I started 2023 with the release of my first book, Graduating from the Electoral College (available wherever books are sold). My last post of 2022 was a promotional post touting my book during the pre-order period, and I continued to discuss the many flaws of the Electoral College here on Substack with “Three candidate chaos and the Electoral College” and “Where will the campaigns for president happen?”
From there, I turned my eye to the upcoming presidential primaries. “What’s in a primary schedule?” covered the topic of the Democratic National Committee’s proposals for changing the schedule of the primary season and explained how we ended up with the rather odd presidential primary system that has generally started with Iowa and New Hampshire.
While the schedule changes are the most interesting thing on the Democratic side of the aisle, I launched a series of articles looking at the open field of Republican contenders focused on the question of electability. “Electability in a Red Haze” (parts 1 2 3 4) talked about the various indicators of electability and applied those indicators systematically to rate the field of Republican contenders.
I will probably add a fifth installment to the series early next year in light of shifting polling on Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and the continued developments in the saga of Donald Trump. Many of the other contenders have dropped out, but the median voter theorem remains the most important factor in determining the strength of a candidate.
“Is the House of Representatives too small?” laid out the argument for why the House of Representatives is, in fact, too small. This article explains something known as the cube root law, one of the “laws” in political science that has both a prescriptive and descriptive function, and touches on the history of why the House of Representatives grew … and why it stopped growing.
In the wake of Trump’s election in 2016, many political scientists and activists blamed weak political parties, asserting that the United States would be better off with a European-style parliamentary system. I addressed this topic first with “Why do Americans hate parliamentary systems?” and then followed up with “Are strong political parties good?” and an explainer article titled “The mixed-member system,” detailing one type of proportional representation system that could actually succeed in the United States.
The topic of balancing power between political parties and the people at large also came up in my discussions of electoral reform, megabills, and the show-business-to-politics pipeline. While recognizing the need for political parties to be able to function, these articles called for greater nuance in recognizing the trade-offs involved with granting more power to political parties in certain domains.
I spared some attention to reflect on the recent history of the 2020 election as well as the history of slavery in New Jersey. Affirmative action has been a hot topic in the news, and I wrote an article titled “Affirmative action is undead” talking about what will probably be the most-cited 2023 Supreme Court case.
Since then, affirmative action has remained in the news due to the Hamas / Israel conflict, which broke out into a hot shooting war on October 7th. I was concerned with the amount of misinformation and misunderstanding circulating and wrote “Hamas snatched defeat from the jaws of victory,” giving context for the present situation.
In response to continued approval of Hamas’s tactics by an unsettling number of fans of Frantz Fanon’s writings and those of other postcolonialists, I wrote “Decolonization demystified,” which pointed out that while Israel could not in any reasonable way be considered a “colony,” nonviolent movements were both more morally defensible and more effective at decolonization in any event. Frantz Fanon was wrong.
Finally, with the death of Henry Kissinger, I was inspired to talk about foreign policy in an article titled “The means betrayed the ends.” This article discussed some of the failures of the realpolitik principle of ends justifying means - namely, the fact that in many cases, embracing dictatorship, theocracy, and human rights abuses only appear in American interests in the short term and have undesirable long-term consequences.