As 2022 draws to a close, The Fulcrum has invited leaders of democracy reform organizations to share their hopes and plans for the coming year. This is the seventh in the series.
Gruber is the senior vice president of Open Primaries. He previously worked for the American Civil Liberties Union and several other civil rights organizations.
Independent voters decided nearly every outcome in the midterm elections and sent many “election deniers” packing. Their reward is that 20 million of them – including millions of voters of color – will be shut out of voting in the 2024 presidential primaries. That number could double if efforts to close the primaries accelerate in 2023.
The civil rights community, which has long insisted that ours is a democracy in progress, has always been at the forefront of the fight for justice in the United States. But it has continued to remain silent on the question of full voting rights for independent voters.
Independent voters are now the largest or second largest group of registered voters in almost every state in the country. They are also the fastest growing group of voters. It’s an accelerating phenomenon driven by dissatisfaction with partisanship and distrust of status quo institutions. But choosing to distance yourself from Democratic or Republican membership comes with a price tag. In many states, independents are locked out of participating in primaries – public elections paid for by taxpayers and administered by our government. It’s systematic voter suppression and exclusion.
The ACLU’s website states that “voting is the cornerstone of our democracy and the fundamental right upon which all our civil liberties rest. The ACLU works to protect and expand Americans’ freedom to vote.” That work has, properly, focused on equal voting rights for racial minorities. There is no moral equivalency between being denied the right to vote because of the color of your skin and the choice not to join a political party – but that is no excuse for silence. The denial of the right to vote, for whatever reason, is an attack on our core values of freedom and equality. It’s felt painfully by millions of independent voters every primary election.
As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his “Give Us the Ballot” speech in 1957:
So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote, I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind – it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact – I can only submit to the edict of others.
When you alternately ignore, justify or distinguish independent voters as a group not worthy of voting rights protections, you miss entirely King’s vision that every citizen has a voice in our democracy.
What’s perhaps most peculiar about the silence of the civil rights community with regards to independent voters is how many independent voters are people of color. Forty percent of Asian Americans, 37 percent of Latinos and 30 percent of African Americans are independent. You wouldn’t know it from the work of any of the organizations entrusted with protecting these key voting groups. Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Unidos US, the NAACP and others fight every day against efforts that make it harder for minorities to vote; unless, of course, they happen to be independents.
A hundred years ago, in the “white primary cases,” the Supreme Court struck down primary elections designed to disenfranchise African Americans in the South. The civil rights community led that effort. In 2023, MAGA elements of the Republican Party in these same states are threatening to close the primaries. If successful it will have a negative impact on all voters, but it will particularly impact African-Americans. As Rep. Joe Neal of the South Carolina legislative black caucus declared back in 2010 after successfully defeating a lawsuit to close the primaries:
The South Carolina federal court has upheld the rights of voters in South Carolina, especially the minority community, to free and unfettered access to the polls. This measure (closed primaries) would have eliminated the ability of hundreds of thousands of African Americans to have a voice in who represents them in many positions of influence in South Carolina.
The civil rights community has ignored this development, despite growing recognition that closed primaries disempower voters of color.
Our country is changing. Voters' relationship to the two parties is in flux. It’s simply untenable to continue to shut out millions of independent voters from our elections. It’s time for the civil rights community to take this on. Our democracy in progress needs you.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.