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The underspoken dark underbelly of the AI debate. The Pied Piper leads children to their deaths with his beautiful song. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Much   ink   has   been   spilled  over the so-called “alignment problem” of artificial intelligence. Will it behave as humans want it to behave? Will it provide what humans want it to provide? My critique is not downstream of the alignment problem. I am not qualified to predict whether AI will someday misalign with mankind’s wishes. It is, however, becoming increasingly evident that AI is fulfilling our wishes faster than ever. Thus, my fear is the very opposite: that AI will accomplish its mission with immense success and that the human race will be worse off for it. In saying this, I echo Dr. Richard Jordan, a game theorist at Baylor University, who wrote an illuminating article  on his Substack last year. The purveyors of everything from Cheetos to tobacco to pornography understand human nature. Humanity's pursuit of gratification is often at odds with our own edification. If artificial intelligence can minimize the work it takes to reach our passions, I fear that we will soon drown in them.  Former Forum Editor-in-Chief Henry Long observed  our crisis of fulfillment. Modernity has bestowed upon us the ability to constantly reach small summits. With this given, Long mourns that many forget about their higher desires, preoccupied with base wants. In turn, they abandon love for lust or truth-seeking for affirmation. AI takes this to an entirely new dimension. AI’s job is to give each of us what we want. It fulfills this function like nothing we have ever made before. It can tell you what you want to hear, even if it is a lie or actively dangerous. It can show you any image you might want to see, even things that objectify or promote violence against others. One thing it will never do is call you to any higher wants or desires. The human soul contains those things most dangerous to our own flourishing. Artificial intelligence unleashes this darkness in its most consolidated form by offering to subordinate us to our own wants. Artificial intelligence can directly seek to groom its audience to focus ever more on their lowest desires by dumbing us down through a constant stream of low quality content.  American democracy has been undermined by echo chambers that weaken pluralism. AI’s programmed desire to please allows us all to make echo chambers with ourselves, lacking any need to critically think at all. Meanwhile, AI adapts to our worst tendencies in a vicious cycle. Its heavy usage by abhorrent extremists online led Grok to praise  Hitler. The stakes are more than virtual debates. They can be life and death. A Florida teenager, struggling with suicidal ideation, turned  to ChatGPT. This sickly-sweet echo chamber affirmed his wants, as AI is trained  to do to every user. His eventual death by suicide was a tragedy preventable by real human intervention.  I am most afraid for those young souls that are to be reared with artificial intelligence in place of parents and siblings. A generation ago, parents complained that their children turned to the television for entertainment over Jane Austen. A generation hence, The Avengers might seem positively intellectual compared to the immediate fulfillment of every desire through AI.  In this insidiously pleasurable manner, AI will remove the challenges that build our character. In too many sad instances, it has already robbed the beauty of the art of writing. Ray Bradbury, one of the great deans of 20th century American literature, passionately argued in Zen and the Art of Writing   that “writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.” Writers are made by tearing over paragraphs, sentences, and words in rounds of edits. Human beings are made by pondering questions and the words to use in answering them, in viewing the sublime and wracking our brains for how to express that beauty through art, and in struggling through our pains.  AI can make words, make art, and transform our echo chambers into sinister halls of mirrors. It can present our desires as solutions for our problems. No amount of code can make AI sob, shudder, or save a trinket of the past for the fantasies of the heart. No amount of code can make AI human.  The Medieval European folk tale of the Pied Piper tells of a musician whose song is so beautiful that it lures a town’s children to a riverbank and off into their demise. AI is our Pied Piper, and our society is at the riverbank. We may already be tossing our children in.  This article was published in conjunction with The Claremont Independent .

With the current ASCMC term ending at Spring Break, the time has come again to elect a new executive board for the 2026-2027 academic year. The CMC student body will elect a new Student Body President, Executive Vice President (EVP), Vice President of Student Activities (VPSA), Dormitory Affairs Chair (DAC), and Senior/Junior/Sophomore Class President on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026. Join with fellow students on Monday, March 2nd, at 10:30 pm for Collins Late Night Snack and watch your candidates as they present their platform proposals. Voting will then open at midnight and will be open for 20 hours, closing the following evening at 8:00 pm, March 3rd.  ASCMC uses an instant run-off system. Voters are asked to rank candidates. If no candidate has a majority, the least popular candidate is eliminated and ballots for that candidate have their next highest choice counted instead. This process is repeated until one candidate holds a majority, for each position.  These are your candidates for this year’s election in alphabetical order by position: Student Body President: Eliot Advani, Amrit Dhaliwal, Katie Hodge, Violet Ramanathan Executive Vice President: Leah Gaidos, Dhamar Ramirez Gomez Vice President of Student Activities:  Alex Bruno Dormitory Affairs Chair: Jonmathew Caballero Hernandez Senior Class President:  Tanveer Grewal, Reid Jones Junior Class President: Ibukun Owolabi Sophomore Class President: David Yusten Jr., Meera Jakhar, Zoey Marzo Read below to learn more about each candidate: their aspirations for ASCMC and the CMC community as a whole. Student Body President Candidates Eliot Advani Hello! My name is Eliot Advani, and I am incredibly excited to run for Student Body President. With President Dudley joining CMC next year, there is potential for major positive change in the student experience. I am eager to be your voice as CMC goes through this transformation, and I intend to revitalize dorm culture, help clubs access more funding, and champion new campus events. Before I share my platform and ideas, here are some things you should know about me. I grew up in Massachusetts, though I am a proud resident of Appleby Hall these days. I love sports, especially soccer, and am a huge fan of the intramurals at CMC. I am majoring in PPE, and I am in the RDS program. I compete on CMC’s Model UN team, give campus tours for admissions, and am currently in a heated battle to find employment. The question remains - Why am I running? I love CMC most for our community, and I feel that we need someone who is unafraid to push new, creative ideas to the leadership of the college. Having helped lead a club, played on club sports teams, and worked with admissions/deans, I know where there is room for improvement in the CMC experience. Here are my plans for new initiatives that I would start: Work with RA’s and Dorm Presidents to create inter-dorm events and competitions (think vintage CMC North Quad baseball tournaments). Increase outreach to connect alumni with clubs, teams, newspapers, etc. to secure funding for new events and travel opportunities. Establish office hours with President Dudley, where clubs/groups can sign up for times to discuss their goals, budget, and place at CMC. Create new recurring events on campus, including big-screen outdoor movie nights on Parents Field, a Student Flea/Thrift market, and team trivia at Late Night Snack. Establish connections with Claremont restaurants and businesses for student discounts. Abuse my power to get an intramural t-shirt The goal of my platform is primarily to have more students voices be heard. I want all student groups to feel that they have an equal chance at creating unique opportunities for their members, and I will ensure that dorm culture is as communal as possible. I will be a fierce advocate for your interests with the deans, board, and the president. I hope to be a part of our new era of leadership. Amrit Dhaliwal Hi everyone, my name is Amrit Dhaliwal and I am running for Student Body President! Over the past two years, ASCMC has been one of the most meaningful parts of my CMC experience. As Sophomore Class President and now Student Body Vice President, I’ve had the privilege of working with and for this community in ways both big and small. I’ve gotten to plan different events like class pregames and 4 Corners, as well as run Senate each week this term and work directly with students to address their concerns.  My focus in ASCMC has always been community! As Class President, that meant building connections through events that brought our class together, and as Vice President, it has meant listening to what you all need and following through. Some projects I have been working on this term are getting outdoor heaters outside the Hub installed over the summer, water bottle fillers in North Quad lounges, and bringing back lost CMC traditions like Hub Royalty and 4 Corners. Running Senate has given me the amazing opportunity to hear directly from students who care deeply about improving our campus, and I have loved every minute of that work!  As President, I want to take that one step further. My goal is to make ASCMC more accessible, more visible, and more responsive to every student on this campus. Working in ASCMC has shown me that a lot of students have important things to say, but often feel like they can’t. Every student should feel comfortable bringing ideas and concerns, even small quality-of-life issues, to ASCMC, knowing that they will be heard. ASCMC is a student organization run by students, for students, and at its best, it strengthens our community and improves everyday life at CMC. No issue is too small if it affects student life. Whether it’s improving campus spaces, supporting new traditions, or solving everyday problems, ASCMC should be the place students turn to first. CMC’s community is its greatest strength. As President, I will work to protect and grow it, and ensure ASCMC remains rooted in what matters most: all of you. I would be honored to continue serving this campus as your Student Body President! As I have famously said:  “”The ballot is stronger than the bullet."             - Abraham Lincoln”                        - Amrit Dhaliwal Katie Hodge Hi everyone! I'm Katie Hodge, and I'm so hyped to be running for ASCMC president this year. I'm in my third year in ASCMC, currently serving as the chair of the Academic Affairs Committee. I’m also an Ath Fellow and the president of 5C Triathlon Club!  I'm running for president because I love and enjoy all the freedoms that we have as students (using DOS Vans, so much funding, events, etc.). These freedoms depend on the student’s relationships with staff, DOS, the board of trustees, faculty and so many others. I want to represent students well, using everything I’ve learned about responsible leadership in the past three years at CMC, to keep up those relationships and ensure we continue to empower students. A lot of these freedoms are in the hands of ASCMC, where we have control over club funding, student life, events, and academics. I want to use the power ASCMC has to improve our community: bringing back events like the charity dodgeball tournament, enriching campus traditions, and improving dorm culture. While I don’t have exact solutions for some of the issues on campus — like improving dorm culture and campus traditions and lowering the stress of club and job application season — I want to have conversations about them. In order to have those conversations I want to make sure all students have a voice in ASCMC. By having more curated exec and senate information, you’ll get the information, and participate in the conversations you care about without having to sort through information you don't.  In summary, I will ensure that everyone can contribute to conversations about issues on campus. I will help solve those issues using the power we have as students. I will make sure students continue to be empowered through relationships with DOS, Admin, the Board, and faculty. I hope that encourages you to vote for me but more importantly, I hope you vote — period. Ballots are open from midnight - 8pm on March 3rd! Violet Ramanathan Hi everyone! My name is Violet Ramanathan, and I’m running to be your Student Body President. I am a junior majoring in PPE with a Gender & Sexuality sequence. On campus, I have served our community as an Ath Fellow, a student journalist, and a FYG (twice!). As Student Body President, I want to focus on two main things. The first is accessibility. ASCMC should feel approachable: everyone should know what our student government does, and everyone should feel like they can be a part of it. ASCMC should work for the students, not the other way around. It should be easier for clubs and affinity groups to get funding, and it should be easier for students to host events — whether those are parties or smaller events like movie nights. As president, I will also be approachable. I am so honored to know so many of you, and I love meeting new people. I want to listen to you, learn from you, and work with you to turn your ideas into reality. The second thing I want to focus on is guiding our new college president when he comes to CMC in the fall. President Dudley will be spending the upcoming year learning what CMC is about and figuring out his leadership style, and he will be looking to the ASCMC President for guidance. I want to use this opportunity to make sure that our college administration values student voices in their decision making process. I will push President Dudley to spend time on campus and be visible to students, and I want to organize monthly forums where he talks with us about important policy decisions. Students should have a say in the design of our campus, the structure of our curriculum, and the policies that guide how we live. In my time at CMC, I’ve noticed a trend: every year, something unexpected happens that ASCMC needs to respond to. This means that it’s important for us to have people in ASCMC that we trust to respond to situations with integrity and composure while confidently standing up for our community. Throughout my many roles on campus, I always carry myself with courage and focus on what is best for our community. Please reach out if you have any thoughts, questions, or just want to talk! I would love to hear from you. Email: vramanathan87@cmc.edu Campaign IG: @Vi4Prez Executive Vice President Candidates Leah Gaidos I’m excited to be running for Executive Vice President! As your current Dormitory Affairs Chair, I’ve spent this year working directly within ASCMC, collaborating with RAs, fellow executive members, participating in Senate, and navigating the behind the scenes logistics that keep fun dorm activities happening. Because of that experience, I understand how ASCMC operates from the inside and can step into the EVP role ready to immediately focus on strengthening Senate and supporting our committee chairs. If elected, I want to make Senate more engaging and connected to students’ everyday experiences. When we don’t have club budget requests, I’ll use that time intentionally, spotlighting committee initiatives, fostering collaboration, and creating space for meaningful dialogue. By better integrating the work of our committee chairs, Senate can feel less siloed and more unified, operating as one cohesive team. And yes, MOST IMPORTANTLY, I’ll be bringing back the weekly Senate snacks. Beyond ASCMC, I’m also on the CMS Women’s Golf team. EVP is a role that requires organization, reliability, and the ability to support others, qualities I practice every day as I balance academics, athletics and my current ASCMC responsibilities. I care deeply about making student government effective, transparent, and engaging. I would be honored to serve as your EVP. Dhamar Ramirez Gomez Hello! My name is Dhamar Ramirez Gomez, and I’m excited to be running to serve as your next Executive Vice President! As an ASCMC Senator since my freshman year, I’ve learned a lot about the inner workings of ASCMC and what students want from their representatives. It would be an honor to bring that experience into the EVP role to ensure that Senate meetings are as accessible, productive, and engaging as possible for the student body.  During my term, I plan to strengthen relationships with CMC clubs and organizations by making communication and expectations more transparent, continue school-wide traditions like Four Corners, and introduce student-serving initiatives that last beyond my time in office. I won’t drone on about institutional reform, so I’ll keep it simple: I want more students to feel comfortable voicing concerns and suggesting campus improvements, and I’m committed to turning that feedback into changes the entire student body wants. ASCMC is meant to serve you, not just be emails that you skim while waiting for a caprese chicken sandwich. If you have questions or ideas, please reach out. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts! Yours truly, Dhamar Vice President of Student Activities Candidate Alex Bruno No photograph submitted. I’m running for Vice President of Student Activities (VPSA) because I want to make our campus more fun, more connected, and more memorable for everyone. My goal is simple: improve school spirit, maximize our budget, and make sure there’s always something exciting happening on campus. Dormitory Affairs Chair Candidate Jonmathew Caballero Hernandez No statement or photograph submitted. Senior Class President Tanveer Grewal Hi! My name is Tanveer Grewal - or tan - and I am running for senior class president. From being a first year guide to wrestling on fight night, I love and admire every aspect of CMC. Whether it's wristbanding and attending Pirate Party or sitting at the hub laughing with an unpredictable group of 5, I think we have an amazing grade and will have a memorable senior year. As I reflect on my time at Claremont, I am most grateful for the moments that seem small and subtle, like dinner with my dorm or hammocking on Appleby lawn. I extend this gratitude to the community we have formed as a grade.  Now that we step into our final year, I want our class to come together with a shared commitment to making memories. By hosting consistent events to attend- grounded in the pillars of inclusivity, unity, and organized action- I hope to bring our class closer. From scheduled class pregames to a camping night at Baldy resembling the WOA trip we didn’t have, I want every weekend to offer the opportunity to create memories. My favorite thing about campus is our connection to each other, which is unparalleled to any other school. My experience with the Event Committee and being a FYG gives me insight into how to create spaces for collaboration and fun, unifying events. Although senior year tends to naturally be full of changes, another change we are preparing for is our shift to a new CMC President after President Chodosh retires. This change requires a President able to facilitate dialogue, not just between him and myself, but between anyone who has a need or change they want addressed. As a member of the DOS Advisory Board, I understand what these conversations have to look like and how essential it is to uplift others to voice their needs. My plan to connect students and our administration aligns with my passion for inclusivity.  As much as I love meeting new people and smiling at the people I see on main street, I want to see more opportunities for everyone in our grade to be together. I understand that this requires keeping students at the forefront of my presidency– this means doing polls, holding conversations, reigniting the class instagram, and inviting everyone to the table to make sure this happens.  Vote Tan! Reid Jones As you may know, I’m running again for Senior Class President. I’m honestly really excited for the opportunity to represent our class one more time. Senior year is going to be special, and I want to make sure we make the most of it. From 200 Days to 100 Days to everything in between and after! I’m ready to plan events that bring us together and make this last year unforgettable. I hope this past year has shown you that I genuinely care about our class, that I listen to feedback, and that I try to be someone you can always come talk to. I want to keep building that community going into our final year. I’d really appreciate your vote. Let’s make senior year the best one yet. Junior Class President Ibukun Owolabi I think I did a good job this past year and I'd love if you guys vote for me again. Sophomore Class President David Yusten Jr. No statement or photograph submitted. Meera Jakhar No photograph submitted. Sophomore year at CMC is where everything starts to feel real. We declare majors. We apply for internships. We step into leadership roles. We stop being “new.” But in the middle of that ambition and momentum, there’s one thing that matters just as much as resumes and recruiting cycles: community. That’s what I’m running to build. I’ve always been a people person. Growing up between two cultures, India and Japan, where connection, hospitality, and bringing people together aren’t just social habits, they’re values. In both cultures, community is created intentionally: around food, celebration, and shared space. Some of my strongest memories are of rooms filled with laughter and music. That’s the energy I want to bring to our sophomore year. As your Sophomore Class President, my priority is simple: make this year unforgettable. And yes, that means throwing the best parties we’ve had yet. But more importantly, it means creating spaces where everyone feels included, excited to show up, and proud to be part of the Class of 2028. CMC works hard. We grind through problem sets, case interviews, and late-night study sessions at Poppa. We deserve social events that match that energy. Events that feel intentional, creative, and actually fun. I want themed parties people talk about weeks later. I want collaborations across the 5Cs. I want formals that feel elevated but still effortless. I want spontaneous pop-ups that break up stressful weeks. Sophomore year shouldn’t just be productive, but also electric. I’m someone who genuinely loves bringing people together. Whether it’s planning a birthday surprise or convincing everyone to stay out “just one more hour,” I care about making sure no one feels left out. Social life isn’t about exclusivity, it’s about connection. The best nights aren’t about who’s there, but how everyone feels while they’re there. Beyond events, I want to make sure our class feels heard. If you want something different like a new theme, a daytime event, a 5C collaboration, or a cultural celebration, I want that feedback. This role isn’t about one person planning parties. It’s about representing what our class actually wants. Sophomore year is our chance to define our identity. Let’s make it bold. Let’s make it fun. Let’s make it something we’ll look back on and say, “That was the year.” If you want a president who will bring energy, creativity, and genuine love for this community, vote for me. Let’s make sophomore year iconic. Zoey Marzo Hi everyone! I'm Zoey Marzo and I'm running to be your Sophomore Class President. I'm from Whitefish, Montana, love skiing, baking, and pickleball, and I've been your First Year Class President this year. Getting to know you all has honestly been one of the best parts of freshman year, and I really enjoyed planning events like Freshman Frat and spending time with you guys. My term as First Year President ends next week, but I'm not ready to stop serving our class! As Sophomore President, I want to finish out this semester strong with events like Freshman Throwback Day (writing letters to our future selves, making slime, playing with Legos, and eating good food) and a class pre-game for Wedding Party in the coming weeks. Through this year, I've learned how to navigate the whole ASCMC system and, more importantly, what events you all actually want to attend (not dating games). I know I can do better with gathering your input and feedback. This past year I tried emails and GroupMe but I want to test out new tactics to make sure everyone's voice is heard. If you have ideas on how to improve, I'm all ears! I've loved being your president this year and would be honored to continue building our class culture into sophomore year. Vote Zoey for Sophomore Class President!

Steven Teles is a Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. Teles sits down with Dhriti Jagadish '27 and Shiv Parihar '28 to talk about the Abundance Agenda. This interview transcript and recording have been edited for length and clarity. Credit: Johns Hopkins University Shiv Parihar: Hello and welcome to The Forum  Podcast.  Dhriti Jagadish:  I'm Dhriti Jagadish. Shiv Parihar: I'm Shiv Parihar. Dhriti Jagadish: And today we're with Steve Teles. Teles is a Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. He is an influential scholar of American political institutions, known for his work on polarization, state capacity, and the structural incentives that shape politics. He’s the author of The Captured Economy: How The Powerful Enrich Themselves , Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality ; The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law ; and Whose Welfare: AFDC and Elite Politics . He has been published widely in Democracy Journal , The Nation , National Affairs , and National Review .  Dhriti Jagadish : Welcome Steve Teles to The Forum . Steve Teles : Thanks for having me.  Dhriti Jagadish : So first question. It’s December 2025. It's been a big year for the Abundance movement—support, as well as criticism. To start, can you define the Abundance Agenda for our audience? Steve Teles : I'll try and give you the simplest version, which is that everybody who's in some ways in Abundance—the thing that everybody has in common is a belief that we need to solve a lot more of our problems through supply. Many of these problems are not fundamentally redistributive. They're about the fact that there's not enough housing, not enough infrastructure, not enough healthcare.  And you can go through the causes of that. And one thing that causes people [in the movement] to vary is, “What are the causes of our supply problems?” But everybody in Abundance believes that there's some  fundamental supply problem at the root of all of our policy, economic, and other problems. Dhriti Jagadish : We want to talk about some critiques of Abundance. From the left, some say the Abundance Agenda is too critical of progressives when it's corporations that are monopolizing the market, for instance. On the economic right, some critics have said that Abundance is not at all pro-free-market, making individual problems and productivity everyone's business. What criticisms are the most sound, and how do you respond to them? Steve Teles : So most of them are not sound, because Abundance is awesome—I'll start out with that answer. The first thing I would say is that it's certainly entirely possible to be progressive or left or socialist and be Abundance. And so in this “ Varieties of Abundance ” paper, I have this category that I call “ Red Plenty .” And the graphics in that are sort of consciously, sort of playing with Socialist Realism, right?  But Zohran Mamdani has explicitly tried to gesture toward Abundance. He said that he wants to build a lot more housing. He wants to get rid of a lot of constraints on small business and the rules and regulations that they have to face. If you want to build a lot more things in the public sector, if you want to pull a lot more things into the public sector, the only way to really do that is to make those things more affordable. Because if those things are really expensive, then the amount of stuff that you can actually get into the public sector is going to be a lot lower.  And so the example I always used is single-payer health care, right? If you pull all the costs in the healthcare system into the public sector, then all of the problems are how much we pay doctors. And the fact that it's really hard for doctors from India or Nigeria or all over the rest of the world to come to the United States. Lots of times, workers face competition from international immigration, which I think is actually good. But it actually turns out [in] health care, we have an incredible system of protectionism. The fact that you're doing something in the public sector doesn't mean that you wish away all those problems. In fact, those problems are even more severe.  So I actually think Abundance is kind of sideways to our normal left-right spectrum. Those are problems that people across the spectrum have to face. So I give the example of what I call “ Cascadian Abundance ,” which is the [variety of Abundance] that's most aligned with environmentalism. If you want a really fast transition to a low-carbon future, you're going to have to build a gargantuan amount of clean energy—way more than anyone’s figured out how to site, and permit, and transmit, and everything else. And if you're going to do that without immiserating people, you're going to have to figure out how to solve all of the problems of proceduralism, and rules, and regulation—including regulation of the public sector.  So I actually think, in some ways, I'm not sure why we're having this weird Progressive vs. Abundance argument. Because again, I think Abundance is something that cuts right through the left-right spectrum, rather than something that rests on the left-right spectrum. Shiv Parihar : Before I jump to the next question, I wanted to ask you about something you said. You said you thought it was a good thing that workers would have global competition as opposed to just sort of local competition. I wanted to ask if you could elaborate and say why that's your stance. Steve Teles : So one is, it's certainly good for the people who are competing, right? That is, one of the reasons why we've had a historically extraordinary drop in poverty is precisely [because of] international competition. And, to some degree, also immigration, but that's another story, because actually remittances, from people who immigrate, are a very important part of the economy of lots of developing countries, and that actually ends up feeding into lots of good things for [their] development.  The basic story is: every developed country gets wealthier by gradually moving people up out of things that are less technologically sophisticated, that have less embedded human capital—into things that have more. And those things then drop down to people who have less human capital—who are in less developed countries. Again, none of this is genius level economics. The thing that makes entire countries wealthier, it means those are the things where there's actually more demand to pay higher wages for, especially for in person services, right? People transition from being in manufacturing into services, paying for people who've got higher value-added things they're doing, and that process is basically good. So long as you make sure that lots of people can participate in it.  Shiv Parihar : Interesting. Well, another critique often leveled at the Abundance Agenda—both from people on the left and the right that care about issues like LGBT rights, abortion, guns—is that the Abundance Movement completely sidesteps some of the social issues which are at the core of fundamental moral debates in American politics. What's your response to those critiques? Steve Teles : I think that's also a weird critique, right? That's like a critique of saying you're not talking about the thing I'm interested in. Now, part of it is, a lot of those problems are irreconcilable. No one's learning anything new. I mean, gun control is a little more complicated: I think we are actually learning some things about what can reduce gun crime. But those are issues that people who’ve got fairly idiosyncratic moral positions really want to be talking about. I always say that one way to think about our politics for the last 30 years is [that] it's been hijacked by people who are pretty extreme—who really want to argue about the thing that they disagree about. There's lots of people who care about other stuff, the things that actually really matter to people on a day-to-day basis. Do they have a house? Do they have schools that work? Do they have police that are actually effective and keep them safe and don’t end up beating up their cousin, right? Those are the things that most people care about. And, it’s not like the things you mention don’t matter.  But, we depend on government to do a lot of really basic stuff, right? It has to repair roads, and pick up trash, and educate kids, and do all those other things.  But it feels like whether or not people's politics are solving those problems have gotten sidelined. And a lot of what Abundance is about is saying “Let’s put those things at the center of our politics.” And those are things that we actually could do a lot better at, that actually would make a lot of difference in ordinary people’s lives. And so in some ways I think Abundance is actually centering things that ordinary, working-class people care about more than the politics that are really developed around people who’ve got very strong moral politics—not that that's not important. But [it] doesn't have to monopolize what we're doing in politics.  Dhriti Jagadish : The Revolving Door Project has termed Abundance as a neoliberal rebrand , but you've argued that Abundance has roots in the Progressive movement of the early 20th-century. Can you explain this historical analogue and how the Abundance movement represents both continuities and departures from the Progressive movement? Why does it or why doesn’t it have similarities to the neoliberalism of the ‘70s and ‘80s? Steve Teles: Well, let me go back to the Progressive analogy, because you can do this either well or badly. It's not really the purpose [of the analogy] to say “the Progressives were great and all their reforms were fantastic.” California is living through some of the worst of its reforms, like referendum [and] initiative. In California, that's a disaster—I think most people who studied this think [it] has been a disaster.  But the thing that's really interesting about the Progressives and why I think it's a good analogy, is they were trying to get the political system to talk about something different than the thing that had dominated the political spectrum. You go back to the late 19th-century. What is everybody arguing about? They're arguing about tariffs. They're arguing about the gold standard. To some degree, they're still arguing about who did what in the Civil War—what people used to call “waving the bloody shirt.” That's what politics was, and Progressives were, in part, saying, “You know, we ought to be arguing about something else.” So it's not a surprise that the Progressives were in both the Democratic and Republican Party right. Woodrow Wilson was a Progressive on the Democratic side. Teddy Roosevelt was a Progressive [on the Republican side].  The core of Progressiv[ism] was really about cities. You think about Chicago, right? Unbelievable. You know, productivity that suddenly happen[s] because we get refrigerated rail cars: the fact we've got rail all over is suddenly massively reducing transaction costs in the economy. It's creating enormous productivity, right? And we've got these cities that are being run by these patronage machines that are not really organized to produce public value. They're organized to produce, as they used to say, “jobs for the boys.”  And Progressives said, “This is crazy. How are we going to have this dynamic capitalist economy? How are we going to stabilize it?” Because the other thing that a dynamic capitalist economy does is it puts people out of work—it disrupts. It takes people off the farm and brings them to cities. And so we need to be able to build housing. We need to be able to build a welfare state. We need to be able to build a regulatory system that can control all this capitalism and these patronage machines can't do it.  If you think about that, that's a really interesting analogy with today. There is actually a lot, at least, potential, economic growth and dynamism out there. Take the example of San Francisco: AI, all this technological stuff, and nobody can move to San Francisco. That's the weird thing. You go into American history [and] when there's boom towns, [when] somebody struck gold or they struck oil, everybody moves there. That ends up producing a lot of value for the people who move. San Francisco has just really successfully ensured that only people who have rich parents can actually move to where the boom town is. That's why I believe [this], in a way, is behind a lot of the cultural anger—they've got their face up against the glass of these protected cities like San Francisco and New York and DC. And again, just like the Varieties of Abundance that I talk about, there were lots of weird variants of Progressives. All the way from people on the left who really thought the problem is, “We need to build a modern welfare state, instead of having these parties that hand people turkeys in exchange for their votes. And to do that, we need proper governmental systems that can actually keep records and do all this other stuff.” And we have [on the right], business[es] who say, “How the hell am I going to run an international company that’s selling things all over the world when I'm getting shaken down all the time by this crazy Chicago local political machine?” So they all believed in a thing called reform. They mostly agree[d] [as] to what their enemy was, which is they hated urban political machines. And they had different reasons why they cared about it. The central question [was] the state. The central question [was], “How do we organize the state? Is it actually capable of doing the things that we need it to do?” And I think those are the questions that, in many ways, we're facing today.  Dhriti Jagadish : And on neoliberalism. I know it's a catch-all term for what people don't like, but is the comparison at all legitimate? Steve Teles : No. I'll give you a longer answer. So I find the term neoliberalism annoying. Because partially, I don't know what it means, and it usually just means “things I don't like.” I wrote this book called The Captured Economy  to say that the various kinds of rent-seeking and control of government by concentrated interest[s] does two things. One, it simultaneously slows down growth—which is the thing that conservatives usually care about— and  it redistributes upward.  So, again, just to go back to what I was talking about the doctor cartel, right? So doctors basically control the system by which we produce new doctors. They determine who gets to be a doctor—and it's not a surprise, they want fewer people to be doctors. And they also, to a significant degree, control what's called “scope of practice” rules, which [ask], “What can only a doctor do, as opposed to a nurse or somebody else?”  And that control does two things. One, it reduces the competition they face. If you reduce competition, you're going to increase price. Increased price is good for doctors, it's bad for patients. Simultaneously, it also reduces dynamism—you think about all the other ways we might be delivering care. So I use the example of dentists. Anybody who's been in a dentist's office knows that when you go to the dentist, you sit in the chair, the first thing that happens is there's a dental hygienist who spends 95% of the time you're there cleaning your teeth, doing your X-rays. And then a dentist comes in [at] the very end, kind of blesses you, looks at your teeth, and then walks off. Well, that's because in most states, dental hygienists are required to work in the office of a dentist. In some sense, they're like a feudal serf: they have to work under [a dentist’s] supervision. We could regulate this by basically letting dental hygienists, who are mostly women, go start their own businesses. And if there's a problem [with a patient], then  they refer the people to a dentist. That would probably compress salaries in the dentistry business: dental hygienists would get more, dentists would get less. It would make basic dental services much more accessible to people. Basically, these kinds of regulations end up redistributing upward and reducing dynamism, reducing productivity.  So why do I hate neoliberalism? This is a long way to preface that answer, which is to say, the story people who whine about neoliberalism have is that, “Oh, the last 50 years has all been this period of deregulation. We released markets to go and immiserate people.” And when I look at, say, occupational licensing in [ The Captured Economy ], there was supposed to be this period of massive deregulation. [It] has actually been a period of massive regulation  of the labor market. Right now, over a third of people now require a license to perform their job which was much lower 50 years ago. That doesn't look like a deregulatory period. If you look at housing, there's way more constraints now on the ability to build housing. That's not a result of a deregulatory period.  So part of it is, I just question the story of history that these people tell. I always say, not neoliberalism, but liberalism —good-old-fashioned Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, free markets—[is] good, right? I think the argument is we ought to get rid of a lot of these regulatory constraints on the private sector and on the public sector that keeps us from being able to effectively deliver things people need in government. Shiv Parihar : I wanted to follow up on what you were saying with Progressive movement. You cast big city urban machines as being a bad thing. But there's a lot of evidence that I've seen—especially in recent sort of revisionist literature—that urban machines like Tammany Hall [and] Roscoe Conkling’s machine in New York, were all engines of democracy—that they brought democracy to the common person, that they oftentimes functioned more efficiently than large welfare states. And that the decline of urban machines in the aftermath of the Progressive movement has been directly linked to increased polarization. And so I'm curious if you think that that's actually a very positive argument in favor of Abundance. Steve Teles : This sounds like a Mike Fortner argument .  Shiv Parihar : Yes, yes.  Steve Teles : I have a lot of credit for that argument. Remember, I was not necessarily giving a normative argument about Progressivism. I was giving an argument about the fact that I think it rhymes historically with our moment. Now, I do think that ultimately, political machines couldn't create, effectively, what I think of as the rule of law that you need for effective global markets and for an effective welfare state—[they] oppose[d] the sort of regularization of the welfare state. So the argument I would have is that, in some ways, we replaced the political machine with the worst possible alternative: we effectively created the equivalent of “NIMBY [Not in My Backyard] machines” in lots of places.  The advantage of a lot of political machines is [that] they did make it easy to cut deals, right? So you could actually get somebody [to] say, “Yes,” right? So the political machine said, “Okay, we're in Chicago [and] we're going to build a highway down the lake. We're going to split up the spoils. Somebody's going to get this, somebody's going to do that—but we're going to do it.” Somebody was capable of saying yes. Effectively, what we ended up replacing that with is a system in which nobody  can say yes.  We were talking about this earlier: a gondola up little Cottonwood Canyon in Salt Lake City.  Shiv Parihar : As a Salt Lake City voter, I voted against that measure. Steve Teles : Well, again, it might also be a terrible idea. But in lots of cases, we never make a decision. We don't decide to  build a gondola or not  build the gondola. We just keep kicking the can down because nobody can authoritatively say yes or no. And that is both a[n] efficiency problem and it's a democracy problem. With a system in which there's so many procedural safeguards, in some ways, designed to attack the political machine, [it’s] now made it impossible to do really big, effective things in the public sector, which leads to alienation. There's [a] feeling that government [is] never going to work—it's never going to get anything done.  Dhriti Jagadish : You've argued that both Peter Thiel and Zohran Mamdani can represent the Abundance movement. Why do you think it's useful to put such different figures under the same label? You've explained that factional fighting is good, competition is good—it includes politically homeless people. But are you at all worried that big-tent politics, movements like the Progressives have historically practiced, won't work today in a very hyperpolarized environment? Steve Teles : So just to be clear about my argument. The best way to think of Abundance is a separate dimension from the left-right dimension. But everybody who's in Abundance is, in a way, interested in something else. And particularly, they're interested in the problems of the state itself—the organization of the state is the most important thing to solve.  Now, that's often because people are angry about the fact that they can't get very different things from the state, right? So Zohran Mamdani cares a lot about the fact that there's not enough housing, there's not enough public infrastructure to move people around, and as a result, people can't get the opportunity. Peter Thiel—him and Musk [say], “I want to go to Mars. And we got to the moon and we haven't been back.” Or people in that space also care a lot about supersonic transport: “We managed to constantly increase the speed of air travel, and then we just stopped.”  My argument about Abundance is, ideally it improves everything across the ideological spectrum. Because there are Abundance versions of all of these different ideologies, all the way from “Red Plenty” and Mamdani to Cascadian Abundance—which is a way to improve environmentalism and concern about climate—all the way to “ Dark Abundance ,” which is the thing that’s most tech-right adjacent, where Peter Thiel comes in.  There are people on the Abundance spectrum [who] are going to be frenemies, right? They're going to be working together, especially where a lot of the things about law and proceduralism are concerned, but they're still going to disagree about, “How much do we care that we're still burning fossil fuels?” That’s a thing that Abundance itself doesn’t tell you about. Abundance says, “If you care about burning fossil fuels, then there's a bunch of stuff you need to get done to do that. But if you care about building new munitions to deter China? You can't really do that with all of our inherited legacy administrative state.” Shiv Parihar : So you really do seem to be arguing that the fundamental question of politics is about how to organize the state. But also, in [our] lunch beforehand, [you] talked about Utah and Salt Lake City where there was quite a lot of community and institutional oversight, because there wasn't—until relatively recently—much separation between the Mormon Church and the state government of Utah. Those that were engaging in building up the city were all people that sort of knew each other through this institution. And even to this day, the Mormon Church owns the mall by my house and they prop up Forever 21.  Steve Teles : I've been in that mall. Shiv Parihar : Exactly, yeah. So do you think that this sort of community-wide, cultural buy-in that Mormon Utah had when it was engaging in this extreme buildup of Salt Lake City, is a prerequisite for Abundance—[is there] a cultural component, as opposed to just sort of a state policy component? Steve Teles : I think that's actually a really profound question. And I'm going to answer it by referring to a paper  I love by Eitan Hersh at Tufts about the political science literature on business. But one of the things he starts out with is this story that in Boston, there used to be this group of businessmen called “The Vault.” This was really a meeting, once a month, of all the most important business leaders of Boston and they basically stitched stuff up: “The Storrow Drive is a disaster. Somebody ought to fix it.” What Hersh is really describing is a kind of coordinating structure. There was a thing that was underneath the state that actually provided the coordinating capacity—and that was mostly business. We've broken that ability of business to perform that coordinating function.  And the thing I think you're describing with Salt Lake City: they have a church. And it provides some of that informal coordinating capacity that's underneath the structure of the state, and allows it to do often, big, ambitious things. And we decided that we thought that was kind of creepy, right? And we decided to come up with lots of ways to prevent that kind of coordination.  There’s a great book by Sarah Anzia called Local Interests —she looked at all the people who participated in local government. And it turns out, there's still a fair amount of coordination in local government, but it's often produced by the producers  of local government—teachers unions, and police unions, and fire unions. They are the ones left providing the coordination, not the consumers  of government.  We need government that's effectively organized around the people who are the consumers of government. Latino working-class people are especially dependent on government working. There's a lot of really great literature that's coming out about African Americans and police—going back to Mike Fortner’s work —saying, it turns out that African Americans really need police. It affects their political participation. People who've been victimized actually participate less.  When government services don't work, it's people who don't have exit options that are most affected by that. But those people mostly lack coordinating capacity in the way that the producer side does. I think one of the things that a lot of us in Abundance are trying to figure out is, how do we actually organize that consumer side of government? I think a lot of the politics we've had in the last five years—especially around criminal justice—has had this vision where people are just the victims of government. But again, people need government. They don't have an alternative.  Shiv Parihar : Before I jump to the next question, I just want to sort of circle back to that one really quickly. So do you think that there might be some sort of cultural or societal prerequisite to making Abundance function? Steve Teles : I mean that's a kind of story that sociologists often tell, which is that, “We've been sort of depending on the non-liberal forms of organization. And that the more we become more purely liberal-rights-oriented [and] modern, we get rid of a lot of those informal, semi-feudal kind of [institutions] that we actually can't reconstruct on a modern basis.” I'd like to believe that [isn’t] true. I do think political parties and political party factions may be capable of doing some of that, right? Again, those are less likely to have some of the sort of raw musculature that things like an entire church or a group of fancy businessmen have. But it's probably the best we've got. Shiv Parihar : Finally, 60 seconds. You sit down with a working mother with kids who's struggling to pay rent and you have to give her your elevator pitch to support Abundance over JD Vance or Zohran Mamdani—or any other sort of alternative economic plan. What's your pitch? Steve Teles : I think actually, in two or three years, Mamdani is going to look even more Abundance-y than he looks now. Because he's going to try some other stuff and it's not going to work, and he's going to end up coming back to just plain, vanilla Abundance. But I think to that person, I would say one, growth is really important. That's what ultimately determines people's wages and how expensive the basic things are. The other thing I would say is, that mother depends very much on the performance of basic government functions. With a couple of kids, she's not going to be able necessarily [to] move somewhere with a lower level of crime—she depends on the police where she is actually reducing crime. She's not going to be able to send her kid to Catholic school. She’s got to send her kid to that [local] school and it’s got to actually work and not teach her kid nonsense and teach them how to read. People who are the furthest down have the fewest private options and they need government to work for them. That is the voter who is the most missing voter in politics: the person who is pro-government because they want government to work for them, not pro-government because they work for government.  Dhriti Jagadish : Steve Teles, thank you for joining us.  Steve Teles : Thank you for having me.

AI romance betrays our distorted idea of love. Credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne Is the dating market so catastrophically bad that a relationship with an AI outperforms a flesh-and-blood partner? Faith Hill, writing for the Atlantic, recently published an article  challenging many preconceived notions about the modern phenomenon of AI romantic partners. Citing Kate Devlin, a professor from King’s College London, Hill presents the use case for AI partners as follows: “ The amount of toxic crap that women get online from men,” Devlin said, “particularly when you’re trying to do things like online dating—if you have an alternative, respectful, lovely, caring AI partner, why would you not?”  I object to the idea that AI relationships are valuable because they provide alternative partners to women fed up with those available to them in the heterosexual dating scene. I also disagree firmly with Hill’s contention that “this phenomenon [AI relationships] may actually be good for romance: not only for women raising the bar but for the men who proceed to meet it.” I think these virtual relationships are good for a certain conception of romance, but are culturally unhealthy and, in the long run, destructive for the general enterprise of human love.  AI relationships merely mesh very well with our warped societal sense of what relationships and love are for : namely, individual validation and satisfaction. We are obsessed with what makes us feel good and comfortable as an individual . AI romance does not ‘raise the bar’ for human partners; it instead further perverts the idea of love. As in the myth of Narcissus - who fell in love with his own reflection - AI romance amounts to a cheap facsimile of love where our selfishness and vanity are reflected back upon us.  David Brooks has a fantastic piece in the New York Times  excavating how the definition of love has become distorted in the 21st century. Brooks contends that, to the average American, love is  “when somebody else makes you feel understood and good about yourself.” He, by contrast, makes the case that love ought to be “something closer to self-abnegation than to self-comfort.” Brooks quotes Eric Fromm, an acclaimed psychoanalyst, and so shall I. As Fromm writes in the Art of Loving, “the main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism.” The true measure of an act of love should be whether one gives, rather than takes, affection. The creed which guides our modern pursuit of love is the exact opposite of Fromm’s condition: we are captivated by an “ethos of self-display.” We post insipid Instagram stories  flaunting sham, fairytale romances. We celebrate financial dependency and traditional gender roles in the name of self-care . We canonize the pseudoscientific language of therapy  and self-love: that the good life consists of what is beneficent and safe and validating  to us. With this cult of the self in mind, the proliferation of digital romances with AI partners seems to have an obvious culprit. Artificial intelligence is the perfect vessel to fuel our narcissistic culture. After all, an AI has no ‘self’ to speak of (at least, not yet .) A pruned and cultivated AI partner need not have any of the pesky trappings which constrain real people: quirks and insecurities, a job, friends, family, personal goals and ambitions not centered around his or her romantic partner. An AI partner gives   affection and is not interested in receiving it in return – and they are really good at giving affection (or an imitation of affection, at least.) Recent studies  of sycophantic AI demonstrate how agents can engulf their users in a torrent of validating praise. It makes sense that we would fall for AI agents who make us feel good about ourselves without requiring any messy “self-abnegation.”  I want to state upfront that I am by no means invalidating the experiences of those whose interaction with AI partners have led them to genuinely reflect on their real-world relationships, such as one user Hill describes learning that “mutual respect is key. It’s not about women always sacrificing for men’s happiness.” But, taking a closer look at Hill’s piece, the boons of the AI relationships she describes are all centered solely on what the user gains. Nowhere is there any discussion of users practicing how they give love or support to their partner. I also find Hill’s solution to sycophancy markedly insufficient: “some large language models are generally less sycophantic than others, and people can also train their digital partner with different prompts.” Sycophantic behavior has been found  to be 47% more prevalent amongst the most popular AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google than in typical human interaction. It also stands to reason that if people like and indeed seek out validating behavior, then the ability to tailor prompts will do little good in combating sycophantic responses.  Greek myth abounds with warnings against vanity and self-conceit. Icarus fell as a result of his hubris as the wax melted off of his wings like water. Narcissus, realizing the object of his desire would be forever out of reach, committed suicide at the foot of his own reflection. I fear that for all the good AI companionship may do in inculcating users against negative behavior by their real-life partners, it will simultaneously serve to perpetuate a wan, disfigured perception of what it means to love another person. The state of the modern world demands us to refuse the temptation to give into self-centered desires. Ours would be a sad and lonely planet were we to ensconce ourselves behind the comfortable parapets of our curated algorithms and artificial lovers. It would also be a more unjust  planet. Political insecurity, climate change, and international conflict require real  human connection, empathy, and vulnerability to resolve. ChatGPT cannot hold me when I am crying, or shoulder the weight of my neighbor when she falls, or stoop down to help the man laying barefoot on the snowy street. It   cannot   do these things , no matter how many times it tells me that it cares.

On Trump’s FTC, Humphrey’s Executor, and the Revival of an Unconstitutional Idea. Image Credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne “The true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.” So writes Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 68 . Argued before the Supreme Court on December 8 this year, Trump v. Slaughter  presents a test of Hamilton’s incisive aphorism. At issue in the case is Trump’s presidential authority to remove Rebecca Slaughter from her commissionership at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Although Trump originally nominated Slaughter for the role in 2018, he subsequently fired her, saying that he took her presence to be “inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.” In the following piece, I will examine the constitutionality of the presidential removal power going back to Humphrey’s Executor v. United States , and compare the ascendancy of unitary executive theory to the death of another congressional check on the executive branch: the legislative veto.  First things first: why do independent agencies like the FTC exist? The modern bureaucratic system can be credited to the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and FDR, who embodied the Progressive-era vision of government by a disinterested expert class. The broader question is: why did the Founding Fathers not create the bureaucratic institutions we have today? I’d argue the absence of an administrative class stemmed from the fact that the particular exigencies of modern government did not exist at the time of the founding. Congress in the Founding Fathers’ day could afford to legislate directly on matters of public policy. The many industries that agencies regulate today were not around, and the national population was significantly smaller. Today Congress could not possibly manage the glut of responsibilities  that it would be handed should the organs of the federal bureaucracy be dismantled. This delegation of congressional authority rankles some originalists on the right. These stalwart historians claim that Congress lacks the authority to delegate its Article I, Sec. 8 powers. Trump, however, is not against independent agencies per se  (although some of his supporters might be). He instead takes umbrage at any refusal to bow and scrape to his every whim. The Trump Administration asserts  that when it comes to agencies like the FTC, “any power they have is delegated by the President, and they must be accountable to the President.”  Which powers do agencies wield? This  dilemma was decided nearly a hundred years ago in the landmark 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States . There, the Supreme Court ruled that the FTC was “an administrative body created by Congress to carry into effect legislative policies embodied in the statute in accordance with the legislative standard therein prescribed, and to perform other specified duties as a legislative or as a judicial aid. Such a body cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive.” The Supreme Court has systematically eroded its 1935 ruling since the ascendancy of the conservative majority headed by Chief Justice Roberts. Most prominently,   the 2020 case Seila Law v. CFPB limited  the scope of Humphrey’s Executor  to exclusively cover multi-member commissions and agencies whose operations don’t dip too deeply into the well of executive power. On this analysis, the Court’s prospective ruling in Trump v. Slaughter  could turn over unprecedented control of the federal bureaucracy to Donald Trump. The Center for American Progress has an exhaustive laundry list  of the dangerous consequences of such a decision. For instance, the FTC and other similar agencies (the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the SEC, etc.) could be pressured by the executive branch to repeal consumer protections and enrich White House insiders at the expense of the public good.  The Wall Street Journal ’s Editorial Board reached an interesting conclusion  regarding the potential outcome of Trump v. Slaughter . “A disease of modern politics is executive overreach and legislative timidity,” they write, “so giving the President direct control of these agencies might seem a strange cure. Yet reversing the constitutional aberration of Humphrey’s  could prompt Congress to rethink how much power it has ceded.” I believe the possibility that the current GOP Congress would fulfill James Madison’s vision for their branch’s ‘ambition’ and grab back their long-delegated and long-neglected responsibilities is laughably slim. (The public comments on the Journal  webpage are also quite funny: “Congress cannot escape 24/7 mental masterbation [sic]”). What strikes me most about the Journal ’s conclusion is that it clashes squarely with the specter of unchecked power that opponents of the ‘administrative state’ often retreat to. In an interview  with former Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz by Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, Chaffetz proclaims that “this bureaucratic class…is running the show. You have outside, big dark money groups, that are pulling all the levers.” The shadowy ‘deep state’ and cabalistic democratic donors dreamed up by Chaffetz seem, in my mind, best embodied by the grift and obfuscation of Trump 2.0.  If the opponents of the federal bureaucracy truly wanted to tackle the overreach of independent agencies without further encouraging an overzealous executive branch, I wager that a different form of oversight is far more effective: the legislative veto . Granted, the legislative veto was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court forty years ago in INS v. Chadha . But, before meeting its demise in 1983, the legislative veto offered an effective and compelling check on executive power. The origins of the legislative veto lie, funnily enough, with the executive branch. Louis Fisher, Senior Specialist in Separation of Powers at the Congressional Research Service, acknowledges  that the executive agreed to the imposition of the legislative veto as a necessary leash attached to the powers delegated to the executive by the legislature. Either branch of Congress, or even occasionally a single committee, could overturn a decision made by an executive agency. One of the earliest examples of a formal legislative veto was the House of Representatives’ 1933 dismissal of President Hoover’s executive reorganization proposals. Congress later even reserved the power to overturn a declaration of emergency  by a simple majority in both houses, per the National Emergencies Act. At issue in INS v. Chadha  was the immigration status of one Jagdish Rai Chadha who had applied to the Attorney General for permanent residence in spite of an expired student visa. Chadha was initially granted permanent residence. The House of Representatives, however, vetoed the Attorney General’s decision per a legislative veto provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The 7-2 ruling in Chadha focused on two potentially unconstitutional elements of the legislative veto: its rejection of bicameralism and violation of the presentment clause. Discourse  on the legislative veto following the ruling in Chadha  acknowledges that this originalist position on the Constitution is legitimate, but questions its applicability given the evolution of both the executive and legislative branches since the founding. Justice White, in an oral dissent to Chadha , made a similar argument: “without the legislative veto, Congress is faced with a Hobson’s choice: either to refrain from delegating the necessary authority, leaving itself with a hopeless task of writing laws with the requisite specificity to cover endless special circumstances across the entire policy landscape, or, in the alternative, to abdicate its lawmaking function to the Executive Branch and independent agencies.” While some pieces of legislation still include provisions akin to a legislative veto (The War Powers Act, Global Magnitsky Act), either a constitutional amendment or reevaluation by the Supreme Court would be required to bring the legislative veto back. In light of the looming Trump v. Slaughter decision , I believe Justice White’s calculus rings true. Congress, spineless as it may be, needs an effective means of maintaining the separation of powers without reappropriating all of the overwhelming number of responsibilities handled by executive agencies. Moreover, the legislative veto also strikes at the heart of conservative complaints against the administrative state. It affords the people, via their democratically elected representatives, a measure of control over a bureaucracy which they feel is not working for them. The true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration. I reckon that the legislative veto would bring the United States closer to passing that test than would the untrammeled prerogative of the President.

Inside the arguments that pushed the Court to confront the limits of executive authority. Illustration: Daybreak. © Getty Images. Credit: Bloomberg. November 5th  wasn’t supposed to be a remarkable day at the Supreme Court. But the justices’ questions made it one. What began as a routine fight over trade law quickly turned into something else: a rare, cross-ideological pushback against presidential power. The tariff cases before the Court— Trump v. V.O.S. Selections  and Learning Resources v. Trump —arrived looking like technical disputes over the meaning of an old statute. They didn’t appear likely to scramble the Court’s usual ideological lines. But under the legal jargon lay an important question for the nation: can the president use a national-security law to claim a tariff power that Congress never explicitly delegated? The administration said yes. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, it argued, lets presidents “ regulate importation ,” and tariffs were simply another way to do that. However, the Court didn’t seem convinced. Not the liberal justices. Not the conservatives. And not even the justices appointed by the president whose policy was on the line. For a moment, there was doubt that the executive branch had the authority it claimed.  The story of these tariffs didn’t begin in the courtroom. It began in January, almost the moment President Trump stepped back through the doors of the White House. Within weeks, he declared a national emergency and immediately announced tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, the start of a sweeping campaign to impose duties on nearly 30 percent of all U.S. imports.  By April, the tariff list had grown to  more than 100 countries . To justify this sweeping tariff campaign, Trump cited the IEEPA. The 1977 statute  was enacted during the Cold War to help presidents restrict trade with hostile nations during emergencies by freezing assets, issuing embargoes, and cutting off transactions. No president had ever used it to impose tariffs. Trump became the first. His administration argued that the law’s authorization to  “regulate the importation”  of foreign property was enough to justify steep duties on dozens of countries and baseline tariffs on all of them. The administration insisted their actions were required to confront what they described as “unusual and extraordinary threats.”  They cited everything from fentanyl trafficking to national-security risks in the industrial base. Importantly, IEEPA never uses the words “tariff,” “tax,” “duty,” or “impost.”  Every other law that lets a president impose duties does so explicitly, and with limits. This one doesn’t. “Tariffs are taxes,”  Neal Katyal, an American lawyer for the small businesses challenging the tariffs, told the Court. And the Constitution puts the taxing power in Congress’s hands for a reason. The Federal Circuit agreed with Katyal. In August, by a 7-to-4 vote , it held that IEEPA did not authorize the “tariffs of the magnitude”  Trump announced. If Congress wanted to hand the president the power to decide the country’s entire tariff system—to set and reset duties on any product, from any country, in any amount—it would have just said so. As the courts scrutinized the limits of constitutional powers, billions flowed in under these emergency tariffs. By the fall, the Treasury had warned that a loss at the Supreme Court could force the government to return  “tens of billions of dollars”  in duties collected this year alone: a figure that could balloon to $1 trillion  if the Court waited until summer to rule. All the while, importers reported widespread disruption—from refund liabilities to  “innovation shocks”  in tech sectors. The CTA and CoC warned that the policy could cost 141,000 jobs  due to reduced exports and likely retaliation. But at the Supreme Court, those downstream effects were background noise. The justices kept re turning to a far more enduring question, one that hovered above the economic fallout: If tariffs function as taxes, who is constitutionally empowered to impose them? Congress? Or a president asserting emergency powers with no historical precedent? That was the real fight on November 5th: not over trade policy, but over who gets to wield the power drafted in the Constitution. It is this question that muddled the typical party lines, as both conservative and liberal justices questioned whether the IEEPA could sustain tariffs of the scope Trump had imposed. Their concerns clustered around three themes: the meaning of “regulate importation,”  the constitutional status of tariffs as taxes, and whether the case triggered the major questions doctrine. On the statutory question, Solicitor General D. John Sauer relied heavily on a simple premise: IEEPA’s instruction to  “regulate importation”  plainly embraces tariffs, which he called among “the most traditional and direct methods of regulating importation.” However, the bench was unconvinced. Chief Justice John Roberts pressed Sauer on why the major questions doctrine should not apply when the government was now claiming authority to impose tariffs on “any product from any country, in any amount, for any length of time” —all under a statute that had never been read that way. On the Republican side, Justice Neil Gorsuch pushed the delegation issue even further by warning the tariff case may set a precedent as “a one-way ratchet  toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the people’s elected representatives.” Most directly, Gorsuch pressed Sauer with hypotheticals about Congress “ abdicating all  responsibility to regulate foreign commerce—or for that matter, declare war—to the president,” and forced him to retreat from his initial claim that such delegations would be effectively “unreviewable. ”  Gorsuch’s questioning of the long-term consequences of broad emergency delegations revealed a rare moment of bipartisan judicial skepticism. The conservatives on the Court did not rally around presidential power; the liberals did not need to stretc h to find limits. Instead, across the bench, the justices kept circling back to the same concern: whether a broad reading of “regulate importation” would let the president do what only Congress is supposed to do: raise revenue from the American public through tariffs, without a clear grant of authority.  Seen in that light, the skepticism on the bench wasn’t simply bipartisan. It was constitutional. The justices were probing a fear as old as the republic itself, one Madison captured plainly: government would not rely on virtue or goodwill, but on the predictable friction produced when each branch guarded its own authority. “ Ambition  must be made to counteract ambition” was less a hope than a structural expectation. But this ambition depended on a second assumption: that institutional ambition would be stronger than partisan ambition. However, in today’s political culture, that assumption no longer holds. Political scientists describe the transformation as a shift from the separation of powers  to the separation of parties . Partisan incentives now run so deep that they often override constitutional duties. Congress routinely delegates broad authority to the executive when the president is politically aligned with the majority. This is precisely why the tariff cases stand out. On November 5th, the questions from the bench did not map onto familiar ideological cleavages. Instead, they reflected the justices’ recognition that allowing a president to infer sweeping tariff authority from a national-security statute would reshape the balance of power between Congress and the executive in unprecedented ways. Whether this marks a genuine rebalancing or merely an episodic return to constitutional first principles remains uncertain. But it revealed something rare in contemporary American governance: a branch openly defending the boundaries of its authority. Moments like this can be easy to overanalyze. A single morning of sharp questioning does not undo decades of partisan drift. But in constitutional politics, the early signs of stress often matter as much as the fractures themselves. Scholars disagree on when a constitutional crisis truly begins. Some look for overt confrontation, such as presidents actively defying an unambiguous court order or refusing to comply with congressional oversight. Others focus on quieter failures: a legislature too passive to protect its own authority or the erosion of norms of institutional forbearance that once restrained the use of lawful power.  If those are the metrics, the tariff case is not an indicator of a constitutional crisis. But it sits uncomfortably close to the fault line. If the Court invalidates the tariffs, it will reaffirm a basic constitutional premise: that raising revenue is a legislative act, not something the executive can argue into existence through an emergency declaration. If it upholds them, the presidency gains another powerful political tool, one that future administrations, of either party, may find hard to resist. At a time when partisan identity often overwhelms institutional identity, the Court’s skepticism showed that constitutional incentives are not entirely extinct. The justices did not behave as political surrogates. They behaved, as Madison imagined, in defense of the structural boundaries that give each branch its purpose. The Nov. 5th discussion will not, by itself, restore Congress’s ambition or reverse decades of norm erosion. But it does suggest that the constitutional system retains some capacity for self-correction, even if that capacity appears only intermittently. And in a moment when American governance often feels like it is eroding from its constitutional foundations, watching the Court reassert the logic of checks and balances was a reminder of what the system was built to do.

Trump’s dehumanizing attack on Somalis is a warning about who this country is willing to cast out of “We the People.” President Trump showing reporters a sheet of paper with a photo of Representative Ilhan Omar. (Credit: The New York Times )  Earlier this week, the president of the United States sat at the head of a Cabinet table and called people like me–Somali Americans, a small, visible, overwhelmingly lawful community living in places like   Minneapolis, Columbus, Seattle,  and even   Fargo –“ garbage .” Our country, he said, “ stinks. ” We “ contribute nothing. ” We “ do nothing but complain .” When he finished, his vice president, J.D. Vance,   banged  the table in encouragement. When a president looks into the cameras and calls an entire community of citizens “garbage,” the question is no longer whether he means it. Of course he does. The question is whether everyone else–courts, universities, city councils, business leaders, voters–is prepared to live with it. For years, Americans have argued about whether this kind of rhetoric is just Trump being Trump or something darker. At a certain point, the argument becomes an evasion. A president who divides the country into “real” Americans and internal enemies; who treats loyalty to himself as more important than the law; who turns public contempt for a targeted group into a recurring spectacle–that is no mystery. We have a word for that style of politics: fascism. By fascism, I mean a politics organized around the boundary between “the people” and their enemies, in which legal constraints vanish when they stand in the way, and in which public cruelty toward the despised becomes a kind of founding ritual. That is what we are watching. The “garbage” remark fits the pattern perfectly. It draws a bright line between the “we” the president claims to represent and the “they” he blames for the country’s problems. It casts a set of citizens as pollutants, not neighbors. It tells his audience that the real issue is not prices or wages or housing, but the presence of people whose mere existence on American soil is an affront. This picture bears no resemblance to the actual Somali presence in the United States. Most of us are not recent border crossers. We came as refugees, as children, as family reunification cases. Over time, we did what this country says it wants immigrants to do. We became   permanent residents and citizens , with some of the   highest naturalization rates of any refugee group . Our names are on voter rolls, property records, and business licenses. Our labor shows up in warehouses and factories, in nursing homes and hospitals, in taxis and trucking routes. We pay state and federal taxes that help fund the very Cabinet agencies now being repurposed to target our neighborhoods. If this story sounds familiar, it should. Every large immigrant wave in American history has heard some version of “you do not belong.” Irish Catholics were depicted as   papist infiltrators  in 19th‑century cartoons. German immigrants were labeled “ enemy aliens ” during World War I; thousands were forced to register, lost their jobs, or were interned and had property seized. Japanese Americans, two‑thirds of them citizens, were   locked in camps  during World War II under Executive Order 9066, while wartime posters and editorials rendered them as vermin and saboteurs to be trapped and contained. Each time, the country later admitted it had gone too far. Those episodes unfolded under different ideologies–some fascist, some not–but they all followed the same script: pick an internal minority, convince the majority that it is a threat, loosen the usual rules in the name of safety, and count on respectable people to tell themselves it is temporary and not really their concern. What is different now is that none of this can be written off as ignorance. The history is in our textbooks. The photographs of the camps and registration centers are in our museums. We know how dehumanizing language has been used before, and who paid the price. And still, with that knowledge, we are watching a president talk about a Black Muslim community in language that comes straight out of that playbook. For Somalis, the message is unmistakable. It does not matter whether you are a citizen, a green‑card holder, a DACA recipient, or a refugee whose paperwork has been scrutinized for years. When the president calls your community "garbage," he is telling you that your rights are contingent–that your safety depends not on the Constitution, but on his mood and the calculations of people around him. You can see that in what is happening beneath the rhetoric. In the weeks prior to the "garbage" remark, the administration moved to end   Temporary Protected Status  for Somali nationals, pushed the   refugee‑admissions ceiling  toward its lowest levels in modern history, and revived a   nineteen‑country travel ban  that includes Somalia. In Minnesota, home to one of the largest Somali communities in the country,roughly a hundred agents have been sent into the Twin Cities for an immigration operation  aimed at Somali neighborhoods.   Unmarked vehicles idle near Somali malls. Business owners report that customers are staying home.  Parents keep their children inside—not because of crime, but because they do not know when a sweep will come down their block. When a president calls a group "garbage," it changes how people with badges and guns think about who it is permissible to frighten, and what level of aggression the public will tolerate. Why Somalis? Partly because we are numerically small and visually obvious. Our clothing, our accents, our mosques make us easy to single out. Our communities are concentrated in a handful of states that have already become symbols in the country's culture wars. For a president who has not delivered on basic economic promises, there is a certain convenience in pointing at a Black Muslim community in Minnesota and saying: that is the problem. That, too, is a well‑worn move. When wages stagnate and costs rise, it is easier to blame immigrants for fraud than to explain why prices are still high. It is easier to mock hijabs than to discuss why health care remains unaffordable. It is easier to rage about a Somali mall than to admit that tariffs and chaotic governance are hurting farmers and small businesses. Somalis will endure this moment. Many of our elders survived state collapse, warlords, civil war in Somalia, famine, and years in refugee camps. They did not cross deserts and oceans just to be undone by one man's insults at a Cabinet table. They will keep working, praying, opening businesses, and raising children. They will keep sending money home through fragile   remittance channels  to keep relatives alive in a country still struggling with   violence and drought . They are not going anywhere. The more interesting question is what everyone else will do. Fascism does not succeed because one man talks like a fascist. It succeeds when enough people decide that talk like that is the acceptable price of doing business. It succeeds when universities decide that issuing a statement will only inflame donors, when city councils decide that immigration raids are someone else’s jurisdiction, when corporate leaders decide that criticizing a president who calls citizens "garbage" is not worth the risk to share price. It succeeds when neighbors who know better stay quiet at work so as not to start an argument. There is nothing especially complicated about the moral test here. You do not need a degree in political science to know that calling an entire community "garbage" is wrong. You do not need to share Ilhan Omar’s politics, or mine, or support any particular immigration bill, to insist that dignified treatment in this country should not be conditional on how one is portrayed in a president’s outbursts. If the United States is serious about the story it tells itself–that people can come from anywhere and become American–then that principle has to hold when it is hardest to defend: when the people in question are Black, Muslim, visibly foreign, and politically unpopular. Either the promise covers us, too, or it was never a promise at all. Trump’s words this week were disgusting. More importantly, they were clarifying. They tell us exactly how he understands power: not as a responsibility to protect all citizens, but as the right to decide which citizens are worth protecting at all. That is a fascist instinct. We can name it. We can refuse to normalize it. Or we can get used to it. Somalis are already doing our part: studying, working, voting, paying taxes, taking care of our families here and abroad. The burden now shifts to everyone who claims to care about democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law. You do not have to like us to say that we are not garbage. You only have to insist that in this country, no president gets to decide which human beings are disposable. That is the test in front of us. It is as large as our future as a republic.

We should dare to know the values that define us. Credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne   “Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong?... You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches…and yet you dare to open the books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to speak good English…Who are you?” - Jack London   It is a true and regrettable assertion that 2025 has been characterized by acts of vicious political violence. Commentators and columnists have   opined  on the root cause of such antisocial behavior: negative partisanship,   irony-poisoning , even justified resentment. I think Mike Cosper, writing for The Dispatch , has it right, or at least presents a prognosis which encapsulates many of the aforementioned catalysts for violent action. Cosper argues that secular, liberal modernity has ‘unbundled’ certain questions which make up our identity— “Am I a Christian? What do I want to be when I grow up? Where will I live?” —that were previously defined by birth or cultural tradition. The modern individual must now decide for themselves what religion to subscribe to, what career to choose, and where they want to reside while participating in both. This has undoubtedly enhanced the liberty of choice which people in the West enjoy, and opened the doors for greater success and the realization of the good life. Yet, this unbundling also places the burden of answering existential questions upon us , by no means an easy undertaking. Should these questions go unanswered, purposelessness and lack of community can drive people into the embrace of conspiracy theories, political radicalization, and unreality. The transience of contemporary employment, the decline in religious faith, and the turgid slew of life-hacks, quack philosophies, and commodified ideologies on social media all seem to reduce the world to a heap of broken images. A church, employer, or local community connects us with something greater than ourselves. If I lack any of these grounding ties, or actively despise those which I am tethered to, the draw of poisonous online communities and fringe ideologies expands tenfold.   I argue in this article that a liberal arts education  in the United States can  and should  act as one means to answering our previously bundled questions of identity. My work is not the first to raise this   claim . This is also not the first Forum  article lauding the   boons  of the liberal arts, nor do I hope it will be the last. Consider it a stump speech for the ever-ongoing reappraisal of the meaning of higher education, or an annual inoculation against the apathy that creeps into our attachment to a style of learning that is easy to take for granted. Writing in The Forum , Henry Long   defined  the liberal arts as being “concerned with knowledge insofar as it is intrinsically valuable.” Articles in the New York Times  describe them as “ a model of teaching  derived from the ancient Greeks,” and key to “initiating students into   a culture of rational reflection  on how to live.” These interpretations capture many of the hallmarks of a liberal arts education: a pursuit of truth divested from commercial or pragmatic considerations; the use of the Socratic method and lively engagement with competing ideas; the study of humanity’s various schemes of morality and politics ranging from the hills of the Peloponnese to the streets of Philadelphia. However, I submit that another crucial facet of the liberal arts is their incorporation of students into a tradition of study . As one sits down to begin their first slog through the Nicomachean Ethics , one can imagine that a student quite similar to themselves (somewhat sleep-deprived and over-caffeinated) sat down to the same exercise five, ten, or even fifty years ago. The liberal arts grant a measure of appreciation for the warp and weft of the intellectual cloth from which Western civilization was tailored.  That civilization is now more polarized, lonely, unhappy, and overwrought than ever. As Cosper puts it, “ lots of lonely people are gathering online in an environment of poisonous political rhetoric, dying to give themselves away to something.” The modern, secular, liberal American is presented with a smorgasbord of lifestyles, moral principles, and ultimate values by which to define themselves. As religious affiliation, civic association, and face-to-face interaction decline, these values are increasingly propagated through the internet. Consider the TikTok-driven   tradwife  trend,   hustle culture , or   #VanLife . There are also far fewer innocuous  spaces accessible to individuals starved for meaning. Instances of left-wing, right-wing, and indiscriminate violence now   feed on one another  through insidious online forums where inhumanity becomes synonymous with social clout. I maintain that the liberal arts offer an alternative path to defining one’s identity insofar as they teach three principles : moral intuition, connection to tradition, and respect for institutions. First, on moral intuition. The liberal arts acquaint students with the breadth and diversity of human endeavors: the natural sciences, social sciences, religion, arts, philosophy. Enshrined in this approach are competing schematics for what one ought to value and what warrants sustained attention, time, or money. Do students sympathize with Cicero that morality and practicality are one and the same? Perhaps—or perhaps not. Maybe they are more persuaded by Plato’s defense of justice in The   Republic , or Isaiah Berlin’s staunch support of pluralism. Perhaps the student disagrees with every moral sensibility they are exposed to in college. The fact remains that they approach genuine answers to those questions which define the course of their life. I call this moral intuition  as students may not find definite conclusions to all the questions of their human identity over the course of only four years. But, they will hoist upon their shoulders a patchwork shroud of possible answers to guide them over the course of their life. The same cannot be said for time spent grinding CAD and SolidWorks certificates, or asking 4chan or Usenet groups to define eudaimonia . Second, on connection to tradition. Part of the ‘unbundling’ described above is the profound transformation which institutions of Western society have undertaken over the course of the last few decades. Work has been redefined by the internet and artificial intelligence, the sexual revolution has upended traditional notions of relationships, and religious affiliation is in free fall. The liberal arts present a lifeline to a rich heritage of intellectual thought which retains its usefulness regardless of technological or cultural shifts. This heritage can provide a grounding to one’s economic, social, and political life that they might heretofore have been missing. The Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, Romanticism and Empiricism, the Modern and Post-modern: these are cornerstones of civilization which allow us a better sense of the grand building as a whole. My argument here brings the liberal arts closer to what is commonly described as a ‘great books’ curriculum of the kind taught at St. John’s College. While I think the liberal arts is more expansive than a mere great books program, the great books are a salient example of the kind of touchstone of tradition for which I am advocating. Arguments against the Great Books and any kind of Western canon typically stem from claims amounting to white-washing or Eurocentrism. I find these contentions demonstrably unconvincing. First, studying the ‘Western’ tradition in no way precludes one from studying works from other continents and cultures. The great thing about liberal arts education is that its breadth allows for plenty of student-specific examination of other works. Indeed, reckoning with the worldviews of cultures quite different to one’s own no doubt improves one’s moral intuition. Second, and more importantly, students in the United States inhabit a world fashioned by the ideas resplendent in the Western canon. It is foolhardy to suggest that one should not study and take seriously the judgements and values which formed the Constitution under which we live and the economic structure we interact with on a daily basis.          Third, on respect for institutions.   By learning the intellectual tradition described above, students of the liberal arts gain insight into the ideas which have shaped our political, economic, and social systems. With this understanding, hopefully, comes a measure of respect. Having read Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws , the Declaration of Independence, and a few of the Federalist Papers allows one to see the institution of the U.S government and its constituent branches as more  than a tool of the opposing party to debase the country, stamp down the marginalized, or perpetuate a sex trafficking ring. A different portrait ought to be painted instead, that of the United States as a flawed yet aspirational and revolutionary political ideal. As Jonah Goldberg   writes , “The remarkable thing about America—and Western civilization generally—is not that we had slavery, but that we ended it.” Institutions are also well-positioned to shape the values of individuals which comprise them, for better and for worse. Knowing which groups to take part in is vital to the development of personal identity. We may not have a choice in our membership in certain institutions, like the U.S. government or one’s family, but having insight into the principles which compose those institutions can help us manage our forced responsibilities. This insight is critical for those institutions which we join voluntarily, such as workplaces, volunteer organizations, and universities. It is within my power to choose whether I work at Palantir or the ACLU. The liberal arts allow me to critically consider the values which I hold in relation to the values of those institutions, and whether joining one would be favorable or inimical to my principles. The virtue of a democracy is defined by the virtue of its institutions and the citizens that comprise them. No democracy survives when its citizens pursue ends indifferent or antithetical to the survival of their constitution. Political violence is contrary to the fundamental principles which hold our nation together, and poses an existential threat to the American experiment. The moral intuition, connection to tradition, and respect for institutions which the study of the liberal arts confers are thus beneficial in two respects. They are, on the one hand, a powerful tool of the individual to interrogate their goals in life. On the other, these three values are critical components of virtuous citizenship. Despite this, it seems a common thread of the last decade that the liberal arts, and humanities more generally, are ‘under threat,’ and that their worth must be consistently proven to the public and the elite alike. Equally, data shows  that younger generations value democracy less than their predecessors. Hence why I call this a ‘stump speech’; it is simply another pitched battle on a long and arduous political campaign. I believe that it is a campaign aimed squarely at the pursuit of the good life.We all want to know who we are and what we stand for. Sempre aude . Dare to know.

What the mailroom reveals about the culture of consumption on campus. Scenes from the CMC mailroom “Has Amazon come yet?”  This is the first thing we ask when we come into the mailroom to start a shift. There is a lot to love about the job—our bosses Shannon, Tati, and Peter, great coworkers, chatting with students, and occasionally getting a live unboxing of a care package from home. But every mailroom worker knows the dread that follows the sound of wheels coming down the hallway—the signal that the delivery driver has arrived, towing carts stacked high with brown boxes and blue-and-white plastic. In the last week of October, the mailroom received 1,888 packages. In the month of September, we sorted 6,125 packages into the lockers. This isn’t including letter mail, perishable items, or boxes that are sorted behind the counter. We have been on shifts where we have received over 300 packages in one hour. We won’t, but we could , recite memorized names and box numbers of our most frequent orderers. A shocking number of students receive packages daily or even multiple times a day. Consumerism is not a problem unique to CMC, or even to college campuses, but talk to our local delivery drivers—and we have—and they’ll tell you that we order more than nearby colleges with over ten times  our student population.  The purpose of this article isn’t to shame anyone for their spending habits, nor to complain about having to do our job: it’s to acknowledge the broader issue of consumerism that has quietly taken over our campus, and to consider what that says about us. Because while those of us who work in the mailroom joke about it, consumerism at CMC is  a problem.  Online shopping has become a pastime. With the advent of Amazon, targeted Instagram ads, and TikTok Shop (the list goes on), buying has never been easier. Purchases happen with a few easy clicks and deliver a dopamine rush. When packages arrive after two whole days (courtesy of Jeff Bezos), much of the time the customer doesn’t even remember what they ordered. Some boxes sit unclaimed for days or weeks, forcing us to pull them from the lockers despite countless reminder emails. The thrill of an impulsive purchase fades, but the waste persists.  Even if the two of us didn’t avidly read Bardia’s (the Vice President of Student Activities) event informs, we still would know when there is a big party coming up. As Monte Carlo neared, we received an influx of packages—from Shein, Princess Polly, and Revolve—each wrapped in multiple layers of plastic and containing outfits that will likely be worn just once. Many CMCers purchase multiple sizes, styles, and colors with the intent of keeping their favorite and returning the rest, only to have them sit untouched for the rest of the semester. A themed event means a corresponding outfit, and this seems to give us permission to fulfill our deep-set desires to acquire something new.  And it isn’t just event-shopping. “One-click” order culture has bled into every part of our routines. Instead of asking a friend to borrow something, driving five minutes to Target, or walking to the convenience store down the street, we press a button and it magically appears.  Maybe the real question isn’t how much we consume, but why we consume to excess . The mailroom tells us something not just about our habits, but about our culture. It’s a culture of convenience and instant gratification—of “I want it now” and “I can afford not to think about why.” There is a privilege in this, the kind we are rarely willing to acknowledge. Being able to impulse-order a new outfit, or replace a phone charger that you definitely already have somewhere but have misplaced, is a luxury. And that luxury depends on invisible labor. Every box passes through dozens of hands before it reaches us, and when it finally does, we get annoyed at how long it takes for it to be sorted into a locker. Some even go so far as to lie, claiming that their non-urgent package is medication, so that we prioritize getting it to them faster (yes, this does  actually happen). In the mailroom, we are constantly surrounded by the physical evidence of consumption, and it’s impossible not to see how individual convenience turns into collective excess.  None of this is to say that we, the authors of this article, are perfect exceptions. Our Amazon carts are often full of items we definitely don’t need, and, at the very least, the two of us rely on the convenience of the mailroom for our monthly order of Nespresso pods. The problem isn’t ignorance. Most of us acknowledge that fast fashion is wasteful and that plastic packaging is terrible for the planet. But knowing better rarely motivates change. The system is designed to make consumption feel frictionless. And we’ve decided to tell ourselves that it’s “not that bad” because we checked Depop first, or because we didn’t have time to go to the store. Behind every “harmless” order, every new clothing item we don’t need, every time we order new notebooks or detergent instead of walking to the Huntley Bookstore to buy some, there’s a system being fed and feeding us in return. So while we laugh when we go to the mailroom and four lockers pop open at the scanning of our QR code, we are consuming without thinking , and it shows.  Next time the Amazon driver makes a delivery, we hope it’s a bit lighter. Not just because we want a slower shift, but because we’ve all decided to slow down a bit ourselves and to resist a system that turns every whim into waste. Ask yourself: Do I need this? Could I borrow it? Could I go buy it locally and talk to a real human being in the process? Could I go without it? A little less clicking. A little more thinking. And if not for the environment, or your wallet, then maybe for the mailroom workers who know your box number by heart.

Legacy is a more complicated process than its critics admit. University of Washington graduating class, Seattle, 1898 Credit: Wikimedia A liberal arts college with hardly over a thousand students and a billion dollar endowment, one-fifth of Claremont McKenna’s student body was drawn from  the top 1% in 2017. This was not my reality. Neither of my parents completed high school—how could I have ended up in Claremont? After a low-income upbringing, I owe my presence here to the Questbridge scholarship program for underprivileged students. Programs like this are made possible  in part by the boons of legacy admissions.  In the way the story is usually told, I should be just the type of student to be celebrating the law  signed last fall by Governor Newsom prohibiting admissions preferences for the children of alumni (“legacy”) in college admissions. Instead, I wonder if the law is a step too far. I have consistently noticed that the paramount issue for first generation college students, particularly outside of tight-knit CMC, is a lack of community. We are too easily swept away by impersonal systems with which we are uniquely unfamiliar compared to our more privileged peers. Legacy students, who typically perform no worse academically than other students, and even perform better at institutions such as Princeton  are key aspects of building just the sort of strong collegiate community that acts as a safety net for underprivileged students.  Attending one of the most expensive institutions in the nation is an opportunity made available for low-income students only through the generosity of donors. Legacy admissions is part of the relationship that makes such resource-intensive mobility broadly viable. The presence of legacy admissions signals to would-be donors that they’d be investing in a community, not merely a teaching or research institution, and thus incentivizes gift-giving.  Further, legacy preferences emphasize that alumni investment is a two-way street. University education in the Anglosphere has always maintained a fundamental element of communitarian society building. In contrast, the German model puts research and publication above all. Our education model recognizes that we are interconnected beings in a social fabric, not atomized individuals. The strength of American civil society has always been grounded in our institutions of higher education, beginning with the Puritans who built more colleges in their ramshackle colonies than old England had until the 19th-century. These colleges have always been more than academic institutions. They provide training in the mores of professional environments, access to career networks, and bestow other benefits buttressed by a strong campus community. This acculturation into professional norms does as much for low-income students such as myself as the academic instruction. The networks colleges build have been directly correlated  with successful economic mobility. The presence of legacy admits bolsters the networks necessary to turn promising but disadvantaged admits into long-term successes.  Evidence suggests that the degree to which legacy admissions benefits donor families is often overstated. It builds community to encourage donations, but, in Claremont at least, it does not lead to the admission of students otherwise not admitted. Legacy admits have been below 10% of Claremont McKenna’s incoming classes in the years  immediately prior to the prohibition of legacy admissions. They comprise a mere 3%  of the students in my year, the class of 2028. While the precise details of the admissions processes of the Claremont Colleges remain generally under wraps, most reports describing the mechanics of admissions at institutions across the nation indicate that legacy status is only factored in when deciding between multiple  candidates judged as worthy of admission. This does not give candidates that would be otherwise unqualified a free pass, but merely acts as a marginal factor in the decision making process. By all accounts, legacy functions as a tiebreaker between equally qualified applicants, not a pole to vault weak applicants ahead of their peers. Pitzer and Scripps, with their much smaller endowments, have little choice but to be need-aware if they want to have the funds to meet the needs of the lower-income students they admit. Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, and Pomona are all able to be need-blind and meet 100% of students' financial aid needs. These colleges have these funds in part because of their longstanding histories of admitting students from legacy backgrounds. Pomona voluntarily ended legacy admission in 2017, while Claremont McKenna and Harvey Mudd were forced to terminate the practice under the new law. Legacy admissions were part and parcel of their wider donation-seeking strategies.  The Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision against affirmative action preserves the ability to recognize race in college admissions as a part of wider life experience. California can hopefully reach a similar legal equilibrium with legacy, as opposed to prohibiting institutions from considering pre-existing campus community connections whatsoever. Retaining legacy admissions as part of a wider holistic approach may open doors for students from underprivileged backgrounds.  The author met with CMC alumnus Desmond Mantle (‘23, Stanford Law School ‘26) to learn the background of college associational rights for this article. This article was published in conjunction with the Claremont Independent .

In a time of crisis, class politics won against a system built to suppress it. Credit: Pari Dukovic for The New York Times Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was historically unprecedented: he became the first convicted felon , the second former president  to return to office as a non-incumbent, and the oldest candidate  ever elected to the office of the president of the United States. In the year since defeating former Vice President Harris, Trump and the MAGA movement have advanced the perception of a grand mandate, enabling a despotic agenda that has produced more executive orders in its first hundred  days than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among these  are orders to punish  states that do not cooperate with ICE, create new “ domestic terrorist ” designations for the political opposition, and condition federal grants  on ideological alignment. How did we get here, and where do we go next? To begin, despite Trump’s projection of executive power, his election does not represent a rightward shift, nor a mandate for the MAGA agenda. To see this, one must look past Harris’s defeat and instead examine Trump’s ambivalent victory among total eligible voters. Donald Trump won  3 million more votes than he did in 2020, amounting to an equivalent share of the eligible voting population (32%). At the same time, Harris’s share of eligible voters dropped 3.5 points from Biden’s 2020 campaign (31.1%). The swing in the popular vote can largely be accounted for by a decrease in turnout in the bluest counties of blue states. In these 20 counties, Harris trailed Biden’s vote count by 2.9 million—a margin greater than her total popular vote deficit to Trump across the country—while Trump improved his vote total by only 150,000 votes out of 25.6 million registered voters. Credit: Michael Podhorzer / Weekend Reading As shown above, Trump’s gains  were largely the product of Democratic voter erosion: Harris underperformed relative to Biden in deep-blue counties, while Trump’s gains were minimal. Hopefully, this lets us do away with the notion that Trump’s 2024 victory was the result of an ideological shift in the American people, an endorsement of the MAGA agenda, or a mandate for authoritarianism. Instead, it’s part of a larger trend . The House, the Senate, or the executive has flipped in nine of the past 10 electoral cycles. This volatility is unprecedented  in the broader history of American politics. It speaks to Americans’ invariable disapproval of the governing party and to a failure of both parties to capture the political imagination of the electorate. The story of each election is not which platform excites, but which disappoints the least. It is a politics that rewards whichever platform most effectively stokes fear by proclaiming the failure of the status quo, all the while maintaining it. Americans are tired of parties which they perceive as not being substantively different—a political system in which ambivalence supplants vigor, and neither party tangibly forwards the aims of the working-class majority of our country.  Anecdotally, this makes sense . It is not as though, especially among blue state urban voters, support for ICE paramilitary deployments has risen substantially over the past four years. Instead, these voters likely saw their vote as inconsequential in the electoral college’s calculus and—fatigued by a third straight election spent resisting MAGA—decided to stay home. In battleground states, the swing—which can be accounted for by Kamala’s vote share falling, not Trump’s rising—was even less, at only 2.2 points, as compared to 4.4 points in the rest of the country.  We are not only, as Scott Sloop recently claimed  in the Forum , facing a crisis within the Democratic Party. Instead, America confronts an entire political system in crisis. And this has created openings for young leaders promising change. Enter Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s democratic socialist mayor-elect, who won in an election featuring the highest turnout  in over fifty years. If you open social media and search “Mamdani” or “New York,” you’ll find endless videos of young people celebrating a platform that is certainly firebrand, but also compassionate and inclusive. Though a member  of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani’s platform is not   actually  “socialist.” He advocates  raising taxes on million-dollar earners and corporations, strengthening tenant protections through rent freezes, and expanding public services such as childcare and fare-free public transit.  In practice, though, his "democratic socialism" functions as part of a moral vocabulary for pursuing redistribution within existing institutions—a liberal reformist expansion of social programs rather than an upheaval of the city’s capitalist infrastructure.  This modest departure from the mainstream drew fierce resistance from New York’s Democratic establishment. After being decidingly defeated in the primary elections, Andrew Cuomo turned coat, re-emerging with a staunchly alarmist platform featuring Islamophobic  and escalatory anti-leftist  rhetoric. According to a poll  of likely New York City voters, Cuomo supporters ranked crime as their top concern, followed by immigration and Israel—a triad of issues lifted from a MAGA “culture war” agenda in which identity politics fracture class solidarity. Cuomo’s aggression against Mamdani highlighted the stark difference in content and character of two platforms that, just months ago, were competing for the Democratic nomination. For many young voters like myself, it was disorienting to watch a disgraced Democratic behemoth claw at a young, popular, and evidently decent candidate. We celebrate Mamdani’s victory and hope that Cuomo swiftly exits the public sphere.  It is easy to disregard Cuomo as a fringe grifter. But his campaign offers a glimpse into the machinery of both parties, which, beholden to their campaign financiers , represent the interests of the billionaire class. Andrew Cuomo and his family have been, for years, in close concert with the Democratic top brass:   he received an endorsement  from former President Clinton, for whom he served as Housing and Urban Development Secretary ; he chaired the 2016 New York delegation to the Democratic National Convention ;  his father Mario served three terms as governor of New York; his similarly disgraced brother Chris  hosted “Cuomo Prime Time” on CNN.   The Cuomos aren’t rogue actors. They’re emblematic of the establishment networks that shape both major parties. Culture-war scapegoats distract from shared donor loyalties, all while these establishment figures uphold the status quo—continuously advancing the wealth and prosperity of the billionaire class. It should not come as a shock that Cuomo accepted donations from Republican and Democratic billionaires , nor that Trump endorsed  Cuomo and threatened federal action against a Mamdani-led New York City. Nor will it be surprising if, come future elections, we find establishment Democratic politicians aligning themselves with Republican interests against democratic socialists. This is what makes Zohran Mamdani’s victory historic. He has loosened, if only slightly, the grip the billionaire class has on mainstream politics and political thought. The preceding essay  on Mamdani’s victory by upperclassman Scott Sloop is emblematic of this grip, framing Mamdani as part of the broader “far-left” shift alongside national Democrats like Harris and Gavin Newsom, collapsing starkly different political traditions into a single undifferentiated bloc. Yet Newsom and Harris belong to the same Democratic establishment that has presided over decades of political stagnation. Newsom championed Proposition 50 , a gerrymandering measure designed to consolidate party control, while Harris, in her 2024 campaign, echoed former president Biden in calling for stricter border security , stronger policing , and a continuation of American military funding to arm Israel’s genocide in Gaza . They sustain the economic order in the name of stability, pointing to the failures of the Republican Party while engaging with the same culture war that diverts attention from class politics and harms the constituents that they claim to represent. This rhetoric subordinates democratic socialist platforms beneath a Democratic party that, in Bernie Sanders’s words in a recent New York Times interview , “isn’t much of a party at all.” By alienating working-class Republican voters and empowering MAGA’s “culture war” theatrics, the party fortifies the billionaire class— the “people on the top”  it claims to want to restrain.  Sloop’s claim that the expansion of “far-left” ideology will strengthen resistance from the Republican party platform is well-founded, though too narrow in its scope and fatalistic in its prescription. The more profound crisis, as the electoral volatility of the past two decades shows, is not polarization but stagnation. Americans are not shifting left or right—they are shifting away from platforms they no longer believe uphold their material interests. Just as there is no mandate for Trumpism, there is no requirement that the Democratic Party continue to move rightward to survive. If Democrats cannot put forward a platform that reinvigorates the political spirit of the working class, they will preside over a victorious flipping election before the next defeating flipping election, as Trumpism erodes what little liberal social freedoms they have claimed over the past twenty years.  Nevertheless, Mayor-elect Mamdani has clearly tapped into the seething apathy of Americans, especially young Americans, and channeled it toward an agenda that extends the Overton window of American politics to again include the working class within its aims. Now, the fight to reclaim our politics from billionaire interests will not be easy. After all, Cuomo broke fundraising records , revealing just how deeply entrenched the system is and how formidable the fight may be against a politician without Cuomo’s tarnished reputation. Yet, Mamdani’s victory proves that it is  possible to win. Will the next Democratic candidate be a figure cast in Mamdani’s mold? Perhaps not. But the very fact that a platform serving the social good has won in the financial capital of America is a win—for all  Americans.

The shutdown reflects not just a procedural failure, but a shift in how political loyalty is defined. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Another government shutdown. At this point, no one in Washington can pretend to be surprised. Senate leaders floated  a three-bill “minibus” as a gesture of progress, while House leadership insisted on holding out for leverage that would signal ideological purity to their base. Senators huddle in closed-door lunches. Leaders argue over whether the stopgap should expire in December or stretch into January. It all feels familiar. And that familiarity is exactly what makes it deeply unsettling. The American system wasn’t designed to avoid conflict. Instead, the founders assumed division was a part of democracy—not a failure of it—and designed our governing institutions to refine disagreement into deliberation. Yet the current shutdown reflects a shift in political incentives. Today, unyielding opposition  is rewarded over negotiation. To understand how we arrived at this political moment, it’s worth returning to the debates that shaped the republic’s structure. James Madison argued in   Federalist No. 10  that factions are an inevitable part of human nature. The question was not how to eliminate disagreement, but how to channel it. Madison believed that a large republic with many competing interests would force negotiation; no single group would be strong enough to rule unchecked. As he wrote in   Federalist No. 55 , “had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” In other words, increasing civic participation does not guarantee sound judgment. The founders saw the need to slow down the decision-making process to allow competing arguments to be heard and evaluated. The Senate was meant to embody that principle. It was designed to cool the passions of the moment, ensuring that decisions were shaped by reason rather than pressure or impulse.  The Anti-Federalists took a slightly different tack. They warned that a national legislature might become too distant and insulated from the people it sought to serve. Representation, they urged, only works when there is genuine proximity between the people and those who speak for them. While such debates took place almost 250 years ago, their importance has not faded. In one way, The Federalists and Anti-Federalists were not arguing against each other so much as agreeing : they were warning about different ways in which the same system might break. The Federalists hoped that well-designed institutions would restrain power; the Anti-Federalists believed that accountability would check institutions. The possibilities they warned about converge today, not because one faction has seized control, but because factions have learned to use the system’s own rules to block compromise and avoid resolution altogether. One mechanism in particular makes the current stalemate possible: the Senate filibuster. The filibuster was not a safeguard envisioned by the framers; it emerged—almost accidentally—in 1806, when the Senate removed a rule allowing a majority to end debate. Over time, the filibuster became  a defining feature of Senate procedure. What began as a way to ensure extended debate has evolved into a tool that allows a determined minority to halt legislation entirely. Since passing funding bills in the Senate requires 60 votes to advance, a unified bloc of just 41 senators can block progress entirely, using the filibuster to turn a shutdown into a stage for signaling ideological loyalty rather than working toward agreement. Bo th parties know the filibuster is what makes shutdowns possible, but neither is willing to get rid of it. During the latest shutdown, President Trump publicly urged Senate Republicans to   “terminate the filibuster”  so they could reopen the government on their own terms. Yet GOP leadership rejected the idea, arguing that doing so would simply hand the same power to Democrats the next time the chamber flips. Democrats understand this as well. Keeping the 60-vote threshold preserves their ability to block legislation when they are in the minority. In this sense, the filibuster functions less as a tool of deliberation and more as a form of political insurance. Each party wants to protect it to preserve its future capacity to obstruct. The unfortunate result is a Senate that no longer mediates factional conflict but intensifies it. The Senate, once imagined as the cooling chamber of democratic passions, now amplifies stalemate by granting outsized power to the minority. The structure that was meant to refine disagreement ends up freezing it in place. This shutdown is an outcome of a system that makes obstruction easy to execute and difficult to reverse. This   week’s  developments make the dynamic even clearer. After more than a month of stalled negotiations, Senate leaders agreed to a short-term deal to reopen the government through January 30. It restores pay to federal workers and resumes basic services, but it does little to settle the dispute that triggered the shutdown. As Senator Dick Durbin put it , “The government shutting down seemed to be an opportunity to lead us to better policy. It didn’t work.” The shutdown lifts, but the stalemate remains. And that impasse points to an issue that’s deeper than congressional rules.  The problem isn’t only procedural. It’s cultural. We are living in a moment of deep polarization, where political ideology has become closely tied to personal identity. When party affiliation becomes a marker of who you are rather than what you believe, representatives are expected to defend their side rather than negotiate across differences. In that environment, compromise doesn’t look like governance. It looks like disloyalty. The founders believed that institutional structures could channel ambition toward the common good, but those structures assumed a shared civic identity amongst the people. Government shutdowns are often described as failures of negotiation, failures of strategy, failures of leadership. But they also mark the quiet erosion of something harder to measure: a shared understanding of what it means to govern together. The Constitution still stands, and the chambers still open each day. The votes, even when they lead to nothing substantive, are still cast. But the underlying principle of self-governance depends on more than procedures. It requires trust, patience, and a willingness to share responsibility. The founders feared many things: tyranny, disorder, the volatility of public opinion. But they also feared that the republic might one day lose the spirit of energetic deliberation—that the government would not be overthrown but gradually slowed, stalled, and neutered.