Independent U.S. Regulatory Agencies: Undermining the Chief Executive

On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal president has the authority to terminate the employment of heads of independent federal agencies at will, rather than only for cause. The latter requirement (i.e., due cause) would still hold for the Federal Reserve, which raises the question of whether a central bank should be distinguished from regulatory agencies. The value in buffering monetary policy from political pressure is why the Federal Reserve is not part of the executive, legislative, or judicial branches of the U.S. government, but is instead an independent central bank within that government. As a consequence, monetary policy does not require approval from either the U.S. president or the Congress. Hence, the “for cause” requirement for removing someone from the Fed’s board of governors cannot be disagreement with the person’s preferences or decisions regarding monetary policy. As for independent regulatory agencies in the executive branch, their independence undermines the unitary executive as well as the president’s role in implementing existing law.

As with virtually any institutional arrangement in government, drawbacks are paired with benefits. In the case of the Federal Reserve, the main drawback lies in the difficulty in coordinating fiscal and monetary policy because Congress and the White House decide fiscal policy while monetary policy is decided by the Federal Reserve, which is buffered from pressure from all three branches of the federal government. So a fiscal policy could be in place to stimulate the economy even though high interest rates slow down economic growth. In the 1970s, for example, the term “stagflation” was coined because high inflation existed along with economic stagnation. During that decade, fighting inflation by monetary policy would have run counter in its economic effects to stimulating the economy by fiscal policy. Typically, inflation and stagnation alternate rather than occur at the same time. Paul Volker, as chairman of the Federal Reserve in the early 1980s, used monetary policy to reduce inflation even though the high interest rates exacerbated economic stagflation and, without sufficient fiscal stimulation to counter the higher interest rates, quickly produced a recession in President Reagan’s first years in office. So there is value economically in coordinating monetary and fiscal policy, and buffering the Federal Reserve from pressure from Congress and the White House (as well as not allowing a Federal Reserve chairperson to dominate those two branches) comes with a price. An iconic line from a European in the film, The Godfather, Part III, is relevant: “All our ships must sail in the same direction.” Separating monetary and fiscal policy institutionally comes with a cost in that ships could be going in opposite directions, producing chaos.

The Federal Reserve is a central bank, and therefore it is not an independent regulatory agency in the executive branch. The very notion of an independent regulatory agency is problematic constitutionally because if such an agency is free of a president’s control and yet still within the executive branch, then separation of powers prohibits direct control by Congress or the judiciary. The Court “held that presidents have free rein to fire agency heads at will, despite federal laws that require a cause for such dismissals” and a 1935 Supreme Court case known as Humphrey’s Executor that held that presidents could not fire heads of federal agencies without cause.[1] That precedent, which the Court overruled, is problematic because assuming a regulatory head does nothing for cause, the person would be free to make regulatory policy at will even if the chief executive officer of the government, the president, disagrees. Because the federal presidency is an office elected by electors of the member-state held to the popular votes in the respective states whereas the head of a regulatory agency is appointed, regulatory agencies being independent of the president incurs a democracy deficit. In other words, the head of an independent agency has too much power given the amount of accountability that is available if termination of employment for cause is not an option due to good behavior.

Furthermore, carving out independent turfs within the executive branch denies the unitary nature of that branch that is implied by the president’s title as chief executive officer. Because the presidency is an elected office, heads of independent regulatory agencies within the executive branch who resist presidential pressure obstruct the “will of the people” from being implemented. Ideally, besides presiding as a neutral figure-head representing the United States of America, the presidency is tasked with implementing law, including defense. Hence it is Congress that has the constitutional power to declare war, for example, and the president is obliged to implement that declaration as the commander in chief. The role of implementing is hardly glamorous, and it has tended to be given insufficient time and energy by presidents who have been more interested in influencing the enactment of law, which is the task of the legislative branch, even though the veto is a negative power and thus designed to be a check on Congressional abuses of power rather than a mandate to legislate in a positive sense.

Ironically, the very existence of independent regulatory agencies with directors free from presidential pressure has freed up presidents from their implementing role, and thus enabled them to spend more time and energy on legislating new law rather than implementing existing law.  Unlike formulating new law, implementing existing law, including declarations of war, is consistent with the neutrality that a figurehead needs to be credible and thus to represent the United States as a whole. That such neutrality politically has been disregarded is evinced when American citizens state that a sitting president “is not my president.” The baleful warnings of expansive presidential power made by Arthur Schlesinger in his seminal 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency, would be less of a concern were presidents willing to constrain themselves to focus on being a figure-head uniquely credible enough to represent the United States as a whole rather than just one political party, and implement existing law by running the executive branch (including the defense department), rather than usurp Congress’s legislative prerogative as per the separation of powers. The Court’s 2026 decision allowing presidents to fire heads of previously independent regulatory agencies in the executive branch is a step in the direction of presidents attending more to functioning as the chief executive of the U.S. federal government when not called upon to preside.  

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1. Mark Sherman, “Supreme Court Says Fed’s Cook Can Keep Her Job for Now, But It Upholds Other Trump Firings,” APnews.com, June 29, 2026.

Congressional Subpoenas: The Case of the Clintons

The rule of law is absolutely essential to a representative democracy being able to endure even as strong personalities in public office may seek to bend or even dismiss law for their own purposes. The notion that anyone subject to law gets a pass according to one’s own discretion and power is toxic to a republic being regarded as fair. Just as everyone has a right to due process in legal proceedings in the U.S., no one is above the law there. This applies to former presidents and secretaries of state, and thus to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Their written statement in refusing to recognize a Congressional subpoena as valid—a presumptuous stunt to be sure—reveals that they held the presumption of being able to decide whether a law to which they were subject was valid. This presumption could also be seen when Bill Clinton occupied the White House, for he deliberately lied under oath, “I did not have sexual relations with” Monika Lewinski even though she had performed oral sex with him in the Oval Office when she was a White House intern. My point is that the underlying pattern is clear with respect to a lack of regard for law itself (even though both Clintons went to Yale’s law school) and the presumption of setting oneself in the position of invalidating law to which one is subject. That Bill Clinton was no punished with incarceration in the 1990s was unfortunate even for him and his wife as they were not afforded the opportunity to learn a lesson.

On January 21, 2026, members of the Republican group in the U.S. House of Representatives began the process “to hold former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary in contempt of Congress” because the couple had repeatedly refused to honor a Congressional subpoena to testify on the Epstein sex-girls racket.[1] Photographic evidence that Bill had been in contact with Epstein had been made public, and members of the House had questions for the Clintons regarding what they may have known of Epstein’s crimes. Even though the demand for testimony sounds reasonable enough, Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the relevant committee, had said at the start of a hearing in which the Clinton’s attendance was required that the Clintons had responded not with “cooperation but defiance.”[2] Such a blatant response to a Congressional subpoena is astonishing because, as Comer said, “Subpoenas are not mere suggestions, they carry the force of law and require compliance.”[3] The Clintons contended that the subpoenas were “invalid because they do not serve any legislative purpose.”[4] But it is not for subpoenaed people called to testify to assess whether any such purpose is being served, for otherwise anyone could disregard a Congressional subpoena simply by declaring there to be no legislative purpose.

In his ethical theory, Kant argues that if universalizing a maxim results in a contradiction, such a maxim is unethical.  For example, if no one were to tell the truth, no one would believe anyone else’s truth-claims and so making such claims would not make any sense. Universalizing the maxim that it is ok to lie would result in no claims being made. Similarly, were everyone to act on the maxim, a person subject to a Congressional subpoena can determine the validity of said subpoena and act on that determination, it would not make sense for Congress to issue subpoenas because none would be honored. Universalizing that maxim results in the absurd, so that maxim is unethical.

Another formulation of Kant’s ethical theory holds that rational beings should be treated not merely as one’s means, but also as ends in themselves. In presuming that the committee members were merely playing political games in issuing the subpoenas and dismissing them, the Clintons were treating the members as means only (to the Clinton’s own ends) rather than as ends in themselves worthy of respect by virtue of being rational beings. Why worthy of respect?  Because to Kant, it is by the use of reason that we assign value in the world, so reason itself must have absolute value and thus be worthy of respect. To Kant, the formulations of his Categorical Imperative have the necessity that law does.

It is such necessity, both in law itself and in ethical principles, according to Kant, that the Clintons repeatedly and conveniently overlooked or dismissed outright, and with impunity. It is significant, therefore, that being in contempt of a Congressional subpoena can carry time in prison. There is a good reason for that, so I submit that the criminal charges should be automatic rather than depend on a majority-vote in the House chamber. Obviating accountability by means of political deals does no favor to the guilty in terms of lessons learned, and no favor to an institution that looks weak if its subpoenas can be ignored with impunity. Impunity for some and jail for the rest is no way to run a republic that is based on the rule of law.

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1. Stephen Groves and Matt Brown, “House Republicans Begin Push to Hold the Clintons in Contempt of Congress Over the Epstein Probe,” APnews.com, January 21, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

U.S. Presidential Encroachment on State Prerogatives

Both in the E.U. and U.S., the member-states are semi-sovereign, and are even guaranteed all residual sovereignty that is not in any of the enumerated competencies (i.e., powers) of the respective unions and the states. Europeans are smart to have multiple avenues for the state governments in the European Council and the Council of Ministers so those governments can protect themselves against encroachment by the Commission. To be sure, these safeguards go too far, especially given the sheer number of states even by the mid-2020s, in giving each state a veto especially on important matters in which qualified-majority voting does not apply. In other words, the safeguards against federal encroachment in the E.U. are excessive as long as each state can wield its veto against federal policies, legislation, and regulations. Regarding the latter, the directive means provides each state with some latitude. I suspect that the Europeans who constructed the E.U.’s federal system were in part fearful of federal encroachment because so much of that had already built-up in the U.S., where federal consolidation had become a threat to the governmental sovereignty of the member-states, as if they were just regions rather than republics holding even more sovereignty, on parchment at least, than does Congress and the federal president. So, it is worth taking not of the rare instances in which a state legislature pushes back against threats from the U.S. president on a competency (i.e., enumerated power) reserved by the states.  The rejection by the Indiana Senate of U.S. President Trump’s pressure to accept new districts for U.S. House representatives from Indiana—a map in which the Republican Group would likely pick up two seats—is important because Congressional-district maps are the prerogative of the states rather than an encroaching federal executive.

According to Article 1, Section 4 of the U.S. basic law (consolidated as a constitution), the member-states have the primary authority to regulate the “times, places, and manner” of the U.S. House or Representatives’ elections. This authority includes enacting the boundaries of the districts within a state. To be sure, Congress has been delegated authority to override a state’s Congressional-district map, as federal oversight is in line with the “checks and balances” feature of modern federalism. For instance, a state’s map that discriminates against regions populated mostly by a racial minority would be ripe for Congressional action. It is significant that the U.S. president plays no role either in crafting such maps or in oversight. Therefore, U.S. President Trump’s threats laid against certain senators in the Indiana Senate so they would pass a new Congressional map before the next census so to give Trump’s Republican group in the U.S. House of Representatives more representation than otherwise would likely be the case was a case of federal encroachment of a state power encased in the U.S. Constitution. The Indiana senators voted prudently and justifiably in rejecting the U.S. President’s “bully tactics.”

Senator Michael Crider, a Republican, who faced “threats of violence and intimidation,” issued a statement after he voted no on the redistricting proposal.[1] “When you get kind of bullied and threatened, if that tactic works, then you can expect to deal with that for the rest of your political career.”[2] Sen. Vaneta Becker issued the following statement: “I think this looks like and feels like bullying, and I don’t think Hoosiers respond well to bullying.”[3] Neither, I might add, do Illinoisians on the other side of the Wabash river, to whom people from the Indiana side of the river-border used to shout, “Whos you’r,” hence the mascot, “Hoosier”, instead of who are you?

The same consequences of giving into a bully can be said of a state legislature; once it capitulates to threats and pressure from the federal executive (or Congress), threats will be more likely to continue and even become more dire until the member-state legislators are afraid to use even the powers reserved for the states. In the case of the redistricting plan, President Trump even threatened the Indiana government that federal funds would be cut off from the state in retaliation for not approving the president’s partisan plan. Sen. Spencer Deery made the problem of encroachment on the state explicit: “As long as I have breath, I will use my voice to resist a federal government that attempts to bully, direct and control this state or any state. Giving the federal government more power is not conservative.”[4] That a prerogative of a state legislature could be circumvented “at the whim of a president’s request” was too much for Sen. Mike Bohacek too.[5] Therefore, both in terms of threatening Indiana lawmakers, who have been democratically elected, and in terms of eclipsing federalism, wherein the vital element of checks-and-balances between the federal institutions and those of states, the political courage of the Indiana Republican senators who voted against President Trump’s partisan plan is laudable. Threats of violence have no place in politics, and efforts to usurp the governmental sovereignty that is reserved for the states, whether in the U.S. or E.U., should be resisted lest the check-and-balance “oversight” feature of modern, dual-sovereignty, federalism be lost.

Fortunately, the “acts of intimidation and threats and acts of violence targeting [Republican Indiana] senators who opposed” the proposal backfired, as a majority of the 40 Republican senators voted against the bill.[6] Ironically, politically conservative principles were cited by some of those senators. The head of the Republican Group in the Indiana Senate, Sen. Rodric Bray, said, “many of my caucus members don’t think redrawing our Congressional map mid-cycle is a guaranteed way for Indiana.”[7] In short, changing maps for partisan purposes mid-way through a decade violates the tradition of redrawing maps only just after the U.S. census, which occurs once every decade. As per conservative principles, Bray urged Republicans to campaign more so as to sway a district that was then held by a Democrat but becoming increasingly Republican. As the saying goes, elections have consequences.

 

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1. Paul Blumenthal, “These Are The Indiana Republicans Who Voted To Crush Trump’s Redistricting Plan,” The Huffington Post, December 12, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Empire-Scale Representative Democracy: The American Presidency

On the very day in which a health-care company’s executive collapsed in the Oval Office, with U.S. President Trump being the only person in the group standing and looking away in what looks like callous disregard instead of compassion or empathy, that president directed his Administration to appeal a federal judge’s ruling that the U.S. Government had to immediately fund food-assistance, or SNAP (formerly “food stamps”) completely for the month then more than a week in, in spite of the "government shutdown." On the next day, the Trump Administration demanded that the member-states that had just paid out full November benefits to recipients “undo"  the difference between the partial and full amounts that had just been "paid out under judges’ orders” because the U.S. Supreme Court “stayed those rulings.”[1] The photo of Trump literally looking the other way while everyone else in the Oval Office is bending over the collapsed man out of concern perfectly aligns with his lack of concern for Americans going without food due to the sudden stoppage of money for food without notice. That many employees of the U.S. Government who had been laid off without pay since earlier that November would be especially reliant on food-assistance money precisely because they were no longer obtaining income (or else they were receiving unemployment compensation at less than full pay) could be understood to be a matter of callousness rather than moral sentiments from Trump simply by looking at the photo.

President Trump's emotional indifference is palpable. (source: Andrew Harnik via Getty Images)

Looking at that photo, not even psychologists should conclude that a majority of the electoral (and popular) votes went to elect a psychopath. However, callousness in the face of a medical emergency can reasonably be inferred from the president’s non-verbal stance and emotionless facial expression. Had that photo been available to voters in the days before the 2024 presidential election, Trump may have lost that election. Such a hypothetical is useful ex post facto because it raises the question of whether so many voters as vote in a U.S. presidential election have enough actual information on the candidates. If the photo shocked many such voters just over a year after the 2024 election, the implication is that relying on “brand” marketing by presidential campaigns because so few voters even know people who know even just one of the candidates is deficient.

The Electoral College was established in the U.S. Constitution not only because the member-states, like those of the E.U., would retain some governmental sovereignty, but also because with even just 7 million people voting for president, so few of them could be expected to know the characters of the candidates beyond what reaches news print that a check by electors who could meet the candidates was deemed to be necessary. That the political parties captured the Electoral College such that such a check did not in fact operate means that American representative democracy as regards the federal president of the Union has been allowed to operate at a deficiency, which is to say that the elections have been vulnerable to the electorates (of the states) being misled by presidential campaigns.

In short, my point is that if even some of the millions of Americans who had voted for Donald Trump in November, 2024 were subsequently shocked a year later when they scrutinized the photo of Donald Trump being so visually inert emotionally, and perhaps even annoyed at the unwanted delay in his office, while antipodally the other people there could be seen as so obviously concerned about a guest who had just collapsed. Trump stood out so much from the others that even the president’s supporters could have been surprised, even marveling in the privacy of their own minds that they had known so little about Trump the man when they had voted for him. I am assuming that only a small minority of the electorate would favor voting for a person who at the very leeast appears to be so callous in person, for judgment, which involves not just reasoning, but also emotion, is salient in governing. The photo of Turmp in the Oval Office paradoxically demonstrates the importance of humane emotion in governance by so clearly dipicting the utter absence of emotion in a very human situation in which we would naturally expect to find spontaneous emotion. In this surreal way, Trump's repeated efforts to stop food-assistance from reaching the poor judicially and in policy can be grasped in terms of Trump as a person.

Perhaps as in the E.U., the chief executives of the U.S. member-states should nominate a candidate for federal president, with the U.S. House of Representatives, whose counterpart in the E.U. is the European Parliament, confirming or rejecting the candidate. The idea of the states' chief executives, who are themselves elected closer to the people, choosing the federal president outright was considered in the Constitutional Convention, but the proposal was unfortunately voted down in favor of the ill-fated Electoral College. The U.S. federal system can indeed be improved by borrowing some ideas from the E.U., and vice versa; this just takes some humility on both ends. 

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1. Scott Bauer and Nicholas Riccardi, “Trump Administration Demands States ‘Undo’ Full SNAP Payouts as States Warn of ‘Catastrophic Impact,’” The Associated Press, November 9, 2025.

The U.S. Supreme Court Clipping Judicial Overreach

The separation of powers that characterizes governments in the United States assumes that each branch will act to further its own interests, given the salience of self-interest (and self-preservation) in human nature. It is assumed that the checks and balances between legislative, judicial, and executive branches will keep any one branch from dominating the other two, and, moreover, the government itself from becoming tyrannical at the expense of the liberty of the citizenry. It is not assumed or relied upon that a branch will prune itself without external pressure from one of the other branches. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court may have done so in ruling on June 27, 2025 to limit “the ability of lower-court judges to block executive branch policies nationwide.”[1] I contend that any real wing-clipping by 6 of the 9 justices is illusory rather than indicative of the federal judiciary unilaterally restricting itself.

“With their decision, the justices appeared to upend the ability of single federal judges to freeze policies across the country,” according to The New York Times.[2] The appearance is belied by the fact that the ruling would not go into effect for 30 days and “the justices laid out a potential path for challengers, saying that district court judges could consider whether to take up class-action suits seeking to bar enforcement of the executive order on a statewide, regional or even national basis.”[3] The latter basis would essentially enable a district-court federal judge to block an executive order from going into effect anywhere in the United States.  Groups that had challenged the executive order at issue—invalidating birth-right citizenship for children of illegal immigrants—quickly filed class-action suits in Maryland and New Hampshire, with others expected in the following week—well within the 30 days. As for the validity of the executive order itself, the court would decide that in a case scheduled in the court’s next term.

It is interesting that the justices “split along ideological lines” on a matter of judicial process rather than on the substance of the executive order.[4] Perhaps political ideology has more of an imprint on judicial rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court than most people realize. After all, Justice Sandra Day O’Conner wrote the majority opinion for Bush v. Gore (2000) before oral arguments were heard. Might it be that the conservative justices on the bench wanted President Trump to see a win for him even though the national judicial block of his executive order would likely continue uninterrupted? That president had been very critical of Justice Amy Barrett for another ruling, and she wrote the majority opinion on the case on whether district federal judges could block an executive order nationally. Indeed, the president declared himself the winner from the ruling even though the six conservative justices left open a way for district court judges to be able to continue wielding nationwide injunctions to block the president’s policies issued as executive orders.

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1. Abbie Vansickle, “Justices Put Limit on Judges’ Power, In Win for Trump,” The New York Times, June 28, 2025.
2. Ibid., italics added.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

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.

The Tech Industrial Complex

Democracy, Plato and Aristotle both theorized, is a governmental system that is most susceptible to the mob—meaning mob-rule. Accordingly, the Electoral College and the appointments of U.S. Senators by state governments, the latter being the case from the establishment of the U.S. Constitution to a few decades into the twentieth century, were meant to limit any damage from momentary passions of the People to the U.S. House of Representatives. The governments in the United States, like those in the European Union, are republics in which democracy is a part rather than the whole. What neither Plato nor Aristotle could foresee in their agrarian city-states is the threat to democracy by plutocracy—the system of government in which private wealth rules. It is less understandable why the American electorates have ignored repeated warnings of the threat, especially as governmental power has concentrated at the federal level since the war between the CSA and the USA in 1861.

Much like U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had done “in 1961 when he expressed concerns about the ‘military industrial complex’ in his farewell address,” President Biden said in his address, “’an oligarchy is taking shape in America’ as power and money become more concentrated in the hands of the few.”[1] Biden “criticized the ‘tech industrial complex’ and social media, where ‘the truth is smothered by lies for power and for profit.’”[2] It seemed likely in 2025 that Biden’s warning would not eventuate in any policies oriented to breaking up the concentrations of private wealth, which I submit are inherently incompatible with a democracy. Simply put, seeing billionaires visibly chatting with government officials during President Trump’s second swearing-in presents a picture that may suggest that the influence of private wealth on public policy (and thus government officials) had gained such a foothold that the confluence could be shown brazenly without fear that the American people might vote for candidates campaigning on enforcing anti-trust law and raising the effective tax-rates on billionaires to the point that, with anti-trust, being so rich from an oligarchic business would not be possible going forward.

Tech titans amid the incoming administration: Just the visible tip of an iceberg. (Getty)

Besides Elon Musk, perhaps the richest billionaire in the world at the time, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook) as well as the titans of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft could be seen on television in front of, and amicably chatting with the incoming administration's Cabinet secretaries. Musk was chatting with Trump's proposed secretary of defense in spite of the conflict of interest in Musk owning SpaceX. Zuckerberg could feel comfortable being seen chatting with secretaries and President Trump’s adult sons in spite of his power to minimize political dissent on social media. With 90 days to decide whether to close down or sell Tik Tok, President Trump expressed interest in a news conference in the evening of his second inaugural in letting rich Americans buy into a 50/50 joint venture that would allow China to continue Tik-Tok operations in the United States. Were Zuckerberg or Musk to invest enough that they could exercise control on the company through the American half, the investments could put the two social-media titans closer to achieving monopoly control over social media in the United States. 

The real power evinced in the inaugural ceremony was in the seating area where the Cabinet nominees, the tech titans, and Trump's business-oriented relatives were sitting. At one point prior to the arrival of Trump himself, all of the living former U.S. Presidents, Democrats and Republicans, were looking across the aisle at the cadre of Trump’s nominated cabinet secretaries, the billionaire tech titans, and Trump’s business-family. Those former presidents undoubtedly knew where the real power was, and perhaps they were surprised to see the public-private collusion so brazenly visible. After the ceremony, hidden from the public’s view at the lunch in the Capitol, members of Congress, “Cabinet nominees and business titans within Trump’s inner circle” mingled.[3] The luncheon was an “opportunity that VIPs use to mix and mingle with members of the administration and advance their policy priorities. Apple CEO Tim Cook [was] seated between Donald Trump Jr and [U.S. Senate] Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.”[4] I submit that most such mingling takes place behind closed doors, even and especially in regard to the writing of laws. It is not uncommon for Congressional committee to use language written by the companies to be regulated.  

Lest President Eisenhower’s warning of the dangers to democracy from the military-industrial complex be replaced by Biden’s warning of a tech industrial complex as if the former had gone away on its own,  President Trump promised in his second inaugural address, “Like in 2017, we will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen.” Lest it be forgotten, President Biden has approved weapon-sales to Israel even as it ravaged the residents of Gaza on a scale that openly deified international human-rights law. Rather than assuming that Eisenhower’s problem was only existed in the second half of the twentieth-century, the American people in the twenty-first century would not be wrong in perceiving the tech industrial complex as being on top of the continuing military industrial complex. How many such complexes must there be before a existential threat to democracy itself be recognized and combatted? The sheer power of huge sums of private money, such as the influx of Elon Musk’s millions in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and the magnitude of the discretion that Zuckerberg showed he had in unilaterally firing fact-checkers on his social-media company, can indeed be peeled back to reveal just how much the American voters could be manipulated on whom to vote for and even what issues to focus on. Rarely, if at all, did a candidate for federal office propose applying anti-trust law to the social-media’s big companies in the U.S.—an oligopoly. Nor was there any traction from the few voices in Congress suggesting that maybe the U.S. Government should stand up to military contractors by refusing to buy weapons for Israel and give that country’s government money to buy even more American weapons. The shop was open for business; human rights be damned.

The point is seldom made in American public discourse that had the U.S. Government enforced anti-trust law, including stopping tech giants like Facebook and Twitter from peremptorily buying up potential new-entrants in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a billionaire class would not have been so large, and thus such an implicit threat to democracy. Just in how social-media company financial (and political) interests can be tacitly presented to manipulate internet users in feeds without the voters realizing it, the reason why Biden’s warning was not likely to be heeded at the ballot box can be understood. I submit that the televised images of tech “competitors” sitting together at Trump’s second inaugural points to an inter-related oligopoly instead of a competitive market (wherein new entrants are not bought up). But this is not all that we can take away from having watched the ceremony; we could also see the billionaires amicably chatting with likely high officials in Trump’s second administration, with Musk’s SpaceX having a financial interest in being NASA’s exclusive space-sub-contractor, and with Musk’s “X” and Zuckerberg’s social-media giant having a financial interest in what the Trump administration does about Tik-Toc. 

Extreme personal and corporate wealth literally in front of government officials at the inauguration in democracy's own Capitol Rotunda. 

My point is that, had the inherent threat that having billionaires poses to a viable republic been grasped by the American public, then governmental power would have been used such that the Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and other tech managerial-visionaries would not have been able to become billionaires in the first place. As of 2025, and perhaps even back in 1961 concerning the military contractors, the proverbial horses were almost certainly already out of the barn. Thus, the electoral grass-roots energy going forward from 2025 needed to upset the proverbial apple-cart being steered by individual teckie billionaires to advance the financial interests of their respective companies in the halls of American government would be, realistically speaking, virtually unattainable. One of the most remarkable visuals from President Trump’s second swearing-in ceremony was that of the former presidents all looking over at the billionaires' very visible nicities with the incoming Trump officials and Trump's financially-inclined scions. The former presidents looked like bystanders rather than as pillars of power in themselves even though power had presumably been given to them by the People. I’m just glad that it does not fall to me to get the horses back in the barn. Ultimately, the American People since World War II are to blame for not having minded the proverbial shop as a going concern, for they should have known from the Titanic that most of an iceberg is hidden from view under water. Yes, I think people should know that, even with respect to icebergs in the ocean of political economy. Perhaps, though, I think too highly of popular sovereignty, which, unfortunately, is admittedly quite vulnerable to being manipulated. Both the manipulation itself and the sources are very difficult for the public to detect. Whether through social and/or mass media, even just a few very rich people or a large company, or a network of large corporations with  oligopolistic shared financial interests can frame what is debated, and keep out what is not. It is precisely because detection is so rare that the visuals coming out of Trump's second inaugural are so important, for they give us a rare glimpse of the nature and dynamics of real power in America.

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1. Chris Megerian and Colleen Long, “Five Things To Know about Biden’s Farewell Address that Also Served as a Warning to the Country,” APnews.com, January 15, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Michelle Shen, “Trump Attends Congressional Luncheon Where Key Politicians and Business Leaders Mingle,” CNN.com, January 20, 2025.
4. Ibid

Certifying a U.S. Presidential Election: A Constitutional Conflict of Interest

That it should go without saying that a constitution providing a government with its basic framework and procedures should not contain any conflicts of interest makes it all the more astonishing when an actual constitution is found to contain a obvious yet undetected conflict of interest that could be exploited by an institutional or officeholder and yet is easy to obviate, or fix. The implication in such a case is that a society can be too comfortable with institutional conflicts of interest without realizing that if such a conflict is exploitable, it is likely that it eventually will be even if not right away. Because U.S. President Don Trump’s pressure on his vice president, Mike Pence, on January 6, 2021 to refuse to certify the votes of the electors in some of the states did not result in any serious proposals to have another office than the vice presidency preside, a societal tolerance for even known conflicts of interests in general and in a constitution more particularly can be inferred. I submit that such a tacit willingness to continue with the status quo can eventually put even a republic itself at risk.

Speaking on January 6, 2024, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris referred to her constitutional duty of presiding in a joint-session of Congress tasked with certifying the election that she had lost as something she took very seriously. The American people should not have to worry about whether a vice president might exploit the presiding role by resisting or thwarting a peaceful transfer of power. “Today was obviously a very important day,” she said, “and it was about what should be the norm and what the American people should be able to take for granted, which is that one of the most important pillars of our democracy is that there will be a peaceful transfer of power.”[1] Such a transfer lies at the core of representative democracy, so it is important that any risk of any impediment, whether an opportunistic person outside of a constitution or something lying in a constitution itself, be minimized. It is not, in other words, a minor matter.

Simply tasking the loser of an election with presiding over the counting of votes and the announcement of the winner should give anyone pause. At the very least, no one should be duty-bound to perform such a function—which can be thought of as “rubbing one’s face” in the affair, which can feel humiliating to the person.

Furthermore, politically, whether a vice president is a candidate for president as Harris was or is pressured to do the partisan or personal bidding of a president as Pence had been, having a partisan office preside is itself problematic not only for the presidency itself in terms sheer credibility, but also for a vice president in terms of the election process itself. Simply put, the vice president who is running for president or for another term as vice president is an active player in the contest and thus should not preside over the tabulation and certification of the results. As simple as this is to grasp, it must be difficult for enough Americans that the problem has been allowed to persist.

This is especially damning because the conflict of interest is easy to remove. The chief justice, or any justice, of the U.S. Supreme Court would be a natural fit for the presiding role as the judiciary is not (supposed to be) partisan. Put another way, a sitting president pressuring the vice president to declare some state slates of electors invalid is more likely than pressuring the chief justice to do that same. Institutionally, given the separation of powers in the U.S. Government, reaching out to the chief justice would be much more difficult than trying to pressure a vice president of one’s own administration. Having the chief justice, who swears in presidents, preside over the Congressional counting of the Electoral College votes for president as both the sitting vice president and Speaker of the House look on makes so much sense that it is sad state of affairs when the status quo is almost mindlessly retained even four years after the conflict of interest could have been exploited, with a riotous mob of partisans literally breaching the Capitol to convey additional pressure.

Putting the loser of an election in the position of having to publicly announce the victor is the smoke that points to an underlying constitutional conflict of interest; a mob pressuring a loser on a presidential ticket to abuse the presiding role of the vice president is more like fire than smoke. That the ensuing public discourse did not contain a proposal of a constitutional amendment assigning the task to the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court reflects very badly not only on the elected office-holders (and the media), but also on the American people, as it is government ultimately by the people. Perhaps a people gets the government, and constitution, that they deserve, for institutional conflicts of interest should be obviated whether in government, business, or in non-profit institutions.

Neither institutional relations nor processes should contain conflicts of interest that can be exploited because human nature is itself rather inclined to exploit them because of the instinctual urges that manifest as self-, office-, and institutional-interest even at the expense of the interest of the whole. Even though governments and economic systems tend to be based on such interests, the latter don’t have to be encouraged by the ongoing existence of institutional conflicts of interest. Continuing with the status quo can itself be thought of as a choice—one that reflects a certain underlying set of beliefs and assumptions that are valued, and even the extent of basic awareness.  Having seen not only smoke, but even fire, a people can indeed be faulted for having insufficient awareness, and this verdict is perhaps even more damning than that which concerns the naivete concerning human nature being able to withstand conflicts of interest without exploiting them in the long run. The sting of these verdicts hurts all the more when an institutional conflict of interest can be obviated relatively easily with a solution that is, or should be, obvious. Because power is that which is channeled in a political constitution, risking the exploitation of a conflict of interest that is in a constitution is not a smart choice if a viable, ongoing republic is desired.

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1. Aditi Sangal, “Congress Certifies Trump’s 2024 Election Win,” CNN.com, January 6, 2025.

Undermining the U.S. Supreme Court: Non-Jurisprudential Ideology and the U.S. Constitution

As in the case of the Roman Empire, which internal corruption likely weakened and even destroyed centuries after that empire had been a republic, modern republics are also not immune from internal decay. Even though political corruption can go under the radar, especially if systemic rather than merely episodic or around particular office holders, the subtle, gradual impact can be just as destructive than had Carthage defeated Rome’s general, Skippio Africanus, in north Africa. Making subtle decadence all the more embarrassing is the fact that it can be right under the noses of upstanding office-holders. I contend that this is the case with Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In his annual report in December, 2024, Roberts “slammed what he described as ‘dangerous’ talk by some officials [in the two other branches, or arms, of the U.S. Government] about ignoring court rulings,” as that could result in a judiciary that is less than independent of the legislative and executive branches and their respective members.[1] Both Republicans and Democrats had “hinted at ignoring rulings in recent years.”[2] To Roberts, that every presidential administration “suffers defeats in the court system—sometimes in cases with major ramifications”[3]—is the main reason why some presidents, including Andrew Jackson, have been tempted to leave it to the high court to enforce its rulings rather than rely on the executive branch. But this explanation ignores something else—something just below Roberts’ nose.

Even as Roberts “lamented that ‘public officials’ . . . had ‘regrettably’ attempted to intimidate judges by ‘suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,” the chief justice dismissed the claim of political bias as “inappropriate.”[4] I submit that the claim has sufficient basis to be taken seriously, and, furthermore, that it goes beyond questions about the ethics of particular justices, such as Thomas’ acceptance of vacations and Alito allowing his wife to fly a right-wing flag at one of their houses.

Proverbially with a straight face, the chief justice wrote in his 2024 year-end report that the role of the judicial branch is “to say what the law is.”[5] I submit that the justices do more than that. Just in the media referring to “the conservative 6-3 majority” contains the implicit assumption that there are indeed conservative and liberal justices and that such labels go beyond referring to jurisprudential hermeneutics (i.e., approaches to interpreting the U.S. Constitution) and even what opinions on what law itself is. Emphasizing what the words in the document meant in 1787 versus what they mean today, or privileging the original intent of the delegates at the U.S. Constitutional Convention versus interpreting the text in terms of the modern world are just two examples of how the words conservative and progressive (or liberal) could appropriately be applied to court justices in a way that delimits the extent to which their ideology can play a role.

I submit that when Justice Sandra O’Conner wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion before the oral arguments in Bush v. Gore—the ruling that effectively gave George W. Bush the federal presidency—something more political than jurisprudential hermeneutics being applied was in play. That O’Conner had been a Republican in Arizona’s lower house from 1969-1974 may have something to do with why she subsequently wrote the Bush v. Gore opinion for the conservative, Republican-nominated majority before even oral arguments were heard.

Furthermore, that justices who were against abortion constituted the majority opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) may suggest that a non-juridical ideology played a role, and thus that those justices went beyond merely deciding what the law is to stating what it should be. That the justices who constituted the majority in the Citizens United (2010) case were conservative, and thus likely pro-business, may have meant that the nonjuridical economic ideology of free, unencumbered markets even manifesting with money being free-speech was in play.

On the other ideological side, it is likely that attitudes towards race played a role in the liberal majority’s opinion in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) that separation is not equal and thus racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. Similarly, the finding of an implicit privacy right in the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution in order to render abortion legal in the Roe v. Wade decision may point to an extra-judicial ideology bearing on life and abortion, and even religion, as being in the driver’s seat.

When moral, political, cultural, or even religious ideologies or beliefs are salient in a judicial decision, then the designation of conservative or liberal points to a broader judgment both as concerning the justices themselves and their respective rulings. If such broadly-informed judgment is really what the electorate in a republic should bring to voting, then the implication is that public matters requiring or even just fitting such broad judgment should not be decided by unelected justices. I submit that such deference is precisely the point on which Roberts and his court (as well as other, past courts, including that of Warren) has lapsed. Individual judges and even an entire court can thus be seen as opportunistic in short-circuiting the prerogative that actually belongs to the popular sovereign: the people. This does not mean that the will of a majority of an electorate should trample over individual rights, as a judiciary is rightfully charged with protecting such rights precisely because a majority of an electorate may act heedless of minorities, as can legislatures and even presidents; but defending rights from majoritarian tyranny does not mean or require a judge coloring beyond the jurisprudential lines on a page to impose one’s own exogenous ideology, which anyone could do—hence the deference.

That the U.S. presidency, which unfortunately has been partisan at the expense of the credibility needed to preside, nominates U.S. Supreme Court justices and Republican or Democratic U.S. Senators (and occasionally an Independent) confirm the nominees means not only that politically conservative or liberal justices can be expected to be sitting on the bench, but also, and perhaps more importantly— though unfortunately almost invisible to the naked eye—the selection process itself is culpable in essentially exporting political judgments from the American electorates to the unelected justices. In short, Americans should not be surprised at all that political ideology, infused with moral, economic, and even religious valued beliefs, has such an impact in U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The U.S. Constitution itself is biased in favor of this, and that the amendment process is itself so hard to complete means that the vulnerability to partisanship on the bench that is structural in the document is effectively intractable.

Being human, all too human, all of us would love to imprint our respective ideologies on law, whether statutory or common. So, we should all have the means to do so through the vote. Essentially, I am arguing that popular sovereignty—government by the people rather than vice versa—has unwittingly ceded too much territory to the U.S. Supreme Court under the subterfuge of an expansive notion of judicial interpretation. Ironically, there is thus a silver lining in this respect to the anti-abortion justices imposing their moral or religious beliefs in overturning Roe v. Wade because as a direct result, some state legislatures have voted on legislation bearing on abortion and even the voters in some states have been able to exercise their popular sovereignty by being able to vote directly on the matter via referendi.[6]

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1. John Fritze, “Roberts Warns Against Ignoring Supreme Court Rulings As Tension With Trump Looms,” CNN.com, December 31, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. That last word is the plural form of referendum; you can blame Latin, and ultimately the Romans whose empire fell at least in part due to corruption within. No human social artifact can be expected to last forever. 

Democracy Breached: Georgia Unfit for E.U. Statehood

On December 14, 2024, Mikheil Kavelashvili became the president of Georgia, further cementing the Georgian Dream Party’s grip on power at the expense of the sovereign state’s accession as a semi-sovereign E.U. state. From the standpoint of representative democracy, what a contrast with the U.S. state of Georgia. The Georgian Dream Party implicitly conflated the qualitative difference between the U.S. and state-scale polities by misappropriating the term, Electoral College, which elects the U.S. President. There is a reason why that College does not apply at the state level, yet in its haste to consolidate power in 2017, the Georgian Dream Party replaced direct presidential elections with an Electoral College, which the party could control. Sure enough, Kavelashvili was the only candidate in 2024, and he got the votes of 224 of the 225 electors who were present for the vote.

Of “the 300-seat electoral college that replaced direct presidential elections in 2017,” the electors were “made up of MPs [i.e., members of the parliament] and representatives of local government.”[1] In contrast, the Electoral College of the U.S. consists not of the existing governments, but, rather, of people appointed by political parties, which in turn are given slots based on the popular votes for U.S. president in the member states. The drafters of the U.S. Constitution believed that the electors should not represent the legislatures, but should be selected only for the task of electing the federal president. That the inordinate dominance of political parties in filling the elector-slots has eliminated the electors’ independence doomed the efficacy of the U.S.’s Electoral College, which was supposed to be a check not only on the government officials, but also the people. The reason for the latter check is that the U.S., as an empire-scale union of states, is too big for much of the American people to know the candidates—the territories are too large and the population too large as contrasted with the territories and populations of states.

The Electoral College of the sovereign state of Georgia in Eurasia was created without any link to popular sovereignty (i.e., an election by the people), and without being independent of the existing government. Rather, the Electoral College is the government, just for a special purpose. Nor was the population or territory of Georgia large enough that electors would be necessary because so few of the electorate had the proximity to know of the candidates enough to be able to cast votes using good, informed judgment. In short, the federal justifications for the U.S.’s Electoral College were missing.

Therefore, in its haste to gain control over the presidency, the Georgian Dream Party misappropriated an element of American political theory, ignoring both the link to popular election and the qualitative rather than just quantitative difference between a state and a union of states. Of course, with raw power in politics/government, might can be declared to be right, but with a knowledge of comparative politics, the sheer might of the Georgian Dream Party can be castrated ideationally. With the democratic legitimacy of Georgia’s government in tatters, the E.U. would act wisely in saying no on Georgia’s accession unless or until drastic changes are made to Georgia’s basic law. In the U.S., it is a requirement that every state be a republic, which means that representative democracy is the basis of a given polity. In the E.U., the case is likewise. Accordingly, rather than protesting at the time to get their government to continue with accession talks with the E.U., the Georgian people should have been oriented to undoing the damage done to the Georgian political system by walking the Georgian Dream Party to the exits.  

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1. Orestes G. Daniel, “Ex-Football Player Kavelashvili Becomes Georgia’s President as Ruling Party Consolidates Power,” Euronews.com, December 14, 2024.

Electing a U.S. President: What Is a Landslide?

A landslide electoral victory in representative democracy is typically limited to the criterion of the extent of the vote-spread between candidates for a given office. In regard to the U.S. presidency, the Electoral College presents an alternative criterion, especially as a significant difference in votes in the College may not be reflected in the popular vote. Although that vote is by member state, the totals from all of the states are typically used to assess whether a landslide has occurred and thus whether the winning candidate has a political mandate to implement campaign promises. Whether a landslide or not, winning an election legitimates a candidate implementing the platform on which a candidate has campaigned. So whether a candidate for U.S. president has a landslide has typically been over-emphasized by American journalists, as if not having a large spread in the popular vote—even if such a spread exists in the Electoral College vote (which is the vote that really matters in the election of a U.S. president)—means that the winner has no prerogative to enact one’s agenda. I contend that even under the assumption that an electoral landslide is important, there are alternative ways of assessing whether a landslide has occurred.

A landslide can be inferred in terms of the extent of a shift from one party’s candidate to that of another. In the election of 2024, over 90% of counties in all of the U.S.’s member states shifted in the direction of Donald Trump from the election in 2020. That the shift took place in so many counties can be reckoned as significant, and thus as a landslide in terms of shift.

Yet another way to interpret whether a landslide has occurred is to compare how many more or less votes a candidate (or party) has received in an election relative to previous election. For instance, “Donald Trump added about 2.8 million votes to his total in his 2024 victory [from the election in 2020]. Vice President kamala Harris, on the other hand, underperformed by about 6.8 million votes compared with Joe Biden in 2020, according to CNN election results as of November 25 [2024].”[1] Viewing Trump’s gain with Harris’s underperformance relative to Biden in 2020 is arguably more revealing than is looking at small percentage-point difference (49.9% to 46.9%) between the two candidates’ totals in the popular vote (158,425, 893 and 154,247, 094, respectively) in 2024.[2] 

Blue: Where Harris Underperformed; Red: Where Trump Gained (Source: CNN)

The tide was coming in for Donald Trump and was going out for the Biden-Harris administration. Harris had said during the campaign that she would not differ from Biden’s policies, so comparing Biden in 2020 with Harris in 2024 is valid. That Harris received almost 2 million fewer votes in California, her home state, than Biden had received there in 2020 is also revealing regarding the depth of the shift away from her in 2024.[3] 

The top line shows California (source: CNN)

Loading only on the 49.9% to 46.9% difference in the overall popular vote totals masks the magnitude and depth of the shift; the 312 to 226 significant difference in the Electoral College in the 2024 election results is a better indication, though the bias toward relatively less populated states that typically vote Republican overstates the real difference that would exist if the number of electoral votes that each member state has were based only on the number of the number of U.S. House representatives rather than adding the number of U.S. senators in too. Therefore, a landslide in the Electoral College can be considered as less legitimate than the percentage spread in the overall popular vote.

Therefore, I contend that measures indicative of the extent and depth of a basic shift pervading all the electorates of the states can be used to assess whether a landslide has indeed occurred. Using this criterion, the 2024 U.S. presidential election can be viewed as a landslide. Contributing factors may include Harris’ decision to continue arms sales to Israel even though the International Court of Justice had ruled that Israel’s entire occupation violates international law. The International Criminal Court would subsequently issue arrest warrants for two Israeli government officials, including Netanyahu. Another factor may have been the failure of the Biden-Harris administration to sufficiently aid Ukraine to forestall territorial advances of Russia in its invasion of the sovereign country. Still another factor may have been the spreading anti-woke reaction and the failure of the Democratic Party to push back on its woke wing in the general election. The Biden-Harris administration’s refusal to apply anti-trust to the meat-producing and grocer industries when prices stayed high after the pandemic may have influenced the working-class voters who had not shifted over to voting based on social/cultural (i.e., woke) issues. Trump’s visual use of an assassination attempt to “Fight” may also have been a factor. In short, the image of Trump’s fist in the air as he was ushered away from his speaking platform with a bloody ear is miles away from the image of half-measures and political calculation. I contend that the indicators of a general shift from 2020 in the election results better reflect these factors than does the small overall percentage-spread in the popular vote for Trump and Harris in 2024.

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1. Amy O’Kruk et al, “7 Charts and Maps Where Harris Underperformed and Lost the Election,” Cnn.com, November 27, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3  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.