Frazier will join the law school faculty at the University of South Dakota as a Visiting Professor starting Academic Year 2023.
You work in HR at a nationwide company. Your boss tells you that a third party has volunteered to do the vast majority of your team’s work. Effective tomorrow, your sole responsibility is to decide between two candidates for the most important roles at the company and you only have to do so every two years.
Shocked at light workload, you wonder how you will spend your time in the interim. Your boss explains that between these retention decisions they will provide your team with information from the third party on the candidates -- namely, the third party will send you a never-ending stream of subjective opinions on the caliber of the candidates. “Don’t worry,” consoles your boss. They let you know that the third party has assured the company’s leadership that they will filter out any undeserving candidates, so your actual influence over the decision is quite limited.
Some of your team members accept this new assignment but pledge that they will conduct their own research on the candidates. They develop extensive dossiers, conduct background checks, and analyze the credentials of each candidate. Then, a few weeks before the retention decisions they share these packets with the rest of the team. Most recipients barely glance at them. A few read the packets cover to cover. Yet, the information provided by the third party always proves most influential.
Other team members realize the company really doesn’t need them, so they just stop participating in the retention decisions. Sure enough, no one really notices and the company keeps them on payroll. A handful of the team think these laggards should be required to participate -- after all, they argue, these folks bring important perspectives to the process. A few branches of the company tried mandatory participation way back at its founding, but leadership later felt this sort of mandate was not inline with corporate culture. So rather than demand their participation, the company simply hopes other team members will peer pressure the non-participants into doing their jobs -- it’s a strategy that works on just a few of them.
Despite all the complaints about this process and suggestions for reform, the company has maintained for centuries. From time to time, leadership has implemented marginal reforms but the company’s desired outcome -- the election of the candidates favored by the third party -- occurs nearly 100% of the time.
Does this sound problematic? It should. And it should sound a lot like the sorry excuse for democratic participation we, the people, have accepted.
Vibrant and strong democracies do not allow the people to outsource their civic duties. Yet, Americans have become the democratic equivalent of the guy at work who sits on their butt and lets others pick up their slack -- consequences be damned. Not only is the system flawed -- calling on we, the people, to make choices between candidates and issues that reflect the will of companies, special interests, and parties more so than Average Joe and Normie Jane, the suggested reforms are also inadequate given the scale of the issues with the health of our democracy -- making it marginally easier for people to vote through mail-in ballots, for example, results in a marginal increase in turnout of about two percentage points.
If this we, the people, are not quite ready to abandon elections - despite them resulting in horse-race journalism rather than coverage of the news, campaigns funded by corporations and billionaires, and unqualified candidates being selected by an unrepresentative set of voters - they we ought to explore reforms reflective of the severity of our democratic inactivity. Universal voting seems best suited to respond to the issues posed by a lackadaisical population of eligible voters.
If, however, the people decide it is time to really kick the tires and begin experimenting with new forms of democratic participation meant to complement elections, then we should adopt a slew of deliberative democracy tools on a trial basis. At the heart of deliberative democracy lies the idea that true democracy cannot occur where participants have unequal political power -- such as through economic wealth or amplification of their priorities by third parties. These deliberative tools come in many forms but, per James Fishkin, require providing participants with quality and balanced information, ensuring the representativeness of participants, creating a process in which participants thoroughly weigh the merits of proposals and candidates, and giving all participants equal political power.
If your boss cut your job responsibilities in half, but stressed that your title and pay would remain the same, you’d likely respond, “That’s too good to be true!” And you’d be right. You cannot effectively do your job in HR or in our democracy if others take charge of the core responsibilities of what it means to be a good employee or good democratic participant.
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.