The Rational Nationalist

Why would a political party support a candidate who's less likely to win an election?
Because winning the election isn't the only consideration. Party leaders and political activists also care about what their candidates will do once elected.
In this episode of The Rational Nationalist, Lee Ellis examines the trade-off between electability and political loyalty—and why a weaker candidate may sometimes offer party leadership more influence than a stronger, more independent one.
We explore:
Why independently popular politicians have greater freedom to defy party leadership.
How primaries create incentives for ideological conformity.
The difference between partisan voting records and actual obedience to leadership.
A simple probability model for comparing a candidate's electoral prospects with their expected value to party leaders.
How political dependence can shape the relationship between elected officials and the people who helped put them in office.
Ultimately, the episode asks whether political movements are trying to elect the most effective representatives—or the representatives they can most easily influence.

We measure success because we need to know whether we're making progress. But what happens when the measurement becomes more important than the goal?
In this episode of The Rational Nationalist, Lee Ellis explores how metrics can reshape the incentives, priorities, and even values of the people using them.
From politicians celebrating legislation without examining its results to journalists chasing page views, individuals competing for wealth and status, and policymakers navigating the Cold War, the same problem keeps appearing: once we establish a scoreboard, people start playing to win.
How do we distinguish genuine progress from impressive-looking numbers? And how can we hold institutions accountable without encouraging them to pursue the wrong objectives?
This week's episode examines how the way we keep score can change the game itself.

Americans increasingly experience politics as a national struggle over everything—from presidential power and cultural disputes to issues that once would have been settled locally.
But nationalizing politics comes with a cost.
In this episode of The Rational Nationalist, Lee Ellis examines the relationship between democracy, political scale, and individual agency. Larger governments can provide greater resources, expertise, security, and economic coordination—but as political systems grow, each individual has less influence over the decisions that govern his life.
We look at how national partisanship increasingly shapes state and local politics, why one-size-fits-all policies often fail in a diverse country, and how federalism can combine the advantages of national cooperation with greater local self-government.
The larger question is simple: if democracy is supposed to allow people to determine their own futures, how many decisions really need to be made nationally?

In a healthy democracy, political parties are supposed to be instruments — means by which citizens pursue what they believe is the common good. But what happens when the party becomes the goal itself?
In this episode of The Rational Nationalist, Lee Ellis examines the relationship between national identity, partisan loyalty, and the shared “we” that democratic government requires. Parties can be useful tools for organizing disagreement, but when loyalty to the team overtakes loyalty to the broader polity, political competition becomes increasingly zero-sum.
The discussion explores polarization, tribalism, hardliners, constitutional limits, executive power, and the conditions under which democratic disagreement can remain productive rather than destructive.

Confidence is useful for a reason. When someone answers quickly and decisively, it often tells us something about how certain they are.
But what happens when confidence stops tracking knowledge?
This week on The Rational Nationalist, Lee Ellis examines the gap between what people know, how certain they feel, how certain they sound, and what everyone else ultimately believes. From ordinary overconfidence to deliberate manipulation and the “noble lie,” distorted confidence can give the least calibrated people a rhetorical advantage over more careful thinkers.
The episode concludes with a different problem: good leadership still requires decisiveness. How do we preserve epistemic humility without turning uncertainty into paralysis?

Why can someone who has almost everything remain miserable, while someone enduring hardship can still find contentment?
This week on The Rational Nationalist, Lee Ellis uses Maslow’s hierarchy as a starting point to examine the difference between material needs and the higher-order search for esteem, identity, and fulfillment. When self-worth depends on status and comparison, there may never be an “enough.” But gratitude, faith, and a more diversified sense of identity can provide alternatives to the endless pursuit of external validation.
The episode also explores how social identity can become a source of political radicalization when belonging, status, and purpose become concentrated in a single group.

Winning a conflict and securing a durable victory are not necessarily the same thing.
Defeat an opponent too weakly and they may believe they can simply try again. Humiliate them too thoroughly, however, and overturning the new order can become more important than their own self-interest.
This week on The Rational Nationalist, Lee Ellis explores the strategic cost of humiliation—from locker-room material and the Ender's Game problem to Reconstruction, postwar Germany, political identity, and the need to give defeated groups an off-ramp into a new social order.
The question isn't simply how to win. It's how to make the victory last.

We spend enormous amounts of time searching for the right answers without stopping to ask whether we're answering the right questions.
This week, Lee Ellis examines how emotion, complexity, and political strategy can cause us to substitute easier questions for the ones actually in front of us. Using the recent Texas Ten Commandments controversy as a case study, we look at the difference between whether government can do something and whether it should, how political actors create strategic confusion, why precedent matters, and how media simplification can obscure what is really being decided.
The Rational Nationalist is a structured, strategic look at politics, institutions, and human behavior.
Read The Rational Nationalist on Substack (leejellis.substack.com) and follow Lee Ellis on X at @EllisLee_lj.

Passing a law is easy. The costs begin when government tries to enforce it.
In this episode, Lee Ellis asks a more demanding question than whether a policy sounds good: Will it improve society enough to justify the police, courts, penalties, opportunity costs, and unintended consequences required to make it work?
From the difference between law and morality to the limits of coercion, the episode argues that legislation should be treated as a costly instrument—not as a symbolic declaration of good intentions.
Read the companion article, “The Cost of Legislation” https://leejellis.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-legislation?r=6rj2hz&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Francesca Hong entered Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary as the overwhelming prediction-market favorite. The final Marquette poll showed her far ahead of David Crowley. Crowley nevertheless returned to the race, consolidated institutional support, and won by roughly four-tenths of a percentage point.
What changed?
This episode introduces the idea of political activation energy: the combination of urgency and coordination that can turn passive preferences into actual votes. Hong’s late “Cancel Thanksgiving” controversy may have supplied an emotional trigger, while Governor Tony Evers’s endorsement of Crowley may have given opposition voters a place to consolidate.
The result cannot prove that either factor caused Crowley’s victory. But it provides a revealing case study in late-breaking voters, low-turnout primaries, polling uncertainty, and the fear that may be holding America’s political coalitions together.