There was plenty of hand wringing over the state of democracy at home and abroad in 2022. Extremists appeared poised to sabotage elections in the U.S., a leading index found half of democratic governments around the world in decline, and Russia’s war against Ukraine placed liberty under direct assault.
Yet 2022 was also the year “the good guys struck back,” as Michael Hirsh wrote in Foreign Policy. Ukrainian forces have thrown Russia on the defensive. Extremist candidates lost in Brazil, France, and in key U.S. midterm contests. In Kenya, the Philippines and elsewhere, elections ended not in chaos, as predicted, but in peaceful transfers of power. In China and Iran, average citizens are rising up.
In the U.S., the House select committee’s investigation of the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol elevated truth over disinformation, and helped trigger a fundamental shift away from extremism, and from the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.
In August, an NBC News survey found that Americans ranked “threats to democracy” ahead of the economy as their top concern. And in November, the midterms unfolded smoothly and election deniers largely lost, in a contest widely hailed as a win for democracy.
None of this takes away from the substantial threats that still place democracy at risk, including rampant disinformation facilitated by social media and the decline of local newspapers. But those who wish to defend democracy must go beyond bemoaning its demise, as so many news outlets, commentators and authors incessantly do. The story of Democracy’s strengths, which were also on display in 2022, merits notice as well.
To succeed, the pro-democracy movement “needs to go beyond its present modus operandi, a mix of fatalism and despair and living in perpetual reaction to the right and policy wonkiness and praying for indictments,” argues author Anand Giridharadas. Democracy advocates “can out-compete the fascists and seize the age,” Giridharadas recently wrote in The New York Times, with a more expansive vision that replaces fatalism with hope.
Hope means appreciating that the nation’s partisan divisions are not as intractable as media pundits driven by ratings like to scream. A full 41 percent of Americans identify as Independents, compared with fewer than 30 percent identified with either party, and large majorities of Americans agree on key issues, from same-sex marriage to legalizing cannabis. Hope means celebrating the teens fighting for the right to read “banned books” with lawsuits and protests, and the young voters whose turnout reached its second-highest level in 30 years in the last election.
Hope also means investing in future generations, as Congress recently did with a $23 million appropriation for civic learning in the year-end omnibus spending bill, effectively tripling federal spending on history and civic learning. That bipartisan investment reflects continued support across party lines for civic education, which recent national polling found is supported by close to 80 percent of voters on both sides of the aisle. It was just one of many wins for democracy this year.
Eliza Newlin Carney is a longtime Washington writer, editor and columnist specializing in democracy issues. She is a columnist and former senior editor for The American Prospect, and previously held senior positions at CQ Roll Call and National Journal. She also is founder and president of The Civic Circle, which uses music and the arts to empower young students to understand and participate in democracy.
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.