CAN IT AFFORD ITS PEOPLE?

AMERICA CAN AFFORD A BALLROOM, A WAR, AND AI. CAN IT AFFORD ITS PEOPLE?

The strongest political question raised by this week's news is not whether America is powerful. It is what American power is being used to do.

In Philadelphia, one of the most striking public-safety stories comes from vacant lots. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society says neighborhoods near lots restored through Philadelphia LandCare experienced a 29% reduction in gun violence. That does not prove greenery alone "solves crime," but it punctures the lazy assumption that safety must always arrive wearing a badge, carrying a weapon, or expanding somebody's arrest authority.

That matters because President Trump spent August 14 on Long Island promoting falling crime as vindication of his law-and-order agenda. The crime decline is real: Reuters reports FBI data showing violent crime fell 9.3% in 2025 and murder fell 18.1%. But the national decline began before Trump returned to office, and experts caution that no single federal policy explains it.

The contrast is revealing. Government can build safety through coercion, or it can build the conditions in which violence becomes less likely.

Now look at Iran. Trump told Americans that paying more for gasoline was an acceptable price for preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and said he would "never apologize." Gasoline was roughly 29% more expensive than a year earlier, while traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained a fraction of prewar levels. This is no longer merely foreign policy. It is a direct transfer of geopolitical risk into household budgets.

At the same time, the human machinery carrying out that policy is showing strain. The USS Abraham Lincoln has spent more than 240 consecutive days at sea. Families and lawmakers have raised concerns about supplies and mental health. Asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump answered: "Not nearly long enough." The Navy disputes claims of a broad suicide crisis, but the ship is nevertheless being relieved by the USS George Washington.

Then there is the White House itself. The administration asked the Supreme Court to let construction continue on a $400 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom after an appeals court said Congress had not authorized the project. The administration calls the work important to national security. The court's answer was essentially that invoking national security does not erase statutory limits.

This is why the August 14 stories belong together.

Black women are experiencing disproportionate labor-market pain. The Institute for Women's Policy Research found that Black women lost more than 251,000 jobs between January and August 2025 and continued to face unusually weak prospects across occupations. Meanwhile, communities are fighting enormous AI data centers because electricity, water, land, and infrastructure costs are increasingly becoming local political issues. In Virginia, data-center demand has helped drive Dominion's fuel costs sharply higher, with residential bills under pressure.

America therefore faces a choice larger than any one election.

That choice also has a racial history. Public investment in the United States has never been distributed evenly, and neither have policing, environmental burdens, employment security, or political voice. A formally race-neutral policy can therefore land on communities carrying profoundly unequal starting conditions.

Will public power be organized primarily around command—war, policing, extraction, executive prestige, and concentrated technological power—or around capacity: affordable electricity, decent jobs, healthy neighborhoods, resilient infrastructure, accountable institutions, and human beings who can actually endure the policies carried out in their name?

A government can possess aircraft carriers, data centers, police academies, and a magnificent ballroom and still fail the test of public power.

The test is whether ordinary people become more secure.

That is where democracy lives or dies.