Category: Uncategorized

Abstract of Argument

  This editorial evaluates competing United States grand strategies against established criteria for protecting state interests. It argues that a strategy of “selective engagement,” which focuses American resources on maintaining favorable regional balances through alliances, limited military force, and economic statecraft, is the only strategy that aligns with current structural and domestic constraints.

I. Introduction

The United States currently faces slowing economic growth, rising debt, and polarized politics. These circumstances have prompted a reevaluation of U.S. grand strategy to sustainably pursue critical interests within contemporary economic and political constraints. Competing proposals for a new grand strategy range from strict isolationism to a renewed version of primacy, but these ideas rest on assumptions misaligned with current political conditions and cost-benefit principles. This piece argues that, despite calls for a new doctrine, the United States should maintain the status quo of selective engagement.

II. Theoretical Groundwork

  Grand strategy links political objectives to the military, economic, and diplomatic tools used to secure them. Objectives must be clearly defined and efficiently pursued. For example, Barry Posen characterizes grand strategy as a political–military means–ends chain through which a state achieves security.¹ The pursuit of “security” through military force must recognize that war is a means to political ends rather than an end in itself.² These ends must be realized through what theorist Nina Silove describes as plans, principles, and durable patterns of behavior.³

  These formulations imply four evaluation criteria: a strategy must identify vital interests, specify the mechanisms required to defend them, align ends with available means, and avoid commitments that cannot be sustained over time. To satisfy these criteria, theorists and policymakers have proposed four competing grand strategies: Restraint, Liberal Internationalism, Primacy, and Selective Engagement.

  Each of these grand strategies reflects assumptions derived from major paradigms in international relations theory. Restraint draws from “defensive realism,” arguing that the United States should protect its homeland through limited threats and avoid extensive foreign engagement.⁴ Liberal Internationalism reflects “institutional liberalism,” treating international rules and economic interdependence as stabilizing forces.⁵ Primacy incorporates elements of “offensive realism” and “hegemonic stability theory,” which assert that sustained military preponderance is necessary to suppress competition to U.S. power.⁶ Selective Engagement embodies “structural realism,” identifying where power shifts matter most and concentrating commitments accordingly while avoiding peripheral obligations.⁷ These paradigmatic assumptions generate different expectations about whether power, institutions, or norms generate stable security outcomes. The core test of any grand strategy is whether these expectations withstand theoretical and empirical scrutiny.

III. Evaluation of the Four Grand Strategies

A. Restraint

  Restraint assumes that geography and nuclear deterrence sufficiently insulate the United States from major threats. It suggests that alliances and forward deployments introduce unnecessary liabilities.⁸ Its causal logic posits that reducing commitments lowers exposure to conflict without compromising homeland security. However, this reasoning misidentifies how regional balances shape global economic and security outcomes relevant to U.S. interests. Regional hegemons can reshape technological standards, production networks, and financial channels in ways that weaken U.S. leverage and limit economic autonomy.⁹ Rising powers also exploit institutional positions to gain advantages in trade, innovation, and coercive diplomacy.¹⁰ Historical evidence indicates that withdrawal accelerates renationalized defense, sharpens nationalism, and intensifies security dilemmas.¹¹ These conditions can lead to arms racing, coercive bargaining, and nuclear proliferation.¹² Because these mechanisms undermine essential U.S. interests and cannot be mitigated by geography alone, restraint fails to meet the grand strategic criteria of aligning available means with accurately identified national interests.

B. Liberal Internationalism

  Liberal internationalism posits that supranational institutions and economic interdependence can stabilize international politics and reduce conflict.¹³ Its causal logic suggests that sustained U.S. engagement embeds states in predictable rules and encourages cooperative behavior. However, this mechanism relies on the acceptance of institutional constraints by rising powers and stable domestic support for broad commitments. Neither condition holds today. Major powers increasingly view institutions as tools rather than constraints, complying selectively when rules align with their interests.¹⁴ Domestic polarization and economic inequality further weaken support for ambitious international order-building.¹⁵ Institutions function reliably only when backed by capable and consistent power, meaning that less domestic support undermines U.S. capacity to sustain institutional commitments.¹⁶ Consequently, liberal internationalism fails the tests of feasibility and sustainability, as it depends on political and structural conditions that no longer exist.

C. Primacy

  Primacy asserts that sustained U.S. preponderance is essential to deter adversaries and stabilize key regions.¹⁷ Its causal logic maintains that forward presence and active regional management prevent the emergence of peer competitors. This approach requires overwhelming material advantage and a stable domestic consensus. These two foundations have eroded as fiscal pressures rise and political support for intervention declines.¹⁸ Evidence from attempts at forced democracy promotion, covert regime change, and counterinsurgency indicates that large-scale interventions often fail to produce desired outcomes, instead generating spirals of overextension, coercive backlash, and threat inflation.¹⁹ Because primacy demands resources and political cohesion that the United States no longer possesses, it fails the sustainability criterion, even if its strategic aims were desirable.

D. Selective Engagement

  Selective engagement posits that only a few regions materially affect the global balance of power.²⁰ Its causal logic holds that outcomes in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East determine access to technology, industrial capacity, capital, and strategic geography, which underpin U.S. national power.²¹ Europe and East Asia possess the industrial and technological weight to produce hostile hegemons, while the Middle East influences global markets and chokepoints that, if dominated, could raise costs and reduce maneuverability for the United States. Because dominance in these regions would reshape global economic and security structures, selective engagement concentrates commitments where stakes are highest.

  Alliances distribute burdens, deter aggression, and reduce the need for unilateral intervention; many exist by “invitation,” reflecting partner incentives to internalize U.S. leadership.²² Military force is reserved for contingencies where hegemonic outcomes are plausible and justified by clear cost–benefit logic.²³ Economic engagement reinforces technological and industrial competitiveness rather than presuming unlimited primacy.²⁴ Avoiding discretionary interventions preserves domestic consensus and prevents strategic drift.²⁵ Selective engagement meets all four evaluation criteria: it accurately identifies vital interests, relies on mechanisms supported by empirical evidence, aligns tools with constraints, and limits commitments to what can be sustained.

IV. Counterarguments and Rebuttals

  Common criticisms of selective engagement often misstate its scope or misunderstand its mechanisms. Claims that the strategy lacks clarity overlook the fact that defining vital interests through the risk of hostile regional dominance leads to a narrow and operational set of commitments. Warnings of entrapment in unnecessary affairs ignore the United States’ ability to impose explicit limits on allied commitments and partner behavior.²⁶ Concerns regarding cost-benefit principles fail to consider that stabilizing key regions is less expensive than the long-term consequences of adversarial control over technological standards, supply chains, or financial rules. Assertions that selective engagement weakens deterrence disregard the reality that concentrated commitments produce clearer signals and more credible resolve than diffuse global activism. Therefore, these criticisms do not undermine the strategy’s feasibility or logic.

V. Strategy and Policy Prescription 

Selective engagement remains the only viable grand strategy for the United States because it clearly identifies critical interests, aligns available instruments with those interests, and limits commitments to what contemporary economic and political conditions can support. Maintaining this strategy requires four policy choices. The United States must sustain alliances in Europe and East Asia, where power shifts most significantly affect the global balance. It must invest in technological and industrial capacity to ensure long-term competitiveness. It must maintain a military posture focused on deterrence rather than indefinite forward operations, with clear thresholds for the use of force. Finally, it must avoid discretionary interventions that do not impact the global distribution of power. Restraint underestimates the consequences of regional power shifts, while liberal internationalism and primacy overestimate the resources and domestic support available for expansive commitments. Selective engagement alone aligns U.S. objectives with the structural and domestic constraints that define grand strategy today.

1. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
2. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 87–89.
3. Nina Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of ‘Grand Strategy,’” Security Studies 27, no. 1 (2018): 27–57.
4. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
5. Robert Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
6. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001).
7. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, “American Primacy in Perspective,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4 (2002): 20–33.
8. Barry Posen, “The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 1 (2013): 116–28.
9. Robert Wade, “The Invisible Hand of the American Empire,” Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2003): 77–88; Carla Norrlof, America’s Global Advantage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
10. Thomas Christensen, The China Challenge (New York: Norton, 2015).
11. A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1992); Sebastian Rosato, Europe United (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).
12. Vipin Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Mark Bell, Nuclear Reactions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).
13. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
14. Christensen, China Challenge.
15. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81; Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice (New York: Norton, 2019).
16. John Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security 19, no. 3 (1994): 5–49; Norrlof, America’s Global Advantage.
17. Stephen Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth, “Lean Forward,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 1 (2013): 130–42.
18. Benjamin Fordham, “Paying for Global Power,” in The Long War, ed. Andrew Bacevich (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 371–404.
19. Lindsay O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Benjamin Valentino, “The True Costs of Humanitarian Intervention,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 6 (2011): 60–73; Robert Jervis, American Foreign Policy in a New Era (New York: Routledge, 2005).
20. Posen, “Less Activist Foreign Policy.”
21. Michael Beckley, Unrivaled (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Brooks and Wohlforth, “American Primacy.”
22. Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation,” in The United States and Western Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan.
23. Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Russell Weigley, The American Way of War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).
24. Diana Mutz, Winners and Losers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); Angus Deaton, The Great Escape (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
25. Valentino, “True Costs”; Porch, Counterinsurgency.
26. Daryl Press, Calculating Credibility (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Conventionally defined as, “collaborative efforts on shared open spaces where participants share in the maintenance and products of the garden, including healthful and affordable fresh fruits and vegetables,” community gardens offer an integrated approach to building community, combating hunger, and fostering ecological protection in an urban environment. They solve complex problems and bond diverse peoples together. More localities ought to create and sustain beautiful community gardens to promote their residents’ flourishing.

Community gardens foster community. 

Humans are fundamentally social beings with obligations to family, neighborhood, and nation. Alienation, boredom, and loneliness increasingly plague Americans of all backgrounds despite constant technological interconnectedness. Today, over half of Americans experience loneliness or consider themselves lonely.  The American Time Use Survey underscores a drastic decline for in-person interactions as youths in 2025 meet with peers 35% less than their counterparts two decades ago. Thus, a need exists for spaces outside of work, school, and home to provide connection, belonging and purpose. Community gardens operate as such a “third place,” or a public place that hosts “the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” Gardeners of all stripes can help grow fresh produce and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Community gardens can fortify bonds of social trust and awaken obligations between the wealthy and common folk, allowing for class intermingling. Class mixing permits encounters with “superior persons,” who “encourage us to make something of ourselves, to impose difficult demands on ourselves, and to appreciate the satisfactions conferred by devoted service to an ideal.” Third places such as community gardens act as a kind of social leveler in that participation and enjoyment are accessible to the general public and not predicated upon socio-economic status. Reliant on the generosity of private donations from individuals and local businesses and corporations, community gardens motivate an embrace of noblesse oblige so that one may become “the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren.”  Therefore, community gardens can bridge the growing social gap and renew reciprocal obligations between the elites and the masses by serving as a space for charity, connection, and community.

Community gardens cultivate civic friendship. 

Nascent forms of technological distraction and the sanctification of individual autonomy have eroded concern for the prosperity of the extended American family, enabling self-interest to reign. But communal efforts can reverse romantic individualism and advance social communion. By the elementary reality of physical proximity, informal associations and communal gatherings unite American citizens as equals in a robust exchange of ideas and opinions that polish political habits and virtues. Informal rendezvous inspire practices of civility and compromise between diverse peoples, drawing together the community as equal parts of a whole working toward a common goal. Engagement in efforts to grow and sustain fresh produce takes patience, hard work, and consensus. The practices of mutual aid, problem-solving, and open conversation involved with communal gardening train participants for democratic governance and active citizenship, learning how to rule and be ruled. Political participation is imperative for a functioning democracy and citizens who engage in civic associations are more likely to be politically active. Thus, community gardens strengthen democracy by instilling volunteers with democratic skills and civic virtue, prompting them to partake in politics.

Community gardens improve health outcomes, especially for the poor.

Community gardens increase consumption of fruits and vegetables. Roughly 53.6 million Americans dwell in “food deserts,” areas in which access to affordable and nutritious foods is significantly limited due to economic or transportation barriers.  Nutritional gaps persist for those struggling with food insecurity. A poor diet is a prominent contributor to chronic disease. Higher intakes of fruits and vegetables have been associated with a reduced risk for cardiovascular disease, cancer, and ischemic stroke, three leading causes of death in the United States. A study of urban adults in Flint, Michigan revealed that gardeners consumed roughly 1.5 times the amount of fruits and vegetables than non-gardeners and were 3.5 times more likely to meet the daily recommended intake amount. Community gardens offer an inexpensive solution to help close nutritional gaps among the poor and reduce the scale of food deserts as free produce within close proximity to one’s home eliminates limitations of cost and availability. 

Community gardens promote environmental stewardship.

Americans suffer from what Richard Louv has coined, “nature deficit disorder,” an unnatural and accelerated disconnect from the physical world. A lack of access to green spaces in urban areas and the allure of a screen has left people disinterested and disenchanted with the environment. Scientific evidence illustrates that those who are withdrawn from nature experience higher levels of physical and emotional illness and exhibit a reduced use of the senses. Detachment from nature contradicts fundamental anthropology as the late Pope Francis remarked, “We are a part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it.” A lack of involvement in nature contributes to a failure to see the earth as our common home. A society that cherishes instant gratification and convenience will likely view nature as a utilitarian good to be exploited for maximal human satisfaction rather than a gift to be respected and taken care of for generations to come. We are called to be responsible stewards of the earth, to preserve it and make it fruitful. Community gardens offer a chance to establish an active connection to and respect for nature and promote a sense of awe and wonder of its complexity and beauty.

Unity Gardens in South Bend, Indiana, is a model for community gardens across the nation. Funded by donations from individuals, local businesses, and even large corporations such as Kohls and AEP, the organization operates over 40 satellite gardens in northern Indiana. In addition to offering free produce for locals, Unity Gardens hosts social events as well as gardening courses, gathering diverse members of the area together and teaching volunteers the value of working in and respecting nature. 

Some critics of community gardens suggest that the responsibility of caretaking often falls on a few committed volunteers or that lots of precious land in urban areas could be better used in solving shortages of affordable housing units. While the housing crisis is a pressing matter, community gardens can and should be built alongside housing developments to beautify the area and provide a space for neighbors to meet. To avoid the labor falling on a few, gardens can partner with local schools to ensure a steady supply of volunteers and inspire the next generation to care for the environment.

Communities should follow the example of Unity Gardens and heed Frederick Douglass’ call “to make us the most perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.” “Feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation” cause Americans to grapple with a growing wealth divide and isolation. A shared aim to construct local spaces of belonging and solidarity with the most vulnerable can combat grotesque economic and social inequalities that contradict a democratic conception of equality and dignity and thwart the ills of self-interest and materialism.. Sharing time, talents, and food within the space of a community garden establishes bonds of mutual trust and civic friendship that are essential for a thriving democratic republic. Efforts to ethically use the earth’s fruits to foster community and promote human flourishing therefore ought to become a priority of America’s future.

René Descartes asserts that “je pense donc je suis,” and Plato claims that the “soul is a helpless prisoner [of the body].” These thoughts, while philosophically interesting, are characteristic of the metaphysical error plaguing modern society. The “real” you is your mind/soul and we are being led to reject the necessity and goodness of our physical bodies. Oftentimes, it isn’t that people are actively seeking out this ideology, but rather it’s that our culture, steeped in technology and digital entertainment, is driving a revival of the new-gnostic – disembodied – philosophical worldview that has been accepted by most without giving it a second thought. 

This is most acutely seen in Gen Z and the sheer amount of time spent in the digital realm rather than physical reality. Kids have phones in their hands as young as ten or eleven. Adults in the United States spend an average of over six hours per day online, and their average attention span is no longer than fifty seconds. Whether it is through scrolling on Instagram for hours at a time or being absorbed by video games, people live in their minds more than in reality. This online, technological realm has even become the new “reality” for some. 

This phenomenon is not without its negative ripple effect. Almost 30% of Generation Z self-reports having poor mental health. The percentage of the adult population who reports having zero close friends has risen to 12% in 2021 (up from 3% in 1990). Our youth can’t read. We have lost the ability to exist in silence and lack the vocabulary and aptitude to describe beautiful things. Living outside of the physical world has undermined humanity. Most distressing, however, is the reliance our society has on technology on every level from the individual all the way up to government. 

How could we have possibly ended up in this conundrum? Technology, after all, was meant to improve our lives, increase our efficiency, and provide a convenient, easy-to-access source of information and entertainment. Our society’s current disillusioned state is far from this idealistic vision. We can attempt to pin all of society’s problems on technology, but we must also recognize that technology is merely a tool that we humans, as moral agents, can use in a virtuous manner, supportive of our flourishing, or in a disordered way, something that drives us into the social, cultural, and mental crisis characteristic of far too many of our modern youth in the West. But is it really just those “dang phones” corrupting the youth, or is there something deeper, even spiritually corrupted, that is contributing to our increasingly dismal outlook?

The disembodiment of modern man from the rest of creation is this fundamental error. And our metaphysical principles influence every other belief we hold, including our politics. 

We need not look far to see this made manifest – even one of the most powerful men in the world, Tim Cook, builds towards a world where people are conquered by technology on their couches. The Apple Vision Pro ad shows just this – rather than living a life of adventure, community, and purpose, technology has found a way to be ever-present, blurring the line between digital reality and the physical world. 

Life is not meant for this. Man is not meant for this. Rather, man is meant to be a steward of creation on his journey towards union with the Divine. Being lulled into complacency in a make-believe technical realm is one of the furthest things from the virtue we are called to. The acceptance, even if passive, of a disembodied framework for viewing the person and world is driving the belief that this is an acceptable way to live our one, precious life. The only way to escape this toxic ideology is to combat it with the truth that we are not solely our bodies nor our minds. We are a soul embodied, living in the physical world while being connected to a higher spiritual realm. While we are called to an end beyond this world, it remains that we have an obligation to live in the world and do it well. We are ultimately stewards of a gift freely given. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, the world offers us comfort, but we “were not made for comfort, [we] were made for greatness.” Our lives and the world are destined for magis. 

In accepting disembodiment and allowing ourselves to be conditioned to an over-reliance on technology, we leave society vulnerable to a plethora of problems. We have hijacked our society’s understanding of leisure and turned us into hedonistic dopamine seekers. We have opened the floodgates for globalizing forces to infiltrate our conception of democratic politics we hold in the West. We are allowing a worldview in which it is justifiable for people to care less for their own bodies and for the environment. Most importantly, it solidifies the destruction of civil society, which in turn fuels polarization and political violence. 

Despite some members of our society beginning to rise to reject and change our current predicament, the modern world makes it increasingly more difficult to escape disembodiment. There is an obsession with making every aspect of our lives “less real.” We have eliminated TSA physical ID checks and passport stamps in favor of biometric data scans. Stores take your biometric data and film you shopping to link your bill to your accounts without ever having you check out at a counter. The world has shifted away from owning and towards a subscription and renting model for everything from music to movies to homes. The United Kingdom has gone so far as to announce the introduction of the mandatory “BritCard,” a digital ID based on biometric data, for all UK citizens by August 2029. 

The BritCard is being promoted to the public as “a new streamlined digital system… [that] will simplify … process[es], drive up compliance, crack down on forged documents and create intelligence data on businesses that are conducting checks.” The brief goes on to detail the efficiency of the “state-of-the-art encryption and authentication technology… providing better security than traditional physical documents.” The mandatory ID would be used in every realm, from education and employment to healthcare and shopping. 

While some may view this move as progress and a use of technology for the benefit of a society, those with a belief in civil rights, personal liberties, and/or a Divine Being beyond the limits of the temporal Earth ought to hesitate in giving their assent so quickly.  

A future with the BritCard as a reality can easily devolve into a theoretical dystopia if the state forgets its obligation to the people it serves. If a government decides to violate the God given rights of a citizen, such as one who decides to criticize the government in speech or media, if every aspect of your life is connected to a digital ID which the government has the power to control, it is easy to conceive of a slippery slope towards a security state in which noncompliance would equal functional nonexistence. Without the power to access your bank account or obtain employment, opposition political movements fighting for the principles the modern West was built upon could be easily quashed. This is not to say this is the BritCards’ aim, but it is an exercise in what could occur if said government were internally hijacked and had this sort of power over its citizenry that is meant to be politically free in a democratic system. 

Patrick Deneen, in his book Why Liberalism Failed, conceived of the skepticism we ought to maintain in order to preserve our rights aptly in writing that “the ‘limited government’ of liberalism today would provoke jealousy and amazement from tyrants of old.” George Orwell speaks even more poignantly when he reminds us in 1984 that “Big Brother is watching you.” The question we face now is, should we invite him in? For the sake of convenience, efficiency, and a feeling of contentment, we will accept the foundation of a security state. The security being promised to us is not synonymous with either privacy or liberty. Rather than resisting these efforts in the name of protecting freedom, comfort, not flourishing and a life steeped in transcendent meaning, will become the ultimate pacifier. 

This is not a left versus right debate. Rather, it is a question of what kind of existence we want to maintain on a societal level. It is bipartisan to reject the rejection of reality that is growing in influence. Looking beyond our political and party predispositions, we ought to ask ourselves what the ultimate end of implementing these overreaching technocratic measures is. Perhaps it is merely for convenience. But we could rationally find belief that it is not. Is the prospect of increased convenience worth potentially conceding your civil liberties beyond recovery? The disembodiment that has dominated every other aspect of our lives is finally creeping into a direct political application – a unified government ID system. The way forward is to realize the disenchantment we have with “progress” and realize that progress is not always good. 

Our current ways have not made us happier nor more confident in the meaning of our lives. Disembodiment has caused the ultimate disillusionment and evoked a sense of feckless existence in the populace. We can only begin to remedy this by recognizing our embedded reality. We are born to families and communities. We have a responsibility to take care of our own bodies and souls, connect with others, and leave the world a better place for the generations to follow us. Returning to our local communities is the first step in fighting disembodiment. Put away your phone, engage with friends in person and not online, join a club, coach a sport, walk your dog with friends and family. The moment we stop talking to our neighbors of both like and unalike opinions and experiences is the day our democracy begins to die. 

We have a civilization worth protecting. Even if it is far from perfect, we are called to improve upon it and order it to its proper end. It is through conversations, despite political differences, that we remind each other of the common ground and principles that we share. We are all aiming at creating a just society – we want flourishing for ourselves, our families, and our society. While we may differ in how we achieve this and which issues are the most critical to be addressed in pursuit of this end, we have far more in common with each other than polarization leads us to believe. In order to enter into these conversations, we must remind ourselves of our embodiedness. This connection is the way out of disembodiment and towards bridging our partisan divide. The fate of Western civilization depends on you talking to and loving your neighbor. Embrace reality and go forth with charity and truth to converse!

---

As inter-state rivalry with China continues to grow, it is important to remember that the US is no stranger to this type of conflict. Throughout the Cold War, US national security decision-makers navigated the United States through tense, complicated scenarios that tested American political and economic security.¹ While observers might view the collapse of the Soviet Union as an inevitable result of internal dysfunction, stagnation, and sloppy attempts at reform, there were various geopolitical scenarios American leaders feared could jeopardize US Cold War aims and tilt the global balance of power in the Soviets’ favor. Among the most prevalent of these fears was the formation of a unified Communist bloc capable of challenging the economic and military might of the West.²

A unified Communist bloc, particularly close alignment and collaboration between the USSR and China, was a serious concern plaguing American policymakers in the first decades of the Cold War. The probability of intimate collusion between the PRC and USSR was highest in the first years of the new Chinese government’s existence. In February of 1950, both nations signed The Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance Between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union – a charter obligating mutual defense in the event of an attack by Japan and its allies.³ The Sino-Soviet relationship remained strong for the next few years, with a 1954 US report stating: “In its most general features the Sino-Soviet Relationship may be compared to that between Great Britain and the US”.⁴ 

Thankfully, ideological tensions, longstanding border disputes, Chinese resentment over Russian colonial treaties with China, and side effects of the Cultural Revolution provided the spark necessary to kick off the deadly Sino-Soviet border clashes that would mark the beginning of the 1969 border crisis and the conclusive Sino-Soviet split.⁵ American paranoia and concern regarding the preservation of the Sino-Soviet relationship can be seen by Nixon’s eagerness to open diplomatic relations with the nation in 1972.⁶ Such a definite reversal on decades-long US foreign policy displays how vital to US interests was the isolation of the USSR from the PRC, a belief that held until the collapse of the USSR. 

US fears regarding the formation of a unified Communist bloc are becoming a reality in today’s international arena. While the world left domino theory behind in 1991, if we substitute “Communist” for “Challenger”, we can see that there is an increasingly resolute axis of states in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea (CRINK) who are striving to challenge the extent and depth of US influence across the world.⁷ China and Russia’s leading role in the foundation of BRICS demonstrate the desire of the ‘no limits’ partnership to construct international institutions that counter-balance traditionally western-dominated international institutions such as the G7, IMF, and WTO.⁸ China has also utilized its Belt and Road initiative to establish comprehensive infrastructure projects within both Iran and Russia, measures that further demonstrate China’s commitment to aiding its sanctions-stricken partners.⁹¹⁰

The largest uptick in collusion between the states within CRINK has been seen during Russia’s war with Ukraine. China has forged an intimate military-technical partnership with Russia that has aided its sustained invasion of eastern Ukraine.¹¹ China has accomplished this through the export of dual-use goods such as semiconductors, microchips, drones, lithium-ion batteries, and ATVs.¹² These goods, while supposedly intended for civilian purposes, are easily converted into components that are vital for the production of Russian weapons systems. China has also helped Russia improve its satellite and space-based capabilities immensely. The identification and targeting of locations hundreds of miles away, a task necessary for Russia’s mass long-range drone strikes against Ukraine, has been greatly improved with Chinese technological transfers.¹³ China’s role in enhancing Iran’s defense capabilities rivals that of their involvement with Russia. Iran’s domestic surveillance systems, air defense network, and the solid fuel used to power its rockets are all sourced from China.¹⁴

While recent years have seen China supplying weapons technologies to Russia, Putin’s regime has long been a vital supplier of advanced military technology to China. Russia has supplied China with a wide array of technologies ranging from fighter jets and an aircraft carrier to advanced missile technologies and cutting-edge command and control systems.¹⁵ These arms transfers have played a prominent role in China’s stunning rise through the global military power food chain and are rooted in Russia’s desire to help China continue challenging American presence in the South China Sea.¹⁶

Russia has provided extensive assistance to North Korea’s armed forces. Recent North Korean military breakthroughs – the deployment of its first nuclear submarine, the new Hwasong-20 ICBM system, and the new Choe Hyon-class destroyers – have all been made possible through technological transfers from Moscow to Pyongyang.¹⁷¹⁸ These transactions have not exclusively benefitted North Korea. North Korean contributions to Russia’s war in Ukraine have been extensive. The DPRK has supplied millions of artillery shells to Russia over the course of the war, contributions that are essential to Russia’s war effort. North Korea has also contributed its own men to the fight, notably sending around 11,000 soldiers to the front in a mission to solidify ties between Russia and the DPRK and to provide North Korean soldiers with critical experience on a modern battlefield.¹⁹ 

CRINK’s increasing levels of cooperation and collusion pose a potential challenge to the US-led international order that has defined the decades after the Cold War. While, short of war, it is impossible to plot and execute a grand strategy that breaks up this new axis of evil, there are a variety of measures the US could take to limit CRINK’s potential influence and power on the global stage. The first measure, which should be the most obvious to US leadership, is to hold on to the advantages we already have. 

One of the most impressive feats in world history has been the forging and maintenance of the modern US alliance system. Spanning across Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Pacific, the US has established intimate diplomatic relations with states of varying size, regime type, geography, and economic power. Looking to southeast Asia, China, the world’s fastest growing power who continually challenges US technological, economic, and military dominance, is boxed in by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines – all close US partners.²⁰ Moving to Iran’s neighborhood, observers will find Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain, and Israel cooperating closely with the United States.²¹ Egypt, Oman, and Turkey – states with vested interests in the Middle East – have also cooperated extensively with US policymakers in recent years.²² Finally, when Putin looks West from his bedroom window in the Kremlin, he sees two institutions in the horizon that are married to the US: The most formidable military alliance in world history and the world’s second-largest economic unit.²³

This point of this detour in geography is the highlight that the US possesses innate advantages over the CRINK axis that its member states could only dream of. What would China give to be a signatory of mutual defense pacts among seven of the world’s ten largest economies?²⁴ What would Iran give to have intense diplomatic sway over the affairs of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant? What would Russia give to trade its rotting CSTO for NATO, an organization containing 3.5 million military personnel across 32 member states? 

With these advantages in place, I wonder why US leadership is behaving in ways to undercut and diminish them. President Trump’s tariffs, trade wars, hesitant commitment to the transatlantic partnership, and troubling negotiations with Russia all significantly strain our alliances and give our partners valid reasons to question the benefits of US alliance leadership. Our escalatory trade war with Canada and our vague threats pointing to its annexation only serve to foster disdain for the US amongst Canadian leadership. Straining a relationship with a neighboring country is generally a bad path to choose. However, straining a relationship with a country you share an integrated air defense command with and who controls vast swaths of territory bordering the Arctic Ocean is an error.²⁵

US apprehensiveness regarding China is often anchored in observations of the PRC’s rapid industrial and technological development. Chinese developments in AI, auto manufacturing, steel production, clean energy infrastructure, and shipbuilding far outpace current US trends.²⁶ With the US locked into an innovation race with China, protectionism is illogical. South Korea, Japan, and the EU are all home to advanced manufacturing industries, economic sectors US firms would benefit greatly from if there were minimal trade barriers between our market economies. 

President Trump’s faltering commitment to our European partners only weakens our global influence and posture. While our European allies undoubtedly freeload off of US security guarantees and have underinvested in their militaries over the past twenty years, the benefits of further involvement in European security affairs outweigh the drawbacks of carrying Europe on our shoulders. European dependence on an American security blanket allows the US to have intense influence over the policy decisions of the European powers.²⁷ Furthermore, having access to fifty military bases across Europe allows the US to have an incredibly strong military presence across a distant continent, project force right on Russia’s doorstep, and support intricate combat operations in a post-US nation-building  Middle East.²⁸

CRINK’s strategic coordination to undercut the US’s global standing presents a challenge the US has not seen for decades. China, Russia, and Iran specifically have made various maneuvers that have placed US policymakers in awkward positions and forced them to make tough decisions. Despite the behavior of these contenders, the US has what CRINK can only dream of: an intricate alliance network allowing privileged economic and military access across the world’s largest economies and most strategically important states. This network is something CRINK can never replicate. Having been developed over the past eighty years, the US has cemented its influence over the world’s leading states, boxing CRINK out of important partnerships and economies. 

With this innate advantage over our rivals, the US, particularly the Trump Administration, needs to stop weakening our alliances and partnerships through its spastic protectionism and imflammatory rhetoric. Yes, European states have neutered their militaries due to assumptions of a permanent American interest in Europe. Yes, the US holds trade deficits in industrial sectors with other states. Yes, it is not at all in the US’ interest to confront Russia directly over Ukraine. However, these grievances are not worth blowing up our alliance system over. CRINK can continue to make their leaps and bounds in technology and interoperability. However, they cannot recruit other leading states to their axis as long as the US maintains its relationships with the world’s largest advanced economies and militaries. 

1. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/TrumanCIA_Timeline.pdf ↩︎
2. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2539142?seq=1 ↩︎
3. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01443R000300050007-8.pdf ↩︎
4. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v14p1/d183?
   ↩︎
5. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB49/ ↩︎
6. https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/nixons-trip-china ↩︎
7. https://theweek.com/politics/crink-the-new-autocractic-axis-of-evil ↩︎
8. https://infobrics.org/ ↩︎
9. https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2025-june-25/ ↩︎
10. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/4/25/iran-to-sign-4bn-oil-deal-with ↩︎
11. https://www.uscc.gov/research/chinas-position-russias-invasion-ukraine#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20officials%20add%20that,to%20make%20propellants%20for%20weapons. ↩︎
12. https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/05/behind-the-scenes-chinas-increasing-role-in-russias-defense-industry?lang=en ↩︎
13. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-provides-intelligence-russia-ukraine-targets-ukrainian-intelligence-says-2025-10-04/ ↩︎
14. https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/10/15/china_and_iran_after_the_12-day_war_1140963.html ↩︎
15. https://cepa.org/comprehensive-reports/partnership-short-of-alliance-military-cooperation-between-russia-and-china/ ↩︎
16. https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/how-russia-helping-china-prepare-seize-taiwan ↩︎
17. https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20251014006100315 ↩︎
18. https://kyivindependent.com/russia-north-korea-warships-failed-launch-06-2025/ ↩︎
19. https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/brothers-arms-assessing-north-koreas-contribution-russias-war-ukraine ↩︎
20. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/geostrategic-competition-and-overseas-basing-in-east-asia-and-the-first-island-chain/ ↩︎
21. https://www.mei.edu/publications/us-policy-middle-east-third-quarter-2025-report-card ↩︎
22. https://jstreet.org/securing-the-ceasefire-the-roles-of-egypt-qatar-and-turkey-as-guarantors/ ↩︎
23. https://alcottglobal.com/infographic/gdp-shifts-for-japan-china-the-european-union-and-the-united-states-2000-vs-2025 ↩︎
24. https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/ ↩︎
25. https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/rising-tensions-shifting-strategies-evolving-dynamics-us-grand-strategy-arctic/ ↩︎
26. ​​https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outperforming-the-united-states-in-critical-technologies/ ↩︎
27. https://chairestrategique.pantheonsorbonne.fr/themes/2019/why-america-us-role-european-defense-and-european-mind ↩︎
28. https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4240876/defense-agency-contributed-toward-operation-midnight-hammer-success/ ↩︎

Social Security is commonly considered the “third rail” of American politics. As one of the most popular programs nationally, 87% of Americans indicate it as a priority regardless of the budget deficit.¹ Maintaining Social Security is also a mainstay on the voting agenda of older Americans, who vote more often and thus have a greater effect on elections. Any mention of cutting or lowering Social Security benefits immediately receives backlash, as hard-working Americans do not want to be “cheated” out of the money they paid into social security throughout their lives. Given its popularity and effect on elections, politicians stay away from debates about reforming the current system. However, Social Security is facing a serious funding problem which needs to be addressed. According to the 2024 Annual Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund Report, the current tax level for funding Social Security is falling short of what the system needs to maintain current outputs, leading to the possibility of decreasing benefits and Social Security faltering over the next decade.² In an attempt to alleviate the funding pressure and extend the life of Social Security, policymakers must jump on this political third rail and revise the current payment system if they want the current level of benefits to be around for future generations. Specifically, the federal government must raise or remove the cap on the payroll tax, which is the primary way Social Security is funded. The current tax is limited to the first $176,100 of earned wages, capping the amount of money that can feed into the system and disproportionately affecting lower wage earners.³ Although the cap increases slightly every year, adjusting to the average wage index, a raise or removal of the cap would provide more funding for Social Security benefits while also making the payroll tax proportional between low-wage and high-wage workers.⁴

The Current Social Security System, Its Shortfalls, and Its Importance

Social Security is an incredibly large program which is under significant stress and threat of decline. In fiscal year 2024 (when the tax was capped at $168,800), the federal government spent $1.5 trillion on Social Security for the elderly and people with disabilities, amounting to roughly 22% of the federal budget and making Social Security the single largest entity of federal spending.⁵ Retired workers and their dependents accounted for 78.5% of total paid Social Security benefits, paying out over 54.4 million people as of December 2024.⁶ To fund this massive program, roughly 184 million workers paid into the system, mainly through the payroll tax. Despite the pay going into Social Security, the funds supporting the program have consistently run a deficit – over the past three years, the assets that fund the retirement portion  of Social Security have declined by approximately $170 billion in aggregate, depleting cash reserves.⁷ A May 2024 report from the Social Security Administration projects the primary fund for Social Security will deplete its reserves by 2035, and the fund specifically for retirement will run out by 2033. After depletion in 2035, funding from tax and interest sources would only be able to pay for 83% of Social Security costs.⁸ The funding problem is exacerbated as an aging population coupled with lower birthrates in the U.S. results in fewer young workers paying into Social Security for a growing number of elderly recipients. 

Why the Government Must Act

It is important that the government responds to the financial problems Social Security faces and maintains its provision as Social Security provides a social safety net for individuals who fail to save for their own retirements. Although rational actors would typically save part of their wages for retirement without government intervention, this behavior is not observed historically or at the current time. Individual failures such as nearsighted savings behaviors, poor self-control, and lack of financial literacy and information lead people to poorly plan and save for their retirement. Nearsighted (defined by economists as myopic) savings behaviors occur when consumers think about short term desires and refuse to plan for the future. These individuals then choose to spend excessively in the present and forgo saving for tomorrow, leaving these individuals financially unprepared for retirement.⁹ Furthermore, many low-income households are forced to focus on day-to-day living and thus struggle to save for retirement.¹⁰ Poor self-control plays into this behavior as impulse spending in the present impedes future savings. Lack of financial literacy and information problems arise when individuals are unsure of how much to save for the future with one’s lifespan, future needs (especially medical needs for the elderly), and other factors being uncertain. The government stepping in to force savings through Social Security alleviates some of these economic failures of individual savings.¹¹ According to a 2023 report, Social Security accounts for 50% of the income for 2/3 of retirees, while 1/3 of elderly households are almost entirely reliant on the program. In fact, without Social Security, 2/3 of the elderly would be considered in poverty.¹² The safety net provided by Social Security protects these individuals who would otherwise be facing a financially uncertain retirement. Social Security is not a substitute for retirement savings, and the government could do a better job at encouraging individuals to save on their own. Additionally, one could argue a case for moral hazard in that Social Security itself incentivizes people to save less and that the government should take a hands-off approach on the issue of savings. Regardless, Social Security is already in place and has successfully protected some vulnerable populations, thus making it vital for the federal government to remedy its shortfalls in the interest of protecting these individuals.

The Payroll Tax and How Its Modification Can Help Social Security

The primary funding for Social Security comes from a payroll tax through the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), which can be both progressive and regressive despite starting as a proportional tax. As part of FICA, employers and employees each pay a flat tax of 6.2% of the employee’s wage into Social Security funding, for a total of 12.4%.¹³ However, this tax structure does not apply to all of a person’s pay–a cap is applied which restrains the tax to the first $176,100 of wages (slightly adjusted each year), meaning someone making $176,100 a year pays the same payroll tax as someone making $1 million a year.¹⁴ By capping the taxable wage limit with a flat tax, the payroll tax shifts from being proportional to regressive, as high-wage earners above the cap pay proportionally less of their wages into Social Security than those earning below the cap (see Figure 1). Below the cap, the payroll tax is slightly progressive, as wages make up more of one’s income compared to other benefits as wages increase.¹⁵

Figure 1: The Regressive Nature of the Payroll Tax

Modifying the payroll tax by either raising or fully removing the tax cap will expand the much-needed contributions to the Social Security fund and reduce the solvency issue. Since the 1980s, approximately 6% of workers consistently earn wages above the taxable maximum.¹⁶ In 2021, the top 5% of workers made up 29.9% of total wage earnings at an average of $322,349, more than 18 times the wages of the bottom 90%, and well above the payroll cap.¹⁷ Thus, with the current tax cap Social Security is losing out on a significant amount of potential revenue. Removing the cap would raise tax revenues from 4.5% to 5.4% of GDP, closing over half of the future gap of Social Security funding (See figure 2). Although not fully solving the financial gap, removing the cap would push back deficit spending to 2029 and reserve depletion from 2033 to 2055. If completely removing the cap may be too drastic a measure to undertake, even raising the cap would go a long way towards maintaining the future of Social Security.¹⁸

Figure 2: The effect of Uncapping the Payroll Tax

Tradeoffs and Economic Effects of Modifying the Payroll Tax Cap

As with any tax issue, modifying the payroll tax cap comes with tradeoffs and economic effects. First, the 6% of workers with wages above the current threshold would see a raise in taxes. The tax shift would lower these individuals’ take-home pay, changing their incentives and causing those affected by the tax to work less.. This shift away from work would lead to a decrease in supplied labor. However, since the tax increase would only affect 6% of workers, the overall effect on labor supply would be minimal, making this tradeoff less impactful. Furthermore, the decrease in take-home pay resulting from the tax would decrease current spending and overall economic output as workers adjust and lower their present spending habits. A cap raise also affects the employer’s behavior and tax incidence. As employers pay half of the payroll tax, removing the cap would also increase taxes on the employers of high-wage individuals. As a result, companies may pass some costs of the tax onto consumers. Raising the tax cap also affects the redistribution of Social Security funds. Part of the benefits structure of Social Security is that the more you pay into Social Security as a worker, the more you receive as a retiree. Therefore, raising the cap also raises the maximum amount of money Social Security can pay out. Thus, while raising the cap would provide more funding to Social Security, the increased payout of benefits would decrease the full effect of the extra funding.

The Future of Social Security

Clearly, Social Security is a vital part of the American social safety net that protects retirees and must be extended to provide for future generations. To do so, policymakers must stop fearing political backlash and take the important steps of reforming the current funding system. Raising or removing the payroll tax cap will not completely fix Social Security, but it is the first of many steps that can promote funding efforts and partially close the widening gap facing the program. Some in Congress are already starting to act on this idea: Senate Democrats led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have proposed the Social Security Expansion Act which, along with increasing benefits, would remove the tax cap on those making over $250,000. This “donut-hole” form of a cap raise would retain the existing payroll tax structure and then reintroduce taxes on wages for individuals earning more than $250,000.¹⁹ Proposed legislation like the Social Security Expansion Act are necessary considerations in order to remedy the funding structure before benefits are affected. 

1. Kenneally, Kelly, and Tyler Bond. “Americans’ Views of Social Security.” National Institute on Retirement Security, 22 July 2024, www.nirsonline.org/reports/socialsecurity2024/. ↩︎
2. Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees. “A Summary of the 2024 Annual Reports.” Social Security Administration, 2024, www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html. ↩︎
3. Cardman, Michael. “2025 Wage Cap for Social Security Payroll Taxes Going up 4.4%.” Brightmine US, 23 Apr. 2025, www.brightmine.com/us/resources/talent-management/2025-wage-cap-for-social-security/. ↩︎
4. “Contribution and Benefit Base.” Social Security Administration, www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html.  ↩︎
5. “The Federal Budget in Fiscal Year 2024: An Infographic.” Congressional Budget Office, 20 Mar. 2025, www.cbo.gov/publication/61181. ↩︎
6. “Social Security Fact Sheet.” Social Security Administration, www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/basicfact-alt.pdf. Accessed 14 April 2025. ↩︎
7. Williams, Sean. “Social Security Is Facing a $23 Trillion Funding Shortfall and Possible Benefit Cuts in 9 Years: Here’s How We Got Here.” The Motley Fool, The Motley Fool, 15 Dec. 2024, www.fool.com/retirement/2024/12/15/social-security-23-trillion-shortfall-benefit-cuts/. ↩︎
8. Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees. “A Summary of the 2024 Annual Reports.” Social Security Administration, www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/. Accessed 5 June 2025. ↩︎
9. Kaplow, Louis. (2015). Government Policy and Labor Supply with Myopic or Targeted Savings Decisions. Tax Policy and the Economy 26(1), 159-193, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/683367#_i1. ↩︎
10. J.M. Jachimowicz, S. Chafik, S. Munrat, J.C. Prabhu, & E.U. Weber, Community trust reduces myopic decisions of low-income individuals, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 114 (21) 5401-5406, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1617395114 (2017). ↩︎
11. Kaplow, Louis. Government Policy and Labor Supply with Myopic or Targeted Savings Decisions. ↩︎
12. “Should We Eliminate the Social Security Tax Cap?” Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Peter G. Peterson Foundation, 13 Dec. 2023, www.pgpf.org/article/should-we-eliminate-the-social-security-tax-cap-here-are-the-pros-and-cons/. ↩︎
13. “Topic No. 751” IRS ↩︎
14. Ellison, Erin, and David Kindness. “What Is the FICA Tax? 2024 Tax Rates and Instructions.” OnPay, OnPay, Inc., 31 Oct. 2024, onpay.com/insights/what-are-fica-tax-rates. ↩︎
15. “Are Federal Taxes Progressive?” Tax Policy Center, Urban Institute, Brookings Institution, and Individual authors, Jan. 2024, taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/are-federal-taxes-progressive.  ↩︎
16. “Population Profiles: Taxable Maximum Earners.” Social Security Administration, May 2024, www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/population-profiles/tax-max-earners.html. ↩︎
17. Gould, Elise, and Jori Kandra. “Inequality in Annual Earnings Worsens in 2021.” Economic Policy Institute, Economic Policy Institute, 21 Dec. 2022, www.epi.org/publication/inequality-2021-ssa-data/. ↩︎
18. Riedl, Brian. “Don’t Bust the Cap: Problems with Eliminating the Social Security Tax Cap.” Manhattan Institute, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Inc., 11 Apr. 2024, manhattan.institute/article/problems-with-eliminating-the-social-security-tax-cap. ↩︎
19. “Lawmakers Announce Bill to Remove Social Security Tax Income Cap.” Taxnotes, 27 Feb. 2025, www.taxnotes.com/research/federal/legislative-documents/congressional-news-releases/lawmakers-announce-bill-remove-social-security-tax-income-cap/7rbl3.  ↩︎

Femininity and religion are destroyed by America’s pursuit of equality

---

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831 to study the prison system, he found himself in the midst of a rapidly developing commercial society. He produced his two-volume work, Democracy in America, reflecting on a new nation at a transitional moment. Andrew Jackson expanded suffrage, the West was open for settlement, the Mexican-American war would come in the 1840s and further fulfill Manifest Destiny, the deep tensions over slavery were still growing, and American commerce was booming. Globally, Queen Victoria assumed the English throne, the British-Chinese Opium Wars brought forward issues of worldwide trade and violence, and ongoing unrest in France following the July revolution brought social upheaval. 

Commercial society was spreading, progress was pushing forward, and the old order was rapidly dissolving. Tocqueville knew that the progress of Europe would be unlike that of the United States. The United States was a new nation, defined by a singular pursuit: the passion for equality.

It was equality, not liberty, which Tocqueville emphasizes as America’s defining characteristic. In the United States, where Enlightenment ideals and a restless pursuit of equality filled citizens with energy, Tocqueville observed that “What grips the heart most powerfully is not the peaceful possession of a previous object but the imperfectly satisfied desire to possess it and the constant fear of losing it.”¹ 

Undeniable human differences, determined by nature or, “stemming directly from God, will always elude laws…the desire for equality becomes ever more insatiable as the degree of equality increases.”² According to Tocqueville, this “insatiable” thirst for the leveling out of the world is restrained and purified by two powerful opponents: women and religion.

The search for something newer, something better, something yet unseen or unknown pushed early Americans towards a deep dissatisfaction. In 1830s America one would “find men constantly changing course for fear of missing the shortest road to happiness.”³

Still, “No equality instituted by men will ever be enough for them.”⁴ 

The energy of early America has stagnated. Now, perhaps the “American dream” consists of cheap consumer goods, numbing drugs like marijuana, free access to internet pornography, and the rejection of marriage and family life. Instead of conquering new horizons, the average American now spends over 7 hours per day on a screen.⁵

The decline of the American exploratory spirit is wholly foreseeable. The desire for equality, together with immediate, cost-free internet communication, has made our day-to-day realities public, fearful, and desperate for meaning. The combination of a technology-obsessed culture, no shared religious foundations, and the gradual disappearance of women in the home has left us unmoored.

In a nation influenced by political philosophers who understood society as a part of a greater social contract, the citizenry is permeated by the powerful words of Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”⁶ In the present-day United States, we are beginning to see the destructive effects of such a misleading philosophy. 

We do not have the power to begin the world over again, and it is a great mistake to attempt to. We have dissolved the restraints of femininity and faith identified by Tocqueville and are heading towards a fundamental undoing. 

Paine, Hobbs, Locke, and Rousseau set the stage for man to define himself most fundamentally as an individual. Tocqueville’s reliance on women and religion is no longer feasible. The false liberal understanding of human nature as well as of the world’s temporal and spiritual ends, has led to the morally degraded, secular, consumeristic, listless globalism of the 21st century.

Thomas Paine thought his political philosophy was a new way of approaching nature for, “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn.”⁷ Far from the arts of philosophy and theology, state of nature theorists sought to place a study of society and government within the realm of science. 

In the modern day, it is often asserted that the human person is most fully and really understood through science and engineering, or through the social sciences of economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology rather than the fields of theology, literature, and history. Traditional humanities funding has decreased dramatically in recent years, while STEM grows ever more aggressively.⁸

Why is this distinction important? Because liberalism has radically redefined the human person. Thomas Paine defines a nation in a deeply subversive manner, stating that “A nation is composed of distinct, unconnected individuals…and it [the public good] is the good of every individual collected.”⁹ Although human beings are made with social necessities, as well as the rationality to recognize that social ties can reduce vice, ultimately “government is an artifice created by human will.”¹⁰

The artificiality of government leads Paine to claim that through political reorganizations and revolutions, we progress towards a new world. This claim denies all traditional social structures in favor of the liberal view of the fundamentally equal, rational man.

A blind acceptance of liberalism simply because it is the water in which we are swimming is unwise. Instead, we ought to rebel against the notion that we are pure individuals who form society through consent with a “great and chief end” which is “the preservation of their property,” as Locke stated.¹¹ Man and his institutions ought to recognize their higher duties to right relationships, justice, and the common good.

In Tocqueville’s view, women and religion held on to these aristocratic tendencies and a higher nature of man. They limited democratic restlessness and allowed for moral guidance. These limits have dissolved in our present century.

In an increasingly godless world which deemphasizes marriages, we are faced with unique challenges: less than 18% of American households are married-parent households,¹² birth rates are declining towards population collapse,¹³ women are reportedly less religious than men,¹⁴ and church attendance continues its long decline.¹⁵

Revolutions against biology ensue, such as the transgender movement, and the push for unchained, individual fertility continues, as in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy are normalized. The rejection of reality is done in the name of equality.

Tocqueville’s American woman and family strongly withstood the pressures of democratization. Although traditional structures, such as primogeniture, were dissolved, “It divides their inheritance but allows their souls to come together.”¹⁶ It is clear that Tocqueville was wrong. 

He argued that the equal conditions allowed for women to “marry only when their reason is practiced and mature…the things that amused the girl cannot be allowed to divert the wife; and that for a woman the sources of happiness are to be found in the conjugal home.”¹⁷

Tocqueville theorized that removing marriage from its old aristocratic enforcement would allow it to be honored more highly. He writes, “without external hindrance or compulsion, what brings the man and woman together is usually nothing but similarity of tastes and ideas, and that same similarity keeps them together and steadily at each other’s side.”¹⁸ Instead, the pursuit for equality in marriage has led to the decentering of marriage in all developed nations.

It is not merely Obergefell v. Hodges which devastated American marriage, although it did deal the deathblow. It was no-fault divorce and the feminist movement, even the earliest suffragette movements of the 1920s, which transformed America’s understanding of political participation. Suddenly, the husband and wife, or the family, were no longer a single unit. They were divorced in voting, separating the natural from the social. 

The passion for equality has disabled the mechanism of women to elevate from vulgar to enlightened self-interest for the last 100 years. Women’s role as wives and mothers has been systematically destroyed. No longer a moderating force on their husbands or children, women have entered commercial life as pure individuals, alongside men. 

Now that children are no longer considered essential, the situation is entirely more dire. Child-rearing, once and always deemed the central aim of human existence, is increasingly not only optional, but discouraged.

 A recent viral video of lesbian 27-year-old popstar Chappel Roan, exemplifies modern attitudes towards family life. In an interview, she comments: “All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I actually don’t know anyone who’s, like, happy and has children at this age.” 

She goes on to specify that she is particularly opposed to young children, saying, “One-year-old, three-year-old, four and under, five and under, I literally have not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.”¹⁹ The deepest irony is that she presents herself as a miserable, embittered person, for all of her talk of happiness. 

Still, her comments are deeply revealing. To this empowered, free, liberal woman, children are obstacles to happiness—after all, they disrupt sleep schedules, making your life a hell. Roan’s “hell” commentary is particularly interesting. Hell is the separation from God; for Roan, self-defined, egocentric happiness and regular sleep is god, and children must be rejected for the sake of these modern prizes.

Women have embraced democratic equality, not by encouraging marriage and monogamy as Tocqueville predicted, but by living restless lives alongside men.

American religious life has also failed to develop as Tocqueville suggested it might. The two restraints are self-enforcing. After all, “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” and the melt-down of faith is tied together with the decline of femininity.

Tocqueville saw an expanding United States in which Christianity offered necessary guidance. He observes strong, impassioned Christianity and writes, “The soul has needs that must be satisfied, and no matter what pains one takes to distract it from itself, it soon grows bored, anxious, and agitated among the pleasures of the senses.”²⁰ 

He theorizes that in the excitement of America, the need for faith is felt most acutely. Men and women will turn to religion more strongly because of the intensity of their conditions. Instead, we have found ourselves turning towards merely deadening and silencing the needs of the soul he identifies. Instead of a social embrace of faith, we have a culture of hedonistic entertainment.

Tocqueville issued some warnings, commenting that if the American pursuit was divorced from the larger knowledge of God and His moral demands on each man, the entire project would head towards calamity. He professes that the American spirit must exist within “limits that apparently it cannot transgress. The moment it surpasses those limits; it can no longer find its bearings and often hastens without stopping beyond the limits of common sense.”²¹ 

These limits have long since been surpassed.

The quest for equality continues to govern our current socio-political landscape; as marriage and family life is decentralized, the equal individual, free to pursue his desires, is unbound by any semblance of meaningful religious life. The pursuit for human equality will continue to push forward, destroying traditional life, without Tocqueville’s suggested counterweights.

 In the absence of Tocqueville’s resources, Americans who care about the moral health of their nation may have to look elsewhere, outside of the Enlightenment liberal tradition. The hard push for equality has destroyed order—only a religious revival of faith and womanhood can save us.

1. Tocqueville, Alexis. Alexis de Tocqueville: A New Translation by Arthur Goldhammer. Library of America, 2004, pg. 617 ↩︎
2. Tocqueville, pg.627 ↩︎
3. Tocqueville, pg. 626 ↩︎
4. Tocqueville, pg. 627 ↩︎
5. “Revealing Average Screen Time Statistics for 2025.” Backlinko, 11 Mar. 2024, https://backlinko.com/screen-time-statistics. ↩︎
6. Levin, Yuval. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. Basic Books, 2014, pg. 48 ↩︎
7. Levin, pg. 49 ↩︎
8. Newfield C. Humanities Decline in Darkness: How Humanities Research Funding Works. Public Humanities. 2025;1:e31. doi:10.1017/pub.2024.39 ↩︎
9. Levin, pg. 46 ↩︎
10. Levin, pg. 48 ↩︎
11. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett, Student edition, Cambridge University Press, 2023, § 124 ↩︎
12. “How Have American Households Changed over Time?” USAFacts, 7 Oct. 2024, https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-the-structure-of-american-households-changed-over-time/.  ↩︎
13. U.S. Fertility Rate Drops to Another Historic Low. 24 Apr. 2024, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2024/20240525.htm. ↩︎
14.  Russell Contreras. “Young Women Grow Less Religious than Young Men.” AXIOS, 28 Sept. 2024. https://www.axios.com/2024/09/28/religion-poll-gen-z-men-women-gap ↩︎
15.  Jeffery M. Jones. “Church Attendance Has Declined in Most U.S. Religious Groups.” Gallup.Com, 25 Mar. 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx. ↩︎
16. Tocqueville, 690 ↩︎
17. Tocqueville, 696 ↩︎
18. Tocqueville, 700 ↩︎
19. https://www.tiktok.com/@pagesix/video/7487992434111057194 ↩︎
20. Tocqueville, 623 ↩︎
21. Tocqueville,  634 ↩︎

Looking at screens,

listening to voices

in nonexistent distance,

seeing, hearing nothing

present, we pass into

the age of disembodiment

Wendell Berry, 2013, Poem XVII

---

Children are losing fine motor skills, literacy rates are plummeting, and even students at elite colleges are increasingly unfamiliar with reading books in their entirety. 77% of teachers today report that their students in grades preK-3 have a much more challenging time using scissors crayons, pencils, and pens as compared to just five years ago. Children are swiping and tapping on iPads, not holding real items, playing with clay, drawing, or building Legos; instead, with toddler headphones blocking out conversation, they scroll through video clips.

Between AI, cell phones, iPads, laptops, computer desktops, “smart” boards, and television screens, it should come as little shock that the average American is thinking less critically than ever (and even dropping IQ points). The human mind is declining as we sedate ourselves with 30-second-video clips and ChatGPT generated summaries.

In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. He promised a “revolutionary product” and shared his hope to “get rid of all the buttons and just make a giant screen.” We have moved far beyond that first 3.5-inch display, but “giant screens” have become wholly integrated into modern life. Over less than twenty years, with no great revolution and even less resistance, humanity has become reliant on tiny touch-activated pixels. We have unconditionally surrendered to a totally recreated world.

Alarm bells are finally ringing across the United States. The new movement to ban cell phones across all education levels poses a promising return to human knowledge, but one must deeply consider the costs of our frenetic passion for convenience.

Wendell Berry, a 90-year-old Kentucky novelist, poet, and environmentalist warned of the push to purchase a computer in 1987, and his reflections are deeply applicable today. Empires rose and fell, wars were fought, great multinational corporations grew and declined, children learned, and authors wrote, not all that long ago, all without the help of personal screens, internet, and computers. In his essay “Why I Am not Going to Buy a Computer,” Berry offers a few good reasons for his resistance.

Berry has an environmental focus and identifies the usage of computers with support of the energy and computer industries. He decries their role in the “rape of nature,” and pledges to write in daytime, without the use of electricity. Shockingly, he is not from some by-gone, backwards era—his essay is less than forty years old. Beyond his conservationist concerns, Berry asks his readers to consider the deeper issues at hand when facing new technologies.

The social surrender to screens has had few opponents and even fewer critical analysts. We have embraced a new model of the world, but as Berry expresses, “Technological innovation always requires the discarding of the ‘old model.’” In Berry’s case, he considers the “old model” his careful editor–his wife–and her typewriting. It is worth considering what the “old model” was and what is being carried out as the “new model” in screens and education.

The purpose of any tool ought to be to serve the common goods of humanity—not to elude nature or subvert reality. Now we are inundated with messaging that our real world is outdated or even harmful. For  the sake of efficiency and ease, we seem to have accepted a total revolution of education and relationships. We must find “new ways to connect and share experiences” as Meta claims on their virtual reality and AI glasses advertisements. In the rush to modernize, we have failed to consider what sorts of “new connections” may result in irreversible damage. 

Are children who cannot read or write “connecting” since they can play on iPads? They cannot connect in real life, in the “old ways,” because nobody has taught them. Berry explains, “I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.”

Wendell Berry’s essay provides an interesting entry point to the current-day education crisis. State legislatures around the nation are flailing as they begin to recognize the severity and urgency of technological dependence. Democratic Illinois governor JB Pritzker joins eight other states in issuing bans and restrictions on cellphone usage in schools. As of February 2025, California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, South Carolina, and Virginia have all passed legislation on statewide restriction. Eleven other states have issued incentives and recommendations, and the effort is widely bipartisan across regions. It is clear that kindergarten to twelfth grade students are in a screen-induced crisis, with the Pew Research Center finding that 72% of high school teachers recognized cell phone distraction as a “major problem.”

The move to curb cell-phone usage is positive and valuable, but may be too little, too late. The problem is deeper than iPhones–it is the entire restructuring of education. I recently had a fascinating (and alarming) interaction with a professor. She questioned me about my printed readings and hand-written notes. I told her I learned better in class, listening, writing. She did not seem to understand and asked me if I was a kinesthetic learner. 

“No, not necessarily,” I said, “but I am a physical being. This is real. When I take notes in class, I am listening to what you are saying and writing it down. I am here, now.” 

She said she did not see a difference between me watching the lecture recording on my own time and then typing my notes. Really, we were debating the value of the physical world. The conversation ended with me saying I did not like the idea of being hooked up to the cloud. I was relieved to have another professor who mandated handwritten notes and purchased books.

I enjoyed a unique high school experience which did not allow cell-phones during the school day or laptops until senior year. Many of my Constitutional Studies classes at Notre Dame have had the same handwritten note expectation. These classes often result in more engaged, present students, and in lively discussion and focused attention. Even when courses are dry, by eliminating laptops, we eliminate the allure of so-called multitasking, which actually involves emails, texts, and projects wholly unrelated to the class. 

Rejecting screens is not nostalgic, or backwards–it is a choice to embrace reality. Screens for children, even those which are purportedly “educational,” detract from genuine education and create a false equivalence between that which is happening and that which is out of time, out of space, and “located” on the internet. 

A 2024 Newsweek article by Clare Morell from the Ethics and Public Policy Center pulls together the harms of screens in classrooms. She finds that despite increases in computer access, educational attainment has not followed. In fact, on exams, students who read text on computers still perform worse than reading on paper. Even MRI scans of 8-to-12-years-olds revealed deeper brain behavior on those who read paper books instead of screens. Literacy remains a concern. In 2023, less than half (43%) of American fourth graders read at or above a proficient level. The statistics broken down by race are even more frightening: only 17% of Black students and 21% of Latino students read proficiently by fourth grade.

Even in the pre-pandemic world, a 2019 article from the Hong Kong Journal of Occupational Therapy found that children who used tablets “showed significantly lower scores than those in the non-tablet group for visual discrimination, visual memory, spatial relationships, form constancy, visual figure ground, fine motor precision, fine motor integration, and manual dexterity.” These are all essential skills–not only for the educational and professional world, but for a fulfilled, human life.

Screens enact more than educational or professional harms. Although it is widely reported that younger generations engage in less risky behaviors, they simply participate in less risky in-person behaviors. I would speculate that youths are as risky as ever, especially considering lack of privacy on the internet and the wide-spread exposure to pornography at young ages. Nearly one-third of teens report having watched pornography throughout the school day, and 44% of those students viewed it on a school-issued device, according to Common Sense Media.

Reliance on technology designed to commodify us into advertisement consumers and purchasers or addicted social-media users causes irreparable harm. Even a former Facebook executive admits that their product is “fundamentally addictive for people, and it’s causing all kinds of mental health issues, and I think it’s eroding aspects of society.” 

Reading, writing, and complex thought must be achieved by reading, writing, and thinking. There is no short-cut to education. Students who reject AI-generated summaries are not at a disadvantage despite what their fear mongering, “efficiency” focused peers claim. Instead, those who are bold enough to advocate for comprehension in the “old way” will be at a huge advantage: the possession of knowledge. Berry understood that the revolutionizing computer must be carefully analyzed:

“My final and perhaps my best reason for not owning a computer is that I do not wish to fool myself. I disbelieve, and therefore strongly resent, the assertion that I or anybody else could write better or more easily with a computer than with a pencil. I do not see why I should not be as scientific about this as the next fellow: when somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.”

One can replace his focus on computers with the more modern frenzy around AI or tablets. Far from making our lives “demonstrably better,” convenience-based technologies are slowing us down and resulting in the true loss of knowledge. State legislatures are taking notice, but ultimately, technology usage begins in the home. Laws and regulations can enforce standards, but formation must come from parental and familial choices.

A comprehensive Pew Research study on children and screens found that 80% of parents know that their child 11-years-old or younger is watching videos on YouTube, and 84% claiming that they allow children to use tablet or iPhone devices while riding in a vehicle and 29% while dining out at a restaurant. 

Why? Why can children not look out the window at the world, or engage with menus, waiters, and their siblings? If it is an argument of ease or efficiency, it is merely a defense of poor parenting. Artificial distraction cannot be a genuine aid. Parents across the nation feel overwhelming pressure and are totally resigned to the inevitability of screens for toddlers and social media for teens. It does not have to go on. Each family can choose to value real life and support educational experiences and schools  that emphasize knowledge.

Penmanship is one way parents can ensure their children are learning writing and motor skills. Humans have communicated with flowing script for centuries, and in just a few years, people have lost the ability to read and write cursive. The National Archives is searching for Citizen Archivists who can understand cursive script. 

Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C, called reading cursive “a superpower.” What a tragic loss of skill and beauty, sacrificed on the altar of the supposed-convenience of print and typing. The search for practicality has resulted in the incredible impracticality of not being able to understand historical texts.

Take after Wendell Berry and refuse to fool yourself. Reject screens, especially for kids, and especially in education. Remove your Airpods or headphones and listen to your surroundings. Stop surrendering to screens, discover the world you are living in, and regain your humanity.

Introduction 

The 21^st century has seen a major uptick in presidential campaigns by female politicians. This has marked a major change in the social attitude surrounding opportunities for women as they pursue a political role that, in the United States, has only ever been held by men. A central question, and a prominent point of debate, among these campaigns is if a woman is qualified to be the leader of the United States. The most notable campaigns by female candidates (in terms of success and popularity) have been those by Hillary Clinton, Nikki Haley, and Kamala Harris, all of whom ran against President Donald Trump. During their campaigns, each woman employed different strategies to control and strategically manipulate the narrative surrounding her womanhood and femininity.

In their campaigns, female candidates face the strategic question of how to present their womanhood – a set of characteristics that has historically been viewed as a hindrance in their run for political office. In an analysis of female political campaigns, the necessity of addressing gender is pertinent: “Female candidates do not ignore feminine traits, but strategically and conditionally use these qualities.” ^[1] However, it requires a balancing act, as overemphasizing their womanhood could also have negative repercussions in the public sphere.^[2] In her 2016 presidential campaign, Clinton placed her gender at the forefront of the campaign, and often returned to the historic nature of her campaign, in an attempt to draw a contrast between herself and President Trump. In her bid for the Republican nomination, Haley wielded her femininity as a weapon, striving to highlight the strengths of womanhood and how femininity can be presidential. In her 2024 presidential campaign, Harris attempted to deemphasize her womanhood, and avoid the double-bind of identity politics. The ways in which Clinton, Haley, and Harris chose to present their gender is not solely determined by political ideology, but rather was determined by political considerations in their races against President Trump. 

Hillary Clinton & The Glass Ceiling 

In her bid for presidency, Hillary Clinton boldly embraced her femininity and made it a major selling point of her campaign. As the first woman to secure a major party nomination, Clinton shaped the rhetoric of being a female presidential candidate. In her 2016 presidential campaign, Clinton often framed her bid for presidency in terms of its historic nature and spoke frequently of breaking the “glass ceiling.”^[3] By acknowledging the groundbreaking nature of her campaign, Clinton intentionally placed her gender at the forefront. This emphasis on her womanhood highlights Clinton’s view of her gender as an asset to her campaign. She strategically embraced her femininity as she thought it would elevate her campaign and make her more popular with the American people: “[Clinton’s] 2016 campaign did more to feature her female sex as an asset, and not a deficit, and she invoked a more feminist ideology on the campaign trail.” ^[4] This strategy attempted to control the narrative on Clinton’s womanhood. By painting her feminine traits as assets, the campaign minimized gendered criticisms of Clinton. 

However, even though Clinton viewed her womanhood as an asset, she had to strategically balance those traits with a conversation surrounding her experience and masculine traits:  “Evidence of trait-balancing emerged in the 2016 presidential campaign when Hillary Clinton talked about ‘being a woman’ but strategically balanced this message by emphasizing her work ethic and leadership experience.” ^[5] By highlighting her qualifications and more masculine traits, Clinton went beyond the idea of the female politician. Although Clinton was qualified and possessed prior political experience, by emphasizing her masculine traits as well, she showed that she was capable in the same way as any male politician. 

Clinton’s political opponent, Donald Trump, often made attacks against Clinton based on her sex. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said that Clinton did not have a ‘presidential look’: “By invoking the ‘presidential look,’ Trump made salient stereotypical notions of presidential leadership, which typically favor men and not women.”^[6] As all presidents have been men, by drawing attention to Clinton’s physical appearance – and the ways in which it lacks – Trump turned her womanhood into a political weakness and a point to attack. This highlights the drawbacks to female politicians centering their womanhood. Although it can be an asset to their campaign, it also opens them up to another line of attack that men are not subjected to. 

Nikki Haley & Her High Heels 

During her presidential campaign, Nikki Haley embraced and even weaponized her feminine traits against her political opponents. However, her nuanced stances on women’s issues ultimately led to her womanhood being a detriment to her campaign. Throughout her bid for the Republican party nomination, Haley often drew attention to her womanhood. She did this through repeated mentions to her high heels: 

Ms. Haley, like the women candidates before her, must balance the qualities we expect of women (warmth, femininity) with what we expect of leaders (authority, strength). By taking the most feminine of objects — a heel — and turning it into a weapon is essentially her way of saying ‘I wear heels, but I’m tough.’^[7] 

Haley weaponized her heels and her femininity, an attempt to close herself off from having it weaponized against her. In doing so, Haley asserted that women – and high heels – can be powerful, and presidential. It was not necessary for Haley to sacrifice her fashion and femininity to be a successful politician. 

Haley also placed women’s issues to the center of her campaign. She highlighted the empowerment of women and the importance of protecting young girls.^[8] Through emphasizing women’s issues, Haley strategically utilized her gender as an asset. As a woman, she appeared more qualified to talk about the problems that women faced than her male opponents. However, Haley’s advantage may have been a double-edged sword, as she attempted to balance the politics of conservative voters with the politics of more moderate or liberal voters whose support she also sought in the primary election: “Jennifer Horn, the former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, said Haley faces a dilemma on abortion in a GOP primary. But she doesn’t believe Haley went far enough to champion women’s rights in a way that would win over the state’s women and centrist voters.” ^[9] As a conservative woman running on women’s issues, Haley was in a double-bind with the issue of abortion. Both a pro-life stance and a pro-choice stance would harm her popularity with different groups, whose support she needed in the Republican primary. Ultimately, Haley attempted to take a ‘middle ground’ and lost support on both fronts as this middle ground damaged her popularity with all voters. The dilemma that Haley faced during her presidential campaign was a uniquely female one. As a woman, it was necessary that she attempt to appeal to women and centrist voters – groups of voters that Donald Trump was historically less popular with. However, in doing so, she also risked her popularity with conservatives, and ultimately cost herself the presidential nomination. Nikki Haley shows that as a female politician, it is necessary to appeal to women, even when doing so goes against the party platform and may be detrimental to her political success. 

Kamala Harris & Childless Cat Ladies 

During her presidential campaign, Kamala Harris attempted to create distance between herself and her femininity. In ignoring the historic nature of her presidential campaign, Harris attempted to invalidate Trump’s attacks against her identity. Unlike Clinton, Harris did not make her womanhood a centerpiece of her campaign, requiring Trump to engage in more debates on the issues, and less debates on her identity.^[10] By decentralizing her femininity, Harris has also strategically steered clear of identity politics: “The history-making nature of Ms. Harris’s candidacy excites at least some in the party, but there are also middle-of-the-road voters who recoil from what they see as identity politics.”^[11] Harris strode to avoid the controversy of identity politics by not talking about her identity as a woman and person of color. In doing this, she attempted to increase her appeal among more centrist voters, whose support she was reliant upon in determining the outcome of the 2024 election. 

Harris’s womanhood has driven the large political divide among men and women, especially younger voters: “Ms. Harris has an advantage of 16 percentage points with likely female voters, while Mr. Trump has an 11-point advantage with likely male voters.”^[12] This split between male and female voters highlights how the presentation of femininity by female politicians can be a political issue. By supporting Harris, women voters are signaling approval of her presentation of femininity and what her presidency would mean as the potential first female president. 

Attacks based on gender are not limited to the presidential candidates, however, with JD Vance criticizing both Harris and her female supporters, calling them “childless cat ladies.” ^[13]

These gendered attacks demonstrate that Harris is not immune from criticism because of her femininity, even if she has been unwilling to center it in her campaign. In the days leading up to the election, Trump and his political allies repeatedly emphasized Harris’s womanhood and the issue of gender. ^[14] These comments and gendered attacks highlight the limitations to female politicians controlling the narrative on their gender. Harris can refuse to address her womanhood, but at the end of the day, the political environment may still allow for gendered attacks against her.  

Conclusion 

Hillary Clinton, Nikki Haley, and Kamala Harris each presented their femininity differently. These presentations of femininity were intentional political strategies to manipulate the public opinion of the candidates, and ultimately, attract more voters. Female politicians face additional barriers to election, as they are subjected to different expectations and gendered attacks. However, Clinton, Haley, and Harris each made history in their presidential campaigns, challenging societal expectations about the role of women. Through different presentations of their femininity, they showed that women can be strong, leaders, and even presidential. Ultimately, these historic campaigns are what is required to elevate the societal role of women and end the stigma around women in politics.

Works Cited

^[1] Bauer, N. M., & Santia, M. (2022). Going Feminine: Identifying How and When Female 

Candidates Emphasize Feminine and Masculine Traits on the Campaign Trail. Political Research Quarterly, 75(3), p 701. 

^[2] Conroy, Meredith, Danielle Joesten Martin, and Kim L. Nalder. (2020). Gender, Sex, and the 

Role of Stereotypes in Evaluations of Hillary Clinton and the 2016 Presidential Candidates. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 41 (2), p. 195.

^[3] Browning, K. (2024). Harris Often Sidesteps Her History Making Potential. Walz Doesn’t.

The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/us/politics/harris-often-sidesteps-her-history-making-potential-walz-doesnt.html

^[4] Conroy, et al. (2020). Gender, Sex, and the Role of Stereotypes, p. 195 

^[5] Bauer, N. M., & Santia M. (2022). Going Feminine, p. 701. 

^[6] Conroy, et al. (2022). Gender, Sex, and the Role of Stereotypes, p 194. 

^[7]Bennett, Jessica. (2023). Maybe This is Why Donald Trump Is Afraid to Debate Nikki Haley. 

The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/opinion/nikki-haley-high-heels.html.

^[8] Vitali, A. & Allen, J. (2024). Nikki Haley plays up femininity, plays down feminism in her 2024 pitch. NBC News. 
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/haley-plays-femininity-plays-feminism-2024-pitch-rcna133824.

^[9] Allison, N. (2024). Nikki Haley made strides for women in politics. 

^[10] Brockes, E. (2024). Kamala Harris is steering clear of Hillary Clinton’s feminist messaging 

– and it’s working. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/04/kamala-harris-hillary-clinton-feminist-messaging-democratic-donald-trump

^[11] Browning, K. (2024). Harris Often Sidesteps Her History Making Potential. Walz Doesn’t.

The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/us/politics/harris-often-sidesteps-her-history-making-potential-walz-doesnt.html

^[12] Lerer, L., & Glueck, K. (2024). Why Gender May Be the Defining Issue of the Election. The New 

York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/us/politics/harris-trump-election-gender.html

^[13] Lerer, L. & Glueck, K. (2024). Defining Issue of the Election.  

^[14] Bidgood, J. (2024). Trump Still Won’t Stop Talking About Women. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/01/us/politics/harris-trump-womens-health-election.html?searchResultPosition=7

Since it opened its doors in 1915, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been dedicated to its mission of protecting consumers and competition. The Federal Trade Commission Act, which established the FTC, gives it the power to “prevent unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” The FTC achieves these ends by setting rules for what is unfair or deceptive, gathering information and conducting investigations into organizations, as well as numerous other powers.¹ Essentially, the FTC is the backbone of antitrust policy and consumer protection. However, in the years following the Reagan Administration the U.S. moved towards a more hands-off economic approach, resetting guidelines to mitigate the FTC’s regulatory influence and leaving it up to market forces to discipline companies.² As a result, corporate consolidation has increased in a range of markets over the past few decades, creating stronger companies bordering on monopolies with the power to raise prices, lower wages, and influence policymakers.³

Enter Lina Khan, nominated by President Biden in 2021 as the new chair of the FTC. At 32, she was the youngest chair ever named, but that did not stop her from revitalizing the FTC and creating a massive antitrust movement. Since the start of her tenure, Khan has worked to reestablish and utilize the full extent of the FTC’s legal and regulatory power to fight against harmful consolidation and monopolistic practices. From threatening and bringing lawsuits against major corporations, to sending warning letters to predatory patents, to major policy wins, Khan’s FTC has been a thorn in the side of anti-competitive business practices. Even when the FTC has lost lawsuits, the fact that they are challenging corporations instead of letting them act as they please creates a tangible impact on the way business is conducted, scaring off potential acquisitions.⁴

The FTC’s resurgent influence under Khan has proved divisive on both sides of the aisle. While progressive Democrats such as Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have praised Khan’s work at the FTC and want her to remain in place, her leadership has faced significant criticism from major business-owning supporters and donors of the Democratic party, including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and billionaire Mark Cuban, who have called for a change in FTC leadership.⁵ On the Republican side, while the incoming Trump administration and its business-owner heavy ties will undoubtedly replace Lina Khan, she has garnered support from an unlikely source: vice president-elect nominee J.D. Vance. Vance has praised Khan on multiple occasions for her efforts combatting major tech industry players, referring to her as “one of the few people in the Biden administration […] doing a pretty good job.”⁶ He is not alone in this opinion, as Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) have supported Khan and her antitrust movement. However, numerous other Republicans have criticized Khan and accused her of overstepping her authority and abusing the FTC’s power. With strong dissenting views of Lina Khan and the FTC under the Biden administration within each party, it is worth a closer examination of what the FTC has accomplished over the last four years to determine for ourselves whether the Khan has revitalized the antitrust movement or overstepped her powers.

Resetting Guidelines

A formative impact of the Khan administration was the new guidelines for mergers which the FTC and Justice Department released in December 2023 with the goal of safeguarding competition and improving economic opportunities for all Americans.⁷ In many instances, these guidelines restore authority in the review and challenging of merger cases stripped away by previous administrations . For example, the FTC is now allowed to designate a merger as illegal if it holds an undue or highly concentrated market share. This rule was used during the 1980s and 1990s but fell out of use with the 2010 Merger Guidelines, so the 2023 guidelines are restoring this power. The new guidelines similarly revitalize past authority to more directly protect competitors to major corporations who could be bullied or bought out by larger counterparts.⁸ Where controversy ensues and these guidelines differ from the past are in the broader scope afforded to the FTC in enforcing and litigating merger cases, allowing them to pick and choose useful guidelines and rules to bolster their individual cases. The FTC can also presume an illegal merger if it would create a “dominant” or monopolistic market position. These new merger guidelines have been met with pushback, especially from people who believe mergers can be economically beneficial and improve economic efficiency. Additionally, there is valid criticism of the guidelines as a return to a “the government always wins” mentality, giving the FTC an unfair overarching power over all mergers.⁹ In response to these critiques, I would respond that while in some cases mergers can be economically beneficial, the degree of dominance and consolidation we see from already large corporations are not examples of economic efficiency. As for the problem of a “government always wins” system, there are still cases where the FTC has failed to break up large mergers, such as a court ruling against the FTC’s motion to block Microsoft’s $68.7 billion purchase of gaming company Activision Blizzard, showing larger mergers still occur.¹⁰

Quality-of-Life Improvements

Beyond the world of corporate merger regulation, the Khan administration has fought for and succeeded in attaining a number of quality-of-life improvements for consumers and promoting competition. The first of these is the FTC ruling on non-compete agreements. Non-compete agreements are clauses in contracts prevent an employee from working for a competitor of a previous employer for a designated period after leaving their job. Initially intended to protect trade secrets, businesses have used non-competes in a predatory manner, for example, against workers like hairstylists or florists who do not work with proprietary information, making it prohibitive for workers to find work upon leaving their current job. This action in turn lowers job mobility, allowing companies to suppress wages.¹¹ In response to this misuse, the FTC announced a rule to ban non-compete agreements nationwide, claiming that it will allow workers to change jobs, increase innovation, and foster new business formation, while also fighting wage suppression. During the comment period for the rule, 25,000 out of 26,000 comments were in support of the ruling to ban non-compete agreements, a ringing endorsement of the FTC’s action. While the ruling has been blocked by a district court in Texas, the FTC is in the midst of appeals and can still address non-compete disputes on a case-by-case basis. Regardless of its longevity, the ambition of the non-complete ban to empower the estimated 30 million workers affected by these agreements reflects a renewed commitment for worker protection from the FTC.¹²

Another quality of life issue the FTC has ruled on is a consumer’s “right to repair” their products without nullifying their product warranties. The FTC has sent letters to multiple companies whose warranty practices may be violating the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (MMWA), which allows the FTC to govern and enforce product warranties. Some companies have made their product warranties contingent on the owner using specific parts or service providers during repair for the warranty to hold, which is prohibited under the MMWA.¹³ By enforcing the right to repair, the FTC has not only benefitted consumers by expanding options and lowering costs for repairs, but also opened new market availability for repair companies.¹⁴ Once again, these simple yet important actions by the FTC help the common consumer lower costs and improve quality-of-life. 

Finally, the FTC is benefitting consumer quality-of-life with its recent decision on a “click-to-cancel” rule for subscription services. This rule is aimed at making it easier for consumers to cancel unwanted descriptions by preventing businesses from making difficult or convoluted ways to unsubscribe. As part of this rule, negative option programs (subscriptions which renew if the consumer fails to take action to cancel the agreement¹⁵) will now be regulated by requiring sellers to have a consumer’s informed consent before using negative option programs, and sellers will be required to provide more information before receiving billing information. Most importantly, businesses will be mandated to have a simple way to cancel negative option programs. Lina Khan commented on this rule saying that it will save “Americans time and money,” and that “Nobody should be stuck paying for service they no longer want,” further emphasizing the FTC’s renewed focus on protecting consumers not just in words but in action.¹⁶ 

Combating the Pharmaceutical Industry

Along with general rule changes, the FTC under Lina Khan has targeted specific industries, with the pharmaceutical industry and its exorbitant drug pricing being a top priority. Their efforts include a lawsuit brought against the three largest prescription drug benefit managers (PBMs) for a harmful drug rebate system that has artificially raised insulin prices. In short, the FTC has charged these PBMs with excluding available lower priced insulin in favor of higher prices so that the PBMs can make more money as the middlemen between drug manufacturers and consumers. Furthermore, the FTC has threatened to go after drug manufacturers themselves, some of whom have increased the price of insulin by 1,200% over the last 25 years.¹⁷ Additionally, the FTC has combatted predatory medicine patent practices which are increasing costs for consumers, such as with asthma inhalers. An inhaler which costs $7 in France costs around $500 in the U.S. due to American companies’ patent rights for the inhaler device. In response, the FTC sent letters to four major inhaler makers, leading to three of them lowering the price to $35.¹⁸ These efforts extend to major individual contributors to the industry’s corruption such as Martin Shkreli, who was accused of using an anticompetitive scheme to increase the price of a life-saving drug from $17.50 to $750 per tablet. In 2022, Shkreli was banned from participating in the pharmaceutical industry and made liable for $64.6 million he made through his illegal means.¹⁹ While there are still many problems in the pharmaceutical industry, the contributions of the FTC have been an unquestionable win for consumer protection and healthy competition during the Khan administration.

Combating the Tech Industry

Outside of pharmaceuticals, the FTC has also gone after technology companies to protect consumers. One of the largest cases the FTC has taken up is a lawsuit against Amazon. Lina Khan had been a vocal critic of Amazon’s monopolistic power prior to her position at the FTC, and her opposition manifested in office as the FTC and 17 state attorneys general have sued the company for taking actions that prevent the growth of competitors and the emergence of future competitors to maintain multiple monopolies. The suit finds Amazon anticompetitive in two areas, the Amazon store itself and the marketplace services it sells to other companies. Tactics under scrutiny include Amazon reducing the visibility of online retailers with lower prices than Amazon within Amazone’s search results, making Amazon Prime eligibility conditional on sellers using Amazon services, search result prioritization for Amazon products over others of better quality, and exorbitant fees for sellers who rely on Amazon for business. Combined, these anticompetitive actions restrict competition and harm consumers by centralizing online marketplaces to one monopolistic provider. Thus, the lawsuit of Amazon is a major move by the FTC to uproot the monopolistic trend of online commerce.²⁰

The FTC has also been active in the emerging world of artificial intelligence. With the speed at which AI has been developing, government regulation is struggling to catch up, but the FTC is working hard to try to maintain a regulated market and clamp down on bad actors. The agency has taken actions against multiple schemes to hype-up or sell AI technology that could harm consumers. For example, they have restricted AI tools that create fake reviews, claim to have law services, and run deceptive online stores. Khan herself has stated “The FTC’s enforcement actions make clear that there is no AI exemption from the laws on the books. By cracking down on unfair or deceptive practices in these markets, FTC is ensuring that honest businesses and innovators can get a fair shot and consumers are being protected.”²¹ Overall, government regulation has always lagged behind the tech industry, and Khan and the FTC are attempting to remedy that issue.

Success or Overstepping?

Despite the criticism of the FTC delegating itself too much power, the successes of the FTC over the last four years make it hard to view the Khan administration as anything other than a success. Whether or not the FTC overstepped their bounds, the benefits it has gained for consumers and the competition it has inspired are undeniably good and contribute to the FTC’s foundational mandate. Resetting merger guidelines to prevent corporate consolidation and anticompetitive deals was an invaluable step towards preventing the massive companies who dominate the economy from increasing monopolistic power, pushing out small businesses, and reducing competition. The quality-of-life improvements of fighting non-compete contracts, establishing a right to repair, and supporting click-to-cancel services will save consumers money and provide more freedom for personal economic choices. Finally, culling the massive pharmaceutical and technology industries and holding them accountable for harmful and predatory actions not only helps consumers and competition now, but also disincentivizes companies from using shady tactics in the future. As for the criticism levied against the FTC for ‘abusing its power,’ the fact that many of the tools and rules the FTC is using are revivals of tools and rules it had in the past allows one to argue the FTC is not overstepping its boundaries, but returning to the more hands-on approach to antitrust policy it once had. If policies and guidelines during the Regan administration weakened the FTC, then it only makes sense that new policies and guidelines under Biden’s presidency and Khan’s leadership of the FTC can restore its power. As for newer policies, there are plenty of legal mechanisms the courts, Congress, or the President could use to restrict the FTC if they thought it was overstepping its boundaries, and in some cases they have. That we have not seen abundant restrictions of the FTC is a testament to the good the FTC’s actions have done in protecting consumers and competition.

Looking to the future and the incoming Trump administration, while it is unlikely that Lina Khan will remain as the chairperson of the FTC, due to the Democratic antitrust fever and the support the Khan administration has had from some Republicans, it remains to be seen the extent to which the expanded powers of the FTC will be rolled back. Even without Khan, recent popular support for antitrust conviction has the chance to keep the aggressive stance of the FTC going. Furthermore, regulating the ever-expanding technology industry is a goal for both sides of the aisle, and as Khan’s time at the FTC has shown, the agency is one of the best ways to deal with regulating new industries in a timely manner. Whether you agree with the actions of Lina Khan and the FTC or not, the last four years have changed the face of consumer and competition protection, the antitrust movement, and the FTC for the foreseeable future.

1. “Federal Trade Commission Act” Federal Trade Commission, www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/statutes/federal-trade-commission-act.  ↩︎
2.  Stofferahn, Justin. “Corporate Consolidation Is Hurting Americans. Now Is the Time to Rein It In.” Washington State Standard, 5 Sept. 2023, washingtonstatestandard.com/2023/09/05/corporate-consolidation-is-hurting-americans-now-is-the-time-to-rein-it-in/. ↩︎
3. “Americans Pay a Price for Corporate Consolidation.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Aug. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/opinion/biden-lina-khan-ftc.html.  ↩︎
4.  Primack, Dan. “Harris Faces Fight over Lina Khan’s Future.” Axios, Axios Media, 18 Oct. 2024, www.axios.com/2024/10/18/kamala-harris-lina-khan-ftc. ↩︎
5. www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine-washington-briefing/3198509/hed-kamala-harris-lina-khan-shaped-elephant-in-room-subhed-ftc-heads-aggressive-approach-left-many-corporations-feeling-like-every-move-being-watched-regulated/. ↩︎
6. Dodd, Ethan. “JD Vance Hints Elon Musk, FTC Chair Lina Khan Could Be in Trump Admin: ‘I Agree with Them Both on Some Issues.’” New York Post, NYP Holdings Inc., 16 Oct. 2024, nypost.com/2024/10/15/us-news/j-d-vance-hints-elon-musk-and-lina-khan-could-be-in-trump-admin-i-agree-with-them-both-on-some-issues/. ↩︎
7.  “Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department Release 2023 Merger Guidelines.” Federal Trade Commission, 18 Dec. 2023, www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/federal-trade-commission-justice-department-release-2023-merger-guidelines. ↩︎
8.  Bolema, Ted. “Decoding the 2023 FTC and DOJ Merger Guidelines: Insights into Shifting Antitrust Enforcement.” Mercatus Center, George Mason University, 15 Feb. 2024, ↩︎
9. Bolema, “Decoding the 2023 FTC and DOJ Merger Guidelines,” Mercatus Center. ↩︎
10.  Warren, Tom. “FTC v. Microsoft: All the News from the Big Xbox Courtroom Battle.” The Verge, Vox Media, 19 July 2024, www.theverge.com/23768244/ftc-microsoft-activision-blizzard-case-news-announcements/archives/2. ↩︎
11.  Ryan, Sean M. “Commentary: Noncompete Agreements Are Bad for Workers, Bad for Consumers, and Bad for the Economy.” The New York State Senate, 16 May 2023, www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/in-the-news/2023/sean-m-ryan/commentary-noncompete-agreements-are-bad-workers-bad. ↩︎
12.  “FTC Announces Rule Banning Noncompetes.” Federal Trade Commission, 23 Apr. 2024, www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes. ↩︎
13.  “FTC Warns Companies to Stop Warranty Practices That Harm Consumers’ Right to Repair.” Federal Trade Commission, 3 July 2024, www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-warns-companies-stop-warranty-practices-harm-consumers-right-repair. ↩︎
14.  “FTC Focus: Competition and the Right to Repair – Insights.” Proskauer, Proskauer Rose LLP, 28 June 2024, www.proskauer.com/pub/ftc-focus-competition-and-the-right-to-repair. ↩︎
15.  Goodrich, Brian J., et al. “The New Cancel Culture: The FTC’s ‘Click to Cancel’ Rule: Insights.” Holland & Knight, Holland & Knight LLP, 30 Oct. 2024, www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2024/10/the-new-cancel-culture-the-ftcs-click-to-cancel-rule. ↩︎
16.  “Federal Trade Commission Announces Final ‘Click-to-Cancel’ Rule Making It Easier for Consumers to End Recurring Subscriptions and Memberships.” Federal Trade Commission, 16 Oct. 2024, www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/federal-trade-commission-announces-final-click-cancel-rule-making-it-easier-consumers-end-recurring. ↩︎
17.  “FTC Sues Prescription Drug Middlemen for Artificially Inflating Insulin Drug Prices.” Federal Trade Commission, 23 Sept. 2024, www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-sues-prescription-drug-middlemen-artificially-inflating-insulin-drug-prices.  ↩︎
18.  Stahl, Lesley. “FTC Trustbuster Lina Khan: Feared in Boardrooms, Cheered on by Progressives – and Even Some Maga Republicans.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 22 Sept. 2024, www.cbsnews.com/news/ftc-chair-lina-khan-60-minutes-transcript/. ↩︎
19.  “Statement on Second Circuit Order Upholding ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli’s Lifetime Ban.” Federal Trade Commission, 23 Jan. 2024, www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/statement-second-circuit-order-upholding-pharma-bro-martin-shkrelis-lifetime-ban. ↩︎
20.  “FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power.” Federal Trade Commission, 26 Sept. 2023, www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power. ↩︎
21.  “FTC Announces Crackdown on Deceptive AI Claims and Schemes.” Federal Trade Commission, 25 Sept. 2024, www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-announces-crackdown-deceptive-ai-claims-schemes. ↩︎

---

June 2024—Media outlets at home and abroad sensationalized a supposed “far-right victory” in the European Parliament as French and German right-wing populists made major gains in the recent election. Centrist parties raised the alarm, panicking at what they believed to be a rapid surge in disregard for liberal-democratic norms. As domestic elections loomed on the horizon, things seemed quite bleak for the liberal consensus.

Yet in the months since June, virtually nothing has materialized for European right-wing populism. On the contrary, centrist and left-wing coalitions have struck back in France and the United Kingdom. Seemingly everywhere, right-wing opposition proves to be domestically ineffective, plagued by scandal and infighting. Could it be that this “far-right victory” was nothing more than a mirage? Perhaps not everywhere.

Out of the big three European economies, only Germany has the potential for a right-wing surge. Political stalemate–as the center-right establishment (CDU) refuses to cooperate with the rising right-wing populist movement (AfD)–as well as Germany’s unique electoral system, have provided the AfD with a pathway to electoral gains in the near future.

On the eve of the European Parliamentary election, I was studying in Germany at the University of Heidelberg—a city historically known for voting for the climate-progressive Green party. Politically, the atmosphere was complacent. Anxieties about the AfD’s surge had subsided from the previous year, as scandal after scandal rocked the party.

But as marred as the AfD’s momentum was, the party managed to pick up four seats in the European Parliament, for a total of 15 out of Germany’s 96. Simultaneously, a new left-wing populist party, the Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), picked up six seats. The results left the ruling left-wing coalition facing disaster, with a hypothetical mandate from only 30% of voters.

To the alarm of many, Britain and France appeared to be heading in a similar direction. In France, the right-wing populist National Rally (RN) gained seven seats and garnered a commanding simple majority. At the same time, the ruling centrist coalition, Ensemble, led by President Emmanuel Macron, saw a devastating loss of 10 seats.

Outside of the EU, the United Kingdom witnessed Nigel Farage’s announcement that he was reentering politics to lead the Reform Party. Farage, infamous for his leadership of the Brexit movement, sought to take out the ruling Conservative party. With the Tories facing a collapsing mandate from voters, Farage took aim at “mass migration,” calling for a return to common-sense politics.

Europe’s three largest economies all seemed to be facing a similar story, as their collapsing establishment parties battled populist dissent from both the left and the right. But what happened next was far from predictable.

On May 31, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (Conservative Party) announced a snap election in which the Conservative Party was resoundingly defeated and the Labour Party took home its first victory in 14 years. Farage’s party made waves, winning the third-highest portion of the vote at 14.3%. Despite this, Reform won just five of Britain’s 650 seats. For reference, the Liberal Democrats won 72 seats with 12.2% of the vote.

The Reform party’s strength–its appeal with disaffected urban Brits–also became its biggest weakness. Because Britain’s “first past the post” system only requires a simple majority (>50%) to win each seat, populist right-wing parties like Reform–with widespread voter bases–lack the voter concentration necessary to win seats.

Just a few days later in France, Macron called a similar snap election after his party’s disastrous results in the EU Election. Unlike Sunak, Macron’s gambit paid off, as Ensemble joined with the left-wing (NFP) to shut out the right and secure a ruling coalition. Macron understood his voters; he knew that they were more likely to support the right-wing in the European Parliament, where consequences seemed remote, than they were to vote for a right-wing party domestically. By calling this bluff, Macron turned a complete disaster into an overwhelming victory.

Similar to the United Kingdom, France’s first-past-the-post system also acted to shut out parties without concentrated voter bases. Despite achieving 33.21% of the first-round vote, RN ended with 142 seats of the available 577, as opposed to Ensemble’s 21.28% and 159 respectively.

Breaking from the United Kingdom and France, Germany’s ruling coalition did not seek a snap election in the immediate aftermath. This decision could be chalked up to sheepishness about the ruling coalition’s odds of success, but, more likely, it resulted from a lack of viable alternatives. Only recently has Germany been forced into a snap election, as its left wing (SPD and Green) parties no longer tolerated the free market liberal party (FDP) in their coalition.

Like other countries, Germany’s parliamentary system includes elements of first-past-the-post. But unlike France and the United Kingdom, Germany only selects half of its candidates from individual district elections. The other half of its parliament apportioned according to the total percentage of the vote. As a result, the AfD controls a far greater portion of seats relative to its voter base when compared to right-wing parties in the big three.

To address this problem and to prevent the AfD from governing, the center-right CDU maintains a “firewall” against the AfD, swearing off any possibility of a joint coalition. But this policy has arguably become a double-edged sword for Germany’s largest party. The CDU cannot form a coalition alone, as it pulls in only around 30% of the electorate. While a joint CDU-AfD coalition would give the CDU a broad mandate to pursue its preferred policies, it would come at a heavy cost—the party’s legitimacy.

Without the AfD, the only possible coalition for Germany’s 2025 snap parliamentary election is a CDU-led alliance with the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD)–maybe even the Greens as well. Such a coalition would be radioactive to both the CDU’s agenda and image and come with little chance of political efficacy.

By blocking millions of AfD voters from its coalition, the CDU is ironically ensuring exactly the kind of “far-right surge” it hopes to prevent. Provided that the AfD can stay alive in the next few cycles, it will absorb a tidal wave of disillusioned CDU voters.

Despite the rise and fall of the “right-wing mirage,” most of Europe seems to have recovered a liberal status quo. But for Germany, the future remains far less certain. Germany’s center-right collapsing would leave the only remaining gatekeepers of right-wing populism on the left. In such a scenario, the right would be more legitimate than ever and surge to new heights.