Byrd is CEO of Invest America and serves on the Leadership Now Project’s steering committee.
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
John F. Kennedy
Rice University, 1962
President Kennedy's iconic Texas speech formalized our national commitment to space innovation and defeating communism. Listeners came away from that moment focused on "how." How will we reach the moon by 1970? How can we beat the Soviet Union? How do we keep focused in an era with so many competing civic and national security priorities?
That one hard thing – reaching a cold, shiny, far-away rock – is rightly history's focal point. My read of that moment is that Kennedy's admonition to reach the moon was both a clear goal and a beautiful metaphor. America's greatness always lies in our exploration and mastering of "the other things."
In the early 1960s, those other things included throwing off the yoke of American apartheid; solving malnutrition and poverty; squaring post-World War II industrial growth with worker rights, and mastering low-level international skirmishes while avoiding nuclear conflagration.
Today's problem set is just as tough. Navigating a tricky inflation economy; adapting to Covid life; managing culture wars plaguing our national conversations; war drums in Eastern Europe; tension with Asia. Next to — and many of us think above – these challenges is our hardest current problem: preserving and protecting our core democracy in the face of rising authoritarian tendencies.
Where I live, New York, a group of committed leaders is focused on elevating democracy issues right here at home. Unite NY was launched after the 2016 election by Martin Babinec, a long-time reform advocate and founder of the cloud-based HR services company TriNet. The group built its platform for New York around important technical fixes and reforms that are difficult to implement in our hyper-polarized political environment. Its agenda is nonpartisan common sense, and would do a lot to push democracy forward for the Empire State's 19 million citizens. These include:
- Advocating for open primaries.
- Allowing citizen-led referendums.
- Expanding and making permanent voting at home.
- Transforming party-controlled election commissions.
- Reform anti-competitive ballot access laws.
We democracy reformers are used to the joy and frustration of explaining why this bouquet of laws and rule changes is vital to a smooth-running society. The passion really emerges from the Republican and Democratic parties, who predictably rise up to oppose any and all changes brought forward.
Today, Unite NY has inspired the two-party duopoly's ire by attempting to secure a nominating ballot line for its candidates to run in the 2022 election – including fielding candidates for governor and lieutenant governor. Their nominees all lean into Unite NY's democracy reform agenda.
Every step of the way, the political status quo has made the process harder for all independent parties. In 2020, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo used a ovid relief bill to increase the signature threshold for those seeking ballot lines in New York from 15,000 to 45,000. Folded into that bill was the requirement to gather at least 500 signatures from a majority of the state's congressional districts, as well as the provision that increased the vote total from 50,000 votes to 130,000 or 2 percent of the vote total for existing parties to maintain a ballot line after the next election cycle.
Unite NY has been challenged at every turn by legislative and political machinery controlled by the two parties. In this election cycle, petition gathering was hampered by the gerrymandered state Senate and congressional district lines. A New York appeals court judge threw out the original post-census map. New congressional lines were approved in late May – just 10 days before the final signature due date. Immediately, opponents of reform sent challenges to the state Board of Elections seeking to invalidate the group's nominating petitions. This struggle is undecided, may continue over the next several weeks and could eventually be decided by the courts.
By seeking a place on the ballot, these democracy reformers come to the table with a very important agenda. Crosspartisan reforms and more choice are vital to opening democracy avenues for all citizens – whether they be upstate or downstate, Republican, Democrat or independent. Victory by the status quo – pushing them off the ballot – means true democracy reform will be once again kicked down the road.
The promise and necessity of Unite NY compel us to keep these too-hard “other things” on the front burner. This is more than just an idea. It is our well-deserved legacy. Instead of trying to snuff out these reform efforts, political forces on the right and left in New York should be working to elevate, support and maybe even join them.
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.