On May 17, 2026, Representative Jamie Raskin (MD-08) delivered the commencement address at Goucher College. These are his remarks as delivered:
Goucher College
Commencement Address
May 17, 2026
Happy birthday, Mr. President. He gave me a surprise party for his birthday. I didn’t know I was going to get this honorary doctorate. My cup runneth over. I don’t know if I deserve it but I will work every day to deserve it. Thank you, Mr. President.
Good morning, everybody. Good morning. President Devereaux, Board Chair Cindy Plavier-Truitt, distinguished Members of the Board of Trustees, Distinguished faculty members, retiring faculty—Professor Florence Martin and Dr. Amanda Woodson. Nalani Brown, Lisa Van Riper—beautiful speeches. Moms, Dads, uncles and aunts—I don’t think they have been recognized yet—brothers and sisters, best friends and cousins who might be here today. Residents of Maryland’s beautiful Eighth Congressional District who might be here today.
Hello Goucher Class of 2026. Hello. Thank you for honoring me by inviting me to address you for this modest two hours and 45 minutes today. Just kidding guys, don’t worry.
Congratulations on your success, which is the concept I want to explore today, perhaps in a kind of counter-cultural and provocative way. I have come to praise the success embodied in your studies and in your hard work. Your summer jobs and part-time jobs, your late night bull sessions, your arduous endeavors—victories and losses both—on the playing fields, your essays, your senior papers, your wonderful relationships, your first loves, your beautiful and wrenching relationships, your service on clubs and choirs and a cappella groups, your identification of lifelong mentors and scholars to emulate, your decision to take your place in the Modern Enlightenment, which continues to this day. I have come to praise you and your professors and all your supporters at this remarkable college on the spectacular, hard-won success surrounding and infusing this moment in our time. And I have come to tell you why I insist on using that word “success” to describe what you have done.
First, I want to start with a question. If you have a friend or roommate who told you that somebody has got the Midas Touch, would you understand them to be saying a positive thing in general? Raise your hand if you think that would be a positive thing that someone has got the Midas Touch.
I’m seeing most of the hands up there.
It’s usually intended indeed as a compliment, a positive statement. Does anybody take it to be a criticism? I have not heard that. Oh—well you’re getting ahead of me in my speech, then, Sir. The Goucher students are too smart.
In our culture, in our time, if you look it up online, the Midas Touch is a positive thing. What is fascinating is the Midas Touch has a meaning quite opposite to its original meaning, derived from the myth of King Midas. It all started when King Midas judged a music competition between Pan and Apollo and Midas chose Pan as the winner simply because he was his friend. And Apollo got mad and punished him for using personal favoritism by giving him donkey’s ears to dramatize that he’d acted like an ass in choosing a winner by favoritism instead of merit. Midas was forced to wear that hat in public to hide his ears and keep people from laughing at him all day. But after King Midas treated a drunken satyr with kindness, the god Dionysus was very moved and treated Midas to the granting of one wish. We all assume that King Midas would have wished for removal of his drooping donkey ears, but that was not his wish.
Despite being repeatedly warned away from it, King Midas insisted upon this seductively simple wish: he wished that everything that he touched would turn to gold.
When that wish came true immediately, he was ecstatic. That was, until he touched his roast beef, his potatoes, his wine and his wife and his daughter—and all of them turned into gold.
He could not eat or drink, he could not play with his children or kiss his wife because they had all turned into golden statues of themselves, and he couldn’t fall asleep on a hard golden bed with a hard golden pillow. Now desperate to get rid of the wish that turned his life into a golden curse, Midas begged Dionysus to reverse it. He agreed. He told Midas to wash his hands in the river, which he did, and the terrible magical curse was washed away. Midas asked if he could get his original wish back so he could get rid of the donkey’s ears, but at least in the original version, Dionysus made Midas keep the donkey’s ears as a reminder of his folly, first judging a competition in a biased way, and then placing gold above all other dreams, all other relationships and values, converting everything into an extension of his gilded obsessions and fantasies of unlimited wealth somehow conferring unlimited happiness.
Now, why am I telling you—or retelling you, presumably—the myth of King Midas? It’s been on my mind a lot lately since we debated in Congress a tax break for the wealthiest corporations and people in America.
And I got up to argue that the people who have benefitted the most from our prosperity should pay more in taxes or at least the same as everyone else, but certainly not less than everyone else. And they should be proud and honored to contribute more. But some of my colleagues thought that sentiment was irrational and outdated. “Socialist,” they said. They said it would kill all the proper incentives. In their world, I could see that for those to whom much is given, very little is expected back.
That debate lasted until the wee hours of the morning, on the record and off the record. As we tried in vain to talk them down from the tax break that would add trillions of dollars in debt to the country and dramatically increase wealth inequality, one of my colleagues looked at me and directed these words right at me and he said: “You just want to punish Americans who are successful.”
And what struck me first was the implication that taxation is a kind of punishment instead of a form of contribution to our common life.
But then I focused on the value proposition underlying the accusation, which was the equation of “success” with great financial wealth. This was the King Midas Fallacy. When he said that I just wanted to punish Americans who are successful, he meant millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires. In this value hierarchy, the richest Americans are, by definition, the most successful Americans. And the most successful Americans are, by definition, the richest ones.
This struck a nerve with me. Here is how I replied, somewhat irritably, I can see now. I said: “What about successful, underpaid middle school math teachers like my daughter, whose students’ parents stop me in the street to thank me for her amazing teaching? What about successful plumbers like my grandfather, who built his own small business and worked six days a week and could carry a bathtub up three floors on his back? What about successful starving poets and street musicians who bring beauty and melody to people every day? What about successful sanitation workers and school bus drivers who keep our neighborhoods clean and get our kids to school safely? What about successful union organizers and family farmers, bricklayers and flight attendants, successful small-town Mayors, doctors and nurses, successful Moms and Dads taking care of their kids while struggling to afford groceries? Why are you trying to use your tax policies to punish all these people for their success?”
Well, after that day, or after that night when that bill passed, I started noticing everywhere this identification of success with wealth. Under this theory I realize many people will become fabulously successful, just by being born into the right family. They will inherit their success. Other people will be declared failures by so-called “successful” people because they were born into a family without financial wealth. Or because they don’t make a lot of money as paramedics or early childhood educators or social workers or firefighters, even if they are rendering indispensable social value with their work.
Now, I’m not saying that a fabulously wealthy person can’t be successful, according to an ethical value system. A lot of them are. Take, for example, Bruce Springsteen, whose life-affirming music rocks the world every day and whose commitment to freedom and democracy is crucial today to our country. Take the great and much-maligned and vilified George Soros, a refugee from Nazism, a champion of a free and open society, a wealthy trader who is an extraordinary philanthropist and change agent. Like him, a lot of the successful people who are wealthy have shared their money with other people and other causes.
Conversely, we would not say that every destitute person is, by definition, noble and successful just because they’re poor. That is silly. Rudy Guiliani is impoverished today, having been ordered by a jury to pay Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss $146 million for defaming them by falsely accusing them of committing election fraud. But his poverty hardly makes Rudy Giuliani a role model to anybody for his character, his values or his commitment to the rule of law.
But according to this deeply ingrained cultural ideology, many people will automatically be treated as a success after achieving great wealth, even if it’s done by completely illegal criminal and antisocial means. As Balzac put it: “Behind every great fortune lies a crime.”
Take Juan Orlando Hernandez who was the President of Honduras. He became one of the richest men in his country, acting as a very successful narcotrafficker. He shipped more than 800,000 pounds of cocaine into America and he made hundreds of millions of dollars until he got caught, prosecuted, convicted and sent off to prison for 45 years.
Now, this would seem to prove that crime doesn’t pay and doesn’t make you a success, except for one thing: the President of the United States, a billionaire himself with 34 felony criminal convictions to his name, stepped forward to grant a full and complete pardon to former president Hernandez for all offenses he committed against the United States, saying without explanation that Hernandez had been treated very unfairly by the Department of Justice and he set him free by commuting his sentence and cancelling all of his fines, totaling more than $8 million.
There are a lot of success stories like that in a world saturated today with authoritarianism and corruption. The richest man in the world, and therefore obviously the most successful, might be Vladimir Putin, a plunderer of the people, an embezzler, a poisoner, an assassin, a mass war criminal, an imperialist aggressor against the people of Ukraine, a kidnapper of children, a liar, a thief, and a destroyer of democracy, the free press and free speech. All of them.
Maybe it’s Mohammed bin Salman. Well, you can pick them yourself. Maybe it’s Elon Musk, whose first and most indelible act of public service as the head of DOGE was to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development by gutting its anti-hunger, anti-malaria, anti-HIV/AIDS health projects across the world, causing unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in the world. The richest man in the world was instrumental in promoting policies that killed hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in the world. And yet, he just bounces from success to success.
The false cultural equation of great wealth and great success is essential to the persistence of corruption and extreme inequality in our society and every society on Earth.
The conflation of gilded wealth with success partakes of the Midas myth, that the greatest wish we could ever be granted would be turning everything we touch into gold. That myth shows the dangers of elevating money above solidarity, community, morality, justice, friendship, fairness, companionship, love, family, children, art, nature, food, music, drink, experience, touch, sensual pleasure, even sleep and rest. All of the pleasures that make up a good life and that you have learned about here at Goucher College.
If you followed the great philosophers and now scientists of happiness, money is only valuable to the extent that it helps you achieve these human goods and, more importantly, to the extent that it helps you help other people to achieve these human goods. But if the love of money overwhelms, supplants and replaces all the human comforts, pleasures and joys of life, then money becomes a destructive and corrosive force. Like all addictions like alcohol, drugs, or gambling, money can trick you into thinking that it is the key to happiness but, like all obsessions and addictions, it can end up destroying your happiness.
Money is essential for all of us, which is why vast inequality is a dangerous thing, but the love of money is literally demoralizing. It strips life of its moral promise. As tens of millions of people have been telling us in the streets, we have no kings here. But our President tells us we live in a new Golden Age, and he’s got a point. If you look around, there is a lot that’s been covered in gold these days. Gilded Oval Office, gilded White House, gilded signage, gilded hotels, golden ballroom, golden statues on gilded golf courses, gilded limo, golden cellphones, gold bathrooms and a golden toilet.
Our values are off. “The times are out of joint,” as Hamlet said. Our leaders seem to know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
So where are we going, my friends? How do we find our way home? I want to propose, dear Goucher Grads of 2026, that the way to start is for each one of you to take the word "success" back from the autocrats and kleptocrats and plutocrats who have usurped it and twisted it beyond recognition for your own purposes. You must define success for yourself. What are you going to do with your one beautiful, free life? How will you make it succeed? That is what you should be talking about at your graduation parties before you have a sip to drink.
The beautiful thing about this final homework assignment that I give you is that it's an essay question. It is not an objective multiple-choice question. And you’ve actually got the rest of your life to answer it. Each of you armed with the amazing education you got here will have the chance—indeed the responsibility—to define what success means and fashion your own sense of integrity and achievement.
So I want to close with a different story. An old, somewhat musty American story which offers a radically different and extremely compelling vision of success. You all know it, or at least I hope you do. It is The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps the greatest American myth, greater certainly than the individualist myth of Horatio Alger and the racist polemic of Gone with the Wind. Frank Baum’s riveting fantasy was written in 1900 as an economic and political parable about the 1896 presidential election. On one side was William Mckinley, the champion of Wall Street and the gold standard, who appears in the book and then the movie as the Wizard of Oz. Oz being “O Z,” an ounce of gold, and living in mystery behind all kinds of doors and traps in the Land of Oz, which is at the end of the Yellow Brick Road, the Golden Road, the Yellow Brick Road.
On the other side is William Jennings Bryan, the populist hero of the common man and woman, every man and every woman, who appeared as the Lion, afraid of the massive forces of wealth, arrayed against him with the great and mysterious wizard and the Wicked Witch of the West, who represented wild Nature, cyclones and hurricanes, tornados, that tormented the farmers. And the Wicked Witch of the East, the distant and oppressive banks and corporations who oppressed the people.
And Dorothy gathered up her friends, the people of the country. She needed to offer them the things they felt they were missing. Political courage to the Lion who represented William Jennings Bryan and the populists. To the Tin Man, she offered a heart. He represented the industrial working class, hardened by harsh circumstances. And she found a brain for the Scarecrow, who represented the virtuous, but uneducated farmers. That was the populist coalition that would follow the Yellow Brick Road of the gold standard to find only that it was a fraud and a put-up job by the tricky man behind the curtain pulling all the levers of power.
In this story, success is not falling for the myth of the great and mysterious powers of money and gold and wealth, but rather, working together collectively, to pursue happiness as a community and for each individual. And in the process of this collective odyssey, the participants experience the personal growth they were seeking. The Lion finds courage. The Tin Man, a heart. The Scarecrow, a brain. But in truth, they all had the power to pursue happiness within them the whole time, when they gave up the illusions of the Yellow Brick Road, the illusionary standard of gold.
Dorothy, of course, found what she was looking for, too: a way home. A way back to Auntie Em, and a life not controlled by these large, impersonal outside forces. All she had to do was click together three times, her silver slippers, representing the silver standard, changed for the movie into ruby red slippers, to get back home. In this story, success is collective and personal together. It is not based on radical individualism, but friendship. It is not based on freezing everything into place with a magic wish, but rather, traveling together on a spiritual journey and rather than success being defined by a king, it is defined by debunking and exposing the king's dogma and propaganda, which are based on all the fantasies of gold.
Hang on to your friends as you graduate. “The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried / Fasten them to thy soul with hoops of steel,” is what Polonius tells his son in Hamlet. Everything we need we have within ourselves and community to draw upon. T. S. Elliot spoke in a voice Dorothy could understand when she ended her journey in The Wizard of Oz. He wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration. In the end of all our exploring shall be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
You have it within yourselves to redefine success, not just for you and your friends, but for a country which has lost its way by falling for the oldest trick in the book: confusing wealth with success, money with merit, vaults with values.
My son, Tommy, had a favorite passage from Wittgensteinin which the philosopher said: “The truth of an empirical proposition is whether it corresponds to reality, the truth of an analytical proposition is whether it obeys the rules of logic, but the truth of a moral and ethical proposition is the courage with which you act to make it real in the world.”
So go out and find your success, make it real in the world with your courage. It will be personal, it will be idiosyncratic. Only you can do it. Antonio Mercado, the great Spanish poet, wrote: “Walker, there is no path. You must create the path by walking.” Jackson Brown said: “Into a dancer you have grown from a seed someone else has thrown / Now go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own.”
And someday, not long from now, people will try to walk in your footsteps and the seeds you have sewn will be growing all over the world. May Fortune love you all in your ventures. May you work together to create a land of hope and dreams for everyone. May you not be afraid to fall and to rebound and get up again. May you lead a life of true success. No kings, no queens, no gilded corruption, no falls for the Midas Touch, no golden ballrooms, and no golden statues of the kings. Just you and your friends under the beautiful blue sky in the Free State.
I send you hopes for boundless joy and flourishing in the days ahead. Godspeed to the Goucher Class of 2026.
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