Politics Always Finds A Way

Consistency is a praised but deeply flawed virtue in modern American politics, as sometimes it takes a willingness to change to solve complex problems. One of Maryland’s two Democratic senators, Chris Van Hollen, is proof that modifying positions can be helpful in a rapidly changing world. Over a thirty-year career that has taken him from Annapolis and the Maryland State Senate to the upper chamber of Congress, Van Hollen has earned the rare reputation of a man who approaches policy not as something that is set in stone, but as a set of tools that can and will be changed alongside shifting American views. That learning and adjusting has turned him from a cautious institutionalist into one of the Senate’s most effective, if quiet, progressive practitioners.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of economics. As the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee in the early 2010s, Chris Van Hollen often clashed with his Republican counterpart, Paul Ryan, over ways to reduce the deficit and pursued a technocratic “Grand Bargain” that combined targeted spending cuts with revenue increases. However, the economic devastation of the 2020 pandemic shattered his faith in austerity. In the Senate, Mr Van Hollen changed his view on government borrowing. Instead of worrying about controlling the national debt, he became a strong supporter of heavy government spending. He voted for massive financial rescue packages and government funding to build up national industries. He argued that the damage caused by not investing enough money into public services like healthcare, infrastructure, and schools was a much bigger danger to the country than a rising national debt. Hollen’s willingness to change is also visible in his approach to Middle Eastern diplomacy. For decades, Van Hollen was a reliable steward of Washington’s bipartisan, unconditional support for Israel, a position that locked up his 2016 Senate primary victory. But the humanitarian fallout from the October 7th attacks, and his own visits to the region in 2024 and 2025, triggered a profound shift in his thinking. A leading critic of American policy, he demanded that the next Democratic president recognize a Palestinian state and condition offensive military aid, which put him far ahead of his party’s traditional guard. Van Hollen also has recently criticised Zionist perspectives that sought to expand the borders of Israel, such as that of Elise Stefanik, President Trump’s nominee for UN Ambassador. Hollen’s criticism of right-wing religious Zionism and support for peace in the region is also evident in his support of Peggy Flanagan and Abdul ElSayed, two Democratic candidates for Senate in Minnesota and Michigan respectively. Both of these candidates share Hollen’s anti-Netanyahu and pro-peace mentality, emphasizing Hollen’s change in his approach to Middle Eastern diplomacy. While this pivot alienated establishment Zionist leaders back home, Van Hollen defends it as an empirical necessity. The failure of the two-state paradigm demanded a new legislative hypothesis. To his critics, this flexibility is just political opportunism, and Van Hollen is simply trying to keep up with a Democratic base that’s been moving to the left. Due to recent problems facing Americans such as increasing cost of living caused by the war with Iran, many voters abandoned the old political center and Americans have become more left or right leaning. Since Donald Trump’s Republican Party is moving to the right, the Democratic base has to move to the left to survive. To his allies, this is a rare kind of intellectual honesty, as Van Hollen has defended his position by describing his policy shifts as simply changing opinions in a changing world. In a political culture that prizes performative outrage and unyielding stagnation, Van Hollen’s career is a compelling case study, showing that in a complex, fastmoving economy the most effective legislators are not those who guard a static trench, but those who have the agility to retreat, reassess, and reform.

Ayaan Alam Samad

student in King’s College School in London.

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