Brendan Carroll, a senior at Saint Francis Prep in Fresh Meadows, N.Y., is an ambassador for Students for Open Primaries.
Eric Adams was just elected mayor of New York with 70 percent of the general election vote and he promises to govern with a "mandate." Yet, there are over a million independently registered voters in the city who had no hand in choosing him as the leading candidate. Many of them, like me, are young voters.
Though I am not of voting age yet, I was able to pre-register at my local DMV upon receiving my driving permit. When prompted to choose a party, I was tempted to choose that with which I associate more commonly, but if the previous years had taught me anything, it's that partisan politics are an unpredictable, polarized game led by mostly self-serving politicians. Partisan divides were already wreaking havoc on all walks of life, and it seemed to me very few wanted to consider issues from all possible angles.
I joined nearly half of millennials and Gen Z voters by signing up as an independent, pleased that my freedom from a party would allow me more opportunity to dictate my own path of civic engagement and limit the amount of implicit bias I would pick up from polarized splits. Little did I know, my decision could fetter me to a future of apathetic votes in general elections, in which I had only scale-tipping power for candidates whom I felt no true proclivity towards. As such, this future will likely produce a generation of discouraged voters like myself, most of whom would become biased not against one party, but elections and the political sphere as a whole.
That's because in New York today, our primary elections silo party voters and shut out independents like me as well as third-party voters entirely. Ironic for a state that has lately prided itself on voting innovations. Twenty-three percent of registered New York voters cannot participate in primary elections at all, despite paying for them with their tax dollars, because they are not registered as Democrats or Republicans. For example, Republicans, who are only 10 percent of registered voters in the city, get the city to pay for an election that they alone can participate in. Make sense so far?
Now it's a pyrrhic victory for those handful of Republicans left in our city, who get "their" primary, because in the end we all know it's the Democratic primary that really counts. With 67 percent of the city's voters registered Democrats, it's almost always the Democratic primary that determines the eventual winning politician. Which is why most New Yorkers were talking about the Democratic mayoral candidate, former Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, as New York's next mayor long before Election Day. He will now represent and make decisions for every New Yorker — though 33 percent of all registered voters never even had the chance to legitimately weigh his candidacy against any others. We need a new direction.
Across the country, most cities have already enacted nonpartisan primaries. Over three quarters of U.S. cities use open, nonpartisan elections, including 23 of the 30 largest cities in the country. New York is in the small minority of cities that have failed to do so. In a nonpartisan primary, all the candidates are on one ballot and all the voters vote, with the top vote-getters moving on to the general election. In those cases, every election seeks the participation of every voter, they are far more competitive with real choices for the voters, and the elected officials that emerge from the general election are compelled to govern for everyone, not just the partisans in their party.
Would Eric Adams be our next mayor if every eligible voter had a chance to weigh in? Who knows. But we can say with certainty that every politician that comes out of an electoral system that disenfranchises directly or indirectly so many New Yorkers lacks the standing to govern for all of us.
New York has started a process of making its elections more equal and fair. But as long as we continue to administer outdated, closed and partisan primaries, New Yorkers will continue to be divided and unequal. And our elected leaders won't have the true mandate they need to govern effectively.
It's time to let all New Yorkers' votes really count for the candidates they stand behind in every public election.
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.