On the Impact of an Electoral Landslide: The 2026 U.S. Congressional Election

Amid all the fanfare of an exciting election in which the opposition, riding an electoral “wave,” gains more (or even complete) control in a legislature, the tendency of an electorate is to assume that everything will change. Even utopian hopes can take wing. The sheer inertia of any political status quo is easily overlooked until reality sets back in as the ascendent group gets to work in a legislative capacity. Clipping the wings of a party that has enjoyed unfettered power does not necessarily mean that the opposition will be able to change existing governmental policy and laws rather than merely act as a stronger check on what had been perceived as the excesses of the other party when it was in power. To be sure, the power of an electorate (the People) to trigger such a check by voting for opposition candidates is a great benefit of representative democracy and is worthy of admiration. Imagine the alternative:  a party whose officeholders could go on and on, even to an extreme, even though most of the electorate objects and yet has no way to put in place replacements wo could counter the hitherto dominant party. This scenario does not have to be imagined; just look at countries such as North Korea, Russia, and China. Lest the accolades of democracy be oversold, the impact legislatively and in terms of U.S. policies, especially foreign policy, of the “blue wave” in the 2026 congressional election in the U.S. should not be overstated.

The American 2026 “midterm” election can be read in general terms as a rebuke of President Trump, and more specifically of his indifference toward, and lack of policy-attention to, the rising food and oil prices that were hitting many Americans hard. Trump’s military attacks on Iran, backed rather than rebuffed by the Republican-controlled Congress, contributed to oil prices shooting past $100 a barrel in time for the election, owing in part to Iran’s strategic constraints on the 20 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum derivatives that pass through the Strait of Hormuz daily. The president insisted that Americans should be willing to pay higher gas (and, relatedly, food) prices at home so the world (i.e., Israel) could finally be free of the bellicose threat of Iran. However, prior to the congressional election in November at least, the American and Israeli attacks had not succeeded in removing Iran’s Islamic regime from power even in spite of mass popular protests in Iran against that regime, which were quickly followed by brutal suppression before the emergent political freedom could blossom.  The inertia of a political status quo can indeed be formidable.

As it turned out, Iran’s nuclear bombs were just as real as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq more than two decades earlier, ignoring his father’s self-restraint in removing invading Iraqi forces from Kuwait without going beyond his international coalition to invade Iraq itself and remove Saddam Hussain from power. In fact, the American and Israeli bombing of Iran actually increased the number of voices in the Iranian government in favor of developing a nuclear bomb, especially as the world had looked the other way while Israel developed its own arsenal. So, a sense of basic fairness can be said to undergird the Iranian adverse reaction after the bombings. After all, Israel’s genocide in Gaza belied the assumption that an Israeli regime would be a rational nuclear power, as even the U.S.S.R. had been, and therefore be allowed by the world to have nuclear weapons. Any government in the Middle East having nuclear weapons is risky, given the intense passions that have given rise to high geopolitical tension and even violence in that region for decades.

Reducing the high price of oil, and thus gasoline and especially diesel, to “the Iranian War,” as if the upcoming Congress controlled by the Democrat group could lower gas and grocery prices enough (or even appreciably) simply by cutting off funds and enacting the War Powers Act, fails to take into consideration the other causes of the higher prices. For example, in late September 2026, Ukraine’s Military Intelligence (HUR) claimed that drone strikes had left 15 of Russia’s 38 major refineries completely inoperable and 12 running at reduced capacity. This, too, pushed oil prices higher than would have been otherwise been. Trump’s purchase of 4.8 million metric tons of Russian diesel, equivalent to 35.76 million barrels (enough to cover only 9 days in the U.S.), was hardly enough to make a dent in the price of diesel. Meanwhile, food prices had recently risen another 2.5% on an annual basis during the third quarter of 2026, on top of the cumulative 26% to 31.9% increase from 2020 to 2025. American farmers and truckers use diesel, whose price was spiking at the time of the election even though President Trump had undercut Ukraine, a country still being invaded by Russia, by buying diesel from Russia.

Although both Trump’s policy toward Iran and Ukraine’s drone-bombing of Russian refineries contributed to the cost-push inflation in the U.S., the upcoming Congress would have to more legislatively than end the “Iran War” and even put the U.S. on the side of Ukraine so that, with the E.U., that war could be ended with a negotiated settlement. Congress would have to do more, and I submit that not even an electoral wave is sufficient for such a legislative response as could really turn things around pricewise.

It did not help President Trump’s case in campaigning for Republican congressional candidates that he had even made fun of the Democrats’ new buzzword, affordability. Furthermore, he was silent on how rising energy costs could be reduced or countered by giving tax credits to the large American agribusinesses and corporations owning and operating grocery-store chains in exchange for lower prices. He was also silent on whether anti-trust laws, such as the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, could be dusted off and applied finally to break up the two large agricultural-seed companies, which had been able to raise seed prices without worrying about competition from new entrants, and applied as well to the large regional and even national grocery chains that had kept grocery prices high after the Coronavirus pandemic. Had market competition existed in that industry in 2022, the artificially high prices in grocery stores during the pandemic would not have been undercut and thus out-competed. In short, the lack of competition in a variety of industries in the U.S. had arguably been a major contributor to the rising prices facing American consumers in buying necessities, for which demand is typically inelastic.

Adam Smith’s prediction that businesses and governments would collude to keep worker wages low—something that Nietzsche would insist is necessary for the development of culture—could be extended to collusion to keep competition from breaking out from new entrants (with low barriers to entry) in markets that had already become monopolistic or oligopolistic (i.e., just a few firms, which can set rather than just accept prices for goods and services). That not even Democrats were campaigning to restore market competition as part of a strategy to bring down oil and food prices goes to say that not even the electoral wave in the Democrats’ favor can be assumed to result in the sort of structural economic change that would be necessary to return affordability to American families. Not even the contours of the public discourses during the campaigns were wide enough. As valuable as a corrective election is to the viability of a democracy, not even a broad electoral mandate on election day is likely sufficient for adequate legislative and executive responses even in the face of the inelastic demand of consumers that enables monopolists and oligopolists to enforce their price-setting (rather than price-taking) on consumers without having to lower prices due to declining demand.

The insufficiency of even a broad electoral wave applies also to voters’ being motivated by reports of massive corruption, with Trump himself, his company, and even his relatives benefitting greatly in financial terms. Exit polls revealed that corruption too was a salient factor for many voters who effectively said no to the sitting president by favoring Democrat candidates for Congress. Those votes were also a no to the current Congress, controlled by Republicans, which had steadfastly refused to hold the president accountable for his overreaches, including decision to build a ballroom at the White House without seeking congressional approval. Trump himself, his company, and even his relatives were reported to be benefitting greatly in financial terms. Voters motivated to vote Democrat because of the corruption may have been incensed by the related financial enrichment not only of Trump’s two eldest sons, but also of his son-in-law, Jered Kushner, whose felon father Trump pardoned and even rewarded with the ambassadorship to France, whose government then chastised the ambassador for inserting himself in French politics in defense of Israel, which was still committing what the UN would classify as a genocide in Gaza. As for Jered, besides having a lucrative financial stake in planned real-estate developments planned for Gaza, his private-equity firm, Affinity Partners, had received substantial funds from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Given the rather obvious conflict of interests involving personal and business financial gain, it is significant that President Trump selected his son-in-law to be one of the principal negotiators working on not only the Russia and Ukraine conflict, but also that which concerns Gaza, and thus any planned real-estate development deals in Gaza.

The fact that Democrats slated to be in the upcoming Congress were already disagreeing on how much time and effort to spend going after President Trump, his company, and his relatives on the alleged corruption means that the election could have more impact on curtailing future corruption than in holding Trump, his relatives, and even Elon Musk accountable for the corruption that occurred from 2025-2026. Within the Democratic group, it was not clear whether the congressional oversight on the existing enrichment constituted revenge, and thus should be minimal, or would serve a more legitimate purpose, such as enforcing the rule of law on an administration that had been enriching relatives and friends with impunity for two years. That President Trump would still be the chief executive of the U.S. Government’s executive branch for two years means that any findings by congressional investigative committees might not get very far in the Department of Justice. Again, the actual results of the “blue wave” would likely be considerably muted from what excited Democrats may have presumed on election night. Politics, and especially the mechanizations of government, tend to be incremental rather than radical.

The election’s impact on U.S. foreign policy could also be expected to be less than drastic, given the power of the presidency in foreign affairs. Even on the federal budget as concerns foreign affairs, compromise would be the best that the Democratic Congress could hope for, given the president’s veto power and the Democrats’ lack of votes to override vetoes. In fact, even powerful incumbent Democratic lawmakers could find themselves resisting calls from within the Democratic caucuses in the two chambers to radically change a foreign policy by cutting off funds. For example, continuing to aid Israel financially even as that country was inflicting what the UN had classified as a genocide in Gaza and enabling wanton violence against Palestinian property-owners in the West Bank had become a contentious issue, even though it was hardly foremost on the minds of the voters who voted for Democratic congressional candidates. Any hopes that the upcoming Congress would be likely to distance the U.S. from its ally, Israel, would ignore the political reality of AIPAC’s reach on Democratic leaders in Congress.

In the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries was poised after the election to be elected Speaker of the House, and Sen. Charles Schumer, the Senate’s Minority Leader at the time, stood the best chance of being elected by the Senate Republicans as the upcoming Majority Leader.  According to the U.S. Federal Election Commission at the time of the 2026 election, AIPAC had given between $297,000 and $427,000 in political contributions to Jeffries’ 2026 campaign, with a total of between $1.28 million and $1.58 million received from the political action committee during his entire Congressional career. In political terms, he could be expected to act in Israel’s political interest in the 120^th Congress and therefore resist legislative attempts to defund Israel of American support. Even though Sen. Schumer, the U.S. Senate’s minority leader in the 119^th Congress, was not up for reelection in 2026, AIPAC contributed $515,698 to him during the 2025-2026 cycle anyway. During his entire Congressional career up to early November 2026, he had received approximately $1.73 million from pro-Israel political action committees (PACs), including NORPAC, DMFI PAC, and AIPAC. Therefore, he too could be expected to be beholden to Israel during the upcoming 120^th Congress even though the UN had determined that Israel was in fact committing a genocide in Gaza. In short, Israel stood to have two gatekeepers at the highest level in Congress during the 2027-2028 session, and President Trump would still be in the White House protecting Israel and even its embattled, scandal-ridden prime minister, whose arrest was still being sought by the International Criminal Court

Absent the politically improbable toppling of Jeffries and Schumer, both of whom hail from Brooklyn, Netanyahu’s partisan embrace of President Trump may not have come at the cost of retribution from the upcoming Democratic majorities in Congress. The claim by Netanyahu’s critics in Israel that it risked losing influence with Democratic lawmakers in Congress due to Netanyahu’s close relationship with Republicans may not be true. Even the election to the U.S. Senate of Michigan’s Addul El-Sayed, a skeptic of U.S. aid to Israel because of its multi-year genocide in Gaza, and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s highly publicized decision to oppose any further U.S. military aid to Israel should not overshadow the political reality of protection that Jeffries and Schumer would likely continue to provide to Israel in defense of that country’s interests regardless of its crimes against humanity. That “some House and Senate members increasingly [had become] increasingly critical of Israel in the run-up” to the Midterm election should not be taken to mean that Israel would be left unprotected in the upcoming Congress.[1] The statement by Tzipi Livni, a former minister in Netanyahu’s government, that “Netanyahu gambled on the Republicans, broke the alliance that we maintain throughout all the years with both parties,” is simply not true.[2] Jeffries and Schumer are enough to dismiss Livni’s assertion. AIPAC and other, less visible means of instilling and protecting Israeli geopolitical interests throughout the U.S. Government means that even the “blue wave” itself not likely have a major impact on U.S. policy on (and funding of) Israel. Even President Trump’s electorally-timed statement that aid to Israel would be discontinued in 2027 should be take with a grain of salt.

Therefore, while it may be tempting to assume from the electoral success of many Democratic candidates for federal office in districts and states that had been electing Republican candidates to federal offices means that the 120^th Congress in 2027-2028 could be expected to enact laws across the board that would be very different from the political status quo in 2026, political inertia should not be counted out.  The entrenched support for Israel in Congress and the White House was likely commensurate with the entrenchment of business interests and related political interests behind the rising prices facing American consumers. The electoral “blue wave” would ineluctably eventually crash into the entrenchment, as if waking up the next morning with a hangover. Even though the world had turned against Israel due to its wholesale genocide in Gaza, shifting American policy on that ally would be a heavy lift politically. Even though nominal wages in the U.S. increased 22 percent, while cumulative inflation rose 18.9 percent, and therefore real wages increased only 3.1 percent from 2020 to mid-2026, gas prices increased by 85-87 percent, and grocery prices increased by 25.2-31.9 percent. Even so, Democratic candidates for Congress acted as if ending the “Iran War” would brin down prices, and corporate America, whose political campaign contributions and promises of lucrative jobs were substantial in 2026, would oppose structural economic change by the enforcement of existing anti-trust law.

Even though a surge in the electoral strength of an opposition party, fueled by a sufficient number of voters, indicates that the People can influence governmental policy and legislation in a representative democracy, especially by reducing the power of the hitherto dominant party, the inertia inherent in any status quo is formidable and should not be overlooked. Not even something as horrendous as a genocide being committed by an ally and as costly to consumers as the gradual encroachment by oligopoly and even monopoly in place of market competition in many industries of an economy may be sufficient to counter the political black ole tat provides such gravitas to the status quo. Put another way, take all the combined energy that is in a seismic-shift election—all of the energy of all of the voters who vote for the opposition party—and still only incremental change in the position of the “black hole” is likely. In the end, politics may come down to physics.

 

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1. Isabel Kershner, “Election Results Show Israelis that U.S. Relationship Is on Tenuous Ground,” The New York Times, November 5, 2026.
2.Ibid.

U.S. Defense Contractors under Pressure

In a republic, which is characterized by representative rather than direct democracy and includes checks on even the elected representatives, private interests, such as corporations that manufacture weapons purchased by the government, undue the very legitimacy and public good of a republic when the elected (and appointed) public officials capitulate to those interests because those interests are of a part rather than the whole. The profit calculus of a defense contractor is not necessarily in line with the national interests of the country in which the corporation operates. Furthermore, acquiescing to the relatively narrow private benefit of corporations places an elected official in the position of possibly betraying one’s constituents and even the national security—the public good—of the whole, the country. It is in the political (and even financial) interests of such officials to hide or obscure their motives in voting on a defense budget by using “real threats abroad” as a subterfuge to increase defense spending going to contractors in payment for more weapons. The threats may be real or not. How would an electorate possibly know without access to classified information? Adam Smith wrote of his concern that governments and capitalists would collude to shortchange labor. The collusion can also be at the expense of an electorate and even a republic itself. In response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question on what sort of government the U.S. Constitutional Convention had just proposed, Ben Franklin is said to have replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The People may be at a considerable disadvantage without realizing it if distant collusion is financially and politically sufficiently concentrated and furtive under subterfuges of public-policy ideals.

During the summer of 2026, when the U.S. was attacking Iran militarily and supplying Israel with weapons, the stockpiles of the U.S. War Department’s munitions were being diminished to the point that the Pentagon began to pressure defense contractors “to accelerate production of weapons.”[1] Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell issued a statement on August 8, 2026 directed to the companies to urge them to adopt a “pace the threat demands.” Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg had recently written to the CEOs “giving them no more than 21 days to submit plans to ‘drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capacities.’”[2] Although it makes no sense to drive schedules or to characterize them as aggressive, the corporate-speak and military-mindset melded into the same sentence symbolize a fusion that U.S. President Eisenhauer, the general who had led the Allied D-Day invasion in World War II, had characterized as the U.S. military-industrial complex. Even though Feinberg wrote to the CEOs, “Years-long development cycles are not acceptable. . . . We must dramatically accelerate our program schedules and expand our production capacity now,” it is more likely in the larger picture that the proverbial tails were waging the dog, meaning that the private companies generally called the shots, with the Congress and President complying.

With U.S. budget caps constraining defense spending by the federal government “from about $528.2 billion in fiscal 2011 to $496.1 billion in fiscal 2015, instead of a previously projected increase to roughly $598 billion,” for example, “the Pentagon’s top contractors sent an army of more than 400 lobbyists to Capitol Hill [in the spring of 2015] to press their case for increasing the nation’s spending on military hardware, in a massive effort costing tens of millions of dollars of [the defense contractors’] own funds from April to June alone, according to an analysis of public lobbying data by the Center for Public Integrity.”[3] Even though causation cannot be derived from positive correlation, private companies would not spend so much money—Lockheed Martin Corporation alone spent $3.5 million and sent 56 lobbyists to Congress on defense spending—were a payoff in terms of more federal spending for contracts not desired and even expected.[4] In December 2015, Congress approved $573 billion for defense ($496.1 billion for the previous fiscal year). As any farmer might say, such an increase is not chicken feed; neither, I might add, did it occur by accident, for the private corporations receiving defense contracts did not take kindly to the budget caps.

Similarly, in 2026, ramping up production of Patriot interceptors, for example, which had fallen from 2,330 before the attacks on Iran in 2026 to 1,030 when the cease-fire that April took effect, to between 759 and 827, a decrease of at least 65%, and of THAAD interceptors, which had fallen from 452 to between 232 and 262, was very much in the financial interests of the corporations making those interceptors. It was as if the Pentagon were saying to children playing outside on a hot summer day, you need to hurry up and finish your ice-cream cones so you can have more. Such an order is hardly an order. Just imagine adults furtively acquiescing to how much ice cream the children want ostensibly by pressuring them to quicken the pace of eating when actually the children have been paying the adults to spend more on ice cream.

Beyond the political and foreign-policy interests (and ideology) of the Trump Administration in supporting Israel both directly in its militancy in Gaza and Lebanon and indirectly by attacking Iran, the financial interests of the companies that sell military hardware to the Pentagon should not be glossed over, for without such interests, it is difficult to say how militaristic the U.S. Government would be abroad, even given the financial power of AIPAC. To be sure, Ukraine, a country still being invaded by Russia without provocation, was at the time very much in need of anti-missile interceptors. Within 24 hours of Feinstein’s statement, “13 people were killed and some 90 others were wounded [from] Russian attacks” on Ukrainian cities as the Kremlin intensified its bombardment.[5] It bears remembering, however, that the existence of normatively justified uses of American weapons abroad is a boon to defense contractors. Like the financial “lobbying” by AIPAC, which is difficult to justify in terms of legitimate uses of American military power abroad, justified uses of American weapons such as in Ukraine—a country being invaded rather than invading—do not mean that those companies do not have a disproportionate influence on how much money the U.S. Government spends on defense. In fact, contractor spending on political campaigns can leverage legitimate uses to pressure member of Congress and even the federal president to contract even for weapon production for more questionable uses.

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1. AP News, “Pentagon Pushes Defense Companies to Boost Weapons Production after Concerns of Depleted Stocks,” APnews.com, August 8, 2026
2. Ibid.
3. Alexander Cohen, “Top Defense Contractors Spend Millions to Get Billions,” The Center for Public Integrity, August 5, 2015 (accessed August 9, 2026).
4. Ibid.
5. Malek Fouda, “13 Killed in Ukraine and 90 Injured as Russia Intensifies Overnight Bombardment Campaign of Ukrainian Cities,” Euronews.com, 9 August, 2026.

The E.U.’s Proposed Sanctions Against Israel: Excessive Reliance on the State Governments

To leverage the combined power, or united front, that is possible in Europe, the European Union was established in the waning years of the twentieth century. Roughly thirty years later, the power of the state governments at the federal level still compromised the leverage, especially in foreign affairs and defense. Even in sanctioning trading partners, even qualified majority voting in the Council of the E.U. can be said to have negatively impacted the ability of the E.U. Commission, the executive branch, to leverage the political muscle of the E.U. against other countries. State-level political agendas could essentially hold any possible leverage hostage. It may be worth thinking about why a qualified majority vote in the Council of the E.U., which represents the state governments, rather than in the E.U.’s parliament, which represents E.U. citizens, was necessary for trade sanctions to be applied to duty-free imports from Israel. That state-level political or economic interests could possibility trump applying economic leverage to stop Israel’s genocide and holocaust in Gaza, as well as Israel’s military attacks on other countries in the Middle East can be an indication that the state governments have too much power at the federal level. For if the E.U. is only an aggregation of states, without the whole being more than the sum of the parts, then the whole sans the aggregate cannot very well enact leverage on foreign actors abroad, even those whose behavior has been nothing short of atrocious.

On September 17, 2025, the European Commission released its proposal to sanction Israel “for its ongoing military assault in Gaza, as well as deepening occupation of the West Bank, which Brussels says breach the EU-Israel Association Agreement.”[1] Regarding that treaty, I contend that the E.U.’s state governments should not have any say on the consequences for Israel because the treaty is between the E.U. and Israel. As trade is an exclusive competency of the E.U., only federal institutions, which include the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Court of Justice, rightly have sufficient jurisdiction (i.e., competence) to terminate the Agreement due to the violation or sanction Israel economically (as the Agreement is economic in nature).

Moreover, developing the habit of distinguishing distinctly federal governmental (i.e., executive, legislative, and judicial) institutions from other E.U. bodies that represent the states would not be a bad idea for the European political elite, many of whom have been in fear of even using the term federal because of what that might provoke in Euroskeptic states such as Hungary. That fear, I submit, is likely overblown, and it subtly undercuts the E.U. itself, especially in it being a whole beyond a mere aggregation of states.

The E.U. Commission, subject to judicial review by the ECJ, determined that Israel had violated the Agreement. The decision to act against Israel was based on “’the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza following the military intervention of Israel, the blockade of humanitarian aid, the intensifying of military operations,’ including the ongoing ground offensive, according to the European Commission.”[2] Such a credible finding against Israel does not justify state governments intervening through their access at the federal level through the European Council or the Council of the E.U. on suspicion that the E.U. president and her commissioners were acting out of prejudice against Israel. This in turn is clear from the fact that the proposed sanctions also apply to ten members of Hamas, in addition to two Israeli ministers, Security Minister Gvir and Finance Minister Smotrich “for their role inciting violence in the West Bank.”[3] The Agreement, of course, only holds for Israel, rather than Hamas, so that the proposed sanctions extend to Hamas demonstrates that the Commission was “bending over backwards” to be fair in such a one-sided war that it is not really a war, but, rather, a genocide and even a holocaust of cruelty wherein death is not deemed as “punishment” enough according to the utterly fallacious theory of collective justice. 

E.U. President Von der Leyen said the week before the announcement of the proposed sanctions, “The horrific events taking place in Gaza on a daily basis must stop. There needs to be an immediate ceasefire, unrestrained access for all humanitarian aid, and the release of all hostages held by Hamas.”[4] She continued, “We propose to suspend trade concessions with Israel, sanction extremist ministers and violent settlers, and put bilateral support to Israel on hold . . .”[5] I submit that it would be difficult for the justices at the ECJ to find bias in her rationale or remedy, or, moreover, with her legitimacy in taking such a decision for the E.U. as a united front even though some state governments were at odds with her decision. 

The whole is more than the sum of the parts, and yet only if one of the two largest states in opposition vote in favor of the sanctions would they pass. The E.U.’s foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, was pessimistic, noting at the time, “The political lines are very much in the place where they have been so far.”[6] But that is at the state level; things might have already changed in the European Parliament, whose representatives not only represent European voters, but also have the interests of the E.U. itself, including its treaties with other countries, in mind. 

That the bias woven into the federal-level fabric of the E.U. in favor of the state governments over E.U. citizens could inhibit the E.U. from taking even an economic stand against a genocidal government indicates that the state governments have too much power at the federal—and it is federal—level of the European Union, such that reform in the Union’s basic or constitutional law is warranted. If such is the case, care should be taken so too much power be taken away from the state governments such that they could not even defend their retained sovereignty from undue encroachment by the feds. Americans could afford to take a lesson on that, for a one-size-fits-all public policy becoming monopolistic at the expense of differences between states, whether American or European, does not bode well in any empire-scale union.  

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1. Shona Murray, “EU Moves to Sanction Israel over Gaza, West Bank Humanitarian Crisis,” Euronews.com, September 17, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Nationalism at Eurovision: A Lack of Vision

The inherent retentiveness of conservatism benefits a society because it need not “reinvent the wheel” in “starting from scratch,” as resort can be made to customs that have been efficacious. Unfortunately, conservatism can easily be in denial as to the need for adaptation to changes whether in geopolitical institutions or in culture. The advent of the European Union as a federal system of dual-sovereignty has been easy fodder for conservatism’s proclivity of denial with regard to very new things. Eurovision, too, was an invention beyond even the European Union, and thus also of the post-World-War-II history of integration meant in part as a check on the full-blown nationalism that had twice decimated Europe in the twentieth century. So it is problematic that the EBU, the organization behind the Eurovision Song Contest, has made so many category mistakes involving Europe in favor of nationalism.

The full essay is at "Nationalism at Eurovision."

E.U. Statehood for Canada: Not So Fast

Even as the federal president of the U.S., Donald Trump, campaigned in 2024 in part on Canada becoming a member of the U.S., statehood in the E.U. was being discussed in 2025 on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Besides being perhaps a knee-jerk political reaction against Trump, the prospect of Canada becoming an E.U. state faced a few major hurdles—one of which being the E.U.’s Basic (aka constitutional) Law. Accordingly, working instead toward a closer trading relationship was a more realistic route.

Firstly, that U.S. President Trump had “taunted and provoked Canadians with talk” of statehood for Canada in the U.S. and even that 46% of Canadians in a February, 2025 poll favored accession in the E.U. instead of the U.S. are not sufficient rationales for Canada to become an E.U. state.[1] One reason for representative rather than direct democracy is that having a term of office protects elected representatives from having to capitulate politically to momentary passions held by the most impassioned in a population. Because Trump’s invitation to Canada to join the other states in the U.S. would likely go unheeded, and, moreover, Trump’s term in office would presumably end at some point, the Canadian interest in accession in the E.U. would likely dissipate rather than continue to build. I submit that such a momentous political change should not be made on the basis of a momentary political context.

Secondly, the Canada is “the most European of non-European countries,” given the “French and British roots” as evinced in Quebec and Newfoundland, for example, is not a sufficient reason, as the same could be said of Australia regarding its British roots.[2] In fact, that Quebec and Newfoundland are so culturally different is an argument that Canada could split up and be more than one state in the E.U. or U.S., since inter-state differences are supposed to be greater than intra-state differences in a federal system.

Thirdly, during a briefing in March, 2025, “a Commission spokeswoman pointed to Article 49 of the Treaty of the European Union which stipulates that ‘any European State’ can apply to become a state—“in other words, ONLY European states” can become E.U. states.[3] Canada lacks the geographical proximity to the E.U. necessary to satisfy Article 49. So whereas Cyprus is technically in Asia, the proximity to the E.U.—not just being culturally European—renders that state different than Canada with respect to the Article. 

Ironically, Hawaii as a member state of the U.S. is not only not in North America, but is arguably more Asian than American culturally. Not even Alaska, which is in North America, is contiguous with “the lower 48.” Europeans who like to point out the cultural differences between E.U. states while assuming that the other union, which stretches across a continent and then some, is culturally homogenous miss not only the tremendous differences between a member-state like Mississippi and that of Massachusetts, but also the distinctive culture and location of Hawaii! So, I’m not sure that Europeans are the best judges of how European Canadian culture is. Certainement, French speakers in the E.U. have strong opinions on the way the language is spoken in Quebec.

In a parliamentary question to the E.U.’s executive branch in 2025, Rep. Streit, a member of the Reform party, argued that Canadian statehood would “expand [the E.U.’s] single market, create sales opportunities, facilitate the exchange of goods and services, and be better able to withstand threats of tariffs and global security risks.”[4] A good trade agreement with Canada would satisfy all but the last benefit, and NATO could handle the last one without risking stretching the E.U. too thin, especially given the staying power of the principle of unanimity in the European Council.

Neither the U.S. or the E.U. evinces regional governance in the sense of covering a global region, as if a stepping stone on the way to a world government. Furthermore, both unions faced significant internal political strains in 2024, and enlarging either union rather than being focused on addressing internal pressures could be foolish rather than prudent. For instance, before adding more Eastern European states, the E.U. could be strengthened on the federal level by applying qualified majority rule to more E.U. competencies in the European Council and the ministerial Council of the E.U., and giving the E.U.’s Parliament more authority so it could be a check on state governments exploiting conflicts of interest through the councils.

Fourthly, allowing Canada to apply to become an E.U. state would open the door to Israel doing the same, which would embroil the E.U. in Middle East politics. That “Israel’s security cabinet . . . approved a plan to expand its military offensive” in Gaza after more than month of blocking humanitarian aid such as food and medical supplies from entering the enclave and in spite of rulings against Israel by the International Criminal Court and the U.N.’s International Court of Justice may suggest that negotiating with Israel in the European Council and the council of ministers could result in stalemate rather than decisions.[5] In other words, if you think Viktor Orbán is stubborn, try Ben Netanyahu. Given the staying power of the principle of unanimity, flexibility on the state level is a highly valuable commodity at the federal level, given the extent of state power there. Even giving Turkey the go-ahead would have introduced a Middle Eastern culture into the E.U. at the councils, and E.U. decision-making would have been much more difficult because of exogenous values would have to be recognized and respected even if they conflict with European culture. Moreover, no limit would exist as to how large the E.U. could become. At some point, diseconomies of scale could take a toll on the federal level in being able to realize benefits from collective action as distinct from merely aggregated benefits from states acting unilaterally, such as in foreign policy and defense.

Lastly, the British monarch is, at least as of 2025, the head of state of Canada. Even though the lack of geographical proximity renders that royal role difficult, that the United Kingdom had seceded from the E.U. renders Canadian accession both awkward and difficult. Although the royal role does not render Canada subservient to the British government, the question of Canada's loyalty to the E.U. could conceivably be raised by federal and state officials in the union because of the head of state is an official role in Canada. Perhaps the loyalist Canadians could push for Canada’s provinces, except for Quebec, to be made equivalent to Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland as regions in the United Kingdom instead of Canada becoming a state in the European Union. Does not having the king or queen as head of state mean that Canada is essentially within the monarch's kingdom, even if not subject to the British government? Of course, neither Canadian provinces becoming regional governments in a European kingdom nor Canada becoming a state in an empire-scale union is very realistic, given the sheer gravitas of the status quo. Radical political change is seen as momentous not only for its platforms being very different, but also because such change is rare. Nevertheless, in analyzing possibilities for significant change in how various scales (and scale-types) of polities are related, the prerequisite of relating stepwise regions, kingdoms, and empire-scale polities around the world is best done without category-mistakes foisted by political ideology (e.g., nationalism).[6]

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1. Stefan Grobe, “Meet the MEP Who Wants to Bring Canada into the European Union,” Euronews.com, 5 May 2025.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. David Gritten, “Israel Security Cabinet Approves Plan to ‘Capture’ Gaza, Official Says,” BBC.com, 5 May 2025.

6. See Skip Wroden, British Colonies Forge an American Empire: A Basis for Trans-Atlantic Comparisons (Seattle: Amazon, 2017).

On the U.S. President as Chief Executive

As the chief executive of the U.S. Government, the president is tasked with executing the law—the passage thereof involving both the Congress and the presidency. It follows that a president cannot legally stand in the way of appropriated federal funding of projects and programs once such allocations have become law. For otherwise, a president could simply ignore appropriations passed by the Congress and signed into law by a previous president. The powers of the unitary executive would reach dictatorial proportions. Within roughly one week of being sworn into office for his second term in 2025, U.S. President Trump decided to pause all foreign aid, and “grants, loans and other federal assistance . . . to ensure spending is consistent with Trump’s priorities.”[1] Those priorities, I submit, would properly have influence on bills in Congress that were not yet laws, as per the legislative veto-power of the presidency and the ability of a president to put pressure on members of Congress by speaking persuasively directly to the American people. The value of leadership available to a presiding role should not be ignored. In terms of symbolic leadership befitting a presider in chief, refusing to enforce laws sends the wrong signal. To be sure, delaying rather than cancelling funding that has already been appropriated as law may fall within reasonable discretion that goes with the executing, and thus executive, function. However, the size, or magnitude, of the federal spending being held up but not cancelled may test the test of reasonableness. This may also be so if the political dimension—that is, the salience of political judgment in the issues involved—is significant.

President Trump “issued an executive order for a 90-day pause in foreign development assistance pending a review of efficiencies and consistency with his foreign policy.”[2] At the time, the United States was the world’s largest international-aid donor; in 2023, $68 billion was spent for this purpose. That number includes “everything from development assistance to military aid.”[3] Interestingly, military funding for Israel was exempted from the delay even though the ICC had issued a warrant for Israel’s sitting prime minister for decimating the civilian population of Gaza, the International Court of Justice (the UN’s court) had ruled the occupation and military attacks by Israel to violate international law, and Amnesty International had found sufficient, credible evidence of genocide perpetuated by the Israeli government. If this exception to the U.S. president’s 90-day delay—and Trump unfroze Biden’s hold on the delivery of the 2000lb bombs to Israel because, Trump said, that country had bought them—reflects Trump’s foreign-policy priorities, then the matter of selectively delaying foreign aid cannot be reckoned as merely technical in nature; rather, the salience of the political dimension means that even a 90-day delay could be unreasonable without Congressional consent in the enacting of resolutions or even law.

With regard to pausing grants, loans and other federal assistance—excepting Medicare and Social Security benefits—again the sheer scale of the funding involved and the salience of politics in the decision to delay test the limits to what is and is not within the reasonable purview of executive discretion in executing federal law that includes federal spending. “Diane Yentel of the National Council of Nonprofits said the order could stop cancer research, food assistance and suicide hotlines.”[4] If so, even a significant delay could be unreasonable as well as contrary to the law concerning SNAP (federal food-assistance to 42.1 million individuals as of the fiscal year 2023) because—to put it bluntly—an awful lot of people need to eat on a daily rather than a monthly basis. Again, the president’s political-ideological judgment here is arguably debatable (hence suggestive of a Congressional legislative role even in the delay): delaying food assistance to Americans while exempting military aid to Israel from delay. Both, and especially juxtaposed, are contentious politically (i.e., ideologically). Furthermore, the memo delaying domestic financial assistance, “signed by acting OMB chief Matthew Vaeth, calls on government agencies to temporarily pause their financial assistance [programs], so they can review spending that could be impacted by the various orders Trump has signed” relating to diversity programs, “woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”[5] It is difficult to square such overtly political reasons with a technocratic delay in the execution of laws. Of course, this is a judgment call, for the length of the delay is also a relevant factor. Aside from the financial assistance to Americans bearing on sustenance, a few month’s delay may be reasonable, but both the scale of the foreign and domestic funding and especially the political rationales for the delay arguably make the delay a significant political matter rather than merely an executive function in implementing law.

My assessment should not be assumed to be in line with my own political ideology, for I oppose affirmative action programs as being contrary to merit and woke “thought-police” as being repugnant to free-speech liberty; I am not obliged to “give my personal pronouns” (in fact, “one” is the neuter third-person singular pronoun in English). I assume, moreover, that we are all human, all too human in fact, and thus that none of us have a monopoly on truth to be imposed on others. My point here is that the use of reason to dissect even a controversial issue, such as presidential power in the U.S., should not cower to the bullying force of the mind’s own ideology. Incidentally, this point is vital in distinguishing between scholarship and opinion-pieces.

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1. James Fitzgerald and Ana Faguy, “White House Pauses Federal Grants and Loans,” BBC.com, January 28, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

An Analysis of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: On a Party's Self-Serving Elite

The 2024 U.S. Presidential election warrants a post-partem analysis, not so much to affix blame, but primarily so the electorate might grasp the perils when the elite of a political party refuses to apply self-restraint in order to keep the party-wide platform and campaign speeches from reducing to the elite’s own favorite ideology even though it is not held by a significant number of the “rank and file” members (i.e., voters), not to mention independents. In other words, running a massive political party to serve the ideological agenda of what Bertrand Russell calls “the inner ring” can cost a party dearly on election day. I contend that this applied to the Democratic Party, which had become a center-left party still dependent on its non-college, working-class, members, whose cultural values were not necessarily progressive. To be sure, substituting managerially-oriented political calculation for visionary leadership and broad policy proposals that are based on principles rather than particular political interests can easily be perceived generally as small, especially in the context of the horrific military attacks against civilians in Ukraine and Gaza. It is paradoxical that Harris lost working-class voters who were socially conservative, and thus “anti-woke” (e.g., against men in women’s bathrooms and playing in women’s sports) even as she lost some liberals who believed that Harris, in explicitly stating on The View that she would not deviate from Biden, was too timid in standing up to Russia’s Putin (e.g., by withholding long-range missiles) and Israel’s Netanyahu rather than enabling the horrific military crimes against humanity with continued shipments of weapons as if the UN’s court were irrelevant to international law.

I begin with the immediate historical context of center-left parties. The parties on the left in the U.S. and E.U. shifted to the center in the 1990s and 2000s. The parties were able to pick up moderate voters, but at the risk of losing ideological distinctiveness (from the center-right parties), and thus their raison d’etre in terms of broad principles and policies.  The 2024 U.S. Presidential election can be fit within the broader shifts since the 2000s that have rendered center-left (rather than far-left, or even socialist) parties less successful in elections. Bill Clinton brought the Democratic Party closer to the center in part due to the losses of Edward Kennedy in challenging the center-left Jimmy Carter in 1980 and of Walter Mondale in challenging Ronald Reagan in 1984. The party’s political elite paid attention to these losses, which went down like lead balloons, and Bill Clinton was a result of the ensuing effort to move the party closer to the political center. Crucially, both he and Barak Obama were able to win with support from the middle class (i.e., labor), which was still primarily voting on the basis of economic interest, including redistribution.

Then, two shifts began that caused the Democratic Party’s working-class, relatively conservative, faction to gradually peel off. The first shift can be described as a negative reaction to the increasingly business-friendly aspect of the party moving to the center. Historically, center-left parties in North America and Europe were critical of capitalism and wanted to constrain it. In reaction to the financial crisis of 2008, however, center-left parties let go of the even more important role of constraining capitalism that had frozen up from within due to uncorrected increased market volatility.

In the E.U. state of Greece, for example, the Syriza Party campaigned against austerity measures during the state’s legislative election in 2015 by promising to renegotiate the state’s bailout agreements. However, just after winning the election, the party’s head, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, accepted the existing austerity conditions in spite of there having recently been a referendum in which the Greek citizens overwhelmingly rejected those very conditions. Considering that the austerity resulting from the government’s required budget-cuts was especially harsh on the working class, Tsipras’ betrayal in going along with the creditor-beholden E.U. state of Germany doubtlessly cost the center-left party votes and Tsipras was ultimately defeated (though strangely, after being reelected again).  

In the U.S., Barak Obama entered the office of federal president in 2008 at the worst of the financial crisis, and he stocked his administration with plenty of folks from Wall Street. It is no coincidence that Obama went along with financial bailouts for the banks without conditions, even in terms of putting ceilings on the bonuses of the banks’ executives. Considering that they had displayed incredibly bad judgment in over-leveraging their respective banks by packaging and even buying bonds based on risky sub-prime residential mortgages, the bankers not only did not deserve bonuses, but arguably should have been fired as a condition of getting the funds appropriated by Congress and those created by the Federal Reserve Bank. Instead, the culpable bankers received hefty bonuses out of the TARP money provided by the U.S. Treasury—money that was supposed to be lent out to stimulate the economy so the working class would not suffer from traumatic unemployment. It was not lost on the Democratic Party’s non-college working-class segment that the incompetent but wealthy bank executives got bonuses in the political elite and the financial elite being cozy. Ironically, it was not until the first Trump administration that Treasury issued checks to every American.

Unfortunately, the trajectory of the partial unraveling of the Democratic Party is not so simple, for it was not only the growing perception that the party had joined de facto with the Republican Party in siding with corporate America at the expense of workers that caused the latter to gradually but steadily peel off from the center-left party—after having asked, perhaps, what was still left about the Democratic Party.

Firstly, structural changes in the economy also had an impact. Economic inequality was increasing, and workers could see that the Democratic Party had done nothing substantial to stop even the increase. That the party had missed an opportunity to come up with its own, alternative economic policies with which to differentiate itself from the Republican Party was especially important because the Democratic Party had moved closer to the center, and away from the wing associated with U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  

Secondly, another structural change, not economic in nature, also had an impact. Since 2000, a shift towards identity/cultural grievances had been occurring in the middle class wherein a gradually increasing number of voters have been less interested in economic redistribution than in opposing the “woke” ideology, which is centered on legalizing rights of certain groups of Americans based on group-identity. Historically, religious wars in Europe had been based on the premise that group-identity is primary in human consciousness; race riots share that assumption. The failure of the Democratic Party to constrain the excesses of capitalism during the financial crisis may be a factor in this shift away from economic distribution, as increasing numbers of working-classed voters came to realize that both major parties had become bought and paid for by the business sector through its political campaign contributions and promises of executive jobs. Regulatory capture of the regulator agencies by the regulated companies is but one result of the inordinate influence of business in government.

The shift in the American working-class voting increasingly on social issues affected the Democratic as a wedge. The “woke” ideology in favor of defunding the police, transsexual rights (i.e., men in women’s bathrooms and sports), reparations for Black Americans, sanctuary cities wherein illegal immigrants are legally protected, university “cancel culture,” such as in mislabeling pro-human-rights protests as antisemitic, and diversity programs gripped the political elite of the party and its left-wing more generally even though Kamala Harris did not emphasize “woke” planks in her speeches. Meanwhile, the “anti-work” political reaction had been gaining speed since at least 2015 among the non-college-educated working folks. This reaction viewed the gay “rainbow” flag as a cult symbol that was being imposed seemingly everywhere, and was viscerally opposed to transsexual men being able to play in women’s sports and use women’s locker rooms, the notion that illegal immigrants somehow had a right to be in the U.S. even though they had committed a crime in entering the country illegally, the proposal that even people living paycheck to paycheck should be taxed more to pay for reparations to Black people, and that certain words could no longer be spoken or written in college courses and even in political protests. Indeed, protests against Israel had practically been banned at many universities, including Yale, where 47 pro-human-rights students were arrested by private university police employees, and Harvard, which had turned Harvard Yard into a preemptive police presence by September, 2024. So much for academic atmosphere and academic freedom; non-academic employees with guns were in charge as scared academic administrators looked on as if proud mice.  My point is that Harris didn’t have to say anything “woke” on the campaign trail; non-college educated workers in the Democratic Party had by then viewed their party’s elite as very “woke” indeed. 

It can be argued that in having no internal check or self-restraint, the party's political elite had pushed the “woke” ideology too hard and too far (and perhaps, most importantly, too fast), and thus naturally had prompted a political reaction against both the elite itself and its favored ideology. That is, the political elite of the Democratic Party refused to constrain itself from pushing its mandatory ideology even though it was clear, or should have been clear without the blocking self-centeredness, that non-college-educated workers, especially in small towns, would bolt. Even with the mistaken assumption that the working class would still vote on an economic basis, the fact that the anti-woke movement was gaining steam should not have been missed or so easily dismissed for being illegitimate. Presumptuousness can indeed be blinding or distortive, as can the underlying self-centeredness and primitive desire to use power to enact one’s own ideology. This is ultimately why Donald Trump was able to win in spite of his own voters acknowledging that he was admittedly a flawed man.

The elite of a political party does its party a disservice by stubbornly pushing whatever ideology that elite loves, as if it were a fact of reason and thus should be imposed on detractors whether they like it or not, rather than applying self-discipline and a little humility to back off the ideology so as to retain the socially-conservative workers for the sake of governing to constrain capitalism. The ancient Confucian scholar, Xunzi, points to “a degree of self-restraint and even virtue, namely trustworthiness ,” as one reason why a hegemon, a ruler who is not as virtuous as is a sage (i.e., a wise and virtuous person) but is more virtuous than is a vicious tyrant, can be “a strong and successful ruler.”[1] Even though a hegemon “is not committed to moral cultivation of himself or those he rules,” applying the virtue of self-restraint, such as channeling away one’s instinctual urge to promote one’s own preferred ideology over others in a political party, can make a ruler successful (and not tyrannical) anyway.[2] The political elite of the Democratic Party could have benefited from this ancient lesson. That an increasing number of voters in the working class were more interested in voting against the societally interlarding “woke” ideology and especially its demands than in voting for economic redistribution means that the self-centered and haughty ideological stubbornness of the Democratic political elite really costed Harris votes.

Thirdly, even given the ongoing shift among working-class Democrats toward voting on the basis of cultural issues, economic pressure from the price increases, especially in gas and groceries, even after the temporary bump from supply shocks and higher transportation costs during the pandemic, prompted a significant number of voters in the middle class (and poor), which is especially vulnerable to price increases on necessities such as food and transportation, to vote on the basic of their bank accounts.

Harris’s promise to reduce grocery-store prices rung hollow because Biden had failed to do it and she said she would not differ from Biden on policies. Even given the trend in the working class to vote on the basis of social over economic issues, the center-left party erred in failing to recharge its historic mission to constrain the excesses of capitalism. Pledges to use federal anti-trust law to break up the meat-producer and grocery-chain concentrated rather than competitive industries would have differentiated the party from Trump’s rightward shift of the Republican Party. Even the Democratic Party, in accepting so much corporate money from lobbyists, was susceptible to enabling rather than lessening the tendency of markets to consolidate—to go from competition, by which food prices would have gone down after the supply shocks during the pandemic, to just a few giant companies with enough market-power to hold prices high and even convince consumers to expect even higher prices in the expectation of inflation as inevitable. As my academic advisor at Yale, who was an Episcopalian priest, once said, “If you must sin, then sin boldly!” Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt would not have lost much time translating that advice into political terms in terms of bold policy in place of political calculation and capitulation to even the private powers behind the proverbial throne. Unfortunately, neither Biden nor Harris was a Jackson or Roosevelt.

Fourthly, as for the shock that many “far-left” Democrats and even some independents had after the election that a convicted felon and narcissist had just won the popular vote (as well as the Electoral College), the explanation for Trump’s success with labor is not only due to the reasons I have just discussed, but also because Trump was very wealthy and bold in a way that vote-maximizer politicians usually are not. That these personal attributes could possibly “trump” the man’s flaws, such as admitting that he could get away with touching women sexually without their consent, allegedly pressuring Georgia to come up with more votes for him, and allegedly prompting a mob to riot through Capitol Hill as electoral votes were being counted by Congress on January 6, 2021, would shatter the ideological view held by the Democratic Party’s elite on what matters in a presidential character. Indeed, the nature of the alleged crimes may actually have augmented or strengthened Trump’s stature to working-class voters, given that their paradigmatic criteria for leadership differed so from those of the political elite (of both parties!).

Whereas America’s political elite and the left-wing of the Democratic party believed that voters should vote at least in part based on whichever candidate is most wise and virtuous, Trump himself might counter that the masses vote instead on the basis of wealth and being bold even in speech as well as action, rather unlike the typical people-pleasing politician, such as Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. Taking into consideration the fact that the level of education (college versus no-college) had been the single best indicator during the arduously long campaign “season” of which candidate a voter favored, it is likely that the criteria valued by the working class differed paradigmatically from the criteria valued by college-educated voters, including the political elite. Unconsciously, the elite of the Democratic Party projected its own paradigm of character-leadership onto how the non-college-educated laborers of the party’s “rank and file” see things. This can explain why even the criminal charges against Trump did not dint his base.

According to Adam Smith in his text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the great mob of mankind are the admirers and the worshipers . . . of wealth and greatness.”[3] These two things are contrast to wisdom and virtue, which the masses “are perhaps incapable of even discerning.”[4] I don’t think Smith is being fair to the “masses” here, but his main point concerning the different criteria is important for college-educated Americans to grasp. Like people outside of a political (and economic) elite, Smith eschews “the proposition that people of superior wisdom and virtue possess a title to rule.”[5] He maintains that birth (family) and wealth are more visible and certain to the masses than are virtue and wisdom.[6] Wealth and greatness, Trump doubtlessly could have said during his 2024 campaign, “are my two middle names.” By “greatness,” even as he applied the adjective to the country itself in terms of its potential, consists not only of wealth, but also the kind of strength that is bold rather than timid, or limited to political calculation at home and abroad. Thinking that they too could someday be rich and admiring bold people, working-class voters could very well have loved him for being both. Again, the shift away from being concerned with redistribution to wanting to push back against the presumptuously encroaching, passive aggressive antagonistic “woke” advocates means that Trump’s “offensive” statements were viewed by the working-class as a plus rather than a minus in terms of character. In other words, few labor-union members would be likely to quote from Aristotle’s Ethics to insist that a virtuous person is necessary to put into effect Trump’s policies.

As for Trump’s pathological lying, the heads of the Democratic Party were hardly blameless in falsely claiming that Harris had been selected as the nominee in an “open, bottom-up” process. With a hundred days to go before election day, the party had time for a primary, which could have been set to take place forty days out, with the general election following after sixty more days. In the same year, the E.U. state of Germany set an election just sixty days after a scheduled no-confidence vote at a time in which that vote was just a month away. To claim that Harris’ chances were diminished by having only a hundred days fails to recognize that the year-plus long campaign season for U.S. president was excessively long. Lacking in boldness in terms of proposed policies was more of a hindrance than just having a hundred days. In other words, she had more than enough time to distinguish herself by departing from Biden’s policies, especially given his unpopularity for not going far enough in terms of a variety of areas. In fact, Harris’ lack of boldness took votes away even from the left-wing of the Democratic Party!

Going on the basis of political calculation, or “the political reality,” based on the presumed power of AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) in U.S. politics, produced political timidity just as cowering to corporate interests, even of the oil and food industries, presented Harris as a politician rather than as a leader. Leadership does not operate by calculation, but by broad principles. Whether those principles are standing up to an aggressor ravaging through Gaza rather than enabling him by being in favor of continuing to supply weapons to his military, or enforcing market competition (and a windfall-profits tax) rather than suggesting that the government give Americans money to spend in the oligarchic grocery chains that would feel free to raise prices even more rather than cut prices to compete for buyers, boldness of policy can be appreciated even more when it involves standing up to entrenched political and economic interests that have turned squalid in part because of the U.S. Government.

Management differs from leadership in part because management is narrowly focused and incremental rather than being oriented to formulating and promoting a vision of society in ideal, paradigmatic terms. I submit that both Biden and Harris were managerial in nature, whereas Ronald Reagan can be studied in terms of providing a vision (e.g., “Government is the problem.”). To be sure, not every vision that a political leader espouses is ethical. Hitler, for example, provided a vision of a strong Germany without weakness enervating the country from within. That vision can be challenged ethically both in regard to how Hitler conceptualized strength and weakness, and his government officials could be challenged for how they implemented Hitler’s vision by literally exterminating what they saw as weakness from the country and even in trying to free up living space for Germans from the U.S.S.R.—Hitler having promised Hindenburg that Communists would be eliminated within Germany, which in turn could mean going after the source further east.

What to a working-class Trump voter was boldness was viewed by some Harris voters and the Democracy Party’s elite as fascist. The claims that democracy was in the balance may have been fueled in part by the fact that Trump working-class voters tended to value wealth and political boldness over wisdom and virtue. To people who value or follow political calculation to minimize political risk, a candidate not speaking as a politician and advocating bold policies would of course be viewed with fear.

It is possible, even ironic in this case, that representative democracy can be put at risk by a cleft or division existing between a party’s elite and a significant part of its “rank-and-file” base. To be effective electorally and in sync with democracy itself, the elite of a party needs to remember that its perspective is not necessarily that of the whole of the party, and if the respective perspectives do indeed differ, the elite needs to exercise some self-constraint in place of self-centeredness and a self-assumed mandate to impose, ideologically, even on the party’s membership. In short, a party’s elite needs to put that membership first if electoral success is desired as a means to being in power.  The refusal to exercise self-restraint deserves to be voted against. Trump’s lack of self-restraint in his use of vitriol against his “enemies,” which included anyone who criticized him publicly, and even in his use of lying habitually to get out of trouble was in line with the boldness atypical of politicians that the working-class valued in a leader, whereas Harris’ lack of self-restraint regarding highlighting aspects of “wokeness” and in not standing up to big business and Israel worked against her. Not that Trump would stand up to big business, for he himself was a part of it, and not that he would stand up to Netanyahu (or Putin), but all that Trump too may have appealed to greatness-as-strength as construed and valued by enough of the the non-college-educated working-class voters.

1. Eric L. Hutton, “Introduction,” in Xunzi: The Complete Text, Eric L. Hutton, trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. xxviii.
2. Ibid.
3. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I. iii.3.2.
4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), VI.ii.I.20, quoted by Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 42.
5. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 44.
6. Ibid., p. 45.

The E.U.: Pulled in Two Directions

European integration has proceeded in fits and starts since Robert Shuman proposed the European Coal and Steel Cooperative in 1950 so Europe could keep an eye on Germany’s military in the wake of World War II. Euroatom and the European Economic Community came in 1957, and the EC, which consisted of the three organizations, existed until 1993. Since then, the European Union too has progressed step-wise, with some steps backwards, such as when Britain seceded from the Union. Whereas the U.S. made the leap from a supranational alliance, the Articles of Confederation, to a federal government all at once in 1789, the way of the E.U. in terms of dual sovereignty and adding states has been incremental. Perhaps throughout its 31 year history, as of its federal election in 2024, the E.U. was being pulled in two directions. Some forces have led the E.U. to gain competencies over time, whereas other forces could be described as “states’ rights,” anti-federalist, or Euroskeptic tendencies. If dominant, those forces would ultimately lead to the dissolution of the federal union, whereas the former forces would lead to its consolidation. After thirty years, the U.S. too was more subject to the centripetal forces than those for ever closer union. From the subsequent history of the U.S., it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether the E.U. too will lean so close too to political (and economic) consolidation too by the time that union is over 200 years old. Like Europeans today, the Americans of the 1820s would never have dreamed that the federal level would be so dominate over the states, which were still regarded as countries.  

That more sovereignty to go to the E.U. on defense was being debated in the weeks before the E.U. election in 2024, with the E.U.’s People’s Party, a proponent of the E.U. defense being expanded to include air defense, being projected to win in the European Parliament, and Russia’s Putin still invading Ukraine and making threats against Europe, even the governments of the largest E.U. states were supporting the additional transfer of governmental sovereignty to the federal government in order to protect the E.U. from its eastern menace. It is significant that whereas the U.S. began as a military alliance of thirteen sovereign countries, the E.U.’s antecedents were economic in nature (even though the E.U.’s pillars extended beyond the economic domain). Even so, it could have been predicted in 1993 that the E.U. would eventually handle both defense and interstate commerce, as those are typically handled at the empire-level in empire-scale unions. This was so in the British Empire, for example, and the U.S. federal government inherited the imperial-level powers of the British king.

It is important to resist the easy conclusion that the E.U. was poised in 2024 to take a step towards ever closer union, for the E.U. was also subject to forces to the contrary. According to the Euronews Super Polls, one thing looked certain a week before the E.U. election: “after the 6-9 June elections, the European Parliament will have a clear right-wing majority.”[1] That majority would be keener on having the state governments get back some of the governmental functions (i.e., governmental sovereignty) that had been delegated to the federal government incrementally since 1993.

It is important to take account of the role of international forces on the two contending political forces in the E.U. that bear on its degree of integration. I have already alluded to Putin’s Russia as prompting concern by E.U. citizens for more federal competencies in defense (e.g., an air defense). The American government’s support of Israel as it continued to ignore and violate the “cease and desist” rulings of the UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice, was undoubtedly causing Europeans to question a global order in which the U.S. would continue to be relied on as the global “police.” European values in favor of international law would not be protected by relying on the Americans. The possibility of the former U.S. president, Don Trump, returning to office meant that an American administration could actually enable and even strengthen the positions of Putin of Russia and Netanyahu of Israel was not lost on E.U. citizens as they prepared to vote in early June, 2024. The E.U. not only being able to defend itself militarily but also have military sway in the global order could naturally result from these forces from abroad.

Going in the other direction, away from increasing E.U. competencies, or enumerated powers in Ameri-speak, the failure of the E.U. to handle the mass immigration from Africa was feeding into the increasing popularity of the “right-wing” European parties in the Parliament. How could the E.U. handle more exclusive competencies if it could not handle its existing functions? More to the point, stubborn anti-federalist, or “nationalist,” resistance to doing away with the veto in the European Council ironically fed the E.U.’s functional difficulties with its extant competencies. Just as the veto in the U.S.’s Articles of Confederation stymied the American Continental Army against the British Empire, so too the refusal of E.U. state governments to agree that more E.U. competencies must be decided by qualified-majority voting rather than unanimity has resulted in a less-than-functional federal government. In the wake of Israel’s refusal to abide by the verdicts of the International Court of Justice (even though the UN founded Israel!) for an immediate cessation of the invasion of Gaza, that the E.U. had to rely on state governments on whether to recognize Palestine is a real testament to the inutility of the veto at the federal level (e.g. in the Council of Ministers, as well as the European Council).[2] In words used for American basketball, the federal recognition of Palestine should have been “a slam dunk.” That it was not signals that something is very wrong with the E.U.’s federal system, and in particular with how decisions are taken at its federal level.

So, heading into their federal election in June, 2024, E.U. citizens were subject to conflicting forces, and thus to opposing political movements, some for and others against ever closer union. My point is that contending forces and questions of federal-level functionality have existed throughout the post-World War II period of European integration. Fits and starts, rather than all at once.  Even in the U.S., the shift from a system in which the state governments held most of the sovereignty to one in which the federal institutions do has been gradual. The difference is perhaps that Europeans do it piecemeal formally in terms of basic law, whereas the progression has been more by case law in the U.S. Essentially, this means that Europeans have had to decide on what Americans call constitutional amendments more often—amendments (i.e., changes to basic law) that are more significant for the federal system as a whole than the American amendments (after the Bill of Rights) have been. This is why the impact of contemporary international forces is so relevant to the E.U. as a still-changing federal system of dual sovereignty (i.e., not confederal, as in the Articles and the EC).

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1. Sergio Cantone, “Super Poll Q&A: Is EU-Wide Conservative Coalition Losing Momentum?” Euronews.com, June 6, 2024.
2. Skip Worden, “Euroskeptic Federalism Obstructing the E.U.’s Recognition of Palestine,” The Worden Report: International Relations, May 27, 2024.