After speaking with a conservative nationalist in my last interview, I wanted to hear from someone on the opposite end of Gen Z’s political spectrum. What surprised me wasn’t where they disagreed—it was where they agreed.

In the second installment of my series to better understand the politics of Gen Z, I sat down with a young progressive student who is very dissatisfied with the establishment of the Democratic Party, and sees Zohran Mamdani as a more hopeful option for the future.

Here he is:

Who are your favorite politicians right now, and why?

“Right now, I would say that most of my favorite politicians aren’t elected yet, and the ones that are elected I still don’t 100% agree with.

However, my favorite is Zohran Mamdani. I like Zohran. He’s a very nice guy, and I met him once too. He always has a smile on his face, and honestly, we need more “aspirational politicians” in the U.S. because he gives off a sense of positivity whenever he’s in a room, even if I think some of his policy objectives are ambitious and, in some cases, flawed. That said, some of his backers concern me, and there are parts of his supporter base whose views I don’t share.

I want a leader that just talks like a normal guy. No mincing of words, no “we are diligently working on serving all xyz constituents,” just say things how they are, good or bad.

With certain progressives, I would love for them to focus more on economics and less on the whole “defund the police“ culture wars and gender politics. It really distracts from the core message of the real divide in this country: to quote James Talarico, “top versus bottom.“

Who do you hope will be the President in 2028?

“While I don’t support anyone in particular at the moment, I just hope JD Vance or Kamala Harris isn’t elected. To me, those two represent the two dominant political tendencies shaping the country today: on one side, right-wing crypto billionaires who support politicians willing to accept their funding and advocate for their priorities; on the other, establishment Democrats who, sensing their waning influence within the political landscape, often elevate candidates who can be presented as diverse or representative in an effort to appeal to progressive voters. In my view, despite their different messaging and presentation, both parties ultimately advance many of the same underlying priorities.”

In my first interview, I talked to a self-identified conservative nationalist. This time, a Mamdani-supporting progressive. Both said the same thing about how to appeal to Gen Z. They want concise and direct messaging. They want social media engagement. They want a personable attitude. They want to feel seen. They don’t want another career politician.

Both also expressed frustration with the establishment of their respective parties. They don’t like seeing candidates that are perceived as expressing the interests of corporations and special interests. They want a more populist version of politics: one in which politicians respond directly to the concerns of the people, act on them, and move on.

On both sides of the political spectrum, support for the establishment is dying among young people. In recent elections, young people consistently favor the more populist, anti-establishment candidate. This phenomenon is true regardless of party, state, or office. Why? Because young people feel that the establishment doesn’t stand for anything, while the insurgents do.

America in 2026 does not have the same ideological makeup it once did. This is especially true among young people. Gen Z is becoming more anti-establishment, more skeptical of foreign intervention, and more distrustful of the corporate elite.

This is not an endorsement of any particular worldview. This is simply an analysis of political trends among Gen Z.

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I interviewed an Ivy League student working in finance who identifies as a conservative nationalist.

We had an hour long conversation about his political beliefs, motivations, and predictions for the future. My goal was to better understand the young populist movement on the right.

Here are some interesting quotes from the interview:

Who did you vote for in 2024, and why?

“I ended up voting for Trump in 2024. But initially, I was going to vote for RFK. I found his messaging through social media and YouTube very appealing. He was talking about affordability for young people in a way establishment Republicans weren’t.

Republicans often say we need to decrease spending and control government finances, but they have not done it. Are these really the fiscally responsible Republicans voters thought they were electing? No.

The conservatives—what exactly are they conserving?”

Where do you diverge from the establishment of the Republican Party?

“For Trump and the MAGA movement, the slogan is “Make America Great Again.” I think a new slogan that you’re hearing a lot more is not just “America First,” but also “America Only.”

From my perspective, jobs should go to Americans first. That is where people with my views differ from traditional establishment Republicans. Part of being economically free-market is allowing the free movement of work and foreign talent. The establishment argument is that those workers bring expertise, create value, and pay taxes that benefit the country. But I think the state has a responsibility to prioritize its own citizens.”

What are the similarities between the populist right and the populist left?

“The difference between a Chuck Schumer Democrat and a Ro Khanna Democrat increasingly comes down to Israel: how much aid should be sent abroad, whether you are interventionist or non-interventionist, and what role foreign lobbying plays. It is becoming a litmus test on the Democratic side, and I think it is now coming to the Republican side as well. The more progressive left and the more nationalist right can sometimes agree that American tax dollars should not be sent out of the country, even though they arrive there from very different ideological directions.

“Populism is not always far right. An increase in taxes on the wealthy, for example, is not traditionally laissez-faire economics, but it can be populist.”

It is clear that the young right is different from the GOP establishment. The biggest differences stem from the question of national identity: immigration, domestic job creation, foreign lobbying, and foreign intervention. Overall, the new right is embracing a more populist agenda than their Reaganite predecessors, designed to protect national sovereignty above all else.

Unless a major change occurs, the party may creep towards this worldview over time as the young right grows older.

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PEW Research Center recently published an article defining several new political ideologies that help explain the complexities of our current electorate. I found it compelling, but vague and unclear. However, PEW’s motivation to create this new ideological map is justified. The fact is, America in 2026 does not have the same ideologies it once did. This is especially true among young people. As a young person myself, I’d like to explain some of the new ideologies, or political groupings, that I’ve seen among my peers. In doing so, I do not intend to advocate for or support any specific worldview. I am simply trying to explain a political landscape that feels extremely foreign to most adults. The following will be purely based on my perceptions and observation of the world around me.

In a recent book, Dr. Steve Davies theorizes that the divide between left and right is no longer primarily drawn along economic differences, but rather differences in national identity. I agree, and this change is especially noticeable with young people.

Here is what I’ve observed:

The populist, anti-establishment far-right

The young far-right doesn’t necessarily believe in free markets, low regulations, low taxes, and an interventionist U.S. foreign policy. Rather, its beliefs are explicitly focused on maintaining what is, in its view, America’s national identity and sovereignty. First and foremost, the new far-right is very opposed to immigration. This is a sharp departure from the old Reagan Republicans, who in many cases welcomed immigrants and saw their economic value in society. This camp of new voters feels as though an influx of people from different cultures, religions, and backgrounds will chip away at the culture they hold near and dear to their hearts. To them, the legality of the immigration is of little relevance. Rather, they reject it in its entirety, legal or illegal. In their view, if America is everyone and everything, every language, every culture, every people, then it is nothing.

This anti-immigration sentiment is coupled with a broader distrust of U.S. intervention abroad: many in this coalition don’t see how the billions of dollars spent on war and regime change throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have materially benefited their lives. Many of these young voters are skeptical of the billions of dollars sent to Ukraine, which they feel is an example of this phenomenon. In recent years, the far-right populist movement has also been very critical of the U.S. military and political relationship with Israel. On top of rejecting it for isolationist reasons, it also fears the influence of Israeli interests in government, most notably AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). In its view, the years of steadfast U.S. support for Israel is largely a result of Israeli lobbying, and thus it distrusts politicians who express strong support for it. On economics, this faction diverges from the GOP establishment again. Many of its members harbor intense resentment towards the American financial elite, sometimes exacerbated by the infamous Epstein Files, which in their view highlighted the ways in which institutions protected the wealthiest people in America from proper consequences. Many would support what is traditionally seen as a left-wing view of higher taxes on billionaires and the corporate elite. Similarly, members of this camp distrust large technology and media corporations, as fears of AI and political bias loom large.

An important note: many in this group are explicitly anti-Trump. I think most mainstream media misses that. Due to the Trump Administration’s handling of the Epstein Files, its foreign involvement in Venezuela and Iran, and its close ties to big tech, many of these far-right populists have abandoned Trump. The Atlantic recently did an article which tells a similar story. In an analysis of young Republican men, they found that “most of the men … said that the president is abandoning his “America First” agenda, which is what attracted them to the Republican Party in the first place” (Sabgir). They feel that Trump’s foreign interventions in Venezuela and Iran directly contradict his “no new wars” message on the campaign trail, and thus feel betrayed. It is however important to recognize that there are a variety of different worldviews in this coalition, and they are not all the same. This is my attempt to paint a general picture of this ideological category.

The Progressive Left

Interestingly, the new progressives on the left share many similarities with the anti-establishment populists on the right. The skepticism of interventionism, hostility towards AIPAC, and resentment of the financial elite are all true for the progressives, too. Of course, they are also very different, and they too have their own idiosyncrasies. On economics, some explicitly reject capitalism in its entirety. A recent survey from Gallup found that around 66% of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism, higher than the number who support capitalism. This is a result of a broader lack of economic success, which is attributed to the failure of the U.S. economic system as a whole. It is harder than ever to buy a house. The job market is brutal. At the end of the day, many believe that the lives their parents and grandparents enjoyed are no longer achievable. That, along with the rise in wealth inequality, has made some young leftists simply reject capitalism. Because of this dynamic, many of these young progressives harbor intense anger towards the nation’s wealthiest. They feel that the intense wealth disparity cannot possibly be just: the support for billionaire or wealth taxes is strongest among this group.

There are also a number of social issues that often correlate strongly with this ideology. For example, a more fluid view of gender and sexuality is common within this camp, as well as more progressive views on race and religion. For instance, young progressives are still very supportive of affirmative action geared towards making universities more diverse and equitable. Protecting abortion is almost a given, especially for young women.

Here’s an interesting and fascinating twist: A lot of young people within these first two groups (in special cases) may actually support the same candidates. Thomas Massie, the Congressman from Kentucky, is a good example. Massie is a libertarian, but recently has become an intense and public critic of the Trump Administration, specifically with regard to the Epstein Files and the Iran/Israel war. He has made the case that the U.S. has first been complicit in protecting a class of ultra-wealthy criminals, while simultaneously making the same mistake that it had in Iraq, and Vietnam before that. This message appeals to both the young far-right and the young far-left. Their main divergence really comes from cultural beliefs, where the populist far-right group is still quite traditionally conservative on issues such as feminism and sexuality, while the new progressives are, in fact, still progressive. Another key divergence from the far-right populists stems from immigration. This progressive camp is pro-immigration, and is quite skeptical of anti-immigration nativism on racial lines. Politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani are very popular in this group. The Democratic establishment, however, is quite unpopular. They are seen as being weak and ineffective against the Trump Administration, and seem unable to articulate an agenda that is anything other than being anti-Trump. This is why farther left candidates, who do have their own ideas irrespective of Trump, are more appealing.

The more traditional young conservatives

There is still a more establishment coalition on the young right, and it is quite prominent. This group’s ideology most notably reflects that of the late political activist Charlie Kirk. It is against DEI, which has made a big impact on young people’s political views due to its large presence in schools, social media, and the workplace. Most of these traditional conservatives support low immigration and tax cuts, but (unlike their Reagan Republican predecessors) their cultural opinions, rather than economic views, seem to be the primary motivation for their political stances. This group, like the anti-establishment movement, really seems to latch on to preserving what it perceives as traditional American culture. Country music, for example, has become very popular and (anecdotally) sometimes feels like a subtle political message about the desire for a simpler, more traditionally American life. A recent study by Cornell University confirms the overlap between country music and conservatism (Liaukonytė, Winkler, Wlömert). Similar to the populists again, for these young conservatives, Christianity will often play a big role in their identities and political views, too. Pro-life sentiment on religious grounds is a very common sentiment among both of these groups. Many are religious, and hope one day, first and foremost, to start a family and have children.

However, this faction’s politics diverge from the new far-right in several key ways, and more closely resembles the old GOP. For instance, many traditional young conservatives are still in favor of legal immigration, while the populists to their right often reject migration writ large. This is probably the biggest difference. Their view of foreign engagement is also different. The traditional right is generally more in favor of U.S. interventionism, and is much less skeptical (and often supportive) of America’s political relationship with Israel. The divide between these two groups on the right can also be seen clearly through their preferred political activists. Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes dominate much of the young populist movement, whose messaging is more conspiratorial and radical. In contrast, Kirk and Ben Shapiro are more popular with this coalition, who generally place a greater emphasis on debate and civil discourse. Unlike the populist right, the traditionalists are still much more supportive of the Trump Administration, though support for it has fallen among young people drastically. Recently, a Yale Youth Poll found that “both men ages 23-29 and 30-34 shifted 14 points towards Democrats” since 2025. Politicians like Marco Rubio, Ron Desantis, and the up and coming Brandon Gill appeal to these new voters more than Thomas Massie or Tucker Carlson.

The less engaged majority

A lot of young people who are less interested in politics do not have strong political opinions yet. Rather, they just hate what they’re seeing on social media. They hate the divisive rhetoric of the Trump Administration. They hate political violence. They feel that ICE’s handling of immigration has gone too far, as many hold a relatively moderate stance on immigration. In general, they hate seeing politics in the news so much and want a return to what they consider to be normalcy. In 2028, this is where candidates have a real opportunity with the youth. If a charismatic, ideally young politician is able to effectively articulate his or her views without coming off as divisive or harsh, they will surely win over a large number of young voters in this group, whose opinions about taxation, foreign policy, and immigration are not as strong. Many of my peers have grown up in a political age unlike any other, where political extremism and violent rhetoric feels culturally embedded rather than a temporal anomaly. If they were shown, for instance, the 2012 Presidential debate between President Obama and Governor Romney, they’d be shocked but pleasantly surprised by the level of civility shown by both sides.

We must, of course, leave room for nuance. Not every young American falls into one of these factions perfectly. In reality, just like before, most people have a wide range of beliefs that dip into various ideologies. These are not the only ideological camps that exist for young voters. However, these political groupings are new, and thus important to understand in a political landscape that is increasingly dangerous and consequential. Although young people do not vote as consistently as older voters, Gen Z will be the future of the country in a few years time, so politicians should start to learn how to appeal to them.

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An Engineered Shipwreck

During the summer of 1848, a 24-year-old seaman drifted into the waters near the island of Rishiri in an open boat, by himself, off the shore of what would become the Japanese prefecture of Hokkaido. This man was named Ranald MacDonald, and he had orchestrated the whole process. Japan was a country closed to most of the world at this point due to its sakoku policy, and landing without permission meant either imprisonment or death for any foreigners who did so. MacDonald made it look like he had shipwrecked himself, and he was taken in by nearby Ainu locals and then turned over to Japanese officials in Nagasaki.

A Different Lineage

Macdonald did not fit the mold of an American who desired to explore out of pure curiosity. MacDonald came from a lineage in which his father was a Scottish fur trader, while his mother was Chinook, named Koale’xoa. His mother was a daughter of Comcomly, a notable Chinook from the lower Columbia River with diplomatic skills who had a talent for trading with the early Americans and Europeans.

Biographers claimed for decades that MacDonald’s interest in Japan began when he was a kid at Fort Vancouver, where he encountered three Japanese sailors stranded on the Pacific coast and rescued them with other soldiers from Fort Vancouver. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support this claim; in fact, recent research shows that the Japanese sailors reached Fort Vancouver in July 1834, when MacDonald, then around 10 years old, left for another place in Canada.

The Nagasaki Classroom

Faced with an increasing number of American and British ships heading towards their waters and a shortage of Japanese speakers fluent in English, the Japanese government decided to take an extraordinary step. Far from considering him as a direct threat, they employed fourteen samurai interpreters, who had been taught only Dutch before, to study English under him. Classes took place in the place of his incarceration, a branch temple in Nagasaki, where he spent roughly seven months. There is one student in particular who distinguished himself with his ability to master English quickly. According to one historian, he was a real “language genius”: Moriyama Einosuke.

The Black Ships Arrive

Five years later, in 1853, an American fleet led by Commodore Matthew Perry appeared at the entrance of Edo Bay, demanding that Japan open up its ports for trading or else face the consequences. Moriyama, MacDonald’s student, became the main interpreter of the shogunate during negotiations with Perry and, later, with Russian and British delegations as well. The English language, which MacDonald had taught Moriyama in the guarded room in Nagasaki, became the language that kept Japan from the war, which it had no chance to win anyway.

The role of the interpreters does not include setting the political course, and Japan’s decision to negotiate rather than fight must be attributed to many other political processes at the top of the shogunate. It is, however, interesting to reflect on the fact that Japan could actually conduct such negotiations, that it could comprehend the demands of Perry and reply accordingly because of the sequence of events triggered by one foreigner who decided to use his imprisonment productively.

Though Perry was not the first American to visit Japan or communicate with the representatives of the Japanese government, he was the first American to approach the country with such a great level of firepower that Japan had to react to it. In 1846, Commander James Biddle approached Edo Bay with two ships and a trade request but without any success. The thing that distinguished MacDonald from other sailors was not his being the first. His uniqueness was in the fact that he not only visited the country but stayed here for quite a long time to teach, leaving behind one of his students who would become central in the future encounter everyone remembers.

A Legacy Forgotten and Remembered

Japan managed to avoid the process of colonization, which destroyed many Asian countries in the nineteenth century, while it faced the threat of Perry’s visit and made necessary institutional changes soon afterward. However, the translator who played a crucial role in this process learned the English language from a person who showed his interest in a “closed” country rather than his fear of it, in a time when being interested in such a country could have cost him dearly.

MacDonald himself received little gratitude for anything he did. He wrote his book regarding this incident shortly after coming back home, yet no publisher agreed to publish it, and it was printed only in 1923, twenty-nine years after MacDonald’s death. He died in 1894 in a town in the east of Washington state, forgotten, trying for years to get some official recognition for his teaching, without getting any. Japan remembered MacDonald much longer than his own homeland.

Lessons for a Modern Era

However, this story shows us that deterrence will tell you how to avoid defeat in a conflict situation. It will not teach you how to avoid the conflict itself and how to exit from it without worsening it further.

As long as we live in the era of mistrust between great nations and of the online discourse dominated by stereotypical representations of “the other side,” the lesson of the story is obvious. The bridge that was of critical importance in 1853 was not constructed by the country possessing a powerful navy. It was built many years ago by two men who could have had reasons to consider each other foreigners and foes, but decided instead to devote their scarce time to studying and teaching each other.

Many people ask, is democracy in crisis?

The question is self-diagnosing. It assumes democracy is an ideal form of government that has somehow begun to fail, and asks only to what extent and how to repair it. But this framing depends on three claims that must first be questioned: that democracy previously produced ideal results, that crisis means deviation from the ideal, and that present instability is an accident rather than a systemic feature. This essay contends that all three are, at best, conditional.

What we are observing is not so much a crisis of democracy, but as a working-out of tendencies internal to it. By democracy, I mean existing Western constitutional liberal democracies, rather than an idealized conception of rule by the people. This essay is interested in the ways that the institutionalized operation of a democracy can, or cannot, accommodate the tendencies it generates. These institutions of the liberal state are designed not to enable the operation of the will of the people, but rather to limit it. What distinguishes constitutional liberal democracy from other governmental systems is precisely its restraint upon its own mechanisms of popular rule; it is the presence of constraints upon majorities: a constitution and a bill of rights, separation of powers, independent judges, and federalism. My argument is that democratic politics now tends to create outcomes that erode the liberal framework which previously stabilized its effects. Democracy is not in crisis, but fulfillment.

The pattern is not entirely new. When the Athenian Assembly voted to invade Sicily, against Nicias’ warning that if it passed all was lost, Nicias demanded an impossible troop deployment; the Assembly granted it, and he was voted commander. The expedition was a disaster; it crippled Athens’ military might and led to a massive loss of life. Athens in many ways does not resemble modern liberal democracy, but its appetite for flattering delusion rather than stark reality clearly has not disappeared. Plato did not merely fear democracy’s potential for error, but also the way its own excesses might produce its self-destruction.

Acemoglu and Robinson rightly acknowledge the achievements of democratic states -- famine avoidance, economic growth, and inclusive institutions. However, though Acemoglu and Robinson stress democratic accountability as itself essential, these triumphs depended critically on the liberal part of the regime. Rule of law, property rights, and fair courts, which democracy once, rather fortuitously, seemed to bolster. Liberal institutions matter because they prevent momentary majorities from exhausting the future for the sake of the present. They slow politics down, fragment power, and make some things hard to do even when they are popular. In that sense, they are not democratic outputs so much as democratic restraints. The relevant issue now is whether the democratic mechanics begin to consume the liberal infrastructure they once appeared to reinforce.

None of this should be taken to mean that democracy will not or cannot persevere. When the liberal scaffolding has been already degraded; by a level of economic inequality which causes people to possess insufficient shared stakes, by fragmentation of media which causes people to lack a common epistemic basis required of liberal norms, and by spatial and cultural segregation causing the electorate to lack competing perspectives; democracy has a tendency toward outcomes which are not self-correcting, but work in a circular mutually beneficial way, exploiting epistemic and emotional deficits of the electorate and electoral strategies of politicians. If so, then the current period is not so much a crisis, in the traditional sense, as a system’s predicted outcome given the state of its institutional underpinnings.

The epistemic problems are already apparent in the act of voting itself. Bryan Caplan, in The Myth of the Rational Voter, argues that an individual voter’s decision to become informed about politics is rarely rational: a single vote is unlikely to sway any outcome, and the cost of political education outweighs the benefit for an isolated voter. This means that voters often make decisions not because of facts, but on things that feel good or carry partisan benefits. While a bad market decision directly harms the chooser, a voter’s bad choice imposes only a very small cost on that voter and can be borne only across millions, making a bad decision politically cheap to endorse. What democracy uniquely adds here is not ignorance by itself, but collective choice under conditions of radically diluted responsibility. Democratic voting processes are thus inherently suited to disseminating poor choices rather than rational ones.

By a different path, Achen and Bartels in Democracy for Realists arrive at a similar conclusion, contending that actual voter decisions are driven by partisan identity and group affiliation, not reasoned calculation over policy. The cause -- economic in Caplan’s view, sociological in Achen and Bartels’ -- may differ, but the conclusion is the same: democratic choices are structurally alienated from facts and outcomes. What voters lack is not necessarily the means to attain information, but the incentive to employ accurate information rather than the heuristic benefits offered by loyalty and affiliation.

A more complex view, developed through Dan Kahan’s work on identity-protective cognition, suggests that people are not simply ignorant, but rather “in a state of conscious opposition to anyone who would provide them with information that contradicts their deeply held loyalties or prejudices; their very intelligence can be put to work devising ever more elaborate ways to protect their desired, emotionally comfortable illusions.” In such cases, democracy might not only fail to compensate for our biases but actually reward them.

One counterargument to this criticism is that democracy inherently possesses the capacity to correct its own mistakes through the power of the ballot box. The idealized version, as articulated by Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, predicts that aggregation will be superior to any individual judgment, though this assumes an unbiased, independent electorate, precisely what we lack. Deliberative democrats such as Hélène Landemore and James Fishkin argue that deliberation is the solution to our aggregation problem. Yet real politics mostly occurs through mass election campaigns, not deliberative assemblies. Friedrich Hayek, meanwhile, relies on the idea that decentralized knowledge is superior because individuals pay a cost for ignoring information contrary to their beliefs. But with the internet and algorithms designed to filter information and push people toward content that supports their existing biases, individuals are rarely forced to confront inconvenient truths. Instead, we live in informational bubbles, where voters are not simply unaware of the truth but are rewarded for continuing to support the political system they prefer.

Secondly, there is the idea that the government in a democracy exploits both our knowledge and our lack of concern for it. The traditional Schumpeterian model of politics sees elections as contests among entrepreneurs-politicians who use ideas as advertising, while Mancur Olson posits that diffuse majorities lack the necessary incentives to address costs as effectively as motivated minorities, who bear relatively low costs to gain concentrated benefits. Combining these two visions of politics reveals an incentive structure not designed for efficiency of choice, but for distributing losses and collecting concentrated benefits. Once accuracy is no longer rewarded among the electorate, leaders are not punished for selling soothing lies; they are often rewarded for it.

Thus, the overall nature of democracy is that while voters are offered diffuse benefits, losses tend to be concentrated in certain groups that bear the high cost of policy failures, or are simply postponed until a later date. An obvious example is the Greek sovereign debt crisis, where political pledges led to the accumulation of sovereign debt that the public was later forced to cover through future taxes. Canada in the 1990s and Germany in the 2000s both had to correct their economies at a painful rate, only to find their reforms punished by the electorate.

As Bastiat famously described, the state has become “the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.” La Boétie had warned earlier that dependence on power is an addictive process; in a democracy, once people accept and receive its gifts of protection, benefits, and services, they acquire a vested interest in its continuation. Many people’s moral claims may therefore be little more than an astute perception of how to satisfy their material interests under democracy. Even when this is dressed up in the language of justice, it may still amount to a demand that present voters be permitted to consume resources whose true costs will be borne by somebody else.

Finally, structural decay complements all of these factors. Tocqueville argued that democracy’s capacity for excess could be tempered by civil society: intermediary associations and local participation can limit centralized state power. Now, these moderating forces have largely dissipated. Putnam and Skocpol document how interest groups and professional lobbyists have crowded out intermediary civic institutions, and federal power continues to rise at the expense of local government. Rather than being active, self-directed citizens, people now view politics as a consumer service. The state becomes more intimate, but citizenship becomes thinner.

Levitsky and Ziblatt point out in How Democracies Die that while voters’ ignorance helps make this possible, there is also a distinct mechanism by which elected politicians use their victories to take over the umpire class: the judiciary, election commissions, and the mass media. Hungary, under Orbán, is the prime example: without ever abandoning democratic procedure outright, the prime minister has dismantled checks and balances from within. This case is certainly an extreme and exceptional one, but it demonstrates that democratic mechanics themselves may offer no protection when elected officials are adept at using them to erode existing liberal constraints.

However, one must also acknowledge important counterexamples: the 2023 elections in Poland and Brazil’s struggle with the Bolsonaro presidency attest that even where institutions are weakened, a capacity for correction may persist, often at high social cost. This essay’s claim must therefore be modified from inevitable self-destruction to a conditional argument. Where liberal infrastructure is strong enough, and where individuals still bear significant enough personal cost from bad political outcomes to motivate information acquisition, democracy can still operate as a self-correcting mechanism. Poland suggests that correction remains possible where civic mobilization, backed by residual judicial independence, survives long institutional erosion. Brazil suggests that institutions can hold, though precariously, when courts and electoral bodies retain enough autonomy to resist populist pressure. The point is not that democracy never recovers, but that recovery becomes harder and costlier once liberal restraints have already been weakened.

Historians generally agree that democracy’s rivals have often been more catastrophic in their effects, but that is not itself an argument that the democracy that replaces them will be sustainable. Brennan may well be correct to call for more reasoned decision-making; he is wrong to assume that those removed from the popular will and installed in a technocracy would not themselves be prone to epistemic error, or that the threat of electoral removal is not itself a key check on political power. The problem may not be who governs, but what governing, under modern conditions, incentivizes.

Is democracy in crisis, then? Not in the way the question implies. What we are witnessing may be closer to normal functioning without the liberal constraints that once disguised its tendencies. Democracy is not failing to do what democracy does; it is doing what democracy does, in the absence of the institutional order that previously made its outcomes tolerable. When Plato saw Athens broken after the Sicilian disaster and the rule of the Thirty, he saw in the city’s defeat a consequence of its own appetite for delusion over restraint. If that parallel holds at all, then the answer to the question is no, democracy is not in crisis. It’s producing predictable results.

Works Cited:

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers, 2012. pp. 73–87, 372–376.

Achen, Christopher H., and Larry M. Bartels. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. pp. 1–20, 213–231, 267–296.

Bastiat, Frédéric. “The State.” In The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat, vol. 2: The Law, The State, and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850. Edited by Jacques de Guenin. Translated by Jane and Michel Willems. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012. pp. 105–106.

Brennan, Jason. Against Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. pp. 1–53, 140–230.

Caplan, Bryan. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. pp. 1–4, 23–49, 94–141.

Condorcet, Nicolas de. Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix. Paris, 1785. [See also: List, Christian, and Robert E. Goodin. “Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem.” Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 3, 2001, pp. 277–306.]

Fishkin, James S. Democracy When the People Are Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. pp. 1–65.

Hayek, Friedrich A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review, vol. 35, no. 4, 1945, pp. 519–530.

Kahan, Dan M. “Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-Protective Cognition.” Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper Series No. 164, Yale Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 605, 2017. pp. 1–9.

Kahan, Dan M. “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government.” Behavioural Public Policy, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 54–86.

La Boétie, Étienne de. The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Translated by Harry Kurz. New York: Free Life Editions, 1975. pp. 60–70.

Landemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. pp. 89–143.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing, 2018. pp. 23–24, 77–117.

Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. pp. 1–16, 28–36, 53–65.

Plato. The Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992. pp. 236–250.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. pp. 31–92.

Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. 3rd ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1950. pp. 269–283.

Skocpol, Theda. Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. pp. 127–220.

Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner. London: Penguin Classics, 1972. Book VI, Chapters 8–26 (pp. 417–441); Book VII, Chapters 84–87 (pp. 536–538).

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. pp. 239–250, 489–500, 661–665.

This is a guest essay from a new page called “The World of Geopolitics.” If you are interested in geopolitics and international relations, please consider subscribing.

“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

As rubble covered the grounds of Europe and Japan after WWII, a new global order emerged in which the overwhelming power of the United States and the Soviet Union prevailed over all other powers. In such a system, the two superpowers conducted their conflicts through proxy warfare, rather than direct conflict. The most notable of which took place in Indochina, when Vietnamese Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh and funded by the USSR rose to power in North Vietnam. By the 1960s, the domino had fallen in the Viet Cong. As a response, the US deployed troops to the region, without ever declaring war. But even though America joined this conflict on the basis of containing Communism, its failures led to just the opposite - a Communist Soviet proxy defeating the beacon of democracy and capitalism in direct military conflict. In retrospect, politicians and constituents alike tend to blame realist thought for the failures in Indochina. But even though realism is often judged as the perpetrator for the Vietnam War, US-Indochina policy is the antithesis of realism because of its blind optimism, failure to accept realities of guerilla warfare, and overplaying the US’s hand.

Realist foreign policy tends to reject ideological or moral considerations in favor of pragmatic national interests. As an example, realists often criticize the Iraq War because the costs of such a war don’t nearly equate to even the best possible outcome, much less the real outcome. And yet, realism is consistently framed as the perpetrator of the failures in Vietnam. As the Crimson Historical Review puts it, “Those who associate [realism] with Kissinger may see it as a hyper—militaristic school of thought.” But this accusation is misplaced. Political realism, though lacking a concrete definition, can be understood as a school of thought which sees the world through a Hobbesian lens - international actors are merely unchecked kings on a chess board who direct their pawns on the basis of national interest, not moral obligation. Thus, realists often argue that conflict is justified if a threat is perceived, even if it is not yet fully realized. It is easy, therefore, to see how people so often frame political realism as the perpetrator of the Vietnam War. But that accusation rests upon the misconception that realists are, at the core, military hawks. Realists would use force when there is a clear threat; a clear means by which the state can achieve its goal; and a clear exit strategy if success is not achieved. None of the aforementioned criteria were established in the Vietnam War. There was not a clear, credible, and powerful threat that Ho Chi Minh posed to the United States; there was not a cogent military strategy to combat Vietnamese guerilla warfare, and there was no solid exit strategy, other than carpetbombing Southeast Asia. Thus, it is clear that the Vietnam War was not an example of political realism used in practice.

When assessing whether military action is warranted or not, a political realist would not only only consider the justifications for action, but also the chances of success. As Hans Morgenthau argues in his acclaimed book, Politics Among Nations, “A rational foreign policy minimizes risks and maximizes benefits and, hence, complies both with the moral precept of prudence and the political requirement of success.” Hans Morgenthau, one of the founders of classical realism, is explaining that to take action without favorability of success is generally counter-productive. In Vietnam, though on the surface it may have appeared that the might of the American military would surely overcome Communist guerillas, American policymakers failed to take into account the mindset and the tactics of the Viet Minh. The North Vietnamese Communists saw this fight as an existential battle between Western powers and national sovereignty. Death was not an end to be avoided, but a means to achieve a goal. As a Viet Minh leader stated, “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.” This idea was fundamental to the way that the Viet Minh fought the Americans. But American policymakers consistently overlooked these harsh realities due to a blind sense of optimism, based on feeling rather than reality. As a former Secretary of State during the war stated, “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point.” When in reality, it turned out to be the Americans who reached their breaking point before the Viet Minh. US policy failures in Vietnam are plentiful, and many of them stem from a false preconceived notion that simply because America has a stronger military than any other civilization in human history, it can, therefore, win every war. After roughly 58,000 American deaths and $120 billion dollars, The United States learned that even if you win every battle, you may not win every war.

A realist would argue that if a war is begun, the states involved ought to have the necessary means to finish it; otherwise defeat or stalemate is inevitable. When the United States gradually began the war on Viet Minh, the ideals were not necessarily unjustifyable. Containment theory was, in fact, constructed mostly by realists such as George Kennan. What branches away from the foundations of classical realism can be understood through former President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, “we will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and the success of liberty.” Though a rhetorical and emotional masterclass, it was proved inaccurate that the US would be willing or able to truly “bear any burden” for the pursuit of liberty in the Viet Cong. The most important principle of international affairs is to avoid committing the state to ends which exceed the available means. In short, there are three main pillars that must all stand strong for a democracy to sustain itself in a military intervention; the state must have the necessary funds to continue the war, it must have enough skilled manpower to accomplish its goal, and it must have domestic support from its constituency. As the Vietnam War dragged on, domestic support was the first of those pillars that began to teeter. By the mid-1960s, nation-wide protests against the war raged on across college campuses. Once the domestic support fell apart, US policymakers had to make an impossible choice: either be the administration that loses the war to the Communists, or continue to aimlessly send young Americans and billions of dollars to a warzone, about which the people do not care. President Lyndon Johnson made his decision fairly clearly in his inaugural address: “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” But even while this decision was made, intelligence assessments proved that sending more troops and money to the region would not end the war, in fact, it may even weaken the US’s position: “I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives--even after we have paid terrible costs.” Essentially, countless American policymakers valued their own legacy over both the position of the United States on the global stage and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Such a decision, though not uncommon in geopolitics, opposes realist thought because it does not value the state’s national interests at the forefront.

The Vietnam war is widely considered one of, if not the, greatest foreign policy failures in the history of the United States. But even though political realism is constantly blamed as the perpetrator for such a failure, the mistakes of US policy in Indochina actively oppose realist principles because of the US’s blind confidence, failure to understand the realities of guerilla warfare, and overestimating the might of the US military. When an unchecked king doesn’t move his pawns on the basis of national interests, it shouldn’t be a surprise when those pawns fall to another king who does.

Bibliography

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Childree, Aaron. “Public Opinion and the Vietnam War: How Race, Gender, and Partisanship Affect Views toward Military Conflicts.” Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-opinion-and-vietnam-war-how-race-gender-and-partisanship-affect-views-toward-military.

Dorothy Hutchinson. “Proposal for an Honorable Peace in Vietnam. Philadelphia, PA.” JSTOR. https://jstor.org/stable/community.33125278.

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No Author. Kennan and Containment, 1947. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/kennan.

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Sempa, Francis. “Conservative Realism and Vietnam.” Modern Age. https://modernagejournal.com/conservative-realism-and-vietnam/250774/.

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“The Vietnam War in Forty Quotes.” The Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/articles/vietnam-war-forty-quotes.

Zeus hurled lightning. Poseidon shook the earth. Dionysus drove men mad. The Olympians terrified humankind not because they were monsters, but because they were forces of extraordinary power operating under a different, non-human playbook.

Mythos, the name Anthropic chose for its latest AI model, is presumably not accidental.

Anthropic has released a preview of it to a limited number of tech companies, but not the public. The reason: the model has already found thousands of vulnerabilities in “every major operating system and web browser.” (the Economist) In the hands of hackers or rogue states, that capability is a weapon.

Then there is the sandbox escape. Mythos broke out of the isolated environment designed to prevent it accessing the outside world, contacted a researcher via email and made a series of public posts, without any instruction to do so. According to Anthropic, this is not just a bug. This is goal-directed behavior operating without adequate constraints, and the fix is not merely patching a bug. (The Next Web)

In this light, Anthropic’s decision to gate access to Mythos is the right call. Luckily, for now, their plan is a restricted-access program called Project Glasswing, in which partners such as Apple, Google, and the Linux Foundation will work to shore up cyber defences before public release. (The Economist)

Yet, one careful release is not enough. The next breakthrough in AI might not come from an organization as responsible as Anthropic is right now. Furthermore, there are great incentives to push forward with rapid AI adoption without concern for the risks, just one being the geopolitical competition between the USA and China. (Council on Foreign Relations)

The pressure to strip safety guardrails is not abstract. When Anthropic refused to let Claude be used for mass domestic surveillance of American citizens or to power fully autonomous weapons systems, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the company a deadline: comply or lose its $200 million Pentagon contract. (CNN) When Anthropic held firm, Hegseth declared the company a “supply chain risk to national security,” barring Pentagon contractors from doing any business with Anthropic. He also called Anthropic’s position “fundamentally incompatible with American principles.” (CBS News) When the world’s leading superpower punishes safety-conscious behavior, that is not a good sign.

What happens when there is no one left to say no?

The Hegseth-Anthropic standoff is not just a procurement dispute. It is a preview of what happens when the incentives of national security and AI safety collide head-on, and it has direct implications for the conflicts shaping the world right now.

Consider Ukraine. Both sides already use AI for drone targeting, battlefield logistics, and signal intelligence. The question of whether a human must approve a strike before a drone executes it is not theoretical; it is being answered in real time on the front lines of the Donbas. If the norm shifts from “human in the loop” to “AI decides,” the decision to kill becomes faster, cheaper, and harder to hold anyone accountable for. A government that punishes companies for insisting on human oversight accelerates that shift.

The same logic applies to the South China Sea, where the US and China are locked in an escalating contest of military posturing. Autonomous naval systems, AI-driven surveillance, and algorithmic threat assessment are already being deployed or tested by both sides. An AI arms race in which neither power is willing to accept safety constraints for fear of falling behind the other is not a hypothetical scenario; it is the stated strategic posture of both governments. The Council on Foreign Relations has warned that 2026 may be the year in which the trajectory of AI governance is decided, and that the window for establishing shared norms is closing. (Council on Foreign Relations)

In the Middle East, AI-assisted targeting systems have already drawn international scrutiny. When an algorithm selects targets at a rate no human analyst can meaningfully review, the label “human in the loop” becomes a legal fiction. The downstream consequence is not just more civilian casualties, but the erosion of the principle that someone, somewhere, is responsible for the decision to use force. Strip that principle away, and the laws of armed conflict lose their teeth.

The pattern across all of these theaters is the same: AI makes military operations faster and cheaper, which makes restraint more costly, which makes the actors who insist on restraint look like obstacles. Anthropic’s refusal, and the punishment it received, is the civilian version of that dynamic. If no company is willing to absorb the cost of saying no, and no government is willing to protect those that do, then the safety constraints disappear not because they were technically impossible, but because they were economically and politically inconvenient.

So is AI actually controllable?

Partly. According to the 2026 International AI Safety Report, risk management in AI has improved. Many AI developers have published Frontier Safety Reports, which describe plans for the evaluation and control of AI models. Governments have created new instruments of regulation for AI, such as the European Union’s General-Purpose AI Code of Practice. Yet significant risks remain. For example, the rate of success of prompt injection attacks, where attackers give AI malicious prompts such as jailbreaking an AI, remains high. (International AI Safety Report)

But “partly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The 2026 Safety Report also notes that the institutions responsible for AI governance are underfunded and often lack the technical capacity to evaluate the systems they are supposed to oversee. The EU’s Code of Practice is voluntary. The US has no federal AI safety legislation. China’s AI regulations are extensive on paper but designed primarily to maintain state control, not to protect populations from misuse. The gap between what the current regulatory infrastructure can do and what it needs to do is wide, and it is growing faster than the institutions are.

Mythos will not be the last model too dangerous to release publicly, and the next one may not come from a lab as careful as Anthropic. The institutions being built are imperfect, underfunded, and too slow. They are also the only real leverage we have.

Unlike the Greeks with their Olympians, we built these gods ourselves. We still have some say in the rules they operate by. The question is whether we use it in time.

Bibliography

CBS News. “Hegseth declares Anthropic ‘supply chain risk to national security.’” CBS News, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-declares-anthropic-supply-chain-risk/

CNN. “Hegseth gives Anthropic deadline over AI military use.” CNN, February 24, 2026. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/24/tech/hegseth-anthropic-ai-military-amodei

Council on Foreign Relations. “How 2026 Could Decide the Future of Artificial Intelligence.” CFR, 2026. https://www.cfr.org/articles/how-2026-could-decide-future-artificial-intelligence

International AI Safety Report. “2026 Report: Extended Summary for Policymakers.” International AI Safety Report, 2026. https://internationalaisafetyreport.org/publication/2026-report-extended-summary-policymakers

The Economist. “How dangerous is Mythos, Anthropic’s new AI model?” The Economist, April 8, 2026. https://www.economist.com/business/2026/04/08/how-dangerous-is-mythos-anthropics-new-ai-model

The Next Web. “Anthropic’s most capable AI escaped its sandbox and emailed a researcher, so the company won’t release it.” The Next Web, 2026.https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropics-most-capable-ai-escaped-its-sandbox-and-emailed-a-researcher-so-the-company-wont-release-it

According to Bertrand Russell, “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill of Locke.” To what extent was he correct?

Bertrand Russell once suggested that Adolf Hitler’s ideas stem from the philosophy of Rousseau, while those of Roosevelt and Churchill are rooted in the thinking of Locke.¹ In this essay, I argue that Russell’s statement is only partially true. What does it mean to be an ‘outcome’ of a philosopher? While Hitler, Churchill, and Roosevelt’s policies show intellectual connections to Rousseau and Locke respectively, they are not direct outcomes. Instead, they are fundamental transformations of the original ideas. An ‘outcome’ of philosophical thought can manifest through direct adoption, adapted influence, or distortion, where concepts are reshaped for different purposes. Russell’s claim assumes continuity, but history reveals a disruption of ideas.

This complexity appears in both philosophical lineages. When later thinkers transform original concepts to serve different purposes, are these authentic developments, or a perversion of their ideas? Russell’s claim assumes that ideas retain their original meaning over time, rather than becoming fundamentally altered through reinterpretation and historical application. I further argue that these ideas were reshaped not because of loyalty to the philosopher’s intent but to serve a deeper tribal impulse: The desire to secure power and influence, to stay loyal to one’s own group and dominate others. This instinct to prioritize one’s own people acted as the unseen hand that transforms these abstract ideals into instruments of political purpose.

Both philosophers created vulnerabilities that enabled this distortion. Rousseau’s general will assumes moral absolutism, one collective right that all must follow, which allows later thinkers to brand dissent as immoral, going far past the ethical boundaries that he set. ² Locke established broad principles without guidance on how to concretely implement them, creating space for selective interpretation. ³

Rousseau’s philosophy centers on human nature and social corruption. Humans are inherently good but become corrupted by society’s desires. This corruption arises from private property and social institutions, creating inequality and lost freedom. As Rousseau argued, “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society”–marking humanity’s departure from natural equality.⁴

His works ‘The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’ and ‘The Social Contract’ explain how civilization introduced artificial inequalities. Individuals become subjugated to the general will, a collective force defining freedom not as personal choice, but as unity with the people’s will. “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains,” he famously declared, capturing the central paradox of human existence under social institutions. ⁵

Furthermore, Rousseau’s general will also established ethical boundaries that Russell’s supposed ‘outcome’ violated, requiring civic equality for all people, deliberative democracy, and universal inclusion. Rousseau envisioned true freedom through collective lawmaking. Freedom comes from obedience to laws individuals have prescribed for themselves, achieved through participating in the general will representing collective interest. Society should allow individuals to collectively determine laws, ensuring equality and freedom for all kinds of people.

However, Rousseau’s core assumptions created interpretive vulnerabilities. The moral authority of the general will and his anti-pluralist views left room for misinterpretation as ideas diffused. Originally grounded in democratic ideals, these concepts were reinterpreted to legitimize state dominance and suppress individual freedom through moral unity. By defining freedom as obedience to collective will while rejecting pluralism, Rousseau created a framework easily used to justify repression. This absolutism excluded moral compromise, positioning opposition as attacks on truth itself.

As the ideas of Rousseau diffused throughout history, they were reinterpreted in ways that diverged from his original democratic intent. His ‘general will’ was intended for democratic unity, however its abstraction and moral absolutism created an ideological rigidity that left room for distortion.

Philosopher Johann Fichte built upon this idea, redefining it in ethnonationalist terms by introducing the concept of ‘Volksgeist,’ or national spirit, positioning the state as the ultimate moral authority. Hegel further reinforced this idea, elevating the state to the position of the highest expression of ethical life, where one’s life only becomes meaningful through subordination and dedication to national unity. Other thinkers like Treitschke, Wagner, Gobineau, and Chamberlain deepened this shift, blending state absolutism with racial myth further glorifying the German people, culminating in Hitler’s fascist vision.⁶

What began as Rousseau’s theory of civic unity and democratic liberty was fundamentally repurposed. These ideas, once tied to Rousseau, were entirely reoriented to serve nationalism and racial purity. This was not a logical extension of his philosophy, but rather a radical distortion, enabled by the ambiguity and absolutism within Rousseau’s original framework.

Hitler’s Nazi regime enforced unity through race and violence. Hitler’s version of the general will replaced civic unity for all with racial conformity and state violence. The general will in Rousseau’s hands was a democratic ideal, but Hitler turned it into a mechanism for authoritarian control and ethnic exclusion.

This was evident in policies like the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of citizenship, and ‘Gleichschaltung,’ which removed pluralism in favor of ideological conformity. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “The state is a means to end… [of] a community of physically and psychically homogeneous creatures,”⁷ which reveals a vision rooted not in Rousseau’s inclusive civic unity, but in an exclusionary racial ideology that defined political legitimacy by ethnic sameness and vilified so-called ‘degenerate’ elements of society presented by the diversity of peoples, portraying them as unworthy of belonging.

Thus, while Rousseau’s absolutism aimed at moral clarity, it laid a philosophical groundwork exploitable by malevolent actors to reframe it into a justification for domination. Hitler co-opted the concept of collective will, not to promote civic unity, but to elevate a racially defined ‘people,’ the so-called Aryans, while systematically dehumanizing and persecuting those deemed decadent or alien, most notably, the Jews.

This transformation was not an accident–but a purposeful repurposing over time–driven not by philosophical allegiance, but by the will to power. As the ideas of Rousseau diffused, they instrumentalized Rousseau’s language to legitimize and increase the influence of their own peoples–a political project rooted in domination, conquest, and the elevation of a singular group, their own tribe. The moral vocabulary was Rousseau’s, but the underlying motive? The pursuit of total influence and exclusionary supremacy.

John Locke’s philosophy is based on ideas of empiricism. Central to his philosophy was his belief in the concept of ‘tabula rasa.’ Where all knowledge is acquired through experience and observation and not divine revelation or innate ideas. Additionally, Locke believed that every person is born with inalienable, natural rights: life, liberty, and property. These are the foundations of a legitimate government system, formed by the consent of those being governed to protect these rights. ⁸

However, Locke’s philosophy, while morally powerful, is philosophically broad and underspecified. His concepts of natural rights and government by consent are overly abstract and flexible due to the fact that he gave very little guidance on how these principles should be applied in different situations, leaving significant room for interpretation.

For example, his idea of ‘consent of the governed’ is ambiguous as he did not concretely define how such consent is obtained, measured, or maintained over time. His faith in just principles leading to just institutions underestimated how those same principles could be selectively applied or manipulated depending on political necessity or ideological intent.

This malleability of ideas is evident in the political ideas and actions of both Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. While both were important advocates for liberal democracy, they also enacted policies that conflicted with and contradicted Locke’s original principles.

For instance, Churchill authorized the suspension of habeas corpus during WWII through Defense Regulation 18B, which allowed for the internment of individuals without trial.⁹ This directly contradicts Locke’s emphasis on due process and the sanctity of individual rights. Furthermore, Churchill’s defense of the British Empire and opposition to Indian self-rule violates Locke’s foundational idea that legitimate government must be based on the consent of the governed.

Domestically, Churchill upheld ideas of liberty, yet abroad, he maintained colonial dominance, showing a selective application of Locke’s supposedly universal principles. This demonstrates how Locke’s broad framework could be interpreted to justify contradictory positions depending on political context and necessity. Churchill’s selective application of Lockean shows how he is impacted by a desire to elevate his own group of people, his tribe. His vision of liberty was not universal but bounded by what he saw as civilizational hierarchy. He extended sovereignty to those he deemed capable of self-governance while maintaining a tight grip over those he considered racially or culturally inferior. Like Hitler’s exploitation of the collective will to elevate the Aryans, Churchill elevated the English civilization as the natural bearer of liberty, treating Indian independence not as a right, but as a threat to the natural rights Locke proposed.

Roosevelt also diverged from Locke’s philosophy through his actions and policies, though in different ways. In his Four Freedoms speech, Roosevelt introduced concepts like ‘freedom from want,’ expanding the meaning of liberty to include economic security. This shifts from Locke’s idea of liberty as freedom from government interference to a more proactive role of the state in ensuring welfare. Moreover, his most stark violation of Lockean principles emerged through actions such as Executive Order 9066, forcibly evacuating over 120,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. It was enacted without explicit public consent, challenging Locke’s principle that governmental power must protect the natural rights of all individuals and is justified through the consent of the governed. ¹⁰ This clearly reveals the selective nature of Roosevelt’s commitment to the natural rights of all people: while championing freedom and democracy for white Americans, he systematically denied life, liberty, and property to those he deemed outside the national tribe.

Thus, Roosevelt’s departure from Lockean limitations stemmed not just from economic necessity but from a tribal understanding of American exceptionalism. The New Deal represented a desire for power of a particular version of American identity. One that expanded federal authority to protect his group of people against economic forces. Japanese-American internment camps serve as the clearest example of how tribal impulses could override the very Lockean principles he claimed to defend. The Four Freedoms speech reveals this tribal aspect: freedom was to be secured for Americans and their allies, where economic nationalism and wartime policies showcase how quickly universal principles could be subordinated in order to prioritize group survival and dominance.

Both leaders, despite operating within Lockean frameworks, ultimately deviated from his ideas by subordinating abstract principles to tribal loyalties. Churchill to imperial civilization, Roosevelt to American nationalism. This tribal desire for power manifested not as philosophical consistency, but as the pragmatic use of ideas to advance their respective peoples’ interests.

Therefore, the core flaw in Russell’s statement lies in its assumption of direct outcome, rather than acknowledging the multifaceted process of reinterpretation. Rousseau’s belief in a singular moral general will, a form of moral absolutism, enabled later authoritarian thinkers to suppress dissent in the name of virtue. Locke offered a highly abstract conception of natural rights and government by consent, but his failure to specify implementation allowed vastly different interpretations to emerge.

Ultimately, Russell’s assertion that Hitler stems from Rousseau, and Roosevelt and Churchill from Locke, captures a partial glimpse of the truth, but oversimplifies the relationship between philosophy and historical action. While the ideas of Rousseau and Locke influenced later political developments, the transformations they underwent through time and context mean that Russell’s statement should reflect correlation rather than direct philosophical causation, leaving him only partially correct.

They diverged from these philosophical principles not merely out of misunderstanding, but because of a deeper, more fundamental desire for control, legitimacy, and historical influence. In this light, Rousseau and Locke provided lofty ideas as tools to be used as pretext for the return to something far more primal.

Beneath the surface of enlightenment and reason lay the ancient impulse to dominate, to reassert the tribe over the individual, and to bend ideology to serve ambition.

References:

1. Russell, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy. Simon & Schuster, 1945.

2. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Translated by Jonathan Bennett, Early Modern Texts, 1762, pp. 6-54. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf.

3. Griffith, Mark F. “John Locke’s Influence on American Government and Public Administration.” Journal of Management History, vol. 3, no. 3, 1997, pp. 224–237. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552529710181578.

4. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. Translated by Ian Johnston, ETH Zurich, 2009, pp. 11–31. www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125494/5019_Rousseau_Discourse_on_the_Origin_of_Inequality.pdf.

5. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Translated by Jonathan Bennett, Early Modern Texts, 1762, pp. 6–54, https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf.

6. Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Simon & Schuster, 1960, pp. 97–113.

7. Bengtsson, Staffan. “The Nation’s Body: Disability and Deviance in the Writings of Adolf Hitler.” Disability & Society, vol. 33, no. 3, 15 Jan. 2018, p. 9, https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2018.1423955.

8. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Rod Hay, vol. V in The Works of John Locke. A New Edition, Corrected, printed for Thomas Tegg et al., 1823. York University, 2025. PDF, pp. 105–167, https://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Locke.pdf. Accessed 9 June 2025.

9. Hansard, UK Parliament. “Defence Regulation 18B (Re-Consideration).” 16 June 1944. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1944-06-16/debates/863d990b-64d6-47cd-a24b-2db8b12b37f0/DefenceRegulation18B.

10. Schumacher, Luke J. “Franklin D. Roosevelt, World War II, and the Reality of Constitutional Statesmanship.” Texas National Security Review, 9 May 2024. https://tnsr.org/2024/05/franklin-d-roosevelt-world-war-ii-and-the-reality-of-constitutional-statesmanship/.

For the last 250 years, America’s veterans have put their lives on the line to preserve and protect the way of life that we hold so near and dear to our hearts. However, instead of rewarding them for their sacrifices, today veterans are quietly subjected to a policy that does the opposite: these men and women are penalized financially for the very injuries they sustained in service. The Major Richard Star Act would fix this problem.

“The American Legion strongly supports the latest effort to eliminate the unjust offset that penalizes thousands of combat-injured veterans.

This long-overdue reform—backed by The American Legion and more than 60 other military and veteran organizations—would ensure that combat-injured retirees can receive both their Department of Defense retirement pay and the disability compensation earned through their sacrifices. Current law reduces retirement pay by the exact amount of VA disability compensation received, a policy that punishes wounded veterans for their service and injury. We call this what it is: a “wounded veteran tax,” and it must end.”

The history of this problem is complicated. Initially, Congress wanted to ensure that veterans would not receive two forms of federal pay for the same period of service (retirement pay and disability compensation, respectively). This concept makes sense on paper, but severely backfired in reality. Reform is necessary.

“The standalone bill has overwhelming bipartisan support, with 313 cosponsors in the House and 77 in the Senate as of January 2026—more than enough to pass if brought to a floor vote.

The American Legion urges Congress to do right by our nation’s combat-wounded heroes and pass this amendment without delay. These veterans have already paid more than their fair share.”

This common sense legislation would represent an obvious improvement to our nation. However, its delay highlights a more fundamental issue within our legislative politics - intense polarization and fiscal constraints make new laws like this harder and harder to sign into law. The Act would cost several billion dollars over the next decade, which would add even more strain to the nation’s historically large national debt. It also has not been prioritized by congressional leadership: a sad but true reality of DC politics. However, inaction is not worth the cost. The result is that these veterans, unlike many of their non-disabled or non-combat counterparts, are denied the full benefits they have rightfully earned. It is only right that United States veterans should be protected from this tragic legal injustice. Congress should put partisan politics to the side and do the right thing: Pass the Major Richard Star Act.

Left internationalism is an ideology that champions egalitarian and revolutionary rhetoric on an international scale. This essay will evaluate the extent to which left internationalism pervaded within advocacy groups during the 1968 Columbia protests, using one specific document as a microcosm. The document I will analyze comes directly from Columbia University’s historical archives, which I gained access to through my Contemporary World History course. Here is the document, typed out:

“Today Third World students and community people from all over the city are coming to this campus to express solidarity with the brothers and sisters in the Third World Center in Hamilton Hall and with all Columbia people who have been on strike. Some people on this campus have mistakenly viewed the community related demands as somehow divisive and unrelated to the main focus of the strike – the war. Nothing could be further from the truth. U.S. imperialism must be fought on all fronts. We express solidarity with the Third World students when they said yesterday:

We celebrate the struggle of oppressed people throughout the world, particularly the advances of the Indochinese people in their battle against U.S. imperialism. We express our solidarity with all progressive forces against oppression and call once again for those on this campus who are not part of the oppressive machinery to assume a responsible position and return to the strike. We will hold an anti-imperialist rally on Tuesday, May 2, at 1:00 p.m., at the sundial.

Only by uniting with Third World students and community people can an effective force be forged that will smash the war machine. This machinery of profit and death oppresses not only the Indochinese but Third World peoples in America. Our own struggle for liberation is inseparable from that of the Indochinese peoples. Our strength is in unity. We call on all white students to join with their Third World brothers and sisters today.

HAMILTON – KENT COLLECTIVE

MASS MEETING TONIGHT AT 8:00 P.M. Hewitt Lounge Ferris Booth

Flash!
J. Edgar Hoover is dead.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE”

The author of this specific Columbia protester channeled left internationalist rhetoric, highlighting a shared struggle of all oppressed third world peoples. An important facet of this type of political thought is that the struggle for equality should not just be fought within one state, but across borders and countries: In the same way that Marx and Engels shout “Working Men of All Countries, Unite,” the author of this document ends his letter with: “Our own struggle for liberation is inseparable from that of the Indochinese peoples. Our strength is in unity” (Box 11, Folder 21). The influence of leftist rhetoric is clear, and informs the worldview of the Columbia protestors.

Interestingly, the language used in this document also reflects Marxist rhetoric. Key to Marxist political thought is the hierarchical division of human groups into classes, with an underlying power dynamic controlling the hierarchy. The author of this document applies a Marxist framework to his current life experience: Instead of referring to a proletariat class as Marx would, the author mentions the Third World as the class of oppressed peoples. He juxtaposes the Third World students with “the war machine” instead of “the bourgeoisie.” He does so by explaining that the machine “oppresses not only the Indochinese but Third World peoples in America” (Box 11, Folder 21). He continues by advocating for the smashing of said war machine, in the same way that the Luddites, as an example, smashed machinery during the industrial revolution. Given that the war machine is a general metaphor for the Western establishment, the call to smash it is clearly a revolutionary call. Marxism, by definition, also champions a revolution against the oppressive establishment. In addition, central to a Marxist framework is also anti-capitalism, which the author includes: he expands on his war machine analogy by calling it a “machine of profit and death” (Box 11, Folder 21). The author sees a link between war and profit, suggesting that there is a financial incentive for the waging of war in Vietnam. This perceived conflict of interest adds to the general anger directed towards the U.S. military and its adjacent institutions, such as the ROTC and IDA. The language used in this document is not unique. For instance, in another letter, Columbia student Mr. Jomo Raskin similarly refers to the University’s military-oriented institutions as a “racist and imperialist scheme” (Box 11, Folder 21). Mr. Raskin also, in several places, calls for revolution. Both of these statements align with the egalitarian and revolutionary rhetoric consistent with extreme left internationalism. In order to understand the point of view of the more radical protesters, we must understand the lens through which they view the world.

One limitation of this document is that it presents one of the more extreme viewpoints held by Columbia students. In addition to using leftist language throughout the letter, the author ends by writing “ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE” (Box 11, Folder 21) instead of signing his name. The rhetoric is clearly anti-establishment, as it implies that power must be removed from one party and transferred to another. More conservative or establishment students would be disillusioned with the radical change that the author calls for. Therefore, this document appealed to only a small, specific group of students at Columbia. In reality, there was a wide variety of viewpoints expressed by Columbia students, many of which were against the protests all together. For example, the very name of the “Majority Coalition,” which wrote strong letters against the anarchic tactics of the SDS, suggests that they felt most students were in fact against the violent protests. Additionally, the beliefs of the country as a whole were clearly opposed to the point of view expressed in the document: President Richard Nixon eventually won his 1968 campaign bid on a promise for “law and order,” which was a direct response to the violence and chaos of the 1960s.

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Once the dust settled in Europe and Japan after the Second World War, a new world order began to emerge, in which the United States and the Soviet Union stood as the only two global superpowers. The bipolarity between the Soviet Union and the United States was dangerous but peaceful. For the most part, middle powers sided with either pole, on the basis of morals and shared ideology (at least theoretically). But when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the United States stood as the unipolar power in the international system. This new development ushered in a world in which great powers faced few international threats compared to those faced by the behemoths of the prior century.

Today, the world order is experiencing another transition. China, Europe, Russia, and others hold great power, rivalling that of the United States. But even after years of this transition, the uncertainty of this new order remains vast. The new international system is complicated, and not yet defined. But to understand what it might look like - and the role of middle powers within it - the contemporary Middle East and Napoleon-era Europe are perfect places to examine

This essay presents three different, yet connected theses about our new world order:

1) The perception of a grave threat guarantees a fluid and transactional system of alliances.

2) Pragmatic (or realist) foreign policy exists as a reaction to geopolitical threats, hence it is less prominent in times of peace, like the post-Cold War era.

3) Recent geopolitical tensions and actions can be easily understood through the lens of points 1 and 2, using historical (Napoleon-era Europe) and contemporary (the contemporary Middle East) examples.

The first and most prevalent pattern, which seems to repeat throughout all multipolar systems, is that alliances are transactional, fluid, and pragmatic rather than ideological and constraining. In the early 19th century, the European balance of power consisted of a multipolar system in which Napoleon’s power was countered by a large rival alliance which was made up of Russia, the United Kingdom, and Austria, while the French alliance included Bavaria, and to some extent, Spain. The point of this information is not to educate you about 1805, but rather to show that in this multipolar system, Russia was not aligned with Austria and the United Kingdom because they supported the same football club or political philosopher; But because France posed such a grave threat that a pragmatic transactional alliance was much more strategically sound than an ideological one. Bavaria, similarly, was not aligned with France because it fancied the same style of croissant as Napoleon, but rather because they sought common strategic national interests that worked hand in hand. Compare this form of international relations with that of the ‘rules based international order’, a unipolar system in which ideology was fundamental to the ways in which foreign affairs were conducted. The United Kingdom and France, for example, were aligned with the United States for many reasons, but especially because they were ideologically compatible, all placing an emphasis on enlightenment ideas such as liberty and democracy.

The contemporary Middle East, another multipolar system (albeit a regional one), is the latest example of what alliances might look like in the future of the international system. States in the Middle East have lived under a multipolar regional system for decades, and they understand what that means better than most other states. For example, in September of 2025, Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense deal with Pakistan, indirectly abandoning the United States as its indispensable defense partner - not because the Saudis shared similar styles of governance with Pakistan, but because Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), the Saudi Arabian ruler, saw in Pakistan a better opportunity for security in a time of rising regional threats. This was a strategic transactional shift based on a rising threat, rather than an ideological shift. Similarly, the UAE has covertly been funding and arming the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan. But is Mohammad bin-Zayed (the Emirati ruler) doing this because he likes the colors of the RSF flag? Or because he sees a strategic national interest in countering Saudi influence in the Horn of Africa, during a time when regional influence in the Horn is highly prioritized? In a multipolar order, states feel that their international counterparts could grow into powerful and malevolent competitors, if not existential threats. This fear causes states to act as powerfully and as pragmatically as possible.

The second pattern in the contemporary Middle East that can help predict the role of the middle powers in our emerging global multipolar system is its ‘free market’ of alliances, as opposed to the locked coalitions of the old system. The first and most obvious example is the growing schism between the UAE and Saudi Arabia (for an in-depth analysis of this shift, see my previous essay, here). Until December of 2025, the UAE and Saudi Arabia were aligned as a Sunni counter to the great regional influence of Iran, a Shiite power. But since October 7th, 2023, Iranian regional power has been vastly degraded by U.S. and Israeli military operations, and by internal strife. Without a powerful common enemy, the foreign policies of Saudi Arabia and the UAE began to diverge and, in many cases, to conflict. Without the necessity of an alliance with the UAE, Saudi Arabia swiftly and effectively shifted to other regional counterparts such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Qatar. Simultaneously, the UAE shifted its alignment towards India and Israel. These free-flowing alliances are more potent in the Middle East than anywhere else in the world because Middle Eastern states understand multipolarity. In such a system, they know, the safest and most effective form of alliances are transactional and fluid, rather than ideological and constraining.

These patterns in the Middle East do more than help us predict the future of global multipolarity. They also cast Donald Trump’s foreign policy, with its extreme shifts, in a new light. Trump’s conduct of foreign affairs has often been criticized as hawkishly pragmatic, to the point of amorality. While subject to valid critiques, such as foreign policy is not entirely unexpected. Rather, it is an extreme form of an approach that a leader in a shifting multipolar system would naturally take. For example, compare MBS’s regional shifts with Trump’s: Saudi Arabia partially replaced its reliance on the United States for defense because MBS saw greater benefit to the Kingdom through a Pakistani defense deal than solely an American one. Saudi Arabia did not change its policy because of an ideological divergence from the US; rather, MBS saw an opportunity for greater security in an inherently insecure multipolar system. Trump, similarly, has recently shown great hostility towards America’s NATO allies. But Trump is not rewriting US-NATO relations because the US is no longer ideologically compatible with Europe; rather, his approach reflects the belief that if an alliance isn’t producing enough results, it should face major reform or complete dissolution. Alliances are always questioned for effectiveness, of course, but in a multipolar system of fluid and transactional alliances, leaders like MBS or Trump feel more at liberty to reform their alliances - or even dissolve them altogether.

But European relations are not the only setting in which these parallels are clear. In January, 2026, the United States launched a military operation to capture the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and remove him from authority. To many, this seemed like an irrational and irresponsible policy on the part of the United States. You do not have to agree with the intervention, but to understand the strategic justification and the broader logic behind such an operation, one must understand the reality of multipolarity, in which all states are in a constant state of fear that an international counterpart will grow into a malevolent behemoth which seeks to destroy them. This great fear causes states to act as powerfully and pragmatically as possible. In other words, pragmatism is a reaction to “the fear of (or the desire for) the shifting of the balances of power.” (Forging the Modern World, James Carter and Richard Warren) Hezbollah, Iran, China, and Russia have all been involved in Venezuela, and the United States has perceived this as a direct threat to American interests. With great fear often comes a great showcase of power. The United States conducted such a showcase on January 3rd, 2026, capturing Maduro and his wife. From the perspective of the previous international system – based on rules and ideological alliances – this military operation was an immoral, unjust, and chaotic show of power. But this outlook disregards a fundamental pattern of multipolar systems: that multipolarity demands a more pragmatic and strategic approach to foreign affairs.

To be sure, a pragmatic foreign policy is not isolated to multipolar systems. For example, the United States armed and funded the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to help counter Soviet aggression (during a famously bipolar international order). The US and the Mujahideen were, by no definition, ideologically aligned. But they shared a common goal of impeding Soviet military control. Pragmatism is a principle based on fear. When fear is isolated to one other great power, as in the Soviet Union to the United States, pragmatism is still present, but mainly isolated to confrontation with the opposing great power. Multipolar systems, on the other hand, guarantee that almost every other state either is an existential threat, or could quickly become one. This forces a sense of pragmatism on the highest scale in which all states feel existentially threatened - and from all directions. The new world order is not yet fully developed, and its alliances are not yet fully shaped, but to better understand how it may look, one must understand the realities of a world with more threats.

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As the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union both began to crumble, the United States stood as the unipolar power in the international system. Since then, American policymakers have based their foreign policies on the expansion of democracy. In some cases, this idea worked beautifully, as in Cambodia and (to some extent) Liberia. But in other cases, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, American foreign policy, which was centered on the fundamental principle of the expansion of democracy, failed miserably. Since those failures, Americans on both the left and right of the political spectrum have questioned this policy’s validity and effectiveness. So what should American interventions really be based on? Should the United States focus its foreign policy on the expansion of democracy - or on something else entirely?

Sprouting from the rubble of Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War, a Communist movement (the Khmer Rouge) swept through the country and established itself as the governing body. For years, the Khmer Rouge executed one of the deadliest mass-killings in the 20th century. It slaughtered around 2 million Cambodians, mostly Khmer Buddhists, because of their class, education, and perceived disloyalty to the state. Buddhist Monks and other religious leaders were also killed because the concept of religion was banned - the Khmer Rouge believed that loyalty should be to the state above all else. In the late 1970s, Vietnamese forces toppled the Khmer Rouge as the governing entity in Cambodia, but what was, at first, a controlled genocide turned into armed chaos. This instability continued until the early 1990s, when the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) sought to bring democratic reforms to the state. By the end of 1993, UNTAC established a relatively functioning democratic system and popular elections were legitimized. Though not a Western liberal democracy, Cambodia functioned as a constitutional monarchy with democratic reforms. The UN’s success in establishing a constitutional electoral system in such an unstable region brought hope across the West of a multilateral system in which freedom could sing the same song abroad that it did in Washington. In the case of Cambodia, the use of democracy as a foreign policy of Western states was an incredibly effective and moral approach to international relations. It was thought that a new era was being ushered in, in which great powers would have the ability to bring a liberal enlightenment to non-Western societies. After Cambodia, the Western multilateral force focused its foreign policy on other unstable regions, with the intention of bringing about liberal democracy; the first of these was Somalia.

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In the 1990s, Somalia was undergoing a violent civil war in which food was used as a weapon. Starvation and famine ensued after supplies were cut off to certain civilian populations. President George H.W. Bush saw this instability as an opportunity to showcase American power as a force for good throughout the world. The U.S. led the U.N. in Operation Restore Hope, in which the U.N. would provide food relief through airdrops and take control of certain shipping lanes. This started as a very successful intervention - the famine, which was at one point fatal, became much more manageable. But quickly American and international intervention shifted from simply food relief, to impeding the ongoing civil war, in which Mohammad Farah Aidid sought to overthrow the dictator in control of the country. Aidid’s militia was furious at the Americans for preventing his regime from taking power. So, on October 3rd, 1993, Aidid’s militia shot down four Black Hawk helicopters – and killed 18 Americans. In the first year of the Clinton presidency, the United States evacuated its forces out of Somalia. This concluded the first failure of the so-called “New World Order”. What started with good intentions resulted in further chaos in Somalia and 18 dead Americans. Democracy was, by no definition, achieved from US intervention. This started the period of American history when intervention was seen as an obstacle, not an opportunity. American foreign policy, which was initially focused on spreading freedom and food, became focused on limiting intervention to avoid another failure like Somalia.

In the beginning of this essay, I posed a question: Should America focus its foreign policy on the expansion of democracy? Over the last 30 years, there have been two main narratives seeking to answer this question. The first is that America should solely value its strategic national interests, even if that means overlooking humanitarian crises. From this perspective, democracy in Somalia or Cambodia has no importance for an American mother who struggles to pay for her healthcare, or a father who can’t pay his mortgage. According to this narrative, America should intervene only when there is a clear strategic justification. Intervention for the sake of democracy or morals is a misinterpretation of how a state should be governed.

From the alternative perspective, democracy and human rights should be at the forefront of all foreign policy. If any injustices are happening abroad, it is the United States’ duty, as a global superpower, to bring freedom and justice to those who are oppressed. This perspective also advocates for democracy-based intervention on the basis that it is in the U.S.’s best interests for as many states to function as democracies as possible - trade is increased, intelligence is sometimes shared, and new alliances can be created. Morality and U.S. interests are held at a similar level of importance, from this perspective, but human rights should generally guide foreign policy.

Both of these perspectives misinterpret a key idea that leads to many foreign policy failures: there is no one answer to foreign affairs. The expansion of democracy is a worthy goal, but that doesn’t mean that Somalia in 1993 could suddenly democratize simply because there were American boots on the ground. Strategic interests are fundamentally important to foreign policy, but non-intervention in a genocidal crisis like Rwanda in 1994 was a moral failure, and a burden to America. There is validity to the idea that the United States benefits when more states are democratic, but that didn’t amount to a strategic justification for the U.S. interventions in Afghanistan.

If American policymakers can find the balance between these two schools of thought, the United States will be able to prioritize the needs of Americans - while also expanding influence and moral ideals, when necessary and possible.

In the decades following the Second World War, liberal democracy appeared to have resolved one of its oldest dilemmas: how to govern complex societies without descending into chaos or authoritarianism. The answer, increasingly, was management. As states expanded their welfare systems, regulated globalizing economies, and confronted technological change, political decision-making was gradually transferred from elected representatives to experts—economists, planners, administrators, and consultants—who claimed neutrality, efficiency, and scientific authority.

Today, this managerial logic dominates governance across much of the world. Central banks operate independently of voters. Policy decisions are outsourced to consultants and advisory firms. International institutions prescribe “best practices” to sovereign states. While elections still occur, many of the most consequential decisions affecting daily life are made far from public scrutiny. This raises a fundamental question: how did expertise come to replace democratic participation as the primary source of political legitimacy?

This essay examines the rise of managerial power as a historical process rather than a sudden takeover. Drawing on James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution and Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I argue that technocratic rule emerged not because democracy collapsed, but because it was deemed insufficient for governing modern complexity. Yet in solving one problem, managerial governance created another: a growing distance between those who rule and those who are ruled.

Burnham and the Managerial Class

Writing during World War II, James Burnham argued that neither capitalism nor socialism would define the future political order. Instead, he predicted the rise of a “managerial class”—technical experts who controlled production, administration, and organization regardless of formal ownership. Power, Burnham suggested, would no longer rest with capitalists or elected officials, but with those who possessed specialized knowledge and operational control.

Burnham’s insight proved prescient. Throughout the twentieth century, governments increasingly relied on economists to manage inflation, engineers to plan infrastructure, and administrators to run expanding bureaucracies. In this system, legitimacy derived not from popular consent, but from competence. Decisions were justified as “necessary,” “evidence-based,” or “without alternative,” insulating them from democratic debate.

Crucially, Burnham did not portray managerial power as overtly authoritarian. On the contrary, it often presented itself as apolitical. By framing decisions as technical rather than ideological, managers reduced political conflict while simultaneously narrowing the space for public participation. Democracy remained intact in form, but diminished in substance.

Foucault and the Governance of Populations

Where Burnham focused on class and control, Michel Foucault approached managerial power through the lens of knowledge. In his lectures on governmentality, Foucault argued that modern states govern less through coercion and more through administration—by measuring, categorizing, and optimizing populations. From public health systems to economic forecasting models, expertise became a tool for shaping behavior. Citizens were no longer simply ruled; they were managed. Risk assessments, cost-benefit analyses, and performance indicators transformed political questions into technical problems with seemingly objective solutions. This shift had profound implications. When governance is framed as optimization rather than choice, disagreement becomes irrational. Opposition is dismissed as uninformed. Politics gives way to administration, and democratic deliberation is replaced by expert consensus. In this sense, managerial power does not eliminate democracy outright—it renders it increasingly irrelevant.

Crisis, Complexity, and the Appeal of Technocracy

The expansion of managerial governance was not accidental. It accelerated during moments of crisis: economic depressions, wars, decolonization, and globalization. Faced with instability, governments turned to experts who promised order and predictability. The rise of international financial institutions, development agencies, and global consulting firms reflected this demand for technical solutions to political problems. Yet this reliance on expertise came at a cost. As decision-making moved further from voters, public trust eroded. Citizens were told that policies were unavoidable, even when they produced inequality or social dislocation. The result has been a paradox: technocracy was meant to stabilize democracy, but has instead contributed to its delegitimization. Populist movements across the world can be understood, in part, as reactions against managerial rule. They do not merely reject specific policies; they challenge the authority of experts themselves. Whether this backlash strengthens democracy or accelerates authoritarianism remains an open question.

Conclusion

The rise of managerial power is not a conspiracy, nor is it a historical accident. It is the product of modern states grappling with complexity through expertise. Burnham helps us see how control shifted to managers; Foucault reveals how knowledge became a mechanism of governance. Together, they illuminate a central tension of the modern world: can democracy survive when expertise becomes the primary source of authority? History offers no easy answer. What is clear, however, is that when politics is reduced to management, citizens are reduced to variables. The challenge for the future is not to reject expertise, but to reintegrate it into democratic life—before governance becomes something that happens to people rather than with them.

References:

Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World. Martino Publishing, 1941.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Weber, Max. Economy and Society. University of California Press, 1978.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.

Fukuyama, Francis. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

This essay was written by Regina Balbalosa

Popular revolutions are often remembered as moments when history breaks open. Images of crowds filling public squares, regimes collapsing overnight, and long-entrenched leaders fleeing into exile have come to symbolize democratic renewal. From Paris in 1789 to Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Middle East in 2011, mass mobilization has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to remove rulers once thought immovable. Yet beneath these moments of apparent rupture lies a recurring historical puzzle. Revolutions frequently succeed in toppling leaders, but they rarely dismantle the political elites and institutional structures that sustained those regimes in the first place. Power changes hands faster than it changes form.

This essay argues that popular revolutions tend to transform leadership more readily than they transform institutions. While mass protest can delegitimize rulers and force political openings, entrenched elites—embedded in electoral systems, bureaucracies, economic structures, and social networks—often adapt to new conditions and reassert dominance. As a result, revolutionary moments are frequently followed not by structural transformation, but by continuity beneath the surface of change.

Revolutions and the Illusion of Rupture

Revolutions are commonly understood as moments of political rupture. They disrupt existing orders, undermine claims to authority, and redefine the language of legitimacy. Popular mobilization can compel concessions that would otherwise be unthinkable, including the resignation of authoritarian leaders or the collapse of long-standing regimes.

These moments generate optimism that entrenched inequalities and abuses of power will finally be addressed. In revolutionary narratives, the removal of a ruler often stands in for the dismantling of the system itself.

Historically, however, revolutionary outcomes have been uneven. Leadership change is often swift and visible, while structural transformation proves slower and far more elusive. Political elites—whether aristocrats, military officers, landed families, or economic oligarchs—possess resources that allow them to survive regime transitions. Revolutions challenge who governs, but they less frequently alter how power is organized, reproduced, and protected.

What Revolutions Change and What They Leave Intact

Mass mobilization is particularly effective at delegitimizing individual rulers. Charismatic authority collapses once public loyalty evaporates, and regimes dependent on coercion struggle when security forces hesitate to act. Revolutions also reshape political discourse, introducing new ideals of citizenship, rights, and accountability.

What revolutions often fail to change are the institutional foundations of elite power. Electoral systems frequently continue to favor wealthy or well-connected candidates. Bureaucracies remain staffed by officials trained and socialized under previous regimes. Economic structures—particularly patterns of land ownership, capital concentration, and access to credit—rarely shift during moments of political upheaval. Without institutional reform, old elites are well positioned to adapt. Revolutionary rhetoric may change, but the mechanisms through which power operates often remain intact.

Elite Persistence in Comparative Perspective

The persistence of elites following revolutionary moments is not confined to any single region or historical period. The French Revolution abolished aristocratic privilege in law, yet many former elites regained influence under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration, adapting to new political frameworks while preserving social and economic power.

In Southeast Asia, the overthrow of authoritarian regimes has frequently been followed by the reassertion of pre-existing elites. In the Philippines, the 1986 People Power Revolution removed Ferdinand Marcos and restored formal democratic institutions. Yet political dynasties—many of which predated Marcos—quickly re-established dominance. Electoral politics rewarded families with name recognition, local networks, and financial resources, allowing elite continuity despite regime change.

A similar pattern emerged in Egypt following the 2011 Arab Spring. Mass protests forced the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, but the military establishment—long embedded within the state’s political and economic life—retained decisive influence. Leadership changed, but the underlying distribution of power did not.

These cases point to a recurring historical pattern: revolutions often succeed during moments of mobilization, but falter during moments of consolidation. Elites who control institutions, capital, and coercive power are typically better equipped to navigate political transitions than protest movements themselves.

Why Elites Outlast Protest Movements

One explanation for elite persistence lies in asymmetries of capacity. Political elites tend to possess legal expertise, organizational experience, and access to financial resources. They are embedded within institutions designed to survive political change—courts, legislatures, ministries, and security apparatuses.

Protest movements, by contrast, are often coalitions united by opposition rather than a shared blueprint for institutional redesign. While highly effective at disrupting legitimacy, they are less equipped to govern, legislate, or administer once revolutionary momentum fades.

Moreover, revolutions frequently prioritize symbolic victories over structural transformation. Removing a ruler satisfies immediate demands for justice and accountability, but restructuring institutions requires sustained coordination, technical expertise, and political compromise. In the absence of these conditions, elites can rebrand themselves as reformers, allies of democracy, or guardians of stability—re-entering power through new doors.

Protest, Power, and Historical Continuity

The persistence of elites does not render protest meaningless. Revolutionary moments expand political imagination, create openings for reform, and establish precedents for civic participation. Anti-corruption institutions, expanded civil liberties, and greater public engagement often emerge from these struggles, even if imperfectly implemented.

Yet history suggests that protest alone is insufficient to dismantle entrenched power. Lasting transformation depends on institutional redesign: electoral reform, redistribution of economic power, bureaucratic accountability, and sustained civic participation. Without these changes, revolutions risk becoming moments of elite circulation rather than structural change.

Conclusion

Popular revolutions remain among the most powerful expressions of collective political action. They demonstrate the capacity of ordinary citizens to challenge authority and reshape political trajectories. However, history cautions against equating regime change with the dismantling of elite power. From revolutionary France to Southeast Asia and the Middle East, political elites have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to survive upheaval by adapting to new institutional environments. Revolutions may transform rhetoric and leadership, but they often leave deeper structures of power intact. Understanding this pattern does not diminish the importance of protest. Rather, it clarifies its limits. Democracy is not secured at the moment a ruler falls, but in the slower, less visible process of institutional reform. Revolutions can open doors—but institutions determine who ultimately walks through them.

References:

Alfred W. McCoy, An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines

Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions

Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution

Comparative analyses of post-revolutionary transitions in France, Egypt, and Southeast Asia

Few objects better capture the ambitions and contradictions of East German socialism than the Trabant. For decades, this small, boxy car dominated the streets of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), becoming both a symbol of socialist achievement and a quiet reminder of its limitations. To its designers and political sponsors, the Trabant represented the triumph of planned industry and egalitarian access. To many of its drivers, it was simply the only car they could reasonably hope to own. In this tension between ideology and everyday life, the Trabant emerged as the defining automotive icon of East Germany.

The Trabant’s origins lie directly in the postwar political settlement of Germany. After 1949, the newly formed GDR fell under the control of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which sought to reorganize the economy along socialist lines. Heavy industry broadly, and transportation specifically, were all brought under state planning, guided by Five-Year Plans modeled loosely on the Soviet system. Within this framework, automobiles were not luxury consumer goods but rather national social goods. The SED envisioned a vehicle that could be produced in massive numbers cheaply and be accessible to the average teacher. In the mid-1950s, this vision materialized in the Sachsenring works in Zwickau, where engineers were tasked with designing a “people’s car” for socialism.

The result was the Trabant, first introduced in 1957. From the beginning, its development was shaped less by market competition than by political priorities. Scarcity of steel and foreign currency pushed engineers to innovate with unconventional materials, leading to the use of Duroplast, a plastic composite reinforced with cotton waste. The engine was a modest two-cylinder, two-stroke, chosen for its simplicity and low production cost rather than performance or refinement.

The Trabant’s timeline closely mirrors the trajectory of the GDR itself. Through the 1960s and 1970s, production steadily increased as the state invested in expanding output without fundamentally redesigning the vehicle. While Western automakers introduced new models every few years, the Trabant remained largely unchanged for decades, although additional models such as a station wagon were introduced in the 60s. In a system that prized stability and predictability, radical redesigns were risky and expensive. As long as the car fulfilled its basic function, planners saw little incentive to innovate. The Trabant thus became a frozen artifact of an earlier industrial moment, rolling unchanged into the late Cold War.

Ideologically, the Trabant was deeply connected to socialism’s promise of equality. Official propaganda portrayed it as a car “for everyone,” a tangible demonstration that modern mobility was not reserved for the wealthy. In theory, any East German worker could apply for a Trabant and eventually receive one at a fixed, state-controlled price. Ownership was not meant to signal status but participation in a collective standard of living. This egalitarian framing distinguished the Trabant sharply from Western automobiles, which were openly marketed as expressions of individuality, success, and taste.

In reality, however, access was far from immediate. Waiting lists for a new Trabant often stretched a decade or more, making the actual accessibility of the vehicle far more limited than the SED would have liked. Yet even this delay reinforced certain socialist values. Since prices were low and resale markets tightly controlled, speculation and luxury consumption were minimized. The car one received was almost always the same as everyone else’s, reinforcing the sense of standardization that defined everyday life in the GDR. Streets filled with near-identical Trabants, differentiated only by age and minor repairs.

The comparison with Western cars, particularly brands like BMW, demonstrates the ideological divide of the Cold War. While BMW emphasized engineering performance and prestige, the Trabant rejected these values outright. It was slower, louder, and technologically outdated, yet it was also cheaper and more widely distributed within its own system. Western observers often mocked the Trabant as a symbol of socialist backwardness, but such comparisons missed the point. The Trabant was never intended to “win” against BMW on performance. Its purpose was social rather than competitive, to demonstrate that socialism could provide basic modern goods without reproducing class distinctions.

By the late 1980s, however, the gap between ideology and reality became increasingly difficult to ignore. East Germans were acutely aware of Western automotive advances, visible on television and, for some, through travel. The Trabant’s obsolescence became a quiet source of dissatisfaction, emblematic of a system unable to advance. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, images of Trabants crossing into West Germany became iconic, representing decades of constrained choice suddenly giving way to abundance.

Ultimately, the Trabant stands as a powerful symbol of East German socialism. It succeeded on its own terms by providing mass mobility and reinforcing ideals of equality and standardization. At the same time, its limitations exposed the costs of insulating production from competition and consumer feedback. Like the GDR itself, the Trabant was functional and orderly, yet increasingly out of step with a changing world. Its legacy is not simply one of failure or ridicule, but also of a distinct social and economic experiment than existed in Central Europe for four decades of the 20th century.

Works Cited

DDR Museum. “The Trabant.” ddr-museum.de. DDR Museum, May 2, 2017.

https://www.ddr-museum.de/en/blog/2017/thema-verkehr-der-trabant.

Eli Rubin, The Trabant: Consumption, Eigen-Sinn, and Movement, History Workshop Journal, Volume 68, Issue 1, Autumn 2009, Pages 27–44, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbp016

Hamer, Tony, and Michele Hamer. “The Historical Significance of the Trabant Classic German Automobile.” liveabout.com. LiveAbout, April 19, 2018.

https://www.liveabout.com/trabant-built-of-plastic-and-socialism-726030.

Koscs, Jim. “Maligned and Misunderstood, East Germany’s Tiny Trabant Left an Outsized Legacy.” hagerty.com. Hagerty Media, October 4, 2021.

https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/maligned-and-misunderstood-east-germanys-tiny-tra bant-left-an-outsized-legacy/.

T Mills, Kelly. “The Trabant.” Rrchnm.org. Making the History of 1989, May 28, 2021. https://1989.rrchnm.org/items/show/672.html.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was hope for a “New World Order,” where liberal democracy would reign supreme across the globe. Since then, the world has become less and less democratic. 72% of the population now lives under autocratic rule, and authoritarian regimes and rhetoric continue to appeal to voters. The strength of these movements feed off of economic uncertainty, cultural erosion, and a general fear of the modern way of life. Hitler’s rise to power can be explained by many of those same factors. As engaged citizens of the world, it is important to understand why these ideologies become so popular. The essay will tackle the question: how and why did Nazism arise in 20th-century Germany? Relatedly, why did Nazism win compared to other radical alternatives? To do this, I will compare J.S. Conway’s Due Process of History with Bessel’s Life in the Third Reich. Conway’s paper is structured not as one argument, but rather an examination of various explanations. The argument I will make is that Nazism, aided by a lack of faith in liberal democracy and a political system favorable to the success of fringe parties, arose because it was seen as the only appealing alternative to other radical options.

An Introduction to Conway’s Evidence

According to Conway, many Nazi sympathizers and conservative historians pushed the view that the rise of Nazism can be explained by the lack of viable alternatives. While this perspective is sometimes rooted in the desire to alleviate responsibility from the German public, it has significant evidence and deserves evaluation. Following the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, Germany fell into a massive economic collapse: on top of suffering huge strategic losses, such as demilitarizing the Rhineland, Germany entered a period of hyperinflation. The German currency crumbled in value, and everyday citizens walked the streets with wheelbarrows of money just for a standard trip to the store. Entering the 1930s, the German populace wanted swift and dramatic change. Conway cites Erich Eyek, a German historian, to explain why a more moderate alternative to Nazism was unrealistic: “According to Erich Eyck, the world economic crisis and the earlier German inflation … had the effect of undermining the German middle-classes’ confidence in the effectiveness of the moderate political parties, and induced them to rely increasingly on a party which offered decisive action to remedy their economic distress.” The Nazi Party offered decisive action in a way that other alternatives did not. He continues: “It was these economic causes rather than the inapplicability of their ideas which liberals believed was the basic cause of the seduction of Germans away from democracy.” Later in the paper, Conway cites the idea that “the big concerns which supported Hitler’s rise to power consisted mainly of [the] groups which had been hardest hit by the depression and thus hoped for the coming of a saviour.” Just like today, everyday Germans lost confidence in the political system’s ability to solve their problems, and thus placed their hope in an anti-democratic, yet charismatic, leader.

Amongst the various radical alternatives to liberal democracy, why did Nazism arise as opposed to a Leftist ideology?

The German people were done with liberal democracy: just like today, the failures of large bureaucracy, slow governance, and dwindling economic confidence had left politics increasingly radical, polarized, and authoritarian. If this were true, and there were going to be a radical alternative to liberal democracy, there is a natural follow-up question: Why did Nazism win over Communism to begin with?

One answer that Conway points to is an inherent bias against Communism that existed within the German population: “Only the smallest fraction of the public had enough power of political imagination to be able to foresee the kind of consequences that would follow an elimination of constitutional guarantees and the disbanding of the democratic system.... Wide circles of the public unblinkingly accepted actions of national-minded men that, had the same actions being undertaken by Communists, would have been considered alarming violations of justice and order.” Though Communism, like Fascism, offered dramatic change to a country in strife, there was simply too much anti-Communist sentiment in Germany at the time. Conway also poses the argument that the wealthy industrialists of Germany played a large role in Hitler’s rise to power, as Nazism, while imperfect, was understandably far more appealing in their eyes compared to Communism: “The big industrial concerns, while welcoming Hitler as an ally against Labor, would have preferred to see him being used as a mere tool in the hands of a Cabinet controlled by industry. When this proved not to be feasible, however, they supported Hitler as the lesser of two evils, eager to make the best of his coming to power both politically and economically.” The influence of these industrialists can be seen within the particularities of the German political system. In order to keep the ever more popular Communists out of power, Hitler had to maintain a very large party within the Reichstag, and had to make deals with political power brokers in doing so: “In October I93I the industrialists brought direct pressure on Hindenburg to have the Cabinet reshuffled still more in accordance with their wishes. As the number of Communist sympathizers continued to rise during 1932, there was ever greater need to purchase the support of a mass party to offset the Bolshevist menace.” It was clear that the failures of the German state had eroded the people’s faith in liberal democracy and stable institutions, and a big shift was coming. However, Conway correctly addresses other factors that made Leftist solutions impossible, thereby paving the way for Nazism to come to fruition.

Bessel’s Argument

Bessel instead focuses on the fundamental nature of left wing politics that left it vulnerable to the rise of Fascism: he suggests that Nazism was inevitable. He asserts that “the idea that a united Left would have survived the onslaught of the Nazis and their conservative allies… was at best a pipe dream.” Later, Bessel claims that “if the history of the Nazi seizure reflects anything about left-wing politics, it is that there is little the Left can do to stop a powerful right-wing movement which has mass support, allies in powerful places, and control of the repressive apparatus of the State.” There are some similarities in Conway and Bessel’s arguments respectively, as they both acknowledge the powerlessness of the Left in relation to a movement like the Nazi Party, albeit for slightly different reasons.

Interestingly, while Bessel and Conway both make compelling arguments about the Nazi rise to power, they perhaps focus too little on the role of the German political system itself. German elections featured a multi-party system that allowed for more fringe parties like the Nazi Party to have an outsized chance to take control of the government. When the Nazis eventually came to power in the early 1930s, they only took 37% of the vote. However, due to the fragmented politics of Germany, this was enough to hold a plurality in the Reichstag. At the time, the Nazi opposition on the Left was divided between the Communists and the Social Democrats, and made up about 35% of the total vote: slightly less than what the Nazi Party was able to receive. However, when incorporating the 12% of the population that voted for the “Centre” Party, the Nazis could have been stopped from taking power. The Centre Party was historically quite Catholic and had at times formed coalitions with the Social Democrats. A united coalition of the Centre, the Social Democrats, and the Communists could’ve actually kept the Nazis from holding a majority 1932, thus casting some doubt on Bessel’s earlier claim that a united left could not have withstood the Nazi onslaught. If the political spectrum from the far-left through the center-right could have properly organized, the data shows that a Nazi defeat was not in fact a “pipe dream.”

The conditions that allowed the Nazis to come to power are not identical to those that exist today, but certain things remain constant. In the Bible, Ecclesiastes wisely points out that “there is nothing new under the sun,” and thus understanding the Nazi rise to power is and always will be a valuable research question for decades to come.

Bibliography:

Bessel, Richard. Life in the Third Reich. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Conway, J. S. “‘Machtergreifung’ or ‘Due Process of History’: The Historiography of Hitler’s Rise to Power.” The Historical Journal 8, no. 3 (1965): 399–413. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3020433.

This essay was written by Adarsh Yadav: a WHT Journalist

Introduction

Crisis moments have had a profound influence on the history of politics. Governments in various societies and throughout history have resorted to using emergency powers to deal with war, domestic upheavals, economic instability, or perceived internal threats to society. The conferred powers were often introduced as temporary and necessitating, wherein the authorities can act rapidly where the normal process of doing things apparently fails. The principle of security tended to override legal and institutional limitations in such situations.

However, history does not always follow this pattern, as the application of emergency powers has not often been limited to the short durations for which the power was created. Extraordinary measures that were instituted in cases of crisis, in most instances, continued to affect political systems even years after the crisis had been overcome. The recurrence of the emergency authority indicates a long-term conflict between the power of the state and individual freedom. This essay examines the patterns that emerge upon the exercise of emergency powers by reviewing their exercise and looking at what these patterns may provide to the situations of the present-day democratic society.

The History of Emergency Powers

Emergency powers are a relatively ancient idea. In ancient politics, the extraordinary power was likely to be conferred on extraordinary occasions of extraordinary jeopardy. One of the best examples is the Roman Republic, where an interim dictator could be introduced in times of acute crisis. This position was supposed to save the state by adopting decisive action to suspend regular political processes over a brief period of time.

The same practices were used in subsequent times. The special powers were often taken by medieval rulers, early modern monarchies when rebellions took place, invasions were made or there was instability. These were the suspension of laws, imposition of taxes without consent or movement reduction. This could be done by justifying that what was needed was a flexibility that was not a normal matter in how the state was run to survive.

With the development of political systems, emergency powers were formalized in legal systems to an even greater extent. Constitutions and laws tried to stipulate the time and manner in which extraordinary power was to be acquired. Regardless of the above development, the rationale underpinning such development was unchanged: emergencies were also considered eventualities where regular rules could be shelved in favor of stability. History indicates that in the few cases where there was a legal definition of emergency powers, their implications usually stretched further than the crises that their inception was created to address.

Emergency Powers and Emergency Authority Building

Although the emergency powers were a topic mainly presented as a measure of protection, they were usually followed by a substantial growth of state power in most cases. As soon as the governments were endowed with extraordinary authorities, the equilibrium between executive action and institutions was disrupted. Policies in which approval is required by law or legislation were made independently due to a sense of necessity.

Another historical trend may be seen through the history of progressive normalisation of exceptional power. Policies that started in a transitional mode to contain situations have, in other cases, become part of the government. The loss of civil liberties, increased surveillance, and the widening of police powers that were created in times of emergencies did not necessarily entirely revert to their previous conditions once they were stabilized. As time passed by, these practices transformed political institutions and changed the expectations of both the rulers and the citizens.

Another impact on the operations of accountability orders was the emergency powers. Courts and legislatures were often marginalized; debate and deliberation were depicted as barriers in the way of taking quick action. This marginalisation undermined institutional checks and reduced the chances of challenging the law. In others, the authority to suppress dissent or silence opposition was applied through emergency powers and it becomes difficult to differentiate between actual threats and political disagreement.

There was a historical trend that emergency powers were not reactionary to crisis, they had a neutral or reflexive aspect. Even though they worked on short-term issues, they have also prepared a situation where power might be concentrated. Such consolidation usually had long term effects that were usually felt after the emergency had calmed.

Past Recollections and Present-day Democratic Issues

Emergency powers are an experience that is still pertinent to democratic initiatives in the contemporary world. The modern states still rely on extraordinary power in time of crisis, armed conflict, a sudden epidemic, and a threat to security. Although the democratic form of government is not similar to other types of pre-democratic governments, history does provide handy insights into the dangers of such a government.

Among other things, it can be understood that legal authorization is not a solution to the risks created by emergency powers. Although extraordinary measures may be introduced by extraordinary means, whether constitutional or statutory, weakening of the democratic norms may still take place when supervision of such extraordinary measures is going little. Past experience shows that the destruction of the safeguards may take place most of the time through a gradual process rather than sudden shifts.

The other lesson is that it is not easy to establish the termination of an emergency. Crises that occurred in history have hardly straight edges, and it is easier to continue making transitory actions. Here, the significance of meaningful time and scope limits is emphasized. In the absence of such limits, the alternative political systems can be transformed by emergency governance in unintended ways.

Lastly, history shows how fear on the part of the population was used to increase the power of the state. Uncertainty has tended to make societies open to making compromises through restrictions to get security. The awareness of this trend leads to a more careful attitude to the powers of emergency, which appreciates thoughtfulness as well as necessity.

Conclusion

According to history, the emergency powers always took a precarious position between kindness and control. They have been introduced in reaction to extraordinary situations and, in many cases, made themselves indelible in the political and legal institutions. The demand to act swiftly and decisively was real in the case of emergencies, although it posed a chance of expansion of authority far more than usual.

Analyzing the way in which the emergency powers have worked historically, one is able to see the patterns and consequences common to them. These historical lessons do not imply the avoidance of emergency powers, they highlight the lessons of care, control and caution. To contemporary democracies, these lessons can assist them in making sure that the answers to the crisis would not hamper the very values that they are trying to protect.

Each year, millions of students take the SAT, with studies showing that a good proportion of students are experiencing significant increases in their stress and anxiety: “On average, students had 15 percent more cortisol in their systems the homeroom period before a standardized test than on days with no high-stakes testing.” When created, the SAT was intended to create a standardized method of identifying talented students from across the country and was seen as a large step towards educational equity. However, as its influence grew, the SAT shifted from a means of opportunity to a defining restrictor in higher education. The implementation of the SAT dramatically reshaped the college admissions process by pressuring institutions to prioritize specific student archetypes, often at the expense of equal—if not more valuable—forms of intelligence.

Before the creation of the SAT, admissions officers relied on a more holistic approach when reviewing applications. Written essays highlighted students’ voices and individual experiences, allowing schools to focus on the character of the individual applicant rather than standardized comparisons between applicants. In addition, professors often looked at a student’s performance in subjects such as Latin and Greek to evaluate their academic abilities. However, this began to change during World War 1. At the time, psychologist Robert Yerkes used an IQ test to recruit members of the Army. By 1923, Carl Brigham started working with Yerkes in hopes of transforming this IQ test into a test that could be easily administered to students. On June 23, 1926, the first official SAT was launched by the College Board to 8,000 highschool student test-takers, with the goal of implementing a nationwide standardized exam. By 1935, Harvard required all of its applicants to submit an SAT score, signifying a shift in admissions practices. What was the rationale for the SAT? Well, at the time, “​​Proponents of admissions tests argued that using the SAT made admissions more progressive and fair. One president of Harvard … saw the SAT as a great equalizer, a test that would allow Ivy League universities to diversify their student bodies based on intelligence rather than family connections.” Initially intended to create a more equal admissions process, the SAT quickly gained momentum. This marked a broader transformation in educational values, as colleges started to shift away from assessing well-rounded students through personal character, and instead favored numerical metrics that claimed to quantify intelligence and academic potential.

The national implementation of the SAT created an artificially narrow archetype of the “ideal” student. The SAT led colleges to focus on students who excelled in analytical rather than creative intelligence, specifically within verbal reasoning and math. As a result, the educational system became more test-centric, creating learning environments shaped around the demands of standardized testing rather than the pursuit of intellectual curiosity. A current example of this is the rise of SAT prep centers, emphasizing performance over genuine academic enrichment. A local prep center in Closter, NJ, reveals their narrow success strategies: “Prestige provides the best SAT prep courses that help students learn just what they need to achieve competitive scores fast.” These institutions focus on pattern recognition and test-taking strategies instead of valuing actual mastery of the material. Specifically, features like the Desmos calculator on the math section incentivize students to use calculator shortcuts instead of conceptual problem-solving. This shift has disproportionately benefited students of a higher socioeconomic status, as they can afford extensive test preparation, deepening existing class disparities in college admissions.

The SAT has marginalized students from less privileged backgrounds, reinforcing a biased definition of merit. Originally named the “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” the test was renamed simply to the “SAT” to avoid the implication that the test measured innate intelligence rather than learned skill. This switch showed that the outcome of a given student was not a representation of their intelligence; however, the SAT continued to be treated as a meritocratic benchmark. Additionally, students from less fortunate backgrounds are prone to increased levels of stress when completing these tests: “Students from the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, with both the highest rate of poverty and crime, saw the largest changes in cortisol in advance of testing, suggesting that their scores were the most affected — and therefore the least valid measures of what they actually knew.” This suggests that the SAT may not be a good assessment of academic ability, as it can be heavily influenced by alternative factors, such as stress, that disproportionately affect underprivileged students. This further undermines the credibility of using the SAT as a national measurement of merit.

The rise of the SAT has led to a more reductive approach when evaluating applicants. Admissions officers, under pressure to process increasing numbers of applications while maintaining a competitive ranking, have come to rely heavily on SAT scores as a quick method of filtering through applications. This leads officers to skim over more holistic methods of admission, such as personal essays, extracurricular activities, interviews, and letters of recommendation. These elements add unique aspects of personality to applications, which standardized testing ultimately undermines. As a result, students face immense pressure to exceed a school’s average SAT score, leading students to retake the test multiple times to fit in a school’s desired range. Additionally, the College Board has allowed students to start “super-scoring” their SAT: “Another reason to take the SAT a second time is that many schools use a process called “superscoring.” Superscoring is when a college combines a student’s highest Math section score with their highest Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section score, even if those scores are from different test dates, to come up with the student’s total SAT score.” This test-centric strategy turns the admissions process into a numbers game, pushing students to focus on score optimization rather than meaningful personal intellectual growth.

In recent years, the SAT has faced growing backlash, leading to the rise of the test-optional movement. This resistance was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, when many students were not able to access open testing centers. As a result, colleges suspended standardized testing requirements due to this lack of accessibility. “As of Monday, 183,000 September-registered students and 154,000 October-registered students are unable to take the test due to closures or COVID safety precautions, the College Board said in a statement.” While originally intended as a temporary measure, a number of institutions chose to permanently adopt test-optional policies after growing backlash, and seeing a more diverse applicant pool. These policies have helped even out the playing field for students from underrepresented racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, who often lack access to expensive, well-resourced, test-preparatory programs. However, this test-optional policy has inadvertently inflated scores, instilling a mindset in students that they must achieve a higher threshold of score in order to boost their application, or they might as well not submit any testing. This stark comparison highlights how standardized testing can reinforce inequality, while test-optional policies offer a more inclusive and equitable approach to admissions.

The SAT has fundamentally changed the college admissions process by promoting a narrower ideal, defined by numerical performance rather than holistic forms of intelligence. This reliance on standardized testing has led to the exclusion of countless talented individuals whose strengths lie beyond verbal and mathematical reasoning, potentially furthering socioeconomic and racial inequalities. Interestingly, there is an alternative argument: colleges have recently identified that high SAT scores are the most directly correlated indicator of a high college GPA, resulting in the re-implementation of “test-required” universities. This presents the ongoing tension in admissions, with balancing objective predictors of academic success and the need for an equitable evaluation of student potential. Ultimately, the goal should be to foster an admissions process that can measure multiple forms of intelligence, ensuring that all students, regardless of background, are given a fair opportunity to succeed in college.

Bibliography:

1. Education Writers Association. “History and Background: College Access and Admissions.” Education Writers Association. Accessed April 27, 2025. https://ewa.org/issues/higher-ed/history-and-background-college-access-admissions.

2. Prestige Institute. “SAT/ACT Classes.” Prestige Institute. Accessed April 27, 2025. https://www.prestigei.com/sat-act-classes.

3. Tatter, Grace. “Tests and Stress Bias.” Usable Knowledge. Harvard Graduate School of Education. February 12, 2019. Accessed April 27, 2025. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/19/02/tests-and-stress-bias.

4. Broderick, Thomas. “A Brief History of the SAT.” BestColleges. Accessed April 27, 2025. https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/history-of-sat/.​

5. Mariana Viera, “The History of the SAT Is Mired in Racism and Elitism,” Teen Vogue, October 1, 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-history-of-the-sat-is-mired-in-racism-and-elitism

6. College Board. “How Many Times Can a Student Take the SAT, and When Should They Take It?” SAT Suite of Assessments. Accessed April 27, 2025. https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/help-center/how-many-times-can-student-take-sat-and-when-should-they-take-it.​

7. Tillman, Rachel. “Hundreds of SAT and ACT Testing Centers Have Closed Due to COVID-19, Wildfires, or Both.” NY1, September 23, 2020. Accessed April 27, 2025. https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2020/09/23/hundreds-of-sat-act-testing-centers-closed.

8. PBS. “Where Did The Test Come From? – History of the SAT.” FRONTLINE. Accessed April 27, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/where/timeline.html.

9. Jacobsen, Erik. “A (Mostly) Brief History of the SAT and ACT Tests.” Erik the Red. Last updated February 20, 2025. Accessed April 27, 2025. https://www.erikthered.com/tutor/sat-act-history.html.​

10. Johnson, David. “Can You Answer These Questions From the Original SAT?” TIME, June 20, 2016. Accessed April 27, 2025. https://time.com/4372031/sat-anniversary-original-questions-quiz/.

“In this conversation, Andrew Kennedy shares his experiences as a platoon leader during his deployment in Iraq, particularly in Baquba. He discusses the challenges faced, the unique missions undertaken, and the camaraderie among soldiers. Andrew reflects on the sacrifices made, the impact of combat on mental health, and the transition to civilian life after serving. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing the sacrifices of soldiers and the complexities of their experiences in combat.”

This article first appeared in the Nottingham Economic Review and is available, along with other excellent articles, in NER’s November Report.

Throughout U.S. history, major fiscal crises have not only shaped economic policy, but also altered political ideologies on all sides of the spectrum.

In the 19th century, the U.S. saw a slew of successive crashes due to the absence of central banking, unregulated credit, and gold-backed currency. The stock market featured crashes in 1837, 1873, and 1893, just to name a few. These crises forged America’s first political divide over monetary policy, in which two main ideologies were created: first, there was the “Gold Standard” group, often Republicans, who believed that the U.S dollar should be tied to a stable asset like gold to prevent inflation and general instability. However, the second ideology was called the “Free Silver Movement,” and was backed by many Democrats, and even a new party called the Populists. In response to the 1893 financial crisis, they advocated for unlimited coinage of silver so that the “common man” could pay off his debts with inflated currency. They believed that a Gold standard only benefited the wealthy.

A few decades later, the divide over fiscal policy between Democrats and Republicans once again became exacerbated by a major financial crisis: The Great Depression. Decline in consumer spending, overspeculation, and a huge stock market crash all contributed to the crisis. Interestingly, according to Brittanica, the aforementioned “gold standard, which linked nearly all the countries of the world in a network of fixed currency exchange rates, played a key role in transmitting the American downturn to other countries.” The response by President Franklin D. Roosevelt would change American politics forever. He introduced “the New Deal,” which represented a series of policies and federal programs aimed at establishing a welfare state within the United States. He created safety nets such as Social Security. Critics feared overdependence on government. Advocates lauded the economic resurgence. Yet again, the United States experienced a political divide, this time over the efficacy of a large federal government.

If the New Deal established the framework of modern fiscal politics, later crises exposed its limits. The 1970s brought stagflation: high inflation paired with high unemployment, which to a large extent discredited Keynesian confidence in perpetual spending. In its place arose a conservative economic movement, featuring monetarism and the supply-side revolution. Under Ronald Reagan, tax cuts and deregulation were sold not just as economic policy but as moral restoration. They represented a return to self-reliance after decades of perceived dependency on the state.

The financial crisis in 2008 revived large-scale federal intervention, from bank bailouts to the Obama stimulus. Once again, Americans argued not only about economics but about the meaning of government itself. The Tea Party framed debt as a symbol of moral decay and elite corruption, while progressives saw public spending as the only bulwark against collapse. The COVID-19 pandemic replayed the same script on a grander scale: multi-trillion-dollar relief packages sparking renewed fears of inflation and insolvency.

In the present day, America’s debt problem has never been worse. The underlying problem is clear. There is not enough money for too many problems. The U.S.’s debt now reaches the mark of $38 trillion, and interest payments now make up a larger portion of spending than defense. The country is in a debt spiral, and not one administration since Bill Clinton’s has balanced the federal budget. Today in the United States, the Democrats and Republicans each react in increasingly extreme ways to America’s debt problem: on the right, we see anti-immigration nativism, and on the left, we see politicians like Zohran Mamdani unequivocally support socialist policies.

The Populist Right offers a simple and yet appealing argument. They believe that globalization and immigration have hurt the American economy, taking jobs from native-born Americans and shipping those jobs off to countries like Mexico and China. Therefore, when President Trump came along and promised protective tariffs to reshore domestic industry, many in the country enthusiastically joined him in his mission.

On the other hand, we now see a new movement on the other side of the political spectrum: the Populist Left. The far left has adopted a similarly simple and appealing argument: In reaction to a rising cost of living and limited wage growth, the government must tax billionaires and large corporations, which, unlike the rest of the country, have experienced huge growth over the last decades.

The fact is that the majority of Americans don’t support either extreme: at least unequivocally. However, the two-party system in the U.S. forces the people’s hand. For the time being, American politics will be ever more dominated by these two reductive ideologies.

Looking back at history, it is clear that each fiscal crisis has forced Americans to reconsider their politics. The 19th century asked whether government should control money at all. The 1930s demanded that it rescue the economy. The 21st century questions whether it can still do so in a fractured democracy. The pattern is clear. Economic panics drive ideological change and reinvention. When the market fails, citizens turn to the state; when the state overreaches, they return to the market. Our modern world is no different. While everyday Americans may be keen to hit the panic button on the extreme change in our country, we must remember the words of Ecclesiastes, who in the Bible wisely pointed out that “there is nothing new under the sun.”