Spinelle is the communications specialist for the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and host of the podcasts “ When the People Decide ” and “ Democracy Works.”
Democracy does not have a singular definition, which is one of the things that makes it so interesting to me — and undoubtedly to many of you.
I don’t have a Ph.D. in political science, but I have done nearly hundreds of interviews with people about democracy in some form or another. During that time, I developed a working definition: Democracy is about the allocation of power among people. Yes, there are norms, institutions and processes. But power is at the heart of it all.
Ballot initiatives are one way for citizens in more than 20 states to harness that power. In my new podcast series, “ When the People Decide,” I explore how people have used the ballot initiative to bring issues they care deeply about directly to their fellow voters and push for political change on their own terms.
Citizen-led initiatives are not perfect. The process is cumbersome and confusing, and is often initiated or taken over by moneyed interests, leaving the public interest in the dust. But despite their flaws and shortcomings, I’m still bullish.
Initiatives offer the chance for regular people to break through the gridlock that plagues so much of politics and to deliver solutions. They can help us fix what’s broken in American democracy and create meaningful political reform
In the past decade, initiatives have been used to legalize marijuana, expand access to Medicaid, raise the minimum wage, restore voting rights, implement ranked-choice voting and open primaries, among many other reforms. Often, these wins come in places you wouldn’t expect — traditionally “red” states like Idaho, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
If organizations like the Fairness Project and the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center have anything to do with it, ballot initiatives will be an even bigger part of American democracy in the future. These organizations are helping citizens advance their ballot measure campaigns and working to defend the initiative process itself.
As you might imagine, state legislatures are not pleased when people go around them, especially when it’s to pass “progressive” issues. So, what do they do? They try to make it more difficult for citizens to use the initiative process by increasing signature requirements or changing the vote threshold from a simple majority to a supermajority.
This story is starting to receive national attention thanks to an investment from Democracy Docket in the Ballot Measure Rescue Campaign, and last month South Dakota voters rejected an effor t by the legislature to amend the state’s Constitution in a way that would limit the ballot initiative.
Not only do ballot measures lead to meaningful policy change and democracy reform, but they can also create new political coalitions among organizers and volunteers who come together to support a shared interest. I heard this sentiment over and over again from the people interviewed, from people working for LGBTQ rights in Cincinnati to ending closed adoptions in Oregon.
There’s a lot of talk these days about finding common ground in politics, but after reporting this series, I think that finding common cause is the real key to breaking through the gridlock.
It’s one thing to fire off an angry social media post about how the system is broken or politicians are corrupt. But it’s something else entirely to decide to do something about it. That’s what our founders did nearly 250 years ago, and that’s what modern-day organizers across the country continue to do, something well worth remembering as we celebrate Independence Day.
Ballot initiatives offer a way to move beyond the stasis that can sometimes bog down politics and lead to resentment and frustration. Again, let me be clear that they’re not perfect, but they do represent a path forward and a bit of optimism in a political landscape that can seem pretty gloomy at times.
There are so many more stories I could tell, and perhaps will, about what happens when people decide to take an active role in our democracy. If you have ideas for people or campaigns to feature, I would love to hear them!
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.