I was seven years old, dressed up like Betsy Ross, and watching Philadelphia celebrate America’s bicentennial. I didn’t understand yet what institutions were, or why they mattered, or how fragile the trust between citizens and the people who govern them can be. But I understood the crowd. I understood the flags. I understood that something bigger than any one of us was being honored that day — and that it was worth protecting.
That memory has stayed with me longer than almost any other, and it’s become the quiet anchor of everything I write. I’m a political scientist, a freelance opinion columnist, and an Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, whose work sits at the intersection of civic accountability, political economy, and institutional power — the kind of power that, left unchecked, erodes the very trust that the 1976 crowd was celebrating.
My columns appear not only in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch but in many newspapers and media outlets across the country, inlcuding The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Orlando Sentinel, and The Tampa Bay Times.
What I Write About
My columns hold both parties accountable on their own terms, despite and perhaps because I consdier myself a tradional Reagan Republican. I’d rather write about a named official, a specific vote, or a real institution than argue in the abstract — accountability means naming names.
I write often about Missouri, where I live and work, but I follow national political developments just as closely, because the two are rarely as separate as they look.
One distinction runs through nearly all of my work: the difference between free-market capitalism and crony capitalism. The first rewards competition, transparency, and risk; the second rewards proximity to power. Confusing the two — treating every defense of markets as a defense of insiders, or every critique of insiders as an attack on markets — is, I think, one of the most consistent failures in American political writing today. I try not to make that mistake.
Principle, not party, is what guides my work. I try to hold every institution, every official, and every claim to the same standard regardless of which side of the aisle it comes from — because the moment accountability bends to loyalty, it stops being accountability at all. That’s the line I keep having to redraw, column after column, but it’s the one I won’t let blur.
“The trade Congress needs to make isn’t in any portfolio. It’s a vote.”
Where the Thinking Comes From
My thinking draws on writers, thinkers, and leaders who understood power from different angles. F.A. Hayek shaped how I think about markets and the limits of centralized control. Alexis de Tocqueville shaped how I think about civic life and the habits that hold a democracy together. Abraham Lincoln shaped how I think about principle under pressure, and what it costs to hold a country to its own founding words. And Dwight Eisenhower — an unlikely touchstone for a lot of political writers, but mine — shaped how I think about institutional power specifically: his warnings, delivered by a five-star general, not a skeptic of strength, still shape how I cover everything from congressional stock trading to corporate conflicts of interest to the slow bureaucratic failures that leave real people waiting on services they were promised. Power doesn’t have to be dramatic to be dangerous. Often it’s just unattended.
Beyond the Byline
You’ll find my work in opinion columns, in research-driven reporting, and on podcasts where I get to think out loud instead of just on the page. Some of my favorite pieces have been the quietest ones — a Memorial Day profile of a soldier, a Fourth of July column built on grief rather than anger, a Mother’s Day piece about a policy fight that mattered to families no one else was writing about.
I still think about that day on the streets of Philadelphia. Fifty years later, I’m still trying to help protect what that crowd was celebrating — one column, one investigation, one named institution at a time.
Organizations and Boards
- Missouri State Chair, Our Republican Legacy
- Member and Past Board Member, Principles First
- Board Member, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Alumni Leadership Board
- Member, Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri Gold Award Committee
Education
Bachelor of Science in Nursing, 1991, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Masters in Political Science, 2023, University of Nebraska-Omaha
For media inquiries, I can be reached at SchmidtOpinions@gmail.com.
schmidtopinions.com 