Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework, " has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
America struggles to this day with the reality that there is a striking contradiction at the heart of the founding of our country. The founding fathers and men and women who fought in the Revolutionary War (or War of Independence) stood for a nation that was free from economic exploitation, political domination and physical brutality, but the new country, notably the Constitution, supported the institution of slavery.
It is also true that the new nation did not give equal political rights to non-property owning White males, denying them (and women, of course) the right to vote. But the slavery of Black people was the most egregious form of oppression – and contradiction.
Even if the colonists had not fought the British for independence, there still would have been a contradiction among the Americans. Southern slaves would have continued to be slaves and many northern Black people would have continued to remain free. The founding fathers did not establish the institution of slavery. They perpetuated it.
Yet there was a second element to the historic contradiction. Moving to North America was not sufficient for the colonists to gain their independence (although it did grant them some freedom) Led by John Adams especially but also by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison and James Monroe, the revolutionary generation fought a war to achieve freedom from the British crown – for certain people.
The contradiction at the heart of the new nation therefore had two aspects that were subtly related: a) For over 150 years the colonies, especially in the South, had people who were free and people who were enslaved; and b) fighting a war to achieve political and economic freedom from Great Britain was in contradiction with the concept of having some people remain unfree.
It was still an open question what kind of nation the colonists would create if they won the war. Indeed, there was a natural bias towards having a monarch in the new nation because all nations had monarchs. The colonists needed to achieve a major breakthrough in Philadelphia and craft a new system in which there would be a president, a Congress and a judicial branch, one admittedly modeled on the writings of Montesquieu in France and Locke in England. Moreover, they could have abolished slavery.
Instead, they chose to meld two contradictions – having a system of slavery in the first place, and fighting a war to achieve freedom while perpetuating slavery – together with a blacksmith's tools.
Perhaps the main point is that actually fighting the War of Independence deepened the contradiction of sustaining a society in which Southern Black people were slaves.
At the same time, the Southern colonies were not fighting the war to preserve slavery, as that was the chief motive for their role in the Civil War. But they did commit to joining the Northerners in 1776 only if slavery would be continued in the new country. And in 1787, the Southern states insisted that the three-fifth rule be included in the Constitution to ensure that they could use the presence of slaves in their individual states to increase their share of members of the House of Representatives.
The clarification of the contradiction at the heart of our nation does not mean we should disown our founding fathers – or our founding mothers. It means we should reach a better sense of national self-understanding about how the heroic actions of the founders led to the creation of a historically vital nation at the same time that it sustained much harm.
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.