Voters stood up for democracy this year, electing Democrats who campaigned heavily on preserving it. Take Minnesota, where Democrats are in charge of both chambers for the first time in eight years. Plus, Governor Tim Walz is asking his fellow Democrats to "think big" when it comes to voting issues. Gov. Walz of Minnesota joined The ReidOut to discuss.
Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Join a growing community committed to civic renewal.
Subscribe to The Fulcrum and be part of the conversation.
Top Stories
Latest news
Read More
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban salutes supporters at the Balna center in Budapest during a general election in Hungary, on April 12, 2026.
(Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
What the end of Viktor Orban means for the New Right
Apr 16, 2026
Viktor Orban, the proudly “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary, beloved by various New Right nationalists and MAGA American intellectuals, was crushed at the polls this weekend.
Over the last decade or so, Hungary became for the New Right what Sweden or Cuba were to the Old Left. For generations, various American leftists loved to cite the Cuban model as better than ours when it came to healthcare, or education. Some would even make wild claims about freedom under Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Susan Sontag famously proclaimed in 1969 that no Cuban writer “has been or is in jail or is failing to get his works published.” This was simply not true. The still young regime had already imprisoned, tortured or executed scores of intellectuals. (Sontag later recanted.)
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez still talk about Nordic countries as if we have much to learn from them, despite the fact the Nordic model heavily depends on taxing the poor and middle class, not soaking the rich. Now, distinctions matter. The Nordic systems are democratic and decent. Cuba is a Marxist basket case and police state. But the one thing uniting both fan clubs is the tendency to see the countries they imagine them to be rather than the reality.
President Trump, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance (most recently while campaigning for Orban) have all lavished praise on Hungary. Patrick Deneen, a leading New Right intellectual, saw in Orban’s Hungary “a model of a form of opposition to contemporary liberalism that says, ‘There’s a way in which the state and the political order can be oriented to the positive promotion of conservative policies.’ ”
The Heritage Foundation, a once respected conservative think tank that has shed its devotion to the Constitution and traditional conservatism, agrees. Its wayward president, Kevin Roberts, in 2024 called Orban’s Hungary a “model for conservative governance.”
This mirrors Orban’s own explanation: “The Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed,” he explained in 2014. “And so in this sense the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”
Don’t be put off by the word “liberal” here (or by Deneen’s and Roberts’ tendentious use of “conservative”). Orban and his fans aren’t talking about mere left-wing policies. The “liberal” here is the liberalism of liberal democratic capitalism, John Locke, Adam Smith and the American founding fathers.
“Checks and balances is a U.S. invention that for some reason of intellectual mediocrity Europe decided to adopt,” Orban claimed. Checks and balances is not actually an American invention. But it is a vital liberal bulwark against authoritarianism and corruption.
When the U.S. Supreme Court said that President Biden couldn’t, on a whim, forgive student loan debt or ban evictions, or when it ruled that Trump couldn’t unilaterally tariff the world or indiscriminately deploy troops to American cities, that was checks and balances at work.
Claims that Orban was an authoritarian could be overblown. But he was moving in that direction, larding the courts, universities and state media with political loyalists and, until this weekend, rewriting the election laws to stay in power.
But his corruption was not exaggerated, and his corruption is why he lost. Orban steered state resources to his cronies, family and hometown friends on a massive scale. But that doesn’t mean he broke the law. He wrote — or interpreted with the help of crony judges — the law to make favoritism legal. That sort of favoritism, it turns out, is incredibly bad for the economy because it distorts the market, misallocates scarce resources for self-serving political objectives and discourages investment. It’s fine to say Orban lost because the Hungarian economy and healthcare system were a mess. But that mess stemmed from Orban’s corruption.
In America we tend to think of corruption as illegal; taking bribes, pilfering taxpayer money, etc. But in many parts of the world that’s neither illegal nor even corrupt. It’s the way business is done. In many developing countries — and for most of human history — government is run like a family business. Special treatment for relatives and allies is natural. What’s unnatural is the modern liberal way of putting contracts out to bid and treating taxpayer money as sacrosanct.
No country is perfect at this. Which is one reason we have checks and balances. Each branch is supposed to be on the lookout for abuses by the others, and everyone is supposed to be subordinate to the rule of law, not the law of rulers.
Orbanism is not a new model, or “wave of the future.” It was a tide of the past. And it’s good news that it’s receding.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
Keep ReadingShow less
Recommended
An NBC News live feed airs a clip from U.S. President Donald Trump's Truth Social video announcement in the White House James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on February 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States and Israel had launched an attack on Iran Saturday morning.
Getty Images, Anna Moneymaker
When a President Threatens a Civilization, Silence Becomes Permission
Apr 15, 2026
Ninety minutes before his own deadline expired, President Trump agreed to pause his threatened strikes on Iran. The ceasefire was real. The relief was understandable. And none of it changes what happened.
In the days leading up to Tuesday’s deadline, the President of the United States threatened to destroy “every” bridge and power plant in Iran. He warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." He said Iran “can be taken out” in a single night. These were not the ravings of a fringe provocateur. They were statements of declared intent from the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on earth, broadcast to the world.
Legal experts were unambiguous. More than 100 lawyers and legal scholars signed an open letter through Just Security, warning that intentional strikes on civilian infrastructure violate international humanitarian law. The International Committee of the Red Cross issued a public statement: “Deliberate threats, whether in rhetoric or in action, against essential civilian infrastructure and nuclear facilities must not become the new norm in warfare.” The New York Times, citing historians and former U.S. officials, noted that no recent American president had spoken so openly about committing potential war crimes. Charli Carpenter, a professor of political science and legal studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, warned that if Trump followed through, lower-ranking service members, and not the president, would bear the greatest legal exposure.
Trump’s own response to this legal consensus was telling. Asked directly at a White House press conference whether his threats amounted to war crimes, Trump answered: “You know the war crime? The war crime is allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” When a New York Times reporter raised the Geneva Conventions specifically, Trump responded, “I hope I don’t have to do it,” and then attacked the paper’s credibility. Press Secretary Leavitt, asked whether the president might use nuclear weapons, said: “Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do.” Secretary of State Rubio walked away from the same question. This was not an aberration. The administration had already been firing the top uniformed legal officers known as judge advocates general and repeatedly circumventing traditional routes for military legal advice, dismantling the institutional guardrails designed to prevent exactly this kind of threat before it was ever made.
That is not a democracy with functioning guardrails. That is a democracy in the middle of a stress test it may be failing.
Congress has been in recess since March 27. As Trump threatened to eradicate 90 million people, most lawmakers concluded the wisest response was silence. Speaker Johnson declined to comment while colleagues posted about Easter egg rolls and frosty weather back home. Only one House Republican, Rep. Nathaniel Moran of Texas, publicly objected: “I do not support the destruction of a ‘whole civilization.’ That is not who we are.” Rep. Don Bacon called it “negotiating Trump style — reckless words,” but said he wanted to see the regime buckle. Rep. Ted Lieu, a senior House Democrat, went further, calling on the Pentagon not to obey any orders to eradicate a “whole civilization” and warning troops directly: “If you commit war crimes, the next Administration will prosecute you.” Democrats erupted — former Speaker Pelosi called for invoking the 25th Amendment, ranking members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees called the threats a war crime, and some members introduced articles of impeachment, but none of it moved the needle. Both chambers had already rejected multiple war powers resolutions along mostly party lines, and the institutional mechanisms designed for exactly this moment remained frozen.
The consequences of that failure don’t fall on the president. “The greater responsibility lies with the president and civilian defense officials,” Carpenter wrote, “as well as Congress, whose job is to hold the president accountable to ensure troops receive only lawful orders.” When Congress fails to do that, it isn’t just a failure of democratic norms. It puts the troops themselves in legal and moral jeopardy.
America’s allies have been nearly as quiet. Several Gulf nations privately warned the administration against such strikes, according to CNN, but most avoided any public rebuke. The countries that did speak — Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey — worked as mediators, not as moral voices. The international community managed to help broker a ceasefire. It did not manage to say, clearly and collectively, that what was threatened was wrong.
This is the accountability gap that civic democracy advocates should be naming plainly. The legal framework exists. The evidence of threatened conduct is public and undisputed. What is absent is the institutional will — in Congress, among allies, in the cabinet — to treat the threat of war crimes as something that demands a response regardless of whether the bombs actually fell. That silence is itself a form of permission.
That gap is now painfully visible again. The Islamabad talks — the first direct U.S.-Iran engagement since 2015 and the highest-level since the 1979 Islamic Revolution — collapsed on Sunday after 21 hours without an agreement. Vance left Pakistan, saying Iran had “chosen not to accept our terms.” Within hours, Trump threatened a full naval blockade. The ceasefire that seemed like a reprieve has become, instead, a brief intermission.
We are back where we started: a president who threatened to annihilate a civilization, with no formal accountability from Congress, no unified rebuke from allies, and no consequences for the threats themselves. The bombs didn’t fall last Tuesday. They may yet fall this week. Every actor in the world now knows that a threat of this magnitude can pass without consequence, and that the institutions designed to prevent it will post about Easter egg rolls instead.
Kristina Becvar is Senior Advisor to the Bridge Alliance Education Fund. She previously served as the Executive Director of the Bridge Alliance,
Keep ReadingShow less
Why strong GDP and stock markets mask middle-class struggles—exploring inequality, housing costs, deficit spending, and the breakdown of economic mobility.
Getty Images, Twenty47studio
Growth Without Gain: Why a Strong Economy Feels So Weak
Apr 15, 2026
Whenever Donald Trump talks about the economy, he always points to the same indicators. GDP is up. The stock market is up. By conventional measures, the economy appears stable, even strong.
And yet, a growing share of Americans–particularly younger ones– feel economically insecure, locked out of homeownership, burdened by debt, and unsure whether they are moving forward or falling behind. If you are in the top 1 percent, things have rarely looked better. For everyone else, the picture is less rosy.
That disconnect reflects a deeper shift in how growth is being generated, and who benefits from it.
Consider a middle-class couple in Seattle. She is a public school teacher. He is an EMT. Together, they earn a solid, steady income, enough, a generation ago, to reasonably expect to buy a modest home and build financial security.
Today, they rent, not by choice.
They have done what they were supposed to do. They have saved. They have delayed. They have watched mortgage rates rise and housing prices climb faster than their ability to keep up. Each year, ownership moves a little further out of reach. Renting, once a temporary stage, has become a long-term condition.
By most macroeconomic indicators, they are doing fine. By their own assessment, they are treading water.
That gap, between statistical strength and lived experience, is where the real story of the economy lies.
Increasingly, economic expansion is being sustained by federal deficit spending and asset-driven gains that flow unevenly across the population. At the same time, millions of Americans are making rational financial decisions, borrowing, investing, and delaying major purchases that, taken together, reinforce the very system producing that imbalance.
The result is a quiet but consequential transformation. The economy is growing, but it is no longer translating that growth into broad-based security. When that translation weakens, the middle class begins to erode.
The Rise of a Deficit-Supported Economy
Deficits are not inherently a problem. In many cases, they help stabilize the economy, especially during downturns. But the current pattern is different. Growth is becoming increasingly reliant on sustained federal spending layered onto an already uneven economic structure.
What matters is not just the size of the deficit, but where its effects land.
A significant portion of that spending works its way into financial markets, supporting asset prices, boosting equity valuations, and reinforcing wealth accumulation among those who already hold assets. Meanwhile, wage growth has been steadier but far less impactful, especially when measured against rising costs in housing, healthcare, and education.
This is not simply a macroeconomic story. It is an institutional one. As Congress relies more on stopgap measures and cedes control over fiscal direction, the structure of spending becomes less deliberate and more reactive. Over time, that weakens the capacity of the system to distribute gains broadly.
A First-Class Economy, Coach-Class Outcomes
The economy increasingly operates like a first-class cabin layered onto a coach-class society.
At the top, asset ownership drives wealth. Gains in housing, equities, and financial instruments generate compounding returns. Access to capital, not just income, defines economic security.
For the rest, the experience is different. Wages grow, but costs grow faster. Housing is less attainable. Education is more expensive and less predictable as an investment. Healthcare remains a persistent source of financial risk.
Under those conditions, it is entirely rational for individuals to behave cautiously, to delay home purchases, rely more on credit, or invest in markets where returns appear more reliable than wages.
But those same choices, repeated across millions of households, reinforce the structure. Asset demand rises. Prices climb further. Entry becomes even harder.
The system is not malfunctioning. It is responding to incentives.
Rational Choices, Distorted Outcomes
Here is the uncomfortable part.
The economy is not producing these outcomes despite individual behavior. It is producing them because of it.
People invest because they need returns.
People borrow because costs outpace income.
People delay consumption because uncertainty is rising.
Each of those decisions makes sense on its own. But collectively, they sustain a model of growth that depends on asset appreciation and debt-supported consumption.
That dynamic helps explain a broader pattern. Confidence is weakening even when headline indicators remain positive. The data suggests growth. Lived experience suggests fragility.
When Growth Stops Translating Into Middle-Class Prosperity
For decades, American institutions served as translators, converting economic growth into rising wages, expanding opportunity, and a general sense of forward movement.
That translation is now less reliable. In many cases, it has broken down.
Growth still occurs, but its benefits are filtered, shaped by asset ownership, access to capital, and the institutional pathways through which policy operates. When those pathways weaken, the connection between growth and security weakens with them.
This is why the current moment feels so disorienting. The economy is not in crisis, but the experience of it increasingly is.
The Risk Ahead
The danger is not simply economic. It is political.
When growth no longer produces widely shared gains, trust erodes. People begin to question not just outcomes, but the system itself. That skepticism does not stay contained. It spills into politics, institutions, and civic life.
An economy that grows without broad gain does more than frustrate. It destabilizes.
Because when the institutions that sustain and distribute prosperity fail to translate it into lived security, belief in the system that produces it starts to disappear.
Conclusion: Repairing the Translators
If institutions have lost some of their capacity to translate economic growth into broadly shared outcomes, the task ahead is not to recreate the past but to rebuild that function under present conditions.
That begins with Congress. Reclaiming the power of the purse requires more than procedural fixes. It requires lawmakers to accept the political costs of making choices in the open rather than deferring them through continuing resolutions and last-minute brinkmanship. Regular order, even in a polarized era, forces negotiation into view and makes trade-offs visible.
Second, administrative capacity must be treated as a public good rather than a partisan tool. Hollowing out agencies may yield short-term political gains, but it weakens the state’s ability to implement policy in ways citizens can see and evaluate. Investment in expertise, staffing, and transparent rulemaking is not technocratic excess. It is the infrastructure that connects policy decisions to real-world outcomes.
Third, the broader informational environment matters. When political incentives reward spectacle over substance, even well-functioning institutions struggle to communicate their work. Strengthening local journalism, supporting public media, and creating space for serious policy discussion can help restore a shared baseline for understanding trade-offs.
None of these steps offers a quick fix. But together, they point toward a more realistic goal. Not the elimination of conflict, but its management through institutions that once again connect growth to security, decisions to outcomes, and policy to lived experience.
That connection, more than any single reform, is what needs to be rebuilt.
Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.
Keep ReadingShow less
Bulk Carrier, Belray, in the Gulf, near the Strait of Hormuz on March 22, 2026 in northern Ras al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates.
Getty Images
The Strategic Mistake: Ignoring Iran’s Indispensable Global Leverage
Apr 15, 2026
Al Ries and Jack Trout are considered America’s foremost marketing strategists, with their seven solo and co-authored books being bestsellers. Three of their books became standard readings for my senior-level Marketing Strategy students when I taught at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). All seven of their books were thoroughly discussed when teaching Marketing Management for UNI’s MBA program in Hong Kong.
If President Trump, Pete Hegseth, and their military advisors had consulted even one of Ries and Trout’s bestselling books, the Iranian war might have been avoided. I will explain further.
The Law of Focus
In Ries and Trout’s book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, law number 5 is “The Law of Focus.” Its subheading states, “The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.” For example, Federal Express is associated with the word “overnight” in most people’s minds. When a product needs to be delivered by the next day, customers typically choose FedEx.
Ries’s book, Focus, emphasizes that successful businesses must concentrate on and claim ownership of a unique attribute that is difficult to replicate and firmly established in the target market’s mind.
This concept also applies to countries whose prospects are other nations. This is called strategic indispensability; other countries will struggle without your resources. In global trade, it is unwise to impose tariffs or initiate conflict with a country that supplies something essential to your nation.
Iran
The Strait of Hormuz is Iran’s focal point of dominance and a strategic indispensability factor. An average of 138 ships sail through Hormuz daily. Only 19 ships have passed through the Strait since the ceasefire, and nearly 800 ships have been stranded for several weeks (BBC).
As a result, Iran controls the passage of ships transporting oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG), fertilizer-related products, sulfur, helium, and petrochemicals to 14 countries: Bahrain, China, India, Israel, Kuwait, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, and the United States.
Strategic Indispensability
Focus, economic leverage, and long-term sustainability for any country comes from three things: 1) a chokepoint, where one route or facility is hard to bypass (e.g., Strait of Hormuz), 2) processing dominance, where the raw material exists elsewhere but one country controls the refining of a manufacturing step (e.g., rare earths and chips) and/or 3) a single-point dependence, where a tiny number of firms or places hold most of the capacity, making disruption globally costly.
Examples of national focus, leverage, and strategic indispensability include:
- The United States dominates high-end advanced technology, defense alliances, and other countries' dependence on access to America’s financial industry.
- China controls ~90% of rare-earth processing, giving it export control over rare earths, as they are vital for defense, electronics, clean technology, and semiconductor supply chains.
- Countries with leverage in semiconductor materials and equipment include China, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Taiwan. Taiwan manufactures over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips.
- Key players in the LNG and helium industries include Algeria, Australia, Qatar, and Russia.
- The major strategic indispensability for Egypt is its access to the Suez Canal.
- Saudi Arabia’s oil production is its dominant factor worldwide.
- Europe relies on Norwegian natural gas as a major non-Russian supply source.
- Countries that are strategically indispensable for nickel supply, which is critical for batteries and stainless steel, include Australia, Canada, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
- Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, China, Chile, Congo, and Peru are key suppliers of copper and lithium, which are vital for electrical and energy storage applications.
Diplomacy 101
It’s a shame the rookie diplomacy crew at Trump 2.0 didn’t learn from Presidents Reagan, G.H. Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden that you do not invade a country if it has dominance (strategic indispensability) over a product, good, or service your country needs.
The United States and virtually every country will pay dearly to end the war Mr. Trump started without understanding the concept of strategic indispensability, without seeking Congressional authorization, and without consulting with NATO members and a multitude of other foreign leaders.
Dear Mr. Trump
Mr. Trump, I encourage you and your administration to consult a scholar from a major business school regarding the concepts of focus, leverage, and strategic indispensability. These principles are relevant not only to the Iranian conflict but also to the imposition of tariffs on countries that supply essential goods to the United States. It is unsurprising that countries affected by these tariffs, such as Brazil, China, and India, are now seeking alternative trading partners.
Hope springs eternal
Effective leadership is needed in the White House, Department of Defense, among military advisors, and within Congress to ensure a clear understanding of the focus, leverage, and strategic indispensability factors for the United States and other nations. This understanding will enable us to act appropriately in the global economy as allies rather than adversaries.
Steve Corbin is a professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa and a non-paid freelance guest columnist contributor to 158 newspapers and 47 social media platforms in 44 states
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More