Paterno, a former quarterbacks coach for Penn State University, ran for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania in 2014 and consults on a variety of issues.
To a nation already drunk on the partisan pursuit of absolutist politics, it appears likely that the Supreme Court is about to uncork a 1973 vintage from Grapes of Wrath Vineyards called “Renverser Roe v. Wade.” The landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was a controversial ruling then; it has remained so. Overturning it will unleash a new round of contentious politics.
This column is not about the legal merits of either side, but how this case adds fuel to the fire in our current age of 50.1 percent Absolutism.
A decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will set off a nationwide scramble to win elections and grab the reins of power at the state and federal levels. And for the most vocal and visible sides of the issue there can be no compromise. But these days that seems to be the case for every issue.
Absolutism is about raw power and is the plague of our current politics. Sides dig in with non-negotiable answers to every issue. Compromise and collaboration are never acceptable.
It is a philosophy that means that once one side hits 50.1 percent they use that majority to try ramming home everything they want. They use it to look the other way on ethics violations on their side, and to advance their agenda without input from anyone else.
For the 49.9 percent in the minority, this new age means obstruction, refusal to cooperate in the hopes that things don’t go well and the majority will be transferred to their party.
For four years with a GOP president we heard all about infrastructure. And what happened when a Democrat got into the White House? Many of the GOP infrastructure hawks suddenly turned to “No” votes. Now many of them are now running around their districts taking credit for new infrastructure projects coming home. But that’s the nature of where we are.
To gain and then ensure a hold on power some will do anything. But there are two basic things that must be protected: the legal system and our election process.
The justice system is best when we remember that our system is founded so that innocent people are not wrongly jailed. And our election system is best when we make voting as accessible as possible for everyone. Retreating on those rights has become a cause because people who did not like the election results continually lie about nonexistent, large-scale fraud.
The right to vote and the right to due process are two sacred foundations of our nation’s governance. But absolutism with a splash of ascendant authoritarian impulses is a cocktail that threatens to poison us all.
The presidential veto and the Supreme Court remain checks in our unique system. Presidents must get elected and then face the people four years later, but Supreme Court justices armed with lifetime appointments remain in power until the hour of their choosing, or until they die. It is easy to see why some of them may attain an arrogance bordering on a god complex.
Congressional power, like the presidency, is ever-changing. So the question for a party with slim margins in Congress is how much party discipline leaders can command. In an evenly divided Senate like we have now, one or two senators can have the keys to an outsized amount of power.
For those who understand that governing is done through ever-evolving coalitions of convenience and consensus, these are bitter days.
The most mature leadership requires compromise, but for everyone willing to work with others, the party extremes are waiting with a primary challenger and an army of social media mobsters to inflame emotions against them.
Absolutism disguised as “integrity” or “consistency” resolves nothing and leads to constant cycles of conflict for those drawing their power from enduring strife. Hard-core extremists engage in politics is an all-or-nothing, zero-sum game.
And conflict sells. So the absolutists are addicted to the social media attention that is then rewarded by partisan news outlets. Those outlets’ viewers drink nightly from the unholy chalice of inflexible extremist ideology.
Aside from ideology, absolutism has even created its own set of “facts.”
I know it is not popular to say this but it must be said: We are not entitled to our own “truths” but rather we must accept the truth. Absolute certainty in someone’s own “truths” births a false worldview that creates the explosive emotions that lead to events like Charlottesville in 2017 or to the riot of Jan. 6, 2021.
As a long, hot summer approaches, the hand-to-hand combat in every state that may be unleashed by overturning Roe v. Wade is another fuse. That fuse is fertile ground for those who draw power from division, for those who drive anger.
These are people who wish to call into question every institution we have in this country, from the government, our elections and our judicial system to our education system and our media.
They do this to create the conditions where all trust is gone. And when trust is gone there is no hope in sitting across the table as sisters and brothers to forge the types of compromises that created our founding documents, the kinds of compromises that can bind us together again.
To reject the default position of distrust, to reject the sweet siren call of constant conflict; that is the challenge of our time. And it is only about to get even harder.
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.