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For the first time in more than half a century, there are no binding restraints on the buildup of the largest nuclear forces on Earth. The New START treaty expired on Feb. 5, 2026, ending the last agreed limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces.

New START limited the number of strategic nuclear weapons the United States and Russia could deploy to 1,550 each. It also limited the missiles and bombers those warheads were loaded on, required on-site inspections and data exchanges, barred interference with satellite monitoring, and established a joint commission to discuss disputes. It did not limit the number of nuclear weapons each side could hold in reserve.

With China rapidly building up its nuclear forces, intense rivalry between the United States, China and Russia, and evolving technologies – from precision conventional weapons to artificial intelligence complicating nuclear balances – there is a real potential of an unpredictable three-way nuclear arms competition.

Such a competition could increase the danger of nuclear conflict, which I believe is higher than it has been in decades.

The security of agreed restraint

While the particular numbers of warheads and delivery vehicles an accord specifies may not make an immense difference, nuclear agreements offer important advantages in four key areas:

• Predictability, limiting the pressures to build up nuclear arsenals that come from worst-case analysis of what adversaries might build and the destabilization that unexpected new weapons can bring.

• Transparency, elements such as data exchanges, on-site inspections and limits on interfering with satellite monitoring, giving each side a better ability to understand what is going on with the others’ nuclear forces.

• Reduced first-strike incentives, from banning or limiting particularly dangerous types of weapons.

• Improved relations, through the mere fact that the other side is willing to limit the nuclear forces arrayed against you, which undermines the belief that they are implacably bent on your utter destruction. This reduces the intensity of hostility that can drive crises and escalation.

After 1962’s Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy realized that relying on nuclear deterrence without any agreed nuclear restraints or risk-reduction measures is just too dangerous. He moved quickly to negotiate the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and put in place a U.S.-Soviet hotline for crisis communication.

He also launched a series of initiatives that led to reductions in defense spending on both sides, cuts in production of nuclear materials for weapons, and even troop pullbacks in Europe. Every subsequent U.S. president has pursued nuclear arms control accords.

Moreover, the countries that have promised not to get nuclear weapons under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty want to see the nuclear-armed nations living up to their treaty obligation to negotiate in good faith toward nuclear disarmament. As pressure builds for countries to get their own nuclear weapons, maintaining the nonproliferation regime and getting the non-nuclear countries’ votes for stronger nuclear safeguards or export controls is likely to require the nuclear-armed nations to accept at least some constraints of their own.

Critics of arms control point out that Russia has violated many past accords – and the Trump administration has accused both Russia and China of carrying out illicit nuclear tests, though his administration has not offered solid evidence in public so far. But despite these very real issues, key elements of these agreements were implemented, and they “left the United States safer,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has noted. More than four-fifths of the nuclear weapons that used to exist in the world have been dismantled.

New limits or buildup?

So, what’s next? President Donald Trump ignored Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal that both sides stay within the limits of New START while they explored options for new steps. But Trump said he wants to negotiate a “better” deal on fewer nuclear weapons – a deal that would not only limit U.S. and Russian strategic forces but also China’s much smaller but rapidly growing nuclear forces and Russia’s large force of nonstrategic nuclear weapons – that is, ones for battlefield or regional use.

So far, though, no negotiations on follow-on accords are underway, and the administration has not offered to negotiate about any of the U.S. weapons systems that worry Russia and China.

Moreover, there is strong pressure in Washington to build up U.S. nuclear forces rather than reduce them, to deter both Russia and China – while also dealing with the smaller but still dangerous North Korean nuclear force. The United States has many hundreds of nuclear weapons in storage that could be brought out and put on existing missiles, along with empty missile tubes on submarines that could again be filled with missiles. And the U.S. is developing new weapons, such as a nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile.

Constraints and challenges

In my view, the more than 1,500 strategic nuclear weapons the United States already has deployed – with a major modernization underway – provide a sufficient deterrent to aggression. And if the United States begins to build up, Russia will respond in kind, and China may go even further. Once a multisided buildup is underway, its momentum will be more difficult to reverse.

Fortunately, the United States, Russia and China all have strong national interests in avoiding an unrestrained nuclear race, which would leave all of them poorer and no more secure. While the United States has quite a few nuclear weapons in storage, its nuclear modernization is struggling with enormous delays and cost overruns, and its industrial base is simply not prepared for a major nuclear expansion.

Putin is building a war economy that can churn out a lot of weapons – but he knows his economy is a 10th the size of the U.S.’s, and he wants to focus on rebuilding the conventional forces being chewed up in his war on Ukraine, making nuclear competition a bad idea. China has an economy to match the U.S.’s and an unrivaled manufacturing capacity, but it, too, would be worse off if its buildup provokes a U.S. buildup in response and a collapse of nuclear restraints.

Despite these common interests, finding a path to new accords among at least three parties, rather than two, will not be easy. Coalitions in each capital will have to win arguments that an accord is in their nation’s interest at the same time. The parties will have to address in some way the non-nuclear technologies that affect nuclear balances, and technologies such as cyber weapons and artificial intelligence would be hard to count or verify.

U.S. political polarization might make it very difficult to get a two-thirds vote in the Senate to ratify a treaty – though there are many other possible approaches, from reciprocal political commitments to executive agreements.

Famously unpredictable, Trump might still reverse course and agree to some version of Putin’s proposal for a “strategic pause” in which neither the United States nor Russia would build up its nuclear capabilities for the time being, while talks on next steps were underway. That would have the advantage of offering time to explore the options before new nuclear buildups got locked in.

And that would give him more chance of reaching his oft-stated goal of being the one to bring home a deal to reduce nuclear weapons and the dangers they pose.

Matthew Bunn is a member of the Board of Directors of the Arms Control Association; is a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences; has consulted for several U.S. national laboratories; and has served on the Academic Alliance of U.S. Strategic Command.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The president announces an aggressive, controversial policy. Large groups of protesters take to the streets. Government agents open fire and kill protesters.

All of these events, familiar from Minneapolis in 2026, also played out at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1970. In my academic writing about the First Amendment, I have described Kent State as a key moment when the government silenced free speech.

In Minneapolis, free speech has weathered the crisis better, as seen in the protests themselves, the public’s responses – and even the protest songs the two events inspired.

Protests and shootings, then and now

In 1970, President Richard Nixon announced he had expanded the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia. Student anti-war protests, already fervent, intensified.

In Ohio, Gov. James Rhodes deployed the National Guard to quell protests at Kent State University. Monday, May 4, saw a large midday protest on the main campus commons. Students exercised their First Amendment rights by chanting and shouting at the Guard troops, who dispersed protesters with tear gas before regrouping on a nearby hill.

With the nearest remaining protesters 20 yards from the Guard troops and most more than 60 yards away, 28 guardsmen inexplicably fired on students, killing four students and wounding nine others.

After the killings, the government sought to shift blame to the slain students. Nixon stated: “When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.”

Minneapolis in 2026 presents vivid parallels.

As part of a sweeping campaign to deport undocumented immigrants, President Donald Trump in early January 2026 deployed armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents to Minneapolis.

Many residents protested, exercising their First Amendment rights by using smartphones and whistles to record and call out what they saw as ICE and CBP abuses. On Jan. 7, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed activist Renee Good in her car. On Jan. 24, two CBP agents shot and killed protester Alex Pretti on the street.

The government sought to blame Good and Pretti for their own killings.

Different public reactions

After Kent State, amid bitter conservative opposition to student protesters, most Americans blamed the fallen students for their deaths. When students in New York City protested the Kent State shootings, construction workers attacked and beat the students in what became known as the “hard hat riot.” Afterward, Nixon hosted construction union leaders at the White House, where they gave him an honorary hard hat.

In contrast, most Americans believe the Trump administration has used excessive force in Minneapolis. Majorities both oppose the federal agents’ actions against protesters and approve of protesting and recording the agents.

The public response to Minneapolis has made a difference. The Trump administration has announced an end to its immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities. Trump has backed off attacks on Good and Pretti. Congressional opposition to ICE funding has grown. Overall public support for Trump and his policies has fallen.

Free speech in protests, recordings and songs

What has caused people to view the killings in Minneapolis so differently from Kent State? One big factor, I believe, is how free speech has shaped the public response.

The Minneapolis protests themselves have sent the public a more focused message than what emerged from the student protests against the Vietnam War.

Anti-war protests in 1970 targeted military action on the other side of the world. Organizers had to plan and coordinate through in-person meetings and word of mouth. Student protesters needed the institutional news media to convey their views to the public.

In contrast, the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis target government action at the protesters’ doorsteps. Organizers can use local networks and social media to plan, coordinate and communicate directly with the public. The protests have succeeded in deepening public opposition to ICE.

In addition, the American people have witnessed the Minneapolis shootings.

Kent State produced a famous photograph of a surviving student’s anguish but only hazy, chaotic video of the shootings.

In contrast, widely circulated video evidence showed the Minneapolis killings in horrifying detail. Within days of each shooting, news organizations had compiled detailed visual timelines, often based on recordings by protesters and observers, that sharply contradicted government accounts of what happened to Good and Pretti.

Finally, consider two popular protest songs that emerged from Kent State and Minneapolis: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis.”

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded, pressed and released “Ohio” with remarkable speed for 1970. The vinyl single reached record stores and radio stations on June 4, a month after the Kent State shootings. The song peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard chart two months later.

Neil Young’s lyrics described the Kent State events in mythic terms, warning of “tin soldiers” and telling young Americans: “We’re finally on our own.” Young did not describe the shootings in detail. The song does not name Kent State, the National Guard or the fallen students. Instead, it presents the events as symbolic of a broader generational conflict over the Vietnam War.

Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis” on Jan. 28, 2026 – just four days after CBP agents killed Pretti. Two days later, the song topped streaming charts worldwide.

The internet and social media let Springsteen document Minneapolis, almost in real time, for a mass audience. Springsteen’s lyrics balance symbolism with specificity, naming not just “King Trump” but also victims Pretti and Good, key Trump officials Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, main Minneapolis artery Nicollet Avenue, and the protesters’ “whistles and phones,” before fading on a chant of “ICE out!”

Critics offer compelling arguments that 21st-century mass communication degrades social relationships, elections and culture. In Minneapolis, disinformation has muddied crucial facts about the protests and killings.

At the same time, Minneapolis has shown how networked communication can promote free speech. Through focused protests, recordings of government action, and viral popular culture, today’s public can get fuller, clearer information to help critically assess government actions.

Gregory P. Magarian does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Jesse Jackson’s two campaigns for president, in 1984 and 1988, were unsuccessful but historic. The civil rights activist and organizer, who died on Feb. 17, 2026, helped pave the way for Barack Obama’s election a generation later as the nation’s first – and so far only – African American president.

Jackson’s campaigns energized a multiracial coalition that not only provided support for other late-20th-century Democratic politicians, including President Bill Clinton, but helped create an organizing template – a so-called Rainbow Coalition combining Black, Latino, working-class white and young voters – that continues to resonate in progressive politics today.

Vermont, where I teach political science, did not look like fertile ground for Jackson when he first ran for president. Then, as now, Vermont was one of the most homogeneous, predominantly white states in the country. But if Jackson seemed like an awkward fit for a mostly rural, lily-white state, he nonetheless saw possibilities there.

He campaigned in Vermont twice in 1984, buoyantly declaring in Montpelier, the state capital, “If I win Vermont, the nation will never be the same again.”

He did not win Vermont, taking just 8% of the Democratic primary vote in 1984 but tripling his share to 26% in 1988. Appealing to voters in small, rural New England precincts was a remarkable achievement for a candidate identified with Chicago and civil rights campaigns in the South.

Jackson’s presidential ambitions coincided with a pivotal moment in Vermont politics: The state’s voting patterns were shifting left, with new residents arriving and changing the state’s culture and economy. In 1970, nearly 70% of Vermonters had been born there. By 1990, that figure had dropped by 10 percentage points.

The Vermont Rainbow Coalition, which was formed to support Jackson’s first campaign, organized a crucial constituency in a fluid time, establishing patterns that would persist for decades.

Setting the standard in Vermont

Jackson created a “People’s Platform” that would sound familiar to today’s progressives, calling for higher taxes on businesses, higher minimum wages and single-payer, universal health care.

In light of Jackson’s efforts, Vermont activists saw the potential for a durable statewide organization. Rather than disband the Vermont Rainbow Coalition after the 1984 primary, they kept the group going, endorsing candidates in campaigns for the legislature and statewide office in each of the next three election cycles. The coalition also endorsed Bernie Sanders’ failed bid for Congress in 1988.

Sanders served eight years as mayor of Burlington as an “independent socialist,” cultivating a core collection of local allies known as the Progressive Coalition who sought to wrest power away from establishment members of the city’s Board of Aldermen.

In 1992, the Vermont Rainbow Coalition merged with Burlington’s Progressive Coalition to form the statewide Progressive Coalition.

The Jackson-Sanders lineage

Sanders eventually went on to win election to the House as an independent in 1990, serving in the chamber until winning his Senate seat, also as an independent, in 2006. His presidential runs in 2016 and 2020 made him a prominent national figure and a leader among progressives.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated a member of the House Democratic leadership in a stunning 2018 primary upset in New York, had been a Sanders campaign organizer and remains his close ally. On Jan. 1, 2026, Sanders swore in Zohran Mamdani – like Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic socialist – as mayor of New York City.

Sanders had endorsed Jackson for president in 1988. Years later, Jackson returned the favor.

Sanders paid tribute to Jackson at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. “Jesse Jackson is one of the very most significant political leaders in this country in the last 100 years,” Sanders said. “Jesse’s contribution to modern history is not just bringing us together – it is bringing us together around a progressive agenda.”

Not just Vermont

In Vermont, Jackson performed surprisingly well in unlikely places – taking nearly 20% of the 1984 primary vote in working-class Bakersfield and Belvidere, for example.

Today’s Vermont Progressive Party, which emerged out of the old Vermont Progressive Coalition, is one of the most successful third parties in the nation, winning official “major party” status in the state shortly after its official founding in 2000. The party has elected candidates to the state legislature, city councils and even a few statewide offices, including that of lieutenant governor.

Vermont was not alone in experiencing the catalyzing effect of Jackson’s presidential runs. Jackson had a significant mobilizing impact on Black voters nationwide. In Washington state, the Washington Rainbow Coalition started in Seattle and spread across the state between 1984 and 1996. New Jersey and Pennsylvania had their own successful and independent Rainbow Coalitions. In 2003, the Rainbow Coalition Party of Massachusetts joined the Green Party to become the Green Rainbow Party.

In my own research, I’ve investigated the durability of the “Jackson effect” in Vermont. There is no better test of what differentiates the Vermont Progressive Party from the state’s Democratic Party than the 2016 Democratic primary race for lieutenant governor, which pitted progressive David Zuckerman against two prominent, mainstream Democrats.

Zuckerman beat the Democrats most handily in towns that had voted the most heavily for Jesse Jackson in 1984, an effect that persisted even when controlling for population, partisanship and liberalism.

Many people would point to Sanders as the catalyst for Vermont’s continuing progressive movement. But Sanders and the progressives owe much to Jackson.

Bert Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The negative public reaction to Operation Metro Surge – the violent immigration dragnet in Minnesota – was “MAGA’s Gettysburg,” wrote New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on Jan. 28.

Bouie, of course, was comparing ICE’s setbacks to the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, the battle often credited with turning the tide of the American Civil War. Fresh off a string of victories, Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, believed his men were “invincible” and launched an invasion into the North.

But Gen. George G. Meade and the Army of the Potomac won the battle of Gettysburg, and the Confederates would fight on the defensive for the rest of the war.

Since early 2026, growing numbers of commentators have turned to the Civil War of 1861 to 1865 to make sense of America’s fractured political climate.

After a masked federal agent shot and killed a 37-year-old mother of three, Renée Good, in Minneapolis, novelist Thane Rosenbaum wondered whether the city might become a “new Antietam.” The battle of Antietam, fought on Sept. 17, 1862, remains the bloodiest day in all of American history, leaving more than 3,600 soldiers dead.

Later in January 2026, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speculated that ICE violence in the Twin Cities could spark a national conflict. “I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?” he asked an interviewer, alluding to the South Carolina harbor fortress where, in 1861, the opening shots of the Civil War were fired.

In response, defenders of Donald Trump, including CNN commentator Scott Jennings and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, compared Walz to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America. On Fox News, Washington Examiner columnist Tiana Lowe Doescher said: “News flash, Tim Walz. In this case, you’re the Confederacy,” accusing him of conspiring to defy federal immigration policy.

At a time of deepening national division, the recent spate of Civil War analogies should come as no surprise.

Unprecedented political fracture

The Civil War remains the nation’s most divisive and defining epoch. The secession of 11 states propelled a democratic nation into unprecedented political fracture. After four years of bloodshed, the Union was preserved and 4 million enslaved people were granted their freedom.

Preservation of the Union came at a heavy price. More than 700,000 people were dead, about 2% of the 1860 population, or a number roughly equivalent to the current population of the state of Maryland.

But the Civil War’s staggering death toll cannot fully explain the references to “Gettysburg” and “Jeff Davis” in media coverage of ICE operations in Minnesota and elsewhere.

As we argue in our book, “They Are Dead and Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America,” the impulse to connect the American Civil War to contemporary crises can be traced to the politics of memory, the ways interest groups, politicians and ordinary people shape the past to meet the needs of the present.

Likening Walz to Jefferson Davis or Minneapolis to Gettysburg or Fort Sumter are clear examples of how Americans appropriate the Civil War for our contemporary political needs.

Competing memories

In the Civil War’s aftermath, the conflict’s participants quickly crafted competing versions of the Civil War.

Some Union veterans labeled their former adversaries as traitors. Clinton Spencer, a captain in the 1st Michigan Infantry, declared, “disloyalty to the old flag was is and shall always be TREASON, deep, dark, and damnable.”

Yet the Union memory soon became subsumed by the dominance of the “Lost Cause,” an intentional and distorted narrative crafted by white Southerners. That version of the Civil War ignored slavery and celebrated Confederate soldiers in a war to defend states’ rights from federal tyranny.

By the early 1900s, Lost Cause ideology had taken root across the nation. The United Daughters of the Confederacy and other Southern apologists erected hundreds of Confederate monuments throughout the United States, and blockbuster movies like “The Birth of a Nation,” from 1915, and “Gone with the Wind,” from 1939, turned Lost Cause nostalgia into big-screen spectacle.

Over the past few decades, however, communities around the United States have made great strides to disentangle the Lost Cause from public memories of the Civil War.

After Dylann Roof massacred nine African American worshippers at Charleston’s Emmanuel AME Church in 2015, he was found to have espoused white supremacist ideas and posted a photo of the Confederate battle flag on his website. In the killings’ aftermath, cities across the South removed more than 300 Confederate flags, monuments and symbols from public view.

“The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity,” declared New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu in a 2017 speech about the removal of four Confederate statues in the city. “It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is a history we should never forget and one that we should never, ever again put on a pedestal to be revered.”

Homegrown analogy

In 1961, poet Robert Penn Warren famously observed, “Many clear and objective facts about America are best understood by reference to the Civil War.”

That remains the case today.

For many Americans, the Civil War is the prime example of the danger of allowing political division to spiral into organized violence.

Minnesota’s governor, Walz, could have used the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 or the bombing at Pearl Harbor in 1941 for his historical analogy, but the references to the start of the Spanish-American War or World War II would not have been as powerful. Using the Civil War as a reference point underscores the danger when Americans decide to abandon their shared history and values and engage in fratricidal war.

Many of the recent Civil War analogies do not hold up to scrutiny. The events going on in Minneapolis bear little to no resemblance to the years of tumult leading to the assault on Fort Sumter, and the violence on the streets of Minneapolis can hardly compare to the horrors on the fields along the Antietam Creek.

But that’s beside the point.

More than 160 years after the defeat of Confederate forces at Gettysburg, the Civil War continues to have an enduring hold on the American political consciousness – shaping the way we view the past and offering a vocabulary for understanding the political conflicts of the present.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In November 2025 the Trump administration announced a special park pass commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary that featured images of two presidents: George Washington and Donald Trump.

Featuring the current president – in place of the National Park Service’s usual landscape pictures – triggered both a lawsuit and a social media movement to put stickers over Trump’s face.

As a businessman, Trump has frequently emblazoned buildings and consumer products – shoelaces, an airline, an edition of the Bible, among many others – with his own name.

During his current presidential term, his administration has put his name on numerous government properties – perhaps most famously the Kennedy Center, but also money, monuments and military equipment. In January 2026, Trump floated the idea Congress would rename both New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after him.

With Florida lawmakers considering renaming the airport near Mar-a-Lago after the president, the Trump Organization has filed an application to trademark his name for use in airports and ancillary activities, although the company said it would not charge a fee in the case of the Palm Beach airport.

As a communication professor who studies the First Amendment, I was intrigued by the federal actions and the protests they’ve triggered.

Citizens certainly have the right to protest these decisions, like any government action. The First Amendment prevents the government from making laws that abridge freedom of speech.

But does the federal government itself have freedom of speech? And can a president put his name and image wherever he wants?

Free speech for government

The answer to the first question has already been answered. In a series of rulings, the Supreme Court has upheld the government speech doctrine, which allows the government as speaker to say whatever it wants.

Moreover, if the forum is governmental, the government may even be able to compel people to express its messages – for example, with public employee speech that is part of job duties. The 2006 Supreme Court decision establishing that principle involved a deputy district attorney who’d questioned the validity of a warrant, but the rule applies to other employees, such as teachers who have to offer instruction in state-mandated curricula.

The court’s decisions in government speech cases imply that if people do not like the government speech, they should change the government with their votes.

However, some scholars and advocates argue that this relatively new constitutional doctrine gives the government too much power to drown out other viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas.

In most instances, the government cannot compel speech or force citizens to express a certain message. Compelled speech is not allowed when the government is forcing a citizen to endorse an ideological message.

For example, the Supreme Court allowed a Jehovah’s Witness to cover the words “or Die” on his license plate, which included the New Hampshire state motto, “Live Free or Die.”

The First Amendment is not absolute, and some government regulations will infringe on speech.

The federal government has strict regulations on how the American flag should be disposed of, but it cannot punish someone who is burning a flag as a form of political protest.

Government control of its own products

What happens when the government itself hosts forums for citizen speech, such as placing monuments in a park or flying flags on government property? Can the government deny certain speech based on the speaker or message?

In such cases, courts have had to decipher whether the forum was purely governmental. To do so, they examine the history of the forum in which the contested speech takes place, who controls the forum, and the public perception of who controls it.

This brings us back to the question of Trump’s name and likeness. As a constitutional matter, the Trump administration can express itself as it sees fit under the government speech doctrine. But in some cases, the administration may be bound by statute or formal contracts, as with the legal battle over the naming of the Kennedy Center, which was named by an act of Congress. The lawsuit over the National Park passes claims that the administration is violating a federal law requiring that the winning entry in a public lands photo contest be used for the passes.

Still, I believe it would be difficult to win a lawsuit claiming that the new passes are a form of compelled speech, with bearers of the pass arguing they are being forced, in effect, to endorse Trump. Most people would likely see the park passes’ artwork as being controlled by the government and therefore a form of government expression, not a form of private expression.

Can people cover up Trump?

But the Trump administration may not be able to defend its policy of declaring passes null and void if the president’s image is covered by a sticker. Citizens protesting Trump’s appearance by covering up the president’s image is protected speech, in my view. The government’s action to void the passes is likely a violation of the First Amendment.

On the face of it, placing stickers on passes would appear to violate the long-standing Interior Department rule that passes are “void if altered.” Those regulations were content neutral and incidental to any particular message or cardholder.

However, the updated policy, voiding the pass if Trump’s image is covered or marred, is more suspect. The new rules seem to be a direct response to the protesters’ political speech and, as applied, primarily aim to affect these stickers and speakers.

With an administration known for its social media savviness, it may not be convincing for officials to argue they did not know about the protest or that the policy was not a direct attempt to chill such speech.

The government will have the right to put Trump’s name and images on more government property in many cases, but most resulting political protests, in my view, will also be protected speech.

Jason Zenor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

On April 9, 1940, Nazi tanks stormed into Denmark. A month later, they blitzed into Belgium, Holland and France. As Americans grew increasingly rattled by the spreading threat, a surprising place became crucial to U.S. national security: the vast, ice-capped island of Greenland.

The island, a colony of Denmark’s at the time, was rich in mineral resources. The Nazi invasions left it and several other European colonies as international orphans.

Greenland was essential for air bases as U.S. planes flew to Europe, and also for strategic minerals. Greenland’s Ivittuut (formerly Ivigtut) mine contained the world’s only reliable supply of the most important material you’ve probably never heard of: cryolite, a frosty white mineral that the U.S. and Canadian industries relied upon to refine bauxite into aluminum, and thus essential to assembling a modern air force.

A month after the Nazis seized Denmark, five American Coast Guard cutters set sail for Greenland, in part to protect the Ivittuut mine from the Nazis.

People sometimes forget that World War II was a dog-eat-dog struggle for resources – oil and uranium but also dozens of other materials, everything from rubber to copper. Without these strategic materials, no modern military could produce crucial new weapons such as tanks and airplanes. The resource struggle often started before actual fighting.

Foreign materials fueled American global power, but also raised tricky questions about access to resources and about sovereignty, just as the old European imperial order was being rethought. As in 2026, U.S. presidents had to skillfully balance force and diplomacy.

As a historian at Macalester College, I research how Americans shape environments around the world through their purchasing and national security needs, and how foreign landscapes enable and constrain American actions. Today, control of Greenland’s natural resources is again on an American president’s radar as demand for critical minerals rises and supply tightens.

During the spring of 1940, America and its European allies mapped out patterns of resource use and ideas of global interconnection that would shape the international order for decades. Greenland helped give birth to this new order.

Rethinking American vulnerability

On May 16, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress, including many “American first” isolationists wary of European entanglements. Roosevelt implored Americans to wake up to new threats in the world – to, in his words, “recast their thinking about national protection.”

New weapons, he warned, had shrunk the world, and oceans could no longer shield the United States. The nation’s fate was inextricably tied to Europe’s. Nothing showed this better than Greenland: “From the fiords of Greenland,” FDR warned, “it is four hours by air to Newfoundland; five hours to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and to the province of Quebec; and only six hours to New England.”

But Greenland set off alarm bells for another reason. To protect itself in a dangerous world, Roosevelt famously called for the U.S. to hammer out 50,000 planes a year. But in 1938, America had produced only 1,800 planes.

To meet this ambitious goal, Roosevelt and his advisers knew that little could be done without Greenland. No Greenland, no cryolite. No cryolite, no massive American air force. Without cryolite, making 50,000 planes would be infinitely more difficult.

The age of alloys

Americans, National Geographic explained in 1942, lived in an “age of alloys.” Without aluminum alloys and other metallic mixtures, assembly lines churning out modern tanks, trucks and airplanes would grind to a halt. “More than any other struggle in history, this is a war of many metals, and the lack of a single one may be a blow far worse than the loss of a battle.”

Few materials mattered more than aluminum. Light yet strong, aluminum formed 60% of a heavy bomber’s engines, 90% of its wings and fuselage, and all of its propellers.

But there was a problem: Refining aluminum from bauxite ore required working with dangerously hot metallic mixtures, over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius). Cryolite solved the problem by reducing the temperature to a more manageable 900 F (480 C).

The Nazis’ chemical industry had found a substitute for cryolite using fluorspar, but the U.S. preferred the more resource-efficient cryolite and wanted to prevent the Germans from having it.

After the Nazis seized Denmark

Just days after German tanks rolled into Denmark in April 1940, Allied officials huddled to devise ways to protect Ivittuut’s magical mineral. On May 3, Danish Ambassador to the U.S. Henrik de Kauffmann, risking trial for treason, requested American assistance. On May 10, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Comanche departed New England for Ivittuut. Four others soon followed, one with guns for the mine’s defenders.

That very week in Washington, at a meeting of the Pan American Union, Roosevelt and his advisers spoke with hundreds of geologists and other representatives from Latin America — a resource-rich region that the U.S. saw as an answer to its strategic materials shortages.

Nervous about the history of U.S. imperial high-handedness in the region, some Latin Americans thought that their countries should seal off their resources to outside control, as Mexico had in nationalizing U.S. and European oil holdings in 1938.

With European empires crumbling, Roosevelt faced a delicate diplomatic dance with Greenland. He wanted to maintain the appearance of neutrality, keep skeptical isolationists in Congress from revolting and give no provocations to Latin American anti-imperialists to cut off resources. Crucially, he also needed to avoid giving the resource-starved Japanese a legal justification to seize the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia – another European colony orphaned by the Nazi invasion.

Roosevelt’s solution: enlist Coast Guard “volunteers” to guard Ivittuut. By the end of the summer, long before the U.S. officially entered the war, 15 sailors resigned from their ships and took up residence near the mine.

Seeing Greenland as crucial to US security

Roosevelt also got creative with geography.

In an April 12, 1940, press conference, just days after the Nazi invasion, he began to emphasize Greenland as part of the Western Hemisphere, more American than European, and thus falling under Monroe Doctrine protections. To calm fears in Latin America, U.S. officials recast the doctrine as development-oriented hemispheric solidarity.

Maj. William S. Culbertson, a former U.S. trade official speaking before the Army Industrial College in fall 1940, noted how the scramble for resources pulled the U.S. into a form of nonmilitary warfare: “We are engaged at the present time in economic warfare with the totalitarian powers. Publicly, our politicians don’t state it quite as bluntly as that, but it is a fact.” For the rest of the century, the front line was just as likely a far-off mine as an actual battlefield.

On April 9, 1941, exactly a year after the Nazis seized Denmark, Kauffmann met with U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to sign an agreement “on behalf of the King of Denmark” placing Greenland and its mines under the U.S. security blanket. At Narsarsuaq, on the island’s southern tip, the U.S. began constructing an airbase named “Bluie West One.”

During the rest of World War II and throughout the Cold War, Greenland would house several important U.S. military installations, including some that forced Inuit families to relocate.

Critical minerals today

What transpired in Greenland in the 18 months before Pearl Harbor fit into a larger emerging pattern.

As the U.S. ascended to global leadership and realized that it couldn’t maintain military dominance without wide access to foreign materials, it began to redesign the global system of resource flows and the rules for this new international order.

It rejected the Axis’ “might makes right” territorial conquest for resources, but found other ways to guarantee American access to critical resources, including loosening trade restrictions in European colonies.

The U.S. provided a lifeline to the British with the destroyers-for-bases deal in September 1940 and the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, but it also gained strategic military bases around the world. It used aid as leverage to also pry open the British Empire’s markets.

The result was a postwar world interconnected by trade and low tariffs, but also a global network of U.S. bases and alliances of sometimes questionable legitimacy designed in part to protect U.S. access to strategic resources.

During the Cold War, these global resources helped defeat the Soviet Union. However, these security imperatives also gave the U.S. license for support of authoritarian regimes in places like Iran, Congo and Indonesia.

America’s voracious appetite for resources also often displaced local populations and Indigenous communities, justified by the old claim that they misused the resources around them. It left environmental damage from the Arctic to the Amazon.

Strategic resources have been at the center of the American-led global system for decades. But U.S. actions today are different. The cryolite mine was a working mine, rarer than today’s proposed critical mineral mines in Greenland, and the Nazi threat was imminent. Most important, Roosevelt knew how to gain what the U.S. needed without a “damn-what-the world-thinks” military takeover.

Thomas Robertson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In December 2025, Andrea Lucas, the chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, invited white men to file more sex- and race-based discrimination complaints against their employers.

“Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the @USEEOC as soon as possible,” she wrote in a post on X.

In February 2026, the EEOC began to investigate Nike on what the agency said was suspicion of discrimination against white workers.

Both initiatives followed the EEOC’s March 2025 characterization of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, or DEI, as potentially discriminatory against white men. The EEOC characterization falls within the Trump administration’s larger pattern of calling DEI “illegal discrimination.”

At the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts, we have done extensive research on who files discrimination charges with the EEOC.

Given the EEOC’s December 2025 solicitation for white men to file discrimination complaints, we revisited our prior research to see what is known about discrimination against white people and, in particular, what is known about white and white male discrimination charges registered with the EEOC.

As part of our research, the EEOC gave us access to discrimination charges submitted to the agency and state Fair Employment Practices Agencies from 2012 to 2016. By law, all U.S. employment discrimination claims must be submitted to the EEOC, or state agencies with equivalent roles, prior to any legal actions.

While the EEOC has a history of sharing its data with researchers stretching back to the 1970s, the EEOC stopped sharing current and historical data with researchers in 2016. As a result, we do not have any data on discrimination complaints after 2016. Judging by the EEOC’s yearly reports, the basic patterns have not changed much in the interim.

White men already file complaints

When we looked at all sex- and race-based discrimination charges received by the EEOC, unsurprisingly we found that men are much less likely than women to file sex-based discrimination charges. But white men do file about 10% of sex discrimination complaints. While Black, Hispanic and Asian male employees are more likely to file racial discrimination complaints, white men file about 9% of such complaints.

In the same study, when we compared legal charges filed with the EEOC to national survey data, we found that percentages submitting a legal complaint to the EEOC roughly correspond to the percentages of survey-reported experiences of discrimination at work. Together, these two findings suggest that white people generally, and white men in particular, were already filing employment discrimination charges.

Second, we did a deeper dive on sexual harassment charges. We found that while white men were 46% of the labor force, they filed 11% of sexual harassment charges and 11% of all other charges, most commonly tied to disability and age.

The general pattern is that, while white men already file discrimination charges, they are less likely to experience employment discrimination than other groups.

The risk of filing complaints

Charges filed with the EEOC can result in two types of benefits to the charging party: monetary settlements and mandated changes in workplace practices.

White men who filed sexual harassment charges received some benefit 21% of the time, lower than white women, at 29%. That’s also lower than Black women, 23%, and higher than Black men, 19%. The EEOC already receives discrimination charges from white men and, at least for sexual harassment, treats them similarly to other groups.

Most people who submit a discrimination charge do so to improve their employment experience and those of their co-workers. But submitting these claims to the EEOC or a state Fair Employment Practices Agency is a high-risk, low-reward act.

We found that, at least for sexual harassment, employers responded to white men’s complaints in much the same way as to other groups. White men who filed sexual harassment discrimination charges lost their job 68% of the time and experienced employer retaliation at about the same rate. Retaliation can include firing but also other forms of harassment at work, such as abusive supervision and close monitoring by human resource departments.

We found this pattern of employer retaliation and worker firings for all demographic groups that file any type of discrimination complaint. White men who file discrimination charges receive the same harsh treatment from their employers as any other group.

Urging more white men to submit discrimination complaints based on the perceived unfairness of DEI practices, as the EEOC has done, is likely to lead to job loss and retaliation from employers.

What will happen?

It’s possible that EEOC chair Lucas’ call for more discrimination charges from white men will increase the number of filings.

This is exactly what happened after 2012 when the EEOC ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of sex discrimination also protected LGBTQ workers from sexual-orientation and gender-identity discrimination.

More concerning is the EEOC defining employer efforts to prevent discrimination and create inclusive workplaces as discrimination against white men.

In the end, all workers want to be treated fairly and with respect. Employer efforts to create such workplaces should be supported. It would be a better use of EEOC resources to support companies’ efforts to create such workplaces.

When this research was completed the authors received funding from the W.K.Kellogg Foundation, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Labor.

When this research was completed the author received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Labor.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The recent FBI search of the Fulton County, Georgia, elections facility and the seizure of election-related materials pursuant to a warrant has attracted concern for what it might mean for future elections.

What if a determined executive branch used federal law enforcement to seize election materials to sow distrust in the results of the 2026 midterm congressional elections?

Courts and states should be wary when an investigation risks commandeering the evidence needed to ascertain election results. That is where a largely forgotten Supreme Court case from the 1970s matters, a case about an Indiana recount that sets important guardrails to prevent post-election chaos in federal elections.

Congress’s constitutionally-delegated role

The case known as Roudebush v. Hartke arose from a razor-thin U.S. Senate race in Indiana in 1970. The ballots were cast on Election Day, and the state counted and verified the results, a process known as the “canvass.” The state certified R. Vance Hartke as the winner. Typically, the certified winner presents himself to Congress, which accepts his certificate of election and seats the member to Congress.

The losing candidate, Richard L. Roudebush, invoked Indiana’s recount procedures. Hartke then sued to stop the recount. He argued that a state recount would intrude on the power of each chamber, the Senate or the House of Representatives, to judge its own elections under Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution. That clause gives each chamber the sole right to judge elections. No one else can interfere with that power.

Hartke worried that a recount might result in ballots that could be altered or destroyed, which would diminish the ability of the Senate to engage in a meaningful examination of the ballots if an election contest arose.

But the Supreme Court rejected that argument.

It held that a state recount does not “usurp” the Senate’s authority because the Senate remains free to make the ultimate judgment of who won the election. The recount can be understood as producing new information – in this case, an additional set of tabulated results – without stripping the Senate of its final say.

Furthermore, there was no evidence that a recount board would be “less honest or conscientious in the performance of its duties” than the original precinct boards that tabulated the election results the first time around, the court said.

A state recount, then, is perfectly acceptable, as long as it does not impair the power of Congress.

In the Roudebush decision, the court recognized that states run the mechanics of congressional elections as part of their power under Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution to set the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives,” subject to Congress’s own regulation.

At the same time, each chamber of Congress judges its own elections, and courts and states should not casually interfere with that core constitutional function. They cannot engage in behaviors that usurp Congress’s constitutionally-delegated role in elections.

Evidence can be power

The Fulton County episode is legally and politically fraught not because federal agents executed a warrant – courts authorize warrants all the time – but because of what was seized: ballots, voting machines, tabulation equipment and related records.

Those items are not just evidence. They are also the raw materials for the canvassing of votes and certification of winners. They provide the foundation for audits and recounts. And, importantly, they are necessary for any later inquiry by Congress if a House or Senate race becomes contested.

That overlap creates a structural problem: If a federal investigation seizes, damages, or destroys election materials, it can affect who has the power to assess the election. It can also inject uncertainty into the chain of custody: Because ballots are removed from absentee envelopes or transferred from Election Day precincts to county election storage facilities, states ensure the ballots cast on Election Day are the only ones tabulated, and that ballots are not lost or destroyed in the process.

Disrupting this chain of custody by seizing ballots, however, can increase, rather than decrease, doubts about the reliability of election results.

That is the modern version of “usurpation.”

From my perspective as an election law scholar, Roudebush is a reminder that courts should be skeptical of executive actions that shift decisive control over election proof away from the institutions the Constitution expects to do the judging.

Congress doesn’t just adjudicate contests

There is another institutional reason courts should be cautious about federal actions that seize or compromise election materials: The House already has a long-running capacity to observe state election administration in close congressional races.

The Committee on House Administration maintains an Election Observer Program. That program deploys credentialed House staff to be on-site at local election facilities in “close or difficult” House elections. That staff observes casting, processing, tabulating and canvassing procedures.

The program exists for a straightforward reason: If the House may be called upon to judge a contested election under Article I, Section 5, it has an institutional interest in understanding how the election was administered and how records were handled.

That observation function is not hypothetical. The committee has publicly announced deployments of congressional observers to watch recount processes in tight House races throughout the country.

I saw it take place first-hand in 2020. The House deployed election observers in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District to oversee a recount of a congressional election that was ultimately certified by a margin of just six votes.

Democratic and Republican observers from the House politely observed, asked questions, and kept records – but never interfered with the state election apparatus or attempted to lay hands on election equipment or ballots.

Congress has not rejected a state’s election results since 1984, and for good reason. States now have meticulous recordkeeping, robust chain-of-custody procedures for ballots, and multiple avenues of verifying the accuracy of results. And with Congress watching, state results are even more trustworthy.

When federal investigations collide with election materials

Evidence seizures can adversely affect election administration. So courts and states ought to be vigilant, enforcing guardrails that help respect institutional boundaries.

To start, any executive branch effort to unilaterally inject itself into a state election apparatus should face meaningful scrutiny. Unlike the Fulton County warrant, which targeted an election nearly six years old, warrants that interrupt ongoing state processes in an election threaten to usurp the constitutional role of Congress. And executive action cannot proceed if it impinges upon the ultimate ability of Congress to judge the election of its members.

In the exceedingly unlikely event that a court issues a warrant, a court should not permit seizure of election equipment and ballots during a state’s ordinary post-election canvass. Instead, inspection of items, provision of copies of election materials, or orders to preserve evidence are more tailored means to accomplish the same objectives. And courts should establish clear chain-of-custody procedures in the event that evidence must be preserved for a future seizure in a federal investigation.

The fear driving much public commentary about the danger to midterm elections is not merely that election officials will be investigated or that evidence would be seized. It is that investigations could be used as a pretense to manage or, worse, disrupt elections – chilling administrators, disorganizing record keeping or manufacturing doubt by disrupting custody of ballots and systems.

Roudebush provides a constitutional posture that courts should adopt, a recognition that some acts can usurp the power of Congress to judge elections. That will provide a meaningful constraint on the executive ahead of the 2026 election and reduce the risk of intervention in an ongoing election.

Derek T. Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

On Feb. 7, 2026, Chasity Verret Martinez won a special election to fill a vacant seat in the Louisiana House. That’s an outcome that might not mean very much to people outside of the state or even outside her Baton Rouge-area district.

But Martinez is a Democrat who took 62% of the vote in a district that had given Donald Trump a 13-percentage-point victory in the 2024 presidential race. And her win came a week after Democrats seized a Texas Senate district that had supported Trump even more strongly – a result that immediately triggered concern in Republican circles.

Because fewer people turn out for special elections, they’re considered an early predictor of partisan enthusiasm heading into regularly scheduled elections. And with the 2026 midterm elections less than nine months away, analysts are already scrambling for indications of the likely outcome.

As a political scientist who studies congressional elections, I’m interested in the question of whether special elections can really tell us which way the political winds are currently blowing.

Democrats, of course, are hoping for a “blue wave” like they rode in 2018, when they picked up 40 House seats and won a majority in that chamber, while Republicans want to hang on to the very slim margins they have in both the House and Senate.

In the 2026 election cycle, as in previous ones, prognosticators and political professionals are looking to the outcomes of these intermittent races at various levels of government as a gauge of how voters are feeling about the two parties. And the results from the first 15 months of the second Trump administration appear to spell very bad news for the Republicans.

Setting a baseline

Since Election Day 2024, 88 special elections featuring candidates from both major parties have taken place for institutions including state legislatures and the U.S. House.

When analyzing the results of these races, it’s important to have figures to compare them to. After all, a Democrat just barely squeaking by in a state legislative race may not look very impressive on its face – but if that race took place in the rural heart of a red state, it could raise hackles among Republicans.

Most political analysts agree that the best available comparison point for special elections are the results for the most recent presidential election in that same district. There are a few reasons for this.

The nationalization of party politics means there are few members of Congress representing states or districts that voted for the other party for president. So the best comparison is to the only truly national election in the U.S.

Second, using presidential results creates the same baseline for all races. By comparing special election results to the prior election environment, all the special election results get compared to the same standard.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, recent midterm elections have typically served as a referendum on the party in power, particularly the president. In trying to measure how voters are reacting to Trump’s second term, it makes sense to measure their behavior against the last time Trump was on the ballot.

Are special elections predictive?

With this baseline in mind, it’s easy to compare the results of special elections in particular districts to the results of the last presidential election in that same district.

In the 2022 cycle, for example, Democrats running in special elections underperformed President Joe Biden’s 2020 results in their districts by about 4 percentage points on average, which translated into a 3-percentage-point loss nationwide in U.S. House races in the November 2022 midterms and the loss of their majority in the chamber.

Conversely, in 2018 – like this year, a midterm following a Trump election – Democrats bested Republicans by 8 percentage points in November, after overperforming Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margins in special elections throughout the previous two years by 9 percentage points on average.

The 2024 cycle is a clear exception to this pattern of regular elections closely following special election results: Prior to the presidential election, Democrats outperformed in special elections by an average of 4 percentage points but ended up losing nationally by 3 percentage points in November.

Like special elections, midterm contests tend to turn out fewer but more engaged voters than presidential years. Therefore, it may be that special elections are more predictive of midterm results than presidential cycles. At any rate, if previous midterm outcomes are any guide, the numbers being posted by Democrats in special elections so far in the 2026 cycle are impossible to ignore.

On average, they’re running ahead of Harris’s 2024 margins by a whopping 13 percentage points. That’s better than they did in 2018, when they ultimately picked up 40 seats in the House and seven governorships across the country.

What’s different about specials?

Democrats, however, may not want to pop the champagne corks just yet. Many roadblocks remain in their quest to take back control of Congress. For one thing, the U.S. Senate map remains a difficult one for Democrats. Even if they end up creating a 2018-like election environment with an unpopular president, many Senate contests are taking place in solidly red states.

It’s also always worth bearing in mind that there’s no telling how the events of the next nine months might reshape public opinion.

And special elections, while useful metrics, are far from perfect barometers of public opinion. They take place at different times, and could be just as reflective of hyperlocal factors, such as flawed candidates, as they are of nationalized partisan conditions.

Special elections tend to have far lower turnout than regular midterm or presidential contests. It’s also difficult to tell whether overperformance is due to highly motivated partisans or persuasion of independents and voters from the other party.

Using all the tools available

Still, special elections do have key advantages over traditional polling. Although polls do their best to approximate voters’ political attitudes, elections reveal these attitudes through voters’ actual, observed behavior – exactly the type of behavior that analysts are trying to predict in November.

Generally, this is preferable to asking a hypothetical in opinion polls, which are getting more difficult than ever to do well.

In the end, special elections are just one piece of the prediction puzzle. But the other puzzle pieces are also spelling out potential bad news for the GOP.

The generic ballot, a standard polling question that asks voters’ intent to vote for one party or the other in November without naming specific candidates, has the GOP about 6 percentage points behind the Democrats. Trump’s approval rating, meanwhile, continues to hover below 40%.

There’s no telling for sure whether these indicators will turn out to be truly predictive until November. But all of them should be sounding alarm bells for Republicans.

Charlie Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation