Why do local and state elections matter, and how can voters be sure that their voices are being represented in the lawmaking process? We open the third season of Democracy Decoded with an overview of democracy at the state and local level, and how we can ensure that all citizens can have their voices heard.
This episode is from the Democracy Decoded podcast as a part of The Democracy Group.
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As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
America is built on values. Its first official texts announce the importance of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those three things might have slightly different meanings to individual people. But our understanding of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness isn’t so different that we miss the larger picture.
Most of us can agree what these three things aren’t: selling American lives for oil, allowing government officials to invade private spaces to selectively enforce immigration rules, or forcing women to have risky C-sections.
My parents are immigrants, and came to the U.S. as adults. They made the choice, willingly and joyfully, to pledge allegiance to this country. Nowhere is perfect, but my parents were happy that here, they had free access for their daughters to decent schools, economic opportunities, and free speech. My sisters and I were all born in the same hospital and raised in the same small city, and all we know is America. It is our country: my sister works for the government, my dad served his community in healthcare for over thirty years, and I am studying to become a lawyer. Any talk of going “home” goes nowhere, because this is our home. Immigrants are the backbone of this country, and they make America special.
But some of our policies and actions, right now, make it easy to forget the bold, unified, and free vision that compelled the original Americans to accept the Constitution and its promises.
For America’s 250th birthday, I picture a recommitment to what the founders sought in the revolution and wrote in our founding texts, even when they couldn’t always live up to it. No kings; dignity and respect for individuals; economic flourishing for all, not just aristocrats.
I spend a lot of my time telling my friends and family that two things can be simultaneously true: that life and this country are much better than they were 100 years ago, and that we could still be doing much better. People are physically healthier, live longer, live in less pain, have more free time, and have more rights than before. At the same time, America is the richest country in the world, and its people, my friends and family, often feel left behind. It’s sometimes hard to feel lucky when government officials intimidate, tear gas, assault, or even kill people for doing the first thing this country promised them: the right to free speech and assembly.
No one believes in the American dream like the people who chose to be here, and the young people like me who want to see this country flourish into my old age feel the stakes in trying to keep this country great and make it better. I don’t want to repeat the generational pattern: my grandparents fled Palestine, and my parents fled Kuwait. I want my daughter to grow up in a free country that fully embodies its promises, to give her the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I choose this country, and I hope that together, we all choose it too.
Sara Abdulla, 29, Chicago, IL
An Ecuadorian soldier stands in front of Basilica del Voto Nacional.
In November, Ecuadorians voted against allowing U.S. military bases in their country. Just over three months later, U.S. armed forces launched operations there, collaborating with the Ecuadorian military in a campaign designed to crack down on narcotics transit and associated crime within the country.
The joint effort has included regional curfews, arrests of gang members, and targeted bombing. It has also been criticized as military overreach, with a group of U.S. lawmakers backed by human rights groups raising concerns over the conduct of the U.S. military in Ecuador during the last several months. The U.S. military presence is also controversial for Ecuadorians, said Ernesto Anzieta, the Metropolitan Director for Citizen Security in Quito.
“The problem is that you are putting [the] military in contact with populations which in some cases are innocent people, in other cases are people that are non-combatants… but are related to criminal gangs, and in other cases they are enemies,” he said in an interview.
Ecuador is not a major producer of cocaine, but 70% of the world’s supply is smuggled through the country and exported to Europe and North America from its coast. Formerly one of Latin America’s most peaceful countries, narcotics and associated gang activity have made Ecuador one of its most violent.
“Ecuador for a long time was an island of peace,” said Anzieta. The country, he said, is not institutionally prepared for what is going on.
Organized crime is multifaceted, encompassing a broad network of corruption in the justice system and the incarceration system, with gangs adapting to traffic whatever goods are most profitable. Right now, narcotics gangs are also involved in Ecuador’s illegal gold mining industry. Cartel violence must be viewed as the systemic issue it is, Anzieta said.
Eddie Contreras, who served as a member of the Ecuadorian military for more than 25 years, supports the U.S. joint military operation. At the same time, he said, corruption must also be addressed within the incarceration system, the justice system, the political structure, and the military itself.
Military operations are sending gang members to prisons, Contreras said, but violence levels remain high, and criminals still operate and recruit from the jails. “The prisons are universities of perfection for crime,” he said in Spanish.
Lorena Villavicencio, a security and defense specialist who worked in Ecuador’s National Assembly and the Ministry of National Defense, proposed bolstering protection and compensation for prison workers, conducting a serious investigation into criminal connections in the transportation and private security sectors, and addressing the lack of social services in poor communities.
Drug trafficking gangs have developed territorial control largely in western provinces, which often withstands strong-arm military operations, according to Villavicencio. “When we have these big operations, it helps, but after a couple of weeks or months, statistics show that we get back to the same levels of violence.”
In some cases, after the military operation is finished, she said, gangs will move back into the area and question local people about what they told the military. Gangs function through extortion and threats, and military pressure can exacerbate this.
Gangs also control territory in large part because of the services they provide to their population. In the city of Duran, for instance, “you have these criminal groups who are basically in charge of providing the water… for the population,” said Villavicencio. “If you have a part of society who doesn’t have the state to provide basic needs … electricity, education, health…the organized crime will use that.”
The German social development organizations Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung have been doing good work in Ecuador, Villavicencio said, also pointing to the initiatives of the European Union in collaborations such as “El PAcCTO” and campaigns to raise awareness about child and teenage gang recruitment. These social development programs must be part of efforts to combat organized crime in the country, she believes.
During his presidency, Donald Trump has prioritized exerting influence in the Western Hemisphere, bombing more than 59 boats the U.S. says were carrying narcotics in the Caribbean and Pacific. The U.S. also captured Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and imposed extensive sanctions on Cuba, while President Trump has founded the Shield of the Americas, a coalition of some Latin American countries whose objectives include stopping “criminal and narco-terrorist gangs and cartels” throughout the Americas.
An American military presence in Ecuador may be helpful in the short term, but in the long term, Ecuador will need to ensure its own efficacy as a state, said Villavicencio. “[I]f the state [is] not able to manage their own challenges… if you don’t have strong institutions internally… any type of … cooperation would not be effective enough to be sustainable in the long run.”
Cocaine and Corruption: As U.S. Military Operations Continue, Ecuadorians Say Drug Crime Needs Holistic Response was first published on the Latino News Network and was republished with permission.
Sophia Lumsdaine is a student of history, political science, journalism, and Spanish at George Fox University. She recently spent four months abroad in Quito, Ecuador.
We have just completed another tough year for America’s most prestigious colleges and universities. Problems are legion; solutions are hard to find.
By their own telling, the richest places are confronting a gloomy economic future. They are cutting staff, freezing hiring, and limiting faculty salary increases. They are also beginning to face the ugly reality of runaway grade inflation and student disengagement from the academic work that is supposedly the lifeblood of their institutions.
However, in perhaps the most important development of the just completed 2025-26 academic year, a few of America’s universities are waving the white flag in a long-running war mounted by conservative critics of higher education. Five years ago, JD Vance argued that conservatives should declare that college professors are “the enemy” and treat the most prestigious schools as “totalitarian” institutions.
His proposed solution: Conservatives need “to seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need a… de-wokeification program.” They need “to deinstitutionalize the left, reinstitutionalize the right.”
As the 2025-2026 academic year comes to a close, Yale, Harvard, and others like them are on board with the “de-wokeification program.” Vance wants these colleges and universities and their students, faculty, and staff to be more deferential. Alas, that will not help prepare their students for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship.
Viewpoint diversity does not guarantee that students will be willing to practice empathy before judgment, to read deeply, and to listen attentively to any argument, left, right, or center. Only if they do can they live well in a democracy.
And as hard as it is for universities to hire faculty with conservative views, it is much harder to rediscover the habits of mind, like those I just enumerated, that are necessary if free speech and democratic political life are to flourish. Trying to appease the JD Vance‘s of the world or powerful alumni who complain that we need to hire fewer faculty to teach about the evils of colonialism or the injustices of America’s past and more who will teach about the virtues of capitalism and our country’s founding ideals, is a mistake that elite colleges and universities seem eager to commit.
The problem is cultural, not representational. Conservatives think that addressing the latter will cure the former and bring a vibrant marketplace of ideas back to our campuses.
Sadly, this year, some of the most prestigious colleges and universities seem to have bought that line.
In November 2025, the New York Times published an interview with the leaders of Dartmouth College, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Wesleyan University. They did not agree on everything, but here is one example of how they are drinking the Kool-Aid on viewpoint diversity.
Jennifer Mnookin, then Chancellor at Wisconsin and now incoming president of Columbia University, put it this way: “I think that many universities, not all, but many, were for a period of time deeply focused on identity diversity, and really not so focused on viewpoint diversity or belief diversity. I think there’s a danger of a pendulum swinging too far in the other direction, and we need to worry about that.”
“But,” she continued, “I think universities should be spaces where ideas, and different ideas, embodied by people from different backgrounds, come together, and where it won’t always be comfortable, but where we will learn and do better from that engagement.”
Note how Mnookin elevates viewpoint diversity and offers a vision of higher education as bringing together “different ideas, embodied by people from different backgrounds….” She assumes, I guess, that a good college will be a place where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
But she said nothing about how that alchemy is supposed to take place once her Noah’s Ark has been assembled, nor how it would help to be equipped for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship.
Moreover, Mnookin pushed back when Wesleyan’s president, Michael Roth, warned about the danger of parroting the White House’s talking points about higher education and the Trump Administration’s plan “to capture higher education for ideological purposes.”
“Michael,” she responded, doubling down on her “commitment to viewpoint diversity and to pluralism,” it “should prevent external capture and internal capture. And it should be a way of thinking about a piece of our mission and looking for excellence that can actually bring people together, even across their differences.”
Then in April, Yale University issued the report of a committee charged with the task of addressing the crisis of trust in higher education. It highlighted the conservative talking point that “the nation’s leading universities, including Yale, tend to exclude conservative intellectual traditions.”
“Some,” it said, “point to the partisan composition of the faculty, noting that professors overwhelmingly identify with the Democratic party. Others focus on the curriculum, or on the suggestion that liberal professors indoctrinate their students. Taken together, these critiques frame universities as intellectual and ideological echo chambers, out of touch with the American nation and out of step with its political currents.”
While the committee did not agree on whether that was the right diagnosis of the problem of free speech and academic freedom at Yale, it did conclude that in ways that would please conservatives that “Echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.”
Of note, two years ago, a prominent conservative intellectual, Prof. Keith Whittington, was hired to join Yale’s law school faculty. At that time, Whittington seemed clear about one of the reasons he was hired and about his mission.
As he explained, “I'm not unmindful of the significance of this move at the present moment….Yale has notoriously lacked right-of-center public law faculty for decades…The lack of political diversity on elite law school faculties,” he added, “is unhealthy, and I'm glad to be able to do my small part to mix things up.”
“With the very meaning of the conservatism in the United States up for grabs,” Whittingham said, “I look forward to lending what perspective and expertise I can to public debates.”
Yale seemed to be conceding that conservatives have been right about elite colleges and universities all along.
Not to be outdone, we also learned last month that “Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of ‘viewpoint diversity.’ The campaign, driven by Harvard’s top brass, aims to raise several hundred million dollars to support a new cohort of professors. If successful, the funding could bring dozens of faculty members to campus and drastically shift Harvard’s academic makeup.”
Wow.
As an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education published in the wake of that revelation points out, Professor Harvey Mansfield, “the sharpest conservative thorn in the side of Harvard’s body politic,” is “entitled to a kind of victory lap…” He has long said, “I think it has to be explicit that you’re hiring conservatives,” and now it seems that Harvard is doing just that.
There is nothing wrong with viewpoint diversity, but it will neither fix the problems that elite schools are experiencing nor equip their students to preserve and improve democratic life. In fact, this year’s let’s hire conservatives crusade may make matters worse.
As my colleague Leah Schmalzbauer and I have argued, that crusade “misses the point and distracts us from the work that needs to be done to further improve the quality of the education students receive in American colleges and universities. Put simply, instead of fixating on who is in the classroom, and whether they are liberal or conservative, we should be focused on how we are in the room.”
“Higher education’s greatest challenge to achieving open inquiry,” we argue, “is not one of ideology or viewpoint diversity, but of disposition….You can decorate campuses with all the colors of the political rainbow, but not make them better places to learn.”
Unfortunately, 2025-26 may go down as the year when elite colleges and universities started doing that kind of decorating. Conservatives may take a victory lap, and the Trump Administration may think its pressure campaign is working.
But for those of us who are privileged to teach in privileged places and want to get students ready for democratic citizenship, our most important work will remain the same whether or not we bring more conservatives to campus: Teaching students to think democratically.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
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.