Our democracy has just emerged from a stress test unlike any other in our history. Despite the fears of many, and thanks to heroic efforts by election administrators amidst a pandemic, there will be a peaceful transition of power on Jan. 20. The American experiment endures.
But while the election has been settled — and most recently affirmed by the Electoral College on Monday — our divisions remain intense. We are a polarized nation of red and blue. We are cleaved along geographic, generational, racial and education lines. Our political and cultural identities have become one. History shows us that these are the dangerous fault lines that tear many nations apart for good.
How fractured are we? No one wants to hear this, but Joe Biden carried Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia by just a cumulative 43,000 votes. If only that tiny number of ballots had gone to Donald Trump instead, the two would have tied at 269 electoral votes each.
The Senate could well end up knotted at 50 from each side if Democrats win both January runoffs in Georgia, a state Biden narrowly carried. The House looks nearly as close, with at most seven seats — less than 2 percent of them — making the difference between Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
We have an urgent need for structural reforms that might change the electoral incentives that help us repair the dysfunction and mistrust that grip our politics. One of the very best solutions would be ranked-choice voting, which turns out to be something that Americans already agree on: It appeared on the ballot in eight places nationwide this year and won a resounding seven victories.
Indeed, there might not be any electoral reform with more momentum. Maine and Alaska will now use ranked-choice voting for nearly all elections in the wake of November's ballot measure win in Alaska. Next year, it arrives in New York as the city chooses its next mayor. Earlier this year, five Democratic presidential primaries used RCV to help voters negotiate a ballot with a dozen candidates. And Republicans in Utah, Indiana and Virginia employed the system to determine congressional and statewide office nominees and party leaders.
Ranked elections work by mimicking an instant runoff. Voters get the power to rank their choices for each position in order. Candidates who are the first choices on at least 50 percent of ballots are the winners — like any other election. But if no one gets a majority of No. 1 votes? The person with the fewest No. 1 nods is eliminated. The second-choice votes of those who liked the last-place finisher the best are counted instead. The process continues until one candidate is revealed to have support from most voters.
The ballot speaks for the voter. Candidates can't win with shallow base support any longer.
More candidates can run, without any of them being derided as a spoiler. Voters can consider all of those candidates, without worrying they might waste their single vote. Politicians need to reach out to everyone, not just their base, and when that happens voters are more likely to listen.
Ranked-choice voting changes the incentive game completely: Voters are more satisfied, campaigns are more positive and our frozen political coalitions become more flexible.
Voters are catching on. Besides the major victory in Alaska, voters also approved ranked-choice voting this year in all six cities that considered it — in California, Colorado, Maine and Minnesota. These municipal ballot measures were approved by nearly two-to-one, on average, and were embraced by voters for many reasons. Some appreciated the greater choice. Others recognized it as a faster and cheaper way to handle runoffs. The one time RCV was rejected, a statewide ballot initiative in Massachusetts, the idea was nonetheless supported by nearly four-to-one among voters younger than 30, demonstrating that millennials and Generation Z are hungry for more choice.
Our system is ridden with structural unfairness. Those realities aren't going away, either. Our goal right now needs to be finding ways to make our elections fairer in a way that voters and candidates can support, no matter their political beliefs.
This year was a lonely one. Not only were we struck by a pandemic, but we also felt mistrust for our fellow citizens. But it doesn't have to be this way. A reform as simple as letting people vote with nuance and back-up choices would be a key step towards building a bridge back to a more unified nation.
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.