Trump’s brand of high-stakes visual spectacle aligns precisely with a prize built on honoring temporary diplomatic disruptions. President Donald Trump is presented with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize at the Kennedy Center, Friday, Dec. 5, 2025, in Washington. Credit: Evan Vucci, AP While the punditry assure themselves that the Nobel Committee would never deign to honor a figure as polarizing as Donald Trump, such self-soothing certitude betrays a historical amnesia regarding the prize’s erratic lineage. This naive belief persists even as Trump is a serious contender for the 2026 prize, nominated by global figures clearly courting his political favor or seeking relief from U.S. tariffs. Experts insist that serious contenders reside elsewhere, yet this presumption relies on the notion that the prize rewards moral purity rather than a forceful disruption of the geopolitical status quo. If Trump were to receive the laurel, the consequent outrage would be performative and the shock entirely feigned, for the committee has long treated the mere interruption of conflict as if it were equivalent to peace. The history of the Nobel is less about rewarding saints and more about giving out practical, often rushed awards to leaders who manage to just briefly pause a conflict. Consider the case of Theodore Roosevelt, feted for mediating the Russo-Japanese War even as the agreement he forged began to buckle under the very imperial pressures that had precipitated the conflict. The committee, fully cognizant of the treaty’s structural fragility, proceeded regardless, signaling that the capacity to compel hostile empires into a temporary pause matters more to Oslo than the longevity of the resolution. This institutional habit of elevating symbolic disruption over settled results is nowhere more evident than in the legacy of Henry Kissinger, whose award remains a monument to the committee’s infatuation with narrative over substance. That Kissinger was honored for a Vietnam agreement that was actively disintegrating even as the citation was read suggests that the Nobel prizes the appearance of a turning point more than the turning itself. This focus on how things look is exactly why Trump is a serious candidate. The Abraham Accords provided the kind of big, historic moments that the committee finds hard to ignore. Although critics rightly note that the Accords failed to address the heart of the Palestinian conflict, the agreements manufactured exactly the sort of high-stakes visual spectacle—Israel and Arab states formalizing ties after decades of cold distance—that the committee finds irresistible. By bypassing the traditional, slow-moving negotiations that usually define Middle East diplomacy, the Accords offered the Nobel Committee a clear "before and after" moment. Fundamentally, the Nobel Peace Prize is an institution built upon a contradiction that Trump’s chaotic brand of statecraft fits with unsettling precision. While the committee postures as a guardian of moral progress, its internal mechanics—a small group appointed by the Norwegian parliament operating behind sealed archives—produce a Janus-faced record that vacillates wildly between affirming conscience and rewarding raw geopolitical leverage. This structure allows the committee to treat the moral purity of a Mother Teresa or Malala Yousafzai as of equal value to the hardline pragmatism of a Henry Kissinger or Menachem Begin. Such tension is a defining feature, not a bug; the committee has learned to metabolize these opposing archetypes as proof of its own sophisticated worldview, alternating between the pulpit and the situation room as the political winds dictate. Trump’s foreign policy, which frequently swings from aggressive threats to sudden, business-like deals, mirrors the Nobel Committee’s own ambivalence. For example, he might threaten "fire and fury" against North Korea one day (impulsive antagonism) and then arrange a historic-looking summit with Kim Jong Un the next (transactional deal-making). This "doctrine of unpredictability"—where he trashes long-time allies while praising former enemies—resonates with a committee that has never quite decided if it wants to honor good intentions or actual results. Those who predict his exclusion on moral grounds fail to grasp that the Nobel is frequently a narrative instrument used to signal what the committee hopes the future might look like, rather than a reward for what has actually been achieved. Since the committee has never hesitated to elevate a potent symbol when it wishes to suggest that history has lurched in a new direction, a Trump Nobel would reflect the institution’s longstanding fascination with rupture and spectacle. The global outrage would be deafening, but the choice would be entirely, cynically consistent.

A mask, apparently, requires at least one person to be aware of its existence. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Pavement was why my father didn’t get a perfect SAT score. The way he tells the story, you’d think his British education had left him functionally illiterate. Once you fly across the Atlantic, the ground your feet step off onto is called the  sidewalk. If you walked on the pavement , you might get hit by an American Car—one of those gas-guzzling rusted pickups driven by a tanned man clad in denim or something like that. This is why we were sent to The American School, so that we knew to walk on the sidewalk.  As I barrel across my front steps, it is not semantics that captivates my mind. I am entirely preoccupied with my toes. They are nestled deep in patent red Mary Janes, the sort that reach out of the catalog with greedy little hands and lilting voices. Each foot is tucked in a sock, one old and one new, because only one foot was up for the challenge of never-been-washed-before-cotton that morning. At all times, my toes must remain at least 2.54 centimeters away from the nearest sidewalk / pavement  crack. Not for my mother’s back or my father’s spine, though (the others sometimes played perplexing games). The pavement / sidewalk  is not divided into even segments whatsoever. But the slabs of concrete must have been manufactured in a standardized manner. I have a world of questions to ask the man that assembled this particular stretch. What sort of person does something like this? The task at hand, given the suboptimal conditions, demands utmost focus. I glue my gaze to the ground, and for extra measure, I hike my knees up. My steps are horizontally timid and vertically fervent. A mother, watching from the window, sees her little girl stomping in slow motion, each exaggerated step convulsing her little purple-with-blue-polka-dots skirt, and purses her lips.  In the classroom, I don’t see that my pigtails dance alone in a sea of docile long locks, or my shiny shoes, interlocked at the ankle, harmonizing with the wall clock’s exact tick as they tap the linoleum floor. People lie when they say that we don’t have eyes at the back of our heads. We do. The way we see behind us—and ourselves from behind—is through our ears. But this mode of seeing is forever limited by the perceptivity of others. And so I was blind for years, because I was too busy watching them to notice that they never saw me.  I observe that Lisa is wearing pink socks that are a different pink from her top, but she doesn’t seem to mind that one is wrong, so I set out to not mind either. I also notice the shoes—all colors of lace-up sneakers in canvas, mesh, suede, and one pair of dull black rubber rain boots—under the row of desks in front of me. They lounge in varying asymmetric positions—pushed far out, wrapped around chair legs, hovering, resting flat—but all are relatively stationary. There is one other set of feet tapping the floor, though. I can’t see them, but I can hear them. I don’t know who he is yet. But apparently, he is allowed to poke the rest of us with the sharp end of his pencil. I don’t quite understand how he manages to do anything at all, let alone torment us with tiny stabbings, given that he seems to have his own personal classroom aid hovering over him at all times. And if you say anything to the teacher, you get into trouble, Sydney tells me over lunch. She alternates between eating singular carrots dipped in ranch and educating me, paying no mind to him being well within earshot. No one else pays him any mind either. I’ve never seen carrots that look quite like hers before, smooth bite-sized oblongs, a small pile nestled next to a tiny container of sour-smelling dressing. How much carrot must be discarded, I wonder, to make those perfect little logs? I don’t tell her this, or much of anything, yet. By the second period, I would know his name, and I would soon come to hate hearing his name, always inexplicably following mine when our teacher—the shared one—would announce pairs. This is when I make my first and only mistake. Turn and talk to your neighbor, the teacher writes on the board. A thought hurtles through me and wrenches my right arm straight into the air.  “I think you spelled neighbour  wrong.” The class goes silent, and all I can hear echoing in my ears is the tapping of my shoes and the ticking of the clock. Then he begins to laugh, laughing so hard that tears stream down his face and he’s kicking his feet and banging the table. Despite all my efforts to step carefully, I’ve stumbled onto the pavement and he’s pushed me and I know he didn’t mean to. Yet, as slender tears well in my eyes and drip down to mar my leather shoes, I discover hate unlike anything I have ever felt before. Rather than flooding outwards, it turns on itself and drills deeper into me. If I had sat with that shocking emotion for longer, perhaps I would have seen for the first time. Instead, determined to give my classmates nothing to watch, I still my shoes against the classroom floor and sit up straight. In just a few days, Justice will be my deepest desire. That and Claire, who manages to pierce everyone’s ears somehow. I learn that my shoes matter much more than the sidewalk cracks, and I vow to never be anything like him.

Meet your next ASCMC Executive Board. Credit: Claremont McKenna College On Tuesday, March 3, 2026, Claremont McKenna College students participated in the annual election to determine their representatives for the 2026–2027 ASCMC Executive Board. With a voter turnout of 59%, 807 out of 1,357 eligible students cast ballots. Amrit Dhaliwal emerged as the new Student Body President. In the first round, Dhaliwal led with 235 votes (32.6%), followed by Eliot Advani with 212 (29.4%), Katie Hodge with 192 (26.6%), and Violet Ramanathan with 82 (11.4%). After Ramanathan was eliminated and votes were redistributed, Dhaliwal remained in the lead with 261 votes (36.5%), while Advani and Hodge tied with 227 votes each (31.8%). Advani and Hodge were consequently eliminated, and Dhaliwal secured the presidency with 648 votes. Dhamar Ramirez Gomez defeated Leah Gaidos in the race for Executive Vice President, earning 378 votes (61.7%) to Gaidos’s 235 votes (38.3%). For Vice President of Student Activities, Alex Bruno ran unopposed and was elected with 541 votes. The position of Dormitory Affairs Chair went to Jonmathew Caballero Hernandez, who ran unopposed and won with 553 votes. In the Senior Class President race, Reid Jones defeated Tanveer Grewal with 115 votes (51.6%) to Grewal’s 108 votes (48.4%). For the Junior Class President role, Ibukun Owolabi ran unopposed and won with 166 votes. For the Sophomore Class President role, Meera Jakhar defeated Zoey Marzo after two rounds. In the first round, Zoey Marzo received 76 votes (38.0%), Jakhar received 75 votes (37.5%), and David Yusten Jr. received 49 votes (24.5%). After Yusten Jr. was eliminated and votes were redistributed, Jakhar secured the position with 100 votes (51.8%) to Marzo’s 93 votes (48.2%). You can read the upcoming Executive Board members' candidate statements here.

Outdoor adventure carries real risks, and wilderness medicine may be the difference between a close call and a tragedy. Mount Whitney in the Eastern Sierra Nevadas. Credit: Riley Hester The rhythm and flow of the mountains are a presence I find myself constantly craving. Early alarms, headlamps flickering in the dark, stiff legs that haven’t yet forgiven yesterday's miles. There's a familiar comfort in the repetition of steps and breath, where mental clutter dissolves and the only focus is the simple, steady motion of moving uphill. Everything becomes quieter and sharper at the same time. And yet, it's not just about the calm. There’s something addictive about testing limits. Just look at Alex Honnold, who recently free climbed a skyscraper on live television. The pull to reach higher, to cover more remote terrain, and to move past what feels comfortable is irresistible for those accustomed to adventure. There is a particular kind of magic that comes with increased risk. I have found myself in multiple situations where the scale of danger exceeded my better judgement, yet I am quick to forget this fear and focus instead on the thrill of the story. Until recently, I felt extremely at peace with this love of risk. My parents, however, were less convinced. They encouraged me to take a Wilderness First Responder course, hoping that if something were to go wrong, I would at least have some idea of what to do. At the time, it felt like over-caution—unnecessary, I thought, considering my experience and competence in the outdoors. Nevertheless, I heeded their advice and came to campus a week early to complete a Wilderness First Responder course through Pomona’s Outdoor Education Center (OEC). I expected to learn some basic skills—bandaging, maybe CPR. Instead, each day after class I walked home replaying scenarios I had just learned about: uncontrolled severe bleeding, spinal injuries, altitude illness, hypothermia. We ran simulations of chaotic accident scenes—packing deep wounds, stabilizing a “patient” with a suspected shoulder injury without moving their spine, and improvising splints and litters from backpacks and skis. The training was designed to feel real, with limited supplies and time pressure. I kept asking myself how I had made it through so many trips without knowing any of this. What if someone I had been hiking with had been bitten by a snake miles from the trailhead? Would I have known when a headache was just exhaustion—or the beginning of something life-threatening at altitude? The more I learned, the clearer it became that my safety owed less to control or competence than to luck. Prior to the OEC training, I had considered myself completely prepared in the outdoors. I made sure to carry many layers, enough snacks and water, iodine to filter water, headlamps, and phones with AllTrails maps downloaded. Sure, all of that preparation is important, but I had miscalculated: I was counting upon my gear and fitness alone to keep me safe. At the time, I thought that preparation meant being ready to feel uncomfortable—a feeling I expected and even welcomed—not necessarily being ready for what could go wrong. That difference is exactly where wilderness medicine matters. It isn’t about fear-mongering or expecting the worst; it's about acknowledging that if something does go wrong outdoors, the stakes are higher and help is farther away. A twisted ankle or dehydration on campus is an inconvenience, yet those same complications miles from a trailhead might be life-threatening if you don’t know how to assess, stabilize, and evacuate safely. The risks aren't abstract or hypothetical. Many of us have had friends or family forward us the same headline: “Three Hikers Found Dead on California’s Mount Baldy.” What makes devastating news—like the headline from Baldy—especially unsettling is that it’s rarely the result of a single catastrophic mistake. Beyond a lack of basic outdoor training, these tragedies often are a result of something the outdoor community doesn’t like to confront: ego. The outdoors rewards confidence and grit, but those same traits can propel us into poor decision-making. Peer pressure, summit fever, and the desire to prove ourselves can cause us to ignore warning signs, stay out too long, or take risks we wouldn’t be able to rationally justify. I am the first to admit that I love to push my limits and hate having to back down from something. But outdoor leadership isn’t just about fitness or enthusiasm. It's also about awareness: of the people we move with, the environments we pass through, and the moments when something begins to shift for the worse. I've known multiple people at the Claremont Colleges who’ve had scary encounters outdoors, close calls with weather, and injuries that could have escalated. But when everyone makes it back safely, those experiences tend to fade with time. As a campus community, we need to take wilderness medicine more seriously. Consider attending a wilderness safety workshop at the OEC or taking a Wilderness First Aid or First Responder Course. Be sure to always clearly communicate trip plans and work to understand region-specific risks. Wilderness medicine doesn’t fully eliminate the risk or dull the magic of being outside. Loving the mountains and craving adventure means respecting them—and respect demands preparation, not just for the summit, but for everything that happens along the way.

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 returning 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 stretch 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.