Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor in San Francisco, is co-counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
When Charles Darwin returned to England in 1836 from two years aboard the HMS Beagle, visiting the Galapagos Islands, Chile and Australia, he reflected on his observations of rare species and developed his theory of evolution.
His “Origin of Species” shook the scientific world with his concept that genetic variations explain how organisms adapt and thrive, particularly when adverse conditions threaten them.
Likewise for human organizations – business or government institutions nimble enough to adjust to adversity can reform and grow.
Such evolution is not automatic. It requires stakeholders who demand it.
In democracies, progress requires that groups suffering harm or foreseeing danger advocate forcefully for change. With a MAGA House majority about to take power in Washington, vigilance in the next two years by those committed to individual rights, equality and constitutional government will be essential.
We’ve just seen three examples in Congress showcasing such activism from ordinary Americans.
First, on Dec. 7, President Joe Biden signed #MeToo legislation that bars employers’ nondisclosure agreements requiring employees to remain silent rather than complain about sexual harassment.
Astonishingly, every senator voted for the law banning these forced-gag agreements. Senate unanimity took a national consensus that did not exist a decade ago. The #MeToo movement built it; women bravely spoke out, told their stories and changed American society.
Second, on Dec. 13, Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act. It reversed 1996’s shameful Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Bill Clinton for culture war advantage. Two decades before same-sex marriage became a constitutional right, DOMA said states that barred such marriages need not recognize same-sex unions from states that permitted them.
The Respect for Marriage Act mandates that all states recognize gay marriages lawfully performed in other states. That matters should the Supreme Court majority overturn those marriages’ constitutional protection. Justice Clarence Thomas has hinted at that.
Again, it took committed activists – this time the LGBTQ community – to achieve a goal that looked impossible a generation ago. Gallup has reported that the paltry 26 percent of Americans who supported same-sex marriage in 1996 has risen to 71 percent in 2022.
Bear with a personal story illustrating that in politics, like physics, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, at least if sufficient human forces mobilize in response. Therein lies hope when bad things happen.
In 1998, I led a legal team in a case that was a steppingstone to gay marriage rights. We successfully defended San Francisco’s Equal Benefits Ordinance, which enormously expanded domestic partner benefits in the city and, indeed, across the nation.
The ordinance came about because three gay and lesbian activists were furious about DOMA. On the theory, “Don’t get mad, get equal,” they persuaded local legislators to adopt the law. A bad event begat a good.
Which takes us to the third piece of legislation. On Friday, Biden signed a federal spending bill that includes the Electoral Count Reform Act. The ECRA is a crucial step to preserve our democracy, closing loopholes in its 1887 predecessor that former President Donald Trump nearly exploited to overturn the 2020 election.
The new law clarifies that the vice president’s role presiding over the certification of a presidential election is purely ceremonial. They cannot reject a state’s official electoral votes or delay the congressional certification, as Trump unsuccessfully tried to pressure Mike Pence to do.
Another key change is to limit state legislatures’ power to declare the winner. The reform act clarifies that a “failed election” occurs only when a force majeure has interrupted the balloting. Without that change from the 1886 Electoral Count Act, a renegade, Republican-dominated, MAGA legislature could wrongly declare that “ballot fraud” caused the election to “fail” and then select the losing candidate.
Like the #MeToo legislation and the Respect for Marriage Act, this reform happened because of grassroots organizations committed to preserving democracy. And like those other bills, this legislation came in reaction to a threat – in this case, the lame duck Congress was pushed to act by the election of a House MAGA majority unlikely to approve the change.
The incoming House leaders have told us what they will do: not legislate but devote all their attention to a scorched earth strategy of attacking Biden, his family, the Jan. 6 committee, the FBI and the Justice Department.
They won’t work to enact kitchen table legislation; in fact, they are likely to try cutting Social Security and Medicare. Negative action and attack will be their trademarks.
For the rest of us who want positive government, democracy is not a spectator sport. The danger to it in the new House is as obvious as the Capitol dome. The essential thing is to mobilize to contain the threat.
We, the people, can keep our democracy by responding to the next two years’ anti-democratic overreach by MAGA House members. Then in 2024, we can vote them out and evolve, in Darwinian fashion, into the better version of America’s self.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.