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. He also contends that what Turkey did to Armenia in the 1920s doesn’t count as a genocide. I was about to write, “You know who else denied the Armenian genocide?” but . . . Adolf Hitler did refer to “the annihilation of the Armenians.”)

Let’s point out that the right side of the aisle is not exactly immune to this yearning for a great leader, an outsider who will overthrow the system and make everything okay.

I mean, could you imagine if some guy who had never had any role in government before just showed up and pledged he would immediately repeal and replace Obamacare with “something terrific” on “day one,” eliminate the national debt in eight years, and get Mexico to pay for “a great, great wall on our southern border”? And if this guy started boasting, “I alone can fix it,” or “we’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning”?

Or imagine if eight years later, after not keeping some of those grandiose promises in his first term, he came back and promised, “They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done — I’ll have that done in 24 hours” or “starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again”? (Cue the inevitable, “Well, what he really meant was . . .” in the comments.) Or a promise to build ten new “freedom cities” on federal land? To shrink federal spending each year? Promising gasoline prices of less than $2 per gallon?

I mean, could you imagine a political party that would fall for another list of wildly unrealistic promises from the same guy a second time?

There are a whole bunch of MAGA fans watching the increasingly openly communist Democratic Socialists of America with their blind faith in politicians’ ability to deliver utopia and immanentize the eschaton and scoffing, “Thank God we’re not like those guys!”

Can different policies generate different outcomes? Sure. Should we try to enact those better policies? Of course.

Occasionally, an elected leader puts in the time, energy, effort, and political capital to keep one of those big, bold promises. Our southern border is pretty much secure. In December 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered more than 252,000 people attempting to sneak across the U.S.-Mexican border. In May this year, CBP encountered fewer than 14,000.

But if you sit around, waiting for the government to improve your life, you will be old and gray before you see much of an improvement, and you’re likely to turn out bitterly disappointed. In fact, counting on those promises from politicians can often screw up your life. A survey in July 2023 found that about one in three Americans with student debt spent more money than they otherwise would have because they believed they qualified for President Biden’s debt relief plan. More than half of this group “laid out between $1,000 and $5,000 more than they would have otherwise” because they believed their student debt would be wiped clean. (In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled, 6–3, that the Biden administration had exceeded its authority when it announced that it would cancel up to $400 billion in student loans.)

In his inaugural address, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” This week, city residents learned what the warmth of collectivism really meant: An instruction to set their thermostat to 78 degrees when the temperature outside was 94 degrees. (Gee, it sure would be nice to have the carbon-free, almost 1,040 megawatts from the Indian Point nuclear power point right about now, huh? Thanks, environmentalists!)

Maybe one of the blessings of age is that you start seeing enough big-talking political candidates come and go, each one wildly underestimating the difficulty of enacting their promises, and your naïveté withers away. Your life isn’t going to get much better because you elected the guy you want or they passed the bill you wanted. Most years, your life changes on the margins. Your taxes get a little lower or a little higher. Your kid’s local schools seem a little better than a few years ago, or a little worse. The process at the Department of Motor Vehicles runs a little smoother than the last time you were there, or a little worse. That new highway interchange might make your commute a little easier when it’s finished.

But by and large, your life is going to get better because you took action to improve it. You studied hard and worked hard. You took the chance of applying for that other job or moving to that new city for an opportunity. You asked someone out. You asked her to marry you. You decided you were ready to have kids. You didn’t wait for someone else to come along and save you.

We’re on the cusp of Independence Day, our nation’s 250th birthday. And while celebrating our proud history of sovereignty, you can also take a moment to celebrate that you’re not dependent upon any president, governor, legislator, mayor, or other blathering nincompoop to improve the quality of your life.

ADDENDUM: Team USA is in the round of 16 in the World Cup Tournament. And they got there playing a man down for much of the game, on a 2-0 shutout against a none-too-shabby Bosnia-Herzegovina team. Look out, Belgium. We’re coming for you.