After six years as president of Open Primaries, John Opdyke is a few months from the biggest test of strength in the group's history: Floridians will vote in November on a referendum to permit all voters (including 3.7 million not registered as Republican or Democrat) to participate in state primaries — which proponents see as transformative for promoting more consensus-building candidates and breaking the two-party hold on almost all political power. Opdycke's career has been spent helping outsiders compete in elections since the 1990s, when he first raised money for the small-party Rainbow Lobby and then the forerunner organization of the National Reform Party. He then spent 15 years on the senior staff of Independent Voting. His answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's democracy's biggest challenge?
Over many years, and for complicated reasons, the role of the people and the position of the political parties has gotten out of whack. Voters are too often seen as merely the consumers of a political product, not the creators of it. The parties have morphed from private associations into quasi-governmental monopolies. This is a formula for gridlocked incompetence at best and broad social decline at worst.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
I ran for secretary of my third grade class, in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, in 1978. I gave a speech to my classmates asking for their votes. Philip Hackbarth just threw lollipops to everyone in the auditorium. He won in a landslide. Later that year, I met Muhammad Ali. My aunt was campaign treasurer for Bob Wallace, a liberal banker running for Congress as an independent. Ali had endorsed Wallace and I got to go to the endorsement press conference, the highlight of which was my 5-year-old brother Jesse punching The Champ in the leg. How these two events fit together I have no idea.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
Helping Mike Bloomberg get elected mayor of New York in 2001. Today, people know him as a global philanthropist and Democratic Party megadonor. But 20 years ago he was a 40-to1 long shot, a progressive innovator who bypassed the corrupt Democratic machine and ran a Republican/independent fusion campaign. He won by 35,000 votes against Mark Green, a career Democrat who was supposed to win in a cakewalk. The Independence Party — I was treasurer at the time — got him 60,000 votes on our ballot line. We were a plucky upstart band of independents and we were Mike's margin of victory. It was electrifying.
And your most disappointing setback?
An aborted effort to enact open primaries and dark money disclosure ballot measures in Arizona in 2016. We failed to structure the campaign properly, and it fell apart. It was humiliating.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
I'm a progressive independent. Independents are the largest and fastest growing segment of the electorate — but, like Rodney Dangerfield, we get no respect. Most pundits insist we are all secret partisans. Hogwash. Being an independent shapes how I approach everything. I'm not trying to protect one party and attack the other. I like working with people who see the world differently than I. I've done a lot of organizing in the black community and believe strongly that if our reform movement doesn't build authentic bridges to communities of color it doesn't have a future.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
It's from a book I edited a decade ago, "Talk/Talk: Making (Non) Sense of an Irrational World." One of the authors, Fred Newman, said, "I don't tackle history. History tackles me." I think about that quote every day and try to live by it. What it means is don't allow your ego, ambition or desire to win blind you to how things work. There's a bigger process.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
Marshall Fields of Dreams, a combination of Marshall Field's Frango Mint ice cream and malt powder. In other words, a mint chocolate malt.
What's your favorite political movie or TV show?
"Bulworth," the 1998 satire about a California senator's campaign, for its honest absurdity. And "When We Were Kings," the 1996 documentary about the heavyweight championship fight between Ali and George Foreman, for showing the magical connection and power between inspirational leaders and ordinary people.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
I fantasize about getting rid of my phone altogether. Why do we swear by these things?
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
Pre-Covid, I performed and directed improv at the Castillo Theater in Manhattan. I love improv. I recently started playing around with improvised freestyle rap and am now a graduate of Lin Manuel-Miranda's Freestyle Love Supreme Academy. I'm also working on an improv-inspired screenplay about a fantasy news program called "I agree." Imagine if every sentence on Fox and MSNBC started with the words "I agree!" (I said it was a fantasy.)
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.