Ronald Pestritto’s article on the Trump Administration’s efforts to tame the administrative state helpfully offers what he calls a “brief snapshot,” focusing primarily on the administration’s project to reshape administrative law to buttress presidential control over the bureaucracy through regulatory review and firing authority. His longer Provocation offers an exceptional and more thorough introduction to these and other issues, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand why the administrative state presents such a fundamental challenge to American constitutionalism.
The core principle that animates Pestritto’s article and Provocation is the consent of the governed—a principle enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a prerequisite of any just government. According to the Founders, our natural equality means that we cannot be governed by another without our consent. To accept government without consent would be tantamount to admitting that there are rulers who are so naturally superior that they may rule us against our will. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote just before the celebration of the Declaration’s 50th anniversary that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
History, as it’s understood in most Western countries, often misses important chapters that leave critical gaps in the story of how modern countries came to be. In Latin America in the 20th century, episodes of guerilla warfare and juntas are acknowledged, along with portrayals of a drug war, usually depicted through popular culture.
What is left out, however, is the clandestine involvement of American intelligence agencies, including the CIA and DEA, and how their drug operations were intimately tied to the Latin American anticommunist brigades funded by Western capital throughout the Cold War, and the brutal liquidation of the Left these narco-terrorists often carried out.
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” — Stephen Miller to Jake Tapper on CNN, Jan. 5, 2026.
“He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. Such a saying may sound hard; but, after all, that’s how it is.” — Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf
“The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical... Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit — i.e., in the tendency of nations to expand — a manifestation of their vitality.” — Benito Mussolini in The Doctrine of Fascism
Following a statement from the board responsible for the Adelaide Festival organisation and all Adelaide Writers’ Week events, The Australia Institute is withdrawing its support and sponsored events from this year’s literary festival.
The Australia Institute has valued being part of discussions at the event, which in the past have promoted bravery, freedom of expression and the exchange of ideas.
Censoring or cancelling authors is not in the spirit of an open and free exchange of ideas.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Maduro No Más: Venezuela’s Future After His Capture ft. Josh Treviño & R.J. Pestritto | The Roundtable Ep. 299
Nicolás Maduro is in U.S. custody, pleading not guilty to federal drug and weapons charges. What does his capture mean for Venezuela, American foreign policy, and the global order? And how does this moment connect to the domestic fight over America’s administrative state? Josh Treviño of AFPI unpacks the geopolitical aftermath of Maduro’s arrest, and R.J. Pestritto of Hillsdale College discusses his latest publication about the rise of America’s unelected bureaucracy: Government by the Unelected: How It Happened, and How It Might Be Tamed.
In episode two of PALMed Off, host Morgan Harrington travels to Leeton, New South Wales, a town that’s become a safe haven for some of the estimated 7,000 people who have ‘disengaged’ from the PALM scheme. We find out what leads people to make the difficult decision to walk away from their employer and speak to some of the community members trying to help them.
PALMed Off is a special four-part series of Follow the Money exploring the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, an Australian Government guestworker program that could be putting people from nine Pacific Island nations and Timor-Leste at risk of modern slavery.
The interviews for this podcast were recorded between June and August 2025.
Host: Morgan Harrington, Research Manager, The Australia Institute // @mhharrington
Interviewees: Ken Dachi (Welcoming Australia), Paul Maytom (Leeton Multicultural Support Group), Ian Bull (member of St. Peter’s Anglican congregation, Leeton), (Waskam) Emelda Davis (ASSI-Port Jackson Chair), anonymous former PALM workers
Scripting and production support: Stephen Long, Senior Fellow & Contributing Editor, the Australia Institute
In the fourth and final episode of PALMed Off, host Morgan Harrington canvases some of the proposed solutions to the problems facing the PALM scheme, including an amnesty for disengaged workers and ensuring that everyone working in Australia has the right to leave their employer.
PALMed Off is a special four-part series of Follow the Money exploring the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, an Australian Government guestworker program that could be putting people from nine Pacific Island nations and Timor-Leste at risk of modern slavery.
The interviews for this podcast were recorded between June and August 2025.
Host: Morgan Harrington, Research Manager, The Australia Institute // @mhharrington
Interviewees: Ken Dachi (Welcoming Australia), Dr Lindy Kanan (researcher), Dr Matt Withers (ANU), (Waskam) Emelda Davis (ASSI-Port Jackson Chair), Thomas Costa (Unions NSW), anonymous former PALM workers
Scripting and production support: Stephen Long, Senior Fellow & Contributing Editor, the Australia Institute
The theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested is playing Eyes Wide Shut. The movie is a revival. Everything is a revival when nothing gets resolved.
I am driving around Dallas the day after Christmas. The Texas Theatre is near Oswald’s residence, an unassuming home with a sign offering tours. I decline: I came to see the graves of Bonnie and Clyde and the Ewing Building where they shot JR. I can only handle so much crime at once. But Dallas never cared about that.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
R.J. Pestritto’s “How the Trump Administration Is Taming the Administrative State” argues that President Donald Trump’s attacks on independent agencies seek to restore democratic accountability to the administrative state. For once, I find that Professor Pestritto has not gone as far as he could have. The fight over the removal of federal commissioners is only part of a larger campaign to free the executive from the misguided “reforms” of the Watergate era. The goal is not just to render the independent agencies democratically accountable, but more broadly to restore the “energy in the executive” that is the “definition of good government,” as Alexander Hamilton declared in Federalist 70.
In episode three of PALMed Off, host Morgan Harrington hears how a lack of affordable medical care can have dire consequences for PALM visa holders and discusses the problems faced by women who fall pregnant whilst working in Australia.
PALMed Off is a special four-part series of Follow the Money exploring the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, an Australian Government guestworker program that could be putting people from nine Pacific Island nations and Timor-Leste at risk of modern slavery.
The interviews for this podcast were recorded between June and August 2025.
1800RESPECT is the national domestic, family and sexual violence counselling, information and support service. Call 1800 737 732, text 0458 737 732, chat online or video call via their website.
Host: Morgan Harrington, Research Manager, The Australia Institute // @mhharrington
Interviewees: Ken Dachi (Welcoming Australia), Dr Lindy Kanan (researcher), Dr Matt Withers (The Australian National University), (Waskam) Emelda Davis (ASSI-Port Jackson Chair), Thomas Costa (Unions NSW), anonymous former PALM workers
When I started trying to write scholarly articles/books, it was SO hard. Writing doesn’t come easily to me—it never has—but this was unusually hard. I always assumed that some day scholarly writing would come easily to me. It hasn’t.
The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was barely a month old when the president ran a successful one-hour military operation, with no American casualties, that captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.
Most of the responses thus far have been one-dimensional, for better or worse: “Trump grabbed a wanted narcoterrorist cartel leader to stand trial.” “He’s starting another war for oil to help his capitalist cronies.” “He’s getting us into another war of choice.” “He’s betrayed his base and done a regime change as a tool of the (insert hidden hand here).” These arguments are simple and easy to understand. They range from the politically and legally tidy to stale anti-imperialist Marxism and paranoid isolationism, which often sound like the same thing, to the ragebait trolling of the gullible. But they all fail to understand the full gravity of the administration’s accomplishment in Venezuela.
In capturing Maduro, Trump has removed a key pillar that, if played wisely, could compromise the web of entangling alliances of many of our most dangerous adversaries.
Operation Absolute Resolve, paralleling the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran, just might have forestalled Communist China’s expected invasion of Taiwan. The synchronicity is perfect. Maduro joins Iran’s mullahs in a pas de deux to the bottom, while the Cuban Communist regime, constantly suckling at a wealthy patron’s teat for 65 years, now faces a fatal weaning.
CEOs at FTSE 100 companies in the UK will enjoy an average pay of £4.4 million this year, according to new research from the High Pay Centre, which means they’ll be paid an entire year’s wage for the median full-time worker in just 29 hours. Polling the public has regularly shown that a majority of […]
Everyone remembers the famous warning Benjamin Franklin reportedly gave Elizabeth Willing Powel as he and his fellow framers left the Constitutional Convention’s final session: they’d created “a republic, if you can keep it.” What’s less understood is that we didn’t.
Ronald J. Pestritto’s new Provocation from the Center for the American Way of Life brings the welcome news that valiant efforts have begun to restore the lost republican framework that those great men designed. But since most Americans believe we still live under the regime forged in Philadelphia, what’s equally valuable in Pestritto’s essay is his lucid reminder of just how we squandered the brilliant contrivance that James Madison shepherded through the Convention: the self-governing republic formed, as Alexander Hamilton wrote, by “reflection and choice” rather than by “accident and force,” arguably the finest achievement of the Western Enlightenment.
In PALMed Off, a special series of Follow the Money, we explore the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, a program that allows people from nine Pacific Island nations and Timor Leste to work in Australia on a special temporary visa. The Australian Government argues the program is a win for the workers, their home communities and Australian employers. But PALM visa holders are subjected to restrictions that no other worker in Australia – temporary or permanent – have to put up with, and this has led to concerns that the program is facilitating modern slavery in Australia.
In the first episode of this four-part series, host Morgan Harrington speaks with people from Vanuatu who have worked in Australia under the PALM scheme and considers what it really means for Australia’s relationships with Pacific Island nations.
The interviews for this podcast were recorded between June and August 2025.
Host: Morgan Harrington, Research Manager, The Australia Institute // @mhharrington
Interviewees: Enoch Takaua (ecotourism business operator), Thomas Costa (Unions NSW), Dr James Cockayne (NSW Anti-slavery Commissioner), (Waskam) Emelda Davis (ASSI-Port Jackson Chair), Dr Matt Withers (ANU), Murielle Meltenoven (Commissioner, Vanuatu Department of Labour & Employment Services), anonymous former PALM workers
The international conversation about social democracy is quite focused on electoral sociology: What blocks of voters support social democratic parties? Can parties craft new electoral coalitions between the working-class, public-sector workers and even professionals? Do these coalitions undermine the parties’ commitment to economic redistribution by favouring more middle-class issues?
The conversation about social democracy in Canada has had much less to say about which voting blocs or electoral coalitions the NDP is pursuing or ought to pursue. After the near complete desertion of its electorate in the 2025 election, it is crucial to ask what coalition of supporters the federal NDP has been able to attract over the past couple of decades, what challengers it faces in retaining those supporters, and what tensions exist within that coalition. We pay particular attention to working class voters. They have historically been an important voting bloc for the NDP. The supposed desertion of the working class from the NDP to the Conservatives has also been an effective trope for political opponents making the case for the NDP’s loss of relevance.
The discussion below draws on a number of recent analyses we have conducted on the relationship of socio-economic class to voting behaviour in Canada over the past half century, relying on the Canadian Election Study. We emphasize that the NDP has some cards to play to reconnect with working class voters, especially around redistribution and economic populism.
This special edition of Perspectives Journal poses the question: “Canadian social democracy at a crossroads?” This framing suggests only presently has Canadian social democracy arrived at such a fork in the road. Yet the history of other social democratic parties in the Global North, including that of the CCF-NDP, points to other periods where other forks in the road appeared, and consequential political choices made. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, socialist and labour parties were established around the world with the goal of the socialist transformation of society. Throughout the latter 20th century, this transformative vision largely disappeared. Social democratic political parties that survived during this period no longer sought the whole transformation of society and instead pursued a pragmatic management of capitalism. The consequence for social democracy, in changing its pursuits, has become the contemporary decline in working-class support, declining leadership and representation of people from working-class backgrounds, and the weakening of once firm relationships with trade unions. (Rennwald 2020, 3). The CCF-NDP historical experience is not unique among these global historical trends for social democracy.
As the post-Second World War liberal international order gives way to a right-wing reactionary internationalism, the task of reimagining social democratic foreign policy and a progressive internationalism is more urgent than ever.
Canadian socialists have certainly experienced a different foreign policy trajectory than contemporary left-wing and centre-left parties around the world. While today’s German SDP takes a zeitenwende towards increased militarism, reacting to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, left-wing governments in Latin America, such as Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay look to a new multilateralism. Through this multilateralism, countries in the Global South have demanded respect for international law in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, but Canada’s foreign policymakers have lagged as they scramble to figure out their continued dependency on a far-right US government.
The 2022 Parliamentary Supply-and-Confidence Agreement (SACA) between Justin Trudeau’s Liberal minority government and the New Democratic Party (NDP) under the leadership of Jagmeet Singh was a watershed moment for Canada’s social democratic party. The party entered the agreement with two strategic goals: (1) to implement legislation aligned with its ideological agenda, and (2) to present itself as a “legible alternative” (Massé & Beland 2024, 499) to the governing Liberals on the progressive side of Canadian politics. However, the political communications deployed by Singh during the SACA was marked by incoherence, undermining the NDP’s legibility as a viable left-wing governing option. The 2025 federal election results confirm the agreement’s electoral failure: the NDP won only 7 seats with 6.3 percent of the vote.
Canada’s 2025 federal election delivered a painful result for the New Democratic Party. Entering the campaign with 24 seats, the NDP ultimately won just 7 and lost Official Party status in the House of Commons for the first time since 1993. What accounts for this outcome and could it have been avoided? How does it compare to other electoral ebbs throughout the party’s history? What are the NDP’s prospects, and to what extent does the 2025 result risk consolidating a US-style duopoly between Conservative and Liberal parties for Canadian federal politics in the longer term? With these and other related questions in mind, this essay will offer a broad assessment of the 2025 federal election and its aftermath, and several more general observations about the NDP. As the party conducts its leadership race and debates the path forward, my modest aim for this assessment is to engage some of the key issues and questions raised by the 2025 NDP campaign, beginning with a broad survey of the election itself.
Today, the concept of “national security” is a staple of our political vocabulary, common in everyday language and entrenched in official institutions such as the National Security Council. But it was not always thus. Total Defense by Andrew Preston, a Canadian who is now a history professor at the University of Virginia after nearly 20 years on the faculty of Cambridge University, traces the rise of this concept and how it displaced earlier notions of national defense during the course of the 20th century. It is an important history, and one with underappreciated implications.
The book’s subtitle—The New Deal and the Invention of National Security—distills its thesis: the concept of national security as we know it today (involving military and foreign policy matters not limited to territorial defense) coalesced during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Before the New Deal era, “national security” was used relatively rarely, and often to refer to something more like economic and political stability or, in the 19th century, national unity versus sectional interests. But in the 20th century, a new vocabulary was required to grapple with increasingly grave foreign threats that did not involve the imminent invasion of U.S. territory. Such a vocabulary was largely lacking in World War I, but the term “national security” emerged in the years leading up to World War II.
We no longer live in a republican regime, properly speaking. We are instead governed by a class of administrators whose claim to rule is based on expertise rather than the consent of the governed. As Ronald J. Pestritto argues, President Trump’s administration has embarked “on the most extensive project since at least the 1930s to reclaim executive power from unelected bureaucrats and judges.” It’s hard to disagree with Pestritto’s observation that, in a more constitutionally sound world, we would not have to rely on the executive branch alone to do this heavy lifting. But as the saying goes, here we are. Whatever one might think of the current occupant of the White House, he is elected by the people—which is more than can be said of federal bureaucrats and judges. Ironically, those who complain most loudly about assaults on “our democracy” are least committed to restoring it.
Foreword: This is not a typical Stained Glass Woman article.
While it talks about a few identities that are much more common among trans people than they are in the general public, it is not, directly, about anything to do with being trans.
While the Federal New Democratic Party could never rely on a majority of union members’ votes, that support now appears as elusive as ever. Indeed, formal ties between the NDP and the labour movement are considerably weaker than they were at the time of the party’s birth in 1961. The crisis of social democratic electoralism, the impact of campaign finance reform, and ongoing concerns about the party’s electoral viability have all contributed to a weakening of the union-party link.
However, the loosening of ties between labour and the NDP has not shifted the landscape of labour politics in the direction of a more left-wing brand of working-class politics as some on the labour left had hoped. Rather, the opposite has occurred, as evidenced by the clear emergence of fair-weather and transactional alliances with Liberals and Conservatives as the main alternative to traditional partisan NDP links in the realm of electoral politics.
History and Institutional Links
When the NDP was founded in 1961, it was heralded as the political voice of Canada’s labour movement. Born from a partnership between the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the party’s architects envisioned the NDP would realign Canadian politics along a left-right axis and unite workers under a single political banner. Yet, despite the initial fanfare, the relationship between the NDP and unions was never as strong as many assumed—and in recent years, it has only grown weaker.
29 December 2025: The Free Palestine movement will rally outside of the State Library of Victoria on Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 12pm to oppose Israeli violations and protest the visit of Israeli President, Isaac Herzog to Australia.
Ahmed Al Ahmed recounts how he disarmed one of the gunmen in Bondi Beach terrorist attack ABC | Isabella Ross and Shannon Corvo | 29 December 2025 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-29/bondi-hero-ahmed-al-ahmed-recounts-story-of-wrestling-gunman/106183900 Ahmed Al Ahmed, who disarmed one of the shooters during the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, has spoken further of his ordeal. The 43-year-old told CBS News he was determined […]
A just transition can remake Australia if we choose to think bigger Peter Hansford A “just energy transition” seeks to balance risks and benefits fairly,…
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From public good to corporate enterprise: The financialisation of universities (Part 2) John H Howard A dominant challenge for universities now is the expectation that…
From neoclassical economics to the masking of it with New-Keynesian economics Tyrone Keynes Economists often begin by making assumptions that bear little resemblance to reality.…
What caused both the Great Depression and the 2008 crisis? Steve Keen Mainstream economists completely missed what caused both the Great Depression and the 2008…
The China dependency nobody talks about: How smart countries build dumb export structures Darren Quinn Part 4 of my series on vulnerability-based monetary sovereignty Here’s…
Economic myths Mark Diesendorf The dominant economic system, capitalism, has the goal of generating profit through private ownership and control of the means of production.…
The military-industrial-complex (MIC) is unique in its ability to pull untold flows of tax revenue into “defensive” infrastructure that benefits no one other than the private sector manufacturing and investing in it. The machine, which perpetuates itself through an incestuous milieu that lobbies for war and defense spending, wages psychological warfare on citizens and engages in corrupt backroom deals, has risen to once unthinkable heights of influence and power since Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned Americans of its growing presence in 1961.
