One nomination, one candidate

It’s true: Democrats didn't have a proper primary battle in the midst of the chaos of 2024. But it is also true that there are plenty of elections where the nominee didn't have to compete, became the winner by collective decree, and no one seemed to care.

Roy Cooper in my home state of North Carolina is one example.

Wiley Nickel, the one Democrat positioned to contest the nomination for NC's Senate seat left by Republican Thom Tillis, dropped immediately after Cooper announced. With no one else daring to 'Duke' it out, Cooper became the definitive nominee essentially the moment he filed (and more precisely, well before he filed). Compare that to what Graham Platner in Maine, James Talarico in Texas, and Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens in Michigan have had to do: define themselves in public, under intense scrutiny from their own party members, because the competition forced them to explicate on a number of highly-controversial topics.

Because they had a public intra-party purity battle, I know El-Sayed campaigned with Hasan Piker. I know Platner was accused of a bunch of horrendous sexual misconduct and has a Totenkopf-style tattoo on his chest. Talarico used to say God was nonbinary.

El-Sayed seems to have hit his peak. Platner suspended his campaign. Talarico had to walk it back.

But what can you say about Roy Cooper—good or bad?

It is a privilege to skip that unnecessary screening entirely. Clearing the field is quite easier for a strong candidate, but it ought to be more of a common strategy in Democratic politics, particularly in a more competitive district and state. Democrats treat clearing the field as an act of deference to a favorite—the elites pulling one over on the people—rather than a tool to gain an advantage against the opposing party. Rid yourself of the primary process, or find a candidate who will force competitors out early in the race, and you can dedicate your entire campaign to beating the actual opponent rather than posturing your purity to win over people likely to support you anyway.

Because of his solo-run, Cooper has enjoyed room to spout on about "affordability," rather than a specific position on Israel-Gaza, the skeletons lurking in his closet, or whether God's gender is indeed binary. Cooper himself clearly thinks that's a good thing because he hasn't voluntarily offered a bunch of specific propositions on various cultural issues of our day. His campaign slogan is: "Make stuff cost less".

"Make" meaning what, by force, or some kind of legislative regulation, or through laissez-faire economics?

What "stuff"--housing, cars, food, energy?

"Cost" in terms of time, money, job benefits?

Does "less" mean the price goes down, or my wages go up, or both?

Like many in the political space have figured out, and the commoners still making their way, the whole "affordability" schtick is almost entirely composed of virtuous platitudes that make working class people feel good but doesn't really possess any substantive policy framework, much less a criticizable one. And though I fully agree candidates should avoid granting any specific policy or decision before they are faced with the actual decision, it is true that the milquetoast offering of 'making stuff cost less' fits the populist, cynical mentality plaguing modern politics on the left and right.

But because Cooper isn't aiming to 'out-populist' his own teammates in a primary, he's not forced to trace his ideology or any specific policy proposal before reaching the critical stages of the election.

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Thanks but no thanks

The best example of Cooper's decision-making may just be declining to be Kamala Harris's running mate.

At the time it read as a lack of appetite. In hindsight it looks like the correct read; he had every reason to keep his distance. Cooper remained a known quality to his own voters, and a stranger to Washington's. In one of his latest campaign rallies, he makes that posture sharp by asserting he would take "some good old North Carolina common sense to Washington."

The decision to stay out of the national light when Democrats were their least favorable provided much-needed separation from the Biden-era politics, didn't coerce him into laying out a bunch of policy positions that would come back to bite him, and prevented the then-Republican lieutenant governor—and nut-job—Mark Robinson (Trump called him MLK 2.0) from linking arms with the Republican super-majority legislature and taking full control of the already-heavily-gerrymandered state.

It also stopped Cooper from becoming a fixation of the rabid retributive gang of buffoons also known as MAGA, like they did with Tim Walz almost immediately, and continuously, until the bitter end of his political career earlier this year.

Though Cooper knew he was seriously contemplating running for Senate, his prudence in this one decision impeded so many other problems from arising. And while I think the Harris-Cooper ticket would've gotten more votes, the strategy he utilized seems to be working out given he's leading all other Senate Democratic candidates.

But unlike many others vying for a Senate seat on the Democratic side, Cooper faces a state party who for the life of them cannot find a decent candidate.

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Oh, brother, this guy stinks

Republicans lost gerrymandered NC-1 congressional district to Don Davis, a black Democrat, in an arena Trump carried three times. They lost the governorship due to Mark Robinson, a candidate so toxic he moved actual Trump voters to vote for the Democrat in Josh Stein. And this last spring, Senate leader Phil Berger—the most powerful Republican in the state—lost his own primary to a local sheriff, despite a Trump endorsement ostensibly bought with the promise of another gerrymandered district (which he delivered) and more than $20 million in spending.

Michael Whatley, the man Cooper actually has to beat, fits that same mediocre pattern.

Whatley is a Michigan transplant and former RNC chair running as a pure vessel for the MAGA agenda, with nothing distinctly independent to offer. Cooper inherited the foe and can take advantage of his hallow nature. After presenting himself as a bastion of North Carolina professional sports, he was found out to be creating fake players using AI when pressed on specifics. Since then, Whatley’s campaign has clamped down on the largest state media outlets being able to attend his rallies, given their alleged bias against him (I'm personally looking to attend one soon since I have yet to be banned).

But I must be cautious not to over simplify it, as I too often see people do. Cooper is by no means running the table. North Carolina is a red state at heart that's moving blue more each day by the sheer number of individuals moving to the major metros, and polling says Cooper's success should come with an asterisk.

Cooper was up roughly seven points through late June, tracking the generic Democratic environment, and one poll had him up fourteen, but even there he was sitting at 48%, which is close to where he's been most of the race (and close to where Platner was before his campaign collapsed entirely). The most recent poll finds that Cooper continues to lead but only 48-44. Cooper appears to have a ceiling near 50%. That's enough to win—certainly. Yet a ceiling all the same.

With as much advantage in the environment as Cooper has, and as much as Democrats are relying on him to lead the pack (meaning his race is an indicator of how Democrats will perform overall), the fact Cooper seems to be just over or roughly even with the generic congressional ballot doesn't make for a super-optimistic, enthusiastic outlook.

The fighter without a fight

Democrats want a fighter; a word that’s become more or less just another meaningless emotive, thrown around by every candidate in the primary cycle. No doubt, Cooper is as much of a fighter as one can imagine: he vetoed 104 bills, nearly three times the combined total of every other North Carolina governor since the veto was created. He blocked abortion restrictions, bans on gender-affirming care, expansions of gun access, and efforts to force cooperation with ICE. He responded aggressively to COVID-19 by closing schools, issuing stay-at-home orders, and mandating masks while Republicans accused him of abusing emergency powers.

But it’s also true that Cooper’s campaign seems built to obscure. He’s a candidate with plenty to say, but who has decided the state won’t reward him for saying it—even if the national base does. That’s the right decision. He’s made a career out of fighting Republican elites in power, not charting an ideological course.

At the same time, Cooper has a long record of working across the aisle because he had to. The constituencies he needs to win a Senate race—rural, business-friendly moderates, disaffected Republicans, ticket-splitters—do not reward rigid ideological purity, particularly not one calibrated to a national platform.

So while the vagueness innate to “make stuff cost less” is providing cover for an ideological fighter dressed up as a common-sense outsider, Cooper is doing the right thing by presenting himself as a humble alternative rather than a defining leader of progressivism. ‘Don’t like the cost of living, tired of Republican rule? Vote for me—the ol’ country boy just trying to help common folks’. It’s not a message for political-heads like us, but it may just be enough to take over a seat Republicans have held for nearly two decades.

The summer of lovers

As heaps of activists plunged into U.S. cities to defend the value of black lives, I made my way to Washington, D.C. (the nearest city with any real chance of something notable ‘going down’) from just outside the old capital of the Confederacy that is coincidentally tucked in the heart of the State for Lovers.

The moments-notice trip was spurred, in part, by the roaming invisible illness that had emptied the streets for the past few months and left us with little to no responsibilities in our quarantined enclosures. I think the virus was partially to blame for why my typical concern of being at the ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ never quite kicked in; that is, until I was already in the midst of the Federal City, reading a notification informing us President Trump was being scuttled to the White House’s underground bunker by Secret Service.

As protesters and officers formed opposing lines on the lawn, teargas and rubber bullets pushed into the encroaching crowd—the first of which seeped into my swiveling eyes and the second into my right calf—as I ran backwards from the cause of the chaos.

I asked to get out of the house and into some good trouble. Ye, indeed, received.

The dashing crowds, smoke filling the air, the look of terrorizing determination in the faces of those both protesting and those defending public property. It was an illustration of our nation’s institutions under intense turmoil, and the active grunt-work required to defend the functionality of that slow and often rancorous process to achieve something better.

A proof that Washington D.C. does not produce typical moments; that, I suppose, was precisely why I found it so fascinating.

A day that will live in ignorance

I wouldn’t step foot in the area again until fall of 2023, the purpose of which was to fulfill my patriotic obligation to tour the various monuments, memorials, and museums presenting the leading expressions of our blessed birthright.

As someone who’d like to be thought of as something of an aficionado on matters of American history, particularly of the Founding Era, my disappointment almost immediately made itself known. I was troubled by how pitiful the sights were, and even more so, my own lofty expectations of them.

Once upon the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, peering down on the scores of people making their way up and down the dusty pedestal, I couldn't help but notice distinctly Indian families in traditional cultural garb, Spanish-speaking parents urging their kids to retain a sense of self-control—impossible to take a step or find a corner where your protruding rear or aghast half-smile wasn't featured in someone's background. A step outside Mr. Lincoln's chambers one could hardly read the words on the side due to the dirt in the crevasses. The Washington Monument fared no better in the distance. The Reflecting Pool (where Martin Luther King once recalled to us his lack of sleep the night before) was just more evidence my fanciful imagination had gotten the best of me.

People had traveled across oceans and continents to witness the American embodiment of characters whose ideas sprung from Enlightenment values across the pond and great minds further east, just to find the sculptural and pictorial record of their legacy left to decay in the open air for all to ponder in suspicion. And though lacking the boisterousness of the first visit, my second tour of the third and definitive United States capital was unsettling in its own quieter way (yet no less untypical for it).

The disappointment was nevertheless shafted as I eventually learned my internal quibbles regarding the national heritage sites would turn out to not be the main significance of the day.

It happened to be the morning of October 7th.

The internal distress I felt touring our institutional architecture was, at that exact moment, being more acutely felt by millions of people dealing with threats the very freedom I possessed had left me wholly ignorant of (and presumably by scores more who have since found me amongst the extras in their vacation photo albums).

Questions of aesthetic upkeep and civic symbolism in America’s capital simply cannot occupy the center of political reality as we Americans are accused, and quite guilty, of allowing. We the people are not wrong to care about the condition of iconography; but we can and do temporarily mistake the maintenance of symbols for the substantive condition of our Republic. But civic infrastructures like the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument (and yes, even the Reflecting Pool) only fail in significance when the meaning behind them is no longer maintained. The hard work of preserving the Union takes precedence, and it is that precedence that allows the concrete (and marble and bronze and granite) of history to accrue dirt rather than be abandoned, plundered, or dismantled.

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A culture of maintenance

In his 2009 Vanity Fair essay, Christopher Hitchens noticed something particular about Washington’s relationship to grandeur: that the city “is and always has been irretrievably bogged down in process, and process doesn’t generally make for electrifying prose.”

Like many of Trump’s ideas to Make America Great Again, even in the world of aesthetics and construction, I possessed a sense of pitiful sympathy for the president’s impulse. The White House, our historical monuments, our statues, the Reflecting Pool—should ideally rank among the wonders of the world. A true cynic may even think we Americans are a materialist people in a materialist nation; we deserve some pleasant materializations that reflect our true prosperity.

But one ought to notice the president’s approach to the capital renovation is imbued with a philosophy that desires definitive completion: The East Wing demolished to make way for a ballroom, the Rose Garden paved over, a 250-foot triumphal arch initiated along the Mall, and the Reflecting Pool fiasco. Trump embodies the materialist gratification innate to Americanism but with that cynical twist: the stubborn insistence that greatness is a destination rather than a condition requiring tending. The idea we renovate our way in posterity the same way you’d flip a property in Queens is a peculiarly populist confusion, and one that the president wears more literally than most.

The confusion mistakes an act of redesign for a culture of maintenance that requires consistent and critical upkeep over long stretches of time.

Trump is gesturing at a Golden Age without putting in the work, based on the assumption that politics, like real estate, can be perfected through decisive intervention (by him anyway).

But the dirt in Lincoln’s crevasses and the algae impeding my reflection are failures of sustained attention rather than momentary acknowledgements of it being overdue. What our capital sites demand is the same as with any of its citizens: the stubborn protection of a civic culture that demands solutions and cumulative work across generations. It's what those we chisel into marble spent their lives doing since 1776: tending to the conditions that make monuments and memorials worth building.

Reflecting on American progress

My first visit offered scenes that Hitchens might reluctantly say calls for “electrifying prose”; institutions under visible, immediate strain. My second confirmed his actual point: a city “irretrievably bogged down in process”, its monuments left to show what has already been achieved through that process.

Both showed a nation in the unglamorous work of keeping itself alive.

The Reflecting Pool bridges the founding of the nation and the preservation of the Union. Its significance will remain so long as its meaning does. That people cross oceans to stand before it, that we retain the freedom to be embarrassed by it, criticize it, or worry with it at all—lies its true significance. Not the drool, mud, and bird feces.

And yet, it ought not require a mob-boss executive obsessed with real estate to cause national attention to these structures. The 250 years of arduous conservation—our Constitution, our institutions, our achievements—have produced the conditions under which that worry is still possible, that improvement is still feasible, and that the work of tomorrow remains ours.

I think that freedom is itself worth tending to.

We must treat the maintenance of our nation’s symbolic edifices, like our political and cultural institutions, as a ongoing practice. The preservation of progress—grime and all—certainly makes for electrifying prose.

Biden promised to be a bridge to a new generation of Democratic leadership. But what did that mean, exactly?

The only way he could literally break that promise is if Democrats never win again. Yet almost no one would say Biden fulfilled the promise in a meaningful way.

One could argue Biden swatted away whispers of being a one-term president and rejected all useful opportunities to be one, thus failing to execute. One can argue he did step aside, is no longer the leader of the party, and that a new generation of Democrats is en route—fulfilling his pledge (even if in chaotic fashion).

What’s strange about campaign promises is that contradictory judgements of its outcome can all be rationally made with the same set of facts. Even though each of these interpretations of Biden’s version of ‘What Happened’ are defensible, the claim that he both kept and broke a promise simultaneously is not. Given each of these claims are indeed accurate iterations of American political history, it seems the problem with the assessments of promise-deliverance is they don’t add insight into whether the decision was correct.

That’s because political promises that are thrown into the political machine are most effective when they’re elastic enough to stretch over almost any outcome; ones that can be continuously reinterpreted (or more accurately, continuously excused).

What more could you ask for from a politician than a set of vague prophecies about specific decisions in moments that haven’t yet arrived?

The collective enchantment around measuring these prior commitments in politics reeks of the centuries-long apologism by evangelicals who argue the very same text can be treated as both a precise prophecy about the present (the United States in Revelation) and a document too historically bound to speak to modern specifics (tolerated slavery). Prophecies operate the same way in politics as religion: they are stretched to fit whatever outcome needs explaining without leaving oneself exposed to potential criticism for incompletion.

But as philosopher Karl Popper pointed out in his book Conjectures and Refutations, “a theory that explains everything explains nothing.”

The fact that a political candidate makes a promise neither explains their ultimate decision and its effects nor whether they honored the initial commitment. And even these are distinct inquiries requiring invariable accounts.

I think this is a merited case for not taking promises from political figures too seriously (and especially not literally). It is also why ‘promise-tracking’ so often collapses into selective interpretation rather than genuine accountability for politicians; it offers an unfalsifiable standard applied selectively against a prediction made about the innately unpredictable future.

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When reality meets assumption

What’s really driving the criticism surrounding Biden’s messy political departure isn’t a broken promise, but a set of assumptions people made about his intentions.

Those expectations were entirely composed of wishful projection—and I say that only partially disdainful, because the audaciousness of assuming one's preferred outcome is immune from the innumerable pivots of reality is its own kind of delusion. As if Biden's political standing was always going down the tubes; as if Republicans would have no choice but to offer a weak opponent.

Criticism surrounding Biden’s ‘Indecision’ is really about a belief that Biden misjudged the moment—that he stayed too long, narrowed his party’s options, and passed up a better strategic path time and time again.

But notice how one can make these arguments without ever mentioning a pre-determined commitment. That’s because true accountability resides in conditions of uncertainty and incomplete information. And in order to focus on more practically-relevant subjects, like how a politician faired in the ring with his own invisible shadow, we need to replace relativist accountability of promise fulfillment with a universally critical evaluation of political outcomes and its handlers.

The disappointment in Biden thus cannot be about his failing to deliver on a promise—or even his intention—to be a one-term president (most notably because he never made such a promise). The collective critique of Biden operates as intra-frustration that an opportunity was not realized, and the realization we are each at fault. It’s a projection of accountability to oneself.

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Improving ideas requires breaking promises

When I began writing this, I was targeting the ambiguous assertions by political candidates who promised everything and offered nothing simultaneously. But, so I thought, it’s always beneficial to be more-specific.

It’s a good rule of thumb epistemically, but in politics I’m not so sure.

Making specific decisions about a future belonging to shifting minds and culture is how Trump ends up telling NBC he never said he wouldn’t start any wars. He was lying, obviously, but the real critique should rest on his making the promise in the first place rather than his noncompliance or lying about it.

And here’s the catch-22: commitments dripping in ever-more specification slowly dims the scope of future opportunities to fulfill them while inadvertently providing additional opportunities to attack it. Not to mention the self-imposed constraints politicians place on themselves (as well as voters on themselves) in their ability to make decisions in the future.

Matthew Yglesias’ piece arguing against politicians having “lots of plans“ was the main influence on my writing here. He makes the case that the promises are a performance, and that locking yourself into specific policy commitments unnecessarily boxes you in—requiring a load of political capital in getting out. He thinks that makes for bad politics and I agree.

But it is also bad for accountability.

Most successful promise-makers frustrate their opponents and make supporters look foolish precisely by making unrealistic promises they never intended to fulfill, and those who make ambitious promises—and tries to fulfill them—end up forcing our bad idea onto our remorseful souls. Biden’s pledge to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court invited more criticism as time pressed forward. Trump’s promise of universal tariffs worked similarly in how the fluidity of politics overwhelmed the stasis of his prophecy.

These examples show how specific promises are more-falsifiable in structure, but that same detail is what makes them devastating for the ones uttering it. Inevitable shifts in reality morphs the feasibility to fulfill previous imagination.

At the same time, the more detailed the commitment, the more opportunities there are to attack it. Trump’s tariff pledge came laden with the who, why, and by how much. Biden’s Supreme Court commitment sprang from genuine cultural concerns. But specificity correspondingly invited more criticism than it was worth and left little room to adapt when reality pushed back.

Vague promises are better for politicians but create more problems for voters, given their uselessness as accountability tools. A promise broad enough to stretch over almost any outcome leaves too much room for irrefutability. It can be fulfilled or not depending on a particular set of facts, or by entire interpretations that are all simultaneously true—tying back to the instability of Biden’s “bridge.”

Accountability gets trapped either way: specific promises constrain governance and arm critics and vague ones are meaningful only to the captive audience laboring through the fruitless spewings on The View or Gutfeld!

The format of accountability in politics is broken regardless, which suggests the problem is that promises, pledges, plans in politics is nothing more than indications of a momentary appetite. Invoking past promises contaminates present decisions by replacing the question of whether something worked with the question of whether it was predicted. Those are not the same inquiry; one is useful for learning, the other is useful for tribal bickering. Politicians are rarely the ones actually held accountable for broken campaign promises. Instead, it’s those who took the promises seriously who end up accountable for their own inaction, even if they project it onto promise-makers.

Democrats have got to stop telling black Americans the system is irredeemably rigged against them. And black Americans must stop believing them.

SCOTUS recently narrowed the Voting Rights Act by ruling that to prove a congressional map is racially discriminatory, one must show the state intended to discriminate by race, not merely that the outcome disadvantaged black voters.

Democrats far and wide—particularly in the South—did what they do best: began telling their voters the electoral system was racist, suppressive, and even violent. They didn’t say this explicitly, of course. No, they began doing it in a more cynical fashion: by comparing the effects of the latest ruling to suppression under Jim Crow.

Since partisan gerrymandering is perfectly legal, and black voters vote Democratic at rates hovering around 90 percent, a state can now draw lines that functionally dilute black voting power and defend it simply by saying “we were targeting Democrats.” And it would be a fair defense! My main concern, however, is that it seems to create a legal paradox: plaintiffs must prove race was the primary factor in drawing the map, but if they use racial data to build a corrected map for the court, their evidence risks being deemed legally tainted. But I’m no legal expert, and it’s possible I have that aspect misinterpreted.

Even so, Democrats have obviously lost their touch when it comes to ‘fighting the power’.

Former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams had the right idea back in 2013 when she created the New Georgia Project, which registered hundreds of thousands of mainly young minority voters, building precinct-level year-round contact programs rather than waiting until the summer before the election. The project paid off and is widely credited with flipping Georgia’s two Senate seats in 2021 and turning the state into a genuine battleground.

Abrams, for all her faults, proved that a minority-heavy Democratic coalition can overwhelm a partisan map and place the first black U.S. Senator from Georgia. She saw the growth of the state and the appetite for real political change. And the state of Georgia achieved it by working together.

If only Abrams and other Democrats had learned a lesson from all that. Unfortunately they took another route in the wake of SCOTUS’ ruling on the VRA:

Justice Elena Kagan even asserted the ruling will lead to “the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction,” as though electoral outcomes are decided by cynical prophecy rather than who shows up to vote.

The comparison to Jim Crow, Reconstruction, and the general pessimism Democrats have presented to their base doesn’t hold up under even the lightest scrutiny. And black Americans’ own history should make that comparison offensive.

For instance, Medgar Evers was a black World War II veteran who had just fought at Normandy and returned to Mississippi in 1946 to vote when twenty armed white men, some of whom had allegedly been his childhood friends, showed up to threaten him at the polls. He left without casting a ballot, fearing for his life. And in 1963, he was assassinated by a white supremacist.

That is just one of millions of examples throughout history that should be more than enough to illustrate what true voter suppression looked like under Jim Crow.

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Black Americans have won before

Working at a historically black newspaper in the South, I’ve had the chance to speak with people who dealt with direct, explicit, and violent forms of racism firsthand. The experience has taught me more about black American history than most textbooks could.

But the more I’ve learned, the less tolerance I have for comparisons between those conditions and today’s. The underlying pattern I’ve found is that people making those comparisons most loudly tend to know the least about what they’re invoking.

The fact is, when it comes to the latest ‘Southern Strategy’ by Republicans throughout the South, partisan redistricting is perfectly legal.

Another fact that Democrats are averse to admitting (possibly for fear of accusations of racism) is that black Americans mostly support them.

I’m not judging. I think that’s actually a reasonable thing to do, given most of them have lived under Republican-rule for decades. A switch wouldn’t be the worst thing for the South.

The two facts make it appear as though black voters throughout the South have lost something: Republicans are splitting their districts and thus preventing Democrats from taking office. And it’s true if all things stayed the same, they would lose seats. But things don’t have to stay the same. In reality, the two facts actually point toward an opportunity to use the hard-fought victory of those who lived under constant, violent, and tolerated suppression: the freedom to vote.

What black voters faced during Jim Crow wasn’t that their districts had been carved up. It was poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications, whites-only primaries. They were measures to prevent black people from voting in the first place. We are not dealing with any—not one—of those specific problems today, and that is the direct result of the progress we as a society and a nation have made from the Civil War through the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to today.

Yes, we still have problems. But they are much better than the one’s black America faced 100 or even 50 years ago. Democrats should be making that point louder than anyone, particularly since their electoral survival fully relies on black Americans turning out to vote.

Black Americans can still vote, actually

Not having a choice is different from your choice not winning. Black voters today do have a choice. They have a free vote, equally cast. What they don’t have is a guaranteed outcome. But unlike during Jim Crow, no other group does either.

Telling black voters that we’re right back where we were a century ago, that they can do nothing but beg federal courts for relief, is the total abandonment of political leadership. And yet Democrats seem more comfortable making that argument than acknowledging the underutilized power sitting right in front of them: organize and turn out.

It’s telling that one of the few prominent left-leaning voices making the case for optimism is Stephen A. Smith. Whatever you think of him, the fact is he’s a sports commentator making the case Democratic leaders won’t. And he says it plainly directly to black voters themselves:

“How many times have we heard people say “[the black] vote doesn’t matter, I don’t need to go to the polls”? You show up and vote for Barack Obama in droves, you do it for Biden, but you don’t do it for Kamala Harris. There’s evidence of people dragging their damn feet and then complaining about the outcome that dragging their feet brought on. That is annoying to me.”

It is annoying!

In the 2022 midterms, only one state came close to reaching half of eligible black voter turnout: Georgia. Senator Warnock beat Herschel Walker by fewer than 100,000 votes in one of the most watched races in the country. Black voters’ united support pushed him past the post. Had they turned out at the national midterm rate—a mere 33 percent—that would’ve resulted in around 180,000 votes evaporating.

My home state of North Carolina tells the other side of that story; what happens when black voters don’t meet the mark. While close to 40 percent of eligible black voters turned out in the last midterms, the Democratic Senate candidate still lost by around 120,000 votes. Had black voters shown up at Georgia’s rate, just 10 percent higher, that’s approximately 165,000 additional votes, which would have mostly gone to Democrats.

The drop-off elsewhere across the South is stark:

Tennessee saw black turnout of just 21.9 percent.

Mississippi, which holds the highest proportion of black residents of any state, came in at 24.8 percent.

Louisiana and South Carolina barely cleared a third.

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I’ve seen some Democrats frame the goal as securing a proportional share of representation by obtaining enough seats to mirror black voters’ share of the population. But that leads to its own kind of suppression: a guaranteed slice of power is still minority power. The stronger play is to organize for a majority by building consistent turnout infrastructure that rewrites the maps altogether.

We know that’s not a fantasy because black America has already proved it’s possible. As Stephen A. pointed out, during Obama’s runs, black voters turned out at over 60 percent in 2008 and 2012. But it didn’t stop there: in 2024, they hit 70 percent in Mississippi alone.

Obama’s message of “Hope” is nice to ponder, but “Change”—real, tangible progress—comes from actions. The one thing every black American in the South over 18 can do to get a voice in their state is vote. And that’s a privilege black Americans 70 years ago didn’t possess.

In May 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Washington about what the ballot would make possible:

“Give us the ballot and we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South. Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and love mercy and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who will have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the Divine.”

Much of that has been accomplished because his argument wasn’t rhetorical. Raphael Warnock became the first black senator from Georgia. Voters in North Carolina (black, white, and Hispanic alike) rejected what would have been the first black governor from that state not because of his race but because of his ideology. These are not small improvements from 1957.

The fight in the civil rights era was to access an equal choice. Now the fight is to make that choice win. Black Americans should be building exactly that kind of enthusiasm by using the very tools they fought for and won to hold those in power accountable.

Only when I see a vast majority of black Americans voting, and see no results, will I consider us closer to Jim Crow than an equal society.

I’m a member of what’s called Zillenials: the last members of Gen Z to have a large part of childhood before the highly-digitalized modern age. We used VHS tapes, CDs, and flip phones. But we were also the first generation to be introduced to smartphones, tablets, and social media as children.

One thing I remember vividly from that transitionary time was watching teachers struggle with the newly-implemented Smartboard.

After decades of chalkboards and markers, these modern devices were much closer in logic to iPhones and tablets than paper and pencil. They’d tap it, nothing would happen. Tap again, wrong response. Can’t find the settings. Forgot what she did last time. Eventually she’d look up and ask a student, who’d fix it in about fifteen seconds. This happened constantly even though we weren’t allowed to use the smartboard.

That’s the part that always irked me. The whole point of the device was to make teaching more efficient—and it would have, for someone who understood it.

But I think teachers, like many older people today, weren’t really trying to understand it but simply trying to manage it. Those are different things.

Understanding a technology means learning how it works, sitting with it long enough to get it wrong a few times and adjust. Managing it means getting it to do the one thing you need it to do for this specific task, and avoiding what everyone else does with it. The teachers who struggled most treated the Smartboard like a slightly complicated whiteboard. We students treated it like a slightly simpler version of everything we were already using.

Management and understanding are also inherently opposing approaches to learning. Management is an attempt to prevent error; understanding is what’s learned in the process of correcting them. You can’t really do both at once. So when older folks have to choose, particularly for those who they want to protect the most (young people) they almost always choose management. Which means they almost always fall behind in understanding.

Almost everyone under the age of 30 has seen this play out in real life. Kids helping parents maneuver settings, teenagers showing grandparents how to get emails, students fixing the Smartboard. I wondered why it’s almost never the other way around.

One of the explanations I’ve come up with is that there’s a tendency to pull back the moment something goes wrong, which prevents the repetitive attempts to create and correct that actually builds understanding. And since they have less understanding of the technology, they must have less understanding of its potential harms. I think it’s that lack of understanding that produces the fear necessary to go so far as to limit other people’s usage and then beg for their assistance when using it.

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Public to private access

One question I had while thinking about this is: shouldn’t we expect those with the most wealth and resources (older people) to be the ones most equipped to utilize the latest technology? And yet there’s at least one Vietnam war vet trusting his ten-year-old great-grandchild with his bank app.

My best guess is that older people are concerned that younger people will be exposed to and influenced by the many evils of the online world. That fear becomes a desire to control it.

But one thing no one ever discusses is how controlling someone else’s technology-use requires a bunch of energy, time, and consistency—leaving even less freedom to actually learn the thing they’re trying to regulate. So they stay ignorant of the technology. And when they inevitably run into a problem while using it, they turn to the very person they’re actively restricting.

I think we all know, on some level, that using technology to solve problems you find interesting puts you ahead of those who don’t. And yet older people try to control it knowing full well how useful the technology is in real-world applications. Why else would they be asking you to get into their Netflix account?

A big part of why management has escalated in the modern digital age is due to legibility—or lack thereof.

When I was a kid asking for a CD, the whole process was out in the open. I’d have to explain the product to older people, we’d find the physical disc, they’d looking it over and deliberate on whether it was permissible, they’d ask other older people if they found it permissible, we’d bring it home, I’d put it in the player in the living room. Everyone knew what you had. The technology was public and hard to access, and because of that, it was more manageable.

Solutions for those looking to manage the technology then go from an old process of step-by-step gatekeeping to one consisting of inaccurate oversight and arbitrary enforcement post-hoc.

In the modern age, the product is fully accessible and almost entirely private. And AI is even further down that road. You can’t glance at a screen and know whether a kid is using it to cheat on an essay or to finally understand the thing their teacher couldn’t explain. It all looks the same from the outside: a young person locked to their screen. But this focus on ‘screen time’ is all wrong. In fact, we would expect those using technology to learn to have more extreme ‘screen times’ compared to those who don’t.

Meaning older people are primarily concerned with access to content. And that overt concern for someone else’s access to content has harmed their own ability to evaluate the content people are accessing.

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Old people should learn about AI-slop

This pattern of older people attempting to manage younger people’s technology-use isn’t new. Comics, novels, radio, television, video games, computers, phones—all arrived with a wave of panic and a round of restrictions. Each of them a battle between the younger and older generations, who, ironically, dealt with the same panic just to turn around and panic over something else.

Though I want to stay more or less universal when it comes to pointing old older people’s fears of technology, I began writing this article with solely AI in mind. I was heavily-influenced by Richard Hanania’s insights, where he tested whether readers could distinguish AI-generated content from human writing.

Older respondents were consistently less accurate and more confident (that combination is its own problem). The conclusion was essentially that people most likely to be wrong about what AI is doing are also the least likely to realize it: older people.

Younger people performed significantly better in recognizing AI-content and in their confidence in distinguishing them. What might be even more telling is that Hanania’s older readers are almost certainly more technologically engaged than average. If those more-online boomers are still failing these tests, just imagine what the typical geezer thinks when scrolling through Facebook’s AI slop.

I always hear from older people that young people need to prepare for the real world, but the real world is using the latest technology—and will contain technologies not yet created. So while its reasonable to still think it should be limited for younger people, you must acknowledge its usefulness as a tool for problem-solving.

Therefore to use it the ‘right’ way requires access.

The alternative of enforcing a limit of access isn’t free. Restricting technology requires constant monitoring, constant catch-up when young people inevitably find workarounds because they understand the technology better than those trying to control it. All of that effort is solving a problem that didn’t have to be a problem.

There’s a simpler version of this where older people ask younger people what they are actually doing with it, sit down and try it themselves, and approach it with curiosity instead of suspicion. That version costs a lot less and produces a lot more.

My prescription for readers is modest: try to avoid becoming the old-fart begging teenagers to help you with McDonald’s drink machines as you yearn for a time we will never see again.

History is full of reckless individuals, impulsive factions, and immoral majorities who have imbued in us an instinct to slow political systems down and force them to earn a higher threshold before acting. People want governance that is orderly rather than lurching from one extreme to another every few years.

This instinct to keep governance ‘stable’ is as old as political thought itself. Plato’s solution was philosopher-kings, rulers so constrained by their own wisdom that bad outcomes would be prevented before they could occur. Intellectuals since then have offered theories of stability through divinity, historicism, and might. Every era has looked at the problem of bad governance and asked how to prevent it. Today we tend to think the most-reliable means of preserving a stable government comes from consensus; the will of the people as a check on itself. If we can’t get the right leaders and keep them there, we contend, we must at least prevent bad ones from doing too much damage. And since we cannot hold referendums on each and every decision, we built procedural constraints that force majorities to share responsibility and earn broader support before they can govern.

Our goal is the same as Plato’s: prevent the government from doing the wrong things by structuring the system so that it cannot act without sufficient wisdom. We differ in that we think that wisdom comes from collective decision-making rather than inherent virtue. And yet, the underlying belief is the same: stability requires constraining power until it is wise enough to act.

I posit that this concept of stability is entirely backwards. Governments are most stable not when their actions are constrained by aggregated wisdom, but when they can be held accountable—blamed, criticized, and removed. True stability comes from the system’s ability to absorb movement and adjust course without collapsing.

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Compromised consensus

We seek an assurance that bad governments can’t make too many mistakes; that minority interests won’t be steamrolled; that the system won’t swing so violently that ordinary people can’t keep up with it. Those are legitimate concerns. The main question though is whether consensus requirements actually deliver on its purported goal to protect, to stabilize, and to prevent error. I don’t think it does because that would depend entirely on being able to identify who failed and their ability to organize criticism around them. That requires clarity of responsibility.

Failed majorities are only removed when people hold negative opinions about the outcomes under their watch. But if they’re unable to tell who is to blame, it necessarily becomes much more difficult to tell who it is to criticize, and thus to remove. Procedural rules requiring broad agreement dilute responsibility before a single policy is ever implemented because they necessitate compromise. Compromised policies get a good reputation but it’s primarily due to our yearn for consensus. They’re amalgamations of no one’s idea of what will work. When it fails, no one learns anything, because no one ever agreed with it. The majority blames the minority for watering it down; the minority blames the majority for passing it at all. The underlying ideas of the policy that seemed good to some factions never get properly tested. The losing coalition can’t point to a responsible party and can’t remove those who failed because the failure belongs to everyone, and therefore to no one.

The instinct behind requiring broad agreement to act is, I think, ultimately about protecting those on the losing side. Legislative procedures like the filibuster is that instinct expressed in procedural form: making broad agreement the price of action, with the aim of protecting the interests of those not in control. Its defenders call this a safeguard for ‘the minority’. The problem is there is no stable, coherent minority. Minority status is dynamic at every level simultaneously: the individual mind all the way to the coalitions they compose.

Procedural consensus vs. fluid minds

Consensus only work as a source of stable wisdom if people’s opinions are stable. But since people change their minds continuously, consensus must be unstable too. Voters realign and shift priorities. Entire coalitions absorb new members and move with them. These changes happen constantly—between elections, during them, and in the long stretches of governance in between. The system is never still.

Procedural constraints that aim to protect against excesses by enforcing stability through shared wisdom rest on the assumption of a static system. Thus, governing rules like the filibuster does its job by privileging a model of legitimacy based on durable consensus. But in a fast-moving environment of shifting preferences, that requirement forces governments to lag behind reality by making action harder than the system would otherwise allow.

I think polarization adds an interesting layer to this. The common understanding is that polarization means both sides getting more extreme—more radical, more distant from other coalition members. I think that’s mistaken. What polarization actually means is that individuals are more consistently aligned with their party’s bundle of positions than they used to be. It doesn’t mean those positions are radical at all; only that fewer people are cross-pressured on as many issues as they once were. But consistent alignment is not the same as uniform alignment. A more polarized electorate still contains individuals whose views cut across party lines by existing inside both coalitions simultaneously.

And because minority status is fluid, the filibuster has no principled basis for what its protecting. It simply hands veto power to whoever happens to be in the minority on a particular vote—even though other members of that minority might support the policy, and members of the majority may hold legitimate criticisms. In our attempt to guard against potential mistakes by government, we have inadvertently diluted and stagnated a system that thrives on clear responsibility and the capacity for movement. This is because it blocks the mechanisms of change by acting as if failure comes from change. Which is true—failure does come from change. But so does something far more significant: progress.

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The dynamics of dynamism

The capacity for progress—the ability to correct errors through continuous testing, criticizing, and correcting—already provides the protection people seek from stable systems. Yet it relies on mechanisms that broad-consensus requirements suppress.

Between coalitions, the constant threat of electoral and legislative reversal constrains majorities at all times—not just in November. Within coalitions, broad majorities already internalize minority interests through the very process of assembling themselves. It is the ongoing adjustments from individual ideological movements that enforces consideration of legitimate criticisms. Every election is an opportunity for a losing faction to reorganize, expand, and return.

Plato’s insight helps explain our instincts. We want to prevent mistakes. But if wisdom were sufficient for government, there’d be no need for protection or procedural constraints, because it would already make the right decisions. That’s what Plato wanted from philosopher-kings, what Europe sought in divine monarchs, what Americans still hope consensus can deliver.

However, a healthy democracy relies on errors. Protection, stability, order—all these desired assurances—are realized from the capacity to make mistakes, recognize them, and correct them without the system imploding. Making mistakes is how we learn. When we prevent actions from being clearly attributable to anyone, we prevent learning.

Consider a party commanding 80% of the electorate. Even at that extreme, decision-making through consensus defenders would still claim the remaining 20% needs procedural protection. At this point, it becomes indistinguishable from minority-rule. And this isn’t just theoretical. Take a bill to ban transgender athletes in sports, for example, polling at roughly 80–20. The moderate Democratic faction wouldn’t object to its passage, but the faction most likely to deploy the filibuster isn’t them. The result is an undemocratic outcome: the system cannot test the idea, assign responsibility, or correct course—despite broad agreement. In both cases, requiring broad agreement to do things privileges procedure over the actual policies and outcomes the government produces.

By the same token, when the majority governs well, the coalition expands further by absorbing additional interests. Therefore, the stability, protection, and order we seek from government comes from remaining a credible threat to the majority’s survival. And that relies on the system’s ability to move—the capacity to make mistakes, to assign blame, and to correct.

From Plato to Marx, political theorists have contemplated ways in which to establish a suitable answer to the question of who should rule.

It was Sir Karl Popper who offered a refutation to this erroneous way of assessing political systems. He argued that democracy isn’t about choosing rulers but rather how we remove rulers without violence. Democratic systems aren’t meant to find the right leader. As Popper explains, they ought to be designed to survive the wrong ones. We mustn’t die; our theories, our policies, our rulers can fail in our stead. That is—so long as we build systems capable of recognizing failure and replacing what produced it.

Though I explicitly accepted Popper’s theory of error correction, it was nevertheless difficult to grasp when applying it to current political issues like partisan gerrymandering. Since the ruling of the Voting Rights Act, Southern states have begun redistricting their congressional seats to obtain a partisan advantage to the maximal degree. And while our gut reaction to such measures is disdain, I wanted to figure out specifically how it affects the functions of democracy following Popper’s principles of recognizing failure and acting on it.

Working that out took me somewhere I didn’t expect.

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The various gerrymandering schemes

One of the things I learned from writing the last piece was how important it is that responsibility is clean. Who to blame should be as clear as possible so that when people want to hold someone accountable, they actually can.

The other thing that stuck with me was removability. The ability to remove those in power is the most fundamental property of a healthy democratic system.

This made me consider competitiveness as the goal. The more competitive the electoral environment, the more susceptible those in power are to removal—even if they won the last election comfortably.

With those two principles in mind, I started thinking about gerrymandering differently. What if maximizing entrenchment by spreading a party as widely as possible across the map actually heightened responsibility? What if you could do this while keeping the removal function as competitive as possible? The more of the government they occupied, the more of the outcomes they owned; and the thinner their margins, the more vulnerable they remained.

That line of thinking led me somewhere counterintuitive: partisan gerrymandering was actually a good thing.

A party that gerrymanders places itself in more districts, giving more exposure, leaving them more vulnerable to removal all while enhancing accountability.

Some gerrymandering techniques allow a sufficiently large swing toward the opposition to flip a greater number of seats compared to others. Virginia’s recent scheme was the proof: Democrats took their votes and spread them thinly across the state. Northern VA Democrats were now more susceptible to removal because they lost votes in safe areas while making disfavored areas more competitive.

Two birds, one stone.

The conclusion seemed obvious: the party in power ought to gerrymander aggressively with the aim of maximizing their responsibility in governance and the competitiveness of each district.

That’s when I encountered Matthew Yglesias’ pragmatic take on gerrymandering using Florida’s efforts as an example.

He argued Democrats’ gerrymandering in Virginia had been self-defeating because they drew maps so aggressive (based on a dominant election) that they left the ruling party overextended.

He thinks gerrymandered maps should distribute voters efficiently across districts to maximize seats in a roughly neutral political environment; in the event of a swing back to the opposition, you retain as many seats as possible.

Florida Republicans did exactly that by drawing more consolidated maps based on voter trends rather than a single dominant cycle.

On purely tactical terms, Yglesias is right. If one party gerrymanders (Republicans) while the other (Democrats) sticks to non-partisan districting, the one with the principle will lose (Democrats). But taken more fundamentally, the Yglesias argument points in exactly the wrong direction from Popper.

Validation!

My theory of an aggressive, thin-margined map that genuinely flips seats under swinging conditions—like in the case of Virginia’s—was indirectly affirmed by Ygleisas’ take on pragmatic partisan engineering in Florida.

I was a step closer to understanding how some partisan gerrymanders stray from the principles of responsibility and removability more than others.

Now all I needed was a way to measure it.

The idol of certainty

Developing a formal model to measure responsibility and competitiveness was difficult. If what I intended to measure was a systems ability of levying responsibility whilst enacting competitive removal processes, what I needed to do was find a way to judge a maps’ dynamism.

I got to something that looked like this: if the goal was to make the maps more competitive, then the variable had to be how votes are spread or wasted across districts. A party sitting on a massive surplus in a safe seat is leaving removal potential on the table. Shave those wasted votes off and redistribute them into less favorable districts and you’ve made yourself more vulnerable while also making more of the map genuinely competitive. Do the opposite by consolidating your support into fewer, safer districts based on demographic trends and you’ve insulated yourself from criticism while entrenching your own power.

A party that deliberately thins its own safe seats to create more genuinely competitive ones is—in theory—making the removal mechanism more sensitive to public criticism across the entire landscape.

Which is exactly what I thought necessary to fulfill the Popperian principle.

What I didn’t realize was that this measurement system already exists. And it doesn’t imply what I had thought.

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The learning curve

Nicholas Stephanopoulos developed the theorem for what courts call the “Efficiency Gap”: how wasted votes are spread to give the ruling party a partisan advantage.

When I found it I again felt briefly vindicated: it measures partisan asymmetry in vote translation, which is exactly what I’d been circling.

But I had conflated two things that are actually separate. And I was wrong about both.

First: there’s a difference between how a party distributes surplus votes across districts and how vulnerable it is. I was wrong in thinking that minimizing wasted votes necessarily produces more competitive districts. It doesn’t.

The efficiency gap measures partisan bias, not competitiveness. A map can be perfectly balanced by each party wasting roughly equal votes while still being full of safe, uncompetitive districts where neither side faces any real removal pressure. Just because both parties happen to be wasting votes “equally” doesn’t make it competitive. And a map with a significant efficiency gap can still contain genuinely competitive districts where criticism finds purchase and removal is cost-efficient.

For instance, imagine a ten-district map where five districts are drawn so Democrats win 70-30, and five are drawn so Republicans win 70-30. Each party wastes roughly the same number of votes. The efficiency gap is near zero. But dynamism is near zero too—criticism has almost nowhere to find purchase, and removing the governing party requires a swing so large it would have to flip districts where they're winning by twenty points or more.

Second: I was wrong in presuming one should be trying to determine a specific outcome at all. Even if you can measure how vulnerable rulers are by assessing how they distributed surplus votes, that's still engineering inputs to produce competitive districts: deciding the right proportions each input should possess.

But the Popperian standard is about whether the system can correct itself when outcomes are bad. I was asking whether wasted votes are being distributed to make areas artificially competitive where they were not. It was an attempt to determine outcomes fairly. It was a moment of deciding the right proportions each input should possess.

It was then I fully realized I was still asking the wrong question.

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Who should rule? How can we blame and remove rulers?

I had been trying to measure something about how well the system corrects itself; and accidentally reconstructed a tool for measuring whether the correction was being distributed evenly. Those are not the same question!

The efficiency gap and the ‘greedy gerrymander’ fail for related but distinct reasons, and that’s how I realized I was conflating them. One misfires the removal signal, the other corrupts the governance that makes removal meaningful.

The electoral problem appears when artificially thin margins causes a party to lose because the map made them structurally fragile.

The governing problem is subtler: rulers on razor-thin margins govern more like hostages than the natural majority.

A safe seat produced by non-partisan principles (compactness, contiguity, genuine community boundaries and support) is genuinely safe because the underlying political geography actually produces that result. The majority knows they have a real mandate, rather than one they made for themselves. A party that governs boldly from that kind of safety and fails deserves to lose it, and the system is structured so that they will.

It was only once I recognized my errors that Plato's spell was—hopefully—lifted. And it’s when I finally conceded that non-partisan, single-member plurality systems preserve the causal link between governing badly and being removed better than any alternatives.

Gerrymandered maps corrupt it no matter whether they manufacture safety or manufacture vulnerability. That was the missing piece of Popper’s principle. Not about how to manufacture maps to make the most places the most competitive, but in upholding the translation of natural shifts in the electorate into a governing body who understands their constraints—or lack thereof.

A mandate is earned through genuine geography, persuasion, and ultimately, failure. And it’s why the representation instinct, however well-intentioned, keeps producing the wrong solution. Independent commissions drawing maps to ensure proportional outcomes, as many people prescribe, are still asking who should get a say, and by how much.

But we should want a system where wrong answers die quickly and where the people responsible for them can’t insulate themselves from that verdict. That’s what Popper meant. That’s what gerrymandering, at its worst, prevents and at its best, dilutes.

Threats to democracy?

Like many Trump critics, I often find myself worried about the president’s numerous attempts to curtail the constitution, skirt common decency, and undermine our democratic system. Trump is also friendly with some of the world’s most aggressively illiberal leaders like Vladimir Putin and Nayib Bukele, which is reasonably concerning to many in the West.

One name that’s become increasingly prominent in that conversation is Viktor Orbán.

After he and his party Fidesz won with a supermajority, Orbán rewrote Hungary’s constitution and amended it dozens of times. He packed the courts. Gerrymandered the maps. Extended voting rights to Hungarians abroad who overwhelmingly supported his rule. State-aligned entities acquired most of the media market. Public funds were directed toward loyal oligarchs.

As political scientists debated whether it still qualified as a democracy by any meaningful definition, Orbán and his party were voted out.

And in light of that event, Ross Douthat made a simple observation that mimicked the ancient excuse Republicans love to parrot whenever Trump's democratic record comes up: the institutions held!

People who think Trump is tyrannical tend to see Orbán as validation of their fears despite his ultimate departure, while those who think the threat is exaggerated use Orbán’s nonviolent removal as evidence that the framing around Trump is overblown.

Both sides are genuinely convinced they’re arguing about democratic legitimacy—and in a sense, they are.

But much too often, our debates around consolidation of power and unpopular governments stray into questions that sound like they’re about democracy but are really about something else entirely: Did the right people win? Are my preferences being represented? Is the system ensuring fair outcomes? Who deserves to be in charge?

These common inquiries are about whether the system is producing the right outcomes for the right people given a specific input—in other words, whether it's fair. Once fairness becomes the standard for preventing tyranny, any widely disliked government is already suspect and any attempt by it to govern looks like a democratic failure.

These must therefore be the wrong questions.

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The wrong question

Since Ancient Greece, every civilization that has tried to organize politically has attempted to answer the question of who should rule.

Plato argued for philosopher-kings. Others responded with God and their anointed authorities. Eventually a more convincing answer formed: the will of the people. But which people? Karl Marx argued for the working class—a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. William Godwin’s theories centered on a tyranny of the individual. Hegel thought the question is resolved by history itself.

The cost contained in all these answers, and in any further attempts, is that if you provide one, you’ve made it permanent.

In The Open Society and Its Enemies, philosopher Karl Popper noticed the error: every attempt to answer who should rule becomes justification for someone to take power and refuse to give it up; whether through wisdom, divine right, historical necessity, or even the will of the majority.

As was Poppers’s style, he decided to throw the question out altogether.

What we should be asking isn’t who should rule—it’s how do we get rid of rulers without violence?

A ruler is only tolerated because there exists a mechanism to remove them peacefully. Elections from this perspective aren’t popularity contests but rather a “Day of Judgment”—when those who governed can be dismissed without bloodshed if the verdict goes against them. But a vote is only a single blunt instrument. And even then, it’s possible for people to remove those who weren’t actually responsible—leaving the mechanism misdirected.

Ensuring those in power are held responsible for bad outcomes is therefore essential to the effectiveness of peaceful removal.

With great power comes great responsibility

For any solution to be useful, it must actually address the problem it’s purporting to. It’s not enough that a populace can remove rulers without violence; the removal mechanisms must be aimed at those controlling the levers—those genuinely responsible for bad outcomes.

It necessitates structuring our system so voters can identify who to blame.

Responsibility should assigned so when a party wins, they govern alone: no coalition compromise and no diluted policies. What they do is fully theirs. Those policies are exposed to reality, and they’re responsible for the outcomes. When the removal mechanism fires, it hits those in control.

In my view, much of Western commentary treats this clarity of responsibility as a flaw rather than a feature. A system is often considered more legitimate the more it incorporates everyone’s preferences into its decisions—leading to arguments in favor of proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, and other variations. But this is just a reformulation of the question of who should rule followed by a response of "everyone, equally, in proportion to their numbers."

But a rational analysis of democracy should concentrate not on questions of how inputs in decision-making can lead to a specific outcome but on how democratic institutions contribute to the assigning of responsibility, the removal of bad policies and rulers, and the creation of new options.

The ‘guardrails’—so to speak—are there to keep those in power exposed to the consequences of governing badly; not to ensure a preferable outcome.

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How the guardrails hold

The removal mechanism operates on two levels, though Popper mainly focused on the first.

At the formal level, elections are held, leaders can lose, and the apparatus of displacement is present. Simple enough.

The second level deals with function: criticism can broadly accumulate and translate into distributable removal of rulers. And notably: we can satisfy the first condition while degrading the second—as in the case of Orbán and in partisan assessments of Trump.

Democracy doesn’t just happen. We set up structures that make certain actions possible, expected, and rational—and others not. These mechanisms depend on institutions; not physical buildings or bodies of experts, but shared expectations about what counts as legitimate. Think of them as accessible systems of rules, norms, and roles that structure how individuals understand and act within political life. They shape what a judge does, what a voter expects, what a peaceful transfer of power looks like.

And the reality of modern democracies is that removal processes are distributed through discrete competitive units (districts, seats, offices) each with its own threshold for displacement.

A wave of criticism must find purchase in enough of these units to produce an actual change in governing power. A system in which many units are genuinely competitive translates distributed criticism into displacement relatively cheaply. And so the system in which few are competitive requires criticism to be more concentrated, more intense, and more precisely targeted before it becomes effective.

The rate and fidelity of institutional learning—what we might call a system's dynamism—is the right measure of democratic health.

In a healthy system, even parties with large majorities remain vulnerable to being blamed and to being voted out. It’s the institutions that keep responsibility alive between elections; what makes blame assignable and dissatisfaction legible before one even arrives at the voting booth.

So rather than asking whether a system is democratic or tyrannical, we should be asking how dynamically is it functioning? Which specific institutions are making that easier or harder? And how can we improve them?

Hungary is the most recent test of the right questions.

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The right question

Measured not by fairness but by the two institutional levels we’ve established, the case of Hungary is genuinely complicated.

Some of Orbán’s reforms actually sharpened accountability. Eliminating the second round in favor of single-round plurality meant whoever won governed alone, owned outcomes alone, and could be removed alone. Governing alone clarifies responsibility.

However, other moves by Fidesz cannot survive the same analysis. Many of their actions were genuine attempts to reduce vulnerability without any corresponding increase in the clarity of responsibility: a deliberate decoupling of democracy’s two core functions. And yet, Orbán and his party, after more than a decade of entrenching themselves in power, were indeed removed peacefully through the very institutional mechanisms they had spent years shaping.

The question was never who should rule Hungary or how to make the outcomes more fair; it was always how effectively its institutions could remove those in power. Those who point to peaceful removal as proof of democracy are right. Those who point to institutional degradation are also right.

Where both sides go wrong is in treating Hungary as a verdict in the domestic ideological conflict about the United States and Donald Trump.

Look: January 6th was bad. I feel very strongly about that, and writing this piece has given me a better explanation for why: it was an explicit attempt to curtail the removal mechanism itself by rejecting the institutional bounds of conduct and using violence and the threat of it to hold onto power rather than submit to it.

But I also don’t think January 6th-styled takeovers are encroaching on us each and every day Trump is in office.

Even if Trump declared himself king tomorrow, that wouldn’t mean we’d simply tolerate it. The same institutions that removed Orbán, that reconvened Congress on the night of January 6th, that refused to certify fraudulent results don’t disappear because one person (or even an immoral group) wills it.

We must throw away the question of who should rule for a dynamic system we control individually and collectively. We are each the guardrails. We retain the ability to criticize and remove those in power because we impose its constraints, we criticize abuses, and we alter what isn’t working.

The fact is our concern for proportionality and fairness in the United States is often an attempt to prevent an immoral majority from entrenching themselves. But a voting system can accomplish this.

What it can do is better enable the structures to make removal possible and effective while keeping responsibility clear. I don’t want to discredit the enlightened institutions we’ve built, the norms of tolerance and error-correction we’ve accumulated, or ignore the fact that we retain the ability to do something about it—all problems are soluble.

Winston Churchill said “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried” and he’s right. Democracy did what no other civilization or religion or king ever attempted: it abandoned the question of who should rule and replaced it with the ability to recognize mistakes, remove those responsible, and keep trying.

Vice President JD Vance returned from his diplomatic mission in Pakistan having accomplished nothing.

But maybe that was the whole point.

If we’re being honest, the ceasefire framework Vance was sent to negotiate was futile. The original ten-point proposal included a full removal of sanctions on Iran, Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, and a complete U.S. military withdrawal from the region. Neither Washington nor Tel Aviv could accept those terms.

And since both sides think they hold enough leverage to demand their preferred outcomes, the mission was likely doomed from the start.

I try to make it a point to take Trump seriously and literally. So, when he said he would take the credit for any success springing from negotiations, and leave Vance out in the cold if it failed, I think Trump knew the outcome he wanted was improbable at best.

That makes his sending of Vance particularly interesting.

Vance is not just the sitting vice president; he is also the current frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. That duality shapes everything about how he operates. Vance has carefully managed his proximity to foreign policy decisions, deliberately distancing from the Trump-Rubio-Hegseth faction driving the Admin’s more aggressive posture.

That divergence first became noticeable to me during the Signalgate scandal, where Vance argued against “bailing out Europe” and maintained that any military action against the Houthis should be limited to “sending a message”—even framing an ostensible military win in Venezuela through the lens of the fentanyl crisis, rather than through oil interests or regime change.

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That distance appeared again in New York Times reporting surrounding Trump’s decision to enter the conflict with Iran.

By its account, Vance was the sole voice in the room to raise any direct (if passive) objection. Given how well rewarded those who opposed the Iraq War were—from Barack Obama to Trump’s own early break from Bush-era idealism—someone in Vance’s orbit clearly wanted his dissent on the record.

But Trump does not reward dissent.

As the lone skeptic, Vance was placed on a diplomatic team that Hillary Clinton described as a joke. And she’s right. Usually, we would expect a president to send a team of experts in nuclear energy, physics, Iranian civics and culture, along with foreign policy leaders and possibly even oil executives.

That’s simply not how the Trump Admin operates.

Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner are, whatever their other qualities, men who built their fortunes in real estate who now function as designated fixers for the world’s chaos.

Alex Shepard, writing in The New Republic, adds context to Vance’s humiliation by showing how the week itself told a story of undermining and political immolation. Vance began in Hungary, campaigning alongside the unpopular Viktor Orbán (who lost), before arriving in Pakistan. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a more enthusiastic supporter of intervention in Iran, was photographed alongside Trump at a UFC event, completely unburdened. The man whose counsel contributed directly to the situation now facing the American public—and Trump itself—was rewarded. The man who expressed doubt was handed a poisoned assignment.

Whatever quiet dissent Vance hoped to register before the war began is now buried beneath the louder image of a vice president walking away empty-handed. Plausible deniability, while being a carefully cultivated asset, is difficult to claim when your face is on the front pages under the words “fail” and “war”.

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I try to avoid cynical theories and conspiracies, but this theory doesn’t require assuming bad faith. If there’s one thing Trump is an expert on it may just be publicity—how to foster it, control it, spin it, and so on. It’s possible the decision to send Vance was simply tactical: if Trump was going to be with Joe Rogan at a UFC event, he might as well send the second-highest-profile envoy to handle the moment. A more nuanced reading is that Trump deliberately placed Vance on the mission to neutralize any future criticism from him regarding Iran (not that he would do so publicly anyway). And that would’ve been a smart play: it’s hard to credibly distance yourself from a war you were publicly sent to help end.

Just as much as Vance wants to be the next nominee, Trump wants to keep attention on himself. This intra-ticket battle has been waged for decades, most notably in the “President Cheney” days.

But the pattern of Trump humiliating and targeting dissenters predates this single mission. It’s even possible the negotiations were another farcical performance as the Admin conjures up their real intentions in the Situation Room. Clinton herself noted that the original negotiations in February were unrealistic, and expressed shock that Trump claimed no one told him Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz.

“Every war plan I was ever involved with, that was the first thing we assumed Iran would do,” she said, laughing in disbelief.

The one dissenter received the most visible and least winnable assignment. I don’t think that’s by coincidence. But it’s also possible it wasn’t entirely nefarious either. Those most aligned with the original decision to war with Iran were given room to shine, including Hegseth’s rambling press conference a few days before the current ceasefire, in which he tried to explain how lethal and sophisticated the U.S. military is compared to the Iranian regime.

Whether by design or by instinct, the outcome is the same. Vance went to the front lines. He returned with his tail between his legs, forced to advocate for a position closer to Trump’s vision of maximum pressure.

We’ll have to see how much this comes back to bite; my guess is quite a lot.

North Dakota is an obscure state. A rural, agricultural expanse sitting in the geographic center of the continent—about as “middle America” as it gets. Its cultural theme is reminiscent of the Dutton family in Yellowstone: ranching, farming, and small communities where tradition is prioritized.

The state has gone overwhelmingly Republican for a century. It voted for Donald Trump by massive margins in three consecutive elections. Because of that long-term support, you might assume nearly everyone there aligns with the national MAGA agenda, or at the very least never supports a Democrat initiative.

As always in American politics, the reality is much more complex.

Six in ten ND residents were born in the state. Over the last couple decades, their foreign-born population has surged at one of the fastest rates in the country, with many new arrivals coming from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

Since the pandemic, they’ve faced severe labor shortages. When Donald Trump began his plot of mass deportations around the country (particularly North Dakota’s neighbor Minnesota), state leaders backed a $12 million initiative to attract “New Americans”—immigrants and refugees—to live and work there.

At the same time, the state is on track to become one of the first in the country to achieve universal high-speed internet access, thanks in part to federal infrastructure investments passed under the Biden Admin. And since its agriculture sector, particularly soybean farmers, have been negatively affected by global tariffs and trade wars, the state’s leaders have to grapple with economic realities that don’t fit into the MAGA agenda.

North Dakota is heavily conservative, to be sure, but it is not ideologically uniform with the rest of the Republican base. Its policies, like those of any state, are shaped by practical needs and parochial concerns.

Democrats have largely stopped trying to compete in places like North Dakota. There are residents—and thus ideas—from middle America which have been almost entirely absent from national political conversations for decades.

That is a strategic failure.

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A coalition of learners

I’ve been bugging readers for months about the bold idea of Democrats building large, durable majorities. To achieve that, they simply cannot afford to write off entire states. They must compete everywhere. They must learn how to pursue progressive policy in ways that considers how change is actually experienced by those impacted by it.

In a place like New York City, constant influx, diversity, and cultural evolution are part of the baseline. Big changes are expected. And for many progressives living there, it even feels too slow.

But in a place like Fargo, North Dakota, or in smaller towns across the country, those same shifts in advocacy and policy are more visible and more disruptive. That’s not to say people always perceive change as “bad”. It’s to say what feels incremental or too cautious in one place can feel sudden and overwhelming in another; it’s to say there isn’t only one kind of progress.

We don’t actually know, in advance, which policies will work—or how they will work. Public policy is inherently uncertain. Laws are, at their core, experiments. Even well-designed ideas can produce unexpected consequences once they interact with creative, unpredictable people. Outcomes diverge from intentions all the time. That’s what makes correction so important. It’s uncertainty, the inherent fallibility of people, that makes variation and diversity valuable. When different states and communities pursue change at different speeds and in different ways, they create a kind of distributed learning system. Some will succeed. Most will fail. Others will succeed in unpredicted ways, solving more problems than originally intended. Over time, those successes and failures can be observed, refined, and adapted elsewhere.

A political party that insists on uniformity everywhere cuts itself off from that process of error correction.

This is where Democrats, in particular, run into trouble. Too often, they present a single nationalized vision of a progressive platform and assume it can be applied everywhere at once. That every community faces the same problems at the same scale and with the same urgency. But as explained, policy that works in New York City may fail—or simply feel intolerable or too bold—in North Dakota because the underlying conditions are actually different.

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Deviation used to be common

A smarter approach to electoral politics for Democrats would be to treat every state as a testing ground by allowing ideas to develop where they are most viable, studying the results, and expanding them where they succeed. The most progressive areas can take the biggest risks, while more moderate states evaluate what works and adapt accordingly.

A party that takes outcomes seriously cannot afford to treat ideology as a substitute for results.

Ezra Klein, for all his faults, has correctly argued that California is a state that should represent the strongest case for Democratic governance, but it often does the opposite. It has become a natural example critics point to as evidence that progressive policies are failing.

He later explained in an interview with The New Yorker that his attempts to push Democrats to listen to those critics by tolerating more internal ideological variation have been recently met with resistance, even though it used to be commonplace:

I covered the Affordable Care Act very closely. When that passed, Democrats held Senate seats in Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, and West Virginia. I think competing in these states has become, in many ways, unimaginable to Democrats…

Politics is about power. And I think people have missed this.

…I want to see real decisions being made to try to compete in Kansas and Missouri and Ohio and then in red states—meaning, redder than that. I’d like to see us running pro-life Democrats again. When Obamacare passed, about forty House Democrats were pro-life. People got very upset about that. I get why, but I think it’s worth thinking about this.

Take abortion as an example of what this variation looks like in practice. After the uprooting of Roe in 2022, the issue became more locally defined (that was actually the whole point of its overturn). Voters in Kansas and Montana supported abortion rights when it appeared on the ballot. Yet, abortion remains almost entirely banned in places like North Dakota and Florida.

Even within the Republican Party, this shift forced Donald Trump to move toward positions like supporting IVF and avoiding punitive measures against women seeking abortions, while largely downplaying the issue publicly. Many pro-lifers in his coalition were frustrated, but they continued to support the party because they recognized their position had become poisoned at the national level.

In other words: political expression of the pro-life position had to adjust to changing conditions.

Voters in every state hold mixed, often conflicting views. If Democrats want to compete in places like North Dakota, they will need candidates who can operate within those realities by recognizing that progress will not look identical everywhere, and that building a governing majority requires making room for disagreement within the coalition.

Ideally, someone like John Fetterman could raise reasonable objections to policies in states like California or Massachusetts without it being seen as a betrayal of Democratic values, but as a reflection of the real political and cultural constraints within their state. Democrats in Pennsylvania are progressive—but not in the same way, or to the same degree, as those in California. Litmus testing everyone in a diverse coalition by a single standard ignores those differences and prevents learning from each other’s mistakes.

How progress becomes tyranny

One problem I’ve had, and Democrats share, is to acknowledge that resistance to change is not always irrational. In places undergoing rapid, visible transformation, people may misdiagnose causes or propose flawed solutions—but the underlying perception that something significant is changing is real.

In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, philosopher Karl Popper argued that history is shaped by countless unforeseen developments, with complex causes and unpredictable consequences. For that reason, the central task of democratic institutions is not to impose a predetermined vision of the future, but to allow societies to learn—to avoid tyranny which prevents change.

That applies just as much within countries as it does between them. When people in certain communities feel that change is happening without their consent—too quickly, too visibly, and without regard for local conditions—it can feel, in a very real sense, tyrannical. They may not oppose change itself, but they resist the feeling that it is being decided for them, rather than with them.

But since change is the mechanism of progress, the solution cannot be stagnation.

As Matt Johnson argued in writing about the decline of open societies, “The defenders of the open society won’t shake the cynicism and complacency of their fellow citizens if they don’t figure out how to make a more inspiring case for democracy.”

The same is true at the domestic level. The defenders of progressive politics will not rebuild trust in conservative areas if they cannot make a more inspiring case for it across different kinds of communities. A party that can hold onto that distinction—committed to change, but flexible in its application—would be far better positioned to compete everywhere.

The lesson of North Dakota is not that Democrats need to abandon their principled support for change, or that Republican voters are uniquely resistant to it. It is that change is always experienced by individuals. A healthy democracy should not have entire regions written off as permanently red or permanently blue. When one party dominates a state completely, voters lose leverage—especially those in the minority. Politicians become less responsive. Over time, that weakens democracy itself. We should want every elected official to feel the fire that is public pressure. Whether that comes from those who voted for them or simply live in their district. Without a competitive opponent, officials are free to act in more partisan ways.

If Democrats want to be a truly national party again, they need to meet voters where they are by adapting how they pursue them. A party that is willing to move at different speeds, to test ideas, and to learn from its successes and failures will compete everywhere.

When John Adams defended the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre in 1770, he called it “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life.”

Adams was part of a society that widely viewed the ruling British as authoritarians seeking to suppress liberty. This meant defending the British was a risk his family’s livelihood—and certainly his own reputation. Many patriots wanted swift vengeance rather than a critical deliberation of the facts. But Adams believed everyone was entitled to a defense and wanted American society to be one of enlightened principles; one that answered only to the rule of law and the state of evidence rather than the mobs’ preferences or authoritative command.

In defending the soldiers, Adams wrote that “facts are stubborn,” and that our wishes, inclinations, and passions—particularly Americans’ lust for punishment against the enemy—“cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” He understood that justice requires defending reason, and that critical restraint over one’s own conclusions is a necessary component to that defense.

Like Adams, I too find it necessary to defend someone facing intense criticism and calls for punishment before the stubborn facts and evidence are fully considered.

Consider this a trial of sorts: The Democratic Party is alleging ideological treason on the part of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.

I rise to his defense.

The accusation of misplaced priorities

What Fetterman’s accusers call betrayal is the political pragmatism necessary to win over people preferring the opposition. In competitive electoral regions, leaders who can win elections need room to exercise independent judgment—provided their priority is the party’s success—lest they become too pure for the broad coalition they built.

Fetterman represents a large Trump-won swing state. I haven’t seen evidence Fetterman has risked success for his party in Pennsylvania by taking popular positions. And nor will you, because his priority is winning elections in a purple state.

It is better to inquire about the priorities of his accusers.

Do Fetterman’s accusers prioritize total alignment from all their party members, or electoral competitiveness in all 50 states? The stubborn facts show that these two priorities cannot be reconciled: pursuing ideological purity undermines competitiveness, while prioritizing competitiveness requires tolerance of deviation.

One can argue Fetterman deviates from his party. No one will contend that. He will not contend that. However, it isn’t evidence of betrayal but of loyalty to the goal of Democratic competitiveness!

Should we not feel contempt for those accusers who continue to cling to failed policies despite repeated electoral rejection? Should we not demand that those far removed from the median voter positions resign or face primary challenges? Or is the accusation only applied in one direction?

Therefore the charge is not of disloyalty at all but of nonconformity and disobedience. Of that he is certainly guilty. Political coalitions without members guilty of the same charge is one without political power.

If we first accept that the party’s priority is competitiveness nationwide, then we can discern which critics undermine that mission. There is simply more evidence Fetterman’s accusers are undermining that mission than anyone else.

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Disloyal to which priority?

To be competitive everywhere, a party must persuade people who do not already belong to it. Yet in their condemnation of Fetterman, many accusers seem willing to sacrifice effective leaders who attempt to broaden the party’s appeal and win more votes.

By any reasonable measure, Fetterman should pass the loyalty test with flying colors. He supports closing income tax loopholes for billionaires, supports labor unions and abortion rights, voted against the Big Beautiful Bill, and holds positions on LGBTQ rights that are more progressive than many members of his party.

If we are to accuse someone of ideological treason, the charge must involve meaningful actions that obstruct the party’s ability to govern effectively or worsens its support levels. That description does not fit Fetterman. Unlike Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema during the Biden Admin, Fetterman has not served as the “deciding vote” against major Democratic initiatives. He has not weakened Democrats’ support.

If the charge is simply that Fetterman votes with Republicans more often than Democrats would prefer, the same could be said for many House members who represent conservative districts. Take Don Davis, who has won multiple elections in a Republican-leaning district in North Carolina. No serious Democrat suggests expelling him from the party for adopting deviating positions.

To win in states like Ohio, Alaska, or Texas, the accusers will have to tolerate—and even encourage—strategic moderation from members who operate in difficult political terrain prioritizing competitiveness. That is all Fetterman appears to be doing.

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Loyal to the wrong priorities

Can one be disloyal if the accusers knew about the deviations before initial acceptance? Because Fetterman has been this way since the beginning: he campaigned as a progressive in areas where he thought it merited, and more conservative in areas where he believed it deserved. This principled positioning is likely one reason he won in the first place.

Now, of course, things change.

But Fetterman has only sided with Republicans when public opinion supports his position, when his vote cannot alter the outcome, or when he believes Democrats have become overly dogmatic or hypocritical. These are all rational reasons to punch left. Even if one disagrees with his judgment, expanding the coalition in competitive states requires including members willing to challenge party orthodoxy.

The accusers do their best to make Fetterman an outlier by harping on his occasional deviations. They condemn relatively minor votes and disdain his willingness to punch left on high-salience issues, like immigration and foreign policy.

Yet consider what makes an issue high-salience: people are interested! And most of them prefer Republicans to solve those issues simply because the accusers don’t have anyone inside the coalition confronting the merits.

Are the accusers really comfortable enough to start rejecting people who think ICE should not be abolished, who doubt the urgency of climate change, or who believe the Iranian regime should fall? I’m not. Fetterman is not. Hell, the opposition isn’t either.

So who is acting disloyal to the cause of becoming competitive everywhere? The accusers themselves.

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You can’t handle the stubborn facts

Like Adams before me, I may wish the political situation were simpler. But the facts remain stubborn. Democrats cannot win durable national power by demanding ideological conformity from every member of their coalition. They must tolerate figures who speak to voters the party base does not reach.

The evidence in Fetterman’s case is hardly damning: he supported President Biden’s agenda 97 percent of the time and currently enjoys approval ratings higher than Donald Trump, his Republican counterpart, and his Republican challenger in Pennsylvania.

The individual accused of ideological betrayal is also one of the partys most electorally viable figures. Defending someone for exercising independent judgment in ways that strengthen the party’s coalition is a defense of political reason. And, like Adams taught us, a defense of facts over passions.

Democrats must tolerate and embrace principled defections from ideological orthodoxy. That is, unless they’re satisfied with riding shotgun as MAGA Republicans grab the wheel.

The Defense Rests.

My most left-leaning position in politics is very possibly transgender issues. But I also sympathize with some of conservatives’ disdain for the pro-trans movement, particularly due to the arrogant intolerance coming out of certain leftist spaces on college campuses and on social media.

We’ve watched as Democrats catered to a crowd concerned only with identity politics, critical theory, and dogmatic disruption. At the same time, Republicans plotted an electoral strategy aimed at winning over voters who felt disdain towards that crowd. But they had to be careful not to overstep their own pitfalls on the trans issue. To accomplish this, they focused on just a few flashpoints: men in women’s bathrooms, trans athletes in women’s sports, gender ideology in schools, and gender-affirming care for minors.

The commonality was that these were narrow areas where public opinion was the most unstable and where Democrats were epistemically vulnerable. The infamous campaign ad line against Kamala Harris captured the strategy well: “[Democrats] are for they/them; [Republicans] are for YOU!”.

It is the success of this anti-trans framing by Republicans that has imprinted in many people the idea that the fight to protect trans rights is increasingly futile. But the reality is that transgender issues are one of the most advantageous topics for Democrats in existence.

Moderate Democrats are the trans community’s best friend

The Argument’s recent polling of transgender issues corroborates the intuitive success of the Republican scheme to make trans activism a dubious task. Almost anyone who reads it leaves with the impression that Democrats are on the wrong side of trans issues altogether.

However, a couple of weeks ago I came across G. Elliot Morris’ polling on a range of key issues and which party was more trusted on each. To my immense astonishment, trans issues sat neatly on the Democrats side by similar margins as healthcare.

As it turns out Democrats are indeed more preferred on nearly every trans issue one can think of—other than the four specific issues on our timelines each week.

The far left helps dilute the distinction between those issues by reinforcing the Republican strategy. For instance, when top Democratic frontrunners like Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg moderate their least popular positions and grow cautious about alienating voters, far-left voices quickly equate them with Republicans.

By suggesting there is no meaningful difference between the parties, the far left pushes moderates away from a coalition that visibly tolerates that kind of identity-absolutism and makes persuasion nearly impossible for voters who are open to broadly pro-trans positions.

In the end, the reflexive equivocation and intolerance of internal disagreement hurts trans people the most.

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Trans rights are generally popular

The problems most trans people face rarely get the attention of the limited exceptions.

Most Americans support allowing transgender people to serve openly in the military. Voters are uncomfortable with heavy-handed government interference in private family medical decisions, even if they also disagree with gender affirming care for minors. Efforts to erase LGBTQ references from government materials or purge books from libraries are not popular with the general public. Discriminating against trans people in hiring and housing practices is thoroughly rejected.

To put transgender issues in a better light in Americans’ minds, Democrats need to shift attention to the most important challenges facing that group. Hint: it’s not trans athletes or gender surgery.

Thousands of books—many about gender and sexual identity—have been banned from libraries. Roughly one in five trans people attempt suicide in their lifetimes, and a similar share report discrimination in hiring and housing. There are more transgender people who served in the military than the combined number of minors who underwent gender-affirming surgery and trans athletes in women’s collegiate sports!

How voters view each party’s level of attention on these matters is also an important part of a political coalition. Diverting too much attention to winning or losing issues can be a problem, particularly when other more prioritized issues aren’t being addressed satisfactorily. In each of these areas, things simply look better for Democrats than Republicans—particularly because Democrats are in the minority and thus not “in charge” of any given issue.

Roughly 70 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say Democrats spend either the right amount of time or too little time addressing transgender issues. Meanwhile, Republicans say their own party spends too much time on it—more than any other issue. Though Republicans have gained with voters since 2023, that hasn’t happened from narrowing of the gap—so to speak. Republicans consolidated voters who prioritized a set of the least popular issues while Democrats remained steady in preference overall.

The perception of transgenderism’s total collapse came from the frame of Republican campaign strategy and Democrats’ toleration of dogma, not from a mass ideological shift in tolerating discrimination against trans people.

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Democrats: beware of whiplash politics

Democrats must not overcorrect by treating trans rights as radioactive. Doing so would also give the far left more reason to equivocate and the right a sense of vindication for their oppressive approach.

It’s completely fine to oppose trans athletes, but Democratic leaders should be careful not to make the few unpopular issues the only trans-related topics they ever discuss. Doing so would be missing a major opportunity to emphasize their military service, advocate for fair practices in business and education, and call out the stigmatization of trans people in civil society. If not, Republicans certainly won’t come to their rescue, and I don’t think the fight for equal protection should be left to people like Hasan Piker

With the Republican game still being played and the far left planting themselves on the hill of critical theory, the Democratic base is left to do what it can to support and protect trans people within a liberal system, where the rule of law prevails.

Democrats are by far the best (and possibly only) vehicle for Americans to help trans people secure the civil rights for which they are entitled. But to implement ideas that help trans people, Democrats have to win over those who aren’t already convinced.

I’ve long opposed mandatory voter ID. Not because of claims of “racism” or “classism,” but because the spirit of the Constitution (especially in the post–civil rights era) is to avoid placing unnecessary barriers on voting. What makes certain barriers necessary is whether the problem is serious enough to undermine the credibility and/or actual fulfillment of free and fair elections.

Things that can undermine election credibility, such as fraudulent ballots or manipulation in counting, are technically real. But I’m not convinced they rise to a level that meaningfully threatens election integrity here in the United States—though we should still work to fix the bugs that exist.

One current bug is the growing distrust in elections among voters. I entirely blame Donald Trump and the MAGA movement for this erosion of trust. However, assigning blame doesn’t change the reality: confidence in elections is declining, and that decline itself is a serious democratic problem.

If Democrats want to restore the public’s confidence, they must start to prioritize restoring trust in elections over the principle of eliminating every procedural burden.

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Why fight to the death on this?

I think many Americans misunderstand how elections function at a basic level.

We vote to remove or retain those in power; we don’t vote to directly implement specific ideas. Once in office, politicians are free to act in unpredictable ways. They can shift left or right, or even switch parties altogether. The only real political constraint on their behavior is their desire to win the next election. Therefore, the implications of any election outcome—what Trump or Harris would actually do once in office—are inherently uncertain.

All of this is to say that election reform is uniquely fraught. Changing the rules of elections is risky precisely because we don’t know how those changes will affect outcomes in the short, middle, or long run. Republican gerrymandering efforts from less than a year ago, for example, now appear to be approaching a point of backfire. That uncertainty makes reform complicated and demands a periodic reassessment of positions.

Voter ID is one such case. What was once widely understood as a policy that benefited Republicans has, within the span of a decade, shifted in ways that may now advantage Democrats.

Matthew Yglesias wrote a piece last year titled “When People Don’t Vote, Democrats Win,” arguing that Democrats’ opposition to things like voter ID requirements isn’t worth placing themselves on the unpopular side of a policy that may be, on balance, beneficial. As he puts it: “Why fight to the death on this?”

Democratic over-performance in recent special elections has given corroboration to this theory. There is, of course, some degree of backlash to any party in power—but that dynamic should compound the pattern, not disprove it.

Mandatory voter ID appears unlikely to harm Democrats electorally, and it is broadly popular with voters.

As I’ve been stressing for the past year, Democrats need to do everything they can to win the Senate in November. Coming out in support of a policy with such widespread approval would likely improve Democrats’ standing with the electorate, particularly given that younger, conservative-leaning voters are among the most suspicious of the election process. Supporting voter ID would also take out some steam in conspiracies and musings about Democrats wanting less election security.

A symbol of political miscalculation

Unfortunately, Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has become a symbol of Democratic miscalculation by reacting to bad optics instead of taking advantage of good political opportunities.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a video circulated of Schumer touting his record on funding Israel and the relationship he helped foster between the two allied nations. I like to think I take a more nuanced view of the conflict than many of my left-leaning counterparts, and even I immediately recognized how bad of a look this was. Then, whether in response to the backlash from that video or for his own reasons, Schumer decided last week that coming out against Republicans’ SAVE Act would be the smart move.

I have my own issues with the latest Republican election legislation, particularly with the limits on the allowed documents required to vote. But I couldn’t help but notice that Schumer likened the bill to “Jim Crow 2.0.”

Democrats should avoid doing this, even if they are against voter ID. Not only does it underrate the oppression imposed by actual Jim Crow laws, they also ignore the real improvements in our laws and broader society when it comes to voting equality. Discarding that history for a talking point about providing birth certificates or passports is disingenuous and only adds credibility to Republican attacks on Democrats reluctance when it comes to tightening election laws.

The SAVE Act is not the new Jim Crow. Race is not even the most important implication of the bill—it’s married women who changed their names. These women are more likely to be white and right-leaning. The only counterargument I can see for Democrats, in terms of electoral risks, is the growing narrative that women have been moving left over the past decade—the so-called gender voting gap. But this is often overstated. PEW data shows that Trump received a higher share of support from white women in 2024 than he did in 2016, and only two points fewer than in 2020. He also gained five points among Black women from 2020 to 2024.

Again, election reforms are difficult to assess given an ever-shifting electorate. But on its face, it appears Democrats would not be losing nearly as much as they think they would by supporting voter ID laws—or even the SAVE Act more broadly. Even if they can’t get themselves to support new election laws, they shouldn’t be comparing modern election legislation to historical apartheid.

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Democrats should try to win elections

Adam Schiff recently made a fair point in response to an irrelevant ABC News question about the SAVE Act, when he was asked whether Democrats should support basic photo ID requirements. Schiff argued that Republicans have spent years sowing distrust in elections through baseless fraud conspiracies, and that asking Democrats to now support “voter suppression” would reward that behavior.

His sentiment is valid, but it misidentifies the central problem Democrats now face.

As I’ve argued, election reform is not an area where parties can reliably outmaneuver hypothetical future tactics by the opposition. What is certain is that public confidence in democratic institutions is essential to democracy. Supporting basic ID requirements does not commit Democrats to endorsing every future restriction Republicans might propose. If Republicans later push more exclusionary measures, Democrats can and should draw a clear line and persuade voters that those policies—not showing a driver’s license—are the real sources of democratic harm. If they lose that argument, like they have with voter ID, then they’ll have to make further concessions. That’s politics.

I found a study from last year that argues states with strict voter ID laws experienced a nearly 3% decrease in turnout in presidential elections—but little to no effect in states that had adopted those laws earlier. Alternatively, midterm election turnout in those same states actually increased by a similar amount, particularly among early adopters. There seems to be a modest effect that varies by election type and adoption timing, but overall the impacts range from generally beneficial for Democrats to no impact at all.

This brings us back to the key question Democrats should be asking themselves: “Why fight to the death on this?”

Voter ID is not needed to stop fraud. But it may be necessary to restore trust in the system and could even work against Republicans. We can’t know the full impact in advance, but what we do know is that elections are one of the most important mechanisms of our society, Americans have grown distrustful of both the procedures and the results, and Democrats need to do everything they can to win public support.

Another thing we should acknowledge is that actual implementation of requiring voter ID can be easily corrected later if it fails as a solution. Take all this together and it looks like a good argument for Democrats championing stronger identification requirements in elections.

One night when I was in college, I saw a guy shouting next to a folding table out next to a bar with a sign that read: “Abolish the Police. Change my Mind”. This guy clearly thought the idea had enough merit to publicly argue for it on the streets of a liberal university town, so I decided to take him up on the challenge.

There was some back-and-forth—much more cordial than most of my encounters with street preachers and the like. Eventually, I got him to publicly reckon with the errors of his theory: he himself supported a large group of trained and experienced individuals who enforce the law using government-sanctioned force when necessary. He conceded those individuals would need equipment, training, and weaponry, and that in rare cases they would justifiably use force to uphold the law.

I felt it was worthwhile to leave it there, forcing him to accept either we needed the police—or Batman.

My point in that debate was simple: our society is rooted in the rule of law. Creating it, abiding by it, and improving it are all part of our grand experiment. The other part is enforcing it. When our institutions fail in carrying out that enforcement, we should be quick to criticize them. But we should do so constructively—in a way that allows for better error correction, not less by calling for its destruction.

The recent killings of American citizens by immigration agencies in Minneapolis have left Democrats with a similar sentiment as the guy in front of the bar: the instinct to respond to institutional failure by calling for abolition, rather than reform.

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Do Democrats want to be right or win?

“Abolish ICE” is increasingly becoming both a slogan and a serious policy proposal on the left. I don’t want to suggest that this reaction is completely irrational or immoral. But I do think the idea is, at best, impractical and, at worst, a serious electoral liability.

Matthew Yglesias is someone whose ideas I follow quite often. I think one of his most important contributions came early in Trump’s second term, when he began laying out just how difficult it would be for Democrats to win back the Senate. The map and demographic trends are unforgiving. Without the Senate, even if Democrats manage to win the House, they’ll spend the next two years largely powerless—watching as the Trump Admin continues to harass citizens in their own neighborhoods. The judiciary will continue to be reshaped in long-lasting ways. Impeachment will be mostly symbolic. And to make it worse, Democrats will absorb more blame for economic turbulence and public dissatisfaction since they’d control part of Congress.

On the bright side, the 2026 Senate map also represents one of Democrats’ best opportunities to make gains for the foreseeable future. Given that reality, I think it’s worth taking seriously whether calling to abolish the very agency responsible for interior immigration enforcement helps or harms Democrats likelihood of winning both chambers in November.

Recent Wall Street Journal polling on major political issues shows that while Democrats have made gains since the start of Trump 2.0, they still trail Republicans by a long-shot on two key issues: border security and immigration enforcement.

The poll was conducted after the killing of Renee Good but before the killing of Alex Pretti. Public opinion on Trump’s handling of immigration worsened after ICE agents shot and killed Good, but it hasn’t meaningfully slowed the administration’s enforcement agenda—either in Minneapolis or nationally, including the detention of American children. The reason for that is somewhat obvious: interior immigration enforcement remains popular.

Democrats beware: the online outrage over these shootings does not neatly translate into official support for abolition of ICE. Nor does it represent the nuance of public opinion in regards to these two tragic shootings in Minneapolis.

It’s true that Republicans who viewed the video of Good’s killing were less likely to say Good posed a threat to ICE agents. However, more Democrats and Independents were open to the idea of her being a threat after watching the video. Two-thirds of Independents said Good was not following ICE agents’ orders. In the more recent Pretti shooting, roughly half of Independents either believe the shooting was justified or are unsure.

Even as ICE’s approval declines, public support for immigration enforcement remains firmly on the Republican side. The vast majority of voters want immigration enforcement to exist—they just want it carried out safely, legally, and with accountability. To accomplish this, Democrats should propose reforms to interior immigration enforcement that align with public opinion.

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Abolition should be plan Z, not plan A

When institutions that do important work fall short of our moral standards, we have a duty to improve them. The complication for Democrats is that immigration enforcement itself was a major reason Trump won in the first place. Many Americans wanted a president who would take enforcement seriously—and aggressively.

How do Democrats win public trust on immigration enforcement? By proposing popular reforms that hold the institution in higher standards. Arguing to abolish the institution responsible for that enforcement is to say interior immigration enforcement isn’t worth the time or energy, affirming Republican claims that the left doesn’t take the problem seriously at all.

Democrats can acknowledge the failures of agencies like ICE and still offer credible and popular alternatives that demonstrates seriousness about law enforcement.

For example, 84% of voters agree that people have the right to safely observe, record, and document ICE activities in public. Sixty-five percent support accountability legislation that would allow individuals to sue federal officers for constitutional violations. Seventy-one percent want an independent investigation into the killing of Renee Good. Other reforms—like restoring or increasing training requirements, mandating body cameras, and requiring clear agent identification—are easy wins and broadly popular without denigrating the need for immigration enforcement.

Accountability measures like the ones I laid out are not radical ideas; they are baseline expectations for any law enforcement body. Even if we dislike how the institution currently operates, the underlying responsibilities do not disappear and neither do their errors. To be fair, I do think that’s what many Democrats mean by “abolish ICE”—that the Trump Admin has gone too far with enforcement operations. But we shouldn’t be arguing for full abolition if that’s not what we mean.

Does anyone know what abolish ICE actually means?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement enforces immigration law inside the United States and investigates cross-border crime. It consists of two primary branches: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

ERO is responsible for locating, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants. It operates detention facilities and executes removal orders. This is the branch most people are referring to when they talk about ICE or advocate for abolishing it. HSI, by contrast, investigates serious crimes connected to international trafficking, smuggling, financial crime, cybercrime, and child exploitation, both domestically and abroad.

One important detail often missed in public discussion is that the agents who shot Pretti were not ICE agents at all—they were with Customs and Border Protection.

Border Patrol is tasked with patrolling ports of entry and areas near the border, intercepting illegal crossings, drugs, and weapons. Which raises an obvious question: if the administration’s stated goal is interior immigration enforcement, what the hell is Border Patrol doing in Minneapolis—more than 250 miles from the… Canadian border? My best guess is it likely reflects how little statutory constraint exists on the executive branch’s discretion over these agencies.

As of late 2025, more than 2,000 CBP agents have been deployed to at least 25 interior U.S. cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Charlotte. Rather than abolishing ICE, Democrats could argue for jurisdictional clarity: keeping Border Patrol at or near actual borders, where unauthorized entry occurs. Limiting interior deployments would significantly reduce unnecessary interactions between militarized border agents and the general public—a major cause of the recent killings of citizens in Minneapolis.

The real head scratcher is that support for Border Patrol is a net-positive after they killed Pretti. To me, that signals the American public doesn’t really know the differences between the departments or they don’t know how much CBP has infiltrated the operations.

When it comes to ICE itself, the reality is that interior immigration enforcement is necessary. Both Minneapolis shootings involved veteran agents who served under multiple administrations of different parties. It’s tempting to assume ICE is entirely staffed by untrained MAGA loyalists acting with impunity, but that narrative isn’t accurate—and it definitely won’t win Democrats the Senate.

I’ve seen some suggest dispersing ICE’s duties across other agencies, but this ignores how specialized their functions are and the potential strains on other departments. We’ve already tried this approach historically: ICE CBP, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are all descendants of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which handled immigration enforcement for decades. Claims that “we were fine before ICE” overlook the fact that we’ve had ICE-like interior enforcement since before World War II.

ICE exists to fulfill a specific and legitimate purpose. And those purposes are generally popular. It isn’t irredeemably broken or beyond reform.

Institutions are made up of people, and people can be trained, held accountable, replaced, and improved. Democrats should focus on doing exactly that, rather than repeating a political mistake they can’t afford to make again.

What has always fascinated me about specific military operations is the moment when overwhelming force collides not just with a foreign nation’s security apparatus, but also with the world’s expectations.

That’s why the American military operation reportedly carried out in Venezuela on January 3rd—“Operation Absolute Resolve”—has been stuck in my head. If the descriptions are accurate, it will likely go down in history as a huge technical achievement. Israel’s Operation Focus in 1967 comes to mind, when the majority of Egypt and Syria’s air forces were destroyed in a matter of hours. So does Ukraine’s clandestine “Operation Spiderweb,” in which drones concealed deep inside Russian territory crippled a significant portion of Russia’s long-range aviation fleet.

According to early accounts, more than 150 U.S. military aircraft were involved in strikes across northern Venezuela, culminating in the seizure of the country’s sitting president, Nicolás Maduro. It was swift. No U.S. troops were reportedly killed, though some were injured, and it remains unclear whether this operation marks a one-off intervention or the opening move of something longer and more entangling.

Still, there is a meaningful difference between being late and decisive, and being late and reckless. Arresting a foreign head of state in a contained operation is a tough endeavour. For that distinction alone, the military sophistication on display deserves acknowledgment and some praise.

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Maduro has rights like everyone else

I’ve read the indictments. I’m not a lawyer or a legal scholar, so what follows is my best non-expert interpretation.

Count One: Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy

This charge requires prosecutors to prove two key elements beyond a reasonable doubt to a New York jury. First, that drug trafficking into the United States occurred. Second—and more difficult—that Maduro personally knew about it, and did so with the knowledge or intent that proceeds would support designated terrorist organizations.

If prosecutors fail to establish Maduro’s knowledge and intent regarding terrorist support, the statute collapses, even if drug trafficking itself is proven.

Count Two: Cocaine Importation Conspiracy

This count alleges that Maduro participated in the manufacture and distribution of cocaine abroad while knowing or having reason to believe that it would be smuggled into the United States, including U.S. territorial waters. The structure is more straightforward, but the burden remains the same: proof of knowing and intentional conduct.

A jury could find that trafficking occurred without finding that Maduro knowingly directed or approved it.

Counts Three and Four: Possession/Conspiracy of Machine guns and Destructive Devices

These are not lesser charges, but they generally function as enhancements or extensions of the first two. They rely on the existence of a qualifying drug-trafficking offense and allege the knowing use of heavy weaponry in furtherance of those crimes.

In theory, Maduro could be convicted on these counts without convictions on the first two, but doing so would be considerably more difficult.

All of this, of course, presumes that U.S. courts are found to have jurisdiction and that claims of head-of-state immunity fail—an argument that has been raised before in U.S. courts, with mixed historical success.

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We shouldn’t overlook politics

Much of what elected officials do is politically calculated, and it would be naïve to treat this operation as an exception. From a purely political standpoint, the Trump Admin appears to have made a fairly shrewd move.

Opposition to the arresting of Maduro is easily framed as sympathy for authoritarianism or narco-terrorism, whether or not that framing is fair. I initially thought that characterization might be overstated until I saw AP reporting of demonstrators openly holding pro-Maduro signs outside a New York courthouse.

Much of the liberal media has emphasized the supposed unpopularity of intervention in Venezuela. I’m not convinced that’s accurate. Polling I’ve seen suggests something closer to uncertainty than rejection: roughly 40 percent approval, 35 percent disapproval, and a sizable remainder unsure. That hardly signals opposition, especially when compared to other Trump scandals and policies. What’s more likely is that most people are confused, relieved by how easily Maduro was captured, and skeptical about the long-term strategy.

The more interesting political maneuver, in my view, is cultural rather than electoral. American voters have spent decades growing disillusioned with interventionism. Trump needed a model that distinguished itself from the Bush-era formula of invasion, occupation, and nation-building. If this operation represents anything, it’s an attempt at a different template: initial dominance followed by leverage, rather than prolonged control followed by hope and prayers.

Whether that’s sustainable is another question.

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Trump wants the oil. Rubio wants regime change.

I’m generally more open to intervention than many of my left-leaning peers. The United States has power, influence, and a set of values that I’d rather see shaping the world than those of Russia or China—or even Europeans. However, I don’t think we should plunge ourselves into needless conflicts.

It helps to have a working theory to judge actions on: like the search for WMD’s, the destruction of bin Laden and his helpers, or even stopping the spread of communism. Whether these turn out to be good theories is up for debate.

I’m just not sure the Trump Admin has any real coherent theory for what we’re doing in Venezuela. It seems to be a lot of overlapping interests: Trump wants the oil, Rubio wants regime change, and no one thinks Russia, China, or even Venezuela deserves to control or influence the nation. I think they’re using the drug-trafficking enforcement simply as a spring-board to begin the process.

Though Trump has stated multiple times the US will be running the government, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested the Admin would instead coerce cooperation from the new leadership through military operations on drug-trafficking and through control over the oil refineries.

I have my issues with this coercive strategy. First of all, we have little to no reason to think the backup for Maduro will be any more kind to US interests, nor that the people around him will cooperate. In fact, reports suggests corruption and oppression is widespread and a “team effort”. It was pointed out to Rubio that the regime remains in place, including the interior and defense ministers, who have ties to Russia and have been indicted by the U.S.

Rubio argues that the U.S. could only get one, which raises questions about the apparent success of the Admin’s goals. While there likely won’t be a “surge” like we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq (where opposition forces returned to the battlefield after we thought we had already won) it may be an even tougher mission here to remove all the adversarial figures in the first place, since the fight will take place in courts and public opinion rather than in combat.

It’s the oil, stupid!

Venezuela today produces a fraction of the oil it did 15 years ago. And roughly three-quarters of its reserves consist of extra-heavy crude, which requires specialized refineries and advanced extraction techniques. Many of Venezuela’s facilities have not been modernized to handle this. Meanwhile, the world’s largest heavy-crude refineries are located in Texas and Louisiana.

It’s not hard to imagine that Trump saw a closing window of opportunity—combined with security concerns about Russia and China—and decided to act. Whether the goal is to revive Venezuelan exports for U.S. allies or simply to exert control over the flow of oil, influence over energy remains the most plausible sticking point.

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Final thoughts

We shouldn’t want the Admin to feel they have free rein to invade other countries or kidnap foreign leaders—but they should act if they truly believe there’s a compelling reason. Those reasons need to be precise and narrowly tied to the specific conflict or situation at hand; they shouldn’t automatically justify actions in Cuba, Colombia, or elsewhere.

I’m truly worried that’s the exact plan the Trump Admin has in mind: get people on board with Venezuela and they’ll have little argument against doing the same other places.

There’s a lot more questions than answers thus far and I fully agree with about not giving foreign policy takes in the midst of the event spilling out into our feeds. But I did want to put some thoughts out here for readers in a sort of thinking-out-loud formed article. It seemed to me that too many write about these things with the presumption that they’re an expert or have more information than the reader, but I am openly laying out the information I possess and how I’m thinking about the situation thus far. I will leave this with a great excerpt that exemplifies the humble and unpredictable perspective of viewing these things, especially when Trump is involved":

When it comes to predicting the president’s next move, too many politicians and analysts assume coherence where there is division, chaos when there is improvisation, and restraint where there is only selectivity. Trump’s foreign policy behavior emerges not from doctrine but from friction. Venezuela offered a target that felt weak, morally disreputable, geographically proximate, and manageable.

Under Trump, foreign policy outcomes are less the product of grand strategy than of episodic alignment. Observers should stop asking whether a given action is consistent with Trump’s supposed beliefs and start asking whether it is legible to him as fast, dominant, and containable. They should pay closer attention to intra-administration dynamics and to how ideas persist even when not immediately acted upon. Otherwise, the failure to predict Venezuela will not be an outlier.

Check out my other foreign policy articles:

My article Why Republicans can’t stop sounding racist was about the lack of explicit cultural understanding on the right and how that deficiency causes their rhetoric (and their immigration policy) to sound overtly racist.

This piece is a narrower analysis focused on the specific places and cultures Republicans claim to want. The irony being that these places, while sharing a fundamental culture of openness and change, differ significantly on policy specifics because of those shared traditions.

Republicans favor less conservative and religious groups in favor of more secular and progressive ones who happen to be white.

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Sweden or Somalia?

President Trump has intensified his criticism of immigrant communities in the United States. At a recent campaign-style rally in Pennsylvania, he repeated a familiar line: he wishes the U.S. received more immigrants from places like Sweden and Denmark, not Somalia.

Many Democrats interpret this as a straightforward preference for white Christians over brown Muslims. Inside the Republican base, the explanation is usually framed not in racial terms but cultural ones. They believe immigrants from Scandinavia share “our” values, while others do not.

Shared culture is a reasonable criterion for immigration. But culture is not determined by race or birthplace.

The irony in the Republican position is that the very societies they want immigrants from are the same societies they the most time condemning.

The traits Americans generally prefer should be those composing open societies; liberal democratic institutions, respect for individual rights, and traditions of self-critique and course correction. These traits make societies adaptable and prosperous. But they also happen to be the traits that distinguish Scandinavia from the societies the American right disdains.

Republicans will praise Northern and Western European societies for their cultural closeness to America while attacking them as “socialist” and “woke.”

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MAGA prefers the people who don’t prefer them

People tolerant of different religions and sexualities align more closely with the values America claims to uphold. That makes it almost obvious why many Europeans don’t like Republicans.

During both of Trump’s terms, rhetoric and policies from Washington alienated these populations. Tourism and immigration from Scandinavia and Western Europe declined sharply.

Europeans’ approval of universal healthcare, robust welfare programs, and multiculturalism stands in stark contrast to American right-wing domestic priorities, all while the countries MAGA most disfavors—like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Cuba— are placed under total travel bans. Yet those unfavorable nations are more aligned with their own conservative and religious worldview.

And this is where Republicans face a real dilemma: if immigrants are expected to assimilate into American values, then the “host” society must also be recognizable and welcoming to them.

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MAGA is a bad reason to become American

Assimilation is MAGA’s central concern, and yet they refuse to assimilate themselves into the progressive, tolerant, and self-critical institutions that have shaped our society. If they will not embrace the culture they claim to admire, why should we expect immigrants to?

The same cultural affinity Republicans want immigrants to possess before crossing the border is the very affinity that keeps them on the other side of the Atlantic.

If you notice in this poll on how other countries view the U.S. (shoutout for the photo), it’s the less white, less “woke” countries that tend to favor a Republican-led America—India, Nigeria, and Brazil. Meanwhile, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, and Australia hold very negative views.

Might I just mention that the Republican infighting over migration from non-white, non-Christian societies is an absolute travesty: it makes no sense. But because they view cultural preferences only through identity markers and national historical narratives, Republicans are missing out on a huge pool of talented, tolerant individuals seeking opportunity from places like Japan and India.

Stephen Miller (who is more correct on this distinction than he is often given credit for, though still far from a morally sound position) has recognized the significant impact of “cultural importing”. But when pressed to identify shared cultures across ethnicities, religions, and histories, he can only point to a narrow group whom he’d allow inside the country: white South Africans “fleeing persecution.”

So what is it about these kinds of people that Republicans like?

What do white Christians in South Africa have that the thousands of Afghan women, families in Sudan, and children in Yemen don’t posses?

Republicans admire the principled aspects of liberal societies through order, prosperity, and cohesion, while opposing the values and policies that produce those outcomes. This makes their immigration preferences incoherent: they want people shaped by systems they despise, and they reject people whose conservative nationalism mirrors their own worldview.

In other words, Republicans only want immigrants from the most progressive societies, and people from those societies don’t want Republicans.

Right after his inauguration, Donald Trump told Sean Hannity that he could look at some immigrants and just tell they were trouble. It was just another Trump diatribe, but it revealed a darker sentiment bubbling in Republican politics.

Even if it wasn’t the harshest thing he’s said about immigrants, it made explicit an underlying assumption: that you can infer a person’s character from identity (skin color, language, so on) rather than their ideas and behavior.

For people in a country like the United States, where 1 in 5 are bilingual and 2 in 5 are non-white, this kind of speech should be concerning.

Large parts of the Republican Party have slowly aligned themselves with bigoted rhetoric and policies that target black and brown people at car washes, daycares, and factories. Masked military men with weapons stop cars on the highway to arrest entire families. Many American citizens and permanent residents now live in fear solely because of their race, accent, or attire—fear validated by the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing ICE to directly target individuals based on language and race.

What makes these policies even worse is how Republicans talk about immigration in light of the horrendous videos and reports. Their language is often unsympathetic yet vague enough to the point it’s hard not to hear white Christian-nationalist undertones.

If someone says:

“People who speak another language are irritating. I can usually look at them and tell their trouble. Too many people like that raise crime and housing costs, you know. It’s no reason their home countries are hellholes. We don’t want them tainting our society—deport them.”

Most readers immediately hear the bigotry. The stereotypes—and stigmas—all point to a particular image of who isn’t welcome: them.

No one assumes this tangent refers to Irish christians who commit tax fraud at a higher proportion than average Americans.

Many people hear what’s being implied. That plausible deniability is exactly how dog-whistling works. Yet, I don’t think that’s what’s occurring most of the time. To me, that vagueness is evidence of a deeper error: Republicans use identity markers like race, nationality, language, or religion because they don’t have a coherent, explicit idea of what culture actually is. When you don’t understand culture, you fall back on visible traits that feel substantive but tell you almost nothing about how a person thinks.

The result is rhetoric that sounds racist—attracting those who truly are.

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The Nationalistic Dog-whistling’s of MAGA

Many Republicans insist they’re just defending “the culture”. But they never explain what that culture actually consists of. The identity-collectivist speech they utilize signals ideas associated with nativism and white nationalism, intentionally or not.

If Republicans could articulate a restrictionist immigration policy without sounding racist, I think they would. It would be more politically salient, substantively tolerable, and moral! They simply don’t know how.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem doesn’t cite specific data on violence or individual screening mechanisms for this recommendation: the justification is entirely rooted in a generalized stigma of certain kinds of people.

What kinds of people? Them.

But why those countries? Why not Russia, Israel, or Germany?

The Trump Admin’s lack of policy, exemplified by Noem’s arbitrary recommendation, is due to their reliance on proxies (majority-Muslim, majority black or brown, non-world-power) rather than any meaningful cultural criteria. And this is precisely where Republican conceptual understanding collapses: they refuse to explain their cultural expectations while demonizing entire citizenries based on their technological contributions as a whole throughout history.

The problem with basing immigration policy on nationally-ordained ideology is that we know individuals from backwards, authoritarian societies can and do become passionate defenders of open societies—and that some born in free societies reject those very values. Travel bans are erroneous not because we shouldn’t have immigration standards, but because banning citizens of entire nations denies the possibility of individuals of those nation’s choosing to fulfill those standards!

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The identity-collectivism of Republicans

What kind of society are we trying to build? Presumably one that is open to criticism, embraces error correction, and strong enough to let diverse interests coexist without losing the shared traditions that make openness possible in the first place.

This is the part Republicans generally get right: we’re not just importing individuals, we’re importing ideas. I’m just not convinced Republicans know what actually separates those things. Too often, they make ideology sound inherent—essential—to one’s nationality, ethnicity, or environment. But identity tells us nothing about a person’s commitment to a particular set of ideas (you would think anti-woke folks would understand that).

Skin color and birth certificates cannot serve as meaningful criteria for deciding who belongs in a society that values individualism.

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Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth?

The Vice President offers an example of why Republicans can’t help themselves but sound racist on almost a weekly basis.

We know when Vance complains about Spanish being spoken in his neighborhood, he’s not referring to a white Christian who happens to be bilingual.

Besides the Vice President arguing that the quasi-racist quote was made up and that he fully agrees with it, there’s a much deeper problem here.

Language is an important tool for communication and practical integration. But it isn’t an indicator of a person’s worldview or values. Boomers and Gen Alpha barely speak the same dialect. Los Angeles slang and New York slang may as well be different languages. Even English speakers across the world use different concepts and references within their shared terminology (remember what Brits call cigarettes?).

Language cannot serve as a measurement of someone’s cultural appropriation. Treating our mere utterances as essential to a person’s ideology collapses cultural analysis into bigoted identity politics.

Richard Hanania makes a useful observation about Vance’s fixation on the languages spoken by neighbors. Consider Switzerland: a predominantly white, Christian country where barely half the population shares the same language. Yet most Republicans would have no objection to Swiss immigrants moving into their communities.

Why? Is it because the Swiss are white? Because the country has few Muslims or racial minorities? Given the rhetoric of the Trump Admin, and in some cases its policy choices, many readers rationally interpret it that way.

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To trouble or not to trouble?

We can’t talk about which cultures to permit unless we understand the culture we want to build.

It’s true: we should be able to have policy conversations about culture without being accused of racism or xenophobia. And it should be okay to base immigration policy on that.

Open societies that value diversity and dissent cannot function if they admit large numbers of people who are dogmatic and exclusionary. What Republicans have yet to grasp: it is the dynamic institutions of individual minds that determines whether someone can embrace and sustain an open societies’ cultural traditions.

If what we are seeking is a shared culture, not particular ethnic customs or origins of birth, then it would be wrong to ignore the pleas of Hong Kong independence-seekers or to deny Afghan allies who risked their lives assisting U.S. military operations and clung to US planes during the evacuation. This is not a call to abolish law enforcement or ignore criminal behavior. Nor does it mean granting citizenship automatically.

What we want is for Republicans to narrow their grievance to illegal criminals and degenerates—not anyone who doesn’t look like them.

Removing and denying individuals from certain countries who have undergone the rigorous process of becoming U.S. citizens (which includes learning English, understanding American history, and navigating numerous interviews and forms) from their naturalization ceremonies should itself be a criminal offense. But almost everyone notices the tinge of racism undergirding the entire operation.

A society that values individualism must evaluate individuals.

Culture is a set of ideas, not a phenotype or geography. So when immigration policy is guided by identity, racism fills the explanatory void.

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Most of us are aware of the phrase “separation of church and state,” often mistakenly thought to be inscribed into the Constitution itself. The line comes from an 1802 letter from Thomas Jefferson to Baptist leaders in New England, more than a decade after the Constitution’s ratification.

I’ve known the origin of the phrase for years, but what I didn’t know was the broader context: Jefferson was responding to criticism over his refusal to issue a federal proclamation for a national day of thanks—Thanksgiving.

Presidents Washington and Adams had both enthusiastically participated. Their proclamations read like church sermons from the national pulpit, calling Americans to prayer and acknowledging divine influence in world affairs. No one questioned whether the president could call the nation to worship. In fact, as Jefferson’s correspondence showed, it was largely expected.

Jefferson’s religious views were complicated. Often accused of being an atheist by his political opponents, he was better understood as a Deist shaped by Enlightenment values. Jefferson was skeptical of the supernatural, and crafted his own version of the New Testament stripped of miracles—the “Jefferson Bible”. Christopher Hitchens once argued that had Jefferson lived to read The Origin of Species, he presumably would’ve been a full-fledged atheist.1

Regardless, Jefferson’s religious heterodoxy, as well as his political convictions, had become a flashpoint in early American politics. And while the First Amendment clearly avoided establishing a national religion, early leaders still saw national days of prayer and thanks as appropriate expressions of civic unity.

That is, until Jefferson dissented.

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The constitutionality of Thanksgiving

A tradition of thanksgiving was in place since the Declaration, when Congress initiated a national day of thanks after America’s victory at the Battle of Saratoga. Washington, who had sent troops to that battle while fighting off the British in Pennsylvania, had a clear connection to the war effort. He was more religiously devout than many other Founders and valued the influence of Federalism.

Reasonably, his proclamation for Thanksgiving in 1789 was drenched in revelatory overtones and mystic fanaticism meant to invoke a civic force.

“It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor…

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be—That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks…”

John Adams, a Unitarian and Federalist, followed his lead.

It wasn’t until Jefferson arrived that anyone thought too much about the quasi-religious tradition.

For Jefferson, it was a kind of state-sponsored religious practice, at best, and imposition, at worst. His reasoning was stylized in the letter to Baptists when describing the “wall of separation”—Jefferson supported the Constitution but was skeptical of federal impositions.

Though his letter featured in some newspapers, it was mostly interpreted as disconnected from thanksgiving proclamations, given he didn’t mention it explicitly. Thus, he remained vulnerable to Federalist attacks that accused him of godlessness, despite his once declaring a Thanksgiving while serving as governor of Virginia.

In 1808, Jefferson explained he did not think the federal government could endorse a day of thanks and prayer without running against the First Amendment—that it was best served by states and local communities.2

Thanksgiving was gradually shifting from a tradition focused on giving thanks for divine guidance in human affairs to an ideological battle about the proper relationship between government and religion, and the limits of freedom within the framework of governmental authority.

Though Jefferson never issued a Thanksgiving proclamation as president, his close ally James Madison would. Madison’s reasoning and his proclamation’s message differed widely from Washington’s and Adams’s emphasis on divine Providence.

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Madison’s regrettable decision

It should be ironic that Jefferson’s right-hand man, who largely authored the Constitution, would find himself on the opposite side of this divide in American Founding politics.

Madison’s Thanksgiving proclamations occurred in the midst of the War of 1812. It was the first declared war of the United States since its founding and, more importantly, its unionization. That made it of the utmost importance to maintain a sense of national solidarity.

When I first read Madison’s proclamation, it seemed as though Madison reluctantly delivered the proclamation in the face of Congressional pressure. As it turns out, that’s more or less what occurred.

“The Senate and House of Representatives of the United States have by a joint resolution signified their desire that a day may be recommended to be observed by the people of the United States with religious solemnity as a day of thanksgiving and of devout acknowledgments to Almighty God for His great goodness manifested in restoring to them the blessing of peace.”

Madison differed slightly from Jefferson’s interpretation in that he believed legislative resolutions were the path to issuing such a proclamation.

However, after his term was over, Madison expressed regret over the proclamations and wrote letters explaining why.

“The idea also of a union of all to form one nation under one [government] in acts of devotion to the God of all is an imposing idea. But reason and the principles of the [Christian] religion require that all the individuals composing a nation, even of the same precise creed and wishing to unite in a universal act of religion at the same time, the union ought to be effected [through] the intervention of their religious, not of their political, representatives.”

After Madison’s reluctant proclamations, no president would participate in the tradition for another half century. One reason may be that Jefferson’s ideological wing controlled the presidency for at least two decades after his term. Either way, as with the earliest proclamations issued to celebrate success in military conflict, the next one would not occur until the Union was at war with itself.

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The emancipation of Thanksgiving

In 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg resulted in a significant Union victory, despite the high casualty count. With this victory in mind, echoing the remnants of Washington’s proclamation, President Lincoln issued a Thanksgiving proclamation—this time with a standardized date for the last Thursday in November.

“In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and provoke their aggressions, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict…

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.”

Lincoln inspired the national day of thanksgiving by appealing to all Americans around a shared sense of gratitude and optimism, even amid civil conflict. By framing it as a federal observance rather than a partisan or explicitly religious act, he helped make the holiday broadly acceptable, even to those who thought more like Jefferson.

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The shifting of whom thanks is given

Since Lincoln, every president has participated in the tradition of proclaiming a day of national thanks. Some have leveraged a distinctly religious message while others have strayed to a more historical and nationalized narrative, drawing to the “first” Thanksgiving as having taken place at Plymouth colony in 1621—an Americanization of the custom.

In 1939, known as the year of two Thanksgivings, FDR had to maneuver complaints that the holiday was too close to Christmas, and that consumer shopping was delayed because of its proximity. In response, Roosevelt altered Lincoln’s initial date to move to the fourth Thursday, rather than the last.

Throughout the 50s and 60s, the Thanksgiving message would move into a historical bend, and by 1969, President Nixon would make the very first Thanksgiving proclamation that did not explicitly mention a Supreme Being or divine characters—only vaguely referencing “the Source of all good” and “His blessings on mankind.”

Nearly 200 years after the Declaration of Independence, President Ford would be the first president to not mention divinity of any kind in his Thanksgiving address. He instead drew on the pluralism of American society and its successes that stemmed from it, rather than any message of an ultimate influencer.

“Let us join in giving thanks for our cultural pluralism. Let us celebrate our diversity and the great strengths that have come from sharing our traditions, our ideas, our resources, our hopes and our dreams. Let us be grateful that for 200 years our people have been dedicated to fulfilling the democratic ideal - dedicated to securing “liberty and justice for all.”

Here in the 21st century, presidents have mostly delivered proclamations that emphasize whatever their momentary base prioritizes. Presidents Bush and Trump highlighted the religious aspect while still nodding to historical inspiration. Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden focused more on American values and less on the religious dimension.

Looking at proclamations from Washington through today, one can see how deeply our history—including the eras of Washington and Lincoln—is embedded, compared with the Founding period, which was more overtly religious and nationally divided, by taking a look at President Biden’s 2021 proclamation:

“The Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving to honor a successful harvest, made possible by the generosity and kindness of the Wampanoag people. On the way to Valley Forge, as General George Washington and his troops continued the fierce struggle for our Nation’s independence, they found a moment for Thanksgiving. And amid the fight to preserve our Union during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday, finding gratitude in the courage of the American people who sacrifice so much for our country.”

President Trump, in his recent pardoning of turkeys, stated that “religion is coming back to America.” Polling on church attendance and beliefs in certain theologies would dispute that notion.

But more fundamentally, religion was never truly “in” American institutions in the first place. The original proclamations for a day of thanks were mostly a nod to military successes and genuine optimism for the new nation, before evolving into a mechanism for civic engagement and cohesion.

When Jefferson wrote that there should be a “wall of separation between church and state,” he was referring to the spirit and intentions of the Constitution itself. The nation was always meant to be secular, and because of Jefferson and his stance, our most treasured traditions uphold that framework—ensuring that all people, regardless of their convictions or lack thereof, are able and encouraged to participate in giving thanks for all we’ve accomplished and for what still lies ahead.

We often use terms like moderate and centrist as though they describe the same thing—the middle of two extremes.

“Centrist Democrats” like Joe Manchin. “Moderate Republicans” like Lisa Murkowski. If Nick Fuentes sits on one end of the spectrum and Hasan Piker on the other, we imagine moderates and centrists somewhere in-between.

Reasonable. Balanced. Objective.

Conversations about how Democrats can win again after the 2024 elections have furthered the conflation of these concepts. The Abundance debates, the Schumer–Mamdani endorsement chaos, the Ezra Klein controversies, and state-election chatter have all been about one thing: Democrats need to “moderate”, which almost always means “align with more voters by moving to the center of the political ideological spectrum.”

But what does moderation and centrism actually mean?

Even Matthew Yglesias, one of the clearest voices in the “Democrats need to moderate” lane, when attempting to explain what he means by “moderate”, just ends up listing a set of electoral tactics:

"I think the moderation argument is primarily about:

• Do you prioritize the issues the public says they care most about?

• Do you take positions on issues the public agrees with?

• Do you prioritize delivering on what the public cares about in your governance?"

I think Yglesias’ ideas about moderation are shared by most people. They describe voting patterns and coalition management intertwined with consensus on varying issues.

However, these politically-charged concepts are only an implication of a more fundamental way of reasoning.

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Misconceptions and improvements of moderation and centrism

People run into trouble particularly when they use the “moderate” label as a virtuous sign of anti-extreme positioning on issues. They imagine moderation akin to balance and compromise. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The middle of public opinion reflects prevailing errors.

The essence of moderation is the willingness to examine claims on their merits, not by their distance from other claims or consensus. It’s the acknowledgement of one’s proneness to error and desire to find the best solutions. Moderates could be aligned with consensus, but they could also hold radical positions.

When people notice that the midpoint can be as bad—or worse—than one or both extremes, they reject the whole framework and look for new ideas entirely. That rejection of both extremes and the warped middle is what we usually refer to as centrism.

Centrists also carry an assumption that they occupy a thoughtful middle ground; they like some right-wing ideas, some left-wing ideas, and blend the best from each. The problem is, I don’t think anyone actually does that. More often, they find every existing side unappealing and reject all of them more or less equally. Their “moderation” is accidental. It’s the product of disliking every available option, not of holding a coherent alternative.

The irony: if a person believes neither side has good solutions, they’re implying that something new is needed. That’s not centrism at all—and it’s certainly not “in the middle” or simply a mix of public opinion. It’s a radical position!

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The myth of the middle

Centrism, in the only form that actually makes sense, is solely a critique of the politically centrist mindset—it’s a more bold mentality than someone constrained by two opposing extremes. The core problem with the current understanding of conventional centrism is that it mistakes personal dissatisfaction with each side for an actual equivalence between them.

I’ve written before how figures like (the old) Richard Hanania exemplified the moral blindness this “centrism” produces. What I was recognizing then, and can articulate more clearly now, is the conflation of centrism with moderation. Someone who considers themselves in the center of two evils must necessarily think the flaws of each side are inherently symmetrical—why else would one find themselves centered?

No attention to context or moral weight. No assessments of detail. Just a condemnation of all wrongdoing. That’s how political centrism collapses into moral blindness.

True centrists don’t stand in the middle of competing ideas; they stand outside the map altogether. And deciding which ideas need replacing—and what to replace them with—requires a mindset of true moderation.

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My own argument for why Democrats lost in 2024 overlaps with other analyses: they weren’t “moderate” enough. But the difference is that my argument dealt not with specific policy positions but with an underlying mentality—how Democrats approached taking positions.

Yes, sometimes they should move closer to consensus. On other issues, they’re fine where they are, or even need to move further in the opposite direction. The point is: moderation, on a philosophical level, is not about positions!

I theorized the problem with Democrats was their wokification—a dogmatic, authoritarian imposition on certain progressive views about crime, immigration, race, gender—and more. It wasn’t that Democrats were necessarily wrong on the substance of these issues. It was the refusal to acknowledge that reasonable arguments existed for traditional positions, and the disdain felt by those who dissented.

It’s only once you move up a level—to the implications—that you reach the Yglesias-type political arguments for moderation: align more with public opinion, or at least stop acting like conservatism is a crime. If Democrats had been less dogmatic about many issues—even without changing their actual positions—they likely would’ve been perceived more positively and won more votes. Maybe not enough to win, but more!

Moderation is all about reasoning.

Historic breakthroughs like heliocentrism, abolition, germ theory, quantum physics, and universal suffrage all looked “extreme” relative to the Overton window of their time.

If moderate is to mean anything intellectually respectable, it must be compatible with holding strong—even “extreme”—views.

If centrism is to mean anything reasonable, it must acknowledge that the political “center” is not where those unsatisfied with each group actually resides.

It is currently being argued in the Supreme Court on whether the president, drawn from the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, has unfettered ability to unilaterally set tariffs whenever an emergency is declared at the president’s sole discretion. The conservative Justices seem skeptical, to say the least.

I wrote a note a few weeks ago arguing why Trump should be optimistic about this pending ruling on tariffs. What I failed to consider was how great a decision it was to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

It’s no big surprise that Trump wants the Supreme Court to rule on something, given his past appeals and the conservative majority on the bench. Nevertheless, the question of whether presidents have the ability to levy tariffs on a whim is of great importance to him, as many people have been reassuring me.

Given these circumstances, Trump has been gifted a win-win decision:

1. SCOTUS rules against him, giving Congress more authority over tariffs and/or the Executive less influence during declared emergencies.

2. SCOTUS rules in his favor, providing him with a lawful mandate to continue on his trade endeavors.

But before I begin explaining more thoroughly why these two results would be a benefit for Trump, I want to make sure we understand just how great of a political move it was for this case to be heard in the first place.

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Trump’s tariffs are unpopular and unsuccessful

Trump’s tariff policy has been a stinker. The president and treasury secretary Scott Bessent have a bunch of contradictory theories in terms of broader economic goals. That divergence is often represented in how the Admin compares their trade policy to that of both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who held competing interests in early 18th-century America.

The Trump Admin is arguing to the Supreme Court that revenue stemming from increased tariff rates are “only incidental.” Yet, Trump himself has stated plenty of times that tariffs are a major source of revenue that, if undone, would do irreparable harm to the nation.

The Trump Admin had no cogent framework for the tariffs to be utilized, other than their excuse of tariffs being tools for reciprocity (revenge). The good news here is that they seem to be one of the main reasons for Trump’s declining approval among the public.

While it’s true Americans apparently care more about whether Trump threatens Jimmy Kimmel’s show or the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, they also definitely care about the lack of focus when it comes to the cost of living, inflation, and other economic issues. The tariffs, tied to trade and inflation, have been leading factors in Trump’s inability to stay relatively popular. We all noticed the quick downturn in the stock market and the panic on Main Street when Trump first announced the tariffs in April, but since then, he’s mostly been threatening tariffs rather than implementing them. To my knowledge, he has yet to make one official, formal deal with another nation on trade, not without cowering out after a few weeks.

What we saw on election night, though not enough of a blue wave to win Democrats Senate races in Iowa or Ohio, certainly gave everyone in the political sphere a nod towards centering campaigns on affordability. Sure, the minority party often receives more support in post-elections. But it’s also quite noticeable how much of the country tied the current Admin and leadership to those unpopular trade and economic policies.

People don’t think tariffs are easing their problems with paying bills; that’s not something to shrug off as someone in the Admin.

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If SCOTUS rules against Trump

An article by the AP articulates how Trump would be able to implement tariffs using other means even if SCOTUS rules against him in this emergency powers case. If SCOTUS rules against the Trump Admin, meaning presidents cannot use emergency powers to arbitrarily set tariff rates, they could also still be created through Congress. This would create a sticky situation, especially after recent election losses by Republicans.

As of yet, Republicans aren’t doing anything about Trump’s use of tariff authority or emergency powers—other than a symbolic vote of overturn on Brazil’s tariffs by a few moderate Republicans in the Senate. But I think that’s because they know Trump really does care about them; he sees them as a tool for personal leverage on other nations and domestic company owners. Though it’s true they can be used for such purposes, that doesn’t seem to be the interests of everyday Americans trying to afford groceries while staying competitive with China on more advanced technologies.

Still, while I think the Admin did the right thing strategically in getting SCOTUS to rule on the emergency powers question, Trump’s personal desire to have full control is still front and center of the conversation. And it will be his downfall.

Trump holds all the cards, as he likes to say.

Republicans in Congress have shown little to no sign of pushback on the Admin—any that tangibly matters anyway. This puts them in a really bad situation if SCOTUS rules against Trump, giving Congress more of the authority and thus responsibility.

Trump can demand Republicans continue his tariffs, at the same rate, for as long as he desires. But will they actually do it, knowing its unpopularity and the economic effects slowly starting to show themselves? That is the question. If they decide against it, they will certainly face primaries from the right.

Trump will then have the ability to blame Congress for not implementing his preferred tariffs, including the countries, rates, and duration, all at the same time. He will have leverage, based on his own official dealings with other nations as well as with congressional leaders, requiring an even more collaborative relationship (can anyone truly collaborate with Trump?). The president will also be able to take credit for any benefits that come with either tariffs or a reduction of them and an improved economic picture.

The only real loss here is that the Admin will owe these companies billions in refunds. Fortunately for them, Trump has billions. The only real way he could lose here is if he continues to publicly tell people he wants to do the unpopular things to the economy, and Congress/SCOTUS/Democrats keep stopping him from following through.

Trump’s got to be more strategic than that.

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If SCOTUS rules in favor of Trump

If SCOTUS rules with the Trump Admin, the obvious result is tariffs stay in place, and more are threatened and implemented soon after. Another win for Trump!

Congress will be able to continue its negligence if SCOTUS rules in Trump’s favor. They’ve got the power to take away tariffs or change them, and they’ve chosen not to do it. I don’t see any reason to expect this will change, especially with the addition of judicial approval.

Trump will be immune from others impeding his authority on tariffs, but not from the consequences. The trouble for us is that he’ll have even more expanded authority to act similarly on a plethora of other “emergencies” he’s declared—from energy to immigration. Trump will be able to claim more praise from his base for sticking it to countries treating us unfairly on trade and continue crony capitalistic processes for deal-making without ever considering Congress.

The only part of this entire equation, in my view, that has the possibility of actually putting a full stop to the newly-introduced tariff policy would be if tariffs remain unpopular, the economy continues to move downward, and people vote for anti-tariff legislators.

Trump really does hold all the cards on this one. But that also means he’s bound to show a bad hand.