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.
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.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.