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

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

Even during periods of instability, normalization still carries strategic upside. Credit : The Jerusalem Post On November 6, 2025, Kazakhstan  became the first Central Asian state to formally join the Abraham Accords. The Accords  were initiated in 2020 as a U.S.-mediated initiative to open diplomatic channels and build cooperation between Israel and Arab governments. This development forces a reconsideration of what normalization now means. Normalization refers to the formal establishment of diplomatic, economic, and political cooperation between Israel and other states. Until now, this process has largely played out within the Middle East. The Accords originated with Arab governments re-calibrating their interests in a shifting regional environment, and many analysts interpreted that early pattern as evidence that normalization would remain confined to that geographic sphere. Kazakhstan’s accession disrupts that assumption. It signals that normalization is now expanding into political and strategic contexts beyond the Middle East.  Kazakhstan is a predominantly Muslim, post-Soviet state that maintains complex relations with Russia, China, and the West . The Kazakh government’s decision to join the Accords occurred amid a period of heightened regional instability, underscoring the broader diplomatic significance of this moment. Many expected normalization to slow during periods of regional conflict. However, Kazakhstan’s decision indicates that the Accords continue to offer strategic value, even under these conditions. Kazakhstan has also been attempting to diversify its partnerships beyond Russia and China, and entering the Accords provides an opportunity to expand economic and strategic options. This development also demonstrates that the Accords are not simply bilateral agreements between Israel and individual states, but instead represent a structured network for economic cooperation, technology partnerships, and security coordination. Kazakhstan had already maintained diplomatic relations with Israel prior to the agreement. Joining the Accords places these ties within a formal, institutionalized framework that may increase predictability, deepen cooperation, and signal diplomatic alignment within the U.S.-supported framework. It also confirms that U.S. mediation  remains central to the Accords’ continued expansion. For decades, many believed that states would not formalize cooperation with Israel until progress was made on the Palestinian question. Arab governments historically treated diplomatic recognition as leverage in negotiations with Israel, suggesting that normalization and the Palestinian question were tied together. Kazakhstan itself has previously affirmed support for Palestinian statehood in United Nations forums , which makes this moment even more significant. Kazakhstan’s decision shows that a state outside the Arab world is calculating the benefits of normalization on the basis of its own strategic interests rather than waiting for a broader political breakthrough. Kazakhstan’s entry also opens up the possibility of the Accords evolving to link Israel to wider Eurasian economic networks. The nation holds large reserves of critical minerals —including the world’s largest chromite ore reserves—and is currently the top global supplier of uranium. It sits on emerging trade routes like the Middle Corridor , which connects China and Europe through the Caspian basin. These factors suggest that future cooperation may extend to incorporate technology supply chains and strategic infrastructure. Kazakhstan’s entry confirms the Accords’s viability as a diplomatic tool. Although it is unclear which country may join next, Kazakhstan’s accession signals that the Accords continue to operate effectively and remain accessible to future partners.

Japan now has its first woman prime minister, and the old boys' club couldn't be more pleased. Credit: Wikimedia Commons When the ruling Liberal Democratic Party elevated Sanae Takaichi to its presidency on October 6, global headlines celebrated a historic moment for gender representation. The New York Times called it a "landmark." CNN described it as "breaking barriers." What these reports glossed over is that Takaichi rejects  same-sex marriage, dual surnames for married couples, and female ascendancy to the Chrysanthemum Throne. She opposes laws that would let married women keep their surnames despite using her  maiden name professionally. Her femininity doesn’t do anything to challenge Japan’s political order. It makes it unassailable. During her campaign, Takaichi promised " Nordic levels " of female representation in cabinet: between 36% and 61%. But her 19-person cabinet in fact has only two women. That’s 10.5% female representation, the same ratio as her predecessor’s cabinet. When pressed , she blamed a shortage of qualified women, though Japan allows non-politicians to head ministries. And yet her deception is working. Her approval rating has climbed  to 64.4%, compared to Kishida's 55.7%, though her policies remain similar to his. The real story is what her gender helps obscure. The LDP's dilapidated coalition with Komeito, a Buddhist-aligned party that moderated nationalist impulses, has buckled . Its replacement, the Japan Innovation Party, shares the LDP's hawkish foreign policy and disdain for progressive reform. Komeito historically curbed constitutional revision and subsequent military expansion; the Japan Innovation Party has no such qualms . After years of corruption scandals and voter apathy, particularly among young voters convinced  Japanese democracy is pure theater, the LDP needed to project renewal without actual change. Takaichi's gender creates the appearance of disruption to the status quo even as her politics guarantee continuity. The United States has long wanted Japan to rearm and to strengthen its role along the first island chain as a counterweight to China’s expanding presence, but Japanese leaders who tried found themselves in an awkward position. When Shinzo Abe pursued constitutional revision and a more assertive security posture, his efforts aligned with American strategic goals. But they unsettled U.S. officials wary of Abe’s nationalist rhetoric and historical revisionism . During the Trump years, the U.S. Embassy and State Department had to calibrate their language to affirm alliance solidarity while distancing Washington from Abe's domestic agenda. What makes Takaichi valuable is that her position as Japan's first female leader softens the ideological edge of policies once viewed as provocative. With a strengthening of relations, both leaders get what they want: Trump secured an anti-China ally that’s rapidly militarizing and investing massively in American infrastructure; Takaichi, whose coalition is two votes short of a majority, gained the American endorsement necessary to bolster her domestic legitimacy. If the G-7 celebrates her "modern leadership," they're endorsing illiberalism made palatable. Unlike Orbán or Meloni, who attack liberal institutions openly, Takaichi makes  ethnic homogeneity, gender traditionalism, and nationalist mythology appear compatible with democracy. Her success demonstrates that democracies can exclude minorities, constrain women, and cultivate nationalist identity without triggering the kinds of alarm bells which populist movements set off. Because Japan's strategic value to Washington is immense, her government will enjoy immunity from the scrutiny other illiberal democracies face. There's a pattern here: identity representation now functions as insulation for conservative governance. A woman leads while women's representation stalls. A coalition shifts right while claiming democratic renewal. Militarization proceeds under the banner of feminist achievement. The old boys' club has learned that the most effective defense isn't keeping women out but letting one woman in, making sure she governs like her predecessors, and then pointing to her presence as proof the system has evolved. If Western democracies celebrate Takaichi’s ascension as progress, they're validating a model where symbolic firsts substitute for substantive change. Other conservative movements are paying attention. Takaichi looks like the future while governing from the past. We risk applauding while the walls close in.

What Zohran Mamdani’s Tuesday mayoral win means for the Democratic Party and national politics.  Credit: Wikimedia Commons I don’t live in New York City, nor have I ever been there. But, for the past several weeks, New York City’s mayoral election dominated my social media feeds, conversations, and even class discussions. I became invested in the election, not because I’m particularly invested in New York, but because the race will meaningfully shape national politics for the next several years.  It’s been one year since Kamala Harris lost. Democrats are still in shambles. Since President Trump took office in January, they have done a pathetic job building a coherent opposition to a president with approval ratings  in the high thirties. Even Democrats hate Democrats, with polls  showing just over a quarter of them are “proud” of their party.  Amid the rubble, however, many Democrats agree that they need to ditch 2010s culture war politics and refocus on the economic issues impacting the working class. “If we’re the party of opportunity, that’s going to give you a real shot at the American dream…then people will say ‘that’s the party I want in there,’” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) told  the New York Times last month.  I agree with Sen. Gallego. But, Democrats don’t just need a revitalized platform with a reorganized coalition around it. They need a charismatic leader capable of convincing voters that Democrats are the party of prosperity.  In a vacuum of Democratic leadership, Zohran Mamdani is filling that role. His campaign was unquestionably impressive. He breezed  past his well-funded and well-known primary opponent, mobilized thousands of unpaid volunteers, accumulated viral moments in debates, and advertised almost exclusively through social media. All this while dozens of billionaires poured money  into portraying him as an ignorant terrorist-sympathizer. Mr. Mamdani’s campaign also fits Sen. Gallego’s vision, focusing primarily on economic issues. He famously promised  free bus fares, rent freezes, ultra low-cost city-owned grocery stores, and free childcare.  Mr. Mamdani’s success has made him a figurehead of Democratic politics. But that’s a problem for a party Americans already view as too extreme . Republicans are using his newfound prominence to advance the idea that all Democrats are radical leftists, and that voters must elect Republicans to stop them. “Mamdani's extreme agenda is the future of the Democrat Party—but we will never allow it to be the future of America,” said  House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). Regardless, Democratic 2028 hopefuls took note of Mr. Madami’s success. “ Mamdani has demonstrated a real ability on the ground to put together a coalition of working-class New Yorkers that is strongest to lead the pack,” said  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY), a potential 2028 presidential candidate.  His win confirms a message Democrats—such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom —have promoted in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election: Democrats need a leader who will shake up the system. Someone exciting, audacious, and willing to disrupt the status quo. Democrats need their own Donald Trump. Mr. Mamdani's colorful style and firebrand socialist platform capitalized on untapped grievances in the Democratic base and beyond, drawing record voter turnout from people typically unengaged in politics. If anything, he is the Sarah Palin of a potential left-wing Democratic revival; a ‘maverick’ using unconventional methods to expose the true appetite within his party.  Far-left Democrats eyeing the 2028 nomination will likely emulate Mr. Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. If these hopefuls gain early momentum, Democratic donors who have lost faith in “traditional” candidates will fund these campaigns, primary voters will turn out for them, and one of them might just win the nomination.  This is exactly what Republicans want.  Republicans know their best hope in 2028 is against a Mamdani-esq candidate. When asked about the 2028 presidential election, Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator, relished the prospect of a far-left Democratic nominee. “Kamala [Harris] might not go away, she's talking about running again, which, ‘God willing’, I will donate to that primary campaign,” Shapiro said , before making similarly excited remarks about Newsom and AOC—who, like Harris and Mamdani, have a far-left reputation.* Mr. Shapiro neglected to mention the slate of moderate Democratic governors who may run, such as Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gretchan Whitmer of Michigan, or Andy Beshear of Kentucky. As governors in “red” or “purple” states, these leaders have shown their ability to unite moderates, progressives, and even some conservatives, making them a much larger threat to Republicans than their far-left counterparts.  Tuesday’s election results  prove moderates’ viability. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, who gained a reputation in Congress for her moderate voting record  and bipartisanship , beat her Republican challenger by 15 percentage-points to flip the state’s governorship. Mr. Mamdani only beat  his challenger, former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, by roughly 9 points. When Cuomo’s votes are combined with the Republican candidate, that margin shrinks to 2 points; if there were only two candidates, Mr. Mamdani would have barely won in one of America’s most progressive cities.  Political pundits are already speculating  that Mr. Mamdani’s victory sets Democrats up to nominate a left-wing ‘maverick’ in 2028. But when Democrats assume that Mr. Mamdani’s success in New York will translate to the national electorate, they ignore how the majority of Americans perceive the far-left. If Democratic primary voters choose a Mamdani-like candidate in 2028, they will hand Republicans a major advantage.  * My description of Ms. Harris’s reputation as “far-left” is based on her record as a senator  and opinion polling  showing voters think she is more extreme than President Trump: “ 47 percent of likely voters viewed Ms. Harris as too liberal, compared with 32 percent who saw Mr. Trump as too conservative .” Correction: A previous version of this article suggested that Mr. Mamdani would be eligible to run for president in 2028. He would not be; the Constitution requires that the U.S. president be a natural born citizen.

A “no” is a vote for democracy when no one seems willing to defend it. Credit: Gabe Khuly On August 21, 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the so-called “ Election Rigging Response Act .” The amendment gives California voters the opportunity to vote on Proposition 50 and decide whether to repeal the maps that were created by California’s independent redistricting committee , instituting new, partisan maps gerrymandered to eliminate five Republican seats. This was passed in response to Texas redistricting its maps  to give Republicans five more seats in that state at the request of President Trump. California’s independent redistricting committee was established  by Prop 11 in 2008. It was initially limited to drawing maps for state legislative districts, but, in 2010, its authority expanded to include congressional maps. The commission consists of 14 members: five Democrats, five Republicans, and four Independents, each thoroughly vetted. The map-drawing process takes place over the course of a year. During this time, the commission holds public meetings, allowing locals to offer their input. This ensures that the maps that are drawn sort people into communities which share common characteristics and interests. In contrast to the open, transparent, and lengthy process of the independent commission, the maps put forth by Prop 50 were hastily drawn behind closed doors by state legislators. While consultation with average citizens is central to the independent commission’s process, none of that was present with the creation of Prop 50’s maps.  Prop 50 stands as a symbol of all that currently ails the Democratic Party. For the last 10 years, Democrats have decried Donald Trump as a threat to democracy, even calling him a fascist . It’s ironic that after a decade of stressing the importance of maintaining our democracy against those that would destroy it, Democrats have decided to turn their back on democratic principles as well. And while they may try to defend themselves against the charge of hypocrisy by claiming  that this is a temporary move that will expire at the next census, the truth is: one cannot protect democracy in a way that blatantly undermines it. Authoritarians have long used “temporary” measures to gradually expand their power while dissolving constraints. If Democrats fail to regain the White House in 2028, a similar ballot proposition will be put forth, no doubt. To be clear, partisan gerrymandering—no matter where or by whom it is done—is abhorrent, undemocratic, and flies in the face of the principles of self-government. However, repulsive actions by one state do not give license to another to commit the same evils in the other direction. Most of us were told growing up that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Prop 50 would not only silence the voices of a great many people in this state; it would incite other states to horribly gerrymander their  maps. The problem with fighting fire with fire is that you burn the house down. The moment you begin to erode democracy, the die is cast. Rather than respond to Texas by stooping to their level, Democrats should show that they are different from Republicans. When they instead use the same tricks, Democrats validate the views of voters who see the parties as equally repugnant. Americans chose to bring back Trump because they didn’t like the direction the country was heading under Joe Biden. If Democrats want to defeat Republicans, they should make changes to their policies and messaging that address the dissatisfaction so many voters felt in 2024.  Now, Proponents of Prop 50 claim that it is  democratic, because Californians are voting on it. But it is not democratic to strip away the rights of others. The people of Shasta County, for instance, should not be lumped into the same district as those from Marin County—and separated from their neighbors in Tehama County—simply because the people of Sacramento want to stack and pack them into districts that share no common interests or needs. Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the “tyranny of the majority,” whereby a majority of the populace uses its electoral potency to suppress the voices of the minority. Such tyranny will be unleashed if Prop 50 passes. Gerrymandering dilutes democracy. It is a reversal of the democratic proposition: rather than allowing the voters to choose their representatives, gerrymandering allows the representatives to choose their voters. It cements the entrenched political order and stifles true opposition. In extreme cases, gerrymandered maps can lead  to a party winning a majority of seats with a minority of votes. By minimizing the degree to which an individual’s vote impacts the electoral results, gerrymandering neuters democracy. A California Republican has just as much right to be heard and to have a say in his government as any California Democrat. Yes, there are more Democrats than Republicans in this state. But Republican voters are Californians just the same. Newsom and the state legislators were elected by the people of California; their responsibility is to the people of California, not to the Democratic Party.  In Crisis of the House Divided , Professor Harry Jaffa described Abraham Lincoln’s objection to Stephen Douglas’ position on slavery. Douglas believed in “popular sovereignty,” the notion that individual states could decide whether or not they would allow slavery. Jaffa, articulating Lincoln’s view, wrote: To justify despotism was of necessity to condemn self-government, and to justify self-government was of necessity to condemn despotism. A popular sovereignty which could, even in theory, issue in the despotic rule of one man by another was a living lie…and to embalm such a lie in the heart of a great act of national legislation…would be a calamity for human freedom. To say that fair representation can be taken away by a ballot measure is to say that democracy itself  can be taken away by a ballot measure. I would hope that no Democrat—indeed, no American—would ever want to follow that logic to its natural end. In our day, as in Lincoln’s, it is important to maintain that the “will of the people” cannot be invoked to justify the denial of rights. Finally, it is quite ironic that a party that proclaims “ No Kings ” would aim to consolidate power in a way that is not representative of their constituents. To that, I say that “No Kings” should include Gavin Newsom. America is unique in the strength of her democratic institutions; we have known no other form of government as long as we have been a nation. Times of crisis have historically proven to be ripe ground for would-be dictators to seize power, but what has kept America strong and free from the temptations of authoritarianism is her eternal commitment to “We, the People” and to the protection of our rights. The challenges we face cannot be solved by silencing our political opponents and granting increased power to the government, but only by We, the People. Vote for democracy; vote no on Prop 50.

Be for something—not just against Trumpism. Credit: Zohran Mamdani's Instagram Page Establishment Democrats have failed New York City. A study by Columbia University and the organization Robin Hood found that 25% of New Yorkers live in poverty , compared to a national rate of 13%. 15%  of New Yorkers cannot “see a medical professional due to cost,” 12% often run “out of money between paychecks,” and 4% have “to stay in a shelter or other place not meant for regular housing.”  The Democratic establishment faces a crisis of confidence. At the time of writing, the RealClearPolitics Poll Average shows  that only 34.1% of Americans approve of the Democratic Party, compared to the 59.6% who disapprove. Left-leaning people have become disaffected  with the Party, in part because of its apparent ineptitude in the wake of Trump’s extremism. Establishment Democrats vaguely lament Trump’s attacks on democracy while refusing to lay out an economic agenda that would make the lives of working people easier.  This widespread economic hardship and political disaffection enabled Zohran Mamdani’s rise. Mamdani, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is running on a platform that is laser-focused on economic issues. He promises  to fight to freeze rent, provide universal childcare, make public buses free, increase the minimum wage to $30 by 2030, and much more—all of which would make life significantly more   affordable  for working-class New Yorkers. Let’s look at the two largest expenses working class New Yorkers face—rent and childcare—and see how Mamdani would combat them.  First, a rent freeze would deliver real relief to the working class. The Adams Administration has increased  the rent of New York’s nearly one million rent-stabilized tenants by 12.6%. Freezing the rent is expected to save  New Yorkers between $2.44 billion and $6.84 billion over the next four years. If Mamdani became mayor, he would likely freeze the rent by appointing progressives to The New York City Rent Guidelines Board.  Second, Mamdani wants  to provide free childcare “for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years, ensuring high quality programming for all families.” NYC Childcare is currently far too expensive, typically costing over  $20,000 annually per child. The office of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander reports , “ Using the conventional federal affordability benchmark of seven percent of family income for child care, a family would need to earn $334,000 to afford the cost of care for a two year old in New York City.” Making childcare free in NYC would increase  the ability of parents to participate in the workplace and would increase disposable incomes. To pay for this and other programs, Mamdani advocates  raising New York’s corporate tax rate to 11.5% and increasing the income tax on the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers. Raising taxes would require support from the New York State Legislature and the New York Governor, but could be made possible if a movement developed to pressure—and primary—establishment candidates.  Unlike the Democratic establishment, Mamdani has created a coherent message centered on delivering gains to working people. It’s a message that gives people something to vote for —rather than merely suggesting they vote against  Trumpism—and it delivered Mamdani a crushing  12 point win over establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary.  Mamdani has a proud history of fighting for the working class. After graduating from Bowdoin College, he helped people avoid eviction as a foreclosure prevention counselor . This experience showed him that the housing system values  corporate profits over the public good, and it inspired him to run for New York Assemblymember. Since winning his Assembly seat, Mamdani has worked both inside and outside the electoral process to effect change. Inside the legislature, he has supported a range of progressive proposals and helped secure funding for a free bus route pilot program . Outside the system, he participated  in a 15-day hunger strike with taxi drivers, which ultimately won the drivers debt relief. Mamdani has proven his commitment to creating a more equitable society.    Nevertheless, establishment candidates are hoping to topple Mamdani in the general election, and they are each uniquely odious. Despite being soundly rejected by Democratic Primary votes, Cuomo is running as an Independent in the general election. Among his list of offenses, Cuomo joined the defense team  of war criminal  Benjamin Netenyahu in his International Criminal Court case, is accused of sexually assaulting  13 women, and obscured  how many New Yorkers died of COVID-19 in nursing homes. Moreover, Cuomo is Trump’s preferred candidate and is supported  by Trump donors. Trump has discussed the race privately  with Cuomo and has attempted  to get  other establishment candidates to drop out of the race.   Then there’s Republican Curtis Sliwa, founder of the vigilante group The Guardian Angels. He’s known for pulling elaborate stunts  like faking his own kidnapping . Live  on Sean Hannity’s show, Sliwa watched as his Guardian Angels roughed up a man for supposedly being a migrant. It was later revealed  that the man was not a migrant and that Sliwa only believed he was because he was speaking Spanish.  Cuomo and Sliwa offer nothing exciting to voters and have instead spent much of their energies insinuating that Mamdani is antisemetic. In doing so, both establishment candidates demonstrate that they are out of touch with their voters. Data for Progress conducted  a poll of 2025 Democratic primary voters in New York City. They found that 78% of primary voters believe that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people living in Gaza.” Mamdani shares the opinion of voters and experts and supports  a durable ceasefire to achieve an “end to the genocide [and] unimpeded access to humanitarian aid.” While Mamdani’s plans to lower costs and stand up to corporations were the primary reasons people voted for him, 62% of his primary voters told Data for Progress  that “his support for Palestinian rights” “was important to me, and swayed how I voted.”  Mamdani provides a blueprint for the Democratic Party. He fights for the working class and believes in the inherent dignity of all people. I’m ecstatic that he will be the next mayor of New York City. However, it’s important to not engage in hero worship. Mamdani is a figurehead of the movement, but the force behind it is the advocates dedicated to justice. It’s up to us to elect more progressives and work outside of the electoral process by creating institutions like labor and tenants unions. As Mamdani himself will tell you , “It is our responsibility to build power everywhere…Because there are so many incredible things that a mayor can do, and there are even more things that the people of this city can do.”

The Forum's full interview with Bill Kristol. Credit: Wikipedia Commons The following text is abridged. It features highlights from The Forum 's interview with Bill Kristol. It has been edited for length and clarity. Dhriti Jagadish: You began as an academic in the realm of political philosophy, so we have to ask, what are you reading nowadays? What do you recommend?  Bill Kristol: Not as much political philosophy as I should. As I’ve gotten older, I'm slightly more inclined to literature and to history, but I still try to read a little bit of political philosophy—and I always love mystery novels. Writing the “Morning Shots,” the newsletter at The Bulwark , keeps me pretty busy. And so when I read, it's often for work. For relaxation—mystery novels and some literature, history, and stuff.  Shiv Parihar: Of all the books you've read, what are some of the top ones you'd recommend to us, especially as college students?  Bill Kristol:  That’s a good question. I’ll say Harry Jaffa’s book—to take a Claremont former professor— Crisis of the House Divided , had a big impact on me in college when I read it. I was already a student of [Harvey] Mansfield, and I'd taken Mark Blitz. I was in his tutorial my first year. That's how I got into political philosophy. And [Jaffa] showed how interesting political history could be—and statesmanship. Political theory wasn’t here [ points upwards ] and politics just down here [ points downwards ]—there was a kind of bridge between the two.  I wrote my senior thesis in college on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America  and that always had a big influence on me. I had an instinct that Tocqueville was a much deeper thinker than people at the time thought. Now I think it's more common to read Tocqueville in political philosophy classes and think about him as Mansfield [and others did].  Oakeshott—I read a little bit, but that was never quite my taste in conservatism. I was more American and less traditionalist. I was a young conservative, or semi-conservative, kid and I was anti-New Left. So when my contemporaries were discovering Marx and various Marxists and neo-Marxists—or lefties from the late sixties—I was discovering Burke and people in that tradition. I was sort of a Burke, Tocqueville, Churchill type person.  Churchill is really worth reading because he's so accessible. And leave aside the books about  Churchill. His own autobiography, My Early Life , is so interesting. [So are] all six volumes [about] how you stumble into a war like [World War II] and how it could have been avoided, perhaps, or dealt with earlier. My recommendation to people who love politics is that they shouldn't read only  politics. And people who love political philosophy shouldn't read only  political philosophy. You should read some history. History is a very good grounding [for] the world. It took me a while to correct myself. I was in so much political philosophy that I sort of ignored the fact that, well, history also happens, and history happens in very contingent and unpredictable ways. You can study the theoretical version of modern liberalism or communism, but then an awful lot of what really happens  is much more mixed and murky and complicated. And I think that's a good lesson.  Dhriti Jagadish: Transitioning to politics now, I had the chance to listen to your son-in-law, Matt Continetti, this summer at Hudson. He said that “a surplus of the college-educated elite could lead to radicalism.” It’s true that we, students, are very out of touch. We don't have the pulse of the American populace. What advice do you have for us, in the time we have left in college and beyond? How do we stay informed and also stay empathetic [from within] this ivory tower? Bill Kristol: I disagree with Matt a little bit on this, I guess.  Not everyone has to be constantly in touch with everyone in America. You’re as American as anyone else is. If you're a student at Claremont, you're no more or less American than if you're a 54-year-old unemployed steel worker. The way the press writes, it's, “That guy is the real American and you're the pampered coastal elite.” But that’s ludicrous. Claremont’s a part of America, New York’s part of America.  Obviously at some point, if you want to go into politics—or if you want to understand the whole country—you need to get some understanding of parts of the country that you're not familiar with. But I think people overdo this sometimes, honestly. It's fine to go to college, read great books, and hang out with your peers at college. You don't have to, at age 22, have a comprehensive knowledge of all America.  I'm slightly on the side of: study what you want to study, hang out with people you find interesting. And if you decide that you want to have a better understanding of America as a sociological place, you should go at some point to Dayton, Ohio and so forth, and see what's going on there.  Shiv Parihar:  You worked for Dan Quayle [as chief of staff] from 1989 to 1993. A few years ago he was back in the news. It was reported that he was a very powerful force in convincing Mike Pence to go forth with a peaceful transition of power in 2020. As you knew Quayle and worked for him, are you inclined to believe that story as it was reported? Do you have your own perspective on [the] role Quayle may have played?  Bill Kristol: He’s a good person and a serious person. He hasn't been much involved in [politics since his vice presidency]. He tried to run for president. That wasn't gonna happen. I think he just decided, “You know, I've done what I could do.”  I don't see him quite as much, just because he's not in Washington too much. We’re on good terms and all that. I'm very proud that, when Pence called him, he told Pence the right thing and bucked him up—and had no question about what the right thing to do was.  As VP, I think he [Quayle] was underestimated and slightly unfairly criticized at times. [So] I'm glad he was able to get deserved credit for having not just good judgment, but a set of real principles. Dhriti Jagadish:  Jonah Goldberg had a piece yesterday about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, who used to write for you at the Weekly Standard . [Carlson] wrote a piece celebrating the withdrawal of Pat Buchanan from the party in 1999, and today he’s unrecognizable. Did you see any inklings of this shift when you knew him?  Bill Kristol: Well, it was a long time ago. I think he left the Weekly Standard  in 2000.  People do change, and I don't really like this game of,  “I'm gonna now go back and find this part that really prefigures that.” I don't know what happened. I believe in human agency, mostly, and people are responsible for what they are and what they become.  But in this case, he's [Carlson] made his choices. I think it's very legitimate from my point of view to criticize him. It's interesting as a kind of biographical matter, obviously—how did someone get from here to there? But I focus more on what people are doing and saying in the moment.  What I do think is, it's been a moment when people had a chance to step up or not. Or not just not  step up—like in his case—[but] really go in and be irresponsible and damaging to the country.  Shiv Parihar: On a similar note, are there any of your older Republican friends that you've remained quite close to, even if they’ve supported the direction the party's gone, or things it’s done? For instance, maybe someone like Norman Podhoretz?  Bill Kristol: Norman's quite elderly. I’ve haven’t really been in touch with him much. I think he's in decent shape. Obviously old friends are old friends and we remain cordial. That's true of some people who served [in] the Trump first term.  I think if you're in another profession—an engineer…or a physician—I assume you can have very close friends [despite political differences]. Politics isn't central to your life. Maybe it's a little awkward sometimes. Maybe there's a little jousting. But 80 percent of your conversation isn't about it. And you have a million other overlaps—in your interests, your hobbies, your families, your communities, church. And so it’s easier in those cases to have close friendships where you're at odds in politics. I’m in [politics] for a living, [so] it's a little harder to say, “I'm just gonna put all this aside.” But I’ve had many friends who I disagree with over the years. The Trump era is different, I think, from normal political disagreements. I had plenty of friends who were against the Iraq War, and that was a policy disagreement. It was a pretty heated one at times.  But at the end of the day, we all wished the country well. We all were in favor of the constitutional processes—the legal processes—that did in this case, produce a vote to authorize the use of force. But that was a different kind of situation. I do think the Trump situation has put real stress on old friends and friendships and even acquaintanceships. I have not had personally—unlike some other friends of mine—dramatic break offs. I've drifted away from a lot of people I was reasonably friendly with and close to. And I do feel—especially with my colleagues at The Bulwark  —that I'm in touch with younger people [who] are thinking about the future, not just because it's intellectually interesting, but because they are going to live in it and their kids are really going to live in it.  My main advice to 22 year olds is: things will change. You'll change. That's good, not bad. You should be open to change, including in your political views, your interests, your tastes, and your friendships to some degree. I do think people who try to keep an open mind about life, who try to keep learning as they get older—who don't get into a defensive shell, if possible—tend to have more fulfilling, more satisfying lives.  I don't mean to be too glib about how easy it is to do this—but I think it's good to be somewhat less judgmental than you are when you're 22. Dhriti Jagadish: It’s clear that you've kept an open mind. You've recently expressed positive sentiments about Zohran Mamdani— Bill Kristol:  Or at least not so negative sentiments.  Dhriti Jagadish: Which trends in the Democratic Party are you optimistic about? What are some tactics you may think work?  Bill Kristol: I'm closer to the centrist Democrats than the left-wing Democrats. Predictable. I’m closer to hawkish Democrats, as that’s one thing I haven't changed my mind much about. I still think the Scoop Jackson-Reagan-McCain view of the world is basically correct and basically the right policy for us.  Things went badly in Iraq. Mistakes were made. And we made some bad judgment calls, including me. But I still think, fundamentally, we should be strong and there should be a global system of alliances. I thought the people who went in after 9/11, many of whom are now serving in Congress, have been a very important change for the Democratic Party from [the] excessive, “We can't use force and power doesn't matter—it’s all about the UN.” I like the more free, pro-free market Democrats. I like the less left-wing, identity politics Democrats. Having said that, it's a big party. I don't have a whole lot of standing to really tell them what to do, because I'm relatively a newcomer from their point of view. I like to be part of the discussions. A lot of people have put very hard work into the Democratic Party on the progressive side, and they have the right to try to nominate their candidates and push for bigger government healthcare solutions than I would prefer. People who’ve been in the Democratic Party for 30 years are much more hostile to each other than I am actually, since, for me, it's a little like coming from outside. It’s sort of, “Okay, you know what? As long as you're against authoritarianism and for the rule of law, and basically for a market system with a welfare state, basically for American global leadership, and basically for welcoming immigrants and [for] a tolerant nation, then I'm sort of okay with it.” And so I found myself a little bit of a big tent Democrat. I think a lot of the younger Democrats are quite impressive. Uh, I wish— Dhriti Jagadish:  Any names [in Democratic politics] stand out to you? Bill Kristol:  I live in Virginia. So, Abigail Spanberger, who I think will win in November, is really excellent. It might be [Mikie] Sherrill in New Jersey, [and she is] excellent. And so, part of my core praise for Mamdani has been that if we elect three Democrats who win in November—the three big races, really—and it’s Spanberger or Sherrill and Mamdani? That’s okay. New York City gets to have a left-wing mayor. It’s not the first time, and it’s different from the rest of the country. I wish they were a little less tolerant of certain things—against Israel and all that. But some of the economic stuff, I think, is just silly, but I don’t think it’s going to matter. Shiv Parihar:  Do you think you would vote for him [Mamdani] if you were voting in New York?  Bill Kristol:  You know, I think so. I really can't think—the idea of going back to Cuomo is just, I think, ridiculous. I think if it had been the first round, I would’ve voted for someone else and maybe wouldn't have even ranked Mamdani and would've had other people who were more centrist, liberal types.  It was very disappointing. All these big shot finance types in New York, they couldn't get behind anyone except for Andrew Cuomo. It's really pathetic, in my opinion. So now they're rallying to Cuomo with some of them, but I don't have that much sympathy for that.  And I also just think, practically speaking, New York is a huge city. He's not going to destroy it, I don't think. He’s gonna set up five silly government-run grocery stores. I don't think he even will do that. So there'll be some grocery store somewhere and it won't be as good as the privately run ones, and it will go out of business in three years and it'll be a little bit of a waste of taxpayer money, you know?  Or it'll be harmless. I do think the right’s reaction to Mamdani has been a little hysterical. He's a very impressive politician. I don't know that he’s going to be a very good mayor. He's 33 years old, he's never run anything. They're good people who could work for him though, in New York. So, who knows? I don’t know.  As I've gotten older, I'm a little more hesitant. Mayor, governor—especially those—are pretty place-specific jobs. And if you don't live in the place…you read stuff online, and you get a little glimpse of Gavin Newsom here and Shapiro there. And of course, you watch clips of them, so you'd have some opinions. But you don't really know, you know? I do not really know what kind of governor Gavin Newsom’s been.  Now, I do think in Virginia, I have a much better sense of what the governor's effect has actually been. So, I've gotten more hesitant, especially on the state and local races, of having extremely firm judgments about people. Obviously I prefer generally pro-free-market and so forth, and anti- too much government planning, and foolish planning.  Shiv Parihar: I wanted to circle back a little bit to your response to the last question [on Podhoretz].  I'm curious how you see old neocon and paleocon debates [like those between Pat Buchanan and Podhoretz] playing out similarly today in the Republican Party. Now that we are approaching the post-Trump era, and the coalition is going to have to find other ways to define itself ideologically and policy-wise… Bill Kristol:  I'm not so sure we're approaching the post-Trump era, first of all. We may be approaching post-Donald Trump [but] you could be in a Trumpist era.  Shiv Parihar:  Post-Trump presidency, at least.  Bill Kristol: Maybe. He’ll probably run again though. But anyway—I do think the paleocons were kind of a precursor of Trump in a different way, and Trump is a much more effective demagogue than they were.  He’s more of a con man, more of a showman, and he is more in touch with actual middle America. He's been selling stuff to them for 40 years. He had a much better feel for how to do all this than someone like Buchanan. Buchanan was a gifted political figure in his own way. A talented polemicist.  Those fights were a little bit of a precursor. We, the neocons, basically won those fights for 20, 30 years—and then lost. So that's what happens in life. You have to keep fighting the fight. I do regret that some of the neocon types have assimilated—have accommodated Trump.  There are two aspects to Trumpism I think that…people like me objected to. One was the policy. I do think a lot of it could do quite a lot of damage, especially in foreign policy. The tariffs and the immigration stuff is really reprehensible, and foolish—just damaging. But, the policy stuff could be reversed.  We could have a crackdown on immigration now, and we could have liberal immigration policies in three years, same with tariffs and so forth. Some of the other stuff’s a little harder to reverse, [such as] global alliances. But that was never my fundamental objection to Trump. There've been plenty of Republicans who were a little more in that direction. I might not have voted for him, but I wouldn't have said, “Never Trump.”  It was always, for me, about the authoritarianism. And people dismissed it. “So you don't like the tweets, the style, the tone.” But that was never it. I mean, the style and the tone conveyed [that]  he didn't have any respect for the rule of law. He didn't have any respect for constitutional limitations. He didn't have any respect for fellow citizens who…didn't agree with him. The really bad thing is that he's been as bad as I feared. He was checked in his first term by internal guardrails in the administration. And Mark Esper and all the other characters obviously. Once January 6th happened, I thought, “Well, maybe that's it.” Once he survived that and got himself back on top of the party, I thought, “The second term is really going to be very bad.” And it has been, in my opinion.  So the people who are still on board, or who are more on board now—I find that somewhat bewildering. And especially if you're older. It's one thing if you're 30 years old, you sort of want a future in politics. For people your age, all you've had is Trump for the Republican Party. [So you go,] “I'm on the right, I'm gonna be Republican.” You're young, I understand that, and I don't hold people quite as accountable.  And then if you're 30 years old, you're ambitious. “Okay, I’m gonna swallow hard and go in, because if I can rise up, I could be [an] Assistant Secretary of State when I'm 36.” I don't approve of that, but I sort of understand. Why people who are at the end of their careers felt they had to go along with this—I am somewhat mystified by that and disappointed. Shiv Parihar: Who surprised you most?  Bill Kristol:  That's hard to say. I don't know. I’ll pass on that, I think. What I was going to say before though, was—in 2016, I thought there was some chance I was wrong. That is, one can miscalculate. “Maybe he’ll become president, he'll feel the weight of the office. He won't be a great president. He'll do some stupid things. I will cringe a lot when he says certain things, but at the end of the day, it'll be four years.” I thought that was the best case, and I wondered if I was overreacting in that sense.  Dhriti Jagadish: I know you’re certainly not naive enough to think that just because Trump is gone, MAGA will be gone. But a successor hasn't been named. So I’m wondering: who do you think is the closest secondhand man to Trump at the moment? And what does he or she have to do to adopt the MAGA brand in the next three years?  Bill Kristol:  It’s a good and interesting question. My main answer to it is: given how unpredictable everything’s been over the last ten years—we didn’t expect Trump, we didn’t expect Biden, we didn’t expect Trump to come back after January 6th—who knows? I could give you a more conventional honestly analysis based on my experience. Vance has probably consolidated a fair amount of power and support as a loyal VP to Trump. We could speculate about how the movement probably fractures, because history suggests that the original demagogue—the original cult leader, if you want to be a little less friendly to him—is the strongest. Right? It’s a little harder to hold it together.  You can imagine it fracturing. Tucker Carlson, Vance, some modern Nikki Haley type, DeSantis, Abbott. It could be a lot of them. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and God knows.  I just think we haven’t really run this experiment before. But also, you’d have to tell me: is the Trump presidency closing in 2028—if it does close in 2028—with 5 percent growth for the last three years and a successful foreign policy? Or is it closing with a tariff-induced recession? [Will we be] throwing our weight around in little places while Europe and Asia fall apart as we do nothing? So much depends on that kind of thing.  Bill Kristol:  The Democrats more broadly—they’re a traditional political party in America: a coalition, unruly, complicated, with cross-cutting cleavages, generational cleavages, left-center, [and] regional problems. I feel like one could game that out. I’m not saying we could predict it, but we could say what’s likely: who’s going to emerge in these elections, who are the leading centrists, who are the leading leftists, who ran before and might be strong, who was governor of a major state. I feel like that would be a normal conversation.  But the Trump Republican Party is such a different animal. It doesn’t lend itself to that conversation. It’s much more like figuring out the succession in some semi-authoritarian movement, and that’s pretty unpredictable if you look at history. So I don’t know. I am pessimistic about the return of a sane Republican Party. I’m pessimistic about a sane conservatism. Look at who’s getting elected. He’s [Trump] been the leader of the Republican Party for a decade. Most people in the House have arrived in the last decade.  A fair number of senators at this point have arrived in the last decade, or just before, but then accommodated to Trump early enough that they’re basically pretty Trumpy. The old Republican Party is old, and it hasn’t won a lot of elections. There’s Brian Kemp here, and a couple of people there… I can go have coffee with Larry Hogan, and I can have lunch with Bob Corker, and that’s all very nice. I can chat with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I don’t think that’s coming back fast. Now, that could be wrong. Things can change. I’d say the upside is: first of all, the Trump thing happened quite quickly. The 2012 Republican ticket was Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. The 2014–2015 Republican leadership in Congress was John Boehner, then Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. It wasn’t obvious in early 2015 that this is all just going to fall apart and we’re going to have Trump. Everyone now has decided that was obvious after the fact, right? “Oh, they were zombie Reaganism, it was old and stale.” It didn’t feel that way. Scott Walker seemed to be a successful governor of Wisconsin. Bobby Jindal was a young, impressive, successful governor of Louisiana. Jeb Bush, if you wanted another Bush, was from Florida. Ted Cruz was an impressive conservative from Princeton [and a] Supreme Court clerk. It wasn’t obvious that it was going to go the way it went. So the flip side of that is maybe it could all change much faster in a different direction. Politics does sometimes do that. Shiv Parihar: Professor Jon Shields at CMC had an article in the New York Times about how he thought liberal professors might influence younger conservative students towards a center-right conservatism, as opposed to [a] more Trumpy, MAGA [type conservatism]. I was curious, what sort of things do you  think young conservatives, maybe Trump-skeptical [young conservatives], should be thinking about?  Bill Kristol:  I’m sympathetic to Jon’s wish that that would happen. I’m a little skeptical [about how much] professors teaching certain books is gonna change students’ views of things. Sometimes it does, but it’s sort of accidental, and it’s often unpredictable. But if you’re honestly gonna teach them, you’re not gonna teach them in this edifying way: “Here, I’m gonna give you a…”  I don’t really like courses—this is my own prejudice in a funny way—about “Conservatism” or “Liberalism.” I’m not against it, of course. You teach these traditions and so forth—but you teach them in a way that’s skeptical and open-minded, not like, “Here are the doctrines, and you’ll really like these ones if you read them.” I think people should read important books. But honestly, the great conservative books are great liberal books, for me.  The Founders did not go around saying they were “conservative.” They didn’t call themselves anything. “Liberal” wasn’t really a term at the time. But they were in favor of a revolution. They were in favor of innovation, as they put it in the Federalist Papers , in politics. They were not friends to the old order in Europe. The more prescient of them were not friends to the parts of the old order that remained here in the U.S., such as church-state issues and especially slavery. And Tocqueville sat on the left, the center-left in the French Parliament, not on the right. And Churchill began as a Tory, then he quickly became a Liberal in 1905, and at the end of his life said something like, “In my heart, I was always a Liberal.” I’m more of a fan, especially at this moment, with Trump, of the broad liberal-conservative and conservative-liberal tradition. Obviously, there are plenty of 20th-century books. You can go back, obviously, to Burke and all these people, which is great—but there are plenty of 20th-century thinkers who fought against fascism and communism, who tried to think about the problems of liberal democracy and how to strengthen it. The neoconservatives were one school of that, but there are many, many instances. [George] Orwell, who was a social democrat and a socialist, [was] a great analyst of politics. [Jose] Ortega y Gasset, who was a liberal in Spain. Bill Kristol: That would be my main recommendation: conservatives should read liberals who are open to conservative insights, and conservatives who are liberal at heart. Now, they can also read Nietzsche and Marx. I read them, and they had an influence on me. One of the stupidest things, honestly, about [those] setting up “conservative programs” and so forth, is that, what, they’re not gonna teach kids Marx? That’s really idiotic. He’s kind of an important thinker in world history. Or they’re not gonna read Nietzsche or Heidegger or other people who were not in favor of the American-type regime? Or they’re not gonna read serious Catholic thinkers or others? I’m more for liberal education and a little less for attempting to shape people’s points of view.   Dhriti Jagadish: In The Bulwark , Jonathan Last wrote that all journalism will tend toward propaganda unless it's explicitly formulated as anti-authoritarian.  Bill Kristol: In the era of Trump, I think he said. Dhriti Jagadish: In the era of Trump, yes. How concerned are you about the recent sales and mergers with Bari Weiss and CBS, David Ellison and Paramount? What do you think about the future of media and journalism? Should we be worried that journalism is so concentrated?  Bill Kristol: Well, I think concentration is a worry regardless in a way of where one might be on the ideological spectrum. I think Jonathan's being a little rhetorical there, but I think it is true. The tendency is to pull your punches against the people who could hurt you if you want to get ahead. The best journalism's always been sort of rebellious, and sometimes that's been at the expense of conservatives, sometimes at the expense of liberals. Obviously Bill Buckley: “we stand athwart history yelling stop.” People need to remember that. That was admirable.  Buckley made some mistakes, and not everything was great with National Review  over the decades, but to have the courage to say that and to do that was really something. I think we need a little more standing athwart history yelling stop, and a little less trying to figure out which way things are going so you can get on the parade.  Shiv Parihar: Thank you so much for your time. Bill Kristol:  Thank you, I enjoyed the conversation. And good luck with everything.

"Going back to Cuomo" would be "ridiculous," said Kristol. Bill Kristol at Arizona State University in 2017. Credit: Wikimedia Commons In an interview with The Forum on October 9th, Bill Kristol told Dhriti Jagadish and Shiv Parihar that he would vote for Zohran Mamdani if he were a resident of New York City. He referred to the alternative of “going back” to former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as “ridiculous.” Kristol, the son of famed conservative intellectual Irving Kristol, was born and raised in New York City. He served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle from 1989 to 1993. In 1994, he founded political magazine The Weekly Standard . Kristol broke  with the Republican Party in 2016 over the candidacy of Donald Trump and, in 2018, co-founded The Bulwark , where he now serves as editor-at-large. He is also Chairman  of the Board of the Salvatori Center at CMC, which hosts The Forum.  Zohran Mamdani is a democratic socialist and candidate for mayor of New York City. He rose to prominence earlier this year, winning  the New York City Democratic Mayoral primary in June. Mamdani has received endorsements from various figures on the American left, but Kristol’s statements may mark the first show of support from the Never-Trump Republican movement.  The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.  Bill Kristol: I think a lot of the younger Democrats are quite impressive. Uh, I wish— Dhriti Jagadish: — Any names [in Democratic politics] stand out to you? Bill Kristol: Yeah, well, I’d say both. I live in Virginia. So, Abigail Spanberger, who I think will win in November, is really excellent. It might be Sherrill, actually, in New Jersey, excellent. And so, part of my core praise for Mamdani has been that, you know what, if we elect three Democrats who win in November—the three big races, really—and it’s Spanberger or Sherrill and Mamdani? That’s okay. You know, New York City gets to have a left-wing mayor. It’s not the first time, and it’s different from the rest of the country. I wish they were a little less, you know, tolerant of certain things—on Israel, and so, against Israel and all that. But some of the economic stuff, I think, is just silly, but I don’t think it’s going to matter. Shiv Parihar: Do you think you would vote for him [Mamdani] if you were voting in New York?  Bill Kristol: You know, I think so. I really can't think—the idea of going back to Cuomo is just, I think, ridiculous. I think if it had been the first round, I would’ve voted for someone else and maybe wouldn't have even ranked Mamdani and would've had other people who were more centrist, liberal types.  It was very disappointing. All these big shot, you know, finance types in New York, they couldn't get behind anyone except for Andrew Cuomo. It's really pathetic, in my opinion. So now they're rallying to Cuomo with some of them, but I don't have that much sympathy for that.  And I also just think, practically speaking, New York is a huge city. He's not going to destroy it, I don't think. He’s gonna set up five silly government-run grocery stores, I guess. I don't think he even will do that [inaudible] . And so they'll be fine. So there'll be some grocery store somewhere and it won't be as good as the privately run ones, and it will go out of business in three years and it'll be a little bit of a waste of taxpayer money, you know? Or it'll be harmless, you know? And so people—I do think the right’s reaction to Mamdani has been a little hysterical. He's a very impressive politician. I don't know that he’s going to be a very good mayor. He's 33 years old, he's never run anything. They're good people who could work for him though, in New York. So, who knows? I don’t know. Listen to The Forum ’s full interview with Bill Kristol here .

The former vigilante running as the Republican nominee for Mayor of New York City deserves national recognition for protecting the lives of those unable to speak for themselves. Credit: Associated Press The 2025 New York City Mayoral election has garnered significant national media attention after the surprise victory  of socialist Zohran Mamdani in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdani’s chief opponent, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, remains in the race as an independent. Despite consistently outpolling  the incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out of the race in late September, Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa has often been dismissed in national discussions of the race. Sliwa’s background is unusual—and fascinating. He is a moderate Republican best known for founding the vigilante anti-crime group the Guardian Angels during the 1980s spike in New York crime. However, his commitment to the welfare of animals sets him apart from the pack of candidates and makes him New Yorkers’ best choice for mayor. Curtis Sliwa is not only running as the Republican nominee for Mayor of New York City; he is also taking advantage of New York State’s election law, which allows candidates to appear on multiple ballot lines if they gather enough signatures. This system, known as fusion voting, has enabled issue-focused groups to thrive.   Sliwa has pioneered  the “Protect Animals” ballot line, for which he will appear as the nominee this November. The effort is unsurprising to those who have followed his career; he’s been involved in animal adoption advocacy  with the Guardian Angels, and he and his wife host the “ Animal Welfare Hour ” on New York’s WABC radio. Those who value animal rights and the protection of mankind’s furry and feathered friends should know that few politicians in America have been as outspoken about the issue as Curtis Sliwa.  In the past, Sliwa has been mocked  for owning 16 cats in the 2,000 square foot apartment he and his wife Nancy share near Central Park. These attacks are deeply unfair. Sliwa has devoted extensive effort to hosting rescue cats in need of a home. Some of these efforts are temporary and the cats later go on to more permanent owners. He is known for taking meticulous care of the animals, so much so that the New York Times  reported that he changes their litter thrice daily such that the apartment bears no odor at all. It is an unfortunate reflection on the state of media that these immense acts of compassion have been caricatured as if Sliwa were some sort of maniac.  Sliwa’s recognition of the brutality of the American factory farming system has led him to become vegetarian. He is known to aspire  to be a vegan. However, Sliwa’s stance on animal rights goes beyond a personal distaste for factory farming and a fondness for cats; his commitment has been a consistent theme throughout his mayoral campaign platform. Sliwa is alone among the candidates in having put together a comprehensive platform  on animal rights issues. Amongst his proposals is the formation of a full fledged Department of Animal Welfare. The new Department would include a “hotline where people can call [to report] animal cruelty tips, illegal backyard breeding tips, [and] other animal related crimes” and would maintain a registry of all convicted animal abusers similar to a sex-offender registry. The agency would be able to “dispatch agents who would have peace officer status to investigate these reports.” Sliwa has promised to lobby against the sale of furs in New York, although it is unclear whether this would entail a complete ban. He has also proposed a program for pet owners modelled after SNAP—colloquially known as “food stamps”—where the city will cover up to $1,000 in care expenses for all who rescue a pet. Sliwa has even floated a GPS system to make tracking lost cats and dogs simpler. He hopes to have the Department of Animal Welfare oversee the formation of managed feline colonies to control the population of stray cats. This would allow strays to be checked for disease, spayed or neutered, and protected from abuse. Meanwhile, the city would use them to effectively control  New York’s rat and mouse population. The over 1,000 animals in New York’s shelter system have experienced tragic overcrowding  to the point of suspension of new arrivals. Sliwa has stood alone in denouncing this overcrowding and the suspension it caused. He has called for cancelling a billion dollars worth of city contracts with exploitative shelters. All future contracts would require shelters to be no-kill and offer free spay and neuter services.  A media obsessed with covering Andrew Cuomo’s long and horrific record  of sexual harassment, bribery  allegations against Eric Adams, and allegations  of anti-semitism against Zohran Mamdani has allowed the compassion of Curtis Sliwa to go relatively unnoticed. For those across the nation who care about animal protection, his campaign stands as a beacon of hope, showing how these issues can transcend party lines in politics.

By the time we feel ready to commit, we’ve spent a decade practicing how not to. Credit: Enya Kamadolli The first time that I told my family that I only date for marriage, my father’s eyebrows flew up, my mother had to put her tea cup back down, and my brother’s mouth opened before mine closed.  They all found that declaration rather worrying, and for good reason.  I’m surprised someone like you would want something that traditional, ventured my father. He may not believe that women should ever pay for dinner, but he’s quietly proud that he’s raised a daughter who demands to, anyway. The little girl intent on conquering the world had grown up into an unabashedly liberated young woman, and dating for marriage seemed to betray the arc of my own becoming.   You’re too young for that, admonished my mother. My mother and I are more alike than either of us would like to admit, and I saw in her eyes a longing to tell her younger self to stave off settling down for as long as possible.  God, what sort of men are you attracting saying things like that? My brother Aeden looked like he wanted to sprinkle me with spiced kombucha and plaster feminist literature across my forehead to ward off the chino-clad, regular-at-church, trad men he was imagining. He’s holding out hope that one of these days I might actually date a woman.  We often equate dating for marriage with a socially conservative outlook—one that upholds the family as the cornerstone of a virtuous life and disapproves of casual dating or sex. To be a social liberal is to have liberal amounts of flings and casual relationships during one’s twenties, apparently.  But really there are plenty of young fellow social liberals that do hope to have a happy marriage someday .  Anyone who considers marriage an eventual priority should start dating with that end in mind right now. In fact, the costs of not doing so are arguably higher for those of us who seek modern, egalitarian partnerships than for those pursuing more traditional ones. Without the templates of prescriptive gender roles or shared religious doctrines to guide us, identifying a truly compatible partner demands far more trial and error.  Divorce rates scream a humbling truth: we’re often not skilled at finding the right person—or at staying right for them. The best way to build conviction that someone is your  right choice and the best way to learn how to be their ideal life partner is to date—and date seriously—for several years. Even serious relationships that fail teach us so much about what it takes to live a successful partnered life and determine what we’re looking for (and what we’re hoping to avoid) in a life partner.  One of my older cousins recently got married after an eight-year-long relationship. She and her husband have the sort of relationship that even atheists pray for. I asked her once why she had waited so long to walk down the aisle. If someone’s the right person for you, you don’t lose anything by waiting to get married. But if someone’s not the right person for you, there are huge costs to rushing.  Wrapped up in all our worries about what we might lose when we commit to a serious relationship at the onset of young adulthood, we ignore the costs that we’re pushing onto our future selves—namely, the risk of committing to a marriage that we are ill-suited and underprepared for, one that is doomed to fail from the start.  If you spend your twenties running around the world with people that you know you’re not going to marry, the likelihood that you rush to the altar into your thirties is much higher. If you start dating to marry only when you’re ready to tie the knot, it might be too late. You’re an individual who has yet to learn how to be a serious partner , searching—frantically, if you want to start a family by a certain age—without knowing what you’re hoping to find.  It takes years to unlearn the individualistic reflexes that sabotage serious relationships. You can’t spend your twenties perfecting the art of self-prioritization and then expect to abandon self-interest the moment the right person appears. A successful marriage needs far more than two individuals—it needs two people who have learned how to make a union greater than the sum of its parts.  Yet, the “flip-switch” mentality is everywhere. There are the people you date for fun in your early 20s—the lore will outlast their stay—and there are the people that you date when you want to start settling down, we’re told. In Privilege ,   an account of his Harvard undergraduate days, Ross Douthat recalls a college crush telling him “I'm sorry—I could see myself marrying you. I could. But I don't know if I could see us dating right now. Does that make any sense?” We’ve forgotten that the two pools (those you date in your twenties and those you marry) can and do overlap all the time—in fact, finding someone who falls in the middle of the Venn diagram should be the goal.  My father and my best friend’s mother are more pessimistic. Even if you’re thinking about your future with someone right now, boys aren’t thinking that way, even if they think they are. While I was healing from my most recent heartbreak, my father advised me that men aren’t emotionally mature enough to have serious relationships until they’re 25, and that perhaps I should just swear off serious relationships until then. Similarly, every corner of the internet warns me that guys just marry whoever they’re with when they’re ready to get married . At least some of the men that I’ve dated are compelling evidence against the above parental wisdom, but many of them prove my father and my best friend’s mother right.  What dating for marriage asks of you is hard, no matter your gender or emotional maturity. How do I know who my future self will want to marry when I don’t yet know my future self?  We live in a world that increasingly pushes us to make predictions about our future selves earlier and earlier. Many of us try to create ordered lives that are older than we are, including in the romantic realm. When we’re young, serious relationships can look like playing house before we’re actually ready to run a household together.  In this way, dating with the future in mind can be dangerous. The imagined idyllic family life ahead can become a mirage that keeps you trudging forward, and in perpetually looking forward, you forget to look down at the ground you’re standing on. The fantasy of a shared future might blind you to the reality of an unfulfilling present.  Dating for marriage is not, and should not be understood as, dating for potential. We should not tolerate dissatisfaction in the present for the promise of an uncertain happy future—if only because our present happiness is predictive of the happiness of our future selves.  To date for marriage, then, is to honor both your present self and your future self. A relationship worth pursuing is one that makes you happy in the present and holds the promise of happiness and fulfillment years down the line. Don’t waste your time dating people you know you’ll never marry, and don’t waste your time dating people who have promised you the future but can’t show up in the present. Date the middle of the Venn diagram.

Higher education through one-sided narratives has created "closed classrooms." Credit: Wikipedia Professors Jon Shields (CMC), Yuval Avnur (Scripps), and Stephanie Muravchik (CMC) have recently released a working paper  analyzing diversity of thought in American college syllabi. The research team examined how three controversial issues—bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion—were taught in classrooms, with an eye to whether these issues were presented as scholarly debates between good-faith opponents.   With op-eds in the Wall Street Journal   and the Washington Monthly , alongside coverage from Ross Douthat in The New York Times  and Emma Pettit in The Chronicle of Higher Education , the researchers have garnered attention for their study’s bleak results: education through one-sided narratives has created “closed classrooms.” Methodology Through the “ Open Syllabus Project ” (OSP) database, the researchers had access to 27 million syllabi scraped from university websites dating back to 2008. “The surprising thing about the database is how little it’s been used,” Professor Shields noted in an interview with The Forum . With features tracking how often specific texts are assigned and paired with those expressing opposing views, the team could use this tool in an innovative way—to examine if syllabi fairly assigned both canonical texts and  their criticisms.     The three focus topics were selected for their disciplinary breadth—criminal justice draws on  sociology and law, Israel-Palestine on political science and history, and abortion on philosophy. These issues have also been omnipresent during the research team’s teaching tenure. Criminal justice and the Israel-Palestine conflict have been the two most polarizing campus issues for the past decade, Shields observed, whereas abortion is the most enduring issue in the broader American culture wars.  The next step was determining the canonical texts of each debate, with decisions made based on citation counts and the researchers’ own familiarity with the scholarship. The researchers chose Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow  (19,000 citations) on criminal justice, Edward Said’s Orientalism  (90,000 citations) on Israel-Palestine, and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” (3,000 citations) on abortion. All of these authors have provoked pushback, with their critics raising subtle complications and, other times, offering full-throated rejections. The question remains whether these critics are being taught and, if so, at what frequency.  Findings Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow —assigned 4,309 times in classrooms since 2012—argues that though formal racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Movement, the carceral system has replaced the old Jim Crow. Critics like James Forman Jr., John Pfaff, and Michael Fortner argue that Alexander fails to consider favorable Black attitudes to incarceration and overemphasizes the role of drug convictions in prison growth.      Of all the opposing texts co-assigned with The New Jim Crow , Forman’s essay “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration” was the most common. However, Forman was assigned only 149 times in the 4,309 syllabi that include Alexander. Simply put, only three percent of students reading The New Jim Crow  have also read its top critic. Instead, they read texts that reaffirm Alexander’s thesis; the texts most frequently co-assigned with The New Jim Crow  are Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete ?, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me , and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish .   Syllabi that include Orientalism  indicate a similar trend. Orientalism —cited 90,000 times and assigned in 16,000 courses—is more popular in classrooms than any “great book” of the Western canon. Author Edward Said, in discussing the ways Western experts (“Orientalists”) misrepresent the East, argues that Israel’s sovereignty can only be justified by embracing a xenophobic Western ideology.  Said’s foremost critic is Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations  (cited 50,000 times and assigned in 9,000 courses). Huntington argues that Islam presents a dangerous threat to Western ideology. Said has called Huntington’s argument “a gimmick.”  Yet students are not made familiar with the heated debate between the two scholars. Huntington is only assigned in 758 of the courses that assign Said—less than five percent of the time. Orientalism ’s more commonly co-assigned texts are other works of critical theory, such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities , Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth , and Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture .  In a surprising turn, and to the credit of professors assigning Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion,” the most commonly co-assigned text is Don Marquis’s essay, “Why Abortion is Immoral.” In fact, works expressing pro-life positions are assigned with Thomson more than a third of the time.  The researchers note that the department primarily responsible for teaching Thomas—philosophy, which accounts for 90 percent of the occurrences of Thomson’s work across syllabi—may play a role in fostering this openness. Philosophy is a “discipline whose pedagogical aims explicitly include exposing students to competing arguments,” the researchers state.  However, during our interview, Professor Shields was cautious to read too much into disciplinary differences. Though philosophy professors assigned Thomson with her critics more often than their non-philosophy colleagues assigned critics for their materials, such professors were in the minority. The “norm was not to assign her with her critics,” Shields observes, remaining uncertain whether other questions in philosophy would be presented any fairer.  Interestingly, when critics are  assigned in syllabi regarding all three topics, the most commonly co-assigned materials are the mainstream canon. For instance, professors who assigned Forman assigned The New Jim Crow 82 percent of the time. And even if Alexander was not taught with her critics, the research team found that similar—sometimes even more radical voices—were often assigned in place of The New Jim Crow .  Reflections  Since the paper’s release, critics have questioned whether “closed classrooms” are the norm. Shields says that many higher-education courses are uncontroversial in their subject matters, and often taught without issue. But the measure of a liberal institution is not how it teaches inoffensive issues, but how it prepares its students to grapple with the deeply polarizing ones.   By no means should academics avoid teaching certain fashionable thinkers, Shields added. “The academy has always been…faddish and taken with certain intellectuals.” The concern lies in whether they are presented in conversation with critics or presented as infallible.  There are also pragmatic benefits to liberalizing these classrooms—even if such “controversial” courses are in the minority. Increasing the rigor of debates in the humanities and social sciences might curb the drift towards STEM. Doing so might also help universities avoid future federal attacks. By presenting more well-rounded syllabi, academics can change the perception that “we’re trying to push a particular political project onto the public,” Shield says. On a final note, when asked how he’d motivate professors to open their classrooms, Shields replied: “it’s more fun.” Presenting these debates certainly makes the world more “complicated and tragic” for these students, but also gives them the sense that something is at stake. They gain the confidence needed to become thoughtful citizens, recognizing the import of these weighty questions.  “We must invite students into the drama of truth-seeking.”