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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom Blocked at the “Freedom 250” Grand Prix

The Indy Car Series event, held on August 23, 2026 in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence by delegates from the British colonies then officially in rebellion, ironically gave people visiting or living in the federal capitol a visceral experience of freedom blocked by governmental police and military authority. For not only the Mall, but also the entire route of the race was blocked by military and local police during the race such that public viewing was blocked. Entire city blocks separated the route from where tourists and local residents alike could drive and walk. Whether the federal government excessively pushed security at the expense of Americans being able to view the race without the luck of a lottery draw in advance for a ticket to be able to see the race at the Mall (roughly, between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument) is one question; the irony of being in such a visual, even overwhelming, militaristic police-city during a celebration of political freedom is more definite.

The public could not access the race route, or even get close enough to see the cars passing. That the entire race course, rather than just the designated fan areas on or near the Mall, was blocked raises the obvious question of why even to have a race if people are blocked from watching it. To be sure, free general-admission tickets were issued by lottery in advance but this process did not allow people in the city on the day of the race to spontaneously see the race, and the fact that a lottery had to be resorted to means that the demand for tickets exceeded the supply, which in turn may have been artificially restricted by security proponents in the government. Around the route, even surrounding streets were blocked off even from foot traffic. Even some museums near the Mall required a Grand Prix ticket for entry. High temporary fences along the Mall between it and the museums kept even people going to the latter to even glimpse the race.

To be sure, blocking visuals of the viewing stands, where ticketed seats were not free, could be justified on security grounds because President Trump was present there, but that rationale does not justify blocking the entire route, especially given the legitimate countervailing public interest to attend a celebration of the Declaration of Independence. In other words, a strong public interest existed but was wholly denied.

The sheer mass of local police, including their cars with emergency lights on, and the militias from the member states, including formidable military trucks, was arguably visually so oppressive as to be a turn-off to freedom-loving Americans. In other words, even if access to the route but not the viewing stands were possible, the experience of so many uniformed people with guns could be enough for a preference to leave the city that day.

Moreover, seeing so much military and police could prompt people to wonder just how much freedom still existed in the United States. The visuals could perhaps be likened to how daily life in Berlin in Nazi Germany may have looked. The presence of the military may have been especially startling to Americans not used to how much Washington, D.C. had changed since the twentieth century.

On the governmental side, the penchant for security can take on a life of its own, such that proponents unknowingly lapse in the sort of healthy judgment that is capable of balancing security interests with others. Such balance goes by the wayside as a republic transitions itself into a police state, and the change can be so gradual that reversal is almost impossible. Like a frog in a pot of water that is gradually being heated, citizens of a republic may not notice even that a transition has been underway. To be sure, American tourists in Washington on August 23, 2026 may have been stunned by the fresh sight of so many military troops, trucks, police employees, and police cars so concentrated blocks from the route and even farther into the city itself.

History may record the transition from the Roman republic to the Roman Empire as sudden, but in the daily life of the Romans, the increased visuals of weaponized troops may have been gradual. Perhaps some educated tourists in Washington during the race may have thought of what Rome may have been like when gladiator contests were going on in the coliseum—celebrations of Roman political power accompanied by a formidable military presence in the vicinity, given the typical attendance of the emperor at the games. Americans could benefit from the insight that even if their empire is a “city on a hill,” as President Reagan referred to the U.S., it is not immune from the rise and fall of empires that has gone on throughout history. A domestic presence of military forces even in the midst of a lot of local police present may be an indication that a republic is in transition to something else, and this transition could be part of the more general decline of empires.

U.S. Defense Contractors under Pressure

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

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

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

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

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

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

The European Parliament: Rejecting the Council’s Proposed Budget

On 16 June, 2026, the European Parliament rejected the European Council’s proposed budget for the E.U. not only because of the proposal’s €32.8 billion budget-cut, which would reduce the six-year 2028-2034 federal budget even below that which the Commission had proposed, but also because the Council had refused to address the issue of federal-sources of revenue, which was made increasingly salient by the increasing need of funds at the federal level. In seeking to keep the federal institutions dependent on money supplied by the states, the Council, which like the U.S. Senate represents states, can be viewed exploiting a conflict of interest at the expense of the ability of the E.U. to operate even within its given mandates. Put another way, the requirement that the Parliament pass any proposed budget can be viewed as a check on the state-centric Council’s proclivity to put the interest of the parts above the whole—the individual states above the Union.

Although the proposed federal budget by the Council represented a political compromise between states that wanted “substantial cuts” and other states that “asked for an increase of the budget for agriculture and regional funds,” enough of the Parliament’s representatives elected by E.U. citizens, rather than appointed by state governments, deemed the Council’s proposal as insufficient.[1] Those representatives were oriented to adequately funding extant federal programs rather than doing the bidding even of their own states. This translates into an orientation to the common good that is implied in collection action (i.e., the whole) rather than to the interests of parts. Because the €2 trillion proposal by the Commission had already been rejected as insufficient by the Parliament, the Council’s even lower figure can be interpreted as perplexing unless the states were making a statement that any federal branch is apt to overstate the E.U.’s funding needs so the Parliament’s rejection of the Commission’s proposal could and should be ignored.

Consistent with the alleged proclivity of federal governmental institutions to over-state the E.U.’s needed funding was the refusal of the Council “to touch the issue of the budgetary correction mechanisms known as rebates, revenues coming from taxes at the E.U. level, known as own resources, and the principle of making the budget conditional on the rule of law.”[2] Refusing to increase the E.U.’s own access to revenue independent of funds contributed (and thus controlled by) the state governments was essentially a decision to maintain power over the federal institutions and thus render the Union subservient to the states. At the time, MEP Carla Tavares told the press, “We need to make progress on own resources. . . . It is difficult to achieve a strong and renewed budget with cuts and without new own resources.”[3] In other words, the common good as funded federally would be diminished by the refusal of the state-centric Council to even consider new sources of own resources at the federal level. The distinctly state-level interest in maintaining (inordinate) power in the federal system was operating at the expense of the whole. The self-interested decision of the states in the Council to refuse to make budget-outlays conditional on rule-of-law being upheld in a given state also evinces an institutional (or structural) conflict of interest because using the budget so state governments do not disassemble rule-of-law provisions is in the interest of the whole (i.e., the European Union). One state government being able to backslide could easily domino across state-lines, and as all of the delegates at the U.S. federal Convention thought in 1787, allowing dictators at the state level would be incompatible with a democratic Union. So, the refusal of the Council to address the matter of conditionality can be viewed as putting the Union at risk. Fortunately, the members of Parliament were foremost oriented to the good of the Union rather than to protecting state prerogatives even at the expense of the Union.

One of the benefits of federalism is that the federal and state levels can act as checks on each other so as to preserve liberty against the threat of tyranny. The Parliament’s role in being a check on the use of the Council by the state governments to put the interests of the state government officials and their respective governments above the interests of the whole is thus vital in safeguarding the E.U.’s federal system and thus the E.U. itself. Moreover, putting the interests of parts above the whole of which they are parts is never a good idea, for the interests of a whole are not identical to the aggregate of the interests of the parts; the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

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1. Eleonora Vasques, “EU Parliament Rejects Member States’ First Draft of Long-Term Budget,” Euronews.com, 16 June, 2026.
2. Ibid, italics added for emphasis.
3. Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should the E.U. Pay Prospective States to Reform?

Should the European Union pay prospective, or “candidate,” states to undergo legislative, rule-of-law reforms prior to accession even though becoming a state is not assured? In April, 2026, Marta Kos, the Commission’s commissioner for enlargement warned the E.U.’s parliament that the Commission might “suspect €1.5 billion in E.U. funding for Serbia due to rule-of-law concerns and contentious judicial reforms” that had been introduced in Serbia’s legislature in January.”[1] I contend that the legislative or constitutional proposals should have been sufficient to freeze the very question of Serbia’s accession, and that the Commission should not pay candidate states to undergo reforms in the first place.

Speaking to the elected representatives in the federal parliament, “Kos said she was particularly concerned about legal amendments that introduce major changes, creating a flawed form of autonomy for Serbia’s anti-corruption prosecution and weakening the independence of the judiciary.”[2] That those constituted major changes are were on the scale of amendments rather than mere statutes could have alerted President Von der Leyen as to whether Serbia was in any condition to become a state in a political union in which rule of law (i.e., an autonomous judiciary, and democratically-valid multi-party elections) is assumed rather than even subject to debate. In other words, rule-of-law, as enforced by a judiciary independent of whatever party happens to be in power in the legislative and executive branches of a government, is so fundamental in the E.U. that major changes even being proposed in a prospective state should be a huge red flag. Accordingly, the question goes beyond whether to suspend paying money to such a state to undergo reforms that should be done anyway.

That Serbia’s political culture, at least with respect to its government, was worsening appreciably is clear from Kos’s statement, “We are increasingly worried about what is happening in Serbia. From laws that undermine the independence of the judiciary to crackdowns on protesters and recurrent meddling in independent media.”[3] Such crackdowns and meddling go beyond rendering a judiciary subservient to a governing political group, and thus render Serbia unfit at least for the time being for joining the E.U. as a state. At the very least, in other words, Serbia should not be “eligible for E.U. funding to support its required internal reforms.”[4] If prospective states want to join the E.U., then they should be willing to pay for their reforms themselves. Why, in other words, should the E.U. feel obliged to pay? I contend that joining the E.U. is of such value to any outside state-level republic that the E.U. should not in principle pay for candidate states to get themselves into shape from a democratic standpoint.

Even on policy grounds, the accession of Serbia was risky for the E.U., given the military aggressiveness of Russia in Ukraine. That the E.U.’s parliament had “adopted a resolution criticizing Serbia’s failure to align with E.U. foreign policy” against Russia in 2025[5] should have been a wake-up call for the E.U., given Viktor Orbán’s intentional undermining of E.U. foreign policy with regard to Russia. Did the E.U. administration want another Hungary wielding its veto in the European Council and the Council of Ministers in favor of Russia even as that country was still invading one of its neighbors?

Therefore, Kos’s statement, “We will continue to support Serbia on its E.U. path,”[6] can and arguably should be subject to formidable critique. After all, the E.U. was not so weak at the time, even given its refusal to expunge the veto-power from states in the European Council, that the Commission should have been so desperate to take in even marginal states. The greatness of the E.U. depended more in making internal reforms at the federal level in line with the fact that the member-states were semi-sovereign, than in enlarging. Just because Orbán had just been voted out of office in Hungary does not mean that the intransigence of one state in the European Council and the Council of Ministers could not again hamstring federal foreign and military policy even in the face of the Russian bear invading one of its neighbors on President Putin’s utterly fallacious supposition that the old Russian empire should rise again.

1. Eleonora Vasques, “E.U. Considers Freezing Serbia’s €1.5 billion in E.U. Funds Amid Rule of Law Scrutiny,” Euronews.com, April 20, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

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.

Is Europe in Civilizational Decline?

Does the E.U. itself instantiate a decline in European civilization? So says a National Security Strategy for the United States released by the Trump administration in December, 2025. That report also claims that migration to Europe was in the process of causing European nations to face “civilizational erasure.” That is to say, the European nation-state was by the end of 2025 facing existential threats due to the E.U. and migration. The report also highlights the loss of democracy in Europe, due both to the E.U. usurping the governmental sovereignty of the states and the clamping down on voices on the right in Europe. I contend that the report contains a sufficient number of fallacies that it can reasonably be dismissed as bias ideology under the subterfuge of national security.

The report “proposes to ‘cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.’”[1] This can be interpreted as an intent to aid Orbán’s anti-E.U. strategy in Hungary and to encourage other governors of E.U. states to resist the E.U.’s exercise of even its existing exclusive competencies, or enumerated powers (i.e., as per the dual-sovereignty feature of that federal system). To hamstring President Von der Leyen’s efforts to aid Ukraine, for example, “kills two birds with one stone,” as the saying goes, because in keeping the E.U. from strengthening, Ukraine’s strength against Russia is also held back.

The report finds “subversion of democratic processes” in Europe, and claims that the E.U. undermines “political liberty and sovereignty.”[2] This would be news to the European Parliament, whose representatives, like those in the U.S. House of Representatives, are elected directly by citizens and thus represent them, rather than even their respective states (the European Council and the Council of Ministers do the latter, as the U.S. Senate does in the U.S.). So, the E.U.’s bicameralism, if anti-democratic, means that the U.S. Congress also suffers a democracy deficit such that most Congressional powers should be returned to the American member states.

Whereas in confederal systems of public governance, democracy is only at the state level, which by the way is fine because the states retain all governmental sovereignty, federal systems characterized by dual sovereignty (i.e., governmental sovereignty being split or divided between the federal and state levels, or subsystems) should have democracy at both levels, rather than just at the state level. This is true of the E.U. grace á the European Parliament, even though its powers could stand to be augmented and those of the European Council lessened so as to enhance the democratic legitimacy of the E.U. even more.

Aside from the erroneous perspective that the E.U. is itself a reduction in European democracy, Trump’s claim that European migration policies had been “transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence” also warrants critique.[3] Does the administration mean to claim that migration policies have been causing birthrates to drop? The application of reason alone can easily dispel such a claim. The same goes for self-confidence, though there may be more to the claim that mass migration dilutes national identities if enough of the new arrivals refuse to integrate culturally. Furthermore, such a dilution is qualitatively different than any from a new-found sense of identifying as Europeans, which, although coming along slowly, is facilitated by the very existence of the European Union. That is to say, even if cultural diversity within a member state is not desirable, identifying increasingly as European rather than merely by member state has the advantage of making war within at least Western Europe less likely in the future. Additionally, identifying culturally as a European can aid indirectly in efforts to enhance the E.U.’s foreign policy and defense competencies, given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Surely Europeans in some of the E.U.’s eastern states would not lament feeling more European and less exclusively of their respective states if that meant that the united action of the E.U. would be more likely to be augmented to include defense without state veto-power standing in the way at the federal level. In short, criticism of migration and the E.U. should not be conflated.

As for free speech, in 2025 it came under threat arguably more as anti-genocide protesters were being arrested as if they were promoting violence rather than protesting against Israel ironically for having been so violent, and with impunity internationally. That the Trump administration had been enabling Israel’s genocide and perhaps holocaust explains why the report ignores the arrests, especially in Germany and Britain, of human-rights protestors while complaining as if Orban has been made into a scapegoat in the European Union even though he has serially violated E.U. law. His support of Russia and criticism of Ukraine, no doubt related to Hungary’s reliance on Russian energy, may have something to do with the report’s “finding” that free speech in Europe has been compromised by forces on the political left rather than the pro-Zionist right. Recently, I encountered such denialism in a coffee shop from a native South African man, whose daughter attends Columbia University. The man insisted that all of the images of destruction in Gaza have been created by AI, and that in actuality, the residents there have been eating well. Regardless of our political disagreement regarding enabling a genocide, I was stunned that his perspective was so divorced from even credible media reports. A European reading Trump’s National Security report might have the same reaction, especially concerning migration causing a drop in birthrates. Such denialism, from ideology, with even credible, mainstream journalism being relegated as illusionary, may be the real sign of a civilizational decline.

Given the impotence of the United Nations to combat the militaristic aggressiveness of Israel and Russia, the collective action that is possible by means of the E.U. can be regarded as a good thing, even though the member-states, or “nations,” would need to give over more governmental sovereignty. Due to the existence of the European Parliament, a democratic legislative chamber, a transfer of additional governmental sovereignty from the states to the Union would not mean that Europe is less democratic. In fact, adding the Parliament to state legislatures means more democracy, with democracy being able to exercise more of a check on itself (i.e., the Parliament on the state legislatures).  Of course, no political union is perfect, or ever can be, and the Parliament could stand to be given more authority in the making of law, so to strengthen the democratic institution at the federal level. Were the Trump administration really for democracy in Europe, the report would include this proposal rather than go with the erroneous claim that democracy only exists, or should only exist, at the state level. Moreover, were the Trump administration to avoid making political category mistakes, the report would compare the E.U. with the U.S., and thus be able to make helpful proposals to strengthen both unions of states. Even though Europeans may bristle at this axis of comparison, my motive in writing is to make such proposals for the good both of Europeans and Americans, for we are more alike in what we value than we sometimes realize.

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1. Andrew Naughtie, “Trump Administration Warns Europe of ‘Civilisational Decline’ in New National Security Strategy,” Euronews.com, 5 December 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

E.U. President Von der Leyen Survives A No-Confidence Vote

Falling short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass on July 10, 2025, the no-confidence vote on President Von der Leyen of the Commission in the E.U.’s parliament mustered only 175 representatives in favor while 360 voted against the motion and 18 abstained. Although commentators discussed whether the president was weakened anyway, a more important matter relates to the politics of the vote as distinct from the Parliament’s institutional interests as they relate to the Commission and the European Council. I contend that the Parliament, which represents E.U. citizens, has a vital interest that is vital to the E.U. itself in maintaining a balance between the collective power of the representatives of the citizenry and the power the state governments at the federal level. Parties making deals with Von der Leyen on policy positions undercut the vote as a means of holding the Commission to maintaining that balance.

For example, the Socialists and Democrats Party “extracted a pledge on the next long term budget in exchange for their support.”[1] The right-wing Patriots for Europe Party and Europe of Sovereign Nations Party both voted in favor of removing Von der Leyen, but certainly not because she left made a deal with the states to sidestep the Parliament on certain matters of policy, for those parties favor more power for the state governments at the federal level. In fact, those parties even deny that there is a federal level! Therefore, we cannot assume that the vote of no-confidence was on the matter of the Commission siding with the state governments to marginalize the Parliament.

The Commission under Von der Leyen had “invoked Article 122 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) to set up SAFE which allows member states to directly approve a Commission proposal ‘if severe difficulties arise in the supply of certain products’ or if a member state is ‘seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control.’”[2] Because the Commission and the state governments were able to set up a federal defense-loan program without the approval of the European Parliament, and thus the citizens of the E.U., Roberta Metsola, the head of the Parliament, wrote to Von der Leyen of the “deep concern” in among the representatives that excluding the Parliament meant “putting at risk democratic legitimacy by undermining Parliament’s legislative and scrutiny functions.”[3] The democratic legitimacy of the federal level depends on the involvement of the Parliament, as it is the only institution representing E.U. citizens directly, rather than state governments, which have their own institutional interests even apart from state residents.

It is highly significant that Metsola “stressed that ‘the European Parliament is not questioning the merits of this proposal for a regulation’.”[4] The objection was not one of policy; rather, the concern was based on the democratic viability and overall balance of the E.U. itself as a federal system. By involving policy in the deal-making leading up to the censure vote, certain political parties in the Parliament undercut that institution’s interest in protecting itself against the Commission giving too much power to the state governments at the federal level. The Socialists should not have extracted a political gain from Von der Leyen, and the Green Party members should not have voted on the basis of how much Von der Leyen had prioritized environmental policy. Instead, the parties apprehensive about the Parliament having been circumvented by the state governments and the Commission should have voted to offset the state-rights ideology of the far-right parties in the Parliament. Had this been done, the next Commission would have been very cautious about circumventing the voice of the people by making deals with the governors of the several states. 

Generally speaking, protecting the viability of the federal system itself, including the checks and balances at the federal level, does not get done by prioritizing political deals and even particular policies, as if the pushing for certain policies in the aggregate were tantamount to protecting the system of governance itself.

1. Jeremy Fleming-Jones, et al, “Von der Leyen’s EU Commission Survives Parliament Confidence Vote,” Euronews.com, July 10, 2025.
2. Alice Tidey, “MEPs Vote for Parliament to Sue Commission over €150 bn Defense Loan Programme,” Euronews.com, June 25, 2025.

3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Political and Economic Elites

I submit that in virtually every political party, a distinction can be made between the “rank and file” and the political elite. Kamala Harris may have lost to Donald Trump in the 2024 U.S. federal-presidential race in part because Harris had not spoken out enough on economic issues amid soaring inflation on groceries and rents to gain traction with Democratic and Independent voters who had had enough of the “woke” ideological agenda, which includes, for example, moral pressure and even demands that people announce their “pronouns” before speaking. Although President Biden had initiated some anti-trust judicial action, the industry-oligopoly of meat producers, for example, was left untouched. So too were the mega-grocery-store chains. Kroger was later found to have spiked egg and milk prices above the increased costs with impunity, yet Harris did not suggest that the Sherman or Clayton anti-trust acts should be taken out of the garage for spin on the American judicial highways that connect the rank-and-file party-members to party elites mainly in New England, New York, and California. I contend that U.S. Senator Bernie Sander’s anti-oligopoly speeches in conservative Congressional districts gained such numbers in 2025 precisely because the Democratic Party’s elite had lost touch with the party’s “rank and file” voters on economic issues.[1]

In early May, 2025, Faiz Shakir, a top advisor to Sanders, castigated elected Democrats who want “to talk down to” voters as if ordinary people are “just too dumb to understand the general notions of powerful elites running” the show, presumably both in politics and business.[2] I don’t think it is lost on many Democratic voters that Democratic office-holders taking campaign donations from oligopolistic companies have been less than willing to urge the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute large companies on the basis of restraint of trade. Virtually no elected official in government who takes a significant amount of “corporate cash” would be willing to propose a law strengthening anti-trust law such that governments in the U.S. would have a duty to restore monopolistic and oligopolistic industries to market-competition even if the existing firms are not colluding on price or other matters.

For example, since its early days, Facebook (then Meta) has actively bought out budding potential competitors. Social media became an oligopolistic industry in part because of that strategy. Whether or not Meta has engaged in restraint of trade, the U.S. Department of Justice could be given the legal mandate to break up the large American social-media companies in order to bring about a competitive industry. A monopolistic or oligopolistic industry cannot be counted upon to metamorphosize itself naturally into a competitive market; rather, the reverse tends to occur. Hence the need for government to act to perpetuate competition in industries.

This is not to say that Democratic and Independent voters would or should accept Sanders’ platforms of “Medicare for All” and free college-tuition at public colleges and universities. Rather, his “relentless focus on economic policy” could have improved his party’s chances to retain the federal presidency by countering “swing voters’ belief [that] Democrats are too close to feckless institutions and too obsessed with culture war issues.”[3] U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, also a Democrat, observed about six months after the 2024 election, “We viewed people like Bernie as an outlier threat to the institutional Democratic Party, when in fact what he was talking about and is still talking about is the crossover message. And it pulls Trump voters back into the Democratic coalition.”[4] Both the Hilary-Clinton-dominated party elite in 2016, which was rather unfair to Sanders, and the Kamala-Harris presumptive-nominee fiat in 2024 demonstrate the lack of willingness of the party’s elite to select its nominees for president by competitive (and fair, open) contests. This lack of political competition mirrors the lack of economic competition that has continued to plague many American industries at the expense of consumers.

Lest the attention on price-spikes from President Trump’s tariffs monopolize the public discourse on prices that American consumers must pay to have even staple products, another, more widespread, reason for higher prices may be right under their proverbial noses and yet many Americans, both as voters and consumers, may continue to be oblivious to the bad odor of greed that has fueled collusion not only within industries, but also between business and government. An anti-elite populism preached by Democratic candidates and office-holders who refuse corporate donations could really make a difference in setting the Democratic Party apart from not only Trump’s Republican Party, but also the status quo itself, whose gravitas can be likened to that of the Earth in its magnitude and relentlessness. Elites may have such a foothold in American politics and business that many party-members and consumers may be left with only a vague instinctual sense that “the gig is rigged.” For the powers that are able to frame the contours of debates on issues, including on which issues will be debated publicly, do so with a keen eye on retaining and even gaining power and wealth. Hence making the contours explicit, and uncovering the underlying vested interests, is vital to restoring bottom-up democracy and competitive markets in the United States. Faith in American democracy may boil down to the precipitate of ordinary people resisting entrenched, powerful interests even in their own political parties.

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1. An oligopoly is an industry in which a few companies dominate. An oligopoly is between a monopoly and a competitive market. Prices on products can be higher than necessary, the surplus revenue going to profits. Sellers are price-takers rather than price-setters in a competitive market, whereas companies in an oligopolistic industry have sufficient market-power to set prices because consumers have few choices.

2. Igor Bobic, “Bernie Sanders: Resisting Trump Is ‘Not Good Enough’,” The Huffington Post, May 6, 2025.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

On the 2025 Political Convention of the European People’s Party

Competition within a pollical party and recognition that a political party is indeed a political party are essential or at least advantageous to any political party in a democratic system. Moreover, a republic, even if it contains smaller republics but is not just them in aggregate, deserves to be recognized as such rather than implicitly relegated by erroneous nomenclature that is designed to appease skeptics so they won’t rise up to resist the federal republic itself. “Let the chips fall where they may” is, I believe, an expression from gambling. Another expression comes from playing cards: Call a spade a spade. These two expressions evince truth and power, whereas hiding behind false notions is sheer weakness. Much of my writing on the European Union is oriented to strengthening it, as well as to gleam lessons for both the E.U. and U.S. by comparing and contrasting them as federal empire-scale unions of states.

Rubber-stamping closed-room decisions is hardly uncommon at conventions of political parties. The E.U.’s European People’s Party is no exception. At the annual convention in 2025, the party’s leadership appeared “quite monarchic” in spite of the fact that the E.U. was “the world’s second largest democracy,” and that President Von der Leyen had been touting the value being placed on democracy.[1] At the convention, Manfred Weber was re-elected by 502 of 563 votes “while his loyal ally Dolors Montserrat was elected unopposed to the position of secretary general with 91% of the votes cast.”[2] The lack of intra-party competition could be expected to have an impact politically on the E.U. itelf, as the “ascendant” EPP included E.U. Commission President Von der Leyen, 13 commissioners, and 188 representatives in the Parliament.[3]

With the E.U. being a few years over 30 years old, the EPP in the E.U. could be likened to the Congress Party in India during the twentieth century. To be sure, the latter party eventually lost its dominance, and the EPP could be expected to lose its early foothold too. Beforehand, however, a democracy deficit can exist not only when one party dominates at the federal level of an empire-scale polity of polities, but also when such a party is monocratic at the party level.

In other words, a multiplier effect can be in the mix when dominance is salient within a party that in turn is dominate in a government, and an executive branch, a legislative chamber elected by citizens, and a supreme court do indeed constitute a government even if denial has a firm foothold in the public square. In fact, for the media to mislabel a political party’s convention as a congress, which is actually an international meeting of sovereign countries, and a union such as the E.U. as a bloc undermines the credibility of a party and union. Both a democracy-deficit and enervating ideological (i.e., Euroskeptic) misnomers imperil a federal system, especially if the states hold most (but not all!) of the governmental sovereignty. 

For the Commission to be able to enforce even its exclusive competencies (i.e., enumerated powers), it is important that that executive branch be representative rather than oligarchic and known to be something more than of a bloc, which is a temporary grouping for one purpose. The E.U. was not intended to be temporary or of just one pillar. Indeed, the third pillar belies any claim that the E.U. is merely an economic international organization. International organizations such as NATO and the UN have no governmental sovereignty of their own, and do not have legislative chambers whose representatives are directly elected by citizens. International organizations do not even have citizens! A little intellectual honesty can go a long way.

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1. Jeremy Fleming-Jones, “The EU’s Biggest Political Party Met in Valencia—What We Learned,” Euronews.com, 30 April 2025.

2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Tariffs as a Negotiating Tactic: Undercut by Wall Street Expediency

With all the economic and political turmoil from the anticipated American tariffs, it may be tempting, especially for financially-oriented CEOs and billionaires looking at quarterly reports, to call the whole thing off even though doing so would deflate the American attempt to renegotiate trade bilaterally with other countries. The concerns of the wealthy, whether corporations or individuals, have their place, but arguably should not be allowed to "lead the proverbial dog from behind, lest the dog run in circles and get nowhere." Moreover, the notion that any goal that is difficult and takes some time to materialize can or even should be vetoed by momentary passions at the outset is problematic and short-sighted. That U.S. President Trump's announcement of bilateral tariffs quickly brought fifty countries to the negotiating table is significant as a good sign for the United States, as long as that country's powerful business plutocracy (i.e., private concentrations of wealth that seek to govern) can be kept from vetoing the emergent trade policy, which at least in part is oriented to trade negotiation and ultimately to the notion that fair trade is conducive to increased free trade. 

The full essay is at "Tariffs as a Negotiating Tactic."

Corporate Governance and Political Activism: The Case of Ben & Jerry's

When a company’s management decides to take a partisan position publicly on a political issue, especially one that is contentious, decreased revenue, whether from potential or actual consumers individually who disagree with the company’s position, or from an organized boycott from groups that stand against the position. Anger may be a stronger motivator than ideological agreement, in which case any increase in purchases would be less than the lost revenue. This asymmetry itself is interesting from the standpoint of human nature, and strongly suggests that CEO’s steer their respective companies, which managements operate on behalf of the stockholders anyway, away from taking controversial positions on social or political issues that do not directly and significantly pertain to the bottom-line (i.e., profitability) in the short- or medium-term. In short, wading into societal issues is, generally speaking, not good for business. What then about a company like the ice-cream manufacturer, Ben & Jerry’s, which from its inception had social/political activism as a salient part of the company’s mission?

Both the initial two owners and all subsequent owners, which includes Unilever, which bought the company in 2000, could not have become owners with the understanding that they were buying (into) an apolitical company, so the fiduciary duty of management was not breached. That Unilever fired Ben & Jerry’s CEO, Dave Stever, in 2025 because he had continued the subsidiary’s very public political activism presumably because it included criticism of U.S. President Trump is, let us say, complicated. I contend that the firing constitutes a breach of contract even though that contract contradicts the principle of corporate governance in part but not enough to justify allowing the firing to stand legally.  

On March 18, 2025, the management of Ben & Jerry’s accused the subsidiary’s parent-company of violating the ice-cream-maker’s “independence on social policy issues.”[1] It is precisely because a parent-company has the legal right to control the management of a subsidiary.

Unilever had informed the management of Ben & Jerry’s on March 3^rd that the latter’s CEO was being removed “without consulting directors because of his commitment to the ice-cream maker’s social mission and brand integrity, not because of concerns about his job performance.”[2] Unilever’s managers had “repeatedly warned personnel” at Ben & Jerry’s “not to defy” that management’s “efforts to ‘silence the social mission’” of the subsidiary.[3] Unilever’s management blocked the management of Ben & Jerry’s from honoring of Black History Month and opposing the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, “a U.S. permanent resident” who had been “active in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University.”[4] It was not as if the subsidiary were supporting a “KKK (i.e., racist) month” and gang activity coming across the border from Mexico and hitting streets in the U.S.; nevertheless, the positions that Ben & Jerry’s management wanted to take were controversial in nature, though it is not clear that either position would have lost the subsidiary much revenue. 

The issue, I submit, comes down to corporate governance. Ordinarily, when a company buys another, the former gets to control the latter. It is not like a federal system wherein two governing bodies have at least some governmental sovereignty over the same territory; rather, corporate governance is top-down. The question is whether, in buying Ben & Jerry’s, Unilever’s agreeing to recognize and go through an independent board tasked with safeguarding the political and social activism that were so much a part of the ice-cream brand was valid. In refusing to go through that board and in accusing the management of Ben & Jerry’s as defying the Unilever management, the latter was taking the position that as the owner of the subsidiary, Unilever could unilaterally cancel the agreement.

Prime facie, to sign off on a clause in a legal contract and while presuming the legal right to unilaterally invalidate said clause without notifying the counterparty of the escape clause before the signing is odious and unethical (the technical term being sneaky). The practice could be considered a form of lying because the standard understanding of a legal contract is that all parties signing it accept that they are bound to it and thus cannot legally violate it. Kant reasoned that promise-breaking is unethical because if such a policy were universalized, making a promise (or an agreement) would not make sense because no one with any sense would sign a written contract. The logical contraction itself offends reason and is thus unethical because it is by the use of reason that we assign value to things.

Another ethical issue is whether it is fair that Unilever fired Ben & Jerry’s CEO even though plans were in place to spin off the subsidiary later that year. In February, 2025, the subsidiary’s management had “accused Unilever of unilaterally banning [the subsidiary’s management] from publicly criticizing [U.S. President] Trump, ostensibly because of the ‘new dynamic.”[5] Given the spin-off plans, this could very well have been the motive in firing the CEO because even a few months more of political speech could be dire for Unilever financially, given the president’s penchant for payback. Using corporate governance to stifle political dissent is, however, questionable ethically as well as from the standpoint of democracy. The ethical issue would be exacerbated were Unilever’s board-members or its CEO supporters of President Trump. In terms of democracy, an elected president’s de facto control of companies with respect to wiping out political dissent is obviously problematic because of the importance and right of free-speech in maintaining a republic. Of course, Hitler’s political use of companies to locate political dissent and even to find Jews didn’t face any such obstacles.

As important as ethics and political freedom are, the core issue in this legal case pertains to corporate governance itself. Specifically, do property rights, such as a parent company has in being able to control any of its subsidiary companies, trump even a written contract by which a parent company has agreed that subsidiary’s management can be protected from certain exercises of control by the parent company’s management or board? This is the pertinent question in this legal case.

Noting that a person putting one’s labor (or money, which represents labor in part) into something renders it legitimately one’s own property, John Locke saw property rights as existing in the state of nature, whereas Thomas Hobbes did not; in the contentious seventeenth-century Europe, he advocated that a political sovereign be given a monopoly on political (and religious) power in part to protect the property of people so they would not kill each other over it (though the sovereign could of course take over the property without providing a justification). In the antebellum southern States in the USA wherein slaves were considered property, those slaves had no rights against their respective owners. It is ironic that a case of humans-as-property illustrates the epitome of property rights, and yet such rights in themselves, at least in a society, have a legitimate basis. My point is that while we may not like where the doctrine of property rights can take us, modern corporate governance is on a sound footing philosophically.

Unilever’s breach of contract may, however, run aground because a system of property rights is for practical purposes based in a legal framework, wherein a breach of contract is not legal even though particular circumstances may admittedly justify it ethically and even legally. The question of whether Ben & Jerry’s CEO could legally “defy” the board or management of Unilever because officials representing the latter signed a legal contract mandating the use of the independent board centers on whether that clause can be considered to be legally valid and thus binding even though it “defies” the doctrine of property rights upon which corporate government itself rests.

I contend that the clause is legally enforceable. It is not as if that clause were in “boiler-plate” small-print that the lawyers at Unilever missed. It is not as if the clause contains an escape sub-clause for Unilever, for Ben & Jerry’s management (and lawyers) would have flagged it as undercutting the very point in having the clause in a legal contract. Moreover, the willful unilateral decision by a party to a contract that it no longer binding is offensive to law itself, which is an important foundation for a free society, l’etat est moi is a different story. In fact, it is as if the board or management of Unilever were saying, we are above the law, or we are the law. Either premise guts the basis of a legal system, and thus of corporate governance too. Such a governance system in the private sector is based on a legal system even more fundamentally than on property rights because even such rights are premised on a legal system (even though Locke disagreed). Regardless of what holds in the state of nature, the rights of property in a society are granted by law, which requires the existence of a legal system unless law is the will of a political sovereign. This is why it is so important that the President of the United States recognize the constitutional validity of judicial decisions bearing on a president’s will, for otherwise that will could easily become law and no legal system would be needed; the republic would collapse into dictatorship.

That a republic, including federal republics wherein smaller republics also exist—the E.U. and U.S. being notable examples—can (and have) become autocracies demonstrates just how tenuous democracy can be. Property rights, too, may be tenuous, especially in autocracies even though eminent domain exists in republics. To be sure, the lack of legal restraint on a regime of dictatorship, for the state’s will is the law, means that property owners are not typically monetarily compensated for the loss of their respective properties taken by the state. The legally contracted legitimacy of the independent board protecting Ben & Jerry’s social-activist-brand intangible asset is in relative terms not much of an affront to property rights as instantiated in corporate governance.

I have argued that Unilever’s representatives signed the contract of the merger-agreement means that the independent board is not even not much of an affront. In effect, Unilever’s property rights regarding  Ben & Jerry’s explicitly excluded the right to ignore the independent board. As a principle to be derived from this case, it can be maintained that corporate governance does not necessitate or require an absolutist doctrine of property rights. The very existence of the state, whether democratic or autocratic, means that absolute property-rights do not and cannot exist. Therefore, a purchaser of an asset agreeing by legal contract to restrict one’s rights with respect to the use of the asset is legally valid and thus should not be vitiated by later appeals to the doctrine of property rights. In renting house, the house’s owner typically agrees in the lease to restrictions on entering the house. The state may mandate this restriction to protect renters even thought their use of a rented property is not ownership. That is, use-rights can trump property-rights in certain respects short of the right to assume ownership of the property, and the existence of such restrictions on property rights does not destroy property rights as a prominent part of a legal system.

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1. Jonathan Stempel, “Ben & Jerry’s Says Parent Unilever Decided to Oust Ice Cream Maker’s CEO,” Reuters, March 18, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.