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Last week's rulings on guns and abortion make us a more backward nation. That will cost us economically.

You can’t really separate social issues from economic issues. At some point a country will become so backward that it will struggle to compete with other leading industrial democracies. We’re approaching that threshold in the United States after the Supreme Court’s decisions last week on concealed gun permits and, especially, abortion. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece.

Also, on Friday I posted a New Republic piece on the battle-of-the-billionaires governor’s race in Illinois. I’d intended to write a longer piece for the print issue, but one of the billionaires threw a monkey wrench into that plan last week by deciding to move to Florida. This suggested to me that internal polls show his hand-picked Republican candidate, on whom he spent $50 million, is going to lose in tomorrow’s primary. So I wrote a web piece instead. It’s a pretty wild story. You can read it here.

PS One thing my Illinois piece will show you is that the New York Times seriously sugarcoated its portrayal of GOP primary candidate Richard Irvin to make its take a cleaner morality tale about bad MAGA candidate Darren Bailey versus good moderate candidate Richard Irvin. As coverage in the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere has shown, Irvin is hip-deep in municipal scandals. I’m sort of appalled that the Times couldn’t accommodate the complex reality that the leading GOP primary candidates are both problematic, albeit for different reasons.