The AfD Group Surges in a Regional Election in the E.U. State of Germany

Both the U.S. and E.U. mandate that their respective states be republics (i.e., representative democracies), and thus assuming an autocratic government is prohibited. When the governor of the state of Hungary restricted freedom of the press and judicial independence, the E.U. pushed back until Viktor Orbán lost reelection in 2026. Later that year, when the AfD (far right) group won in a region of the state of Germany, the state’s chancellor publicly voiced concern regarding the group’s attitude toward democracy. Viewing the governor as the bastion of constraint on such a trend ignores the E.U. entirely and treats Germany as still fully sovereign rather than being a state in the federal Union, which also has authority to protect democracy even if that authority was shown to be too weak with regard to Orbán’s rule in Hungary.

In early September, 2026, the “anti-immigration AfD group won the election in the Saxony-Anhalt region of the state of Germany “by a landslide, taking 43.8% of the vote. The CDU came in a distant second with 17.2%.”[1] Compared with the region’s election in 2021 “the AfD more than doubled its vote share, while the CDU saw its share halved.”[2] Merkel’s decision to open the state to immigrants from vastly different cultures than that of the E.U. had come home to roust, electorally; she could have predicted such a counter-reaction, given the cultural conservativism that has been so very salient in that E.U. state, as well as in Austria, another socially conservative state.

In the regional election, “60% of voters had chosen parties that call democracy into question.”[3] Merz, the state’s governor, said at the time that his state “needs fundamental reforms,” and yet he had hardly been a charismatic leader for substantial change.[4] Indeed, he lamented “the government’s failure to communicate policies in a sufficiently emotive and compelling way.”[5] Such policies hardly constituted “fundamental reforms” even though he “saw a society ‘longing for disruption’ and ‘fundamental change.’”[6] The victory of the AfD group doubtlessly had something to do with the built-up pressure from the dissatisfaction. Looking to the state government as a check against excesses in the AfD group can thus be regarded as problematic. Fortunately, Germany is an E.U. state. That a state in a federal system can itself have a federal system is perfectly consistent with historical federal theory, as discussed theoretically by Althusius, interestingly a German jurisprud, in his treatise, Political Digest (1603). Just because a state has a federal system does not mean that it cannot itself be a state in a federal system. Large U.S. states that are internally diverse in their respective regions could benefit by this point, as such states could benefit from adopting federal systems. Texas, New York, Illinois, and most obviously California could benefit greatly.

In analyzing the victory of the AfD group, I am deliberately taking a federal perspective from the vantage point of the E.U., which like its states is semi-sovereign politically, and thus constitutes a “political union” (of the same genus as the United States). Both unions represent “empire-scale” federal republics of republics—wheels within a wheel, to borrow from Kenneth Wheare’s text, Federal Government. To be viable, all of the wheels must be democratic rather than autocratic; otherwise, states without political freedom would tend to unilaterally nullify federal law from being valid within such states.

Once federal law is ignored, a federal union of state is in real trouble because the practice could easily spread to become a norm. This is doubtless why U.S. President Jackson sent troops to South Carolina in 1831 after its government enacted a law nullifying any federal law contrary to the state’s political or economic interests. The issue then was an agricultural tariff that had recently been enacted by the federal government. Jackson got both the tariff and the Nullification Act revoked, and thus safeguarded the system of federalism.

The E.U. too has sought to counter efforts by states to ignore federal law, and to eclipse democracy and freedom of the press and judiciary as well. Although Merz emphasized after the regional election that the AfD group would “have to follow the line set” by the state government, he omitted the fact that the group would also have to follow the line set by the European Union. This is a significant omission, especially given the governor’s political weakness at the state level. Just as the Commission withheld federal funds from the state of Hungary during Orbán’s autocratic rule, such funds would be held back from a state governed by the AfD were that group to eviscerate rule of law, freedom of the press, and judicial independence there. To be sure, the (excessive) involvement of the state governments at the federal level via the European Council and the Council of Ministers and the state veto itself enervate the enforcement by the Commission, but this is not to say that the state governments are the only ones capable of safeguarding democracy. State officials ignore the E.U. at their own peril; such a stance, which in American parlance has been referred to as “state rights” and in European terms is commonly known as the “Euroskeptic” ideology, needlessly opens Europe up to dictatorship once again. We need only look back less than a century to see examples of fascist dictatorship in what would become the European Union. Even in the twenty-first century, Europeans can hardly afford to ignore the E.U.’s safeguards even though they are needlessly weak in enforcement due to the state veto mechanism (i.e., a conflict of interest) at the federal level.

---

1. Laura Freischmann, “Merz ‘Deeply Shocked’ After Major Afd Win in Saxony-Ahhalt,” Euronews.com 7 September, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

California and Florida: Different Political Cultures in the U.S.

As evinced by Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney likening a planned referendum on whether Alberta should vote to separate from the rest of Canada to “Brexit,” in which Britain seceded from the E.U., as if the UK in the European Union were equivalent to Alberta in Canada, political category mistakes can run rampant without being detected as such. Referring to the referendum in the province, Carney said, “That is a very dangerous bluff.” He was “pointing to the turmoil that followed the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union.”[1] The implied false equivalence of Canada and the E.U., as if the former too had been formed out of countries, is as incorrect as that which Carney was more directly assuming between Alberta and Britain. A region of a country, even if the latter has a federal system, is not equivalent to a country that joins a political union such as the E.U. and U.S. That Britain was once the host kingdom in the British Empire, and thus equivalent to other members of the empire, including Ireland and Virginia, does not mean that the UK as a state in the E.U. was equivalent to the latter, or to other political unions consisting of early-modern-scale countries.

Even before they became independent countries, the thirteen British colonies that would rebel were considered to be an empire within the British empire, and such an incongruity was correctly believed to render the latter unstable[2]. Empires consist of (early-modern) kingdom-scale polities, rather than of empires. The distinction between a kingdom and empire was well established, as in Althusius’s 1603 book, Political Digest, on federalism. It would not surprise Althusius at all that the countries that became members of the U.S. would continue to have their own political cultures rather than be fully homogenized at the empire-level.  The ideological conviction that the 50 states are somehow very similar culturally, as if linguistics were the exclusive basis of cultural differences, and thus that the U.S. is equivalent to an E.U. state, is empirically false (as are most ideological biases).

On May 27, 2026, the head of government of California vowed “to tax any payouts that California residents receive from a $1.776 billion ‘anti-weaponization’ fund that Donald Trump secured in a settlement with his own [U.S.] Justice Department.”[3] Newsom said, “Anyone from California that receives any of those funds, we want to tax 100 percent of those proceeds.” A similar proposal had been made in New York by NY Senator Mike Gianaris. It would be a grave mistake to assume that such a bill were also being entertained by the Florida legislature, and the reason goes beyond partisanship between the two major American political parties.

That Newsom would make public his proposal means that he believed that the political center of gravity in California favored going after not just corruption generally, but also efforts to reward people who had rioted at the federal Capitol building as the states’ respective votes for U.S. president were being counted in 2020. State populations differed appreciably on the ideology behind Trump’s “MAGA” populist movement. That movement had a much lower percentage of believers in say California and Massachusetts, than in Florida and Oklahoma. Alaska and Hawaii provide yet another stark contrast on how pervasive support for MAGA was as of 2026.

The sheer ideological difference between the centers of political gravity of those two republics resonates with the theoretical claim that the heterogeneity between kingdom-level polities in an empire is not just a matter of degree, but, rather, a leap, from the cultural differences that exist within any one of those polities. This is why federalism, which intentionally includes governmental means of managing inter-state cultural diversity, originated with empires rather than kingdoms, and is better suited to empires even though some early-modern-scale kingdom-level polities have federal systems (e.g., Germany, Switzerland, Belgium). The cultural differences between E.U. states is a leap rather than just a degree more than such differences within Germany and even Belgium within which different languages are spoken (in Flanders and Wallonia, respectively). The practical need to take account of cultural differences is greater in E.U. governance than at the state level, and thus federalism is more valuable—more fitting—at the E.U.-state interface than within a given state.

Back to the U.S., on the very day on which Newsom announced his proposal to tax all of the proceeds of Trump’s “slush fund” to his base that had sought to interfere with the role of Congress in counting the ballots of electors from the States for in the federal presidential election, Ron DeSantis, the head of Florida’s government, announced his proposed tax cut that would vastly increase the exemption from $50,000 to $250,000 on property taxes in Florida. Ben Albritton, the president of the Florida Senate, said, “I can’t think of a more meaningful way to celebrate America’s 250 [year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence than] the passage of $250,000 in tax relief for every Florida homeowner.”[4] Both men were betting that any drop in school budgets from the drop in tax revenue would be less important to most voters than paying less in property taxes. Here again, a distinct political ideology was in play—one that would get considerably less broadcast air-time in California where proportionally more voters believed in a more expansive role of government and thus for government spending by which public goods could be provided even if taxes are high. To be sure, the ideological divide between favoring tax-cuts versus government spending on public goods is an old one; my point is that the peoples in the American states differed, at least as of 2026, significantly on which side should be valued more. In fact, the European states may have differed much less in this respect even though different languages were spoken! So much for the false claim that cultural differences depend on linguistic differences! Belgium and the Netherlands were much more alike on this axis of political ideology that were California and Florida. Moreover, the differences within a given state, whether of the E.U. or U.S., were a leap down from the differences between the states.

Therefore, Alberta leaving Canada (or the southern region known as Egypt leaving Illinois—which has been attempted five times in Illinois history) is not like Britain seceding from the Union. Even though Canada’s regions admittedly may differ culturally, an empire consists of many polities and thus the diversity between the polities in an empire is greater than in Canada. Put another way, Canada would come into the U.S. as states just as every other country that has become a member of the U.S. has (and territories that became states are legally assumed to have been sovereign countries). Neither Texas nor Hawaii merged with the existing U.S., so neither would Canada merge with the United States. Neither would Canada come in as just one state, but this is not to say that each province would translate into a state; even if each one would, Canada still could not be classified as an empire (unlike the E.U. and U.S., both of which have many country-level republics).  

---

1. Mike Blanchfield and Sue Allan, “Carney Warms Alberta Not to Pull a “Brexit,” Politico, May 25, 2026.
2. Skip Worden, British Colonies Forge an American Empire.

3.Tyler Katzenberger and Nick Reisman, “Newsom Vows 100 Percent Tax on DOJ ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ Payouts,” Politico, May 27, 2026.
4.. Gary Fineout, “In One of His Final Acts, DeSantis Calls For Vote on Sweeping Florida Property Tax Cut,” Politico, May 27, 2026.

E.U. States and US Economies Compared Economically

Even in reporting and analyzing seemingly-objective economic data for comparative purposes, political ideology can creep in if that instinctual urge is powerful enough. Even in comparisons of political entities that are on the same level (e.g., city, region/province, kingdom, empire), “word-games” can be used to suggest that the republics being compared are on different political levels. The use of linguistic subterfuge is, I submit, underhanded and based on a stubborn refusal to admit to oneself that the two or more political entities being compared are indeed on the same level, rather than one being higher than the other. In the case of comparing GDP and GDP per capita between E.U. and U.S. states, the very fact that the states are being compared to each other, rather than a state in one union to another union (as if a state in one political union were equivalent to another union of states—a category mistake to be sure!), means that the respective states are in fact equivalent even though different labels are used according to whether a given state is in one union or another. In arguing these points, I shall juxtaposition the respective labels to highlight the absurdity of using different labels for ideological purposes.

In mid-April, 2026, Euronews, which reflects Euroskeptic language in order to appease critics of the E.U., reported that top E.U. states and U.S. republics were roughly similar in “economic size rankings.”[1] Even though E.U. states, like U.S. states, were (and had been) semi-sovereign states, Euronews belied its own economic likeness of the respective economic sizes of big states in both unions by erroneously inventing the label, “EU countries” just before “US states.” Then, in the next paragraph, the journalist used the label, “European economies” for the E.U. states yet retained US states. In English, the expression, “Something funny is going on here” is a way of applying suspicion to another person’s underlying motives. In other words, something more is going on in the writing of the article than merely comparing economic numbers. This is the idea.

The “word games” bent on subtly overlaying differentials are undercut when we turn to the numbers themselves. In terms of GDP, the list from highest to lowest shows E.U. states and U.S. states clustered: Germany, California, France, Texas, Italy, New York, Spain, and Florida. That big states in one union of states are economically equivalent to big states in the other union is good evidence that the respective states in the two unions are equivalent more generally. To take one example, the GDP of Spain in 2025 was €1.687 trillion and that of Florida was €1.624 trillion.[2] To be sure, in making more general comparisons between the two semi-sovereign states, Spain’s greater size, 3.6 times the territorial size of Florida, is significant. However, that Spain’s 505,990 square kilometers falls between the 423,970 of California and the 695,662 of Texas strongly suggests that in terms of territory, the large (and small) states of the respective unions cluster together, rather than it being the case that a large state in one union clusters with the other union overall. To be sure, the exception to this is Alaska being larger than the E.U. itself, but otherwise, the large states in the two unions cluster not only in terms of economic output, but also geographical size.

The article’s report of GDP per capita even puts some large U.S. states above even large E.U. states because New York, California, Illinois, Texas, and Florida have higher numbers than do the Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy. The bar-graph in the article even has all of the states in blue whereas the U.S. and E.U. are in other colors so those two unions could be compared to each other. Even though the graph is labeled as “EU’s top 5 economies vs. top 5 U.S. states” (notice, too, the subtle, selective use of periods in “U.S.” but not “EU” as if this means that the latter is an organization rather than a union of states!), that all of the states are shown with blue bars indicates that the states of the respective unions are equivalent (and that the unions can be compared with each other, rather than to a state).

In making the argument of state-equivalence, out of which I derived union-equivalence, I once read the ten volumes of George Bancroft’s History of the United States of America, From the Discovery of the American Continent after having taken Joanne Freeman’s Yale course on the American Revolutionary War. In writing British Colonies Forge an American Empire: A Basis for Trans-Atlantic Comparisons, I wanted to highlight that according to Bancroft’s studies, people on both sides of the Atlantic viewed the British colonies as being on the scale of the countries in Europe at the time. Bancroft reports in his texts that both the political elite in the colonies and in the British Empire’s host kingdom (i.e., Britain) tended to view the United Colonies as being on the empire- rather than kingdom-level.[3] In fact, even New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and Southern (informal) sub-groups of colonies were viewed as empires in themselves by some people! Not just a few British politicians were nervous about there being an empire (or empires!) within the empire; an empire consists of kingdom-level political entities. That both Virginia and Ireland were regarded as members of the British Empire is strong evidence that the British colonies in North America were regarded from the start in the Greek rather than the Roman sense of a colonialization (i.e., a colony constructed to be equivalent to the host country rather than as a part thereof; for example, a city-state in Greece creating another city-state). This is the historical underpinning for my conclusion that the U.S. states, rather than the U.S. itself, are equivalent to E.U. states, and therefore I submit that the claim that a state of the E.U. is equivalent to the U.S. is a political category mistake. In historical terms, no one would have claimed that a kingdom and an empire are equivalent because empires consisted of kingdoms. That both a free-standing, or free, kingdom and an empire were both sovereign does not make the two equivalent because sovereignty is merely an attribute rather than definitive.  

Comparative politics can extend beyond comparing types of political systems (e.g., democracy, autocracy) to consider the matter of equivalence in terms of city-states, regions, kingdoms, and empires. Early in the seventeenth century, the European jurisprud Althusius wrote Political Digest on federalism based on the Holy Roman Empire. In his text, he clearly distinguished between the different levels in a federation: the guilds, the cities, the regions, the kingdoms, and the empire. His theory of federalism has the next-lower being members (and thus represented) in the next-higher, with individuals being members only of the guilds. His isomorphic federalism is more the case in the E.U. than the U.S. because none of the American states have federal systems. By viewing the E.U. and the U.S. as equivalent, Althusius’s theory could be seen to be applicable to the U.S., especially in regard to that union’s large, internally heterogenous states like California, Illinois, and New York. Comparing apples with apples, and oranges with oranges in comparative politics can indeed have such significant practical benefits, but not if Europeans and Americans go on treating individual states in one union as being equivalent to the other union rather than to states thereof.

---

1. Servet Yanatma, “E.U.’s Largest Economies vs. Top US States: How Do They Compare in GDP?”  Euronews.com, 12 April, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Skip Worden, British Colonies Forge an American Empire: A Basis for Trans-Atlantic Comparisons.

On Electing a U.S. President: The Case of President Biden’s Age

One of the reasons why the delegates at the U.S. Constitutional Convention devised the Electoral College to elect the federal president was that they thought that even at 7 million, the population of the U.S. back then was too large for the even just the propertied people, who could vote, to know the candidates very well, if at all. At over 300 million, the U.S. population during the presidential reelection campaign of Joe Biden had to rely on the mass media and the political elite, including statements by the White House, for information on whether the sitting president was too old to serve viably in a second term. The limited number of presidential electors in the states would presumably be small enough that they could have the opportunity to size up the candidates in person. But with electors from fifty rather than just thirteen states, such an opportunity would not be likely. So given the exponential growth of the United States both in terms of member states and their respective populations, the originally anticipated benefit of the Electoral College would not still hold even if the two major political parties had not taken over the College. Even if the states’ respective electors were able to spend enough time in person with the candidates, the parties had ensured that those electors could not be autonomous and thus exercise their judgment. Instead, judgment could only be made at a distance by the massive American electorate whose perspectives have been very vulnerable to intentional manipulation through and even by the media. Put another way, the American people have been vulnerable to making a bad choice based on faulty information. This makes American representative democracy itself vulnerable.

Under most circumstances, a president’s staff can manage how the president comes off to the public. The presentation can thus differ from how the president really is. Yet in casting a vote, a voter should be able to size up how the candidates really are. This is crucial when one of the candidates is already 81 years old. The Biden-Trump debate in June, 2024 was a rare opportunity to see both men beyond the reach of their respective handlers, and thus to get a glimpse of both men as they really were at the time. Whereas Don Trump came off as focused, the president was disoriented at times and generally appeared to suffer simply from old age. There is no fault in that; the fact that the rare glimpse came as a surprise to many Americans demonstrates the extent to which any president is managed on nearly all occasions for public consumption and thus how wrong the voters’ view of an incumbent can be. This insight, more than whether Joe Biden was too old to serve a second term whose beginning was still six months away, was universally missed by the media.

As if to confirm the realization of how much a president’s appearance is managed, and thus misleadingly positive as to a president’s person, the “Biden campaign said the president had a cold to explain why he sounded so hoarse and weak. But Biden’s stumbles right from the beginning [of the debate] played into his biggest vulnerability—his age.”[1] That a cold would not account for a person being disoriented and that Biden had no nasal congestion or even sneezing apparently did not occur to the president’s handlers. Their next explanation was that the president was suffering from jetlag from having flown internationally, but that he had not done so in 12 days also apparently did not occur to the campaign. As neither of these episodic explanations worked to diminish the rather obvious fact that old age is a condition rather than being merely showing in an isolated episode or event, the president himself tried again by telling a group of Democratic governors that he had not been getting enough sleep. If only getting more sleep could extinguish the general effects of old age, nursing homes would be empty. 

Not unexpectedly, “Biden’s comment left several of the governors in the room frustrated.”[2] Yet after the meeting, three governors “painted a positive picture of the meeting during a news conference [outside the White House], adding that Biden is ‘all in’ and ‘in it to win it.’”[3] That the White House had governors speak publicly after the meeting to reassure the electorate of the president’s viability without mentioning that some of the governors had just been frustrated by the claim that an episodic lack of sleep could somehow account for the general condition of old-age demonstrates just how deceivingly the electorate is manipulated and thus how erroneous its view of the president can be without the people realizing it. How could they? The implications for impaired electoral judgment based on (deliberately) faulty information are clear. Without realizing it, the electorates of the States could vote for a second term not unlike that of President Wilson's.

Even in portraying the president’s old-age as if it could possibly be a “one-off” episode, Biden's handlers were taking advantage of the fact that they could manage how the president comes off in almost all of his public appearances. Sitting down for an interview on the radio and television, and reading a speech from a teleprompter at a campaign rally are just a few examples of how the handlers can make the president’s debate “performance” appear to be a “one off” bad performance relative to the others. It is precisely because of the deceiving effect of the handlers that "Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman . . . told CNN that the president needed to do a prolongued and live television interview unlike the recorded one on ABC."[4] The implication is that the public had not seen Biden without guide-rails on ABC and thus could not judge from that appearance how he might do on his own behind the scenes in thinking through and using judgment in an international incident. That Biden's handlers had given a radio host a list of questions to ask the president during a radio interview and that the same questions were asked in other interviews, also after the debate, also attests to the widespread impact of the handlers[5]. I contend that voters should have been informed of this "stagecraft" so they could realize the extent to which their perceptions of the president were being manipulated and thus could lead to bad or impaired judgment in voting.

A performance, such as is staged for a television interview or a campaign rally, is not at all like an ongoing condition such as old-age, which goes on. Even though the condition of old-age is more apparent on some days than others, the underlying condition itself is ongoing, and in fact gradually gets worse even if the people closest to the person don’t notice the change and think he is ok. 

To intentionally portray such a condition as merely a bad performance (rather than a condition) by engineering good performances is intellectually and ethically dishonest. Leaving the electorate with a false impression, taking advantage of the distance between the people at the president, is precisely why the founders wanted the Electoral College. In other words, it is bad for American representative democracy that manufactured images of a president can have, and indeed have had an inordinate influence on voters' judgments. Shock from observing President Biden unfettered, and thus himself, during the debate reflects back on just how good a president's handlers are in crafting a "brand" for public consumption. That it is rare that the American people get to see the proverbial "man behind the curtain" (an allusion to the movie, The Wizard of Oz) can be inferred from just how shocked viewers were in glimpsing President Biden reacting in real time. 

Not satisfied with leaving viewers with their valid conclusions from what they had seen of the the president during the debate, self-interested presidential handlers with an agenda—winning the election—tried to supersede the common-sense conclusions as if they were invalid or incorrect. The president had a cold. He had jetlag. He had not been sleeping well. Anything but the truth. Even if the cause of the condition of old-age were a lack of sleep, smart voters would ask themselves what might happen were President Biden called to the Situation Room in the White House even as early as 10pm (and what about at 3am?) in 2027 to handle an emergency abroad involving the U.S. military. 

Ignoring that serious implication from their own narrative, the handlers scrambled nonetheless to get the president to a podium and teleprompter, and then, days later, to a television interview, as if the condition that the public had just seen during the debate were merely episodic too (and thus outweighable by the other appearances), the president’s handlers even got surrogates, including sitting governors, to publicly attest to the official narrative, which was that the president was fine and was "all in." Faced with this full frontal "corrective," how could the electorate's judgment on election day possibly reflect their authentic observations during the debate? Good judgment based on accurate empirical data is requisite to a voter being able to make a good decision on who should be president of the United States. 

The American people were left with oblique references on television by Jake Tapper of CNN and Carl Bernstein, one of the famous Nixon-Watergate reporters, of admissions heard behind closed doors by people who had witnessed Biden in person enough to know that the president had actually been disoriented on as many as 20 occurrences, especially during the preceding six months. Bernstein said on CNN, "The people I've talked to have all been to Ron Klain [Biden's chirf of staff] in the last year to say, 'We have a problem.'"[6]. That such stuff doesn't usually get out (and isn't meant to get out) and thus reach the American electorate is a large part of why the delegates at the Convention anticipated the need for an institutional check, the Electoral College, on the electorate itself should it make a bad decision. The need for such a check was live and well in 2024, and the Electoral College had never worked as intended, so there was a problem even though it was below the radar of public discourse in the media.

The Founders’ astute insight that not even 7 million citizens could know the candidates for the federal presidency well enough to exercise effective judgment in assessing them at the ballot box was behind the invention of the Electoral College. Even if it had ever worked as a check on bad judgment that can occur at a distance, the College could not be relied upon as such a check by 2024.

Historically, the main officeholders at the federal level of a federation, including the Holy Roman Empire, were chosen by officials at the state level rather than by the individuals in the states. In having state governors in the European Council nominate a candidate for President of the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, the E.U. is in sync with the historical federal thought. Although the electors of the Electoral College in the U.S. meet by state, such that each state votes for president, state officials did not, at least as of 2024, have a role in selecting the federal president. 

That representatives elected by E.U. citizens in the European Parliament vote (as a parliament) on the nominee also deviates from the historical thought, which has state-level officeholders select federal officeholders. In American terms, the European Council nominating a candidate and the European Parliament voting on that candidate is roughly as if the U.S. Senate nominated a candidate for president and the U.S. House of Representatives voted on that candidate. Both unions instantiate modern federalism, which is a hybrid as governmental sovereignty is split between the state and federal institutions/governments, so the U.S. would not have to look very far for compatible ideas on how to modify the way its federal president is selected. This is not to say that the U.S. Senate should nominate candidates for president and the U.S. House should vote (not by state) to elect a nominee; rather, some role for governors and/or the Congress might serve as a viable check on the electorate, given the extent to which handlers manipulate the electorate and can thus cause it to make a bad decision on election day. 

Given the falsity in how handlers manage the presentation of a president, including President Biden, it should not be surprising that the American people make some bad decisions as an electorate. How many Americans in 2016 anticipated how President Trump would react to losing the election in 2020? The public image of the man in 2016 differed strikingly from the man himself, yet how many Americans knew even that such a difference existed (and exists for any occupant of the White House). 

To be consistent with historical federal thought, state legislatures and governors, rather than the Congress, would either elect the federal president or at least act as a check on the American people as an the electorate. It has been said especially in American anti-federalist historical thought that state officeholders are "closer to the people" because there are fewer people in the state-level districts than in the Congressional constituencies. But some states are quite populated themselves. Some big states, such as Illinois, California, Florida, and New York, could have a level of even smaller legislative districts by being federal themselves, hence with their respective sovereignties split between the state-level government and those of states within a given state. Such federated states would be like the E.U. states of Belgium and Germany. Chicagoland in Illinois could be like Bavaria in Germany. Having grown up in northern Illinois well outside of Chicagoland, I can attest that the Chicago metro is like another country even within Illinois (although I am a native Cubs baseball fan), even if Europeans like to assume that U.S. states are like provinces. 

Such a system of American federalism within federalism would resemble the federalism theory that Althusius describes, based on the Holy Roman Empire, in his Political Digest (1603). In that theory, the officials of the immediately lower "rung" select the officeholders of the next higher level. Given the E.U.’s process for selecting its executive-branch president, the U.S. could realistically incorporate at least one element of historical federal thought: namely, that the selection of at least one federal official could involve state-level legislators and/or heads-of-state. Because modern federalism, which both the E.U. and U.S. instantiate, is a hybrid only partially incorporating from the historical federal thought, a role for the Congress (like that of the European Council and the European Parliament in the E.U.) is an alternative candidate for a check. 

I submit that some hybrid of either state-level or federal-level office-holders could add a badly needed check-and-balance to the U.S. federal system of governance. In this respect, the E.U. is structured better than is the U.S., as per how a federal president is selected.

In conclusion, the issue of President Biden’s age in 2024 gave the American people an opportunity to see a basic vulnerability in how the federal presidency is filled, and looking to the E.U. affords the Americans a glimpse of a possible solution. How many American voters in 1968 and then again in 1972 had spoken with Richard Nixon in person without his handlers present and could thus realize how morally and criminally compromised the man really was? Sadly, even incumbents are marketed as if they were brands, and votes “buy” one on election day. So much more was at stake in 2024 than President Biden’s age, though insight on how that was being deceivingly managed by the president’s handlers could give Americans a sense of how vulnerable they really were even to their own judgments, given the misinformation. That the excuses of a cold, jetlag, and a lack of sleep—all under the incorrect premise that old-age is episodic rather than being a condition—are so pathetic and that being interviewed by a journalist, reading from a teleprompter at a (caffeinated?) rally, and meeting with governors could possibly be effective counterarguments should have given even Biden supporters pause concerning how an occupant of the federal presidency was being determined by 2024. The failure of the Electoral College could thus be understood as leaving the U.S. vulnerable.

---

1 Domenico Montanaro, “4 Takeaways from the First Presidential Debate,” NPR.org, June 28, 2024 (accessed July 4, 2024).
2 Edward Dovere, “Biden Tells Democratic Governors He Needs More Sleep and Plans to Stop Scheduling Events after 8 p.m.” CNN.com, July 4, 2024.
3. Ibid.

4. Stephen Collinson, "Biden's ABC Interview Does Nothing to Quell the Existential Crisis around His Campaign," CNN, July 6, 2024, italics added.

5. Lauren Koenig, Samantha Waldenberg, and Betsy Klein, "Radio Host Who Interviewed Biden Says Aides Provided Questions in Adavance," CNN, July 6, 2024.

6. Joey Garrison, "'I'm the Nominee'," USA Today, July 5, 2024.

Cases of Coronavirus: Comparing China, the U.S.A., and Italy

On March 26, 2020, “the US overtook Italy and China as the country with the highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases.”[1] At first glance, this statement can gain sufficient traction to become definitive. The implication that the U.S. is mismanaging the pandemic can even be regarded as valid even though the comparison itself is invalid.

Firstly, the United States, Italy, and China have very different population-levels. At the time, China’s population stood at roughly 1.435 billion, the U.S. population was 331 million, and Italy’s was 60 million. The U.S. had at least 81,321 cases.[2] China had at least 82,000 cases.[3] Italy had at least 80,539.[4] Per capita, the U.S. had at least one case for every 4,070 people; China had at least one per 17,500 people; and Italy had at least one case per 745 people. Adjusted for population-level, Italy was worse than the United States, which in turn was worse than China. Of course, China was coming down from its apex of cases, while the United States had not yet hit its apex and Italy may not have hit its own yet. Singapore’s confirmed 631 cases may seem a trifle until the city-state’s population of 5,838,360 is taken into account.  With at least one case per 9,253 people, Singapore stood between the United States and China in severity of cases.  So, at the very least, taking the population level into account is vital in comparing countries on the coronavirus pandemic.

Secondly, comparing countries assumes that they are all equivalent, as countries, not only for comparative purposes, but also as political entities. This is a modern assumption—that a city-state is equivalent to an empire, to take two points at the extremes; the kingdom being between the two. In other words, it is assumed that just because every country is sovereign, every country is equivalent even in non-political matters of comparison.

Historically, the attribute of sovereignty was not so decisive in declaring equivalencies. No one would claim that a stand-alone kingdom was the equivalent of an empire. For example, Althusius’ theory of federalism, described in his Political Digest (1604), clearly distinguishes a city, province, kingdom, and empire from each other. Based in part on the Holy Roman Empire, Athusius’ version of federalism contains a hierarchy, including guilds, villages, cities (composed of villages), provinces/regions, and the empire. Representatives of the guilds sit on village councils, village representatives sit on city councils, and so on until representatives of the provinces sit at the federal head—the empire’s governance.[5] It would be absurd to claim that a kingdom in one empire is equivalent to either a city or another empire. With these terms of political organization going by the wayside, the vague, over-generalizing term, country, filled the void, with its fallacious assumption that the attribute of sovereignty means that countries are equivalent in matters of making even non-political comparisons. This working assumption, as part of the status quo by the twenty-first century, is so ridiculous that the underlying presence of a warping large mass can be indirectly detected.[6] The ideology of nationalism, for instance, would have sufficient force to warp reasoning, as well as perception.

To get a glimpse of the flawed assumption, we can superimpose the historical terms on early-modern/modern countries (e.g., the UK, rather than the medieval England). At least as of 2020, the United States and China, as well as the European Union, were empire-level polities, whereas the E.U. state of Italy was an (early-modern) kingdom-level polity, and Singapore was a city-state. The flaw in only using the number of cases of coronavirus rests on the deeper flawed assumption that all countries can be classified on the same level, notwithstanding huge differences in scale and political type. In the E.U. and U.S., representatives of the states (early-modern kingdom level) sit in bodies at the empire level (i.e., the European Council and the U.S. Senate). To treat a state in one empire as equivalent to another empire thus represents a category mistake (i.e., conflating two different categories as one).

By implication, to treat the regions or provinces of a U.S. or E.U. state as equivalent to the U.S. or E.U. state level (provincia level in the ancient Roman Empire) also involves a category mistake. The American colonies, which became sovereign states (in a league or confederration), were mapped out to be on the scale of the early-modern kingdoms in Europe.[7] Hence the geographical scales of the U.S. and E.U. states cluster. California is roughly the size of Spain, Arizona of Italy, Texas of France, and Montana of Germany. The small states also cluster, but the differences between the large and small states is dwarfed by the difference between the state cluster and the unions' cluster. In other words, the difference between the sizes of the states and the unions is sufficiently larger than how much the states differ and the unions differ that a "step" (i.e., difference in kind, rather than just in amount) can be seen. That the unions are made up of the states is another way of pointing to two plateaus rather than a continuous slope (i.e., saying that the U.S. is larger than France, which is the size of Texas). This is why conflating the two clusters (i.e., of the states and of the unions) represents a category mistake. 

Therefore, comparing Italy’s 80,539 cases to the United States’ 81,321 can be understood as misleading, therefore, because not only are the population-levels so different, but also Italy is a state in a union that in turn is equivalent to the U.S. Logically, if the two unions are equivalent, then a state in one cannot be equivalent to the other union.

In comparisons in which either the E.U. or the U.S. as one or both sides, the overgeneralization is itself problematic because it hides the significant differences between the states. In other words, that the American States differed significantly in coronavirus cases in March, 2020 was lost in comparing the entire U.S. to Italy. With a population of 5.85 million, Wisconsin had at least 707 cases on March 26, 2020, and therefore one case per 8,274 people, while Washington (the state) had at least 3,207 cases in a population of 7.8 million, and therefore one case per 2,432 cases. The represents a substantial difference that is hidden in aggregating all of the states' data. The statement that the entire United States just got worse in coronavirus cases than a state in the E.U. is thus problematic. 

Even in correcting for the category mistake (e.g., comparing an empire-scale geographic polity with an early modern/modern "kingdom"-level polity, we would over generalize to say that the E.U. is worse off than the U.S. precisely because such a comparison ignores significant differences between the states in both unions. In fact, even if it made sense to generalize the entire U.S. (i.e., states differing little) rather than report predominately on the States, then the E.U. too should have been at the other end of the comparison, even if its states differed appreciably. As both unions were empire-scale, their respective states were very likely to different on a variety of indexes.

Having corrected for the category mistake and taken account of the fact that state-level differences were significant in both unions, greater insight could have been gleamed on how the virus was faring in Europe and America by comparing the "hot spots," for example. That is to say more accurate comparisons would be made between Italy, New York, France, Germany, California and Washington because they were all being battered by the illness by the end of March (which was going out like a lion).

On March 26, 2020, New York (the State) had over 37,000 cases in population of 20 million: one case for every 542 people, worse than Italy's 745 people. Washington (the State) stood at 2,432 people, less severe than the E.U. state of Italy. From this standpoint, the derivative (i.e., the change in the rate of increased cases) for each state could be used to compare the "hot spots" with regard to where they are relative to their respective apexes (i.e., the highest, hence peaking, infection rates). Comparing the "hot spots" could thus have been quite useful. 

Because the state level in both the U.S. and E.U. bore out tremendous differences in severity, it is just common sense that states rather than the unions, or even worse, a union and a state in another like union, should be compared. Moreover, that vast differences in population and in political category, or even just geographical scale (Italy being roughly the size of Arizona), have been routinely missed is a serious flaw both in reasoning and knowledge of political organization. I submit that the flaws in the default-axis of comparison have been protected by a worldwide blind-spot, which has enabled a myriad of false-comparisons. 

Nietzsche would doubtlessly write that a brain-sickness predicated on a weakness was behind the warping of reason and perception. A herd-animal mentality, including in the animals who cannot resist the urge to dominate, could explain how the warping became ingrained in the societal (and global) status quo. I contend that nationalism and turning the attribute of governmental sovereignty into a tautology rendered the flaws both invisible and part of the taken-for-granted status-quo. 

Well into the twenty-first century, people (and governments) around the world were still intent on assuming that the attribute of sovereignty justifies the assumption of equivalence between countries even in making non-political comparisons. Singapore and the U.S. can be compared on a variety of things because both are countries, meaning both are recognized internationally as sovereign within their respective territories. 

With its strong desire, ideology can eclipse reason and perception without leaving finger-prints. Nationalism has likely been playing a subterranean role in the warping of equivalence as in comparing E.U. states like France and Germany to the U.S.A., with the E.U.'s governance and the American States being deliberately overlooked or even blocked from view in a sort of state of denial. 

Even in comparative politics, confounding the state and federal levels of both the E.U. and U.S. is problematic. For instance, federalism came out of empire-level groupings and has the greatest benefits for empires, which are by definition heterogenous (diverse between provinces/states). To model the governance system of the E.U. or U.S. on that of Sinapore (a city) would entail a greater downside of uniform (i.e., union-wide) laws because in empires, "one size does not fit all" of the circumstances of the states (e.g., significant differences in coronavirus infection). Hence New York's government took much more strict measures against the spread of coronavirus than did the government of Kansas in March, 2020. Had the U.S. President handed down a severe, blanket "lock-down," it would have gone unnoticed that several states did not yet need that level of caution through government action. Hence, the state governments were able to set policies according to their situations. As in the case of the E.U. state governments, it was even possible for those American governments to distinguish between their respective regions (or provinces) in taking precautionary measures.[8] As a city, Singapore, unlike the states (and empire-scale unions), could only have one situation. Rather than being influenced by where sovereignty resides (at both the state and federal levels in the U.S. and E.U.), the level at which comparison is best made depends on what is the subject of comparison (e.g., coronavirus) and which level (or cluster) of institutional and geographical political organization (i.e., state, county/province, state/kingdom, or empire-scale country) presents the greatest differences on the subject.

---

[1]. Jeffrey Sachs, “Why America Has the World’s Most Confirmed Covid-19 Cases,” CNN.com, March 27, 2020 (accessed March 28, 2020).

[2]. Donald McNeil, “The U.S. Now Leads the World in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases,” The New York Times, March 26, 2020.

[3]. Sachs, “Why America Has the World’s Most Confirmed Covid-19 Cases.”

[4]. Crispian Balmer and Gavin Jones, “Italy Suffers Setback to Hopes Its Corronavirus Epidemic Might Be in Retreat,” US News & World Report, March 26, 2020.

[5]. Skip Worden, British Colonies Forge an American Empire: A Basis for Transatlantic Comparisons (2015). Athusius' theory of federalism is also discussed and applied.

[6]. I am thinking here of how the presence of a black hole can be detected by looking at the warped orbits nearby (their shape and relatively high speed).

[7]. Skip Worden, British Colonies Forge an American Empire: A Basis for Transatlantic Comparisons (2015).

[8] Lest it be argued that the most suitable level of comparison is that of intra-state regional/provincial, the state size-cluster is not so large that intrastate differences would be as big as the interstate differences. However, the fact that the counties of Dane (which contains the state capital city, Madison) and Milwaukee were both more severely hit on March 26, 2020 than were the other counties suggests that state governments had reason in at least once case to either have different policies for counties or delegate the power to the county governments. Adopting the county level for comparisons within or across empire-scale unions would not be parsimonious and thus practical. Also, I suspect that the typical inter-county differences were less than the inter-state differences. This is why I stopped at the state level in assessing the best level of comparison generally.