Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has rejected the idea of meeting one on one with Sen. Joe Manchin to try to resolve their differences over President Biden's $3.5 trillion proposed social services bill. When asked about it last week, Sanders said, "This is not a movie." On the other side, Manchin has not said if he supports the idea. Moreover, President Biden said, jokingly, such a meeting would lead to "homicide."
The current stalemate within the Democratic Party is not primarily a fight between the chairman of the Budget Committee (Sanders) and the centrist (some would say conservative) Democratic linchpin (Manchin). Whoever suggested these two men be put in a room to resolve their conflict may have been thinking about a movie about the 1950s or 1850s.
The reality of this historical drama is that the conflict is not only within the Senate or even centered around the Senate. After all, it was the House Progressive Caucus led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal and members like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who refused to vote in favor of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill until the Senate Democrats, notably Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, supported the $3.5 trillion social services bill.
Even if Sanders and Manchin agreed to a figure, even one as high as $2.75 trillion, that doesn't mean Jayapal and other House progressives would be satisfied — or that Sinema would either.
In short, the conflict is not focused on two powerful men or the Senate. It also concerns powerful women, and it also concerns the House. The very idea that this is a two-man Senate fight is really absurd. Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself is thoroughly immersed in the conflict within her full House Democratic Caucus. If anything, it is the House Progressive Caucus, led by women, that has emerged as the major force in this two-chamber, progressive vs. centrist battle.
Moreover, the idea of putting Sanders and Manchin in a room together, at this stage, is stupid. While it would most likely not lead to homicide, it would probably be a nasty, brutal, loud discussion.
Last week I argued in The Baltimore Sun that House and Senate leaders needed to get together, at Biden's invitation, at Camp David. Indeed, I wrote that Manchin and Ocasio-Cortez needed to "talk under the trees" and be "in nature" outside of Washington. I was not joking. They had a terrible exchange via the media a few weeks ago. It is time for them to meet face to face in an unthreatening environment.
Sanders' outburst reinforces my belief that powerful men and women from both chambers need to join Biden not for a conference table meeting in D.C. but for less structured, more personal interactions ranging from taking a walk to playing shuffleboard.
Do the precise opposite of one-on-one meetings or traditional meetings with two camps represented. Many of the players barely know each other, if they know one another at all. I also argued that the bills in question are not Biden's bills but legislation actually owned by both chambers and the president. And I said make them for five years, not 10. To be sure, the details have to be worked out.
This is 2021 not 1950 or 1850. It's not an old boys' club matter, and there is not going to be a duel. But this drama has a good ending if all parties involved remember that our democracy, thanks to the other party, is on the verge of disintegration. The men and women in powerful positions need to leave their unwillingness to compromise in Washington and head off to Camp David and make the country proud.
It falls on President Biden to issue the invitations.
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.