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.
There is a conundrum at the center of American politics that is unresolvable on its face: according to Gallup, 40 percent of registered voters do not regard themselves as Democrats or Republicans, but they cannot express their deepest political commitments in electoral politics without voting for candidates who run as Democrats and Republicans.
Not voting at all is not much of a solution. Not voting is an indirect way of expressing your interests, but it will not get you very far. Indeed, if you lean toward one party, then not voting will make it impossible for you to cast a vote for a candidate who supports some of your interests. There is nothing wrong with voting for a third party or independent candidate, but the chances of your candidate winning are well under 5 percent.
The conundrum must be approached at its roots. But how? How do we get beyond dandelion solutions? Wisdom suggests that there is not one solution in the same way that there are a variety of ways to get rid of the roots of a patch of dandelions. You can get them all with a single shovel, some chemicals, dynamite or a bomb.
This is the starting point to resolving the conundrum of American electoral politics. We should not be trying to be the Newtonian genius who discovers the laws of motion -- or the Einsteinian genius who uproots them and rethinks the relationship between mass, energy and motion.
One approach restricts the scope of the problem by working on a part of the problem, whether it is elections in one state or only congressional elections or only presidential politics. So don't approach the problem by trying to change the system.
Given that the scope of the challenge can be restricted at the outset, what can be done?
It may be best for change agents to focus on being or backing independent candidates rather than third parties. The concept of third parties is a nonstarter for most Americans and most political scientists and sociologists. The concept of independents is different. Three U.S. Senators are independents, Bernie Sanders (Vermont), Angus King (Maine) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona). That is not an insignificant number. Nor are they the same kind of independents. Sanders is a democratic socialist, King is a New England moderate and Sinema is a creative, hard to pin down new centrist. Breaking out of the two party stranglehold thus may require more independent candidates who will speak to the interests of citizens who do not fall neatly into the Democratic or Republican categories.
The more independents who win, the more independents who will run.
That holds whether an independent wins a race for mayor or governor or president. The process of change, moreover, would presumably take five to ten years. So this strategy does not try to rip up the roots of the dandelions in 50 states all at once in one election. It rips up some roots at a time.
The most ambitious approach goes after the presidency with an independent candidate who appoints themself to lead an effort to force the two parties in Washington to work together. This can be done without the majority of votes, so long as 270 electoral votes were obtained. Lincoln, Wilson and Clinton all got the electoral votes with about 40 percent of the popular vote.
The independent strategy could also be worked from the state level, say in Minnesota or Wisconsin or Georgia. And states that sought to continue the effort to uproot the two party system could do so from a different ideological perspective. Minnesota might elect an independent for governor, as it did in 1999 when it chose Jesse Ventura to be its governor.
Avoiding third parties, encouraging independent candidates with diverse agendas, dismantling some gerrymandering, instituting ranked choice voting, and not tackling the systemic problem all at once provide some elements of a strategy for ultimately changing the system. By 2026, the 250th Anniversary of the United States, we should have a Declaration of Independents. This Declaration could include a flood of independents in the midterm elections.
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.